Stephen. As they were, so was he: a man beneath whose unremarkable surface lay an extraordinary capacity for action and an extraordinary knowledge of arcane and vital things.
In the last hour of the training course the instructors all at once retracted, suddenly at pains to emphasise that this, a fraction of the Institute’s procedures, was all they were permitted to divulge. We have taught you what you need to know for the purposes of security, they said; better to know less than more. Half-truths are more dangerous than lies. Those who were to be operatives in the field would have further specialist training; for everybody else an outline was enough. Stephen had beenvery disappointed. He felt that having promised to bare all, the instructors had lowered too soon the curtain they had lifted – but they had at least allowed a glimpse into the world of secret tradecraft, and even in the long room the things that he had briefly seen might conceivably be useful.
For the whole of Tuesday the listeners sift through hours of speech, looking for essential nuggets. Speech, or rather, spoken words and half-words, mumbles, words in broken strings and fragments, sometimes making sense in context, sometimes not. Few targets speak in sentences, consecutive and fully thought-out in advance, subject, verb and object marshalled, the ending foreseen before the first word is pronounced. No one does; especially not on the telephone. Everyone abandons words midway, trails off, uses hesitating words to shape the thought that was unformed when they began to speak, and studs their talk with sounds that have their origins in another form of language, the one that speaks with hands and eyes, through gesture, movement and expression, that can’t exist on any page or be transcribed, the one that is the ground of true communication. Want of this visual lexicon can make conversations overheard on telephones difficult to decrypt. There are simple conversations obviously – between people who have never met, and are speaking merely to trade information, and between people who meet each other often. Telephone calls are expensive, to be kept to the point and made only when needs must, but when meeting face-to-face is just not possible and messages are complex, there’s no alternative. Therefore another kind of call: longer, more intimate, more softly voiced, punctuated by sighing breaths and wordless sounds, and silences sometimes. And listeners become interpreters of silence.
It’s harder still to make good sense of the product of an eavesdropping device. Talk in offices and homes goes on against myriad sounds, and a speaker only needs to turn away from the implanted microphone or to stray beyond the compass of its reach for words to change to babble. In any case, even when the words themselves are clear, the flow will stutter. Spoken thoughts are constantly diverted, by distractions, televisions, babies, doorbells, other people. It often strikes Stephen how carelessly people interrupt each other and finish off each other’s sentences as if the yet unspoken words were totally foreknown. And how often they are wrong, anticipating one conclusion when the speaker intended quite another. Dialogue in life is nothing like dialogue in transcript. There are times when Stephen thinks himself to be only person in the world who truly listens. And monologue the one true form of speech. A man speaking to himself in an empty room.
But there are exceptions, he has noticed. When two people are alone together in a car, they do sometimes speak with rare and concentrated intensity, and they also listen. He hasn’t overheard many such conversations; his are not the kind of targets who demand a level of surveillance so intense that their cars need to be bugged, but he has helped out his colleagues when they are extra-busy. For some reason he remembers one of these times especially: a man, a South African, suspected of gun-running. He was Solly’s case. An entrapment
In the last hour of the training course the instructors all at once retracted, suddenly at pains to emphasise that this, a fraction of the Institute’s procedures, was all they were permitted to divulge. We have taught you what you need to know for the purposes of security, they said; better to know less than more. Half-truths are more dangerous than lies. Those who were to be operatives in the field would have further specialist training; for everybody else an outline was enough. Stephen had beenvery disappointed. He felt that having promised to bare all, the instructors had lowered too soon the curtain they had lifted – but they had at least allowed a glimpse into the world of secret tradecraft, and even in the long room the things that he had briefly seen might conceivably be useful.
For the whole of Tuesday the listeners sift through hours of speech, looking for essential nuggets. Speech, or rather, spoken words and half-words, mumbles, words in broken strings and fragments, sometimes making sense in context, sometimes not. Few targets speak in sentences, consecutive and fully thought-out in advance, subject, verb and object marshalled, the ending foreseen before the first word is pronounced. No one does; especially not on the telephone. Everyone abandons words midway, trails off, uses hesitating words to shape the thought that was unformed when they began to speak, and studs their talk with sounds that have their origins in another form of language, the one that speaks with hands and eyes, through gesture, movement and expression, that can’t exist on any page or be transcribed, the one that is the ground of true communication. Want of this visual lexicon can make conversations overheard on telephones difficult to decrypt. There are simple conversations obviously – between people who have never met, and are speaking merely to trade information, and between people who meet each other often. Telephone calls are expensive, to be kept to the point and made only when needs must, but when meeting face-to-face is just not possible and messages are complex, there’s no alternative. Therefore another kind of call: longer, more intimate, more softly voiced, punctuated by sighing breaths and wordless sounds, and silences sometimes. And listeners become interpreters of silence.
It’s harder still to make good sense of the product of an eavesdropping device. Talk in offices and homes goes on against myriad sounds, and a speaker only needs to turn away from the implanted microphone or to stray beyond the compass of its reach for words to change to babble. In any case, even when the words themselves are clear, the flow will stutter. Spoken thoughts are constantly diverted, by distractions, televisions, babies, doorbells, other people. It often strikes Stephen how carelessly people interrupt each other and finish off each other’s sentences as if the yet unspoken words were totally foreknown. And how often they are wrong, anticipating one conclusion when the speaker intended quite another. Dialogue in life is nothing like dialogue in transcript. There are times when Stephen thinks himself to be only person in the world who truly listens. And monologue the one true form of speech. A man speaking to himself in an empty room.
But there are exceptions, he has noticed. When two people are alone together in a car, they do sometimes speak with rare and concentrated intensity, and they also listen. He hasn’t overheard many such conversations; his are not the kind of targets who demand a level of surveillance so intense that their cars need to be bugged, but he has helped out his colleagues when they are extra-busy. For some reason he remembers one of these times especially: a man, a South African, suspected of gun-running. He was Solly’s case. An entrapment
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