There was a moment’s bewildered silence.
“That wouldn’t do at all,” Leclerc said shortly, Leiser’s master.
Having rested, he should walk to the village of Marienhorst and look around for transport to Schwerin. From then on, Leclerc added lightly, he was on his own.
“You have all the papers necessary for a journey from Magdeburg to Rostock. When you reach Schwerin, you are on the legitimate route. I don’t want to say too much about cover because you have been through that with the Captain. Your name is Fred Hartbeck, you are an unmarried mechanic from Magdeburg with an offer of employment at the State Cooperative shipbuilding works at Rostock.” He smiled, undeterred. “I am sure you have all been through every detail of this already. Your love life, your pay, medical history, war service and the rest. There is just one thing that I might add about cover. Never volunteer information. People don’t expect you to explain yourself. If you are cornered, play it by ear. Stick as closely to the truth as you can. Cover,” he declared, stating a favorite maxim, “should never be fabricated but only an extension of the truth.”
Leiser laughed in a reserved way. It was as if he could have wished Leclerc a taller man.
Johnson brought coffee from the kitchen, and Leclerc said briskly, “Thank you, Jack,” as if everything was quite as it should be.
Leclerc now addressed himself to the question of Leiser’s target; he gave a resume of the indicators, implying somehow that they only confirmed suspicions which he himself had long harbored. He employed a tone which Avery had not heard in him before. He sought to imply, as much by omission and inference as by direct allusion, that theirs was a Department of enormous skill and knowledge, enjoying in its access to money, its intercourse with other services and in the unchallenged authority of its judgments an unearthly oracular immunity, so that Leiser might well have wondered why, if all this were so, he need bother to risk his life at all.
“The rockets are in the area now,” Leclerc said. “The Captain has told you what signs to look for. We want to know what they look like, where they are and above all who mans them.”
“I know.”
“You must try the usual tricks. Pub gossip, tracing an old soldier friend, you know the kind of thing. When you find them, come back.”
Leiser nodded.
“At Kalkstadt there’s a workers’ hostel.” He unfolded a chart of the town. “Here. Next to the church. Stay there if you can. You may run into people who have actually been engaged. . .”
“I know,” Leiser repeated.
Haldane stirred, glanced at him anxiously. “You might even hear something of a man who used to be employed at the station, Fritsche. He gave us some interesting details about the rockets, then disappeared. If you get the chance, that is. You could ask at the station, say you’re a friend of his….”
There was a very slight pause.
“Just disappeared,” Leclerc repeated—for them, not for himself. His mind was elsewhere. Avery watched him anxiously, waiting for him to go on. At last he said rapidly, “I have deliberately avoided the question of communication,” indicating by his tone that they were nearly done. “I imagine you have gone over that enough times already.”
“No worries there,” Johnson said. “All the schedules are at night. That leaves the frequency range pretty simple. He’ll have a clear hand during the day, sir. We’ve had some very nice dummy runs, haven’t we, Fred?”
“Oh yes. Very nice.”
“As regards getting back,” Leclerc said, “we play the war rules. There are no submarines any more, Fred; not for this kind of thing. When you return, you should report at once to the nearest British Consulate or Embassy, give your proper name and ask to be repatriated. You should represent yourself as a distressed British subject. My instinct would be to advise you to come out the way you went in. If you’re in trouble, don’t necessarily move west straightaway. Lie up for a bit. You’re taking plenty of money.”
Avery knew he would never forget that morning, how they had sat at the farmhouse table like sprawling boys at the Nissen hut desks, their strained faces fixed upon Leclerc as in the stillness of a church he read the liturgy of their devotion, moving his little hand across the map like a priest with the taper. All of them in that room—but Avery perhaps best of all— knew the fatal disproportion between the dream and reality, between motive and action. Avery had talked to Taylor’s child, stammered out his half-formed lies to Peersen and the Consul: he had heard that dreadful footfall in the hotel, and returned from a nightmare journey to see his own experiences remade into the images of Leclerc’s world. Yet Avery, like Haldane and Leiser, listened to Leclerc with the piety of an agnostic, feeling perhaps that this was how, in some clean and magic place, it really ought to be.