Free Saving the Queen by William F. Buckley Page A

able to put routine heat on Scotland Yard through the ambassador. The decision hasn’t yet been made whether to tip off MI-6. That’s one of the questions Dulles and Acheson will have to settle. The circumstances are pretty convincing. The two operatives were bearing down on Fuchs from different directions—they didn’t even know about each other. One of them left his flat to go to work on a Monday, at an engineering firm used by the government to check out research done within the secret atom laboratory. He never reached his office. The other worked as an accountant in the firm that handled Fuchs’s personal affairs. He got a phone call the following Tuesday and asked permission to take an extra half hour for lunch because he had to make an appointment a few miles away. Exit.”
    â€œDid you try the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool?” Black asked. Almost instantly he regretted doing so. He realized that, for Alistair, and the others—even for Anthony—it wasn’t a couple of characters out of E. Phillips Oppenheim who had disappeared, but two men who four months ago, were alive, who might have sat where he was now sitting, listening to Alistair even as Blackford was now doing.
    â€œNo comment,” said Alistair. “You will come to know, Mr. Truax, that although what frightens normal people may or may not be something frightful, in this case it is. Because the people we are struggling against take orders from a monster crazed by a frightful system. There are no bearable jokes about Vorkuta, any more than there could be jokes about Anne Frank. A single night, half frozen in a Soviet jail, knowing you probably will never see anybody again you care for, and that nobody knows where you are, or will ever know, is enough to change the texture of one’s feelings about what this is all about.”
    Black knew suddenly that he was talking to someone who had had such an experience. He wished he could ask him about it, but knew he couldn’t. Perhaps Anthony would satisfy his curiosity, if Anthony knew Alistair, or about him. Once more he strained at the silence with his colleagues and wished that he had been selected to sit behind a desk, behind a door lettered B LACKFORD O AKES , E SQUIRE , U. S. Representative, Central Intelligence Agency . Then it occurred to him that the engineer, and the accountant, must have heartily wished the same thing at that moment in London when, looking up or sideways or down, they suddenly realized that they had come, irreversibly, to the end of the road. He knew now, even from his limited and abstract experience, and his few weeks’ training, that almost certainly they had been betrayed. In central London. The heart of civility in the civil world.
    He left with his bundle of English papers, and he read solidly into the night, and, before turning off the light, he found himself reading even the Court Circular in the Times .
    â€œThis afternoon, Her Majesty Queen Caroline graciously received His Excellency Mr. Jonathan Hanks and accepted his credentials as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from the United States of America.”

Five
    He arrived on the last day in September, and as the Super Constellation circled the field, he was not surprised that the neat hedgerows and the green green, and the light mist and tidy cottages and factories were as fresh in his memory as the campus at New Haven. The ten years since his last arrival in England had been among the most tumultuous in world history, and he had participated in them, in a minor way, landing in France from North Africa, and fighting—brilliantly: His prowess as a pilot, who had soloed at age twelve, was legendary in his outfit—established in a few tangential air engagements until his transparent physical weakness got him ordered to the sick bay, and home. But these events hadn’t changed the landscape, though he had never seen it from the air, because the first time was