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It lasted four days. Then Prentice had to return across the Rheine to attend to the demands of his employers, Paul Kingdon and British Intelligence. As they neared Zurich, Prentice toyed with the idea of proposing marriage.
But how could he? You couldn’t ask a girl to share her life with a man whose business was espionage. Or, more specifically, he couldn’t conceal his calling from her because a marriage threatened by such subterfuge was no marriage at all.
There were two alternatives, Prentice decided, as he parked the silver BMW 2002 outside the apartment block. He could confide in Annette or he could find another job. He hoped that the latter wouldn’t be necessary because, unlike most of the spies he read about in modern fiction, he enjoyed his work.
He decided to fly to England to seek advice. As it happened there was a cable awaiting him, summoning him urgently to London. He told Annette that he would have to leave her for a couple of days; she kissed him and told him that she understood and, in the single bed that had never known anything more orgiastic than the weekly disarray of the Sunday newspapers, they made love with abandonment.
For the last time.
When Prentice arrived at the offices of MI6 in Northumberland Avenue, between Trafalgar Square and the Thames, he was immediately aware that there was something wrong. It showed in the embarrassed greetings from a colleague, in the diffident attitude of Ballard’s secretary.
Leonard Ballard was a man in his sixties with the stamp of the Navy about him, but none of an old sea-dog’s geniality. Ballard had once been a submarine commander and during World War II he had been deputy chief of the Admiralty’s Operational Centre, housed beneath the hideous, bunker-like building in Horse Guard’s Parade, known without affection as Lenin’s Tomb. Ballard had been in charge of the destruction of U-boats; as an ex-submariner he knew the sort of death to which he was dispatching men; it had seemed to affect him not at all.
To Ballard the pursuit and extermination of the enemy was everything. Now as then. But whereas he was normally urbane, the sophisticated skipper of a clandestine crew, he was today cold and brusque.
‘Sit down, Prentice.’
Prentice sat down and nervously assimilated the trappings of the office – seafaring charts, propellers of a ship, a brass compass shining in a shaft of dusty sunlight.
‘You look uncommonly dapper,’ Ballard remarked.
Prentice didn’t reply; there was no reply.
‘Dressed to kill?’
‘Not as far as I am aware, sir,’ regretting the grey lightweight suit and the slightly jazzy tie that Annette had bought him.
‘Appropriate for a fond farewell at Kloten Airport?’
A cold finger of apprehension touched Prentice as he said: ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.’
‘Don’t you? Then I shall enlighten you. You were driven to the airport by a Miss Annette du Pont, were you not?’
‘As it happens I was. But I don’t see —’
‘That it’s any of my business? I’m sorry to disillusion you. The companions favoured by my employees are always my business.’
Prentice was silent.
Ballard picked up a glossy photograph on his desk and tossed it on Prentice’s lap. ‘That is Mademoiselle du Pont, I believe.’
Prentice looked at the photograph. Annette looked back at him, smiling. Admiring the tie, he thought foolishly. The apprehension froze into fear. For Annette, for himself, for the future that he had glimpsed in a green field scattered with flowers. He said yes it was Mademoiselle du Pont.
‘A student of economics, I am told. I’m sure you were able to teach her a lot ….’ Ballard picked up other photographs and rifled through them. ‘Not that she needed much teaching.’
‘I don’t think —’ but Ballard interrupted him again: ‘You should have thought before. You disobeyed instructions. You know perfectly well that you should have checked out anyone who made such a direct approach to you.’
But she approached me for help, stayed with me because she loved me.
Ballard went on: ‘I believe you know a man called ‘Karl Danzer?’ And when he didn’t reply: ‘I asked you a question, Mr Prentice.’
Prentice looked up. ‘Karl Danzer?’ He found it difficult to concentrate. ‘Yes, of course I know Karl Danzer. He’s a currency speculator. Not very big, but big enough. He also handles the Russians’ hard currency for them. I’ve mentioned him in reports.’
Ballard said crisply: ‘He’s more than a Soviet bank-master: he’s a spy employed by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. We’ve just cracked him through a turned KGB operative in the Soviet Embassy in London.’
Hope surfaced briefly. ‘Is that why you brought me to London?’
Ballard sat down behind his desk and faced Prentice. ‘We had intended to bring you to London to brief you about Herr Danzer, yes. Now the matter has become more urgent.’
The hope began to die.
Ballard picked up a silver paper-knife bearing a Royal Naval crest and pointed it at Prentice. ‘I assume that by now you realise in what direction this conversation is leading.’
‘I consider Miss du Pont to be above reproach.’
‘Do you now. Very gallant. I’m afraid I shall have to disillusion you.’
Prentice searched for his cigarettes but decided against lighting one, and sat with his hands clasped tightly together.
Ballard sorted through the photographs, selected one and stared at it expressionlessly for a moment. ‘Miss du Pont,’ he said after a while, ‘has been associating with Karl Danzer for at least six months.’
Prentice wanted to protest, but there was no point. He watched the specks of dust spinning in the sunlight as despair settled upon him.
Ballard turned the photograph so that Prentice could see it, saying at the same time: ‘You will appreciate that I don’t enjoy this. Here, take it,’ as though it were soiling his hands.
Prentice took the picture and gazed at Annette’s lovely face. At the beautiful, full-breasted body that he now knew so well. And that expression of languorous contentment – as she gazed into the eyes of Karl Danzer lying naked beside her.
Prentice dropped the photograph on the floor.
‘The photograph,’ Ballard said, ‘was taken in her room in Basle a week ago after Danzer had been blown.’
Annette had driven back to Basle a week ago – to fetch some clothes, she had said.
Ballard said: ‘The only question that remains – and I am prepared to take your word on it – is, did you communicate anything … indiscreet?’
‘Of course not. I had intended to seek your advice.’
‘And what do you think I would have advised you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters now. The liaison must cease.’
‘Of course,’ Prentice said dully.
‘According to our information you were approached merely in your capacity as an industrial consultant. You have made quite a name for yourself in that particular field, Mr Prentice. Apparently she has no idea – or didn’t have a week ago – that you also work for us.’
So they had bugged her room in Basle.
‘One more thing,’ Ballard said evenly. ‘Leave Danzer alone. For the time being, anyway. He’s more useful that way,’ he added.
‘Is that all?’
‘For the moment.’ Ballard picked up a photograph of another girl on his desk. Her prettiness had been frozen by the lens of the camera; the studio lights and the hairstyle placed her prettiness in the 1940’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel ….’
The girl was Ballard’s wife who had been killed in the Blitz. It was the only time Prentice had heard Ballard apologise.
* * *
No, Prentice assured himself as he turned on his side and prepared to sleep, Anderson knew nothing about Annette du Pont. The story was known only to Ballard, himself and the agent who had reported the liaison to London.
He closed his eyes. When a catalyst such as that bitch’s voice on the radio talking to Danzer stirred the memories – ‘You’re very handsome, you know. Not a bit like an economist!’ – it took a long time for sleep to visit him.
During the first few months after the interview with Ballard he had wondered about the identity of the agent who had denounced Annette du Pont. He had never found out, nor had he ever resented the professional’s role in the affair.
Instead he had disciplined himself to be just as professional. He had taken a course at an establishment near King’s Lynn in Norfolk, run by a cheerful ex-Commando named Saddler, and told Paul Kingdon, his overt employer, that he was taking a vacation.
At the end of the course he was far more than an industrial espionage agent: he was lethal.
Sleep touched George Prentice, but only briefly. He returned to consciousness as he had known he would, as he always did when this train of thought took its inexorable course. Until they reached the point where he was authorised to kill Karl Danzer.
As always it was the photograph that awoke him.
A photograph of a corpse. No ordinary corpse this. Teeth and hair had fallen out, face and body were covered with weals and swellings crusted with dried blood and pus.
The photograph of the man, who looked as though he might have been middle-aged – if, that is, you could imagine him as he was – was in colour.
This time it was Saddler who was displaying photographs – in a Nissen hut in the camp near King’s Lynn. His normally cheerful, broken-nosed features were as savage as the wind hurling rain across the bleak Fens.
‘His name,’ Saddler said, stuffing black tobacco into his pipe, ‘was Nemeth. He was a Hungarian. He had worked for us since the revolution in Budapest in 1956. I knew him, he was a good man.’ The black tobacco began to glow in his pipe.
Prentice stared at the glossy horror in his hands.
Saddler, blowing out a jet of thick grey smoke explained: ‘Thallium. Treated radioactively and introduced into his body. Either forcibly or in his food. The result was the same, his body just fell apart.’
Rain drummed against the corrugated metal walls of the hut and hissed in the chimney of the old stove burning in the corner.
Prentice placed the photograph face downwards on the table Saddler used as a desk. ‘The Russians?’
Saddler nodded. ‘The Executive Action Department of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Once known as Department Thirteen. Renamed as Department V – V for Victor, that is – before the KGB was reshuffled in 1968. For Executive Action read Execution.’
Prentice lit a cigarette. ‘Have you got a drink?’
‘I thought we’d weaned you off the stuff.’
‘I don’t drink any more. But I like a drink on occasions, This is one of them,’ managing a faint smile as Saddler brought out a bottle of Bell’s and two glasses from a drawer in the table, saying: ‘Not a bad idea at that.’
‘The department,’ Saddler went on, drinking his whisky neat, ‘is run by a gentleman named Nikolai Vlasov. In addition to assassination, its functions are sabotage. It has infiltrated agents into North America and Western Europe to destroy installations in the event of war. But that is not our concern here today ….’
Prentice poured a little water from a tap over a sink into his whisky and wondered what their concern was.
Saddler handed him two more photographs. Nothing horrific this time, merely mug shots of two straight-faced young men staring straight into the eye of the camera.
Prentice looked at Saddler inquiringly.
‘Both dead,’ Saddler told him.
‘Murdered?’
‘By Department V. Both British agents.’ Saddler picked up a pencil in one huge hand and began to doodle; it looked like a gallows to Prentice. ‘I trained them both. Both good lads. As far as we know they were both killed cleanly. At least that was something,’ as he began to draw a noose.
‘Blown I presume.’
‘Oh yes,’ Saddler told him, ‘they were blown all right.
‘Do we know who?’
A pause. A rope joined the noose to the scaffold. Karl Danzer. I believe you know him.’
Prentice swallowed the rest of his whisky.
Without waiting for him to reply, Saddler went on: ‘Runs quite a harem does our friend Danzer. His girls prey on unwary agents.’ Saddler’s blue-grey eyes stared expressionlessly at Prentice. ‘One of them memorised the names of these poor sods,’ pointing at the photographs, ‘from a document in a briefcase.’
‘In Basle?’ Prentice couldn’t help himself.
‘Vienna.’
Annette? Prentice decided not to pursue it. He wasn’t a masochist. He asked: ‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘A combination of circumstances.’
The rain-loaded wind sighed in the telephone wires outside.
It seems,’ Saddler said, working on the scaffold, ‘that Herr Danzer has managed to penetrate Bilderberg. I presume you know about Bilderberg?’ And, as Prentice nodded: ‘The annual secret – sorry, private – session of Western clout. Well, Danzer managed to get himself invited this year and will probably make bloody sure that he’s invited next year and the year after. Our Company friends in Washington sussed him. They want to turn him, and they want us to work with them. Decent of them, isn’t it? What they want of course, is our intelligence in Zurich. In other words you, George. More whisky?’ holding up the bottle.
‘No thanks. What do they want from me?’
‘Everything you can get on Danzer. I imagine you’ve got quite a bit already ….’
Prentice replied non-committally: ‘Quite a bit. I can get a hell of a lot more.’
‘Good.’ Saddler began to draw a body hanging from the noose. ‘What we want is as much information as we can get out of Danzer. Top priority stuff-the names of all the Soviet agents he knows.’
‘And then?’
‘The CIA,’ Saddler said, ‘is anxious to use Danzer to feed misinformation about Bilderberg back to the Kremlin. That’s fair enough but we have a more conclusive scheme for curbing Danzer’s activities at Bilderberg. We want him dead.’ He turned over the photograph of the putrified corpse that had once been a man named Nemeth. ‘You see, the Americans haven’t got this to take into consideration. Nor these ….’ He tapped the pictures of the other two dead men with his pencil.
‘I still don’t see—’
