The Company of Strangers

‘Of course, sir,’ said Anne, thinking – pompous.

‘Information is at a premium. There’s an active market on all sides. Nobody is innocent. Everyone is either buying or selling. From maids and waiters to ministers and businessmen. The overall climate is quieter. A lot of the refugees have been shipped out now, so the rumour circuit is tighter and there’s less misinformation. We have won the economic war. Salazar no longer fears a Nazi invasion and he’s closed the wolfram mines. We’re doing our best to make sure that they don’t get their hands on any other useful products. As a result we see things more clearly but, although there are fewer players on the pitch, and less complications, it has become a much more subtle affair because now, Miss Ashworth, we are in the endgame. Do you play chess?’

She nodded, mesmerized by the intensity of his passionless face, her own blood zipping around her body faster now that she was close to the current, the live wire. All her training seemed like so much theory. In less than an hour a new world had been peeled open – not just the place, Lisbon, but also an immediate sense of the power of the clandestine. The privilege of knowing things that nobody else knew. Smoke trailed from the pipe held just off Sutherland’s face, curled through the sparse sunlight coming through the cracks of the shutters and disappeared up to the high ceiling.

‘Part of your mission is a social one. There are no lines drawn here. Who is who? Who plays for whom? There are powerful people, rich people, people who’ve made a great deal of money out of this war, out of us and the Germans. We know who some of them are, but we want to know all of them. Your ability to speak Portuguese, or rather understand it, is important in this respect and, equally, that nobody should know of this facility. The same applies to your German. You will only use that in the office for translating these journals.’

‘What specifically is it from these journals that the Americans are interested in?’

Sutherland beckoned Rose into the conversation, who gave a historical rundown of German nuclear capability from their first successful fission experiments back in 1938 through to Weizsäcker’s discovery of Ekarhenium, the vital new element that could make the bomb. As Rose spoke, Sutherland watched the young woman. He didn’t listen because he didn’t understand any of it and he could see that she was struggling too.

‘On 19th September 1939 Hitler made a speech in Danzig in which he threatened to employ a weapon against which there would be no defence,’ said Rose. ‘The Americans are convinced that he meant an atomic bomb.’

‘You shouldn’t worry about understanding any of this perfectly. There are probably only a handful of scientists in the world who do,’ said Sutherland. ‘The important thing is for you to understand the significance of this endgame that we’re all involved in.’

‘Why would the Germans tell you all this in a physics journal and published papers? Shouldn’t this be top secret?’

Sutherland ignored the question.

‘The fact is that the Allies have their own bomb programme. We have our own Ekarhenium, the 94th element, which for reasons of secrecy we refer to as “49”.’

Brilliant, thought Anne, to switch the numbers round like that.

‘In March 1941 Fritz Reiche, a German physicist on the run from the Nazis, passed through Lisbon on the way to the United States,’ Rose continued. ‘He was met by the Jewish Refugee Organization here and before they put him on a ship to New York we had a meeting in which he warned us that a bomb programme did exist in Germany. We now know that they’re building an atomic pile for the creation of Ekarhenium somewhere in Berlin. We also know that Heisenberg went to see Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, and that they had an argument about whether atomic warfare was the right way for physics to be going. A rift developed between the two men over the Germans’ active bomb programme. Heisenberg also sketched out, in rough, the makings of an atomic pile. Since then Bohr has left Denmark and gone over to the Americans. You’ve been in London since June?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you know about the doodlebugs…the V1 rocket bombs?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We believe that these are the prototype rockets for launching an atomic bomb on London.’

It felt suddenly cold in the room despite the grinding heat outside. Anne rubbed her arms. Sutherland sucked on his pipe, which bubbled like a tubercular lung in the stem.

‘Your day job in Cardew’s office will be to microfilm the two German physics journals Zeitschrift für Physik and Die Naturwissenschafen and provide Sutherland and me with typed translations of any articles which pertain to atomic physics,’ said Rose. ‘More important than that is the accommodation we’ve managed to arrange for you in Estoril. Cardew has been working up a good social relationship with a fellow called Patrick Wilshere. He’s a wealthy businessman in his mid fifties, with contacts and companies in the Portuguese colonies, mainly Angola. He is also Irish, a Catholic and not a lover of Great Britain. We have intelligence that he was selling wolfram, from his Portuguese wife’s family’s mining concessions in the north, exclusively to the Germans, as well as cork and olive oil from family estates in the Alentejo. He has offered Cardew a room in his considerable house for a lodger. He specified a female lodger.’

Sutherland looked to see the effect of this on his new agent. Her blood now felt as thin and cold as ether.

‘What is expected of me?’ she asked, clipping each word off.

‘To listen.’

‘You just said that he specified a female lodger.’

‘He prefers female company,’ said Rose, as if it was something he himself couldn’t understand.

‘What about his wife? Doesn’t his wife live in the same house?’

‘I understand that the relationship with his wife has…broken down somewhat.’

Anne began to breathe deep, slow breaths. Her thighs were sticking together under the cotton of her dress. Sweat seemed to be pricking out all over. Sutherland shifted in his chair. His first bodily movement.

‘Cardew thinks she’s suffered some kind of breakdown,’ he said.

‘You mean she’s mad, too?’ asked Anne, the scenario burgeoning in her mind.

‘Not howling at the moon, exactly,’ said Rose. ‘More nerves, we think.’

‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

‘Mafalda. She’s very well connected. Excellent family. Hugely wealthy. The spread they’ve got in Estoril…magnificent. Small palace. Own grounds. Marvellous,’ said Sutherland, selling it hard.

‘Do you mind if I smoke, sir?’ she asked.

Sutherland broke out of his chair and offered her a cigarette from a silver box on the table. He lit it with a weighty Georgian silver lighter with a green baize bottom. Anne drew in heavily, saw Sutherland brightening in her vision.

‘Tell me more about Wilshere,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘please, sir.’

‘He’s a drinking man. Likes to…’

‘Does that mean he’s a drunk?’

‘He likes a drink,’ said Rose. ‘You do too, from the accounts of the Oxford do’s. Quite a strong head on you, they said.’

‘That’s different from being a drunk.’

‘Well, while we’re about it, he’s a gambler as well,’ said Sutherland. ‘The casino’s practically at the bottom of their garden. Do you…?’

‘I’ve never had that sort of liquidity.’

‘But you probably know something about probability, what with your maths…’

‘It’s not a particular interest of mine.’

‘What is?’ asked Rose.

‘Numbers.’

‘Ah, pure maths,’ he said, as if he might know something. ‘What drew you to that?’

‘A sense of completeness,’ she said, hoping that would do the trick.

‘A sense or the illusion?’ asked Rose.

‘We might be talking about a lot of abstractions but what links them, the logic, is very real, very strict and irrefutable.’

‘I’m a crossword man myself,’ said Rose. ‘I like to see into people’s minds. How they work.’