London Match

by Len Deighton

  ‘But we saved them from making fools of themselves. We saved the D-G’s job, Frank.’

  ‘Maybe we did. But there’s more to be gained from giving bad advice when the result is a triumph, than from giving good advice when the outcome is a near disaster.’

  A doctor came through the door that led down the long corridor to the intensive care unit where a white-faced, motionless, unseeing Bret was wired into a roomful of life-support machinery: heart pumps, oxygen supply and drip feeds. At his side attentive nurses watched dark monitor screens on which little electronic lines jumped, faltered and flickered.

  ‘Would you come?’ said the doctor, a Turk with a strong accent and large moustache. ‘He might be able to recognize you this time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Frank to the doctor. To me he said, ‘Life is like show business – it’s always better to put a fiver into a hit than five grand into a flop.’

  ‘We put five grand into a flop,’ I said.

  ‘Give my best wishes to Werner,’ said Frank. ‘I wouldn’t have let him down, Bernard. Even if you hadn’t been here, twisting my arm, I wouldn’t have let Werner down.’

  ‘He knows that, Frank. Everyone knows!’

  Werner was waiting outside in Zena’s car. He looked tired, but no more tired that I’d often seen him before. He was still wearing the old jacket and corduroy trousers. ‘I got your message,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you not to go near that bloody Miller woman?’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t know it was a stakeout?’

  I let his question hang in the air for a moment; then I said, ‘No, I didn’t know it was a stakeout, but I had brains enough to guess it might be.’

  ‘I just got back to my apartment here when the phone rang,’ said Werner. ‘It was your girl. She’d been trying to get you all day.’

  ‘My girl?’ I knew he was talking about Gloria, of course, but I was annoyed that she’d phoned, and also that she’d got through to Werner.

  ‘Gloria. She thought you might be staying with us. Rumours were going around in London. She was worried about you.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘In the middle of the night?’

  ‘She was in some rotten little hotel in Bayswater. She couldn’t sleep. She said you’d quarrelled and she’d moved out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I told her to pack her things and get a cab and move back into your place.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘You don’t want the poor kid sitting in some crummy little doss house in Bayswater, do you?’

  ‘Are you trying to break my heart, Werner? She’s got enough money to check into the Savoy if Bayswater is so terrible.’

  ‘Don’t be a bastard, Bernie. She’s a nice kid and she loves you.’

  ‘Hold everything, Werner! Did you tell her that this was my idea, this moving back into my place?’

  No answer.

  ‘Werner. Did you tell Gloria it was my idea?’

  ‘She thought it was your idea. I thought it was better that you sorted it out when you got back to London.’

  ‘You’re a regular bloody matchmaker, aren’t you, Werner?’

  ‘You’re crazy about her – you know you are. You should grab her while you have the chance, Bernie. It’s no good you living in the hope that one day Fiona will come back to you.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said.

  ‘You saw her today…yesterday, I mean. I saw her too. Fiona’s changed, Bernie. She’s one of them now. And she beat us at our own game. She’s tough and she called the shots. She made fools of us all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. I was weary and irritable. I wasn’t asking that Werner thank me for getting him out, but neither was I welcoming his criticism.

  ‘So take Stinnes. Are you still going to tell me he’s sick?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Because I saw him after he arrived over there. I saw him light up a big Havana and make some crack about how pretending to be off tobacco was the worst part of the job. He didn’t avoid the physical because he was very sick; he avoided it because he didn’t want us to know how strong he was.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, but Werner had to go on about it.

  ‘That was just one small part of the deception plan. By letting us think he was sick, he avoided any risk of us giving him intensive interrogation. He was treated with silk gloves…’

  ‘Kid gloves,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Just the way Fiona knew a sick man would be treated. She outwitted us at every turn. It’s game, set and match to Fiona, Bernie. It’s no good you trying to pick a quarrel with me – it’s game, set and match to Fiona.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying the same thing over and over again,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t keep saying the things you don’t like to hear over and over again. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

  ‘We came out of it intact,’ I said. ‘You’re here, I’m here, and the Department is still putting our salaries into the bank…’

  ‘Face the truth, Bernie. See how fast her success has come. Do you remember that night we waited at Checkpoint Charlie in my old Audi? Zena was away somewhere and you were sleeping on my sofa. We were expecting Brahms Four to try. Remember? That was only a year ago, Bernie, and that was well before Fiona went over there. Look what she’s done since then. Brahms Four is retired, Bret’s economic department is closed down. She’s smeared you so cleverly that it will take you years to get in the clear again. Bret’s been facing some sort of enquiry. Stinnes stirred up all kinds of trouble for us with MI5 so that it may take years before the bad feeling is gone. And they’ve done it all so cheaply. Fiona is as arrogant and successful as I’ve ever seen a KGB senior grade officer – and I’ve seen plenty – while Stinnes is repatriated and will obviously use the knowledge and experience he’s acquired to stage more operations against us. Face the facts, Bernie.’

  Werner turned the key and started the engine. It was a cold night and the car needed two or three tries before it came to life. He went down the slope and out past the gatekeeper. Berlin never goes to sleep and there was plenty of traffic on Grunewaldstrasse as we headed for his apartment in nearby Dahlem. He took it for granted that I would sleep on his sofa for what was left of the night, just as I took it for granted that Frank Harrington would phone me there to give me any instructions that came from London. It was like that with all of us. We all knew each other very well; too damned well at times. That’s why, when we arrived outside his apartment and he switched off the engine, he said, ‘Admit it.’

  ‘Look at it another way,’ I said. ‘Fiona, one of the brightest and best-placed agents they’ve ever had, was flushed out and had to run for it so hurriedly that we lost little or no data. Brahms Four, a brave old man who for years supplied such good banking data and East Bloc forecasts that the Americans traded with us for it, was brought out safely…’

  ‘Because you and I…’ said Werner.

  But I ploughed on. ‘I survived their attempts to discredit me and even their loony hope that I’d run. I survived it so well that they had to rejig their resources to turn suspicion onto Bret. Okay, they were smart – I fell for it at first and so eventually did a lot of other people who had more data than I had and should have known better. But at the end of the road, Bret’s reputation will have survived, and we proved flexible enough to bend the rules and even break them. The willingness to break rules now and again is what distinguishes free men from robots. And we spiked their guns, Werner. Forget game, set and match. We’re not playing tennis; it’s a rougher game than that, with more chances to cheat. We bluffed them; we bid a grand slam with a hand full of deuces and jokers, and we fooled them. They were relieved to get Stinnes back and they didn’t even try to sustain the fiction that he was really enrolled.’

  ‘Luckily for you,’ said Werner.

  ‘Luckily for both of us,’ I said. ‘Because if they’d stuck to their story tha
t Stinnes was a traitor, I’d now be on a plane to London handcuffed to an Internal Security man and you’d still be on the wrong side of Charlie. Okay, there are wounds, and there will be scars, but it’s not game, set and match to Fiona. It’s not game, set and match to anyone. It never is.’

  Werner opened the door and, as the light inside the car came on, I saw his weary smile. He wasn’t convinced.

  Spy Hook

  Len Deighton

  Working for the Department was like marriage is supposed to be – ‘’til death do us part’ – but the Department is really not like that; and neither are many marriages, including that of Bernard Samson. The cool and cynical field agent of the GAME, SET and MATCH trilogy has grown older and wiser. But things have not gone well for Samson: old pals are not as friendly as they used to be and colleagues are less confiding than they once were.

  Now, starting with his mission to Washington, life has become even more precarious for Bernard. Ignoring all warnings, friendly, devious and otherwise, he pursues his own investigation and, in California, meets with the biggest surprise of his life…

  Spy Hook is the first book in the international bestselling Hook, Line & Sinker trilogy.

  ‘Superb…The secret of Spy Hook is its readability…Deighton is the inspiration for Le Carré and Forsyth and a master of his craft’

  Today

  ‘In Deighton’s best books – like this one – the narrative glides forward on rollers, and the scenes and characters fit perfectly into place. The result is marvellous entertainment’

  Independent

  About the Author

  London Match

  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.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  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

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This paperback edition 2010

  FIRST EDITION

  First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1985

  Copyright © Len Deighton 1985

  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

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable 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.

  EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-38720-5

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Find out more about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com