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Danzer peered round. The first premonition of danger assailed him, an ice-cold wariness. ‘Who is it?’
A figure materialised in front of him. Curiously indistinct, despite a brief parting of the clouds. Then he had it. The man was black. Danzer wished he had brought a gun.
‘We’ve met before,’ the man said. He was very tall, broad with it. He emerged into the moonlight. ‘The trouble is we all look the same, especially at night.’ Danzer could see that he was grinning. ‘And yes, I have got a gun, and no, you aren’t going any place,’ as Danzer tensed himself to run.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘I’d like to have a little talk with you, Herr Danzer.’
‘Who are you?’
‘We were both at Woodstock. Does that help?’
The black security chief. ‘You sent the cable?’
‘Of course, it’s time your people changed the code,’ and conversationally: ‘Shall we take a walk?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Danzer said. ‘You wouldn’t use a gun here.’
‘I have something much more persuasive than a gun, Herr Danzer.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
‘The number of your bank account, currently in credit to the equivalent of five hundred thousand American dollars.’
They began to walk.
Step by step Anderson detailed everything he knew about Danzer. From his birth in Leningrad to his last deposit in the numbered account. ‘You’re blown, Herr Danzer, he remarked as they threaded their way through the cars parked beside the river. ‘Blown sky high.’
‘What do you intend to do about it?’ He couldn’t believe it: the comfortable, secure future scythed away, leaving only exposed foundations. Danzer shivered as fear replaced shock.
Anderson said: ‘I’m sure you know what will happen to you if I tell your employers about your savings for a rainy day.’ Anderson stopped and pointed to a telephone kiosk. ‘I could do it right now. One call ….’
Danzer had seen the white-tiled cells beneath Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Had seen a little of what went on inside them. It was enough. ‘What do you want for God’s sake?
‘You,’ Anderson said.
* * *
Karl had said he would meet her in the little café they frequented at 11 pm or thereabouts, and she had told her father that she was going to a party with a girl-friend. Not that he objected to Karl. Far from it, but he was a good member of the Swiss Reform Church and he wouldn’t have tolerated the moral implications of an 11 pm assignation, especially without dinner beforehand.
She glanced at the slim gold Longines watch on her wrist. 11.23. He had said ‘thereabouts’ but when did ‘thereabouts’ finally run out? She would give him until 11.30, she decided, as she ordered another coffee, acutely aware that she looked like a girl who had been stood up.
She hadn’t, of course. Karl would come. And he would talk. How beautifully he could talk. And then – and she had no doubt about this – they would go back to his apartment where she would give herself to him. Love was wonderful, just as she had always known it would be.
But how many girls were lucky enough to enjoy love on so many levels? From the physical to the idealistic. Between them they would carry on the fight here in Switzerland, the heartland of the Capitalist Conspiracy. (Such phrases!) They had a cause and it united them.
11.30 pm.
He had obviously been detained by THEM. Helga had only a very vague idea what Karl’s employers looked like. Certainly not like the caricatures of Russians she saw in the newspapers.
The waiter was glancing at his watch. What time did they close? Candles were being snuffed out on the small, intimate tables; traffic on the street outside was thinning out.
Unaccountably her lips began to tremble. Her body had sensed what was happening before her brain had admitted it. There were only three customers left in the café. 11.40 ….
Perhaps he had been in an accident. Perhaps he’s sick of you! Karl Danzer could have any woman he wanted in Zurich. Why should he bother with someone unsophisticated and, yes, clinging …. From college to finishing school to Investors Club with no taste of life in between …. What a catch.
A tear rolled unsolicited down Helga Keller’s cheek.
Behind her the waiter cleared his throat. She could smell the smoke from the snuffed-out candles. She finished her coffee, paid her bill and tried to smile when the cashier said: ‘Don’t worry, he’s not worth it.’
It was midnight.
She crossed the street to a call-box and dialled his number. Supposing he was with another woman. But it was even worse than that. His voice told her that he didn’t care. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make it …. You’ll have to excuse me … I’ve got a lot on my mind just now.’
Click.
Desolation.
IV (#ulink_ca84ccf0-e783-50a4-9617-0e4c956f33e1)
The message was terse. SUBJECT TURNED.
Anderson transmitted it through one of the three CIA operatives at the United States Embassy in Berne, who would send it to Washington via the TRW installation in Redondo Beach, California.
‘So all we do now is feed Danzer,’ he said to Prentice who was listening to the news on the BBC World Service.
‘Especially at Bilderberg,’ said Prentice.
‘Provided he’s invited again.’
‘He will be.’ Prentice turned off the radio and lit a cigarette. ‘I tracked down some of his financial contacts. He’s a dead cert – like you.’
‘And you, George?’
‘Up to a point. I’m a tame lecturer. They keep one or two up their sleeves. Adds respectability to the set-up. I expect they’ll give me a miss next year. It doesn’t matter which one of us they invite: we all send them to sleep.’
‘So British Intelligence won’t be represented at Bilderberg next year?’
Prentice smiled faintly. ‘I didn’t say that.’ He pointed at the receiver picking up transmissions from Danzer’s apartment. ‘He’s taken to his bed. Shit-scared by the sound of him.’
‘How do you know?’ Anderson asked, sitting down in a leather arm-chair beside the electric fire. The chair sighed beneath his weight.
‘The girl called. He sent her packing. We can’t have that, of course,’ Prentice added.
‘Of course not. He’s got to keep to his pattern.’
‘Exactly. So he’s got to continue his recruitment campaign.’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ Anderson asked, spinning the bloodstone fob on his watchchain, ‘that she could get hurt?’
‘It’s occurred to me,’ Prentice said. ‘Does it matter?’
Anderson gave the fob a last twirl and shook his head. ‘How did you get like this, George?’
‘I worked at it,’ Prentice said.
‘A girl?’
Prentice said flatly: ‘I’m sure you know all there is to know about me.’
‘A little,’ Anderson replied.
He knew, for instance, that Prentice had belonged to a post-war intellectual elite at Oxford who believed in Capitalism as fervently as other young men at Cambridge had once believed in Communism.
‘Any economist,’ he was on record as saying, ‘must be a Capitalist. Unless, that is, they are tapping around economic realities with a white stick.’
Anderson knew also, from a CIA agent at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, that at a remarkably early age Prentice had taught economics at Oxford before gravitating to the more exciting fields of industrial consultancy.
The consultancy, as Danby had told him, was owned by the English financial whizz-kid of the late sixties, Paul Kingdon.
The CIA agent, young and keen, had elaborated in a Mayfair pub. ‘Kingdon is a smart cookie. As you probably know he’s big in mutual funds – or unit trusts as they call them over here. Only, like Cornfeld, he’s gone a step further: his funds invest in other funds. To safeguard the investments he started this industrial consultancy and put Prentice in charge with an office in Zurich. It wasn’t long before Prentice was recruited by British Intelligence.’
‘Does Kingdon know that his prize spook works for MI6?’ Anderson asked.
The agent shrugged. ‘I doubt it. Why should Prentice tell him? At present he’s got the best of two worlds – he’s paid by both. Not only that but he believes in the work he’s doing.’
‘Don’t you?’ Anderson asked.
‘Of course,’ hastily.
‘Does he believe in the work he’s doing for this guy Kingdon?’
‘Just so long as Kingdon is making money for the Honest Joe’s, he does. At the moment Kingdon is doing just that. His funds have made millions for people whose only hope was the Irish Sweep or the football pools.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Anderson drank some beer. ‘Tell me what makes Prentice tick.’
‘Difficult.’ Anderson looked up with interest. ‘He’s deceptively tough. He can read a balance sheet like you or I would read the baseball scores. He’s not above breaking into premises to get what he wants. He once killed a Russian who tried to knife him in West Berlin. But about a year ago he changed ….’
‘His sex?’
‘Apparently he became bitter, introverted. Drank a bit for a while. We don’t know why,’ anticipating Anderson’s question.
‘Sounds like a security risk,’ Anderson remarked.
‘The British don’t seem to think so.’
‘Which means they know why his character changed,’ Anderson said thoughtfully. ‘Prentice sounds an interesting character.’
‘If you can get near him.’
‘I can try,’ Anderson said, finishing his beer.
‘A little,’ Anderson repeated, his thoughts returning to the present.
Prentice said: ‘And that’s what you’ll have to make do with.’ He stretched. ‘I’m going to bed. Tomorrow you must introduce me to Danzer.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ Anderson said, shifting his position and making the leather chair sigh again. ‘He’s got a lot to tell us.’
‘How long?’ Prentice asked, hand on the door to his bedroom.
‘In my experience it can take anything up to six months. We’ve got to bleed him dry. And we can’t have any professional interrogators out here to alert the Russians.’
‘Six months …. As long as that?’ And when Anderson nodded: ‘By that time we’ll have to be briefing him what to tell the Kremlin about Bilderberg. It shouldn’t take the Russians too long to tumble what we’re up to.’
‘Don’t be such a goddam pessimist,’ Anderson said. ‘The Kremlin hasn’t got a smell of what goes on at Bilderberg. If we play it cool we can use Danzer for misinformation for years. We just have to make sure he doesn’t feed them anything which is dramatically wrong.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ Prentice opened the door of his bedroom. ‘Well, good-night; …’
‘The name’s Owen.’
‘Good-night,’ Prentice repeated and closed the door.
So Anderson knew ‘a little’.
He undressed and climbed into bed.
How much was ‘a little’?
He switched out the light and lay still, hands behind his head, thinking, as he did every night, about what he hoped Anderson knew nothing about.
* * *
Annette du Pont had been beautiful.
Flaxen-haired, grey-eyed, full-breasted, just saved from looking like a conventional sort of model advertising tanning cream or toothpaste, by traces of sensitivity on her features that would soon settle into character.
She was, in fact, a student of economics at the old university at Basle, and she came to Prentice for help in her studies.
It was high summer and she was on vacation. While Prentice guided her though the theories of John Maynard Keynes – he had always admired a man who could preach enlightened economics and at the same time make killings on the stock market – he had found that he, too, was learning. How to live.
He bought new suits and Bally shoes, and had his brown hair fashionably cut. He felt ten years younger than his thirty-three years. Even younger when, as they lay in a field printed with flowers overlooking the lake, she stroked his hair and said: ‘You’re very handsome, you know. Not a bit like an economist.’
His own awakening astonished him: he had never realised that such emotions lay dormant. There had been other girls, of course, but never rapport such as this.
They crossed the border by car into Germany and, for the first time since they had met two weeks earlier, made love. In a luxurious old hotel in the little town of Hinterzarten. Prentice had experienced sex before, but never anything like this ….
They drove through slumberous green valleys in his silver BMW; they picnicked in forest glades, explored castles, ate and slept and loved in village inns. And shared.
