Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

‘Our boy hasn’t even faked his flight plan yet,’ I said. ‘He’s only fifteen minutes’ flying time away from here.’

‘OK, OK, OK,’ said Mann. ‘I don’t need any of that Dunkirk spirit crap.’ For a long time we drove in silence.

‘Watch for that cairn at the turn-off,’ I said. ‘It’s no more than half a dozen stones, and the sand has drifted since we came down this road.’

‘There’s no spade in the Land Rover,’ said Mann. ‘You don’t think he’d bury him with his bare hands, do you.’

‘Slow a little now,’ I said. ‘The cairn is on this side.’

An aircraft came dune-hopping in from the north-west. It was one of a fleet of Dornier Skyservant short-haul machines, contracted to take Moroccan civil servants, politicians and technicians down to the phosphate workings near the Algerian border. The world demand for phosphates had made the workings the most pampered industry in Morocco.

The pilot landed at the first approach. It was part of his job to be able to land on any treeless piece of hard dirt. The Dornier taxied over to us and flipped the throttle of the port engine, so that it turned on its own axis, and was ready to fly out again. ‘Watch out for the prop-wash!’ Mann warned me.

Mann’s father had been an airline pilot, and Mann had a ten-year subscription to Aviation Week. Flying machines brought out the worst in him. He rapped the metal skin of this one before climbing through the door. ‘Great ships, these Dorniers,’ he told me. ‘Ever see a Dornier before?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My uncle George shot one down in 1940.’

‘Just make sure you lock the door,’ said Mann.

‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ said the pilot, a young Swede with a droopy moustache and ‘Elsa’ tattooed on his bicep.

I pushed Bekuv ahead of me. There were a dozen or more seats in the cabin, and Mann had already planted himself nearest the door.

‘Hurry!’ said the pilot. ‘I want to get back on to my flight plan.’

‘Casablanca?’ said Mann.

‘And all the couscous you can eat,’ said the pilot, and he opened the throttles even before I had locked the door.

The place from which the twin-engined Dornier climbed steeply was a disused site left by the road-builders. There were the usual piles of oil-drums, two tractor chassis and some stone markers. Everything else had been taken by the nomads. Now a bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours was parked in the shallow depression of a wadi.

‘That’s screwed this one up for ever,’ said Mann. ‘When the cops find the VW they’ll be watching this airstrip for ever.’

‘Dempsey will collect it,’ I said.

‘He’s a regular little Lawrence of Arabia, your pal Dempsey.’

‘He could have done this job on his own,’ I said. ‘There was no need for us to come down here.’

‘You’re even dumber than you look.’ Mann looked round to make sure that Bekuv couldn’t hear.

‘Why then …?’

‘Because if the prof yells loud enough for his spouse, someone is going to have to go in and get her.’

‘They’ll use one of the people in the field,’ I said.

‘They’ll use someone who talked to the professor … and you know it! Someone who was here, who can talk to his old lady and make it sound convincing.’

‘Bloody risky,’ I said.

‘Yep!’ said Mann. ‘If the Russkies are going to send gun-ships here and blast cars out of the desert, they are not going to let his old lady out of their clutches without a struggle.’

‘Perhaps they’ll write Bekuv off as dead,’ I said.

Mann turned in his seat to look at the professor. His head was thrown back over the edge of the seat-back. His mouth was open and his eyes closed. ‘Maybe,’ said Mann.

Now I could see the mountains of the High Atlas. They were almost hidden behind the shimmer of heat that rose from the colourless desert below us, but above the heat haze I could distinguish the snow-capped tops of the highest peaks. Soon we’d see the Atlantic Ocean.

4

I never discovered whether New York University realized that they had acquired a chair of Interstellar Communication; certainly it was not mentioned in the press analysis. The house we used was on Washington Square, facing across the trees to the university buildings. It had been owned by the CIA – through a land-management front – for many years, and used for various clandestine purposes that included extra-marital exploits by certain senior members of the Operations Division.

Technically, Major Mann was responsible for Bekuv’s safety – which was a polite way of saying custody, as Bekuv himself pointed out at least three times a day. But it was Mann’s overt role of custodian that enabled Bekuv to believe that the interrogation team were the NYU academics that they pretended to be. The interrogators’ first hurdle was to steer Bekuv away from pure administration. Perhaps it was inevitable that a Soviet academic would want to know the floor-area his department would occupy, spending restrictions, the secretarial staff he was entitled to, his voting power in the university, his access to printing, photography and computer and his priority for student and postgraduate enrolment.

The research team was becoming more and more fretful. The reported leakage of scientific information eastwards was reflected by the querulous memos that were piling up in my ‘classified incoming’.

Pretending to be Professor Bekuv’s assistants, the interrogators were hoping to recognize the character of the data he already knew, and hoping to trace the American sources from which it had been stolen. With this in mind, slightly modified data had been released to selected staff at various government labs. So far, none of this ‘seeded’ material had come back through Bekuv, and now, in spite of strenuous protests from his ‘staff’, Bekuv declared a beginning to the Christmas vacation. He imperiously dismissed his interrogators back to their homes and families. Bekuv was therefore free to spend all his days designing a million-dollar heap of electronic junk that was guaranteed to make contact with one of those super-civilizations that were sitting around in space waiting to be introduced.

By Thursday evening the trees in Washington Square were dusted with the winter’s first snow, radio advertisers were counting Christmas shopping time in hours, and Mann was watching me shave in preparation for a Park Avenue party at the home of a senior security official of the United Nations. A hasty note on the bottom of the engraved invitation said ‘and bring the tame Russkie’. It had sent Mann into a state of peripatetic anxiety. ‘You say Tony Nowak sent your invite to the British Embassy in Washington?’ he asked me for the fourth or fifth time.

‘You know Tony,’ I said. ‘He’s nothing if not tactful. That’s his UN training.’

‘Goddamned gab-factory.’

‘You think he knows about this house on Washington Square?’

‘We’ll move Bekuv tomorrow,’ said Mann.

‘Tony can keep his mouth shut,’ I said.

‘I’m not worrying about Tony,’ said Mann. ‘But if he knows we’re here, you can bet a dozen other UN people know.’

‘What about California?’ I suggested. ‘UCLA.’ I sorted through my last clean linen. I was into my wash-and-wear shirts now, and the bath was brimming with them.

‘And what about Sing Sing?’ said Mann. ‘The fact is that I’m beginning to think that Bekuv is stalling – deliberately – and will go on stalling until we produce his frau.’

‘We both guessed that,’ I said. I put on a white shirt and club tie. It was likely to be the sort of party where you were better off English.

‘I’d tear the bastard’s toenails out,’ Mann growled.

‘Now you don’t mean that,’ I said. ‘That’s just the kind of joke that gets you a bad reputation.’

I got a sick kind of pleasure from provoking Major Mann, and he rose to that one as I knew he would: he stubbed out his cigar and dumped it into his Jim Beam bourbon – and you have to know Mann to realize how near that is to suicide. Mann watched me combing my hair, and then looked at his watch. ‘Maybe you should skip the false eyelashes,’ he said, ‘we’re meeting Bessie at eight.’

Mann’s wife Bessie looked about twenty years old but must have been nearer forty. She was tall and slim, with the fresh complexion that was the product of her childhood on a Wisconsin farm. If beautiful was going too far, she was certainly good-looking enough to turn all male heads as she entered the Park Avenue apartment where the party was being held.

Tony greeted us and adroitly took three glasses of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter. ‘Now the party can really begin,’ said Tony Nowak – or Nowak the Polack as he was called by certain acquaintances who had not admired his spike-booted climb from rags to riches. For Antoni Nowak’s job in the United Nations Organization security unit didn’t require him to be in the lobby wearing a peaked cap and running metal detectors over the hand baggage. Tony had a six-figure salary and a three-window office with a view of the East River, and a lot of people typing letters in triplicate for him. In UN terms he was a success.