Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

‘Okay,’ Anderson said to Foster and Suzy, ‘strip off those wet clothes.’

Foster and Suzy stared at each other. Foster shrugged. They stripped to their underclothes. Anderson and Prenticelooked appreciatively at Suzy but said nothing. She wrapped one of the robes around herself.

From the flight bag Anderson took a red Thermos flask and some white plastic containers. He poured coffee into the screw cup from the Thermos and handed it to Suzy. He opened the containers in which he had stuffed remnants of the cold lunch buffet.

Foster ate hungrily, washing down the food with hot coffee. Suzy said she wasn’t hungry. When Foster had finished, Anderson locked the cuffs round their wrists and ankles.

Prentice spread one of the curtains on the floor. He went downstairs and returned with two worn hassocks. He placed them on the curtain as pillows and said: ‘Now lie down.’ He placed two more thick curtains over them. With the remaining two pairs of cuffs, Anderson locked their feet to the railings.

Anderson said: ‘You can make as much noise as you like, no-one will hear you. And as for that scene when, back to back, one undoes the other’s cuffs, forget it. I’ve got the keys,’ as he dropped them into the pocket of his raincoat.

Prentice said to Anderson: ‘Did you bring the other gear?’

Anderson nodded. From the flight bag he took a portable radio and a tape recorder.

He said to Foster: ‘I presume it was you that put the bug in the mike in the conference room?’

Foster nodded.

‘Not exactly a pro job. But full marks for initiative. And guts,’ he added thinking about the graveyard. ‘Do you want to take over, George?’

Prentice said: ‘I gather you’re a journalist and you’ve been preparing for this for a long time.’

‘And, by Christ, I’ve got a story,’ Foster said.

‘If anyone will publish it. If anyone believes it.’ Prentice switched on the radio to see if it was working, switched it off again. ‘Well, we have decided that you deserve a story. You see at Torquay I discovered a way by which Bilderberg can be penetrated. It’s ridiculously easy and anyone can do it. All you need is a small radio with a VHF wave band.’

Foster watched him intently.

‘You know, of course,’ Prentice went on, ‘that with VHF you can pick up all sorts of radio messages. In particular police messages.’

‘But if you act on them you can be prosecuted,’ Foster said. ‘They sometimes broadcast phoney messages and when a reporter turns up to cover a fictitious robbery or something, they nick him. But I can’t see how any of this applies to Bilderberg.’

‘Think about it,’ Prentice urged Foster.

‘The interpreting apparatus!’

‘Got it in one. You see ever since Bilderberg first employed the instantaneous translation system, any journalist could have picked up all the debates. You just fiddle with the tuner on the VHF waveband and, Voila!’

An English male voice issued from the portable radio. Precise and unemotional.

‘A translation of the Swedish Prime Minister if I’m not mistaken,’ Prentice said. ‘Later on you’ll hear me. “I rise in our defence” – that’s my opening line.’

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Foster said. ‘All that secrecy all those years….’

Anderson said: ‘Think what a spy could have found out.’

‘And there’s a lot of those around,’ Prentice said.

‘So what we do,’ Prentice said, ‘is switch it up nice and loud, and at the same time switch on the tape-recorder. And there, you have a complete transcript of what’s left of the Bilderberg conference.’

Grinning, he turned and followed Anderson out of the door. Foster and Suzy heard a bolt slot into place and a key turn in the lock.

They lay back listening to the views of the Swedish Prime Minister on the fuel crisis.

It was 9 am and within ten hours they would all be dead.

And he would be gone, identity assumed five years ago discarded. A nice touch that, to revert to your former self.

As he dressed in the apartment over the tabac, he ran over in his mind the final details.

All he had to do while panic reigned in the Château was reach his new car hidden in a lock-up garage, change his clothes make a few alterations to his appearance – spectacles worked miracles – and drive away.

By the time road-blocks were set up he would be on the autoroute to Paris. And when the police stopped him, he would be Jacques Bertier with papers to prove it. No-one would be looking for Jacques Bertier….

Once in Paris he would register at the small hotel where he had made an advance reservation and sit back and watch television as the first reports of the massacre filtered through.

The hierarchy of Capitalism removed from the face of the earth! By a man who had once been regarded as a nonentity… because he had possessed only half an identity.

Now at last Jacques and Georges Bertier were about to triumph in their pre-ordained crusade, which had faltered only because they had been born as two….

An error rectified by death. He made the sign of the cross on his forehead.

When he had finished dressing he made some coffee, adding a little rum. The plan really had worked perfectly, so different from the crude methods of today’s terrorists.

The old German rifle – returned during the night to the hiding place in the countryside – the photostats of the guest list…. What can they have made of the crosses against certain names? They would only find the solution later today, when it was too late.

When the filth had been exterminated!

Carefully he picked up the means of extermination and carried it down to his old grey van parked outside the tabac.

He placed it on the seat beside him where it could be plainly seen by any curious guards at the gates to the château.

Then he switched on the ignition, let out the clutch and drove in the direction of the Château Saint-Pierre.

Among those whose thoughts were concentrated that morning on Bilderberg was Nicolai Vlasov, chairman of the KGB.

And his thoughts were murderous.

Sitting at his enormous desk in his office in Moscow, he re-read the message that had just been brought to him.

If it was to be believed, then he had been betrayed and he would be plucked from his luxurious office with its Persian carpets and mahogany-panelled walls and tossed ignominiously into obscurity.

On the eve of his retirement.

Vlasov had been mounting his attack on the dollar for two years. It was to be his triumphant valediction. The monumental finale to a career always finely balanced between subversion and political conformity.

Along with the President of the Soviet Foreign Bank he had watched the carefully managed dollar reserves multiply. They had now reached such proportions that if they were dumped on the foreign markets they would, with sufficient support from other sources, launch a world-wide wave of panic-selling.

Opponents of the scheme urged that Russia needed the dollars to buy essential commodities. Not so, claimed Vlasov; if the United States was destitute they would sell their produce for chocolate bars.

The man who had first suggested the plan had been Pierre Brossard. Now, according to the message in his hand, Brossard had double-crossed them.

But had he?

Why should Brossard, like himself on the brink of retirement, destroy a future in which even his peculiar pleasures had been catered for?

No, the message stank.

It was allegedly a Telex communication transmitted by Brossard from the Château Saint-Pierre to his newspaper office in Paris, cancelling the vital newspaper column that would ignite the processes to bring down the dollar. It had been taken from Brossard’s briefcase by Helga Keller and handed to an agent in Paris at dawn that morning.