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always had to write it.
 It s simply a matter of motivating them all, said Dicky, sitting at his
rosewood table and straightening out a wire paper-clip.  I want them to feel .
.
 Part of a team, I supplied.
 That s right, he said. Then, detecting what he thought might be a note of
sarcasm in my voice, he frowned.  You have a lot to learn about being part of
a team, Bernard, he said.  I know, I said.  I think the school I went to
didn t emphasize the team spirit nearly enough.
 That lousy school in Berlin, he said.  I never understood why your father
let you go to a little local school like that. There were schools for the sons
of British officers weren t there?  He said it would be good for my German.
 And it was, conceded Dicky.  But you must have been the only English child
there. It made you into a loner, Bernard.  I suppose it did.
 And you re proud of that, I know. But a loner is a misfit, Bernard. I wish I
could make you see that.  I ll need your notes, Dicky.
 Notes?
 To do the D-G s report.
 Not much in the way of notes today, Bernard, he said proudly.  I m getting
the hang of these Tuesday morning talks nowadays. I improvise as I go along.
Oh my God! I should have listened to what he was saying.
 Any rough notes will do.
 Just write it the way I delivered it.
 It s a matter of emphasis, Dicky.
He threw the straightened wire clip into his large glass ashtray and looked
at me sharply.  A matter of emphasis was Dicky s roundabout way of admitting
total ignorance. Hurriedly I added,  It s so technical.
Dicky softened somewhat. He liked being  technical . Until recently Dicky s
lectures had been a simple resume of the everyday work of the office. But now
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he d decided that the way ahead was the path of hi-tech. So he d become a
minor expert and a major bore - on such subjects as  photo-interpretation of
intelligence obtained by unmanned vehicles and  optical cameras, line-scan
and radar sensors that provide monochrome , colour, false-colour and infra-red
imagery .  I think I explained it all carefully, Dicky said.  Yes, you did,
I said and bent over far enough to fflp through the cardboard-mounted pictures
he d used, in the hope that they would all be suitably captioned. To some
extent they were:
 SLRR sideways-looking reconnaissance radar the first -one said, and there
was a neat red arrow to show which way was up. And  IRLS infra-red line scan
photo showing various radiometric temperatures of target area at noon. Notice
buildings occupied by personnel, and the transport vehicles at bottom right of
photo. Compare with photo of same area at midnight.  Don t take that material
away with you, Dicky warned.  I ll need those pictures tomorrow, and I
promised the people at Joint Air Reconnaissance that they d have them back in
perfect condition: no fingerprints or bent corners.
No, I won t take them, I promised and slid the illustrations back in place.
I was hopeless at understanding such things. I began to wonder which one of
Dicky s staff, present at this morning s meeting, might have remembered his
discourse well enough to recapitulate and explain it to me. But I couldn t
think of anyone who gave Dicky their undivided attention during the Tuesday
morning meetings. Our most assiduous note-taker, Charlie Billingsly, was now
in Hong Kong and Harry Strang, with his prodigious memory, had artfully
contrived an urgent phone call that granted him escape just five minutes into
Dicky s dissertation. I said,  But you used to be strongly opposed to all this
stuff from JARIC, and the satellite material too.  We have to move with the
times, Bernard. Dicky looked down at the appointments book that his secretary
had left open for him.  Oh, by the bye, he said casually. Too casually.  You
keep mentioning that fellow Prettyman . .
 I don t keep mentioning him, I said.  I mentioned him once.
You said you didn t remember him.
 I don t want to quibble, said Dicky.  The point is that his wife has been
making a nuisance of herself lately. She cornered Morgan when he was in the FO
the other day. Started on about a pension and all that kind of stuff.
 His widow, I said.
 Verily! Widow. I said widow.
 You said wife.
 Wife. Widow. What damned difference does it make.  It makes a difference to
Jim Prettyman, I said.  It makes him dead.
 Whatever she is, I don t want anyone encouraging her.
 Encouraging her to do what?
 I wish you wouldn t be so otiose, said Dicky. He d been reading Vocabulary
Means Power again, I noticed that it was missing from the shelf behind his
desk.  She shouldn t be button-holing senior staff. It would serve her right
if Morgan made an official complaint about her.
 She wields a lot of clout over there, I reminded him.  I wouldn t advise
Morgan to make an enemy of her. He might end up on his arse.
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Dicky wet his thin lips and nodded.  Yes. Well. You re right. Morgan knows
that. Far better that we all close ranks and ignore her.
 Jim Pettyman was one of us, I said.  He worked downstairs.
 That was a long time ago. No one told him to go and work in Washington DC.
What a place that is! My God, that town has some of the worst crime figures in
the whole of North America. So Dicky had been doing his homework.
I said,  This is not official then? This ... this not encouraging Prettyman s
widow?
He looked at me and then looked out of the window.  It s not official, he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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