Spy Sinker Read online

  Spy Sinker

  Len Deighton

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Cover designer’s note

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  About the Author

  By Len Deighton

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cover designer’s note

  The title of the third book in this middle trilogy, Spy Sinker, conjures an array of interesting possibilities for the designer when attempting to capture it. For those readers who have been following the adventures of Bernard Samson thus far, I am sure they could venture a number of scenarios into which Bernard could be said to be sinking – his relationship with Fiona, Gloria, his growing isolation among his colleagues in the shadowy and labyrinthine world of his work, even his relationship with himself. All of which were considered to some degree or another, but in the end I took the design in a slightly different direction. For me, the mousetrap seemed to perfectly symbolize the idea of subjugating one’s adversary, which in this instance would be employed by the KGB to ‘sink’ their antagonist, Bernard Samson.

  The back cover’s vignette is of a Russian nesting doll, or matryoshka, depicting a bemedalled Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet General Secretary. I purchased the set of dolls on Arbat Street, Moscow in exchange for two packets of Marlborough cigarettes. The doll’s content reveals that this KGB agent wears red lipstick from Boots the Chemist…!

  At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

  Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

  Introduction

  Even as a child I was a dedicated reader. A fugitive from my grammar school, I spent my time in libraries reading everything within reach. Much of what I read was beyond my intellectual ability and much of it still is. But when later in life I went back to some of those books I found new pleasure. I enjoyed the work of those writers who were able to provide a gripping story for readers who enjoyed narrative above all. But I was able to see a complexity of interaction and meanings that I had not bothered with when I was younger. When I became a writer this complexity seemed to be something to aim for. How did characters change? Most importantly: how much does each character know at each stage of the story? How much, and how soon should the reader be told of the story. What should be revealed, and when? I liked the idea that, as well as being a story, every book should offer fresh and unexpected ideas, and ask provocative personal questions that the reader will enjoy answering.

  So I planned the Bernard Samson books like a row of terraced houses. Each book is a house. Each book is complete, and can be visited without a visit to the other books. Walk through the rooms on the ground floor and enjoy the story-driven narrative. Walk through the ground floor rooms of all nine houses and find that they connect. But upstairs in each house there are rooms to search and, for those who want an extended tour, even attics to explore.

  But Sinker is different to all the other houses. Sinker provides access to the roofs. Sinker tells the reader things that remain secret to some of the characters, even to Bernard Samson. For the first time the reader gets a chance to confirm suspicions or eliminate them. Events seen through Bernard’s eyes in other books are altered and rectified. Some readers tell me that it is best to read Sinker first because it provides a valuable structure for the other books. That may be true but my overall planning did not intend it as a preliminary key to the other books.

  The decisive factor in writing a book is not the planning (although that is a vital second necessity) it is self criticism. The writer is the best person to decide when a typescript is complete and measure its success or failure. This is the worry a writer carries day and night while the keys are tapped, copy-printers operated and countless pages tossed into the waste bin. And when the book is published a writer sees why the result was not good enough. It never is. For that dissatisfaction, and only that, will provide the energy and determination that will make the next book better.

  So what does the writer bring to the as-yet unwritten story? A pitiless examination of human nature? A vengeful wrath? I don’t think so. I feel a responsibility towards my fictional family and prefer to show a respect and a benevolent understanding towards every one of them. Perhaps you are saying that the characters in the Bernard Samson books are not immune from caustic comment and patronizing description and cite Dicky Cruyer as an example of such cruelty. Then I would have to remind you that the books are mostly written in the first person of Bernard. We share Bernard’s world.

  The story starts again with Sinker. We go far back in time; Bernard is younger and physically and mentally strong. Although the basic style remains the same, Sinker is a book written in a different format; that of third-person narrative. It takes a longer, broader view. The other books take place inside Bernard’s head but Sinker provides an overall look at the story to be told. And Bernard’s sardonic view of the world is replaced by the more moderate voice of the author. His caustic observations have no outlet in this version of his life. Instead Bernard is scrutinized with the same Godlike and superior impartiality that he customarily judges others.

  Sinker is Fiona’s book. Fiona’s life and work is cocooned by several layers of secrets. Sinker opens that cocoon and so she inevitably dominates the story. Here is a new Fiona, very human in some ways and yet coldly dispassionate in her work. By the time Sinker was published I was receiving quite a lot of reaction from readers. My memory is that while women readers were sympathetic to the multiple dilemmas – in love, family and work – faced by Fiona, men readers were harsher in their judgments and repeatedly told me how much they loved the vivacity of Gloria. Does Gloria upstage everyone? You are the only one who can say.

  Another question in my mail was about the role of the secret agent in the modern world. In my non-fiction war history, Blood Tears and Folly, I have written about the part played by the Enigma codes in the history of World War Two. Hasn’t Bernard been made redundant by technology? In fact: no. An old friend of mine, the late Constantine Fitzgibbon, who worked at Bletchley Park and handled Ultra traffic, made this comment about ‘human intelligence’:

  ‘With the existence of satellites, together with sophisticated cipher-breaking, deception has become almost impossible. Even strategic deception…Wisdom may be invoked, but it remains a minor element in a highly complex, essentially futile, equation.’ (Constantine Fitzgibbon, Secret Intelligence in the 20th Century Hart Davis, MacGibbon, London 1965.)

  As the Cold War grew violent, and Bernard Samson was working across the German divide, the emphasis had returned to ‘humint’. The sites of Russian military formations, the state of their equipment and the morale of their soldiers were what the men in London and Washington wanted to know. What was in the enemy’s mind had become more important than what was in the enemy’s signals traffic. This was what made the Berlin station, and men such as Bernard, so important to the careers of
the desk-men and high-ups.

  Len Deighton, 2010

  1

  England. September 1977.

  ‘Bret Rensselaer, you are a ruthless bastard.’ It was his wife’s voice. She spoke softly but with considerable force, as if it was a conclusion arrived at after long and difficult reasoning.

  Bret half opened his eyes. He was in that hedonistic drowsy half sleep that makes awakening so irksome. But Bret Rensselaer was not a hedonist, he was a puritan; he saw himself as a direct descendant of those God-fearing, unyielding nonconformists who had colonized New England. He opened his eyes. ‘What was that?’ He looked at the bedside clock.

  It was very early still. The room was flooded with sunlight coloured deep yellow by the holland blinds. He could see his wife sitting up in bed, one hand clutching her knee and the other holding a cigarette. She wasn’t looking at him. It was as if she didn’t know he was there beside her. Staring into the distance she puffed at the cigarette, not letting it go far from her mouth, holding it ready even as she exhaled. The curls of drifting smoke were yellow like the ceiling, and like his wife’s face.

  ‘You’re utterly cold-blooded,’ she said. ‘You’re in the right job.’ She hadn’t looked down to see whether he was awake. She didn’t care. She was saying the things she was determined to say, things she’d thought a lot about, but never dared say before. Whether her husband heard her or not seemed unimportant.

  Without a word of reply, he pushed back the bedclothes and got out of bed. It was not a violent movement. He did it gently so as not to disturb her. She turned her head to watch him go across the carpet. Naked he looked thin, if not to say skinny – that was why he looked so elegant in his carefully cut suits. She wished she was skinny too.

  Bret went into the bathroom, drew back the curtains and opened the window. It was a glorious autumnal morning. The sunlit trees made long shadows across the gold-tipped grass. He’d not seen the flower-beds so crowded with blooms. At the end of his garden, where the fidgeting boughs of weeping willows fingered the water, the slow-moving river looked almost blue. Two rowing boats tied up at the pier bobbed gently up and down amid a flotilla of dead leaves. He loved this house.

  Since the eighteenth century, many wealthy Londoners have favoured such upstream Thameside houses. With grounds that reach the water’s edge they are hidden behind anonymous brick walls all the way from Chiswick to Reading. They come in all shapes, sizes and styles from palatial mansions in the Venetian manner to modest three-bedroom residences like this one.

  Bret Rensselaer breathed deeply ten times, the way he did before doing his exercises. The view of the garden had reassured him. It always did. He had not always been an Anglophile but once he’d arrived in this bewitching land, he knew there was no escape from the obsessive love he had for everything connected with it. The river that ran at the foot of his garden was not an ordinary little stream; it was the Thames! The Thames with its associations of old London bridge, Westminster Palace, the Tower, and of course Shakespeare’s Globe. Still, after living here for years, he could hardly believe his good fortune. He wished his American wife could share his pleasure but she said England was ‘backward’ and could only see the bad side of living here.

  He stared at himself in the mirror as he combed his hair. He had the same jutting chin and blond hair that his mother had passed on to him and his brother. The same good health too, and that was a priceless legacy. He put on his red silk dressing gown. Through the bathroom door he heard a movement and a clink of glass, and knew it was his wife taking a drink of bottled water. She didn’t sleep well. He’d grown used to her chronic insomnia. He was no longer surprised to wake in the night and find her drinking water, smoking a cigarette or reading a chapter of one of her romantic novels.

  When he returned to the bedroom she was still there: sitting cross-legged on the bed, her silk nightdress disarranged to expose her thighs, and its lacy shoulder trimming making a ruff behind her head. Her skin was pale – she avoided the sun – her figure full but not overweight, and her hair tousled. She felt him examining her and she raised her eyes to glare at him. In the past such a pose, that fierce look on her face, and a cigarette in her mouth, had aroused him. Perhaps it was a shameless wanton that he had hoped to discover. If so his hopes had soon been dashed.

  He stepped into the alcove that he used as a dressing room and slid open the mirrored wardrobe door to select a suit from the two dozen hanging there, each one in its tissue paper and plastic bag as it had arrived from the cleaners.

  ‘You have no feelings!’ she said.

  ‘Don’t, Nikki,’ he said. Her name was Nicola. She didn’t like being called Nikki but it was too late now to tell him so.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You send men out to die as if you were sending out junk mail. You are heartless. I never loved you; no one could.’

  What nonsense she spoke. Bret Rensselaer’s position at SIS was Deputy Controller of European Economics. Yet it was a shrewd guess, there were times when he had to give the final okay on dangerous jobs. And when those tough decisions were to be made Bret did not shy from making them. ‘You left it a darn long time before telling me,’ he said reasonably, while hanging a lightweight wool and mohair suit near the light of the window and attaching the braces to the trousers. He screwed up the blue tissue wrapping and tossed it into the linen basket. Then he selected shirt and underclothes. He was worried. In this quarrelsome mood Nikki might blurt out some melodramatic yarn of that kind to the first stranger she came across. She hadn’t done such a thing before but he’d never known her in this frame of mind before.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it lately,’ she replied. ‘Thinking about it a lot.’

  ‘And did this thought process of yours begin before or after last Wednesday’s lunch?’

  She looked at him coolly and blew smoke before saying, ‘Joppi has nothing to do with it. Do you think I would discuss you with Joppi?’

  ‘You have before.’ The way she referred to that Bavarian four-flusher by that silly diminutive name made him mad. No matter that just about everyone else did the same.

  ‘That was different. That was years ago. You ran out on me.’

  ‘Joppi is a jerk,’ said Bret and was angry with himself for betraying his feelings. He looked at her and knew, not for the first time, murderous anger. He could have strangled her without a remnant of remorse. No matter: he would have the last laugh.

  ‘Joppi is a real live prince,’ she said provocatively.

  ‘Princes are ten a penny in Bavaria.’

  ‘And you are jealous of him,’ she said, and didn’t bother to conceal her pleasure at the idea of it.

  ‘For making a play for my wife?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Joppi has a wife already.’

  ‘One a day, from what I hear.’

  ‘You can be very childish sometimes, Bret.’

  He didn’t respond except to look at her with fierce resentment. He deplored the way that Americans like his wife revered these two-bit European aristocrats. They’d met Joppi at Ascot the previous June. Joppi had a horse running in the Coronation Stakes and was there with a big party of German friends. Subsequently he’d invited the Rensselaers for a weekend at a house he’d leased near Paris. They had stayed with him there but Bret had not enjoyed it. He’d watched the unctuous Joppi looking at Nikki in a way that Bret did not like men to look at his wife. And Nikki had not even noticed it: or so she said when Bret complained of it afterwards. Now Joppi had invited Nikki to lunch without going through the formality of inviting Bret along. It made Bret sizzle.

  ‘Prince Joppi,’ said Bret with just enough emphasis upon the first word to show his contempt, ‘is a two-bit racketeer.’

  ‘Have you had him investigated?’

  ‘I ran him through the computer,’ he said. ‘He’s into all kinds of crooked deals. That’s why we’re going to stay clear of him.’

  ‘I don’t work for your goddamned secret intelligence outfit,’ she sai
d. ‘Just in case you forgot, I’m a free citizen, and I choose my own friends and I say anything I want to say to them.’

  He knew that she was trying to provoke him but still he wondered if he should phone the night duty officer. He’d have a phone contact for Internal Security. But Bret didn’t relish the idea of describing the nuances of his married life to some young subordinate who would write it down and put it on file somewhere.

  He went and ran the bath: both taps fully on gave him the temperature he preferred. He squirted bath oil into the rushing water and it foamed furiously. While the bath was filling he returned to Nikki. Under the circumstances, reasoning with her seemed the wiser course. ‘Have I done something?’ he asked with studied mildness. He sat down on the bed.

  ‘Oh, no!’ said his wife sarcastically. ‘Not you.’ She could hear the water beating against the bath with a roar like thunder.

  She was tense, her arms clamped round her knees, the cigarette forgotten for a moment. He looked at her, trying to see something in her face that would give him a hint about the origin of her anger. Failing to see anything that enlightened him he said, ‘Then what…?’ And then more briskly but with a conciliatory tone, ‘For goodness’ sake, Nikki. I have to go to the office.’

  ‘I have to go to the office.’ She attempted to mimic the Englishness that he’d acquired since living here. She was not a good mimic and her twanging accent, that had so intrigued him when they first met, was still strong. How foolish he’d been to hope that eventually she would embrace England and everything English as lovingly as he had. ‘That’s all that’s important to you, isn’t it? Never mind me. Never mind if I go stir-crazy in this Godforsaken dump.’ She tossed her head to throw her hair back but when it fell forward again she raked her fingers through it to get it from her face.

  He sat at the end of the bed smiling at her and said, ‘Now, now, Nikki, darling. Just tell me what’s wrong.’