The Intercom Conspiracy (10 page)

If he had left it there it wouldn’t have been too bad, though I itched to do a rewrite job on it; but he then went on to list the contractors involved in the manufacture of the plane. I don’t mean just the air-frame and engine people, but
all
the contractors
and
subcontractors – undercarriage, hydraulics, automatic control equipment, fuel system, parachute braking release, ejection modules, the lot – with full names, head-office addresses and the locations of their plants. That bulletin took up a whole page single-spaced.

I assumed, naturally, that it was a smear job hashed up to discredit one or another of his clients’ competitors. It went out in the
Intercom
issue dated November 15. That was the day the second
SESAME
bulletin arrived – too late for inclusion that week, so held over, as per instructions, until the following week.

The second bulletin was barely comprehensible, at least to me. It was a chatty little item about Soviet rocket fuels and at least half of it was taken up with chemical symbols set out in complicated diagrammatic arrangements. Ask Nicole about it. She had a terrible time cutting the stencils on that one and had to put in a lot of the lines by hand.

The general idea of it seemed to be that Soviet Army tactical nuclear missile units were reported to be in trouble because of the deterioration of certain missile fuels in storage. Red Army scientists were having a hard time solving the problem. The types of missile affected were given and the quantities thought to be involved. The chemical nature of the problem was described. With diagrams the bulletin took up a page and a half.

Aside from its length, total unreadability and the fact that I couldn’t figure out the public-relations angle intended, what bothered me about that one was the policy question it raised. In the General’s day the only kind of Soviet difficulties we had
played up had been the political ones – China, revisionism, trouble with satellites, Ukrainian nationalism, stuff like that. The idea that Soviet missiles might not always be 100 per cent efficient would not have appealed to the General. If bugs had been found in
our
missiles, that would have been fine with him; that would have meant that there was treachery afoot and a conspiracy to expose; but word of bugs in Soviet missiles would merely have served to encourage a slackening in the anti-communist Free World effort and to play into the hands of liberals, coexisters and pseudo-intellectuals. In the General’s day I would have killed the story automatically without reference to him. Now, despite Herr Bloch’s assurances, the character of
Intercom
was being made to change. There were a good many subscribers who still thought the way the General had. If they could understand what that bulletin was about I didn’t think they would like it. I would get stern letters warning of the dangers of underrating a ruthless opponent and even hinting that we have been taken in by a cunning Soviet propaganda trick. That sort of thing was always bad for subscription renewals.

The third
SESAME
bulletin seemed relatively harmless. It was headed ‘Operation Triangle’, though it didn’t say what that was. It began by reporting a recent order, placed with an Italian firm by an American defence procurement agency in Brussels, for prefabricated concrete structures ‘of a new and interesting type’. The question now, it went on, was to decide who would supply the ‘sensitive equipment’ which had been designed to go inside these structures. There were many possibilities – here followed another ghastly list of names, addresses and plant locations – of which two (names again and presumably these were Bloch associates) were favoured by the scientific advisers on Operation Triangle.

We published that in the issue dated November 29.

Four days later another of the technical block-busters arrived. The envelope it came in was postmarked Copenhagen.

This bulletin was a detailed description of a new portable seismograph ‘constructed on the variable reluctance principle’. It had been designed by a professor of physics in a Soviet university
(name and address supplied) for the detection of low-yield underground atomic explosions at ranges up to five thousand kilometres. It was on the Soviet General Staff secret list.

The technical description itself was gibberish to me. The only thing that I could understand in that bulletin, apart from the preamble, was a footnote. This said that the technical information had been supplied by N. V. Skriabin, a member of the Soviet trade mission in Oslo.

That footnote really made me jump. Up to that point I had been prepared to take Herr Bloch more or less at his face value. Two of the bulletins so far published had been easily construable as attempts to influence government defence contract awards, in one way or another, for the benefit of his associates. The rocket-fuel story was more difficult to place, but I was prepared to attribute the difficulty to my ignorance of the subject matter and background. Talking about technical problems with Soviet rocket fuels
could
have been a subtle way of drawing attention to the existence of similar problems with our own. It was conceivable that one of Bloch’s associates or clients had specialised know-how to sell and that this was the round-about way Bloch had chosen to interest the concerned parties in his man.

With Bulletin Four, however, no such possibility existed. All that Bloch was trying to do in that one, it seemed to me, was a hatchet job on Comrade Skriabin.

I thought about it a bit and then decided to wire for confirmation. This was the telegram I sent to Munich:

For forty-eight hours I heard nothing. Then a telegram arrived from Brussels.

So I did as I was told.

But from that moment on I disliked Herr Bloch. My sympathies were with N. V. Skriabin. It seemed to me that he had been put on the wrong end of a very dirty deal.

It wasn’t long before I began to suspect that I might be in the same position.

Tuesdays, when we went to press, were noisy, with the Addressograph and mimeo machines going and the part-time help who came in to do the collating, folding and enclosing all chattering away at the tops of their voices; but Monday was my really busy day. That was when I put
Intercom
to bed. On Mondays I rarely left the office much before ten.

In the mornings I used to park my car in a side street near the church of St Gervais and then walk across the river to the office. There was no easy parking nearer. By ten at night, though, the bridge I used to walk back over the river wasn’t carrying much traffic and the streets beyond it were quiet, almost deserted.

I don’t know when the surveillance began or which lot started it, but it was on a Monday night – Monday, December 12, just six days after the publication of
SESAME
Bulletin Four – that I first realised that I was being followed.

VALERIE CARTER

transcribed tape interview

I remember that night well.

My father came home, poured himself a whisky as usual and then forgot to drink it.

On those nights when he stayed late at the office I used to have hot soup ready for him, a sort of
pot au feu
with plenty of the vegetables he liked in it. When I brought the soup out of the kitchen that night I saw that his drink was still on the side table. He was at the window staring down at the street.

‘I feel like Comrade Skriabin,’ he said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I just told him to eat the soup while it was hot.

He came over to the table and sat down. Then he looked up and gave me one of his small apologetic smiles. ‘Unless I’m completely off my head,’ he said, ‘I think that I was followed when I left the office tonight. Two men in a Fiat One-Two-Five. I think they’re still outside. See if you can spot them, will you, Val?’

Now I know my father is sometimes silly, mostly when he’s been drinking; but he’s anything but stupid and certainly not fanciful. I’m not saying that he isn’t neurotic, Mr Latimer. For instance, this thing he has about calling you Mr L. That’s defensive. He thinks that if he calls you by your whole name that will somehow give you an advantage over him. He’s done that with other people he’s envied. Oh yes, I’m sure he envies you. He admires your books for one thing. You see, I love my father, but I don’t think I have many illusions about him. He’s a kind, clever, unhappy man who can be funny and delightful one moment and unbelievably awful the next. But even when he’s awful he’s still sane. He may have a vivid imagination, but he doesn’t see things that don’t exist.

So I went to the window and looked into the street.

Our apartment is on the third floor, as you know, but you can’t see all the street below unless you open a window and lean out. It was a cold night and I didn’t want to do that, so I just pressed my nose against the glass.

I could see enough. There
was
a Fiat parked a little way along across the street. That wasn’t remarkable, of course; there were other cars parked there, too, most of them belonging to people in the apartments opposite. I could just see a bit of the roof of my father’s Renault, which was parked directly below near our portecochère. As I looked down, I saw a man walk by the Renault and cross the street going towards the Fiat. He was wearing a felt hat and a dark overcoat. I couldn’t see his face, naturally, but I noticed that although he appeared to walk slowly he took very long strides. When he reached the Fiat he opened the door on the passenger side and got in. With the opening of the door the interior light went on for a moment and I caught a glimpse of the gloved hands of a man in the driver’s seat. Then the engine started and the headlights were switched on.

‘They’re going,’ I said and told him what I had seen.

My father went on with his supper. ‘Can you get the number?’ he asked.

The Fiat was moving away now. ‘No, but I think it’s a Fribourg plate.’

‘That’s the one,’ he said.

I went over and sat down facing him.

‘How do you know they were following you?’ I asked.

‘Pure chance.’ He shrugged. ‘I happened to notice that car when I left the office because it was illegally parked outside the bank on the corner. I thought of the long walk I had to reach my car, and in an uncharitable moment hoped that a policeman would come along and give the fellow a ticket. There was no policeman around, of course, but I kept oil hoping. As I walked away I could still see him, you see, reflected in the shop windows. Then, just as I turned the corner, I saw his passenger get out and start walking the way I was going.’

He broke a piece of bread and ate some more of the soup.

‘I didn’t think any more about it until I was walking across the bridge. Then that same car with the Fribourg plates passed me going north, the way I was going. Travelling quite fast he was. But not for long. As I turned off up the hill to St Gervais I saw that he’d parked again. He didn’t get out, just sat there. That made me think of the passenger he’d dropped and wonder which way
he’d
gone. You see I was getting curious about this fellow by then. When I reached my car I didn’t start up immediately. Instead, I looked in the rear-view mirror. What I saw was interesting. I’d just walked along that stretch of road and none of the cars left there had had lights on. Now there
was
one with lights on. I couldn’t be sure that it was the Fiat, of course – it was just two lights. But then a man came from the sidewalk and got in beside the driver. That I saw clearly.’

‘Because the interior light went on when the door opened?’

‘That’s right. How did you guess?’

‘Because the same thing happened before they drove off just now.’

‘They were behind me all the way home,’ he said. ‘I thought at one moment of making a detour to see if they really were following me or if I was only imagining it, but I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I knew that I
wasn’t
imagining it.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Besides, if I’d started making detours they’d have known I’d spotted them. You know, if it hadn’t been for that illegal parking outside the bank I
wouldn’t
have spotted them, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing.’