The Unlikely Spy

The top floor was the preserve of the senior staff: the director-general's office, his secretariat, the assistant directors and division heads. Brigadier Sir Basil Boothby's office was there, hidden behind a pair of intimidating oaken doors. A pair of lights glared down from over the doors, a red one signifying the room was too insecure to permit access, a green one meaning enter at your own risk. Vicary, as always, hesitated before pressing the buzzer.

 

Vicary had received his summons at nine o'clock, while he was locking away his things in his gunmetal gray cabinet and tidying up his hutch, as he referred to his small office. When MI5 exploded in size at the beginning of the war, space became a precious commodity. Vicary was relegated to a windowless cell the size of a broom closet, with worn bureaucratic green carpet and a sturdy little headmasterly desk. Vicary's partner, a former Metropolitan Police officer named Harry Dalton, sat with the other junior men in a common area at the center of the floor. The place had a newsroom rowdiness about it, and Vicary ventured there only when absolutely necessary.

 

Officially, Vicary held the rank of a major in the Intelligence Corps, though military rank meant next to nothing inside the department. Much of the staff routinely referred to him as Professor, and he had worn his uniform just twice. Vicary's manner of dress had changed, though. He had forsaken the tweedy clothes of the university, dressing instead in sharp gray suits he purchased before clothing, like almost everything else, was rationed. Occasionally, he bumped into an acquaintance or old colleague from University College. Despite incessant warnings by the government about the dangers of loose talk, they inevitably asked Vicary exactly what he was doing. He usually smiled wearily, shrugged his shoulders, and gave the prescribed response: he was working in a very dull department of the War Office.

 

Sometimes it was dull, but not often. Churchill had been right--it had been time for him to rejoin the living. His arrival at MI5 in May 1940 had been his rebirth. He thrived on the atmosphere of wartime intelligence: the long hours, the crises, the dismal tea in the canteen. He had even taken up cigarette smoking again, which he had sworn off his last year at Cambridge. He loved being an actor in the theater of the real. He seriously doubted whether he could be satisfied again in the sanctuary of academia.

 

Surely the hours and the tension were taking a toll on him, but he had never felt better. He could work longer and needed less sleep. When he did go to bed he dropped off immediately. Like the other officers, he spent many nights at MI5 headquarters, sleeping on a small camp bed he kept folded next to his desk.

 

Only the ill treatment of his half-moon reading glasses survived Vicary's catharsis--still smudged and battered and something of a joke inside the department. In moments of distress, he still absently beat his pockets for them and thrust them onto his face for comfort.

 

Which he did now, as the light over Boothby's office suddenly shone green. Vicary pressed the buzzer with the reflective air of a man about to attend the funeral of a boyhood friend. It purred softly, the door opened, and Vicary stepped inside.

 

 

 

 

 

Boothby's office was big and long, with fine paintings, a gas fireplace, rich Persian carpets, and a magnificent view through the tall windows. Sir Basil kept Vicary waiting the statutory ten minutes before finally entering the room through a second doorway connecting his office to the director-general's secretariat.

 

Brigadier Sir Basil Boothby had classic English size and scale--tall, angular, still showing signs of the physical agility that made him a star athlete at school. It was there in the easy way his strong hand held his drink, in the square shoulders and thick neck, in the narrow hips where his trousers, waistcoat, and jacket converged in graceful perfection. He had the sturdy good looks that a certain type of younger woman finds attractive. His gray-blond hair and eyebrows were so lush the department wits referred to him as the bottle brush from the fifth floor.

 

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