The Key to Rebecca Read Online Free PDF Page A

strike me as the kind of man to spend his life investing in a few shops and small factories and cotton farms. He was much more the assured cosmopolitan type: if he had money to invest it would probably be with a London stockbroker or a Swiss bank. He just wasn’t a small-timer ... It’s very vague, sir, but do you see what I mean?”
    “Indeed.” Newman sounded a bright chap, Vandam thought. What was he doing stuck out in Assyut?
    Newman went on: “And then it occurred to me that he had, as it were, just appeared in the desert, and I didn’t really know where he might have come from ... so I told poor old Cox to stay with him, on the pretense of helping him, to make sure he didn’t do a bunk before we had a chance to check his story. I should have arrested the man, of course, but quite honestly, sir, at the time I had only the most slender suspicion—”
    “I don’t think anyone’s blaming you, Captain,” said Vandam. “You did well to remember the name and address from the papers. Alex Wolff, Villa Les Oliviers, Garden City, right?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “All right, keep me in touch with any developments at your end, will you?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Vandam hung up. Newman’s suspicions chimed with his own instincts about the killing. He decided to speak to his immediate superior. He left his office, carrying the incident report.
    General Staff Intelligence was run by a brigadier with the title of Director of Military Intelligence. The DMI had two deputies: DDMI(O)—for Operational—and DDMI(I)-for Intelligence. The deputies were colonels. Vandam’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel Bogge, came under the DDMI(I). Bogge was responsible for personnel security, and most of his time was spent administering the censorship apparatus. Vandam’s concern was security leaks by means other than letters. He and his men had several hundred agents in Cairo and Alexandria; in most clubs and bars there was a waiter who was on his payroll, he had an informant among the domestic staffs of the more important Arab politicians, King Farouk’s valet worked for Vandam, and so did Cairo’s wealthiest thief. He was interested in who was talking too much, and who was listening; and among the listeners, Arab nationalists were his main target. However, it seemed possible that the mystery man from Assyut might be a different kind of threat.
    Vandam’s wartime career had so far been distinguished by one spectacular success and one great failure. The failure took place in Turkey. Rashid Ali had escaped there from Iraq. The Germans wanted to get him out and use him for propaganda; the British wanted him kept out of the limelight; and the Turks, jealous of their neutrality, wanted to offend nobody. Vandam’s job had been to make sure Ali stayed in Istanbul, but Ali had switched clothes with a German agent and slipped out of the country under Vandam’s nose. A few days later he was making propaganda speeches to the Middle East on Nazi radio. Vandam had somewhat redeemed himself in Cairo. London had told him they had reason to believe there was a major security leak there, and after three months of painstaking investigation Vandam had discovered that a senior American diplomat was reporting to Washington in an insecure code. The code had been changed, the leak had been stopped up and Vandam had been promoted to major.
    Had he been a civilian, or even a peacetime soldier, he would have been proud of his triumph and reconciled to his defeat, and he would have said: “You win some, you lose some.” But in war an officer’s mistakes killed people. In the aftermath of the Rashid Ali affair an agent had been murdered, a woman, and Vandam was not able to forgive himself for that.
    He knocked on Lieutenant Colonel Bogge’s door and walked in. Reggie Bogge was a short, square man in his fifties, with an immaculate uniform and brilliantined black hair. He had a nervous, throat-clearing cough which he used when he did not know quite what to say, which was