Read Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) for Free Online

blur at the edge of the frame.
    Ruthven-Greene put a copy of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on the table. Last week’s big story. Stahl’s funeral. The photograph of Stahl had been blown up, magnified many
times, from a crowd shot – so coarse was the grain it could have been anyone. Stahl’s own mother would not have known him. The 12-Uhr Blatt , the Beobachter and the Börsen Zeitung had all carried the same picture – it was probably all they had.
    ‘Is that all? Just identify the man? I was his control officer for two years.’
    ‘Quite. I meant . . . help us find him . . . help us . . .’
    Ruthven-Greene thrashed around for the right technical term.
    ‘. . . Help us . . . de-brief the bugger. That’s it. De-brief him.’
    He smiled with satisfaction at having mastered the term. Cal half liked, half loathed this about the English
– the dreadful affectation that they were all amateurs, that precise and specific was the sort of thing you paid someone else to be rather than bother with yourself. War as cricket –
gentlemen and players. They had to be kidding.
    Ruthven-Greene showed Cal out.
    ‘You know, I’m still a bit puzzled,’ he said.
    He could not be half as puzzled as Cal felt.
    ‘Tin Man. Don’t you think it was a bit . . . well . . . obvious? For a codename, I mean. A bit close. Stahl, steel, tin? Geddit?’
    ‘I didn’t choose it, Reggie. Stahl did.’
    ‘All the same he’s damn lucky no-one put two and two together.’
    ‘Perhaps he was overfond of The Wizard of Oz ?’
    ‘Ah . . . perhaps so . . . if he only had a brain, eh?’
    ‘That was the Scarecrow. The Tin Man wanted a heart. You didn’t grow up reading Frank Baum, did you?’
    ‘Never heard of him. But then I don’t suppose you grew up reading E. Nesbit and The Railway Children , did you? Ah well. Toodle pip. See you in the morning.’
    Ruthven-Greene went away whistling the Tin Man’s song to himself. If he only had a heart. Blasé as ever. Toodle fucking pip.
    It was only in the staff car going back to the embassy that Cal pondered the truth of what Ruthven-Greene had said so casually, ‘We’re not allies, at least not yet.’ He had the
feeling that he’d just given away his birthright. Ripped off the bloody bandage, thrown down the fife and drum. That in sharing with this not-yet-ally he had somehow diminished himself, wiped
out his own raison d’être . There were times when he felt not that he was Stahl, exactly, but that without Stahl he was, not nothing, exactly – but something other,
something lesser, not quite Calvin M. Cormack III. His identity was bound up in Stahl’s identity. On the other hand he’d walked into the meeting with Stahl dead and come out with Stahl
alive.
    Then the other thing Reggie had let slip – did Reggie let anything slip? Wasn’t every word planted to a measure and a stick? The British had cracked the German code. Not any routine
traffic code, but the codes used by Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, by the very people who’d broken the US Embassy Traffic code. The British had broken the codebreakers’ own
code. What, then, did they not know?

§ 7
    The outer office was empty when Cal got back. There was usually a cypher clerk stuck out front, nominally his assistant – his secretary if they’d both but been
civilians. Janis – Sgt. Doyle – had reported sick two or three days ago, and he hadn’t seen her since. But the desk was neat, no mail unopened, no memo pad full of urgent
messages. Somebody was doing the job.
    On his own desk, in his in-tray was the letter from his father. He tore it open. It was weeks old. The mail was taking longer as the war grew older.
    Dear son,
    Well – it’s done. The Lease and Lend is passed into law. It’s a bum’s charter – a licence for the English to come panhandling whenever they
     feel like it. I was not alone in this view, believe me, but such is democracy – or such is presidential arm-twisting. Not a day went by