Devil May Care

this evening he was particularly keen to be on time. He put on the headphones and positioned himself in front of the transmitter. His practised fingers went to work on the keys, tapping out his call sign – ‘PXN calling WWW’ – on14 megacycles. He heard the sudden hollowness in the ether that meant London was coming in to acknowledge him.
    He had a great deal to tell them, but it was important to keep calm as he did so. In the control room in Regent’s Park, there was an entire wall of glass dials with quivering needles which, among other things, measured the weight of each pulse and the speed of each cipher group, and registered any characteristic stumbles Darius had with particular letters – the s, for instance, under the weak second finger of his left hand. If the machines didn’t recognize his personal ‘fist’, a buzzer would sound and he would immediately be disconnected.
    He knew of an agent in the West Indies who, when overexcited, frequently transmitted too fast and found himself cut off by the electronic guardians. There were subtle ways in which agents who had been captured could let it be seen from the variations – either in their ‘fist’ or by previously agreed groups of words in the message – that they were operating under duress. But Darius was distrustful of such measures. The whole of the British SOE group in Holland, having been captured in the war, had faithfully included the agreed tell-tale signs in their Nazi-supervised transmissions only for their bosses in Baker Street to come on the line and tell them to stop messing about.
    Darius informed London in code that there was still no word from 007 and requested instructions as to whether he should himself proceed to Noshahr. He included the slender details of what he had so far discovered in Tehran – from Hamid among others – about the Caspian Sea Monster. At lunchtime he had gone downtown to the elegant French club and bought cocktails on the veranda for some old Indo-China hands who viewed themselves as having seen itall. Over côtelettes d’agneau and red Burgundy, he had learned that they were aware of sightings and that their photographs suggested the Monster had been modified to fire rockets. On his way back, Darius called in at the club known only as the CRC, one of the chicest venues in Tehran, where ten-pin bowling was played in a marble alley by the city’s most fashion-conscious people to the background music of Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck.
    Here, from an American who had drunk too much bourbon, Darius learned something even more interesting. A Vickers VC-10, which was meant to be delivered to the BOAC-owned Gulf Air in Bahrain two weeks earlier, had mysteriously never arrived. The American had heard from a friend whose son worked on a USAF base that the VC-10 had in fact entered western Persian airspace but had not emerged. The plane was thought either to have crashed or to have put down in the sand desert, the Dasht-e Lut, somewhere near Kerman. No trace had been found.
    Darius’s fingers relayed the news with measured urgency. He knew that M would understand the implications – and the danger – as completely as if he had transmitted the entire message en clair.
    An hour later, in the middle of the London afternoon, the pulse high on M’s right temple was showing, as it did when he was tense. He struck a match and held it to his pipe, inhaling noisily. On his desk were cables from Paris and Washington, as well as Darius’s latest offering from Tehran. Between them they might make up an entire picture, but for the time being they were only fragments – urgent, frustrating, incomplete. On the roof, only a few feet above M’s head, were the three squat masts of the most powerful radiotransmitters in Britain. The ninth floor was almost entirely taken up by a hand-picked group of communications experts who spoke a private language about sunspots and the ‘Heavi-side layer’. But as they had patiently explained to M, in reply to his tetchy questions, there was not much more they could do to help without further incoming signal traffic.
    M walked to the window and looked out towards Regent’s Park. A couple of weeks ago he had spent a morning down the road at Lord’s, watching England on their way to victory over the touring Indians by an innings and 124 runs. There was no time for such frivolities now.
    He buzzed the intercom. ‘Moneypenny? Send in the chief of staff.’
    Down the softly carpeted