Three men listened to the President of the United States talking on the top security telephone wire from Washington to London.
Robert Lindsay Bartlett, the American Ambassador in London, for whom the call was intended. He took it in his office in Grosvenor Square and understood every word the President said because they had discussed the crisis the previous day.
Nicolai Malenkov, head of communications at the Russian Embassy in Kensington, still smug from the congratulations from Moscow for succeeding in tapping the Washington-London line. He reported the President’s remarks to his superiors in the KGB who partially understood them.
Tom Bartlett, geologist, who was totally confused by the President’s observations because he had been expecting to hear the voice of his wife, Helen Bartlett, who worked in the American Embassy library.
Bartlett subsequently decided that the reasons for the crossed wire were twofold. One, he was trying to call his wife at the Embassy. Two, he had the same surname as the Ambassador. But, on further consideration of the British telephonic system, he decided that the wire could have become crossed just as easily without any coincidences of name and timing.
At the time of the call he did not speculate on the reasons for the interception. The male voice on the phone, young, respectful, and possibly sycophantic, said: ‘This is the White House, Mr Ambassador Bartlett, I have the President for you.’
Tom Bartlett put down the ammonite which he used as a paperweight on his desk, stared at the receiver for a moment, then put it back to his ear.
He recognised the President’s voice at once. Authoritative, sincere but somehow always electioneering. The President was saying: ‘So you haven’t been able to get hold of this guy?’
The Ambassador said: ‘You didn’t give us much time, Mr President.’ It was the voice of big business unaccustomed to diplomatic subservience.
‘I’m aware of how much time I gave you. We’ll have to get to work on it at the other end. Even on the plane maybe.’
At this point Tom Bartlett, who suffered from hay fever, was overcome by the pollen count rising in the study because he had forgotten to shut the French window facing the honeyed garden of the country house in Sussex. He sneezed many times and when he picked up the receiver again the President was just finishing with the Ambassador. American prestige, said the President in his whistle-stop voice, was at stake. The Ambassador did not heckle him, but his silence was resentful.
There was a small click mocking the crash with which Bartlett imagined the President cracked down the phone. Then a louder click which sounded as if it emanated from the local exchange. Bartlett rubbed his itching eyes and pondered on the conversation he had overheard. It seemed vaguely as if, at one stage, they had been talking about the Ambassador in the third person. But that was ridiculous: it was his hay fever capsules affecting him again. They stunned his senses, convinced colleagues that he was on hard drugs and had no effect whatsoever on his early summer allergy.
Outside he heard rubber on gravel announce the arrival of the hire car to take him to London Airport. An old Bentley with sighing leather seats and inherited decorum; much more his style, Bartlett decided ruefully, than the serpent-faced jets screaming for their passengers on the tarmac.
The driver who was ageing decorously with the car said: ‘Where to this time, Mr Bartlett?’
‘Israel,’ Bartlett said. ‘The Promised Land.’
‘Ah,’ said the driver who had taken many passengers to the launching pad but never been launched himself. ‘More trouble there today. Just heard it on the news. The Israelites made another raid into Egypt.’ He reproached an E-type Jaguar overtaking him on a bend with a genteel note from his hooter ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was a place for a gentleman like yourself to be going.’
‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be going to a place where there’s a bit of action?’
‘No, sir. I didn’t mean it like that.’
But Bartlett knew he did. He glanced at the trousers of his new lightweight suit already bagging at the knees, at the stain from a ball-point pen on his lapel; he peered in the driving mirror and saw the wing of his shirt collar sticking out like a sleeping butterfly, his untidy, finger-combed hair. Indisputably the composite picture was not that of a man of action.
The driver said: ‘I meant you being a geologist, sir. You can’t somehow associate fossils with bombs and rockets.’
‘I’m going to address the International Geological Society in Jerusalem,’ Bartlett said.
‘Ah.’ The driver nodded as if the word society explained the incongruity.
The car left the green cushions of the South Downs where as a boy Bartlett had first examined the earth’s crust. He was excited about going to Israel. To see the headlines jerk into life like marionettes. To revisit the Negev and the Sinai. To see Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Caesarea.
It wasn’t until he was at the airport waiting to be called for the El Al jet that he realised that he hadn’t phoned his wife. He glanced at his watch. She would be on her way back to their town apartment in Marylebone High Street by now. He could always explain that he had been delayed by the President of the United States … at that moment they called the Amsterdam–Tel Aviv flight.