Len Deighton - Spy Sinker

'Was Busby a party to this?'

'Busby was the Duty Ops Officer at the Nuremberg CIC office that night. He was getting a lot of stick because he was in command of the party. He preferred an accident with some foreign officer as the guilty party.'

'I can see why there was such bad feeling between him and Samson when he came to work in Berlin.'

'That's why Busby went to work for Lange's people: Brian Samson wouldn't have him.'

'And the wife?'

'She took the gold, probably changed her name and disappeared from the story. There was no sign of her by the time Samson got to the house, and I never found her. She left Esser to face the hangman, and took her daughter and went into hiding; perhaps that's what Esser wanted her to do. She was a very resolute and resourceful young woman. She worked in a nightclub in Garmisch, so she would have had no trouble in contacting the people from whom she could buy permission to live in the French Zone, which is what she did. That removed her from the British and the US jurisdiction. Eventually she got a French passport and took her gold and her baby…'

'And lived affluently ever after,' supplied the D-G caustically.

'Crime does sometimes pay,' said Silas. 'We may not like to concede it but it's true.' He drank some tea.

'How much gold was there?' asked the D-G, helping himself to a second piece of seed cake.

'I saw the large metal box. It had been buried – the dirt was still on it. It was provost exhibit number one. About this big.' Silas extended his hands to show the size of a small steamer trunk.

'Do you have any idea what that would weigh?' said the D-G.

'What are you getting at, Sir Henry?'

'No one could carry gold of that dimension; it would weigh a ton.'

'If she couldn't carry it, what would she do with it? Why would you dig it out in the first place, unless you were going to take it away?'

The D-G smiled knowingly. 'Speaking personally, I might dig it up because too many people know where it is.'

'Her husband and Esser and so on?'

'And perhaps many other people,' said the D-G.

'And bury it again,' said Silas, following the D-G's thought processes. 'Ummm.'

'Now there would be only three people who know where it is.'

'And two of them are dead a few minutes later.'

'So only Inge Winter knows where it is.'

'Are you suggesting that she got this American sergeant to shoot her husband and her brother-in-law?'

'I've never met any of them,' said the D-G. 'I'm simply responding to the story you've told me.'

Silas Gaunt said nothing. He tried to remember the evidence he'd examined and the soldiers he'd talked to. The sergeant was a flashy youngster with jewellery and a vintage Mercedes that he was taking home to America. Was he really drunk that night, or was that a ruse to make the 'accident' more convincing? And there was, of course, the sergeant's missing woman friend, who was a singer with a dance band. Silas never did find her. Were the woman friend and Inge Winter one and the same person? Well it was too late now. He poured more tea, drank it and put the mystery out of his mind.

Soon, reflected Silas, the D-G would retire, and that would sever his last remaining link with the Department. Silas found the prospect bleak.

The D-G got up, flicked some cake crumbs from his tie and said, 'I want you to promise me you'll have someone to look at those trees, Silas. It's a beetle, you know.'

'I don't think I could bear to lose those elms, Henry. They must be about two hundred years old. My grandfather adored them: he had a photo taken of the house when they were half the size they are now. There were four of them in those days. They say one of them blew down the night Grandfather died.'

'I've never heard such maudlin nonsense. Elms don't blow down, they're too deep-rooted.'

'My mother told me it fell when Grandfather died,' said Silas, as if the honour of his family rested upon the truth of it.

'Don't be such a fool, Silas. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the things you love. It has to be done. You know that.'

'I suppose so.'

'I'm going to send Mrs Samson over to Bret when she comes out. California. What do you think?'

'Yes, capital,' said Silas. 'She'll be well away from any sort of interference. And Bernard Samson too?'

'No. Unless you…?'

'Well, I do, Henry. Leave Samson here and he'll roar around trying to locate her and make himself a nuisance. Bundle him off and let Bret take care of them both.'

'Very well.' The grandfather clock, which Silas had moved to this room because he didn't trust the work-men not to damage it, struck five p.m. 'Is that really the time? I must be going.'

'Now, you're leaving all the arrangements to me, Henry?' Silas wanted to get it clear; he wanted no recriminations. 'There is a great deal to be done. I'll have to have matching dentistry prepared, and that takes ages.'

'I leave it to you, Silas. If you need money, call Bret.'

'I suppose the special funding mechanism will be wound up once she is safe,' said Silas.

'No. It will be a slush fund for future emergencies. It cost us so much to set up that it would be senseless to dismantle it.'

'I thought Samson's probing into the money end might have made it too public.'

'Samson will be in California,' mused the D-G. The more I think of that idea the better I like it. Volkmann said that Mrs Samson has aged a lot lately. We'll send her husband there to look after her.'

Müggelsee, East Berlin. May 1987.

'How stunning to have the Müggelsee all to ourselves,' said Harry Kennedy. He was at the tiller of a privately owned six-metre racing yacht: Fiona was crewing.

On a hot summer day the lake was crowded with sailing boats, but today was chilly and the lake was entirely theirs. It was late afternoon. The sun, sinking behind bits of cumulus – ragged and shrinking in the cooling air – provided fleeting golden haloes and sudden shadows but little warmth.

The wind was growing stronger, pressing upon the sail steadily like a craftsman's hand, so that the hull cut through the water with a loud hiss, and left a wake of curly white trimmings.

Fiona was sitting well forward, huddled in her bright yellow hooded jacket complete with heavy Guernsey sweater and Harry's scarf, but still she shivered. She liked the broad expanse of the lake, for it enabled her to sit still and not have all the work of tacking and jibing and trimming which Harry liked doing so much. Or rather liked to watch her doing. He never seemed to feel the cold when he was sailing. He became another man when dressed in casual clothes. The short red anorak and jeans made him look younger: this was the intrepid man who flew planes over the desert and the tundra, the man who fretted behind a desk.

She had seen a lot of him during that year he'd spent at the Charité. He'd taken her mind off the miseries of separation at a time she'd most needed someone to love and care for her. Now that he was working in London again, he saw her only when he could get a really long weekend, and that meant every six weeks or so. Sometimes he arranged to borrow this sailing boat from a friend he'd made at the hospital, and she brought sandwiches and a vacuum flask of coffee so they could spend all the day on the lake. These trips must have involved him in a lot of trouble and expense, but he never complained of that. She couldn't help wondering if it was all part of his assigned duty of monitoring her, but she didn't think so.

Neither had he ever suggested the impossible: that she should come to London to see him. He knew about her, of course, or at least he knew as much as he needed to know. Once late at night in her apartment after too much wine he'd blurted out, 'I was sent.' But he'd immediately made it into some sort of metaphysical observation about their being meant for each other and she'd let it go at that. There was nothing to be gained from hinting that she knew the real story behind that first meeting. It was better to have this arm's-length love affair: each of them examining the thoughts and emotions of the other, neither of them entirely truthful.