When Foster put down the telephone for the last time, he found that like other reporters tackling the same subject before him, he was singularly ill-equipped to write a factual exposure.
But he tried. And, as he sat in the newsroom tapping away on an ancient typewriter chained to a green-topped desk – a precaution, he assumed, against scrap-metal thieves – anger began to smoulder among the words. Worse, opinions became a substitute for missing facts; somehow, although he didn’t altogether realise it at the time, the resentment he had always felt towards his father, doyen of the Establishment, got mixed up in his writing.
Ordinarily the story wouldn’t have got farther than the news-desk. But, unfortunately for Nicholas Foster, the editor demanded to see the copy just as he finished it.
Ten minutes later he was summoned to the editor’s office.
The editor, an austere but nimble-brained Scot, held Foster’s copy up by one corner and asked: ‘Just what is this supposed to be?’ as though Foster had dropped a soiled handkerchief.
Fear of failure gripped Foster. He saw his father’s patronising expression; heard him saying: ‘Now you’ve had your fling, let’s map a decent career for you.’
The editor said: ‘As you don’t seem to know, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s crap.’
The fatal quick-temper, which helped to give the impression that he was Irish, began to rise. ‘I don’t think so, sir.’
The editor pointed to a chair in front of his desk, now strewn with paper. Foster sat down. ‘You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. The fact remains that I asked for a follow-up to the Bernhard scandal. Which this,’ holding up the copy again, ‘manifestly is not.’
Foster said: ‘With respect, sir, I think I found an angle which the dailies missed. It’s been proved that Bernhard has been taking bribes, and all the time he’s been presiding over meetings of some of the most influential men in the West —’
‘Which hardly indicts them,’ the editor interrupted.
‘No, sir, but —’
‘How long has Bilderberg been meeting?’
‘It first sat in 1954.’
‘More than 20 years. Is that news?’
‘Surely investigative journalism always involves digging up old facts.’
The editor winced. ‘Facts? Where are the facts?’ He tossed the copy on the desk.
Foster began to enumerate the facts, aware, as he spoke, of their paucity.
The editor held up his hand. ‘New facts, Foster. Everything you’ve said so far has been written before. What you’ve produced here is a cuttings job tarted up with opinions.’
Foster said: ‘I’ll admit that I’ve drawn inferences. Surely I’m entitled to when everyone involved clams up ….’
‘Inferences! Since when did a newspaper depend on inferences? So-and-so last night refused to comment on allegations that …. That contrivance went out with the ark.’
A part of Foster’s consciousness accepted the criticism, but it was over-ruled by frustration so he said: ‘The fact is’ – facts or lack of them were dominating the exchange – ‘that Bilderberg is a secret society and, because of the Bernhard affair, we have a peg on which to hang an exposure.’
The editor leaned forward across his desk; when he was angry his Scots accent thickened. ‘If you had come up with an exposure, Foster, I would accept what you’ve said. But as you’ve come up with a hotch-potch of antiquated facts and unsubstantiated accusations, I don’t. Has it ever occurred to you that these men are entitled to their privacy?’ He picked up the copy and spiked it.
Afterwards Foster wasn’t sure whether it was the spiking of his copy or the editor’s last remark that plunged him into the brief duel, from which there could emerge only one winner.
With words overtaking thoughts he snapped: ‘Privacy – that’s their word. Mine is secrecy.’
‘So Bilderbergers and I share a common vocabulary ….
‘No newspaper that I know of has ever had the guts to expose Bilderberg.’ Foster had by now dropped the sir.
‘A conspiracy of silence? I’m surprised you didn’t use that immortal phrase in your story. It’s very popular, you know, with reporters who fail to dig up any facts.’ There was a cutting edge to the editor’s voice. ‘Am I to assume that you are including me in this category of … ah … gutless newspaper editors?’
‘I’m merely observing that it’s odd that no-one wants to publish anything about Bilderberg.’
The editor stood up. ‘You are suggesting that I’m suppressing news?’
Despair engulfed Foster, but he heard himself say: ‘The facts speak for themselves.’
The editor leaned over, pulled the story off the spike and handed it to Foster. ‘I suggest you hawk it somewhere else,’ he said, ‘because you no longer work here.’
At first Foster nurtured his sense of injustice. He drank too much and swore to other journalists, who displayed little interest, that he would expose Bilderberg for what it was – whatever that was. A one-man crusade. A glorious, swashbuckling phrase.
It wasn’t until several weeks later, when he discovered that no other editors were interested in employing him, that Foster sat back and took stock. Then he telephoned a reporter named Lucas who worked for the Financial Times and arranged to meet him in a pub in the City.
Lucas was a tall, beaky-faced, prematurely-balding man, who had once worked with Foster on a weekly newspaper in the suburbs. Foster admired him and listened to him.
In the pub, a relic of Dickensian London, Lucas ordered two pints of bitter and, while smoke from the coal fire bil lowed past them, asked to see the story Foster had written.
Later Foster decided that it was the moment that he crossed the border from professional adolescence to maturity.
Lucas said: ‘So the editor thought it was crap. Well, you know, I’m inclined to agree with him.’
‘Thank you,’ Foster said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘And I think you agree with me,’ handing Foster the copy.
He hadn’t read it since he had been fired: it was crap. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
‘Which doesn’t, of course, preclude you from writing a story, or a series of stories, about Bilderberg. But this time you’d have to mount a campaign. Plan a long time ahead, find ways to infiltrate a conference ….’
‘First of all,’ Foster said, ‘I’ve got to find myself a job.’
‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid,’ Lucas said. ‘You’re not really Financial Times material.’
‘All this flattery is going to my head,’ Foster said.
‘Why don’t you try an agency? Your shorthand’s good, you’re fast, you’re accurate – except when the madness takes you. Then you can plan your attack. But, by Christ, it had better be good if you’re going to penetrate Bilderberg. Better men than you have tried …. And I’ll have another pint,’ as he put down his empty tankard on the shining copper bar.
Foster ordered two more pints. ‘A good detective,’ he said, ‘has good informants. Can you help me?’
‘I’ll see. In fact I wish I could write the story —’
‘But it’s not exactly Financial Times material ….’
Lucas patted his head, as though, Foster thought, his hair had been stolen. ‘What you’ve got to be prepared for,’ Lucas said thoughtfully, ‘is a bloody great disappointment.’
‘No story?’
‘Not quite.’ Lucas swallowed half of his beer. He drank gallons of the stuff and never put on any weight. The bright blue eyes in the hawkish face were thoughtful. ‘Not quite,’ he repeated.
‘What then?’
‘You know what they say, There’s no such thing as good news. Not necessarily true, of course, but it’s a fact that most news is bad. Wasn’t there a paper once that tried to publish only good news? I don’t think it lasted very long.’
‘So you think I might find a lot of good guys under one roof?’
‘I don’t think that either. That’s stretchi
ng the imagination a bit too far. But I think you might find that a lot of what they discuss is constructive. For the West, that is. If you intend to write a balanced report you’d have to include that.’
‘Of course.’ A few weeks ago he would have accused Lucas of being part of the conspiracy.
‘You see,’ Lucas went on, picking up his tankard and eyeing it thirstily, ‘I believe in Capitalism. Communism is the equal distribution of poverty. Capitalism is – or should be – the equal distribution of wealth. Have you been to a Communist country?’
Foster shook his head.
‘Victorian England all over again. All the money goes towards armaments and expansionism, while the man in the street queues for goodies and lives in an apartment built with a do-it-yourself kit.’
Foster said: ‘It’s your turn to buy a drink.’
Lucas delved into the trouser pocket of his pin-stripe for some change, ordered two more beers and went on: ‘Whereas the sort of man you’ll meet at Bilderberg provides employment, pays good money and expands his business – not his country’s borders. You’ve only got to compare West and East Germany,’ Lucas added.
‘You’d make a good spokesman for Bilderberg.’
‘On the contrary, I abhor secrecy. Every self-respecting journalist does. What I’m trying to say is that if you manage to break down their barriers – a bloody great if, I might say – then you’ve got a marvellous opportunity to give a complete, composite story.’
Foster was silent, planning ahead.
Lucas said: ‘Of course, you’re bound to uncover a few diabolical plots. It’s up to you how you present them. You’ll have to learn how to differentiate between sharp practice and business practice … the borderline is very thin.’
Foster said: ‘I’ll tell you what you can do for me.’
Lucas’ blue eyes searched his face.
‘Find out where the Bilderbergers are planning to meet and let me know well in advance.’
‘I should be able to manage that. When?’
‘When I’m good and ready,’ Foster said.
‘It’s reciprocal, of course.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘If you infiltrate Bilderberg I’d like a few crumbs —’
‘From the poor man’s table.’
‘It could make you a rich man,’ Lucas said. ‘Bilderberg seems to affect people that way.’
Foster went to the toilet; when he returned Lucas was tackling his fourth pint.
Foster said: ‘Just one more thing.’
Lucas looked at him inquiringly and Foster pointed at his pint and said: ‘Just tell me where you put all that stuff.’
It took Foster longer than he had anticipated to prepare himself for his campaign. He managed to get a desk job at Reuters. There his talents, now disciplined, were noticed and he was given foreign assignments. He was sent to Rhodesia to cover the interminable negotiations and the guerrilla war; he flew to Beirut where he was shot in the thigh by a sniper’s bullet. Moslem or Christian, he was never quite sure.
He returned with a limp to a desk. But he had entered journalism to avoid sitting behind a desk. He brooded, planned, called Lucas and told him that he was ready to tackle Bilderberg.
When Lucas finally came up with the necessary information, the Nicholas Foster who was poised to take on the power elite of the Western world was a very different person from the impetuous young man who had presented a newspaper editor with a self-opinionated cuttings-job. He was now a professional – competent, calculating.
The venue of the next Bilderberg: the Château Saint-Pierre, forty miles south of Paris.
Foster picked up the telephone and called his father.
* * *
The other event of little consequence – to everyone, that is, except the protagonists – occurred much earlier in the small French alpine resort of Mégève, twenty miles from the Swiss border.
Georges Bertier, aged forty, an anarchist with a history of mental illness, was stopped on the road leading to the luxurious Hotel Mont d’Arbois where a Bilderberg conference was being held.
It had been the intention of Bertier and a handful of muddle-headed followers to storm the convention. The French police guarding the hotel suggested politely that Bertier and his little band should disperse.
The courtesy of the French police when civic disturbance is threatened has never been robust, and when Georges protested they set about him with batons and gloved fists.
Among the supporters, dedicated more to vandalism and irrational violence than the doctrine that all governments should be abolished, was Georges Bertier’s twin brother, Jacques. Jacques rushed to defend Georges, but was thrust contemptuously aside by the police, as were the rest of the anarchists who, in any case, preferred to give vent to their spleen when opposition was minimal.
As far as Jacques was concerned, it was the story of the life he had shared with Georges. Only momentarily were they ever mistaken for identical twins – the same shortish stature, pale sleek hair, neat but undistinguished faces; then the dynamism of Georges asserted itself and new acquaintances examined them and said: ‘No, no, you’re not the same at all,’ as they compared the hawkish expression on Georges’ face with Jacques’ air of docility. Now, as always, he had been rejected.
It may have been due to the savagery of the beating, or it may have been the effect of a single blow on Georges’ already abnormal brain – the doctors never decided with any certainty – but, after the incident on the road leading to the Hotel Mont d’Arbois, Georges Bertier was never the same again.
He was taken first to a hospital in Grenoble and later transferred to a mental institution at Lyon. Sometimes when Jacques visited him he was raving and it was impossible to converse with him; at other times he was relatively articulate, and it was during one of these periods of lucidity that Georges told Jacques what he must do.
Since Georges had been hurt at Mégève, Jacques had been aware of a change in his own personality. While he lay on the road, watching the batons ram into his twin, he had felt the blows. Actually felt them. Now, when he sat beside Georges’ bed, he felt as if his twin’s strength was flowing into his body. As though he were Georges, and it was Jacques lying there between the sheets.
Jacques came one day with books – nothing political, nothing to upset Georges – and red grapes from the village in the great vineyard where they had been born within minutes of each other. And he sat beside Georges and touched his hand, and felt the power ebbing from Georges’ body into his own.
‘So,’ said Georges after he had lain there gazing at the wall for a while, ‘it’s come to this.’
‘You’ll be better soon,’ Jacques told him, lying, but lying with the sort of purpose that had eluded him in the past. Georges shook his head, winced. ‘Do you ever think about the old days, Jacques?’
Jacques did, all the time.
‘We had some good times. You know, the two of us being one. Somehow we could enjoy two things at once, couldn’t we, Jacques?’
To Jacques it had always seemed that they each owned separate aspects of one character. In an individual these aspects tempered each other: divided and undisciplined, they became exaggerated; thus Georges’ aggression boiled over while he became increasingly more submissive.
In the playground at the village school, Georges had always defended him. Handed out beatings that more than compensated for any injury Jacques might have suffered. It had been Georges who had decided that they, always they, would leave home ‘because we’re not peasants like the rest of them,’ meaning the other four children and their parents, the placid, uncomplaining mother and father who drank vast quantities of wine and had become as purple as the grapes he harvested.
It had been Georges who had found them work in an hotel on the outskirts of Paris; Georges who had called a strike and threatened the owner with a knife; Georges who had got the girls – and the girls had made it clear that it was Georges, not Jacques, that they favoured; Georg
es who, when money and success eluded him, had turned savagely on the wealthy and privileged and, taking Jacques unprotestingly with him, had turned first to Communism and then, because doctrinaire politics cramped his style, to the wild, wide-open spaces of anarchism.
‘Yes,’ Jacques told his sick brother, ‘we did have good times.’
Georges gripped his arm. ‘And I want you to carry on.’
Jacques was surprised by the feebleness of his brother’s grip. ‘Of course I’ll carry on. Of course I will, Georges.’ And it came to him again that it was Jacques lying there on the bed with fevered eyes and shaking hands.
Georges said: ‘Oh those bastards. If only we’d reached them ….’
‘We will, Georges.’
‘Because those Bilderbergers represent everything that we’ve been fighting. Carry the fight to them, Jacques, carry it ….’ His hands were clenching and unclenching and his eyelids were flickering; Jacques knew the symptoms – soon he would be mouthing wild nonsense, and a nurse would come and slide a needle into his vein and bring him temporary peace.
Georges continued to hold Jacques’ arm, making an effort – Jacques knew this because he could feel it – to control himself. He said: ‘There’s something I must tell you ….’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Bilderberg must be destroyed. It’s evil …. For the sake of the world you (not we any more) must kill ….’ He bit his lip and blood flowed.
‘Easy,’ Jacques said softly. ‘Take it easy.’
‘You must plan, Jacques. Because, you see, there will only be you. You were always the cool one. You can succeed where I failed, Your brains, my fists. A nice combination, eh, Jacques?’
Jacques smiled at him.
‘And you’ll have both …. Now listen to me,’ and his voice dropped to a whisper.
Jacques bent his head while his brother talked about their childhood. About the days during the German occupation of France and during the fighting when the Allies had swept across Europe. ‘You remember how we used to go out collecting things? Anything we could lay our hands on – pieces of shell-casing, spent bullets, even a gun or two ….’
I, Said the Spy Page 11