Even her pleading tears could not move her husband. He was in the business of treachery and knew the price that men and women paid for it within his own sphere of activity. He packed some clothes and a couple of sentimental items, then left the house they had shared for one and a half decades. His last act was to hand her the keys.
On the following morning he contacted his solicitor, set the divorce in motion, then went over to the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service-in those days Century House-and put in a report that he knew would get Saunders dismissed from the organization, almost certainly without a pension.
He did not enjoy these tasks, but his deep love for Susan ended at the moment he opened the door and saw, fleetingly, her body entwined with that of a man whom he had, until that second, respected without question.
Oddly, as he reported back for duty, putting his leave off for a few months, he recalled his father once having said to him, "As far as women are concerned, remember one thing: True and all-consuming love can kill. Sometimes it's not worth it." His parents' marriage had been far from ideal, but now he imagined that he knew what his father had been talking about. There was a coarser saying he had heard from junior officers-"The loving you get ain't worth the loving you get." Only, they substituted another word for loving. This last summed up his feelings exactly and with it came the anger. He felt a fool not to have detected his wife sooner. Part of his job, his livelihood and survival, had been to sense the danger signals, to put his finger on people and situations that were not quite right.
He did not realize it at the time, but the anger spawned a desire to take his revenge. Automatically he had wreaked havoc on Saunders's life, but the need for vengeance was now aimed at his soon to be ex-wife. While this requirement festered deep within his subconscious, Benyon got on with his professional life -though his colleagues later commented that Godfrey Benyon seemed to change into a hard and uncompromising man, something his superiors applauded. Benyon, they decided, would go a long way in the service.
They sent him back to Berlin, and in the next six months he crossed into the East on five separate occasions, servicing dead letter drops and making contact with the one agent he ran- usually from afar-highly placed in the typing pool of the KGB facility at Karlshorst.
This agent, known as Brutus, was a twenty-five-year-old young woman, the daughter of a couple of doctors who lived and worked in the West. Her name was Karen Schmidt-"Such an ordinary name," one of his superiors had said when she first offered herself for active work and cooperation with the Secret Intelligence Service.
Karen's parents were medical P4s for the service: psychiatrists knowledgeable in the ways of what were often known as "deep debriefs"-a term that covered a number of things ranging from counseling of agents who had been through traumas in the field to the kind of interrogations that required the use of certain dangerous drugs allowing inquisitors to reach far into the subconscious of a suspect's mind, trawling for and plundering secrets.
The doctors Schmidt were skilled and respected by the service, their records were squeaky clean, and their work had given Karen her entree into the world of secrets. She was educated at a private, highly regarded school and went on to Oxford where she read foreign languages at St. Anthony's College-sometimes referred to as the spook prep school. Her parents tipped off the Foreign Office that she was interested in working in Intelligence, so the contact was made and she took the one-year course at the place they kept in Wiltshire for training possible field officers.
Benyon had looked after her when they sent her over the Wall and he had played her, normally at long distance, ever since. Now, at just around the time his divorce was becoming final, there was a reason to see her face-to-face again. A signal had made it plain that a meeting was essential, so he went over one evening in early June of 1986, and following the elaborate choreography necessary to this kind of thing, they wound up at a safe house not far from the Berliner Ensemble Theater.
His first surprise came when they made the initial contact on the street. He had seen her only once since she went over three years before. At that time they had given her the appearance of a mousy little thing, advising her about everything from a severe hairstyle, the kind of low-heeled shoes she should wear, to the nondescript clothes with which to equip her wardrobe. When she had gone over, Karen was a girl that no man would even look at twice. Now, her whole persona had changed. She was still the same girl, but the mouse had gone, leaving the most beautiful willowy young woman in its place.
She had let her hair grow, smooth, black and soft, with such a sheen that Benyon wanted to reach out and run splayed fingers through it. Her face was fuller and you could see that the brown eyes glittered with humor, while her lips seemed to have become fuller and more enticing, the corners bracketed by little laugh lines. She wore a white dress, full skirted so that Benyon was aware of her thighs and body moving under the thin material. In short, the almost ugly duckling had become the most attractive swan on the block.
His look must have been transparent, for Karen picked up on it immediately. "You've noticed the change." She smiled, showing that one of her front teeth was crooked. "It was inevitable. You know about the promotions over the past couple of years."
"So the Party insists that you become more glamorous as you move up the ladder?"
"You'd be surprised, but yes. Yes, that's about it. I'm a supervisor now, and they expect supervisors to take care of their appearance. That was one of the things I had to see you about." Her voice had altered as well. The English was, of course, perfect, but the voice was more throaty than he remembered it.
They sat across from one another at the little wooden table. Benyon had brought food: bread, cold ham, potato salad, and a bottle of wine, explaining it away at the checkpoint as a picnic that he and his girlfriend were going to eat before the performance at the Berliner Ensemble, who were doing Brecht's Threepenny Opera that night. The girlfriend had been his backup-a young woman called Bridget Ransom, of whom the more caustic would say that a king's ransom could not buy the pathway to Bridget's secret garden. Maybe, but she was an incredibly good field officer with immaculate German and a Silesian accent, plus the ability to become invisible almost at will. On this occasion she watched Benyon's back during the sit-down with Brutus, and he could not have asked for anyone more professional.
So, in that bedraggled little apartment, not a stone's throw from the theater where Bert Brecht had built his fabled ensemble of actors, Benyon, the agent runner, listened to Brutus, his spy. Over the years he had heard similar stories, but mainly from men. How, in the sensitive position in which they worked, an opportunity had presented itself which, if taken, would lead to a mother lode of hard intelligence. The opportunity always came in the form of a man or woman, depending on the sexual preference of the agent.
It was something Benyon had learned to treat and advise on with great care. An agent in the field was often the loneliest of people, constantly tested, tried, and a prey to every kind of temptation. The common wisdom on field agents likened them to hermits, monks or nuns, living out their days in a hostile environment and denied a normal way of life.
Karen Schmidt's problem was a senior KGB officer, one of the main liaisons between the East German Intelligence and security forces and Moscow Center. That this man, Colonel Viktor Desnikoff, had access to deeply hidden secrets was not in doubt. Back in London, Benyon had read his dossier many times. It was part of his job to keep an eye on Soviet and East German intelligence officers-their comings and goings, any particular strengths or weaknesses, their general profiles, and all the other litter of life so often used by an opposing intelligence service. Desnikoff was undoubtedly a prime target, and here was Benyon's own agent telling him that the colonel had invited her out to dinner on several occasions and had now proposed that she should become his mistress with a later view to marriage.