Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘But nobody knows I’m ...’

  ‘Exactly. Except the committee. How many people?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Sixteen people and the people they sleep with. That makes thirty-two people at least, probably more. And one of them is getting his ten pounds a month from the Branch just in case you swap your printing press for gelignite and plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament.’

  She knew it was true. She thought of all the earnest comrades on the committee and wondered which one. Of course, they would suspect her, daughter of the establishment.

  ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘you’re a cynic.’

  ‘I’m alive.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I think I’m going to leave a little sooner than I planned.’

  ‘But if they’re watching -’

  ‘I don’t think they will have a close watch on you. They don’t like your politics so you’re under surveillance. They read your mail, tap your telephone maybe. These things are automatic once you have reached a certain position in your sort of party. They do it to the communists all the time. But to watch your apartment, follow you around, that’s a big operation, expensive. They would need to have a big team to do it. There might be talk. It might get back to your father. They would have to have a very good reason.’

  He was verbalizing something he had spent a long and worrying time working out that afternoon. He was giving her what he had come to call the good scenario. There was also a bad scenario. It went like this. They knew he was in the flat, they had placed a cordon around it and there was no chance of him getting away. Once they knew where he was they were taking their time, in case he wasn’t working alone and somebody else swam into the net. It was also safer for them to grab him outside. They could do it with less warning. Not give him time to get the Browning out. So even if nobody else did come along much better, from their viewpoint, to wait until he thought it safe enough to venture out and then get him.

  He didn’t want to tell the girl about the bad scenario because he suspected that she was already on the edge of hysteria. He would just have to take his chances. He had already decided to go out unarmed. With the British police there was a good chance of survival. For a terrorist they would be armed, but compared with the Germans or the French they were not generally triggerhappy. The main reason for this was that they had not been shot at as much. Of course, he couldn’t be sure. It depended on how nervous they were or whether among them there was a man bored with target practice longing to put a bullet into a real terrorist. Then again there might be some political encouragement not to catch him alive for fear of embarrassing reprisals by his comrades. The British were such accomplished hypocrites. He imagined a conversation between the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner - he would be much too sly to put it on paper and both parties would make tape recordings. The politician would tell the policeman that he would quite understand, and could rely on his absolute support if, in the circumstances, this crazy German terrorist proved much too dangerous to take alive.

  When he walked out he would walk with his hands well clear of his clothes. They would see that he was unarmed. He had even considered carrying a bunch of flowers because the sight of a supposedly dangerous man bearing such an incongruous thing could, he supposed, unnerve an enemy. Then again they might find such originality disturbing, think his bouquet contained a weapon.

  He didn’t think much about the woman he had killed. It was an accident. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had read in the newspapers that she was the daughter of a senior army officer and therefore obviously not a member of the working class. He had fleetingly wondered whether she had ever been in rebellion against her background like he was. Probably not. As a rule the British were too naive, too complacent for that.

  ‘When will you leave?’ asked the cabinet minister’s daughter.

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to go at night.’ She didn’t say ‘tonight’, but he knew that was what she meant. He didn’t tell her his fears. In the dark they would be twice as nervous; in the dark a twig became a cannon.

  ‘You want to get rid of me?’ He smiled to show he was joking, that he could not possibly suspect her of that.

  ‘No. Don’t be silly. I just thought it would be safer for you.’

  ‘No. That’s wrong. People are twice as watchful at night.’

  He knew she wouldn’t argue with him however stupid his reasoning sounded. He was supposed to be the expert. Besides, she was still in love with him and fear had not yet swamped the other emotion.

  ‘And when you get back you’ll look into the other thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where will you start?’

  He hesitated. He had already told her something of his suspicion, but only in the vaguest terms. Normally he told her as little of the truth as possible. There were, for instance, other warm beds for him in the city, other people holding passports and money for him she never knew existed. They were much too valuable to compromise. Ruth was blown, expendable. If he got away he could never return now that the cops were taking an interest in her. He had been a fool, unable to resist the luxury of good sex and a mind open to colonization. Next time, he promised himself, it would be the debutante who thought Engels was something to do with geometry.

  But for the moment he recognized the necessity to confide in her. She desperately needed the flattery of a confidence, being on the team, to help keep the fear in check. If she panicked she might run to somebody for help, one of the PERRP crowd or even her parents. And that would be messy. Even fatal. It would do no harm, he reasoned, to give her the outline of his problem. No details. Nothing that would damage him if she talked. And one day she would talk; he had no doubt about that.

  ‘Do you know anything about the cut-out system?’ he asked, and quickly went on to explain what it was without bothering for her reply.

  It was a method, he told her, commonly used by both intelligence agencies and organisations like his own. In the active part of the movement it was important to keep each cell as watertight as possible so that if one lot got busted it would be impossible for them to give away the others even if their captors plugged their balls into the local electricity supply. Cell members had no idea who belonged to the other cells and where they were to be found. There had been two people in his cell, he said. Now there was only himself.

  ‘What happened to your comrade?’

  ‘He was killed.’ He didn’t explain the circumstances; it would only add to her fear.

  ‘A cut-out,’ he went on, ‘is a go-between. This is the person through whom we talk to the headquarters of the Front. The cutout gives our orders and we give him our requests. This way we never meet our immediate bosses; we do not even know who they are.’

  Sometimes, he explained, the cut-outs would change without warning. Until shortly after Siegfried disappeared he had never actually met their cut-out. He collected messages from a drop.

  ‘A drop?’

  ‘A dead-letter-box.’ He made one up for her. ‘In Paris we used to use a cigarette packet dropped by a certain tree in a park.’

  Then one day he had received a coded message telling him to deal directly with the cut-out. At the time, since it had to be assumed that Siegfried had probably talked, it seemed a sensible break in routine. The cut-out was a waiter in a cafe on the Left Bank. This was the man who had given him instructions to bomb the publisher. When he got back he was going to ask this man some questions.

  ‘You see, the cut-out system works beautifully as long as nobody breaks the circuit.’

  ‘And if they do?’, she asked.

  He drained his cognac. ‘Then a man could find himself playing for a different team without even realizing the colour of his shirt had changed.’

  8. New Clubland

  The Palestinian publisher had arranged to meet Dove in his club. He was not looking forward to it. Som
ebody had tried to kill him, his arm was still in a sling, and another man’s wife had accidentally died. Now this man insisted on seeing him. Why? What could they possibly have to say to each other? Could he, with any degree of credibility, say to him: much better it had been me, when it was perfectly obvious that ninety-nine per cent of the human race would, given a choice, prefer a complete stranger to die than themselves? The man was obviously a fool.

  It was partly because he felt like this that he had chosen his club for the meeting. If his guest turned out as expected, with any luck he would be intimidated by the ambiance and could be disposed of fairly quickly.

  Until comparatively recently the club had been a distinctly threadbare institution, with its members, servants and fittings in a state of sympathetic decay. Its saviour had been a distinguished Arabist on the committee, a man consumed by what the publisher, with his Levantine disdain, regarded as a peculiarly English passion for the unwashed Bedouin and terrible deserts. He proposed the recruitment to the club of selected billionaire sheikhs from the Gulf, men who habitually spent their summer months in Europe, mostly in London. The sheikhs, as the Arabist rightly predicted, were not unappreciative of the honour or the spirit in which it had been made and there had been several generous donations.

  The split leather armchairs, the tarnished cutlery and the stained linen had all gone. The aged waiters had been pensioned off and replaced with a crew of clear-eyed, firm-limbed Mediterraneans. An order for oxtail soup had ceased to be a hazardous undertaking.

  The publisher’s own contribution towards this metamorphosis had been extremely modest. He often suspected that the real reason an English friend had put him up for membership was that he was regarded as something of a bridge between the petro-dollar set and the indigenous old guard. Whatever the reason, the place amused him. The dub still totally excluded women, a habit he considered one of the more fathomable bonds between the upper-class English and the Arab. The atmosphere sometimes reminded him of one of the better, older cafes in Beirut or Cairo. All it needed was a few hookahs for hire.

  He greeted Dove in the hall, where portraits of distinguished former members had become indecipherably black with age, disembodied eyes glowering out of dark oil swirls. The Palestinian was surprised at the size of the schoolteacher, the powerful look of the broad shoulders squeezed into the jacket of a brown suit which he judged had been cut in a darkened room with a pair of garden shears. They sat in the new leather chairs in the reading room where one of the new Greek waiters brought them whisky.

  After the publisher had repeated the condolences he had already expressed in a formal letter from his hospital bed, Dove got to the point very quickly. His wife, he said, had died because she got caught up in somebody else’s war. For his own peace of mind he had to know more about this war. He had to know why somebody felt it worthwhile to try and murder the publisher regardless of how many innocents had to die with him. Because of this he was going to take a holiday in Beirut, where he understood some of the people engaged in this war lived. He was going to talk to as many people as possible in an attempt to understand the motives of those involved. Dove tried to give the impression that this was motivation enough for his journey, that he somehow expected this learning process to heal his grief.

  Like many journalists, which is what he basically was, the Palestinian enjoyed delivering impromptu lectures on his favourite subject. In addition, he had the Arab’s reluctance to get straight to the meat of a subject without first surrounding it with a few conversational hors d’oeuvres.

  So, after taking a sip of his whisky and bringing out a string of amber worry beads, he began to tell Dove of the modern history of the Palestinian people. He started in 1948 when his people were, as he put it, driven out of their homeland by an army which included in its ranks hundreds of European Jews who, only a few years before, had been refugees themselves. ‘You have no doubt heard,’ said the Palestinian, ‘of the Jewish diaspora - the dispersal of the Jews throughout the world.’

  Dove gave a curt nod, increasingly resentful of the patronizing tone. Perhaps at some point he should demonstrate that he could read and write.

  ‘Well,’ continued the publisher, quite indifferent to the effect his lecturing tone was having on the schoolteacher, ‘there is also a Palestinian diaspora of rather more recent vintage. Three million of us are scattered about the world. Mostly in the Middle East, but also in Europe, North and South America, Australia ... everywhere.

  ‘Many of us still have,’ he said, kneading the beads through his fingers, ‘the door-keys of the homes we left thirty years ago. Our right to Palestine has a sight more validity than a mystical religious claim going back two thousand years. Especially a claim that allows Poles, Germans, Russians and what have you, people who look about as indigenous to the Middle East as I would in Lapland -’

  ‘And, if you go back far enough, you were all Jews before you were converted to Islam,’ said Dove, determined to illustrate that he was not entirely ignorant of the affairs of men.

  ‘Possibly,’ said the Palestinian, as if he found the idea rather distasteful. Nevertheless, he ordered more whisky. Evidently the man was not a complete fool.

  ‘The trouble with the Palestinian cause,’ he went on, ‘is the same problem the other Arab states have in their confrontation with Israel. In short, we can’t get it together: we lack unity. In fact, we reflect the divisions among the Arab nation as a whole because almost each Arab state has its clients among the Palestinians. This has resulted in the tragic situation whereby we’re fighting the Palestinian civil war before we’ve recaptured Palestine.’

  He tapped his sling. ‘This is a civil war injury. Let me explain. There are those of us, myself included, who some people call moderates. We prefer to call ourselves "realists". If we can get some of our land back we are willing to enter into some accommodation with the Zionists. We are also firmly opposed to the use of terrorism anywhere but inside occupied Palestine - that’s the place you call Israel. We believe that terrorism is counterproductive. We don’t want to get into the situation where the word terrorist is synonymous with Palestinian.’

  ‘You don’t have humanitarian objections?’ Dove was choosing his words carefully. Emma had been killed because she had walked into his war and this bastard was saying that bombs were merely counter-productive.

  ‘My dear fellow. My country is at war. If I thought it would advance our cause one inch to wipe out the population of Tunbridge Wells tomorrow I would agree that it was a painful, but necessary thing to do. How many British voices protested the bombing of Dresden when the RAF knew it was packed with refugees? War is war. You have lost a wife and I have lost a whole country - and many friends.’

  ‘But my wife wasn’t part of your bloody war,’ said Dove through clenched teeth.

  The publisher noticed that the big man was holding his glass so tightly that he seemed in danger of grinding it to a powder. ‘I know,’ he said hastily. ‘I know and you have my deepest sympathy. What more can I say?’

  ‘You can tell me exactly who the people were who wanted to kill you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know exactly who they were. I mean I don’t know the name of the man who was shooting at me, but I have a very good idea where he was from and why. He was almost certainly one of the German anarchists some of the Front have been employing for years. They find them convenient for operations in Europe where a brown skin sometimes attracts attention around airport terminals or embassies. There are not all that many left now, but the ones who are left around are - the publisher was going to say ‘very good’; in the circumstances he thought it better to change this to ‘very deadly’.

  ‘And you’ve no idea who planted the bomb and then shot at you.’

  ‘I think there are three possibilities.’ He rattled off three names. The first one he mentioned was Koller’s.

  ‘But if these men are supposed to be so good why did they bungle it?’

  ‘That’s something I’ve been
trying to work out myself,’ said the publisher, ‘and I have come to the conclusion that it was the will of God.’

  They talked a little more. The publisher gave Dove the names and addresses of some friends of his in Beirut. He asked the schoolteacher why he wanted to go and he replied vaguely that he had to ‘understand’. And because the publisher prided himself on being a sensitive man he thought he understood what Dove meant. He warned him to be careful in Beirut. It was not, he said, a town to make mistakes in.

  When Dove left the club he bought an evening paper at the kiosk by the underground station. Most of the front page was covered by a headline which read: ‘Cabinet minister’s daughter arrested in anti-terrorist swoop.’

  9. A Sensitive Matter

  Koller was in Paris, having arrived there via Amsterdam, by the time the police called at Ruth’s flat. The news of her arrest did not altogether surprise him. When he left he had noticed something he had not even considered they would bother to use against her. Across the street from the entrance to the basement flat, attached high up on a concrete lamp-post, was a small video cassette television camera, with its stubby wide-angle lens trained on the door. No attempt had been made to disguise it. For most people the very brazenness of its position would be disguise enough; if it registered at all on the untrained eye it might be assumed to be some esoteric part of the street-lighting equipment, perhaps a time-switch.

  For a moment he had debated going back and telling Ruth, but easily decided against it. She would panic, demand to go with him. And that was impossible. If they came, he mused as he walked away, she would be surprised, to say the least, when they found the gun. He considered climbing the lamp-post and destroying the camera but dismissed that idea too, on the grounds that it might be fitted with an alarm that sounded at the local police station. Moreover, there was always a chance that some policeman might happen by while he was unarmed and halfway up a lamp-post. It would be a very humiliating way to be captured and he was not unconscious of his position in the hierarchy of wanted men. He guessed that the camera was probably fitted with an infra-red lens for night filming and that somebody came along, disguised as a municipal workman perhaps, and changed the cassette once a day, most likely shortly after dawn, which would explain why he had not noticed this activity.