But, as he yawned and stretched in the very English room with its ornate ceiling and old-fashioned furniture, he would have regarded any suggestion that he would soon be involved in a plot to extort $15 million as extravagant lunacy.
He showered and shaved and dressed in a fawn suit with flared turn-ups, ordered more coffee from Room Service and, with Frank Sinatra singing to him through loudspeakers concealed in the walls, sat down at a desk and ran through the accommodation arrangements.
Kissinger in Suite 410 (personal guards next door) … Helmut Schmidt in Suite 210, guard dogs in tow … Lord Home, who was temporarily taking the chair after the Bernhard debacle, in the Chinese Room … David Rockefeller in one of the apartments adjoining the hotel ….
The coffee arrived. Anderson poured it black and strong, leaned back in his chair and picked up The Times.
And it was then that the sourness that for the past year or so had disturbed him returned. On the front page was a report of yet another investigation into the CIA. Allegations of surveillance on visiting statesmen; accusations of overspending ….
Anderson hurled the newspaper across the room. It read like an attack on the KGB rather than an attack on the United States’ own intelligence organisation. The syndrome of self-destruction.
But it wasn’t until he received the coded cable from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, that the day that had dawned so serenely broke up into shards of bitterness and anger.
It took a few seconds before the message sank home. He, Owen Anderson, was under investigation. After Bilderberg he was required to give an accounting of his expenditure over the past twelve months and details of an audio-visual tap he had planted on a team of East German industrialists visiting Los Angeles.
It didn’t seem to matter that he had nailed them discussing industrial sabotage: all that mattered was that a dove-like senator with paranoic tendencies regarding the CIA, had exposed the surveillance. Once again the Agency was the enemy: the real enemy was a martyr.
The cable ended on a slightly apologetic note from Danby. It was, apparently, Anderson’s life-style that had upset the self-appointed critics of what had once been the best intelligence network in the world.
His bachelor pad on the East Side! As though it were a baronial mansion, a seat of decadence and corruption.
Fuck them!
Anderson paced the room, thumbs stuck in the pockets of his waistcoat. He remembered his youth and his ideals and the unrelenting slog of achievement, and the anger surged inside him.
When the knock came on the door he shouted: ‘Who is it?’ And when George Prentice identified himself, he flung open the door and said: ‘What do you want, for Christ’s sake?’
Prentice said: ‘I want to talk.’
‘The last thing on this fucking earth I want to do,’ Anderson said, bunching his fists, ‘is talk to you.’ He began to shut the door but Prentice pushed it aside, once again surprising Anderson with his strength.
Anderson swung at him with one fist; Prentice parried the blow, but its impetus sent him sprawling on the bed. He lay there gazing at Anderson in astonishment,
Anderson said: ‘Now get out.’
‘First hear what I’ve got to say.’
Anderson hesitated, lowered his fists. Prentice wasn’t the enemy. Who was the enemy? He no longer knew. ‘What the hell do you want?’
‘Shut the door first.’
Anderson kicked the door shut.
‘I presume this room is clean?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters.’
Anderson went to the window and stared out across the bay. A few white sails had appeared on the sea which now looked like molten silver in the sunlight. ‘It’s clean,’ he said.
Prentice said: ‘Helga Keller’s here.’
Despite himself, Anderson swung round. ‘Helga Keller?’
‘Where it all began,’ Prentice said. ‘Where it all began with us.’
‘Where it all ended.’
‘You’re blown,’ Prentice said quietly, swinging himself off the bed and sitting in a plush easy-chair.
Anderson stared at him. ‘How do you know?’
‘Because I had dinner last night with Helga Keller. Or Hildegard Metz as you have her on your guest list.’
‘She doesn’t look a bit like—’
‘She’s Helga Keller. I’ll explain if you’ll let me. Because, you see, I’m blown too. Shall we take a walk?’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Anderson said. ‘Let’s get drunk.’
But they didn’t.
Instead they walked along the sea-front.
The day was warm; the flowers in the gardens had opened overnight and the sunshine had cleaned winter from the houses piled on the hills crowding the harbour. Dogs gambolled on the beach and nurses pushed invalid chairs along the promenade as their elderly charges emerged from hibernation.
Prentice told Anderson about the remoulding of Helga Keller. And he told him that the KGB had penetrated Bilderberg through Pierre Brossard,
‘Brossard? Sweet Jesus!’
Prentice also repeated what Anderson had always refused to believe: that he hadn’t shot Karl Danzer. And Helga Keller would confirm it.
‘I wanted you to know,’ Prentice said.
‘Why? You tried to shoot the bastard. You even took a Soviet rifle with you to make it look like a Department V job.’
‘But I didn’t and I just wanted you to know.’ Prentice stopped and gripped the rails overlooking the daintily-lapping waves. ‘It’s difficult to explain,’ he said. ‘You see I once loved a girl like Helga Keller, She worked for Danzer … after that everything was founded on hatred ….’ His voice faltered, died.
They walked on in silence.
Finally Anderson said: ‘Are you trying to tell me that there’s something between you and this girl? After one night.’
Another silence extended in front of them. A pretty nurse pushing an old lady smiled at them, but got nothing in return.
Prentice broke the silence. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that, since yesterday, a lot has changed. Our values – my values – have all been wrong ….’
He stopped outside the Palm Court Hotel, recommended by local CID officers assigned to the conference at the Imperial.
‘Come and have a drink,’ Prentice said.
In the lounge he ordered two beers from the barman, Paul Jones, as famed for his prowess with cocktails as the barman who was to be present at another hotel in another time.
Holding the two beers, Prentice led the way to a table overlooking the sea. Sitting in one of the orange and mauve chairs was a young woman wearing spectacles and severely styled hair.
Prentice put the two beers on the table and said: ‘I want you to meet Helga Keller.’
It took twenty minutes for the chemistry to begin fermenting.
Then Anderson began to laugh. Shared misfortune, a glimpse of an astonishing concept.
They smiled at him uncertainly.
He went to the bar and ordered two more beers and a glass of dry white wine for Helga. When he returned he was still grinning.
‘All right,’ Prentice said, ‘I’ll say it. What’s so funny?’
‘Us.’
‘Us?’
‘Sure, us. Three loyal servants and look at us. You,’ nodding at Helga, ‘have been betrayed ever since you were a kid and you,’ nodding at Prentice before Helga could interrupt, ‘have been living like a monk because of some infatuation that happened a hundred years ago.’
‘That makes two of us,’ Prentice said. ‘What about you?’
Anderson told them about the cable.
It was Helga who said it and added an ingredient to the chemistry. ‘Our people think more of you than yours,’ she said to Anderson.
And as the chemistry began to bubble, Anderson said: ‘Let’s take a drive. I’ve read about Dartmoor. They tell me it’s wild and free – the guidebook definition – and, as we’re neither, le
t’s go and sample it in my beautiful, rented, debugged automobile.’
They drove in the fawn Rover 3500 through Totnes and Ashburton onto the moors, where a breeze combed the grass and shook the dead flowers of the heather and the shadows of clouds chased each other across the distant hills.
Anderson had a map with him. He parked the car on a narrow road and pointed at the skyline studded with tors of rock. ‘The future,’ he said, and pointing in the opposite direction to a complex of grey-stone buildings, ‘the past.’
Helga said: ‘I don’t understand.’
Prentice said: ‘I do. That’s Dartmoor jail. One of the worst in the country. Built to house prisoners captured in the Napoleonic wars.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ Helga told him. ‘We can’t escape.’
‘Why not?’ Anderson opened the car door and climbed out onto the springy turf; lapwings and golden plover rose from the bracken. ‘Why not?’ he repeated as they followed him. ‘You know something? I’ve just had a vision. Although it’s not quite clear …’ as the chemistry approached exploding point.
They breathed the sweet air, turned their backs on the corpse-grey tombstone that was the prison.
‘I figure,’ Anderson said slowly, ‘that we’re all pretty much in the same boat. We’ve all served a cause; we’ve all served it well. But we’ve all been cheated. Which is not,’ he corrected himself quickly, ‘to say that we haven’t enjoyed what we’ve been doing. Do you go along with that, George?’
‘It was a substitute life,’ Prentice said ‘but, yes, I enjoyed it. I was never a kitchen-sink spy brooding over a gas-ring in St. Pancras ….’
‘Wherever that may be,’ Anderson said. ‘But I take your point. The great days of espionage are drawing to a close. We’re the rearguard of an epoch. Now it’s the turn of the bureaucrats and computers. Do you agree?’ addressing Helga Keller.
‘I was never Mata Hari.’
Neither of the two men spoke but Prentice moved closer to her and wished she would un-pin her hair, take off her spectacles.
High above them a bird of prey hovered, plunged.
Helga turned to them. ‘My life was certainly a substitute.’
Karl Danzer briefly intruded, then vanished. Forever? Ever since the walk on the rain-spattered promenade with Prentice she had experienced a miraculous sense of uplift. ‘Many people’s lives are substitutes,’ she said. ‘Most of them never have the luck to realise it.’
‘And I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to have a slice of that luck,’ Anderson said, a note of excitement in his voice.
His mood reached Prentice. ‘We’ve certainly got the professional abilities to profit from any luck that comes our way.’
Profit! Thus did George Prentice make his contribution towards the chemistry.
Anderson said: ‘Not much profit so far, George. I doubt if any of us saved enough for retirement. In the style to which we are accustomed, that is.’
He looked at Helga and Prentice questioningly, and their silence said that no they hadn’t.
‘I don’t have a dime,’ Anderson said. ‘But I’ve lived well.’ He smiled reflectively. ‘But what about our employers? They’ve lived well too. And I guess they’ll go on doing so, indulging their weaknesses ….’
Weaknesses!
‘Brossard certainly will,’ Helga said, a little breathlessly.
‘Kingdon has his diamonds,’ Prentice said. ‘Anyone who puts all his eggs into one basket is vulnerable.’
Vulnerable!
The chemistry exploded.
Synthesised into one word.
BLACKMAIL.
On the way back to Torquay, hesitantly at first, they explored the staggering possibilities of their shared inspiration. Like most inspirations it was simple: they merely had to draw on their joint funds of secret knowledge, and extract a fortune from a selected trio responsible for funding espionage of one sort or another.
Why not? They had spent their lives carrying out missions of dubious intent for their masters. By such standards there was nothing immoral in redirecting their skills for their own benefit. For the final pay-off.
Two subjects for extortion were obvious: Paul Kingdon and Pierre Brossard. They both deserved such a fate, it was agreed.
The third?
Inevitably their thoughts homed down on Bilderberg. And it was then that the third name occurred to Owen Anderson.
He swung the Rover into a turn and said: ‘Claire Jerome. I’ve had to work for her a few times.’
Prentice, who was sitting in the back of the car with Helga Keller, said: ‘A woman?’
‘For Christ’s sake cut out the English gentleman stuff, George. I’ve known you too long. She’s in armaments, right? Can you see anything wrong in extracting our retirement pensions from the profits of a few arms deals?’
‘I suppose,’ Prentice said, glancing at Helga to gauge her reactions, ‘she wouldn’t miss a few quid.’
‘The question,’ said the new transformed Helga Keller, ‘is how much?’
Prentice, who was delighted by her reaction, said: ‘A lot.’
‘Five million?’
‘Dollars or pounds?’ from Anderson.
‘I was thinking in dollars. We don’t want to get greedy. We’ve seen too many people end up in front of a firing squad because they were too greedy. Two and a half million quid.’ He thought about it. ‘I should be able to buy a jet-propelled wheel-chair with that sort of money.’
‘A fair reward for services rendered,’ Anderson remarked as they left Newton Abbot on the last stretch of road to Torquay.
It was as they were entering the outskirts of the resort that the ultimate beauty of the burgeoning plot occurred to George Prentice. He squeezed Helga’s arm, tapped Anderson on the shoulder.
‘We want this to be perfect, right?’
They both nodded.
‘We want symmetry. We want poetic justice. We want a perfect irony.’
‘Get it off your chest,’ Anderson said. ‘We don’t want crossword puzzle clues.’
‘We don’t extort from our own subjects.’
Silence in the car as an ambulance overtook them, siren wailing, on its way to Torbay hospital.
‘What I’m getting at is this. We use each others’ strengths, rather like Judo. For instance you,’ to Anderson, ‘would take Paul Kingdon on information supplied by me. And you,’ to Helga, ‘would take Mrs Jerome on information supplied by Anderson.’
‘And you,’ Helga said to Prentice, ‘would blackmail Brossard on information supplied by me.’
‘Exactly. Three agents co-operating while their governments continue to do battle. Isn’t that a beautiful concept?’
They both sighed. It was indeed beautiful.
It was left to Helga to sound the realistic note.
‘After this,’ she said, ‘we mustn’t be seen together. In fact,’ she said, eyes searching Prentice’s, ‘we must go on hating each other ….’
‘Hating?’ Prentice frowned.
‘We must continue as we were. If we don’t we’ll arouse suspicions. We have to go on acting out our hatred.’
She told Anderson to stop the car.
As he watched her walking away from them, Prentice wondered if he could be that good an actor.
They called the plan Operation Imperial, after the hotel. And they code-named themselves after two rocky tors on Dartmoor where inspiration had visited them – Vixen and Kings – and Prince from Princetown, the ugly little town where the jail was located. It was, after all, an escape that they envisaged.
The conference at the Imperial was par for the course; they endured it impatiently.
There was an unusually large gathering of journalists haunting the lobby, and delegates agreed that the expanded coverage might attract trouble at future conferences; but, on the whole, they were confident that their lives and their deliberations would be safeguarded.
Their confidence would have been severely eroded had they known
that, quite by accident, Prentice had discovered a ridiculously easy means of listening to their debates. A means available to any curious member of the public, journalist or espionage agent.
XXVII
Of course the final act of the conspiracy had to be staged at a Bilderberg conference.
Separately each had come to the same conclusion.
Where else could the three of them work together? Where else could they synchronise Operation Imperial? What other venue could provide such an apt setting for its climax?
But the venue did involve certain disadvantages. The principal obstacle: time. In between each conference Anderson, Prentice, and Helga Keller dispersed across the world, and so opportunities to scheme were limited.
But they all agreed that everything had to be planned to the minutest detail. Method of extortion, timing, escape route, financing, final destination ….
Prentice had hoped to enjoy his retirement with Helga Keller – if, that is, things worked out in that respect (nothing had been said). Privately he wished that they could hurry things along. Did they have to be such perfectionists? Of course they did, Prentice the professional admitted to himself.
Another obstacle was the reluctance of the Establishment to invite Paul Kingdon to Bilderberg. Anderson was working on this when Pierre Brossard, promoted to the steering committee, stepped in and solved the problem.
It was also Brossard who inadvertently settled the date of the operation. Through Helga they learned that he was planning a final consummate coup that he hoped would smash the American dollar. If it was successful he would escape to Yugoslavia where he would be granted asylum.
If it was successful, then the $15 million ransom to be reaped from Operation Imperial would be worthless!
Until then the Brossard plan had appeared to be the simplest because Helga had copies of Gestapo documents indicting Brossard as a war criminal. Now the Frenchman had jeopardised the whole venture.
One late summer evening in 1979, Anderson, Prentice and Helga Keller contrived to meet to discuss the emergency. Owen suggested the Villa d’Este on Lake Como, Italy, where Bilderberg had once met before he got the security job. He had always regretted missing out on that one.
* * *
The Villa d’Este at Cernobbio, on the shores of Lake Como, might have been built with intrigue in mind. But intrigue on the grand, romantic scale – whispered conversations behind fluttering fans; assignations in the shaded parkland overlooked by green slopes, where once a beautiful widow had built imitation fortresses to please her handsome new husband, a Napoleonic general; cloaked figures lurking behind the great pillars in the hallway.
I, Said the Spy Page 32