Derek Lambert: I, Said the Spy

‘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.

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.