Free I Can't Begin to Tell You by Elizabeth Buchan Page A

was in?
    Her gaze veered towards the door and the moment passed.
    ‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’
    The bicycle ride back to Køge took it out of Felix. His body ceased to pump adrenalin, and the stiffness in his muscles slowed him down.
    The priorities. Contact London. Check Vinegar and other Joe in place … He hoped to God that Vinegar had made it and was safe. Check safe houses. Hide weapons. Begin recruiting.
    The list was a long one and the cold nearly bested him.
    Doubt was a condition of life – his life at any rate. But he had learned to deal with it. Doubt was a spur. It made action leaner and fitter. More effective. Even so, on that hard journey back, Felix found himself asking:
Am I up to this?



CHAPTER SEVEN
    Hidden in the back of Jacob’s cottage, and almost felled by some hefty slugs of schnapps, Felix dozed on and off.
    He was back in training at The Firm.
    ‘My name is Major Martin …’
    Major Martin, or DYC/MB, as he signed himself on his messages, welcomed Felix into a stuffy, cramped room, not much more than a cupboard really, in the building used by The Firm’s Danish section, somewhere near London’s Marylebone Road.
    Felix was not a natural observer of human beings – he preferred buildings – but Major Martin’s very dark brown, almost black, eyes made an instant impact. These rested on Felix thoughtfully. ‘You are probably not going to love me much.’
    During his training, Felix had become better acquainted with English humour, which took getting used to. ‘Probably not,’ he answered.
    Major Martin indicated a chair. ‘So why have we met? Because, as an agent in the field, you will need to send messages back here. In code, obviously. These will be picked up by our signals clerks in one location, decoded by our decoders in another and then analysed in yet another. For security reasons, none of the departments are allowed to communicate with each other. So we have to try to make it all work. I am responsible, along with others, for the coding part and I am going to teach you how to do it.’
    ‘Black days,’ said Felix.
    Major Martin tapped his finger on the table as if to say:
Steady on
.
    ‘Weuse the poem-code system here,’ he said, and Felix picked up an undercurrent, a reservation in the tone. A scepticism? ‘Put simply, the code sender selects words from a previously agreed poem, numbers the letters of those words as the key and buries the message in a grid that combines the numbered code letters with a lot of useless letters.’
    Felix was relieved. ‘That sounds reasonably straightforward.’
    The major then went on to give a detailed explanation of the system, describing the encryption, the transpositions, the indicator groups, the laying of traps in case the message was intercepted, the feints to fool the enemy, the counter-feints …
    ‘Christ,’ said Felix.
    ‘Sending messages also requires you to include two security checks. A bluff one which you can use to fool the enemy and the real one which …’ the major’s voice held steady, ‘we hope the enemy never get hold of. No one else will have yours.’
    Rummaging in his briefcase, Major Martin produced a piece of paper. ‘First off, I’m going to give you a poem.’
    ‘I thought agents chose their own poems.’
    Major Martin glanced up at Felix. ‘Let’s see … If you asked me to predict your choice I would plump for something from your Danish national poet. Failing that, Kipling’s “If”, because it’s likely to be a British poem that you’ve heard of.’ He sounded ultra dry. ‘Good thinking. But if you have heard of it, so will the enemy.’
    At this point, both of them lit up cigarettes.
    Major Martin balanced his on the ashtray. Smoke rose between them. ‘Why is it the intelligence services, not so aptly named, refuse to understand that the enemy reads poetry too? In fact, more than we do.’ He sent Felix a wintry smile. ‘But we are getting around this with our very own Ditty