XPD (53 page)

Authors: Len Deighton

Tags: #Action & Adventure, #Espionage, #Fiction, #Historical, #Mystery, #Spies, #Suspense, #Thriller, #World War II

BOOK: XPD

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‘Now what?’ Kleiber asked. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, watching Stuart warily and still surprised that his guess about the Scotsman’s violent nature was so soon confirmed.

Stuart had discovered everything he wanted to know. Already he had begun to decide how much of it should go into his report to Sir Sydney Ryden. He looked at his watch and wondered if the cashier would complain if he went Concorde.

‘Now, what? Now nothing, Kleiber.’ The man was a repugnant creature but that made his job only marginally more bearable.

Stuart patted his pockets as if searching for cigarettes. He felt the box inside which the hypodermic was wrapped in cotton gauze, with a spare phial inside his silver cigarette case where it was not likely to be broken. He hated these XPD jobs that the laboratory experts arranged. It was horrible enough to dispose of men with gun, blade or explosive but these toxic chemicals were loathsome.

‘I’m sorry, Kleiber,’ he said. ‘But it’s the end of the story.’

‘I’m a soldier,’ said Kleiber. It was almost as if he welcomed the chance to die like a hero.

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XPD
, check out these other great Len Deighton titles.

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About the Author

Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the
Observer
and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book,
The IPCRESS File.
Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made
Bomber
into a daylong radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two,
Blood, Tears and Folly
, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.

Also by the Author

FICTION

The IPCRESS File

Horse Under Water

Funeral in Berlin

Billion-Dollar Brain

An Expensive Place to Die

Only When I Larf

Bomber

Declarations of War

Close-Up

Spy Story