XPD (28 page)

‘Thank you, Willi,’ said Fritz Rau. He was one of the oldest men in the room and thus enjoyed the privilege of addressing his younger colleagues in that informal manner.

Böttger gave a sigh of relief and hastily pressed on to the only other matter. ‘Money is suddenly required in London and we will need some sort of corporate structure to which to send the funds. Obviously we must not attract the attention of English government departments and I wonder if one of us can provide a way to hold half a million Deutschemarks just while we are forming a company there.’

‘No problem,’ said the expert on maritime insurance. ‘But you’ll have to let me have the details about who will have access to the money. Specimen signatures and so on.’

‘Willi will provide those details. I’ll let you have the money in whatever way you want it.’ He looked at the clock over the door. ‘That will do for this week, gentlemen,’ said Böttger. ‘You will all get a telex in the usual code to tell you where the next meeting will be. Kindly let me have proxies for anyone who cannot attend.’

When the meeting had broken up it was Willi Kleiber who remained for a final word with Dr Böttger. ‘I wondered what old Fritz was going to say for a moment,’ said Kleiber. ‘It is the violence that troubles me,’ Kleiber imitated Fritz Rau’s Saxon accent and the quaver which could sometimes be heard in his voice. It was a cruel parody.

‘He’s getting too old,’ said Böttger. ‘It will happen to all of us eventually, I suppose.’

‘Anyway, it all turned out all right.’

‘For the time being it did,’ said Böttger. ‘But you know as well as I do that it will not be one or two deaths.’

‘It will be messy,’ said Willi Kleiber. ‘It is hard to say how many will eventually have to be removed. I agree with you about that. I thought the explosion in England, when we had to deal with my old comrade Franz Wever, was going to become a big newspaper story.’

‘They were mad to do it like that,’ said Böttger. ‘Have our people there no sense?’

‘The British Secret Intelligence Service already knew Wever,’ explained Willi Kleiber. ‘They were pressing him. We had to do something very quickly indeed.’

‘The British Secret Service. To let them get hold of the Hitler Minutes would be the very worst thing that could happen to us,’ said Böttger. ‘If the newspapers got them, we might be able to buy them off or even frighten them off. Failing that, we can put up a smoke screen. But if they get into the hands of the British Secret Service, anything could happen.’

Willi Kleiber scratched his chin. ‘You mean the British are dangerous to us? Yes, I hadn’t thought of it in that light, Dr Böttger, but I have to agree with you whole-heartedly.’ Böttger looked at him and nodded. He knew that Willi Kleiber had never looked at it any other way.

Chapter 24

Sir Sydney Ryden had a lunch appointment but he was able to fit Boyd Stuart into a gap between the secretary of the estimates sub-committee on pay and a pre-lunch drink with the co-ordinator. Boyd Stuart waited in an empty sitting room for half an hour before the DG came in, slumped down into the armchair and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Everything seems to come at once, Stuart. Do you find that?’

‘Yes, sir, I do. I’m awfully sorry to be making a difficult day even worse for you.’

‘Not at all,’ said the DG. ‘It was my own decision to keep close to your investigation. Something come up, has it?’

Boyd Stuart explained the phone call which Paul Bock had made to Stein’s home in Los Angeles. And his visit to the house in north London the day before.

‘Homosexuals are they?’ He nodded as if in answer to his own question.

‘I’ve no reason to think so, Director.’

‘They sound like two delinquents,’ said the DG.

‘They
are
delinquents,’ agreed Boyd.

‘Quite so, Stuart.’ The DG eyed the drinks cabinet but decided that his lunch was going to be a tricky one. It would be better to remain completely clear-headed. ‘Am I to take it that you are treating their information seriously?’

‘For the time being I am, sir.’

‘Isn’t it rather preposterous? Surely you don’t believe that a syndicate of German industrialists is about to start a new Nazi movement?’

‘I’m not yet at the stage where I can start enjoying the luxury of discounting anything,’ said Boyd.

‘Well, it’s your investigation,’ said the DG scratching his head. ‘But the PM is asking for a situation report. I’m not going to relish telling her that my principal field agent thinks it’s all a neo-Nazi plot.’

‘Paul Bock gained access to the bank computer,’ insisted Boyd Stuart. ‘The other one has worked in electronics and, according to the hasty and superficial inquiries I’ve made this morning, is well qualified to know about retrieving information.’

‘I’m not contesting any of that,’ said the DG testily.

‘Then what could be their motive?’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘Why would they contact Stein to warn him that his life is in danger? Obviously Stein is a stranger to them or they would have recognized me immediately as an impostor. The German boy has confessed a secret to a perfect stranger. If that stranger betrays him, he could face at best dismissal from the bank, perhaps a term of imprisonment. So what motive could they have, other than what they told me?’

‘Perhaps he thinks it’s fun,’ said the DG. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t need to have a job of any kind; he might well have a private income. Rich young trouble-makers. The western world is full of such people.’

Only with difficulty did Stuart suppress his irritation at this generalization. ‘I think it’s safer to assume that they work for a living, sir. And I prefer to assume they’re sincere.’

‘You don’t have to read me the riot act, Stuart.’ Boyd Stuart did not reply. The DG looked at his watch. ‘Well, I can see that you want to follow this one up, so I’ll not stand in your way.’ He got to his feet. His knee joint cracked and he massaged it briefly. ‘Don’t mind if I make a few inquiries too, eh?’

‘No, sir,’ said Boyd Stuart in a tone that he hoped conveyed the idea that he dreaded the thought of it.

‘That’s splendid then. Let’s talk again tomorrow before I see the PM.’

Sir Sydney Ryden did not look forward with pleasure to his meeting with the representative of West Germany’s intelligence organization, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND. Somehow the two men seemed incompatible and what should have been an exchange of helpful information all too often developed into an exchange of complaints which sometimes came close to bickering.

The lunch they shared at Boodle’s on Tuesday, 17 July, was no exception. There were differences about training facilities which were not yet ready for use, a request for the return of important dossiers which Sir Sydney secretly knew had got lost somewhere in Whitehall, and an argument about a news story concerning a secret rocket which had been leaked to a German newspaper. As an exercise in European cooperation, the lunch was a failure but, when the two men went downstairs for coffee, and watched the other club members sunk deep into the ancient leather armchairs, the talk turned to gardening.

Discovering that this difficult German shared his taste for growing cactus came as a revelation to Sir Sydney Ryden, who was a well-known member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of Great Britain.

‘As a general rule,’ Sir Sydney was saying, his coffee neglected, ‘it is common enough to find flowers larger than the plant, with the exception perhaps of
Mammillaria
and
Rhipsalis
. If you had seen my
Echinocactus tabularis
with three flowers – each one of them larger than the plant itself – my goodness, I think you would have been amazed.’ Sir Sydney slapped the arm of his leather chair hard enough to have a member across the room look up from his newspaper.

‘Mealy bug is the worst,’ said the German. ‘The only thing that will kill it is paraffin, but often I have found that the plant dies too.’

‘I never resort to paraffin,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘As soon as you see those little grey fluffy specks, get them off with a pin. I’d rather cut away a large piece of the plant than put paraffin on it.’

‘That is most interesting,’ said the German. ‘I shall remember too your advice concerning seeds.’

‘Yes, it’s not difficult at all. Wait until the flower stem has completely died before removing the seeds, of course. The
Mammillaria
seeds are in pods; keep them all until the following spring and don’t sow before late April unless you can be sure the temperature won’t drop below 65° Fahrenheit.’

‘I shall try it,’ said the German.

‘It’s a damned pity that you can’t spare the time to come down to my place in the country.’

‘Next time, perhaps.’

‘Excellent.’

‘I only wish that there was something I could do for you in return, Sir Sydney.’

A sudden thought struck the DG. ‘Well, perhaps there is, my dear chap. This is a top-secret matter, but I want to check up on the likelihood of a young fellow working for the London branch of a Hamburg bank being able to get something from their central computer. As I say, it’s top secret. It would have to be a very discreet inquiry.’

‘That’s a simple matter, Sir Sydney,’ said the BND man. ‘No need to put it through my department at all. I’ll handle it personally. Tomorrow I’ll be in Bonn lunching with my wife and an old friend who runs one of our very best private security companies. He knows all about German banks.’

‘Excellent,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘I’d rather not have it made official. I’ll give you the details.’

The German took out his pocket diary and turned the pages to find the following day’s entry: Wednesday, 18 July. He wrote ‘mention inquiry Sir SR’ under the name of his luncheon companion – Willi Kleiber.

Chapter 25

All the efforts of the British Secret Intelligence Service employees in the Los Angeles area to erase Paul Bock’s message from Charles Stein’s answering machine had come to nothing. The machine itself, manufactured by a small factory in San Diego, was advertised as the most reliable domestic machine on the market. One aspect of this reliability, upon which the copywriter expended much care, was the impossibility of accidental erasure of any incoming message. The ‘Executive Type II’ even had an erase head that could be unplugged and locked away elsewhere. It was a facility that appealed to Charles Stein, who believed his son Billy only too likely to erase vital messages accidentally.

As for the attempt to get a field agent posing as a telephone repairman into the Stein residence, this too was doomed to failure. Stein’s housekeeper had long since discovered that the best way to live in peace with her employer was to take his instructions literally. So when a young man, bedecked with tweezers, pliers and reels of wire, spoke to her over the voice box at the front entrance, she told him that he could not come in. He told her that her telephone was not working properly and, when she proved indifferent to this, insisted that the fault was going to affect all the phones in Cresta Ridge Drive. ‘You’ll have to come back some other day,’ she told him. Charles Stein had said let no one in the house, and that is exactly what she intended to do. When the bogus telephone man persisted, she threatened to call the telephone company and complain of his behaviour. It was at that stage of the operation that all attempts to interfere with the answering machine were abandoned.

Charles Stein arrived home at eleven
A.M.
He was in a bad mood and his housekeeper did not ask him about anything except what he would like to eat. It was only after she served his soup that Stein confided to her that he had been arrested for drunken driving by the California Highway Patrol while moving decorously along the number two lane of the Harbor Freeway at no more than forty miles an hour.

The housekeeper nodded and remained silent except for some sympathetic noises that semanticists call ‘purr sounds’.

‘Me drunk!’ said Stein indignantly.

‘Did they put you on the breathalyzer?’

‘And it registered nothing. I’d had only two glasses of white wine with an old pal. You know me, Mrs Svenson, did you ever see me drunk? I practically never touch hard liquor, I don’t even like the taste of it any more.’

‘And they said you were speeding?’

‘They said going at a careful forty miles an hour is the sure sign of a drunk, that’s what they said.’

The housekeeper made some more tutting sounds.

‘Erratic driving, unsafe lane change … took me down to the county jail near Union Station … how do you like that?’

‘It’s terrible, Mr Stein.’

‘I demanded a blood test. I know the law. I demanded a blood test. They said they couldn’t get the damned police doctor. Maybe he’s drunk too, I told them. Finally the new shift came on, and the watch commander had me released.’ Stein looked at his housekeeper and shook his head. ‘I’m mad, Mrs Svenson. I’m telling you, I’m really sore about the way I’ve been treated.’

‘Eat your meal, Mr Stein,’ she said. ‘Try and forget the whole thing.’

Stein tore his bread roll to pieces and began to eat it with his soup.

‘Those CHP guys can never admit they’re wrong, you know,’ Stein told his housekeeper. ‘They held me overnight, threatening me with all kinds of driving charges. Then, this morning, they released me. Big deal. I go to jail for doing nothing and they’re kind enough to release me.’ He finished his soup in silence. ‘Where’s Billy?’ he said as he pushed the plate away. Stein always pushed empty plates away. He needed a space on the table in front of him; he found plates and glasses – especially empty ones – constricting.

‘Gone down to the boat,’ said the housekeeper.

‘Again?’

‘He’s practising for the race next month. It’s the championship. You know that, Mr Stein. Billy never misses that.’

Stein looked up, realizing that Billy Stein had converted another female to his cause, whatever that might be. ‘Time that kid got a job,’ said Stein.

‘I’ll get you the rest of your lunch,’ said the house-keeper.

Stein soon finished the grilled lamb chops and hashed brown potatoes which his housekeeper had calculated would provide the fastest satisfactory meal, and thus the fastest way to return her employer to his usual calm demeanour. But Stein had pushed aside the fried potatoes, choosing instead to eat the grilled tomato flavoured with some fragments of basil from the garden. But now his resolution weakened as he recalled the indignity of being handcuffed, stripped, searched, photographed and fingerprinted. He put the potatoes into his mouth with nervous rapidity. ‘And then tossed into the drunk tank like a common criminal.’