The Twisted Wire

by Richard Falkirk

  THE TWISTED WIRE

  Espionage and Murder in the Middle East

  Derek Lambert

  writing as

  RICHARD FALKIRK

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  50th Anniversary edition 2021

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd

  in association with Arlington Books 1971

  Copyright © Estate of Derek Lambert 1971

  Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com

  Richard Falkirk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008433901

  Ebook Edition © June 2021 ISBN: 9780008433918

  Version: 2020-12-04

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  By the same author

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Big Derek Lambert, newsman turned novelist, is darkly looking over a dying half of Guinness in the Bailey. Getting tired of resting. Essentially a newsman without a deadline. Talking. Killing time.

  But why the hell should you worry about deadlines when your first novel, Angels in the Snow, brought in £10,000 and when that was four books ago and when there’s no tax on writers in Ireland?

  And when your publishers in London send out blurbs describing you as one of their best new writers and when you are the only man in Dublin who can claim to be living in a Georgian house with a bow-backed back room (whatever that is)?

  Forty years old. Six feet and fourteen stone big and dark like a Connaught cattle dealer with the same canniness in the face. An Irish mother called Riddick before Lambert. Another book, For Infamous Conduct, just finished. Publishers usually want just one book a year from the one ‘name’. Even cheating a little on ten pages a day (a personal deadline?), an old newsman can write a thriller in maybe five weeks. Maybe it’s time to get more names.

  ‘But still I miss the big story. The fellows I know are in Vietnam or in Nigeria. Though I don’t much fancy it, I get tired resting. I might go to Iceland next.’

  Yesterday was Moscow for the Daily Express. Maybe it was India or Africa or the Middle East – on expenses. Yesterday was a time of two-finger pecking at the guts of a battered portable Olivetti, catching planes, meeting deadlines.

  Yesterday was the UDI story from Rhodesia. A hot room in the hot city of Salisbury. Ambassador Hotel and the Derek Lambert byline over stories recording a colony slipping out of colonization.

  Yesterday was Tel Aviv and sitting at a café table on the Dizengoff, drinking, watching the girls go by in military uniforms. Or it was Suez and battle. Standing beside a General and saying, ‘I can’t see any bloody snipers,’ then ‘Krak!’ – splinters flying and a head wound.

  The room in the bleak flats where the Westerners live in Moscow was in Kutuzovsky Prospekt, only a little way from the Kremlin. ‘The room was bugged. You called the unseen bug “Fred” and often had conversations with it late at night. You got used to it after a while. It was stupid for a Westerner to bring one of the Muscovite women to his room with Fred there, and a camera could be operating across the roadway from anywhere.’ The Westerners still try, though. They get into trouble that way.

  ‘You have the impression that the women in Moscow are drab and unattractive. It’s the clothes. The women in Tel Aviv are beautiful. And Irish girls with their long slithery hair.’

  The road back from Moscow ended in Ballycotton, where Moscow-based thriller Angels in the Snow was finished in the flat above Mrs Roberts’ grocery shop in Main Street and the book was dedicated to a lady called Mona in the Holiday Inn, where many good drinks were drunk and good times enjoyed.

  For Infamous Conduct, an India-based adventure saga, is confidently expected to follow Angels and such other books as The Kites of War into the bestseller lists. By then Derek Lambert will probably be in either Brazil or Iceland or who knows where? These will be trips away from his flat in Ely Place which is now to become his permanent home. That’s where the battered Olivetti portable is now.

  ‘I like Ireland. I very much like Dublin. This is a writers’ city really. The trouble is that everybody wants to write a novel about Ireland. I’m a little unusual for a novelist because I don’t think up a plot and then find a location that would suit it. I prefer to visit a country then a plot occurs to me quite naturally. Will I write a book about Ireland? Maybe.’

  Now that would be interesting.

  This unattributed interview with Derek Lambert was published in 1970 as ‘The Newsman Who Swapped Stories for Novels’ shortly before his two Richard Falkirk books The Chill Factor and The Twisted Wire were published.

  Part of a quote from a spokesman of the American Embassy in London, following a report in February 1969, alleging that, because of a crossed wire, someone overheard a telephone conversation between the Ambassador and the President of the United States:

  ‘Anything is possible with telephones …’

  PROLOGUE

  Three men listened to the President of the United States talking on the top security telephone wire from Washington to London.

  Robert Lindsay Bartlett, the American Ambassador in London, for whom the call was intended. He took it in his office in Grosvenor Square and understood every word the President said because they had discussed the crisis the previous day.

  Nicolai Malenkov, head of communications at the Russian Embassy in Kensington, still smug from the congratulations from Moscow for succeeding in tapping the Washington-London line. He reported the President’s remarks to his superiors in the KGB who partially understood them.

  Tom Bartlett, geologist, who was totally confused by the President’s observations because he had been expecting to hear the voice of his wife, Helen Bartlett, who worked in the American Embassy library.

  Bartlett subsequently decided that the reasons for the crossed wire were twofold. One, he was trying to call his wife at the Em
bassy. Two, he had the same surname as the Ambassador. But, on further consideration of the British telephonic system, he decided that the wire could have become crossed just as easily without any coincidences of name and timing.

  At the time of the call he did not speculate on the reasons for the interception. The male voice on the phone, young, respectful, and possibly sycophantic, said: ‘This is the White House, Mr Ambassador Bartlett, I have the President for you.’

  Tom Bartlett put down the ammonite which he used as a paperweight on his desk, stared at the receiver for a moment, then put it back to his ear.

  He recognised the President’s voice at once. Authoritative, sincere but somehow always electioneering. The President was saying: ‘So you haven’t been able to get hold of this guy?’

  The Ambassador said: ‘You didn’t give us much time, Mr President.’ It was the voice of big business unaccustomed to diplomatic subservience.

  ‘I’m aware of how much time I gave you. We’ll have to get to work on it at the other end. Even on the plane maybe.’

  At this point Tom Bartlett, who suffered from hay fever, was overcome by the pollen count rising in the study because he had forgotten to shut the French window facing the honeyed garden of the country house in Sussex. He sneezed many times and when he picked up the receiver again the President was just finishing with the Ambassador. American prestige, said the President in his whistle-stop voice, was at stake. The Ambassador did not heckle him, but his silence was resentful.

  There was a small click mocking the crash with which Bartlett imagined the President cracked down the phone. Then a louder click which sounded as if it emanated from the local exchange. Bartlett rubbed his itching eyes and pondered on the conversation he had overheard. It seemed vaguely as if, at one stage, they had been talking about the Ambassador in the third person. But that was ridiculous: it was his hay fever capsules affecting him again. They stunned his senses, convinced colleagues that he was on hard drugs and had no effect whatsoever on his early summer allergy.

  Outside he heard rubber on gravel announce the arrival of the hire car to take him to London Airport. An old Bentley with sighing leather seats and inherited decorum; much more his style, Bartlett decided ruefully, than the serpent-faced jets screaming for their passengers on the tarmac.

  The driver who was ageing decorously with the car said: ‘Where to this time, Mr Bartlett?’

  ‘Israel,’ Bartlett said. ‘The Promised Land.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the driver who had taken many passengers to the launching pad but never been launched himself. ‘More trouble there today. Just heard it on the news. The Israelites made another raid into Egypt.’ He reproached an E-type Jaguar overtaking him on a bend with a genteel note from his hooter ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was a place for a gentleman like yourself to be going.’

  ‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be going to a place where there’s a bit of action?’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t mean it like that.’

  But Bartlett knew he did. He glanced at the trousers of his new lightweight suit already bagging at the knees, at the stain from a ball-point pen on his lapel; he peered in the driving mirror and saw the wing of his shirt collar sticking out like a sleeping butterfly, his untidy, finger-combed hair. Indisputably the composite picture was not that of a man of action.

  The driver said: ‘I meant you being a geologist, sir. You can’t somehow associate fossils with bombs and rockets.’

  ‘I’m going to address the International Geological Society in Jerusalem,’ Bartlett said.

  ‘Ah.’ The driver nodded as if the word society explained the incongruity.

  The car left the green cushions of the South Downs where as a boy Bartlett had first examined the earth’s crust. He was excited about going to Israel. To see the headlines jerk into life like marionettes. To revisit the Negev and the Sinai. To see Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Caesarea.

  It wasn’t until he was at the airport waiting to be called for the El Al jet that he realised that he hadn’t phoned his wife. He glanced at his watch. She would be on her way back to their town apartment in Marylebone High Street by now. He could always explain that he had been delayed by the President of the United States … at that moment they called the Amsterdam–Tel Aviv flight.

  ONE

  The official gunman sat in the front row of the tourist seats. Inside his suede jacket which he had bought in London he carried a Beretta. Just inside the flight deck was an Uzi submachine gun.

  Ya’acov Krivine, who was twenty-two years old with bandit good looks, officially hoped that there would be no trouble when the Boeing landed at Amsterdam. Unofficially he envied the guard who had shot the Arab terrorists in Switzerland and hoped that a similar attempt would be made in Holland.

  He glanced round at the rest of the passengers. All had been checked. All were clean with the possible exception of the young Polish Jew sitting beside the button-down-collar American diplomat. That, he had been told, was the trouble with Jews who were allowed out of Russia and its satellites: you couldn’t always be sure whether the young ones really considered themselves to be Jews or Communists. But Ya’acov was sure that all of them would be Jews once they had lived in Israel.

  Behind the Pole and the American sat the Englishman Bartlett whose movements he had been told to keep under observation. He didn’t know why. Geologist, fortyish, vaguish. Perhaps he was a British agent; that would explain some of Britain’s more spectacular security blunders.

  Ya’acov Krivine turned his attention to the Pole and the American sitting next to him. The Pole was pale and damp and wore unassertive gold-rimmed spectacles and a black suit with broad lapels. The American was just as Ya’acov expected all Americans to be: athletic, crewcut, excessively polite, probably ex-Army and Vietnam. Ya’acov wondered about the scrubbing-brush hairstyles which so many Americans wore and patted self-consciously: he knew from experience that girls preferred longer hair.

  The tall, gentle-faced stewardess in the blue uniform just beginning to shine said in Hebrew: ‘Coffee, sir?’ Her voice was sarcastic. This annoyed Ya’acov because he was accustomed to girls who became instantly available on perceiving his looks and wholeheartedly acquiescent on seeing the scar of his Six Day War wound.

  ‘Yes, please.’ He looked up at her gentle face and recalled that she was a Judo expert as well as a stewardess. ‘Why are you so hostile to me?’

  The stewardess glanced around and leaned towards him. ‘Because I am tired of tough guys,’ she said. ‘Every man in Israel who puts on a uniform thinks he’s Steve McQueen.’

  Ya’acov favoured her with his brigand smile. ‘I think the Arabs must think so too.’

  The stewardess who had been attached to the same Army unit as Ya’acov in the Sinai said: ‘I prefer other qualities in a man.’

  ‘You prefer someone like that Englishman who looks like a schoolmaster?’

  Ya’acov noticed with surprise and irritation that her expression softened. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Someone like that. He’s rather sweet.’ She straightened up.

  Ya’acov said: ‘There’s just one thing.’

  ‘Really? What’s that?’

  ‘Your black belt’s showing,’ Ya’acov said.

  He leaned back in his seat, quite pleased with himself, and lit a Savyon cigarette. Below the English Channel was blue and molten. In ten minutes’ time they would be landing at Amsterdam. His hand strayed inside his jacket and fingered the barrel of the Beretta. Then he went into the flight deck to check the Israeli-made Uzi. Just in case, he thought hopefully and unofficially.

  Five rows behind the official gunman Tom Bartlett obediently fastened his safety belt, extinguished his cigarette and picked up the fawn pamphlet called Flying Kosher. The tall stewardess leaned over the girl sitting beside him and checked his belt. She was, he thought, unusually solicitous. He smiled at her and went on reading. ‘Kosher is knadles, knishes, gefilte fish – all the traditional treats of the Jewish Kitchen.�
�

  The girl beside him said: ‘Don’t worry too much. It just means you can’t have cream in your coffee after lunch.’

  ‘I only drink it black,’ Bartlett said. There was a pause. He smelled her perfume: Chanel No.5, he decided, because that was the only perfume he knew. He noted her shiny buckled shoes and her neat knees and became aware of the body warmth they shared between them. Again he was reassured by the virility of his observation.

  The girl said: ‘Are you going to Israel on vacation?’

  Bartlett half-turned so that he could see her face. Tanned, a little sad, greenish-eyed, finely textured hair worn in a fringe, inquisitive features. Not the sort of face you expected an Israeli girl to have after all those newspaper pictures of women soldiers toting rifles. If, in fact, she was an Israeli. He asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I hope you didn’t mind me talking to you. But we are like that in Israel. I know that in the States and Britain it is different.’

  ‘I certainly don’t mind,’ Bartlett said. And meant it. ‘No, I’m not going on vacation – it’s a business trip.’

  ‘I see.’ She stuffed a copy of Maariv into the seat pocket. ‘Did you know that we Israeli girls are also very nosey?’ She spoke with a slight American accent.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with curiosity,’ Bartlett said. ‘It’s the foundation of my profession. Which, incidentally, is geology.’

  ‘That,’ said the girl, ‘is quite remarkable, Mr …’

  ‘Bartlett,’ he said. ‘Tom Bartlett. Why is it so remarkable?’

  ‘Because I too have been studying the soil. Advanced methods of irrigation which have been perfected in the States.’

  It was, Bartlett thought, quite remarkable. But it had been a remarkable day.

  ‘How long will you be in Israel?’ she said.

  ‘About three days in Tel Aviv,’ he said. ‘Then two or three days in Jerusalem for the actual conference.’

  They were interrupted by the voice of the stewardess, first in Hebrew, then in English. ‘We hope you have enjoyed your flight from London to Amsterdam. We regret that, owing to the short duration of our stay in Amsterdam, passengers in transit will not he allowed to disembark from the aircraft.’