The coordinator was flushed in the face by now. He clenched his fist on the table top. ‘If this is some sort of joke. Sir Sydney… ’
‘No joke,’ said the DG. ‘How I wish it were.’
‘And the PM has been told?’
‘She is particularly distressed about the Irish dimension,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘You can see how this could be manipulated by the Dublin government or by the IRA.’
‘Hardly any need for manipulation,’ said the deputy secretary with uncharacteristic bitterness. He was the youngest man there and felt that this was a legacy that his elders and betters should not have left for him.
‘And credit guarantees,’ continued Sir Sydney. ‘Several hundred million pounds sterling was to be advanced for German purchases from Canada and the USA. This to be backed by the British gold reserves already there. And Churchill most unwisely discussed the use that the Germans might make of elements of the French fleet.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said the MI5 man. ‘Every last bloody friend Britain has in the world would be enraged overnight if this sort of stuff was ever made public.’ He took off his spectacles and polished them with exaggerated energy. In spite of his distress, he could not help feeling some gratification that this had landed on Sir Sydney Ryden’s desk rather than his own.
‘Any rumours that we were prepared to hand over parts of Africa to save Britain would certainly stiffen anti-white attitudes about Rhodesia,’ said the deputy secretary.
Sir Sydney nodded. ‘It’s a political problem of the first magnitude. It’s containable if only rumours emerge-such rumours have surfaced several times over the past fifteen or twenty years-but if there was written proof… ’ Sir Sydney let it go.
‘Worse than Suez,’ said the deputy secretary, who was just old enough to remember that political upheaval. He had pencilled an elaborate maze all over his agenda sheet. Now he blocked off the beginning and end of it so that there was no way out.
‘Do you realize what this would do to our delicately balanced economy?’ said the coordinator. ‘Foreign investors would flee from sterling and the stock market would crash… the social consequences of that would be terrible to contemplate. The Kremlin is well provided with friends in our trade unions and on the shop floor who would welcome any opportunity for creating chaos.’
‘Our finest hour!’ said the coordinator. ‘Poor old Winston would be turning in his grave.’
‘I’m not sure you understand me,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘I’m referring to decisions in which Sir Winston Churchill played a major role. I’m referring to exchanges between Sir Winston and the German leader himself.’
‘Hitler?’ said the coordinator, his face reflecting his incredulity. ‘Adolf Hitler and Churchill?’
Sir Sydney Ryden stood up and closed the locks on his document case with a loud click. ‘Let’s not meet trouble halfway, gentlemen. Pray that my people get their hands on these wretched files before the press see them.’
The MI5 director also got to his feet. ‘I think we’ll have to point out that these documents are not authenticated.’ He looked at Sir Sydney meaningfully.
‘I take your point,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘I think it would be as well if we talked about the preparation of a couple of items.’
‘Forge them, and then prove to the press that they are forgeries, to discredit the rest of the material?’ The MI5 man nodded. He had a department which employed some of the most meticulous engravers, paper technicians and handwriting experts in the world. ‘Tomorrow lunch, eh? The Travellers’ suit you?’
Sir Sydney Ryden hesitated. It would mean rearranging his morning but this was urgent. He was not an inveterate clubman and he would have preferred a private dining room in his own building, but he nodded his agreement. At least they would get a decent claret at the Travellers’ Club. ‘One o’clock then. I dare say we’ll find somewhere to hide ourselves away, after we’ve eaten.’
The MI5 man noted the appointment in his tiny diary and replaced it into his waistcoat pocket.
‘It’s damnable timing,’ said the coordinator looking at the calendar. ‘Suppose it all leaked out while the Queen and Mrs Thatcher were both in Africa. Could it possibly be a plot with exactly that in mind?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ said Sir Sydney.
The deputy secretary picked up the agenda sheets and fed them into a shredder with a hand which visibly trembled. Like all shredders for top-secret waste, it reduced the papers to narrow worms then cross-chopped them before dropping the confetti into a large transparent plastic bag. ‘Churchill discredited. It would mean the end of the Tory Party,’ he said miserably. ‘That’s what I can’t bear thinking about.’
17
Charles Stein was a happy man. The son of a Polish-born trade union official in the garment industry in New York City ’s West Side, Stein had grown up in a house where a strike meant a bare dinner table. In such times the young Steins were fed on left-overs from the table of their equally penurious next-door neighbours.
Charles had never shared the interest in books that his father had stimulated in his brother Aram, but that did not mean that he grew up illiterate. Charles-or Chuck, as he was more usually called at the garment factory where he was eventually employed as an assistant to a senior salesman-could find his way through an order book or an account sheet with the natural ease that some untutored men bring to the intricacies of horse-racing. And he was a generous boy who never begrudged the money that he paid each week into the family expenses, which in turn enabled his mother to send Aram cinnamon khvorost and some money to supplement his meagre scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. But Chuck was not entirely benign. From his father, Chuck Stein got an all-pervading hatred of Hitler and on Pearl Harbor day he joined the long line of men in Times Square who waited patiently to join the US army. So did his young brother.
Charles Stein’s political convictions had now faded, but his natural ability to read an account book remained. It was this facility, together with the unmistakable power of his personality and the energy that even his immense bulk could not disguise, that had made Stein the leader of the men who called themselves ‘the Kaiseroda Raiders’. In spite of the military etiquette, the nostalgia and the respect that all of them showed towards Colonel John Elroy Pitman the Third, every last man of them knew that the important decisions were made by Charles Stein. And they preferred it that way.
‘You’ll like the bau,’ Charles Stein told his son. ‘They have shrimp inside. The chicken ones are not so tasty.’ He wiped his mouth on his napkin. That was the worst of eating ‘small chow’, one always got fingers and face covered in soy and sauce and bits of food. At least, Charles Stein always did.
‘I’ve had enough, thank you, dad. Why don’t you finish it?’
‘They’ll wrap it if you want to take it home.’
‘You have it, dad.’
‘I hate to see food wasted,’ said Stein. He wrestled with temptation. ‘I’ve had enough to eat really, but it’s a crime to see food wasted.’ He gulped a little of his jasmine tea and then filled the tiny cup again. ‘Paper-wrapped shrimp?’
‘No thanks, dad. I couldn’t eat another thing.’