The Harry Palmer Quartet

Behind Jay’s voice I could hear the radio playing very quietly. An English jazz singer was even now Gee Whizzing, Waa Waa and Boop boop booping in an unparalleled plethora of idiocy. He noticed that I was listening, and his attack veered. What of the capitalist countries themselves? What of them then, racked with strikes, with mental illness, with insular disregard for their fellow men. On the brink of anarchy, their police beset by bribes, and by roving bands of overfed cowards seeking an outlet for the sadism that is endemic to capitalism, which is in any case licensed selfishness. Who do they pay their big rewards to? Musicians, aviators, poets, mathematicians? No! Degenerate young men who gain fame by not understanding music or having talent for singing. He’d timed his speech well, or he had luck, for he switched the radio across to the Home Service. It was time for the news. He went on talking, but I didn’t hear him. I could only hear the announcer saying. ‘The police are anxious to interview a man seen near the scene of the crime.’ There followed a fairly good description of me.

‘Cut out all this,’ I said to Jay. ‘Who killed Charlie Cavendish?’

Jay got up from his chair and went to look out of the window. He beckoned to me and I went to look out. There were two taxis parked across the street. At the bottom of the street was a single-decker bus. Jay switched on the FM radio, and tuned it to the police wave-length. A police walkietalkie outside the Victoria and Albert Museum was co-ordinating the movements.

‘We all did,’ said Jay. ‘You, me and them.’

One of the three men across the street leaned into the taxi-cab and we heard his voice saying, ‘I’m going across there now – pay particular attention to the back and the roofs. Street blocks! Hold everyone until further notice.’ It was Ross’s voice. The three men came across the road.

Jay turned to me. ‘One of these days, brainwashing will be the acknowledged method of dealing with anti-social elements. Criminals can be brain-washed. I’ve proved it. Nearly 300 people I’ve processed. It’s the greatest step forward of the century.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Maurice, we have callers.’ Jay gave me a broad calm smile. ‘Show them up, but tell them that I am already in custody.’ And I remembered other things about garrulus glandarius rufitergum – alert, tireless, excitable, vociferous, pairs for life, sociable in the spring but solitary at all other times.

Maurice let Ross and the two policemen in, and everyone shook hands with everyone. I’d never been pleased to see Ross before. They were taking no chances and the street blocks were kept in position for another hour. Ross was pretty cool with Jay, and he was searched and taken off to Carshalton, which was a house that Ross’s department owned for purposes unknown. When Jay came in to say good-bye, I noticed he had changed into a very fine grey-green mohair. I was mildly surprised to notice that he had a nuclear disarmament badge in his lapel. He saw me looking at it and removed it and pressed it into my hand without saying a word. Considering the place he was going, he could have given me the TV.

When all the commotion had faded, Ross said, a little patronizingly I thought, ‘And now I suppose you’ve got something that can’t wait another moment.’

I said, ‘I have, if you like homard à la broche,’ and I took him to the kitchen to show him.

Ross made a joke then. He said, ‘Do you come here often?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know the chef.’

31

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Joyful renewal of old acquaintance. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into your work.]

It was midnight when I got to Charlotte Street. The whole place was a hive of activity. Alice wore green lisle stockings and asked my permission to use the IBM. Jean wore a new round-necked, sleeveless, button-through tailored dress in tangerine linen, one small gold ear-ring, the one she hadn’t lost, and a centre parting. I gave Alice a list of names, and when she went away I smudged Jean’s lipstick.

All the people arrested were being taken down to Carshalton, and at 3.30 A.M. they were bursting at the seams, so Alice told Ross, and he fixed an alternative detention centre because it was so important to keep all the detainees separate.* The IBM went on buzzing and clattering, and at 6 A.M. there was a meeting at Scotland Yard. The police were very worried, but Ross had got one of the 4th Secretaries from the Home Office along there, and then they were even more worried. By 8 o’clock the worst part was over. At 8.9 A.M. Murray, who had arrested Dalby shortly after being hit on the head, phoned from Liphook to say he was holding a man named Swainson, and would I send a car. Swainson, it seemed, was K.K.’s real name. I sent the car and had it drop Jean and myself off for breakfast.

‘A plan to brain-wash the entire framework of a nation,’ said Jean, over the coffee and croissants. ‘It’s hardly credible.’

‘It’s credible all right,’ I told her, ‘and we haven’t entirely eradicated it! I don’t know which was more surprising even now; Dalby working for the other side, or Ross master-minding the whole operation that netted him.’

‘Did Ross know what was happening when he transferred you to WOOC(P)?’ asked Jean.

I said, ‘He half guessed. That was why he put Murray in to spy out the land. When he heard the news of my near arrest in the strip club he let Dalby understand that he was suspicious of him. A very dangerous thing to do. In this case it paid off, for, to prove his loyalty, Dalby did a very efficient job in Lebanon. I remember seeing Ross at the airport when he returned from Beirut after seeing Dalby.

‘To what extent Dalby’s action in the Lebanon was against Jay’s wishes we shall never know, for Dalby made a point of shooting all the people in the car with Raven, you remember.’

Jean said, ‘So Carswell wasn’t such a fool?’

‘He wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Even to the “concens” having fever and Right-wing views – both being conducive to Communist thought reform. Of course, at first, the fact that Carswell’s statistics began to show up the whole plot was a pure coincidence. But as soon as possible, Ross had Carswell hidden away. That was why I could find no trace that he had ever existed through Charlie at C-SICH. Ross was frightened for Carswell’s safety.’

Jean added, ‘To say nothing of the fact that, as things are right now, if Jay says nothing, Carswell might provide the only guide to the extent of operation IPCRESS. By the way is IPCRESS a figure from Greek mythology, the allusion to which I should immediately catch?’

I said, ‘No, it’s a distorted word that one of Ross’s men invented from the words “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress”, which is a clinical description of what they did in the haunted house.’

‘And what they started to do to you at Wood Green,’ said Jean.

‘Exactly. They had three basic systems. The “haunted house” system, for want of a better word, depended on mental isolation. They used phoney ambassadors to convince the subject that he was completely alone, or phoney policemen (but they dropped the policeman idea after we got the fellow at Shoreditch by accident) – civilian clothes were safer. At Wood Green they even had radiant heating and cooling systems to alter the temperature as often as they wished. Switched lights on and off to give a one-hour-long day or a thirty-six-hour-long night. It was all to throw the mind off balance, and as Pavlov discovered, this is much easier to do to someone physically weak.’

‘What would they have done to you if you hadn’t escaped?’ asked Jean. It was nice to know someone had been worried.

‘Escaped is too strong a word,’ I said. ‘Luckily I had enough information about their methods to make an informed guess. Most of the previous inmates never dreamed that they were still in England. There was no point in getting out of the house only to find yourself thousands of miles behind the Iron Curtain. As to the next stages; the beginning is this severing of connections, a feeling of isolation and physical and mental fatigue and uncertainty; that’s what they started with me. Tension and an uncertainty; about what will please and what won’t please. Any sort of humour is dangerous to the technique. You’ll notice how the American treatment after my arrest on Tokwe, had these same basic characteristics. Well, had I stayed at Wood Green the next stage would most likely have been the memorizing of long passages of dialect. Probably they would have told me to memorize that long document about my trial.’

Jean poured out some more coffee. I was very tired, and just talking about how near I had come to being converted made my throat nervously dry. ‘After that?’ Jean said. She lit a Gauloise and passed it across to me.

‘Group therapy. We know they had five others there at the same time as me. Maybe even more. The tape recordings of moans and groans and talking in sleep in a foreign language must have worked everyone up to a fever pitch, but since it was identical to the tape that Keightley had found, it only encouraged me. Soon there would be group meetings, and we would be allowed to discover that one is an informer, to increase the tension. Then there is the confession and autobiography stage. This is detailed. Things like why you smoked, had love affairs, drank, mixed with certain people.’

‘Had love affairs?’ said Jean.

‘I escaped before that part,’ I said.

‘Now I know why,’ said Jean. ‘It was very sweet of you.’

I drank my coffee. The sun shone brightly in the Soho street below. Large blocks of ice stood outside restaurants and melted into the gutter. A man in a straw boater arranged a large Severn salmon across a wet marble slab. Around it he carefully placed soles and turbot and scallops and flat oysters and portugaises that looked like pieces of rock, and herrings and mackerel, and a fountain of water played over it, and Jean was talking to me. I turned and gave her my full attention.

‘What happened after the mutual confession stage?’

‘You don’t have an ulterior motive?’ I asked.

‘Oh, every woman understands brain-washing. It’s letting a husband get furious about a new hat and then knowing when to ask him to pay for it. Just when he starts to feel guilty.’

‘You don’t know how right you are,’ I said. ‘The whole process is one of discovering weaknesses; preferably the subjects find their own. Self-criticism, etc. Then the third phase is using the information so far gained to create what is technically called “abreaction”. This is caused by intense mental work, indoctrination by meetings. In fact by overwork and stress, and is the culmination of all brain-washing. Abreaction is the point of no return.’

‘How do you know when you’ve reached it?’ asked Jean.

‘You know all right – it’s a complete nervous collapse. Dilated pupils, rigid body, the skin goes clammy with perspiration. You feel you can’t get your breath, you breathe in and out very quickly, but not deeply at all. That’s just the beginning; after that, there’s continuous sobbing hysterics, complete loss of control. In World War One it was called “shell shock”, in World War Two, “battle fatigue”. As soon as abreaction hits one of your group, the others soon topple – one after the other they are hooked.’

‘You said there were three basic systems,’ said Jean. ‘You’ve told me only one.’

I said, ‘Oh, did I? I didn’t mean that the systems were different – only the way the one system was applied. The haunted house was the first sort. Then Jay thought of using small private nursing homes – less conspicuous, you see, and no need for all the building work – or the conversion back to normal before they moved out again. It was the nursing home aspect that Carswell found with his “concens”; do you remember the description he gave us? The fever rate was high because that is the best physical debility to prepare one for brain-washing.’

‘You mean that they were deliberately given fever, then whipped into one of these nursing homes?’ Jean said.

‘The other way round,’ I told her. ‘They were brought in, then given fever.’

‘Injected with it?’ Jean asked.

‘Apparently medical science still uses mosquitoes. They strap a glass cup on the skin and the mosquitoes bite. That’s when it’s needed to give a patient fever; it’s pretty rare nowadays.’ Jean didn’t wrinkle her nose or say ‘how awful’ when I got to the mosquito bit and I appreciated that.

‘The fever speeded things up,’ Jean said.

I agreed, ‘It certainly did, which led to the third system. This was to create this breakdown …’

‘Abreaction?’

‘Yes, this abreaction. To create it by drugs alone; what doctors call a pharmacological shock. It’s done by injecting lots of insulin into the blood stream; this lowers the sugar in the blood, and very soon you have the same twitches and convulsions that one sees in abreaction – shouting and sobbing and finally collapse into a deep coma. Later they gave intravenous sugar.’

‘Why didn’t they do that to you?’ asked Jean. ‘Why didn’t you go to one of their nursing homes?’

‘I do believe you still have doubts about me.’ Jean laughed nervously, but it went home. ‘That was my big worry, I can tell you, but it’s tricky; they needed the man who had experience, but he was deeply involved at the place in Scotland. Luckily he couldn’t be in two places at once. Plus the fact that the older system is more thorough, and I was considered difficult.’

‘You can say difficult again,’ said Jean. ‘But I’m still not sure if I understand even now. You mean, after this brain-washing, these people, these “concens”, went back to work but were really working as Russian agents, their convictions totally reversed?’

I said, ‘No. It’s far more complex than that. Everything revolves round Jay, really; to understand IPCRESS you must understand Jay. Jay has spent his life amidst changing political scenes. Here in England it’s easy for us to have allegiance to a government that has stayed pretty constant since the Stuart restoration; but Jay has seen governments come and go too often to place too much reliance on them. He remembers the Tsars; government by ignorance; Paderewski, government by gentle pianist; Pilsudski, the general who won the brilliant battle of Warsaw in 1920, and smashed the new Soviet Armies under Voroshilov. He remembers the dictator who seized power by shouting “This is a whorehouse, all get out!” to Parliament. He remembers the government who followed Hitler’s example in 1938 by grabbing a piece of Czechoslovakia by force. He remembers the Nazis, and then, after the war, the protégés of London and Moscow fighting each other for power. Jay has come through all these changes like a plastic duck going over Niagara – by floating along with the current. He has sold information. Information from Klaus Fuchs in Britain, Alan Nunn May in Canada, and the Rosenbergs in the US. Then he graduated to kidnapping and arranging that Otto John from West Germany, the Italian physicist, Bruno Pontecorvo, and Burgess and Maclean should travel eastward. But always for money. He would have sent them equally willingly to anyone who named the right price. Then one day, perhaps while he was shaving, an idea hit him; he would brain-wash a network of well-placed men, and all of them would clear their information through Jay. They would be loyal to Jay personally. Jay knew enough about psychiatry to know that it was possible (and let’s not forget that it’s been working very well for nearly a year), and he knew that it would make us all “trigger happy”, suspicious of everyone once we got on to it.’

I ordered some more coffee and phoned Charlotte Street to see if there were any cables for me, but there was nothing fresh. I went back to Jean.

‘What was that water tank that you mentioned in the “haunted house” report?’ she asked.

‘Yes, the water tank. I should have perhaps said four ways because that was for another system. You mask the subject’s eyes and fit him with breathing apparatus, then suspend him face down in a tank of blood-heat water. At first he sleeps; when he awakes he is completely disorientated and subject to anxiety and hallucination. You choose the right moment and begin to feed him information …’

‘Hence the tape recorder.’

‘Exactly …’

‘It’s a quick way of brain-washing then?’

‘It is, but they discontinued it, so it probably wasn’t so sensational.’

‘And they didn’t use TAP* either,’ Jean said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t know you’d read that report.’

‘Yes, Alice gave it to me to read last night. There were some mentions in a Norwegian medical journal which I translated for her.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s all right then.’

‘Alice said you’d say that.’ Before I could say anything, Jean continued, ‘This brain-washing …’

‘Say “thought reform”. No one says “brainwashing” nowadays.’

‘This thought reform,’ said Jean, ‘is it … ?’

‘Enough of thought reform,’ I said, ‘what are you doing tonight?’

Jean fingered the lone gold ear-ring, and looked at me from low down under her eyelids. ‘I thought perhaps I should give you a chance of making your ear-ring into a pair,’ she said. It was suddenly very quiet and Jean picked up a copy of the Guardian, and I fought back the goose pimples.

The newspapers were playing it down but London murders always found an audience. ‘London Club Murder’ it said, and there was a lot of stuff about the police going through the membership books at the ‘Tin-Tack Club’ where Charlie was a part-time barman.

‘Murray said he was a close friend of yours,’ said Jean.

I told her that he had warned me when I was in danger, but I didn’t tell her that anyone else had.

‘But why would anyone want to kill him? For helping you?’

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘It was more tragic than that. He’d lent me some clothes, including a light-blue raincoat. I gave Charlie his raincoat back at Fortes, and he wore it when he left me and returned home. It was a simple case of mistaken identity.’

‘Who arranged it?’ asked Jean.

‘A hoodlum that worked for Jay’s network. We’ll pick him up,’ I said.

‘Not Jay himself?’

‘No, certainly not. On the contrary. As soon as he got wind of Charlie’s connection with C-SICH he rushed down to talk to Dalby, which is where I came in.’

‘He hoped Dalby could black it out?’ Jean said.

‘Yes, but Dalby hadn’t a chance with C-SICH. It’s got too many direct government connections via industry, as well as the combined services side of it.’

‘They must have had a fit when you arrived,’ said Jean.

‘Well, Jay hadn’t arrived then, but Dalby knew he was coming. His infra-red detectors gave him a few minutes to get ready for me. I would have left it there if this private eye that I had with me hadn’t mentioned a Chinese. It was a long shot, but I took it, and it paid off. Murray, passing Dalby’s study, heard the detectors buzzing and switched them off before coming to find me. After Murray found me in the garden he was worried that I would spoil the whole thing by precipitate action.’

‘How could he think that?’ asked Jean.

‘That’s what I thought, but anyway, he knew I had little to lose, so he phoned Ross.’

‘After he came conscious?’ said Jean.

‘After he came conscious.’

‘Murray is exclusively Ross’s man?’

‘Not normally, but for the IPCRESS business he was. After talking to Ross he turned around, went back into the house and arrested Dalby. The Chinese man …’

‘Who really is Lithuanian, dear,’ said Jean.

‘So I hear,’ I said. ‘That was what Murray just phoned in about. He picked him up near Liphook. I don’t know the story.’

‘Ross must have acted quickly after Murray phoned.’

‘Well, he certainly did, but don’t forget that he’d had the Home Secretary prepared for days. They knew it would come suddenly when it came.’

‘Why did Jay give up so easily when Ross arrived?’ Jean asked. ‘It’s not like him, somehow.’

‘I’m not sure about that. Either because he thought Dalby would pull him out of the fire, in spite of the struggle for power that was obviously going on between them.’

‘Or?’ said Jean.

‘Or it’s something to do with the phone call from someone named Henry. Time will tell.’

‘More questions,’ said Jean.

‘Very well,’ I said.

‘Why did Jay let you find Raven in that club the day you were nearly arrested?’

‘Simple. Jay and Dalby had the “thought reform” going well by then, but they needed a neat punctuation mark to account for the series of kidnappings. If they could find a scapegoat, there the matter would end, and they could happily go forward with their new plan.’

‘Until they quarrelled.’

‘Perhaps, but they might not have quarrelled. Anyway, Dalby and Jay set me up to be found alongside Raven, with a hypodermic in my pocket, police raid and all.’

‘But,’ said Jean.

‘But instead of waiting a few more minutes, when I would have been organized into the gaming room, I got impatient …’

‘Extraordinary,’ said Jean. ‘So out of character. The man from US Naval Intelligence was only trying to help, then?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ I said.

‘We must get back,’ said Jean, ‘or Alice will grumble.’

‘The devil with Alice,’ I said. ‘I’m the boss, aren’t I?’

‘Not when Alice gives the orders,’ Jean said.

‘You know, there’s something different about that office lately,’ I said, and we both returned to it, although I was still thinking about the ear-ring.

32

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) By the week-end you will be free to follow new interests. Unexpected action brings happiness to all.]

Back at the office the cables were beginning to flood in from Washington and Calcutta and Hong Kong. Alice was coping very well, and only a few required a decision from me. Murray flew up to a little country town near Grantham and brought Chico back in an army helicopter. He looked very ill when I saw him at the Millbank Military Hospital. Ross put a couple of men on a twenty-four-hour watch at Chico’s bedside, but they got nothing from him, except that he’d seen a friend of his cousin in the piece of film he’d seen at the WO. Instead of telling Ross, he went to visit the man. Needless to say he was in the IPCRESS network, and Chico was at Millbank, and his friend in Ross’s bag.

Painter, the thin-faced tall fellow who’d been with us on the Lebanon job, turned out to be a psychiatrist of some standing who had brought our captive Raven, who was half-way ‘brainwashed’, back to something approaching normalcy. I gave him a room with Carswell on the top floor at Charlotte Street. If we couldn’t break Jay down everything would depend on those two.

By Thursday I was able to take a full night’s sleep. Until then I’d kept going mainly on coffee and cigarettes and an aspirin sandwich, but Thursday I took some sleeping pills Painter gave me and didn’t wake until midday. I swore off coffee for a couple of days and stepped into a cold shower. I put on Irish tweed with Veldtshoen, cotton shirt, and wool tie. At three o’clock I was summoned to the presence of an exalted military personage at the WO.

I was a minute or so late and Ross and Alice were both there before me. Ross was in a very stiff new uniform with crown and pip on the shoulder. His Sam Browne was as shiny as the doorman’s head and he had his bright red OBE with the Military Stripe and the India General Service and the George VI Coronation, to say nothing of a ’39–’43 Star and a Western Desert ribbon. I began to wish I’d worn the pullover with the Defence Medal sewn on it.

The EMP shook hands rather grandly and referred to me as ‘the hero of the hour’. I celebrated by helping myself to a cigar and pretended to have no matches in order to have the EMP light it for me. He thanked me and Ross and Alice, but I knew there was more to it than that. When he began the sales talk with, ‘Mr Ross is most anxious that you should hear this from me …’ I knew what it was. Ross had finally taken over Charlotte Street. What timing! No one could challenge Ross’s competence after this IPCRESS fiasco. I heard him going on about Ross going up to ‘half-colonel’ and ‘seniority’. On the walls were photos of the EMP standing with Churchill, seated with Eisenhower, receiving a medal, sitting on a horse, and reviewing an armoured brigade while standing in a jeep. There were no photos of him as an inexperienced subaltern with his foot jammed in a drainage pipe. Perhaps people like him are born as brigadiers.