Bernard Samson: Faith - Bernard Samson: Faith Part 12
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Bernard Samson: Faith Part 12

'I work hard,' she said. 'But I've forgotten so much of my Hungarian. The grammar. My father is helping me.'

'You're living with your parents again?'

'You never wrote,' she said, without making it into an accusation or a reprimand.

'I'm sorry. I tried to write ...'

'Wives come first, Bernard. "Other women" know that. Deep in their hearts they know it.' There was still no bitterness audible in her voice, but she tossed her head, and she pouted for a moment before remembering to smile. 'You went off on that Friday morning and said it was just for the weekend. Back Monday or Tuesday, you said ... And you never came back. I still have suitcases with your clothes and all sorts of things.'

'I wasn't told that they planned to bring Fiona out that weekend. I had to go. They said she'd know it wasn't a trap if I was there.'

'I'm not blaming you, Bernard, I'm really not. It's the job. It's the men running this bloody rotten Department. They treat us all like dirt.'

'But you're all right?' I asked. 'I put money into your account.'

'You were decent enough, Bernard. But they were determined to separate us. First they reneged on their promise to keep me on full pay if I could get a place doing Slavonic Studies at Cambridge. No money, they said. When they saw that you and I were still together, they closed Daddy down.'

'What do you mean?'

'They bullied him about us. They hated you and me living together. You can see why, now that we know Fiona's defection was all a ruse. They knew she was coming back. They bullied my poor father about it.'

'Who did?'

'How can they be such hypocrites? What harm did we do to anyone? We were happy together, weren't we, Bernard?' She looked over the partition to be sure there was no one in earshot.

'Who did?' I said. 'Who knew Fiona was coming back and that it was all a ruse?'

'Daddy won't talk about it.'

'So how do you know?'

'He was happy doing work for the Department until you and I set up home together. Then suddenly he loses the lease on his surgery, and that workshop he had at home is closed down.'

'Why?'

'You don't know the lengths they will go to. And the power they have is awesome. Daddy got a visit from the local Environmental Health Officer or Inspector or something. He said Daddy's workshop contravened building regulations. It was in a residential zone, they said.'

'Didn't your father apply for planning permission when he built that extension?'

'The Department told him not to apply in writing. They didn't want any attention drawn to the way Daddy did secret Departmental work at home, in case the KGB noticed and came prying into it. The Department said: Go ahead and build, and promised to arrange some special permission through the Ministry.'

'It's not a conspiracy. It sounds more like some jumped-up little sod in some office somewhere. Does the D-G know?'

'They came into the surgery and removed everything; from plaster casts to his drills and lathe and tools and all the paperwork. Everything. My father won't pursue it. He took the compensation they offered. But they've ruined his life, Bernard. He's still young and he loved being a dentist.'

'He can start again.'

'No, that's part of the deal. He'll lose his Departmental pension if he works full-time.'

'That couldn't have been because of us living together,' I said. 'It's absurd.'

She looked at me, took my hand and held it. 'Perhaps not, Bernard. Don't blame yourself.'

'Seriously, Gloria. It doesn't make sense.'

'It makes sense, all right, Bernard. Your wife runs this Department. She couldn't have more power if they made her the Director-General. She has only to raise her little finger and everyone is running to fulfil her every wish.'

'Rubbish,' I said, and laughed at such exaggeration. But I could see it might seem that way to poor Gloria.

'It's not rubbish, Bernard. If you were some lowly clerk, or just a nobody like me, you'd see the sort of reverence Fiona gets throughout the whole Department. She's treated like a saint. They weren't going to have some silly little girl like me ruin all their plans. That's why they sent you to California to be with your wife. And as soon as you were there they took the children from me, victimized my father and made sure I was rendered powerless.'

'It's not a conspiracy, Gloria. You've met my father-in-law. You must see what an interfering old idiot he can be. He's got no connection with the Department.'

'You told me he was some kind of blood relation.'

'With Uncle Silas. Yes, a cousin but a very distant one. They are friends but not very friendly. There could be no collusion between them, believe me.'

Absently she fingered the keyboard and called up a directory of codenames. 'I wish I hadn't mentioned it,' she said. 'I wasn't going to tell you.'

'I'm glad you told me. I'll go and see Uncle Silas and tell him what's happened.'

'Don't rock the boat, Bernard. Daddy says it's better to let things remain as they are.'

'I'll ask Uncle Silas to give me his advice, without mentioning you or your father.'

'You'll get yourself into trouble; you'll get me into trouble, and you'll do nothing to help Daddy,' she predicted gloomily. She leaned down and picked up one of her books from the floor and turned to a marked page. 'You'll upset your wife too. She won't like it.'

'I'll go to his house in the country and talk to Uncle Silas,' I said. 'Are you down here every day?'

'Two days or more. I still have a lot to do.'

'And everything's okay otherwise?'

She looked at me for a long time before answering: 'Yes, I'm on a motor-rally team. I'm a navigator. I have a really super driver as my partner. It's fun.'

'Motor rallies? You were always a crazy driver, Gloria.'

'You were always saying that. But I never had a crash, did I?'

'No, I had all the crashes,' I said.

We lingered for a moment, neither of us having anything more to say, and neither knowing how to say goodbye. Finally I blew her a kiss, went to a work-station across the aisle and started digging into the mainframe. From where I was sitting I could see Gloria at work. I suppose I was hoping that she would turn, or find some way of snatching a glance at me. But perhaps she sensed I was watching her, for she never gave a sign that she knew I was there until the moment she packed up her books and papers and left. She waved as she passed me, giving me that same finger-waggling wave that she'd given me on arrival.

'Tomorrow perhaps,' she said.

'Yes, tomorrow.'

There was no way I could pretend to myself or to anyone else that I had forgotten to bring up the question of her visiting the children. It was in the forefront of my mind all the time as I sat at the console. I really tried to think of some way of asking her to stay away from them, but I couldn't do it. Anyone who'd seen her with the children would know that she loved them as much as anyone could. I suppose that is what had persuaded even my insensitive father-in-law that Gloria's visits were good for them.

It was not until Gloria left the Centre that I started my real inquiry. It took me only ten minutes to discover that the computer would not provide me with the information I sought. I booted up and responded to the menu request for program with KAGOB, the KGB data section. I brought up another menu and clicked the mouse on RED LAND OVERSEAS to get the biographies. But when I keyed in VERDI the screen responded with the message: 'All field use cover names now require password for access.'

Damn! There was never a month went past without the data becoming more safeguarded. Soon only the D-G would be permitted to come down here. I tried a couple of the passwords I'd used to get data on previous visits, but the machine was not fooled so easily. I knew VERDI's real name of course, I'd known it all along. But the first lesson I'd learned from my father was that supplying the real identity of a field agent was absolutely verboten. Even if it was an enemy field agent. I remembered VERDI only too well, just as Werner did. My father had arrested him back in the Seventies, but he'd claimed diplomatic immunity and been released within an hour. His family name was Fedosov and his first name Andrey or Aleksey or maybe Aleksandr. When I went back to the first menu and keyed in Fedosov and asked for a 'Global' the machine whirled for a long time and I thought I was going to be lucky, but then it said: 'File withdrawn in reference Transfer dated 1.1.1865.'

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 a as policemen cherish their informants a 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 Russian 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 a that the Department was secretly commanded by Fiona's every wish and whim a 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.'