by Len Deighton
His head emerged in a cloud of blue smoke. He tossed the spent matchstick into the moat. Two ducks swam quickly towards it but, discovering it wasn’t edible, moved away sedately. ‘What then?’ He was looking at the moat, with the dead leaves moving slowly on the current and the patches of weed swaying to the movement of the ducks.
‘One night in September 1978 –’
‘In 1978 I was in Berlin,’ he said as if that would mean the end of the question.
‘We all were,’ I said. ‘Fiona was there, Frank was there, I was there. Dicky was working in Frankfurt and he used to come to Berlin whenever he got the chance. Bret too. I want to ask you about a radio intercept that Signals got one night during the Baader-Meinhof panic. Remember?’
‘The airliner hijack – I remember that clearly enough. Frank Harrington seemed to think it had all been done to discredit him.’ Trent smiled. It was as near as he came to making a joke.
‘There was a special inquiry about this Russian Army signal.’
Trent turned to look at me. ‘Yes, I remember that. Frank let an American do the questioning. It was a fiasco.’
‘A fiasco?’
Trent shrugged but said nothing.
‘You went into the main building,’ I said, ‘and into Operations at the end of your duty shift. You saw the signal…maybe on Fiona’s desk.’
‘The night of the big panic? Who said I was in Operations?’
‘Fiona. You went up to collect her and take her home.’
‘Not that night, I didn’t.’
‘Are you sure? You’re not telling me you weren’t permitted in Operations?’
‘Well, officially I wasn’t, but anyone who wore a badge could get into the main building. I’m not denying I gatecrashed Operations regularly. But I didn’t do it when I knew Frank was up there holding court and laying down the law. Hell, you know what Frank is like. I’ve seen him blast a senior man because he’d moved a fire extinguisher out of his office.’
‘Frank’s a bit obsessed about fire precautions,’ I said. ‘We all know that.’
‘Well, he’s obsessed about a few other things, including people from the annex going into Operations without an Ops pass. No, I didn’t go up there that night. The word went round that Frank was throwing a fit because Bonn thought the mayor of Berlin was going to be kidnapped, and we all stayed well away from him.’
‘It was just a signal intercept from Karlshorst…’
He nodded. ‘News of which got back to Karlshorst within three days, and they changed codes and wavelengths. Yes, I know all about it. That American fellow…Joe something – “Just call me Joe,” he kept saying –’
‘Joe Brody.’
‘Joe Brody. He explained the whole thing.’
‘Let’s make it off the record,’ I said.
‘Off the record, on the record – it makes no difference. I didn’t go up there that night.’
‘Fiona told me you did.’
‘Then Fiona is not telling you the truth.’
‘Why should she lie about it?’ I said.
‘That’s something you’ll have to ask Fiona.’
‘Did you get the information by some other means? I’m determined to press this point, Giles. You may as well come clean.’
‘Because your pal Werner Volkmann did it? And you’d like to clear him?’
‘How did Werner get into Operations that night? He’s never worked in Operations. He’s always been a street man.’
‘Werner Volkmann wasn’t up there. He was Signals Security One. He brought it from Signals to Ciphers that night.’
‘That’s all? But Werner would have to be some wizard to decipher a message while he’s travelling five blocks in the back of a car.’
Trent smoked reflectively. ‘The theory was that Werner Volkmann was hanging around the cipher room that night. He could have seen the deciphered message. Anyway, he didn’t have to decipher it in order to tell the Russians that their traffic was being intercepted. He only had to recognize the heading or the footing codes and the time and the Karlshorst Army transmitter identification. The Russians would know exactly what had been intercepted without Werner ever knowing what the message was.’
‘Do you believe it was Werner?’
‘Brody is a very careful investigator. He gave everyone a chance to speak their piece. Even Fiona was interrogated. She handled the message. I never saw the report, of course, but it concluded that Volkmann was the most likely person of those who could have done it.’
‘I said, did you believe Volkmann did it?’
‘No,’ said Trent. ‘Werner’s too lazy to be a double agent – too lazy to be a single agent, from what I saw of him.’
‘So who could have done it?’
‘Frank hates Werner, you know. He’d been looking for a chance to get rid of him for ages.’
‘But someone still has to have done it. Unless you think Frank leaked his own intercept just as a way of putting the blame on Werner.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Why not?’
I said, ‘Because if Frank wants to get rid of Werner, he’s only got to fire him. He doesn’t have to go to all the trouble of leaking an intercept to the Russians.’
‘It wasn’t a vitally important piece of intelligence,’ said Trent. ‘We’ve seen more important things than that used as Spielzeug just to boost the reputation of a double agent.’
‘If Frank wanted to fire him, he could have fired him,’ I repeated.
‘But what if Frank wanted him discredited?’
I stared at Trent and thought about it. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I said.
‘Werner Volkmann spread stories about Frank.’
‘Stories?’
‘You’ve heard Werner when he’s had a few beers. Werner is always able to see scandal where none exists. He had stories about Frank fiddling money from the non-accountable funds. And stories about Frank chasing the typists around the filing cabinets. I suppose Frank got fed up with it. You keep telling stories like that and finally people are going to start believing them. Right?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘Someone leaked it,’ said Trent. ‘If it wasn’t Volkmann or Frank, then Moscow had someone inside Operations that night. And it certainly wasn’t me.’
‘God knows,’ I said, as if I’d lost interest in the mystery. But now I was sure that the Karlshorst intercept was vitally important, because it was the only real slip Moscow’s well-placed man had made.
‘What do you think will happen?’ said Trent. What was going to happen to him, he meant.
‘You’ve had a long time in this business,’ I reminded him. ‘Longer than I have. You know how these things work. Do you know how many people just as guilty as you are have retired from the service with an unconditional pardon and a full pension?’
‘How many?’ said Trent. He knew I couldn’t answer and that amused him.
‘Plenty,’ I said. ‘People from Five, people from Six, a couple of Special Branch people, and those three from Cheltenham that you helped to interrogate last year.’
Trent said nothing. We watched four men as they came out of the house and went down the gravel path towards the gate lodge. One of them skipped half a pace in order to keep step with the others. They were security guards, of course. Only such men are that anxious to keep in step with their fellows. ‘I hate prisons,’ he said. He said it conversationally, as a man might remark upon his dislike of dinner parties or sailing.
‘You’ve never been inside, have you?’
‘No.’
‘It’s not like this, believe me. But let’s hope it won’t come to that – not for you, not for anyone.’
‘That’s called “leaving the door open”,’ said Trent. It was a subheading in his training report.
‘Don’t dismiss it on that account,’ I said. But we both knew that Trent had written: ‘Promise the interviewee anything. Promise him freedom.
Promise him the moon. He’ll be in no position to argue with you afterwards.’
16
People made jokes about ‘the yellow submarine’, but Fiona seemed to like going down to the Data Centre, three levels below Whitehall. So did I sometimes, for a brief spell. Down there, where the air was warmed, dehydrated, filtered and purified, and the sky was always light blue, you had the feeling that life had temporarily halted to give you a chance to catch your breath and think your own unhurried thoughts. That’s why the staff down there are so bloody slow. And why, if I wanted anything urgently, I went down there and got it myself.
The Data Centre can only be entered through the Foreign Office. Since this entrance was used by so many others, it was difficult for enemy agents to identify and target our computer staff. The Centre occupied three underground levels: one for the big computers, one for the software and its servicing staff, and the lowest and most secret level for data.
I went through the security room on the ground floor. I spent the usual three minutes while the uniformed guard got my picture, and a physical description, on his identity-check video screen. He knew me of course, the old man on the desk, but we went through the procedures just the same. The higher your rank, the longer it took to satisfy the security check, the men on the desk were more anxious to impress the senior staff. I’d noticed the way some of the junior employees seemed to get past with no more than a nod or a wink.
He punched a code to tell the computer I was entering the Centre, and smiled. ‘Here we are, sir.’ He said it as if he’d been more impatient than I had. ‘Going to see your wife, sir?’
‘It’s our anniversary tonight,’ I told him.
‘Then it’ll be champagne and roses, I suppose.’
‘Two lagers and an Indian take-away,’ I said.
He laughed. He preferred to believe I wore these old suits because I was a spy.
Fiona was on level 3 in Secret Data. It was a very big open room like a well-lit car park. Along one wall, the senior staff had been allotted spaces marked out by means of a tiny rug, a waist-high bookcase and a visitor’s chair for visitors who never came. There was endless metal shelving for spools and, facing that, some disk-drive units. Underfoot was the special anti-static carpet, its silver-grey colour reflecting the relentless glare of the fluorescent lighting.
She didn’t see me as I came along the glass-sided corridor that ran the length of the Centre. I pushed through the transparent door. I looked around: there was no one in sight except my wife. There was a hum of electricity and the constantly whirring disk drives. Then came the sudden whine of a machine going into high speed before modulating into a steady pattern of uneven heartbeats.
Fiona was standing at one of the machines, waiting for it to whine down to a complete standstill. Then she pressed the button, and a drawer purred open. She dropped a cover over the disk and snapped the catches before closing the machine again. It was Fiona’s boast that she could stand in for any one of the Data Centre staff. ‘That way they can’t tell you it’s a long job, or any of the other fairy stories they invent to get home early.’
I went to the nearby terminal, a typewriter keyboard with a swivel display screen and printer. There was a roller-foot typist’s chair pulled close to it, and a plastic bin spilling over with the wide, pale green paper of the terminal’s printer.
‘You remembered,’ said Fiona. Her face lit up as she saw me. ‘You remembered. That’s wonderful.’
‘Happy anniversary, darling,’ I said.
‘You know we’re going to the school to watch our son win his race?’
‘Even that I remembered.’ It was a convention of our marriage that I was the one who was overworked and forgetful, but Fiona gave more hours to her work than I ever did. She was always making mysterious journeys and having long late meetings with people she did not identify. At one time I’d simply felt proud of having a wife senior enough to be needed so much. Now I was no longer sure of her. I wondered who she was with and what she did on those nights when I was alone in my cold bed.
She kissed me. I held her tight and told her how much I loved her, and how I missed her when we were apart. A girl wheeling a trolley loaded with brown boxes of new magnetic tapes saw us, and thought she’d discovered some illicit romance. I winked at her and she smiled nervously.
Fiona began tidying the papers spread across her metal desk; behind her, shelves of files, books and operator manuals were packed to capacity. She had to move a pile of papers before she could sit down. She began to speak, but changed her mind and waited as a nearby tape suddenly went into high speed and then ran down to silence. ‘Did you phone Nanny and tell her to give the children early dinner?’
‘She was doing something in the garden. I told Billy to tell her.’
‘You know how Billy gets everything mixed up. I wish she would stay with the children. I don’t want her doing something in the garden.’
‘She was probably doing something about the children’s clothes.’
‘We have a perfectly good tumble dryer,’ said Fiona.
Nanny preferred to hang the clothes to dry in the garden, but I decided not to mention this. The dryer was an endless source of disagreement between the two women. ‘Phone her again if you like,’ I said.
‘Are you going to be long?’
‘No. Just one personnel printout,’ I said.
‘If you’re going to be here for half an hour or more, there’s work I could do.’
‘Ten minutes,’ I said. I sat down at the terminal and entered OPEN. The machine purred and the screen lit up with ‘Please type your name, grade and department.’ I typed that and the screen went blank while the computer checked my entry against the personnel file. Then ‘Please ensure that no other person can see the screen or the console. Now type your secret access number.’ I complied with that request and the screen said ‘Please type the date and time.’ I did it. The machine requested ‘Today’s code number, please.’ I entered it.
‘What time does this sports show begin?’ Fiona called across to me. She was hunched over her desk giving all her attention to the task of painting her nails Passion Red.
The screen said ‘Program?’; I responded with KAGOB to enter the KGB section. ‘Seven-thirty, but I thought we’d have a quick drink in that pub opposite.’
The same girl who’d seen us kissing came past carrying a huge bundle of computer output clutched to her bosom. There were plenty of other boxes for secret waste, but she obviously wanted to have a closer look at the lovers.
I typed in the other codes, ‘Redland Overseas’ and the name of ‘Chlestakov’, and the screen asked ‘Screen only?’ It was a ‘default query’, which meant the material was typed on the printer unless the operator specified otherwise. I pressed START.
The terminal made a loud buzzing noise. It was running background, which meant it was rejecting millions of words that were not about Chlestakov. Then suddenly the printer cleared its throat, hiccupped twice, and rattled off four lines of text before the machine settled into background again. ‘And don’t tug at the printout,’ Fiona called to me. ‘The new lot of continuous tracking paper has got something wrong with the sprocket holes. We’ve had three printout jams this afternoon.’
‘I never tug at the printout.’
‘And if it doesn’t feed, dial 03 on the internal for the duty engineer.’
‘And say goodbye to being anywhere before midnight.’
‘Don’t tug at it and it won’t jam,’ she said. She still hadn’t raised her eyes from peering closely at her nails.
The printer suddenly came to life and produced a long section of data on Chlestakov, the daisy wheel whizzing backwards and forwards. It always amazed me the way it printed every second line backwards. It was a little like Leonardo da Vinci mirror writing. No doubt its designers wanted to make human operators feel inferior. The run ended with a little tattoo of end codes to show that all the relevant data had been searched, and the printer was silent. The red l
ight on the console came on to SYSTEMS BUSY, which is computer language for doing nothing.
Fiona walked from her desk waving her extended fingers at me in a manner I would have regarded as threatening had I not seen her drying her nails before. ‘You had nice weather for your jaunt to Berwick House. You should have taken the Porsche.’
‘Everybody expects such big tips when they see a car like that.’
‘How was poor Giles?’
‘Feeling sorry for himself.’
‘Did he take a lethal dose or was it a cry for help?’
‘A cry for help? You’ve been mixing with sociologists again.’
‘But was it?’
‘Who can tell? The bottle of tablets was empty, but it might have only had a couple of tablets in it. Thanks to his sister’s quick action, he vomited before the tablets all dissolved.’
‘And the doctor didn’t say?’
‘He was only a kid, and Dicky had obviously filled his head with dark hints about the secret service. I don’t think he knew what he was doing. It was Trent’s sister who did the medical treatment. She only called in the doctor because nurses – even ex-nurses – are brainwashed to believe that they must have a doctor to nod at them while they make the decisions and do all the work.’
‘Do you think he’ll try again?’ said Fiona. She blew on her nails.
‘Not if he knows what’s good for his sister. I told him I’d make sure she stood trial if he did a bolt in any direction.’
‘You hate him, don’t you? It’s a long time since I saw you like this. I’ll bet you scared the daylights out of poor Giles.’
‘I doubt that very much.’
‘You don’t know how frightening you can be. You make all those bad jokes of yours and your face is like a block of stone. That’s what made me fall for you, I suppose. You were so damned brutal.’
‘Me?’
‘Don’t keep saying “Me?” darling. You know what a tough bastard you can be.’