A Perfect Spy

In Berlin, the Firm had agents of influence, agents of disruption, subversion, sabotage and disinformation. We even had one or two who supplied us with intelligence, though these were an underprivileged crowd, kept on more out of a traditional regard than any intrinsic professional worth. We had tunnellers and smugglers, listeners and forgers, trainers and recruiters and talent-spotters and couriers and watchers and seducers, assassins and balloonists, lip-readers and disguise artists. But whatever the Brits had, the Americans had more, and whatever the Americans had, the East Germans had five of it and the Russians ten of it. Pym stood before these marvels like a child let loose in a sweet shop, not knowing what to grab first. And Axel, slipping in and out of the city on any number of false passports, padded softly behind him with his basket. In safe flats and dark restaurants, never the same one twice, we ate quiet meals, exchanged our goods and gazed upon each other with the incredulous contentment that passes between mountaineers when they are standing on the peak. But even then, we never forgot the bigger peak that lay ahead of us as we raised our vodka glasses to each other and whispered, “Next year in America!” across the candlelight.

And the committees, Tom! Berlin was not safe enough to contain them. We assembled in London, in gilded imperial chambers appropriate to players of the world’s game. And such a bold, diverse, brilliantly inventive cross-section of our society’s leaders we were, for these were the new years of England, when the country’s hidden talent would be winkled from its shell and harnessed to the nation’s service. Spies are blinkered! went the cry. Too incestuous. For Berlin we must open the doors to the real world of dons, barristers and journalists. We need bankers and trade unionists and industrialists, chaps who put their money where their mouths are and know what makes the world tick. We need Members of Parliament who can supply a whiff of the hustings and utter stern words about taxpayers’ money!

And what happened to these wise men, Tom, these shrewd no-nonsense outsiders, watchdogs of the secret war? They rushed in where even the spies might have feared to tread. Too long frustrated by the limitations of the overt world, these brilliant, unfettered minds fell overnight in love with every conspiracy, skulduggery and short cut you can imagine.

“Do you know what they’re dreaming up now?” Pym raged, pacing the carpet of the service flat in Lowndes Square which Axel had rented for the duration of an Anglo-American conference on unofficial action.

“Calm yourself, Sir Magnus. Have another drink.”

“Calm myself? When these lunatics are seriously proposing to plug themselves into the Soviet ground control, talk a MiG over American airspace, blow it out of the sky and, if the pilot by any chance survives, offer him the choice of being put on trial for espionage or staging a public defection in front of the microphones? That’s the defence editor of the Guardian newspaper speaking, for Christ’s sake! He’ll start a war. He wants to. It will give him something to report at last. He was backed by a nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a deputy director general of the BBC.”

But Axel’s love of England would not be spoiled by Pym’s prissiness. Through the passenger window of a self-drive Ford from the Firm’s carpool, he gazed at Buckingham Palace and softly clapped his hands when he saw the royal pennant fluttering in its arclight.

“Go back to Berlin, Sir Magnus. One day it will be the Stars and Stripes.”

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