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Anderson said it was him and, with eyes closed, listened to a complaint that water had been leaking from his bathroom into the apartment below. He told the porter to fix it, that was his job.
He abandoned the sit-ups and considered having a drink. 11.23. Too early. The road to ruin. He sat down on an easy chair, legs stretched uncomfortably in front of him, and stared at the telephone, malevolently cold and impersonal.
Where the hell was Miller? Give him time, for Chrissake. The man carrying the briefcase wouldn’t stride straight into the United Nations and hand it to the Soviet Ambassador. Perhaps Miller had lost him; perhaps the briefcase contained girlie magazines ….
He switched on the television. An old black and white spy movie, the original Thirty-Nine Steps. Anderson had watched every spy film ever made during his training in Virginia; they seemed to think that you could still learn a trick or two from James Bond. Anderson enjoyed the movies, in particular John Buchan’s masterpiece with Robert Donat because it had style and he admired style. But not today; leave Richard Hannay to his own devices ….
He switched off the television and went into the steel-bright kitchen to make coffee.
Holding a steaming mug in one hand and a chocolate biscuit in the other, he returned to the living-room. It looked unlived-in, which it was because Anderson was rarely there. A show-piece, an extravagance.
He sat down beside the telephone. Ring damn you! And it did, just as he bit into the chocolate biscuit.
He picked up the receiver, swallowed the mouthful of biscuit and said; ‘Hallo.’
‘Is that you, Anderson?’
‘Speaking. Who’s that?’
It was Miller.
Two hours later Anderson took a cab to La Guardia and caught the shuttle to Washington.
II (#ulink_5b74a26e-460c-5194-8e6b-784b030259a5)
William Danby picked up a white plastic cup of coffee; it was his fourth that morning. Danby who rarely drank liquor – an infrequent beer, the occasional weak whisky at cocktail parties – was fuelled by coffee. This morning he barely tasted it: he was too pre-occupied with the three dossiers and the typewritten report lying on the top of his mahogany desk. They worried him.
Not that Danby ever looked worried. He was a man of medium height, fifty-eight years-old; his greying hair with a suspicion of a quiff, a relic from his youth, was neatly barbered; his pale blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses were calm, and his features were barely lined.
Imperturbable, was how his staff described Danby. An automaton with a computer for a brain. A man who, when he removed his spectacles and stared at you with those pale eyes, withered the lies on your tongue.
Nevertheless Danby worried. If you were the head of the largest – or, arguably the second largest intelligence organisation in the world then you lived with worry. The trick was to discipline the worry, regard it merely as an occupational hazard, and never, never show it.
William Danby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, subordinated his worry and for the first time savoured his coffee. It tasted like cardboard. He put the plastic cup to rest between the intercom and two telephones, swung round in his swivel chair and gazed over the countryside surrounding his $46 million castle close to the highway encircling Washington.
He observed the thin sunlight rekindling spring among the trees. He stared beyond the limits of his vision. From coast to coast, from north to south. The vision awed him as it always did, because he was responsible for the security of the land and the 203 million people inhabiting it.
Which was why the dossiers, two blue and one green, and the report lying on the desk worried him. He was investigating the very people responsible for the prosperity of the United States.
In a way he was guilty of the same suicidal introspection that was racking the CIA (He had just prepared a report on accusations of CIA involvement in the 1970 Chilean elections – despite the fact that the Marxist Salvador Allende had won them.)
But whereas the campaign being waged against the CIA was destructive – instigated by misguided crusaders manipulated by America’s enemies – Danby believed that surveillance of the power elite of America was, however unwholesome, necessary and constructive.
Bilderbergers had to be protected against themselves.
He swivelled back to his desk and surveyed the dossiers and the typewritten report stamped PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. The blue dossiers contained summaries of all that was known about Bilderberg and its participants; the green dossier contained all that was known about Owen Charles Anderson; the report was Anderson’s preliminary observations about the 1971 conference brought by courier from Woodstock.
If Anderson was correct, the Russians had infiltrated Bilderberg.
If he was correct …. If he wasn’t, and his investigations led to his own exposure, then the furore would equal the uproar after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. AMERICAN POWER ELITE PROBED BY CIA. Danby read the headlines of the future. It was difficult even for him to subordinate his worry.
The intercom buzzed. He pressed a button and a woman’s voice said: ‘Mr Anderson for you, sir.’
‘Send him in.’
Danby picked up the green dossier. Anderson had been his personal choice for Bilderberg. Like Danby himself, Anderson represented change.
Danby wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer like so many of his predecessors: he was a non-political professional who had learned his trade posing as a diplomat in Guatemala, Moscow and Saigon.
Anderson’s claim to represent change was his colour. He had risen meteorically through the ranks since the CIA had been accused of racial prejudice. (In 1967 fewer than twenty blacks had been employed in intelligence work for the Agency.)
A knock at the door.
‘Come in.’
Anderson, big, black and handsome, loomed in front of him.
‘Sit down.’ Anderson sat in the chair opposite Danby: occupied it, Danby thought. ‘So they all survived, huh?’
‘No casualties, sir,’ Anderson said.
Ostensibly Anderson worked for the Secret Service. He had been put in charge of Bilderberg security. The perfect cover, thought Danby, who had arranged it.
‘Any trouble?’
‘Only what I expected. Other agencies tripping over each other’s big feet. British, French, German, Feds ….’
‘Anything personal?’
‘How do you mean, sir?’
They both knew that Danby meant his colour.
‘Any resentment?’ forcing Anderson to concede.
‘You’ll always find prejudice, sir,’ smiling at Danby. There was about Anderson the faintest suspicion of cynical amusement: it had gone against him when he had been put up for the job, but Danby’s views had prevailed. They always did.
‘Your colour’s your greatest ally,’ Danby said. ‘Coffee?’ as he pressed the button on the intercom and, as Anderson nodded, ‘Two coffees, please …. With milk?’ to Anderson. ‘Yes, and sugar,’ Anderson told him.
Danby released the button. ‘Who the hell would suspect that a black security officer worked for the Company?’
‘I guess you’re right, sir, I’m too conspicuous in all-white company.’
‘Precisely.’ Danby picked up one of the blue Bilderberg dossiers and extracted the guest list. ‘You were in exalted company.’ He ran a finger down the list. ‘Chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands ….’
‘Riding for a fall,’ Anderson interrupted him.
‘Lockheed?’
‘It’s got to come out,’ Anderson said.
Danby took off his spectacles and stared at Anderson. If Danby had a weakness, it was his admiration for American big business. He had been on intimate terms with corruption for most of his professional life, but he still found it difficult to distinguish between business practice and bribery. It didn’t bother him that the smiling extrovert husband of the Queen of Holland might take a fall, as Anderson put it; it bothered him that those who had paid him money might be hurt. And the American image with them.
His finger moved on down the list. ‘Rockefellers, Rothschilds … British members of Parliament … financiers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland …. You seem to have concentrated your attentions on the Swiss, Mr Anderson.’
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A grey-haired woman wearing a pink knitted cardigan placed two plastic cups of coffee on the desk and retired. Danby and Anderson sipped their coffee and regarded each other through the steam.
Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘Have you anything to substantiate your suspicions about Herr Danzer? If you’re right, it’s a considerable coup considering it was your first Bilderberg.’
Anderson put his cup down on the desk. He opened his jacket and stuck his thumbs in the pocket of his waistcoat, where the gold watch and the cigar-cutter resided. An assertive gesture, Danby decided. Or was it defensive?
Anderson said: ‘We put a tail on him in New York.’
‘And?’
‘He made a drop. A Soviet agent picked up his briefcase.’
‘I see. How —’
‘The agent was followed to the Soviet Mission at 136, East 67th Street.’
‘Then there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.’
‘No, sir.’
‘I’m glad for your sake,’ Danby remarked. ‘The coffee,’ he said, ‘gets worse,’ but he finished it.
Danby stood up and walked round the spacious office. He ran his fingers along the bookshelves of weighty volumes, spun the globe in the corner – the world in which his 12,000-strong army fought daily for American interests. Against enemies outside and inside the States. Danby envied Anderson’s lack of appreciation of the canker within.
As the world spun beneath his fingers he said: ‘You may smoke if you wish.’
‘I don’t smoke, sir.’
‘Of course, I forgot.’
Danby moved to the desk and picked up the green dossier on Anderson. ‘One of your economies to enable you to live in the style to which you are accustomed.’
Danby opened the dossier.
Here we go, Anderson thought.
By style he knew that Danby referred to his apartment. It wasn’t the first time the apartment had cropped up during interrogation.
And what was about to follow would be a form of interrogation. A tactic to quell over-confidence, to hone the blade of Anderson’s perception. A man such as Danby was incapable of conducting an analytical conversation without employing psychological stratagem.
Anderson admired him for it. And it worked! He felt the assurance ebb from him as Danby turned the pages of the dossier. There in between green cardboard covers is my life.
The adolescent years in the hovel in Harlem when he was a runner in a numbers racket. (A lot of question marks there, a lot of heavy underlining.)
The street brawls re-directed by an unusually enlightened social worker into the boxing ring. Showed promise …. But who wants to make money with his fists when he has brain?
Night school resented by his parents, ridiculed by his friends. Long solitary hours with a second-hand speech-training course on a phonograph – ‘Now repeat after me ….’ the invisible tutor’s plummy voice scratched by a score of needles.
Danby said: ‘I see you play chess.’
‘Sir?’
‘I see you’re a chess-player.’
‘Pretty low grade, sir.’
‘It’s good training,’ Danby said, turning a couple of years of Anderson’s life.
And then a scholarship to Columbia. (Exclamation marks here probably. Black, street-fighter, ambitious, educated. Possibilities.)
Perhaps he had been ear-marked as early as that.
The Army. Military Intelligence. Vietnam with the U.S. Military Assistance Command in 1962. And then the approach (names, assessments, cross references here) by the CIA, followed by another two years in Vietnam, two years in Washington and then New York in a sub-division of the Secret Service.
‘Do you know what finally swayed us in your favour for the Bilderberg job?’ Danby asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘French,’ Danby said. ‘You speak excellent French.’
‘I learned it in Vietnam. I believe I have a slight colonial accent.’
‘And I see you shoot straight’ (Anderson was Army Reserve pistol champion, having scored 2581 points in the 1970 championships.)
‘I’m not popular in amusement parks.’ Instinctively Anderson felt for the gun he normally wore in a shoulder-holster; but it wasn’t there; you didn’t arm yourself to meet the DCI.
‘How do you manage to live, Mr Anderson?’
Anderson sighed. ‘I believe it’s all there, sir,’ pointing at the dossier.
‘Refresh my memory.’
‘You mean the apartment?’
‘And that suit you’re wearing.’
Blue with a silky sheen to it, lapels beautifully rolled.
‘I buy one suit a year,’ Anderson told him, ‘The apartment is mine. I didn’t blow my money in Saigon.’
‘But the apartment is not quite paid for, I gather.’
‘Not quite,’ Anderson said, the anger that was his weakness (all there in the dossier) beginning to rise.
