10
The Tale of Bernard Birch

ON THE GROUNDS of the boys’ school where Hermann had spent most of his childhood, there was a wide, deep lake. By day, the blue lake was where they learned to swim, to row, and later to sail; but past dusk, the water was black. Unsupervised swimming was strictly forbidden. A boy had drowned there some years ago. He’d dived too deep, his ankles had gotten tangled in the pond weed, and he hadn’t resurfaced.

The circumstances of this drowning were muddled zealously by generations of schoolboys. He was said to have been pushed in, lured in, eaten by a giant snake, or to have drowned himself on purpose. And in the dormitory mythos, it merged with the other object of interest at the lake, which was the dark underwater shape in the northeast corner.

On rare occasions when the boys did manage to sneak down, they secreted a boat out of the boathouse. The opposite shore was dense, dark forest. They never ventured there. Instead, they paddled to the northeast corner of the lake. The water there was clear enough to see, at the bottom, a big dark shape. This, school staff had told them, was simply a large rock. Many boys believed it was a wrecked ship, a sunken bridge, or a crashed warplane; one of them said it was an alien craft.

But none of the fantastical explanations for the drowning were more terrifying to Hermann than the real one. And the mystery of the rock—or ship—paled next to the danger of drowning, dragged down by mundane, indifferent weeds.

Myths or not, the lake became a permanent fixture in the landscape of his mind. Secrets were large black shapes on the lake floor. Visions of escape were set on that distant wooded shore. Even as an adult, he had nightmares in which he snuck out to swim, against the rules, only to find his legs entangled and the air vanishing from his lungs. Tonight, he dreamed he was rowing on the lake’s flat black surface. The prow of the boat pushed the mist aside. When he reached the northeast corner, he stopped paddling and peered over the edge. His pale face stared back at him. As the dark shipwreck took shape below, something in it quivered and moved. Suddenly he realized that the face in the water was not his. It was Charles Rennie’s. Strong white hands leapt out and dragged Hermann into the dark waters below.

June 5th

Tuesday

The morning started poorly when Hermann discovered that Newton had forgotten about the laundry. There was no room service—it was not that kind of hotel—and Hermann refused to risk going out to eat. So he left Newt and returned with sandwiches in a bag and paper cups of coffee from the lobby. While they ate, he told Newton all that he had learned from the Greenwich file, trying his uncaffeinated best not to snap at him.

“I want to find out what happened to Birch,” Hermann said. “What actually happened.”

“You don’t buy the party line? Kidnapping?”

“No,” said Hermann. “I never did.”

He began collecting his things for work. Newt, still eating, watched him do so with unacknowledged envy. He suddenly dreaded the long day alone in that tiny room.

“You should talk to Stella. Stella McLuhan,” Newt said. Hermann, tying his tie in front of the mirror, nodded curtly.

“Yes.”

“You already thought of that?”

Hermann hadn’t, though it was the obvious thing—everyone knew she and Birch were friends. She’d been treated rather badly in the fallout. In fact, she had been one of Hermann’s teachers at GCHQ. She now ran one of the coding bays upstairs. But he hadn’t had a conversation with her in years, and he dreaded asking a living person any question about this case that they could repeat.

He simply nodded into the glass, trying to keep his unwarranted annoyance in silent check. Newt felt it nonetheless. He came to the mirror to fix Hermann’s collar and straighten his tie, because he only knew how to run at a problem; but even when he kissed his partner on the cheek, Hermann studiously avoided his eyes and told him to stay in the room, not speak with anyone, and wait until his call after work. When Hermann left, Newt collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh.

Hermann commuted alone. It was a relief, the solitude, but he still felt anxious and unresolved. He had expected to feel differently after his Wagner confession—relieved, or absolved, or at least unburdened—but all he felt was touchy and tense. It wasn’t Newton’s fault, but he couldn’t help it.

Today he would follow the Greenwich file to Bernard Birch. Birch was a disgraced former cipher clerk. He had been an energetic, friendly man, somewhat eccentric, once of military intelligence. A few years ago, he had been posted to Vienna. There, working in the secluded Division offices inside the British embassy, he’d enciphered and deciphered messages to and from Becket and his staff. Then one Monday morning last July, he had not come into the office.

Rumors had flown through the support staff networks, a whisper web more robust than even the best op could hope to grow. Hermann remembered hearing of Birch’s disappearance—the radio lab had been among the first in Century to learn the news. Support staff witnessed all of the action from the sidelines. Stories of defections, kidnappings, and nervous breakdowns passed with fearful exaggeration among them. Cipher clerks, with their high levels of access and high-stakes daily tasks, were known flight risks.

No one had believed Birch was that type. But the investigation had found otherwise. They’d discovered a receipt for a train ticket to East Berlin. In his flat, they found a microfilm camera: British-made, but not issued to him. When his phone records were requisitioned from the Viennese phone company, they found a regular Friday night phone call from a long-distance number.

His betrayal sent a tremor of shock through Newt and Hermann’s strata; even as the upper floors pursued their investigation, their peers whispered anxiously. Birch became a traitor to most in the service, and a tragedy to those who had known him.

Whitehall exercised control over the story—in what minor press he received, he was called a ‘deserter.’ There had been no expectation of ever seeing him again.

Then in late September, 1972, he had reappeared.

He was discovered in Prague. He was insensible. Rumor had it that he was damaged beyond even speech. He’d been returned to London, where an inquiry had been launched, which the press had caught wind of, and soon Whitehall was in another minor intelligence scandal.

The headlines ran amok. Repatriated Traitor: Disgraced British Intelligence Officer Returned at Taxpayer Expense. The Spy Who Sold Secrets and Kept His NHS Card. Send Him Back to the Russians! Whitehall’s intelligence committee and the Division’s spokesperson took what had been leaked and shaped it into a palatable story: Birch had been lured, they said, kidnapped, and then tortured. They said that his return was part of a prisoner trade.

Hermann had always had his doubts. He’d never understood how Birch, of all people, could become a traitor. What had lured him from his post? What had they offered him to come over?

And what in God’s name had happened to him over there?

And now Hermann knew that his desertion had coincided approximately with Greenwich’s. Coincidence? Perhaps. But instinct told Hermann it was a meaningful thread. It was not the Greenwich connection alone that raised his suspicions; it was the subsequent cover-up, and that scent of Division secrecy and mismanagement which had troubled him all along.

Stella might know something about Birch; but she was only a friend. She hadn’t worked with him in Vienna—there was no reason she would know the truth. No reason to involve her in his inquiries. No reason to trust her, really.

He held onto a pole as the train lurched forwards. Somebody holding onto the same pole had the word STAMPS scrawled across the back of his hand, and below, in smaller letters, juice, bread. He thought of Newton. He would have to go shopping before he went home. To the hotel, that was. Not home. And they would have to move hotels. There was so much to do, and he felt alone doing it.

Hermann spent the morning in the computer bay, entering the cumulative Orpheus data. The IBM had been purchased in the last few years. It had a massive memory, but it was a bit beyond the Division, as an institution. They didn’t really know how to integrate its massive database into their venerable intelligence processes. As a result, it was understaffed, and Hermann and Wesley had to do a lot of the hands-on programming.

Unlike the Blueberry, which was merely a processor (and now a bit outdated), the IBM was a database computer. It stored personnel records, including travel records. Referring to Victor’s list of "suspects," they looked up a personnel code in the paper directory. They entered that number into the IBM, calling up the file. Then they directed the computer to interface with Orpheus’s transmission record. If they found a travel record matching the locations and dates of the Orpheus transmissions, they found the spy.

As a former employee of GCHQ, the computing and surveillance headquarters of the British secret services, Hermann had little patience for doing this the old-fashioned way—least of all to hunt for a culprit who probably didn’t exist.

“I left GCHQ twelve years ago,” Hermann was saying to Wesley, “And I swear the machines they had then were more efficient than this one.”

“It’s a shame,” Wesley said, paging through the directory looking for a Smith. “A lot of computing progress was lost after the war, you know. All destroyed. Top secret. Really a shame.” This was one of Wesley’s frequent complaints. “I used to know Tommy Flowers, you know.”

“I don’t think you’re meant to tell me that, Dr. Wesley,” Hermann said flatly. “Do you have the ID number?”

“Oh—yes,” said Wesley, and read it off. Hermann entered it into the computer. “We only went to school together,” he added, as the IBM hummed. Hermann ignored him and limped down the bay to where the dot matrix was whining. He watched the output emerge. He could see there was no match.

“Negative,” he said, tearing it off. “Wesley—let’s do a batch in a row and check them all at once. It’ll be more efficient.”

“Certainly, certainly, Hermann,” Wesley said, standing up from his chair. “I’ve just got to step out. I’ll only be a moment.”

Frustrated, Hermann sighed out his nose as Wesley shuffled out. Then he realized that, since he was alone, he could look up Birch’s personnel file.

He hurried to the directory, looked up Birch’s personnel number, and entered it into the IBM. The machine printed his record at the other end of the room. Hermann hurried back over and tore off the output.

To his disappointment, it was less than two pages long. A bulleted summary of his government career. His treason—his first known contact with the other side—was dated several months before his desertion. His return was referenced in the final paragraph, vaguely. It said only that he was sighted in Prague, and not by whom.

Birch’s employment had officially terminated October 25th, 1972. There was no information about where he was now.

Who found him? Where had they hidden him away?

Who had sanitized his record?

Hermann heard footsteps and hurriedly fed Birch's record into the paper shredder. When Wesley came back in, he said quickly, “No match.”

He returned to their tedious task, frustrated. The full case file for Birch’s disappearance could be in Century Central, but he didn’t remember the number, so he couldn’t steal it—he’d have to ask outright, and he didn’t want to leave a trail. And it might not even be there.

He was brooding on the problem, paying even less attention to his labmate’s Fermat chatter than usual, when a different name brought him out of his reverie.

“What’s that?”

“Newt? He’s still out, is he?”

Wesley had paused with the paper directory open.

“Yes—I suppose,” said Hermann.

“Weeks said he’s sick,” Wesley said. “You haven’t heard from him, then?”

“No,” said Hermann, but Wesley, he realized, would not believe that. “But I’ll call him tonight and find out how he is.” Wesley thought of them as friends, and would notice an absence of contact if he noticed anything at all.

“He’s at home, then?” Wesley said, turning a page and avoiding Hermann’s eye. “I thought he was at the conference.”

“Don’t know,” said Hermann. “I thought so too.”

Wesley’s eyes roved down the columns of names. “Only with all this, and with Orpheus being at the conference...”

“Orpheus?” Hermann said sharply.

Wesley looked at him, frowning. “The signals?”

“Oh. Oh, of course,” said Hermann. The new Orpheus transmission from the weekend, the one sent from close to the Estate: in all the confusion, he had entirely forgotten about it. “Of course. Excuse me. But I think Victor is exaggerating this whole business... If you want my opinion, Orpheus doesn’t exist.”

If he had been less distracted, he might have noticed Wesley’s silence, his uncomfortable nod. Or he might not have. Hermann was not in the habit of taking Dr. Wesley seriously.

At lunch, Hermann went to the crypto registry to look up the August ‘71 2TP transmission, the one mentioned in the Greenwich file. That message had set off the whole thing. Their registry clerk, Aalvar, was leaning back in his chair with a newspaper over his face. He greeted Hermann by name without lifting the paper, and told him to find whatever he needed quietly. Hermann searched the 2TP directory and checked the Blueberry archive. And he left with a queasy combination of frustration and vindication, for the transmission was missing from the files, and its interception had been scrubbed from the record.

After an afternoon of hand-wringing, Hermann decided he would go upstairs to the coding bay and ask to check their records. He didn’t have clearance, but he had tentative hopes of leveraging his title.

But these hopes were dashed when he saw Berkeley at the counter, chatting with the young female clerk behind it.

“Ah, Gottlieb!” he said, smiling uninvitingly.

Berkeley was a case officer, ex-Army, with all the worst self-importance and machismo that came with both titles. He was a contemporary of Raleigh Becket’s. He’d recently been promoted to the North African desk, so he could have no reason to be in this office other than to harass the clerk.

Hermann disliked him immensely.

“You’re busy,” Hermann said, hovering in the doorway. “I’ll come back later.”

“No, no,” said both Berkeley and the clerk at the same time, in two different tones. Hermann hesitated, then came in.

“How is it, down in the basement? Hermann here works in the lab," he added pedantically to the clerk. "He doesn't get out much. Where’s your little friend?” he said, back to Hermann. “I haven’t seen that pansy around for a while.”

“Sick,” Hermann said shortly.

“What are you looking for, sir?” the clerk said.

“I—need to look at some files,” Hermann said lamely.

“Which ones?” barked Berkeley. “Excuse him,” he said to the clerk. “They don't see many women down there.”

Hermann stifled an undiplomatic urge to step on the man’s foot.

“I’d like to look them up myself. Is that possible?” Hermann said.

“Sorry, sir,” she said. “The filing system is too complex. There are too many files, updating all the time. I’ve got to fetch the records for you.”

Hermann nodded, heart sinking.

“Would you like me to step out?” Berkeley said, in a voice that invited a ‘No, that’s quite all right.’

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Hermann said abruptly. “This is a sensitive inquiry.”

Berkeley made a face. “Oh, well, if it’s a sensitive inquiry, then I suppose I’d better leave you two alone… Gottlieb. Miss.”

Hermann stood still, frozen with furious humiliation, until he heard the door close.

The clerk exhaled and looked at Hermann. If she was looking for commiseration, she was disappointed. He intended to act like nothing had happened. Without looking at her, he said, “I need the twotime transmission from August, 1971, please."

“Certainly sir,” she said mechanically. Hermann watched in agony as she wrote it down on a slip of paper, and then disappeared into the stacks.

He waited for several minutes. Just as Hermann heard her hurried step, he saw a woman pass by the window into the hall. It was Stella McLuhan.

He turned quickly back to the counter. The clerk was back. Her hands were empty.

“Sorry sir, it appears we didn’t get a 2TP transmission that month,” she said.

“There’s nothing?” Hermann said in surprise.

“You’re certain it was August?”

“Quite—” Hermann stopped himself. “No, perhaps I’m mistaken,” he amended. “I’ll have to double-check. I’ll come back tomorrow. Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said.

Hermann exited into the coding bay. This was the department with the most manpower in Century; it took up several floors. But manpower was the wrong word, for the majority of the decoding clerks were women. Each bay covered a different region of the world.

As he waited for the lift, he looked across the hall to the other set of glass doors: Decoding. Eurasia. That meant Russia. It should have read “deciphering.” That was one of Hermann’s pet peeves.

Today the files had disappointed him. It felt like someone was sneaking ahead of him, clearing signs from the path—unsnapping twigs and sweeping dirt over footprints. Would the clerk destroy that slip of paper? He hated knowing that he was leaving traceable tracks.

Through the glass into the Russia bay, he could see a few women still at work. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was Stella’s section.

Hermann closed his eyes and sighed. File-spelunking was getting him nowhere. He had to ask somebody—he had no other choice.

“Miss McLuhan?”

Stella looked up from her desk in her small office at the front of the Russia bay.

“Hermann!” she said, in her surprisingly high voice. She stood and crossed the room to clasp his hand with both of hers. “What a wonderful surprise. Oh dear, it’s been so long—so long. How long has it been?”

“I don’t know,” Hermann said, trying to smile. Stella McLuhan was a small woman on the later side of middle age, with quick brown eyes and beautiful dark hair. She wore it up, in an old-fashioned style, which made her look older and more matronly than she actually was. Back in the ‘40s, just after the war, she’d answered an oblique job posting for girls who were “good with numbers” and who “enjoyed puzzles.” She was a natural. A few years later, when Hermann was training at GCHQ, she’d been one of his instructors—the only female instructor, at the time.

“I was hoping we could talk,” Hermann said, unsure how to put the question. “Are you busy?”

“Talk? Is something wrong?”

“Not urgent,” Hermann lied. “Can I walk you out?”

She took his meaning. “Certainly,” she said. “I was just, I was just leaving. Let me get my things.”

“Oh—it’s Bernard you wanted to talk about? My, you should have said so.”

They were in the corner booth of a café, far from Century. She sat up a little straighter, and patted the side of her hair with the air of a press secretary. She fixed her bright eyes on him—brighter, now, in self-defense. Birch’s disgrace had harmed her by association.

“What were his particular interests?” Hermann asked as two coffees were set down in front of them. “He studied physics before he joined the service, is that right?”

“Yes, oh yes,” said Stella. “Particle physics. He missed it. He was always keeping up with the research, reading all the new developments, telling me all about them. All the public ones, anyway. He was a little... superstitious about the work the government was doing in that field.”

“What government? Our government?”

Stella nodded. “Ours, theirs, the States. All that. I think it was the work he would have really liked to do, physics, but maybe it would have been too much for his nerves. They got worse the older he got. His nerves did. He wasn’t always like that, you know. Not when we met.”

“At GCHQ?”

“That’s right,” she replied. “Class of ‘47. Most of the others in training were men, of course, so they either paid me far too much attention or none at all. Bernard was an odd duck, you know, so he talked to me. At me, is more like it. I don’t think he really noticed that I was a girl at first—he only noticed that I wasn’t telling him to piss off.” She smiled. “After we completed the course, I stayed on to teach, and he got assigned to military intel. I think he was in the radar area, though he couldn’t tell me, of course. But we always stayed in touch. Letters, dinner, you know, whenever he was in town. He proposed to me once, you know, after too much wine, but I told him not to be silly.”

Hermann smiled. He had forgotten how much he liked Miss McLuhan.

“Bernard was in MI for, oh, seven years. Nearly. He got transferred back to us in ‘62. I was working at Century by then, you know, managing the girls in the coding bay.” A lock of hair swung free, and she re-pinned it as she continued. “It transpired that the event that had made him finally impossible to work with was the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had become obsessed with the idea of these secret Soviet missile bases. Wouldn't concentrate on anything else. His bosses finally had enough. They transferred him.”

Hermann frowned and nodded. “It’s strange how an idea can take hold like that,” he said.

Stella nodded, looking at the window behind Hermann’s head. “Yes, yes. Very strange. Bernard was always that type. He was looking for that—that one great discovery. He wasn’t meant for this business, I think, Dr. Gottlieb. He should have stayed in physics. Research. At a university. Not working for the government. But he couldn’t resist it.”

Over the next few years, working together in London, she had watched his paranoia grow in secret. He had talked less of scientific papers, and more particularly of Soviet nuclear studies. He had done everything he could to get his hands on their research intercepts, even the ones that didn’t come through their coding bay.

“Then he was dispatched to Austria. I didn’t think it was a good idea, you know, sending him into the field,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. But he was excited. I think he wanted to get closer.”

“Closer?” said Hermann.

“To the Wall. The Iron Curtain. He thought there were secret bases in Austria.” Stella’s voice became oddly sharp. “I mean. I don’t know what idea he had in his head—to find one in the forest and sneak in? One little man with no field training? I have no idea what he was thinking. I really don’t.”

Hermann looked away, abashed by her flare of anger.

“Well, he got what he wanted,” she said. “Because the next time he visited home, he told me he had met someone.”

“Someone?”

“Someone from the other side,” she said. “An informant. I didn't believe him. But he was so certain—so certain.”

“I don’t understand,” Hermann said. “Birch was the informant.”

“It was a trade.” She rubbed her eyes. “He had a contact with information about the GDR’s nuclear missile project. They were sharing it with him, in exchange for information of his own. Of course that’s not how he explained it to me, and I thought the whole thing was a con. Which—well, it was. Just not the way I thought.”

“So you believe he was tricked?” said Hermann.

“Tricked? Yes, of course,” she said, dropping her hand from her face. “Of course he was tricked. He was desperate for information—they manipulated him. They fed falsehoods to him, while pumping him for information.”

Hermann said nothing, only nodded.

“Then, last year, in the spring, he visited home once more. He told me that his boss—I forget his name, do you need it?”

Hermann shook his head.

“Well, Bernard said the Vienna station was in touch with a nuclear scientist. A defector. He was very anxious that this man come over to our side. He said he was working on a very dangerous project.”

There was a sliver of ice digging into Hermann’s heart. Greenwich. If only Birch had known the truth. Not nuclear missiles—something far less destructive, and far more sinister.

“Bernard told me he was going to use his contact to get to that defector—but that was insanity, of course, all just—”

Hermann looked up quickly. Without warning, her voice had fragmented. Her mouth was trembling. “And that—that was the last time I saw Bernard.”

She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut.

"He was gone for all those months... I thought for certain he was dead... and then..."

Hermann’s heart was in his gut. “What about when he came back? You didn't see him?”

She kept shaking her head. “No, no. They never let me see him.”

Hermann pulled his handkerchief out and wrapped it anxiously around his palm under the table. “But...”

“They wouldn’t even tell me where—where he was—where they were keeping him—” Stella rested her elbow on the table and shaded her eyes. “They say he’s—out of his mind, doesn’t know where he is, but—but—”

Sobs shook her shoulders. Hermann handed her the handkerchief. She took it with her free hand but only clenched it in her fist.

“—But I kept thinking—if they would just let me see him, that I could help... And now...”

She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, and breathed in a great shuddering breath.

“Oh, Hermann, I’m so sorry,” she said, eyes still covered.

“I’m sorry. I'm sorry that it... happened.”

She patted his arm, still wiping her face.

“I shouldn’t get so worked up. It was just such a mess, you know.”

“I know.”

Stella sniffed.

“I just don’t understand why,” Hermann said. “Why did he turn?”

“For information,” she said in a light, brittle voice. “I’m sure he didn’t see it as a betrayal—only a transaction. It wouldn’t have been a contradiction to him. He wasn’t a traitor, Hermann. He wasn’t a spy. He was a scientist. He just wanted to know.”

She drew her hand back.

“But they manipulated him. They used him. And then when he ran away to East Germany, they... tortured him.”

Hermann reclaimed his handkerchief while she, frowning, drank some coffee. Her defense of Birch, her faith in him despite it all, was heartbreaking.

“Who found him in Prague?” he said. “The report said he was wandering on somebody’s property. One of our people recognized him in a local newspaper. Do you know who it was?”

“It was Chara,” she said. “The head of the Marathon network.”

“Chara?”

She nodded. There was a short silence.

“Miss—Stella,” Hermann began with difficulty. “If anybody asks whether we’ve spoken…”

She shook her head. “Of course. But Hermann. If you find out where he is, where they’re keeping him, you’ll tell me?”

Hermann nodded. “Yes.”

Stella excused herself. When she reappeared, face pale and eyes scrubbed, Hermann had already paid the bill. He walked her to her bus, trying to formulate his last question.

“In the... decoding bay, who is it that deciphers the 2TP matches, generally?”

“Oh, that’s by region,” she said. “Most of them come in through Eastern Europe, I think.”

“Is there one particular clerk who takes care of them?”

“They’re rare these days, aren’t they?” Stella said. “Oh, there’s my bus. No, no one in particular. At least, not in my section. They may run it differently in E.E.”

“Right,” said Hermann, heart sinking. He watched her bus go, then trudged to a phone booth.

He had no idea where to look for the '71 2TP transmission. Every route was a dead end. The day felt like a failure.

He called several downtown hotels in the phone booth directory and asked their availability. Finally, he found one—large, corporate—with two adjacent single rooms available. He booked them.

Through the glass, he watched the front doors of a ballet school open across the street. Kids in their teens and early twenties spilled onto the sidewalk, over-bundled in the spring air, bags slung over their shoulders. Two girls linked arms; one boy spun a twirl, making his classmates laugh. Hermann thought about the world of spies through which his colleagues traveled. The web of dark alleys, seedy bars, the clubs, brothels, libraries, offices, airports, where spies exchanged their covert goods on the market of information. The journalists collecting disinformation, the soldiers stealing blueprints, the diplomats sleeping with other diplomats’ wives. That was the world of Rennie and Bowen and Victor’s golden years, the world Becket and Berkeley had inherited. It was not his world. The support staff—himself, Newton, Stella, Wesley; Mme Marsden; Caitlin, long ago; Birch, until a few months ago; Rennie’s long-dead cipher clerk, whose name Hermann had already forgotten—they stood by like the telephone wires on which those important people sent their vital messages; they were the poles, they were the catenaries. The spies came and went, but they were fixed: inflexible, under-repaired, overlooked.