Artillery of Lies Read Free

you?”
    They were warming their backsides at the library fire. Garcia was about forty years old. He was Anglo-Spanish. His face was olive-skinned, smooth, straight-lipped, with a polished ax-head of a nose and black hair that he brushed straight back, no parting. But he dressed like an English countryman, perhaps a successful vet or a stud-farmer: whipcord trousers, tweed jacket of a soft and faded pattern with leather patches on the elbows, rust-red woolen tie. Hisfather had been a minor Spanish diplomat, his English mother a very good painter of watercolors. For work and pleasure the family had traveled around the world, ending up in London, where MI6 (the public label of the British secret intelligence service) recruited Freddy the day after Hitler invaded Poland.
    He was recruited in a fashion typical of the day. He was in Brown’s, a club which had a lot of members who were obviously decent chaps, and someone he occasionally played backgammon with came up to him at the bar and asked him if he might be interested in doing something interesting. Freddy said he might. It all depended on what and where and why and how long. Hard to say, the man said. We do lots of different things in lots of different places, all for the same reason, and we’ll go on doing them as long as this war lasts. It’s not boring. They had lunch, then Freddy went with him, and by teatime he was a spy.
    He had dual nationality, and until the fall of France he floated around Europe on his Spanish passport, doing harm and good by stealth and subterfuge. What he mainly did was help talented Jewish scientists escape from Germany. The man in Brown’s had been right: it was not boring. After the fall of France, he joined MI5’s new B1A section, which ran the Double-Cross System.
    â€œThey tell me your Mr. Cabrillo is a bit of a handful,” Freddy Garcia said.
    â€œTwo handfuls, actually,” Templeton said. “You don’t get Luis without Julie Conroy. Very pretty, very American, very head-screwed-on.”
    â€œDamn. Where on earth did he pick up Miss Conroy?”
    â€œMadrid, and it’s Mrs. Conroy.”
    â€œDouble damn.”
    â€œIt’s all in the Eldorado file,” Templeton said. “I suggest you read the file before you make any judgments.” He hoisted a fat bundle of papers from his briefcase.
    â€œCrikey.” Garcia weighed the bundle on his palms. “He’s been busy, hasn’t he?”
    â€œThe
Abwehr
certainly think so. I’ll get the kitchen to send you up some sandwiches at lunchtime. It’s a jolly good read.”
    Templeton went out. Freddy Garcia put the bundle on a table and tugged at the ends of the tape around it until they came loose. The first page was headed
Origins.
He found a deep armchair and began to read.
    CODENAME: “ELDORADO”
    AGENT : Luis Jorge Ricardo CABRILLO
NATIONALITY : Spanish
AGE : 24 (b. September 9, 1918)
LANGUAGES : Fluent English (self-taught), some French
POLITICS : None (anti-Fascist and anti-Communist)
EDUCATION : Varied. Cabrillo claims to have attended 27 different schools in 13 towns and to have been expelled from 23 of them. (As an employee of Spanish State Railways, his father moved from town to town.)
    Spanish Civil War
    Having left school at the age of 15 and tried many jobs, Cabrillo was a taxi-driver (aged 17) in Granada, specializing in tourists, when the Civil War broke out. He soon found profitable work as chauffeur/interpreter for English and American war correspondents. Cabrillo claims he became expert at “discovering” appropriate news to suit the political slant of any reporter’s newspaper (e.g. Guernica was destroyed either by German bombs or by the dynamite of Republican saboteurs); for this he got well paid. The work took him back and forth through the Republican and Nationalist lines and grew increasingly dangerous. Both sides suspected him of spying. He was nearly arrested in Guernica