Early on Monday, 20 May, 1940, at a point in the Second World War when the threat of a Nazi invasion of Britain feels unmistakably real, a police car pulls up outside a boarding house in central London. Five men pile out of the vehicle and make for the building. The door is opened by a maid. One of the men explains that they are looking for an American. His name is Tyler Kent. She asks them to wait and goes to fetch her employer. There follows a pause, probably no more than a few seconds, before the five men rush into the building.
One goes after the maid, while the others make a dash for the stairs. Two of the four men now haring up the staircase of No. 47 Gloucester Place are seasoned, solid-looking police detectives from Special Branch. The third is an official from the United States Embassy. The last is a broad-shouldered thirty-nine-year-old with a beaky nose and a gait that speaks of long country walks. His name is Maxwell Knight. To his friends, he is Max. To most of his colleagues in MI5, Britain’s counterespionage agency, and to his sprawling family of undercover agents, he is better known as ‘M’.
This is M’s raid. It is based on his analysis of intelligence from his operatives, a web of men and women that he personally recruited to his maverick wing of MI5 known as ‘M Section’. His speciality is getting agents inside extremist political groups. One of M’s undercover operatives, a middle-aged single mother who made a living before the war doing cooking demonstrations, recently provided her spymaster with the intelligence that led to this raid.
After the first flight of stairs, the four men are confronted by the landlady. One of the detectives produces his search warrant and asks for the whereabouts of Kent. She gestures at the door behind them.
Tyler Kent is an American embassy official that M believes to be a Nazi spy. If the man from MI5 is wrong about this, there will be a diplomatic incident. If he is right, but has left it too late, classified communications may have already been dispatched to Rome and from there to Berlin. In the spy films this spymaster loves to watch the plot usually centres on an enemy agent trying to steal secret papers – the ‘MacGuffin’, as Alfred Hitchcock calls them. It rarely matters what is on those papers. This is different. The documents that M hopes to find, and that the alleged Nazi spy has stolen, contain secret correspondence between Winston Churchill, the new British Prime Minister, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US President, which, in the wrong hands, could change the course of the war.
One of the detectives tries the door. It is bolted shut from the inside, so he knocks.
‘Don’t come in,’ a man calls out.
The detective knocks again.
‘Don’t come in!’ The voice is more indignant this time. M can hear traces of a whispered conversation and the irregular clunk-clunk-clunk of people moving about suddenly and at speed.
One of the detectives walks away from the door, turns and prepares to charge. His name is Inspector Pearson and he is built like the side of a barn. The rest of the men clear a path to give him a clear run at the door and for a moment in that corridor, while elsewhere in London people are making their way to work, and across the English Channel German forces continue to bomb, shell and shoot their way towards Paris, all is still.
It is hard to say precisely what is running through M’s mind at this point in the operation, only that very recently in his life he reached a crossroads. The outbreak of war nine months earlier forced him to confront a ghost from his past. Now as he stands in the corridor, waiting for the policeman to break down the door, he is facing a decision that will change the way he is seen for years to come. This MI5 spymaster knows that he must choose between his friends and his country, punishing one in order to protect the other, and if he does not make this decision soon, very soon, it might be made for him. M is a man who has always valued loyalty above any other human quality, yet at this point in his life, to his dismay, he must contemplate a betrayal.
Inspector Pearson jogs down the corridor. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. Crack. M watches his body slam into the door. The wood gives way with an easy splintering sound, and the passage is filled with light. The men race in.