by Len Deighton
They were all waiting for the D-G in the number 2 conference room. There was Ladbrook, the senior interrogator, a decent quiet fifty-year-old who never got ruffled, and Harry Strang, a weather-beaten veteran of Operations. With them was Henry Tiptree, the young fellow whom Internal Security rated as one of their brightest stars. And, sitting unobtrusively in the corner, the Deputy D-G, Sir Percy Babcock.
The table had been arranged with notepads and pencils and water jug and glasses. ‘Who else is expected?’ asked the D-G, having counted them.
‘We couldn’t get hold of Cruyer,’ said Strang, ‘but I’ve left a message with his secretary.’
‘Are we expecting a long session, Percy?’ the D-G asked his Deputy.
‘No, very short, Director. Internal Security has something to put before you.’
‘Quite a crowd,’ remarked the D-G. He was well over six feet tall and broad-shouldered too. He towered over them.
‘We’ll need five signatures,’ said the Deputy gently.
‘Um,’ said the D-G and his heart sank. They all knew what sort of form needed five signatures; one from Internal Security. ‘And no one taking notes?’
‘That’s correct, Director.’ Well that was it then. The only way to save Bret from this humiliating investigation was to reveal the secret of Fiona Samson. That was out of the question. Bret would have to take his chance.
They all sat down. The Deputy clicked his gold ballpoint while Harry Strang took out his cigarettes and then remembering the presence of the D-G put them away again. Tiptree, a tall thin fellow with well-brushed red hair and ruddy complexion, poured himself a glass of water and drank it with elegant precision.
Ladbrook looked round the table. They were looking at him expectantly, except for Tiptree who was now drawing circles on the notepad. ‘Would you like to start, Sir Percy?’ asked Ladbrook diffidently.
‘Tell the Director just what you told me,’ said the Deputy.
‘I’m afraid it concerns senior staff,’ said Ladbrook. The D-G looked at him without a flicker of emotion showing on his face.
‘Bret Rensselaer,’ supplied Tiptree, looking up from his pad. A lock of hair fell forward across his face and he flicked it back with his hand.
‘A leak?’ said the D-G, but he knew what was coming.
‘More serious than that,’ said Ladbrook.
‘I have the file,’ said Tiptree, indicating a box file that he’d put on a side table.
‘I don’t want to look at files,’ said the D-G with a weary despair that came out like irritation. Everyone waited for the D-G to speak again but he settled back in his seat and sighed.
Sir Percy clicked his ballpoint and said, ‘Since Bret often takes his orders directly from you, I thought you might want to interpose.’
‘Has anyone spoken with Bret?’ the D-G asked.
‘With your permission,’ said Ladbrook, ‘I propose a preliminary “talk-through” as soon as it’s made official.’
‘That’s the usual way, is it?’
‘Yes, Sir Henry, that’s the usual way.’
The Deputy said, ‘The interrogator wanted to be quite sure that Bret didn’t cite you as a reason for not answering.’
‘On this sort of inquiry,’ added Ladbrook, ‘a loss of momentum like that can be difficult to make up afterwards.’
‘I understand,’ said the D-G. He noticed Harry Strang get a pen from his waistcoat. So Harry knew how it had to end.
‘He’ll probably want to speak with you on the phone,’ said Ladbrook. ‘When I first tackle him, I mean. He’ll probably want to put a call through to you.’
‘And you want me not to take the call?’ said the D-G.
‘Whatever you think best, Sir Henry,’ said Ladbrook.
‘But I’ll bugger up your interrogation if I do take it; is that what you mean?’
Ladbrook smiled politely but didn’t answer.
‘Give me the form,’ said the D-G. ‘Let’s get it over as quickly as possible.’ The Deputy handed his ballpoint to him and slid the papers across the polished table.
‘I can do the rest of the paperwork,’ said the Deputy gently. ‘Morgan can counter-sign the chit on your behalf.’
‘It will be a nonsense,’ said the D-G as he put his signature on the form. ‘I can tell you that here and now. I’ve known Bret Rensselaer for years; salt of the earth, Bret Rensselaer.’
Harry Strang smiled. He was old enough to remember someone using the almost identical words about Kim Philby.
22
England. April 1984.
How far can you run into a wood? asks the ancient schoolboy joke. Halfway: after that you’re running out. A missile stops in the air and begins to fall back to the ground, a sportsman’s career reaches a physical peak at which it begins decline. A flower in full bloom falls, water at its most exuberant disappears into vapour. For most things in nature there comes a moment when triumph is doom in disguise. So it was for Pavel Moskvin that lovely day in Berlin when, fittingly enough, the first growths of spring marked the end of winter.
Erich Stinnes was also riding high. Everything had gone as he’d predicted. The British seemed to have accepted him at face value because they found it so difficult to believe that anyone could resist their way of life. Stinnes had played his role to perfection. Tropfenweise, drip by drip, he had worn away the hard diamond face of Rensselaer’s reputation until, in front of the committee, he shattered it completely.
The culmination of all that Stinnes had worked for came on what had promised to be a routine visit of the ‘Stinnes committee’ to Berwick House, where he was being held. An eighteenth-century manor set in seven acres of attractive English countryside, its fifteen-foot-high stone wall and ancient moat had made it easy to adapt into a detention centre. The Whitehall clerks, who had seized house and contents from its owners by means of some catch-all legislation, had done little to repair the damage caused by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. There was a musty smell in the house, and if you looked closely enough at the rotting structure you’d find the woodworms were working harder than anyone.
The committee travelled together in a bus except for Bret. He arrived in his chauffeur-driven Bentley having used the lunch hour to squeeze in an appointment with the doctor. He looked drawn, and the skin under his eyes had blackened so that the eternally youthful Bret was suddenly aged.
There was such a crowd that they all sat round the big polished table in what at one time had been the dining room. On the panelled wall there was a huge oil painting. A family posed stiffly on a hill near the newly built Berwick House, and stared at the painter as he extended to Gainsborough what is reputed to be the sincerest form of flattery.
The committee were all trying to show how knowledgeable and important they were. Bret Rensselaer sat at one end, and thus established his authority as chairman. Stinnes faced him at the far end, an adversary’s positioning that Bret afterwards thought might have contributed to the subsequent fiasco. Bret looked at his watch frequently, but otherwise sat with that look of attention that people who sit on too many committees master, to conceal the fact that they are half asleep. He had heard it all before. Well, thought Stinnes, I’ll see if I can wake you up, Mr Rensselaer.
In a committee like that, there would always be a couple of know-alls. It was exactly the same in Moscow: Stinnes could have named their counterparts. The worst bore was Billy Slinger from MI5, a scrawny fellow with a thin, carefully trimmed moustache and a restrained Tyneside accent that Stinnes found challenging. He had been attached to the committee to advise on communications. Of course he felt he must prove to them all how clever he was.
Erich Stinnes had endured the ups and downs of his detention with little change, but there was not much to change. Stinnes was a tough middle-aged man with a sallow face, and hair that he liked to keep as short as possible. When he took off his metal-rimmed glasses – which he did frequently – he blinked like an owl and looked round at the committee as if he preferred to see them slightly
out of focus.
Stinnes fielded the questions artfully and let Slinger demonstrate his technical knowledge until he got on to signals procedures. This was something that Moscow had agreed he could disclose, so, quietly and conversationally, he went through the Embassy routines. He started with the day-to-day domestics and went on to a few KGB encoding styles. These were technical developments that Slinger was unlikely to be familiar with, and thus he was unlikely to know that they had already been superseded or were used only for mundane traffic.
Out of the corner of his eye he watched Rensselaer uncoil like a serpent disturbed by the approach of heavy footsteps. ‘This is all new to me,’ said Slinger repeatedly, his accent more pronounced as he filled sheets of paper with notes scribbled so fast and so excitedly that his pencil broke and he had to grab another and ask Stinnes to slow down.
The other members of the committee became enthusiastic too. Between eager questions from Slinger, one of the committee asked him why he hadn’t disclosed these gems earlier. Stinnes didn’t answer immediately. He looked at Bret Rensselaer and then looked away and took a long time lighting up a cheroot.
‘Well?’ said Bret finally. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘I did,’ said Stinnes finally. ‘I told you during the first days but I thought it must be stuff you knew already.’
Bret jumped up as if he was going to start shouting. They all looked at him. And then Bret realized that an argument with Stinnes in front of the committee was only going to make him look ridiculous. He sat down again and said, ‘Carry on, Slinger. Let’s get it down on paper.’
Stinnes inhaled on his cheroot and looked from one to the other like a social worker in the presence of a combative family. Then he started to give them even more material: Foreign Country routeings, Embassy signals room times and procedures and even Embassy contact lists.
It took about an hour, and included some long silences while Stinnes racked his brains, and a few little Stinnes jokes which – due to the tension in the room – everyone laughed at. By the end, the committee was intoxicated with success. Satisfaction flushed their faces and circulated through their veins like freshly sugared blood. And not the least of their triumph was the warm feeling they got from knowing that Bret Rensselaer, so cold and patrician, so efficient and patriotic, was going to get his rightful comeuppance.
As Stinnes left the room to be taken upstairs he looked at Bret Rensselaer. Neither man registered any change of facial expression and yet there was in that exchange of looks the recognition that a contest had been fought and won.
But Bret Rensselaer was not the sort of man who would lie down and play dead to oblige an enemy. Bret Rensselaer was an American: pragmatic, resourceful and without that capacity for long-term rancour that the European is born with. When Bret faced the wall of opposition which Moskvin and Stinnes had between them constructed brick by brick, he did something that neither of the Russians had provided for. Rensselaer went to Berlin and pleaded for the aid of Bernard Samson, a man he’d come to dislike, reasoning that Samson was even less conventional than he was, and certainly far more savage.
‘What do we do now?’ Bret asked. Stampeded by Stinnes and faced with the prospect of arrest, Bret ran. He was a fugitive and looked like one: frightened and dishevelled and lacking all that smooth Rensselaer confidence.
‘What do we do?’ echoed Samson. This was Bernard’s town and both of them knew it. ‘We scare the shit out of them, that’s what we do.’
‘How?’
‘Suppose we tell them we are pulling out Stinnes’s toenails one by one?’
Bret shivered. He wasn’t in the mood for jokes. ‘Be sensible, Bernard. They are holding your friend Volkmann over there. Can’t you see what that means?’
‘They won’t touch Werner.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they know that for anything they dream up to do to Werner I’ll do it twice to Stinnes, and do it slowly.’
‘Is that a risk worth taking?’ asked Bret. ‘I thought Volkmann was your closest friend.’
‘What difference does that make?’ asked Bernard.
Alarmed, Bret said, ‘Don’t get this one wrong, Bernard. There is too much riding on it.’ Samson had always been a hard-nosed gambler, but was this escalating response the way to go? Or had Bernard gone mad?
‘I know the way these people think, Bret. Moscow has an obsession about getting agents out of trouble. That is the Moscow law: KGB men ignore it at their peril.
‘So we offer to trade Stinnes for Werner Volkmann?’
‘But not before letting them know that Stinnes is going to go through the wringer.’
‘Jesus! I don’t like it. Will Fiona be one of the people making the decision?’ asked Bret.
Bernard looked at him, trying to see into his mind, but Bret’s mind was not so easy to see into. ‘I should think so,’ said Bernard.
‘Frau Samson,’ said Moskvin with exaggerated courtesy and an unctuous smile. ‘Have you prepared charges against this West German national Volkmann?’
‘I am in the process of doing so,’ Fiona Samson fielded the question. She’d learned a lot about Moskvin in the time she’d been working here. Some people thought Moskvin was a fool but they were wrong: Moskvin had a quick and cunning mind. He was pushy and gauche but he was not stupid. Neither was he clumsy, at least not in the physical sense. Every day he was in the basement: weight-lifting in the gym, swimming in the pool, shooting on the range or doing some other sort of physical exercise. He was no longer young, but still he had that overabundance of energy that is usually confined to childhood.
‘Do you have another file on him, Comrade Colonel?’ he asked sweetly.
Fiona was disconcerted by this question. She had created the Volkmann file that was open on her desk. ‘No more than what you’ve seen already.’
‘No more than this?’ said Moskvin, and was able to make it into a very unfavourable pronouncement.
‘I know…’ she stopped.
‘Yes? What do you know?’
‘In the past he has worked for the SIS office in Berlin.’
Moskvin looked at her. ‘Suppose Moscow wanted to see the file on Volkmann? Is this what we’d send?’ He flipped the card cover of the file so that his fingernails made a click. It sounded empty.
‘Yes,’ said Fiona.
Moskvin looked at her and made no secret of the extent of his contempt. Intimidation was a part of his working method. By now she’d recognized him for what he really was. She’d known plenty of other men like Moskvin. She’d known them at Oxford: rowdy sportsmen, keenly aware of their physical strength, and relishing the latent violence that was within them.
‘I know Volkmann,’ she said. ‘I’ve known him for years. Of course he works for SIS Berlin. SIS London too.’
‘And yet you’ve done nothing about it?’ Moskvin looked at her with contempt.
‘Not yet,’ said Fiona.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Well, now we’ll do something, shall we?’ He was patronizing her, smiling as tyrants do with small children. ‘We’ll talk to Volkmann…perhaps scare him a little.’
‘How?’
‘You might learn something, Frau Samson. He hasn’t been told that he’s being released in exchange for Major Stinnes. We must make him sweat.’
‘Volkmann gets his money from doing business in our Republic. Without that he would be penniless. He might be persuaded to work for us.’
Moskvin eyed her. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘He’s back and forth all the time. That’s why he was so easy to pick up. Why shouldn’t he tell us what happens over there?’
‘You could do that?’
‘I could try. You say he’s being held in Babelsberg?’
‘You’ll need a car.’
‘I’ll drive myself.’
‘Bring him back here. I’ll want to see him too,’ said Moskvin.
She smiled coldly at him. ‘Of course, Colonel Moskvin. But if we frighten him too muc
h he won’t come back.’
It had happened before. That was the trouble with agents: you sent them to the West and sometimes they simply stayed there and thumbed their noses at you. ‘He has no relatives here, does he?’
‘He’ll work for us, Colonel Moskvin. He is the sort of man who loves a good secret.’
Now that she had equated Moskvin with those Oxford hearties, she found herself remembering her college days. How she’d hated it: the good times she’d had were now forgotten. She recalled the men she’d known, and those long evenings in town, watching boorish undergraduates drinking too much and making fools of themselves. Keen always to make the women students feel like inferior beings. Boys with uncertain sexual preferences, truly happy only in male society, arms interlinked, singing together very loudly and staggering away to piss against the wall.
She went to Babelsberg in the southwest of Berlin to get Werner Volkmann. It was not very far as the crow flies, but crows flew across the Western sector of the city while good communists had to journey round its perimeter. This was just outside the city limits and not a part of Berlin: it was Potsdam in the DDR, and so the British and American ‘protecting powers’ did not have the legal right to come poking around here. Volkmann was in the Ausland Block, some buildings that had started out as administration offices of the famous UFA film studios.
Behind the empty film library building, and the workshops, there was an old backlot where the remains of an eighteenth-century village street built originally for the wartime film Münchhausen could be seen. ‘That was Marlene Dietrich’s dressing room,’ said the elderly policeman who took her to the interview room. He indicated a store room with a padlock on the door.
‘Yes,’ said Fiona. The same policeman had said the same thing to her the last time she was here. The interview room had a barred window through which she could see the cobbled yard where she’d parked her car.