Len Deighton - XPD

‘Me a general?’ said Kleiber. ‘No thanks. You’ll never get me to Moscow, Eddie. Forget that idea, right now.’

‘They all say that at first, Willi,’ said Parker. It was fun to encourage this man’s egomania to see how far he would go.

‘You know they are in Geneva,’ said Willi Kleiber, ‘You know Stein’s documents are in this big house on the lake front.’ He had already told Parker his important news but he wanted to enjoy it again.

‘Yes,’ said Parker. ‘It’s a small package. Bring it. There should be no trouble.’

‘Fly stateside from Geneva?’ said Kleiber. He wrinkled his nose, as if detecting a foul smell. ‘ Geneva has more Moscow Centre people living there than you’ll find in Moscow itself. It’s the espionage capital of Europe, you know that, Eddie. Why bring the documents back here, when I can hand them over in Geneva for the diplomatic bag, and have them in Moscow the same night?’

Parker realized that he should not have baited Kleiber who was an intelligent man. This was his retaliation. Kleiber knew that if the documents were handed over to a Russian agent in Geneva, Parker would share little of the credit for the coup. Perhaps he guessed too how badly Parker needed some credibility with Moscow Centre.

‘I’d prefer you to bring the documents back here,’ said Parker. His voice was cold and pitched a little higher than previously. His nerves had tightened the muscles of his throat. Kleiber had a quick eye for other men’s weaknesses; he smiled. Parker added, ‘How do we know who we might be dealing with in Geneva, Willi? You might be handing the result of all this effort and hazard to some dumb clerk who’ll file it, or lose it, or some damned thing. These things happen, you know.’

‘Is it an order, Eddie?’

In fact, Edward Parker had no authority to make the carriage of the documents back to the USA a direct order. Not only was it in contravention of standing instructions about briefing agents for missions overseas but it exceeded his territorial authority. The rulebook said Kleiber should be provided with a ‘drop’ and ‘letter box’, if not a proper structure and ‘cut-out’. This was especially true of Task Pogoni, the very high priority mission for which the Centre had sent General Shumuk all the way to Mexico City.

But this was a chance for Edward Parker to redeem his reputation with his Russian superiors. It would perhaps provide a chance for him to see once more the wife and grown-up son whom he sometimes missed with a yearning which bordered on physical pain, and was all the more agonizing because he could speak of it to no one. ‘Bring them back here, Willi. It’s an order.’ He looked at his watch again and began calculating how long it would take to get to the airport. Before going to bed tonight he must go through his factory accounts again.

The FBI sound engineer and his assistant were pleased that the meeting was at an end. Boxed inside a poorly ventilated panel truck together with a photographer, driver and clerk, they were all shiny with perspiration. They had long since emptied the tiny refrigerator of its cold drinks. The sound engineer removed his headphones. ‘That’s it,’ he said. In the street outside someone started shouting at the children playing softball. A transistor radio was playing ‘Hello Dolly’, and whoever was carrying it banged on the panel truck as he passed. It was a normal extrovert action in that locality, but the men knew it was their signal to move.

‘Son of a bitch,’ said the sound engineer. ‘He wants him to bring the papers back to the USA. That’s good. The boys will snatch him when he re-enters the country. The poor bastard is going to get a hundred years in the pen.’

Todd Wynn, Kalkhoven’s young assistant, checked his shorthand notes, then took the spool of tape off the machine and pocketed it before signing a receipt for the driver.

‘What gets into these guys?’ said the driver bitterly. ‘They have no loyalty to their friends or the people they work with. Do they get a kick out of betraying people?’

‘They should get the chair,’ said Melvin Kalkhoven. ‘These two hoodlums are the ones who snuffed that movie producer in LA and hacked his head off. And Scotland Yard are looking for them on account of the same kind of job they did in London.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the driver, as he climbed carefully over the recording equipment ‘I’ve got a lovely wife waiting in bed for me.’

The other men laughed. They knew he meant some other man’s wife.

Todd Wynn glanced at Kalkhoven, who, if he had a biblical quotation apt for such hypocrisy, kept it to himself.

While Kleiber and Parker suffered the humid languor of that Manhattan evening, Boyd Stuart in London watched the hands of the clock move to midnight and on into the first day of August. His windowless basement room in the Ziggurat was bleak and far too deep underground for him to hear the chimes of Big Ben, or the traffic which moved unceasingly over Westminster Bridge. The shiny brickwork interior was finished in the same acid green that Whitehall had been specifying for official habitation, from post offices to prisons, since Queen Victoria ’s reign, and perhaps before. Two wooden trestle tables had been moved close to the wall, in an attempt to steady precarious piles of books and documents which now reached almost to the low ceiling, the sprinklers and the blue fluorescent light which hummed.

Stuart shifted in discomfort on the hard wooden chair. It had been repaired by the Department of the Environment and was now relegated to this ‘Secure Room No. 4’ because it rocked on its uneven legs. There was little else in the room, except for a red fire extinguisher and a framed, fly-spotted notice which went into considerable detail about the Official Secrets Act’s references to official papers. It was dated 1962, but little had changed.

The hours had passed quickly as Stuart went through these references to the events of the summer of 1940. All the published accounts were here: the memoirs of the victors and of the conquered. There were unpublished accounts too: dusty typewritten bundles of reports, diaries and memoirs, detailing the days of men long dead and half forgotten.

Stuart had been sceptical at first. Had Winston Churchill actually become so depressed and demoralized, as the German Panzer divisions swept through France so effortlessly, that he had himself gone to see Adolf Hitler, the man he so abhorred? Had he really gone to the German Führer, cap in hand, and offered to trade away his allies to the men he called ‘gangsters’? Boyd Stuart had prepared a large sheet of paper and noted down the movements of both men through the days of May and June.

It was the clock striking midnight that made Stuart realize how long he had spent with his history books. There could no longer be any doubt about it. The diaries clearly showed when it was that Churchill had made his secret trip to meet Hitler. It would be obvious to anyone once the facts were assembled.

Churchill’s visit to Paris on May 16 was far too early, the German advance had only been going six days and the Allies entertained hopes of a complete recovery. The visit to Chateau de Vincennes-HQ of the French supreme command-on May 22 was equally impossible. It involved all the complications of another visit to Paris, and all the witnesses to the Prime Minister’s movements.

On May 31, Churchill flew to Paris for the third time. With him went General Dill, General Ismay and Clement Attlee. This time, instead of visiting the Quai d’Orsay, Churchill went to see Paul Reynaud, the French Premier. They met in a room at the War Office in the Rue St Dominique. As on all his visits to France in May, Churchill slept in the British embassy and returned to England the following morning.