Cover designer’s note

The title of the third book in this middle trilogy, Spy Sinker, conjures an array of interesting possibilities for the designer when attempting to capture it. For those readers who have been following the adventures of Bernard Samson thus far, I am sure they could venture a number of scenarios into which Bernard could be said to be sinking – his relationship with Fiona, Gloria, his growing isolation among his colleagues in the shadowy and labyrinthine world of his work, even his relationship with himself. All of which were considered to some degree or another, but in the end I took the design in a slightly different direction. For me, the mousetrap seemed to perfectly symbolize the idea of subjugating one’s adversary, which in this instance would be employed by the KGB to ‘sink’ their antagonist, Bernard Samson.

The back cover’s vignette is of a Russian nesting doll, or matryoshka, depicting a bemedalled Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet General Secretary. I purchased the set of dolls on Arbat Street, Moscow in exchange for two packets of Marlborough cigarettes. The doll’s content reveals that this KGB agent wears red lipstick from Boots the Chemist …!

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

LEN DEIGHTON

Spy Sinker

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson Ltd 1990

Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1990

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008125035

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007395385

Version: 2018-05-21

Contents

Cover

Cover Designer’s Note

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the Author

By Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

Even as a child I was a dedicated reader. A fugitive from my grammar school, I spent my time in libraries reading everything within reach. Much of what I read was beyond my intellectual ability and much of it still is. But when later in life I went back to some of those books I found new pleasure. I enjoyed the work of those writers who were able to provide a gripping story for readers who enjoyed narrative above all. But I was able to see a complexity of interaction and meanings that I had not bothered with when I was younger. When I became a writer this complexity seemed to be something to aim for. How did characters change? Most importantly: how much does each character know at each stage of the story? How much, and how soon should the reader be told of the story? What should be revealed, and when? I liked the idea that, as well as being a story, every book should offer fresh and unexpected ideas, and ask provocative personal questions that the reader will enjoy answering.

So I planned the Bernard Samson books like a row of terraced houses. Each book is a house. Each book is complete, and can be visited without a visit to the other books. Walk through the rooms on the ground floor and enjoy the story-driven narrative. Walk through the ground floor rooms of all nine houses and find that they connect. But upstairs in each house there are rooms to search and, for those who want an extended tour, even attics to explore.

But Sinker is different to all the other houses. Sinker provides access to the roofs. Sinker tells the reader things that remain secret to some of the characters, even to Bernard Samson. For the first time the reader gets a chance to confirm suspicions or eliminate them. Events seen through Bernard’s eyes in other books are altered and rectified. Some readers tell me that it is best to read Sinker first because it provides a valuable structure for the other books. That may be true but my overall planning did not intend it as a preliminary key to the other books.

The decisive factor in writing a book is not the planning (although that is a vital second necessity) it is self criticism. The writer is the best person to decide when a typescript is complete and measure its success or failure. This is the worry a writer carries day and night while the keys are tapped, copy-printers operated and countless pages tossed into the waste bin. And when the book is published a writer sees why the result was not good enough. It never is. For that dissatisfaction, and only that, will provide the energy and determination that will make the next book better.

So what does the writer bring to the as-yet unwritten story? A pitiless examination of human nature? A vengeful wrath? I don’t think so. I feel a responsibility towards my fictional family and prefer to show a respect and a benevolent understanding towards every one of them. Perhaps you are saying that the characters in the Bernard Samson books are not immune from caustic comment and patronizing description and cite Dicky Cruyer as an example of such cruelty. Then I would have to remind you that the books are mostly written in the first person of Bernard. We share Bernard’s world.

The story starts again with Sinker. We go far back in time; Bernard is younger and physically and mentally strong. Although the basic style remains the same, Sinker is a book written in a different format; that of third-person narrative. It takes a longer, broader view. The other books take place inside Bernard’s head but Sinker provides an overall look at the story to be told. And Bernard’s sardonic view of the world is replaced by the more moderate voice of the author. His caustic observations have no outlet in this version of his life. Instead Bernard is scrutinized with the same Godlike and superior impartiality that he customarily judges others.

Sinker is Fiona’s book. Fiona’s life and work is cocooned by several layers of secrets. Sinker opens that cocoon and so she inevitably dominates the story. Here is a new Fiona, very human in some ways and yet coldly dispassionate in her work. By the time Sinker was published I was receiving quite a lot of reaction from readers. My memory is that while women readers were sympathetic to the multiple dilemmas – in love, family and work – faced by Fiona, men readers were harsher in their judgments and repeatedly told me how much they loved the vivacity of Gloria. Does Gloria upstage everyone? You are the only one who can say.

Another question in my mail was about the role of the secret agent in the modern world. In my non-fiction war history, Blood, Tears and Folly, I have written about the part played by the Enigma codes in the history of World War Two. Hasn’t Bernard been made redundant by technology? In fact: no. An old friend of mine, the late Constantine Fitzgibbon, who worked at Bletchley Park and handled Ultra traffic, made this comment about ‘human intelligence’:

‘With the existence of satellites, together with sophisticated cipher-breaking, deception has become almost impossible. Even strategic deception … Wisdom may be invoked, but it remains a minor element in a highly complex, essentially futile, equation.’ (Constantine Fitzgibbon, Secret Intelligence in the 20th Century, Hart Davis, MacGibbon, London 1965.)

As the Cold War grew violent, and Bernard Samson was working across the German divide, the emphasis had returned to ‘humint’. The sites of Russian military formations, the state of their equipment and the morale of their soldiers were what the men in London and Washington wanted to know. What was in the enemy’s mind had become more important than what was in the enemy’s signals traffic. This was what made the Berlin station, and men such as Bernard, so important to the careers of the desk-men and high-ups.

Len Deighton, 2010

1

England. September 1977.

‘Bret Rensselaer, you are a ruthless bastard.’ It was his wife’s voice. She spoke softly but with considerable force, as if it was a conclusion arrived at after long and difficult reasoning.

Bret half opened his eyes. He was in that hedonistic drowsy half sleep that makes awakening so irksome. But Bret Rensselaer was not a hedonist, he was a puritan; he saw himself as a direct descendant of those God-fearing, unyielding nonconformists who had colonized New England. He opened his eyes. ‘What was that?’ He looked at the bedside clock.

It was very early still. The room was flooded with sunlight coloured deep yellow by the holland blinds. He could see his wife sitting up in bed, one hand clutching her knee and the other holding a cigarette. She wasn’t looking at him. It was as if she didn’t know he was there beside her. Staring into the distance she puffed at the cigarette, not letting it go far from her mouth, holding it ready even as she exhaled. The curls of drifting smoke were yellow like the ceiling, and like his wife’s face.

‘You’re utterly cold-blooded,’ she said. ‘You’re in the right job.’ She hadn’t looked down to see whether he was awake. She didn’t care. She was saying the things she was determined to say, things she’d thought a lot about, but never dared say before. Whether her husband heard her or not seemed unimportant.

Without a word of reply, he pushed back the bedclothes and got out of bed. It was not a violent movement. He did it gently so as not to disturb her. She turned her head to watch him go across the carpet. Naked he looked thin, if not to say skinny – that was why he looked so elegant in his carefully cut suits. She wished she was skinny too.

Bret went into the bathroom, drew back the curtains and opened the window. It was a glorious autumnal morning. The sunlit trees made long shadows across the gold-tipped grass. He’d not seen the flower-beds so crowded with blooms. At the end of his garden, where the fidgeting boughs of weeping willows fingered the water, the slow-moving river looked almost blue. Two rowing boats tied up at the pier bobbed gently up and down amid a flotilla of dead leaves. He loved this house.

Since the eighteenth century, many wealthy Londoners have favoured such upstream Thameside houses. With grounds that reach the water’s edge they are hidden behind anonymous brick walls all the way from Chiswick to Reading. They come in all shapes, sizes and styles from palatial mansions in the Venetian manner to modest three-bedroom residences like this one.

Bret Rensselaer breathed deeply ten times, the way he did before doing his exercises. The view of the garden had reassured him. It always did. He had not always been an Anglophile but once he’d arrived in this bewitching land, he knew there was no escape from the obsessive love he had for everything connected with it. The river that ran at the foot of his garden was not an ordinary little stream; it was the Thames! The Thames with its associations of old London bridge, Westminster Palace, the Tower, and of course Shakespeare’s Globe. Still, after living here for years, he could hardly believe his good fortune. He wished his American wife could share his pleasure but she said England was ‘backward’ and could only see the bad side of living here.

He stared at himself in the mirror as he combed his hair. He had the same jutting chin and blond hair that his mother had passed on to him and his brother. The same good health too, and that was a priceless legacy. He put on his red silk dressing gown. Through the bathroom door he heard a movement and a clink of glass, and knew it was his wife taking a drink of bottled water. She didn’t sleep well. He’d grown used to her chronic insomnia. He was no longer surprised to wake in the night and find her drinking water, smoking a cigarette or reading a chapter of one of her romantic novels.

When he returned to the bedroom she was still there: sitting cross-legged on the bed, her silk nightdress disarranged to expose her thighs, and its lacy shoulder trimming making a ruff behind her head. Her skin was pale – she avoided the sun – her figure full but not overweight, and her hair tousled. She felt him examining her and she raised her eyes to glare at him. In the past such a pose, that fierce look on her face, and a cigarette in her mouth, had aroused him. Perhaps it was a shameless wanton that he had hoped to discover. If so his hopes had soon been dashed.

He stepped into the alcove that he used as a dressing room and slid open the mirrored wardrobe door to select a suit from the two dozen hanging there, each one in its tissue paper and plastic bag as it had arrived from the cleaners.

‘You have no feelings!’ she said.

‘Don’t, Nikki,’ he said. Her name was Nicola. She didn’t like being called Nikki but it was too late now to tell him so.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You send men out to die as if you were sending out junk mail. You are heartless. I never loved you; no one could.’

What nonsense she spoke. Bret Rensselaer’s position at SIS was Deputy Controller of European Economics. Yet it was a shrewd guess, there were times when he had to give the final okay on dangerous jobs. And when those tough decisions were to be made Bret did not shy from making them. ‘You left it a darn long time before telling me,’ he said reasonably, while hanging a lightweight wool and mohair suit near the light of the window and attaching the braces to the trousers. He screwed up the blue tissue wrapping and tossed it into the linen basket. Then he selected shirt and underclothes. He was worried. In this quarrelsome mood Nikki might blurt out some melodramatic yarn of that kind to the first stranger she came across. She hadn’t done such a thing before but he’d never known her in this frame of mind before.

‘I’ve been thinking about it lately,’ she replied. ‘Thinking about it a lot.’

‘And did this thought process of yours begin before or after last Wednesday’s lunch?’

She looked at him coolly and blew smoke before saying, ‘Joppi has nothing to do with it. Do you think I would discuss you with Joppi?’

‘You have before.’ The way she referred to that Bavarian four-flusher by that silly diminutive name made him mad. No matter that just about everyone else did the same.

‘That was different. That was years ago. You ran out on me.’

‘Joppi is a jerk,’ said Bret and was angry with himself for betraying his feelings. He looked at her and knew, not for the first time, murderous anger. He could have strangled her without a remnant of remorse. No matter: he would have the last laugh.

‘Joppi is a real live prince,’ she said provocatively.

‘Princes are ten a penny in Bavaria.’

‘And you are jealous of him,’ she said, and didn’t bother to conceal her pleasure at the idea of it.

‘For making a play for my wife?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Joppi has a wife already.’

‘One a day, from what I hear.’

‘You can be very childish sometimes, Bret.’

He didn’t respond except to look at her with fierce resentment. He deplored the way that Americans like his wife revered these two-bit European aristocrats. They’d met Joppi at Ascot the previous June. Joppi had a horse running in the Coronation Stakes and was there with a big party of German friends. Subsequently he’d invited the Rensselaers for a weekend at a house he’d leased near Paris. They had stayed with him there but Bret had not enjoyed it. He’d watched the unctuous Joppi looking at Nikki in a way that Bret did not like men to look at his wife. And Nikki had not even noticed it: or so she said when Bret complained of it afterwards. Now Joppi had invited Nikki to lunch without going through the formality of inviting Bret along. It made Bret sizzle.

‘Prince Joppi,’ said Bret with just enough emphasis upon the first word to show his contempt, ‘is a two-bit racketeer.’

‘Have you had him investigated?’

‘I ran him through the computer,’ he said. ‘He’s into all kinds of crooked deals. That’s why we’re going to stay clear of him.’

‘I don’t work for your goddamned secret intelligence outfit,’ she said. ‘Just in case you forgot, I’m a free citizen, and I choose my own friends and I say anything I want to say to them.’

He knew that she was trying to provoke him but still he wondered if he should phone the night duty officer. He’d have a phone contact for Internal Security. But Bret didn’t relish the idea of describing the nuances of his married life to some young subordinate who would write it down and put it on file somewhere.

He went and ran the bath: both taps fully on gave him the temperature he preferred. He squirted bath oil into the rushing water and it foamed furiously. While the bath was filling he returned to Nikki. Under the circumstances, reasoning with her seemed the wiser course. ‘Have I done something?’ he asked with studied mildness. He sat down on the bed.

‘Oh, no!’ said his wife sarcastically. ‘Not you.’ She could hear the water beating against the bath with a roar like thunder.

She was tense, her arms clamped round her knees, the cigarette forgotten for a moment. He looked at her, trying to see something in her face that would give him a hint about the origin of her anger. Failing to see anything that enlightened him he said, ‘Then what …?’ And then more briskly but with a conciliatory tone, ‘For goodness’ sake, Nikki. I have to go to the office.’

‘I have to go to the office.’ She attempted to mimic the Englishness that he’d acquired since living here. She was not a good mimic and her twanging accent, that had so intrigued him when they first met, was still strong. How foolish he’d been to hope that eventually she would embrace England and everything English as lovingly as he had. ‘That’s all that’s important to you, isn’t it? Never mind me. Never mind if I go stir-crazy in this Godforsaken dump.’ She tossed her head to throw her hair back but when it fell forward again she raked her fingers through it to get it from her face.

He sat at the end of the bed smiling at her and said, ‘Now, now, Nikki, darling. Just tell me what’s wrong.’

It was the patronizing ‘just’ that irritated her. There was something invulnerable about his resolute coldness. Her sister had called him ‘the shy desperado’ and giggled when he called. But Nikki had found it easy to fall in love with Bret Rensselaer. How clearly she remembered it. She’d never had a suitor like him: slim, handsome, soft-spoken and considerate. And there was his lifestyle too. Bret’s suits fitted in the way that only expensive tailoring could contrive and his cars were waxed shiny in the way that only chauffeur-driven cars were, and his mother’s house was cared for by loyal servants. She loved him of course but her love had always been mingled with a touch of awe, or perhaps it was fear. Now she didn’t care. Just for a moment, she was able to tell him everything she felt. ‘Look here, Bret,’ she said confidently. ‘When I married you I thought you were going to …’

He held up his hand and said, ‘Let me turn off the bath, darling. We don’t want it flooding the study downstairs.’ He went back into the bathroom; the roar of water stopped. A draught was coming through the window to make steam that tumbled out through the door. He emerged tightening the knot of his dressing gown: a very tight knot, there was something neurotic in that gesture. He raised his eyes to her and she knew that the moment had passed. She was tongue-tied again: he knew how to make her feel like a child and he liked that. ‘What were you saying, dear?’

She bit her lip and tried again, differently this time. ‘That night, when you first admitted that you were working in secret intelligence, I didn’t believe you. I thought it was another of your romantic stories.’

‘Another?’ He was amused enough to smile.

‘You were always an ace bullshitter, Bret. I thought you were making it all up as some kind of compensation for your dull job at the bank.’

His eyes narrowed: it was the only sign he gave of being angry. He looked down at the carpet. He had been about to do his exercises but she’d hammer at him all the time and he didn’t want that. Better to do them at the office.

‘You were going to bleed them white. I remember you saying that: bleed them white. You told me one day you’d have a man working in the Kremlin.’ She wanted to remind him how close they had been. ‘Remember?’ Her mouth was dry; she sipped more water. ‘You said the Brits could do it because they hadn’t grown too big. You said they could do it but they didn’t know they could do it. That’s where you came in, you said.’

Bret stood with his fists in the pockets of the red dressing gown. He wasn’t really listening to her; he wanted to get on, to bathe and shave and dress and spend the extra time sitting with a newspaper and toast and coffee in the garden before his driver came round to collect him. But he knew that if he turned away, or ended the conversation abruptly, her anger would be reaffirmed. ‘Maybe they will,’ he said and hoped she’d drop it.

He lifted his eyes to the small painting that hung above the bed. He had many fine pictures – all by modern British painters – but this was Bret Rensselaer’s proudest possession. Stanley Spencer: buxom English villagers frolicking in an orchard. Bret could study it for hours, he could smell the fresh grass and the apple blossom. He’d paid far too much for the painting but he had desperately wanted to possess that English scene for ever. Nikki didn’t appreciate having a masterpiece enshrined in the bedroom, to love and to cherish. She preferred photographs; she’d admitted as much once, during a savage argument about the bills she’d run up with the dressmaker.

‘You said that running an agent into the Kremlin was your greatest ambition.’

‘Did I?’ He looked at her and blinked, discomposed both by the extent of his indiscretion and the naïveté of it. ‘I was kidding you.’

‘Don’t say that, Bret!’ She was angry that he should airily dismiss the only truly intimate conversation she could remember having with him. ‘You were serious. Dammit, you were serious.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’ He looked at her and at the bedside table to see what she’d been drinking, but there was no alcohol there, only a litre-size bottle of Malvern water. She’d stuck to her rigorous diet – no bread, butter, sugar, potatoes, pasta or alcohol – for three weeks. She was amazingly disciplined about her dieting and Nikki had never been much of a drinker: it went straight to her waistline. When Internal Security had first vetted her they’d remarked her abstinence and Bret had been proud.

He got up and went round to her side of the bed to give her a kiss. She offered her cheek. It was a sort of armistice but his fury was not allayed: just repressed. ‘It’s a glorious sunny day again. I’m going to have coffee in the garden. Shall I bring some up?’

She pulled the bedside clock round to see it. ‘Jesus Christ! The help won’t be there for an hour yet.’

‘I’m perfectly capable of fixing my own toast and coffee.’

‘It’s too early for me. I’ll call for it when I’m ready.’

He looked at her eyes. She was close to tears. As soon as he left the room she would begin weeping. ‘Go back to sleep, Nikki. Do you want an aspirin?’

‘No I don’t want a goddamned aspirin. Anytime I bug you, you ask me if I want an aspirin: as if talking out of turn was some kind of feminine malady.’

He had often accused her of being a dreamer, which by extension was his claim to be a practical realist. The truth was that he was even more of a romantic dreamer than she was. This craving he had for everything English was ridiculous. He’d even talked of renouncing his US citizenship and was hoping to get one of these knighthoods the British handed out instead of money. An obsession of that kind could bring him only trouble.

There was enough work in the office to keep Bret Rensselaer busy for the first hour or more. It was a wonderful room on the top floor of a modern block. Large by the standards of modern accommodation, his office had been decorated according to his own ideas, as interpreted by one of the best interior decorators in London. He sat behind his big glass-topped desk. The colour scheme – walls, carpet and long leather chesterfield – was entirely grey and black except for his white phone. Bret had intended that the room should be in harmony with this prospect of the slate roofs of central London.

He buzzed for his secretary and started work. Halfway through the morning, his tray emptied by the messenger, he decided to switch off his phone and take twenty minutes to catch up with his physical exercises. It was a part of his puritanical nature and upbringing that he would not make a confrontation with his wife an excuse to miss his work or his exercises.

He was in his shirt-sleeves, doing his thirty pressups, when Dicky Cruyer – a contender for the soon to become vacant chair of the German Stations Controller – put his head round the door and said, ‘Bret, your wife has been trying to get through to you.’

Bret continued to do his pressups slowly and methodically. ‘And?’ he said, trying not to puff.

‘She sounded upset,’ said Dicky. ‘She said something like, “Tell him, you get your man in Moscow and I’ll go get my man in Paris.” I asked her to tell me again but she rang off.’ He watched while Bret finished a couple more pressups.

‘I’ll talk to her later,’ grunted Bret.

‘She was at the airport, getting on the plane. She said to say goodbye. “Goodbye for ever,” she said.’

‘So you’ve said it,’ Bret told him, head twisted, smiling pleasantly from his position full length on the floor. ‘Message received and understood.’

Dicky muttered something about it being a bad phone line, nodded and withdrew with the feeling that he’d been unwise to bring the ugly news. He’d heard rumours that all was not going well with the Rensselaer marriage, but no matter how much a man might want to leave his wife it does not mean that he wants her to leave him. Dicky had the feeling that Bret Rensselaer wouldn’t forget who it was who had brought news of his wife’s desertion, and it would leave a residual antipathy that would taint their relationship for ever after. In this assumption Dicky was correct. He began to hope that the appointment of the German Stations Controller would not be entirely in Bret’s gift.

The door clicked shut. Bret began the pressups over again. He had inflicted that mortifying rule on himself: if he stopped during exercises he did them all over again.

When his exercises were done Bret opened the door that concealed a small sink. He washed his face and hands and as he did so he recalled in detail the conversation he’d had with his wife that morning. He told himself not to waste time pondering the rift between them: what was gone was gone, and good riddance. Bret Rensselaer had always claimed that he never wasted time upon recriminations or regrets, but he felt hurt and deeply resentful.

To get his mind on other matters he began to think about those days long ago when he’d wanted to get into Operations. He’d drafted out some ideas about undermining the East German economy but no one had taken him seriously. The Director-General’s reaction to the big pile of research he’d done was to give him the European Economics desk. That wasn’t really something to complain about; Bret had built the desk into a formidable empire. But the economic desk work had been processing intelligence. He always regretted that they hadn’t taken up the more important idea: the idea of promoting change in East Germany.

Bret’s idea had never been to get an effective agent into the top of the Moscow KGB. He would prefer having a really brilliant agent, with a long-term disruptive and informative role, in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic. It would take a long time: it was not something that could be hurried in the way that so many SIS operations were.

The Department probably had dozens of sleepers who’d established themselves, in one capacity or another, as longtime loyal agents of the various communist regimes of East Europe. Now Bret had to find such a person, and it had to be the right one. But the long and meticulous process of selection had to be done with such discretion and finesse that no one would be aware of what he was doing. And when he found that man, he’d have the task of persuading him to risk his neck in a way that sleepers were not normally asked to do. A lot of sleepers assigned to deep cover just took the money and relied upon the good chance that they’d never be asked to do anything at all.

It would not be simple. Neither would it be happy. At the beginning there would be little or no cooperation, for the simple reason that no one around him could be told what he was doing. Afterwards there would be the clamour for recognition and rewards. The Department was very concerned about such things. It was natural these men, who laboured so secretly, should strive so vigorously and desperately for the admiration and respect of their peers when things went well. And if things did not go well there would be the savage recriminations that accompanied post-mortems.

Lastly there was the effect that an operation like this would have upon the man who went off to do the dirty work. They did not come back. Or if they did come back they were never fit to work again. Of the survivors Bret had seen, few returned able to do anything but sit with a rug over their knees, talk to the officially approved departmental shrink, and try vainly to put together ruptured nerves and shattered relationships.

It was easy to see why they couldn’t recover. You ask a man to leave all that he holds most dear, to spy in a strange country. Then, years later, you snatch him back again – God willing – to live out his remaining life in peace and contentment. But there is no peace and no contentment either. The poor devil can’t remember anyone he hasn’t betrayed or abandoned at some time or another. Such people are destroyed as surely as if they’d faced a firing squad.

On the other hand it was necessary to balance the destruction of one man – plus perhaps a few members of his family – with what could be achieved by such a coup. It was a matter of the greater good of the community at large. They were fighting against a system which killed hundreds of thousands in labour camps, which used torture as a normal part of its police interrogation, which put dissenters into mental asylums. It would be absurd to be squeamish when the stakes were so high.

Bret Rensselaer closed the door that hid his sink and went to the window and looked out. Despite the haze, you could see it all from here: the Gothic spike of the Palace of Westminster, the spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Nelson balancing gingerly on his column. There was a unity to it. Even the incongruous Post Office tower would perhaps look all right given a century or so of weathering. Bret pushed his face close to the glass in order to see Wren’s dome of St Paul’s. The Director-General’s room had a fine view northwards and Bret envied him that. One day perhaps he would occupy that room. Nikki had made jokes about that and he’d pretended to laugh at them but he’d not given up hopes that one day …

Then he remembered the notes he’d made about the whole project. A great idea struck him: now that he had more time, and a staff of economists and analysts, he’d have it all up-dated. Maps, bar charts, pie charts, graphs and easy to understand figures that, even the Director-General would understand could all be done on the computer. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Thank you, Nikki.

And that brought him back to his wife. Once again he told himself to be resolute. She had left him. It was all over. He told himself he’d seen it coming for ages but in fact he hadn’t seen it coming at all. He’d always taken it for granted that Nikki would put up with all the things of which she complained – just as he put up with her – in order to have a marriage. He would miss her, there was no getting away from that fact, but he vowed he wouldn’t go chasing after her.

It simply wasn’t fair: he’d never been unfaithful to her all the time they’d been married. He sighed. Now he would have to start all over again: dating, courting, persuading, cajoling, being the extra man at parties. He’d have to learn how to suffer rejection when he asked younger women out to dinner. Rejection had never been easy for him. It was all too awful to contemplate. Perhaps he’d get his secretary to dine with him one evening next week. She’d told him it was all off with her fiancé.

He sat down at his desk and picked up some papers but the words floated before his eyes as his mind went back to Nikki. What had started the breakdown of his marriage? What had gone wrong? What had Nikki called him: a ruthless bastard? She’d been so cool and lucid, that’s what had really shaken him. Thinking about it again he decided that Nikki’s cool and lucid manner had all been a sham. Ruthless bastard? He told himself that women were apt to say absurd things when they were incoherently angry. That helped.

2

East Germany. January 1978.

‘Bring me the mirror,’ said Max Busby. He hadn’t intended that his voice should come out as a croak. Bernard Samson went and got the mirror and placed it on the table so Max could see his arm without twisting inside out. ‘Now take the dressing off,’ said Max.

The sleeve of Max’s filthy old shirt had been torn back as far as the shoulder. Now Bernard unbound the arm, finally peeling back a pad that was caked with pus and dried blood. It was a shock. Bernard gave an involuntary hiss and Max saw the look of horror on his face. ‘Not too bad,’ said Bernard, trying to hide his real feelings.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ said Busby, looking at it and trying to sound unruffled. It was a big wound: deep and inflamed and oozing pus. Bernard had stitched it up with a sewing needle and fishing line from a survival kit but some of his stitches had torn through the soft flesh. The skin around it was mottled every colour of the rainbow and so tender that even to look at it made it hurt more. Bernard was pinching it together tight so it didn’t break right open again. The dressing – an old handkerchief – had got dirty. The side that had been against the wound was dark brown and completely saturated with blood. More blood had crusted in patches all down his arm. ‘It might have been my gun hand.’

Max bent his head until, by the light of the lamp, he could see his pale face in the mirror. He knew about wounds. He knew the way that loss of blood makes the heart pound as it tries to keep supplying oxygen and glucose to the brain. His face had whitened due to the blood vessels contracting as they tried to help the heart do its job. And the heart pumped more furiously as the plasma was lost and the blood thickened. Max tried to take his own pulse. He couldn’t manage it but he knew what he would find: irregular pulse and low body temperature. These were all the signs: bad signs.

‘Put something on the fire and then bind it up tight with the strip of towel. I’ll wrap paper round it before we leave. Don’t want to leave a trail of blood spots.’ He managed a smile. ‘We’ll give them another hour.’ Max Busby was frightened. They were in a mountain hut, it was winter and he was no longer young.

A one-time NYPD cop, he’d come to Europe in 1944, wearing the bars of a US Army lieutenant, and he’d never gone back across the Atlantic except for an attempted reconciliation with his ex-wife in Chicago and a couple of visits to his mother in Atlantic City.

After Bernard had replaced the mirror and put something on to the fire, Max stood up and Bernard helped him with his coat. Then he watched as Max settled down carefully in his chair. Max was badly hurt. Bernard wondered if they would both make it as far as the border.

Max read his thoughts and smiled. Now neither wife nor mother would have recognized Max in his filthy overcoat with battered jeans and the torn shirt under it. There was a certain mad formality to the way that he balanced a greasy trilby hat on his knees. His papers said he was a railway worker but his papers, and a lot of other things he needed, were at the railway station and a Soviet arrest team was there too.

Max Busby was short and squat without being fat. His sparse hair was black and his face was heavily lined. His eyes were reddened by tiredness. He had heavy brows and a large straggly black moustache that was lop-sided because of the way he kept tugging at one end of it.

Older, wiser, wounded and sick, but despite all that and the change in environment and costume, Max Busby did not feel very different to that green policeman who’d patrolled the dark and dangerous Manhattan streets and alleys. Then, as now, he was his own man: the wrongos didn’t all wear black hats. Some of them were to be found spooning their beluga with the police commissioner. It was the same here: no black and white, just shades of grey. Max Busby disdained communism – or ‘socialism’ in the preferred terminology of its practitioners – and all it stood for, with a zeal that was unusual even in the ranks of the men who fought it, but he wasn’t a simplistic crusader.

‘Two hours,’ suggested Bernard Samson. Bernard was big and strong, with wavy hair and spectacles. He wore a scuffed leather zip-front jacket, and baggy corduroy trousers, held up by a wide leather belt decorated with a collection of metal communist Parteitag badges. On his head there was a close-fitting peaked cap of the design forever associated with the ill-fated Afrika Korps. It was a sensible choice of headgear thought Max as he looked at it. A man could go to sleep in a cap like that, or fight without losing it. Max looked at his companion: Bernard was still in one piece, and young enough to wait it out without his nerves fraying and his mouth going dry. Perhaps it would be better to let him go on alone. But would Bernard make it alone? Max was not at all sure he would. ‘They have to get through Schwerin,’ Bernard reminded him. ‘They may be delayed by one of the mobile patrols.’

Max nodded and wet his lips. The loss of blood had sapped his strength: the idea of his contacts being challenged by a Russian army patrol made his stomach heave. Their papers were not good enough to withstand any scrutiny more careful than a cop’s casual flashlight beam. Few false papers are.

He knew that Bernard wouldn’t see the nod, the little room was in darkness except for the faint glimmer from an evil-smelling oil-lamp, its wick turned as low as possible, and from the stove a rosy glow that gave satin toecaps to their boots, but Qui tacet, consentire videtur, silence means consent. Max, like many a NY cop before him, had slaved at night school to study law. Even now he remembered a few basic essentials. More pertinent to his ready consent was the fact that Max knew what it was like to be crossing a hundred and fifty kilometres of moonlit Saxon countryside when there was a triple A alert and a Moscow stop-and-detain order that would absolve any trigger-happy cop or soldier from the consequences of shooting strangers on sight.

Bernard tapped the cylindrical iron stove with his heavy boot and was startled when the door flipped open and red-hot cinders fell out upon the hearth. For a few moments there was a flare of golden light as the draught fed the fire. He could see the wads of brown-edged newspaper packed into the cracks around the door frame and a chipped enamel wash-basin and the rucksacks that had been positioned near the door in case they had to leave in a hurry. And he could see Max as white as a sheet and looking … well, looking like any old man would look who’d lost so much blood and who should be in an intensive-care ward but was trudging across northern Germany in winter. Then it went dull again and the room darkened.

‘Two hours then?’ Bernard asked.

‘I won’t argue.’ Max was carefully chewing the final mouthful of rye bread. It was delicious but he had to chew carefully and swallow it bit by bit. They grew the best rye in the world in Mecklenburg, and made the finest bread with it. But that was the last of it and both men were hungry.

‘That makes a change,’ said Bernard good-naturedly. They seldom truly argued. Max liked the younger man to feel he had a say in what happened. Especially now.

‘I’ll not make an enemy with the guy who’s going to get the German Desk,’ said Max very softly, and twisted one end of his moustache. He tried not to think of his pain.

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Don’t kid around, Bernard. Who else is there?’

‘Dicky Cruyer.’

Max said, ‘Oh, so that’s it. You really resent Dicky, don’t you?’ Bernard always rose to such bait and Max liked to tease him.

‘He could do it.’

‘Well, he hasn’t got a ghost of a chance. He’s too young and too inexperienced. You’re in line; and after this one you’ll get anything you ask for.’

Bernard didn’t reply. It was a welcome thought. He was in his middle thirties and, despite his contempt for desk men, he didn’t want to end up like poor old Max. Max was neither one thing nor the other. He was too old for shooting matches, climbing into other people’s houses and running away from frontier guards, but there was nothing else that he could do. Nothing, that is, that would pay him anything like a living wage. Bernard’s attempts to persuade his father to get Max a job in the training school had been met with spiteful derision. He’d made enemies in all the wrong places. Bernard’s father never got along with him. Poor Max, Bernard admired him immensely, and Bernard had seen Max doing the job as no one else could do it. But heaven only knew how he’d end his days. Yes, a job behind a desk in London would come at exactly the right stage of Bernard’s career.

Neither man spoke for a little while after that. For the last few miles Bernard had been carrying everything. They were both exhausted, and like combat soldiers they had learned never to miss an opportunity for rest. They both dozed into a controlled half sleep. That was all they would allow themselves until they were back across the border and out of danger.

It was about thirty minutes later that the thump thump thump of a helicopter brought them back to wide-eyed awakening. It was a medium-sized chopper, not transport size, and it was flying slowly and at no more than a thousand feet, judging from the sound it made. It all added up to bad news. The German Democratic Republic was not rich enough to supply such expensive gas-guzzling machines for anything but serious business.

‘Shit!’ said Max. ‘The bastards are looking for us.’ Despite the urgency in his voice he spoke quietly, as if the men in the chopper might hear him.

The two men sat in the dark room neither moving nor speaking: they were listening. The tension was almost unbearable as they concentrated. The helicopter was not flying in a straight line and that was an especially bad sign: it meant it had reached its search area. Its course meandered as if it was pin-pointing the neighbouring villages. It was looking for movement: any kind of movement. Outside the snow was deep. When daylight came nothing could move without leaving a conspicuous trail.

In this part of the world, to go outdoors was enough to excite suspicion. There was nowhere to visit after dark, the local residents were simple people, peasants in fact. They didn’t eat the sort of elaborate evening meal that provides an excuse for dinner parties and they had no money for restaurants. As to hotels, who would want to spend even one night here when they had the means to move on?

The sound of the helicopter was abruptly muted as it passed behind the forested hills, and for the time being the night was silent.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Max. Such a sudden departure would be going against everything they had planned but Max, even more than Bernard, was a creature of impulse. He had his ‘hunches’. He wrapped folded newspaper round his arm in case the blood came through the towel. Then he put string round the arm of the overcoat and Bernard tied it very tight.

‘Okay.’ Bernard had long ago decided that Max – notwithstanding his inability to find domestic happiness or turn his professional skills into anything resembling a success story – had an uncanny instinct for the approach of danger. Without hesitation and without getting up from his chair, Bernard leaned forward and picked up the big kettle. Opening the stove ring with the metal lifting tool, he poured water into the fire. He did it very carefully and gently, but even so there was a lot of steam.

Max was about to stop him but the kid was right. Better to do it now. At least that lousy chopper was out of sight of the chimney. When the fire was out Bernard put some dead ashes into the stove. It wouldn’t help much if they got here. They’d see the blood on the floorboards, and it would require many gallons of water to cool the stove, but it might make it seem as if they’d left earlier and save them if they had to hide nearby.

‘Let’s go.’ Max took out his pistol. It was a Sauer Model 38, a small automatic dating from the Nazi period, when they were used by high-ranking army officers. It was a lovely gun, obtained by Bernard from some underworld acquaintance in London, where Bernard’s array of shady friends rivalled those he knew in Berlin.

Bernard watched Max as he tried to move the slide back to inject a round into the chamber. He had to change hands to do it and his face was contorted with pain. It was distressing to watch him but Bernard said nothing. Once done, Max pressed on the exposed cocking lever to lower the hammer so the gun was ready for instant use but with little risk of accident. Max pushed the gun into his inside breast pocket. ‘Have you got a gun?’ he asked.

‘We left it at the house. You said Siggi might need it.’ Bernard swung the rucksack over his shoulder. It was heavy, containing the contents of both packs. There was a grappling hook and nylon rope as well as a small digging implement and a formidable bolt-cutter.

‘So I did. Damn. Well, you take the glasses.’ Bernard took them from round Max’s neck, careful not to jar his arm. ‘Stare them to death, Bernard. You can do it!’ A grim little laugh. Silently Bernard took the field-glasses – rubber-clad Zeiss 7 × 40s, like the ones the Grenzpolizei used – and put his head and arm through the strap. It made them uncomfortably tight, but if they had to run for it he didn’t want the glasses floating around and banging him in the face.

Max tapped the snuffer that extinguished the flame of the oil-lamp. Everything was pitch black until he opened the door and let in a trace of blue starlight and the bitterly cold night air. ‘Attaboy!’

Max was expecting trouble and Bernard did not find the prospect cheering. Bernard had never learned to face the occasional violent episodes that his job provided in the way that the old-timers like Max accepted them even when injured. Was it, he wondered, something to do with the army or the war, or both?

The timber cabin was isolated. If only it would snow again, that would help to cover their tracks, but there was no sign of snow. Once outside Max sniffed the air, anxious to know if the smoke from the stove would carry far enough to alert a search party. Well at least choosing this remote shelter had proved right. It was a hut for the cowherds when in summer the cattle moved to the higher grazing. From this elevated position they could see the valley along which they had come. Here and there, lights indicated a cluster of houses in this dark and lonely landscape. It was good country for moving at night but when daylight came it would work against them: they’d be too damned conspicuous. Max cursed the bad luck that had dogged the whole movement. By this time they should have all been across the border, skin intact and sound asleep after warm baths and a big meal and lots to drink.

Max looked up. A few stars were sprinkled to the east but most of the sky was dark. If the thick overcast remained there, blotting out the sun, it would help, but it wasn’t low enough to inconvenience the helicopters. The chopper would be back.

‘We’ll keep to the high ground,’ said Max. ‘These paths usually make good going. They keep them marked and maintained for summertime walkers.’ He set off at a good pace to show Bernard that he was fit and strong, but after a little while he slowed.

For several kilometres the beech forest blocked off their view of the valley. It was dark walking under the trees, like being in a long tunnel. The undergrowth was dead and crisp brown fern crunched under their feet. As the trail climbed the snow was harder. Trees shielded the footpath and upon the hard going they made reasonably good speed. They had walked for about an hour and a half, and were into the evergreens, when Max called a halt. They were higher now, and through a firebreak in the regimented plantations they could see the twist of the next valley ahead of them. Beyond that, through a dip in the hills, a lake shone faintly in the starlight, its water heady with foam, like good German beer. It was difficult to guess how far away it was. There were no houses in sight, no roads, no power lines, nothing to give the landscape a scale. Trees were no help: these fir trees came in all shapes and sizes.

‘Five minutes,’ said Max. He sank down in a way that revealed his true condition and wedged his backside into the roots of a tree. Alongside him there was a bin for feeding the deer: the herds were cosseted for the benefit of the hunters. Resting against the bin, Max’s head slumped to one side. His face was shiny with exertion and he looked all in. Blood had seeped through the paper and there was a patch of it on the sleeve of the thick overcoat. Better to press on than to try to fix it here.

Bernard took out the field-glasses, snapped the protective covers from the lenses, and looked more carefully at the lake. It was the haze upon the water that produced the boiling effect and softened its outline.

‘How are your feet?’ said Max.

‘Okay, Max.’

‘I have spare socks.’

‘Don’t mother me, Max.’

‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Yes, we’re in Germany,’ he said, still staring through the glasses.

‘Are you sure?’

‘But that’s our lake, Max,’ Bernard affirmed. ‘Mouse Lake.’

‘Or Moulting Lake,’ suggested Max.

‘Or even Turncoat Lake,’ said Bernard, suggesting a third possible translation.

Max regretted his attempt at levity. ‘Something like that,’ he said. He resolved to stop treating Bernard like a child. It was not so easy: He’d known him so long it was difficult to remember that he was a grown man with a wife and children. And what a wife! Fiona Samson was one of the rising stars of the Department. Some of the more excitable employees were saying that she was likely to wind up as the first woman to hold the Director-General’s post. Max found it an unlikely prospect. The higher echelons of the Department were reserved for a certain sort of Englishman, all of whom seemed to have been at school together.

Max Busby often wondered why Fiona had married Bernard. He was no great prize. If he got the German Desk in London it would be largely due to his father’s influence, and he’d go no further. Whoever got the German Desk would come under Bret Rensselaer’s direction, and Bret wanted a stooge there. Max wondered if Bernard would adapt to a yes-man role.

Max took the offered field-glasses to have a closer look at the lake. Holding them with only one hand meant resting against the tree. Even holding his arm up made him tremble. He wondered if it was septic: he’d seen wounds go septic very quickly but he put the thought to the back of his mind and concentrated on what he could see. Yes, that was the Mause See: exactly as he remembered it from the map. Maps had always been a fetish with him, sometimes he sat looking at them for hours on end, as other men read books. They were not only maps of places he knew, or places he’d been or places he might have to visit, but maps of every kind. When someone had given him the Times Atlas of the Moon, Max took it on vacation and it was his sole reading matter.

‘We must come in along the southern shore,’ said Bernard, ‘and not too close to the water or we’ll find ourselves in some Central Committee member’s country cottage.’

‘A boat might be the best way,’ Max suggested, handing the glasses back.

‘Let’s get closer,’ said Bernard, who didn’t like the idea of a boat. Too risky from every point of view. Bernard was not very skilled with a set of oars and Max certainly couldn’t row. In winter a boat might be missed from its moorings, and even if the water was glassy smooth – which it wouldn’t be – he didn’t fancy being exposed to view like that. It was an idea typical of Max, who liked such brazen methods and had proved them in the past. Bernard hoped Max would forget that idea by the time they’d covered the intervening countryside. It was a long hike. It looked like rough going and soon it would be dawn.

Bernard felt like saying something about the two men with whom they had been supposed to rendezvous yesterday afternoon, but he kept silent. There was nothing to be said; they had gone into the bag. Max and Bernard had been lucky to get away. Now the only important thing was for them to get back. If they didn’t, the whole operation – ‘Reisezug’ – would have proved useless: more than three months of planning, risks and hard work wasted. Bernard’s father was running the operation, and he would be desolated. To some extent, his father’s reputation depended upon him.

Bernard got up and dusted the soil from his trousers. It was sandy and had a strange musty smell.

‘It stinks, right?’ said Max, somehow reading his thoughts. ‘The North German Plain. Goddamned hilly for a plain, I’d say.’

‘German Polish Plain they called it when I was at school,’ said Bernard.

‘Yeah, well, Poland has moved a whole lot closer to here since I did high school geography,’ said Max, and smiled at his little joke. ‘My wife Helma was born not far from here. Ex-wife that is. Once she got that little old US passport she went off to live in Chicago with her cousin.’

As Bernard helped Max to his feet he saw the animal. It was lying full-length in a bare patch of ground behind the tree against which he’d rested. Its fur was caked with mud and it was frozen hard. He peered more closely at it. It was a fully grown hare, its foot tight in a primitive wire snare. The poor creature had died in agony, gnawing its trapped foot down to the bone but lacking either the energy or the desperate determination required for such a sacrifice.

Max came to look too. Neither man spoke. For Max it seemed like a bad omen and Max had always been a great believer in signs. Still without speaking they both trudged on. They were tired now and the five minutes’ break that had helped their lungs had stiffened their muscles. Max found it difficult to hold his arm up, but if he let it hang it throbbed and bled more.

‘Why didn’t he go back?’ said Max as the path widened and Bernard came up alongside him.

‘Who?’

‘The poacher. Why didn’t he go back and look at his snares?’

‘You mean we are already in the Sperrzone? There was no fence, no signs.’

‘Locals know where it is,’ said Max. ‘Strangers blunder onwards.’ He unbuttoned his coat and touched the gun. There was no practical reason for doing so except that Max wanted to make it clear to Bernard that he hadn’t come all this way in order to turn himself in to the first person who challenged them. Max had shot his way out of trouble before: twice. Some people said those two remarkable instances of good luck had given him a false idea of what could be done when facing capture; Max thought the British with whom he worked were too damned ready to let their people put their hands up.

He stopped for a moment to look at the lake again. It would be so much easier and quicker to be walking along the valley instead of along this high path. But there would be villages and farms and dogs that barked down there. These high paths were less likely to have such dangers but the ice on the northern aspects meant they were sometimes slower going and the two men didn’t have time to spare.

The next hill was higher and after that the path would descend to cross the Besen valley. Perhaps it would be better to cross it somewhere else. If the local police were alerted they were sure to put a man at the stone bridge where the footpath met the valley road. He looked at the summit of the hill on the far side of the river. They’d never do it. The local people called these hills ‘mountains’, as people do in regions where no mountains exist. Well, he was beginning to understand why. After you walked these hills they became mountains. Everything was relative: the older he got the more mountainous the world became.

‘We’ll try to get over the Besen at that wide place where the stones are,’ said Max.

Bernard grunted unenthusiastically. If they’d had more time Max would have made it into more of a discussion. He would have let Bernard feel he’d had a say in the decisions, but there was no time for such niceties.

Scrambling down through the dead bracken and the loose stones caused both men to lose their balance now and again. Once Max slid so far he almost fell. He knocked his wounded arm when recovering himself, and the pain was so great that he gave a little whimper. Bernard helped him up. Max said nothing. He didn’t say thanks, there was no energy to spare.

Max had chosen this place with care. Everywhere on its east side the Wall occupied a wide band of communist territory. Even to get within five kilometres of the Wall itself required a permit. This well guarded and constantly patrolled prohibited region, or Sperrzone, was cleared of trees and any shrubs or growth that could conceal a man or child. Any agricultural work permitted in the Sperrzone was done only in daylight and under the constant surveillance of the guards in their watchtowers. Artfully the towers were different in height and design, varying from the lower ‘observation bunkers’ to the tall modernistic concrete constructions that resembled airport control towers.

But in the Sperrzone of that section of the frontier that NATO codenames ‘piecemeal’, good or bad fortune has called upon the DDR to contend with the lake. It was the presence of a lake at a part of the Wall that was undergoing extensive repair work that caught Max Busby’s attention in the so-called Secret Room.

For the regime it was a difficult section: the Elbe and the little river Besen that feeds into it, plus the effect of the Mause See, all contributed to the marshiness of the flat land. The Wall was always giving them problems here no matter what they did about waterproofing the foundations. Now a stretch almost three kilometres long was under repair at seven different places. It must be bad or they would have waited until summer.

Getting through the Sperrzone was only the beginning. The real frontier was marked by a tall fence, too flimsy to climb but rigged with alarms, flares and automatic guns. After that came the Schutzstreifen, the security strip, about five hundred metres deep, where attack-trained dogs on Hundelaufleine ran between the minefields. Then came the concrete ditches, followed by an eight-metre strip of dense barbed wire and a variety of devices arranged differently from sector to sector to provide surprises for the newcomer.

To what extent this bizarre playground had been dismantled for the benefit of the repair gangs, remained to be discovered. It was difficult to forget the helicopter. The whole military region would be alerted now. It wouldn’t be hard to guess where the fugitives were heading.

When they reached the lake it was not anything like the obstruction that either of them had anticipated. They’d been soaked to the knees wading across the slow-moving Besen. The necessary excursion into the Mause See – to get around the red marker-buoys which Max thought might mark underwater obstacles – did no more than repeat the soaking up to the waist. But there was a difference: the hard muscular legs had been brought back to tingling life by brisk walking, but the icy cold water of the lake up to his waist drained from Max some measure of his resolution. His arm hurt, his guts hurt and the arctic water pierced through his belly like cold steel.

The snow began with just a few flakes spinning down from nowhere and then became a steady fall. ‘What a beautiful sight,’ said Bernard and Max grunted his agreement.

There was just a faint tinge of light in the eastern sky as they cut through the first wire fence. ‘Just go!’ said Max, his teeth chattering. ‘There’s no time for all the training school tricks. Screw the alarms, just cut!’

Bernard handled the big bolt-cutters quickly and expertly. The only noise they heard for the first few minutes was the clang of the cut wire. But after that the dogs began to bark.

Frank Harrington, the SIS Berlin ‘resident’, would not normally have been at the reception point in the Bundesrepublik waiting, in the most lonely hours of the night, for two agents breaking through the Wall, but this operation was special. And Frank had promised Bernard’s father that he would look after him, a promise which Frank Harrington interpreted in the most solemn fashion.

He was in a small subterranean room under some four metres of concrete and lit by fluorescent blue lights, but Frank’s vigil was not too onerous. Although such forward command bunkers were somewhat austere – it being NATO’s assumption that the Warsaw Pact armies would roll over these border defences in the first hours of any undeclared war – it was warm and dry and he was sitting in a soft seat with a glass of decent whisky in his fist.

This was the commanding officer’s private office, or at least it was assigned to that purpose in the event of a war emergency. Among Frank’s companions were a corpulent young officer of the Bundesgrenzschutz – a force of West German riot police who guard airports, embassies and the border – and an elderly Englishman in a curious nautical uniform worn by the British Frontier Service, which acts as guides for all British army patrols on land, air and river. The German was lolling against a radiator and the Englishman perched on the edge of a desk.

‘How long before sun-up?’ said Frank. He’d kept his tan trenchcoat on over his brown tweed suit. His shirt was khaki, his tie a faded sort of yellow. To the casual eye he might have been an army officer in uniform.

‘An hour and eight minutes,’ said the Englishman after consulting his watch. He didn’t trust clocks, not even the synchronized and constantly monitored clocks in the control bunker.

Hunched in a chair in the corner – Melton overcoat over his Savile Row worsted – there was a fourth man, Bret Rensselaer. He’d come from London Central on a watching brief and he was taking it literally. Now he checked his watch. Bret had already committed the time of sunrise to memory; he wondered why Frank hadn’t bothered to do so.

The two men had worked together for a long time and their relationship was firmly established. Frank Harrington regarded Bret’s patrician deportment and high-handed East Coast bullshit as typical of the CIA top brass he used to know in Washington. Bret saw in Frank a minimally efficient although congenial time-server, of the sort that yeoman farmers had supplied to Britain’s Civil Service since the days of Empire. These descriptions, suitably amended, would have been acknowledged by both men and it was thus that a modus vivendi had been reached.

‘Germans who live near the border get a special pass and can go across nine times a year to see friends and relatives,’ said Frank, suddenly impelled for the sake of good manners to include Bret in the conversation. ‘One of them came through yesterday evening – they are not permitted to stay overnight – and told us that everything looked normal. The work on the Wall and so on …’

Bret nodded. The hum of the air-conditioning seemed loud in the silence.

‘It was a good spot to choose,’ Frank added.

‘There are no good spots,’ interposed the BGS officer loudly. He looked like a ruffian, thought Frank, with his scarred face and beer belly. Perhaps riot policemen had to be like that. Meeting no response from either of the strange foreigners, the German officer drank what remained of his whisky, wiped his mouth, belched, nodded his leave-taking and went out.

The phone in the next room rang and they listened while the operator grunted, hung up and then called loudly, ‘Dogs barking and some sort of movement over there now.’

Bret looked at Frank. Frank winked but otherwise didn’t move.

The English guide swallowed the last of his whisky hurriedly and slid off the desk. ‘I’d better be off too,’ he said. ‘I might be needed. I understand two of your freebooters might be going in to try to help.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Frank.

‘It won’t work,’ said the Englishman. ‘In effect it’s an invasion of their soil.’

Frank stared at him and didn’t reply. He didn’t like people to refer to his men as freebooters, especially not strangers. The guide, forgetting his glass was empty, tried to drink more from it. Then he set it down on the desk where he’d been sitting and departed.

Left to themselves, Bret said, ‘If young Samson pulls this one off I’m going to recommend him for the German Desk.’ He was sitting well back in the chair, elbows on its rests, hands together like a tutor delivering a homily to an erring student.

‘Yes, so you said.’

‘Can he do it, Frank?’ Although framed as a query, he said it as if he was testing Frank with an exam question, rather than asking help with a difficult decision.

‘He’s not stupid.’

‘Just headstrong,’ supplied Bret. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?’ asked Frank, holding up the bottle of scotch which was on the floor near his chair. Bret had bought it in the duty-free shop at London airport but he hadn’t touched a drop.

Bret shook his head. ‘And the wife?’ said Bret, adding in a voice that was half joking, half serious, ‘Is Mrs Samson going to be the first female Director-General?’

‘Too fixed in her viewpoint. All women are. She’s not flexible enough to do what the old man does, is she?’

‘A lead pipe is flexible,’ said Bret.

‘Resilient I mean.’

‘Elastic,’ said Bret, ‘is the only word I can think of for the capacity to return to former shape and state.’

‘Is that the primary requirement for a D-G?’ asked Frank coldly. He’d trained with Sir Henry Clevemore back in wartime and been a personal friend ever since. He wasn’t keen on discussing his possible successors with Bret.

‘Primary requirement for a lot of things,’ said Bret dismissively. He didn’t want to talk but he added, ‘Too many people in this business get permanently crippled.’

‘Only field agents surely?’

‘It’s sometimes worse for the ones who send them out.’

‘Is that what you’re worried about in the case of Bernard Samson? That too much rough stuff might leave a permanent mark? Is that why you asked me?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Bernard would do a good job in London. Give him a chance at it, Bret. I’ll support it.’

‘I might take you up on that, Frank.’

‘Freebooters!’ said Frank. ‘Confounded nerve of the man. He was talking about my reception team.’

From the next room the operator called, ‘They’ve put the searchlights on!’

Frank said, ‘Tell them to put the big radar jammer on. I don’t want any arguments: the Piranha!’ The army hated using the Piranhas because they jammed the radars on both sides of the line. ‘Now!’ said Frank.

The first searchlight came on, spluttering and hissing, and its beam went sweeping across the carefully smoothed soft earth ahead of them. Now neither Max nor Bernard could hope that they’d get right through undetected.

Bernard went flat on the ground but Max was a tough old veteran and he went running on into the darkness behind the searchlight beam, confident that the region round the beam was darkest to the eyes of the guards.

The Grenzpolizei up in the tower were caught by surprise. They were both young conscripts, sent here from the far side of the country and recommended for this special job after their good service in the Free German Youth. There had been an alert, two in fact. Their sergeant had read the teleprinter message aloud to them to be sure they understood. But alerts were commonplace. None of the Grepos took them too seriously. Since the boys had arrived here six months ago, there had been nine emergencies and every one of them had turned out to be birds or rabbits tripping the wires. No one tried to get through nowadays: no one with any sense.

On the Western side of the Wall, Frank’s reception team – Tom Cutts and ‘Gabby’ Green – had come up very close by that time. They weren’t directly in Frank’s employ, they were specialists. Despite being in their middle thirties, they were, according to their papers, junior officers of the Signal Corps. With them was a genuine soldier, Sergeant Powell, who was a radar technician. His job was to make sure nothing went wrong with their equipment, although, as he’d told them quite frankly, if something did go wrong with it, it was unlikely that he’d be able to repair it there in the slit trench. It would have to go back to the workshop, and then probably to the manufacturer.

These ‘freebooters’ had been dug in there a long time, dressed in their camouflaged battle-smocks, faces darkened with paint, brown knitted hats pulled down over the tops of their ears. Helmets were too heavy, and, if you dropped them, dangerously noisy. It was a curious fact that they were safer dressed as soldiers than as civilians. Those Grepos over there were cautious about shooting soldiers; and soldiers on both sides of the Wall were garbed almost identically.

They didn’t speak very often: every sound carried a long way at night and they’d worked together often enough to know what had to be done. They’d manhandled the little radar set forward and got the antenna into a favourable position ahead of them as soon as darkness came the previous evening, and then spent all night with the set, watching the movements of the vehicles and the guards. Both men were wearing headphones over their knitted hats, and Gabby, whose taciturn disposition had earned him his nickname, had his eye to the big Hawklite image-intensifying scope.

‘Yes,’ he said suddenly, the rubber-sided microphone clamped tight to his mouth. ‘One! No: two of them. One running … the other on the ground. Jesus!’

The searchlight had come on by that time, but it provided no help for anyone trying to see what was happening.

‘And there go the infra-red lights too. My, my, they are getting serious,’ said Gabby calmly. ‘Can we jam?’ Tom had already tuned the jammer to the required wavelength, but it was a lower-power machine that would only affect the small sets. ‘I’ll have to go forward. I can’t get it from here.’

Tom said nothing. They’d both hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary for either of them to cross into DDR territory. Over the last year they’d had a couple of close shaves, and their opposite numbers – the two-man team who were responsible for the stretch of Wall to the north – had both been killed after one of them stepped on a mine that had been ‘accidentally’ left on the West side of the Wall when DDR repair parties had finished work.

Tom Cutts’s misgivings would have been confirmed had he had a chance to see into the Russian Electronic Warfare Support Vehicle that was parked out of sight behind the dog kennels. Inside its darkened interior a senior KGB officer named Erich Stinnes could just about fit between the collection of electronic equipment. His face was tense and the lenses of his glasses reflected the screen of a battlefield radar far more sophisticated than the ‘man-portable’ infantry model that the two ‘freebooters’ had placed into position.

‘One of them is moving forward,’ the Russian army operator told Stinnes. The blip that was Gabby glowed brighter as he scrambled from his trench and exposed more of his body to the radar.

The EW support vehicle provided more than one indication of what was happening in the sector. There was a thermal imager rendering the warmth of human bodies into revealing white blobs, and now that the infra-red lights were on, the automatic IR cameras were taking a picture every five seconds. If it came to an inquiry there would be no chance of proving the DDR was in the wrong.

‘Let him come,’ said Stinnes. ‘Perhaps the other fellow will come too. Then we’ll have both of them.’

‘If we wait too long the two spies will escape,’ said the Grepo officer who’d been assigned to give Stinnes all the help and assistance he required.

‘We’ll get them all, never fear. I’ve followed them a long way. I’ll not miss them now.’ They didn’t realize how circumscribed he was by the rules and regulations. But without breaking any applicable rules Stinnes had supervised what can only be described as an exemplary operation. The two agents arrested in Schwerin had yielded the details of their rendezvous after only two hours of interrogation. Furthermore the methods used to get this ‘confession’ were by KGB standards only moderately severe. They had detected the two ‘Englishmen’ at the log cabin and kept them under observation all the way here. Apart from the misrouteing of a helicopter by some imbecilic air traffic controller it was a textbook operation.

‘The second man is coming forward,’ said the operator.

‘Kolossal!’ said Stinnes. ‘When he gets to the wire you can shoot.’ The unrepaired gap in the Wall had enabled them to plan the fields of fire. It was like a shooting gallery: four men trapped inside the enclosure formed by the Wall, the wire and the builders’ materials.

It was Gabby who shot the searchlight out. Afterwards Bernard said it was Max, but that was because Bernard wanted to believe it was Max. The death of Max distressed Bernard in a way that few other losses had ever done. And of course Bernard never shook off the guilt that came from his being the only survivor.

He saw the other three die. Max, Tom and Gabby. They were cut to pieces by a heavy machine gun: an old reliable 12.7mm Degtyarev. The noise of the machine gun sounded very loud in the night air. Everyone for miles around heard it. That would teach the English a lesson.

‘Where’s the other one?’ said Stinnes, still watching the radar screen.

‘He tripped and fell down. Damn! Damn! Damn! They’re putting the big jammer on now!’ As the two men watched, electronic clutter came swirling up from the bottom of the screen: major interference like a snowstorm.

‘Where is he?’ Stinnes slapped his hand upon the blinded radar and its useless screen and shouted, ‘Where?’ The men in the bunker with him jumped to their feet, stared straight ahead, standing stiff and upright as a good Russian soldier is taught to stand when a senior officer shouts at him.

Thus it was that Bernard Samson drowned in the clutter and scrambled away unhurt, running like he’d never run before, eventually to fall into the arms of Sergeant Powell.

‘Shit!’ said Powell. ‘Where did you come from, laddie?’ For one wild moment Sergeant Powell thought he’d captured a prisoner. When he realized that it was only an escaper from the East he was disappointed. ‘They said there’d be two. Where’s the other fellow?’

3

Cambridgeshire, England. February 1978.

Sir Henry Clevemore was not renowned for his hospitality, and rightly so. As the Director-General of the Secret Intelligence Service, he carefully chose the people he met and where he met them. The chosen venue was unlikely to be his own home, a magnificent old timber and stone mansion, a large part of which dated from the sixteenth century. In any case Lady Clevemore did not enjoy entertaining, she never had. If her husband wanted to entertain he could use the Cavalry Club in Piccadilly. It was more convenient in every way.

So it was a flattering exception when on a chilly February evening he invited Bret Rensselaer – a senior Departmental employee – to drive out to Cambridgeshire for dinner.

Sir Henry appeared to have overlooked the fact that Rensselaer was the sort of American who liked to wear formal clothes. Bret had agonized about whether to wear a tuxedo but had finally decided upon a charcoal suit, tailored in that waisted style so beloved of Savile Row craftsmen, lightly starched white shirt and grey silk tie. Sir Henry was wearing a blue lounge suit that had seen better days, a soft collared shirt with a missing button and highly polished scuffed black brogues that needed new laces.

‘For God’s sake, why a woman?’ said Bret Rensselaer more calmly than his choice of words suggested. ‘Why ever did you choose a woman?’ This was not the way Departmental staff usually addressed Sir Henry Clevemore, but Bret Rensselaer had ‘a special relationship’ with the Director-General. It was a relationship based to some extent upon Bret Rensselaer’s birthplace, his influential friends in the State Department, and to some extent upon the fact that Bret’s income made him financially independent of the Secret Intelligence Service, and of most other things.

‘Do smoke if you want to. Can I offer you a cigar?’

‘No thank you, Sir Henry.’

Sir Henry Clevemore sat back in his armchair and sipped his whisky. They were in the drawing room staring at a blazing log fire, having been served a grilled lobster dinner and the last bottle of a particularly good Montrachet that Sir Henry had been given by the Permanent Under-Secretary.

‘It doesn’t work like that, Bret,’ said Sir Henry. He was being very conciliatory: they both knew how the Department worked but the D-G was determined to be charming. Charm was the D-G’s style unless he was in a hurry. ‘I wasn’t looking for a female,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Of that you can be quite sure. We have a number of people … I know you wouldn’t expect to go into details … But several. Men and women we have been patiently playing to the Russians for years and years, in the hope that one day we’d be able to do something spectacular with one of them.’

‘And for her that day has come?’ said Bret. He extended an open hand towards the fire to sample its heat. He hadn’t been really warm since getting out of his car. That was the trouble with these stately old homes, they could never be efficiently heated. Bret wished he’d taken a chance on what sort of evening it would be, and worn warmer, more casual clothes: a tweed jacket perhaps. Sir Henry probably wouldn’t have cared or even noticed.

The D-G looked at Bret to see if there was an element of sarcasm there. There wasn’t: it was just another example of the American directness of approach which made Bret the best candidate for looking after a really promising double agent. He turned on the charm. ‘You started this thing rolling, Bret. When, a few weeks back, you floated this idea I didn’t think much of it, to tell you the truth. But I began looking at possible candidates, and then other things happened that made it seem more and more possible. Let’s just say that the float has twitched and that may be a sign the other side is ready to bite. It may be, that’s all.’

Bret suppressed a temptation to say that in too many such situations the Russians had devoured the bait so that the Department had reeled in an empty hook. Everything indicated that the Russians knew more about turning agents than their enemies did about running them. ‘But a woman …’ said Bret to remind the D-G of his other reservation.

‘An extraordinary woman, a brilliant and beautiful woman,’ said the D-G.

‘Enter Miss X.’ Bret’s feelings were bruised by the D-G’s stubborn reluctance to provide more details of this candidate. He’d expected to be having a say in the final selection process.

‘Mrs X, to be precise.’

‘All the more reason that the Russkies will not want her over there. It’s a male-dominated society and the KGB is the last place we’ll ever see change.’

‘I’m not sure I agree with you there, Bret.’ The D-G permitted himself a little grin. ‘They are changing their ways. So are we all, I suppose.’ He couldn’t hide the regret in his voice. ‘But my feeling is that we’ll gain from their old-fashioned entrenched attitudes. They will never suspect that we would try to plant a woman into the Committee.’

‘No. I guess you’re right, Sir Henry.’ It was Bret’s turn to wonder. He liked the way the old man’s mind worked. There were people who said the D-G was past it – and the D-G sometimes seemed to go to great lengths to encourage that misreading – but Bret knew from first-hand experience that, for the overall strategy, the old man had an acute mind that was tortuous and sometimes devious. That was why Bret had taken his idea about ‘getting a man into the Kremlin’ to Sir Henry in person.

The old man leaned forward. The polite preliminaries, like the evening itself, were coming to an end. Now they were talking as man and master. ‘We both know the dangers and difficulties of working with doubles, Bret. The Department is littered with the dead bodies of people who have misread their minds.’

‘It goes with the job,’ said Bret. ‘As the years go by, a double agent finds it more and more difficult to be sure which side he’s committed to.’

‘They forget which side is which,’ said the D-G feelingly. He reached forward for a chocolate-covered mint and unwrapped it carefully. It was the very devil trying to do without a cigar after dinner. ‘That’s why someone has to hold their hand, and get inside their head, and keep them politically motivated. We learned that from the Russians, Bret, and I’m sure it’s right.’

‘But it was never my idea to become the case officer,’ said Bret. ‘I have no experience.’ He said it casually, without the emphasis that would have been there had he been determined not to take on this new task the D-G was giving him. That softening of attitude was not lost upon the D-G. That was the first hurdle.

‘I could give you a million reasons why we don’t want an experienced case officer on this job.’

‘Yes,’ said Bret. The sight of a known case officer in regular contact with an agent would ring every alarm bell in the KGB.

But the D-G did not put that argument. He said, ‘I’m talking about an agent whose position and opportunity may be unique. So this is a job for someone very senior, Bret. Someone who knows the whole picture, someone whose judgement I can trust completely.’ He put the mint in his mouth and screwed the wrapper up very tight before placing it in the ashtray.

‘Well, I don’t know if I fit that picture, Sir Henry,’ said Bret, awkwardly adopting the role that Englishmen are expected to assume when such compliments are paid.

‘Yes, Bret. You fit it very well,’ said the old man. ‘Tell me, Bret, what do you see as our most serious shortcomings?’

‘Shortcomings? Of the British? Of the Department?’ Bret didn’t want to answer any questions of that sort and his face showed it.

‘You’re too damned polite to say, of course. But a fellow less inhibited than you, speaking recently of British shortcomings, told me that we British worship amateurism without having intuitive Yankee know-how; result disaster.’

Bret said nothing.

Sir Henry went on, ‘Whatever the truth of that assessment, I am determined that this operation is going to be one hundred per cent professional, and it’s going to have the benefit of that “can do” improvisation for which your countrymen are noted.’ He raised his hand in caution. ‘I will still need to go through the details of your plan. There are a number of points you raise that are somewhat contentious. But you realize that, of course.’

‘It’s a ten-year plan,’ said Bret. ‘They are in a bad way over there. A well-planned attack on their economy and the whole damned communist house of cards will collapse.’

‘Collapse? What does that mean?’

‘I think we could force the East German government into allowing opposition parties and free emigration.’

‘Do you?’ The idea seemed preposterous to the old man, but he was too experienced in the strategies of Whitehall to go on record as a disbeliever. ‘The Wall comes down in 1988? Is that what you are saying?’ The old man smiled grimly.

‘I don’t want to be too specific but look at it this way. In World War Two RAF Bomber Command went out at night and dropped bombs on big cities. Subsequent research discovered that few of the bombers had found their way to the assigned targets, and the few that did bombed lakes, parks, churches and wasteland so that only one bomb in ten was likely to hit anything worthwhile.’

Sir Henry was fingering the coloured cards upon which there were graphs and charts showing various statistics mostly concerned with the skilled and unskilled working population of the German Democratic Republic. ‘Go on, Bret.’

‘When Spaatz and Jimmy Doolittle took the US Eighth Air Force into the bombing campaign they went in daylight with the Norden bombsight. Precision bombing and they had a plan. They bombed only synthetic-oil plants and aircraft factories. No wasted effort and the effect was mortal.’

‘Weren’t they called panacea targets?’

‘Only by the ones who were proved wrong,’ said Bret sharply.

‘I seem to remember some other aspects of the strategic bombing campaign,’ pondered the old man, who hadn’t missed the point that the RAF got it wrong and the Americans got it right. Neither did he miss the implication that the efforts of the SIS had up till now been ninety per cent futile.

‘I wouldn’t want to labour the comparison,’ said Bret, who belatedly saw that this example of the RAF’s wartime inferiority to US bombing performance might be less compelling to an English audience. He tried another approach. ‘That “Health and Hospitalization” chart you are holding shows how many physicians between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are holding their health scheme together. I estimate that the loss of twenty-five per cent of that labour force – that’s the red sector on the chart – would make the regime start closing hospitals, or hospital departments, at a rate that would be politically unacceptable. Or take civil engineering: look at the chart I see on the table there …’

‘I’ve looked at the charts,’ said Sir Henry, who had never liked visual presentations.

‘We must target the highly skilled labour force. It will put acute strain upon the communist society because the regime tells its people that they endure low wages and a drab life to get job security and good social services: health care, urban transportation and so on. And a brain-drain is something they can’t counter. It takes seven years to train a physician, an engineer or a chemist: even then you need a bright kid to start with.’

‘You mentioned political opposition,’ said the D-G, and put Bret’s charts aside.

Bret said, ‘Yes. We also have to change our disdainful attitude to these small East German opposition groups. We must show a little sympathy: help and advise the Church groups and political reformers. Help them get together. Did you see my figures for Church denominations? The encouraging thing the figures demonstrate is that we can forget the rural areas: Protestants in the large cities will give us enough of the sort of people we want and we can reach townspeople more easily.’

‘Strategic bombing. Ummm,’ said the D-G. Even the Cabinet Secretary might see the logic of that approach when he was being told about all the extra money that would be needed.

‘And the people we want are the people in demand in the West. We don’t have to invent any fancy high-paid jobs for the people we entice away. The jobs are here already.’ Bret pulled out another sheet. ‘And see how the birth-rate figures help us?’ Bret held up the graph and pointed to the curving years of the early Eighties.

‘How do we get them here?’

Bret grabbed another chart. ‘These are people leaving East Germany for vacations abroad. I have broken them down according to the country they vacation in. Under the West German constitution every one of those East Germans is entitled to a West German passport on demand.’

The D-G stopped Bret’s flow with a gesture of his hand. ‘You are proposing to offer a crowd of East German holidaymakers getting off a bus in Morocco a chance to swap their passports? What will the Moroccan immigration authorities say about that?’

Bret gave a fixed smile. It was typical of the old man that he should take a country at random and then start nitpicking. ‘At this stage it would be better not to get bogged down in detail,’ he replied. ‘There are many ways for East German citizens to get permission to travel, and the numbers have been going up each year. The West German government press for a little more freedom every time they fork out donations to that lousy regime over there. And remember we are after the middle classes – respectable family men and college-educated working wives – not blue denim, long-haired hippy Wall-jumpers. And this is exactly why we need Mrs X over there looking at the secret police files and telling us where the effective opposition is; who to see, where to go and how to apply the pressure.’

‘Tell me again. She’s to …?’

‘She must get access to the KGB files on opposition groups – who they are and how they operate – Church groups, democrats, liberals, fascists, even communist reformers. That’s the best way that we can evaluate who we should team up with and prepare them for real opposition. And we need to know how the Russian army would react to widespread political dissent.’

‘You are the right man for Mrs X,’ said Sir Henry. He remembered the PM saying that every Russian is at heart a chess-player, and every American at heart a public-relations man. Well, Bret Rensselaer’s zeal did nothing to disprove that one. The sheer audacity of the scheme plus Bret’s enthusiasm was enough to persuade him that it was worth a try.

Bret nodded to acknowledge the compliment. He knew there were other things that had influenced the old man’s decision. Bret was American. And if Sir Henry was persuaded by Bret’s projections for the East German economy then Bret must be the prime choice to run the agent too. He had a roomful of experts in statistics, banking, economics, and even an expert in ‘group and permutation theory’ he’d raided from the cryptanalysts. Bret’s economic analysis department was a success story. It would make perfect deep cover for a case officer. And since a woman was involved there was another advantage: now that he was separated from his wife, Bret could be seen in the company of a ‘brilliant and beautiful woman’ without anyone thinking they were discussing their work.

‘I take it that Mrs X has managed without a case officer for a long time,’ said Bret.

‘Yes, because Silas Gaunt was involved. You know what Gaunt is like. He squeezed a promise from me that nothing would be on paper and that he would be the only contact.’

‘Literally the only contact?’ said Bret, without dreaming for a moment that the answer would be in the affirmative.

‘Literally.’

‘Good God! So why …?’

‘Bring someone else in now? Well, I’ll tell you. Gaunt only comes up to town once a month and I’m not sure that even that isn’t too much for him.’

And of course Silas Gaunt was a dedicated exponent of the sort of public school amateurism that the D-G apparently had rejected. ‘Has something happened?’

Bret’s reaction confirmed the D-G’s belief that this was the right man for the job: Bret had instinct. ‘Yes, Bret. Something has happened. Some wretched Russian wants to defect.’

‘And?’

The D-G sipped some whisky before saying, ‘And he’s made the approach to Mrs X. He took her aside at one of those unacknowledged meetings those Foreign Office fellows like to arrange with our Russian friends. I have never known anything good to come from them yet.’

‘A KGB man wants to defect.’ Bret laughed.

‘Yes, it is a good joke,’ said the D-G bitterly. ‘I wish I were in a position to join in the merriment.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Bret. ‘Was this a high-grade Russian?’

‘Pretty good,’ said the D-G guardedly. ‘His name is Blum: described as third secretary: working in the service attaché’s office: almost certainly KGB. The contact was made in watertight circumstances,’ he added.

‘She’ll have to tell them,’ said Bret without hesitation. ‘Watertight or not, she’ll have to turn him in.’

‘Ummm.’ Bret Rensselaer was completely cold-blooded, thought the D-G. It wasn’t an attractive characteristic, but for this job it was just the ticket.

‘Unless you want to throw away all those years of good work.’

‘You haven’t heard all the circumstances, Bret.’

‘I don’t have to hear all the circumstances,’ said Bret. ‘If you don’t turn in that Russkie, you will erode the confidence of your agent.’

‘This particular Mrs X …’

‘Never mind the psychologist’s report,’ said Bret. ‘She’ll know that you measured the risk, that you put her in the scales, with this Russian defector in the other pan.’

‘I don’t see it that way.’

‘Never mind how you see it. In fact never mind the way it really is. We are sitting here talking about an agent whom you call “unique”. Right?’

‘Whose position and opportunity may be unique.’

‘May be unique. Okay. Well I’m telling you that if you compromise her, in even the slightest degree, in order to play footsie with a Russian agent, Mrs X will never deliver one hundred per cent.’

‘It might go the other way. Perhaps she’ll feel distressed that we sacrificed this Blum fellow,’ said the D-G gently. ‘Already she’s expressed her concern. Remember it’s a woman.’

‘I’m remembering that. She must contact them right away and reveal Blum’s approach to her. If you show any hesitation in telling her that, she’ll deeply resent your inaction for ever after. A woman may express her concern but she doesn’t want to be neglected in favour of a rival. In hindsight it will infuriate her. Yes, I’m remembering it’s a woman, Sir Henry.’

‘This fellow Blum might be bringing us something very good,’ said the D-G.

‘Never mind if he’s bringing an inside line to the Politburo. You’ll have to choose one or the other: not both.’ The two men looked at each other. Bret said, ‘I take it that Mrs X is separated from her husband?’

The D-G didn’t answer the question. He sat back and sniffed. After a moment’s thought he said, ‘You’re probably right, Bret.’

‘On this one, I am, sir. Never mind that I don’t know Mrs X; I know that much about women.’

‘Oh, but you do.’

‘Do?’

‘You do know Mrs X. You know her very well.’

The two men looked at each other, both knowing that the old man would only divulge the name if Bret Rensselaer agreed to take on the job of running her. ‘If you think I’m the right person for the job,’ said Bret, yielding to the inevitable. They’d both known he’d have to say yes right from the very beginning. This wasn’t the sort of job you advertised on the notice-board.

‘Capital!’ said the D-G in the firm bass tone that was the nearest he ever got to expressing his enthusiasm. He looked at his watch. ‘My goodness, it’s been such a splendid evening that the time has flown.’

Bret was still waiting to hear the name but he responded to his cue. He got to his feet and said, ‘Yes, I must be going.’

‘I believe your driver is in the kitchen, Bret.’

‘Eating? That’s very civil of you, Sir Henry.’

‘There’s nowhere round here for a chap to get a meal.’ Sir Henry pulled the silk cord and a bell jangled somewhere in a distant part of the house. ‘We’re in the wilds here. Even the village shop has closed down. I don’t know how on earth we’ll manage in future,’ he said, without any sign that the problem was causing him great stress.

‘It’s a magnificent old house.’

‘You must come in summer,’ said Sir Henry. ‘The garden is splendid.’

‘I would like that,’ Bret responded.

‘Come in August. We have an open day for the local church.’

‘That sounds most enjoyable.’ His enthusiasm dampened as he realized that the D-G was inviting him to be marshalled around the garden with a crowd of gawking tourists.

‘Do you fish?’ said the D-G, shepherding him towards the door.

‘I never seem to have enough time,’ said Bret. He heard his driver at the door. In a moment the servants would be in earshot and it would be too late. ‘Who is it, sir? Who is Mrs X?’

The D-G looked at him, relishing those last few moments and anticipating Bret’s astonishment. ‘Mrs Samson is the person in question.’

The door opened. ‘Mr Rensselaer’s car is here, sir.’ Sir Henry’s butler saw the look of dismay on Bret’s face and wondered if he was not well. Perhaps it was something about the food or the wine. He’d wondered about that Montrachet: in the same case he’d come upon a couple of corked bottles.

‘I see,’ said Bret Rensselaer, who didn’t see at all, and was even more surprised than Sir Henry thought he would be. All sorts of thoughts and consequences were whirling round in his mind. Mrs Bernard Samson. My God! Mrs Samson had a husband and young children. How the hell could it be Mrs Samson?

‘Goodnight, Bret. Look at all those stars … It will freeze hard tonight unless we get that rain those idiots on the TV keep forecasting.’

Bret almost got back out of the car. He felt like insisting that he should have another half an hour to discuss it all. Instead he dutifully said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Look here, sir, we can’t possibly give Bernard Samson the German Desk in view of what you’ve told me.’

‘You think not? Samson was the only one to get across alive the other night, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘What bad luck. It was the other one – Busby – we needed to talk to. Yes, that’s right: Samson. No proper schooling of course, but he has flair and deserves a shot at the German Desk.’

‘I was going to make it official tomorrow.’

‘Whatever you say, Bret, old chap.’

‘It’s unthinkable with this other business on the cards. From every point of view … unthinkable. We’d better give the desk to Cruyer.’

‘Can he cope?’

‘With Samson as an assistant he’ll manage.’ Bret shifted position on the car seat. He began to think that the D-G had planned all this, knowing that Bernard Samson was about to be promoted. He’d invited Bret out here to dinner just to prevent him appointing Samson and thus threatening the prospect of the big one: putting Mrs Samson into ‘The Kremlin’. The cunning old bastard.

‘I’ll leave it with you,’ said the D-G.

‘Very well, sir. Thank you. Goodnight, Sir Henry.’

The D-G leaned into the car and said. ‘Oh, yes. On that matter we discussed: not a word to Silas Gaunt. For the time being it’s better he doesn’t know you’re a party to it.’

‘Is that wise, sir?’ said Bret, piqued that the D-G had obviously passed it off as his own idea when talking to ‘Uncle’ Silas.

The D-G knew what was going through Bret’s mind. He touched the side of his nose. ‘You can’t dance at two weddings with one bottle of wine. Ever hear that little proverb?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Hungarian.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Or Romanian, or Croatian. One of those damned countries where they dance at weddings. Get started, old chap. You’ve got a long journey and I’m getting cold.’

Sir Henry slammed the door and tapped the roof of the car. The car moved away, its tyres making loud crunching noises on the gravel roadway. He didn’t go back into the house, he watched the car until it disappeared round the bend of the long drive.

Sir Henry rubbed his hands together briskly as he turned back and went indoors. All had gone well. It would need a lot of tough talking to get it all approved, but Sir Henry had always been good at tough talking. Bret Rensselaer could do it if anyone could do it. The projections were convincing: this was the way to tackle the German Democratic Republic. And it was Bret’s idea, Bret’s baby. Bret had the right disposition for it: secretive, obsessional, patriotic, resourceful and quick-witted. He cottoned on to the fact that we couldn’t have Samson running the German Desk while his wife was defecting: that would be a bit too much. Yes, Bret would do it.

So why did the Director-General still have reservations about what he’d set in motion? It was because Bret Rensselaer was too damned efficient. Given an order, Bret would carry it out at all costs. The D-G had seen that determination before in rich men’s sons; overcompensation or guilt or something. They never knew where to stop. The D-G shivered. It was cold tonight.

As the car turned on to the main road Bret Rensselaer sank back into the soft leather and closed his eyes to think more clearly. So Mrs Bernard Samson had been playing out the role of double agent for God knows how many years and no one had got even a sniff of it. Could it be true? It was absolutely incredible but he believed it. As far as Mrs Samson was concerned, Bret would believe anything. Fiona Samson was the most radiant and wonderful woman in the whole world. He had been secretly in love with her ever since the day he first met her.

4

Kent, England. March 1978.

‘We live in a society full of preventable disorders, preventable diseases and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties.’ His accent was Welsh. He paused: Fiona said nothing. ‘They are not my words, they are words of Mr H. G. Wells.’ He sat by the window. A caged canary above his head seemed to be asleep. It was almost April: the daylight was fading fast. The children playing in the garden next door were being called in to bed, only the most restless of the birds were still fidgeting in the trees. The sea, out of sight behind the rise, could be faintly heard. The man named Martin Euan Pryce-Hughes was a profile against the cheap net curtains. His almost completely white hair, long and inclined to waviness at the ends, framed his head like a helmet. Only when he drew on his curly pipe was his old, tightly lined face lit up.

‘I thought I recognized the words,’ said Fiona Samson.

‘The Fabian movement: fine people. Wells the theorist, the great George Bernard! … The Webbs, God bless their memory. Laski and Tawney. My father knew them all. I remember many of them coming to the house. Dreamers, of course. They thought the world could be changed by writers and poets and printed pamphlets.’ Without looking at her he smiled at the idea, and she could hear his disdain in the way he said it. His voice was low and attractive with the sonorous call of the Welsh Valleys. It was the same accent that she’d heard in the voice of his niece Dilwys, with whom she’d shared rooms at Oxford. The Department had instructed her to encourage that friendship and through her she’d met Martin.

On the bookshelf there was a photo of Martin’s father. She could see why so many women had thrown themselves at him. Perhaps free love was a part of the Fabian philosophy he’d so vigorously embraced when young. Like father like son? Within Martin too there was a violent and ruthless determination. And when he tried he could provide a fair imitation of his father’s famous charm. It was a combination that made both men irresistible to a certain sort of young woman. And it was a combination that brought Martin to the attention of the Russian spy apparatus even before it was called the KGB.

‘Some people are able to do something,’ said Fiona, giving the sort of answer that seemed to be expected of her. ‘Others talk and write. The world has always been like that. The dreamers are no less valuable, Martin.’

‘Yes, I knew you’d say that,’ he said. The way he said it scared her. There often seemed to be a double meaning – a warning – in the things he said. It could have meant that he’d known she’d say it because it was the right kind of banality: the sort of thing a class-enemy would say. She infinitely preferred to deal with the Russians. She could understand the Russians – they were tough professionals – but this embittered idealist, who was prepared to do their dirty work for them, was beyond her comprehension. And yet she didn’t hate him.

‘You know everything, Martin,’ she said.

‘What I don’t know,’ he admitted, ‘is why you married that husband of yours.’

‘Bernard is a wonderful man, Martin. He is brave and determined and clever.’

He puffed his pipe before replying. ‘Brave, perhaps. Determined: undoubtedly. But not even his most foolish friends could possibly call him clever, Fiona.’

She sighed. They had been through such exchanges before. Even though he was twice her age he felt he must compete for her. At first he’d made sexual advances, but that was a long time ago: he seemed to have given up on that score. But he had to establish his own superiority. He’d even shown a bitter sort of jealousy for her father when she’d mentioned the amazing fur coat he’d given her. Any fool can make money, Martin had growled. And she’d agreed with that in order to soothe his ego and pacify him.

Only lately had she come to understand that she was as important to him as he was to her. When the KGB man from the Trade Delegation appointed Martin to be her father-figure, factotum and cut-out, they’d never in their wildest dreams hoped that she would wind up employed by the British Secret Intelligence Service. This amazing development had proceeded with Martin monitoring and advising her on each and every step. Now that she was senior staff in London Central, Martin could look back on the previous ten years with great satisfaction. From being no more than a dogsbody for the Russians he’d become the trustee of their most precious investment. There was talk of giving him some award or KGB rank. He affected to be uninterested in such things but the thought of it gave him a warm glow of pleasure: and it might prove an advantage when dealing with the people at the London end. The Russians respected such distinctions.

She looked at her watch. How much longer before the courier came? He was already ten minutes late. That was unusual. In her rare dealings with KGB contacts they’d always been on time. She hoped there wasn’t trouble.

Fiona was a double agent but she never felt frightened. True, Moscow Centre had arranged the execution of several men over the previous eighteen months – one of them on the top deck of a bus in Fulham; killed with a poison dart – but they had all been native Russians. Should her duplicity be detected, the chances of them killing her were not great but they would get her to tell them all she knew, and the prospect of the KGB interrogation was terrifying. But for a woman of Fiona’s motivation it was even worse to contemplate the ruin of years and years of hard work. Years of preparation, years of establishing her bona fides. Years of deceiving her husband, children and her friends. And years of enduring the poisonous darts that came from the minds of men like Martin Euan Pryce-Hughes.

‘No,’ Martin repeated as if relishing the words. ‘Not even his best friends could call Mr Bernard Samson clever. We are lucky you married him, darling girl. A really clever man would have realized what you are up to.’

‘A suspicious husband, yes. Bernard trusts me. He loves me.’

Martin grunted. It was not an answer that pleased him. ‘I see him, you know?’ he said.

‘Bernard? You see Bernard?’

‘It’s necessary. For your sake, Fiona. Checking. We make contact now and again. Not only me but other people too.’

The self-important old bastard. She hadn’t reckoned on that, but of course the KGB would be checking up on her and Bernard would be one of the people they’d be watching. Thank God she’d never confided anything to him. It wasn’t that Bernard couldn’t keep a secret. His head buzzed with them. But this was too close to home. It was something that she had to do herself without Bernard’s help.

‘I suppose you know that they have given me this direct emergency link with a case officer?’ She said it in a soft and suggestive voice that would have well suited the beginning of a fairy story told to a wide-eyed and attentive audience of five-year-olds.

‘I do,’ he said. He turned and gave her a patronizing smile. The sort of smile he gave all women who aspired to be his comrades. ‘And it’s a fine idea.’

‘Yes, it is. And I shall use that contact. If you or Chesty or any of those other blundering incompetents in the Trade Delegation contact any of the people round me with a view to checking, or any other stupid tricks, they’ll have their balls ripped off. Do you understand that, Martin?’

She almost laughed to see his face: mouth open, pipe in hand, eyes popping. He’d not seen much of that side of her: for him she usually played the docile housewife.

‘Do you?’ she said, and this time her voice was hard and spiteful. She was determined that he’d answer, for that would remove any last idea that she might have been joking.

‘Yes, Fiona,’ he said meekly. He must have been instructed not to upset her. Or perhaps he knew what the Centre would do to him if Fiona complained. Lose her and he’d lose everything he cherished.

‘And I do mean stay away from Bernard. You’re amateurs; you’re not in Bernard’s league. He’s been in the real agent-running business from the time when he was a child. He’d eat people like you and Chesty for breakfast. We’ll be lucky if he’s not alerted already.’

‘I’ll stay away from him.’

‘Bernard likes people to take him for a fool. It’s the way he leads them on. If Bernard ever suspected … I’d be done for. He’d take me to pieces.’ She paused. ‘And the Centre would ask why.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Pretending indifference, the man got to his feet, sighed loudly and looked out of the window over the net curtain as if trying to see the road down which the messenger would come.

It was possible to feel sorry for the old man. Brilliant son of a father who had been able to reconcile effortlessly his loudly espoused socialist beliefs with a lifetime of high living and political honours, Martin had never reconciled himself to the fact that his father was an unscrupulous and entertaining rogue blessed with unnatural luck. Martin was doggedly sincere in his political beliefs: diligent but uninspired in his studies, and humourless and demanding in his friendships. When his father died, in a luxury hotel in Cannes in bed with a wealthy socialite lady who ran back to her husband, he’d left Martin, his only child, a small legacy. Martin immediately gave up his job in a public library to stay at home and study political history and economics. It was difficult to eke out his tiny private income. It would have been even more difficult except that, at a political meeting, he encountered a Swedish scholar who persuaded him that helping the USSR was in the best interest of the proletariat, international socialism and world peace.

Perhaps the cruellest jest that fate had played upon him was that after seeing his father thrive in the upper middle-class circles into which he’d shoved his way, Martin – educated regardless of expense – had to find a way of living with those working classes from which his father had emerged. His rebellion had been a quiet one: the Russians gave him a chance to work unobserved for the destruction of a society for which he felt nothing. It was his secret knowledge which provided for him the strength to endure his austere life. The secret Russians and, of course, the secret women. It was all part of the same desire really, for unless there was a husband or lover to be deceived the affairs gave him little satisfaction, sexual or otherwise.

From the household next door there came the sudden sound of a piano. These were tiny cottages built a century ago for agricultural workers in the Kent fields, and the walls were thin. At first there came the sort of grandiose strumming that pub pianists affect as an overture for their recitals, then the melody resolved into a First World War song: ‘The Roses of Picardy’. The relaxed jangle of the piano completed the curious sensation Fiona already had of going back in time, waiting, trapped in the past. This was the long peaceful and promising Edwardian Springtime that everyone thought would never turn cold. There was nothing anywhere in sight to suggest they were not sitting in this parlour some time at the century’s beginning, perhaps 1904, when Europe was still young and innocent, London’s buses were horse-drawn, HMS Dreadnought unbuilt and Russia’s permanent October still to come.

‘They’re never late,’ she said, looking at her watch and trying to decide upon an explanation which would satisfy her husband if he arrived home before her.

‘You seldom deal with them,’ he said. ‘You deal with me, and I’m never late.’

She didn’t contradict him. He was right. She very seldom saw the Russians: they were all too likely to be tailed by MI5 people.

‘And when you do contact them, this is the sort of thing that happens.’ He was pleased to show how important he was in the contact with the Russians.

She couldn’t help worrying about this Russian who’d tried to defect. He’d seen that she was alone and approached her in what seemed to be an impulsive decision. Had it all been a KGB plot? She’d seen him only that once, but he’d seemed such a genuine decent man. ‘It must be difficult for someone like Blum,’ she said.

‘Difficult in what way?’

‘Working in a foreign country. Young, missing his wife, lonely. Perhaps shunned because he is Jewish.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ he said. ‘He was a third secretary in the attaché’s office: he was trusted and well paid. The little swine was determined to prove how important he was.’

‘A Russian Jew with a German name,’ said Fiona. ‘I wonder what motivated him.’

‘He won’t try that stunt again,’ said Martin. ‘And the attaché’s office will get a rocket from Moscow.’ He smiled with satisfaction at the idea. ‘Everything will go through me, as it was always done before Blum.’

‘Could it have been a trick?’

‘To see if you are loyal to them? To see if you are really a double: working for your SIS masters?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘As a test for me.’ She watched Martin carefully. Bret Rensselaer, her case officer, who was masterminding this double life of hers, said he was certain that Blum was acting on orders from Moscow. Even if he wasn’t, Rensselaer had explained, it’s better we lose this chance of a highly placed agent than endanger you. Sometimes she wished she could look at life with the same cold-blooded detachment that Bret Rensselaer displayed. In any case, there was no way she could defy him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. But what would happen now?

Martin gave a cunning smile as he reflected upon this possibility. ‘Well if it was a test, you came through with flying colours,’ he said proudly.

She realized then, for the first time, what a stalwart supporter she had in him. Martin was committed to her: she was his investment and he’d do anything rather than face the idea that his protégée was not the most influential Soviet agent of modern history.

‘It’s getting late.’

‘There there. We’ll get you to the train on time. Bernard’s coming back from Berlin today, isn’t he?’

She didn’t answer. Martin had no business asking such things even in a friendly conversational way.

Martin said, ‘I’m watching the time. Don’t fret.’

She smiled. She regretted now the way that she had snapped at him. The Russians had decided that the two of them were joined by a strong bond of affection: that Martin’s avuncular manner, as well as his unwavering political belief, was an essential part of her dedication. She didn’t want to give them any reason to re-examine their theory.

She looked round the tiny room and wondered if Martin lived here all the time or whether it was just a safe house used for other meetings of this sort. It seemed lived-in: food in the kitchen, coal by the fireplace, open mail stuffed behind the clock that ticked away on the mantelpiece, a well-fed cat prowling through a well-kept garden. A clipper ship in full sail on the wall behind spotless glass. There were lots of books here: Lenin and Marx and even Trotsky stared down from the shelves, along with his revered Fabians, an encyclopedia of socialism, and Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. Even the tedious works of his father. It was an artful touch. Even a trained security man was unlikely to recognize a KGB agent who was so openly familiar with the philosophies of the dissidents, revisionists and traitors. That was Martin’s cover: a cranky, old-fashioned and essentially British left-wing theorist, out of touch with modern international political events.

‘It’s my son Billy. His throat was swollen this morning,’ said Fiona and looked at her watch again. ‘Nanny should be taking him to see the doctor about now. Nanny is a sensible girl.’

‘Of course she is.’ He didn’t approve of nannies and other domestic slaves. It took him back to his own childhood and muddled emotions about his father that he found so difficult to think about. ‘He’ll be all right.’

‘I do hope it’s not mumps.’

‘I’m watching the time,’ he said again.

‘Good reliable Martin,’ she said.

He smiled and puffed his pipe. It was what he wanted to hear.

It was a long-haired youth who arrived on a bicycle. He propped it against the fence and came down the garden to rat-a-tat on the front door. The canary awoke and jumped from perch to perch so that the cage danced on its spring. Martin answered the door and came back with a piece of paper he’d taken from a sealed envelope. He gave it to her. It was the printed invoice of a local florist. Written across it in felt-tip pen it said: ‘The wreath you ordered has been sent as requested.’ It bore the mark of a large oval red rubber stamp: ‘PAID’.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Blum is dead!’ he announced softly.

‘My God!’ said Fiona.

He looked at her. Her face had gone completely white.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said soothingly. ‘You’ve come out of it as pure as the driven snow.’ Then he realized that it was the news of Blum’s death that had shocked her. In a desperate attempt to comfort her he said, ‘Our comrades are inclined to somewhat operatic gestures. They have probably just sent him home to Moscow.’

‘Then why …?’

‘To reassure you. To make you feel important.’ He took a cloth from the shelf and wrapped it carefully round the bird cage to provide darkness.

She looked at him, trying to see what he really believed, but she couldn’t be sure.

‘Believe me,’ he added. ‘I know them.’

She decided to believe him. Perhaps it was a feminine response but she couldn’t shoulder the burden of Blum’s death. She wasn’t brave about the sufferings that were inflicted upon others, and yet that was what this job was all about.

She got home after half-past eight, and it was only about ten minutes later that Bret Rensselaer phoned with a laconic, ‘All okay?’

‘Yes, all okay,’ she said.

‘What’s wrong?’

Bret had heard something in her voice. He was so tuned to her emotions that it frightened her. Bernard would never have guessed she was upset. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said carefully, keeping her voice under control. ‘Nothing we can speak about.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Usual time: usual place.’

‘Bernard’s not here yet. He was due back.’

‘I arranged something … delayed his baggage at the airport. I wanted to be sure you were home and it was all okay …’

‘Yes, goodnight, Bret.’ She hung up. Bret was doing it for her sake but she knew that he enjoyed showing her how easy it was for him to control her husband in that way. He was another of these men who felt bound to demonstrate some aspect of their power to her. There was also an underlying sexual implication that she didn’t like.

5

Somerset, England. Summer 1978.

The Director-General was an enigmatic figure who was the subject of much discussion amongst the staff. Take, for instance, that Christmas when a neat panel bearing the pokerwork motto ‘Only ignorance is invincible’ was hung in a prominent position on the wall beside his desk. The questions arising from that item were not stilled by the news that it was a Christmas present from his wife.

His office was a scene of incomparable chaos into which the cleaning ladies made only tentative forays. Books were piled everywhere. Most of them were garlanded with coloured slips of paper indicating rich veins of research that had never been pursued beyond the initial claims staked out for him by his long-suffering assistant.

Sir Henry Clevemore provided a fruitful source for Bret Rensselaer’s long-term anthropological study of the English race. Bret had categorized the D-G as a typical member of the upper classes. This tall shambling figure, whose expensive suits looked like baggy overalls, was entirely different to anyone Bret knew in the USA. Apart from his other eccentricities the D-G encouraged his staff to believe that he was frail, deaf and absent-minded. This contrived role certainly seemed to provide for him a warm loyalty that many a tougher leader would have envied.

One of the disagreeable aspects of working in close cooperation with Sir Henry was the way he moved about the country in such a disorganized and unplanned style that Bret found himself chasing after him to rendezvous after rendezvous in places both remote and uncomfortable. Today they were in Somerset. In the interests of privacy the D-G had taken him to a small wooden hut. It overlooked the sports field of a minor public school of which the D-G was a conscientious governor. The D-G had made a speech to the whole school and had lunch with the headmaster. Bret at short notice had had to be driven down at breakneck speed. There had been no time for lunch. No matter, on a hot day like this Bret could miss lunch without feeling deprived.

The school’s surroundings provided a wonderful view of mighty trees, rolling hills and farmland. This was the English countryside that had inspired her great landscape painters: it was brooding and mysterious despite the bright colours. The newly cut grass left a pungent smell on the air. Although not normally prone to hay fever, Bret found his sinuses affected. Of course it was an affliction aggravated by stress and it would be unwise to conclude that the prospect of this meeting with the Director-General had played no part in bringing on the attack.

Through the cobwebbed window two teams of white-clad teenagers could be seen going through the arcane gymnastics that constitute a cricket match. Entering into the spirit of this event, the D-G had changed into white trousers, a linen jacket that had yellowed with age, and a panama hat. He had seated himself in a chair from which he could see the game. The D-G had wiped his piece of window clear but Bret saw the scene through the grimy glass. Bret was standing, having declined to sit upon the cushioned oil drum that the D-G had indicated. Bret kept half an eye on the game, for the D-G referred to it at intervals seeking Bret’s opinions about the way it was being played.

‘Tell the husband,’ said the D-G, shaking his head sadly, ‘and it’s no longer a secret.’

Bret didn’t answer immediately. He watched the left-handed batsman thumping his bat into the ground and waiting for the ball to come. The fielders were well spread out anticipating some heavy swings. Bret turned to the D-G. He’d already made it clear that in his opinion Fiona Samson’s husband would have to be told everything: that she was a double agent and was being briefed to go over there. ‘I will see her later today,’ Bret said. He’d hoped to get the D-G’s okay and then he would brief Bernard Samson too. By tonight it would all have been done.

‘What are you doing with her at present?’ the D-G asked.

Bret walked away a couple of paces and then turned. From that characteristic movement the D-G knew that unless he nipped it in the bud he was going to get one of Bret’s renowned lectures. He settled back in his chair and waited for an opportunity to interrupt. Bret had no one else he could explain things to. The D-G knew that providing Bret with a sounding board at frequent intervals was something he could not delegate. ‘If we are going to place her in the sort of role where she will pull off the sort of coup we’re both hoping for, we can’t just leave things to chance.’

‘Bravo!’ said the D-G, reacting to a stroke that sent the ball to the far boundary. He turned to Bret and smiled. ‘We haven’t got too much time, Bret.’

‘We need ten years, Director, maybe twelve.’

‘Is that your considered opinion?’

Bret looked at the old man. They both knew what he was thinking. He wanted Fiona Samson in place before he came up for retirement. Forget the modest, self-effacing manner that was his modus operandi, he wanted glory. ‘It is, Sir Henry.’

‘I was hoping for something earlier than that.’

‘Sir Henry, Fiona Samson is nothing more than an agent in place as far as Moscow is concerned. She has never done anything. She has never delivered.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘She should be posted to Berlin. I want them to have a closer look at her.’

‘That would speed things up. They would start thinking of getting her over there quickly.’

‘No, they want her in London where the big stuff is hidden.’ Bret got out his handkerchief and self-consciously blew his nose, making as little noise as possible. ‘Forgive me, Sir Henry. I think the newly cut grass …’

‘Then why Berlin?’

‘She will have to do something for them.’

The D-G looked at him and pulled a face. He didn’t like these stunts which required that the KGB were given things. They were always given good things, convincing things, and that meant things that the Department should keep to itself. ‘What?’

‘I haven’t got as far as that, Director, but we’ll have to do it, and do it before the end of the year.’

‘Would you acquaint me with a little of your thinking? Wait one moment, this fellow is their fast bowler.’

Bret waited. It was a hot day: the grass was bright green and the boys in their cricket clothes made it the sort of English spectacle that under other circumstances Bret might have relished. The ball came very fast but bounced and went wide. Bret said, ‘Mrs Samson goes to Berlin. During her time there she gives them something substantial …’ Bret paused while the D-G winced at the thought, ‘… so that we have a big inquiry from which she emerges safe. Preferably with their help.’

‘You mean they arrange that one of their agents takes the blame?’

‘Well, yes. That, of course, would be ideal,’ said Bret.

The D-G was still watching the match. ‘I like it,’ he said without turning round.

Bret smiled grimly. It was an uphill struggle, but that was something of an accolade coming from Sir Henry Clevemore, although it could of course have been prompted by some cricketing accomplishment that Bret had failed to understand. He said, ‘Mrs Samson comes back here to London and they tell her to keep still and quiet.’

‘That’s one year,’ the D-G reminded him.

Bret said, ‘Look, sir. We can deliver Mrs Samson to them right away, of course we can. She’s like a box of nuts and bolts: an all-purpose agent they can use anywhere. But that’s not good enough.’

‘No,’ said the D-G, watching the cricketers and wondering what was coming.

‘We must take this woman and clear her mind of everything she knows.’

‘Classified material?’

‘I’m already making sure she sees nothing that would affect the Department.’

‘How did she take that?’

‘We have to make our plans as if she will be interrogated … interrogated in the cellars at Normannenstrasse.’ In the silence that followed a big fly buzzed angrily against the window glass.

‘It’s a nasty thought.’

‘The stakes are high, Sir Henry. But we’re playing to win.’ He looked around the hut. It was insufferably hot and the air was perfumed with linseed oil and weed-killers for the lawn. Bret opened the door to let a little air in.

The D-G looked at Bret and said, ‘A good thunderstorm would clear the air,’ as if this was something he could arrange. Then he added, ‘You’re making me wonder whether a woman is right after all.’

‘It’s too late to change the plan now.’

‘Surely not?’ Even the D-G was feeling the heat. He mopped his brow with a red silk handkerchief that had been protruding from his top pocket.

‘Mrs Samson knows what we intend. If we change to another agent our plan is known to her. I have shown her the figures and the graphs. She knows that the skilled and professional labour force is our target. She knows that we want to bleed their essential people and she knows the sort of opposition groups we intend to support over there.’

‘Wasn’t that a little premature, Bret?’

‘It will all depend upon her once she’s there. She must understand our strategy so well that she can improvise her responses.’

‘I suppose you’re right. I wish it was you explaining it all to the Cabinet Secretary next week. All your charts and mumbo-jumbo … You see Bret, if we don’t persuade him to go along with the fundamental idea … Do you have an operational name yet?’

‘I thought it was better not to ask the Department for an operational name.’

‘No, no, no, of course not. We’ll think of one. Something that suggests the weakening of the economy without prejudicing the security of our operation. Any ideas?’

‘I thought Operation Haemorrhage? Or Operation Bleeder?’

‘Blood; casualties. No. And bleeder is an English expletive. What else?’

‘Leaker?’

‘Vulgarism with connotations of urinating. But Sinker might do.’

‘Sinker then. Yes, of course, Sir Henry.’

‘Oh, my God, this fellow is useless. Left-handed and look at the way he’s holding the bat.’ He turned to Bret. ‘You understand what I mean about persuading him to the basic idea?’

Bret understood exactly. If the Cabinet Secretary didn’t go for the economic target then they’d start having second thoughts about using Bret. Mrs Samson would be provided with a different case officer.

The D-G said, ‘There still remains the problem of the Soviets engaging her for operational service over there. We can’t leave that to chance.’

‘Agent X has to be created from scratch,’ said Bret, having decided that naming Mrs Samson might be creating doubts in the D-G’s mind. ‘I must deliver to them an agent who is so knowledgeable and experienced in one specific field of activity that they will have to put her in the place we want.’

‘You’ve lost me now,’ said the D-G without taking his eyes from the cricket.

‘I shall spend this year studying the Russian links with the East German security police, particularly the KGB-Stasi operational command in Berlin. I’ll come to you with a complete picture of their strengths and weaknesses.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘I spent most of last week reading Operational Briefs. Give me a closer look at the command structure over there, and my analysts could build a detailed picture. It will take time but we’ll get what we need.’

‘Their security is good,’ said the D-G.

‘We will be trying to discover what they need … the things they don’t know. I have good people in my section. They are used to sifting through figures and building a picture of what is going on.’

‘For economics, yes. It’s possible to do that with statistics of banking, exports, imports and credit and so on because you’re dealing with hard facts. But this is far more complex.’

‘With respect, Sir Henry, I think you’re wrong,’ said Bret Rensselaer with a slight rasp to his voice that betrayed his tension.

The D-G forgot the cricket and looked at him. Bret’s eyes were wide, his smile fixed, and a wavy lock of his blond hair had fallen out of place. Until this very moment he hadn’t realized to what extent Bret Rensselaer had become consumed with his new task.

For the first time the D-G began to feel that this mad scheme might actually work. What a staggering coup it would be if Bret really did it: planting Mrs Samson into the East Berlin command structure where she could use their own secret records on protest groups, dissidents and other anti-communists to guide the Department as they planned the economic destruction of the communist regime. ‘Time will tell, Bret.’

‘Yes, indeed, sir.’

The D-G nodded to Bret. Was it the prospect of moving from a vitally important, but somewhat wearisome, world of committees into the more dashing excitement of operations that had so animated him? Or had the departure of his wife, now seemingly a permanent separation, provided him with more time? Or had the loss of his spouse to another man made it necessary for Bret to prove himself? Perhaps all of those. And yet the D-G had not allowed for Mrs Fiona Samson and the influence her participation had had upon Bret Rensselaer’s strength and determination.

‘Give me a free hand, sir.’

‘But ten years …’

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have given a time frame.’ His sinuses hurt: he felt an overwhelming need to blow his nose again and did so.

The D-G watched him with interest. He didn’t know Bret had sinus problems. ‘Let’s see how it goes. What about finance?’ He turned back to the cricket. The left-handed batsman had hit a superb catch – up up up it went and curved down like a mortar bomb – but luckily for him there was no fielder able to reach it. One fellow ran in for it but was unable to judge where it would land. The ball hit the ground and there was a concerted groan.

‘I’ll need money and it must not be routed through Central Funding.’

‘There are many ways.’

‘I have a company.’

‘Do it any way you like, Bret. I know you won’t waste it. What are we talking about? Roughly?’

‘A million sterling in the first year. Double that in the second and all subsequent years, adjusted for inflation and the exchange rate. No vouchers, no receipts, no accounts.’

‘Very well. We’ll have to concoct a route for the money.’ The D-G shielded his eyes with a folded newspaper. The sun had come round to shine through the window. ‘Have I forgotten anything?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I’ll not keep you then. I’m sure you have things to do. Look at this: the captain has put another fast bowler on. And he’s rather good. What do you think, Bret?’

‘Very good indeed, sir. Very fast. A problem will arise when we send Mrs Samson to work in Berlin. Will they continue to use this Welsh socialist as the contact? If not we’ll have to be very careful setting up the new one. Berlin is quite different to London: everyone knows everyone.’

‘And everyone hates everyone,’ said the D-G. ‘You’d better have her float the possibility before them and see what reaction she gets.’

‘The Welshman is very supportive,’ said Bret. ‘He’s determined to believe that she’s the KGB superspy. She’s his protégée. She could make a terrible blunder and he’d still hold on to his trust in her. But when she goes to Berlin they’ll be more suspicious. You know how it is when someone’s treasure is scrutinized by a rival: the KGB will turn her over.’

The D-G frowned. ‘Is this some narrative form of second thinking?’ he said tartly.

‘No, sir. I am sure the Berlin tour is an essential part of the plan. I’m simply saying that she will be under a lot of stress.’

‘Out with it then.’ The D-G stood tall and bent his head to see Bret over his glasses.

‘We’re asking her to give up her husband and children. Her colleagues will despise her …’

‘When did she say all this to you?’

‘She hasn’t said it.’

‘She hasn’t expressed doubts at all?’

‘Not to me. She’s a patriot: she has a wonderful sense of purpose.’

The D-G sniffed. ‘We’ve seen patriots change their minds, haven’t we, Bret?’

‘She won’t,’ said Bret firmly and certainly.

‘Then what is it?’

‘The husband. He should be told. He will be able to give her the sort of help and encouragement she’ll need. She’d go East knowing that her husband will be keeping her family intact. It would be something for her to hang on to.’

‘Oh, don’t let’s go through that again, Bret.’ The D-G turned away.

‘You said I’d have a free hand.’

He swung round, and when he spoke there was a hard note in his voice. ‘I don’t remember saying any such thing, Bret. You asked for a free hand: almost everyone in the Department asks for a free hand at some time or another. It makes me wonder what they think I am paid to do. I will of course give you as much freedom as possible. I’ll guard you from the slings and arrows of outrageous officialdom. I’ll give you non-voucher funds and I’ll listen to any crackpot idea you bring me. But a secret is a secret, Bret. The only chance she has of coming out of this in one piece is to have her husband overwhelmed and horrified when she goes over there. That will be the ace card that saves her. Never mind help and encouragement, I want Bernard Samson to become demented with rage.’ He used the newspaper to slam at the buzzing fly and after a couple of swipes the fly fell to the floor. ‘Demented with rage!’

‘Very well, sir. I’m sure you know best.’ Bret’s tone did nothing to make the D-G think he’d changed his opinion.

‘Yes, I do, Bret. I do know best.’ They both watched as the batsman swung and then seemed to leap backwards, blundering into the wicket so that the stumps were knocked asunder. A fast ball had hit him in the belly. He went down clutching his stomach and rolled about in agony. ‘Left-handed,’ pronounced the D-G without emotion. The other cricketers gathered around the fallen boy but no one did anything: they just looked down at him.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Bret. ‘Well, I’ll be off.’

‘She might waver, Bret. Agents do when the time gets close. If she does you’d better make sure she toes the line. There is too much at stake now for a last-minute change of cast.’

Bret stood there in case the D-G had more to say. But the D-G flicked his fingers to dismiss him.

Once outside Bret blew his nose again. Damn this grass: he’d keep away from cricket matches on freshly mowed grass in future. Well, the old man could still provide a surprise or two, thought Bret. What a tough old bastard he was. Bernard must not be told under any circumstances. So that was what ‘Only ignorance is invincible’ meant. By the time he got to his car Bret’s sinus problem was entirely gone. It was the stress that brought it on.

6

London. August 1978.

Fiona Samson, a thirty-one-year-old careerist, was a woman of many secrets and always had been. At first that had made her relish her demanding job in London Central – the most secret of all the government’s secret departments – but as her role as a double agent developed and became more complex she found there were times when it all became too much for her. It had always been said that double agents eventually lose their own sense of direction and fail to distinguish which side they really work for, but for Fiona it was different. Fiona could not envisage ever becoming a supporter of communist regimes: her patriotism was a deeply rooted aspect of her upper middle-class upbringing. Fiona’s torment came not from political doubts: she worried that she would not be able to cope with the overwhelming task that she’d been given. Bernard would have been perfect for such a double agent role; like most men he could compartmentalize his brain and keep his family concerns quite separate from his work. Fiona could not. She knew that her task would become so demanding that she would have to neglect her husband and children more and more and finally – with no possible warning – leave them to fend for themselves. She would be branded a traitor and they would be spattered with the dirt. The thought of that distressed her.

Had she been able to discuss it with Bernard it might have been different, but authority had decreed that her husband should not know the plan. In any case she was not good at talking with Bernard. No less spirited than her extrovert sister Tessa, Fiona’s fires were damped down and seldom showed a flicker. Sometimes, or even often, Fiona would have enjoyed being like Tessa. She would have got great and immediate relief and satisfaction from the sort of public performance – displays of anger or exhilarated madness – for which her sister was famous, but there was no choice for her.

Fiona was beautiful in a way that had sometimes separated her from other women. Fiona’s beauty was a cold perfect radiance of the sort that is to be seen in the unapproachable models posing with such assurance in glossy magazines. Her brain was cold and perfect too; her mind had been bent by pedantic university teachers to think in terms of male priorities and had sacrificed many of the unbridled joys of femininity in order to become a successful surrogate male. Fiona’s miseries, her tensions and her times of great happiness were shared only reluctantly – grudgingly sometimes – with those around her. Emotion of any sort was always to be hidden, her father had taught her that. Her father was an insensitive and opinionated man who had wanted sons, something he explained to his two children – both daughters – at every opportunity, and told them that boys didn’t cry.

Fiona’s marriage to Bernard Samson had changed her life forever. It was love at first sight. She’d never met anyone like Bernard before. A big bear-like man, Bernard was the most masculine person she’d ever met. At least he had the qualities that she thought of as being masculine. Bernard was practical. He could fix any sort of machine and deal with any sort of people. He was of course a male chauvinist: categorical and opinionated. He never thought of helping in the house and couldn’t even boil an egg successfully. On the other hand he was constantly cheerful, almost never moody and quite without malevolence. Inclined to be untidy he gave no thought to his clothes or his appearance, never put on airs or graces and while enjoying art and music he was in no way ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ in the way that so many of her male acquaintances were determined to be.

Fiona’s husband was the only person she’d ever met who completely disregarded other people’s evaluation of him. Bernard was a devoted father, more devoted to the children than Fiona was if the truth was faced. And yet he was not the unmotivated drifter that her father had warned her about. Bernard was driven by some force or thought or belief in the way that great artists are said to be, and woe betide anyone who got in his way. Bernard was not an easy man to live with. He’d been brought up in post-war Berlin – his father a senior intelligence officer – in an atmosphere of violence and betrayal. He was by nature tough and undemonstrative. Bernard had killed men in the course of duty and done it without qualms. He was well adjusted and enjoyed a self-confidence that Fiona could only wonder at and envy.

The burden of their marriage came from the fact that Bernard was far too much like Fiona: neither of them found it easy to say the things that wives and husbands have to say to keep a marriage going. Even ‘I love you’ did not come easily from Bernard’s lips. Bernard really needed as a wife some noisy extrovert like Fiona’s sister Tessa. She might have found a way of getting him out of his shell. If only Bernard could be foolish and trivial now and again. If only he could express doubts or fears and come to her for comfort. Fiona didn’t need a strong silent man: she was strong and silent herself. It was difficult for a man like Bernard to be really sympathetic to a woman’s point of view and Bernard would never understand the way that women would cry for ‘nothing’.

Lately, there had been many occasions when the complex tangle of Fiona’s working life became too much for her. She was using tranquillizers and sleeping tablets with a regularity that she’d never needed before. Bernard had found her crying several times when he’d come into the house unexpectedly. She had told him she was under treatment from her gynaecologist; embarrassed dear old Bernard had not pursued it further.

When she found herself weighed down by her thoughts, and the worries would not go away, Fiona found an excuse to leave the office and walked to the Waterloo mainline railway station. She’d come to like it. Its size suggested permanence while its austere design and girder construction gave it anonymity: a vast waiting room made from a construction kit. Coming through the dirty glass of its roof the daylight was grey, dusty and mysterious. Today – despite the rain – she had benefited from the walk from the office. Now she sat on a bench near number one platform and quietly cried her heart out. No one seemed to notice these emotional outbursts, except once when a lady from the Salvation Army offered her a chance for prayer at an address in Lambeth. Sobbing was not so unusual on Waterloo Station. Separations were common here and nowadays it was a place where the homeless and hungry were apt to congregate. London Airport was probably just as good a place to go for the purpose of weeping, but that provided too great a chance of seeing someone she knew. Or, more exactly, of someone she knew seeing her. And Waterloo Station was near the office, and there were tea and newspapers, taxicabs and metered parking available. So she went to number one platform and cried.

It was the prospect of leaving Bernard and the children, of course. They would end up hating her. Even if she did everything that was expected of her, and returned a heroine, they would hate her for leaving them. Her father would hate her too. And her sister Tessa. And what would happen to the children? She had asked Bret that, but he had dismissed her fears. The children would be cared for in the manner that her sacrifice and heroism deserved, he’d said in that theatrical style that Bret could get away with because he was so damn certain. But how sincere was he? That worried her sometimes. Sincere or not she couldn’t help thinking that her children would be forgotten once she was working in the East. Billy would survive boarding school – and perhaps even flourish there – but Sally would find such an environment unendurable. Fiona had resolved not to put her children through the sort of childhood that she had hated so much.

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