The bell push was marked ‘Upstairs flat’ in red felt-pen lettering on a torn scrap of paper. Stuart pressed the button. Nothing happened, so he pushed it again, and kept on doing so until a miserable figure in a torn dressing gown made his way slowly through the life-size inanimate soldiers and draped flags to pull back the bolts of the front door.
‘We’re not open,’ he said. He was in his twenties, bespectacled, with long hair and a half-grown beard adorning his white, pimply face.
‘I’m looking for Mr Paul Bock,’ said Stuart.
The man took a cigarette from his mouth. ‘You ain’t the law, are you?’ He coughed and spat into the street. He had a strong south London accent.
‘I’m here because he wants to see me.’
‘At this time of day?’ said the man with disgust, but he stood back and opened the door. ‘You’re not Stein, are you?’
‘Charles Stein,’ said Boyd. ‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘You don’t have an American accent.’
‘I was at school in England,’ said Stuart.
The man looked Stuart up and down before saying, ‘Well, come in. Paul will be surprised to see you. He’s frying himself an egg upstairs.’
‘The message went on my answering machine,’ said Stuart. ‘I phoned to see if there were any messages, and I have a device which makes the recording play back over the phone.’
‘Ain’t science wonderful?’ said the man. ‘By the way, I’m Jimmy.’ He led the way up a creaking staircase to a landing with cracked lino. Small plastic dishes of ancient food scraps were placed in the corner, and a black cat stretched itself and came to look at the visitor. They went up another flight of stairs before entering the kitchen. A century of ground subsidence had given the doors and windows a curious rhomboidal shape and the stained wallpaper bulged with accumulations of loose plaster. A small plastic-topped table was set with crockery of mixed patterns, and a large economy-size packet of Kellogg’s cornflakes was its centrepiece. On the wall behind the square china sink there was an old Rolling Stones poster. At the ancient, cast-iron gas stove a second man was frying six eggs in a bent frying pan. He seemed fully occupied with his task, tipping the pan in each and every direction and using a spoon to baste hot fat over the yolks.
‘Here’s your Mr Stein,’ said the bearded man.
The man at the stove put down the teaspoon and, still holding the tilted frying pan, offered his hand. Stuart shook it.
‘Charles Stein,’ said Stuart. ‘I was in London.’
‘Phoned his home and got your message using one of those whistle gadgets,’ explained Jimmy.
‘That’s right,’ said Stuart.
‘Jimmy is a communications engineer,’ explained Paul Bock, the man at the stove. ‘I’m just an amateur, but I’ve been using my little microcomputer to get into main frames by telephone for years.’ He had a soft German accent.
‘Are you political activists?’ Stuart asked.
‘COMPIR,’ said Jimmy. ‘Computer pirates. We’ve no political ideals. Our idea of having fun is accessing password files. We’re a sort of club… ’
‘The bank where I work has got a really big computer,’ said Bock. ‘It took us months to crack the “bug fixes” and find our way inside.’
‘What are “bug fixes”?’
‘Modifications that the manufacturers keep adding to stop people like us,’ said Bock. ‘Do you want an egg? Soft or turned over?’
‘Soft.’
‘Jimmy eats them turned over. They taste like plastic.’
There was an open packet of cigarettes on the table. Jimmy leant across and nipped the end of one and tried to tease it out of the packet. When it did not budge he shook it more fiercely like a terrier with a rat. Finally it came free. ‘Help yourself,’ he said and pushed the packet towards Stuart.
‘No thanks,’ said Stuart. ‘It’s too early for me.’ He watched Jimmy light the new cigarette from the stained, misshapen old one.
‘Tell me everything you know about Operation Siegfried,’ said Bock. He turned round with the frying pan and tipped the eggs on to the plates, two at a time. He was a muscular boy with a short haircut and a carefully shaved face. Under a shabby silk dressing gown he was wearing a clean blue shirt and the trousers of a grey suit. He saw the puzzled expression on Stuart’s face. ‘I have to go to work,’ he explained. ‘Jimmy is lucky he doesn’t have to disguise himself in these absurd uniforms.’
Stuart became painfully aware of the ‘uniform’ that he himself was wearing. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Now tell us about Operation Siegfried.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘We can get rough, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock. ‘You might find that hard to believe, but we can get very rough.’
‘I believe you can get rough,’ said Stuart. ‘So why don’t you believe me when I say that I’ve never heard of Operation Siegfried?’
Jimmy took the bread knife and roughly sliced some bread. He tossed a slice to each of the other men. Stuart dipped a piece of it into the soft yolk of his egg and ate in silence.
‘If you’ve got something to tell me, then tell me,’ said Stuart.
Paul Bock cut his egg into rectangles and ate it section by section between his fingers. ‘I work in the bank-a big German bank-no matter its name at the moment. We got this information from the bank’s computer.’
‘Is that difficult?’ asked Stuart.
‘This computer was a beauty,’ said Jimmy, rubbing his hand over his half-grown beard. ‘Could be this is one of the most complex of its sort anywhere in Europe.’
‘But we cracked it,’ said Paul Bock. ‘Or Jimmy did.’
‘Paul got the hardware keys,’ said Jimmy. ‘Until we could physically unlock the machinery, I couldn’t even begin. And he completed the first codes for the terminal keyboard. Then it got trickier. The bank have performance-measuring consultants who tune the computer; they notice the access per programme, and we didn’t want them to get suspicious. We had to trickle the stuff out bit by bit; spread it over a few weeks.’ He coughed and thumped his chest with his fist still holding the cigarette.
‘This material is ultra secret,’ said Bock. ‘There were many software keys, each one opening up more and more secret stuff.’
‘It’s like a series of doors,’ explained Jimmy. ‘You’ve got to unlock each and every one to get into the inner sanctum. And every door has a sort of burglar alarm that will close down the terminal and store a message saying that someone has attempted an unauthorized access.’
‘And you managed all that?’ said Stuart, not without a trace of genuine admiration.
‘Jimmy’s a wizard,’ said Paul Bock.
‘So what is Operation Siegfried?’ Stuart asked.
‘We are not quite sure,’ admitted Jimmy. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and began to eat.
‘There is a secret fund-a Trust, they call it-formed by some of the most powerful organizations of the Bundesrepublik,’ said Paul. ‘Steel companies, armaments, car-parts manufacturers, insurance companies, publishers and very big banks. We know that the senior trustee is a man named Böttger, who is president of a bank based in Hamburg. Like all the other men involved, he has never been associated with any post-war political party. That’s significant.’
‘In what way significant?’ asked Stuart.
‘If you were going to resurrect the Third Reich,’ said Paul Bock, ‘would it not be a good idea to tell your agents to avoid all political activity?’
‘The war was thirty or more years ago,’ protested Stuart. ‘You mean they’ve been asked to wait that long for Operation Siegfried?’ It all seemed highly unlikely.