‘No one knows about it,’ said Kitty, ‘Not even my boss knows how they assign the XPDs or even which of our agents handle them. But I’ll tell you one thing, Boyd. There’s no way that Sir Sydney could arrange it without the collusion of others, and I’ve worked there long enough to know that he wouldn’t get it.’
‘Are you seriously telling me that in the time you’ve worked in Operations, you’ve never seen an order for expedient demise?’
‘For defectors, Boyd. For traitors. For people with heads filled with secrets like the whereabouts of field agents. Then only after the department is certain that they are on the point of betraying everything to Moscow. They never XPD field people like you, pursuing an operational task to the best of your ability.’
‘Do you mind if I take notes,’ said Stuart sarcastically. ‘You’re talking just like a field manual.’
‘Thanks a lot! And now I’ve had enough of your bad temper I’m going home!’
‘Oh, stop it, Kitty. You know I didn’t mean to say that.’
‘Do you know what it’s like for me, being in this bloody flat with you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that everywhere I look there are bits and pieces belonging to your other women.’
‘Woman, not women,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Jennifer’s things, you mean?’
Kitty’s lips tightened. Even hearing the name of the woman with whom Boyd Stuart had shared his life was enough to make her feel the pangs of jealousy, and feeling the pangs of jealousy made her angry. ‘Yes, your bloody Jennifer. That’s right. How did she talk? Not like a field manual… How then? Like a sex manual…?’ She found a handkerchief.
‘Oh, my God, Kitty, don’t start crying, I can’t stand it.’
‘That’s it!’ she yelled. ‘Of course! Not “Don’t cry, Kitty, because I hate to see you unhappy”-not “Don’t cry, Kitty, what can I do for you?” It’s “Don’t cry, little Kitty, because your man can’t stand it.” ’ She was very angry now. She threw the bedclothes aside and jumped out of bed. She was still sniffing as she pulled on her tights and looked under the bed for her shoes.
‘Your car is miles away,’ Stuart reminded her.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said tartly. ‘I’m not frightened of little green men in flying saucers.’
‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Stuart and meant it. After he heard the front door close he went down, wondering if she would be waiting there for him, but she had gone home. He undressed and went to bed but it was not easy to go to sleep. Awake in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the traffic going along Millbank. The road alongside the river was never quiet; it was one of the penalties of living here. Would Kitty King report the conversation they had just had, he wondered. How would that affect his career prospects? He chuckled to himself: what kind of career prospects does a man have when he suspects that his employer is trying to kill him? And if his employer is also his father-in-law? It was a problem still unresolved by the tune he drifted into a deep sleep. When he awoke, very late the next morning, the sun was shining and the green car outside the butcher’s shop and the men inside it had gone as if they had never existed.
So that, by Monday morning when he started work, the idea that someone from his own department would plot to have him killed was almost gone from his mind.
16
At that same time-10.30 on the morning of Monday, July 2, 1979-Sir Sydney Ryden was attending the regular weekly intelligence meeting. It is held in a small conference room on the first floor of 12 Downing Street. The room contained a long polished table, with eight chairs, four coloured telephones, some red leather armchairs, a fireplace with highly polished fire irons, and a small oil painting by Winston Churchill placed above the hearth. The only incongruously modern item was a machine with two ‘letter boxes’ in its top: a paper shredder.
Those present for the final part of the meeting were a deputy secretary of the Cabinet Office representing the Prime Minister, the coordinator of intelligence, Sir Sydney Ryden, and his opposite number, the DG of MI5.
The only important such person missing was the chief of GC HQ, the head of the department which obtains intelligence from orbiting satellites and radio monitoring. The reason for his absence was that nearly all his best hardware had been financed by the American government, an investment secured by the presence of American National Security Agency employees in the most sensitive posts in his department. The chief of GC HQ had departed early. He always did when the agenda included as a last item ‘non-electronic systems’. It was a polite way of asking him to leave the room. It was better that he did not know what was discussed, rather than have to feign ignorance to his American colleagues.
‘In the absence of any hard and fast evidence we have to assume certain things,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden as soon as the GC HQ chief had departed. ‘We must assume that a large body of documentary evidence has fallen into private hands. We have to assume that this material has not been noted, indexed, inventoried, photocopied or seen by the US State Department… ’
‘How can we be quite sure of that?’ said the man from MI5.
Sir Sydney turned and, raising a hand to press his hearing aid, scowled. The MI5 man seemed ready to cower under the threat of the upraised hand. ‘I have people there,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘We have scoured the State Department archives.’
‘Even the classified ones?’
‘What else would be of use?’ His voice was low and resonant.
‘Quite,’ said the MI5 chief, and was able to convey in that one syllable all his doubts that Sir Sydney Ryden had penetrated the secret archives of the US State Department.
‘We assume that the US government have no knowledge of it,’ continued Sir Sydney, glowering at his opposite number. ‘The material in question includes messages, telegrams, cables and conversations between various representatives of His Majesty’s government and the German leaders during the year 1940.’
The deputy secretary from the Cabinet Office looked at his watch. He had a great deal to do before lunchtime, and that included briefing the Prime Minister on this meeting. ‘I think we can all dispense with the euphemisms, Sir Sydney,’ he said. ‘We’re talking about the Hitler Minutes, aren’t we? We’re talking about the undated document headed ‘Framework for a negotiated settlement’ that was passed to the German Foreign Office… ’ he paused and wrinkled his brow, ‘via Stockholm, if my memory serves me correctly, in late May 1940.’
It was about time, thought Sir Sydney Ryden, that his colleagues started to share some of the nightmares that he had borne for the last few weeks. It was time for them to hear his worries. ‘How I wish that were all we were talking about, gentlemen,’ he said after a long silence. ‘But I can assure you that that dissertation of well-intentioned gobbledegook would never cause me to lose a wink of sleep at night. There would be no great difficulty in passing that off as a clever way of playing for time during the Dunkirk evacuation.’
‘What then?’
‘We’re talking about top level exchanges in which specific concessions were discussed. The map of Africa was to revert to its nineteenth-century colours: German East Africa, German South-West Africa, Togoland and the Cameroons would reappear. And the British government would support German demands for a return of the Caroline Islands, the Mariannes and the Marshalls.’ He bared his teeth. ‘ Samoa and German New Guinea would be transferred to them of course.’
‘My God,’ said the deputy secretary, Sir Sydney looked round the room, and was not disappointed with the horrified faces of the others There was little need to detail the cataclysmic portent of such revelations.
Relentlessly, Sir Sydney continued his grim story. ‘The whole of Ireland was to be placed under what was to be known as an Anglo-German administration-you know Winston’s feelings about Ireland of course-and Cork and Belfast were to become permanent German naval bases for a newly created German Atlantic fleet. The ships for this would of course have been ours… ’ He hurried on through the gasps of dismay and shouts of no. ‘Worldwide port facilities of the Royal Navy, from Hong Kong to Gibraltar, would immediately start refuelling and revictualling any German warships as required, as well as any merchantmen flying the German flag.’