Of course he never saw the little fat man again after being dropped off that afternoon at a pub off the A12 up in Norfolk, where two men bought Hale a pint and then walked him to an old farmhouse up an unpaved track somewhere near Great Yarmouth; and for the next fourteen days Hale sat with a dozen other uncommunicative men in a sweltering barn and studied wireless as he had never studied anything before.
He learned about the Heaviside Layer, an atmospheric blanket of ionized air molecules that would reflect radio waves and let them “skip” across great distances; the layer was only about sixty miles above the earth during the day, with the sun pressure forcing it down, but at night it sprang up to a height of two hundred miles and split into two layers, and though transmission was clearer and stronger at night, signals could sometimes get caught between the layers and bounce along for thousands of miles before finally escaping to earth. The skipping effect was necessary for long-distance transmission, but Hale’s instructors spoke of the Heaviside Layer with a sort of irritated respect, for its capricious billows and varying height often scattered signals and caused fading in the reception. Illicit spy broadcasts were referred to as les parasites, flickering covertly between the bandwidths of official transmissions, but sometimes his instructors seemed to use the French term for the knots of turbulent activity in the nighttime Heaviside Layer.
He learned to file and tin a soldering iron, and where to use a metallic flux and where to use a non-conducting rosin flux in connecting wire splices; and he learned how to rewire the heater circuit of a direct current radio set so that it would work off alternating current, and what socket and vacuum valve needed to be changed, and how to avoid getting squealing and dead spots from the more sensitive cathode valve. At various points on the roofs of the barn and the barracks-like farmhouse he practiced setting up a Herz off-center-fed aerial, stringing the enameled wire at maximum angles to existing power lines or house wiring to avoid picking up accidental induction currents, and using ceramic coffee creamers and Coca-Cola bottles as makeshift insulators.
But mainly he learned the dit-and-dah characters of the International Morse code, concentrating on the numbers rather than the letters.
And he learned to use one-time pads. These were tiny books whose flimsy pages were nothing but columns of random four-digit numbers; given a practice sentence to encipher, he would assign a number to each letter of it-usually just 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on-and then after having written the message out in this pedestrian substitution-cipher he would add to each of the numbers one of the numbers from the one-time pad, taking them in order off the pad page from left to right. None of the one-time pad’s numbers was so high that the addition of any two-digit number would make it a five-digit number. When he tapped out the resulting code groups, his partner on the other side of the table would copy the numbers and then use a duplicate one-time pad to subtract the pad’s numbers and derive the original substitution-cipher message, and then quickly convert that all the way back into letters. Immediately after sending and copying, both copies of the used one-time pad page would be formally burned or eaten.
Accuracy was more important than speed here, and the students were constantly warned against the danger of losing their place on the flimsy pages, or turning two pages at once, as this would put the signal out of correspondence with the receiver’s deciphering, and the message would be lost in gibberish. Oddly, the instructors sometimes called such nonsense results les parasites too.
His photograph was taken at the end of the first week, and when he left the Norfolk farm he was given a Swiss passport in the name of LeClos, with his picture in it. He was driven in a closed van down to Gravesend, where it turned out that LeClos was listed as a passenger aboard a Portuguese merchantman bound for still-neutral Lisbon.
At the dock he nearly bolted-he had not been abroad since the uncomprehending age of two, and now he was apparently expected to enter some Nazi-occupied country, pretending to be a Comintern spy. A British prison seemed infinitely preferable…until he remembered his haggard mother taking him to the ship-like rooftop building in Whitehall Court. These are the people who got us home from Cairo…And they’re the King’s men. They deserve our obedience. And he remembered his resolve at seeing the ruins around St. Paul ’s…
In the end, with the aid of some whisky provided by one of his sympathetic escorts, he had got aboard the ship.
Immediately on his arrival in Lisbon, after having spent the four-day voyage mostly secluded in his cabin with a stack of ragged old Belgian newspapers, he was met on the dock by a Soviet agent carrying an orange and taken to a crowded hotel across town near the Sintra Airdrome; Hale surrendered the LeClos passport and was given a Vichy-government French passport in the name of one Philippe St.-Simon, who was a cork buyer for a Paris-based company called Simex and who had airline tickets to Paris on the next weekly flights of both Air France and Luft-Hansa. As St.-Simon, bewildered and disoriented and wearing a secondhand European business suit, Hale had wound up taking the Air France flight at midnight on the thirtieth of September-and she had met him in the chilly dawn of the first day of October in the terminal at Orly Airport.
With no luggage besides a briefcase full of assorted cork washers and gaskets, and a thoroughly stamped passport that indicated a business traveler who had been checked and cleared many times before, Hale had been passed through Paris Customs without a second glance. His mouth had been dry and his ears ringing with the knowledge that he was all alone in an enemy-occupied foreign country now, and the loudspeaker announcements in flat, German-accented French had seemed to batter at him physically, but he had managed to keep a steady, distracted frown on his face and to answer the routine questions in relaxed French-though the interior of his head had been echoing with unvoiced, astonished British curses.
When the thin girl caught his eye and nodded to him outside the Customs shed, he assumed that the Comintern was using schoolgirls as inconspicuous couriers, for she appeared to be no more than eighteen years old, if even that, and the loose gray skirt and blouse and black sweater could have been a convent school uniform. Until she spoke to him he thought she might be of Irish descent, with her auburn hair and blue eyes, but her French was animated with the full vowels and razory consonants of Spain, and when she pronounced St.-Simon it was with the back-of-the-teeth lisp of Castile.
“Rien a declarer, Monsieur St.-Simon?” she said with a tight smile as she took his elbow and led him through the crowded terminal.
“Uh, non,” agreed Hale in a voice that was only now beginning to shake. He certainly had nothing to declare, and the infinitive verb had no significance to him beyond the concerns of Customs.
She led him to a tiny right-hand-drive Citroen in the car park, and as soon as Hale climbed in on the left side and she pressed the starter, she said in her lively French, “If the police stop us, you are my brother, understand? We are both fair, it is believable. My name during this drive is Delphine St.-Simon. Say something quickly now, in French.”
Nervously but smoothly, and with a sincerity that surprised him, Hale recited the first several lines of Ghelderode’s Death of Doctor Faust, in which the frightened old mage complains that everything in the modern world is so false that one can blunder into one’s own self in the darkness; Hale even managed to mimic her Castilian accent. “Is that good enough for our purposes, sister Delphine?” he added in Spanish, feeling all at once absurdly pleased with himself. His shirt was damp with sweat, and he had to restrain himself from giggling.