Artillery of Lies (2 page)

It was still night when they landed at Plymouth harbor. They were given breakfast—charred bacon and a slab of reconstituted dried egg—and then put in a car. Luis fell asleep. The first time he
saw England by daylight it was gray with rain. He asked Templeton where they were. “Salisbury Plain, I think,” Templeton said. “Not far now.” Luis asked him where they were going. “Big house called Rackham Towers, just outside London. You'll like it there.”

“Don't bet your pension on it,” Julie said.

It was mid-morning when they arrived. Rackham Towers was a Victorian pile set in five hundred acres of parkland and built of rain-blackened granite. It had battlements. It had round turrets with arrow slits, and overhanging square turrets with cannon ports, and smaller square turrets growing out of the bigger square turrets. A besieging army would have died of hunger until it worked out how to get in through the french windows.

They stood in the rain and looked at it.

“Fortunately, the light is bad,” Luis said.

“Unusual place, isn't it?” Templeton said. “I'm told the architect shot himself.”

“Before or after?” Julie asked.

“It's quite nice inside.” Templeton and Julie made for the door, leaving Luis standing and staring at the house. “Why on earth is he being such a pig?” Templeton murmured.

“Why not? There he was in Lisbon, having a lovely war, running the whole show, praised and admired by all and making a killing too, when down came the British Secret Service and took all his toys away.”

“Not quite. We just want him to let us play with them.”

“He says it's a rotten swiz. Is that the phrase?”

“In my country,” Luis shouted at them, “in Spain, we would pay our enemies to come and bomb a thing like this.” He turned “thing” into a piece of airborne graffiti.

Templeton carried in a tray of tea and biscuits, and found Luis and Julie on the sofa, reading the morning papers. Her eyes were half-closed. “If you want to go to bed,” Templeton said, “your rooms are ready. Just say.” She smiled, looking as lazy as a cat in the sun.

“Listen,” Luis announced, “I didn't realize this Stalingrad business was so awful.” He winced as he read on. “My God,” he muttered.

“I haven't seen a paper.” Templeton looked over Luis's shoulder and scanned the story. “That's not so bad, is it? I'd say it was quite good.
German Sixth Army's still trapped and the Russians are breaking out on all sides. Nothing for us to worry about there.”

“What?
It's a disaster. It could become a catastrophe.” Luis gave him the newspaper and began bouncing on the sofa, using up his excess of nervous energy, until Julie complained and he stood up. “The OKW must be
desperately
worried,” he said. “I mean, where is it going to stop?”

Fatigue was beginning to catch up with Templeton. “Sorry, old chap,” he said. “Not quite with you. O K What?”

“Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.”
Luis snapped out the words. “Hitler's High Command.” Templeton put milk in his tea, and waited. “You remember Hitler?” Luis said. “Looks like Charlie Chaplin, only not so funny?”

“With you now, Luis. So tell me why I should worry about OKW's ulcers.”

“Because the largest office in OKW is the
Abwehr.
When OKW catches a cold, the
Abwehr
runs a fever. It needs to be soothed.” Luis was pacing up and down, gesturing. “Luckily I have just the medicine. The British War Cabinet is unhappy about this Soviet success, very unhappy.”

Templeton was more tired than he knew. “Where does it say that?” he asked. He gave the newspapers a shake.

“Perhaps not the entire War Cabinet. No. But a powerful minority is very, very apprehensive. The danger is …” Luis walked all around the sofa and ended up looking at Julie. “What is the danger?” he asked, like an actor at rehearsals, seeking a cue.

Julie yawned and curled herself around a cushion. “I guess the danger is the Bolsheviks will sweep across Europe like a red tide,” she said sleepily.

Luis clicked his fingers. “Of course. And we don't want that, do we?” he said to Templeton. “So we're going to reduce the number of Arctic convoys we send to Russia. We must stop feeding the bear before he gets too big and gobbles us all up. That's it. That's what several influential members of the War Cabinet are demanding. Yes. Far too many ships are being sunk in the Arctic. Britain must stop bleeding herself white for the greater glory of Uncle Joe Stalin. Ha!” He jumped in the air, clicked his heels and clapped his hands. “You see? Stalingrad is not all doom and disaster. There is a bright and optimistic side to Stalingrad, if you know where to look. Where to listen.”

“And where exactly did you see and hear all this?” Templeton asked.

“Um …” Luis gave it some thought, pursing his lips and shrugging as he selected his source. “Pinetree,” he said at last.

“Pinetree? Refresh my memory. Whose codename is Pinetree?”

“British civilian employee in the American embassy.”

Templeton finished his tea. “Well, Pinetree would know, if anyone does.”

“Exactly. I'll draft something for transmission. The
Abwehr
will love it, they must be gasping for good news. Can we get it out tonight?”

“I'll see.” Templeton heard the crunch of tires on gravel and he went to the window, in time to see a man in a blue raincoat run up the steps. Freddy Garcia. Thank God. For the first time in a week, Templeton felt he could afford to think about relaxing. Eldorado was Freddy's pigeon now.

“How is Lisbon? Don't tell me, I can't stand to know,” said Freddy Garcia. “London's ghastly. The Americans have got all the taxis and ever since we had a bomb in the back garden, I can't make the hot-water system work. Not that it matters, because I virtually live in the office, which is another madhouse. The Director won't hire a secretary unless she's in
Debrett
or
Burke's Peerage;
he says in this racket loyalty counts more than efficiency, so there are debs everywhere. Charming gels with perfect manners but the files are in chaos. You don't know how lucky you are, Charles.”

“Actually, it was raining in Lisbon too. I think it's raining everywhere. Not in North Africa, perhaps.”

“What? It rains harder and colder in North Africa than anywhere outside Burma.”

“I'll take your word for it, Freddy,” Templeton said. “I mean to say, you've been everywhere, haven't you?”

They were warming their backsides at the library fire. Garcia was about forty years old. He was Anglo-Spanish. His face was olive-skinned, smooth, straight-lipped, with a polished ax-head of a nose and black hair that he brushed straight back, no parting. But he dressed like an English countryman, perhaps a successful vet or a stud-farmer: whipcord trousers, tweed jacket of a soft and faded pattern with leather patches on the elbows, rust-red woolen tie. His
father had been a minor Spanish diplomat, his English mother a very good painter of watercolors. For work and pleasure the family had traveled around the world, ending up in London, where MI6 (the public label of the British secret intelligence service) recruited Freddy the day after Hitler invaded Poland.

He was recruited in a fashion typical of the day. He was in Brown's, a club which had a lot of members who were obviously decent chaps, and someone he occasionally played backgammon with came up to him at the bar and asked him if he might be interested in doing something interesting. Freddy said he might. It all depended on what and where and why and how long. Hard to say, the man said. We do lots of different things in lots of different places, all for the same reason, and we'll go on doing them as long as this war lasts. It's not boring. They had lunch, then Freddy went with him, and by teatime he was a spy.

He had dual nationality, and until the fall of France he floated around Europe on his Spanish passport, doing harm and good by stealth and subterfuge. What he mainly did was help talented Jewish scientists escape from Germany. The man in Brown's had been right: it was not boring. After the fall of France, he joined MI5's new B1A section, which ran the Double-Cross System.

“They tell me your Mr. Cabrillo is a bit of a handful,” Freddy Garcia said.

“Two handfuls, actually,” Templeton said. “You don't get Luis without Julie Conroy. Very pretty, very American, very head-screwed-on.”

“Damn. Where on earth did he pick up Miss Conroy?”

“Madrid, and it's Mrs. Conroy.”

“Double damn.”

“It's all in the Eldorado file,” Templeton said. “I suggest you read the file before you make any judgments.” He hoisted a fat bundle of papers from his briefcase.

“Crikey.” Garcia weighed the bundle on his palms. “He's been busy, hasn't he?”

“The
Abwehr
certainly think so. I'll get the kitchen to send you up some sandwiches at lunchtime. It's a jolly good read.”

Templeton went out. Freddy Garcia put the bundle on a table and tugged at the ends of the tape around it until they came loose. The first page was headed
Origins.
He found a deep armchair and began to read.

CODENAME: “ELDORADO”

AGENT
: Luis Jorge Ricardo CABRILLO
NATIONALITY
: Spanish
AGE
: 24 (b. September 9, 1918)
LANGUAGES
: Fluent English (self-taught), some French
POLITICS
: None (anti-Fascist and anti-Communist)
EDUCATION
: Varied. Cabrillo claims to have attended 27 different schools in 13 towns and to have been expelled from 23 of them. (As an employee of Spanish State Railways, his father moved from town to town.)

Spanish Civil War

Having left school at the age of 15 and tried many jobs, Cabrillo was a taxi-driver (aged 17) in Granada, specializing in tourists, when the Civil War broke out. He soon found profitable work as chauffeur/interpreter for English and American war correspondents. Cabrillo claims he became expert at “discovering” appropriate news to suit the political slant of any reporter's newspaper (e.g. Guernica was destroyed
either
by German bombs
or
by the dynamite of Republican saboteurs); for this he got well paid. The work took him back and forth through the Republican and Nationalist lines and grew increasingly dangerous. Both sides suspected him of spying. He was nearly arrested in Guernica shortly after the bombing but escaped. In the course of his escape a Nationalist army officer chasing him was killed (accidentally, Cabrillo says) and Cabrillo somehow acquired a very large sum of money.

He went into hiding for the next four years. The first two, he spent moving about northern Spain, keeping clear of areas of the fighting, always traveling on foot and pretending to be a poor peasant. When the war ended (March 1939) he moved to Madrid and rented a small apartment. He claims not to have left it for the next two years—he was still on the wanted list of Franco's police in 1939 and 1940—and spent all his time reading books in English, thus acquiring a huge, if miscellaneous and secondhand, knowledge of life in Britain.

Introduction to intelligence work

By May 1941 Cabrillo's money had run out. He emerged from hiding and applied to the British embassy for work as a spy. As he had no experience apart from his job with the war correspondents, no contacts in Occupied Europe and no knowledge of German, the embassy turned him down.

Cabrillo immediately went to the German embassy and offered to spy for the Axis cause. (He now asserts that this move was intended to
give him valuable inside knowledge of the workings of German military intelligence which he could later offer to British Intelligence.) It seems that Madrid
Abwehr
were impressed by his initiative and imagination and agreed to train him. This they did, very thoroughly: he learned codes, secret writing, gunmanship, unarmed combat, Morse transmission, radio maintenance and repair, technique of microdots, landing by rubber dinghy, principles of military intelligence, conversion of British systems of weights, measures and currencies, how to recruit sub-agents, the psychology of espionage. According to Cabrillo he scored well in everything except gunmanship and radio.

The
Abwehr
must have been confident of Cabrillo's value because he survived two potential disasters. The lesser involved his friendship with an American woman, Mrs. Julie Conroy, whom he met at the German embassy; she was seeking information about her husband, an American journalist, thought to be somewhere in Europe. Their friendship ripened but so did Mrs. Conroy's anti-Nazi views, which she expressed openly. This disturbed Brigadier Christian (then head of Madrid
Abwehr
); however, Cabrillo persuaded him that a vehemently anti-Nazi girlfriend was excellent cover for an
Abwehr
agent. In any case Mrs. Conroy left Madrid for America (or so Christian believed) and the crisis passed.

More serious was the involvement of Freddy Ryan, an MI6 agent who was infiltrated as a potential
Abwehr
agent. Ryan trained alongside Cabrillo until something (or someone) betrayed him. The
Abwehr
shot him, in Cabrillo's presence. Cabrillo might have been considered guilty (or at least suspect) by association; in the event Christian seems to have decided that Ryan's death had so frightened Cabrillo that he had been cleansed of any possible disloyalty.

Madrid
Abwehr
planned to land Cabrillo in England by rubber dinghy from a U-boat. He took strong exception to this, pointing out that since he was a Spanish neutral he could go by ship or air to Britain, traveling as a businessman. He further persuaded them that he had arranged a method of communication which was better than radio: he would use friends in the Spanish embassy in London to send his reports by diplomatic bag to Lisbon, where another contact would forward them to Madrid. Christian agreed to these arrangements and Cabrillo left Madrid for England, traveling alone, on July 23, 1941.