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—’
‘Ballard consulted me.’ Saddler put down his pipe, now cold. He wanted to know what I thought of your capabilities. He seemed to think that you might like the job ….’
Saddler finished drawing the body hanging from the noose. Underneath it he wrote DANZER. ‘Now that,’ he remarked, ‘was very indiscreet of me. The very reverse of what you were taught