Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

‘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.’