by Len Deighton
‘Keep still and stay down,’ I said. ‘If it’s some pay-by-result freelance, he’ll be miles away by now. But if this is a KGB operation they may be ordered to wait and see what happens.’
‘Even with all the lights off, they could see that white roll-neck as he came near the window?’
‘Exactly, Werner.’
‘But if we’d had the lights on we would have closed the curtains.’
‘Life is full of maybes.’
‘But even then … How did they know which of us was wearing the white roll-neck? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘Maybe they’re going to pick us off, one by one.’
Werner gave a nervous laugh.
I got to the curtains and pulled them closed. ‘Maybe they watched us arriving,’ I said. ‘Maybe someone told them.’
‘Do you think they’ll wait at the front entrance for us? Shall I phone for the clean-up team? We’ll need a Special Branch man and a doctor, won’t we?’
‘Maybe. Let’s just wait here a moment and get our thoughts together.’
‘Is he still bleeding?’
‘One shot, Werner. They must have figured that there would not be time enough for a second round. Flat trajectory. Hits the glass, spreads a little and takes him out. Even allowing for an element of luck, how many rent-a-guns do we know with that kind of expertise?’
‘No one.’
‘I’ll find him, Werner, I’ll find that bastard,’ I said, expressing my anger more than my considered opinion.
‘Is this the end of Operation VERDI?’ said Werner.
‘It’s the end of a lot of things.’
21
‘Why have you got all this paper in your office?’ Werner was not the first visitor to express surprise about the boxes that were stacked from floor to ceiling, scarcely leaving room for me to work.
‘They can’t think of anywhere else to put us,’ I said.
‘Who’s up there on the top floor?’ Werner asked nervously, and not for the first time. He went to the window and stood there looking out. The sky had become darker and darker, and now there came a rumble of distant thunder.
‘Who isn’t?’ I said. We’d already been waiting almost two hours for the inquiry to send down for us.
‘Number Two Conference Room,’ said Werner. ‘Not Bret’s office. That shows they are really serious.’
‘Bret is having his office redecorated. Haven’t you noticed all the men in overalls, with ladders and transistor radios? They are stripping the paper off the walls, and putting in a false ceiling.’
‘Don’t you know who’s up there?’
‘I saw Frank arrive, and the D-G must be there too because I heard that bloody dog barking.’
‘Does he take that smelly animal with him everywhere?’
‘They’ve always said if you want a loyal friend in Whitehall, buy a dog,’ I said.
‘By the time we get up there we’ll be the only ones left to blame,’ Werner agonized.
‘Yes, we’re the ones chosen to be pushed out of the sled.’ Werner shuddered at the thought.
‘Do they all sit round a table?’
‘I don’t know, Werner,’ I said sharply. His fretting was having an effect on me. These official inquiries were always unpredictable. It was difficult not to worry that you might walk in through the door and have them say: You are a KGB spy so why not confess? It had happened to others, and many of them had eventually proved totally innocent. The Soviets were always trying to make trouble within the Department, by sowing false evidence and disinformation. No one was safe from it.
There was a perfunctory tap on the door and Bret came in. He was jacketless, with dark pants and a waistcoat from whose pocket a row of gold and silver writing instruments were peering. ‘What’s going on? Why are you guys sitting here in the dark?’ said Bret, switching on the lights without waiting to hear.
‘It’s energy-saving week,’ I said. There was a crackle of electricity and a flash of lightning that lit the two men, freezing them into poses that stayed in my mind long afterwards. Werner was hunched, with furrowed brow, and looking out of the window as if waiting for the rain to start. Bret, head bent, was looking down as his fingers searched among the pens in his waistcoat pocket.
‘We are taking a thirty-minute recess,’ Bret explained. ‘But I wanted to ask you your opinions about the killer, Bernard. We’re trying to construct a profile, to decide if this was a Moscow-inspired hit.’ From his waistcoat pocket he’d taken a piece of metal. He tossed it on to my desk, where it came to rest on the typewritten transcript of a diplomatic phone call. ‘What do you make of that?’
I looked at it. It was like a silver dollar that had been chewed at the edges. ‘Did this come out of VERDI’s body?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Bret. ‘It was in a large chunk of flesh found near the body. What kind of gun fired it?’
I didn’t pick it up. ‘I left my crystal ball in my other pants, Bret. It’s just a piece of metal that has distorted on impact.’
With manifest patience Bret said: ‘It’s what killed him, Bernard. It’s the round that came through the window. Can’t you say anything helpful about it?’
Werner reached over and picked it up to study it.
‘It’s some kind of factory-made soft-point or hollow-point round,’ I said. ‘They all collapse like that. In doing so, all the land and groove markings are effaced, along with any other characteristics, except maybe the weight.’
Bret looked at Werner, who was weighing it in his hand. Werner shook his head.
‘So what shall I tell them upstairs?’ Bret asked.
‘Say it’s probably a Remington Soft Point Core-Lokt. That’s usually regarded as the softest dum-dum, and you couldn’t get much softer than this one.’
‘How many different ones are manufactured?’ Bret asked, while writing in a tiny leather-bound notebook. I looked over his shoulder and corrected his spelling.
‘Quite a number,’ I said. ‘And for a tricky shot like that one, it may have been hand-loaded to increase the propellant charge.’
‘So it’s a Soviet hit man?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s not that it’s too sophisticated, but it’s not Soviet style. They go for short-range gimmicks like gas-guns used point-blank, or poison-tipped implements. Every way you look at this one, you see American sophistication.’
Perhaps Bret took it personally. ‘It’s a sniper-rifle assassination, Bernard. A good shot maybe, but surely nothing a Soviet army marksman couldn’t bring off?’
‘More than that, Bret. I know that in the movies huge cross-hairs fill the screen, pan to the villain’s chest and we’re in to the end-roller. But that’s not the way it really is. Even if the technology was provided by a third party, this one was an expert job. For a shot like this, the trajectory will demand a lot of correction – for wind and for gravity too. And it was a moving target that was probably only going to be in view momentarily.’
‘Okay, a freelance hit man then.’ Bret took the distorted metal round from Werner, and put it back into his waistcoat pocket.
‘It’s a six-figure assignment by a top pro,’ I said.
‘I’m going to let you into a little secret, Bernard. When this little old inquiry finally shuffles to a close, its report will conclude that VERDI’s death was caused by a Stasi hit man. Or by a freelance sniper employed by them.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s logical and conclusive that way, Bernard. We don’t want to drag in a lot of complex ideas that just don’t make sense and leave loose ends.’ The thunder was getting closer. Bret looked at me and raised an eyebrow: ‘Unless you have some wacky Samson theory to peddle?’
‘Not me, Bret,’ I said.
‘So can I take it that the board will not have to listen to, and my report will not have to incorporate, the one dissenting opinion of Bernard Samson?’
‘It was a Stasi hit man, Bret. And you can quote me.’
He
looked at me sadly and said: ‘I didn’t think it would end like this. When I saw you off from Los Angeles airport I. told you that faith must be your anchor. Grab VERDI and come on out, I said. I thought it would be something an experienced whiz-kid like you could wrap up successfully in forty-eight hours or so.’
‘Is that what you thought, Bret?’
‘Okay, I didn’t want the D-G to send you,’ Bret admitted. ‘Not because I thought you’d fail, but because I knew you’d want to do everything your own oddball way. I warned you that there were people in the Department gunning for you: looking for an opportunity like this. You ignored that warning. You went running off to see Werner.’ A fleeting smile for Werner to show it was nothing personal. ‘And pulled every other provocative antic that caught your fancy.’
‘What you call provocation, I call protecting my back,’ I said.
‘I wanted to send someone “hungry”: a younger man, an unmarried probationer who would do everything the way the book says do it.’
‘Wow! Poverty, celibacy and obedience. But that’s only for monks, Bret.’
Bret put his notebook away, looked at us both without evident admiration, and went to the door. ‘Dicky is next. I don’t know which of you we’ll want after him.’ As he stood in the doorway he couldn’t resist giving me a final volley: ‘I wish you hadn’t run off to see Werner and your brother-in-law. At that time they were both persona non grata. Now your capers have all blown up in our face. I’m sitting there, hour after hour, listening to all this stuff and wondering how I’m going to handle it in my report and keep you intact. And right now, I’m all ready to commit hara-kiri.’
‘Let me know if you need a hand,’ I said.
Bret went out and closed the door, being very careful that it didn’t slam.
When Bret had gone, Werner resumed his worrying, or perhaps he’d never stopped. ‘Bret is determined to dump all the blame on us. You could see that in his face. Did you have to make it worse?’
‘Just stick to what you wrote,’ I said.
‘That’s just it. I haven’t even got a copy of my own statement. That girl from Dicky’s office said she’d bring a copy back for me, and never did. The board will be asking me questions and I won’t even know what I told them already.’
‘Just tell them the way it happened,’ I said wearily. ‘It was all over in sixty seconds. He’s dead. We can’t resurrect him.’
‘I should have closed the curtains,’ said Werner.
‘Don’t find reasons to blame yourself,’ I advised. ‘They’ll find enough lousy reasons to roast you, without you supplying them with good ones.’
‘They are out for blood,’ he said. ‘I could see it in Bret’s face. He’s absolutely furious.’
‘Well, Frank won’t be furious,’ I said. ‘The wire-taps would have gone directly to England. Frank saw the danger of his precious Berlin Field Unit becoming sidelined.’
‘Bret is writing the report,’ Werner persisted. ‘And Bret doesn’t like being the butt of your jokes.’
‘Bret had begun to see he was going to be the referee in a knock-down drag-out battle between Frank and Dicky. Is Bret the type to pitch his tent in no-man’s-land?’
‘Dicky was staking his career on it, you told me that yourself. What is he telling them?’
‘Can’t you see him, Werner? He’s up there in the conference room right now, explaining in that wide-eyed sincere way that he practises in front of a mirror, that deprived of Berwick House we did the best we could. And that means he put me and you in charge of it, and we failed him dismally.’
‘If he says that,’ said Werner, trying to be cool, calm and matter-of-fact, ‘we’ll take all the blame.’
It was difficult to disagree with that prognosis, but I was determined not to join Werner in his mood of Teutonic self-pity. I said: ‘He’ll be confirmed as Ops supremo, and that’s all Dicky cares about. He is not going to be crying salty tears about the collapse of the VERDI operation. He couldn’t understand it for one thing. And it wasn’t the sort of job that could be done overnight, and establish him as a Wunderkind. Tapping into the Karlshorst computer was going to be a long-term on-going slog. And when he had Bret over to dinner the other night, he was left in no doubt that Bret wasn’t going to offer him much support. Dicky realized that he was going to be fighting Frank, while the D-G looked on unsympathetically and Bret yelled told-you-so. Dicky saw it was going to be a long stony path.’
Werner looked even more dejected. Like most such long-winded arguments it sounded unconvincing, even to me. ‘This was Dicky’s opportunity to become the most important man in the Department,’ said Werner. ‘And we screwed it up.’
‘Yes, but do the minds of Whitehall apparatchiks work that way, Werner? The more success he had, the more he would be proving his superiors wrong. That’s not the Whitehall style and it’s certainly not Dicky’s.’
‘Why would Dicky care about proving the D-G wrong? The Director-General’s past retirement age anyway. A shove like this from Dicky and he’d be toppled. And who would be the hero? – Dicky.’
‘You don’t understand the British, Werner. No D-G is ever going to be happy with a black box Department tapping into Karlshorst, and run by people from the wrong schools who have little screwdrivers in their top pockets. The old man always said that we only get our allocation of funds because we use humans as field agents. That’s what keeps us in business, Werner. I heard him tell Bret once, that NASA wouldn’t get a nickel from Congress if the rockets they fired into space contained sensors and measuring equipment instead of crews. You need men to get money out of politicians, he said. And he’s right.’ There was a drumroll of thunder, and Werner looked at the window furtively as if considering escape. ‘And don’t think the D-G is so easily toppled. He’s not going to “lose” the VERDI operation, he’s assigning it all to GCHQ and leaving them to pick up the pieces.’
‘That will be impossible. It’s beyond salvage.’
‘I think he knows that, Werner. It’s his subtle way of cutting GCHQ down to size, lest they get ideas above their station.’
‘The D-G said that with VERDI’s help we could clear up the mystery of the Tessa Kosinski death.’ Werner studied my face to see my reaction. ‘For once and for all, they said. You were there when he said it.’
‘I don’t plan to tell them that yarn about Tessa still being alive, if that’s what you’re fishing for.’
‘It wasn’t in my written notes,’ said Werner.
‘I noticed that.’
‘I thought we should discuss it before we told them upstairs.’
‘What have we got to tell them? A totally unsubstantiated fairy story with Tessa still alive as some mysterious prisoner who they might one day unveil. The woman in the iron mask? I mean … what have we got to tell them, Werner?’
‘You can’t be sure it’s a fairy story. They could have got her out of the Ford van without you knowing. It could have been another woman who was shot.’
‘Don’t give me that stuff, Werner. What do you know? You weren’t even there.’
‘You didn’t contradict him, Bernie. I know you; you would have slaughtered him with questions if there had been a flaw in that description.’
I sighed. ‘You’re showing me exactly what could happen upstairs, Werner. If we open a can of worms like that, we’ll both be picked to pieces. Keep stumm. If there is any truth in VERDI’s story, the boys in Magdeburg will find another way of airing it.’
‘You didn’t tell Fiona?’
‘Fiona? That’s a major reason for saying nothing. Can you imagine what an uproar that kind of wild rumour would create with Tessa’s family?’
‘But the D-G said he wanted VERDI’s help to clear up the Tessa Kosinski death. The board are sure to pursue it.’
‘That’s what the D-G thinks he’s already done, Werner. The D-G showed Fiona that post-mortem report, the coroner’s verdict and the glossy photos, and the little plastic bag with the buckshot in it. None of t
hem have any reason to believe that the body is anyone but Tessa. Maybe in time the Germans will release a burned body. I’m not going to examine it and try and find out its true identity. We’ll give it a proper burial and then maybe the whole miserable business will end.’
‘What about a Tessa still alive?’ said Werner. ‘Suppose what VERDI said is true? Suppose she suddenly turns up here?’ Werner never let go; that was his greatest virtue and his most irritating vice.
‘Then that will be all right,’ I said crossly. ‘She’ll live happily ever after.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes. Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.’
‘But if Tessa is really alive it won’t be like that.’ Werner was not to be put off. ‘If she is alive they will start putting the pressure on to Fiona and to George, and, for all I know, on to your father-in-law too.’
I looked at him. Werner was a clever and perceptive man who was reminding me that such pressure might have begun already. It was an ominous thought, as if the worst was yet to come.
‘I have to look after her, Werner,’ I said. ‘You were right in what you said. Fiona is crippled by her grief. What would it do to her to be told that a dead man says Tessa is alive, but brought no proof of it?’
‘So VERDI said nothing about Tessa? That’s the way you mean to handle it when you are upstairs?’
‘You don’t have to back me up, Werner. If you want to tell them everything, I’ll say I wasn’t present when he said it to you.’
Werner said: ‘I’ll go along with it, Bernard. I’ll say whatever you are going to say. We’re in enough trouble already without giving them conflicting accounts of what happened.’
‘Fiona wakes me in the middle of the night and asks me who did it.’
‘What do you tell her?’ said Werner.
‘I tell her to go back to sleep.’
‘It’s your marriage, Bernard. I’ll do anything … you know that.’
‘I know, Werner. Thanks.’
‘Will she continue working?’