The House of Rumour Read Online Free PDF Page B

all innocence. He turned to her.
    ‘Political are being rather insistent on this one, I’m afraid,’ he told her.
    ‘I see.’
    ‘But I wouldn’t want to order you on a job like this, Joan,’ he said.
    There was an odd expression on his face. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling or baring his teeth.
    ‘M—’
    ‘You will volunteer, won’t you?’
    There seemed a soft threat in his words, as if he was implicating her in something unknown. She had come to know all his little prejudices. He had toned down his anti-semitism, at least for the duration, but he often voiced his vehement dislike of homosexuals. It seemed part of his brutal and ruthless side, which included a strange insistence that she conspire in his own self-loathing. He seemed to be goading her, testing her to discover whether she knew the truth or not. He stared at her.
    ‘Well?’ he demanded.
    She knew now that he feared blackmail, disgrace. It would be unendurable for such an arrogant man to be in another’s power. He would do anything to protect himself.
    ‘Of course, M,’ she said. ‘Just concerned about security, that’s all.’
    ‘Good,’ he rejoined, with a cold smile.
    There had been the odd business with the chauffeur who had been hastily dismissed. That time she had spotted him hanging around a cinema tea room. And, of course, the young bus driver from Leicester who had come up to Camberley to help fix M’s motorbike. He had once pointed out with disdain the particular demeanour of male prostitutes in Piccadilly, yet as Joan had been shocked to observe when she spied M from the bedroom window, he had walked towards the garage, and the bus driver, in precisely the same manner. From then on many things about her boss had become clear to her.
     
     
    3 / ROOM 39
    Room 39 was a vast office on the ground floor of the Admiralty, crammed with desks and filing cabinets, resounding with telephone bells and the constant clatter of typewriters. Fleming sat at the far end of it, next to the glass door that led to the inner sanctum of Naval Intelligence. He had called up NID’s file on the Magician and was shuffling through the pile of papers in front of him. He glanced at an old memorandum of his that had finally been returned to him. ‘Operation Ruthless’ had been a plan of his to seize one of the new high-speed German launches that patrolled the Channel, to overpower its crew and steal its code devices.
     
I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:
1 Obtain from Air Ministry an airworthy German bomber.
2 Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German air force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit.
3 Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service in plain language.
4 Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring boat back to English port.
     
    He had even volunteered to lead the operation personally. Anything to get out of Room 39, to prove himself more than a mere staff officer. And there was, after all, a desperate need to crack the enemy’s codes. The Government Code and Cypher School was building a mechanical brain somewhere in the Home Counties. His project had eventually been rejected.
    Fleming had begun to see himself as merely a component in a vast thinking machine. So much of intelligence seemed to be about generating obscure ideas and intellectual exercises. Departmental subsections and research units were springing up everywhere. Operation Mistletoe had emerged from this arcane world of speculation and second-guessing.
    The Magician’s file made for fascinating reading. The subject had worked for Naval Intelligence in New York during the last war, posing as an Irish Nationalist and a German sympathiser, disseminating scurrilous and extreme propaganda that was aimed at discrediting both these professed causes. This was, as M said, what was now being called ‘black propaganda’. The Magician also had significant