The Intercom Conspiracy (24 page)

It is virtually certain that, during the week following the share transfer, the counterintelligence investigators did apply for and obtain such an order; and it is no less certain that Dr Schwob told the investigators the name of the purchaser of the
Intercom
shares.

Who was that purchaser?

Someone covering for a foreign intelligence service, undoubtedly; but for which service? And what type of cover did it employ?

Dr Schwob’s lips are again sealed, of course, but it is possible to draw some conclusions. No banker of Dr. Schwob’s substance and reputation would act for a client in a negotiation of that kind unless he knew the client well and valued his normal business. Nor would he act for a client known to have connections with a foreign intelligence service. He must, therefore, have believed that there were valid commercial reasons for his client’s costly determination to liquidate
Intercom
. Only a corporate client in the same line of business as Bloch’s imaginary French and West German associates could have pretended convincingly to have such reasons. The case for concluding that a big company was used as cover for the operation is reinforced by the remark about ‘prudence’ made by the banker when Bloch’s price was made known to him. There is the hint of a threat in it. Men like Dr Schwob do not threaten violence; however, they have been known to warn the ambitious against becoming too greedy and to remind adventurers that powerful corporations have the resources with which to punish bad faith. The instruction, given to Dr Bruchner, to secure the
Intercom
mailing list and Addressograph plates shows the kind of bad faith Dr Schwob’s client had in mind. When
Intercom
died it was to stay dead. There was to be no rebirth under another name.

There are several Swiss-based corporations, owned predominantly
by non-Swiss shareholders, with important arms and defence contracts. Some have their primary connections with NATO countries, but others do business (mainly in machine tools and chemicals) with the Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania and Hungary. Any one of them might have been used as the cover. The refusal of Swiss counterintelligence to give out any information on this subject was severely condemned in the left-wing West German press.

There has also been some criticism of the Swiss in NATO command circles. It has been said that, if the investigators had moved more energetically, the whole
Intercom
transaction could have been stopped and the true identity of Arnold Bloch established. Theodore Carter was first interrogated by counterintelligence on Tuesday, December 20, and arrested on the Wednesday. The
Intercom
office was searched the same day. Why, the critics ask, was Dr Bruchner not told at once that
Intercom
was under investigation? He was at that time in touch with Bloch by mail and telegraph through the Brussels
poste restante
address. Why was that address not discovered earlier and given to the Belgian authorities in time for them to identify the user of it?

The complaint is as ill-informed as it is unfair. It must be remembered that what counterintelligence were investigating was the suspected violation on Swiss territory of a Swiss law designed to protect Swiss neutrality. Their primary concern was with Carter and with those elusive persons whom he accused of harassing him. The scene of the action was Geneva. Bloch was outside their jurisdiction. Drs Schwob and Bruchner were doing nothing illegal, and no court would have stopped the share transfer from taking place. Carter had the Brussels address, it is true, but in the confusion he completely forgot about it.

On the night when he was attacked in his office, he had stuffed the telegram from Dr Bruchner, the telegram giving him the address, into his overcoat pocket. A few minutes later he had been sick and in the process soiled the coat. In the hospital, on Monday, his clothes were returned to him so that he could leave; but as soon as he got back to his apartment his daughter sent
both his suit and the overcoat to the cleaners. The telegram went with the overcoat and was returned with it on Friday. Miss Carter immediately showed it to the investigators; but by that time it was useless. By then, Bloch had dissolved into thin air and the consortium’s two million francs were on their way to Lebanon.

Admittedly, Colonel Jost and Colonel Brand were fortunate. If Carter had transferred the telegrams from his overcoat pocket to his Bloch file, things might have happened differently – but only a little. As we shall see, Jost and Brand had planned with great care and ingenuity. After Wednesday, December 21, the day the two million went into Dr Bruchner’s escrow account, they ran no risk at all of failure. Their Christmas present was safe beneath the tree.

Who, then, was Santa Claus.

There are four prime suspects.

FROM THEODORE CARTER

At that point Latimer’s manuscript ends
.

According to Nicole Deladoey, he worked from notes made on cards which he kept in a small box. Presumably the names of the suspect companies were there. However, during the investigation following his disappearance the cards were all removed from his hotel room. They, too, have disappeared
.

Intercom was silenced
.

Charles Latimer was silenced
.

Those who silenced them are themselves now mute
.

Mine is the only voice left
.

1

The last person known for certain to have seen Charles Latimer alive was the Avis counter clerk at the airport to whom he delivered the key of his rented car. The time was just before noon.

A French passport inspector at the nearby frontier post on the road to Ferney-Voltaire reported seeing an elderly man answering Latimer’s description. He had been travelling in a car with two other men, and the time had been about 12.30 p.m. However, the inspector could not be sure of the day. He had remembered the man, who had been carrying a United Kingdom passport, chiefly because he had been wearing very dark sunglasses. The inspector had asked the man to remove the glasses so that he could compare the photograph in the passport with the face of its holder. He had no special recollection of the other two men.

It was established that this particular inspector was unusually fussy about sunglasses and frequently asked travellers to remove them. His evidence was dismissed in the end as inconclusive; but it tended to confirm the cantonal police in their already well-founded belief that Latimer had left Switzerland alive and well, and of his own free will. Thereafter, their interest in his subsequent fate could only be academic; and, in the complete absence of further evidence of any kind about his movements after May 31, public interest also faded. When there are no developments to report, unsolved mysteries rarely stay long in the news.

Valerie said at one point that I admired and envied Latimer. I did indeed admire his work; it has given me many hours of
pleasure. Perhaps I envied him, too; I certainly wish that I had known him better. I still find it hard to think of him as dead. Of the manner of his death I try not to think at all. My great regret is that, during the period immediately prior to his disappearance, our relations, which earlier had been more or less friendly, had become soured. My refusal to tell him about the security investigation had annoyed him, and I in turn had been piqued by his attempts to pump Valerie on the subject. She and Dr Loriol dined with him once or twice; but, although I too had been invited, I didn’t go.

It wasn’t only pique that kept me away, though he probably thought it was. I was at the time beginning to build up my translation bureau. Using the apartment as an office with Nicole Deladoey as a part-time secretary had been all right at the beginning, but as the work began to grow it became necessary to make other arrangements. Nicole’s going to work for Latimer precipitated the move. I hired a full-time girl to replace her and installed a mimeo machine. The people living in the apartment below soon complained about the noise, so a proper office became essential. I hadn’t much time to spare for Latimer during those weeks.

The news of his disappearance disrupted everything. In spite of the cover-up job done by the security people, Latimer’s connection with the
Intercom
affair and the fact that he had been at work on a book about it couldn’t be hushed up. Paragraphs mentioning the forthcoming book had already appeared in American and British publishing journals.

We shall hear more about those paragraphs later. Almost certainly one or another of them triggered the disappearance. First, though, I must explain my own position.

The immediate effect on me of the disappearance was that for a few days I became news again. With no solid leads to go on, the reporters naturally dug around for some sort of angle on the story, and I was it. That was not only bad for my new business, it also brought me once again to the attention of the bogeymen and the police. But I had learned my lesson. I was extremely careful what I said, and mostly I said nothing. As I had hoped,
the reporters became bored with me and it wasn’t long before the police decided that I could be of no help to them in their efforts to trace Latimer. Nicole Deladoey knew, of course, that Latimer had been sending me a carbon of the first draft manuscript, chapter by chapter, for comment; but, even if it had occurred to her to mention the fact to the police, I doubt if she could have persuaded herself to soil her lips with my name. By the time I heard from the publishers about the revised first draft in her possession, I was, as far as the police were concerned, of no interest as a source of further information.

So, when I got hold of the revised draft and began to read between the lines I was able to keep what I saw there to myself.

I use the phrase ‘read between the lines’ in a loose sense. In fact, it was the changes Latimer had made in his first draft that enabled me to get at the truth. Two of those changes were of major importance.

Chapter One, which had originally consisted of an exchange of letters between us, had been rewritten as a ‘narrative reconstruction’ with some passages from the letters quoted to give the effect of dialogue. However, in one of those passages there was a significant deletion. In a letter to me he had written, ‘Through a friend
in the country where I spend the autumn of my days
I became acquainted with the man I am calling “Colonel Jost” in the book.’

The words that I have here italicised were deleted for the second draft.

Why?

His literary conscience could have been troubling him, of course. ‘The autumn of my days’ is a pretty dreadful euphemism, and, although he had a weakness for mandarin adornment, he wasn’t that dreadful a writer. But if the deletion had been decided upon for reasons of taste, why had he not replaced the euphemism with the information it had partly concealed? No reference to his age, coy or otherwise, had been in the least necessary. Why had he not said, ‘Through a friend in Majorca I became acquainted …’ and so on?

The answer must be, I decided, that Colonel Jost was now living in Majorca and that Latimer had seen that even an oblique reference to the place in that passage would have given the game away.

The other deletion that especially interested me was more substantial. I had given him a detailed account of the meeting I had had in the
Intercom
offices with the man calling himself Werner Siepen. I had suggested that the man was really Colonel Jost and had carefully described him to Latimer. He had agreed that my description fitted the Colonel Jost he knew.

The whole of my account of the meeting and all later references to it had been cut out. And not just crossed out; eight pages of the typescript had actually been removed. Bridge sentences had been pencilled in on the pages preceding and following the cut.

My reactions to this cut were mixed. I was annoyed at first. I thought that he had cut those pages because they made him look less well informed than he had claimed to be. Then annoyance gave way to relief. For about half a minute I felt quite grateful to Latimer. He had seen, and I hadn’t, that anyone known to be able to identify Colonel Jost might have a thin time with the bogeymen when the book was published.

That was the moment when my head began to clear, when I began to re-examine the whole picture that had been presented to me.

It looked, on the face of it, as if Latimer had made that cut to protect me; but how had he proposed to protect himself? By disappearing and leaving his book unfinished? Clearly not. How then?

As a distinguished scholar and a well-known writer he was probably in a position to cock a snook at the spooks and bogeymen. Moreover, he lived on a Spanish island, and Spain is not a member of NATO. Any revelations he might have had to make about the nominal purchaser of
Intercom
would no doubt have been answered with a bland denial, and any speculation about the intelligence agency which had financed the purchase would have been coldly ignored. Providing that he didn’t make a wrong
guess about the purchasing company and get sued for libel, he had nothing much to fear from those quarters.

With Jost and Brand, however, things would be very different. If they were identified they would be exposed in their own countries as traitors and in their country or countries of refuge as politically undesirable crooks. The consequences would be at best highly unpleasant. Latimer and his book represented an appalling danger to them. He had made no attempt to conceal the fact that he could identify Jost. It was more than likely, too, that he knew Jost’s true nationality and probably Brand’s as well. No doubt he had written his first narrative reconstruction in the belief that he had made it useless as an aid to positive identification. Most of the little circumstantial touches he had put in – for example, the casual mention of the fact that Jost came from a country with a coastline exposed to North Sea gales – were clearly red herrings. As defences against professional investigatory techniques, however, such story-teller’s tricks would be hopelessly inadequate. There are only fifteen nation members of NATO and only eight of them were occupied by German forces during Hitler’s war. For someone on the inside with access to security records and data-processing equipment, the task of identifying the two would not be difficult. The moment they discovered what Latimer was up to, Jost and Brand would have to do something to stop him, or at least try to.