Len Deighton - XPD

‘I had not fully understood that when we began,’ said the frail man. ‘I wonder how many of us would have authorized the formation of the Trust, had we realized that money was to be paid to hired killers.’

There was a shocked silence but it did not last long. Willi Kleiber stood up. He was a powerfully built man who liked to attend reunions of his infantry regiment and sing the old wartime songs over steins of dark Bavarian beer. Kleiber said, ‘I understood it, and everyone I spoke to understood it.’ He smiled. ‘Everyone who is not hard of hearing understood it.’ It was a powerful voice. Kleiber was seldom contradicted.

‘My hearing is not defective,’ said the frail man, Rau.

‘We must leave the operational side of the matter to Willi,’ said Dr Böttger. For one moment he felt a wave of panic, believing that Rau must have discovered something about the British diplomat they had killed by mistake in Los Angeles. Kleiber’s attempt to kill the British secret agent had been another error. Willi Kleiber was inclined to solve problems by eliminating his opponents. But Böttger had agreed to using Kleiber as operations chief and now they were stuck with him, so they must give him all the support he needed.

‘Does “operational side” mean killing people we don’t like?’ said Fritz Rau.

‘Yes,’ said Böttger. He looked round the table anxiously before sipping some black coffee. Fritz Rau had once been one of the cleverest scientists in German industry. Even today he could sometimes be found white-coated in the laboratory of the vast chemical combine that he virtually owned, testing out some new ideas he had jotted down on the back of an envelope. Böttger knew that the silence of the other men present was due largely to the respect that Rau commanded amongst them. Böttger began to worry that Rau’s doubts could undermine the whole of Operation Siegfried.

‘You’d better understand this, gentlemen,’ said Böttger. He held a coffee cup in one hand, as if this vitally important thought had only this moment come to him. He looked slowly at all the faces. There had always been this weakness for melodramatic style in Böttger. The truth was that he had used such mannerisms in his climb to his present exalted status. ‘You’d better understand that each and every one of us has already committed a crime. We are all accessories to murder. It is as simple as that. I believe that what we are doing is what every German who loves his country will approve. If we closed down Operation Siegfried tomorrow, our plans unfulfilled, what then? Can we bring those men back to life? No. And what if one of us decided to go to the police or to the Foreign Ministry and tell them of our plan? Shall I tell you what would happen? Everyone associated with Operation Siegfried would be ruthlessly hunted down and rigorously punished. We’d probably be sent to prison for the rest of our lives. And, quite apart from the criminal liability of what we have done, what of our colleagues? I am sure that, like me, you have secured the generous help of your business partners and colleagues in falsifying books to make the large cash appropriations available to the Trust. We have also dispersed and hidden the funds we stole from the bank in Geneva. Many people were involved in that. They didn’t ask questions; they did it because they were friends. Is their repayment to be betrayal? I say no. I say that we must now hold fast, as the English held fast in 1940, and as our people held fast in 1944 while the Russians came ever closer and the Anglo-American bombers tore our cities to pieces. Hold fast, silence your doubts, my friend. Do what must be done.’

Böttger smiled as he reached the end of his harangue. For a moment he feared the worst. He waited until he saw his smile reflected in the anxious faces round the table, but then he knew he had won them over. Even poor little Fritz Rau seemed temporarily reassured.

Willi Kleiber spoke next. ‘There will be no violence for the sake of violence, Dr Rau,’ he promised. ‘In our lifetimes there has been enough killing and none of us wants more of that.’

He paused and looked round the table. They were all men he had known for ten or fifteen years. Willi Kleiber owned and personally managed one of the finest security organizations in Europe. All these men had done business with his company. Some of them shared their darkest secrets with him; he had helped more than one of their children involved with drug peddlers, and ferreted out the secrets of two transgressing wives. Not even the tax man knew as much about these men as Willi Kleiber knew. He said, ‘Dr Rau has asked if the operational side of things means killing people we don’t like. Dr Böttger said yes. With all due respect to Dr Böttger, I must be allowed to correct him. There is no place in this delicate operation for personal animosities. The only people who will be killed are those who have knowledge which is dangerous to our cause. The list of executions will be as short as I can possibly make it. Everyone here in this room may rest assured about that. I killed men in the war. I killed them in hand to hand combat. It was disgusting. It was not something about which I will ever be able to tell my children. Dr Böttger has selected me for the operations side of this plan simply because he knows that I do not relish violence. I am your sword arm, gentlemen. Be confident that I will not strike down the innocent.’

‘Thank you, Willi,’ said Fritz Rau. He was one of the oldest men in the room and thus enjoyed the privilege of addressing his younger colleagues in that informal manner.

Böttger gave a sigh of relief and hastily pressed on to the only other matter. ‘Money is suddenly required in London and we will need some sort of corporate structure to which to send the funds. Obviously we must not attract the attention of English government departments and I wonder if one of us can provide a way to hold half a million Deutschemarks just while we are forming a company there.’

‘No problem,’ said the expert on maritime insurance. ‘But you’ll have to let me have the details about who will have access to the money. Specimen signatures and so on.’

‘Willi will provide those details. I’ll let you have the money in whatever way you want it.’ He looked at the clock, over the door. ‘That will do for this week, gentlemen,’ said Böttger. ‘You will all get a telex in the usual code to tell you where the next meeting will be. Kindly let me have proxies for anyone who cannot attend.’

When the meeting had broken up it was Willi Kleiber who remained for a final word with Dr Böttger. ‘I wondered what old Fritz was going to say for a moment,’ said Kleiber. ‘It is the violence that troubles me,’ Kleiber imitated Fritz Rau’s Saxon accent and the quaver which could sometimes be heard in his voice. It was a cruel parody.

‘He’s getting too old,’ said Böttger. ‘It will happen to all of us eventually, I suppose.’

‘Anyway, it all turned out all right.’

‘For the time being it did,’ said Böttger. ‘But you know as well as I do that it will not be one or two deaths.’

‘It will be messy,’ said Willi Kleiber. ‘It is hard to say how many will eventually have to be removed. I agree with you about that. I thought the explosion in England, when we had to deal with my old comrade Franz Wever, was going to become a big newspaper story.’

‘They were mad to do it like that,’ said Böttger. ‘Have our people there no sense?’

‘The British Secret Intelligence Service already knew Wever,’ explained Willi Kleiber. ‘They were pressing him. We had to do something very quickly indeed.’

‘The British Secret Service. To let them get hold of the Hitler Minutes would be the very worst thing that could happen to us,’ said Böttger. ‘If the newspapers got them, we might be able to buy them off or even frighten them off. Failing that, we can put up a smoke screen. But if they get into the hands of the British Secret Service, anything could happen.’