A GAME FOR TWO PLAYERS
The steamer from Evian on the French side of the lake had made its stop at Territet. Now it came into sight again and turned to head for the pier on which Colonel Jost stood waiting.
He looked down at the water. He remembers that there was a cold breeze blowing along the lake that day and that waves were breaking over the boulders along the shore. The sight did not interest him in the least. He came from a country with a coastline open to North Sea gales, and these waves, he says, reminded him of slopping bath water; but he kept his eyes on them just the same. It was better than staring expectantly at the approaching steamer, and better than appearing to examine, even idly, the other persons waiting beside him on the pier. There were five of them: two women with bulging string bags, a seedy man carrying an imitation-leather sample case, and a pair of out-of-season German tourists, husband and wife. All probably harmless, he thought, but you could never be certain; and if you appeared not to notice people, there was less chance of their noticing and remembering you. He kept staring at the waves until the steamer came alongside.
Paddle wheels churned, mooring lines were passed, the gangway was pushed out. Four persons came ashore. The waiting passengers walked on board.
Jost went last and saw his friend Brand almost immediately.
Brand was sitting in the saloon, on the starboard side by one of the windows.
Neither man gave any sign of recognition. Jost walked up the companionway, turning up the fur collar of his coat as he went, and took a seat on the upper deck.
His expression of bored indifference to his surroundings remained, but for several seconds he had had to make a conscious effort to preserve it. He had had a shock.
It had been over six months since he had seen Brand, and in that time his friend’s appearance had changed remarkably. Brand had always been pale; that kind of pale, slightly sallow complexion is not uncommon among Scandinavians. But always before it had been a healthy pallor; there had been blood beneath the skin. Now, the face was pinched and grey and the life seemed to have gone out of it. Suddenly, Brand looked old and either very sick or very frightened.
The last thought made Jost’s muscles tighten for a moment. He forced himself to relax. Brand had requested this meeting and said that the need for it was urgent. With secret meetings of this kind there was always an element of risk to be accepted. If on this occasion the risks were for some reason to be greater than usual, Brand’s message would surely have said so. It had not said so. Therefore his appearance must be due to illness. Nothing in the message about that either; but then the method of private communication which they employed had not been designed to convey information about personal matters.
He remembered the night they had worked out the method, on the garden terrace of a hotel near Strasbourg.
A French ten-franc note has on its face side four groups of figures. There is the date of issue and a printing-batch number. Then there are two serial numbers, one of five figures in the lower left-hand corner and one of ten figures in the centre below the words Banque de France. In all, there are at least twenty-five digits on every note, and no two of the notes are exactly alike. It had been Brand’s idea to use these notes as ‘one-time’ cypher pads. Jost himself had devised the matrix. The method was crude, no doubt, but it worked and was as safe as such things could be: a ten-franc note in one airmail envelope, the encyphered message in another. The limitation was that you could only send short, simple messages.
The message which had brought him there had been short and simple: URGENT MEET PROPOSE COVER MILAN THEN VISIT GODCHILD TWENTIETH PM EVIAN STEAMER AFTER VEVEY CONFIRM.
Well, perhaps it was not really simple. A good deal of thought had gone into its composition.
Even in those parts of the world where international travel is easy and commonplace, there are some persons – presidents, kings, prime ministers and known criminals, for example – who can never, as ordinary men can, move freely from country to country, meeting whom they please where they choose, without their comings and goings being more than casually supervised.
Directors of government secret intelligence services are among these inhibited few.
In their own countries they are able to shroud their movements in secrecy and generally prefer to do so; but the moment they plan to go abroad, questions will be asked, and not only by their subordinates and those to whom they are technically responsible. Protocol, and sometimes prudence, demands that the foreign colleagues into whose territories they are moving be informed of their movements and of the reasons for them. Since such travellers must always expect to be under some sort of surveillance – at best benevolent and protective, but invariably careful and inquisitive – the reasons they give, whether true or false, must never be less than convincing.
A director of a secret intelligence service himself, with personal experience of the problem, Colonel Brand had thoughtfully suggested a good cover story for his friend’s use on this occasion. The suggestion was contained in the message references to Milan and visiting a godchild.
In Milan during the week immediately prior to the date of the proposed meeting, an international electronics-industry fair would be in progress. New miniaturised sensing and detection devices would be shown, as well as the latest telecommunications equipment. Brand had guessed, correctly, that Jost would be sending a man from his technical section to Milan to report on the new developments. He had also guessed, again correctly, that a decision by Jost to go to Milan himself with the technician would cause no surprise. The decision would be in character; Colonel Jost’s interest in technical development was well known.
However, Colonel Brand could not go to Milan for the same reason; for him that would have been out of character. So the meeting would have to be elsewhere.
In addition to the cypher messages they exchanged, they took care to keep up an ordinary, quite innocent private correspondence. Jost, a childless widower, had complained in one of his recent letters that a niece of whom he was fond, and to whom he was godfather, had been sent by her parents to an English school near Montreux in Switzerland. Brand had remembered. What could be more natural than that Jost, on his way back from Milan, should break his journey at Montreux and visit his godchild?
Brand had always been clever with cover stories, Jost reflected. Presumably he had cooked up something equally ingenious to get himself to Evian. It would be amusing to hear.
Well, he would hear soon. They were past the Ile de Salagnon now and heading across the lake towards Vevey.
After Vevey, Brand had said.
They had been friends for fifteen years then – since, in fact, the year of their appointments to the posts they still held.
They had been introduced, under circumstances humiliating to both of them, at a NATO base in France. It had been the humiliation, petty and even laughable when they looked back on it but infuriating at the time, that had first drawn them together.
The title of Brand’s post was Director of Security and Intelligence, that of Jost’s Director of Defence Intelligence. In effect, the jobs they did for their respective governments were the same; they were opposite numbers. They had other things in common. Both had fought with bravery and distinction in resistance movements when their small countries had been under German occupation. Both had been leaders and organisers, loyal to their governments in exile and, as professional soldiers from ‘good’ families, politically of the right. They had survived the occupation because they were hard, self-reliant and resourceful men, because they had despised heroics and action for action’s sake and because they had learned early enough to disobey orders from remote commanders when they knew those orders to be unrealistic or ill-advised. Both had developed the special skills needed for the successful conduct of clandestine operations. As staff officers in the immediate postwar years, their knowledge, experience and natural aptitudes were found to be of the kind needed in intelligence work and they became specialists in it. When the growth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation made the creation of their posts necessary, they were the men considered best qualified to fill them. They had no predecessors and were hampered by no precedents. They were from the first very much their own masters.
On their appointment they automatically became full members of a standing joint intelligence committee of NATO on which their countries had been temporarily represented by military attachés. At that time the quarterly three-day meetings of the committee were held at a U.S. Army base twenty kilometres outside Paris. Security arrangements on these top-secret occasions were handled by the Americans.
For the first of these meetings that they attended, Jost and Brand were accommodated in their respective Paris embassies. Both had already received the NATO top-secret security clearance known as Cosmic.* However, since they were new to the committee, it had been necessary for their embassies to obtain from the Americans the special maximum-security passes that would be needed to gain admittance, first to the base and then to the heavily guarded conference area within the base perimeter. These passes were delivered to them personally at their embassies by an American liaison officer.
At eight-thirty on the morning of the first day, Jost and Brand were picked up separately at their embassies by U.S. Army staff cars and driven out to the base. Both were in uniform. They arrived within two minutes of each other at about nine-fifteen. By nine-thirty both were under arrest, or at any rate under armed guard in a guardroom, and being interrogated by an American military-police lieutenant who accused them in highly offensive terms of being newspaper reporters.
It seemed that the lieutenant had recently had an unfortunate experience with some too-enterprising foreign reporters, an experience which had resulted in his being reprimanded by his commanding officer. But he had learned his lesson. Now, he said, he could smell a newsman a mile off. He used a great many four-letter words in expressing his opinion of the two bewildered colonels, in shouting down their protests and in describing what he intended with his own hands to do to them. Nearly ten minutes passed before a captain from the security section arrived to investigate.
The captain was in private life a trained police officer. He silenced the impassioned lieutenant, asked sensible questions and received sensible replies. The nature of the misunderstanding now became apparent. The special passes which had been issued to Jost and Brand were of a type which had been withdrawn a month previously. It was obvious, the captain said, that there had been a foul-up.
Obvious it may have been, but two hours elapsed before the mistake could be corrected. The identification papers the two men carried had no validity in that maximum-security area. Their fingerprints had to be taken, records had to be fetched for purposes of comparison and persons summoned to double-check their identities. They were, of course, late at the committee meeting, where, since the current chairman had not been told about the cause of the delay, they had a cool reception.
During the luncheon break, however, there were explanations and an American major from the security section introduced himself to the two. He did not grovel and he did not invent excuses. He did admit, without equivocation, that the mistake had been due to carelessness in his office and he confirmed that their embassies had been in no way responsible. He apologised unreservedly for the embarrassment and inconvenience the mistake had caused.
His style was engaging and they were reasonable men. Foul-ups, Jost said amiably, were not unknown where he came from, and Brand congratulated the major on his captain, whose courtesy and good sense that morning had eased a trying situation.
If the matter had been allowed to rest there, with an apology unreservedly given and as unreservedly accepted, it is probable that the relationship between Jost and Brand would not have developed quite as it did. The private joke might still have been born, but it would have been short-lived and would have remained only a joke.
As it was, the major’s superior officer decided that it would be a wise move on his part to apologise personally to these two foreigners. ‘After all,’ he pointed out to the major, ‘they’re cloak-and-dagger boys. That means they’re creeps. They may act like all is forgiven and forgotten, but did they actually state that they’re not going to put in formal complaints? No. I’m not taking any chances. I’ll handle them myself.’ At the end of the day’s session he sent a message asking if they would mind stopping by at his office to receive and sign for the new passes that had been prepared for them.
He was a full colonel with two rows of medal ribbons of the kind commonly referred to in the U.S. Army at that time as ‘spinach’. After the business of the new passes had been disposed of, he produced a bottle of whisky and offered them a drink. They accepted. He then moved on to his apology, which began with a brief but confusing description of the pass-issuing procedure and ended with a long, rambling account of the security problems he faced there and of the difficult, responsible, thankless task he had. By the time he had finished, he had not only made it plain that he regarded himself as the real victim of the foul-up, but had also conveyed the impression that, in his view, they had brought most of the indignities to which they had been subjected that morning on themselves.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said with a friendly smile, ‘but I’m told that it was the strange uniforms that made the sergeant on the outer gate double-check those passes. I don’t say that you’d have gotten away with it if he hadn’t double-checked – there’d be some heads rolling around here if you had, believe you me – but that’s why you had those redneck MPs on your backs instead of my boys.’
‘Surely,’ said Jost as calmly as he could, ‘our attachés have been attending these meetings in uniform.’
‘Sure, they have. But your attaché is a navy man, and yours –’ he looked at Brand – ‘who has PX privileges here, wears American olive drab. Sure he has his own badges and flashes, but unless you’re real close to him he looks strictly GI.’
‘The appearance of our uniforms is perhaps better known in combat areas,’ said Brand coldly.
Their host was not put out. ‘I’ve no doubt it is, Colonel. As I say, don’t get me wrong. We do have a problem here with all these foreign uniforms. We know it and we’re trying to lick it. You’ve seen the NATO wall charts we’ve put up – uniforms, badges, flashes, flags, the lot. But it’s tough. We had a guy here last month in the goddamndest fancy dress you ever saw. He could have been anything – Peruvian field marshal, doorman at a new clip joint, you name it. In fact, he was an Italian captain in some crack outfit of theirs. It’s a problem, all right. But I’ll tell you this. It’s a problem you gentlemen won’t have to worry about again. Now, let’s freshen up those drinks.’
They got away as soon as they could and decided to share a staff car back to Paris.
In the car they nursed their anger in silence for a while. Then Jost cleared his throat.
‘The denial that affirms,’ he said.
Brand stared at him.
Jost cleared his throat again. ‘ “I would never for a moment suggest that Mr X is a liar and a thief, but …” ’ He pursed his lips distastefully. ‘I think that “don’t get me wrong, but” is a gambit of the same kind. In effect it says, “What I am going to say will undoubtedly offend you, but, as I have denied in advance that I mean to give offence, you have no right to complain.” All the same, I do complain.’
Brand smiled. ‘Then you won’t get me wrong if I say that I hope that man is still wondering whether he persuaded us to keep our mouths shut. I would like to think of him troubled by doubts.’
‘So would I. Doubts at the very least.’ Jost glanced at the American driver in front of them and then went on in French. ‘Do you intend to lodge a protest?’
‘I had decided not to – that is, if you were in agreement with me. Now I am undecided. What is your view?’
Jost thought for a moment. They were both speaking French now.
‘I share your disgust and annoyance,’ Jost said, ‘and I think that protests would be justified. Whether or not they would serve any useful purpose is another matter. I am inclined, reluctantly, to think that they would not. Besides, one does not want to start out by being labelled difficult.’
There was a pause before Brand replied. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘I shall make a report to my ambassador, of course, but will ask that no action be taken. However,’ he went on grimly, ‘I will certainly see that in future our military attaché does not wear uniforms obtained cheaply from the American PX. This place has obviously demoralised him.’
Jost sighed. ‘It is all very regrettable. Last week I was briefed by our army commander. Officials from the defence and foreign ministries attended. The man from the foreign ministry saw fit to warn me of a tendency on the part of some allied representatives here to harbour anti-American sentiments and even sometimes to express them.’ He gave Brand a sidelong look. ‘He called anti-Americanism a vice of the most corrupting kind and the one in which we could least afford to indulge, as it was rooted in envy.’
‘That has an Old Testament ring.’
‘Our civil officials take themselves seriously. At the time I was offended that such a warning should have been thought necessary, even by that old fool. I didn’t know then how soon I would be tempted.’
‘But are we tempted?’ Brand shrugged. ‘You know as well as I do that our friend with the whisky bottle is merely a time-serving buffoon of a type you will find in every army. If the security arrangements had been in other hands, he might have been French or British and, though possibly in different ways, just as offensive. It is not being anti-American to dislike that man.’
‘And you know,’ Jost retorted, ‘that that is no argument in our situation. It is the Americans who count now in the West, because only they have the real power and the will to exercise it. Whether they like or dislike us does not matter – they will value us according to our usefulness within the alliance and our readiness to comply with their wishes. What does matter is that we do not, on that account, permit ourselves to dislike and resent them – any of them, for any reason, good or bad. Such dislikes or resentments are not in our interest.’ He paused, then added blandly: ‘I am again quoting, of course, from my official instructions.’
‘So I gathered,’ Brand replied dryly. ‘I, too, have instructions from my government in which I do not wholly believe.’
They eyed each other for a moment and then smiled. The first step in their mutual understanding had been reached. They suddenly felt at ease with each other.
‘So,’ said Jost, ‘since such instructions, wholly believed in or not, must still be resolutely obeyed, let us forget the man with the whisky and remember only that good captain and his admirable major.’
Brand nodded. ‘Yes, indeed, let us do that. But –’ a faraway look came into his eyes – ‘don’t get me wrong if I remind you of the lieutenant of military police who first interrogated us this morning. Did you not find him specially interesting?’
‘Because his first thought was that we must be newspaper reporters in disguise?’
‘Yes, and because he appeared to be far more disturbed by that possibility than the possibility of our being enemy agents. That thought did not seem even to enter his head.’
‘He has had a bad experience with reporters, remember, and no experience at all, probably, with enemy agents.’
‘Perhaps not. But I prefer a different explanation. I like to think of that man as an instinctive realist.’
Jost glanced at his companion warily. ‘You will have to explain that, I’m afraid.’
They were in the city now and the passing street lights flickered on their faces. Brand was smiling.
‘A realist in this context,’ he said, ‘being one who assumes that most of the secrets we guard so jealously are already well known to the other side, and that most of the secrets the other side guards are already well known to us. One who also understands, however, that the conventions must be observed and the pretences maintained, that outsiders may not look in on our foolishness and that both sides have a common enemy – the small boy who saw that the emperor was naked.’
‘Dangerous talk, Colonel!’
They began to laugh. Then Jost glanced out of the window and saw that they were nearing their destination. ‘I take it that you will be dining with your ambassador tonight,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid so. And you with yours?’
‘Yes. Perhaps tomorrow evening we could continue these useful bilateral discussions.’
‘The same thought was in my own mind.’
And so the friendship began.
Directors of intelligence services with secret budgets at their disposal and the ability, sometimes the obligation, to put expediency before strict legality tend to become back-room potentates. It is in the nature of their occupation that they should. As long as they and their subordinates avoid committing blunders too gross to be hidden, they are immune from public criticism. The secrecy fetish and a general acceptance of the ‘need-to-know’ principle are very powerful defences. When such defences are reinforced, as they so often are, by politic murmurs of ‘don’t-want-to-know’ from nominal superiors, the men behind them are secure even from attacks launched by hostile factions within the establishments they serve. They acquire more authority than their responsibilities warrant. They are accountable virtually to no one; and the longer they remain in their posts the stronger they become. Inevitably they also tend to become arrogant. The arrogance will generally be concealed, of course, behind well-composed masks of professional objectivity and reserve, and the quality of it will vary; but it will be there. How it is expressed will depend on the character of the man concerned, on his hopes, conceits and circumstances, on the political environment in which he works, and on time and chance. There have been directors who have found it amusing to lend support to leaders they despise, as well as those who have followed their consciences when it would have been safer and more profitable to ignore them. There have been directors who became kingmakers, who have subverted the governments they were pledged to serve and helped plan the coups which brought them down. There have been those who have seized power for themselves, and those who have preferred to act as the éminences grises of puppet rulers. And there have been those whose arrogance has expressed itself in more eccentric, less familiar, ways.
Jost and Brand came to power in the early nineteen-fifties and established themselves in the NATO intelligence community dining the bitter cold-war years of that decade.
By the end of it they knew beyond doubt that they had made the mistake that so many other ambitious men have made, that of specialising too early. Posts that had seemed desirable when they were younger men had, now that they were entering middle age, become dead ends. In the modest hierarchies of the defence establishments to which they belonged they could rise no higher.
It would be easy to see their disenchantment simply as a product of professional frustration and financial disappointment, to paint a picture of disgruntled colonels, barred from further promotion by their own undoubted abilities, underpaid and denied redress, finally becoming sufficiently embittered to take their futures and their fates into their own hands. Such a picture, however, would be out of drawing.
Grievances they certainly had. Their formal responsibilities – and, consequently, their informal powers – had increased substantially over the years without any commensurate advance in rank or pay. Most of their foreign colleagues – not all, but most – held the rank of major-general or its equivalent. Attempts by both to have the establishments of their directorates upgraded had invariably failed. These men had not endeared themselves to higher authority; and higher authority, ever wary, was not disposed to make them more influential than they already were. Understandably, they came to prefer civilian dress to their army uniforms. But to conclude that they were driven by their grievances alone and that what they eventually did was merely a bloodyminded expression of accumulated resentments would be to oversimplify their case. Their disenchantment, and the aberration that grew out of it, had deeper origins.
Although Jost and Brand were both professional soldiers, their thinking about war and men had been conditioned not by active service in conventional armies but by what they had learned in resistance movements. The idea that great force can be successfully opposed only by equal or greater force had no meaning for them. To their way of thinking, the way to oppose great force was to find out how to destroy its cohesion and then, when it was fragmented, deal separately with the pieces. They thought, as they had always fought, as guerrillas. They could accept the necessity for the alliance to which their countries were committed. They could accept with resignation the knowledge that their countries meant no more to NATO than Romania or Bulgaria meant to the Warsaw Pact and that they were pygmies involved in a struggle between giants. What they could not do was change their ways of thinking about giants.
They had known the German giant, so omnipotent in his day, and had helped to bring him down. Now, they were able to observe and appraise from peculiar vantage points the American and Russian giants.
The appraisals they made were not flattering. What impressed them most about these giants, they ultimately decided, was not their strength, still less the loud and threatening noises they made, but their inherent clumsiness.
As Brand remarked to Jost one night in Brussels, ‘They make one think wistfully of dark nights and trip wires.’
Their friendship was seven years old when that remark was made and it more or less sums up their attitudes at that stage. They are anti-American as well as anti-Russian. Their talk is subversive, but still only talk. They are dissident, but able to relieve their feelings by indulging in fantasy.
They were meeting officially quite often at that time. Regional intelligence committees had been established, and there were planning conferences in connection with NATO exercises to attend besides.
They looked forward to these occasions, but they were discreet. Both had made other friends among their NATO colleagues and both took care to cultivate them; but with the other friends the professional views they expressed were always carefully orthodox. Their dissidence was a private joke which they had no intention of sharing, even with those who might have proved sympathetic. Their agreement on this point was unspoken, but neither of them ever questioned it. Even at that stage they must have known instinctively that a time would come when they would be glad of their discretion.
From harbouring vague thoughts about the efficacy of trip wires to wondering what they could be made of and where they might be strung is a short step. Jost and Brand began to take that step in 1964.
The meeting place was London and the circumstances were unusual. Tension between the United States and the Soviet Union had eased considerably; the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had been signed; the hot line between Washington and Moscow had been installed; the reorganisation of NATO was being discussed; the position of France was in doubt; there was change in the air.
Obliged now to examine a new future, Jost and Brand did not much like what they saw. Not that they feared for their posts; they were all too well entrenched in those and could expect to remain so until they reached retirement age; but it was becoming increasingly evident that their importance in the NATO scheme of things, already diminished, was likely soon to become little more than parochial. In a gloomy moment they saw themselves reduced to the role of passive onlookers, of village policemen stationed at minor crossroads on a secret war battlefield where the only effective forces engaged were the big battalions of the CIA and the KGB.
This view of the situation was not altogether fanciful. The CIA and the KGB already operated clandestinely in both their countries. Jost and Brand knew this. They also knew that, beyond keeping themselves informed of their uninvited guests’ activities, there was little they could do but register displeasure. They found the CIA’s self-righteous assumption that it was not only a welcome guest but also a specially privileged one almost as annoying as the KGB residenturas’ bland insistence that they did not exist, and just as insulting to the intelligence.
Jost was an overseas member of a London club and it was in the coffee room there that the first of two critical conversations took place.
There had been an unsuccessful attempt early that day to hijack a gold-bullion shipment at London airport, and the evening papers had made it a front-page story. Three of the robbers had already been captured, four others in a second getaway car were being sought, as was the driver of a power-lift truck found abandoned near the scene. Over their brandy, Jost and Brand began idly to discuss the attempt.
‘A carefully planned job,’ commented Brand, ‘but much too elaborate. I wonder where they got the tear gas. Stolen from an army depot, I suppose.’
‘Clearly the police had a tip-off.’
‘Not a very detailed one, though, by the look of things. Five men got away. What is a power-lift truck?’
‘I think they are used for delivering heavy objects – machines, refrigerators, things like that. The tail board is power-driven and can be raised and lowered vertically like an elevator. Presumably that was going to be used to load the bullion.’
‘Gold bars worth half a million sterling, it says.’ Brand thought for a moment. ‘That would weigh about eleven hundred kilos. Yes, eight men would certainly need help if they expected to load that in a hurry. What idiots!’
‘Nothing idiotic about half a million sterling.’
‘But idiotic to try to take it in gold.’
‘I don’t see why. There is always a market for gold and no need to pay a fence. Any crooked fool can sell gold if he goes to the right places.’
‘And if he can take the gold with him to these places, yes. Eleven hundred kilos!’ Brand snorted. ‘If I decided to get rich quickly I would choose something lighter to take to the market.’
Jost smiled. ‘Half a million in used banknotes would be lighter, but they would make an awkward parcel.’
Brand did not reply immediately. His eyes wandered around the empty room and then returned to Jost. He spoke very quietly now. ‘For those of us who have access to knowledge,’ he said, ‘there are surely other negotiable commodities.’
There was another pause. Jost was aware of a sensation in his stomach that he recognised very well, but a sensation with which he had for some years been unfamiliar. He was in the presence of danger again. To reassure himself, to make sure that his friend was joking, he invoked the old formula.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I am as eager as the next man to supplement my pension, but –’ he sighed regretfully – ‘isn’t the special knowledge of the kind we have much too unstable to travel? On such a difficult, dangerous road I would feel safer with liquid nitroglycerine.’
Brand did not smile. ‘There is much special knowledge that with careful handling can be made safe,’ he said, ‘knowledge, moreover, that raises no issues of conscience.’
‘Oh. Play material, you mean.’ Jost was relieved but also slightly disappointed. ‘Play material’ was the jargon phrase used to describe the low-grade classified information fed back to the enemy through double agents. It wasn’t like Brand to talk nonsense.
Brand shook his head. ‘No, not play material. Much better than that.’ He leaned forward. ‘Hard stuff, but hard stuff that is possibly already shared.’
‘And therefore probably useless? Oh, I see.’
‘Useless but not valueless.’ Brand did smile now. ‘Just like gold, some might think.’
Jost was aware again of the danger sensation, but it was not unpleasant now. ‘Like gold, perhaps,’ he said, ‘but without the market that there is for gold.’
‘A market could be found, no doubt.’
‘Can you see us looking for one?’
‘No.’ Brand shrugged. ‘Perhaps for that sort of commodity the market has to be made.’ He picked up the evening paper again. ‘Eight men on the job,’ he commented, ‘and there were doubtless as many again involved in the planning and preliminaries. No wonder their security was bad. No wonder the police had a tip-off.
That was all that was said then.
The expected reorganisation took place and official occasions for their private meetings became rarer. Over a year passed before the subject of ‘access to knowledge’ came up again between them. This time it was Jost who raised it.
They were dining at a restaurant in Rome.
Towards the end of dinner Jost said casually: ‘I heard the other day of a strange commodity sold in an even stranger market.’
He saw Brand’s eyes flicker over the other tables to see if there was anyone near enough to overhear them, and knew that his friend had not forgotten the earlier conversation. The words commodity and market had worked as he had hoped they would. Brand’s eyes were on his now, still and intent.
‘In Mexico,’ Jost went on, ‘there is a forger. He is an old man but still very skilful indeed, and he has been practising his craft successfully for years.’
‘Successfully? You mean he hasn’t been caught?’
‘In Mexico he has committed no offence.’
‘Forgery is not an offence there?’
‘Forgery of banknotes, yes. Forgery of bond certificates, of cheques, of other valuable documents of that kind, all those are serious offences, of course. But this old man does not commit them. He forges something different, documents without any face value at all – rare postage stamps with their overprints and cancellations.’
Brand raised his eyebrows. ‘No value, you say?’
‘No face value. Rare stamps, the very valuable kind, have usually been cancelled by a postmaster and have therefore lost their face value. They are not valid for postage. Their value to international collectors and to those who invest in them lies in their rarity. You know, I dare say that there are large sums invested in rare stamps.’
‘Yes.’ Brand shrugged. ‘I can see that this would be an amusing and profitable racket for a forger working in Mexico, but I don’t quite see …’
Jost raised the palm of one hand. ‘One moment. You don’t yet know how profitable it has been for him, nor how amusing.’ He paused for effect. ‘The United States Treasury Department has just cooperated in the business of buying him out.’
Brand stared. ‘Are you serious?’
Jost smiled. ‘It surprised me too. What happened was this. The international stamp dealers had been worried for years by this man’s activities. You see, many of these extremely valuable rare stamps are valuable because of the overprints and surcharges superimposed on them. Overprints and surcharges are very much easier to forge than, say, a modern banknote. So, when you get a really skilful man at work, the forgeries are very difficult to detect. That means not only that for the big dealers there has been what amounts to a debasement of their currency, but also that they have been obliged to spend large sums in tracing and exposing the forgeries. They must if they are to protect their own and their clients’ investments. Naturally, they, and particularly the Americans, have wanted for some time to do something about the Mexican. But what could they do? They had no legal position. When they heard that he was thinking of retiring – he is seventy-six now – they had a new fear. Supposing he sold his plates and equipment to a younger man, or to a group? What then? It didn’t bear thinking about. So they decided to pocket their pride and buy him out themselves.’
‘Where did the Treasury Department come in?’
‘Forgery in the United States is a matter for the Treasury Department. The dealers had to have Treasury blessing before they could take what they were buying back into America. An arrangement also had to be made with the U.S. Customs.’
‘And the blessing was given?’
‘Certainly. A secret negotiating committee went down to Mexico to meet with the old man. They not only bought his plates and dies and equipment and records, they also persuaded him to sign an agreement, enforceable in a Mexican court, that he would retire for good. That was for their protection, of course, but it cost them a lot of money. I asked a stamp dealer at home about the case. He told me that it is not unique. A similar thing happened in fifty-three when the British Philatelic Association bought out a French stamp-forger named Sperati. Interesting, is it not?’
Jost finished his wine. Absently, Brand reached for the bottle and refilled Jost’s glass. With the bottle still poised in the air he looked across the table.
‘Nuisance value,’ he said.
‘Precisely.’
They said no more until they were back in their hotel; but both had been thinking and they spent the rest of that evening talking of ways in which the lesson of the Mexican forger might be applied by those having their own particular skills and resources. They agreed in the end that there was only one way that could be considered relatively safe. Before they went up to their rooms that night they amused themselves by mapping out a plan of campaign.
Colonel Jost says that he has no idea when the decision to put the plan into action was made.
This was not, I think, an evasion on his part, an attempt to shift the ultimate responsibility onto Brand. In a collusive relationship such as theirs, commitments and decisions are often made obliquely, without discussion, and without anything having been said directly. It is possible, too, that no formal decision was ever taken. Theirs was a long-term plan and, in its initial stages certainly, neither of them was called upon to do anything obviously illegal or suspect. A tacit understanding could have carried them to a point of no return, or at any rate to a point at which return would have seemed to them anticlimactic and ridiculous.
So, the moment when the private joke turned into a conspiracy passed unnoticed by those who conspired. They were not given to self-examination. All they knew, or cared, was that in Rome that year they had found a new game to play and that it would be more stimulating, perhaps more profitable, than the old.
As the steamer left the quay at Vevey, Brand came out of the saloon and went to the upper deck.
Jost was sitting near the rail. After a moment or two Brand strolled over and sat down beside him.
For a full minute they stared out at the lake in silence. A casual observer would have put them down as respectable business or professional men in their late fifties; a perceptive one might have guessed from their clothes that they were foreign to Switzerland, but not from the same country; nobody would have thought it odd that they should start talking to each other rather than look at the scenery. On that cold, windy day the beauties of Lac Léman were not much in evidence.
‘What is your cover in Evian?’ It was Jost who spoke first.
‘The best.’ Brand stared out at the slate-grey lake. ‘There is a doctor in Evian who specialises in diseases of the kidneys. I had reason to consult him.’
‘My friend, I’m sorry. I hope he has given you good news.’
‘Not good. Not quite as bad as I had expected, but not good. I am afraid that our business has now become a matter of urgency.’
Jost turned to look at him.
‘In three months I must retire,’ Brand said.
‘For reasons of health?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is a sad blow.’ Jost drew his coat collar closer around his neck. ‘Personally, I detest sympathy. I would think that it is the same with you.’
‘Yes. I did not propose this meeting merely to talk of trouble. I have more interesting news. Fortune appears at last to be smiling on us.’
‘Fortune?’
Brand slid a hand into his overcoat breast pocket. ‘I think we can now take the steps necessary to activate our joint investment.’
His hand reappeared with a slip of paper. He passed it to Jost.
Jost saw that it was an obituary clipped from the European edition of an American news magazine. It read:
DIED. Brigadier-General Luther B. Novak, 62, U.S. Army (Ret.), lecturer, publisher of the international weekly newsletter Intercom and patron saint of the far-out, millionaire-backed Interform Foundation; of a heart attack; in Geneva. His premature retirement from the Army in 1955 followed GI complaints to Congressmen of his attempts to indoctrinate U.S. troops in Germany with his own political views, the extremity of which, according to one witness at the inquiry, ‘made the John Birch Society look like parlor pinks’. His subsequent career as publisher, polemicist and self-styled ‘controller of a world-wide private spy network’ was marked by further brushes with authority, notably the State Department and the CIA. A harassed deputy director of that agency was once driven to describing the Intercom newsletter and its gadfly proprietor as ‘an international migraine headache airmailed weekly by a latter-day Titus Oates’.
Jost passed the cutting back. He hid his disappointment behind a polite nod.
‘I had heard that Novak was dead,’ he said; ‘but the newsletter is controlled by this foundation, surely.’
‘That is what I thought,’ Brand replied; ‘but it is so exactly the sort of thing we had in mind, that, with my time running out, I thought it was worthwhile to make further inquiries. What I found was interesting. The foundation is run as sort of a hobby by three wealthy, rather stupid men who think they are fighting world communism. They subsidise the making of documentary films, recorded radio and television programmes for free distribution, and the writing of unreadable but expensive-looking books and pamphlets. They pay the wages of a staff working on anti-communist research, whatever that may be, and they retain a firm of public-relations counsellors. They paid Novak a salary and expenses for his work as organiser of the foundation. But they do not own the Intercom newsletter. That was Novak’s personal property. He started it, after he resigned from the American Army, with money left to him by his wife. He used up most of that inheritance. Intercom lost money for several years, and, in spite of its circulation and notoriety since, it has never done better than break even. He had his army pension, of course, but, until he met these rich idiots who backed the foundation, most of his income came from lecturing.’
‘Then who owns Intercom now?’
Brand gave his friend a sidelong look. ‘I hope that we do.’
Jost drew a deep breath. ‘You must forgive me,’ he said. ‘For a moment there I doubted.’
‘I know.’ Brand smiled. ‘I have not often surprised you. I was tempted to try. I say I hope it is ours. It should be by next week if all goes well. The position is this. Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G. is a Swiss corporation registered in Zug and directed, in order to conform with the Swiss code, by a Swiss national. He is a lawyer in Bâle. The shares, ninety-seven per cent of which were owned by Novak, are now part of his estate. This goes to a married daughter living in Baltimore in the United States. Through our cut-out I have made an offer for the shares of ten thousand dollars. Since the only assets are the lease of an office suite in Geneva, one Addressograph and two duplicating machines, two typewriters and some highly questionable goodwill, ten thousand is about twice what the shares are worth. I heard two days ago that the daughter in Baltimore is likely to accept the offer. Pending confirmation of her acceptance, the Intercom lawyer has undertaken to see that the Geneva staff salaries are paid and that publication continues.’
‘Has Novak’s death not affected it at all? Who is writing the thing now?’
‘The same man who has been writing it for the past four years. His name is Theodore Carter. Novak was never much more than a figurehead. He always had to have someone to do the actual work.’
‘But what about the material? Where does that come from? Crude invention may account for some of it, but there is much circumstantial stuff. Even Intercom must have sources. What is this “private spy network” he boasted about?’
Brand grinned. ‘Paper mills,’ he said.
Jost grimaced sourly. ‘Paper mills’ was the term they and their colleagues used to describe the innumerable political warfare and propaganda groups engaged in feeding misinformation to the international news-gathering agencies. Some paper mills had government subsidies, others were financed by émigré organisations and separatist movements; a few of the smaller, more furtive paper mills – those, for instance, which specialised in the manufacture of false intelligence documents – were businesses run for profit. Since the output of the paper mills had always to be evaluated – the kind of misinformation being propagated by an opponent could sometimes give an indication of his true intentions – the work load they created was a perennial source of inconvenience to intelligence agencies.
‘This Theodore Carter,’ said Jost, ‘where did he come from? Is he one of the paper-mill hacks?’
‘Not exactly. His predecessor at Intercom was certainly one of those. Felix Kortan, you may remember him. An American-educated Hungarian who operated after the war in Vienna. Called himself a Russian expert. Even Novak saw through his faking eventually. Carter is a little better than that, I think. I have seen a fairly thorough report on him.’
‘I would like to see that report, if possible.’
‘I can tell you the essentials now.’ Brand half closed his eyes. ‘Theodore Carter. No middle name. Aged fifty-five, a Canadian citizen born in Montreal. Educated there and in France. Married a French woman from whom he is now divorced. A daughter, Valerie, aged twenty-three, lives with him and is an assistant librarian employed at the University of Geneva. Carter has spent most of his adult life as a working journalist, mainly in French-speaking countries. He is a French-English bilingual and proficient in German and Italian. His best period – by “best” I mean the period when he behaved more or less as an educated man of his age should, and when he drank least – was the six years prior to the break-up of his marriage. He worked in the Paris office of a British news agency for four of them, and then in the news department there of an American radio and television network.’
‘Is he an alcoholic?’
‘He has what our American friends call a drinking problem. Not an alcoholic, but certainly a heavy drinker. The report describes him as being flawed, a man of undoubted ability who takes pleasure in misusing it.’
‘And so, while wallowing in self-pity, drinks. I see. Is he himself an extreme anti-communist?’
‘The judgment is that he is capable of being extremely anti-anything, as long as the pay is good. It proved impossible to discover whether or not he had private political convictions different from those of his employer. Since Novak appears to have trusted him completely, he is undoubtedly capable of putting on a convincing act when it suits him to do so.’
‘Has anyone ever attempted to recruit this man?’
‘I suppose the CIA looked him over when he worked for the American radio people in Paris. They would do so normally. Probably the drinking put them off. There was nothing in the report.’ Brand paused. ‘Is your part of the operation ready?’
‘It can soon be made ready, but I will have to move quickly.’ Jost stared ahead. They were approaching the pier at Ouchy-Lausanne now, and in a few minutes he would have to leave. ‘I think I may stay in this area for a further twenty-four hours,’ he said.
‘And visit Geneva?’
‘I would like to see things for myself.’ Jost hesitated. ‘This is going to be a little dangerous for Carter,’ he said.
Brand pursed his lips. ‘Well, yes. A little dangerous perhaps. But that was always an implicit side-effect.’
‘Implicit, yes, but we have never discussed the problem.’
‘What is there to discuss?’ Having said all that he had come there to say, Brand was tiring now. ‘Once your démarche begins there will be dangerous moments for Carter. We must accept that. We cannot protect him.’
‘No, of course not. It would be ill-advised to try. We might perhaps, though, warn him.’
‘Impossible. A man like that? He would just leave. The whole operation would be aborted.’ Brand drew breath. ‘No, it is all a calculated risk. He must take his chance. It may be unpleasant for him, but it will not be so for long. They will soon realise that he knows nothing, that he is an innocent.’
Jost looked at the grey face and decided to say no more. In any case there was no time left; the steamer was edging in towards the pier. He stood up.
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘all my congratulations on your work for us. I hope that my own part will be as effective.’
‘Of course it will. You will send me a progress report?’
‘In the usual way. Take care of yourself. I hope your family are all well.’
‘Yes, yes, all well.’
They touched hands briefly, surreptitiously, and then Jost walked aft, down to the gangway where he would disembark.
* An aeronym for Coordination of Security Measures in International Command.