A Perfect Spy

On a nod from Frankel he shifted a spool to a machine at the far end of the bank. The printer began chattering immediately. Nigel and Lorimer moved quickly towards the platform. The printer stopped. Nigel magisterially ripped out the sheet and held it for Lorimer and himself to read. Brotherhood was already striding down the aisle. Mounting the platform, he snatched the script from their unresisting hands.

“Jack, don’t,” said Kate under her breath.

“Don’t what?” Brotherhood said, suddenly out of patience with her. “Don’t care about my agents? Don’t do what exactly?”

“Tell them to print another copy, will you, Frankel?” Nigel said smoothly. “Then we can all look at it together without shoving.”

Brotherhood was holding the sheet before him. Nigel and Lorimer had meekly arranged themselves to either side of him and were reading it over his shoulder.

“Routine intelligence report, Bo,” Nigel announced reading aloud. “Promised length, three hundred and seven groups. Actual length so far forty-one. Subject, restationing of Soviet missile bases in mountains north of Pilsen. Subsource Mirabeau reporting ten days ago. Mirabeau in turn reporting her Soviet Army boyfriend codename Leo — Leo’s done us rather well in the past, I seem to remember. Message reads as follows: Subsource Talleyrand confirms empty low-loaders leaving area — message ends in midsentence. Obviously the winder. Unless, as you say, his signal hit freak conditions.”

Frankel was already giving orders to the taller boy. “Send them ‘Your signal garbled.’ Do it immediately. Tell them we want a rerun. Tell them if they can’t transmit now we’ll remain on standby till they can. Tell them we want a roll-call of all members of the network. You got set phrases for that or you want I draft something?”

“Tell them damn all,” Brotherhood ordered very loud. “And stop crying, everybody. No one’s hurt.”

He had thrust his hands into his raincoat pockets. He was halfway down the aisle. Nigel and Lorimer were still on stage, a pair of choirboys clutching their hymn sheet between them. Brammel sat stoically upright in the auditorium. Kate was staring at him, not stoical at all.

“You can tell them you want a roll-call or a rerun, you can tell them to abort, you can tell them to jump in the Vistula. It doesn’t make a dime of difference,” said Brotherhood.

“Poor man,” said Nigel to Lorimer. “They’re his Joes, you see. It’s the strain.”

“They’re not my Joes and they never were. You can have them with my blessing.” He looked around him for men with sense. “Frankel. For Christ’s sake. Lorimer. When this service catches someone else’s Joe, if it ever does these days, what does it do? If he’s willing to be played, we play him back. If he’s not we send him to the Tower. Is it different now? I wouldn’t know.”

“So?” said Nigel, humouring him.

“If we decide to play him back, we do it as naturally and as fast as we can. Why? Because we want to show the opposition that nothing has changed. We want it seamless. We don’t hide his car and close his house. We don’t let him or his daughter or anybody else vanish into thin air. We don’t ignore dead letter boxes or invent fatuous stories about people eating bad mushrooms. We don’t sandbag radio operators in the middle of their high-speed transmissions. That is the last, the very last thing we do. Unless.”

“I don’t read you, Jack, old boy,” Nigel said, whom Brotherhood had deliberately ignored. “I don’t think anybody does, to be truthful. I think you are very naturally upset and you are getting a bit metaphysical, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Unless what, Jack?” said Frankel.

“Unless we want the opposition to know we’re rolling up their network.”

“But why would anybody want that, Jack?” Frankel asked earnestly. “Explain to us. Please.”

“Why not explain it another time?” said Nigel.

“There never was a bloody network. They owned those networks from day one. They paid the actors, wrote the script. They owned Pym and near enough they owned me. They owned all of you as well. You just haven’t woken up to it.”

“Then why do they bother to tell us anything at all?” Frankel objected. “Why send us a fake interrupted signal? Why rig the disappearance of the Joes?”

Brotherhood smiled. Not kindly, not with humour. But he did turn to Frankel and he did smile at him. “Because, old boy, they want us to think they’ve got Pym when they haven’t,” he said. “That is the only lie they’ve got left to sell us. They want us to call off the hunt and go home to our high tea. They want to find him for themselves. That’s the good news of the day. Pym is still on the run and they want him as much as we do.”

They watched him turn and stride down the aisle and slide the locks back on the padded door. Poor old Jack, they said to each other with their eyes as the light went up: his life’s work. Lost all his Joes and can’t face it. Dreadful to see him so cut up. Only Frankel seemed to wish he hadn’t gone.

“Have you ordered the rerun yet?” said Nigel. “I said have you ordered a rerun?”