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I, Said the Spy
Derek Lambert
A classic Cold War spy story from the bestselling thriller writer Derek Lambert.

Each year a nucleus of the wealthiest and most influential members of the Western world meet to discuss the future of the world’s superpowers at a secret conference called Bilderberg.

A glamorous millionaire just sighting loneliness from the foothills of middle age … a French industrialist whose wealth matches his masochism and meanness … a whizz-kid of the seventies conducting a life-long affair with diamonds, these are just three of the Bilderbergers who have grown to confuse position with invulnerability. A mistake which could prove lethal when a crazed assassin is on the loose…

‘Lambert certainly keeps the action moving with surprise plot twists thrown in every now and again to unsettle the reader’
Liverpool Daily Post

‘Could put ideas into the head of many a spy’
Sunday Telegraph

‘An exciting novel’
Derby Evening Telegraph

‘A demanding but entirely satisfying read’
Coventry Evening Telegraph


I, SAID THE SPY
Derek Lambert




COPYRIGHT (#ulink_e70bb495-175c-5391-9ad1-fe0aacdf1f4c)
Collins Crime Club
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Arlington Books (Publishers) Ltd 1980
Copyright © Derek Lambert 1980
Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780008268404
Ebook Edition © December 2017 ISBN: 9780008268398
Version: 2017-11-10
Bilderberg is the most top-secret conference in the world. Most people know nothing of its existence. The few who do know little more than that Bilderberg, held each year, is attended by one hundred or so of the richest and most powerful people in the western world, whose decisions determine future world policy. Bilderberg is organised each year by a steering committee based at The Hague, in Holland. Invitations to attend a conference are highly coveted and are extended only to heads of state, leading politicians, top bankers and major industrialists; those who influence the daily lives of millions of people. Yet their debates are unreported in the world’s press. Nothing at all of the events at Bilderberg has ever got through the strict security curtain which shields the conference from the outside world.
UNTIL NOW
DEDICATION (#ulink_6794f425-df82-5d09-a54b-367c0ad848e5)
For my not-so-grey eminence – Desmond Elliott
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_bb141d47-7582-550d-bbca-e3f7fe43cb6b)
‘The world is governed by very different
personages from what is imagined by those who
are not behind the scenes.’
Benjamin Disraeli
CONTENTS
Cover (#ue07b3ba8-4904-50a4-9bf2-750f9e2a5402)
Title Page (#u48110c9d-0cac-58ff-b396-492d36e2dead)
Copyright (#ulink_a8b205dc-61d2-519b-b58e-1e7c267014ac)
Dedication (#ulink_dc88b565-6a01-5d16-824f-c24812c6651e)
Epigraph (#ulink_abeb3373-97b3-5d01-a3a5-8a242ea8b4b5)
Author’s Note (#ulink_dc83429d-7b99-5f61-81fb-6d978feaadde)
Part One (#ulink_c13531ae-5e1a-57a8-b7d6-aa7209e0d98c)
Chapter: I (#ulink_11ffdc27-d884-548e-8502-9ae8d2c60287)
Chapter: II (#ulink_ac73dba3-a9ad-58a5-a992-40f929664281)
Chapter: III (#ulink_987c8386-de22-5ab3-837c-0a451a44cdc2)
Chapter: IV (#ulink_08442a49-15dc-5f01-a857-795c7693f81e)
Chapter: V (#ulink_347886a1-e0a7-5f9c-969d-73ecfa86f6f2)
Chapter: VI (#ulink_f8d50a0b-653f-5aaf-8464-301728054ba7)
Part Two (#ulink_2f03803e-93db-5a0e-91e3-14ad6ac505b0)
Chapter: VII (#ulink_a6019609-6839-573a-8920-ef42f93c1cdb)
Chapter: VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: IX (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: X (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter: XXXVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_a9f44ae9-4b7c-54bd-bca9-3506468366fa)
Bilderberg is fact.
Since 1954 key members of the Western Establishment have met annually at a conference named after the venue of their first meeting, the Bilderberg Hotel at Oosterbeek, Holland.
Bilderberg has been accused of both Right and Left Wing machinations; it has been indicted as a cabal of the elite of both Jewry and Masonry. Its deliberations have always been conducted in an atmosphere of obsessive secrecy and therefore the organisers cannot protest too vehemently at the calumny they occasionally attract. What is indisputable is that, once a year, a nucleus of incalculable wealth and power gathers under one roof. Indisputably, too, the future of the Western world, and therefore indirectly the future of the Communist bloc, must to an extent be affected.
The conference and the Château in France in this novel, however, are fictitious, as are the principal characters.
PART ONE (#ulink_f9c72443-0c0c-547f-a6e9-22aa537ec4cc)
I (#ulink_b534727b-e708-563d-b481-a667e8a232e4)
Danzer didn’t look like a spy.
He was too sleek, too assured, too obtrusive.
But who does look like a spy? Anderson pondered as he sat shivering in the back of the battered yellow taxi, on loan from the New York Police Department, waiting for the Swiss financier to emerge from La Guardia Airport.
There was no future in looking like a bank robber if your profession was robbing banks!
For three days Anderson had kept Danzer under surveillance at the Bilderberg conference at Woodstock, Vermont, attended by more than eighty of the richest and most powerful men in the Western world.
Earlier that April morning in 1971, Bilderberg had broken up. Heads of state, politicians, bankers, industrialists, were now dispersing, confident that their deliberations had been secret.
Overconfident.
If Anderson’s calculations were correct, the conference had been attended by three spies. Certainly two – himself and the Englishman, George Prentice, one-time Professor of Economics at Oxford University.
Anderson was ninety per cent certain about Danzer. Well, eighty-five …. The Russians had been trying for seventeen years to penetrate Bilderberg. He had two reasons for believing that with Karl Danzer they had succeeded. Firstly, he was a new recruit to Bilderberg; and secondly, he was the only guest whose credentials didn’t quite pass intensive scrutiny.
Nothing specific, Anderson admitted, as the wind sweeping across the East River spattered sleet against the windshield of the taxi. Just a gap here, an inconsistency there.
Nothing that he could prove to his employers in their headquarters eight miles from downtown Washington D.C., where hunches were regarded with cynicism.
It was to convert a hunch into fact that Anderson had flown on ahead from Boston’s Logan airport to follow Danzer when he landed at La Guardia.
It’s got to be him, Anderson insisted to himself. Got to be, as the eighty-five per cent certainty wavered and fell five points.
‘Are you a hundred per cent sure he’s flying to La Guardia?’ the man sitting beside him asked.
Anderson who was sick of percentages said: ‘Sure I’m sure.’
‘Then he ought to be here by now.’
Anderson grunted. It always surprised and annoyed him when Miller broke into his thoughts. You forgot that Miller with his thin, greying hair, inconspicuous clothes and gum-chewing jaws was there. That was Miller’s strength.
Miller slipped a wafer of gum into his mouth without interrupting the rhythm of his jaws. In front of them, on the other side of a grimy transparent screen, sat the driver, bearded and wild-haired, staring into the sleet.
At regular intervals jets materialised from the cloud, as though suspended from somewhere above the low, grey ceiling; they seemed to hover for a moment, big and vulnerable, before disappearing onto the runway.
Anderson glanced at his wrist-watch. Miller was right: Danzer should have arrived by now. He assumed that the executive jet had been delayed by the weather. Whoever heard of a plane that was not delayed by some unexpected phenomenon?
‘Maybe he’s meeting someone inside,’ Miller said, nodding towards the arrival lounge. ‘Maybe he won’t be taking a cab,’ shifting the wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other.
Anderson shook his head irritably. ‘He told me he was going to take a cab.’
‘Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe ….’ Miller said hesitantly – he was a nervous man and his nerves prodded him into making tactless remarks – ‘maybe you blew it’
‘How the hell would you know?’
‘Well, you are kind of conspicuous.’
‘I’m not the only black at La Guardia ….’
‘I didn’t mean that. But, you know, supposing he recognises you ….’
‘In this?’ Anderson gestured at the sleet; nevertheless he raised the collar of his raincoat so that it touched his tan, snap-brimmed hat, and slid lower in the seat.
‘I just hope you’re right,’ Miller said.
‘I am!’ Anderson leaned forward, rapped on the partition and pointed at the darkly handsome young man who had just joined the line-up for cabs. The driver, who already knew Danzer’s description, nodded his shaggy head.
Although it was 9.35 in the morning, Danzer stood blinking in the daylight as though he had just walked out of the night into a brightly-lit stadium. He was not alone in his reactions: all the other passengers waiting for cabs looked cowered by their meeting with the sleet, which was extinguishing springtime in New York.
‘Take a good look,’ Anderson said to Miller.
‘Don’t worry, I already got him.’
Anderson believed him: Miller’s eyes were camera lenses. And they had certainly photographed every detail of Danzer’s appearance. His wavy black hair, a little too long but not trendily so, the slim athlete’s frame, the cleft chin elevating what would otherwise have been ordinary good looks.
He wore a camel-hair coat slung casually over his shoulders, and beneath it the navy-blue mohair suit that he had worn at the conference. (In Anderson’s experience Russians who had managed to escape the attentions of Muscovite tailors favoured blue mohair.)
He carried a suitcase made of soft black leather, bearing in gold the initials KWD. The W, Anderson knew, stood for Werner. His black, buckled shoes were custom-made from crocodile skin. The only incongruous item was the shabby brown briefcase he carried in his left hand. Anderson noted that, although he pushed the suitcase along the ground with his foot as he neared the front of the line-up, he kept a tight hold on the briefcase.
Anderson said to Miller: ‘Don’t let that briefcase out of your sight.’
The driver of the police taxi, capable of speeds approaching 100 mph, started the engine as Danzer climbed into an equally battered cab, with an equally hirsute driver at the wheel.
The sleet continued to pour down as the two cabs, fifty yards between them, joined the expressway. Cabs and cars rode to Manhattan on wings of slush; they reminded Anderson of power-boats racing on a river, except that here on Long Island the race never ended.
The driver of Danzer’s cab was in a hurry, weaving in between the other vehicles whose drivers were too disgusted with the weather to brandish their fists or sound their horns. But, whatever Grand Prix ploys he pulled, Anderson’s driver kept behind him, theatrically nonchalant with one hand on the wheel, the other adjusting the wave-band on the portable radio stuck together with Scotch tape.
‘He’s too cool,’ Miller said. ‘He’ll lose him.’
‘It’ll be the first time,’ Anderson said.
Anderson knew that as soon as Miller took up the chase his nerves would stop jangling and he would be as cool as the driver.
Framed in the rear window of the cab Anderson could just make out the outline of Danzer’s head. He wondered what was going on in it. He hoped that it was filled with elation at his success in rubbing shoulders with the clique that unofficially moulded the lives of millions of men and women, most of whom had never heard of Bilderberg. He hoped that Danzer was anticipating promotion that had nothing to do with his outward trappings of success; elevation, that was, within the ranks of Soviet Intelligence. He also hoped that he was concentrating on the location where the drop was to be made.
But perhaps, Anderson brooded as the two vehicles crossed Triborough Bridge, he was merely deciding where to have lunch; anticipating, perhaps, a liaison with a beautiful girl. One aspect of Danzer’s character had been incontrovertibly established: he liked women; what’s more they liked him.
Danzer’s cab merged with the traffic pounding along the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. To his right Anderson caught glimpses of the dull-eyed buildings of Harlem, marvelling as he always did at the circumstances that had lifted him from a leaning tenement there to a small but luxurious apartment on the East Side.
Danzer’s cab took an exit to the right and burrowed into mid-town Manhattan. Here the sleet fell erratically, blown by the winds exploring the canyons between the high-rise blocks, and the streets were wet and clean while the slush piled up in the gutters.
‘What if he makes a meet?’ Miller asked, jaws quickening. ‘Who do I follow?’
‘Follow the briefcase,’ Anderson said.
‘You’re the boss.’
On East 42nd Street Danzer’s cab slowed down. Anderson could see Danzer’s head craned to one side as though he were looking for something – or someone.
‘Okay, any minute now,’ Anderson said. Unnecessarily, because Miller was hunched against the door, fingers on the handle. Miller’s nervousness was infectious; Anderson found that his fists were bunched so tightly that his knuckles gleamed white. ‘Don’t jump, just pay the driver and get out. Take your time.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Danzer’s cab stopped at an intersection while pedestrians, heads bowed into the unseasonal and treacherous cold, flooded across the avenue.
Then it took off again, hugging the kerb. They passed the New York Daily News building with the huge globe of the world in the window. Danzer’s driver was looking behind him, gesticulating with one hand. Anderson imagined what he was saying – ‘Why don’t you get out and walk? Time’s money, buddy ….’ Odd how your mind chanced on any trivia when you were tensed up. He noticed a gaunt man wearing only check shirt and jeans despite the cold, a poodle trailing a lead and sniffing ankles ….
Danzer’s taxi stopped.
‘You know where to find me?’ Anderson asked, and Miller said: ‘Sure I know, you told me a dozen times already.’
Danzer was standing on the sidewalk looking around him as his cab departed at speed. He took a notebook from the pocket of his coat, consulted it and peered down the street in the direction of the East River and the United Nations. His suitcase was between his legs but he still held onto the shabby briefcase.
Miller climbed out of the cab onto the sidewalk, timing it well because at that moment Danzer turned and began to walk swiftly in the opposite direction like a man who has suddenly made a decision.
Miller spat out his gum and began to follow.
Anderson rapped on the partition again and the taxi began to edge along the kerb. It was easy enough to keep Danzer in sight: it was Miller the chameleon who kept disappearing.
Once or twice Danzer glanced behind him, saw nothing suspicious and hurried on. Then he disappeared.
Anderson blinked and searched for Miller. There he was, entering a hotel in between First and Second Avenues. Anderson knew it vaguely: it had an English-style pub at the back.
The driver stopped.
Thirty seconds later Danzer emerged without his briefcase. He turned sharply and began to walk towards the taxi. Anderson slid down low in the seat, face averted from the sidewalk.
Danzer hurried past, almost running, like a man escaping from a crime.
The driver turned and looked at Anderson questioningly. Anderson shook his head. There was no point: the briefcase had just emerged from the hotel – in the hands of a balding man wearing a cheap grey topcoat, wide-bottomed trousers and crepe-soled brown shoes.
Anderson kept his eyes on the briefcase as it swung down the street. Miller emerged from the hotel, glanced briefly in Anderson’s direction, nodded almost imperceptibly and began to follow the newcomer.
A Russian? Anderson placed the tips of his fingers together in a prayer-like gesture. Then he lost sight of Miller and his quarry. The next time he saw them they were crossing the bridge spanning 42nd Street.
This time the driver slid open the partition. ‘What do you want me to do, Mr Anderson?’ His voice was soft and cultured, a contradiction of his appearance.
‘Take me home,’ Anderson said.
All he could do now was wait.
* * *
The apartment was furnished with impeccable taste.
But was his taste just a little too studied? Anderson wondered in those transient moments of self-doubt that assailed him from time to time.
Olive green, wall-to-wall carpet covered the floor of the living room; the white-leather Chesterfield and easy chairs were low-slung – a little too low for Anderson’s long legs; the television peered from fitted bookshelves; abstracts – some bought in Greenwich Village and some painted by a long-ago girl-friend – hung on the walls; in one corner, approached by a zebra-skin lying on the olive-green carpet, stood a small jungle of poinsettias, rubber plants and ferns. The bedroom was all white, the bathroom blue-tiled with a sunken bath, the kitchen shone with stainless steel fittings.
The rent was more than he could reasonably afford and, during those fleeting moments of uncertainty, Anderson wondered whether it was all worth it because, in the eyes of some of his guests, he could discern the patronising appraisal of those who had inherited rather than learned impeccable taste.
To hell with them, Anderson thought, as he took off his raincoat and tossed his hat onto a glass-topped table. But now, as he waited for the telephone to ring, the self-doubt was persistent. It even extended to his clothes – brown Gucci shoes, immaculate fawn suit with vest, across which was looped a gold chain linking a gold watch with a gold cigar-cutter tucked in the pockets. A black dude! The sort of gear affected by a prize-fighter who had punched his way out of Harlem.
Anderson consulted the gold watch, 11 a.m. It would be at least half an hour before Miller called. Anderson decided to take a hot shower to force the cold from his bones – and the questions from his mind.
The water sluiced down over his ebony frame, machine-gunned his powerful shoulders. He turned the handle another degree so that the water ran hotter and steam enveloped him. Ah … the doubts dispersed. The man with the briefcase was a Russian; any minute now Miller would call and confirm his suspicions; confirm the decision of the hierarchy of the CIA – decision taken after considerable debate – to give Owen Anderson one of the key jobs assigned by the Company. Bilderberg.
The telephone shrilled in the living-room.
Anderson stepped out of the bath and padded swiftly across the carpet, shedding droplets of water as he went.
‘Hallo, is that you, Owen?’
‘Sure it’s me.’ The anticipation subsided as he heard the girl’s voice; adrenalin stopped flowing in his veins.
‘Are you free tonight?’
Standing naked and dripping, Anderson shook his head at the cream receiver in his hand. ‘’Fraid not, honey.’ She was a black model, tall, fine-boned and small-breasted.
A sigh at the other end of the line. ‘Are you going cold on me, Owen?’
‘I’ve got work to do, honey.’ She knew he was some kind of policeman; probably thought that, with his life style, he was a corrupt one. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah, I’ll bet. There’s a party in the Village ….’
‘Some other time,’ Anderson said. Maybe Miller was trying to reach him now.
‘What sort of work, Owen?’
‘The usual sort.’
‘I won’t be going to that party alone.’
‘Have a ball,’ Anderson said. ‘I’ll call you.’ He replaced the receiver in its cradle.
He put on a white towelling robe and stood at the window watching the sleet pass by on its way to the street, straddling Lexington and Park, fifteen storeys below.
He prowled the apartment. Waiting, waiting. The silent telephone dominated the room. He picked up the New York Times and scanned the front page. Spaceshots, political jockeying for the presidential election next year; Nixon on Vietnam, Senator George McGovern on Vietnam.
Anderson threw aside the newspaper, stripped off his robe and went into his daily work-out routine. Fifty press-ups, fifty sit-ups.
The phone rang when he was half way up to the forty-ninth press-up. He collapsed on the carpet and reached for the receiver.
The head porter said: ‘Is that you, Mr Anderson?’
Anderson said it was him and, with eyes closed, listened to a complaint that water had been leaking from his bathroom into the apartment below. He told the porter to fix it, that was his job.
He abandoned the sit-ups and considered having a drink. 11.23. Too early. The road to ruin. He sat down on an easy chair, legs stretched uncomfortably in front of him, and stared at the telephone, malevolently cold and impersonal.
Where the hell was Miller? Give him time, for Chrissake. The man carrying the briefcase wouldn’t stride straight into the United Nations and hand it to the Soviet Ambassador. Perhaps Miller had lost him; perhaps the briefcase contained girlie magazines ….
He switched on the television. An old black and white spy movie, the original Thirty-Nine Steps. Anderson had watched every spy film ever made during his training in Virginia; they seemed to think that you could still learn a trick or two from James Bond. Anderson enjoyed the movies, in particular John Buchan’s masterpiece with Robert Donat because it had style and he admired style. But not today; leave Richard Hannay to his own devices ….
He switched off the television and went into the steel-bright kitchen to make coffee.
Holding a steaming mug in one hand and a chocolate biscuit in the other, he returned to the living-room. It looked unlived-in, which it was because Anderson was rarely there. A show-piece, an extravagance.
He sat down beside the telephone. Ring damn you! And it did, just as he bit into the chocolate biscuit.
He picked up the receiver, swallowed the mouthful of biscuit and said; ‘Hallo.’
‘Is that you, Anderson?’
‘Speaking. Who’s that?’
It was Miller.
Two hours later Anderson took a cab to La Guardia and caught the shuttle to Washington.
II (#ulink_5b74a26e-460c-5194-8e6b-784b030259a5)
William Danby picked up a white plastic cup of coffee; it was his fourth that morning. Danby who rarely drank liquor – an infrequent beer, the occasional weak whisky at cocktail parties – was fuelled by coffee. This morning he barely tasted it: he was too pre-occupied with the three dossiers and the typewritten report lying on the top of his mahogany desk. They worried him.
Not that Danby ever looked worried. He was a man of medium height, fifty-eight years-old; his greying hair with a suspicion of a quiff, a relic from his youth, was neatly barbered; his pale blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses were calm, and his features were barely lined.
Imperturbable, was how his staff described Danby. An automaton with a computer for a brain. A man who, when he removed his spectacles and stared at you with those pale eyes, withered the lies on your tongue.
Nevertheless Danby worried. If you were the head of the largest – or, arguably the second largest intelligence organisation in the world then you lived with worry. The trick was to discipline the worry, regard it merely as an occupational hazard, and never, never show it.
William Danby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, subordinated his worry and for the first time savoured his coffee. It tasted like cardboard. He put the plastic cup to rest between the intercom and two telephones, swung round in his swivel chair and gazed over the countryside surrounding his $46 million castle close to the highway encircling Washington.
He observed the thin sunlight rekindling spring among the trees. He stared beyond the limits of his vision. From coast to coast, from north to south. The vision awed him as it always did, because he was responsible for the security of the land and the 203 million people inhabiting it.
Which was why the dossiers, two blue and one green, and the report lying on the desk worried him. He was investigating the very people responsible for the prosperity of the United States.
In a way he was guilty of the same suicidal introspection that was racking the CIA (He had just prepared a report on accusations of CIA involvement in the 1970 Chilean elections – despite the fact that the Marxist Salvador Allende had won them.)
But whereas the campaign being waged against the CIA was destructive – instigated by misguided crusaders manipulated by America’s enemies – Danby believed that surveillance of the power elite of America was, however unwholesome, necessary and constructive.
Bilderbergers had to be protected against themselves.
He swivelled back to his desk and surveyed the dossiers and the typewritten report stamped PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. The blue dossiers contained summaries of all that was known about Bilderberg and its participants; the green dossier contained all that was known about Owen Charles Anderson; the report was Anderson’s preliminary observations about the 1971 conference brought by courier from Woodstock.
If Anderson was correct, the Russians had infiltrated Bilderberg.
If he was correct …. If he wasn’t, and his investigations led to his own exposure, then the furore would equal the uproar after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. AMERICAN POWER ELITE PROBED BY CIA. Danby read the headlines of the future. It was difficult even for him to subordinate his worry.
The intercom buzzed. He pressed a button and a woman’s voice said: ‘Mr Anderson for you, sir.’
‘Send him in.’
Danby picked up the green dossier. Anderson had been his personal choice for Bilderberg. Like Danby himself, Anderson represented change.
Danby wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer like so many of his predecessors: he was a non-political professional who had learned his trade posing as a diplomat in Guatemala, Moscow and Saigon.
Anderson’s claim to represent change was his colour. He had risen meteorically through the ranks since the CIA had been accused of racial prejudice. (In 1967 fewer than twenty blacks had been employed in intelligence work for the Agency.)
A knock at the door.
‘Come in.’
Anderson, big, black and handsome, loomed in front of him.
‘Sit down.’ Anderson sat in the chair opposite Danby: occupied it, Danby thought. ‘So they all survived, huh?’
‘No casualties, sir,’ Anderson said.
Ostensibly Anderson worked for the Secret Service. He had been put in charge of Bilderberg security. The perfect cover, thought Danby, who had arranged it.
‘Any trouble?’
‘Only what I expected. Other agencies tripping over each other’s big feet. British, French, German, Feds ….’
‘Anything personal?’
‘How do you mean, sir?’
They both knew that Danby meant his colour.
‘Any resentment?’ forcing Anderson to concede.
‘You’ll always find prejudice, sir,’ smiling at Danby. There was about Anderson the faintest suspicion of cynical amusement: it had gone against him when he had been put up for the job, but Danby’s views had prevailed. They always did.
‘Your colour’s your greatest ally,’ Danby said. ‘Coffee?’ as he pressed the button on the intercom and, as Anderson nodded, ‘Two coffees, please …. With milk?’ to Anderson. ‘Yes, and sugar,’ Anderson told him.
Danby released the button. ‘Who the hell would suspect that a black security officer worked for the Company?’
‘I guess you’re right, sir, I’m too conspicuous in all-white company.’
‘Precisely.’ Danby picked up one of the blue Bilderberg dossiers and extracted the guest list. ‘You were in exalted company.’ He ran a finger down the list. ‘Chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands ….’
‘Riding for a fall,’ Anderson interrupted him.
‘Lockheed?’
‘It’s got to come out,’ Anderson said.
Danby took off his spectacles and stared at Anderson. If Danby had a weakness, it was his admiration for American big business. He had been on intimate terms with corruption for most of his professional life, but he still found it difficult to distinguish between business practice and bribery. It didn’t bother him that the smiling extrovert husband of the Queen of Holland might take a fall, as Anderson put it; it bothered him that those who had paid him money might be hurt. And the American image with them.
His finger moved on down the list. ‘Rockefellers, Rothschilds … British members of Parliament … financiers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland …. You seem to have concentrated your attentions on the Swiss, Mr Anderson.’
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A grey-haired woman wearing a pink knitted cardigan placed two plastic cups of coffee on the desk and retired. Danby and Anderson sipped their coffee and regarded each other through the steam.
Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘Have you anything to substantiate your suspicions about Herr Danzer? If you’re right, it’s a considerable coup considering it was your first Bilderberg.’
Anderson put his cup down on the desk. He opened his jacket and stuck his thumbs in the pocket of his waistcoat, where the gold watch and the cigar-cutter resided. An assertive gesture, Danby decided. Or was it defensive?
Anderson said: ‘We put a tail on him in New York.’
‘And?’
‘He made a drop. A Soviet agent picked up his briefcase.’
‘I see. How —’
‘The agent was followed to the Soviet Mission at 136, East 67th Street.’
‘Then there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.’
‘No, sir.’
‘I’m glad for your sake,’ Danby remarked. ‘The coffee,’ he said, ‘gets worse,’ but he finished it.
Danby stood up and walked round the spacious office. He ran his fingers along the bookshelves of weighty volumes, spun the globe in the corner – the world in which his 12,000-strong army fought daily for American interests. Against enemies outside and inside the States. Danby envied Anderson’s lack of appreciation of the canker within.
As the world spun beneath his fingers he said: ‘You may smoke if you wish.’
‘I don’t smoke, sir.’
‘Of course, I forgot.’
Danby moved to the desk and picked up the green dossier on Anderson. ‘One of your economies to enable you to live in the style to which you are accustomed.’
Danby opened the dossier.
Here we go, Anderson thought.
By style he knew that Danby referred to his apartment. It wasn’t the first time the apartment had cropped up during interrogation.
And what was about to follow would be a form of interrogation. A tactic to quell over-confidence, to hone the blade of Anderson’s perception. A man such as Danby was incapable of conducting an analytical conversation without employing psychological stratagem.
Anderson admired him for it. And it worked! He felt the assurance ebb from him as Danby turned the pages of the dossier. There in between green cardboard covers is my life.
The adolescent years in the hovel in Harlem when he was a runner in a numbers racket. (A lot of question marks there, a lot of heavy underlining.)
The street brawls re-directed by an unusually enlightened social worker into the boxing ring. Showed promise …. But who wants to make money with his fists when he has brain?
Night school resented by his parents, ridiculed by his friends. Long solitary hours with a second-hand speech-training course on a phonograph – ‘Now repeat after me ….’ the invisible tutor’s plummy voice scratched by a score of needles.
Danby said: ‘I see you play chess.’
‘Sir?’
‘I see you’re a chess-player.’
‘Pretty low grade, sir.’
‘It’s good training,’ Danby said, turning a couple of years of Anderson’s life.
And then a scholarship to Columbia. (Exclamation marks here probably. Black, street-fighter, ambitious, educated. Possibilities.)
Perhaps he had been ear-marked as early as that.
The Army. Military Intelligence. Vietnam with the U.S. Military Assistance Command in 1962. And then the approach (names, assessments, cross references here) by the CIA, followed by another two years in Vietnam, two years in Washington and then New York in a sub-division of the Secret Service.
‘Do you know what finally swayed us in your favour for the Bilderberg job?’ Danby asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘French,’ Danby said. ‘You speak excellent French.’
‘I learned it in Vietnam. I believe I have a slight colonial accent.’
‘And I see you shoot straight’ (Anderson was Army Reserve pistol champion, having scored 2581 points in the 1970 championships.)
‘I’m not popular in amusement parks.’ Instinctively Anderson felt for the gun he normally wore in a shoulder-holster; but it wasn’t there; you didn’t arm yourself to meet the DCI.
‘How do you manage to live, Mr Anderson?’
Anderson sighed. ‘I believe it’s all there, sir,’ pointing at the dossier.
‘Refresh my memory.’
‘You mean the apartment?’
‘And that suit you’re wearing.’
Blue with a silky sheen to it, lapels beautifully rolled.
‘I buy one suit a year,’ Anderson told him, ‘The apartment is mine. I didn’t blow my money in Saigon.’
‘But the apartment is not quite paid for, I gather.’
‘Not quite,’ Anderson said, the anger that was his weakness (all there in the dossier) beginning to rise.
‘I admire you.’
The anger evaporated. Danby was a professional.
‘So the question is,’ Danby remarked, ‘what did Danzer get away with?’
‘Not a great deal,’ Anderson said. ‘He was too busy being accepted. Meeting the right people to make damn sure he’s invited again. Herr Danzer,’ Anderson said, ‘would like to be a regular.’
‘He must have picked up something.’
‘Maybe a line on Lockheed and Bernhard. Maybe the fact that Nixon is going to woo the Chinese. Maybe a few leads on the economic squeeze that’s on its way. … A few financial killings could be made there if it leaked out,’ Anderson observed.
Danby sat down again in the swivel chair facing Anderson. ‘It’s your job to stem those leaks.’ The pale eyes stared across the desk.
‘I can’t stop the richest men in the Western world trading stories. The critics say Bilderberg rules the world. That whatever is discussed at their conferences just happens to happen. If I were a billionaire then maybe I could do something.’
‘There’s no law that says the captains of industry shouldn’t meet privately.’
Anderson hadn’t said there was, but Danby’s belief in the American Dream was well-known. He told Danby that, in his view, ‘privately’ meant secretly and then tried to steer the conversation in a different direction – ‘My private nightmare is in my Secret Service capacity. All that clout under one roof. One of these days someone is going to get wise to it ….’
‘An assassination?’ Danby smiled thinly. ‘Perhaps, Mr Anderson, that is the reason for the … secrecy.’ You couldn’t deflect a man like Danby.
‘Why just one, sir? Supposing a terrorist organisation got wind of the next Bilderberg? They could eliminate the whole goddam bunch of them. Or hold them to an astronomical ransom. Which, of course, they’d pay,’ he added.
‘It’s your job to stop them, Mr Anderson. You had a battalion of police and agents working for you. The Woodstock Inn was more like Fort Knox.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Anderson said quietly, ‘my private nightmare doesn’t concern terrorists: it concerns cranks. Just one. How many assassinations throughout history have been carried out by nuts? And I can tell you this, sir, when it’s happened, someone will turn round and say, “He was a guy who kept himself to himself.”’
‘A sobering thought, Mr Anderson. But the Secret Service has the utmost faith in your abilities. In fact,’ Danby said, picking up his now-empty cup, examining it and tossing it into the wastepaper basket, ‘they have agreed to upgrade you and increase your expenses.’
‘I’m very grateful, sir.’
‘So has the CIA. You are now the highest graded black in the Agency. And your expenses will be higher than most whites draw, so keep it to yourself. Danby closed the dossier on Anderson. ‘You’ll even be able to pay that last instalment on your apartment. A thousand dollars, wasn’t it, Mr Anderson?’
Anderson nodded.
Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘And now to work,’ he said.
‘What do we know about Herr Danzer?’ Danby asked.
‘Not as much as I’d like to. He’s Swiss –’
‘I know that,’ impatiently.
‘He’s a financier with offices on the Bahnofstrasse in Zurich.’
‘What sort of a financier?’
‘Currency speculation. If he got wind of a proposal to devalue a currency at Bilderberg ….’
‘He’d be even richer than he is now.’
‘And yet he doesn’t live extravagantly.’
‘Do the Swiss ever? They live well, I believe.’
‘And yet he does have a taste for extravagance. It’s as if he isn’t in control of his money.’
‘Funds for the Party?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘Married?’
Anderson shook his head. ‘But he likes women.’
‘Any other weaknesses?’
‘I haven’t had time to find out.’
‘Mmmmmmm.’ Danby pinched the bridge of his nose where his spectacles rested. ‘Then you must find the time. Does he drink?’
‘Champagne,’ Anderson said. ‘The best.’
‘I gather you don’t regard that as an extravagance, Mr Anderson.’
‘It’s not an extravagance with his sort of money. But he could have a yacht, a private plane, a penthouse in Monte Carlo. He hasn’t got any of those ….’
‘Does he gamble?’ Danby held up his hand. ‘I apologise, that’s his profession.’ He paused. ‘Any particular women?’
‘The usual. Jet-set. Models, starlets, poor-little-rich-girls. All beautiful,’ Anderson said, wondering if a tinge of envy had entered his voice.
‘Where does he live?’
‘In Zurich. An apartment– more expensive than mine,’ forestalling Danby.
‘Does Prentice know all this?’
Anderson’s head snapped up. ‘Prentice?’
Danby said patiently: ‘George Prentice, the British agent who has also penetrated Bilderberg.’
Christ, Anderson thought, Danby kept you on your toes. ‘I don’t know what Prentice knows,’ he told Danby.
‘We’re collaborating,’ Danby said tersely.
‘As from when?’
‘As from now. As you know we have worked closely with Britain’s MI6 since Penkovsky.’
Anderson knew. Oleg Penkovsky had been deputy chief of the Soviet State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research. He was also a colonel in Russian military intelligence – and a spy for the West.
But when he had first tried to join the CIA in Turkey he had been turned down. The British had enlisted him and offered to share his secrets with the CIA. The spirit of cooperation that had foundered after the Burgess/Maclean/Philby debacles had been re-established.
At his trial in May 1963 Penkovsky had admitted passing 5,000 frames of film showing Soviet classified information and had been sentenced to death.
‘Is it necessary to cooperate in this case?’ Anderson asked.
‘It’s in your own interests. As you probably know Prentice has a good front. Not only is he a professor of economics but he runs an industrial consultancy for an English businessman named Paul Kingdon. He might even know more about the industrialists attending Bilderberg than we do.’
Danby stood up and walked over to the globe in the corner of the office. ‘I have a few thoughts about Herr Danzer,’ he said, spinning the globe. ‘You see, he conforms to a pattern. We’ve met Karl Danzers before. Soviet agents with a liking for Western decadence who don’t have the opportunity to enjoy it to the full.’
‘You think he can be turned, sir?’
‘That’s for you to find out. And that’s where Prentice will be useful. You see, I figure you might be a little conspicuous here,’ as his finger landed unerringly on Zurich on the spinning globe.
III (#ulink_42b606a4-7dd1-5094-a50e-5366250e4e3c)
Zurich is Switzerland’s largest city. It is also one of the world’s largest storehouses of money and therefore a dull place: bankers do not besport themselves on their own premises.
The streets of the city, divided by the Limmat River, are clinically clean, the night-life as permissive as a whist-drive. It is not, however, without its charm – the historic guild-houses, the twin towers of Grössmunster Church, said to be the finest example of Romanesque Ecclesiastical architecture in Switzerland, the backcloth of snow-crested mountains.
But the language is Swiss francs, and when the leaves of the trees on Bahnofstrasse are ruffled by a breeze from Lake Zurich they rustle like bank-notes.
Dull.
But not when you are twenty years-old and in the arms of the man you love. A wonderful man, a handsome man, an idealist …. Idealists are thin on the ground in Zurich.
Helga Keller stirred and looked into the brown eyes of Karl Danzer. ‘Tell me again,’ she said.
‘Tell you what?’
‘Tell me about Russia.’
‘Ah Mother Russia. The steppes sparkling in the snow beneath blue skies in winter … the wind rippling the corn in summer … the cottages like fretwork dolls’ houses … the forests of birch where tigers still prowl ….’
‘And Moscow,’ she said, snuggling up against him on the couch in his apartment. ‘Tell me about Moscow.’
He kissed her. ‘You will see it one day. Soon perhaps. Hear the music of the skates on the ice in the parks … see the domes of the Kremlin gold in the dawn …. Taste the fires of vodka as we drink with our comrades.’
‘I like to hear you talk about comrades,’ she said. ‘I like to hear about people who are … alive.’
Neither her father’s friends, nor the girls at the finishing school at Basle, had been alive.
‘They are alive – full of life – because they share. That is the heart of the matter. Sharing. Common endeavour. Even today,’ throwing out one arm as though dashing a glass against the wall, ‘we still drink to the glorious revolution. The revolution that will one day spread throughout the world.’
Helga Keller glowed with the visions. ‘And we shall be part of it. If only I could help more ….’
‘You have helped already,’ Danzer told her. ‘They are very pleased with what you have done.’
‘And to think that until three months ago I didn’t spare a thought for this … this sharing. I’d read about Communism, but here they talk about it as if it is a crime ….’
‘To such people,’ Danzer said, ‘Socialism is a crime. Grand larceny. The theft of their privilege. The distribution of their wealth to the underprivileged …. Has it been three months?’ he asked in surprise.
‘Two months, two weeks, three days ….’ She felt the warmth of the sunshine reach her through the window. Outside, the lake sparkled, the flanks of the mountains were green with young growth. Helga had known from the moment she awoke that the hazy dawn was filled with portent; that June 12th 1971, was one of those days that would change her life; she glimpsed patterns of destiny and was filled with delicious anticipation.
She stretched herself and took in the apartment. It was, she supposed, expensively furnished – she had no yardstick by which to judge expenditure – but certainly not lavishly. (Karl had explained that, to maintain his front, he had to live reasonably well.)
It certainly needed a woman’s touch. But there was no chance of a permanent relationship in Zurich. Karl had explained that, too.
Karl put his arm round her. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a blue silk shirt tapered at the waist; through the silk she could feel the thud of his heart. His hand stroked her waist, then cupped her breast. Wings of fear – or was it excitement? – fluttered inside her. She was so inexperienced, ridiculous in 1971. But if you were the daughter of a Zurich banker …. She hoped that he would understand; be grateful, even, that she had kept herself …. God, what an antiquated expression ….
‘Helga.’
She didn’t reply. It was ridiculous. They both knew …. Did he perhaps think that she didn’t want to? How do I show him? Then a thought occurred to her that made her feel suddenly foolish. Supposing he didn’t want to? She wasn’t a raving beauty. Her long, dark, lustrous hair had been much admired but nothing much else; no one had ever complimented her on her figure, although it wasn’t too bad, perhaps a little too full. Swiss! She closed her eyes in mortification and the warmth of the sun no longer reached her.
‘I love you,’ he said as his hand caressed her breast. Feeling exploded inside her.
He led her to the bedroom which she would remember for the rest of her life. The deep white carpet and the books on the bedside table, and the smell of after-shave and the triangle of blue water jostling with light through the roof-tops. He lay on the single bed and she lay beside him and he kissed her lips, her neck, her breasts which had somehow become exposed.
He went to the bathroom, returning in a dressing gown embroidered with Chinese patterns, by which time she was naked beneath the sheets. Trembling.
Would he know immediately that she was a virgin? In the books that she had read surreptitiously at finishing school – sex was a subject that was never finished, not even started —they always knew and the girl said: ‘Please don’t hurt me.’
His lips were on her breasts and she was guiding his hands to the warm mound that needed him. His hardness astonished her: it was like warm marble. She slid her fingers along its length, then wanted him inside her. Karl, my love …. She lay back and opened her legs and guided him.
And afterwards she couldn’t remember whether or not there had been any pain.
* * *
When they began to make love George Prentice removed his earphones and switched off the receiver in an apartment not far from Danzer’s.
He removed the tiny cassette that had been recording the conversation between Karl Danzer and Helga Keller, labelled it and stacked it neatly in the wooden cigar box containing the other Danzer recordings. A dozen of them in all.
Danzer, you’re not a pro: you should sweep your apartment every day. But that, Prentice knew, wasn’t true: Danzer was a pro. It was merely that he had become careless, his reactions dulled by the good life – and the mistaken belief that he was above suspicion.
Stupid bitch, he thought, as he considered what Helga Keller was now doing in Danzer’s bedroom. Did she imagine she was the only one? She should hear some of the other recordings.
Prentice, lean-framed with scholarly good looks, which he managed to conceal partially by his own indifference to them – that worked, he found, when you were over thirty – lit a cigarette. Acquaintances of Prentice, none of them close, sometimes commented that there was an unfulfilled air about him, that he had sublimated his personality. They were right but they were never able to elaborate: Prentice didn’t let them.
He turned his attention to the Daily Telegraph crossword. He had been on the point of breaking his record, ten minutes, when he had been interrupted by Danzer and the girl. The clues now seemed more enigmatic than before; he had lost contact with the mind of their author.
In fact the conversation which he had overheard had disturbed him more than he had so far admitted to himself. It was as though he had unlocked a room and found the perfume of a woman he had once loved still lingering there. Stupid bitch, he thought again.
He poured himself a Scotch and soda and wished that Anderson would get back. He should have arrived on the Swissair flight from New York two hours ago, at 11.40 am, to resume his duties. And Anderson’s duties – at least when Danzer was in town – were confined to electronic surveillance: you didn’t let a 6ft. 2 inch, 220 pounds black loose in Zurich without attracting attention.
Prentice had been surprised to discover that the head of security at Bilderberg also worked for the CIA; Anderson, apparently, had experienced no such astonishment that a former Professor of Economics at Oxford played a dual role. ‘It’s not Oxford that worries me,’ he had said. ‘It’s those sons-of-bitches from Cambridge.’
The buzzer beside the small grille on the wall sounded. Prentice pressed the button. ‘Who is it?’ Anderson’s voice accompanied by street noises: ‘It’s me.’ (‘Owen,’ if there was any trouble.)
‘Come on up.’ (‘Okay I’ll let you in,’ if there were uninvited visitors in the apartment.)
‘How did it go?’ Prentice asked as Anderson tossed his raincoat and overnight bag onto an easy chair.
‘Routine. I had to make a statement for some goddam Senate investigation.’
‘Bilderberg?’
Anderson poured himself a beer. ‘Christ no. I assume we’re clean?’ sitting down and drinking thirstily.
‘Of course.’
‘If it had been Bilderberg I wouldn’t have returned. You don’t return from the dead.’ He grinned. ‘How’s it been going here?’
‘Danzer finally got the girl into bed.’
‘You listened?’
‘Up to a point,’ Prentice said. ‘You can take over if you want.’
‘You’re a cold fish, George,’ Anderson said.
Now, yes. But it hadn’t always been so.
They appraised each other across the small lounge. A working relationship, nothing more. Prentice guessed that Anderson knew a lot about him; how much he didn’t know.
Anderson opened another can of beer and said: ‘I wish Danzer would get the hell out of this town. I feel as if I’m in a cell in San Quentin.’
‘Thanks,’ Prentice said. The cell was his apartment. It was small – two bedrooms, lounge, kitchen and bathroom – but, Prentice believed, tastefully furnished if, perhaps, a little bookish; the lounge with its leather chairs was a study, really, and the bedrooms were used only for sleeping.
‘Sorry, George. You know something?’ Anderson drank some beer. ‘You’re the least likely looking spy I ever did see. But I thought that about Danzer. People’s appearances change when you get to know all about them. Danzer looks like a spy now.’
‘You look like a contender for the world heavyweight title,’ Prentice observed. ‘I always imagine you wearing a red robe waving your fists above your head.’
‘Not the champ?’
‘No,’ Prentice said firmly, ‘the contender.’
‘Let’s see how the champ’s getting on,’ Anderson said, crossing the room to the desk, switching on the radio receiver and slipping the earphones over his head. He listened for a minute, then removed the earphones and said: ‘It’s all over. They’re back in Siberia listening to balalaikas. Give it ten minutes and they’ll be back to politics. Are you political, George?’
Prentice shook his head.
‘But you enjoy our game, huh?’
‘Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.’
Which was true. The game, as Anderson called it, was all he had.
‘Motives?’
‘I happen to believe in what we’re doing. Just the same as I would have believed in fighting the Germans in 1939. We’re merely fighting an extension of that enemy. One tyranny succeeds another.’
Anderson tapped his forehead with one finger. ‘Do you have a brain or a computer up there, George?’ He picked up the Telegraph crossword. ‘You didn’t do so well here. Ins out a form of art singer. Sinatra,’ Anderson said, filling in the blank squares.
‘What are your motives?’ Prentice asked curiously.
‘Much the same as yours, I guess. Just a little more flamboyantly so. None of that kitchen-sink stuff for me.’
‘You enjoy the game?’
‘It’s the only one I know. But I’ll be glad when this series is over. How much longer, George?’
‘Not long now,’ Prentice said. ‘Do you want to eat?’
‘I assume it’s cold roast beef and …. What do you call that mess?’
‘Bubble-and-squeak,’ Prentice told him. ‘You guessed right.’
‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Anderson said with resignation. ‘We had it the day I left. And the day before. Do you ever eat anything else?’
‘I take it you want some?’
‘I could eat a horse,’ Anderson said. ‘Come to think of it, that would make a pleasant change.’
Prentice went into the tiny kitchen and tossed a mixture of mashed potatoes and cooked cabbage into a frying pan.
From the living-room Anderson said: ‘Three down. You should have gotten this, George. Notice without direction an agent.’
‘Spy,’ Prentice said over his shoulder.
‘How long is not long, George?’
The cabbage and potatoes sizzled. Prentice turned them; they were a little burnt on the underside. ‘When I get access to his bank account.’
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult for you. You’re the guy with the contacts in Zurich.’
‘It’s not that easy any more. Article 47 of Swiss Banking Law. It sets out the penalties for divulging bank secrets, i.e. the names behind the number accounts. Jail sentences and fines.’
‘So, what’s new?’
‘The banks are getting very touchy since the British Inland Revenue broke the secrecy.’
‘Was that you, George?’
Prentice ignored the question and quoted: ‘ … the banker has no discretion in this matter and, by law is required to maintain silence about his client’s affairs under penalty of heavy fines and even imprisonment. As laid down by the Swiss Bank Corporation, the Swiss Credit Bank and the Union Bank of Switzerland. The Big Three.’ He cut four slices of cold, overdone beef. ‘But it’s Article 273 of the Swiss Criminal Code that worries me. It states that agents …’ He smiled faintly ‘ ….Three down, wasn’t it? Agents can be jailed for trying to break numbered accounts.’
Prentice put two plates of beef and bubble-and-sqeak on the coffee table in the living-room. When Anderson sat down the table looked ridiculously small.
Anderson began to eat hungrily but unenthusiastically Between mouthfuls he said: ‘You’re not trying to tell me that any of this worries you?’
‘I merely have to be a little more cautious.’
‘If he’s stashed away a fortune then we’ve got him. Maybe we’ve got him anyway. We know he was born in Leningrad in 1941. We know he was infiltrated into Berlin in 1945 with his parents. We know they turned up in Switzerland in 1947 with forged German-Swiss papers. We also know, thanks to you, George,’ liberally smearing mustard on a piece of beef, ‘that a lot of the bread that he makes speculating with currency doesn’t reach the coffers of the Soviet Foreign Bank.’
‘We can’t prove that,’ Prentice pointed out. ‘We need that numbered bank account. When you can wave that under his nose then he’s yours.’
‘Ours,’ Anderson said, pushing aside his half-eaten meal. ‘You really enjoy that stuff?’
‘I was brought up on it.’
‘Jesus,’ Anderson said. He washed away the taste with a mouthful of beer. ‘But you haven’t answered my question. How long is not long?’
‘Tonight if I’m lucky,’ Prentice said. He reached for the sports jacket with the leather-patched elbows. ‘See you later.’ He nodded towards the radio receiver. ‘Happy listening’.
As he crossed the Munster Bridge, heading for Bahnofstrasse, Zurich’s Fifth Avenue George Prentice ruminated on Anglo-American collaboration. It worked beautifully up to a point. That point would be reached when he carried out his instructions to kill Karl Danzer.
* * *
The Swiss legalised banking secrecy in 1934. The aim was to conceal the identities of Jewish customers from their German persecutors. Whenever the Swiss are under attack for their fiscal discretion they remind their critics of its humane origins. Then, glowing with self-righteous indignation, they retire to the vaults to tot up the billions entrusted to them by despotic heads of state, Mafia dons, crooked financiers, businessmen avoiding (not evading) the attentions of tax inspectors, oil sheikhs, misers, bankrupts, politicians championing the cause of the impoverished; the spectrum, in fact, of humanity embarrassed by riches.
Numbered accounts have their disadvantages: interest is virtually non-existent and, in some instances, a depositor may have to pay a bank a small sum to safeguard his money; he is, of course, buying secrecy and, unless it can be proved that the money was obtained by criminal means, his anonymity is assured.
Such obsessive reticence naturally arouses curiosity, and in the cities of Berne, Zurich, Geneva and Basle there are many agencies dedicated to undermining the system. Among them professionals described euphemistically as industrial consultants, blackmailers and spies.
George Prentice, recruited to British Intelligence when he was precociously teaching at Oxford, represented all three categories. He knew the identities of sixty-nine eminent personages holding numbered accounts – knowledge which had rubber-stamped his entry into the monied Establishment – and was about to make Karl Werner Danzer the seventieth. Although in Danzer’s case, he was reversing the process: he knew the name but not the number.
The information concerning numbered accounts is known only to two or three bank executives. It was therefore these worthies that Prentice cultivated. Many proved intransigent – it is difficult to bribe a wealthy banker – a few succumbed readily to Prentice’s blandishments.
Danzer banked with a relatively small establishment in a side street near Zurich’s railway station. The modest pretensions of the bank had encouraged Prentice: its officials were likely to be paid less than their counterparts in the big banks, and would thus be more resentful of their customers’ wealth.
Prentice’s contact at Danzer’s bank was Hans Weiss. Weiss, plump, middle-aged and embittered, had lost most of the money he earned gambling with currency. He hated Danzer who gambled similarly but successfully.
Prentice met him in a small café frequented by taxi-drivers and printers. It was crowded and noisy and cigarette smoke floated in shafts of sunlight. Weiss was eating a cream cake and drinking chocolate.
Prentice ordered tea. ‘Well?’ he said as Weiss licked a dab of cream from the corner of his mouth.
‘Have you got the money?’
‘If you’ve got what I want.’
‘It’s here.’ Weiss slid his hand inside his jacket. ‘Where’s the money?’ He glanced around the café nervously.
‘The information first please.’
Weiss stared at him speculatively. Prentice was used to the expression; it was frequently assumed when people first became aware of the hardness in his voice. And when they suddenly realised that, beneath his indifferent clothes, his body was just as hard.
A waiter brought the tea. The tea-bag had been placed in the milk at the bottom of the cup. Prentice added boiling water but it made little impression on the tea-bag.
Weiss said: ‘How do I know you’ll give me the money?’
‘You don’t.’
Weiss sipped his chocolate. His hand holding the cup was trembling. Prentice knew he badly needed the money, two thousand dollars jointly funded by the CIA and MI 6.
‘It isn’t fair,’ Weiss finally said.
The remark sounded ludicrous, the words of a schoolboy negotiating a sale of marbles. ‘No one said it was.’ Prentice pushed his cup aside in disgust. ‘The envelope please.’
Reluctantly Weiss handed it over. Prentice glanced at the contents – a photostat of Account No. YT 43 9/8541. The balance in Swiss francs was the equivalent of five hundred thousand dollars. He asked: ‘How can I be sure this is Danzer’s account?’ and would have forgiven Weiss if he had replied: ‘You can’t.’
But Weiss’ mind was on the money. ‘The letter,’ he said.
Folded inside the photostat of the account was a copy of a letter signed by Johann Beyer, the manager of the bank. It assured Karl Danzer of the bank’s best attention at all times and confirmed the number of the account.
Prentice handed over the envelope containing the money. Weiss snatched it from his hand, ruffled the bills inside with his thumb.
Prentice said: ‘Try pa-anga this time.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The currency of the Tonga Islands. A hundred seniti to one pa’anga. If you’re going to speculate you could do worse. But I know what I’d do with that money if I were you.’
‘What would you do?’
‘Put it in a numbered account,’ Prentice said as he stood up and strode out of the café into the sunshine.
* * *
The cable surprised Karl Danzer. They usually telephoned from the Soviet Embassy in Berne to make appointments. A change of policy, perhaps. The coded message instructed him to report to an address on the Limmat Quai at 10 pm that evening.
Walking to work in the crisp morning sunshine, Danzer considered the immediate implications of the cable. A nuisance, nothing more. He had planned to take Helga Keller to dinner, then to bed. Perhaps not such a nuisance …. He would cancel the dinner and still take her to bed, thus avoiding the boredom of answering her ridiculous questions as she gazed at him across the table like a schoolgirl with a crush on a pop star. In bed Danzer found her ardour and inexperience stimulating; soon, he surmised, she would do anything he asked. Except, perhaps, sleep with other men; in that respect, Danzer sensed, she was different to the other girls.
All in all the recruitment of Helga Keller had been a thoroughly worthwhile exercise. Not only was she an assistant in the Investor’s Club where financial advice was dispensed free of charge but, being the daughter of an eminent Zurich banker, she moved in influential circles. Already she was learning to hate the people with whom she mixed. When she described a dinner party thrown by her father, Danzer reminded her of the starving millions in the Third World countries; when she mentioned some million-dollar deal of which she had heard, Danzer painted word pictures of peasants reaping the harvest in Russia and sharing their wages.
In fact Zurich, with its secrecy, complacency and affluence, was the ideal location to seize a young girl’s confused ideals and give them direction.
Danzer turned into the Bahnofstrasse, glancing appreciatively at the shops filled with gold, jewels, watches and cream cakes. He was really managing his life exceedingly well. He lived well but without excess; he was trusted by his mentors in Moscow; he was accepted at Bilderberg and had been given to understand that he would be invited again; he had salted away enough money to ensure an early retirement, in South America perhaps.
He entered his business premises, discreetly imposing with a brass nameplate and a small, marbled foyer, listened for a moment to the gabble emanating from the room where his staff juggled with telephones and currencies, and entered his own oak-panelled office where his secretary awaited him with the day’s business attached to a clip-board under her arm.
The secretary, middle-aged and homely, knew a considerable amount about the affairs of Danzer Associates. What she didn’t know was that a sizeable proportion of the profits were creamed off into the hard-currency reserves of the Soviet Union; nor did she know that a percentage was also channelled into the secret coffers of Karl Danzer.
The day progressed predictably. Danzer’s sense of well-being swelled as a small fortune was made out of the wobbling dollar and the rock-hard German mark. He took a light lunch and, in mid-afternoon, a sauna.
In the evening he retired to his apartment to change. He had a couple of drinks and set off for the address on the Limmat Quai, blissfully unaware that his euphoria was about to be terminated for ever.
He wondered without any particular concern why the KGB wanted to see him. A development, perhaps, from the information – admittedly sparse – that he had gathered from Bilderberg … a lead on the American team of financiers who had just arrived in Zurich … a progress report on his latest recruit, Helga Keller ….
He stopped outside the guildhouse named in the cable. The moon shone fleetingly from the low clouds that had detached themselves from the mountain peaks to sweep across the lake. From the shadows came a voice: ‘Herr Danzer?’
Danzer peered round. The first premonition of danger assailed him, an ice-cold wariness. ‘Who is it?’
A figure materialised in front of him. Curiously indistinct, despite a brief parting of the clouds. Then he had it. The man was black. Danzer wished he had brought a gun.
‘We’ve met before,’ the man said. He was very tall, broad with it. He emerged into the moonlight. ‘The trouble is we all look the same, especially at night.’ Danzer could see that he was grinning. ‘And yes, I have got a gun, and no, you aren’t going any place,’ as Danzer tensed himself to run.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘I’d like to have a little talk with you, Herr Danzer.’
‘Who are you?’
‘We were both at Woodstock. Does that help?’
The black security chief. ‘You sent the cable?’
‘Of course, it’s time your people changed the code,’ and conversationally: ‘Shall we take a walk?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Danzer said. ‘You wouldn’t use a gun here.’
‘I have something much more persuasive than a gun, Herr Danzer.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
‘The number of your bank account, currently in credit to the equivalent of five hundred thousand American dollars.’
They began to walk.
Step by step Anderson detailed everything he knew about Danzer. From his birth in Leningrad to his last deposit in the numbered account. ‘You’re blown, Herr Danzer, he remarked as they threaded their way through the cars parked beside the river. ‘Blown sky high.’
‘What do you intend to do about it?’ He couldn’t believe it: the comfortable, secure future scythed away, leaving only exposed foundations. Danzer shivered as fear replaced shock.
Anderson said: ‘I’m sure you know what will happen to you if I tell your employers about your savings for a rainy day.’ Anderson stopped and pointed to a telephone kiosk. ‘I could do it right now. One call ….’
Danzer had seen the white-tiled cells beneath Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Had seen a little of what went on inside them. It was enough. ‘What do you want for God’s sake?
‘You,’ Anderson said.
* * *
Karl had said he would meet her in the little café they frequented at 11 pm or thereabouts, and she had told her father that she was going to a party with a girl-friend. Not that he objected to Karl. Far from it, but he was a good member of the Swiss Reform Church and he wouldn’t have tolerated the moral implications of an 11 pm assignation, especially without dinner beforehand.
She glanced at the slim gold Longines watch on her wrist. 11.23. He had said ‘thereabouts’ but when did ‘thereabouts’ finally run out? She would give him until 11.30, she decided, as she ordered another coffee, acutely aware that she looked like a girl who had been stood up.
She hadn’t, of course. Karl would come. And he would talk. How beautifully he could talk. And then – and she had no doubt about this – they would go back to his apartment where she would give herself to him. Love was wonderful, just as she had always known it would be.
But how many girls were lucky enough to enjoy love on so many levels? From the physical to the idealistic. Between them they would carry on the fight here in Switzerland, the heartland of the Capitalist Conspiracy. (Such phrases!) They had a cause and it united them.
11.30 pm.
He had obviously been detained by THEM. Helga had only a very vague idea what Karl’s employers looked like. Certainly not like the caricatures of Russians she saw in the newspapers.
The waiter was glancing at his watch. What time did they close? Candles were being snuffed out on the small, intimate tables; traffic on the street outside was thinning out.
Unaccountably her lips began to tremble. Her body had sensed what was happening before her brain had admitted it. There were only three customers left in the café. 11.40 ….
Perhaps he had been in an accident. Perhaps he’s sick of you! Karl Danzer could have any woman he wanted in Zurich. Why should he bother with someone unsophisticated and, yes, clinging …. From college to finishing school to Investors Club with no taste of life in between …. What a catch.
A tear rolled unsolicited down Helga Keller’s cheek.
Behind her the waiter cleared his throat. She could smell the smoke from the snuffed-out candles. She finished her coffee, paid her bill and tried to smile when the cashier said: ‘Don’t worry, he’s not worth it.’
It was midnight.
She crossed the street to a call-box and dialled his number. Supposing he was with another woman. But it was even worse than that. His voice told her that he didn’t care. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make it …. You’ll have to excuse me … I’ve got a lot on my mind just now.’
Click.
Desolation.
IV (#ulink_ca84ccf0-e783-50a4-9617-0e4c956f33e1)
The message was terse. SUBJECT TURNED.
Anderson transmitted it through one of the three CIA operatives at the United States Embassy in Berne, who would send it to Washington via the TRW installation in Redondo Beach, California.
‘So all we do now is feed Danzer,’ he said to Prentice who was listening to the news on the BBC World Service.
‘Especially at Bilderberg,’ said Prentice.
‘Provided he’s invited again.’
‘He will be.’ Prentice turned off the radio and lit a cigarette. ‘I tracked down some of his financial contacts. He’s a dead cert – like you.’
‘And you, George?’
‘Up to a point. I’m a tame lecturer. They keep one or two up their sleeves. Adds respectability to the set-up. I expect they’ll give me a miss next year. It doesn’t matter which one of us they invite: we all send them to sleep.’
‘So British Intelligence won’t be represented at Bilderberg next year?’
Prentice smiled faintly. ‘I didn’t say that.’ He pointed at the receiver picking up transmissions from Danzer’s apartment. ‘He’s taken to his bed. Shit-scared by the sound of him.’
‘How do you know?’ Anderson asked, sitting down in a leather arm-chair beside the electric fire. The chair sighed beneath his weight.
‘The girl called. He sent her packing. We can’t have that, of course,’ Prentice added.
‘Of course not. He’s got to keep to his pattern.’
‘Exactly. So he’s got to continue his recruitment campaign.’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ Anderson asked, spinning the bloodstone fob on his watchchain, ‘that she could get hurt?’
‘It’s occurred to me,’ Prentice said. ‘Does it matter?’
Anderson gave the fob a last twirl and shook his head. ‘How did you get like this, George?’
‘I worked at it,’ Prentice said.
‘A girl?’
Prentice said flatly: ‘I’m sure you know all there is to know about me.’
‘A little,’ Anderson replied.
He knew, for instance, that Prentice had belonged to a post-war intellectual elite at Oxford who believed in Capitalism as fervently as other young men at Cambridge had once believed in Communism.
‘Any economist,’ he was on record as saying, ‘must be a Capitalist. Unless, that is, they are tapping around economic realities with a white stick.’
Anderson knew also, from a CIA agent at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, that at a remarkably early age Prentice had taught economics at Oxford before gravitating to the more exciting fields of industrial consultancy.
The consultancy, as Danby had told him, was owned by the English financial whizz-kid of the late sixties, Paul Kingdon.
The CIA agent, young and keen, had elaborated in a Mayfair pub. ‘Kingdon is a smart cookie. As you probably know he’s big in mutual funds – or unit trusts as they call them over here. Only, like Cornfeld, he’s gone a step further: his funds invest in other funds. To safeguard the investments he started this industrial consultancy and put Prentice in charge with an office in Zurich. It wasn’t long before Prentice was recruited by British Intelligence.’
‘Does Kingdon know that his prize spook works for MI6?’ Anderson asked.
The agent shrugged. ‘I doubt it. Why should Prentice tell him? At present he’s got the best of two worlds – he’s paid by both. Not only that but he believes in the work he’s doing.’
‘Don’t you?’ Anderson asked.
‘Of course,’ hastily.
‘Does he believe in the work he’s doing for this guy Kingdon?’
‘Just so long as Kingdon is making money for the Honest Joe’s, he does. At the moment Kingdon is doing just that. His funds have made millions for people whose only hope was the Irish Sweep or the football pools.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Anderson drank some beer. ‘Tell me what makes Prentice tick.’
‘Difficult.’ Anderson looked up with interest. ‘He’s deceptively tough. He can read a balance sheet like you or I would read the baseball scores. He’s not above breaking into premises to get what he wants. He once killed a Russian who tried to knife him in West Berlin. But about a year ago he changed ….’
‘His sex?’
‘Apparently he became bitter, introverted. Drank a bit for a while. We don’t know why,’ anticipating Anderson’s question.
‘Sounds like a security risk,’ Anderson remarked.
‘The British don’t seem to think so.’
‘Which means they know why his character changed,’ Anderson said thoughtfully. ‘Prentice sounds an interesting character.’
‘If you can get near him.’
‘I can try,’ Anderson said, finishing his beer.
‘A little,’ Anderson repeated, his thoughts returning to the present.
Prentice said: ‘And that’s what you’ll have to make do with.’ He stretched. ‘I’m going to bed. Tomorrow you must introduce me to Danzer.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ Anderson said, shifting his position and making the leather chair sigh again. ‘He’s got a lot to tell us.’
‘How long?’ Prentice asked, hand on the door to his bedroom.
‘In my experience it can take anything up to six months. We’ve got to bleed him dry. And we can’t have any professional interrogators out here to alert the Russians.’
‘Six months …. As long as that?’ And when Anderson nodded: ‘By that time we’ll have to be briefing him what to tell the Kremlin about Bilderberg. It shouldn’t take the Russians too long to tumble what we’re up to.’
‘Don’t be such a goddam pessimist,’ Anderson said. ‘The Kremlin hasn’t got a smell of what goes on at Bilderberg. If we play it cool we can use Danzer for misinformation for years. We just have to make sure he doesn’t feed them anything which is dramatically wrong.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ Prentice opened the door of his bedroom. ‘Well, good-night; …’
‘The name’s Owen.’
‘Good-night,’ Prentice repeated and closed the door.
So Anderson knew ‘a little’.
He undressed and climbed into bed.
How much was ‘a little’?
He switched out the light and lay still, hands behind his head, thinking, as he did every night, about what he hoped Anderson knew nothing about.
* * *
Annette du Pont had been beautiful.
Flaxen-haired, grey-eyed, full-breasted, just saved from looking like a conventional sort of model advertising tanning cream or toothpaste, by traces of sensitivity on her features that would soon settle into character.
She was, in fact, a student of economics at the old university at Basle, and she came to Prentice for help in her studies.
It was high summer and she was on vacation. While Prentice guided her though the theories of John Maynard Keynes – he had always admired a man who could preach enlightened economics and at the same time make killings on the stock market – he had found that he, too, was learning. How to live.
He bought new suits and Bally shoes, and had his brown hair fashionably cut. He felt ten years younger than his thirty-three years. Even younger when, as they lay in a field printed with flowers overlooking the lake, she stroked his hair and said: ‘You’re very handsome, you know. Not a bit like an economist.’
His own awakening astonished him: he had never realised that such emotions lay dormant. There had been other girls, of course, but never rapport such as this.
They crossed the border by car into Germany and, for the first time since they had met two weeks earlier, made love. In a luxurious old hotel in the little town of Hinterzarten. Prentice had experienced sex before, but never anything like this ….
They drove through slumberous green valleys in his silver BMW; they picnicked in forest glades, explored castles, ate and slept and loved in village inns. And shared.
It lasted four days. Then Prentice had to return across the Rheine to attend to the demands of his employers, Paul Kingdon and British Intelligence. As they neared Zurich, Prentice toyed with the idea of proposing marriage.
But how could he? You couldn’t ask a girl to share her life with a man whose business was espionage. Or, more specifically, he couldn’t conceal his calling from her because a marriage threatened by such subterfuge was no marriage at all.
There were two alternatives, Prentice decided, as he parked the silver BMW 2002 outside the apartment block. He could confide in Annette or he could find another job. He hoped that the latter wouldn’t be necessary because, unlike most of the spies he read about in modern fiction, he enjoyed his work.
He decided to fly to England to seek advice. As it happened there was a cable awaiting him, summoning him urgently to London. He told Annette that he would have to leave her for a couple of days; she kissed him and told him that she understood and, in the single bed that had never known anything more orgiastic than the weekly disarray of the Sunday newspapers, they made love with abandonment.
For the last time.
When Prentice arrived at the offices of MI6 in Northumberland Avenue, between Trafalgar Square and the Thames, he was immediately aware that there was something wrong. It showed in the embarrassed greetings from a colleague, in the diffident attitude of Ballard’s secretary.
Leonard Ballard was a man in his sixties with the stamp of the Navy about him, but none of an old sea-dog’s geniality. Ballard had once been a submarine commander and during World War II he had been deputy chief of the Admiralty’s Operational Centre, housed beneath the hideous, bunker-like building in Horse Guard’s Parade, known without affection as Lenin’s Tomb. Ballard had been in charge of the destruction of U-boats; as an ex-submariner he knew the sort of death to which he was dispatching men; it had seemed to affect him not at all.
To Ballard the pursuit and extermination of the enemy was everything. Now as then. But whereas he was normally urbane, the sophisticated skipper of a clandestine crew, he was today cold and brusque.
‘Sit down, Prentice.’
Prentice sat down and nervously assimilated the trappings of the office – seafaring charts, propellers of a ship, a brass compass shining in a shaft of dusty sunlight.
‘You look uncommonly dapper,’ Ballard remarked.
Prentice didn’t reply; there was no reply.
‘Dressed to kill?’
‘Not as far as I am aware, sir,’ regretting the grey lightweight suit and the slightly jazzy tie that Annette had bought him.
‘Appropriate for a fond farewell at Kloten Airport?’
A cold finger of apprehension touched Prentice as he said: ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.’
‘Don’t you? Then I shall enlighten you. You were driven to the airport by a Miss Annette du Pont, were you not?’
‘As it happens I was. But I don’t see —’
‘That it’s any of my business? I’m sorry to disillusion you. The companions favoured by my employees are always my business.’
Prentice was silent.
Ballard picked up a glossy photograph on his desk and tossed it on Prentice’s lap. ‘That is Mademoiselle du Pont, I believe.’
Prentice looked at the photograph. Annette looked back at him, smiling. Admiring the tie, he thought foolishly. The apprehension froze into fear. For Annette, for himself, for the future that he had glimpsed in a green field scattered with flowers. He said yes it was Mademoiselle du Pont.
‘A student of economics, I am told. I’m sure you were able to teach her a lot ….’ Ballard picked up other photographs and rifled through them. ‘Not that she needed much teaching.’
‘I don’t think —’ but Ballard interrupted him again: ‘You should have thought before. You disobeyed instructions. You know perfectly well that you should have checked out anyone who made such a direct approach to you.’
But she approached me for help, stayed with me because she loved me.
Ballard went on: ‘I believe you know a man called ‘Karl Danzer?’ And when he didn’t reply: ‘I asked you a question, Mr Prentice.’
Prentice looked up. ‘Karl Danzer?’ He found it difficult to concentrate. ‘Yes, of course I know Karl Danzer. He’s a currency speculator. Not very big, but big enough. He also handles the Russians’ hard currency for them. I’ve mentioned him in reports.’
Ballard said crisply: ‘He’s more than a Soviet bank-master: he’s a spy employed by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. We’ve just cracked him through a turned KGB operative in the Soviet Embassy in London.’
Hope surfaced briefly. ‘Is that why you brought me to London?’
Ballard sat down behind his desk and faced Prentice. ‘We had intended to bring you to London to brief you about Herr Danzer, yes. Now the matter has become more urgent.’
The hope began to die.
Ballard picked up a silver paper-knife bearing a Royal Naval crest and pointed it at Prentice. ‘I assume that by now you realise in what direction this conversation is leading.’
‘I consider Miss du Pont to be above reproach.’
‘Do you now. Very gallant. I’m afraid I shall have to disillusion you.’
Prentice searched for his cigarettes but decided against lighting one, and sat with his hands clasped tightly together.
Ballard sorted through the photographs, selected one and stared at it expressionlessly for a moment. ‘Miss du Pont,’ he said after a while, ‘has been associating with Karl Danzer for at least six months.’
Prentice wanted to protest, but there was no point. He watched the specks of dust spinning in the sunlight as despair settled upon him.
Ballard turned the photograph so that Prentice could see it, saying at the same time: ‘You will appreciate that I don’t enjoy this. Here, take it,’ as though it were soiling his hands.
Prentice took the picture and gazed at Annette’s lovely face. At the beautiful, full-breasted body that he now knew so well. And that expression of languorous contentment – as she gazed into the eyes of Karl Danzer lying naked beside her.
Prentice dropped the photograph on the floor.
‘The photograph,’ Ballard said, ‘was taken in her room in Basle a week ago after Danzer had been blown.’
Annette had driven back to Basle a week ago – to fetch some clothes, she had said.
Ballard said: ‘The only question that remains – and I am prepared to take your word on it – is, did you communicate anything … indiscreet?’
‘Of course not. I had intended to seek your advice.’
‘And what do you think I would have advised you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters now. The liaison must cease.’
‘Of course,’ Prentice said dully.
‘According to our information you were approached merely in your capacity as an industrial consultant. You have made quite a name for yourself in that particular field, Mr Prentice. Apparently she has no idea – or didn’t have a week ago – that you also work for us.’
So they had bugged her room in Basle.
‘One more thing,’ Ballard said evenly. ‘Leave Danzer alone. For the time being, anyway. He’s more useful that way,’ he added.
‘Is that all?’
‘For the moment.’ Ballard picked up a photograph of another girl on his desk. Her prettiness had been frozen by the lens of the camera; the studio lights and the hairstyle placed her prettiness in the 1940’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel ….’
The girl was Ballard’s wife who had been killed in the Blitz. It was the only time Prentice had heard Ballard apologise.
* * *
No, Prentice assured himself as he turned on his side and prepared to sleep, Anderson knew nothing about Annette du Pont. The story was known only to Ballard, himself and the agent who had reported the liaison to London.
He closed his eyes. When a catalyst such as that bitch’s voice on the radio talking to Danzer stirred the memories – ‘You’re very handsome, you know. Not a bit like an economist!’ – it took a long time for sleep to visit him.
During the first few months after the interview with Ballard he had wondered about the identity of the agent who had denounced Annette du Pont. He had never found out, nor had he ever resented the professional’s role in the affair.
Instead he had disciplined himself to be just as professional. He had taken a course at an establishment near King’s Lynn in Norfolk, run by a cheerful ex-Commando named Saddler, and told Paul Kingdon, his overt employer, that he was taking a vacation.
At the end of the course he was far more than an industrial espionage agent: he was lethal.
Sleep touched George Prentice, but only briefly. He returned to consciousness as he had known he would, as he always did when this train of thought took its inexorable course. Until they reached the point where he was authorised to kill Karl Danzer.
As always it was the photograph that awoke him.
A photograph of a corpse. No ordinary corpse this. Teeth and hair had fallen out, face and body were covered with weals and swellings crusted with dried blood and pus.
The photograph of the man, who looked as though he might have been middle-aged – if, that is, you could imagine him as he was – was in colour.
This time it was Saddler who was displaying photographs – in a Nissen hut in the camp near King’s Lynn. His normally cheerful, broken-nosed features were as savage as the wind hurling rain across the bleak Fens.
‘His name,’ Saddler said, stuffing black tobacco into his pipe, ‘was Nemeth. He was a Hungarian. He had worked for us since the revolution in Budapest in 1956. I knew him, he was a good man.’ The black tobacco began to glow in his pipe.
Prentice stared at the glossy horror in his hands.
Saddler, blowing out a jet of thick grey smoke explained: ‘Thallium. Treated radioactively and introduced into his body. Either forcibly or in his food. The result was the same, his body just fell apart.’
Rain drummed against the corrugated metal walls of the hut and hissed in the chimney of the old stove burning in the corner.
Prentice placed the photograph face downwards on the table Saddler used as a desk. ‘The Russians?’
Saddler nodded. ‘The Executive Action Department of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Once known as Department Thirteen. Renamed as Department V – V for Victor, that is – before the KGB was reshuffled in 1968. For Executive Action read Execution.’
Prentice lit a cigarette. ‘Have you got a drink?’
‘I thought we’d weaned you off the stuff.’
‘I don’t drink any more. But I like a drink on occasions, This is one of them,’ managing a faint smile as Saddler brought out a bottle of Bell’s and two glasses from a drawer in the table, saying: ‘Not a bad idea at that.’
‘The department,’ Saddler went on, drinking his whisky neat, ‘is run by a gentleman named Nikolai Vlasov. In addition to assassination, its functions are sabotage. It has infiltrated agents into North America and Western Europe to destroy installations in the event of war. But that is not our concern here today ….’
Prentice poured a little water from a tap over a sink into his whisky and wondered what their concern was.
Saddler handed him two more photographs. Nothing horrific this time, merely mug shots of two straight-faced young men staring straight into the eye of the camera.
Prentice looked at Saddler inquiringly.
‘Both dead,’ Saddler told him.
‘Murdered?’
‘By Department V. Both British agents.’ Saddler picked up a pencil in one huge hand and began to doodle; it looked like a gallows to Prentice. ‘I trained them both. Both good lads. As far as we know they were both killed cleanly. At least that was something,’ as he began to draw a noose.
‘Blown I presume.’
‘Oh yes,’ Saddler told him, ‘they were blown all right.
‘Do we know who?’
A pause. A rope joined the noose to the scaffold. Karl Danzer. I believe you know him.’
Prentice swallowed the rest of his whisky.
Without waiting for him to reply, Saddler went on: ‘Runs quite a harem does our friend Danzer. His girls prey on unwary agents.’ Saddler’s blue-grey eyes stared expressionlessly at Prentice. ‘One of them memorised the names of these poor sods,’ pointing at the photographs, ‘from a document in a briefcase.’
‘In Basle?’ Prentice couldn’t help himself.
‘Vienna.’
Annette? Prentice decided not to pursue it. He wasn’t a masochist. He asked: ‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘A combination of circumstances.’
The rain-loaded wind sighed in the telephone wires outside.
It seems,’ Saddler said, working on the scaffold, ‘that Herr Danzer has managed to penetrate Bilderberg. I presume you know about Bilderberg?’ And, as Prentice nodded: ‘The annual secret – sorry, private – session of Western clout. Well, Danzer managed to get himself invited this year and will probably make bloody sure that he’s invited next year and the year after. Our Company friends in Washington sussed him. They want to turn him, and they want us to work with them. Decent of them, isn’t it? What they want of course, is our intelligence in Zurich. In other words you, George. More whisky?’ holding up the bottle.
‘No thanks. What do they want from me?’
‘Everything you can get on Danzer. I imagine you’ve got quite a bit already ….’
Prentice replied non-committally: ‘Quite a bit. I can get a hell of a lot more.’
‘Good.’ Saddler began to draw a body hanging from the noose. ‘What we want is as much information as we can get out of Danzer. Top priority stuff-the names of all the Soviet agents he knows.’
‘And then?’
‘The CIA,’ Saddler said, ‘is anxious to use Danzer to feed misinformation about Bilderberg back to the Kremlin. That’s fair enough but we have a more conclusive scheme for curbing Danzer’s activities at Bilderberg. We want him dead.’ He turned over the photograph of the putrified corpse that had once been a man named Nemeth. ‘You see, the Americans haven’t got this to take into consideration. Nor these ….’ He tapped the pictures of the other two dead men with his pencil.
‘I still don’t see—’
‘Ballard consulted me.’ Saddler put down his pipe, now cold. He wanted to know what I thought of your capabilities. He seemed to think that you might like the job ….’
Saddler finished drawing the body hanging from the noose. Underneath it he wrote DANZER. ‘Now that,’ he remarked, ‘was very indiscreet of me. The very reverse of what you were taught here, eh, George?’ He tore the sketch from the pad on his desk and walked over to the stove; he removed the lid with a broken poker and dropped the sketch into the glowing interior.
Together they watched the sketch burn.
Saddler said: ‘But don’t forget, George, not before we’ve bled the bastard dry.’
Raindrops spattered against the corrugated iron. To Prentice the noise sounded like distant gunfire.
* * *
The sequence of events had spent itself. Now Prentice could sleep. He dreamed that he was John Maynard Keynes.
V (#ulink_52f68316-e6b7-5c0c-b5a7-f51a50ff4e1a)
In September, 1971, the British, acting with the sort of cavalier authority that had characterised them in the days when they were building an empire, expelled from their country 105 Soviet spies.
This one-way package deal so alarmed the Soviet authorities that Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev cut short a tour of Eastern Europe, postponed a reception for Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, and conferred with members of the Politburo at the airport in Moscow.
One man attending the emergency session was more alarmed than most. His name was Nicolai Vlasov and he was chairman of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, known the world over as the KGB.
The British action had followed the defection in London of a traitor, Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin, aged thirty-four, and Vlasov’s alarm was twofold:
Firstly, like everyone else at the Kremlin, he feared that the whole KGB operation abroad was in danger of being blown.
Secondly Lyalin had been a member of Department V (assassination and sabotage) and, before his promotion to chairman, Vlasov had been head of that particular department.
Vlasov had not the slightest doubt that his enemies would store that ammunition in their armoury for future use. So he set out to try and prove that Lyalin wasn’t wholly responsible for the debacle; in fact, he didn’t believe that he was.
Several weeks later he sat in his huge office at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow, watching the pellets of snow bounce off the window and reviewing his progress in the Lyalin affair.
It wasn’t spectacular.
Vlasov, an elegant man by Soviet standards, with greenish eyes and a skull that looked peculiarly fragile, as though a single blow with a fist would shatter it, pressed a red button on his desk.
Immediately the door opened. A bald-headed man wearing rimless glasses materialised. ‘Can I help you. Comrade Vlasov?’
‘Has the computer come up with the answers?’
‘Not yet, Comrade Vlasov.’ The bald-headed man ventured a joke. ‘It is British made.’
‘The British didn’t waste any time in September.’
The bald-headed man’s expression changed as he realised that the joke had been untimely.
Vlasov said: ‘The trouble with the computer is that it’s creaking at the joints. Go and give it a kick.’
The door closed. Vlasov shivered despite the fierce central heating that – so they claimed – exhausted his staff. He was never really warm but today he was chilled to the bone. It was that frozen snow, as hard as gravel, sweeping into Moscow from Siberia.
He lit a cigarette with a yellow cardboard filter and poured himself a glass of Narzan mineral water. Theoretically, he shouldn’t have to bother about exonerating Department V; as head of the KGB, which penetrated every stratum of life from the Central Committee of the Communist Party down to the smallest commune in Georgia, he should have been the most powerful man in the land.
Theoretically. Not in practice. Acutely aware of the lurking threat of the monster in their midst, successive Kremlin regimes had made it their business to dissipate the power of the KGB. Every move, every appointment and promotion, was supervised by a special department created by the General Committee of the Party.
Vlasov pressed his fingertips to his fragile-looking temples, Another debacle like London and he would be toppled from his throne. But not if I have my way, he thought. It had taken too long to be crowned.
His thoughts descended from the mahogany panelled office, from the great desk with its batteries of telephones, to the white-tiled cells of Lubyanka Prison somewhere below him in the same building ….
A knock on the door. ‘Come in.’ Vlasov took the lime-green sheet of paper from the bald-headed man and dismissed him.
The computer had printed eight code-names on the paper. The names were the feedback from information compiled by Vlasov during interludes of free time since September.
Each code-name represented a KGB agent abroad. If the aged computer (a replacement was on order) had done its job, each of the agents was above suspicion. With one small qualification: they all demonstrably enjoyed the Western life style.
Not that Vlasov could blame them – he had served in Soviet embassies in Washington, Ottawa and Copenhagen. No, their weakness was their failure to disguise their enjoyment. These eight men, according to the computer, were the most likely agents to succumb to Western blandishments. Just as Lyalin had done.
Not that any of them would be replaced. Just watched. A fatherly eye.
The eighth name was Karl Werner Danzer.
Vlasov sighed and pushed back the heavy drawer of the filing cabinet. The Americans and British had a saying for it: You can’t win ’em all. Danzer had just been accepted by the powerful elite clique known as Bilderberg: it had been Vlasov’s greatest coup since his appointment as KGB chairman.
He picked up one of the telephones, and when the girl on the switchboard answered, told her to arrange for the central heating to be switched up. He wondered if it also heated the cells in Lubyanka Prison.
* * *
Helga Keller was at first so overjoyed by the rekindling of Danzer’s love that she didn’t notice any difference in his attitude.
‘But why were you so offhand … so cruel that night?’ she asked and was completely satisfied when he replied: ‘A business deal fell through. It would have netted the Cause hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs. I wouldn’t have been good company that night.’
But there had been three more days and nights of misery and she asked him about them, and was again satisfied when he said: ‘I was still feeling bad; I didn’t want to upset you,’ and kissed her.
He was still as eager as ever to hear the titbits of conversation she picked up from her father’s dinner table and the Investors’ Club. Hints of deals, loans, devaluations, market trends ….
He seemed pleased with what she obtained, but she wasn’t naive enough to believe that her contributions were devastatingly important and when he suggested that she accept dinner invitations – particularly from American financiers – she reluctantly agreed.
He seemed particularly impressed by one item she innocently extracted from a drunken banker over a champagne cocktail. Astonished even. She had told Danzer that the banker had been celebrating an invitation to Bilderberg.
‘Did he know the date?’
‘I think it was April 21
.’
‘Where?’
‘Knokke in Belgium.’
‘I didn’t even know that,’ Danzer said as he stood sipping a gin-and-tonic in his living-room.
‘Should you have known, darling?’
Danzer said enigmatically: ‘I thought so.’
He seemed distressed, Helga thought. She wished it was because she had been dated by the American banker who was as rich as Croesus. But she was honest enough to acknowledge that it was the mention of Bilderberg that had upset him.
Danzer was depressed for the rest of the day. And it was only then that she realised how much he had changed since that day when he had stood her up. Like it or not, that’s what he had done. From time to time she saw him in the company of a big black man and an Englishman – attractive in a shabby sort of way – but it wasn’t until much later that she associated them with the change in Karl.
She assumed it was the pressures under which he was working that were affecting him. It was tough enough dealing in currency in Zurich: she could imagine what it must be like when you were double-dealing. And for a goal, an ideal ….
The change in Karl Danzer only served to add another dimension to Helga’s love: she worried for him. Perhaps he was under investigation of some sort; she approached the subject circumspectly once, but he reacted so savagely that she never asked again.
But if he were caught …. She stared into a future as bleak as bereavement.
* * *
The snow had settled on the lower flanks of the mountains and still Danzer had not been bled dry. He seemed to ration his intelligence as though he sensed that, when it ran out, so would his usefulness – although Anderson went to considerable pains to assure him that the West needed him for the purposes of misinformation.
One Saturday afternoon just before Christmas, when Anderson was again in Washington, Prentice drove fifty miles from Zurich to the run-down ski-resort where Danzer owned a chalet.
He strapped skis to the roof of the silver BMW and covered everything, except the tips of the blades, with tarpaulin. Under the tarpaulin, between the skis, he slotted a Russian Kalashnikov rifle fitted with a telescopic sight.
The sky was a metallic blue and the white fangs of the mountains were sharp against it. Prentice took the Berne autobahn. The traffic was thin, the Germans in their Mercedes stoically unconcerned as the French drivers overtook them in their big Citroens. Prentice drove at a steady 40 mph; no sense in attracting attention when your baggage included a sniper’s rifle; Saddler had taught him never to break small laws when you were about to shatter big ones.
Twenty miles out of Zurich he took an exit to the left. The snow was hard-packed and, occasionally, the heavy-duty tyres spun on the polished surface. He stopped two miles outside the ski-resort. To his left stood a house which he had rented for six months under the name of Gino Salvini. It was a modest establishment by Swiss standards, four rooms built over a garage. Covered with snow and gilded by the sunlight, it looked positively chic. Always sell a car in the rain, they said: in Switzerland always sell a house covered with snow.
Prentice opened the doors of the garage. Inside was an egg-shell blue Alfasud bearing Italian codeplates and registered H52870 MI. He turned on the ignition. The engine fired first time and he drove onto the drive beside the BMW.
The house and the drive were hidden from the road, surrounded by low hills spiked with pine trees. He backed the BMW into the garage, removed the ski-rack complete with the skis and rifle, adjusted it and fitted it onto the roof of the Alfasud. Then he locked the garage, took the wheel of the Alfasud and drove back onto the road.
From the road he could now see the village – a few snow-bonneted houses, a church with a needle-pointed spire, a shop or two and an hotel that had once specialised in package deals before a tour operator had made the astounding discovery that the terrain wasn’t a happy choice for sking; the consistency of the snow was never quite right – something to do with a warm wind that nosed through the valley – and the ski-runs were too short.
It wasn’t quite accurate to describe the resort as rundown: it had never got up. Nevertheless, a ski-lift served the slope with erratic rhythms, but it was rarely used.
Prentice surveyed the village, the snow-patched valley and the white battlements beyond. Then he glanced across the valley to a cluster of chalets. One of these belonged to Karl Danzer. Doubtless he would have preferred St. Moritz or Klosters but this served his purpose. It was undeniably low-profile.
Prentice drove in second gear down the hill to the village. Before climbing out he adjusted the neck of his black sweater so that it masked the lower part of his face, and pulled up the fur-lined hood of his jungle-green parka.
He inspected the control cabin of the ski-lift. Like the scarlet cable-cars themselves, it had been constructed with grandiose ideas. But it had a disused air about it and the operator, wearing a plum-coloured uniform shiny with wear, was leaning back in his chair reading a copy of Der Blick.
The operator could, if asked, stop the ascending cable-car half way up the valley, at a platform designed to serve the cluster of chalets on the hillside. He looked as if any request would severely disrupt the tempo of his day.
Prentice made a note of the times of the last three ascents, the list on the wall compiled, presumably, in headier days. He tried the handle of the door. It was open. The operator looked up frowning, indicating with his thumb that Prentice should use the staircase to the platform where an empty car waited for passengers, and returned to his newspaper.
Prentice signalled that he understood. Then he set the stop-watch on his wrist and walked rapidly back to the Alfasud. When he reached the car he climbed in and set the stop-watch again. He drove up the hill, beside the thickly-greased cables, to an observation parking lot with room for about a dozen cars.
There were three cars there. One Swiss, one Belgian and one British, a Ford Granada. The boot of the Granada was open and a middle-aged couple were brewing tea on a spirit stove.
Prentice clocked himself from the village to the observation post. It was 4.37: it had taken him exactly three minutes. He glanced around; the bright colours of the day were fading fast and clouds were curdling on the mountain-peaks. The wind that played havoc with the piste was iced now, and there was a cruelty about the evening.
Prentice set the stop-watch again, put on climbing boots and set off down the precipitous path beside the car-lot. Almost immediately, he was out of sight from anyone above; not that anyone would be able to see much in the gathering dusk.
He reached a bed of flat rocks a hundred yards beneath the car-lot. It was surrounded by stunted pine trees capped with snow. He checked his stop-watch again and lay down on the rocks and peered through the feeble growth, none of the pines bigger than Christmas trees.
Above him to the right, on the far side of the valley, stood the cluster of chalets. Danzer’s was the biggest, made from split pine painted blue with fretted eaves and a balcony on which to drink wine on summer evenings. Prentice had been there several times with Anderson; so, according to the bug in Danzer’s apartment, had the girl. And many other girls ….
The cables jerked suddenly. He restarted the stop-watch. He couldn’t see the descending car but in any case it didn’t interest him. He peered down the valley at the ascending car, lit now by a single naked bulb.
As he had expected, there were two men in the car. One was the attendant who had, if anything, an easier job than the operator. The other was Karl Danzer. Stop-watch off.
Danzer passed him about fifty yards away, standing impassively, staring out of the window wearing a black, Cossack-style fur hat and a grey, waisted topcoat. The scarlet car stopped at the landing half way up the slope and Danzer stepped out.
For the rest of the night, Prentice thought, Danzer would worry. Prentice had called him and made an appointment. When appointments were made and not kept, when you were left alone in a chalet high up among the pine trees, you worried. If, that is, you had been reduced to Danzer’s mental state.
Prentice began to climb the path. A car engine coughed into life. The English couple must have finished their tea.
Prentice timed himself as though he were replacing the rifle between the skis. Then he drove back through the dusk at speed, skidding round the bends as though he were on the Cresta run. At the rented house he swapped cars, locked the garage and timed himself for the last time.
The dummy run was over. Prentice licked warmth back into his frozen lips as he drove the BMW back to Zurich at a sedate pace, and thought of Danzer framed in the lighted window of the cable-car.
* * *
Unbelievably the Swissair jet arrived twenty minutes early at Kloten Airport. A tail wind, according to the pilot. A girlfriend in Zurich more likely, Anderson thought, as he passed through customs and immigration and told a cab driver to take him to the corner of the street where Prentice’s apartment was located.
A lined page from a notebook stood propped up in the bowl of fruit on the table, back at six. They were becoming like the Odd Couple, Anderson thought. The note should have added: dinner in the oven. Bubble-and-squeak!
Anderson took off his topcoat and glanced at his wrist-watch. 5.30 pm. He had half an hour in which to find out what Prentice had been up to during this three-day absence. Searching Prentice’s possessions was always an intriguing process because they gave nothing away. Nothing.
Anderson selected a skeleton key on his ring and opened the old-fashioned desk in Prentice’s room where he kept his papers. Normally you were assailed by a man’s personality when you broke into a desk; an old passport, a key to a forgotten portmanteau, a group photograph – school or Army, perhaps – with the desk’s owner staring self-consciously from the ranks; a shabby wallet containing a happy snap of a long-forgotten girl; letters, bank accounts, cheque stubs …. A man’s imprisoned past clutching at the sleeve of the experienced investigator.
Not in Prentice’s desk. It contained relics from the past but none of them had a message. It was as though Prentice had sterilised his possessions. Anderson glanced at the contents expertly: nothing had been moved since he last inspected them: as if they were as foreign to Prentice as they were to him. The collected trivia of a stranger.
Prentice, Anderson thought, had nothing except his professionalism and that was beyond doubt, its strength being its deceptiveness. With another key, Anderson opened the rudimentary safe in the wall of the bedroom – coded reports on Danzer and himself, left there no doubt for Anderson to read.
As he slotted a third key into the built-in wardrobe, Anderson heard the elevator stop outside the door of the apartment. He froze. Then the scrape of a key being inserted into the lock of the apartment across the way. He turned his own key and peered into the wardrobe. A minimum of clothes, a few pairs of shoes. He wondered what Prentice would look like in a tuxedo; attractive to women without a doubt – it was his remoteness that would appeal, that and the hint of ruthlessness.
Running his hands along the line of hanging clothes, Anderson momentarily experienced a flicker of … what? Shame? He shook his head. It was, as they said, all in the game. But he wished just for that moment that he was playing the game during a time of war, when the excuses were more flamboyantly obvious. But it’s always war, it never ceases.
He stretched out one hand to the rear of the wardrobe where, behind his shabby suitcases, Prentice kept a Russian rifle in a Dunlop golfing bag. The bag was still there. He was about to peer inside when the elevator stopped again. By the time Prentice opened the door Anderson was in the living-room pouring himself a whisky.
Anderson, who was playing black, moved his knight and said: ‘I’m beginning to agree with you about the girl.’
‘What about the girl?’ Prentice also moved a knight.
‘She’s a stupid bitch. She could be sending guys to their deaths with the information she’s passing on.’ He brooded over the board for a moment before moving his king’s knight’s pawn one square.
Prentice made his next move quickly, and then applied himself to the Daily Telegraph crossword.
Anderson thought: ‘Arrogant bastard,’ and, moving a bishop quickly, too quickly, said: ‘You know, the stuff she comes up with. Nothing spectacular but all part of a pattern. Those patterns spell out death sentences ….’
Prentice shrugged. ‘We’re at war,’ voicing Anderson’s earlier thoughts. ‘We’ve got our Helga Kellers. It all balances out in the end. I’ve moved,’ he added, pointing at a pawn.
Anderson castled. Prentice immediately moved a bishop and returned to the crossword puzzle, filling in the squares as quickly as though he were writing a letter.
Anderson pored over the board. ‘She heard about Bilderberg before him. That shook the bastard.’
‘Did he pass it on to Berne?’
‘Of course. All to the good. We want Moscow to go on thinking he’s on his toes. By the way,’ Anderson said, moving a pawn to queen’s knight three, ‘I picked up the guest list in Washington. Danzer’s on it. You’re not,’ he added with satisfaction.
‘I know. I calculate that I’ll be invited every three years. Any new names?’
‘A few …. Have you nearly finished that goddam crossword?’
‘Nearly. One more clue. No way near my record, though.’
‘Tough,’ Anderson said.
‘What are the new names?’
‘How can I concentrate on chess when you want names?’ Anderson took a photostat of the list from the inside pocket of his jacket and tossed it to Prentice.
Prentice moved a pawn down the rook’s file, completed the crossword with a fairly simple anagram and picked up the list.
Anderson moved a pawn, anticipating the sacrifice Prentice intended to make. Prentice took the pawn, offering the sacrifice, a bishop, and said: ‘I see Mrs Claire Jerome is on the list for the first time.’
Should he accept or decline the sacrifice? All his instincts said: ‘Take it.’ You had to be a hot-shot to keep the upper-hand if you were a bishop down. Prentice was good, but was he that good? Anderson took the proferred bishop.
Immediately Prentice moved the pawn another square down the rook’s file. Anderson took the pawn, and for the first time Prentice deliberated over his next move.
He filled in the time by asking: ‘Why Mrs Jerome?’
Anderson leaned back and said: ‘It was about time. She is one of the richest women in the world and it is the age of sex equality. Have you got much on Mrs Jerome, George?’
‘A fair bit.’ Prentice’s hand hovered over the board, then returned to his lap. ‘We have to keep track of arms manufacturers.’
‘We?’
‘The British Government. Paul Kingdon hasn’t so far shown any interest in her companies.’
‘I’m surprised Kingdon hasn’t been invited,’ Anderson remarked.
‘So is Kingdon.’
Anderson wondered how much Prentice knew about Mrs Claire Jerome’s interests. Did he, for instance, know that she was of great assistance to the CIA? And why doesn’t he take my bishop with his rook?
Prentice took the bishop. This time Anderson moved quickly, his castled king.
‘You play a good game,’ Prentice said reluctantly.
‘We play it every day, George.’ He leaned over the board and tapped the list. ‘As you will see, there is another significant newcomer, Pierre Brossard. A lot of clout there, George. One of the richest men in Europe.’
‘And one of the meanest.’
‘I guess that’s how he got rich.’
‘He became rich helping to rebuild Europe after the war.’ Prentice made his move and relaxed a little, regarding Anderson watchfully. ‘Has Danzer got the list?’
‘Nope. Just the invitation.’
‘How much longer do you reckon before he’s told us everything he knows?’
‘About a month maybe.’ I think I’ve got the bastard now, Anderson thought; but you could never be sure with someone like Prentice; you could never be sure of anything with him. He moved his queen imperiously across the board. It looked an obvious move; perhaps it was too obvious. ‘But that doesn’t mean we’ve finished with him. We’ve got to brief him about Bilderberg.’
‘Of course. But you think the interrogation will be over some time in January?’
Anderson looked up, frowned. ‘I figure that, yes. Why?’
‘Check,’ said Prentice moving his queen.
‘Shit!’
Anderson rested his head on one hand and stared intently at the board. It was seven minutes before he moved his king.
Prentice moved his queen again. But this time she didn’t look so regally powerful.
Prentice asked: ‘What made you change your opinions about the girl?’
‘I didn’t change them. I didn’t have any strong opinions. It was only when I knew that she had passed on the venue and date of Bilderberg that I realised what damage she could do. Supposing one of the terrorist organisations working with the KGB got wind of it now. They could plan six months ahead’ – putting his bishop in front of the white queen with a flourish – ‘and hold the whole bunch to ransom.’
‘Or just blow the whole bloody lot up,’ Prentice remarked, frowning at the board. ‘But Danzer would have known within a few days anyway ….’
‘Sure, in this instance. But supposing one day there isn’t any Danzer? She can still pick up that sort of information and pass it on. One thing’s for sure – something’s going to happen at that convention one of these days. All that power, all that bread ….’
‘ … under one roof.’
‘It’s your move,’ Anderson said as Prentice sank back in his chair and lit a cigarette.
‘I resign.’
Anderson felt ridiculously elated by the victory.
Prentice said: ‘I should stick to cross-word puzzles.’
‘I had an advantage,’ Anderson said. ‘I was playing black.’
* * *
Two days later Paul Kingdon telephoned from London. Listening to his Cockney voice snapping over the wires, Prentice smiled faintly: unlike most people he had a soft spot for the whizz-kid. He imagined him now, sitting at his desk overlooking the rooftops of the City of London, wolfish features tense with impatience.
Kingdon said: ‘We need everything we can get on Marks International and its subsidiaries.’
Prentice raised his eyebrows. Marks International was Mrs Claire Jerome, Coincidence? Possibly. Certainly an easy assignment: he already had plenty on Marks International. He knew, for instance, that Mrs Jerome was a good friend of the CIA.
He asked: ‘Who wants to know?’
‘I do.’
‘You and who else?’
‘Does it matter?’
Prentice didn’t reply. Only he was allowed to treat Kingdon like this. After all, where would Kingdon be without him? In jail most likely.
Finally Kingdon said: ‘Pierre Brossard.’
After Kingdon had rung off, Prentice stayed beside the telephone drumming his fingers on the table. Four months to go and already the Bilderbergers were beginning to stretch out invisible hands towards each other.
VI (#ulink_ece640af-27cb-52c1-9d43-cc7e3bc010d7)
It took until the second week in January, 1972, to bleed Danzer dry.
On January 11th Prentice and Anderson celebrated the accomplishment with a bottle of Bell’s whisky. At 7 am on January 12th Prentice set out to kill Danzer.
Anderson was still asleep when he left the apartment, having drunk most of the whisky.
Standing on the landing outside the apartment, Prentice heard Anderson laugh in his sleep; laughter from a sleeping man, he reflected, was more eerie than a scream.
He walked down the three flights of stairs and stood shivering in the darkness outside. He wore thick flannels, the roll-neck black sweater and the jungle-green parka; but winter had made a come-back. Ice particles glittered in the glow of the street-lamps, the cold prickled in his nostrils, ice crunched under his feet as he made his way to the BMW.
As he drove towards the autobahn, flakes of snow were peeling from the black sky. He could just make out the outline of the mountains. But he wasn’t sure whether he wanted the snow to thicken. Like a fog, a blizzard can be a Godsend and a hazard to an assassin. He prays for a parting in the veil when he takes aim, then pleads for the veil to be drawn again as he flees from vengeance.
After a few minutes it began to heat up inside the car. Prentice longed for a glass of orange juice followed by a mug of hot black coffee. If he felt like that, what would Anderson feel like when he woke up?
He had told Anderson that he would be driving to Berne early in the morning, usual contact number. But his true destination had been decided by Danzer speaking from his bugged apartment.
‘Let’s go to the chalet tomorrow.’
‘That would be lovely, darling.’
‘I’ve got a few things to do in town. Perhaps you could go on ahead and get the place warmed up.’
‘Put the champagne on ice?’
Stupid bitch!
‘And slip into something exotic ….’
‘Mmmmmmm.’
‘I’ll be a little late. The last cable car probably.’
‘I’ll be waiting.’
Seeing the face of Annette du Pont, Prentice had switched off the radio.
Headlights swooped along the highway. He could see the silhouettes of the mountains clearly now, rimmed with pale green light. He took the exit to the left and parked the BMW in the driveway of the rented house. He drove the Alfasud out, substituting the BMW.
Then he went upstairs, drank a glass of orange juice as though he had just staggered out of the desert, made coffee and sat in front of the picture window to watch the dawn flushing the mountains.
He sipped his coffee. The snow was beginning to fall more thickly. He wondered what it would be like by dusk.
* * *
Anderson finally got out of bed at 11.30.
His head ached and he felt sick; it was a long time since he had drunk so much whisky. Prentice, of course, had risen bright and early and gone about his business without an ache in his body. Well, Prentice wasn’t human; thank God they could split up now.
Anderson wandered into the bathroom, dropped a couple of Alka Seltzer tablets into a glass of water and watched them fizz. He tossed back the drink and stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee. Unwashed plates were piled in the sink. No more bubble-and-squeak, Anderson thought. Never.
He took his coffee into the living-room, drew the drapes and stared with disgust at the empty, whisky-smelling glasses. Later, he decided, he would call Washington, then in a couple of days drive to Knokke in Belgium to begin the preliminary checks for Bilderberg.
As soon as he learned the subjects for debate – probably as deceptively dreary as they had been at Woodstock – he would be able to brief Danzer about his leaks to the Kremlin.
Anderson wondered how long they could keep that up. Two or three years maybe if the mixture fed to Moscow was finely balanced, i.e. equal parts of harmless truth and misleading fiction. Finally, of course, the KGB would tumble what was happening …. Danzer was not a good risk for a life assurance policy.
But the information Danzer had provided, blended with the intelligence supplied by Oleg Lyalin, had been dynamite. Trust the British to expel the Soviet diplomats in London. A gunboat in Kensington! Unpredictable as always. Anderson had never believed that the British had been as naive as it seemed with traitors such as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean; he believed that, like Karl Werner Danzer, they had been used for misinformation. One day, he supposed, all the others – men like Anthony Blunt – would come crawling out of the woodwork; and even when they did, the British would keep up the deception.
George Prentice, Anderson thought, was a classic of Anglo-Saxon unpredictability and deviousness.
The philosophising intensified Anderson’s headache. He went back to the kitchen and fried some eggs and bacon. He stared at the sizzling food for a few moments, then poured the contents of the frying pan into the garbage bucket.
* * *
At the same time that Anderson was disposing of his brunch, Helga Keller was driving her grey beetle Volkswagen out of the drive of her father’s house. She had called the Investors’ Club and told them she was sick.
As she drove through the streets of Zurich, watching the snow peel off the bonnet of the car, she sang to herself. She had with her information that she thought would please Karl – a photostat of the guest list for the April meeting of Bilderberg borrowed, from the American banker. Karl’s name was on it.
After they had drunk champagne and eaten and made love, she would broach the subject that had been on her mind for weeks. She wanted to go to Russia, to see for herself the picture gallery that he had painted in her mind.
Ah, love and shared ideals. I’m so lucky, she sang to herself, as she turned off the autobahn and drove through the swirling snow towards the ski-resort.
From the picture window Prentice could just see the road. He saw the Volkswagen pass by the end of the drive. He glanced at his watch. 1.30. He would give it another three hours.
Anderson showered, shaved and dressed slowly. He could think of only one course of action that might revive him. He picked up the telephone and called a girl named Rita Geiser, whom he had met filling in the Christmas vacation from university at a toy store on the Bahnhofstrasse. The children had been absorbed with the excellent German and Swiss mechanical toys on her counter, and there had been no shortage of fathers accompanying them because she was very well built and her blouse was cut unseasonably low.
Yes, she said, she would be delighted to have dinner with him and, yes, it would be a good idea to have a few drinks at his apartment first. Anderson began to clean up the apartment, moving like an automaton, keenly anticipating the period between drinks and dinner.
His thoughts wandered as desultorily as his movements. When had Prentice received the summons to Berne? Certainly not last night; well, not as far as he could remember ….
Anderson yawned and activated the cassette that had been recording Danzer’s conversation in his apartment. The tiny tape whirred smoothly but without sound, Anderson pressed the playback button.
‘Let’s go to the chalet tomorrow.’ (Today)
‘That would be lovely, darling.’
Anderson listened to the end. So he wasn’t the only one planning recreation for the evening …. He frowned: there was something disquieting about the tape. What was it? He played it again. Then he had it. It wasn’t the end of the conversation. Prentice had abruptly terminated it. As though he had made a decision.
Anderson stood in front of the window watching the snow pouring from the sky. The disquiet persisted. He consulted his address book in which the digits of all telephone numbers were shuffled. He found the contact number Prentice had given him months ago in Berne. He reshuffled the digits, called the number and asked for Kimber, Prentice’s code-name.
‘Who’s calling?’ A woman’s voice.
‘Parsons.’ (Apparently a man named Parsons compiled the crossword in the Sunday Telegraph, Somewhere, well hidden, Prentice had a sense of humour.)
‘I’ll see if he’s available.’
Then a man’s voice, wary: ‘Who is it?’
‘Parsons.’
A pause. ‘I’m afraid Mr Kimber isn’t here.’
‘But I thought —’
‘Thought what, Mr Parsons?’
‘Wasn’t he summoned?’
A lengthier pause. ‘Not so far as we are aware. Would you care to leave a message?’
‘No,’ Anderson said, staring at the receiver in his hand, ‘no message.’
Anderson paced around the living-room. Unease gnawed at him. He tried the handle of Prentice’s bedroom; it was locked. He took the skeleton key from his ring and opened the door. The room was tidy except that the bed was unmade.
Anderson crossed the room to the built-in wardrobe. Locked. He opened it with another key. There was the Dunlop golfing bag. Even before he had opened it he knew ….
Empty!
Holy shit! The disquiet splintered into panic. He grabbed a sheepskin jacket, shoved a Magnum pistol in the pocket and ran out of the apartment.
His rented white Mercedes 450 SE was parked in a side-turning. It looked like an igloo. Anderson swept the snow from the windshield and windows with his arm.
The starting motor whined. Come on, you sonofabitch! The engine fired, faltered, then roared the third time. The clock on the dashboard said 4.48 as the Mercedes took off, rear wheels spewing snow.
Rita Geiser would have to buy her own dinner tonight.
Prentice slipped a Walther automatic, two lengths of wire and a roll of masking tape into the pocket of his parka and left the rented house in the blue Alfasud at 4.40 pm. It was still snowing and already the day was assuming the sullen textures of an early winter evening.
He drove slowly, watching the snowflakes charge the windscreen before veering away. He stopped at the brink of the hill leading down to the village. There was a light burning, in Danzer’s chalet, the girl warming the nest. The other chalets appeared to be unoccupied.
The cables were motionless and Prentice doubted whether the cars had been in use that day. He drove on down the hill and parked the Alfasud across the empty square from the control cabin.
The windows of the car began to steam up. Good. He adjusted the neck of the black sweater and pulled the hood of the parka forward. A little girl ran across the square pulling a puppy behind her. Otherwise the place was deserted. Forgotten. Preserved in snow and ice.
Here and there lights from the windows of the old-fashioned village houses lit the falling snow. He could hear a choir singing in the church. It was possible, Prentice thought, that the cable-car operator might confer with the two attendants – one stuck at the top of the mountain, poor sod – and decide to call it a day. In which case Danzer would have to walk up to the chalet through the pine trees; he would still die, but the execution wouldn’t be so neat ….
Prentice remembered the colour photograph of the Hun garian whose body had disintegrated. He felt many things as he recalled the weals, the bloody swellings, but compunction was not among them.
He consulted his watch. 5.20. the light was fading. An orange Porsche drove into the square and stopped. A man climbed out, locked the doors and began walking towards the control cabin. It was Danzer.
At least he knew the way. Had driven to the chalet half a dozen times before to interrogate Danzer.
Anderson left the autobahn too fast, skidded, drove into the skid and straightened out onto the side road.
What was it with Prentice? Anderson pressed his foot down on the gas-pedal. Danzer had said something about the last ski-lift. Well, that would be about now give or take a few minutes.
The wheels spun on the hard snow beneath the day’s fall, then gripped again.
Anderson assumed that Prentice intended to kill Danzer when he reached the chalet. Which means that I’ve got to catch that last lift.
The Mercedes reached the top of the hill. Below lay blurred lights. The village. Anderson steered the car down towards the lights. The snow poured down from the darkening sky.
Danzer walked briskly across the square. He felt elated, truly elated, for the first time since Anderson had stopped him that nightmarish evening. The interrogation was finally over; if he behaved shrewdly – and he always did – then the rewards of acting as a double-agent should be handsome.
Ahead lay a bottle of champagne on ice, a good meal and a mistress who was attentive if not practised. Tonight I shall teach her a few tricks, Danzer decided.
He vaguely noticed an Alfasud parked beside the cobbled sidewalk. Italian registration. He wondered what an Italian tourist was doing in this dump. Unloading lire probably. He forgot the Alfasud and rapped on the window of the ski-lift control cabin.
The slovenly-looking controller was buttoning a torn parka over his plum-coloured uniform preparatory to leaving. He looked aggrieved, then recognised Danzer who had in the past made a habit of tipping him well. He smiled. Danzer pointed upwards with his thumb and the controller nodded. No great favour, Danzer thought, because they had to bring the attendant at the top down to earth again.
He climbed the slippery steps and told the attendant to go home: he was perfectly capable of negotiating the doors at the platform adjoining his chalet. Rules were made to be broken and tonight he would enjoy breaking any rule in the book. He wondered if Helga Keller loved him enough to ….
He rubbed his cold hands together as the scarlet car jerked and, swinging a little from side to side, began its last ascent of the day.
Prentice waited until the homeward-bound attendant had got half way across the square. Then he walked swiftly to the glass-door of the control cabin. It opened as it had opened before. The controller swung round in his seat and stood up.
Prentice prodded the barrel of the Walther in his stomach and said: ‘Keep quiet and you won’t get hurt. When I tell you to stop the cars stop them. Understand?’ He spoke with a thick Italian accent.
‘But —’
Prentice jammed the gun deeper into the flabby belly. ‘Understood?’
The controller nodded, sweat already glistening on his lumpy face.
‘Good. Then I’m going to put this round your mouth just to make sure you don’t shout, and this,’ tossing the two lengths of wire onto the panel of dials, ‘round your wrists and ankles.’
Prentice stared up towards the cable-car, barely visible in the falling snow. He consulted his stop-watch, in thirty-five seconds the car should be opposite the rocks nestling among the little pine trees.
‘What controls the lights in the cars?’
The controller pointed at a switch to Prentice’s right.
Prentice nodded towards a grey fuse-box with one red and one green button on it. ‘Does that affect the lights in the cars?’
The controller shook his head and a few beads of sweat fell on the flickering dials.
‘Right. Now!’
The controller pulled a lever. The cables stopped. Shuddered. Prentice pulled the grey fuse-box from the wall. Sparks showered around him.
He told the controller to turn round. He put down the gun and stuck the masking tape round his mouth. ‘Now lie face down with your hands behind you.’ It took Prentice less than a minute to bind his ankles and wrists.
Then he locked the door from the outside and ran across the square to the Alfasud. As he drove up the hill the outline of the cable-car became clearer. Danzer was standing with his hands and face pressed against the glass. Suspended in space, facing the firing squad.
Anderson saw the lighted cable-car hanging motionless in the gorge and thought: ‘Christ, what a target!’ But, because his attention was concentrated on negotiating the road down to the village, it was a couple of seconds before he stamped on the brake. The Mercedes slewed first to one side, then the other, before stopping. Anderson jumped out and ran back up the road.
The snow had thinned out and the figure of Danzer was quite clear. A standing target. There was one car in the parking-lot, an Alfasud. Anderson glanced inside. On the front passenger seat lay a newspaper thickly folded so that only a completed crossword puzzle was visible.
Where was he?
Anderson stared wildly around in the fading light. To the right a pathway. Freshly kicked tracks in the snow. Anderson drew his Magnum and charged down the path.
With the night field-glasses, which Karl had used more and more frequently since the change in his personality, Helga Keller stared down the valley.
She saw him enter the cabin. Happiness expanded inside her. She smiled. Her hand went to her throat. She closed her eyes for a moment; when she opened them again the cable-car had begun its ascent bringing him to her.
She could see him quite plainly through the powerful glasses. She stretched out a hand as though to touch him.
Then the cable-car stopped.
Helga saw the frown on his face.
She focussed the field-glasses on the control cabin below to see if she could find the cause of the stoppage. There didn’t appear to be anyone there.
An avalanche higher up, perhaps. Her hands shook a little as she traversed the length of the cable with the field-glasses. On the far side of the valley, directly opposite the stationary car, she noticed a movement.
She refocussed the glasses. A man. One of the men she had seen with Karl … He was holding … a rifle …. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound issued from her lips.
Another figure entered the picture. The big black man whom she had seen with Karl ….
This time the scream found its voice – at the same time as the crack of the rifle shot. Two of the windows of the cable-car shattered, the figure of Karl Danzer disappeared.
Helga Keller, wearing the low-cut evening gown that she had bought especially for this evening, ran into the snow. Still screaming.
And it wasn’t until she saw the blood splashing on the broken shards of glass still attached to the window-frame, that she collapsed in the snow and the screams were stilled.
‘Hold it, you stupid fuck!’
Anderson aimed the Magnum at Prentice’s head. But he hadn’t recovered his balance from his headlong descent down the path. He slipped and Prentice, kneeling, swung at him with the butt of the rifle, catching him on the shin. Anderson fell into the snow, dropped the pistol.
He gazed down – into space. They were on the brink of a precipice. The last echo of the rifle-shot lost itself in the mountains; the wind whined through the jagged holes in the cable-car windows.
And then Prentice, who had discarded the rifle, was on him. Hard and wiry. Instinctively, Anderson began to employ the unarmed combat that he had learned a long while ago; his movements were brutal and measured but his instincts were out of control: he wanted to kill.
They rolled nearer to the edge of the drop. Anderson got his knee into Prentice’s groin and thrust upwards; Prentice catapulted backwards, teetered on the brink, then fell forwards towards Anderson.
As Prentice tried to get up, Anderson went for his throat. And realised, too late, that his instincts had taken over from his training. Prentice twisted to one side and chopped at Anderson’s neck with the side of one hand. Pain leaped up Anderson’s neck into his skull ….
Then Prentice was free, crouching, coming at him with both hands slicing and chopping. Anderson put up a hand to defend himself but he couldn’t fend off those hands. Like the blades of a machine, he thought, as one of them caught him just below the ear and he fell back unconscious in the snow.
Prentice picked up the rifle and started up the hill. Before climbing into the Alfasud, he gazed briefly at the cable-car suspended in the darkness below and wondered who had killed Danzer: it certainly hadn’t been him.
The Swiss are never over-anxious to publicise violent death within their country: it is very bad for their image. Better to bury the details beneath the snow which so perfectly represents their façade of pristine correctitude. Inevitably the killing of Karl Werner Danzer attracted some publicity but, with the intelligence organisations involved reluctant to become overtly involved, the stories soon drifted down-page, leaving behind the impression that jealousy had been the motive for the shooting of the womanising financier.
The cable-car was repaired; fresh snow settled in the valley.
In certain more esoteric circles no such calm was discernible.
In Washington, William Danby, head of the CIA, considered recalling Anderson and assigning the plum Bilderberg assignment to another agent. But, even if he had screwed up the perfect opportunity to feed Moscow with inspired misinformation, Anderson was still the man for the job. He was established.
Nevertheless, Danby did not refrain from informing Anderson, recovering in hospital from a dislocated vertebra in his neck, of his views on the loss of the turned Russian spy. Even more explosively, he made his views known to Leonard Ballard, head of MI6, effectively shattering Anglo-American co-operation in the field of Intelligence.
Helga Keller disappeared completely from Zurich. George Prentice gratefully accepted the offer of an extended leave, completed his investigations on Mrs Claire Jerome for Paul Kingdon, closed up his Zurich apartment and flew to Rio de Janeiro.
Lying in a hospital bed with his neck in a cast, Anderson reflected that he was lucky to have kept the Bilderberg job – any job, for that matter. And, because he had been told to relax as much as possible, he tried not to think about George Prentice (who ludicrously claimed that it wasn’t he who shot Danzer) or Helga Keller who had unwittingly lured Danzer to his death.
To assuage the anger that boiled inside him when he thought about either of them, he comforted himself by reflecting that the Russians certainly hadn’t succeeded in infiltrating any other agents into Bilderberg.
In that assumption he was entirely wrong.
PART TWO (#ulink_7af215db-8b3f-5fca-b1ba-fff9e05a36cb)
VII (#ulink_d02df335-6cea-5550-9ff5-9d7bc4a373d4)
Bilderberg, according to an article in The Times of London, ‘is best known for the fact that no one knows anything about it.’ Not strictly true, of course. A lot of people know a lot about Bilderberg; but they keep it to themselves.
Among them was Owen Anderson. Sitting up in bed in his apartment (now paid for) in New York, doing his homework for the 1975 Bilderberg at Cesme in Turkey, Anderson gained little satisfaction from his inside knowledge. As always, it seemed to him that they were setting themselves up to be destroyed.
It was only a matter of time. The American way of death. Clandestine manoeuvring followed by suicidal, well-publicised soul-baring. Like the God-awful Watergate mess ….
What the American people didn’t seem to realise, Anderson brooded as he swung his legs out of the paper-littered bed and made his way to the kitchen to make coffee, was that by over-indulging the democratic processes they were destroying democracy. Playing into the hands of tyrants who sat back and enjoyed the suicidal ceremonies ….
Could anyone imagine Leonid Brezhnev being served with subpoenas for refusing to release Kremlin tape-recordings?
Anderson tightened the belt of his white robe and drank some coffee, hoping it would drown the disillusion. He gazed out of the window at the windswept February morning. Far below, office-bound crowds strode the sidewalks, heads ducked into the wind blowing in from the East River. Not one of them, Anderson was willing to bet, was aware that in two months time a hundred or so men – and a couple of women – would meet secretly to discuss policies that would control their lives ….
So, in a way, by protecting those who attended the convention, he was protecting the people on the sidewalks beneath him. If the logic was flawed, then Anderson chose not to analyse it. He returned to the bedroom with his coffee, sat on the edge of the bed and began to read what little had been written about Bilderberg.
* * *
It was born in the early ’50s when a Polish philosopher, Joseph Retinger, and an American, George W. Ball, approached the urbane Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and asked him to preside over a series of conferences.
The aim amounted to an attempt to re-unite European-American relations that had been thrown out of gear by the Cold War. Not everyone agreed that the intent was so innocent ….
The first meeting was held at the Bilderberg Hotel, near Arnhem, in Holland, from May 29–31,1954. And one of the first critics to voice an opinion about the Bilderbergers, as they were subsequently called, was the syndicated American columnist Westbrook Pegler.
Pegler picked on the fifth conference at St. Simon’s Island, off the coast of Georgia, after a reader had told him that an almost deserted hotel there was crawling with FBI and Secret Service. Pegler immediately compared the meeting with a conference held on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1908 when the currency of the United States and the world was secretly ‘manipulated’. Pegler claimed that at the 1908 meeting, convened by Senator Nelson W, Aldrich, of Rhode Island, the Federal Reserve System was secretly hammered out.
Anderson knew about that meeting. It had been chronicled in a book by B. C. Forbes, former editor of Forbes magazine, in a book Men Who Are Making America published in 1917. And it was true that a new currency system had been written on the aptly named Jekyll Island. A government outside the government …. Just what the critics claimed Bilderberg was.
Of the 1957 Bilderberg, Pegler wrote: ‘The public knows substantially nothing about the meeting nor even who selected the company to attend or on what qualifications.’
Well, the guest-list was drawn up by an international steering committee, and Bilderberg had a Secretariat located at Smidswater 1, The Hague, Holland.
The bedside telephone buzzed and Anderson reached for it.
‘Mr Anderson?’ The nasal voice of the janitor.
‘Speaking. What is it, the bathroom?’
‘ ’Fraid so, Mr Anderson, another complaint from the folk underneath.’
‘How many times is that?’
‘About ten, I guess.’
‘Well fix it, goddam it,’ Anderson said with the full authority of a man who owned a property. He cradled the phone, drank some cold coffee and picked up a sheaf of ammunition supplied by the Liberty Lobby.
The Liberty Lobby, with offices at 300, Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington D.C., was the sworn enemy of Bilderberg. Over the years they hadn’t achieved much; small wonder when they were pitted against the power-elite of the West. But they were a thorn in the sides of Prince Bernhard and the other participants.
Anderson ran one finger down the list of Bilderberg meeting places ….
1955 – Barbizon, France, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany; 1956 – Fredensborg, Denmark; 1957 – St. Simon’s Island and Fiuggi, Italy; 1958 – sleepy little Buxton in England; 1959 – Yesilkoy, Turkey; 1960 – Burgenstock, Switzerland; 1961 – Quebec, Canada; 1962 – Saltsjobaden, Sweden; 1963 – Cannes, France; 1964 – Williamsburg, Virginia; 1965 – Lake Como, Italy ….
Anderson, who hadn’t become the Bilderbergers’ guardian angel until 1971, was sorry he had missed that one. They had stayed, of course, at the best hotel, the baronial Villa d’Este, said by some to be the best hotel in Italy. And the guest list had, as always, been impressive. Among those present, the Duke of Edinburgh, George W. Ball, one of the two innovators and Under-secretary of State, David Rockefeller (a regular), Lord Louis Mountbatten, Denis Healey, Britain’s Minister of Defence and Manlio Brosio, secretary of NATO.
Writing about the Lake Como get-together, Walter Lucas of The Christian Science Monitor, had commented: ‘But there is nothing mysterious or sinister about it all.’
A good Christian conclusion, Anderson thought. If a little naive ….
1966 – Wiesbaden, Germany; 1967 – Cambridge (surely a dangerous location!), England; 1968 – Mont Tremblant, Canada; 1969 – Copenhagen, Denmark; 1970 – Bad Ragaz, Switzerland.
Then Woodstock, followed by Knokke in Belgium – a golden opportunity to screw the Russians sabotaged by George Prentice, Saltsjobaden once again, Megeve in France and now Cesme.
He thumbed through the documents supplied by the Liberty Lobby, stopping at an extract from the Congressional Record dated September 15, 1971. John R. Rarick, of Louisiana, had once again raised Bilderberg in the House of Representatives – his fifth foray that year.
Rarick asserted that he had tried, so far unsuccessfully, to get the U.S. Attorney General to take action against Bilderberg on the grounds that it violated the Logan Act.
He also inserted into the Record a revised article by two authors, Eugene Pasymowski and Carl Gilbert, which first appeared in the Temple University Press. The article was the most comprehensive Anderson had come across.
It drew attention to the preponderance of members of the Council on Foreign Relations, among the American participants. It also underlined the ties with NATO and the big bands of the West.
But even these two writers, who had obviously exhaustively researched their subject, had failed to discover what was actually said during discussions on such subjects as the ‘contribution of business in dealing with the current problems of social instability.’
They should have access to my little bugs, Anderson thought.
The critics, of course, claimed that Bilderbergers schemed outside the conference chamber. Claimed, for instance, that after the Woodstock meeting, American speculators dispatched billions of dollars to West Germany – and made billions when Richard Nixon devalued the dollar a few weeks later.
Well, only the mentally-retarded would believe that fluctuation in currencies, in gold and silver, was outside the interests of Bilderbergers; that they didn’t concern themselves with political manipulation, the removal of unfriendly regimes, supplies of armaments and raw materials to the right people ….
The few Bilderbergers who had ever discussed the meetings – albeit uncommittally – had agreed that contact was everything. Only a simpleton would accept that they didn’t profit from that contact.
The Vietnam War that had ended for America on January 23, 1973, had undoubtedly taken up much of their time – Henry Kissinger frequently attended the meetings …. Soon the Prince Bernhard scandal would break. Would the fact that their illustrious chairman had accepted bribes be the end of Bilderberg? Anderson doubted it: that sort of clout could ride any storm.
One of the most succinct comments in Anderson’s file was made by C. Gordon Tether in the London Financial Times. On July 10, 1974, he ended an article with the words: ‘It might be added that, if those foregathering at the Bilderberg shrine want to demonstrate that there is nothing questionable about their “humane activities”, they could with advantage go to more trouble to avoid fostering the opposite impression.’
Anderson considered the list of participants at the meeting to be held at Cesme. Even if Bilderberg secrecy was undented, changes were being wrought: sex equality had touched its calculating soul.
Among the women invited was Mrs Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Opposition in Britain. Which, Anderson thought, was a happy omen for Mrs Thatcher. The Western world’s leaders, so it was said, were drawn from the ranks of Bilderberg. Gerald Ford was a relatively unknown member of the House of Representatives when he attended.
Anderson yawned and stretched. Not for him to pass judgement on the deliberations of the Brotherhood. It was his job to stop them being spied upon – or killed.
He turned his attention to two stacks of dossiers piled up beside the bed. One contained the computerised background on newcomers to the conference; the other, material on regulars which had been substantially revised.
He began with the second stack and picked up the top two files. Mrs Claire Jerome and Pierre Brossard. He decided to study Mrs Jerome first: not only was she prettier but she had an appointment later that day with the President of the United States.
* * *
In a penthouse two blocks away from Owen Anderson’s apartment, Claire Jerome was luxuriating in a bathtub gazing at a building which may or may not have been the Taj Mahal. In a blue pool in front of the building a muscular young man was swimming energetically in pursuit of a girl who looked not unlike Dorothy Lamour in her prime. It had so far taken him five years to catch her; perhaps, Claire pondered lazily, she should recall the painter and shift the young man a little nearer to his goal on the mural.
She lay back in the black marble bath, toyed with the foam and breathed the perfume rising from the water. The bathroom really was decorated in atrocious style. Which was just how she wanted it. For fifteen minutes every day she escaped from convention. Black back (gold taps), white-tiled floor, a multitude of steam-proof mirrors and the wall-painting, which looked like a still from an early colour movie, was just about as vulgarly unconventional as you could get.
Claire adored the place. She glanced at the Philip Patek watch on her wrist: she still had five more minutes left in which to let her thoughts roam away from board meetings, executive decisions, business luncheons, scheming colleagues ….
She stretched out one leg and squeezed a sponge over it. Why did girls advertising baths or bath-salts always do that? Four minutes left …. Her thoughts drifted into the future; recently this was the direction they had been taking, accompanied by a vague sense of dissatisfaction. Unfulfilment? Now she was becoming her own psychiatrist. Perhaps she should restrict her therapy to ten minutes.
She stepped out of the bath and surveyed herself from every angle in the mirrors. Pushing thirty-eight, not bad. Full firm breasts, flat belly; the figure of a woman ten years younger. And yet there was something unfulfilled about it. You’re getting neurotic, she told herself; she towelled and anointed herself, removed her shower cap and let her jet black hair fall over her shoulders.
The unease dispersed.
Mrs Claire Jerome, fifth richest woman in the world, de facto head of Marks International, the multi-national corporation founded on armaments, strode into the bedroom and gazed dispassionately at the man propped against the pillows in the big round bed reading a copy of Time magazine.
‘I see we made it again,’ he remarked, tapping the magazine with one finger.
‘We?’
‘Okay, you.’ He yawned. ‘Are you always crabby like this in the morning?’
‘I enjoy my privacy.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me to get out last night?’
‘I thought I did,’ said Claire, sitting in front of the dressing-table and beginning to apply foundation cream.
‘I’m sorry. I guess we both fell asleep.’
Claire observed him in the mirror. Crisply handsome and physically in good shape, age only beginning to show in that tautness of the facial muscles peculiar to men who had knifed their way to the top, and knew that other blades were flashing behind them.
Well, almost to the top. Stephen Harsch was in his early forties, an age when you could still be described as ‘an up-and-coming young executive.’ Forty-five and you were a middle-aged fixture. Harsch was No. 4 in the Marks hierarchy and was anxious to become No. 3 as quickly as possible.
Which, Claire knew perfectly well, was why he was in her bed. Ostensibly he was at the moment very pro Claire (No. 2) and her father, the titular head of the business. A proxy vote was looming and Harsch was marshalling the stockholders behind father and daughter. When he had won that round, Harsch would be agitating against them.
The knowledge didn’t disturb Claire. She understood the Harschs’ of the world: she was their female counterpart. And her reasons for wanting Harsch in her bed were equally calculating: sexual satisfaction. And to have someone beside you, an unsolicited voice whispered.
Angry with herself, she smudged her lipstick.
Behind her Harsch began to read aloud from the Time article in the Business and Economy section headed ARMS AND THE WOMAN. It struck her, as she erased the smudge with a tissue, that the article contained exactly the sort of ammunition that Harsch would direct against her when/if he got the No. 3 job.
When is an enemy of Israel not an enemy? When he’s a Persian, according to U.S. arms dealers assuaging their consciences about the destination of their weaponry in the Middle East.
Few armaments manufacturers would overtly clinch deals with states committed to anti-Israel policies. But for a long time Pentagon officials have succeeded in the not-too-daunting task of persuading them that the pro-West Iran falls into a different category. That by strengthening Western clout in the Middle East they are, in fact, helping the cause of the beleagured Israelis. In 1974 a staggering $3.9 billion of the total $8.3 billion arms sales went to Iran.
Currently facing the dilemma of whether or not to help satisfy the Shah’s insatiable appetite for the most sophisticated arms is Mrs Claire Jerome, 38, head, in all but title, of Marks International, the California-based conglomerate. Mrs Jerome is Jewish and she has in the past proved to be intransigent on her Middle East policy to supply only the Jews. But this time the Shah from his Peacock Throne is dangling a $1.5 billion carrot. Can Mrs Jerome, bearing in mind the interests of stockholders and employees, afford to disregard it?
‘Well,’ Harsch asked, ‘can she?’
Claire Jerome began to brush her shiny hair. ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ she said. ‘And Stephen ….’
Harsch looked up inquiringly.
‘I think I did tell you to get the hell out of it last night. Would you oblige now please?’
‘Okay, okay.’
‘And shower in the other bathroom, would you. This is strictly private.’
Harsch gathered together his crumpled clothes and headed for the door. In the circumstances, Claire thought, he managed to muster a little dignity.
At the door, shielding his nakedness with his clothes, he turned and said: ‘You know you’ll have to make up your mind about that order from Iran pretty damn soon.’
She said: ‘I’m flying to Washington today to discuss it.’
Harsch frowned. ‘Who with?’
Claire Jerome enjoyed her moment. ‘With the President of the United States,’ she told him.
Happier now, she put on a dark-grey, two-piece suit and red cashmere roll-neck sweater, fetched her mink and went down in the elevator to the lobby, where the driver of her Rolls Corniche was waiting for her.
* * *
1.43 pm. The Oval Office of the White House.
Claire Jerome entered nervously. The President rose to greet her. It was odd, she reflected, that a couple of years ago she would have been quite composed in the presence of this man; now because he was President by default she was agitated.
The President, tall and hefty and a little gangling with pale thinning hair, did his best to put her at her ease. He wagged his pipe at her. ‘Do you mind this?’
She managed a smile and shook her head. ‘But I don’t care for cigar smoke.’ He probably smoked them in secret.
‘I wish,’ the President said, ‘that every business tycoon I met looked like you.’
Claire began to relax because he was so relaxed.
‘I want you to meet Bill Danby,’ the President said. He corrected himself. ‘Although I think you two know each other already.’
Danby inclined his head and smiled. ‘We have met.’
The last time had been in Danby’s office on the outskirts of the city, when she had assured him that she intended to continue Marks International’s policy of collaborating with the CIA.
A steward in a red jacket served coffee. Claire declined and the President said: ‘Bill will have your cup. He lives on the stuff. Would you prefer tea?’
Claire, who would have preferred a beer, shook her head. So did the President; perhaps he would have liked a beer too. Danby sipped his coffee – contained and watchful as always but not as omnipotent as he seemed in his own office. The Oval Office did that to people.
As Claire glanced around the room, history enfolded her. Oil-paintings of Lincoln and Washington resurrected the past; so did the furniture – an antique chest of drawers, a grandfather clock loudly ticking away the present into the past.
The President – or his wife – had taste.
The Presidential desk and its environs, however, were an island on which the man’s own personality was stamped. Behind his swivel seat, between desk and the gold-draped windows, was a table on which stood photographs of his family; on the desk was a pennant bearing the name of a College baseball team.
The President relit his pipe and said: ‘It’s been Cambodia day today. Do you think we should cut aid, Mrs Jerome?’ He peered at her through a cloud of smoke.
‘It’s in my interests to say no, I guess. But to be truthful, I don’t think it’s going to do much good. The Government will fall however much we send them.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right. But we can’t reduce our commitment. Never let it be said that the United States has been niggardly.’ He pointed his pipe at Danby. ‘Bill, I think agrees with both of us.’
‘That’s how I keep my job,’ Danby remarked. His spectacles glinted in the light pouring down relentlessly from the ceiling. The only hint of human frailty about him was the suspicion of a quiff in his hair, a relic of innocence. ‘In fact, I do agree with both of you. Yes, we should stick to our commitment, no it won’t do any good.’
The President traversed the Asian continent and said: ‘I hear you’ve been offered the opportunity to provide aid where it might do more good, Mrs Jerome.’
Claire noticed clips from Time, Newsweek and a couple of newspapers on his desk. ‘I’m not so sure about the latter part of your remark, Mr President.’
‘Indeed? Why not, Mrs Jerome?’
‘I believe our commitment’ – their phraseology was infectious – ‘in Iran is becoming gross. The Shah hoards arms like other people hoard gold. He needs advice, not guns.’
‘Well, Bill,’ the President said easily, puffing on his pipe, ‘what do you say to that?’ ‘Simple. No prevarication this time. I think Mrs Jerome is wrong. The Shah needs us, we need the Shah. According to our information, he’s in a strong position and we need to keep him that way. What’s more,’ Danby added, ‘I don’t think Mrs Jerome is being totally honest with herself.’
Claire Jerome understood Danby’s resentment: it was the first time since her father had agreed to sell arms to U.S. Intelligence customers that she had questioned the Agency’s judgement.
She said: ‘I presume you mean the fact that I’m Jewish. Well, of course, you’re correct up to a point. In the Middle East I’ll only sell to Israel. One day Iran could become actively hostile to the Jews.’
‘I rather doubt that,’ Danby remarked, reaching for the cup of coffee intended for Claire.
Claire said: ‘I think you rather underestimate the power of Islam. Come to that, so does the Shah.’
Danby said: ‘The Iranians are not in the same bracket as Libya or Syria.’
‘They worship the same God,’ Claire said. ‘And as you probably know,’ wondering if he did, ‘Persia was conquered by the Arabs in 671 A.D. and their principal language, Farsi, is written in Arabic script.’
The President grinned. ‘I’m learning,’ he said. ‘Does it amount to this, Mrs Jerome, that irrespective of the pros and cons about Iran, you have no intention of doing business with the Shah?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘I wonder,’ Danby said, taking off his spectacles and polishing them with a white handkerchief, ‘what your stockholders will think about losing one and a half billion dollars worth of sales.’
The President’s manner became less easy-going. ‘That’s a private matter for Mrs Jerome,’ he said. ‘Doubtless she will be able to handle it and doubtless some other company will be only too pleased to accommodate the Peacock Throne. I hear,’ he said to Claire, ‘that you will shortly be visiting one of the Shah’s neighbours.’
Claire looked at him sharply. She realised suddenly that this was the reason for the summons to the White House, not Iran. ‘You mean the Bilderberg convention in Turkey, Mr President?’
‘Exactly. Bilderberg worries me, Mrs Jerome.’
‘But —’
He held up one large, well-manicured hand. ‘I know what you’re going to say. I’m an old Bilderberg hand myself. Well, that’s true enough. It would have been very stupid of an obscure politician to refuse their invitation, now wouldn’t it.’
‘I guess so,’ warily.
‘You are in an extremely advantageous position, Mrs Jerome. You are not, as yet, a member of the clique. You haven’t completely thrown your hand in with them.’
Did he want her to spy on them? If so, why hadn’t Danby made the approach? She glanced at the Director of the CIA; he had replaced his spectacles and his face was expressionless.
‘I am suggesting, Mrs Jerome, that you are in a unique position to be able to report back to me any … any extracurricular activities. Trends in the sale of the commodities in which you specialise – and anything else which you think would be in the interests of the United States.’
‘But surely —’
The President cut in: ‘I will, of course, receive many reports. One of my assistants is attending. But your contacts will be rather special, Mrs Jerome.’
‘But surely Mr Danby has such matters in hand.’
The President said: ‘I don’t doubt that Mr Danby is also represented at Bilderberg. I do doubt that his representative – or representatives – will operate in the same circles as yourself, Mrs Jerome.’
For the first time Claire Jerome sensed hostility between the two men. The President wanted an end to intrigue outside his authority. And he wanted Danby to know that he wanted it.
She said ‘You know, of course, that there is a gentleman’s agreement not to divulge anything that happens at Bilderberg.’
‘I know that very well, Mrs Jerome. But you are not a gentleman. You are a woman. And, if I may say so, a very attractive one.’
The President’s heavy-handed charm reached her; what saved it, was its apparent sincerity. Flattery will get you everywhere. ‘Mata Hari, Mr President?’
He smiled. ‘Everything hinges on your priorities. Which is more important: Bilderberg or the United States of America?’ He swivelled round in his chair and Claire caught a glimpse of the President’s responsibilities – in his family photographs. Wife, children, dogs … millions of them.
She asked: ‘What worries you about Bilderberg?’
He answered promptly: ‘Their power and, paradoxically, their vulnerability. Can you imagine what a temptation they must present to the enemies of the West?’
He stood up, towering over them. ‘Lunch-time, all fifteen minutes of it. Bill has got to be on his way too – to decide whether or not his organisation ever contemplated assassinating Fidel Castro.’
Danby stood up unsmiling. ‘Not to mention the Kennedys, John or Robert, take your choice.’
The President clumped him on the back, a considerable clump. ‘Don’t be bitter, Bill. All I seek is a little honesty. God knows we need it.’
Danby said tersely: ‘I’m sure the Russians agree with you,’ and walked swiftly to the door.
As the President escorted her out of the office, Claire said: ‘Do you mind if I ask you just one question?’
‘Fire away, Mrs Jerome.’
‘Do I gather from our conversation that you believe that Bilderberg constitutes a greater authority than the Presidency?’
‘A good question, Mrs Jerome. Perhaps you will help me to answer it.’
The door closed behind her.
* * *
The Golden Dolphin Hotel – or holiday resort as the management prefers it to be called – is located in the Turkish village of Cesme overlooking the Aegean Sea. It is a modernistic complex of buildings, boasting 900 rooms and private moorings for those guests who own yachts.
On Friday, April 25, it was virtually a fortress. Armed Turkish troops and police stood guard, and the casual visitor – if he were allowed to get that far – might well have assumed that terrorists were holding a bunch of wealthy guests as hostages. (Had this been so, the captors would have been in a position to demand an astronomical ransom; what’s more they would probably have got it.)
The prisoners were, in fact, there by choice. A wise choice because Cesme is remote, and ‘easily accessible’ is not a phrase that lightens the hearts of Bilderbergers gathering in force.
Sitting in the sun on one of the balconies, a middle-aged Frenchman with a long lean body and sparse hair combed into grey wings above his ears, was disputing a bill for a bottle of Perrier water with a waiter. The host country picked up the tab, but Pierre Brossard queried all financial transactions on principle.
The waiter who, like the rest of the hotel staff, hoped to make a killing in tips, gazed with astonishment and chagrin at the Frenchman who, he had been told, was one of the richest men in Europe.
Brossard, clad only in a pair of briefs, his disciplined body glistening with sun-tan oil, ignored the waiter and concentrated on his pocket calculator while he converted Turkish lire into French francs. ‘Preposterous,’ he finally remarked in English.
The waiter looked stunned; even he could just about afford a bottle of mineral water at the Golden Dolphin.
‘I shall take it up later with the management,’ Brossard told him and dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
Well satisfied with the one-sided exchange, Brossard leaned back in his canvas chair, contemplated the sparkling blue sea, and considered the good fortune that inexorably came his way these days.
His empire was flourishing. New office blocks were shooting up in Paris, Marseilles and Montreal; his oil tankers hadn’t yet lost any cargoes through the fuel crisis; the circulation of his financial newspaper published in Paris was climbing steadily, thanks largely to its prestigious columnist, Midas.
Pierre Brossard found this particularly satisfying; Pierre Brossard was Midas.
He applied more sun-tan oil, feeling the whippy muscles on his body. He had just completed a course at a health farm and he was trim after ten days of starvation and exercise. Brossard planned to eat well at Cesme, at other people’s expense.
He slid a plastic protector over his nose to prevent it peeling and turned his attention to his less publicised enterprises. Brossard acted as middleman in oil and armaments deals. He represented many countries, Israel included, but not, to his regret, the hard-line Arab states who dealt exclusively through the debonair Mohamed Tilmissan and Adnan Kashoggi.
At Bilderberg there was much business to be negotiated.
He sipped his Perrier water. What a target we represent, he thought. On the charter plane from Zurich to Izmir, fifty miles from Cesme. Here at the hotel, despite the security.
Brossard didn’t want any harm to come to the Bilderbergers. And not merely out of consideration for his personal safety. If the rumours were to be believed, he was about to be asked to become a member of the steering committee. Brossard calculated that, when he was on the committee, he could expect to be present at the next five conferences. Then he would retire – from Bilderberg and business life. After a coup, already burgeoning in his mind, that would shatter the financial structure of the Western world.
The bell on the door to the hotel room rang and Brossard called out: ‘Who is it?’
‘Mrs Jerome.’
Brossard removed the nose-protector, slipped on a Navy blue sports shirt and let her in. ‘Right on time,’ he said leading her onto the balcony. ‘But in my experience Americans are usually punctual.’ He moved a seat into the shade for her. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Why not? It’s on the house. How about some tea?’
Brossard called Room Service and sat down opposite her. She was wearing a white skirt and a pink silk blouse with a rope of pearls round her neck. With her black hair shining in the sun, she looked attractive and ten years younger than her age.
But not my type, Brossard thought. During sex she would be passionate and practised but at the same time watchful, looking for weakness. Like so many successful American women.
Not my type at all. Pierre Brossard thought of the blonde girl in the black corselette in Montmartre, whose apartment he had vacated prior to catching the plane to Izmir. The pain had been truly delicious, the weals beneath his shirt and briefs there to remind him of it.
Claire Jerome would interpret such sexual behaviour as a sign of decadence, weakness. Why? He remained strong and purposeful and his preferences hurt no-one; no-one but himself that is.
The waiter served the tea, glancing nervously at Brossard. Brossard signed the bill without looking at it and the waiter fled.
Claire Jerome added sugar and lemon and said: ‘Don’t you ever tip them?’
‘I presume service is included,’ Brossard said.
‘You certainly live up to your reputation.’
Brossard smiled thinly. ‘You flatter me. Have you just arrived?’
‘No, yesterday. I stopped off at the Efes Hotel in Izmir to see how Bernhard handled the Press.’
‘And how did he?’
‘Effortlessly. He told them that they hadn’t got a hope in hell of getting into the Golden Dolphin and that’s about all he told them. But it was hilarious really. As you know, the United States imposed an arms embargo on Turkey this year because they invaded Cyprus. The Turkish journalists think that’s why we’re all here.’
Brossard stretched and winced; the blonde girl had perhaps been a little too zealous. ‘I have no doubt the arms embargo will be discussed,’ he remarked. He picked up an agenda. ‘What have we here? The Economic, Social and Political Consequences of Inflation. Well, I think we all know the answer to that – things become more expensive.’ He shifted his position in the chair; odd that the residue of pain gave no pleasure, only its infliction. ‘And here’s another item. The Arab-Israel Conflict. A titillating subject, Mrs Jerome.’
‘Stop sending arms to the Arabs,’ Claire Jerome said. ‘That would resolve it.’
‘And stop sending them to the Israelis?’
‘The Israelis are under siege.’
Brossard shrugged. ‘Anyway, this is a pleasant setting in which to do business.’
‘Bilderberg always seems to choose well.’
‘Shall we go into the bedroom, Mrs Jerome? Our voices may carry out here ….’
In the bedroom he wiped the oil from his face with a towel, and said softly: ‘Have you come to a decision about the Iranian deal, Mrs Jerome?’ adding: ‘I’m assured that the rooms have all been debugged.’
‘You know I have. Frankly I don’t know why —’ But Brossard interrupted her: ‘One and a half billion is a lot of money, Mrs Jerome.’
‘And a lot of commission.’
‘You make it sound immoral. I don’t think an arms dealer should ever sound moral, do you,’ and, walking across the room, he said: ‘Will you excuse me a minute.’
In the bathroom he examined the weals. They were really quite painful. But how could he ask anyone to bathe them? He managed to sprinkle talc on his back, then slipped into a soft, towelling robe.
‘Well, Mrs Jerome?’ he said when he returned to the room. He glanced at his watch. ‘I haven’t much time. I have other interested parties. That’s what’s so convenient about these get-togethers.’
‘The only Middle East country I sell to is Israel.’
‘Then I can’t fully understand why you bothered to come up here.’
‘I thought you might have other business to discuss.’
‘I might have had. But there are other Dealers in Death ….’
‘And there are other middlemen dealing in death.’
She picked up her purse and strode out of the room.
In the lobby Claire noticed a big black man immaculately turned out in a pearl-grey lightweight suit. Vaguely familiar … something missing … the waistcoat and the watch-chain … the American head of security at the Knokke conference.
He smiled at her and said: ‘Howdy, Mrs Jerome.’
She smiled back. ‘You looked naked without it,’ she said.
‘Come again, Mrs Jerome?’
‘The vest – and the chain.’
He relaxed. ‘You’re very observant, Mrs Jerome.’
‘And you have a very good memory, Mr —’
‘Anderson, ma’am. Take care,’ as she walked towards the reception desk to see if there were any messages.
One. Please call Mr Stephen Harsch.
To hell with Mr Stephen Harsch, directing the anger aroused by Pierre Brossard at the Marks International executive in New York.
In the corridor leading to her room, she heard a whistle. She swung round. The only other occupant of the corridor was a diminutive pageboy with an angelic face.
The anger subsided. If pageboys whistled at you in your 39th year, things couldn’t be all that bad. Suddenly she hadn’t the slightest doubt that she could handle the stockholders.
She advanced upon the pageboy who stood staring at her, terrified. ‘Here.’ She handed him a five-dollar note. ‘Go and buy yourself a new whistle.’
* * *
For three days Pierre Brossard listened attentively to what the Bilderbergers had to say in their debates. They sat alphabetically and they were allowed five minutes to air their views – longer if Prince Bernhard, who exercised control with red and green lights, thought they merited it.
At cocktail time Brossard stayed in his room making notes. Then he adjourned to private chambers and suites to meet government ministers, bankers, industrialists, financiers, heads of family dynasties, men even richer than himself …
He suggested deals, clinched deals. He heard many secrets. From Western hawks and doves; from the EEC and NATO (in particular the intent of Turkey which had closed four of America’s bases and listening posts in reprisal for the arms embargo); from men juggling dollars, marks, francs, yen, pounds …. He heard about sanction-busting in Rhodesia, diplomatic overtures in China to counter Soviet expansionism … about arms and oil – or lack of it – which were his specialities.

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