‘I’m inclined to agree,’ said the case officer. ‘Let’s call it a day.’ But before they did anything about it, a grey Pontiac double-parked alongside them and a young man jumped into the rear seat of their car.
‘Hello, Santos,’ said the CO. The man grinned. He was a dark-skinned youth with an Afro hair-do and a long moustache which drooped over the ends of his mouth. He was wearing a rock-and-roll T-shirt and a football jacket.
‘ Santos is monitoring the tap on the Stein and Breslow phones,’ the controller explained to the section head.
‘A call to Stein,’ said the youth. ‘A call timed at 8.30. A man named Bock called him from London.’
‘Who answered? Billy Stein?’
‘Billy Stein took off for Ensenada. He phoned the Breslow girl but he got nowhere with that proposition, so he took his T-bird and headed south. We have a tail on him.’
‘So who answered?’
‘No one. The message went on to the answering machine. I’ve got a transcript here.’ He was holding a piece of paper. ‘But you probably would sooner hear the essence of it.’
‘Yes.’
‘This guy Bock works for a German bank in London. Says he has life and death information about the documents-papers, he said on the phone, but that’s got to be the documents, right?’
The case officer nodded.
‘Bock wants to talk to Stein but he’s acting very nervous about his contact number. We have a secretarial service number. Bock says to leave a message there.’
‘Could be a chance for us,’ said the CO. He looked at the section head quizzically. The section head nodded.
The CO said, ‘On an answering machine, is it? Could you wipe it clean, Santos?’
‘Not without getting inside the Stein place, and his home is pretty well equipped with bolts and locks. Stein’s got a lot of valuable carpets and stuff in there. You can bet the insurance company have approved the burglarproofing.’
‘I smell this as being something of a break for us,’ said the CO.
‘I think we must try to get inside the Stein home and wipe it clean,’ said the section head. ‘I’ve arranged a high-security phone call to Stuart on Sunday evening.’
‘You want us to try getting into the Stein place?’ said the youth.
‘Let’s think about that for a moment. Stein might not even take the messages off the machine when he gets home tonight.’ The youth leant forward between the front seats. ‘Yeah, and he might be taking the messages off his tape right now. He has one of those musical codes that enables him to read back his own messages from any phone. Why don’t we take Stein off the street while we try to clean the tape?’
‘How?’
‘It doesn’t have to get rough,’ said the youth. ‘I could fix it so that the highway patrol pick him up for drunk driving and put him in jail all night.’
‘Highway patrol? What makes you think he’s going out of town?’
‘The CHP has jurisdiction on the freeways that criss-cross the whole of Los Angeles,’ explained the CO patiently to his visitor. ‘It would be unlikely-if not impossible-for Stein to go home without using them.’ The section head nodded his agreement.
‘Get on to it,’ said the CO.
The youth got back into the Pontiac and disappeared in the direction of Inglewood.
‘If anyone can fix it, Santos can,’ said the CO. ‘You can reckon on Charlie Stein being out of operation for the rest of the night. Early tomorrow morning I’ll try and get a telephone repairman into the Stein home.’
21
The phone connection that Boyd Stuart used in London to speak to Los Angeles was the highest priority ‘crypto-ciph B’. The crypto-ciph network (A for America, B for Britain) is a scrambler phone. The encryption machines take the varying frequencies of the human vocal chords and, converting them first into fluctuating electrical current, use computer technology to rearrange each fraction of sound, a microsecond at a time, into new patterns. At the other end, similar machinery reconstructs the impulses and recreats a facsimile of the original sounds. Although the American National Security Agency owned and operated the network, they were so far not able to decipher intercepted conversations without knowing the day’s code. Thus London advised Boyd Stuart to use the ‘crypto-ciph B’ to speak to his contact clerk.
‘Sorry I’m a little late. The machine was in use until a few minutes ago,’ said the voice from Los Angeles.
‘It doesn’t matter, I was only sleeping.’
‘Well, I said I was sorry. Anyway you’d better make sure you are fully awake. It looks like we have a breakthrough on the Stein documents.’
‘Speak on.’
‘A call to Stein from London. A man named Paul Bock wants to talk to Stein about the papers. He says he works for a German bank in London. He says it’s a matter of life and death.’
‘Oh, he does, does he?’
‘He won’t give his address but he’s left the phone number of a secretarial agency which will take a message for him.’
‘Where did this call come through to?’
‘He was phoning Stein.’
‘All the way from London?’
‘That’s right. It’s gone on to Stein’s answering machine. Our people here have been trying to wipe the message off the tape so that Stein doesn’t get it.’
‘What’s the number he left?’ Boyd Stuart wrote it down on the message pad. It was bad enough getting access to the encryption machines only at these absurd hours when the senior civil servants and the politicians were in bed and asleep, but he did not enjoy being kept waiting for nearly two hours in the Foreign Office communications room deep under the traffic of Whitehall. He thanked the machine operator who had made the connection for him and then went to follow the smell of coffee.
He came up through the basement of 10 Downing Street. It is not a hive of industry so soon after dawn. The upstairs apartment which provides a residence for the Prune Minister was not occupied. He could hear the policemen chatting together in the entrance hall; their voices had that special hush that night workers acquire. An elderly woman was making coffee in a small kitchen at the rear of the building. She poured him a cup almost before he had asked for one, she had mistaken him for one of the plain-clothes detectives from the ground floor, or one of the coding clerks from the basement.
Boyd Stuart looked at his watch. It was 6.40 a.m., Monday, July 16. The only sound he could hear was the press service teleprinter firing off its occasional bursts of news.
Boyd Stuart went to one of the telephones and dialled the phone number of the secretarial agency. They answered. At least they worked all round the clock. ‘I’m trying to contact Paul Bock,’ he said when the girl replied.
‘Your name?’
‘Stein. Charles Stein,’ said Boyd Stuart.
‘Yes, I have the message for you. Go to Jimmy’s Militaria. It’s in York Way near King’s Cross station. You can’t miss it, it says here.’
‘OK, thanks.’
He hung up. He walked from 10 Downing Street through the connecting doors that gave access to the whole street of houses to emerge from the front door of No. 12. Even at this time in the morning there were sight-seers standing on the opposite side of the road hoping for a glimpse of someone important. Boyd had left his car near the foot of the steps that led down to St James’s Park. He wondered what time Jimmy’s Militaria opened. He decided that it was too late to go home and catch up on his sleep. He drove through Trafalgar Square and headed north up Charing Cross Road.
You can’t miss Jimmy’s Militaria. Its shop-front is part of a row of Victorian houses sited between a pet shop and a launderette. It’s not as busy as the launderette nor as smelly as the pet shop, but it’s painted in black, red and white stripes, and the name board is surmounted with fretwork Iron Crosses. In one window there are dummies dressed in military uniforms and equipment; on the other side of the door, the smaller window is packed tightly with steel helmets, swords and daggers, buttons and badges, swastika armbands and trays filled with broken model soldiers.