poker and dropped the sketch into the glowing interior.
Together they watched the sketch burn.
Saddler said: ‘But don’t forget, George, not before we’ve bled the bastard dry.’
Raindrops spattered against the corrugated iron. To Prentice the noise sounded like distant gunfire.
* * *
The sequence of events had spent itself. Now Prentice could sleep. He dreamed that he was John Maynard Keynes.
In September, 1971, the British, acting with the sort of cavalier authority that had characterised them in the days when they were building an empire, expelled from their country 105 Soviet spies.
This one-way package deal so alarmed the Soviet authorities that Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev cut short a tour of Eastern Europe, postponed a reception for Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, and conferred with members of the Politburo at the airport in Moscow.
One man attending the emergency session was more alarmed than most. His name was Nicolai Vlasov and he was chairman of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, known the world over as the KGB.
The British action had followed the defection in London of a traitor, Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin, aged thirty-four, and Vlasov’s alarm was twofold:
Firstly, like everyone else at the Kremlin, he feared that the whole KGB operation abroad was in danger of being blown.
Secondly Lyalin had been a member of Department V (assassination and sabotage) and, before his promotion to chairman, Vlasov had been head of that particular department.
Vlasov had not the slightest doubt that his enemies would store that ammunition in their armoury for future use. So he set out to try and prove that Lyalin wasn’t wholly responsible for the debacle; in fact, he didn’t believe that he was.
Several weeks later he sat in his huge office at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow, watching the pellets of snow bounce off the window and reviewing his progress in the Lyalin affair.
It wasn’t spectacular.
Vlasov, an elegant man by Soviet standards, with greenish eyes and a skull that looked peculiarly fragile, as though a single blow with a fist would shatter it, pressed a red button on his desk.
Immediately the door opened. A bald-headed man wearing rimless glasses materialised. ‘Can I help you. Comrade Vlasov?’
‘Has the computer come up with the answers?’
‘Not yet, Comrade Vlasov.’ The bald-headed man ventured a joke. ‘It is British made.’
‘The British didn’t waste any time in September.’
The bald-headed man’s expression changed as he realised that the joke had been untimely.
Vlasov said: ‘The trouble with the computer is that it’s creaking at the joints. Go and give it a kick.’
The door closed. Vlasov shivered despite the fierce central heating that – so they claimed – exhausted his staff. He was never really warm but today he was chilled to the bone. It was that frozen snow, as hard as gravel, sweeping into Moscow from Siberia.
He lit a cigarette with a yellow cardboard filter and poured himself a glass of Narzan mineral water. Theoretically, he shouldn’t have to bother about exonerating Department V; as head of the KGB, which penetrated every stratum of life from the Central Committee of the Communist Party down to the smallest commune in Georgia, he should have been the most powerful man in the land.
Theoretically. Not in practice. Acutely aware of the lurking threat of the monster in their midst, successive Kremlin regimes had made it their business to dissipate the power of the KGB. Every move, every appointment and promotion, was supervised by a special department created by the General Committee of the Party.
Vlasov pressed his fingertips to his fragile-looking temples, Another debacle like London and he would be toppled from his throne. But not if I have my way, he thought. It had taken too long to be crowned.
His thoughts descended from the mahogany panelled office, from the great desk with its batteries of telephones, to the white-tiled cells of Lubyanka Prison somewhere below him in the same building ….
A knock on the door. ‘Come in.’ Vlasov took the lime-green sheet of paper from the bald-headed man and dismissed him.
The computer had printed eight code-names on the paper. The names were the feedback from information compiled by Vlasov during interludes of free time since September.
Each code-name represented a KGB agent abroad. If the aged computer (a replacement was on order) had done its job, each of the agents was above suspicion. With one small qualification: they all demonstrably enjoyed the Western life style.
Not that Vlasov could blame them – he had served in Soviet embassies in Washington, Ottawa and Copenhagen. No, their weakness was their failure to disguise their enjoyment. These eight men, according to the computer, were the most likely agents to succumb to Western blandishments. Just as Lyalin had done.
Not that any of them would be replaced. Just watched. A fatherly eye.
The eighth name was Karl Werner Danzer.
Vlasov sighed and pushed back the heavy drawer of the filing cabinet. The Americans and British had a saying for it: You can’t win ’em all. Danzer had just been accepted by the powerful elite clique known as Bilderberg: it had been Vlasov’s greatest coup since his appointment as KGB chairman.
He picked up one of the telephones, and when the girl on the switchboard answered, told her to arrange for the central heating to be switched up. He wondered if it also heated the cells in Lubyanka Prison.
* * *
Helga Keller was at first so overjoyed by the rekindling of Danzer’s love that she didn’t notice any difference in his attitude.
‘But why were you so offhand … so cruel that night?’ she asked and was completely satisfied when he replied: ‘A business deal fell through. It would have netted the Cause hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs. I wouldn’t have been good company that night.’
But there had been three more days and nights of misery and she asked him about them, and was again satisfied when he said: ‘I was still feeling bad; I didn’t want to upset you,’ and kissed her.
He was still as eager as ever to hear the titbits of conversation she picked up from her father’s dinner table and the Investors’ Club. Hints of deals, loans, devaluations, market trends ….
He seemed pleased with what she obtained, but she wasn’t naive enough to believe that her contributions were devastatingly important and when he suggested that she accept dinner invitations – particularly from American financiers – she reluctantly agreed.
He seemed particularly impressed by one item she innocently extracted from a drunken banker over a champagne cocktail. Astonished even. She had told Danzer that the banker had been celebrating an invitation to Bilderberg.
‘Did he know the date?’
‘I think it was April 21st.’
‘Where?’
‘Knokke in Belgium.’
‘I didn’t even know that,’ Danzer said as he stood sipping a gin-and-tonic in his living-room.
‘Should you have known, darling?’
Danzer said enigmatically: ‘I thought so.’
He seemed distressed, Helga thought. She wished it was because she had been dated by the American banker who was as rich as Croesus. But she was honest enough to acknowledge that it was the mention of Bilderberg that had upset him.
Danzer was depressed