uncertainly, and then put it away again. He said in a slow voice,
‘That’s quite a girl you have, Mr Stewart.’
‘What happened?’
‘Wel , when you passed out she didn’t know what to do. She thought about
it a bit, then she loaded the rifle and started to put even more holes
into that house.’
I thought of Elin’s attitude towards kil ing. ‘Did she hit anyone?’
‘I guess not,’ said Ryan. ‘I think you did most of the damage. She shot
off al the ammunition – and there was a hel of a lot of it – and then
she waited a while to see what would happen. Nothing did, so she stood
up and walked into the house. I think that was a very brave thing to do,
Mr Stewart.’
I thought so too.
Ryan said, ‘She found the telephone and rang the Base, here, and
contacted Commander Nordlinger. She was very forceful and got him real y
stirred up. He got even more stirred up when the phone went dead.’ He
grimaced. ‘It’s not surprising she fainted – that place was like a
slaughterhouse. Five dead and two badly wounded.’
‘Three wounded,’ said Taggart. ‘We found Slade afterwards.’
Soon after that they went away because I was in no shape for serious
conversation, but twenty-four hours later they were back and Taggart was
talking about deception.
‘When can I see Elin?’ I said abruptly.
‘This afternoon,’ said Taggart. ‘She’s quite al right, you know.’
I looked at him stonily. ‘She’d better be.’
He gave an embarrassed cough. ‘Don’t you want to know what it was al
about?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would. I’d certainly like to know why the Department
did its damnedest to get me kil ed.’ I switched my eyes to Ryan. ‘Even
to the extent of getting the cooperation of the CIA.’
‘As I say, it was a deception operation, a scheme cooked up by a couple
of American scientists.’ Taggart rubbed his chin. ‘Have you ever
considered /The Times/ crossword puzzle?’ ? ‘For God’s sake!’ I said.
‘No, I haven’t.’
Taggart smiled. ‘Let us assume it takes some maniacal genius eight hours
to compile it; then it has to be set up in type, a block made, and
printed in the paper. This involves quite a few people for a short time.
Let us say that a total of forty man-hours is used up in this way – one
working man-week.’
‘So?’
‘So consider the consumer end of the operation. Let’s assume that ten
thousand readers of /The Times/ apply their brain power to working out
the damned thing – and that each one takes an hour. That’s ten thousand
hours – five man-years. You see the implication? One man-week of labour
has tied up five man-years of brain power in total y unproductive
activity.’ He looked at Ryan. ‘I think you can take it from there.’
Ryan had a low, even voice. ‘There are a lot of discoveries made in the
physical sciences which have no immediate application, or any
conceivable application, for that matter. One example is sil y putty.
Have you ever seen the stuff?’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said, wondering what they were getting at. ‘I’ve
never seen it.’
‘It’s funny stuff,’ said Ryan. ‘You can mould it like putty, but if you
leave it alone it flows like water. Furthermore, if you hit it with a
hammer it shatters like glass. You’d think that a substance with such
diverse properties would be useful, but so far no one has thought of a
single goddamn thing to do with it.’
‘I believe they’re now putting it into the middle of golf bal s,’
offered Taggart.
‘Yeah, a real technological breakthrough,’ said Ryan ironical y. ‘In
electronics there are quite a few effects like that. The electret, for
example, carries a permanent electric charge like a magnet carries a
magnetic field. That idea has been around for forty years and only now
has a use been found for it. When the scientists began to kick the
quantum theory around they came up with any number of odd effects – the
tunnel diode, the Josephson effect, and a lot more – some of them are
usable and some not. A fair number of these discoveries have been made
in laboratories working on defence contracts and they’re not general y
known.’
He shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘Go ahead.’
Thankful y he took out his pipe and began to fil it. ‘One scientist, a
guy cal ed Davies, surveyed the field and came up with an idea. As a
scientist he’s not very bright -certainly not of the first rank – but
his idea was bright enough even if he merely intended it as a practical
joke. He figured it was possible to put together an electronic package,
utilizing a number of these mysterious but unusable effects, which would
baffle a real y big brain. In fact, he did put together such a package,
and it took five top research men at Caltech six weeks to discover
they’d been fooled.’
I began to get the drift. ‘The deception operation.’
Ryan nodded. ‘One of the men who was fooled was a Dr Atholl, and he saw
possibilities in it. He wrote a letter to someone important and in due
course the letter was passed on to us. One of the sentences in that
letter is outstanding – Dr Atholl said this was a concrete example of
the aphorism: “Any fool can ask a question which the wisest of men
cannot answer.” Davies’s original package was relatively
unsophisticated, but what we final y came up with was real y complex ?
and it was designed to do precisely nothing.’
I thought of how Lee Nordlinger had been baffled and began to smile.
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Taggart.
‘Nothing much. Carry on.’
Taggart said, ‘You see the principle, Stewart; it’s just like /The
Times/ crossword. The design of the package didn’t take much brain power
– three scientists worked on it for a year. But if we could get it into
the hands of the Russians it could tie up some of their finest minds for
a hel of a long time. And the joke is that the problem was
fundamental y unsolvable ? there was no answer.’
‘But we had a problem,’ said Ryan. ‘How to get it into the hands of the
Russians. We started by feeding them a line by a series of careful y
controlled leaks. The word was that American scientists had invented a
new form of radar with fascinating properties. It had over the horizon
capability, it showed a detailed picture and not just a green blob on a
screen, and it wasn’t affected by ground-level clutter and so could
detect a low-level air attack. Any nation would sel its Premier’s
daughter into white slavery for a gadget like that, and the Russians
began to bite.’
He pointed out of the window. ‘You see that funny antenna out there –
that’s supposed to be it. That radar is supposed to be having a field
test here at Keflavik, and we’ve had jet fighters skimming the waves for
five hundred miles around here for the last six weeks just to add to the
plausibility. And that’s when we brought you British in.’
Taggart said, ‘We sold another story to the Russians. Our American
friends were keeping this radar to themselves and we were annoyed about
it, so annoyed that we decided to have a look at it ourselves. In fact,
one of our agents was sent to pinch a bit of it – an important bit.’ He
nicked a finger at me. ‘You, of course.’
I swal owed. ‘You mean I was intended to let the Russians have it!’
‘That’s right,’ said Taggart blandly. ‘And you were hand-picked. Slade
pointed out – and I agreed – that you were probably not a good agent any
more, but you had the advantage, for our purposes, of being known to the
Russians as a good agent. Everything was set up and then you fooled
everybody – us and the Russians. In fact, you were a devil of a lot
better than anyone supposed.’
I felt the outrage beginning to build up, and said deliberately, ‘You
lousy, amoral son of a bitch! Why didn’t you let me in on it? It would
have saved a hel of a lot of trouble.’
He shook his head. ‘It had to look authentic.’
‘By God!’ I said. ‘You sold me – just as Bakayev sold Kennikin in
Sweden.’ I grinned tightly. ‘It must have complicated things when Slade
turned out to be a /Russian/ agent.’
Taggart glanced sideways at Ryan and appeared to be embarrassed. ‘Our
American friends are a bit acid about that. It wrecked the operation.’
He sighed, and said plaintively. ‘Counter-espionage work is the very
devil. If we don’t catch any spies then everybody is happy; but when we