Program for a Puppet

by Roland Perry

  Graham nodded. Gould’s interest sounded hopeful.

  “Best if you leave us the photo and details, and all the documentation on Radford. Visa and so on. Could your contact get copies?”

  “Possibly.”

  “See what you can do. I can’t make promises right now. But we’ll see.” Gould moved to a filing cabinet, took a folder from it and handed it to Graham. “You might like to have a look through this to see what you may be up against.”

  The Australian turned over the folder. It was headed The KGB Today—Recent Operations and General Tactics.

  When their meeting was over Gould took the elevator to MI-6’s operations communications center to send a coded telex to his superior, who was out of the country. It would ask if there was any chance of using Graham.

  Since meeting the Australian the commander had a much rounder, deeper perspective of the man. He couldn’t remember meeting anyone with more self-possession. There was a simmering self-confidence about him, as if he was always holding something back. Gould put this down to Graham’s family background, high intelligence and wide experience. Yet all this had to be seen, perhaps, in another perspective. The Australian had had many years’ experience as an actor. In front of a camera performances could be turned on. Graham may have done that for him just now. A performance to get help. Perhaps under the pressure the strain would crack the façade….

  The commander thought of Graham’s just detectable reaction to the true story of poor dead Steven. But it didn’t necessarily put Gould off. On the contrary. It demonstrated that the Australian was no fool. He was aware of what he might be walking into. Only a fool would be oblivious of the dangers.

  Yes, caution was one of the man’s characteristics, especially apparent, Gould thought, in the methodical planning of his investigation. What was it Sir Alfred had said? He was a brilliant chessplayer with the ability to think many moves ahead.… He had a logical mind.

  Gould pondered Sir Alfred’s remarks about the Australian’s lack of discipline. Yet that was under authority. What would count in the Soviet Union was the man’s level of self-discipline. Graham gave the impression that this was definitely one of his strengths.

  What worried the commander most was the publisher’s comments on the man’s aggressive tendencies. Tendencies that sometimes led him to rush things. Was it a counteraction to his methodical, meticulous planning? Or was it a complement to it—an innate ability to time his dynamism?

  Gould put the question out of his mind for the moment. Using Graham now depended on the commander’s superior, and whether the agent over there would be in place.

  At a casino in the Honfleur seaside resort in Normandy, a dinner-suited, tall, middle-aged man with trim brown hair and short mustache let his chips ride on black 13 for the third successive spin of the roulette wheel. His regular features, marred by a faint but long scar running from below the left earlobe to his neck, remained impassive as he watched the whizzing ball with cold, gray eyes.

  Just as the spin neared completion, the man was distracted by a tap on the elbow. It was a young German courier, who an hour earlier had arrived from Stuttgart. They moved away from the table. The middle-aged man had a slight limp, a legacy of a mild dose of polio as a small child.

  The two men spoke rapidly in German for a few seconds as a noise went up from the table. The ball had jumped into black 13. The courier slipped the winner an envelope and left.

  Collecting his mound of chips and changing them for cash, the middle-aged man moved into an adjoining bar. He sat down on a stool, ordered a beer and opened the envelope. There was a typewritten message in German, which read: “Herr Director, Research done. Script prepared. Interview set up. Ready for shooting. Await your direction. Crew.”

  He left the casino and drove the hundred miles to a hotel in Le Havre.

  The next day he took a train to Paris. He thought about his current year-long assignment which was to culminate soon, and resolved it would be his last. His would be fifty-four next birthday and the money from this contract would net him around two million dollars. His business was murder by contract, and for the Director, business had always been good.

  Too frail by the end of the Second World War to fight for Hitler’s Germany, he fled to Brazil with his parents. His father, a colonel in the Waffen SS, wanted to sever all evidence of his past. He bullied his son into finding a career. The young man chose photography, but soon found that an early passion for firearms, sparked during his years in the Hitler Youth, had reemerged when he left home and traveled around the turbulent American subcontinent.

  Later he drifted into the life of a mercenary soldier and guerrilla, while never completely discarding photography and film. Occasionally it brought him income from capturing action on civil war fronts, and earned him the title Director.

  During this time he met an Argentinian Marxist, José Boliva Rodriguez, who was helping to finance revolutionary wars. Rodriguez had not let his ideology stop him from becoming a multimillionaire through big property deals in Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. Money was a useful weapon to fight capitalism. The Director carried out two lucrative contract hits for him, and made a lasting impression on his teenaged son, Alexandro Emanuel, who admired the German’s fearless dedication to fighting, and his great knowledge of arms. The encounter between the Rodriguezes, with their ideological verve, and the Director, who was strictly a mercenary, was disrupted when the Director moved to greener pastures in Africa. There he gained an underworld reputation as an efficient contract killer.

  Despite the split, the Director never lost contact with José Rodriguez, who continued to finance revolutions and educate his son. The Director urged the father to give the young Rodriguez a taste of Europe. His son spent the next decade there, a high-spirited and sophisticated period, especially in Paris.

  Then the father thought it was time for the real thing. Young Rodriguez was packed off to Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow for four years. Only once did he return to Paris: in 1968 during the weeks of the near-revolution.

  The influence of the Director on the young Rodriguez eventually had its decisive impact. The German had worked on two occasions for the KGB in Eastern Europe and he urged his contacts in Moscow to recruit and train the Argentinian student. The Soviet secret police were grateful to the Director. They found Rodriguez excellent material, suitable for exporting Soviet-style revolution. Yet not even they could hold him completely. Soon he went out on his own as a terrorist assassin, heavily subsidized by his father—as long as it was for a Marxist-Leninist cause.

  The young Rodriguez again met the Director in London, at a time when the former was losing his ideological zeal, and yearning for the easier life he had experienced in Paris. The Director urged him to take advantage of the several revolutionary causes wanting to use him, and to charge high fees for his services. And he did. The reasons behind his killing assignments soon became confused between ideology and money. He was pleased if they coincided, and this led him into a partnership with the Director. He had moved to France, returning to Africa and going twice to Eastern Europe for a “hit” to maintain a lavish life-style. The two men had a lot in common: the love of arms, the spilling of blood, photography, film, Paris and a life-style fit for a king.

  Using the guise of a film crew, the two men began working together. They carried out two successful contracts in Europe and North Africa and decided to use the front once more for an elaborately planned major hit. A very wealthy client was prepared to pay them a small fortune for their efforts.

  On arrival at his apartment at 4 rue Brunel in the sleazy Pigalle area of Paris, the Director began to make final preparations for this latest assignment. He hauled a heavy aluminum-padded case from a cupboard, unlocked it and removed an Ariflex 16-mm. B.L. camera. He detached the side to reveal the gate mechanism and unscrewed a metal plate backing the film path. This uncovered a secret chamber in which the barrel and frame of a highly modified Walther P.38, 9-mm. revolver had been cunn
ingly concealed.

  The Director, with loving care, removed each gun piece from a false bottom in the metal case, and cleaned them. This included a tripod, scope mount, scope, silencer attachment and other equipment which allowed the gun to be used as a handgun or a high-powered close-range rifle. Once at his destination he would transfer this doubtful contribution to ballistic science in component form to a small Grundig tape recorder, a Pentax camera and the tripod’s hollow legs, which all fitted neatly into the Director’s metallic briefcase.

  Satisfied that everything was in order, he packed the camera weapon away and them thumbed through two sets of forged documents. One, a carnet, would allow the Director to move his equipment in and out of any country. The other set confirmed that he was a representative of a small reputable documentary film group based in Munich. Finally he poured himself a strong Pernod and water.

  After months of careful preparation, the Director was going to do some shooting. This time in North America.

  “I think we could be of mutual benefit,” Gould told Graham. He had asked the Australian to meet him again in his office, the morning after their first meeting. “The situation is this. We have had enormous trouble getting data out over just what the Soviets are doing with computers in their military set-up. Steven was our number-one expert in this field in Moscow before the KGB tracked him down. All other relevant operatives who are specialists in this field at this time, even inside the Soviet Union, we suspect, are actually known to the KGB. I’m not being melodramatic when I say that any of our people would be dead at the first false move. We simple cannot risk them. You happen to have the expertise, especially in computerized military systems, that we want. If we assist you all we possibly can, would you agree to helping us get that intelligence out of the Soviet Union?”

  Graham was a little stunned. It was more than he expected. He lit a cigarette. Gould took out his pipe.

  “I’m willing to cooperate, if I agree to your plan,” the Australian said cautiously. “What I’d like to know now is how much of this ‘intelligence’ I would be able to publish.”

  “We could come to some arrangement when you returned. It may be useful for us to have some of it public.”

  Graham nodded. “Okay. What have you in mind?”

  “We want to put you through a crash program. It means you will have to be closeted away for about three or four days commencing next Sunday. We have an operations center near Oxford. I shall be in charge. You’re going to hate the sight of me. We will have to go over your covers as Boulter and Radford until you know them in your sleep.”

  “You said we …”

  “There is a third person. He will be involved in your Radford impersonation in Moscow. Call him Radford three. Radford three will be on the flight the real Radford would have taken, because otherwise the KGB will become suspicious of the empty seat on the plane. You would be picked up immediately you tried the impersonation. Radford three will arrive in Moscow and check in at the Hotel Berlin. Then he’ll disappear. At the same time you will pick up a taxi near the Berlin and carry out your impersonation.”

  “How will Radford three disappear?”

  “The alternatives are he can lie low and leave on the normal return flight the real Radford would have taken, or more likely, he will be smuggled out as a queen’s messenger assistant.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Quite simple really. Each week a QM and sometimes an assistant bring in and take out diplomatic mail. Our Radford three will go out as an assistant. All our Soviet Embassy has to do is inform the Soviet authorities who is flying out forty-eight hours in advance. Radford three will travel out under a different diplomatic passport.”

  There was a reflective silence before Graham asked, “What sort of data and intelligence will be passed to me?”

  “At Oxford you’ll have to memorize blueprints on computer plans for missile systems, rocket reentry and so on, so that you will recognize certain network blueprints when you make contact with our operative.”

  “How and where will contact be made?”

  “We shall teach you simple codes.” The commander paused to suck on his pipe. He watched smoke spiral to an invisible grate in a corner of the ceiling. “As to where, leave that to us. You will not know until it actually happens. That way we minimize the chance of a mistake.…”

  George Revel arrived in London on Thursday, September 11, for an important part of his PICS assignment. He spent the best part of the first two days with Intelligence contacts in the British Foreign Office and the U.S. armed forces and embassy.

  By late Friday he received a telephone call at the Connaught Hotel from Graham, for whom he had left a message at Ryder Publications. They planned to meet for dinner at an out-of-the-way Italian restaurant in Kensington. Although both men started cautiously, an easy rapport developed between them.

  The Australian was surprised and delighted to make contact with the lawyer. He had often read about and admired his efforts to beat Lasercomp in the Justice Department court battle. He outlined his investigation without mentioning his cooperation with MI-6, and Revel told the Australian that the PICS assignment was considered important to high officials in the U.S. administration. They had a mutual interest in finding out how computers were being used inside the Soviet Union. The lawyer had contacts there, and by the end of their meeting he trusted Graham enough to share their names with him. Since they found that a few hours over dinner was not enough to exchange information, they planned to meet again the following day.

  Normally Graham would have a workout on a Saturday morning and follow it with a three-mile run around Hyde Park. Now he could not risk any former routines. However, when he learned that Revel was a keen jogger, he invited him to join him for a run beside the river at Kew, a mile from his Strand-on-the-Green hideout.

  By eleven the two tracksuited men had set themselves a steady pace in the drizzling rain. Early autumn yellow and green leaves were already falling in the almost deserted gardens.

  “Those contacts may be able to speak to you,” Revel said, puffing as they reached the first mile. “One is a Ukrainian-American. He will be in Kiev the same time as you. The other is Professor Boronovsky, a leading dissident scientist.”

  “I know of him. An expert in cybernetics.”

  “That’s right. He has become quite vocal about human rights in the Soviet Union lately.”

  The drizzle had turned into rain, which became quite heavy as they jogged on.

  Graham wondered how well the lawyer knew Dr. Donald Gordon, the former computer scientist at Lasercomp … the man Jane Ryder had wanted to contact in Paris shortly before her death.

  “I had met him several times,” Revel said. “We worked in different areas, but his reputation in design made him one of the best-known names in the computer world.”

  “He was behind the early Cheetah development. But I believe he fell out with the Brogans about what they wanted to see built into the machine.”

  “Did you ever learn what that was?”

  “No. I think only a handful at Lasercomp did. But it must have been damned important.”

  “Why?”

  “Rumor said he had one of the biggest golden handshakes in American business history to shut up about the dispute, and not join an opposition corporation.”

  “Would he speak to you?”

  “Possibly. But if I tried to arrange for us both to meet him, you would have to come to the States. He lives like a recluse near Washington.”

  “I may come over after I’ve been to the Soviet Union.”

  By September 15, another big problem for President Everett Rickard involving the Soviet Union had come to a head. Daily now he was being presented with evidence that it was breaking previous agreements and escalating its arms build-up in almost every weapons system area. The Cheetah put America ahead in “first strike capability.” But with the knowledge that computers were being smuggled into the East, Rickard had to cover the risk that som
ehow these machines could be converted to military use. If that ever happened, with Cheetahs, the Soviet Union would be equal in the precision use of whatever weapons they had developed.

  Until a few months ago he had been making steady progress in agreements with Soviet Premier Brechinov. Now the Soviet administration was ignoring them. Rickard suspected the Soviets could have been gambling on the fact that he might try to avoid confrontation just before an election.

  The National Security Council assembled in a White House west wing conference room early on the morning of the fifteenth. Rickard had asked six representatives from Congress to join the meeting so that it could be briefed on the situation, which was potentially explosive.

  Each person was given a copy of a note Rickard proposed to give the Soviet ambassador.

  The note said that the U.S. would consider stringent trade sanctions against the Soviet Union if it did not agree quickly to maintain arms agreements.

  Rickard asked if they had any comment.

  Nicholas Stavelin, a burly, bespectacled Texan, drawled, “Mr. President, I am basically in agreement with the note. But I’m not sure about your threat to cut back trade. Is that absolutely necessary?”

  “Yes,” Rickard said firmly, “I think it is.”

  “But you’ve threatened trade sanctions before.”

  “And it has worked.”

  “Well, I want it on the record that I think you’re overdoing it,” the senator argued. “Mixing trade and politics is dangerous.”

  Rickard had expected this from the senator. He had long suspected him of being in the pocket of Lasercomp.

  When he first became President, Rickard had caused an international stir by tearing up all previous agreements with the Soviet Union that called nations to stop interfering in the internal politics of other nations. He had demanded concessions for Soviet political prisoners when some big trade deals were made. Rickard knew he could not work miracles. But each time he had stood up to the Soviet administration, concessions had been granted. Occasionally political prisoners were released from mental hospitals, or allowed to leave the Soviet Union. And so far, trade between the two nations had not slackened.