The Liar [calibre]

As Trefusis spoke, the BMW moved out to the left and swept past them. Adrian caught a glimpse of the driver's face, alert and tense behind the wheel.

'The same man all right. British number plates. Right hand drive. GB sticker on the back. Why's he passed us, though?'

'Perhaps a relay,' said Trefusis, 'someone else will take up the pursuit. It is scarcely a problem to identify a car of this age and distinction.'

Adrian looked at him sharply. 'You admit that we're being followed then?'

'It was always a possibility.'

Adrian popped a lump of barley-sugar into his mouth. 'You were telling me about this organisation. That paid for your godson to go through school.'

'I have become increasingly aware in recent years,' said Trefusis, 'of what can only be called a conspiracy on a massive scale. I have watched the most talented, the most able and most promising students that come through St Matthew's and other colleges in Cambridge and other universities in England... I have watched them being bought up.'

'Bought up?'

'Purchased. Procured. Acquired. Gotten. Let us say an undergraduate arrives with phenomenal ability in, for example, English. A natural candidate for a doctorate, a teaching post, a life of scholarship or, failing those, a creative existence as poet, novelist or dramatist. He arrives full of just such ambitions and sparkling ideals but then . . . they get to him.'

'They?'

'Two years after graduation this first class mind is being paid eighty thousand pounds a year to devise advertising slogans for a proprietary brand of peanut butter or is writing snobbish articles in glossy magazines about exiled European monarchs and their children or some such catastrophic drivel. I see it year after year. Perhaps a chemist will arrive in the college. Great hopes are held out for his future. Nobel Prizes and who knows what else besides? He himself is full of the highest aspirations. Yet even before his final exams he has been locked and contracted into a job for life concocting synthetic pine-fresh biological soap powder fragrances for a detergent company. Adrian, someone is getting at our best minds! Someone is preventing them from achieving their full potential. This organisation I told you of is denying them a chance to grow and flourish. A university education should be broad and general. But these students are being trained, not educated. They are being stuffed like Strasbourg geese. Pappy mush is forced into them, just so one part of their brains can be fattened. Their whole minds are being ignored for the sake of that part of them which is marketable. Thus they have persuaded my godson Christopher to read Engineering instead of Mathematics.'

'How long has this been going on?'

'I cannot tell how long. Years, I suspect. I first began to take real notice fifteen or twenty years ago. But it is getting worse. More and more brilliant students are being diverted from work that could be of real benefit to mankind and their country. They are being battery farmed. Young Christopher Daly is just one of thousands.'

'My God!' said Adrian. 'You know who's behind this? We've got to stop them!'

'It's a conspiracy of industrialists, of certain highly placed economists and of members of governments of all political colours,' said Trefusis.

'But how can we prevent it? And what has it got to do with Salzburg?'

Trefusis looked across at Adrian, his eyes filled with grave concern. Suddenly he burst out laughing. Shaking his head from side to side, he snorted and struck the steering wheel. 'Oh Adrian, I am cruel! I'm wicked, naughty, dreadful and digraceful. Please forgive me.'

'What's so funny?'

'You silly, silly boy. What I have just described is the way the world works! It's not a conspiracy. It is called Modern Western Civilisation.'

'W-what do you mean?'

'Of course the best brains are lured into industry, advertising, journalism and the rest of it. Of course universities are adapting to the demands of commerce. It's regrettable and there's little we can do about it. But I think only a Marxist would call it an international conspiracy.'

'But you said an organisation . . . you told me that a specific organisation had offered that boy Christopher a scholarship.'

'The state, Adrian. A state scholarship. And the state will hope in return that he goes into something productive once he has obtained his degree. He will be incented by money, recruitment drives and the general thrust and tenor of the times. That is all.'

Adrian fumed in silence for a while.

'And this has nothing to do with what we're going to Salzburg for?'

'Nothing at all.'

'You are impossible, you know that?'

'Improbable perhaps, but not impossible. Besides, whilst what I described may not be a conscious intrigue, it is happening nonetheless and is vexatious in the extreme.'

'So you're still not going to tell me what we are in actual fact doing here?'

'All in actual good time,' said Trefusis. 'Now the Cardinal is getting thirsty; if memory has not fully quit her throne I believe there should be an amenable garage and routier in about eighty kilometres or so. In the meantime, we can tell each other the story of our lives.'

'All right,' said Adrian. 'You first. Tell me about Bletchley.'

'Little to tell. It was set up as a wartime decrypting station and filled up with mainly Cambridge personnel.'

'Why Cambridge?'

'The closest university town. At first they recruited philologists and linguists like myself.'

'This was when?'

'Nineteen-forty. Round about the time of the Battle of Britain.'

'And you were how old?'

'Tush and bibble! Is this then to be an interrogation? I was twenty-two.'

'Right. Just wondered.'

'Young and fizzing at the brim with ideals and theories about language. Now, who else was there with me? Dozens of girls who filed and clerked away with great brilliance and flair. The chess master Harry Golombek was on the team of course, and H.F.O. Alexander, also a magnificently dashing player. It was all rather cosy and fun at first, wrestling with enemy cyphers that had been intercepted all over Europe and Africa. It soon became clear, however, that the Enigma encryption device that German Naval Intelligence was using would need mathematicians to crack it. Acquaintanceship with the decryption techniques of the last war, the ability to do the Times crossword while shaving and a mastery of Russian verbs of motion were not enough any more. So they brought in Alan Turing, of whom you may have heard.'

Adrian had not.

'No? What a pity. Brilliant man. Quite brilliant, but very sad. Killed himself later. Many credit him with the invention of the digital computer. I can't quite remember how it came about. There was some pure mathematical problem which had faced the world of numbers for fifty years, I think, and he had solved it as a young man by positing the existence of a number-crunching machine. It was never his intention to build such a thing, it was merely hypothesised as a model to help solve an abstract difficulty. But unlike many mathematicians he relished the physical application of numbers. His hut in Bletchley was soon filled with rows and rows of valves. You remember valves? Tubes they call them in America. Little vacuum bulbs that glowed orange.'

'I remember,' said Adrian. 'It used to take television ages to warm up.'

'That's right. Well Alan had thousands of them all linked together in some impossibly complicated fashion. Got them from the Post Office.'

'The Post Office?'

'Yes, the GPO had been experimenting in electronics before the war and they seemed to be the only people who really knew about it. The clever thing about the Enigma machine was that, although it was purely mechanical, it changed daily and the number of permutations was so grotesquely huge that the old techniques of decryption wouldn't work. Alan cracked it quite brilliantly. But that was ony the first stage of course. He still needed to know the code before he could read the cypher.'