Automatically, it seemed, he also began to take more care in his appearance. He bought new clothes, became conscious of things like regular haircuts and unscuffed shoes. Occasionally he would stand in front of the mirror in the little apartment he rented in Chelsea, wondering how a young girl could possibly be interested in him outside his job. At forty-three his hair was showing signs of gray at the temples, yet his face, like his body, remained lean and firm. He was six foot one in height and had a strong bone structure. He would age well, so perhaps a girl of Karen's age might just be interested in him from a physical aspect. Yet she could know nothing of him as a man, for agent runners always held back their true personality, like actors playing the role expected of them.
The high-grade intelligence kept coming, but with it also came an undertow of strain, detectable not only by Benyon but also by those who ruled over him. Together they began to take precautions, setting up a quick route, a black hole through which they could get Brutus out should it become necessary.
Benyon knew that, inevitably, it would become necessary. It almost always did, particularly with a high-risk operation like this.
He met her in the following spring and thought she looked tired out, frazzled and jumpy, starting at shadows. Once more they embraced and this time-the first time ever-they kissed, not the air, or lips brushing a cheek, but mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, body to body, so that each felt the other through their clothing.
Finally he pulled away, scorched with desire, faint with need and love. "There's no time." He sounded out of breath.
"My darling, we have to make time." She pulled him to her again and he drew away.
"This is far too dangerous. Listen, I have things to tell you…" and he began to outline her escape route, which she immediately turned down.
"Charles, if I have to get out, I'm not going to be treated like someone about to face the Inquisition." Her cheeks flushed. "This has been bloody difficult. Hell, in fact. If I do have to run, then I want you to run with me and I want to be left alone, with you, in some nice quiet place for a couple of weeks before they start pounding on my memory and forcing me to give them a blow-by-blow and fuck-by-fuck commentary…"
Benyon knew how she felt. He had seen it in others, the fear of an immediate interrogation-sometimes hostile-when they were still under the trauma of battle fatigue.
"It won't be that bad, my dearest." His heart was not really in it and he did not even believe himself. Interrogation of agents just in from the cold-as they now said, though the term had been filched from a novelist-was anything but amusing.
"No. Tell them from me that if the worst happens, I have to spend a couple of weeks with you before I speak to any of them. If they don't like it, they can forget about me coming over at all. I'll stick around and suffer the consequences." She reached up and twined her arms around his neck, pulled him close to her, and kissed him again, fiercely and with a violence that took his breath away.
"Just the two of us," she said. "A couple of weeks in the sun. It isn't much to ask after all I've done. It's my final offer, darling Charles, so get it for me."
In London they did not like it. This was going against all the laws of that jungle which is the world of secrets. When you pull someone out, you get at them while they have it all fresh and straight in their minds. Yet, when Benyon laid out her threatened alternative, they finally caved in-if only because the grade A, genuine diamond information kept coming. What she was still giving them confirmed what they believed about certain aspects of the Soviet military, the political leaders, and their future operational plans.
On the next trip over the Wall, Benyon was able to tell her that it was a done deal. He went through all the important moves, which were tricky and needed careful timing. "Once we get you in the West," he smiled and gave her a long squeeze, "once you're over, the pair of us get on a plane and fly to Bermuda. There'll be minders, of course, but you won't even see them. Two weeks in Bermuda can't be bad."
"Right now, two weeks in Bermuda sounds like heaven." "You're okay to go on at the moment?" he asked, concerned, for she had lost weight and had become more jumpy, while her eyes gave away the truth that she was under even greater strain than ever.
"He may suspect something." She bit her lip. "I don't know. I think I should go on a little longer. The stuff he's giving me…?"
"Yes?"
"Does it still check out? Is it still good?" "The best."
They kissed again before she left and he could feel her body pulsing urgently. Needing him, wanting him there and then.
The signal that she was in trouble came only two weeks later. A burst of what sounded like static, beamed directly into GCHQ. It contained the one word-Overcast.
Immediately a team went into action. Benyon was left out, as it was too dangerous for him to make the trip over the Wall. All he could do was sit and wait in the house they had prepared for Karen's return to the West. Even at this late stage, the people who gave him his orders tried to renege on their agreement. She could do nothing about it, they argued. Once she is in the West we can whisk her out of sight.
Benyon said this was no time to begin playing games with her. "She'll shut up like a clam and you'll never get the full story," he cautioned, knowing that the bureaucratic minds of those at the top of the SIS had to cross all their T's and dot all their I's.
So it was that Karen Schmidt was smuggled out of East Berlin and deposited in the West. Within an hour of her arrival, she was on a commercial flight to Paris, with Benyon watching over her with all the tender and loving care he could muster.
She had brought nothing with her, but two of the young women from the West Berlin Residents' office had been sent on a shopping spree armed with Karen's measurements-which were current as from the last time Benyon had seen her. It was one of the more pleasurable jobs he had been given: a tying of every thread so that she would not come near naked into her new life.
From Paris they flew direct to Bermuda and there, in a pleasant little villa on the outskirts of St. George's (they all felt that Hamilton was too risky), she overcame her fatigue and made love to Benyon in a way that surpassed any of his fantasies.
"Darling Charles," she whispered again and again as she lay quietly in his arms after the loving.
"Not my real name, my dearest girl," he said.
She gave him a slow and quaint smile, which showed her one crooked tooth. "I know, but I don't like the name Godfrey."
He thought nothing of the last remark and they drifted into a golden sleep, wrapped around one another like a pair of children.
In the days following, they became true lovers. Benyon caught only odd glimpses of the watchers assigned to them. He also took three telephone calls from the officer in charge of the team minding them. Apart from that, they took occasional walks down into St. George's, eating twice in a very good restaurant, doing a little touristy shopping and buying food, which they took turns in cooking for one another. For the balance of the time they were lovers and proved all the pleasures. They even made plans for the future, talked seriously about life out of the service and what they could do once they were both released from the bondage of secrecy.