The Garden of Weapons (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Stentor told his men he would only be a few minutes. One other car was parked in front of them. Apart from that, the street remained almost deserted.

  Passing through the doors, Stentor felt in his inside pocket for the clear, plastic-covered, identification which allowed him entry to this small Aladdin’s cave. Here, and in many other hidden places like it, those with the necessary rank, appointment, or position, could buy items ranging from vegetables to Japanese stereo equipment—all unobtainable in ordinary stores.

  Stentor bought four 200 packs of Lucky Strikes, and a flask of Chanel for his wife. He took time over the small transaction, lingering, as though trying to make up his mind. Finally, as the purchases were being loaded into a thick paper sack, he glanced at his gold digital watch—another status symbol. The timing was right, and the only other customer had left. By this afternoon the place would be crowded with women and children, and you might have to wait for up to an hour for service.

  Outside again, he paused, taking the Lucky Strike packet from his pocket, removing the last cigarette, and lighting it as the bodyguard came over to help with the paper sack.

  Crumpling the empty packet in his hand, Stentor set off towards the car. The few people on the street studiously took no notice—particularly those who had spotted the Volga’s number plates, which identified it as an official vehicle.

  As he climbed into the car, Stentor dropped the crumpled packet into the gutter, among the remnants of hard snow which still fingered there. Inside, he delved into the paper sack, tossing two of the packages of cigarettes to the bodyguard and driver. They thanked him almost casually. He was a good boss, but, over the past few years, the driver, at least, had come to know he disliked any effusive gratitude for small gifts such as these.

  Nobody noticed the young man, approaching the building on foot, from the Kremlin end of Granovskaya Street. Almost opposite The Bureau of Passes, the young man hesitated, bending to adjust the zip on his short leather boots.

  When he straightened up, the Lucky Strike packet was safely inside the pocket of his greatcoat. Fifteen minutes later, Stentor’s flimsy ciphered message lay on the desk of a room deep within the British Embassy. The Ambassador, and his main staff, would know nothing about it; but, within the hour, the series of numbers were flashed to a clandestine receiving point in Finland. From there they continued their journey to GCHQ—the Government Communications Headquarters—near Cheltenham. Finally they reached the building near Westminster Bridge. All these journeys through the airwaves were made at high speed, and intermingled with other messages.

  Allowing for the time difference, Stentor’s message was on the Director’s desk, in London, ready for deciphering, at nine o’clock in the morning—Thursday morning.

  Deciphered, Stentor’s message read:

  WARNING POINTER TOWARDS QUIET DOGS/OLD FRIEND JACOB FROM BERLIN GIVEN MEMBERSHIP/SUSPECT OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION/POSSIBLE LINK WITH THE BIG MAN/ STENTOR

  This message, combined with information concerning the death of a man called Gold in a street accident, tipped the scales. For some time, men in secret places of power had prevaricated over making a decision. Now there had to be action, and so it was that Tubby Fincher—ADC to the Director General of the British Secret Intelligence Service—received orders to bring Big Herbie Kruger, the Big Man, back from Warminster.

  3

  IN THE FIRM, THEY always spoke of the house as Warminster; though, to be accurate, it stands—a Georgian pile with some ugly Victorian additions—well back from the road, between the army camp at Knook and the village of Chitterne, some seven miles from the Wiltshire garrison town of Warminster.

  The main house is centred in ten acres of open country, dotted with a seemingly haphazard series of prefabricated huts, and an acre of woodland: the whole surrounded by high walls, studded with invisible electronic sniffers.

  Depending on their sense of nostalgia, or guilt, members of the Firm regard Warminster with either a feeling of warmth, or a shiver of fear. Dreadful things had happened there; as well as good.

  Tubby Fincher stood in the Commandant’s office, his emaciated frame silhouetted against the tall sash window, as he looked out across a stretch of lawn, towards the line of evergreens which hide the brick wall on the road side of the estate.

  From the open door, Tubby appeared—to Herbie Kruger—as a Giacometti figure.

  Fincher turned, smiled and put out a hand to the huge ungainly man as he entered. Searching for the right words, and not finding them, Tubby resorted to some banality about Herbie looking fit and well.

  “The weight comes back easy enough,” Big Herbie growled. “Life may not be as simple.”

  They stood facing each other; both ill at ease, until Herbie took the initiative, carefully lowering himself into a chair.

  “You come to give me the bullet, Tubby?” he asked; the lumpy porridge face set in a deceptively stupid expression, as though he did not care one way or another. It had been almost a year since they last met—in cold and grim circumstances.

  A little over a year before, Big Herbie—one of the Service’s most experienced men—had been granted permission to carry out an operation, codenamed Trepan, to save an old, and valued, network in East Berlin. His brief had been clear—he was not to go over the Wall himself: that was too dangerous to contemplate.

  But Herbie, whose field work had been mainly within the Eastern Bloc, had blatantly disobeyed orders—slipping into East Berlin, settling the problem, and getting himself neatly trapped into the bargain.

  For a good week, Eberhard Lukas Kruger was the prisoner of Jacob Vascovsky. His escape was ingenious and lucky, but left a nasty taste in the mouths of his colleagues. From the day of his return, Herbie had been kept at Warminster. The Firm’s trust in him was sadly uncertain.

  “The bullet?” Herbie repeated. “The sack, and a bag to put it in? That’s what young Tony Worboys told me—it’s an expression, he says; his mother uses it. You get the sack, and a bag to put it in. The bullet. Fired.”

  Tony Worboys had been Big Herbie’s assistant. Five years out of training but still known as young Worboys.

  Tubby held up a hand through which the bones appeared to show clearly like an X-Ray. They were as alike as chalk and cheese—Fincher and Kruger. Young Worboys’ mother would have said that also, Herbie thought. Alike as his last pair of confessors—the ones with the names like a firm of specialist leather workers: Fidge and Morray. Fidge with the warts, big hands and policeman’s feet; Morray like his name, slippery, with a sting in his voice. Neither had been as good as Crawford, the Firm’s old hand, brought out of retirement especially to deal with Herbie Kruger’s case. At the time, Big Herbie had thought he should feel honoured. Crawford was exceptional. Never had there been a confessor to touch him; except, possibly, Skardon. Yet even Skardon had failed to break Philby.

  Tubby Fincher found it difficult to look his former friend in the eyes. They had been close once, but that was over, and the thin senior officer had even fought hard to avoid this final scenario. Trust was a thing of the past.

  “You’re going home, Herbie,” he said quietly.

  “So where’s home?” A shrug of the massive shoulders.

  “The flat’s still waiting for you. St. John’s Wood. Just as you left it. I’ve a car to take you back. Tonight. You’ll have a weekend to settle in, then the DG wants to see you first thing on Monday. Giving you a job.”

  “Cleaning latrines, yes?” Herbie looked at him with vacant, peasant-ignorant eyes.

  What was going on behind the eyes, deep within that agile brain, Tubby wondered. He still felt a little guilty, not trusting the man, once such a close confidant. “Something like that.” He tried to sound cheerful. “Cleaning up a mess anyhow. Mopping up your own vomit, if you want to think of it like that.”

  Herbie remained silent, staring at a patch of carpet between Fincher’s shoes; an act which made the macilent Tubby even more uncomfortable. It was so simple to forget Herbie’s ab
ility. The big man was using technique even now, just by staring at the carpet in silence: the technique of secrecy, intrigue, and misdirection. Herbie was from the old school; from the days when men on the ground, and agents in place, were of greater importance than the evaluation of data, or infra-red pictures taken from intelligence satellites. Nobody should ever underestimate Kruger’s mastery of technique, or his intellect.

  It was because of these things, and the climate within the intelligence community, Tubby presumed, that the Director General had obtained personal clearance from the Prime Minister to bring Kruger back and use him in an active capacity.

  “Tubby … ?” Herbie began, but Fincher did not want to be drawn. He forced his voice to stay neutral, and not betray hostility as he told Kruger to go and pack the few things they allowed him in this place. “We must leave within the hour.”

  Big Herbie gave a small smile, indicating that he realised the boot was on the other foot now—after all the years, the fighting, operations, planning, and arcane action. His hands came up, palms flat, lifting six inches from the knees, then dropping again, with alarming gentleness, as the great head gave one quick nod. “I get ready, Tubby.” At the door he turned back. “You pay, my friend, believe me. In our business you pay in years, or months, or days. You pay in our own coinage—Trust. I’ll mop up my vomit; then, possibly you’ll trust again.”

  Tubby Fincher swung back towards the window, deeply disturbed.

  Tubby sat in the back of the car with Herbie, and considered the change that had overtaken the huge man. Big Herbie was docile, staring out of the window, like a child being taken to an unfamiliar house. Fincher wanted to talk, but could not; just as he would like to banish all thoughts of betrayal from his mind. There was no evidence against the big man—Crawford had said it a dozen times: only that single inexplicable deviation from a lifetime’s professional habit, discipline and caution. Tubby Fincher wondered what went on in the mind of a man who knew he was suspected of treachery: what thoughts would plague him if the suspicions were founded in truth? What anxieties? Or what bewilderment if he was, as the Director General believed, clean and free of guilt?

  Big Herbie had no wish to talk with Tubby Fincher. There was little desire to speak with any of them. He knew the suspicions, and he was conscious that they were unlikely to go away. Now he was simply puzzled by this new, and unexpected, move—taking him from the institutionalised life of Warminster, back to some kind of job which could only be another test, ‘mopping up his own vomit’: a jab at his loyalty.

  As he had done in the field for all those years, Herbie started to use his strongest mental weapon. He watched the road, fields, villages and copses rolling past, allowing his mind to play the music he knew so well. It was an escape, a method of retreat, and of putting the mind either in neutral, or setting a task for the subconscious—a problem that would finally emerge solved.

  The music in his mind was Mahler’s Second Symphony—‘The Resurrection’—for he knew the works of Mahler by heart, and had no need of orchestra, recording, or tape, to listen when he needed to use the facility.

  Crawford had understood his love for the composer. One of the other confessors—was it Morray?—had scoffed. An oaf, neither comprehending Herbie’s devotion to the composer, nor the works themselves. Pretentious, the boor had called them, signalling by one word that he had no understanding of either Herbie’s work, or Mahler’s stature.

  But Crawford was astute: a tweedy man who smelled of pipe tobacco, and some shaving lotion which Herbie could not identify. There was nothing of the bully, or inquisitor, about Crawford, who had put even Big Herbie—no stranger to the methods of interrogation—off guard.

  Crawford had gone, first, not for the horrors—the recent happenings and folly which had brought Herbie Kruger to Warminster—but back to the beginning: to childhood, and the trail of secret life which the large German had followed since his teens. It was as though Crawford realised Herbie Kruger was still in shock, drowned in night sweats and dreams of what had happened—the fact of love, the anxiety and sense of responsibility—those driving forces that had led him to the sin of disobedience, murder, deceit. No, he would never be free again; but in this profession you were not free, from the moment it embraced you. Freedom was another land, a different time. Possibly you could touch it for a moment in this life—but freedom was not the easy word of politicians.

  Having just come back from behind the Berlin Wall—when facing Crawford—it had been simple for Herbie to talk about the past: of life in Berlin in the late 1930s; his father and mother; his father’s death as a fighter pilot; and the young Herbie’s growing distaste for the regime, for the Party, and the Führer. Then the hell of Berlin as the Russians drew near; the death of his mother; his own flight into the arms of the Americans, and the strange life that was to become his profession.

  The work, as a lad of fourteen, undercover in the DP Camps of Europe, winkling out Nazis posing as refugees; then the change of pace when, in spite of pleas from his case officer, the American service refused him, rejecting all thoughts of taking Herbie into the fold of what was eventually to become the CIA. Yet, when one door closed, another opened—to the British, who saw his potential, and the great use to which they could put this mountain of a young man, who had an ideal deceptive air of stupidity. So, through those years when Big Herbie Kruger had become a legend in the British Service as an agent runner in the Eastern Zone, where his networks built him a reputation which had lasted until the previous year.

  Openly, he had spoken to Crawford of the secret battle, during those Cold War years: the feud with the then rising KGB officer called Vascovsky; and the river of gossip, hard fact, and superlative intelligence provided by his people in the East. Then the forming of that small and secret network, after the building of the Berlin Wall; and the final crash, when Herbie had seen his agents blown, killed, turned, and made suddenly invisible by Russian magic.

  It became a passionate, vital, even emotionally gripping, story. Crawford had listened as one captivated by what seemed, in retrospect, and in the telling, an adventure; yet was, at the time, a terrifying period, interspersed with long dull interludes: and a final capitulation, when Herbie Kruger got out by the skin of his teeth, leaving only a handful of watchers still untouched by Vascovsky.

  He told Crawford of the following years; of his work in Bonn: another blown cover, and the instructions that he was never to work in the field again. Then of the new cover—as a burnt-out case in London, with an office and facilities in the Whitehall Annexe, away from the tall, concrete, steel and glass building near Westminster Bridge which is the Firm’s headquarters.

  There Herbie spent his days, ostensibly involved in paperwork and vetting. In reality he had become one of the most knowledgeable Intelligence mandarins, with a special understanding of—and responsibility for—East Germany.

  From the quiet, neat office in the Annexe, Big Herbie enhanced his already brimming reputation—dealing with daily problems affecting the East, and slowly building a new servicing machinery for the few men and women on the ground in East Berlin. Because of this network; because of his old alliances; because of his reputation, and past success, the Director General had given permission for Operation Trepan—the job that was to cause Big Herbie’s fall from grace.

  So it was that Crawford finally led Herbie through his life, to those few days of horror, when the adroit Vascovsky had him close mew’d up on the wrong side of the Wall. Nightmare time.

  Sitting next to Tubby, now, in the back of the car speeding towards London, Herbie felt the same old swell of depression, aware of the one constant—that his life’s work, his reputation and loyalty, had been shattered into fragments through one act of folly.

  Slowly Herbie turned his head, conscious of Tubby Fincher’s eyes moving away from him. Not only his old enemies were hiding in the dark, but his old friends also.

  Tubby Fincher still wondered how it was for Herbie; though not a particle of h
is own senses felt compassion. The Director General could possibly allow the benefit of the doubt, but Fincher was unable to give way as easily. What had once shown the smallest chink remained unsafe for all time. He heard Big Herbie give a small sigh, and thought that it was all very well for Kruger to feel strain. Tubby Fincher still had a long session ahead, once Herbie was safely installed, back in the St. John’s Wood flat. The long session would, in the end, have a final effect on Kruger.

  They turned into the road Herbie knew so well. Yet now, he could hardly recognise it. Like a man returning to a childhood haunt, the street and buildings seemed smaller and more cramped. The year at Warminster had accustomed him to space.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1980 by John Gardner

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4804-0614-8

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  THE HERBIE KRUGER NOVELS

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