by Len Deighton
Dr Böttger sat down. There was no reaction to his speech except that each of the men now turned his attention to the German-style breakfast that had been set upon individual embroidered cloths around the long polished table.
Böttger fastidiously took a knife and cut the top from his boiled egg. The others followed his example. The formalities were finished. Now came the questions. Dr Böttger hated questions.
‘It is the violence that troubles me,’ admitted a frail, freckled man at the other end of the table. His name was Fritz Rau. ‘Several men have already been killed, you tell us. Can we be sure that this is the end of it?’ He was forbidden to eat eggs, butter or cheese, and now he nibbled carefully upon the black bread.
Böttger seized the nettle. ‘By no means. I have no doubt that there will be other deaths, simply because the men we are up against are determined upon a collision course.’
‘I had not fully understood that when we began,’ said the frail man. ‘I wonder how many of us would have authorized the formation of the Trust, had we realized that money was to be paid to hired killers.’
There was a shocked silence but it did not last long. Willi Kleiber stood up. He was a powerfully built man who liked to attend reunions of his infantry regiment and sing the old wartime songs over steins of dark Bavarian beer. Kleiber said, ‘I understood it, and everyone I spoke to understood it.’ He smiled. ‘Everyone who is not hard of hearing understood it.’ It was a powerful voice. Kleiber was seldom contradicted.
‘My hearing is not defective,’ said the frail man, Rau.
‘We must leave the operational side of the matter to Willi,’ said Dr Böttger. For one moment he felt a wave of panic, believing that Rau must have discovered something about the British diplomat they had killed by mistake in Los Angeles. Kleiber’s attempt to kill the British secret agent had been another error. Willi Kleiber was inclined to solve problems by eliminating his opponents. But Böttger had agreed to using Kleiber as ‘operations chief’ and now they were stuck with him, so they must give him all the support he needed.
‘Does “operational side” mean killing people we don’t like?’ said Fritz Rau.
‘Yes,’ said Böttger. He looked round the table anxiously before sipping some black coffee. Fritz Rau had once been one of the cleverest scientists in German industry. Even today he could sometimes be found white-coated in the laboratory of the vast chemical combine that he virtually owned, testing out some new ideas he had jotted down on the back of an envelope. Böttger knew that the silence of the other men present was due largely to the respect that Rau commanded amongst them. Böttger began to worry that Rau’s doubts could undermine the whole of Operation Siegfried.
‘You’d better understand this, gentlemen,’ said Böttger. He held a coffee cup in one hand, as if this vitally important thought had only this moment come to him. He looked slowly at all the faces. There had always been this weakness for melodramatic style in Böttger. The truth was that he had used such mannerisms in his climb to his present exalted status. ‘You’d better understand that each and every one of us has already committed a crime. We are all accessories to murder. It is as simple as that. I believe that what we are doing is what every German who loves his country will approve. If we closed down Operation Siegfried tomorrow, our plans unfulfilled, what then? Can we bring those men back to life? No. And what if one of us decided to go to the police or to the Foreign Ministry and tell them of our plan? Shall I tell you what would happen? Everyone associated with Operation Siegfried would be ruthlessly hunted down and rigorously punished. We’d probably be sent to prison for the rest of our lives. And, quite apart from the criminal liability of what we have done, what of our colleagues? I am sure that, like me, you have secured the generous help of your business partners and colleagues in falsifying books to make the large cash appropriations available to the Trust. We have also dispersed and hidden the funds we stole from the bank in Geneva. Many people were involved in that. They didn’t ask questions; they did it because they were friends. Is their repayment to be betrayal? I say no. I say that we must now hold fast, as the English held fast in 1940, and as our people held fast in 1944 while the Russians came ever closer and the Anglo-American bombers tore our cities to pieces. Hold fast, silence your doubts, my friend. Do what must be done.’
Böttger smiled as he reached the end of his harangue. For a moment he feared the worst. He waited until he saw his smile reflected in the anxious faces round the table, but then he knew he had won them over. Even poor little Fritz Rau seemed temporarily reassured.
Willi Kleiber spoke next. ‘There will be no violence for the sake of violence, Dr Rau,’ he promised. ‘In our lifetimes there has been enough killing and none of us wants more of that.’
He paused and looked round the table. They were all men he had known for ten or fifteen years. Willi Kleiber owned and personally managed one of the finest security organizations in Europe. All these men had done business with his company. Some of them shared their darkest secrets with him; he had helped more than one of their children involved with drug peddlers, and ferreted out the secrets of two transgressing wives. Not even the tax man knew as much about these men as Willi Kleiber knew. He said, ‘Dr Rau has asked if the operational side of things means killing people we don’t like. Dr Böttger said yes. With all due respect to Dr Böttger, I must be allowed to correct him. There is no place in this delicate operation for personal animosities. The only people who will be killed are those who have knowledge which is dangerous to our cause. The list of executions will be as short as I can possibly make it. Everyone here in this room may rest assured about that. I killed men in the war. I killed them in hand-to-hand combat. It was disgusting. It was not something about which I will ever be able to tell my children. Dr Böttger has selected me for the operations side of this plan simply because he knows that I do not relish violence. I am your sword arm, gentlemen. Be confident that I will not strike down the innocent.’
‘Thank you, Willi,’ said Fritz Rau. He was one of the oldest men in the room and thus enjoyed the privilege of addressing his younger colleagues in that informal manner.
Böttger gave a sigh of relief and hastily pressed on to the only other matter. ‘Money is suddenly required in London and we will need some sort of corporate structure to which to send the funds. Obviously we must not attract the attention of English government departments and I wonder if one of us can provide a way to hold half a million Deutschemarks just while we are forming a company there.’
‘No problem,’ said the expert on maritime insurance. ‘But you’ll have to let me have the details about who will have access to the money. Specimen signatures and so on.’
‘Willi will provide those details. I’ll let you have the money in whatever way you want it.’ He looked at the clock over the door. ‘That will do for this week, gentlemen,’ said Böttger. ‘You will all get a telex in the usual code to tell you where the next meeting will be. Kindly let me have proxies for anyone who cannot attend.’
When the meeting had broken up it was Willi Kleiber who remained for a final word with Dr Böttger. ‘I wondered what old Fritz was going to say for a moment,’ said Kleiber. ‘It is the violence that troubles me,’ Kleiber imitated Fritz Rau’s Saxon accent and the quaver which could sometimes be heard in his voice. It was a cruel parody.
‘He’s getting too old,’ said Böttger. ‘It will happen to all of us eventually, I suppose.’
‘Anyway, it all turned out all right.’
‘For the time being it did,’ said Böttger. ‘But you know as well as I do that it will not be one or two deaths.’
‘It will be messy,’ said Willi Kleiber. ‘It is hard to say how many will eventually have to be removed. I agree with you about that. I thought the explosion in England, when we had to deal with my old comrade Franz Wever, was going to become a big newspaper story.’
‘They were mad to do it like that,’ said Böttger. ‘Have our people there no sense?’
&n
bsp; ‘The British Secret Intelligence Service already knew Wever,’ explained Willi Kleiber. ‘They were pressing him. We had to do something very quickly indeed.’
‘The British Secret Service. To let them get hold of the Hitler Minutes would be the very worst thing that could happen to us,’ said Böttger. ‘If the newspapers got them, we might be able to buy them off or even frighten them off. Failing that, we can put up a smoke screen. But if they get into the hands of the British Secret Service, anything could happen.’
Willi Kleiber scratched his chin. ‘You mean the British are dangerous to us? Yes, I hadn’t thought of it in that light, Dr Böttger, but I have to agree with you whole-heartedly.’ Böttger looked at him and nodded. He knew that Willi Kleiber had never looked at it any other way.
Chapter 24
Sir Sydney Ryden had a lunch appointment but he was able to fit Boyd Stuart into a gap between the secretary of the estimates sub-committee on pay and a pre-lunch drink with the co-ordinator. Boyd Stuart waited in an empty sitting room for half an hour before the DG came in, slumped down into the armchair and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Everything seems to come at once, Stuart. Do you find that?’
‘Yes, sir, I do. I’m awfully sorry to be making a difficult day even worse for you.’
‘Not at all,’ said the DG. ‘It was my own decision to keep close to your investigation. Something come up, has it?’
Boyd Stuart explained the phone call which Paul Bock had made to Stein’s home in Los Angeles. And his visit to the house in north London the day before.
‘Homosexuals are they?’ He nodded as if in answer to his own question.
‘I’ve no reason to think so, Director.’
‘They sound like two delinquents,’ said the DG.
‘They are delinquents,’ agreed Boyd.
‘Quite so, Stuart.’ The DG eyed the drinks cabinet but decided that his lunch was going to be a tricky one. It would be better to remain completely clear-headed. ‘Am I to take it that you are treating their information seriously?’
‘For the time being I am, sir.’
‘Isn’t it rather preposterous? Surely you don’t believe that a syndicate of German industrialists is about to start a new Nazi movement?’
‘I’m not yet at the stage where I can start enjoying the luxury of discounting anything,’ said Boyd.
‘Well, it’s your investigation,’ said the DG scratching his head. ‘But the PM is asking for a situation report. I’m not going to relish telling her that my principal field agent thinks it’s all a neo-Nazi plot.’
‘Paul Bock gained access to the bank computer,’ insisted Boyd Stuart. ‘The other one has worked in electronics and, according to the hasty and superficial inquiries I’ve made this morning, is well qualified to know about retrieving information.’
‘I’m not contesting any of that,’ said the DG testily.
‘Then what could be their motive?’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Why would they contact Stein to warn him that his life is in danger? Obviously Stein is a stranger to them or they would have recognized me immediately as an impostor. The German boy has confessed a secret to a perfect stranger. If that stranger betrays him, he could face at best dismissal from the bank, perhaps a term of imprisonment. So what motive could they have, other than what they told me?’
‘Perhaps he thinks it’s fun,’ said the DG. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t need to have a job of any kind; he might well have a private income. Rich young trouble-makers. The western world is full of such people.’
Only with difficulty did Stuart suppress his irritation at this generalization. ‘I think it’s safer to assume that they work for a living, sir. And I prefer to assume they’re sincere.’
‘You don’t have to read me the riot act, Stuart.’ Boyd Stuart did not reply. The DG looked at his watch. ‘Well, I can see that you want to follow this one up, so I’ll not stand in your way.’ He got to his feet. His knee joint cracked and he massaged it briefly. ‘Don’t mind if I make a few inquiries too, eh?’
‘No, sir,’ said Boyd Stuart in a tone that he hoped conveyed the idea that he dreaded the thought of it.
‘That’s splendid then. Let’s talk again tomorrow before I see the PM.’
Sir Sydney Ryden did not look forward with pleasure to his meeting with the representative of West Germany’s intelligence organization, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND. Somehow the two men seemed incompatible and what should have been an exchange of helpful information all too often developed into an exchange of complaints which sometimes came close to bickering.
The lunch they shared at Boodle’s on Tuesday, 17 July, was no exception. There were differences about training facilities which were not yet ready for use, a request for the return of important dossiers which Sir Sydney secretly knew had got lost somewhere in Whitehall, and an argument about a news story concerning a secret rocket which had been leaked to a German newspaper. As an exercise in European cooperation, the lunch was a failure but, when the two men went downstairs for coffee, and watched the other club members sunk deep into the ancient leather armchairs, the talk turned to gardening.
Discovering that this difficult German shared his taste for growing cactus came as a revelation to Sir Sydney Ryden, who was a well-known member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of Great Britain.
‘As a general rule,’ Sir Sydney was saying, his coffee neglected, ‘it is common enough to find flowers larger than the plant, with the exception perhaps of Mammillaria and Rhipsalis. If you had seen my Echinocactus tabularis with three flowers – each one of them larger than the plant itself – my goodness, I think you would have been amazed.’ Sir Sydney slapped the arm of his leather chair hard enough to have a member across the room look up from his newspaper.
‘Mealy bug is the worst,’ said the German. ‘The only thing that will kill it is paraffin, but often I have found that the plant dies too.’
‘I never resort to paraffin,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘As soon as you see those little grey fluffy specks, get them off with a pin. I’d rather cut away a large piece of the plant than put paraffin on it.’
‘That is most interesting,’ said the German. ‘I shall remember too your advice concerning seeds.’
‘Yes, it’s not difficult at all. Wait until the flower stem has completely died before removing the seeds, of course. The Mammillaria seeds are in pods; keep them all until the following spring and don’t sow before late April unless you can be sure the temperature won’t drop below 65° Fahrenheit.’
‘I shall try it,’ said the German.
‘It’s a damned pity that you can’t spare the time to come down to my place in the country.’
‘Next time, perhaps.’
‘Excellent.’
‘I only wish that there was something I could do for you in return, Sir Sydney.’
A sudden thought struck the DG. ‘Well, perhaps there is, my dear chap. This is a top-secret matter, but I want to check up on the likelihood of a young fellow working for the London branch of a Hamburg bank being able to get something from their central computer. As I say, it’s top secret. It would have to be a very discreet inquiry.’
‘That’s a simple matter, Sir Sydney,’ said the BND man. ‘No need to put it through my department at all. I’ll handle it personally. Tomorrow I’ll be in Bonn lunching with my wife and an old friend who runs one of our very best private security companies. He knows all about German banks.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘I’d rather not have it made official. I’ll give you the details.’
The German took out his pocket diary and turned the pages to find the following day’s entry: Wednesday, 18 July. He wrote ‘mention inquiry Sir SR’ under the name of his luncheon companion – Willi Kleiber.
Chapter 25
All the efforts of the British Secret Intelligence Service employees in the Los Angeles area to erase Paul Bock’s message from Charles Stein’s answering machine had come to nothing. The machine itself, manufactured by a sm
all factory in San Diego, was advertised as the most reliable domestic machine on the market. One aspect of this reliability, upon which the copywriter expended much care, was the impossibility of accidental erasure of any incoming message. The ‘Executive Type II’ even had an erase head that could be unplugged and locked away elsewhere. It was a facility that appealed to Charles Stein, who believed his son Billy only too likely to erase vital messages accidentally.
As for the attempt to get a field agent posing as a telephone repairman into the Stein residence, this too was doomed to failure. Stein’s housekeeper had long since discovered that the best way to live in peace with her employer was to take his instructions literally. So when a young man, bedecked with tweezers, pliers and reels of wire, spoke to her over the voice box at the front entrance, she told him that he could not come in. He told her that her telephone was not working properly and, when she proved indifferent to this, insisted that the fault was going to affect all the phones in Cresta Ridge Drive. ‘You’ll have to come back some other day,’ she told him. Charles Stein had said let no one in the house, and that is exactly what she intended to do. When the bogus telephone man persisted, she threatened to call the telephone company and complain of his behaviour. It was at that stage of the operation that all attempts to interfere with the answering machine were abandoned.
Charles Stein arrived home at eleven A.M. He was in a bad mood and his housekeeper did not ask him about anything except what he would like to eat. It was only after she served his soup that Stein confided to her that he had been arrested for drunken driving by the California Highway Patrol while moving decorously along the number two lane of the Harbor Freeway at no more than forty miles an hour.