Hammerhead

by Peter Nicholson

  Love. Or rather sex, then love. The oldest conundrum. Nicholas had been smitten by someone he’d met at a conference—Ari, short for Arianna. Nothing wrong with that, except the loved one turned out to be a Mossad agent, a beautiful young thing who had seemed a fount of wisdom on contemporary German philosophy. Maybe his difficulties with Ari accounted for the serious manner in which he’d addressed us all recently. Nicholas had managed to compromise himself, and now he was expected to hand over information he had gathered, otherwise his wife would find out what he’d been doing and the press would be leaked the usual compromising evidence.

  We had to protect Nicholas—he was too important to The Hammer. And I knew Mossad didn’t waste time. I had to think fast.

  We were supposedly on the same side, but there was a lot of territorial jealousy, and they thought they owned rights to certain issues.

  Nicholas was due to meet Ari next week.

  We would have to provide selected and amended documents, getting on with this work immediately if they were to be ready in time. We would let a little real information through but be careful to make the rest of the material believable.

  I recalled the history of MI5 and MI6 who had done this kind of thing often enough. Anton would have made short work of Philby. How he was allowed to get through the system for so long was beyond me. In Clubland the buffers thought they were sitting on top of the imperial pile, though all around them things were falling apart. The centre did end up holding, but only because of a massive effort on the part of the whole free West, not because a wire got put into the Russian embassy or various Watchers photographed the comings and goings of people and cars around Kensington, or wherever.

  In a way I found it reassuring that even someone as fastidious and committed as Nicholas could still show that flesh, as Byron said, is frail. Or is it strong, stronger than anything, beliefs, theories, politics.

  I flew back to Germany the next day with the papers Nicholas had given me. There were lists of contacts in very high places, some of which surprised me—I thought I was getting to the shockproof state. Detailed notes of conversations and various involvements were also annotated along with assessments of a bugging extravaganza going on in London embassies for the last thirty years.

  How had Nicholas managed his double life all this time?

  Now we had to work out what to let through and what to fake. I called in the relevant experts who spent the next few days trawling through the information.

  I hoped we could manage this deception. If not, I didn’t like my old tutor’s chances.

  With a great deal of help and a few long nights we managed to get together a portfolio of material we thought would convince. Now poor Nicholas had to write a lot of it out again by hand. It would have been easy to get it all on a computer, but Mossad knew their man. He was from a time when writing was done at leisure. Now he was going to get aching wrists, trying to vary his style to disguise the fact that everything was being produced at once. I didn’t envy him this herculean task.

  I was going through our information late one evening when it came to me what the Israelis were after. Perhaps Nicholas hadn’t been aware of it; his connections weren’t what they used to be. But I was quite certain I had found the issue concerning them.

  Nicholas had known several members of the House of Saud in the past and had played a part in helping to get good oil contracts for the British. He had thus developed friendly relations with some of the princes. These relations were very useful in Washington. From what I could work out, those contacts had been feeding information to the Americans. This is what Mossad would have been after. They probably didn’t give a damn about the other material in the files.

  It appeared the Saudi Arabian government was due to implode and then their oil fields would be vulnerable to attack. Oil prices governed world economies, and anyone who had anything to do with black gold was suspect in a crazy realpolitik that influenced even the most powerful.

  I told Nicholas what I was thinking and, after some initial doubts, he agreed, however reluctantly, that I was probably right. He felt foolish at having compromised himself, but thought we could amend the appropriate information to get attention shifted onto the shoulders of some of the more corrupt princes.

  We finally got together what looked like the convincing dossier Nicholas was due to hand over at a bench near the Tower of London.

  What a bloody nerve. Honestly, it got me round to thinking about our liberal constituencies, such as they were. Here was Nicholas getting blackmailed simply because he’d done his duty as a citizen, but shown he was human. I knew he’d be crucified if the press ever got hold of his story; moderation wasn’t their strong suit. We are not completely free to do as we wish. That is clear. But we do have the freedom to choose a destiny for ourselves, even if the destiny ends up pear-shaped, as it usually does. Sure, Nicholas hadn’t been careful enough, but what he had been working at so assiduously was to try to get some kind of crossover going between the self-interest lying at the heart of most foreign policy and the need to uphold parliamentary virtues. Those who decry democracy should try living for some time in countries where it isn’t practised, and see how they feel then. The Mossad agent would agree with me on that point, I’m sure.

  While I waited for Nicholas to prepare himself, I stared out of the hotel window at the crowds passing below. We were sleepwalking into a chasm of horrors, sedated by overextended, overpraised culture, contained by self-righteousness. Was this the triumph of modernism? Was this liberation? There were no simple answers, no easy solutions, for our malaise.

  I remembered the look on Charles’ face when he heard an Indonesian cleric responsible for the deaths of hundreds had been given a reduced sentence. His face set hard; then he made a note in his agenda list. I knew what would ensue not too long into the future. Charles believed in The Hammer. Well, of course he did. He had brought it into being. And I was beginning to understand the obstacles he’d overcome simply to get this organisation going, the fatigue he and Roy must have experienced as they shaped an amorphous entity into something ready for effective espionage.

  I had said I would accompany Nicholas, at a safe distance, just to make sure everything happened as it was meant to.

  So, later that morning I got myself into position, after assuring Nicholas help was at hand—I had managed to get a few of our people over.

  The sun shone on the Thames. You couldn’t really say it glinted, but it did look livelier than usual. Tourist hordes headed for the Crown Jewels, and ice-cream melted on the paving as people enjoyed themselves.

  And then Ari arrived. I could see at once why he had fallen for her, but no doubt remorse predominated with Nicholas at the moment.

  I watched them talking for about half an hour. I knew other Mossad people would be about, but I couldn’t place them.

  The exchange took place, and Nicholas had the photos back. I doubted whether one could trust people to do the right thing in the future, but the main thing was to stop Nicholas being exposed.

  One thing surprised me. When Nicholas and Ari parted, they kissed. I thought all that would have been put behind them, but the intensity was still there. I could feel it, even at this distance.

  I hoped we’d given out the right amount of information.

  The volcano of Saudi Arabia looked set to blow, so who knows what was going to be done with our dossier.

  But Nicholas was safe. I could now tell Charles at length about what had been happening.

  One of the last things Vella revealed was information about encrypted messages outlining future plans for the diamond and gold smuggling business left in several places in Australia. He told us there were documents and diamonds hidden in a roof somewhere in Sydney. Anything was possible in this game. At the moment, we didn’t have anyone available back there to check out this story. We would just have to wait until later on to find out about it.

  Regarding Linden, it is not easy to blow up a building so that you get
rid of the people inside but not hurt others. We couldn’t destroy any more private planes because you only get a chance to do something like that once, and professional criminals are usually too clever not to travel in jumbos like the rest of us have to. This gave them a measure of safety. I was a little surprised to see so many key figures coming over to Berlin at the one time. But, as Charles had said, they were an arrogant bunch, punch-drunk on power. We’d finally worked out who had attacked me in Melbourne. He’d been one of Carascaolo’s crowd, a citizen of Banana Bender, as we called it. Carascaolo was so hated by the people of his country, and even by his government, one of the most corrupt in that region—which is saying something—that there had already been several attempts on his life. Since none of them had succeeded, like those farcical attempts to get rid of Castro, it was now up to us to ensure there would be no happy return to the motherland.

  I wanted to know more about what was bringing this crew to Berlin when the dangers for them were so great. It must have been something big to get them together like this.

  I spent a day checking our finances—what I was ostensibly employed for. We had been spending a lot of money, but there was plenty available for the next stage of our activities.

  Stalin’s fiftieth anniversary (of the bastard’s death) had passed, and I was watching a documentary about Uncle Joe that reinforced everything Nicholas had been saying. How to understand a mind which had brought thirty million humans to their end. And yet there were people today who espoused Stalinism—they still hadn’t seen the light! One despaired of woebegone sorts who thought Cuba was a good role model for social development. Some people don’t want to know how the real world is. Perhaps they suspect it might not be like the rooms beyond their curtains, but they can’t cope with other people’s pain. Like Celia, they have a hard enough time coping with their own and their selfishness doesn’t let them empathise with what is going on elsewhere, or help someone through a dark night of the soul. Their fate is aloneness.

  There had been the cheering masses, the gaily fluttering flags, the icons of hammer and sickle, the cult of the waxwork Lenin. Gone. All the workers’ heroes—they had disappeared into the night too with their political theory, their oppression and cruelty. If you could speak a prayer for those who had died in the name of the great leader, how might that sound. What a shriek of human misery it would bring forth.

  A rumour persisted that Beria had poisoned Stalin. Supposedly, Beria believed that Uncle Joe thought he could start another war against the United States and win it, even with the Soviet economy in the parlous state it declined to after the depletions of the Second World War. If Beria did have Stalin poisoned, it was a service of mercy to the Russian people. But fellow travellers in the West who wrote up glowing reports about the proletarian paradise, even attaining a kind of ecstasy about collectivist farms—how did they reconcile the past with the present.

  I remembered the footage of the smiling faces, the expectant crowds. And I remembered too the gulags, the wracked bodies of political prisoners, the paranoid eyes peering out above the walrus moustache.

  Dame Enid called in on me unexpectedly. She had some good news. My recommendations to her in the stock market had made money and she wanted to give some of it to The Hammer.

  ‘Be careful David. Politics has to be a dirty game. But you know that. I will tell you this though. If the end justifies the means, you can cope. Otherwise, it won’t work. There is too much at stake each day for you not to believe in what you are doing. I always have. And I think you do too.’

  It was still hard to get over the feeling I was having an audience when I spoke to Enid. I had seen the lioness roar on television often enough during the time of the previous government. Here she was pleasant and helpful, though you could hardly say she helped me relax.

  The next day I went to the hotel pool and sauna. Thérèse came with me and we were soon waterlogged. Splashing around in the pool reminded me of lazy summers by the sea, though there was no comparison with the swell of an Australian beach, the grazed belly brought on by a dumper, jellyfish sometimes stinging your arms and neck. I thought of my family at the beach. I could remember being at one with the world then, sitting underneath the umbrella, the sun doing its best to blister my skin. You could only be at peace like that once. Then you had to spend the rest of your life aiming for a different kind of wholeness. You could get there, over the corpses of feelings, the shed remainders of love, friendship.

  Thérèse came up behind me in the pool and kissed me. Then she swam to the other end, flipping in and out of the water.

  ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ Tennyson. I knew ‘Ulysses’ well because Vansittart used to quote it when he was trying to explain some awful event in a philosopher’s life. I remember Nietzsche used to get the Tennyson line quite a lot. Then I noticed Anton watching us, looking annoyed, as if to say, there’s work to be done. Which there was. I knew I didn’t have the experience needed for this next operation. I would be on the sidelines. But I was still required. Then another line came to mind from a poem Vansittart had also been keen on—Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias.’ ‘I met a traveller from an antique land …’ Grandeur ending in emptiness. Perhaps that would be my lot too.

  It seemed, in one sense only, that the bunch of villains we were planning to blow up were a little like our group—they couldn’t resist the occasional meeting. Our meetings were ordered affairs with a fixed agenda, though there were too many of them. Their meetings were ramshackle with lots of shouting and threats. If the information Vella had given us were true, there would be plenty of drinking too.

  The former East Berlin was stagnating. The economy hadn’t really developed as much as had been expected, even though the government was doing its best to stimulate tourism and industry there. Anton and I went to Berlin to do a recce from the television tower, the Fernsehturm, where you could see the old divide, east of the Alexanderplatz, the rows of identical units stretching along the Karl-Marx-Allee into the distance. Schoolchildren scampered around the viewing platform.

  Anton thought you should get an overall view of the place you were going to operate in. I had a sudden recall of my vertigo on the staircase in Saint Stephans. It was neurotic, but I felt I couldn’t stand close to the edge of the platform.

  Anton turned to me, clearly in a mood to dispense some wisdom.

  ‘You know David—you are far too conservative. You need to cut loose. Let go of the bourgeois. And stop trying to save the world. You won’t. If you had ever smelt jet fuel exploding around you, you would know that.’

  This unanticipated pronouncement on high from Anton exasperated me. Somehow, I maintained a glum silence.

  ‘They are meeting at a private villa. The problem for us is going to be getting underneath and planting our explosives. Charles has some ideas he’s discussed with me. We have to be careful because if they get hold of us it won’t be pleasant. Also, we want to try to listen to their conversations before we send them off.’

  It would be good if we could get someone into the villa beforehand to see what was happening. It would have to be someone already employed there. Perhaps they had a gardener or a cook who could be offered an inducement.

  A squall blew up shrouding the whole of Berlin. Rain wrapped around the glass sheeting. I thought how easy it would be for a hijacked plane to fly at this thrust to the heavens, except you wouldn’t kill many people if you did knock it down.

  The excitable school children around us soon were bored with nothing to see, and it wasn’t long before we had the Fernsehturm platform almost to ourselves. The storm eventually passed and we looked out over the eastern part of the city carefully once more. One lovestruck couple remained. With any luck they might join the almost-mile high club undisturbed. I hoped they would.

  Thérèse had a quiet passion my uncertainty needed just then. From what I could tell by way of occasional passing comments, sex to Anton was a brutish thing. Just like an animal you see in those documen
taries really. He didn’t seem attached to anyone in particular, but it was hard to tell. I didn’t know what was going on in his private life. Well, why should I.

  Why did I find Anton such an attractive character? It must have been, despite the violence I had witnessed—behind the suspect charm—the commitment to principles, the lack of pretence. Anton was awfully moody and hadn’t treated me particularly well at crucial moments. Perhaps he knew I required toughening up. Both of us were loners, despite apparent success. But he had worked out a way through life’s mess, and I hadn’t. Anton had depth and I felt drawn to it. I needed depth in my relationships because most of my previous friendships had been pretty superficial.

  Still, I couldn’t get beyond a certain point with Anton. He kept the inner part of himself free of encroachment, and there was no way through the walls there. When I tried to ask him about his past I just got stares in return. And if I ventured something more inquisitive he bridled. Worst of all was when I started talking about my ideas concerning God. ‘I do not believe in your God. You want things to have meaning. And they don’t.’

  Anton was authentic, in a horrible kind of way, which was rare. To be truly authentic—what did that require of me. I could get into an exalted existential state looking at the stars on a fine night. I was often lost in a torrent of music. I knew my politics and philosophy. I tried to keep up with science too. But was it knowledge or feeling that made you authentic. Anton seemed to have torn strips of feeling from his core; there was little but instinct left. Was that the end result of knowing the politics of the world well. I saw how vicious Anton could turn when he was frustrated. He had knifed Shevchenko without hesitation and laid into Vella with a will.