Len Deighton - XPD

Willi Kleiber scratched his chin. ‘You mean the British are dangerous to us? Yes, I hadn’t thought of it in that light, Dr Böttger, but I have to agree with you wholeheartedly.’ Böttger looked at him and nodded. He knew that Willi Kleiber had never looked at it any other way.

Sir Sydney Ryden had a lunch appointment but he was able to fit Boyd Stuart into a gap between the secretary of the estimates sub-committee on pay and a pre-lunch drink with the coordinator. Boyd Stuart waited in an empty sitting room for half an hour before the DG came in, slumped down into the armchair and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Everything seems to come at once, Stuart. Do you find that?’

‘Yes, sir, I do. I’m awfully sorry to be making a difficult day even worse for you.’

‘Not at all,’ said the DG. ‘It was my own decision to keep close to your investigation. Something come up, has it?’

Boyd Stuart explained the phone call which Paul Bock had made to Stein’s home in Los Angeles. And his visit to the house in north London the day before.

‘Homosexuals are they?’ He nodded as if in answer to his own question.

‘I’ve no reason to think so, Director.’

‘They sound like two delinquents,’ said the DG.

‘They are delinquents,’ agreed Boyd.

‘Quite so, Stuart.’ The DG eyed the drinks cabinet but decided that his lunch was going to be a tricky one. It would be better to remain completely clear headed. ‘Am I to take it that you are treating their information seriously?’

‘For the time being I am, sir.’

‘Isn’t it rather preposterous? Surely you don’t believe that a syndicate of German industrialists is about to start a new Nazi movement?’

‘I’m not yet at the stage where I can start enjoying the luxury of discounting anything,’ said Boyd.

‘Well, it’s your investigation,’ said the DO scratching his head. ‘But the PM is asking for a situation report. I’m not going to relish telling her that my principal field agent thinks it’s all a neo-Nazi plot.’

‘Paul Bock gained access to the bank computer,’ insisted, Boyd Stuart. ‘The other one has worked in electronics and, according to the hasty and superficial inquiries I’ve made this morning, is well qualified to know about retrieving information.’

‘I’m not contesting any of that,’ said the DG testily.

‘Then what could be their motive?’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Why would they contact Stein to warn him that his life is in danger? Obviously Stein is a stranger to them or they would have recognized me immediately as an impostor. The German boy has confessed a secret to a perfect stranger. If that stranger betrays him, he could face at best dismissal from the bank, perhaps a term of imprisonment. So what motive could they have, other than what they told me?’

‘Perhaps he thinks it’s fun,’ said the DG. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t need to have a job of any land; he might well have a private income. Rich young trouble-makers. The western world is full of such people.’

Only with difficulty did Stuart suppress his irritation at this generalization. ‘I think it’s safer to assume that they work for a living, sir. And I prefer to assume they’re sincere.’

‘You don’t have to read me the riot act, Stuart.’ Boyd Stuart did not reply. The DG looked at his watch. ‘Well, I can see that you want to follow this one up, so I’ll not stand in your way.’ He got to his feet. His knee joint cracked and he massaged it briefly. ‘Don’t mind if I make a few inquiries too, eh?’

‘No, sir,’ said Boyd Stuart in a tone that he hoped conveyed the idea that he dreaded the thought of it.

‘That’s splendid then. Let’s talk again tomorrow before I see the PM.’

Sir Sydney Ryden did not look forward with pleasure to his meetings with the representative of West Germany ’s intelligence organization, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND. Somehow the two men seemed incompatible and what should have been an exchange of helpful information all too often developed into an exchange of complaints which sometimes came close to bickering.

The lunch they shared at Boodle’s on Tuesday, July 17, was no exception. There were differences about training facilities which were not yet ready for use, a request for the return of important dossiers which Sir Sydney secretly knew had got lost somewhere in Whitehall, and an argument about a news story concerning a secret rocket which had been leaked to a German newspaper. As an exercise in European cooperation, the lunch was a failure but, when the two men went downstairs for coffee, and watched the other club members sunk deep into the ancient leather armchairs, the talk turned to gardening.

Discovering that this difficult German shared his taste for growing cactus came as a revelation to Sir Sydney Ryden who was a well-known member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of Great Britain.

‘As a general rule,’ Sir Sydney was saying, his coffee neglected, ‘it is common enough to find flowers larger than the plant, with the exception perhaps of Mammillaria and Rhipsalis. If you had seen my Echinocactus tabularis with three flowers-each one of them larger than the plant itself-my goodness, I think you would have been amazed.’ Sir Sydney slapped the arm of his leather chair hard enough to have a member across the room look up from his newspaper.

‘Mealy bug is the worst,’ said the German. ‘The only thing that will kill it is paraffin, but often I have found that the plant dies too.’

‘I never resort to paraffin,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘As soon as you see those little grey fluffy specks, get them off with a pin. I’d rather cut away a large piece of the plant than put paraffin on it.’

‘That is most interesting,’ said the German. ‘I shall remember too your advice concerning seeds.’

‘Yes, it’s not difficult at all. Wait until the flower stem has completely died before removing the seeds, of course. The Mammillaria seeds are in pods; keep them all until the following spring and don’t sow before late April unless you can be sure the temperature won’t drop below sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit.’

‘I shall try it,’ said the German.

‘It’s a damned pity that you can’t spare the time to come down to my place in the country.’

‘Next time, perhaps.’

‘Excellent.’

‘I only wish that there was something I could do for you in return, Sir Sydney.’

A sudden thought struck the DG. ‘Well, perhaps there is, my dear chap. This is a top-secret matter, but I want to check up on the likelihood of a young fellow working for the London branch of a Hamburg bank being able to get something from their central computer. As I say, it’s top secret. It would have to be a very discreet inquiry.’

‘That’s a simple matter, Sir Sydney,’ said the BND man. ‘No need to put it through my department at all. I’ll handle it personally. Tomorrow I’ll be in Bonn lunching with my wife and an old friend who runs one of our very best private security companies. He knows all about German banks.’

‘Excellent,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘I’d rather not have it made official. I’ll give you the details.’

The German took out his pocket diary and turned the pages to find the following day’s entry: Wednesday, July 18. He wrote ‘retention inquiry Sir SR’ under the name of his luncheon companion-Willi Kleiber.

All the efforts of British Secret Intelligence Service employees in the Los Angeles area to erase Paul Bock’s message from Charles Stein’s answering machine had come to nothing. The machine itself, manufactured by a small factory in San Diego, was advertised as the most reliable domestic machine on the market. One aspect of this reliability, upon which the copywriter expended much care, was the impossibility of accidental erasure of any incoming message. The ‘Executive Type II’ even had an erase head that could be unplugged and locked away elsewhere. It was a facility that appealed to Charles Stein, who believed his son Billy only too likely to erase vital messages accidentally. As for the attempt to get a field agent posing as a telephone repairman into the Stein residence, this too was doomed to failure. Stein’s housekeeper had long since discovered that the best way to live in peace with her employer was to take his instructions literally. So when a young man, bedecked with tweezers, pliers and reels of wire, spoke to her over the voice box at the front entrance, she told him that he could not come in. He told her that her telephone was not working properly and, when she proved indifferent to this, insisted that the fault was going to affect all the phones in Cresta Ridge Drive. ‘You’ll have to come back some other day,’ she told him. Charles Stein had said let no one in the house, and that is exactly what she intended to do. When the bogus telephone man persisted, she threatened to call the telephone company and complain of his behaviour. It was at that stage of the operation that all attempts to interfere with the answering machine were abandoned.