Reggie would not take no for an answer. He brushed McKendrick’s secretary aside and took the inner office by storm. McKendrick looked at him across the top of his glasses and said, ‘What’s so bloody important you have to barge in here like a gatecrasher? As if I couldn’t guess.’
He waved his secretary away and told Reggie to close the door.
‘Let’s hear it, Reggie.’
Reggie was almost breathless with glee.
‘Stahl is everything the Americans cracked him up to be. Memory like a Pathé newsreel. Marvellous stuff, sir, simply marvellous.’
‘Give me the edited version, Reggie.’
‘June 22nd, dawn. Luftwaffe attack precedes Panzer invasion and Infantry. He reckons three million men under arms, possibly more.’
McKendrick thought this important enough to merit taking off his glasses.
‘As many as that?’ he said flatly. ‘Oh well, it’s pretty much what I thought. Just the scale is a wee bit bigger. No matter . . .’
‘When do we tell the Russians?’ Reggie asked.
McKendrick thought this important enough to merit putting his glasses back on.
‘We don’t,’ he said.
‘What?!?’
‘We don’t tell them. But, to be exact ... we have already told them.’
‘I do hope I’m not being dim, sir, but I don’t get it.’
‘Remember Reggie, I said all along that you were “confirming sources”?’
Reggie vaguely remembered.
‘Our ambassador in Moscow saw Vice-Commissar Vyshinsky at the Soviet Foreign Office on the twenty-third of April. He’d asked for a meeting with Stalin in person. A Vice-Commissar was all the audience he got. Nonetheless, he delivered our warning. We gave Stalin the date and the time of the German invasion six weeks ago, and as far as our sources can tell, Stalin’s only reaction was to dismiss the ambassador as some sort of agent provocateur.’
‘Six weeks ago? How did we know six weeks ago? Six weeks ago Stahl was still on the run.’
McKendrick said ‘Reggie, shut up. Don’t ask. Don’t tell’ . . . and looked enigmatic.