by Len Deighton
‘I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Gloria. ‘It’s just what Dicky Cruyer has been saying all along, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh, Bernard, you know it is. He’s been saying it over and over. You argued with him.’
‘Dicky does it again,’ I said, with all the joy I could muster.
‘But you risked your life bringing him out. You had diplomatic cover; you could have just walked past customs and immigration.’
‘I brought him out because I want that bastard sliced open and chopped into pet food. He’s as guilty as anyone could be but he thinks he’s going to sweet-talk his way out of it.’
‘He’s always so sweet… George Kosinski I mean,’ she added hurriedly.
‘He thought spying made him a big man. It helped him overcome the shame he felt at his wife going to bed with other men. God knows what he reported back to Warsaw or Moscow or wherever the best material was ending up.’
‘They use people,’ she said. ‘They are clever at that.’
‘There are no alleviating circumstances,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t intellectual writer Stefan, using his power and influence to protect honest old George Kosinski, capitalist charmer and devout Christian. George was the leader; Stefan the anchor. Between them they kept their old mansion intact and the big estates in his family’s private hands. They did it by spying for their communist masters, for the army and for anyone else who had to be placated. I have a nasty feeling that we’ll discover that George is the tip of something very big and important. He’s been provided with a cover story that will “prove” he was recruited as late as 1983 but he was spying for them for ages before that. It will all come out when they start questioning him. He hasn’t got the guts to resist.’
‘You sound as if you would like to interrogate him personally.’
‘I’d like to hang the little bastard personally.’
‘Did Tessa know what he was doing?’
‘It’s the big question isn’t it? But his Bezpieca masters no doubt convinced George that we killed her for exactly that reason.’
‘And I was feeling sorry for him,’ said Gloria. She took my arm. She knew me well. I was angry and tired and talking too much.
‘I should have dumped him into the Baltic Sea,’ I said. ‘It went through my mind to do it.’
‘You’ll get into trouble one day, saying things like that,’ Gloria warned.
‘And what will they do to me? Send me on a dangerous mission?’
‘Oh, Bernard. I did worry. Bret could see how I felt. He sent me to meet you.’
‘He always was a romantic sort of fellow.’
‘That’s the air-ambulance I came on. A Learjet. Bret rented it from an insurance company he’s connected with. I’ve never been on a private jet before.’ There was a fuel bowser alongside it, and men probing the engines.
‘Is that how you’re getting back to London?’
‘The plane has to return today,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and the crew want to be at home. Come and see it: it’s beautiful.’ She grinned nervously, like a little girl. ‘I don’t think those bloody embassy people are going to send a car for you.’
‘Yes, it’s Christmas Eve, I forgot. Going away?’
‘I’ve nowhere to go. Daddy and Mummy are away. I’ll just stay at home, raid the freezer for food, and watch all those awful television shows. And you?’
‘I can’t go home until I’ve had our engineers to check my apartment for bugs. There’s no telling what George might have planted there when he moved out.’
‘Poor, homeless Bernard. The engineers won’t come out on Christmas Day.’
‘I love you, Gloria,’ I said. I’d been trying not to say it, but I blurted it out. She squeezed my arm without replying.
The Swede finished inspecting the bullet holes and climbed back into the cockpit of the Trislander.
I took Gloria’s hand and we walked in silence towards the jet. ‘My overnight bag is in the plane,’ she said. ‘Do you have luggage?’
‘No. No luggage.’
The Learjet pilot was standing by the wing signing a clipboard for the driver of a fuel bowser. There was a strong smell of jet paraffin in the air. ‘So what’s the verdict?’ the pilot asked Gloria. ‘These Swedes want me to file a flight plan. It’s always the same with these horse and buggy outfits, they always want to do everything by the book. Are you both on diplomatic passports?’
‘Yes, we can leave,’ said Gloria. ‘No need to do any customs and immigration.’
‘Great! I’ll go over to the office and do the airport paperwork,’ said the pilot. He looked at his watch. ‘You may as well get aboard, out of the cold. There’s food in the galley. I’ll be back directly. Then we’ll crank up and get out of here.’
The plane had its own steps and the interior was luxuriously equipped as an air-ambulance. Gloria removed her coat and hung it in the wardrobe. Directly behind the flight-deck there was a cabin for the nurse, doctor and wealthy relatives, the soft leather seating arranged around a polished table. On the cabin walls, over the tinted windows, there was a drinks cabinet, racks of magazines, and on a polished-wood panel there were instruments and gauges which relayed altitude, airspeed, cabin temperature, and the time in the financial centres throughout the world where ambulances were most needed. Part of the space was a tiny galley – no more than a closet really – with a sink, a coffee machine and a shelf packed with groceries: shrink-wrapped sliced chicken and bread and canned soup.
I opened a leather-covered door to find another larger cabin. Behind me I heard Gloria putting water into the coffee machine. I went through the door, marvelling at the deep carpeting, and at the beds with crisp sheets and pillows. ‘Look at this!’ I called as I went into the main cabin. ‘Big soft beds!’
‘Goodness,’ said Gloria, looking at me and smiling demurely.
‘Did you tell the embassy not to send a car for me?’
‘Beds,’ said Gloria. ‘I never noticed that.’
About the Author
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.
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Other Books 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
G
oodbye 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
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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This paperback edition 2011
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
HOPE. Copyright © Len Deighton 1995.
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011.
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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
ISBN: 978-0-00-739575-0
EPub Edition © MAY 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-739579-8
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