Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [17]
The decoded messages were in Bloggs’s file.
Finally there were the double agents, but their value was largely hoped-for rather than actual. Messages to them from the Abwehr had warned of several incoming agents, and had given away one resident spy—Mrs. Matilda Krafft of Bournemouth, who had sent money to Snow by post and was subsequently incarcerated in Holloway prison. But the doubles had not been able to reveal the identity or locations of the kind of quietly effective professional spies most valuable to a secret intelligence service. No one doubted that there were such people. There were clues—someone, for example, had brought Snow’s transmitter over from Germany and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria Station for him to collect. But either the Abwehr or the spies themselves were too cautious to be caught by the doubles.
However the clues were in Bloggs’s file.
Other sources were being developed: the experts were working to improve methods of triangulation (the directional pin-pointing of radio transmitters); and MI6 were trying to rebuild the networks of agents in Europe that had sunk beneath the tidal wave of Hitler’s armies.
What little information there was was in Bloggs’s file.
“It can be infuriating at times,” he told Godliman. “Look at this.”
He took from the file a long radio intercept about British plans for an expeditionary force for Finland. “This was picked up early in the year. The information is impeccable. They were trying to get a fix on him when he broke off in the middle, for no apparent reason—perhaps he was interrupted. He resumed a few minutes later, but he was off the air again before our people had a chance to plug in.”
Godliman said, “What’s this—‘Regards to Willi’?”
“Now, that’s important,” said Bloggs. He was getting enthusiastic. “Here’s a scrap of another message, quite recent. Look—‘Regards to Willi.’ This time there was a reply. He’s addressed as ‘Die Nadel.’”
“The Needle.”
“This one’s a pro. Look at his message: terse, economical, but detailed and completely unambiguous.”
Godliman studied the fragment of the second message. “It appears to be about the effects of the bombing.”
“He’s obviously toured the East End. A pro, a pro.”
“What else do we know about Die Nadel?”
Bloggs’s expression of youthful eagerness collapsed. “That’s it, I’m afraid.”
“His code name is Die Nadel, he signs off ‘Regards to Willi,’ and he has good information—and that’s it?”
“’Fraid so.”
Godliman sat on the edge of the desk and stared out of the window. On the wall of the opposite building, underneath an ornate window sill, he could see the nest of a house-marten. “On that basis, what chance have we of catching him?”
Bloggs shrugged. “On that basis, none at all.”
5
IT IS FOR PLACES LIKE THIS THAT THE WORD “BLEAK” has been invented.
The island is a J-shaped lump of rock rising sullenly out of the North Sea. It lies on the map like the top half of a broken cane, parallel with the Equator but a long, long way north; its curved handle toward Aberdeen, its broken, jagged stump pointing threateningly at distant Denmark. It is ten miles long.
Around most of its coast the cliffs rise out of the cold sea without the courtesy of a beach. Angered by this rudeness the waves pound on the rock in impotent rage; a ten-thousand-year fit of bad temper that the island ignores with impunity.
In the cup of the J the sea is calmer; there it has provided itself with a more pleasant reception. Its tides have thrown into that cup so much sand and seaweed, driftwood and pebbles and seashells that there is now, between the foot of the cliff and the water’s edge, a crescent of something closely resembling dry land, a more-or-less beach.
Each summer the vegetation at the top of the cliff drops a handful of seeds on to the beach, the way a rich man throws loose change to beggars. If the winter is mild and the spring comes early, a few of the seeds take feeble root; but they are never healthy enough to flower themselves and spread their own seeds, so the beach exists from year to year