The Intercom Conspiracy (3 page)

Jost went last and saw his friend Brand almost immediately.

Brand was sitting in the saloon, on the starboard side by one of the windows.

Neither man gave any sign of recognition. Jost walked up the companionway, turning up the fur collar of his coat as he went, and took a seat on the upper deck.

His expression of bored indifference to his surroundings remained,
but for several seconds he had had to make a conscious effort to preserve it. He had had a shock.

It had been over six months since he had seen Brand, and in that time his friend’s appearance had changed remarkably. Brand had always been pale; that kind of pale, slightly sallow complexion is not uncommon among Scandinavians. But always before it had been a healthy pallor; there had been blood beneath the skin. Now, the face was pinched and grey and the life seemed to have gone out of it. Suddenly, Brand looked old and either very sick or very frightened.

The last thought made Jost’s muscles tighten for a moment. He forced himself to relax. Brand had requested this meeting and said that the need for it was urgent. With secret meetings of this kind there was always an element of risk to be accepted. If on this occasion the risks were for some reason to be greater than usual, Brand’s message would surely have said so. It had not said so. Therefore his appearance must be due to illness. Nothing in the message about that either; but then the method of private communication which they employed had not been designed to convey information about personal matters.

He remembered the night they had worked out the method, on the garden terrace of a hotel near Strasbourg.

A French ten-franc note has on its face side four groups of figures. There is the date of issue and a printing-batch number. Then there are two serial numbers, one of five figures in the lower left-hand corner and one of ten figures in the centre below the words
Banque de France
. In all, there are at least twenty-five digits on every note, and no two of the notes are exactly alike. It had been Brand’s idea to use these notes as ‘one-time’ cypher pads. Jost himself had devised the matrix. The method was crude, no doubt, but it worked and was as safe as such things could be: a ten-franc note in one airmail envelope, the encyphered message in another. The limitation was that you could only send short, simple messages.

The message which had brought him there had been short and simple:
URGENT MEET PROPOSE COVER MILAN THEN VISIT
GODCHILD TWENTIETH PM EVIAN STEAMER AFTER VEVEY CONFIRM
.

Well, perhaps it was not really simple. A good deal of thought had gone into its composition.

Even in those parts of the world where international travel is easy and commonplace, there are some persons – presidents, kings, prime ministers and known criminals, for example – who can never, as ordinary men can, move freely from country to country, meeting whom they please where they choose, without their comings and goings being more than casually supervised.

Directors of government secret intelligence services are among these inhibited few.

In their own countries they are able to shroud their movements in secrecy and generally prefer to do so; but the moment they plan to go abroad, questions will be asked, and not only by their subordinates and those to whom they are technically responsible. Protocol, and sometimes prudence, demands that the foreign colleagues into whose territories they are moving be informed of their movements and of the reasons for them. Since such travellers must always expect to be under some sort of surveillance – at best benevolent and protective, but invariably careful and inquisitive – the reasons they give, whether true or false, must never be less than convincing.

A director of a secret intelligence service himself, with personal experience of the problem, Colonel Brand had thoughtfully suggested a good cover story for his friend’s use on this occasion. The suggestion was contained in the message references to Milan and visiting a godchild.

In Milan during the week immediately prior to the date of the proposed meeting, an international electronics-industry fair would be in progress. New miniaturised sensing and detection devices would be shown, as well as the latest telecommunications equipment. Brand had guessed, correctly, that Jost would be sending a man from his technical section to Milan to report on the new developments. He had also guessed, again correctly, that a decision by Jost to go to Milan himself with the technician would
cause no surprise. The decision would be in character; Colonel Jost’s interest in technical development was well known.

However, Colonel Brand could not go to Milan for the same reason; for him that would have been out of character. So the meeting would have to be elsewhere.

In addition to the cypher messages they exchanged, they took care to keep up an ordinary, quite innocent private correspondence. Jost, a childless widower, had complained in one of his recent letters that a niece of whom he was fond, and to whom he was godfather, had been sent by her parents to an English school near Montreux in Switzerland. Brand had remembered. What could be more natural than that Jost, on his way back from Milan, should break his journey at Montreux and visit his godchild?

Brand had always been clever with cover stories, Jost reflected. Presumably he had cooked up something equally ingenious to get himself to Evian. It would be amusing to hear.

Well, he would hear soon. They were past the Ile de Salagnon now and heading across the lake towards Vevey.

After Vevey, Brand had said.

They had been friends for fifteen years then – since, in fact, the year of their appointments to the posts they still held.

They had been introduced, under circumstances humiliating to both of them, at a NATO base in France. It had been the humiliation, petty and even laughable when they looked back on it but infuriating at the time, that had first drawn them together.

The title of Brand’s post was Director of Security and Intelligence, that of Jost’s Director of Defence Intelligence. In effect, the jobs they did for their respective governments were the same; they were opposite numbers. They had other things in common. Both had fought with bravery and distinction in resistance movements when their small countries had been under German occupation. Both had been leaders and organisers, loyal to their governments in exile and, as professional soldiers from ‘good’
families, politically of the right. They had survived the occupation because they were hard, self-reliant and resourceful men, because they had despised heroics and action for action’s sake and because they had learned early enough to disobey orders from remote commanders when they knew those orders to be unrealistic or ill-advised. Both had developed the special skills needed for the successful conduct of clandestine operations. As staff officers in the immediate postwar years, their knowledge, experience and natural aptitudes were found to be of the kind needed in intelligence work and they became specialists in it. When the growth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation made the creation of their posts necessary, they were the men considered best qualified to fill them. They had no predecessors and were hampered by no precedents. They were from the first very much their own masters.

On their appointment they automatically became full members of a standing joint intelligence committee of NATO on which their countries had been temporarily represented by military attachés. At that time the quarterly three-day meetings of the committee were held at a U.S. Army base twenty kilometres outside Paris. Security arrangements on these top-secret occasions were handled by the Americans.

For the first of these meetings that they attended, Jost and Brand were accommodated in their respective Paris embassies. Both had already received the NATO top-secret security clearance known as Cosmic.
^*
However, since they were new to the committee, it had been necessary for their embassies to obtain from the Americans the special maximum-security passes that would be needed to gain admittance, first to the base and then to the heavily guarded conference area within the base perimeter. These passes were delivered to them personally at their embassies by an American liaison officer.

At eight-thirty on the morning of the first day, Jost and Brand were picked up separately at their embassies by U.S. Army
staff cars and driven out to the base. Both were in uniform. They arrived within two minutes of each other at about nine-fifteen. By nine-thirty both were under arrest, or at any rate under armed guard in a guardroom, and being interrogated by an American military-police lieutenant who accused them in highly offensive terms of being newspaper reporters.

It seemed that the lieutenant had recently had an unfortunate experience with some too-enterprising foreign reporters, an experience which had resulted in his being reprimanded by his commanding officer. But he had learned his lesson. Now, he said, he could smell a newsman a mile off. He used a great many four-letter words in expressing his opinion of the two bewildered colonels, in shouting down their protests and in describing what he intended with his own hands to do to them. Nearly ten minutes passed before a captain from the security section arrived to investigate.

The captain was in private life a trained police officer. He silenced the impassioned lieutenant, asked sensible questions and received sensible replies. The nature of the misunderstanding now became apparent. The special passes which had been issued to Jost and Brand were of a type which had been withdrawn a month previously. It was obvious, the captain said, that there had been a foul-up.

Obvious it may have been, but two hours elapsed before the mistake could be corrected. The identification papers the two men carried had no validity in that maximum-security area. Their fingerprints had to be taken, records had to be fetched for purposes of comparison and persons summoned to double-check their identities. They were, of course, late at the committee meeting, where, since the current chairman had not been told about the cause of the delay, they had a cool reception.

During the luncheon break, however, there were explanations and an American major from the security section introduced himself to the two. He did not grovel and he did not invent excuses. He did admit, without equivocation, that the mistake had been due to carelessness in his office and he confirmed that
their embassies had been in no way responsible. He apologised unreservedly for the embarrassment and inconvenience the mistake had caused.

His style was engaging and they were reasonable men. Foul-ups, Jost said amiably, were not unknown where he came from, and Brand congratulated the major on his captain, whose courtesy and good sense that morning had eased a trying situation.

If the matter had been allowed to rest there, with an apology unreservedly given and as unreservedly accepted, it is probable that the relationship between Jost and Brand would not have developed quite as it did. The private joke might still have been born, but it would have been short-lived and would have remained
only
a joke.

As it was, the major’s superior officer decided that it would be a wise move on his part to apologise personally to these two foreigners. ‘After all,’ he pointed out to the major, ‘they’re cloak-and-dagger boys. That means they’re creeps. They may act like all is forgiven and forgotten, but did they actually state that they’re not going to put in formal complaints? No. I’m not taking any chances. I’ll handle them myself.’ At the end of the day’s session he sent a message asking if they would mind stopping by at his office to receive and sign for the new passes that had been prepared for them.

He was a full colonel with two rows of medal ribbons of the kind commonly referred to in the U.S. Army at that time as ‘spinach’. After the business of the new passes had been disposed of, he produced a bottle of whisky and offered them a drink. They accepted. He then moved on to his apology, which began with a brief but confusing description of the pass-issuing procedure and ended with a long, rambling account of the security problems he faced there and of the difficult, responsible, thankless task he had. By the time he had finished, he had not only made it plain that he regarded himself as the real victim of the foul-up, but had also conveyed the impression that, in his view, they had brought most of the indignities to which they had been subjected that morning on themselves.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said with a friendly smile, ‘but I’m told that it was the strange uniforms that made the sergeant on the outer gate double-check those passes. I don’t say that you’d have gotten away with it if he hadn’t double-checked – there’d be some heads rolling around here if you had, believe you me – but that’s why you had those redneck MPs on your backs instead of my boys.’

‘Surely,’ said Jost as calmly as he could, ‘our attachés have been attending these meetings in uniform.’

‘Sure, they have. But your attaché is a navy man, and yours –’ he looked at Brand – ‘who has PX privileges here, wears American olive drab. Sure he has his own badges and flashes, but unless you’re real close to him he looks strictly GI.’

‘The appearance of our uniforms is perhaps better known in combat areas,’ said Brand coldly.

Their host was not put out. ‘I’ve no doubt it is, Colonel. As I say, don’t get me wrong. We do have a problem here with all these foreign uniforms. We know it and we’re trying to lick it. You’ve seen the NATO wall charts we’ve put up – uniforms, badges, flashes, flags, the lot. But it’s tough. We had a guy here last month in the goddamndest fancy dress you ever saw. He could have been anything – Peruvian field marshal, doorman at a new clip joint, you name it. In fact, he was an Italian captain in some crack outfit of theirs. It’s a problem, all right. But I’ll tell you this. It’s a problem you gentlemen won’t have to worry about again. Now, let’s freshen up those drinks.’

They got away as soon as they could and decided to share a staff car back to Paris.

In the car they nursed their anger in silence for a while. Then Jost cleared his throat.

‘The denial that affirms,’ he said.