by Len Deighton
Thurkettle got off his bike and walked over to the car. The rain had soaked him to the skin and the exertions had left his muscles stiff. He remembered that the VW camper had a shower in it, and wondered how long it would take for the water to get hot.
Werner lowered the car window. ‘Was there any difficulty?’ he asked.
‘Nothing I couldn’t handle. But Fiona Samson is dead,’ said Thurkettle. It was what he’d been told to say. ‘One of the Russkie goons wasted her. Bernard Samson got away: so did some other woman. I don’t know who she was: she was in a long yellow dress. She went with Bernard Samson.’
Werner knew who the other woman was: it was Tessa. He’d seen her leave the party with Bernard. ‘Fiona Samson is dead? Are you sure?’
‘It’s not something I’d make a mistake about,’ said Thurkettle. He smiled: he liked secrets. The switch of identities he’d arranged for the two women was a secret Prettyman had told him to keep entirely to himself. ‘All the others are dead.’
‘Kennedy too?’
‘Yeah, Kennedy too. And a guy dressed as a gorilla. There was a shoot-out. I was lucky to get away in one piece.’ He always embellished events when he came to collect his fee. Clients always wanted to feel they were getting value for their money. ‘Those Russkie sons of bitches came there all set to blow me away. If I hadn’t been there, Bernard Samson would never have made it.’
‘My God! Poor Fiona,’ said Werner. He’d come to adore her over the months they’d worked together. She should never have taken on a task like that, the strain was too much for her. He’d seen her fading under the stress of it. At one meeting recently she had had a momentary black-out. She’d said it was too many late nights and made him promise to keep it a secret. Poor Fiona. He got out of the car and went round to the trunk. It was raining. He looked round him in the brightening dawn. There wasn’t much time.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes,’ said Thurkettle philosophically. He smiled at Werner. He seemed like a genial fellow and Werner smiled too.
‘I didn’t realize it was still raining,’ said Werner.
‘Is that right?’ said Thurkettle, who was soaked to the skin.
‘Do you want to sit in the car and count it?’ Werner asked. ‘I don’t want to stand here getting wet.’ He was going through his keys to find the one for the trunk.
‘We’ll just take a peek at it so I can see it’s real.’
‘It’s real,’ said Werner. ‘Used notes. Exactly as you specified. I got it from the Commerzbank on Friday.’
He reached into the trunk of the car to get a leather document case. Carefully he put the case into Thurkettle’s hands, saying, ‘Don’t rest it on the car. The paintwork is brand new.’
Thurkettle smiled pitifully. He was used to the sort of nervousness that Volkmann displayed. Clients were always timorous when dealing with a hit man. He held the case with both hands while Werner bent forward and fiddled with the lock. ‘It’s a combination lock,’ explained Werner. He could smell the blood and filth on Thurkettle’s clothes: it was the stink of the slaughter-house. ‘You can make the combination into anything you choose. I made it 123. You can’t forget 123 can you?’
‘No,’ said Thurkettle. Werner snapped the lock open, and pulled up the lid. There it was: fifty-dollar bills: line upon line of them. ‘You can’t forget 1, 2, 3.’
It was while Thurkettle was standing there, holding the new leather document case with both hands, that Werner, gripping the curious-looking gun so it was hidden under the case, pulled the trigger. A strip clip of eight rounds fired as fast as a machine gun. They all went into Thurkettle’s belly.
Eight rounds. It was only a little ‘expendable’, but at point-blank range a weapon doesn’t have to be a masterpiece of the gunsmith’s art for its effect to prove fatal.
The impact of these little medium-velocity rounds did not knock Thurkettle down, he just staggered backwards a couple of paces still holding the case in both hands and staring at Werner in uncomprehending disbelief. Thurkettle’s jerky movements caused the money to spill over, and a gust of rainy wind started to carry it away. Thurkettle watched his money blowing away. He grabbed at some notes but winced in pain. This couldn’t be happening to him. He was shot. Thurkettle was a professional killer and this jerk was a nothing…
As he staggered back, more and more money fluttered away and he tasted the blood gushing up into his mouth and knew he was done for. By now he was clutching the document case against his chest as if it might prove protection against more shots or comfort him in his final moments, and he embraced it tight like a lover, and the bloodsoaked money fell around his feet.
It was just before he fell down that Deuce Thurkettle understood exactly how he’d been tricked. His eyes opened wide in fury. Deuce Thurkettle was the only one who knew for certain that Fiona Samson was still alive. Even this clown who had shot him thought that Samson had escaped with Tessa.
Well, he’d tell the world. He opened his mouth to tell the truth but only blood came out. Lots of it. Then he toppled to the ground.
Werner threw away his little ‘expendable’. That was the convenient thing about them. He watched Thurkettle die, for he knew that London would want a positive answer. Werner didn’t feel compassion for him. He was a psychopath and society is better off when such people are dead. Any last feeling he might have shown for Thurkettle had been removed when he heard that Fiona was dead. He’d told Thurkettle that getting Bernard and Fiona to safety was of paramount importance and he’d failed to do it.
Werner prodded the body with the toe of his shoe, and kicked it to tip it into the ditch. He’d chosen this spot because of that deep ditch. He moved the motor cycle too. It would be found eventually – someone would spot the dollar bills beflagging the fields – but it was better to get the bike out of sight. He pushed the leather case into the grass, and the rest of the money fluttered aside. He didn’t pick any of it up. The notes were probably marked, or counterfeit. London Central had provided the money and the British were very careful about money, it was one of the things he’d discovered soon after starting to work for them.
Bret Rensselaer was at La Buona Nova, the hillside estate in Ventura County, California. He was having an early breakfast by the pool when the coded message came telling him that Fiona and Bernard Samson were on the way to join him in California.
It was a truly beautiful morning. Bret drank his orange juice and poured himself the first cup of coffee of the day. He so enjoyed sitting outdoors inhaling the clear cool air that came off the ocean. Around the pool there were whitewashed walls where the jasmine, roses and bougainvillaea seemed to bloom almost all the year round. There were trees bearing oranges, trees bearing lemons and trees bearing the maja fruit that his hostess called ‘Brets’. It looked like a lemon but tasted like an orange, and calling it a Bret was perhaps her way of saying that Bret was sweet and sour. Or British yet American too. Bret didn’t know what was implied but he went along with her joke: they had known each other a long long time.
People who had known Bret for a long time would say that he’d aged since being badly wounded at the Berlin shoot-out, but to the casual observer he was as trim and fit and agile as a senior citizen had any right to be. He was swimming and skiing and doing a routine of exercises. He wanted to look good when the visitors arrived.
He could not suppress a smile of satisfaction: they were coming. His plan to get an agent in the Kremlin, as Nikki had sardonically put it, had worked exactly as he’d predicted it would when he first took it to the D-G just after she ran out on him. Now there was only the long and interesting work of debriefing.
Bernard Samson would be here too. He had tried to get the old man to send Bernard elsewhere but it was good security to have him here where he could be supervised. Tessa’s disappearance had to be accounted for; the idea that she had run away with Bernard was in every way believable.
This morning Bret would go right through all his notes again so as to be prepared f
or Fiona’s arrival. This would be the last job he’d ever do for London Central and he was determined that it should end perfectly. Werner Volkmann’s last report said that Fiona was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but Bret didn’t give it much credence. He’d heard that too often about other working agents: it was usually the preamble to a demand for more money. Fiona would be all right. Good food, sleep and the California air would soon bring her back to being her old self again.
Bernard Samson would go nowhere, of course. His career was at an end. It was strange to think how near Bernard had come to a senior position on the SIS staff. That evening long ago when Bret had gone to see the D-G, he had been all set to promote Bernard to German Stations Controller. From there he would have gone to the top floor and perhaps ended up as Director-General. Heaven knows, he wouldn’t be facing any fierce opposition from the line-up of dead-beats that now occupied the top floor. Would Sir Henry and Silas and Frank Harrington, and the rest of that cabal which really ran things, have gone along with Bernard Samson in a top job? They were always saying what a splendid fellow Bernard was, and many of them thought that the Department owed him something for the shabby way his father had been treated. But D-G? Any chance of Bernard as D-G had been eliminated that night when Sir Henry had revealed that Fiona was his choice to go over there.
Bret put down his coffee cup as a sudden thought came to him. The D-G must have known that choosing Fiona meant eliminating Bernard. There were others he could have chosen instead of Fiona: good people, he’d admitted that many times. So, had the D-G’s choice of Fiona been influenced by the fact that it would prevent Bernard getting the top job?
Bret drank his coffee and thought about it. There was always another layer of onion no matter how deep you went. Well, if it was true, the old man would never admit it, and he was the only one who knew the answer. Bret knew that he could never really become English. They were very strange people: tribal in their complex allegiances. He finished his coffee and dismissed such thoughts from his mind. There was a lot of work to do.
About the Author
SPY SINKER
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
AUTHOR NOTE:
Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match together cover the period from spring 1983 until spring 1984.
Winter covers 1900 until 1945.
Spy Hook picks up the Bernard Samson story at the beginning of 1987 and Spy Line continues it into the summer of that same year.
Spy Sinker starts in September 1977 and ends in summer 1987. Faith picks up the story and continues it. The stories can be read in any order and each one is complete in itself.
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By Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain
Airshipwreck
French Cooking for Men
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
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This paperback edition 2010
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson Ltd 1990
Copyright © Len Deighton 1990
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-39538-5
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