Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

‘What are you doing in here?’

‘I came to make sure that Monsieur Brossard had everything he needed. I thought I should check when there was no reply….’

‘Well, you’ve checked,’ staring at him suspiciously.

Foster nodded and walked into the corridor as the door closed behind him.

At approximately the same time a Presidential aide was informing a puzzled Pierre Brossard that the President had most certainly not requested his presence.

‘Lucky for him that he didn’t,’ the aide said to the guard posted outside the door, as they watched Brossard stumble away. ‘The President abhors drunkards.’

The guard, who thought that a man who had just been shot had a reasonable excuse for getting drunk, didn’t reply.

In a motel room eight miles from the Château, Anello stood at the window watching the traffic speeding past on the highway. He wondered if Claire had received the note. Wondered if she would act on it.

The proposition which the man with the submachine-gun had put to him had made sense. He had told him to put away the gun, he wouldn’t need it.

Anello suddenly found that he had a purpose. The effect on the international trade in arms would be negligible. But it was his own gesture. It was a beginning.

One disturbing aspect of the shooting nagged Owen Anderson, as he made his way to his room for the 6.15 pm meeting with George Prentice and Helga Keller. It looked as though the gunman had known that an empty room in the Château had suddenly been occupied. Which means that, in all probability, he was inside the hotel.

All members of the staff living outside the hotel had been screened and cleared and there wasn’t time to repeat the performance. All they could try and do was check their movements at the time of the shooting.

Where, for instance, had the trainee manager Nicholas Foster been? The previous day he had walked into the village; he may have done the same today. Anderson decided to check with the guards at the gate.

Anderson had a feeling about Foster: he was incongruous in this Gallic setting: he was also a comparative newcomer and his past history was vague. He didn’t look like a killer, but Anderson had long ceased to equate looks with criminal intent.

Of one thing Anderson was sure: the shooting had been a diversion. The would-be killer had bigger things in mind.

Prince and Vixen were waiting for King in his room.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I promised you an unpredictable. I keep my promises.’ He sat on the bed beside Helga. ‘Kingdon is still making arrangements for the transfer of the money. How about your two?’

Prentice said: ‘Luckily we left the old bug in Brossard’s original room. Brossard’s as scared as hell. Who wouldn’t be? But he’s pushing the money through.’

Helga said: ‘So is Mrs Jerome. She got the note from Anello. Thanks to George,’ she added smiling at him.

Prentice lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall. ‘Anello was as good as gold, A nice guy into the bargain. He seemed to think it’s about time Mrs Jerome was taught a lesson.’

‘Does he know we’re demanding cash?’

Prentice shook his head.

Anderson turned to Helga. ‘And our own financial arrangements?’

‘Proceeding smoothly,’ Helga said. ‘I do know about Swiss banking.’

Dollars deposited in Swiss accounts, to be converted into Swiss francs as a hedge against devaluation and inflation, were no longer welcome and the United Bank had readily agreed, at a price, to diversify the money. Some of it was being transferred to interest-earning accounts in Andorra, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and the Bahamas. Some was being deposited in a fixed-time deposit account in the Zurich bank. Some was being deposited to earn interest abroad in the name of the United Bank to avoid Swiss taxation. Some was being gambled on currency speculation. Some was being invested in gold and silver. A comparatively small proportion was being channelled into Brazilian checking accounts for immediate use.

All the transactions were being conducted on behalf of fictitious persons whose identities, careers, nationalities and credibility had been fully documented from birth.

‘So we have a situation,’ Anderson remarked, ‘where we still stand to lose if our assassin hits any of our subjects before they’ve completed the financial arrangements.’

‘Fifteen million if he hits all three of them,’ Prentice said. ‘We’ve got another whole day tomorrow. And then till 4.30 pm the following day.’

‘My guess,’ Anderson said, ‘is that the sonofabitch works in the hotel.’

‘Which reminds me,’ Helga said, ‘the English trainee manager, Foster… I found him in Brossard’s room. He claimed he was checking to see if Brossard had everything he wanted. He was lying.’

Anderson stood up. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is very interesting. I shall have to pay a call on Mr Foster. By the way,’ as he reached the door. ‘That Yugoslav booze that was delivered to Brossard. A nice touch that, George. A touch of class.’

The Telex room was empty. Foster locked it from the inside and sat at one of the machines. The tape he had stolen from Brossard’s briefcase was in three parts, one of them long, the other two short.

He switched on the machine, fed in the long tape and sat back to watch the message being hammered out at breakneck speed – as in the past he had watched his own stories being transmitted.

The byline, Midas , followed by the dateline and then the first paragraph…. After that Foster sat transfixed as one stunning revelation after another appeared in front of him.

The dollar about to crash… OPEC countries blocking all exports of oil to the United States… Russians dumping dollars… followed by the major speculators… whizz-kid Paul Kingdon involved….

As the last serpentine coil of tape sped through the machine, Foster leaned back in the chair. ‘Christ,’ he exclaimed aloud.

He had infiltrated Bilderberg to put together an exclusive, but he had never envisaged anything on this scale: the facts in front of him spelled out the destruction of the Western economy.

But were they facts? He had no way of knowing; the story wasn’t his. Certainly the author was one of the most reputable financial journalists in the world. But for Nicholas Foster, who had learned responsibility the hard way, that wasn’t sufficient. It had to be his own story. He decided to call Lucas on the Financial Times and seek his advice.

Meanwhile what had he got? Sufficient, certainly, to file a story to the newspaper that had been primed to expect a call from him. It had now been established beyond all doubt that an attempt had been made on the life of Pierre Brossard.

It didn’t require any stroke of genius to write the second paragraph to the story: —

Police and security guards responsible for the safety of some of the most powerful men and women in the Western world fear that the would-be killer may strike again.

Then the fact that the Bilderbergers, including the President of France and the former globe-trotting American Secretary of State, had decided to stay put. Followed by details of the search for bombs and the theory that the shot had been fired from the church tower.

All that was sensational enough. But Foster’s instincts told him that there was more. Paul Kingdon had told Suzy Okana that the financial structure of the world was about to change: Kingdon was named in the story written by Brossard….

He fed the two short tapes into the machine. Brossard seeking and obtaining confirmation that $5 million was being transferred to a numbered account in Zurich. Why had he waited until Bilderberg to make such a transfer?