Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

Kingdon said: ‘Don’t stand out there in the cold, officer. Come in and have a drink. A Scotch maybe?’

‘Well, I don’t mind if I do.’

Kingdon smiled at him. There was still hope.

In Paris the wife of Pierre Brossard knelt in prayer in an apartment on Rue d’Alésia. Also kneeling were six of her new-found friends. But Madame Brossard’s prayers were of a different calibre to those of the rest of the group. She was praying for deliverance – from her husband; praying that in some miraculous fashion the Almighty could intervene and prevent his return to Paris.

In Moscow Nikolai Vlasov, who had advised the Politburo to cancel the dollar operation, when the dollar began to rally the previous evening, issued one last command before penning his resignation.

The command was to Department V of the KGB.

Pierre Brossard was nearing the Yugoslav border when he noticed a flash of light on the mountains to his left.

A piece of glass, perhaps, or a discarded beer can.

For the second time in two days Brossard was framed in the telescopic sight of a rifle. The sight was trained on his head and this time the marksman didn’t miss.

The Citroen wheeled off the road and smashed into a tree. The marksman, dressed as a peasant, ran down the mountainside to make sure that Brossard was dead. Not much doubt: bone and brain were spattered over the windows.

He collected three cans from his van parked down the road, doused the Citroen with gasolene and set fire to it.

Only a few charred remains of Marcel Rabier, architect, were later found by the Italian police.

Nicholas Foster was in despair.

It was ten days since Bilderberg and no-one would touch his story – the shooting, the attempt at mass assassination, the bid to bring down the dollar… everything given credibility by tapes of debates and the minutiae of his background material.

But Bilderberg was omnipotent.

Suzy watched him in her apartment in Chelsea as he pushed aside the telephone in disgust after a last abortive attempt.

‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘They don’t believe me. Or say they don’t. For the first time in its history Bilderberg secrecy has been breached, but in the end they come out smelling of roses.’

‘Don’t worry, love,’ she said. ‘I don’t really want to be married to a journalist anyway.’

He picked up a copy of Paris-Match ‘They made a stab at it – buried in a general piece about the conference – but, God, it’s nothing like the truth. Just vague rumours. The sort that surround Bilderberg every year.’

‘Do you want some plonk with your steak? You’d better wash it down with something, it’s as tough as a legionnaire’s boot.’

‘And now there’s a story in the papers that Pierre Brossard’s missing. Backed-up, of course, by the statement that he left the conference in one piece. Bilderberg exonerated once again.’

Nicholas tried to cut his steak. She was right: tough was the understatement of the year.

‘I know I can’t cook,’ Suzy said, sawing at her steak, ‘but I am good on ideas.’

‘Such as what?’

‘While I was cooking – well, murdering – the meal, I was thinking.’

‘And?’

Suzy put down her knife and fork, rested her chin in her hands and stared at Nicholas. ‘I believe you’ve misplaced your talents. You should have been a novelist.’ She stretched out her hand and touched Nicholas’ cheek. ‘Why don’t you write a novel about Bilderberg? A novel based on fact.’

Nicholas persevered with his steak in silence. After a while he said: ‘You’re right, you are better on ideas than cooking.’

He stood up and went round the table and kissed her. Then he refilled his glass with wine, walked into the spare room, rolled a sheet of paper into his portable typewriter and, after a few moments’ thought, he began to type.

Danzer didn’t look like a spy.

If you enjoyed I, Said the Spy , check out these other great Derek Lambert titles.

Derek Lambert’s classic spy novel exposes the truth about the life of the Western community in post Stalin Moscow, and their existence in which tensions and hostility of the Soviet Union sometimes prove intolerable.

An American working for the US embassy and the CIA, a young Englishman at the British Embassy gradually cracking under the strain of Moscow life, and a member of the Twilight Brigade. In an alien land their lives become inextricably joined in a vivid and tense story of diplomats, traitors, Soviet secret police and espionage.

The Red House follows a year in the life of Russian diplomat Vladimir Zhukov, the new Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington – a ‘good Communist’ in 1960s America.

Seeing what life in the West is really like, he discovers there is more to American than what Soviet propaganda has taught him. Increasingly intrigued by the Washington circuit, from outspoken confrontation between diplomats to the uninhibited sexual alliances arrange by their wives with other diplomats, the capitalist ‘poison’ begins to work on him and his wife.

As he struggles to remain loyal to his country and begins to question who is the real enemy, he has to decide to whom is first loyalty due: country or lover, party or conscience.

The Trans-Siberian Express has left Moscow carrying the most powerful, closely guarded man in the Soviet Union - and also the man who plans to kidnap him.

Tension aboard the train is at a maximum. The KGB has checked and double checked. But as Vasily Yermakov, the Soviet leader, tries to sleep on the first night in his cabin, he has an uneasy feeling that something is about to go wrong.

As the Soviet space-shuttle Dove orbits 150 miles above the earth on its maiden flight, Warsaw Pact troops crash into Poland.

The seventy-two-year-old President of America wants to be re-elected, and for that he needs to win the first stage of the war in space: he needs to capture the Soviet space shuttle. But as the President plans his coup a nuclear-armed shuttle speeds towards target America – and only defection in space can stop it.

In neutral Lisbon, British Intelligence have concocted a ruthless doublecross to lure Russia and Germany into a hellish war of attrition on the Eastern Front and so buy Britain the most precious commodity of all: time.

That plot now hinges on one man: Josef Hoffman, a humble Red cross worker. But who is Hoffman? And where do his loyalties really lie?

Moscow treated defectors from the West with kid-gloves. That is, until they had outlived their usefulness. But the American Robert Calder was different. He had defected to Russia with information so explosive that even the iron-clad regime of the Kremlin shook with fear. It had kept him alive. Until now.