Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett Read Free Book Online

asked.
    “I’m a widower.”
    “Sorry.”
    “My wife died of tuberculosis in 1930. We never had any children.”
    “We’re not having any yet,” Bloggs said. “Not while the world’s in this state.”
    Christine said: “Oh, Fred, he’s not interested in that!” She went out to the kitchen.
    They sat around a square table in the center of the room to eat. Godliman was touched by this couple and the domestic scene, and found himself thinking of his Eleanor. That was unusual; he had been immune to sentiment for some years. Perhaps the nerves were coming alive again, at last. War did funny things.
    Christine’s cooking was truly awful. The sausages were burned. Bloggs drowned his meal in tomato ketchup and Godliman cheerfully followed suit.
     
     
     
    WHEN THEY GOT BACK to Whitehall Bloggs showed Godliman the file on unidentified enemy agents thought still to be operating in Britain.
    There were three sources of information about such people. The first was the immigration records of the Home Office. Passport control had long been an arm of Military Intelligence, and there was a list—going back to the last war—of aliens who hadentered the country but had not left or been accounted for in other ways, such as death or naturalization. At the outbreak of war they had all gone before tribunals that classified them in three groups. At first only “A” class aliens were interned; but by July of 1940, after some scaremongering by Fleet Service, the “B” and “C” classes were taken out of circulation. There was a small number of immigrants who could not be located, and it was a fair assumption that some of them were spies.
    Their papers were in Bloggs’s file.
    The second source were wireless transmissions. Section C of MI8 patrolled the airwaves nightly, recorded everything they did not know for certain to be theirs, and passed it to the Government Code and Cipher School. This outfit, which had recently been moved from London’s Berkeley Street to a country house at Bletchley Park, was not a school at all but a collection of chess champions, musicians, mathematicians and crossword puzzle enthusiasts dedicated to the belief that if a man could invent a code a man could crack it. Signals originating in the British Isles that could not be accounted for by any of the Services were assumed to be messages from spies.
    The decoded messages were in Bloggs’s file.
    Finally there were the double agents, but their value was largely hoped-for rather than actual. Messages to them from the Abwehr had warned of several incoming agents, and had given away one resident spy—Mrs. Matilda Krafft of Bournemouth, who had sent money to Snow by post and was subsequently incarcerated in Holloway prison. But the doubles had not been able to reveal the identity or locations of the kind of quietly effective professional spies most valuable to a secret intelligence service. No one doubted that there were such people. There were clues—someone, for example, had brought Snow’s transmitter over from Germany and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria Station for him to collect. But either the Abwehr or the spies themselves were too cautious to be caught by the doubles.
    However the clues were in Bloggs’s file.
    Other sources were being developed: the experts were workingto improve methods of triangulation (the directional pin-pointing of radio transmitters); and MI6 were trying to rebuild the networks of agents in Europe that had sunk beneath the tidal wave of Hitler’s armies.
    What little information there was was in Bloggs’s file.
    “It can be infuriating at times,” he told Godliman. “Look at this.”
    He took from the file a long radio intercept about British plans for an expeditionary force for Finland. “This was picked up early in the year. The information is impeccable. They were trying to get a fix on him when he broke off in the middle, for no apparent reason—perhaps he was interrupted. He resumed a few minutes