by Len Deighton
‘Two dead KGB thugs? Armed thugs? Hardly likely that Moscow are going to declare an interest in such antics, Sir Henry.’
‘Is that a considered opinion based on your Berlin experience?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘It’s my own opinion too, but the Cabinet Office do not respond to expert opinions; they are too concerned about the politicians they serve.’ The D-G said it without resentment or even displeasure. ‘I knew that, of course, when I took the job. Our department’s strategy, like that of every other government department, must be influenced by the varying political climate.’
‘The last time you told me that,’ said Frank, ‘you added, “but the tactics they leave to me”.’
‘The tactics are left to me until tactical blunders are spread across the front pages of the tabloids. Did you see the photos of that launderette?’
‘I did indeed, sir.’ Big front-page photos of the launderette, with the sprawled dead men and blood splashed everywhere, had made a memorable impression upon the newspaper-reading public. But whatever was being said about the shooting in London’s bars and editorial offices, the story printed was that it was another gangster killing, with speculation about drugs being offered for sale in all-night shops and launderettes.
‘“Five” are pressing for an inquiry and the Cabinet Secretary is convinced that their added expertise would be valuable.’
‘A combined inquiry?’
‘I can’t defy the Cabinet Office, Frank. I will bring it up in committee, and look to you for support.’
‘If you are sure that’s the right way to do it,’ said Frank, with only the slightest intonation to suggest that he didn’t think it was.
‘It’s a matter of retrenching before I get a direct order. In this way I will set up the committee and be able to give Bret the chair,’ said the D-G.
‘You think Bret will need that sort of help and protection?’
‘Yes, I do. But what I want you to tell me is, will Bret have the stamina to see it through? Think before you answer, Frank. This is important to me.’
‘Stamina? I can’t give a quick yes or no on that one, Sir Henry. You must have seen what has been happening to the Department since Fiona Samson defected.’
‘In terms of morale?’
‘In terms of morale and a lot of other things. If you are thinking of the psychological pressure, you might look at young Samson. He’s under tremendous strain, and to make it worse there are people in the Department saying he must have known what his wife was up to all along.’
‘Yes, I’ve even had members of the staff confiding their fears about it,’ said the D-G sadly.
‘When a chap is having a difficult time with his wife he can get away to work; a chap having a hard time in the office can look forward to a break when he gets home to his family. Bernard Samson is under continual pressure.’
‘I understood that he has formed some kind of liaison with one of the junior female staff,’ said the D-G.
‘Samson is a desperate man,’ said Frank with simple truth. He didn’t want to talk about Samson’s private life: do to all men as I would they should do unto me, was Frank’s policy.
‘I asked you about Rensselaer,’ said the D-G.
‘Samson is a desperate man,’ said Frank, ‘but he can withstand a great deal of criticism. He is a born rebel so he can fight back when called a traitor or a lecher or anything else. Bret is a quite different personality. He loves England as only the foreign-born romantic can. To such people the merest breath of suspicion comes like a gale and is likely to blow them away.’
‘Well done, Frank! Was it Literae Humaniores you read at Wadham?’
Frank smiled ruefully but didn’t answer. He’d known the D-G ever since they were very young and shared a billet in the war. The D-G knew all about Frank Harrington’s mastery of the Greek and Roman classics, and – Frank suspected –was still somewhat envious of it.
The D-G said, ‘Will Bret crack up? If the committee turn upon him – as committees in our part of the world have a habit of turning upon a vulnerable chairman – will Bret stand firm?’
‘Has this inquiry been given a name?’ asked Frank.
The D-G smiled, ‘It’s an inquiry into Erich Stinnes, and the way he’s been handled since coming over to us.’
‘Bret will take a battering,’ pronounced Frank.
‘Is that what you think?’
‘The Department is awash with rumours, Sir Henry. You must know that or you wouldn’t be here asking me these questions.’
‘What is the thrust of the rumours?’
‘Well, it’s commonly thought that Erich Stinnes has made a complete fool of Bret Rensselaer, and of the Department.’
‘Bret was not experienced enough to handle a wily fellow like Stinnes. I thought Samson would keep Bret on the straight and narrow but I was wrong. It now seems that Stinnes was sent to us on a disinformation mission.’
‘Is that official?’ Frank asked.
‘No, I’m still not sure what sort of game Stinnes is playing.’
‘A senior official like Stinnes sent on a disinformation mission can do whatever he likes and damn the consequences. He might well decide to come over to us.’
‘I share that view.’ The D-G took out his cigar case and for a moment was going to light a cigar. Then he decided against it. The doctor had told him to stop smoking altogether, but he always carried a couple of cigars with him so that he didn’t become too desperate. Perhaps it was a silly idea to do that: sometimes it was torture. ‘You said that some of the staff were of the opinion that Bret had been made a fool of. What do the rest think?’
‘Most of the staff know that Bret is reliable and resourceful.’
‘You know what I mean, Frank.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean. Well, there are some hotheads who think perhaps Bret was working with Fiona Samson.’
‘Working with her? They think Bret Rensselaer and Fiona Samson have both been under Moscow’s orders for that long?’
‘It’s an extreme view, Sir Henry, but they spent a lot of time together. There are stories of them having a love affair – a couple of sightings in the wrong hotels, you know the sort of thing. Even young Samson is not entirely certain that it’s not true.’
‘I didn’t realize that such absurd stories were going around.’
‘People wonder what motivated Bret, after a lifetime behind a desk, to grab a gun, rush into that launderette and try his hand at the sharp end. We have people trained to do that sort of thing.’
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ said the D-G.
‘The gunfight at the OK Corral was how one of the newspapers described it. I’m afraid that description has provided the basis for a lot of doubtful jokes.’
The D-G sniffed audibly and then again. ‘Berlin smells of beer, have you ever noticed that, Frank? Of course it’s not the only German town with that odour but I notice it in Berlin more than anywhere else. Hops or malt or something…’ he added vaguely, as if wanting to declare his unfamiliarity with that plebeian beverage.
‘You’ll have to support him, Sir Henry. Visibly and unequivocally.’
‘I won’t be able to do that, Frank. He must take his chances.’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘There are good reasons why I can give him no support; no support whatsoever.’
Frank was stunned. Despite the unwavering good manners for which he was famed, Frank was on the point of asking what the hell the Director-General was there to do, if it wasn’t to support his staff when they were in trouble. ‘Are those reasons operational or political?’
It was as near as Frank had ever gone to open rebellion, but the D-G accepted the reproach. On the other hand, the decision not to confide the truth about Fiona Samson to Frank was a sound one. Stinnes had to go back to Moscow firmly believing that Fiona Samson was a traitor. To say there were operational reasons for not supporting Bret Rensselaer was only a step away from revealing th
e whole story of Fiona Samson’s mission. ‘I can’t go into that, Frank,’ said the D-G in a voice that drew the line across Frank’s toes. If Bret Rensselaer was suspected of being Fiona’s coconspirator, so be it.
‘One supplementary, Director,’ said Frank, his voice and form of address making it an official question. ‘Is Rensselaer to be left to die of exposure? Is he to wither on the vine? Is that the purpose of the inquiry? I have to know in order to formulate my own responses.’
‘My God, no! The last thing I want to see is Bret Rensselaer thrown to the sharks, especially the sharks of Whitehall. I want Rensselaer to come out of this on top. But I can’t go in and rescue him.’
‘I’m glad you made that clear, Sir Henry.’
The exchange of views had produced a stalemate, and the D-G recognized it as such. ‘I still have a great deal of work for Rensselaer to do, and he’s the only one equipped to do it.’
Frank nodded and thought it was some sort of reference to Bret’s Washington contacts, which had always been important to the Department.
The story of that shooting in the Hampstead launderette that had worried the D-G and which the newspapers, and Frank Harrington, were pleased to call ‘The Gunfight at the OK Corral’ starts a week or so before the D-G’s visit to Berlin.
Had Bret Rensselaer displayed his usual common sense he would have kept well out of it. It was a job for the Department’s field agents. But Bret was not himself.
Bret Rensselaer missed Fiona Samson, he missed her terribly. Over the time when they had been working together they had met regularly and furtively, like lovers, and this had added to the zest. Bret could not, of course, tell anyone of this feeling he had, and his passion was not assuaged by seeing Bernard Samson, deprived of that perfect woman, going about his business in his usual carefree way. No matter what some people said about Samson’s anguish Bret could only see the Bernard it suited him to see. He was especially outraged to discover that Bernard was now living with a gorgeous young girl from the office. Heaven knows how the children were reacting. Bret was appalled by this but took great care to disguise his feelings in the matter. He could see no way to influence what happened to the Samson children. He hoped that Fiona wasn’t going to accuse him of bad faith at some future time.
Bret’s participation in the shooting in the launderette changed a lot of things. For him it was nothing less than traumatic. Traumatic in the literal sense that the violent events of that night inflicted upon Bret a mental wound from which he never completely recovered.
For Bret everything suggested that the contact with the KGB team in the launderette would be mere routine. There had been no warning that things would go as they did. One minute he was sitting next to Bernard in an all-night launderette in Hampstead, and the next minute he was in the middle of one of the most horrifying nightmares of his entire life.
They were watching Samson’s shirts revolving in the suds. Samson insisted that both of them brought laundry and had even produced a plastic bag of detergent; he said he didn’t like the stuff they had in the shop. Bret wondered whether it was a mark of Samson’s meticulous attention to detail or some sort of joke. Now Samson was intermittently reading a newspaper that was on his knee. He’d given Bret no indication at all that he had a damn great gun – with silencer attached – wrapped inside the a copy of The Times. Samson had been chatting away about his father as if he had not a care in the world.
Bernard Samson could be an amusing companion if he was in a good mood. His caustic comments on his superiors, the government and indeed the world around him were partly his defence against a system that had never given him a proper chance in life, but they sometimes contained more than a grain of truth. Bernard’s reputation was of being lucky, but his luck came from a professional attitude and a lot of hard work. Bernard was a tough guy and there can be no doubt that Bret’s willingness to involve himself in this caper was largely due to the fact that he felt safe with Bernard.
Bret was wearing an old coat and hat he’d bought at the Oxfam shop specially for this evening’s excursion. In the bag, under Bret’s soiled laundry, there was a heavy manila envelope containing forty one-hundred-dollar bills. It was funding. The money was to be given to a KGB courier when he used the code word ‘Bingo’. Positioned in the street outside the launderette there were enough men to warn of the courier’s approach and – should Bret decide that they must be arrested – enough men to hold them. To Bret it seemed very straightforward, but it didn’t turn out like that.
Things began with no warning from the men in the street. One of the KGB men had been hiding upstairs, in a room above the launderette, and when he came in unexpectedly he was brandishing a sawn-off shotgun. Then a second man entered; he too had a shotgun. One of the men said ‘Bingo’, the code word. Bret remained completely calm, or that was how he remembered it afterwards, and reached for the money to show them.
The sequence of the events that followed was disputed, although certainly everything happened in rapid succession. Samson said that this was when the car exploded in the street outside, but as Bret remembered it Samson took the initiative before that.
Samson did not stand up and fire his gun, he remained seated. He used Bret as a shield, and the rage that Bret felt when he realized that, stayed with him for the rest of his life. Leaning forward far enough to see the intruders – there were now two of them – Samson calmly took aim and fired. He didn’t even take the gun out of the newspaper that concealed it. The gun was silenced. Bret heard two thuds and was astounded to see one of the KGB men reel back, drop his gun, clutch at his belly and fall over the washing machines spewing blood.
Samson was suddenly up and away. Bret remembered Samson pushing him roughly aside and seeing him stumble over the discarded gun on the floor, although in Samson’s version he pushed Bret down to safety and then kicked the gun in Bret’s direction. Samson had even reproached him for not picking up the gun and following him through the back door to chase the others.
Bret was suddenly left in the launderette watching the young KGB man die, vomiting and bleeding and mewling like a baby. Bret had never seen anything like this: it was brutal and loathsome. From upstairs somewhere there came more shots – Samson killed another man – and then it was all over and Bret found himself pushed roughly into a car and was speeding away into the night, and passing the police as they were arriving. To Bret’s amazement Bernard Samson chose that moment to tell Bret he’d saved his life.
‘Saving my life, you son of a bitch?’ said Bret shrilly. ‘First you shoot, using me as a shield. Then you run out, leaving me to face the music.’
Samson laughed. To some extent the laugh was a nervous reaction to the stress he had just been through, but it was a laugh that Bret would never forget. ‘That’s the way it is being a field agent, Bret,’ he said. ‘If you’d had experience or training, you would have hit the deck. Better still, you would have taken out that second bastard instead of leaving me to deal with all of them.’
Bret had hardly listened; he couldn’t forget the sight of the dying KGB man bent over, holding tight to one of the washing machines, while his frothy blood streamed out of him to mix with the soapy water on the floor.
‘You could have winged him,’ croaked Bret.
Bernard scoffed at such naïve talk. ‘That’s just for the movies, Bret. That’s for Wyatt Earp and Jesse James. In the real world, no one is shooting guns out of people’s hands or giving them flesh wounds in the upper arm. In the real world you hit them or you miss them. It’s difficult enough to hit a moving target without selecting tricky bits of anatomy. So don’t give me all that crap.’
It was no use arguing with him, Bret decided, but bad feeling remained. Bret resented the way that Bernard Samson made quick decisions with such firm conviction and seemed to have no misgivings afterwards. Women admired such traits, or seemed to, but Bret was finding every decision he had to make more and more difficult.
Bret was beginning to see that his own plan
ning would have to entail ruthlessness at least the equal of Bernard’s. But Bret’s present state of mind didn’t make things easy. Sometimes he sat staring at his desk for half an hour unable to conclude even self-evident matters. Perhaps Bret should not have gone to the doctor and asked his advice. The Department’s doctor was competent and helpful – everything one wanted from a physician, in fact – but he did dutifully report back to the Department.
It began with no more than a slight loss of his usual power of concentration, and a tendency to wake up in the small hours of the morning unable to get back to sleep. Then Bret began to notice that he was being treated like an outsider. He was aware of being treated in a wary and distant manner even when he was chairing the committee. Substance was given to his suspicions when two subcommittees were formed and Bret was deliberately excluded from them. It meant that about three-quarters of the people on the committee were able to have meetings to which he was denied access.
What Bret didn’t know was the way in which his downfall was being master-minded by Moscow. Bret had not been targeted because Moscow suspected that Fiona Samson had been planted in Berlin, or for any reason except that he was suddenly vulnerable to the sort of sting operation that they had proved so expert at many times in the past. Not only was Moscow able to blow upon the embers and help the rumours but as the operation proceeded there was false evidence planted. Some of it was crude enough to convince the real experts – like Ladbrook, the senior interrogator –that Moscow was trying to discredit Rensselaer, but that did not mean that the experts could afford to ignore it.
The Director-General had a rough idea of what was happening and decided to go to Berlin and talk to Frank Harrington. Frank was an old friend as well as a well-established member of the senior staff. That lunch and the subsequent afternoon of chatting with Frank did not set the D-G’s mind at rest. What Frank told him was little more than washroom gossip but it prepared the D-G for the phone call from Internal Security that said that Ladbrook and Tiptree would like an appointment urgently. The caller boldly told Morgan – the D-G’s assistant – that tomorrow would not be soon enough.