I, Said the Spy

by Derek Lambert

  After that Nathan Marks never escaped from his mentors, the FBI, the OSS and its successor, the CIA. Nor did he wish to: the fortunes of war and its aftermath had made him a multi-millionaire.

  But, while his products equipped the armies of the world, Marks International remained a family business. The major stock-holder and senior vice-president was his daughter, Claire.

  When she was sixteen, ripening into extravagant beauty, he sent her to Paris and London. Then back to New York for instruction in the subtleties and brutalities of big business. By the time she was twenty-three he believed he had developed a protégé capable of holding her own against any male.

  She was beautiful, sophisticated, tough as the boss of the Teamsters’ Union. Not bad for the daughter of a penniless, deformed German-Jewish immigrant.

  But one outstanding problem faced Claire: the problem that faces any woman who possesses a strong character, a good brain and the trappings of wealth: the choice of a man.

  Claire believed that she had found a man as arrogantly accomplished as herself in Michael Jerome, heir to a family oil fortune, reputed to be on paper in the region of 15 billion dollars. Nathan, now in his late fifties, approved of the choice: arms and oil. And if Jerome didn’t meet the requirements he sought, then he could be jettisoned.

  Michael Jerome had one other asset in addition to wealth and apparent business acumen: he was extraordinarily handsome, Dark curly hair, Byronic profile, athlete’s body adorned by Savile Row tailors.

  After the wedding in New York the couple flew to London to a suite in the Savoy overlooking the Thames. There Claire, still a virgin but aching not to be, discovered that Michael Jerome’s dynamism ended at the bedroom door.

  The honeymoon wasn’t a fiasco. They made love many times. But it seemed to Claire that she was always the instigator; that, although he responded, he regarded her passion as somewhat distasteful.

  She became pregnant on the honeymoon, and nine months later a baby boy was still-born. She never saw him and, because this had been Nathan’s wish, she forever wondered if there had been a hunch on the tiny body.

  When she finally surfaced from the grief, there might still have been a chance for the marriage. Until she discovered that Michael’s vaunted business capabilities were a charade. And she knew then that the partnership was over because somewhere there had to be respect.

  She was divorced four years to the day after the marriage.

  There were many other men in Claire’s life, many of them sophisticated, affluent and physically attractive, but they always failed her. She didn’t seek domination from a partner: merely equality. But as she thrust herself into the forefront of the business world, the equality became more elusive.

  By the time Nathan was sixty-five, Claire was in virtual command of an empire that now included copper mines in Zambia, oil in Alaska, a chemical plant in Britain, thousands of acres of prime real estate in South America.

  Claire, in her mid-thirties, was still devastating. Beautiful, powerful, rich. Newspapers and magazines speculated endlessly about her wealth and her lovers. But none of the writers ever suspected her clandestine activities.

  American Intelligence had founded Marks International; throughout the fifties and sixties the company, which had moved its headquarters to Los Angeles, continued to repay the debt, arming and financing CIA operations all over the world. Claire revelled in the atmosphere of intrigue and was able on one occasion to tell an ecstatic CIA director in Washington that she had concluded a deal to sell antifreeze to the Russians who were accustomed to using vodka. Marks International installed a staff of two in an office in Moscow, one of whom was a CIA agent.

  It wasn’t until she was peering into middle-age – and Nathan was an old man to whom the past had become more real than the present – that Claire paused for a stock-taking. Realisable assets of around a billion dollars, houses in the Bahamas, Switzerland and Mexico, penthouses in Manhattan and Los Angeles, apartments in Paris and London, private jet, yacht moored at Antibes ….

  But to her astonishment Claire Jerome discovered that she was discontented. She peered ahead and saw that there was nowhere else to go. Worse, there was no one with whom to share what she had achieved.

  Until she met Pete Anello.

  Now Anello knew most of what there was to know about her. (Nothing about the CIA connection, of course.) But he didn’t reciprocate; she hadn’t really expected him to. Whatever it was that he dreamed about was private property. No trespassers. One day perhaps.

  Claire wondered if she had told him too much about herself. Then she thought: ‘It’s a pity we have to think that way; it shouldn’t matter.’

  For a while she was content and it wasn’t until the evening of the last day of her vacation in the Bahamas that, as a cool breeze came in from the sea, her fear returned.

  They had taken a picnic lunch to a deserted stretch of beach fringed by tamarind trees and, after they had swum and eaten, they had made love on a towel, tasting the salt on each other’s bodies. And the hiss of the waves and the cries of sea-birds had been part of the love-making.

  ‘You know something,’ he said at the wheel of the buggy, driving back to the house, ‘you once told me that all the men you’d known had been weak. Well, I’m just about the weakest goddam article you’re ever likely to meet.’

  ‘I was wrong about them. Well, a lot of them. I just nosed out their weaknesses like a dog searching for truffles. I didn’t stop to observe their strengths, I judged them by one set of rules. They were lucky to escape.’

  ‘Since the Army I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life. Except, perhaps, on boats.’

  He drove the buggy fast and expertly, and the airstream whipped at his dark hair, the sunlight finding a few strands of grey.

  When she didn’t reply he said: ‘So what are you going to do about me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Come on. The Bahamas’ fine. Wall Street, Washington, dinner with the Krupps … no way. Can you see me in the boardroom with my ass hanging out of a pair of jeans?’

  She laughed. ‘Stay here for a while. We’ll work something out.’ Of course he was right; there were shark-fins in the waters ahead.

  But it was her last day. She exerted her will and the shark-fins submerged. She concentrated on how it had been on the beach that afternoon.

  ‘That scar,’ she said. ‘I always meant to ask you. How did you get it?’

  ‘Vietnam.’

  ‘And you don’t want to talk about it ….’

  ‘That’s right, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  But later, during dinner, he did indirectly. Pete Anello, it transpired, was anti-armaments.

  And he chooses our last meal together for at least a month to tell me, she thought, and said: ‘You know, I’ve heard all these arguments a hundred times before. Couldn’t we forget it? Just for tonight?’

  ‘If you wish,’ shrugging and helping himself to the lobster, prawns and scallops glistening in their bed of ice. ‘If you figure it’s not important.’

  She sighed. ‘Okay, let’s get it over. You know which was the most powerful anti-arms lobby in the thirties? The Communists. And why? Because while they moralised about profiteering from guns and bullets Russia was re-arming. If the American arms manufacturers had heeded the lobby, the United States would have been crushed. By the Japs … by the Germans … and then by the Russians if the others had missed out. Arms dealers are accused of fermenting war to line our pockets. Bullshit. That’s just the tired old rationalising of the jealous. It has nothing to do with armaments – just envy of riches. The riches which are distributed to provide jobs for the people who gripe.’

  ‘Not for me,’ Anello said mildly. ‘Nobody’s ever provided work for me in a long time.’

  ‘So the guy whose yacht you skippered wasn’t wealthy?’ He smiled. ‘And you, of course.’

  ‘When I hear these stupid arguments I always quote a certain Englishman named Maurice Ha
nkey. He was giving evidence at an inquiry into the arms trade back in the thirties. And this is what he said:

  ‘“Doctors, pharmaceutical chemists and nurses depend for their profit on ill-health and disease. It would be outrageous to suggest that for that reason they try to encourage epidemic disease or are lukewarm in their promotion of public health.”’

  ‘Maybe,’ Anello said, lifting up his shirt and pointing at the scar, ‘you made the bullet with my name on it.’ He removed the shell from a prawn and chewed the white flesh. ‘Are you into percussion bombs or napalm?’

  ‘Neither. And no, we didn’t make your bullet because we don’t manufacture arms for the enemy,’ reflecting that this wasn’t entirely true.

  ‘How can you be sure? Let’s face it, the British manufactured the rifles with which the Turks shot them in World War One.’ There was a new note to his voice; it was a stranger’s voice and it scared her. ‘Have you ever seen the end product of one of your production lines? Have you ever seen a man cut in half by a burst of machine-gun bullets?’ She had to fight back. She said: ‘Have you ever seen the atrocities perpetrated on innocent people because they didn’t have arms with which to defend themselves?’

  Anello shook his head slowly. ‘No, nor have you. But I have seen a soldier tearing at his guts with his bare hands trying to get a bullet out.’ He cracked a lobster claw. ‘Have you ever considered pulling out of armaments?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Stick with oil and copper and anti-freeze and you’ll still be a billionaire.’

  ‘Are you a Communist, Pete?’

  ‘No way. Just a simple soul. No arms, no wars. It’s got to start somewhere. Why not with you?’

  ‘Forget it,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe I’ll do just that.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  He shrugged.

  The shark-fins re-appeared. She shivered. ‘Why? Why tonight?’

  ‘At this moment someone somewhere is getting killed by a bullet.’

  ‘Let’s have a real ball,’ she said, ‘and talk about hydrogen bombs.’ She pushed her plate away. ‘I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. Are you coming?’

  He seemed to soften. ‘Sure I’m coming.’

  As they passed the front door she noticed an envelope lying on the floor. She picked it up. ‘Odd. Someone must have pushed it under the door.’

  She opened it.

  On a sheet of cheap blue notepaper was a date cut from the page of an old newspaper. October 10th, 1943.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked frowning. She handed it to Anello. ‘Does it mean anything to you?’ ‘Damn right it does.’

  Another nudge of fear.

  ‘It was the day I was born,’ Pete Anello said.

  XI

  Pierre Brossard received the details of the 1980 meeting at the Château Saint-Pierre while he was sipping lemon juice with distaste and eating dry toast on the terrace of a health farm in the Swiss Alps.

  He scanned them with satisfaction. It was to be his last Bilderberg. A sumptuous setting for his last coup which now had the enthusiastic support of Nicolai Vlasov, the head of the KGB in Moscow.

  The sound of cow bells reached him from the green valley below. The sky was blue but the mountain peaks above him were already sprinkled with snow and there was a hint of ice in the air; like the trace of crushed ice lingering in a Martini cocktail, Brossard thought. For Martini he substituted champagne (’61) from a friend’s vineyard near Epernay. And then, by Gallic logic, his thoughts progressed to food—truite au bleu, beurre blanc crȇme.

  His mouth watered. A Frenchman on a diet: it was a contradiction in terms. But necessary if you were nudging sixty, still working an eleven-hour day with a tendency to put on weight around the belly. And a pot belly in a six-foot-tall, lean-fleshed man was more ridiculous than an immense corporation in a man who was uniformly fat.

  His hands strayed beneath his bath robe. Most of the excess fat had been shed. By God he was trim compared with most of his contemporaries. And virile in his own particular way. He wondered if his secretary, Hildegard Metz, realised this. But the question would always be unanswered: not on your own doorstep: one of life’s rules.

  Hildegard Metz came through the French windows onto the terrace. Neat and dark and efficient and, he supposed, attractive if she ever broke loose and tossed away her spectacles. She looked older than twenty-eight, he thought.

  She smiled at him politely and said: ‘A beautiful morning, Monsieur Brossard.’

  ‘Like champagne. I only wish I was drinking some.’

  ‘Only two more days.’

  ‘And then I shall eat like a pig.’

  She sat down at the table. ‘Not you, m’sieur.’

  The remark pleased him: she recognised his self-control, his discerning palate.

  She crossed her legs – good legs – and placed a pad on one knee. ‘Any letters this morning, Monsieur Brossard?’ glancing at the gold watch as thin as a coin on her wrist – an extravagance, Brossard thought. ‘In ten minutes you have to be in the gymnasium. And then the sauna.’

  Brossard sighed. A few other guests were wandering around the lawns, printed with autumn crocuses, trying to forget their hunger by admiring the scenery.

  He said: ‘A few calls Fraulein Metz. Could you telephone Madame Brossard and confirm that I shall be flying back on Thursday.’ He could have called her himself but why compound the tedium of the day? ‘Also call Mayard and see what he proposes to put on the front page on Friday.’

  Of all Brossard’s possessions it was the financial newspaper, published once a week in Paris, that brought him most satisfaction. It was prestigious and informed and its columns exercised great influence on the stock markets.

  Brossard had always been scrupulously honest in his handling of the paper. One contributor who had suggested that a stock was weak, bought heavily when the shares fell and sold immediately they re-attained their rightful price, had been fired.

  The spearhead of the paper was Brossard’s own column, Midas. Followed, feared and respected. Midas could elevate a struggling company to stardom, destroy a giant trying to conceal its crumbling foundations.

  ‘Anything else, m’sieur?’

  ‘See if you can contact Paul Kingdon in London. Tell him I’ll call him at four this afternoon.’

  Brossard’s stomach rumbled. He sighed, ‘Have you eaten breakfast this morning, Fraulein Metz?’

  ‘I won’t tantalise you.’

  ‘An English breakfast perhaps? Eggs and bacon?’

  ‘You’re a masochist, m’sieur. In fact I had croissants with rich Swiss butter and peach confiture and hot chocolate. It was delicious,’ Hildegard Metz said smiling.

  ‘And you’re a little sadist,’ wondering if it could be true. ‘There’s just one more thing,’ as his stomach groaned again, ‘could you acknowledge these details about Bilderberg. There’s the address – The Secretariat, Smidswater I, The Hague.’

  ‘Bilderberg again. They obviously think very highly of you.’

  ‘I am on the committee,’ he reminded her.

  In the gymnasium he pedalled two miles on a bicycle and sculled half a mile on a rowing machine. A male attendant in a white uniform took his pulse and remarked: ‘You are in very good shape – for your age.’ Brossard wished he hadn’t added the qualification; still, the flattery pleased him.

  He adjourned to the sauna where four other men sat stoically enduring the dry heat, towels wrapped round their waists. Two of them were plump – one a banker from West Berlin with almost feminine breasts; the third was scrawny; the fourth, brown and muscular, a film star from Rome fleeing from the temptations of pasta.

  They sat in silence.

  As the heat enveloped him, Brossard lay down on one of the wooden benches and let his thoughts drift back to the last Bilderberg he had attended in Torquay in Devon, England. How did Bilderberg describe itself?

  ‘ … a high-ranking and
flexible international forum in which opposing viewpoints can be brought closer together and mutual understanding furthered.’

  Fine as far as it went.

  But, of course, intrigues weren’t discussed in a forum. They were concocted in ante-rooms, private chambers, penthouses and executive suites.

  You would have to be very gullible, Brossard thought turning onto his stomach, to believe that the elite of the Capitalist world gathered between four walls and did not come to a few arrangements ….

  The film star got up and left. Brossard seemed to remember him having a screen love affair with Sofia Loren. Or was it Gina Lollobrigida?

  This time the venue was only sixty kilometres or so from his house in Paris. He knew the château fairly well, not far from the autoroute to the south but cloistered among woods and fields. The food there was excellent, the wine irreproachable … his stomach made a noise like a drain emptying. But it was too expensive.

  Brossard cooled down in the splash pool, put on his robe and returned to his room, decorated in autumnal colours, to compose his column. This week it would be innocuous – anecdotes and gossip and appetisers for the column the following week – because he had been away from his office for too long to have any hard facts to hand.

  And facts, cold, hard and often sensational, were what the public expected from Midas. Over the years he had built up a reputation for total credibility.

  Which was just as well. You needed such a reputation when in six months time, at the end of the Bilderberg conference, you intended to publish a sensational story that was totally false.

  Half an hour later Brossard broke off for his mid-morning snack – half an apple and a glass of warm water on which a slice of lemon floated.

  He ate the apple, chewing the skin carefully, and nibbled the flesh of the lemon up to the rind. Then he read what he had written on the portable electric typewriter. Bland, very bland. But readable. He switched on the typewriter again and his thin fingers glided over the keys. Half an hour later it was finished; Hildegard could send it to Paris on the health farm’s Telex.