The Intercom Conspiracy Read Free Page B

be accepted. If on this occasion the risks were for some reason to be greater than usual, Brand’s message would surely have said so. It had not said so. Therefore his appearance must be due to illness. Nothing in the message about that either; but then the method of private communication which they employed had not been designed to convey information about personal matters.
    He remembered the night they had worked out the method, on the garden terrace of a hotel near Strasbourg.
    A French ten-franc note has on its face side four groups of figures. There is the date of issue and a printing-batch number. Then there are two serial numbers, one of five figures in the lower left-hand corner and one of ten figures in the centre below the words
Banque de France
. In all, there are at least twenty-five digits on every note, and no two of the notes are exactly alike. It had been Brand’s idea to use these notes as ‘one-time’ cypher pads. Jost himself had devised the matrix. The method was crude, no doubt, but it worked and was as safe as such things could be: a ten-franc note in one airmail envelope, the encyphered message in another. The limitation was that you could only send short, simple messages.
    The message which had brought him there had been short and simple: URGENT MEET PROPOSE COVER MILAN THEN VISIT GODCHILD TWENTIETH PM EVIAN STEAMER AFTER VEVEY CONFIRM .
    Well, perhaps it was not really simple. A good deal of thought had gone into its composition.
    Even in those parts of the world where international travel is easy and commonplace, there are some persons – presidents, kings, prime ministers and known criminals, for example – who can never, as ordinary men can, move freely from country to country, meeting whom they please where they choose, without their comings and goings being more than casually supervised.
    Directors of government secret intelligence services are among these inhibited few.
    In their own countries they are able to shroud their movements in secrecy and generally prefer to do so; but the moment they plan to go abroad, questions will be asked, and not only by their subordinates and those to whom they are technically responsible. Protocol, and sometimes prudence, demands that the foreign colleagues into whose territories they are moving be informed of their movements and of the reasons for them. Since such travellers must always expect to be under some sort of surveillance – at best benevolent and protective, but invariably careful and inquisitive – the reasons they give, whether true or false, must never be less than convincing.
    A director of a secret intelligence service himself, with personal experience of the problem, Colonel Brand had thoughtfully suggested a good cover story for his friend’s use on this occasion. The suggestion was contained in the message references to Milan and visiting a godchild.
    In Milan during the week immediately prior to the date of the proposed meeting, an international electronics-industry fair would be in progress. New miniaturised sensing and detection devices would be shown, as well as the latest telecommunications equipment. Brand had guessed, correctly, that Jost would be sending a man from his technical section to Milan to report on the new developments. He had also guessed, again correctly, that a decision by Jost to go to Milan himself with the technician wouldcause no surprise. The decision would be in character; Colonel Jost’s interest in technical development was well known.
    However, Colonel Brand could not go to Milan for the same reason; for him that would have been out of character. So the meeting would have to be elsewhere.
    In addition to the cypher messages they exchanged, they took care to keep up an ordinary, quite innocent private correspondence. Jost, a childless widower, had complained in one of his recent letters that a niece of whom he was fond, and to whom he was godfather, had been sent by her parents to an English school near