Who dies if England live?”?’
She wet her lips. A favourite quote from Kipling was not going to divert her from what she had to say. ‘You talk of a year or two. My children are very young. I love them: I need them and they need me. You are asking too much. How long will I be away? What will happen to the children? What will happen to Bernard? And my marriage? Use someone without a family. It’s madness for me to go.’
She had kept her voice low but the expression on his face, as he feigned interest and sympathy, made her want to scream at him. Who stands if Freedom fall? Yes, Bret’s words had scored a point with her and she was shaken by being suddenly brought face to face with the resolute young woman she’d been not so long ago. Was it marriage and motherhood that had made her so damnably bovine?
‘It is madness. And that is exactly what will make you so secure. Bernard will be distraught and the Soviets will give you their trust.’
‘I simply can’t cope, Bret. I need a rest.’
‘Or you could look at it another way,’ said Bret amiably. ‘A couple of years over there might be just the sort of challenge you need.’
‘The last thing I need right now is another challenge,’ she said feelingly.
‘Sometimes relationships come to an end and there is nothing to be done but formally recognize what has happened.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s the way it was with me and Nikki,’ he said, his voice low and sincere. ‘She said she needed to find herself again. Looking back on it, our marriage had diminished to a point where it was nothing but a sham.’
‘My marriage isn’t a sham.’
‘Maybe not; but sometimes you have to look closely in order to see. That’s the way it was for me.’
‘I love Bernard and he loves me. And we have two adorable children. We are a happy family.’
‘Maybe you think it’s none of my business,’ said Bret, ‘but this sudden instability – this ring down the curtain and send the orchestra home, I can’t go on, nonsense – hasn’t resulted from your work but from your personal life. So you need to take a look at your personal affairs to find the answer.’
Bret’s words acted upon her like an emetic. She closed her eyes in case the sight of the plate of food caused her to vomit. When finally she opened her eyes she looked at Bret, seeking in his face an indication of what he was thinking. Failing to find anything there but his contrived warmth, she said, ‘My personal affairs are personal, Bret.’
‘Not when I find you in an emotional state and you tell me to abandon the most important operation the Department has ever contemplated.’
‘Can you never see anything except from your own viewpoint?’
Bret touched his shirt cuff, fingering the cuff-link as if to be sure it was still there. But Fiona recognized in the gesture, and in the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head, something more. It was that preparation for something special seen in the nervous circular movement of the pen before a vital document is signed, or the quick limbering up movements of an athlete before the start of a record-breaking contest. ‘You are not in a position to accuse anyone of selfishness, Fiona.’
She bit her lip. It was a direct challenge: to let it go without responding would be to admit guilt. And yet to react might bring down upon her the grim avalanche that loomed over her in nightmares. ‘Am I selfish?’ she asked as timorously as possible, and hoped he’d laugh it off.
‘Fiona, you’ve got to keep to the arrangements. There’s a hell of a lot riding on this operation. You’ll do something for your country the equal of which few men or women ever get a chance at. In just a year or two over there, you could provide London Central with something that in historical terms might be compared with a military victory, a mighty victory.’
A mighty victory?’ she said mechanically.
‘I told you before; the economic projections suggest that we could make them knock the Wall down, Fiona. A revolution without bloodshed. That would go into the history books. Literally, into the history books. Our personal affairs count for nothing against that.’
He knew everything she wanted to hide; she could see it in his eyes. ‘Are you blackmailing me, Bret?’
‘You are not yourself tonight, Fiona.’ He feigned concern but without putting his heart into it.
‘Are you?’
‘I can’t think what you mean. What is there to blackmail you about?’
‘I don’t respond to threats; I never have.’
‘Are you going to tell me what I’m supposed to be threatening you about? Or do I have to start guessing?’ Fiona could see he was loving it; what a sadist he was. She hated him and yet for the first time ever she saw within him some resolute determination that in other circumstances might make a woman love him. He would fight like this on her behalf too; there was no doubt about that. It was his nature.
‘Answer one question, Bret: are you having me followed?’
He put down his fork, leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands with interlocked fingers, and stared at her. ‘We are all subject to surveillance, Fiona. It’s a part of the job.’
He smiled. She took her glass of champagne and tossed it full into his face.
‘Jesus Christ!’ He leapt to his feet spluttering and fluttering and dancing about to dab his face and shirt-front with the napkin. ‘Have you gone ape?’
She looked at him with horror. He went across the room to get more napkins from a side table. He dabbed his suit and the chair and as his anger subsided he sat down again.
She hadn’t moved. She hated to lose control of herself, and rather than look at him she picked up her fork and used it to follow a blob of souffle across her plate. ‘But Bernard doesn’t know?’ she said without looking up. She didn’t eat the piece of souffle: the idea of eating was repugnant now.
He ran a finger round inside his collar. The champagne had made it stick to the skin. ‘Such housekeeping is done outside the Department. It would be bad security to use our own people.’
‘Promise me that Bernard won’t know.’
‘I could promise that he won’t be told by me. But Bernard is a shrewd and resourceful man…I don’t have to tell you that.’ He looked at his watch. He wanted to go and change.
‘It’s all finished anyway.’
‘I’m glad.’ He looked at her and – despite the wet stains on his shirt and his disarranged hair – he gave her his most charming smile.
‘You know what I’m talking about?’ she asked.
‘Of course not,’ he said, and kept smiling.
‘It’s clearly understood that I’m over there for only a year and then I must be pulled out?’
‘A year. Yes, that was always the plan,’ said Bret. ‘Have you got a purse? I’ll give you the details of the intercept. Phone the contact number for Pryce-Hughes first thing tomorrow. It’s his morning for being at the office number he gave you.’ Even being doused with champagne had not unnerved him.
‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard,’ she told him.
‘It never was a job suited to hot-blooded people,’ said Bret.
9
London. April 1983.
For Bret Rensselaer that long long ago dinner in Berlin was a hiccup in the lengthy preparation that Fiona Samson had undergone for her task. Looking back, it was just a chance for him to provide some of the comfort and reassurance that become necessary to agents when traumatic indecision attacks them. It had been, he told the D-G, in one of the reviews Bret liked to provide, an inevitable stage in the briefing and preparation period of any long-term agent placement. ‘It was a role change for her. Some would call it the “schizothymic period”, for we had to inflict upon a normal personality the task of becoming two separate ones.’
The D-G was about to challenge both the terminology and the scientific basis of what sounded like a distorted over-simplification, but just in time he remembered a previous discussion in which Bret – who had been psychoanalysed – buried him under a barrage of
psychological doctrine which had included extensive notes, statistics and references to ‘the fundamentally important work of James and Lange’. So the D-G nodded.
Bret reminded him that in this case the agent was a woman, a highly intelligent woman with young children. Thus the attack had been more acute than usual. On the other hand, these factors which made her vulnerable to doubts and worries were the same elements which would make her less suspect when she went to bat for them. Fiona Samson was a stable personality, and Bret’s subtle conditioning had reinforced her behaviour, so that by the time she was ‘put into play’ Bret was confident that the ‘transference’ would be complete. Since that awful champagne throwing scene an emotional dependence upon Bret, and thus upon the decisions made in London Central, had provided her with the necessary motivation and internal strength of mind.
‘You know far more about these things than I do,’ declared the D-G with a genial conviction that did not reflect his true feeling. ‘But my understanding was that in a scientific context “transference” sometimes means the unconscious shifting of hatred, rather than love and respect.’
‘Entirely true!’ said Bret. Jolted, not for the first time, by the old man’s sharpness, he recovered quickly enough to add, ‘And that’s an aspect of the work that I have already taken into account.’
‘Well, I’m sure you have everything under control,’ said the D-G, looking at his watch.
‘I do, Director. Depend upon it.’
Bret Rensselaer was not basing these conclusions upon his personal experiences with field agents; he’d had little personal contact with those strange animals in the course of his career (although of course the day-to-day decisions he’d made had had an effect upon the whole service). The Director-General was well aware of Bret’s purely administrative background. He’d chosen him largely because he had no taint of Operations on him – and no one had guessed that a dedicated desk man like Bret could function as a case officer – and thus Fiona’s role of double agent would be more secure.
But Bret Rensselaer, and Fiona Samson, were not the only ones coping with the problems of the role change. For if Fiona had never been an agent before, and Bret had never been a case officer, it was also true that the D-G had never before faced the harrowing experience of sending into enemy territory someone he knew as well as he knew Fiona Samson. However it was too late now to change his mind. The D-G allowed himself to be comforted by Bret’s optimistic reassurances because he could think of no possible course of action if he became anxious.
If that long ago dinner at Kessler’s was remembered by Bret as no more than a temporary failure of Fiona’s resolution, it was burned into her memory as a program is burned into a micro-chip. She remembered that horrifying evening in every last humiliating detail. The condescension with which Bret Rensselaer had treated her desire to pull out of the operation, the insolent way he had so smoothly blackmailed her into continuing. The contempt he’d shown for her when she’d thrown the champagne: humouring her as one might the infant daughter of a respected friend. And, most shaming of all, the way in which she had done exactly what he told her to do. For, like so many humiliations, hers was measured by the success of the opposing party: and Bret’s dominance by the end of that dinner had been absolute.
From that dire confrontation onwards, she had never again expressed any desire to withdraw from the task ahead. After those first few agonizing weeks during which she desperately hoped that Bret Rensselaer would leave the Department, be transferred or suffer a fatal accident, no idea of being released from her contract entered her head. It was inevitable.
Like most women – and here Fiona evidenced women customs and immigration officers, women police officers and secretaries in her own office – she was more conscientious and painstaking than her male peers. Her detached contempt for Bret, and other men like him, was best demonstrated by doing her job with more care and skill than he did his. She would become this damned ‘superspy’ they wanted her to be. She would show them how well it could be done.
Fiona’s meetings with Martin Euan Pryce-Hughes continued as before, except that Bret made sure that the little titbits she was able to throw to him, and the responses to his requests for specific information, were better than the Spielmaterial he’d been given before. Pryce-Hughes was pleased. Reacting to a broad hint from him Fiona asked for more money: not much more but enough to assert her worth. Moscow responded promptly and generously and this pleased Bret, and pleased Pryce-Hughes too. And yet, as month after month became a year, and time went on and on, she began to hope that the Department’s long-term plan to place her in the enemy camp would be abandoned. Bret continued with their regular briefing sessions, and her duties were arranged to that purpose. Her use of the computers was strictly defined and she never handled very sensitive papers. But the D-G appeared to have forgotten about her, and forgotten about Bret Rensselaer too. Once or twice she came near to asking the D-G outright, but decided to let things continue. Bernard said the D-G was becoming eccentric to the point of disability but Bernard always inclined to overstatement.
Typically it was her younger sister, Tessa, who made the whole thing erupt again. ‘Darling, Fi! You are always there when I need you.’
‘You have such good champagne,’ said Fiona, in an effort to reduce the tension that was evident in her sister’s face, and in the way she constantly twisted the rings on her fingers.
‘It’s my diet: caviar, champagne and oysters. You can’t get fat on it.’
‘No. Only poor,’ said Fiona.
‘That’s more or less what Daddy said. He disapproves.’ As if in contravention Tessa picked up her glass, looked at the bubbles and then drank some champagne.
Tessa had always shown a constitutional spirit that bent towards trouble. The relationship between Fiona and her younger sister provided a typical example of sibling rivalry – it was a psychological phenomenon to which Bret referred many times during their sessions together. Their father, a single-minded man, had his favourite motto (‘What I want are results not excuses’) embroidered on a cushion displayed on the visitor’s chair in his office. He believed that any form of forgiveness was likely to undermine his daughters’ strength and his own.
Tessa had discovered how undemanding and convenient it was to play the established role of younger child, and let Fiona fulfil, or sometimes fail to fulfil, her father’s expectations. Tessa was always the one of whom little was expected. Fiona went to Oxford and read Modern Greats; Tessa stayed at home and read Harold Robbins. Temperamental, imaginative and affectionate, Tessa could turn anything into a joke: it was her way of avoiding matters that were demanding. Her own boundless generosity made her vulnerable to a world in which people were so cold, loveless and judgemental. In such a world did it matter too much if she indulged in so many frivolous little love affairs? She always went back to her husband and gave him her prodigious love. And what if, one casual night in bed with this silly drunken lover, he should confide to her that he was spying for the Russians? It was probably only a joke.
‘Describe him again,’ said Fiona.
‘You know him,’ said Tessa. ‘At least he knows all about you.’
‘Miles Brent?’
‘Giles Trent, darling. Giles Trent.’
‘If you’d stop eating those damned nuts I might be able to understand what you are saying,’ she said irritably. ‘Yes, Giles Trent. Of course I remember him.’
‘Handsome brute: tall, handsome, grey wavy hair.’
‘But he’s as old as Methuselah, Tessa. I always thought he was queer.’
‘Oh, no. Not queer,’ said Tessa and giggled. She’d had a lot of champagne.
Fiona sighed. She was sitting in Tessa Kosinski’s elaborately furnished apartment in Hampstead, London’s leafy northwestern suburb, watching the blood-red sun drip gore into the ruddy clouds. When, long ago, London’s wealthy merchants and minor aristocracy went to take the waters at regal and fashionable Bath, the less wealthy sipped their s
pa water in this hilly region that was now the habitat of successful advertising men and rich publishers.
Tessa’s husband was in property and motor cars and a diversity of other precarious enterprises. But George Kosinski had an unfailing talent for commercial success. When George bought an ailing company it immediately recovered its strength. Should he wager a little money on unwanted stock his investment flourished. Even when he obliged a local antique dealer by taking off his hands a painting that no one else wanted, the picture – dull, dark and allegorical – was spotted by one of George’s guests as the work of a pupil of Ingres. Although many nonentities can be so described, Ingres’ pupils included the men who taught Seurat and Degas. This, the coarse canvas and the use of white paint so typical of the Ingres technique, was what persuaded the trustees of an American museum to offer George a remarkable price for it. He shipped it the next day. George loved to do business.
‘And you told Daddy all this: Trent saying he was a Russian spy and so on?’
‘Daddy said I was just to forget it.’ Idly Tessa picked up a glossy magazine from the table in front of her. It fell open at a pageful of wide-eyed people cavorting at some social function of the sort that the Kosinskis frequently attended.
‘Daddy can be very stupid at times,’ said Fiona with unmistakable contempt. Tessa looked at her with great respect. Fiona really meant it: while Tessa – who also called her father stupid, and worse, from time to time – had never completely shed the bonds of childhood.
‘Perhaps Giles was just making a joke,’ said Tessa, who now felt guilty at the concern her elder sister was showing.
‘You said it wasn’t a joke,’ snapped Fiona.
‘Yes,’ said Tessa.
‘Yes or no?’
Tessa looked at her, surprised by the emotions she had stirred up. ‘It wasn’t a joke. I told you: I went all through it with him…about the Russian and so on.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fiona. ‘How could it have been a joke?’
‘What will happen to him?’ Tessa tossed the magazine on to a pile of other such periodicals.