Spy Hook. Len Deighton

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      There was another thing I didn’t like about the suburbs: getting to work. I braved the morning traffic jams in my ageing Volvo but Gloria seldom came with me in the car. She enjoyed going on the train, at least she said she enjoyed it. She said it gave her time to think. But the 7.32 was always packed with people from even more outlying suburbs by the time it arrived. And I hated to stand all the way to Waterloo. Secondly there was the question of my assigned parking place. Already the hyenas were circling. The old man who ran Personnel Records had started hinting about a cash offer for it as soon as I registered my new address. You’ll come in on the train now I suppose? No, I said sharply. No I won’t. And apart from a couple of days when the old Volvo was having its transmission fixed, I hadn’t. I calculated that five consecutive days in a row would be all I’d need to find my hard-won parking space reassigned to someone who’d make better use of it.

      So on Monday I went by car and Gloria went by train. She arrived ahead of me, of course. The office is only two or three minutes’ walk from Waterloo Station, while I had to drag through the traffic jams in Wimbledon.

      I got into the office to find alarm and despondency spread right through the building. Dicky Cruyer was there already, a sure sign of a crisis. They must have phoned him at home and had him depart hurriedly from the leisurely breakfast he enjoys after jogging across Hampstead Heath. Even Sir Percy Babcock, the Deputy D-G, had dragged himself away from his law practice and found time to spare for an early morning session.

      ‘Number Two Conference Room,’ the girl waiting in the corridor said. She whispered in a way that revealed her pent-up excitement: as if this was the sort of day she’d been waiting for ever since beginning to type all those tedious reports for us. I suppose Dicky must have sent her to stand sentry outside my office. ‘Sir Percy is chairing the meeting. They said you should join them as soon as you arrived.’

      ‘Thanks, Mabel,’ I said and gave her my coat and a leather case of very unimportant non-classified paperwork that I hoped she’d mislay. She smiled dutifully. Her name wasn’t Mabel but I called them all Mabel and I suppose they’d got used to it.

      Number Two was on the top floor, a narrow room that seated fourteen at a pinch and had a view right across to where the City’s ugly tower blocks underpinned the low grey cloud base.

      ‘Samson! Good,’ said the Deputy D-G when I went in. There was a notepad, a yellow pencil and a chair waiting for me and two more pristine pads and pencils that may or may not have been waiting for others who were arriving at work hoping their lateness would not be noticed. Bad luck.

      ‘Have you heard?’ Dicky asked.

      I could see it was Dicky’s baby. This was a German Desk crisis. It wasn’t a routine briefing for the Deputy, or a conference to decide about annual leave rosters, or more questions about where Central Funding might have put the odd few hundred thousand pounds that Jim Prettyman authorized for Bret Rensselaer and Bret Rensselaer never got. This was serious. ‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

      ‘Bizet,’ said Dicky, and went back to chewing his fingernail.

      I knew the group; at least I knew them as well as a deskman sitting in London can know the people who do the real nasty dangerous work. Somewhere near Frankfurt an der Oder, right over there on East Germany’s border with Poland. ‘Poles,’ I said, ‘or that’s how it started. Poles working in some sort of heavy industry.’

      ‘That’s right,’ said Dicky judiciously. He had a folder and was looking at it to check how well my memory was working.

      ‘What’s happened?’

      ‘It looks nasty,’ said Dicky, unvanquished master of the nebulous answer on almost any subject except the gastronomic merits of expensive restaurants.

      Billingsly, a bald-headed youngster from the Data Centre, tapped the palm of his hand with his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and said, ‘We seem to have lost more than one of them. That’s always a bad sign.’

      So even in the Data Centre they knew that. Things were looking up. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s always a bad sign.’

      Billingsly looked at me as if I’d slapped his face. Uncordial now, he said, ‘If you know anything else we can do …’

      ‘Have you put out a contact string?’ I asked.

      Billingsly seemed to be unsure what a contact string – a roll-call for survivors – was. But eventually Harry Strang, an elderly gorilla from Operations, stopped scratching his cheek with the eraser end of his brand-new yellow pencil for enough time to answer me. ‘Early yesterday morning.’

      ‘It’s too soon.’

      ‘That’s what I told the Deputy,’ said Dicky Cruyer, nodding deferentially to Sir Percy. Dicky was looking more tired and ill every minute. He usually came down with something totally incapacitating in this sort of situation. It was the thought of making a decision, and signing it for all to see, that affected him.

      ‘Mass,’ said Harry Strang.

      ‘They see each other at Sunday morning Mass,’ explained Dicky Cruyer.

      ‘No out-of-contact signals?’ I asked.

      ‘No,’ said Strang. ‘That’s what makes it worrying.’

      ‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘What else?’

      There was a moment’s silence. If I’d been paranoid I could easily have suspected that they wanted to keep me ignorant of the confirmation.

      ‘Odds and ends,’ said Billingsly.

      Strang said, ‘We have something from inside. Two men picked up for interrogation in the Frankfurt area.’

      ‘Berlin.’

      ‘Berlin? No Frankfurt,’ said Billingsly.

      I’d had enough of Billingsly by that time. They were all like him in the Data Centre: they thought we all needed a couple of megabytes of random access memory to get level with them.

      ‘Don’t act the bloody fool,’ I told Strang. ‘Is your information from Berlin or from Frankfurt?’

      ‘Berlin,’ said Strang. ‘Normannenstrasse.’ That was the big grey stone block in Berlin-Lichtenberg from which East Germany’s Stasi – State Security Service – intimidated their world and poked their fingers into ours.

      ‘Over СКАЧАТЬ