Tom McCarthy - C

“HumInt: Human Intelligence. Got agents everywhere: here; Suq Al-Shuyukh, where the sheiks all meet; Nasiriyah, from whence sedition seems to spread down the Euphrates to the Arab tribes; the Shia holy cities, hotbeds of intrigue and points, if memory serves me rightly, of contact with Damascus, which, via them, can exercise remote control of Persia… or is it the other way round? Either way, we’ve got to keep an eye and ear out for what’s brewing. We have men doing the Hajj, or wandering around with herdsmen, or hanging out in mosques, bazaars, communal washhouses, village meetings…”

“Folklore?” Serge asks, pointing to a table labelled with this word, across whose surface lies a mish-mash of handwritten pages crudely illustrated with pictures of lions and eagles.

“Supposed to contain useful information,” Macauley responds. “Stories of curses going round, or afrits haunting districts, may be telling us something… or not…” He sighs. “It’s all pretty intangible: whispers and rumours drifting like some kind of vapour across swathes of desert…”

“Back in London,” Serge says, “I was reading about some chap named Laurice, Lorents, Laudence…”

“That fucking twit,” Macauley snorts. “Bombards us all the time with useless information. Not just him: every two-bit traveller, ‘adventurer,’ ‘novelist’ or general man of leisure who’s inherited more money than sense… ladies of leisure too: they’re just as bad… Sending us their ‘reports,’ briefing their friends on Fleet Street to extol their bravery and cunning to readers who aren’t any the wiser, then expecting knighthoods when they get home… Fantasists and frauds, the lot of them! The worst part of it is, they’re actually quite useful.”

“How?” Serge asks.

“With the other parties all spying on us, if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too. We call it ‘feedback’-no, hang on a second… ‘bleedback’: that’s it. Lots of those sequences you saw being written out across the blackboards in the other room get bled back too, mutated but still recognisable, in telegrams, transmissions, new acrostics… Make sure they’re confused as we are, eh? Plus, who knows? We might actually hit some nerve, activate something… maybe… Oops! Don’t let us get in your way: carry on!”

This last phrase is directed at a man who’s arrived bearing more photographs, maps, foolscap pages. As Serge and Macauley move aside, he sets them down on the table next to the folklore one and starts sorting them, stamping each with a different scarab-sized seal as he does so.

“Half the people in the region are spies,” Macauley says as they move on. “Engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists: you name it. If they’re not spies, they’re suspected of being spies, which makes them just as much a part of the whole maddening caboodle as if they had been. To give you an example: we’ve been keeping a close eye on a consignment of butterflies that’s at quay here on its way from Baghdad to the Tiergarten in Berlin. Butterfly eggs, to be precise: they’ll hatch when they arrive. The French have been showing a keen interest in the consignment. The Italians too. The Wafdists not-which might be because they already know something we don’t. The eggs are being escorted by some acclaimed naturalist, Professor Himmel-This-or-That von Something-Else. Papers in order: all legitimate, perhaps; or perhaps not. We’ve picked up intimations that the whole operation forms part of a larger German rearmament plan, although how it does this isn’t clear; also, that Prof Von’s in cahoots with the Bolsheviks; or, in fact, the Turkish CUP. And it has been decided, at some juncture, that, for our part, we should act as though each of these theories held water.”

“But what’s the truth?” Serge asks.

“The truth?” Macauley repeats. “Who’s to say? Scientists-physicists-are telling us that two things can be true at once nowadays. The point is, if we think the butterflies are something other than what they are, or that they serve some purpose other than that which they serve, or if we act as though we think this, then the French will also think they are-do, I mean-or think that they’ve tricked us into thinking this, and the Italians will follow suit, which means the Germans will… I lose track beyond that point… It’s quite frustrating…”

He sighs again, and leads Serge from the room. As they move down a corridor, Macauley continues, wistfully:

“One of my men’s working on mirages: trying to prove they’re real…”

They’re in his office now. The box files have been rehoused on new shelves; the desk has one large folder on it, labelled “EmpWirCh.” Macauley holds his thumb and finger to his scrunched-up eyes for a few seconds after he sits down, then opens them again and says to Serge:

“So, finally: the pylon at Abu Zabal is to be completed. It’ll be switched on in May, they say. About eight years too late-eight years in which the nation that had radio before all others has slipped hopelessly behind. The French alone have high-powered transmitters in Beirut, Bamako and Tananarive; America has five times more foreign stations than we have; even the Germans match us kilowatt for kilowatt worldwide. It’s an embarrassment. And all because the Post Office Department and the Committee of Imperial Defence couldn’t agree; or if they did they couldn’t get the Admiralty on board, or the Treasury, the Board of Trade, the India Office, the Air Ministry or whatever other gaggles of failed politicians had to be in accord in order for the whole thing to progress. Do you know,” he asks Serge, “how many committees have been set up to address the Imperial Wireless question in the last eight years?”

Serge shrugs his shoulders.

“Six! The technology’s not even the same now as when Marconi first proposed the whole chain idea: arc-transmission’s giving over to the valve method; there’s talk of a new beam-system that’ll enable long-distance communication without intermediary stations; who knows what else? The man himself, meanwhile, seems to have lost his marbles. Last I heard he was heading to Bermuda, to find out if Mars is sending wireless messages to us.”

“Marconi?” Serge asks.

Macauley nods.

“But I thought,” Serge says, “that he wasn’t involved in the whole chain thing anymore.”

“Oh, he’s not,” Macauley reassures him. “The Cabinet felt he’d have a monopoly, which is precisely what they wanted for the Post Office. They forgot, though, to consult with their Australian and South African counterparts, who’ve thumbed their nose at Whitehall by developing their own high-powered transmitters with him-Marconi, that is. Now Whitehall’s worried the Dominions will start distributing counterproductive content through the airwaves-which is why they’re setting up, back home, a national Broadcasting Corporation, to pump a mix of propaganda, music and weather reports all around Britain and, eventually, to every corner of the Empire. Which, in turn, is why they’ve realised that they’d better get the Abu Zabal pylon up and running, and start working on the next one, and the next…”

“Strange timing,” Serge says.

“What’s that?”

“That we start broadcasting central content Empire-wide just as we lose our empire…”

“The irony is, as they say, striking,” Macauley concurs.

“They should play dirges,” Serge suggests.

Macauley breathes out heavily, then tells him, in a voice that’s laced with fondness: “I can see your father in you.”

“You know my father too?” Serge asks.

Macauley looks back at him bewilderedly. “Well, yes, of course,” he says. “After all, he’s the one who sent-” He stops, as though catching himself, and looks away, then, shifting in his seat, continues: “The new chain will run in parallel-through Egypt at least.”