Len Deighton - XPD

‘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.

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.