“Hold on a minute, will you?”
Little Nigel’s head snaps round like a weathervane in a gale. Even Brammel shows distinct signs of human interest. From his exile at the end of the table, Jack Brotherhood is pointing a.45-calibre forefinger straight at Artelli’s navel. And it is symptomatic of the many paradoxes of Lederer’s life that of all the people in the room, Brotherhood is the one whom he would most wish to serve, if ever he had the opportunity, even though — or perhaps because — his occasional efforts to ingratiate himself with his adopted hero have met with iron rebuff.
“Look here, Artelli,” Brotherhood says. “You people have made rather a lot out of the point that every time Pym left the precincts of Washington, whether on leave or in order to visit another town, a particular series of coded transmissions from the Czech Embassy was discontinued. I suspect you are going to make that point again now.”
“With embellishments, yes, I am,” says Artelli pleasantly enough.
Brotherhood’s forefinger remains trained on its mark. Artelli keeps his hands on the table. “The assumption being that if Pym was out of range of their Washington transmitter, the Czechs wouldn’t bother to talk to him?” Brotherhood suggests.
“This is correct.”
“Then every time he came back to the capital they’d pop up again. ‘Hullo it’s you and welcome home.’ Correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well turn it round for a moment, will you? If you were framing a man, isn’t that precisely what you would do too?”
“Not today,” he says equably. “And not in 1981 or ’82. Ten years ago, maybe. Not in the eighties.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t be that dumb. We all know it’s standard intelligence practice to continue transmitting whether or not the party is listening at the other end. It’s my hunch they—” He stops. “Maybe I should leave this one to Mr. Lederer,” he says.
“No you don’t — you tell it to them yourself,” Wexler orders without looking up.
Wexler’s terseness is not unexpected. It is a feature of these meetings, known to everybody present, that a curse, if not an outright embargo, hangs over the use of Lederer’s name. Lederer is their Cassandra. Nobody ever asked Cassandra to preside over a meeting on damage limitation.
Artelli is a chess-player and takes his time. “The communication techniques we were required to observe here were out of fashion even at the time of their use. You get a feel. A smell. A smell of age. A sense of long habituation, one human being to another. Years of it maybe.”
“Well now that’s very special pleading,” Nigel exclaims, quite angry, and continues to sit bolt upright before keeling towards his master, who appears to be trying to shake his head and nod at the same time. Mountjoy says “Hear, hear.” A couple of Brammel’s supporters’ club are making similar farmyard noises. There is hostility in the air, and it is forming on national lines. Brotherhood says nothing but has coloured. Whether anyone apart from himself has noticed this, Lederer does not know. He has coloured, he has lowered his fist, and for a second he appears to have dropped his guard entirely. Lederer hears him growl, “Fanciful twaddle,” but misses the rest because Artelli has decided to continue.
“Our more important discovery relates however to the types of code in these transmissions. As soon as we had the notion of an older type of system, we subjected the transmissions to different analytical methods. Like you don’t immediately look for a steam engine inside the hood of a Cadillac. We decided to read the messages on the assumption they were being received by a man or woman in the field who is of a certain generation of training, and who cannot or dare not store modern coding materials. We looked for more elementary keys. We looked in particular for evidence of non-random texts that would serve as base keys for transposition.”
If anybody here understands what he’s saying, they are not showing it, thinks Lederer.
“When we did this, we at once began to detect a progression in the structure. Right now it’s still algebra. But it’s there. It’s a logical linguistic progression. Maybe it’s a piece of Shakespeare. Maybe it’s a Hottentot nursery rhyme. But there is a pattern emerging that is based upon the continuous text of some such analogue. And that analogue is in effect the codebook for those transmissions. And we feel — maybe it’s a little mystical — that the analogue is — well, like a bond between the field and base. We see it as having almost a human identity. All we need is one word. Preferably but not necessarily the first. After that it’s only a question of time before we identify the rest of the text. Then we’ll break those messages wide open.”
“So when will that be?” says Mountjoy. “About 1990, I suppose.”
“Could be. Could be tonight.”
Suddenly it becomes apparent that Artelli means more than he is saying. The hypothetical has become the specific. Brotherhood is the first to take him up on his innuendo.
“So why tonight?” he says. “Why not 1990?”
“There’s something very peculiar going on with the Czech transmissions overall,” Artelli confesses with a smile. “They’re throwing stuff out at random everywhere. Last night Prague Radio put out a world-wide spook call using some phoney professor who doesn’t exist. Like a cry for help to somebody who’s only in a position to receive spoken word. Then all around the clock we get Mayday calls — for example a high-speed transmission from your Czech Embassy here in London. For four days now, they’ve been bumping high-speed signals into your mainline BBC transmissions. It’s as if the Czechs had lost a kid in the forest and were shouting out any messages that might conceivably get through to him.”
Even before Artelli’s echoless voice has died, Brotherhood is speaking. “Of course there’s a London transmission,” he declares vehemently, laying his fist on the table like a challenge. “Of course the Czechs are stirring it. My goodness, how many times do we have to put this to you? For two damned years, there have been Czech transmissions in any part of the globe where Pym sets foot and they do, naturally, coincide with his movements. It’s a radio game. That’s how you play the radio game when you’re framing a man. You persist and you repeat and you wait till the other fellow’s nerve cracks. The Czechs are not fools. Sometimes I think we are.”
Unbothered, Artelli turns his twisted smile to Lederer as if to say, “See if you can impress them.” At which Grant Lederer allows himself an irrelevant memory of his wife Bee splayed above him in her naked glory, making love to him like all the angels in Heaven.
“Sir Michael, I have to start at the other end,” Lederer says brightly in a prepared opening, straight at Brammel. “I have to pick up in Vienna just ten days ago, if you don’t mind, sir, and track back from there to Washington.”
Nobody is looking at him. Start wherever you must, they were saying, and get it over with.
* * *
A different Lederer has broken loose inside him and he greets this version of himself with pleasure. I am the bounty hunter, shuttling between London, Washington and Vienna with Pym perpetually in my sights. I am the Lederer who, as Bee vociferously complained when we were safe from microphones, took Pym into bed with us every night, woke sweating with self-doubt in the fitful hours, woke again in the morning with Pym once more firmly between us: “I’ll get you, boy. I’ll nail you.” The Lederer who for the last twelve months — ever since Pym’s name began to wink at me from the computer screen — has tracked him first as an abstraction, then as a fellow screwball. Has posed with him on spurious committees as his earnest and admiring colleague. Shared jolly drunken picnics with family Pym in the Vienna woods, then rushed back to my desk and set to work with fresh vigour to rip apart what I have just enjoyed. I am the Lederer who too easily attaches himself, then punishes whatever holds him tight; the Lederer who is grateful for every wiry smile and casual pat of encouragement from the great Wexler, my master, only to round on him minutes later, lampooning him, degrading him in my overheated mind, punishing him for being yet another disappointment to me.