Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

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.

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.’