by Len Deighton
I pressed the Quit key. Okay computer: a good joke. You get the last word. And that mistyped date was not the only operator error to be found in the data. When the Data Centre was first built, there were no such things as optical read-out machines, so for weeks and weeks every vetted typist in Whitehall was down here at some time or other, transferring the typed and written files on to the mainframe computer. Typists were going home with bulging wage packets, as some of them worked seventy hours a week. I don’t think Whitehall had ever seen such energy displayed in the workplace. But the price was paid in accuracy, and now everyone has become accustomed to such errors as dates being 100 years behind reality, along with most other things in the government service.
I remembered when some Jeremiahs were saying that there were millions of pages of typed and written material in those racks of bulging files, and predicting that the job of entering them into the computer would never be completed. They were wrong of course. Finally it was all on disk or chip or wherever words end up when the computers swallow them. And now all the old files were abandoned and gathering dust in the archives downstairs on the storage level. Of course nothing had ever been added to those old files, but perhaps young VERDI had secured a place in our records before the conversion.
I went down to the storage mezzanine. It was a gloomy place of bare concrete echoing with the constant noise of pumps and generators. Apart from the machinery it was only used for unwanted desks and chairs, dented filing cabinets, and packets of paper on racks as high as the ceiling. At one time they’d started shredding all these old secret documents, but when the index cards jammed the knives of the shredding machines the project had been temporarily halted. And then the shredders were needed upstairs and the files were conveniently forgotten. Now only the guards and engineers ever came down here, and even they did not stay long.
I didn’t have to search for the old files. They were arrayed on the same metal racks that had held them when they were stored in Registry. All of them were dusty and torn. Some had burst open and been retied like waste paper ready for the recycling machine. There was none of that fancy silver-coloured anti-static carpeting that covered the floor of Level 3, and my footsteps echoed from the grey walls.
It took me a little time to find my way along the racks but I had used the files a lot in the old days. Here was the British Empire’s postwar history written in blood. Palestine? No; Kenya? No; Cyprus? No; Malaya? No; Suez? No. I’d spent a year in London Central as a dogsbody, and fetching and carrying from Registry was the task everyone wanted to foist off on someone else.
I switched on another light. Berlin. Here were some files I recognized. Of course the bloody agent files would be on the top shelf. I went and found a ladder and climbed up to get them. As the dust rose from secret files that had not been touched in a decade or more I felt like Howard Carter breaking into Tutankhamun’s inner chamber.
The files were arranged in alphabetical order. Not in the alphabetical order of agents, or agents’ codenames. They were arranged in the order of the case officers, or more accurately the persons who ran the agents. I sighed. If I needed proof of the value of a computer, and the access it afforded, this task provided it. It was logical for the files to be arranged this way, because each agent-runner jealously guarded his agents – as policemen cherish their informants – and hid their files away from their colleagues and superiors. I looked at the long line of files I would have to go through to locate Fedosov, who might well prove not to have an entry at all. There were more than forty files there, and some were of back-breaking weight.
I took down the first one and put it on a table under the light. Peter Andrews. I remembered him, an amiable ex-SOE man who in 1944 survived Gestapo interrogation in Lyon. Even more surprisingly he’d survived the selection boards of the SIS; for the arthritic old Foreign Office diehards were determined to keep such ‘wartime amateurs’ out of ‘their’ service. It wasn’t a very long file. He’d run four agents into East Germany but, as a child, what I remembered most vividly was that on the wall of his office he had the framed front page from a prewar satirical magazine: ‘Arch-duke Franz Ferdinand Alive: Great War a Mistake!’ In 1963 an order from Whitehall suddenly detached him to Iraq to take ten thousand Maria Theresa silver dollars to the revolutionary group led by Colonel Aref. Arriving as the rebellion began, he sent a message that he’d made contact. But Andrews was too old to be a revolutionary. The next message said his mutilated body was buried in the desert one hundred miles north of Baghdad, and would HM Government pay for it to be sent home.
As I went through the files I became more adept at finding the separate agent listings inside them. But there was no Fedosov as far as I could see, and no VERDI either, so VERDI must have been assigned a cover name after the data was transcribed. When I looked at my watch I found it had taken me two hours to search only half the files, but getting Dicky to agree to me coming down here again tomorrow would involve all kinds of silly discussions, so I continued with my self-appointed task and finished the last file at nine fifty-two p.m. I was hungry and thirsty, my hands were dirty and my lungs choking with dust and accumulated filth.
The flickering light had given me a headache, and the loud buzzing of a malfunctioning fluorescent tube drilled through my brain, as did the throbbing of the other machinery as I got to the end of the final file. Billy Walker, another man I remembered very well; always sleekly dressed in dark suits from London, with a diamond tie-pin and a heavy gold watch-chain. He was a little older than my father, and when the appointment as Berlin Rezident fell vacant he became one of my father’s most dangerous rivals. Some people said afterwards that Billy Walker followed one of his agents on an impossible job, believing that some kind of award for bravery would assist in his getting the position he coveted beyond any other. Some said his conspicuous homosexual lifestyle was punctuated by quarrels with dangerous young men. Whatever the truth of that, Billy was fished out of the Landwehr Canal having died of multiple stab wounds. According to this file, Billy Walker’s best agent was never seen again.
My head was spinning with memories as I carried the file back up the ladder and pushed it back on to the shelf. My head was brushing the cobwebbed pipes and tin ducting. Despite the lateness of the hour I couldn’t resist getting down one of my father’s personal files. To see his handwriting on all these stuffy old reports brought back memories of the letters he used to write to me. He felt guilty that he hadn’t pushed harder for me to go to university. Had it not troubled him, perhaps I wouldn’t have thought so much about it myself. I told him I wouldn’t have enjoyed being away from home, and that I probably wouldn’t have secured a place. But my father insisted that it was all his fault. He had allowed me to start work in the Department where a university education, no matter how inappropriate or inadequate, was the only way to get to the top floor.
I thought about all this as I flipped through the written account of my father’s days in Berlin. Fedosov. Good grief! There it was: Fedosov. Not Fedosov the younger; this was Valeriy Fedosov, born 1910, a captain working in the Red Army headquarters at Berlin Karlshorst. According to these reports, he had provided my father with secret information from the Soviet files during the time that the Soviets blockaded Berlin. The US Air Force and the RAF combined to stage an airlift, their aircraft expanded by the addition of any other large plane that could be bought or rented anywhere in the Western world. Here were photocopies of the Soviet assessments of the supplies arriving and their estimates of how long the airlift could be kept going. Knowing what the Soviets were thinking day to day was vital. Even London and Washington secretly believed the airlift could be no more than a brief easing of shortages before the city collapsed under the Russian stranglehold. The aircrews had been told to take ‘enough kit for ten days’. In the event the planes brought enough to keep both the civil population and the Allied forces supplied. It was a triumph. It unified the Germans and the Anglo-Americans in a way that nothing else could have done. And it shook R
ussian self-confidence at a time when their confidence seemed unassailable.
There was no mistaking my father’s signature on the payments card and no mistaking the name of his informant. It was good material too. No wonder my father kept it all to himself, running this agent in person. There was no Wall in those days and my father could walk across the city without attracting any attention and brazenly visit Fedosov in his Pankow flat. There was no need to wonder why this hadn’t been put into the computer. On the front cover of the file there was a big black rubber stamp: ‘Data not transcribed by reason:’ Someone had provided the reason in handwriting: ‘file ended December 1950 with no continuation’ and under that in a box there was the scribbled signature of a supervisor. It was a legitimate reason for not entering all this material on the computer at a time when it was taking so much time and effort to get the up-to-date essentials into the machine.
The Soviet blockade of Berlin was lifted on May 12th 1949. Payments to Fedosov continued for another three months but then stopped without explanation. It was not unusual for informants to come and go in that way: most of them were mercurial prima donnas looking for love and money that they weren’t getting from their own side. In those days everything was very casual. Fedosov had been run by my father personally, and as far as these records revealed, had never been given a cover name. I took the payments card, folded it and put it in my pocket. And I wondered if this Valeriy Fedosov, VERDI’s father and the Soviet Union’s Hero of Banner Party No. 5, was still living in his flat in Berlin-Pankow.
I reasoned that Dicky Cruyer would soon get around to deciding that my visiting Berlin was urgently necessary. And if Dicky didn’t soon get around to deciding that, I’d have to think of some way of putting the idea into his mind.
9
On Tuesday morning, as if to confirm Gloria’s theory – that the Department was secretly commanded by Fiona’s every wish and whim – the whole top floor was in an uproar. By mid-morning desks, filing cases and other furniture had been heaved and carted around to provide her with an office next door to Dicky.
Compared to the miserable little place allotted to me, her office was magnificent, but being next door to Dicky was a high price to pay for such comfort. That proximity to Dicky was important to him and the reason why old Flinders Flynn, the Statistics wizard, had been unceremoniously relegated to a noisy downstairs room adjacent to the lifts.
‘Aren’t I lucky, darling?’ said Fiona as I went in to see her and take her to lunch.
‘You didn’t say anything about this new job last night.’ I knew she’d been helping Dicky with his work but I’d figured it as no more than a determined attempt to stay out of the clutches of the Hungarian desk.
‘You were so late. Anyway Dicky only said he was thinking about it. I always like to be quite sure.’
‘What’s your official label?’
‘Deputy to Dicky,’ she said. ‘But it won’t become official until the first of next month.’
‘In Operations?’
She smiled conspiratorially and glanced at the door that connected her to the ante-room where Dicky’s secretary and assistant lurked, tirelessly alert for his next command. ‘Artfully not stated,’ she said.
‘So Dicky is hoping to hold on to German Stations Controller and Operations too?’
‘He told me it’s just a temporary arrangement. If he gets pushed out, I go too.’
‘Why didn’t Controller Europe assign Harry Strang to hold the fort again, as he did during the summer vacation?’
‘I didn’t ask him, darling,’ she replied loftily.
I supplied the answer: ‘With someone as high-powered as you to prop him up, Dicky hopes to split the two jobs laterally and cling to both.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fiona. ‘And you think he’s a fool.’ She screwed up her face, reached for a handkerchief and sneezed into it.
‘Not in office politics,’ I said. ‘Have you still got that cold?’
‘No, it’s the dust.’
I looked around her office. ‘Is that Bret’s old desk?’
‘It was in the store-room,’ she said. ‘Everyone was frightened to lay claim to it.’
I looked at the remarkable glass-topped desk and remembered one of the junior staff saying that Bret’s desk was like his women: ultra modern, with shiny legs, black drawers and see-through top. I hadn’t thought it very amusing at the time; perhaps because I hadn’t eliminated Fiona from the list of Bret’s possible amours. ‘And the carpet too?’ I said, looking at the expensive grey carpet that had contributed to the totally monochrome room that Bret had had designed for him.
‘This is Bret’s old office, darling. Didn’t you realize that? The walls have been redone but the carpet has been here all along.’
‘I see.’ Just for a moment it gave me a curious feeling to be remembering Bret and all the things that had happened to me and to others in this room. The decisions taken, the operations okayed, the careers made, blood spilled and reputations blighted.
‘Are you kidnapping me for lunch?’ she asked.
From her new glass-topped desk she picked up a folder. Despite its plain cover I knew it was the one containing my revised report; Dicky’s assistant had given it a big red Top Secret, and in the distribution box there were Dicky’s initials and Fiona’s too. I also saw the light circular mark of a teacup that I had left on its front. An old-timer named Riley once showed me that making a little fold or stain on one’s own submissions was a useful way of identifying them, for instance when they were on the desk of a superior. In Riley’s case, I suspected that he often used it as a way of retrieving things of his authorship which hindsight decreed better lost, so he could put them into the fine-cut shredder.
Fiona noticed me looking at it as she locked it away in a metal cabinet. ‘Why do you fill Dicky’s head with such absurd stories?’ she asked as she pushed the drawer shut and turned the combination lock.
‘Did you read it?’
‘I mean what you told him about VERDI. The suit with nothing in the pockets,’ she said mockingly. ‘Have they eliminated all the dry-cleaners over there since I left?’
‘I was just thinking aloud. I told Dicky that.’
‘He’s gone off to the Cabinet Office to give them his lecture and tell them the good news: the Permanent Secretary and all his acolytes and heaven knows who else.’
‘Tell them what?’
‘That the dead man is not VERDI. He’s telling them that VERDI is still alive.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I said with unconcealed relief.
‘If Dicky comes out of this looking a fool he will hound you.’ Her warning was emphasized by her tone of voice and the expression on her face.
‘It’s all right,’ I said again.
‘How do you know that, darling? Just because the dead man’s pockets were empty?’
‘Don’t be tiresome, Fi. I know because I know.’
‘Then tell me how you know.’
‘I know what VERDI looks like. I knew him in the old days. I’d recognize him. The dead man wasn’t VERDI.’
Her face registered consternation. ‘You said you didn’t know him. You told everyone you didn’t remember him.’
‘I always like to be quite sure too,’ I said.
She nodded soberly. ‘Touché, Bernard. But seriously?’
‘VERDI only got his name when he made contact with us. VERDI is a target name. That’s how it’s supposed to work, isn’t it? Musician codenames for people vetted, recruited or enrolled but in any case tested for loyalty. But VERDI is no friend of mine: I have very strong doubts about VERDI. I’d need persuading that he really wants to come over to us. I knew him. And when I knew him he was working very hard indeed doing nasty things proving his loyalty to Moscow.’
‘And you recognized the man in the Mercedes as VERDI? Is that it?’
‘It was dark. But I’m guessing that it was VERDI from the context.’
‘Why are you always so difficult, Bern
ard?’ she asked with a sigh. ‘Why does every single thing have to be dragged out of you?’
‘I caught one glimpse of him on a dark country road when I was full-length on the ground, hiding my head under a radiator and aiming a toy gun at a wheel.’
‘Dicky believes this could be a monumental step for us,’ she said.
‘What could?’
‘This business with VERDI. This is off the record until Dicky tells you. Last year the Stasi started putting everything into a computer. Stasi files and records; arrests, targets, their own personnel even. With VERDI to help us, we might be able to hack into their mainframe by phone … without leaving this office.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘There won’t be a big backlog of material. It will just go back as far as January but … well, you see …’
‘But when VERDI comes over to us they’ll change all the codes and electronic gimmicks, won’t they?’
‘They won’t junk several million dollars’ worth of computer equipment. They’ll just change the codes and passwords. VERDI will have someone in place to provide the new ones. Now do you see?’
‘Yes, I do see. It’s the stuff that knighthoods are made of.’
‘Not everyone is convinced. The D-G is very much against it. It was only when Dicky subjected the Deputy to a long boozy lunch at White’s that he got permission to continue with it. He had to get in quickly because the Deputy will be leaving us before Christmas.’
‘Who will notice?’ I said.
‘Don’t be hard on him,’ said Fiona. ‘He has a sick wife. And he tries to run his law practice as well as his office here.’
