He stood at the podium, erect and composed.
Raub was beside him. ‘Brilliant, Doktor Krause, impressive. Please continue.’
Goldstein murmured, ‘Perhaps they will keep you to front the network news. God and we will miss you.’
The boom of the amplified voice: ‘He despises the politicians whom he regards as responsible for the weakness of the Army. He will work until his last breath to change that weakness into strength…’
The head waiter leaned to speak discreetly into the ear of the judge, Court of Appeal, and made the slightest of gestures towards the door. The judge’s guests in the old timbered dining room of Middle Temple would not have noted the brief movement of his head. It would be wrong for them to be disturbed, and their conversations rippled uninterrupted around the table. There was a man at the door, hovering, a pale, stoat-faced man with a brush moustache, a black overcoat folded over his arm. The judge took a leather-encased notepad from an inner pocket, wrote, ‘Phlegm, you have a visitor – don’t bugger up a good evening, Beakie’, then tore out the page, folded it for the head waiter, and pointed his index finger across the table.
The head waiter circled the table, handed the note to Fleming. The frown settled on his forehead. The glance arrowed on the doorway, found Perkins. Fleming, so politely, apologized to the lady on his right, a tax consultant with no other avenues of conversation, and left the table.
He didn’t have to question the importance of whatever had brought Albert Perkins to Middle Temple. Fleming would have said that nothing in Perkins’s working life involved the trivial.
‘She’s gone, Mr Fleming, good as gold. Of course, I challenged her to produce evidence of murder, and I warned her. The challenge and the warning made it inevitable that she would go – actually she’s there.’
‘As you said, Albert, she would. Do you know where she’ll head for?’
‘Yes, Mr Fleming, I think I have that.’
‘Our friends and allies, they would be privy to the same information?’
‘I doubt it, Mr Fleming. Rostock would only have dealt with the incursion and the death. The follow-up would have been handled from Berlin. I doubt the Hauptman would have been told details of the follow-up. My understanding is that that sort of material is long gone from the Berlin files. I don’t think they’d have that information. They’d certainly want it but not have it.’
They murmured in the doorway.
‘But they are, Albert, friends and allies..
‘Exactly so.’
‘And, Albert, there is a moral obligation to share with valued friends and respected allies..
‘Out of sharing, Mr Fleming, comes the opportunity of barter.’ Fleming mused quietly, ‘All that Iran stuff they’ve gathered.
If we shared, Albert, the Iran stuff bartered for her location, then would we be cutting her off at the knees?’
‘Maybe, and then maybe not.’
‘If we share, if they catch up with her – your Hauptman said on the tape that he would deal with matters himself, yes? – what would be her position?’
‘First they’d warn her – my opinion. If she kept going forward they’d rough her. If she continued going forward and they began to believe themselves threatened, then they would kill her. If it’s their freedom or her life, there’s no choice.’
Fleming looked into Perkins’s eyes. They were the coldest eyes he knew, the eyes of a ferret going into a rabbit’s burrow. ‘If we shared, Albert, as we should with valued friends and respected allies, just at the start, would we condemn her?’
‘Not necessarily. Right now she’s out in front, so we might handicap her, but she can still win… We would be making it harder for her to win, but still possible. You want my assessment of her, Mr Fleming. She is truly incredible. I hammered her, no sleep, no food, no heat, I was about to drop. Not a single word. She said nothing. People pass through our Resistance to Interrogation course who wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes alongside her. Her mental focus, her strength, they are fantastic. But that determination will cause her to ignore warnings and a softening beating. She will go for her evidence, she will threaten them. She’s driven by love for the agent who was killed. She won’t be deflected. She will win or she will be killed. That’s only my assessment.’
‘Go with it, Albert, share it.’
‘What might interest you – her file, the personal one, it tells nothing. Plenty of reports on her work, but inadequate on the personality. Her work is always highly praised, but I don’t know her. The person is locked away, kept from sight. You can read a file, most files, and proffle an individual – not her. She hid, very successfully, behind her work. Private, alone
·.. It makes her so much more interesting, Mr Fleming, don’t you think?’
‘Share it.’
‘So very sorry, Mr Fleming, to have disturbed you.’
Fleming wandered back towards the table. He felt a little sick.
The guests were standing in small knots and talking.
The judge, the host, came to him. They had been at school together, then at the same Oxford college, had played rugby together for Richmond 4th XV, they were godparents to each other’s children. The judge advised the Service on legal matters.
‘You all right, Phlegm?’
‘I’m fine, Beakie, but sometimes I disgust myself.’
‘Want the shoulder for the old weep?’
They were in a corner. Fleming’s hand trembled around the brandy glass pressed on him.
‘Our friends and allies, the Germans, they flick us at every turn. Our Bank, our City, our food, our EU membership, our diplomacy, our American link – every way we turn they seek to fuck us. Now it’s Intelligence. They’re looking for a way in, their usual delicate style, kicking and blundering towards influence. They resent that there, at least, we still punch above our weight.
They’ve some dreadful little creature from the old East German secret police and they’re trailing him round because he’s an alpha-quality source on a particular Russian in whom we have an interest. The Americans are panting because the German source – we cannot match it – is to be paraded before them, which will lead to increased German influence at our expense. I aim to destroy the credibility of that source, but at second hand. I am using a young woman to do my work, a very ordinary young woman, and I am endangering her. Can’t dress it up in fancy words, Beakie. In order to maintain correct relations I am sharing information with our friends and allies which will have the certain effect of hazarding that young woman’s life. Why will she do the job I want done? Love, boy-and-girl stuff. The target killed the boy she loved. I cannot be seen to help her, not when she works against the agenda of friends and allies, so I have to hope that she is resourceful enough on her own to destroy our mutual target.’
Krause said, pleasantly, ‘You had a good journey yesterday, Julius?’
He had discarded his jacket, unbuttoned his collar, loosened his tie. The clothes had been paid for with BfV funds. The organization owned him, dressed him, fed him and put the roof over his family’s heads. Goldstein poured the whisky. Raub studied the script and pencilled minute adjustments on it. Sprawled comfortably in his chair, Krause took the whisky and smiled to Goldstein as if he were a servant.
‘The aircraft did not crash so it could be described as a good journey.’
‘Doktor Raub said yesterday you were in Berlin. In Normannen Strasse? How is it there?’
‘Like any other piece of shitty socialist architecture, but still standing.’
‘I presume you visited the archive.’
‘I did.’
‘And I presume you searched for evidence of a criminal act by myself in violation of human rights.’
‘I did.’
‘And you found nothing… nothing.. nothing.’ He rapped his glass on the table, in emphasis.
He rang the bell for the third time. The bastards had checked that he worked late in the office. He kept his finger on the bell until the light came on, sliced between the drawn curtains of the upper window. First Wilkins, then Greatorex and Protheroe, had telephoned him on the direct line with some damn feeble query about the morning. He heard her coming down the stairs. They’d be asleep now in their homes in Gerrards Cross, Beaconsfield and the Chalfonts.