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thing was a feeble Nazi attempt to panic the population.) Anyway, David knew the way to London.
    They climbed a long hill. The little sports car took it nimbly. Lucy gazed through half-closed eyes at the blackness ahead. The downside of the hill was steep and winding. Lucy heard the distant roar of an approaching truck.
    The MG’s tires squealed as David raced around the bends. “I think you’re going too fast,” Lucy said mildly.
    The back of the car skidded on a left curve. David changed down, afraid to brake in case he skidded again. On either side the hedgerows were dimly picked out by the shaded headlights. There was a sharp right-hand curve, and David lost the back again. The curve seemed to go on and on forever. The little car slid sideways and turned through 180 degrees, so that it was going backwards, then continued to turn in the same direction.
    “David!” Lucy screamed.
    The moon came out suddenly, and they saw the truck. It was struggling up the hill at a snail’s pace, with thick smoke, made silvery by the moonlight pouring from its snout-shaped top. Lucy glimpsed the driver’s face, even his cloth cap and his moustache; his mouth was open as he stood on his brakes.
    The car was traveling forward again now. There was just room to pass the truck if David could regain control of the car. He heaved the steering wheel over and touched the accelerator. It was a mistake.
    The car and the truck collided head-on.

4

    F OREIGNERS HAVE SPIES; BRITAIN HAS MILITARY Intelligence. As if that were not euphemism enough, it is abbreviated to MI. In 1940, MI was part of the War Office. It was spreading like crab grass at the time—not surprisingly—and its different sections were known by numbers: MI9 ran the escape routes from prisoner-of-war camps through Occupied Europe to neutral countries; MI8 monitored enemy wireless traffic, and was of more value than six regiments; MI6 sent agents into France.
    It was MI5 that Professor Percival Godliman joined in the autumn of 1940. He turned up at the War Office in Whitehall on a cold September morning after a night spent putting out fires all over the East End; the blitz was at its height and he was an auxiliary fireman.
    Military Intelligence was run by soldiers in peacetime, when—in Godliman’s opinion—espionage made no difference to anything anyhow; but now, he found, it was populated by amateurs, and he was delighted to discover that he knew half the people in MI5. On his first day he met a barrister who was a member of his club, an art historian with whom he had been to college, an archivist from his own university, and his favorite writer of detective stories.
    He was shown into Colonel Terry’s office at 10 A.M . Terry had been there for several hours; there were two empty cigarette packets in the wastepaper basket.
    Godliman said, “Should I call you ‘Sir’ now?”
    “There’s not much bull around here, Percy. ‘Uncle Andrew’ will do fine. Sit down.”
    All the same, there was a briskness about Terry that had not been present when they had lunch at the Savoy. Godliman noticed that he did not smile, and his attention kept wandering to a pile of unread messages on the desk.
    Terry looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to put you in the picture, briefly—finish the lecture I started over lunch.”
    Godliman smiled. “This time I won’t get up on my high horse.”
    Terry lit another cigarette.

    CANARIS’S SPIES in Britain were useless people (Terry resumed, as if their conversation had been interrupted five minutes rather than three months ago). Dorothy O’Grady was typical—we caught her cutting military telephone wires on the Isle of Wight. She was writing letters to Portugal in the kind of secret ink you buy in joke shops.
    A new wave of spies began in September. Their task was to reconnoiter Britain in preparation for the invasion—to map beaches suitable for landings; fields and roads that could be used by troop-carrying gliders; tank