The Intercom Conspiracy (14 page)

‘Thank you.’ Dr Bruchner had quite recovered now. ‘Would you like me to send you a letter confirming Herr Bloch’s counter-offer?’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’ The banker paused as if about to end the conversation, but then went on. ‘Your client is a bold man, Dr Bruchner.’

‘He seems to know his own mind, yes.’

‘And with that knowledge goes prudence, I trust.’

Since he was privately of the opinion that his client was demented, Dr Bruchner did not quite know how to reply to that. ‘I would very much hope so,’ he said awkwardly.

Dr. Schwob was suddenly jovial. ‘I would very much hope so too,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Dr Bruchner.’

‘Goodbye, Dr Schwob.’

Dr Bruchner put down the telephone, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and called for his secretary. To Herr Bloch in Brussels he sent the following telegram:

He thought next of Theodore Carter’s anguished call earlier in the week and considered telephoning him to pass on Bloch’s
poste restante
address in Brussels. Then he decided not to telephone. Two days had gone by without further word from Carter, so presumably his need to contact Bloch was no longer urgent. He knew that this was wishful thinking on his part; but with so much else on his mind concerning
Intercom
he did not want to hear about Carter’s troubles just then. Carter could wait.

He called for the current
Intercom
back-number file.

Normally Dr Bruchner did not trouble to read
Intercom
. His secretary disposed of the weekly issues as they arrived by inserting them in a loose-leaf box file. There was a file for each year and they were kept on a shelf in her office. In earlier days Dr Bruchner had sometimes referred to them – usually in order to brief himself in preparation for a meeting with the General – but he had had no occasion to do so recently. As he had told Goodman, what went into
Intercom
was nothing to do with him. He managed the company’s business affairs; the rest was in Theodore Carter’s hands.

Now, however, things were different. Dr Schwob’s calm reception of Bloch’s preposterous counter-offer had made the lawyer curious. By now, too, he was wondering how his own position would be affected if the company’s shares were to change
hands for a large sum of money. He had talked glibly about indirect values and subsidiary assets, but why had nobody seen before that they existed? While the General had been alive there had never been even so much as an inquiry about
Intercom
shares, much less an offer to buy them. Yet within three months of his death there had been two offers, first from Bloch – and he had paid more for the shares than they had then seemed to be worth – and now from Bank Schwob’s client. What had happened to
Intercom
? Why had it suddenly become so desirable a property?

He began to read.

Dr Bruchner is not only a trained lawyer. As an able-bodied adult Swiss male below the age of sixty, he is also a trained soldier. He is an army reserve major and his annual training that year had included attendance at a course on staff duties.

He had no difficulty in singling out the
SESAME
bulletins as likely Bloch contributions. It was obvious that they had not been written by Carter. However, the satisfaction he derived from the discovery that he could detect stylistic differences in English was short-lived. Although he was not sufficiently well informed to be able to identify the bulletins as NATO and Warsaw Pact classified intelligence leaks, he knew enough to find them collectively rather disturbing. Reviewing them in the context of his recent conversation with Dr Schwob, he began to get worried. He had a suspicion that there was something going on with
Intercom
that he would rather not know about.

Better then, he wondered, not to inquire further? Better to leave it alone? He himself was, after all, acting in complete good faith, as no doubt was Dr Schwob. They were merely trusted intermediaries between the prospective buyer and the prospective seller of a piece of corporate property. The motives of those principals were really not their concern, legally or morally.

However, Dr Bruchner did like to leave his office for the day with a clear professional conscience, and that evening he chose to clear it by reversing a decision he had made earlier. He put
in a call to Theodore Carter with the idea of giving him Bloch’s
poste restante
address in Brussels.

There was no reply from the
Intercom
office – it was after six o’clock – so he put in a call to Carter’s home number. There was no reply from that either. So Dr Bruchner sent Carter a telegram giving him the address. In the circumstances, he felt, he had done his best to be helpful.

FROM THEODORE CARTER

transcribed dictation tape

The reason that Dr Bruchner was unable to reach me by phone that Friday night was that I was in the process of being kidnapped at the time.

With that in mind, Mr L, I know you won’t be too disappointed when I tell you that your thrilling account of the Herr Doktor’s heroic bargaining sessions with big, bad Bank Schwob doesn’t exactly move me to tears. The same goes for the subsequent handwringing and soul-searching episodes. If the purblind idiot had had the elementary good sense – to say nothing of the decency – to tell me at the time about that crazy bidding for the shares, I would have told him what was happening at my end. Between us we might have made sense of all those goings-on and maybe stopped the horseplay before anyone got hurt. But no.

‘Carter was in an excited state and at times barely coherent.’

Wrong on two counts, Mr L. I merely used some idiomatic English that he didn’t understand. I was not in the least excited; what happened was that his stupidity finally made me hopping mad. When I phoned him that Wednesday morning, you see, I had just received another memorandum from Mr bloody Bloch and another
SESAME
bulletin, and I was worried sick. If you’d been in the spot I was in you’d have been worried, too, believe me.

I have been called a lot of things in my time, but nobody has yet suggested that I am a simpleton. I will admit that in the beginning I did kid myself a little about those bulletins; I did so by trying to explain them away in terms of Bloch’s own declared intentions, but that phase didn’t last long. I mean if you could go on believing that the
SESAME
bulletins were nothing more than harmless little efforts to drum up trade with the button-pushers in the Pentagon and elsewhere, you’d have to be feebleminded.
After the CIA-scripted ham act put on by Goodman and Rich, I couldn’t even pretend to believe.

So what was I to believe instead?

It’s all very well for you, Mr L. You know the score. I didn’t then. And it’s all very well for Val to be so wise.
By the way, she would
never
have talked about me in that cold-blooded, pseudoanalytical way before she started going around with that psychiatrist. Never. She’s not the same any more
.

Where was I? Oh yes. What was I to think?

Well, this’ll make you laugh, Mr L, it really will.

I had begun to have a nasty suspicion that the business that Herr Bloch and his mysterious clients were engaged in was not peddling arms but peddling secrets. Isn’t that a laugh? I suspected that what they were doing with
Intercom
was to use it as a shop window. Why not? Calculated indiscretion. ‘You want the juiciest secrets, we have them. Here’s a sample of our wares to show you that the quality’s right. Send for our free booklet today or call Arnold Bloch Associates direct.’ There are lots of smart cookies operating on the fringes of the intelligence racket. The introduction of modern sales methods in the world’s second oldest profession may be overdue.

How was I to know that what they were really peddling was silence?

All right, let’s not get rhetorical. Let’s forget about what I thought or didn’t think. This is what I did.

That night, after Goodman and Rich had left and Val had told me what she had found out about Comrade Skriabin, I decided that the first order of business next day would be to get hold of Arnold Bloch and ask him what the hell he was playing at. I decided, too, that until I had seen him, and until he had satisfied me both that my suspicions were unfounded and that there was a good reason for publishing this weird stuff he was sending me, I was going to hold back on it.

Then, when I got to the office the following morning, there was this second memorandum from Bloch.

CONFIDENTIAL

Publication of the
SESAME
bulletins in recent weeks has, I am glad to tell you, had a most satisfactory effect on the markets in which my associates are primarily interested. For your private information I can state that the bulletins have been instrumental in securing important business for our French friends and in opening up avenues of approach which we had previously been obliged to consider closed. The prospects for the future appear to be excellent. Needless to say, your cooperation and strict attention to the letter of your instructions have contributed substantially to this desirable state of affairs. You may be sure that this contribution will not go unrewarded
.

As was to be expected, however, our associates’ competitors have sought to counter the thrust of this novel promotion policy by attempting to discredit it. We have been reliably informed that efforts have recently been made to persuade certain western government agencies, including, it is said, the BND
(Bundesnachrichtendienst),
to bring pressure to bear upon us to discontinue publication of technical information, on the extraordinary grounds that by openly breaching Warsaw Pact security controls we are inviting reprisals by the Soviet authorities
.

It will be immediately apparent to you that submission to such pressures would be quite inconsistent with the traditional anti-communist, anti-Soviet-bloc policies of
Intercom.
Should any approaches of this kind be made to you in your capacity as editor you should reject them immediately in those terms. You should point out also that you yourself have, in any case, no discretion in the matter. You implement a policy laid down by the owners of Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G. If pressed you should at once refer the person or persons making
the approach to me. I need not remind you that any interference with a Swiss business enterprise by any foreign government agency of the kind mentioned above would not be tolerated by the Swiss security services. It may be necessary, however, to remind others of this fact should the occasion arise
.

I would appreciate prompt reports to me by telegram of any such approaches, so that steps may be taken to prevent their repetition. The agency concerned should be identified simply by its nationality
(
e.g., German, American, British, etc.
)
and the nature of the argument used discreetly stated. The circumstances of the approach and the manner in which it was made should also be briefly described
.

The importance of maintaining our independent position and our absolute right to publish technical and scientific information of interest to our readers ‘without fear or favour’ cannot be too strongly emphasised. We must show no weakness, display no disposition to compromise and refuse to be intimidated. Firmly held, our position is unassailable, and both our competitors and those dubious allies whose aid they have solicited will soon learn to recognise the fact
.

I enclose
SESAME
Bulletin Number Six for inclusion in next week’s issue. Bulletin Number Seven, which will discuss in detail current NATO purchasing policies, should reach you in a few days. It may be expected to arouse considerable international interest and controversy
.

Bloch

By the time I had finished reading that I was really confused. That memorandum threw me for a loop. I reacted more or less as Dr Bruchner reacted when he received the telegram from Bloch quoting his asking price for the
Intercom
shares. I began to wonder if Arnold Bloch and his associates were quite sane.

I looked at Bulletin Number Six.

It was headed ‘Electrets Employed Successfully in New Torpedo Guidance System’.

All I was able to get from the bulletin itself was that the Royal
Naval Scientific Service (
sic
) of the British Ministry of Defence had come up with a torpedo, for use by antisubmarine submarines. with a novel guidance system employing ceramic electrets in the timing and memory-storing elements. The rest was a page of technical gibberish.