Gavin Lyall - Spy’s Honour

“Well enough,” the Commander said, grinning falsely. Even out of uniform, he would have looked like a Naval officer: in his fifties, solidly built, with bright eyes in a large head whose nose and chin seemed prevented from meeting only by the briar pipe he usually wore in between. His usual expression was aggressive but amused and he was trying hard to keep the balance: he did owe the Brigadier something.

“How’s the recruiting drive coming along?” the Brigadier asked.

“Splendidly,” the Commander began, then had to break off to order his lunch. The Brigadier chose lamb chops, was told it was too early in the season, and opted for pork instead.

“And half a bottle of the Beaune,” he added. “You’ll join me in a glass? Did I hear you say ‘splendidly’?”

“If I were recruiting for a concert party to tour the better lunatic asylums, yes.”

The Brigadier laughed. “The dear old Army game of pass the parcel; sooner or later it’s everybody’s turn to be the Dead Letter Office. But in all seriousness, you can’t expect us to send you our best officers, chaps we’ve been training for fifteen or twenty years. We’re only human.”

“Which is more than can be said for the people you do send me.”

“Oh, come now – what about the last chap I put you on to?”

“At no great sacrifice to yourself, since you’d dropped him and he was serving in the Greek Army at the time.”

“Well, you can’t keep a chap who’s about to be hauled into court for bankruptcy, even if it was allowed. His brother officers … well, they wouldn’t … it would be an embarrassment to …” He was grateful that the arrival of the soup stopped him.

“Anyway,” he resumed when the servant had gone, “I noticed you’d got him back in the Army List as attached to the War Office. Does that mean you solved his money problems for him?”

“To an extent.” The Commander was ready to leave it there, but the Brigadier obviously wanted more, so he went on: “We – our bank – offered his creditors a cast-iron Deed of Composition so that they get paid off in instalments and only care about the bank, not him.”

“By that, d’you mean nothing has to come out in public?” The Brigadier fixed on the only aspect of bankruptcy he knew or cared about.

“That is correct.”

“Good. We look after our own, in the Gunners.” The Brigadier, who had done nothing but gossip Ranklin’s name to the Commander, gulped soup smugly. “I hope he isn’t resenting our efforts as being an act of charity or something damn fool.”

“I think he resents it rather more as being an act of blackmail. He’s not a bloody fool, not entirely. He certainly resents working for me. But he’d like the alternatives even worse.”

The Brigadier frowned uneasily and dabbed soup off his moustache. “Look, I hope you’re not being too hard on the chap. He seems to have been a perfectly good officer until …”

“Well-travelled, languages, able to mix in respectable society – I can use all that. And he can pretend he’s still got money, even to himself if he wants. I want good pretenders.”

The Brigadier didn’t like this turn in the conversation. “It isn’t as if he was an absolute blackguard, spending it all on women and horses. I expect you went into the details, but I understood it was really his elder brother getting into the wrong crowd at the Stock Exchange and then shooting himself when it all went wrong. I thought our chap just signed some papers that got him involved, and if you can’t trust your own brother …”

“Splendid lesson. I don’t want him to trust anyone.”

The Brigadier looked at him warily. “Aren’t you being rather ghoulish? I know you expect your chaps to dress up in disguise and so forth, but surely you want men of good character underneath. ”

“Do I?” the Commander asked blandly. “You may be right, but I really don’t know. Not yet.”

“Good God. Why don’t you go the whole hog and hire some of these Irish fanatics?”

“How can you be sure I haven’t?” The Commander smiled wickedly. “They’ve certainly got the experience, and Irishmen make good mercenaries: the ‘Wild Geese’ tradition. Continental armies are full of Irish names. And all I ask is a full day’s skulduggery for a full day’s pay.”

“Good God,” the Brigadier said again. Just then their main courses and wine arrived and there was a lull of serving, pouring and tasting. The Brigadier chewed thoughtfully for a while, then said: “Of course, it is rather difficult to imagine what sort of person would actually want to be a spy.”

“Agent. We prefer ‘agent’.”

The Brigadier raised his eyebrows, acting more surprise than he felt. “Really? I don’t imagine your chaps introduce themselves as ‘agents’ any more than they do as ‘spies’. However, if you feel their self-esteem needs such unction …”

The Commander said nothing.

“When I was younger,” the Brigadier mused, “it seemed to me that we had the best Secret Service in the world. It never got mentioned in the newspapers, its – ah, agents never got caught, it seemed to function perfectly, in perfect secrecy. Only later did I realise that this was because we had no Secret Service at all. Oh, a few ad hoc arrangements in India and Ireland, but no organised Service until you were asked to set up your Bureau. And I suppose a myth has fewer practical problems than the real thing.”

“Quite,” the Commander said.

“Such as finding the right personnel.”

“Exactly.”

“Particularly if you have a clearer idea of what you don’t want than of what you do.” The Brigadier looked down at the haggled bits of pork on his plate. “As with this chop.”

“As with that chop, you just have to make do with what you’ve got.”

The Brigadier laid down his knife and fork. “When I reached General rank, I decided there were some things I no longer had to swallow.”

“Lucky you,” said the Commander.

They got a first-class smoking compartment to themselves on the train to Newhaven, carrying three copies of the Anglo-French military code “X” parcelled up in Ranklin’s hand baggage. It wasn’t the genuine code: that was the “W” one, three copies of which were being carried by Lieutenant Spiers of Military Operations in the next compartment. And somewhere else on the train was a gentleman with three copies of the equally false code “Y”.

It was all overcomplicated and uncertain and Ranklin didn’t like it. Why, for instance, wasn’t the code simply going by Diplomatic Bag?

“Because,” the Commander had explained, “the Foreign Office doesn’t know about it. Half the Cabinet doesn’t know we’ve got as cosy with the Frogs’ Army as to need a joint code. Their Liberal morality would be outraged and their mistresses would have told all of London by lunchtime. And we don’t want two years’ work thrown away.

“Mind you,” he had added, “damn few secrets last that long, especially when they involve the Frogs’ Ministere de la Guerre. That’s why we’ve undertaken to deliver the code ourselves, right to their front door.”

“Does the Ministere know when the code’s supposed to arrive, sir?”

“Oh, yes. So if there’s been any leak, it’ll come from their end, and it’ll be your job to prove it. Spring any ambush, fall into any trap. I envy you: should be jolly good sport.”

Sport?

“I want two volunteers to go ahead until they get shot, then report back,” O’Gilroy interpreted.

“Apart from that word ‘volunteers’, that seems to be the case.”

“And just what will we be doing when somebody tries to relieve us of our precious burden?”