The Intercom Conspiracy (6 page)

‘Has Novak’s death not affected it at all? Who is writing the thing now?’

‘The same man who has been writing it for the past four years. His name is Theodore Carter. Novak was never much more than a figurehead. He always had to have someone to do the actual work.’

‘But what about the material? Where does that come from? Crude invention may account for some of it, but there is much circumstantial stuff. Even
Intercom
must have sources. What is this “private spy network” he boasted about?’

Brand grinned. ‘Paper mills,’ he said.

Jost grimaced sourly. ‘Paper mills’ was the term they and their colleagues used to describe the innumerable political warfare and propaganda groups engaged in feeding misinformation to the international news-gathering agencies. Some paper mills had government subsidies, others were financed by émigré organisations and separatist movements; a few of the smaller, more furtive paper mills – those, for instance, which specialised in the manufacture of false intelligence documents – were businesses run for profit. Since the output of the paper mills had always to be evaluated – the kind of misinformation being propagated by an opponent could sometimes give an indication of his true intentions – the work load they created was a perennial source of inconvenience to intelligence agencies.

‘This Theodore Carter,’ said Jost, ‘where did he come from? Is he one of the paper-mill hacks?’

‘Not exactly. His predecessor at
Intercom
was certainly one of
those. Felix Kortan, you may remember him. An American-educated Hungarian who operated after the war in Vienna. Called himself a Russian expert. Even Novak saw through his faking eventually. Carter is a little better than that, I think. I have seen a fairly thorough report on him.’

‘I would like to see that report, if possible.’

‘I can tell you the essentials now.’ Brand half closed his eyes. ‘Theodore Carter. No middle name. Aged fifty-five, a Canadian citizen born in Montreal. Educated there and in France. Married a French woman from whom he is now divorced. A daughter, Valerie, aged twenty-three, lives with him and is an assistant librarian employed at the University of Geneva. Carter has spent most of his adult life as a working journalist, mainly in French-speaking countries. He is a French-English bilingual and proficient in German and Italian. His best period – by “best” I mean the period when he behaved more or less as an educated man of his age should, and when he drank least – was the six years prior to the break-up of his marriage. He worked in the Paris office of a British news agency for four of them, and then in the news department there of an American radio and television network.’

‘Is he an alcoholic?’

‘He has what our American friends call a drinking problem. Not an alcoholic, but certainly a heavy drinker. The report describes him as being flawed, a man of undoubted ability who takes pleasure in misusing it.’

‘And so, while wallowing in self-pity, drinks. I see. Is he himself an extreme anti-communist?’

‘The judgment is that he is capable of being extremely anti-anything, as long as the pay is good. It proved impossible to discover whether or not he had private political convictions different from those of his employer. Since Novak appears to have trusted him completely, he is undoubtedly capable of putting on a convincing act when it suits him to do so.’

‘Has anyone ever attempted to recruit this man?’

‘I suppose the CIA looked him over when he worked for the American radio people in Paris. They would do so normally.
Probably the drinking put them off. There was nothing in the report.’ Brand paused. ‘Is your part of the operation ready?’

‘It can soon be made ready, but I will have to move quickly.’ Jost stared ahead. They were approaching the pier at Ouchy-Lausanne now, and in a few minutes he would have to leave. ‘I think I may stay in this area for a further twenty-four hours,’ he said.

‘And visit Geneva?’

‘I would like to see things for myself.’ Jost hesitated. ‘This is going to be a little dangerous for Carter,’ he said.

Brand pursed his lips. ‘Well, yes. A
little
dangerous perhaps. But that was always an implicit side-effect.’

‘Implicit, yes, but we have never discussed the problem.’

‘What is there to discuss?’ Having said all that he had come there to say, Brand was tiring now. ‘Once your
démarche
begins there will be dangerous moments for Carter. We must accept that. We cannot protect him.’

‘No, of course not. It would be ill-advised to try. We might perhaps, though, warn him.’

‘Impossible. A man like that? He would just leave. The whole operation would be aborted.’ Brand drew breath. ‘No, it is all a calculated risk. He must take his chance. It may be unpleasant for him, but it will not be so for long. They will soon realise that he knows nothing, that he is an innocent.’

Jost looked at the grey face and decided to say no more. In any case there was no time left; the steamer was edging in towards the pier. He stood up.

‘My friend,’ he said, ‘all my congratulations on your work for us. I hope that my own part will be as effective.’

‘Of course it will. You will send me a progress report?’

‘In the usual way. Take care of yourself. I hope your family are all well.’

‘Yes, yes, all well.’

They touched hands briefly, surreptitiously, and then Jost walked aft, down to the gangway where he would disembark.

FROM THEODORE CARTER

transcribed dictation tape

I think I’ll call you Mr L. L for Latimer, Lewison, lubricious and
louche
.

Well, Mr L, you’d better watch yourself; your sheep’s clothing is slipping. When I agreed to cooperate with you I had to listen to a lot of sanctimonious jazz about probity, good faith and strict adherence to proven fact. I thought at the time that it smelt a bit of overcompensation, but I didn’t think the gilt would wear off the gingerbread quite so soon. I gave it a month. But no: two weeks.

Mr L, I don’t very much mind your appropriating a privately dictated tape from my former secretary, Nicole Deladoey, and transcribing it without my permission; after all, you’re paying the cow’s wages now, and so presumably have purchased her loyalty along with her services.
That was a bitchy trick, Nicole
. I don’t even mind your wide-eyed and patently dishonest contention that, in reproducing that tape unedited, you were merely honouring retroactively a term of our agreement that
I
had insisted upon; that’s the kind of probity and good faith we men of the world can all understand. What I do object to, and object strongly, is your slipping in flagrant distortions of fact.

We’d better get this straight. I don’t know what half-baked sources you’ve been tapping for this gossip and hearsay. You can’t tell me that you got it all out of ‘Colonel Jost’, though I suppose that some of it
must
be hard or not even
you
would dare.

By the way, I will admit that the scene where those two old buzzards are mumbling over the evening paper and thinking about play material and pension plans still reads as if it could have happened
. Schadenfreude
is the word you wanted for their
kind of bloodymindedness, but maybe it eluded you. Cut down on the adjectives and adverbs, Mr L; purple is out this season
.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Facts. Now look. As I say, I don’t know anything about these sources of yours or how much you’ve paid them, but if that little character-assassination vignette of me which you’ve now added is a fair sample of what you’ve been getting, I’ll tell you something. You’re stuck with a bag of lemons. I was taught always to check and double-check information received before starting to think of it as fact. I think you should have checked with me first, Mr L. Maybe I don’t know everything about myself, but I do know a few things. Or was it too tasty as it was to risk spoiling with a dash of truth?

Cooperation is a two-way street, Mr L. I do not like that reference to my drinking. It is not only untrue but damaging to my reputation. I want it deleted from the text. Get it right, Mr L, get it right. I do not drink heavily. I drink what I
need
to drink. The need
varies
from time to time. It’s that simple.

The night the General turned in his chips is a case in point. As what happened that night had a distinct effect on the attitudes of the police and security people towards me later, you’d better know about it.

The General got into Geneva at about five-thirty that afternoon on a delayed Swissair flight from New York. As usual, I met him at the airport and drove him to his hotel.

I always got on well with the General. You say, or make one of those old bastards say, that I put on an act with him. Well, of course I did. With him you couldn’t do anything else but put on an act. Talking to him was like talking to a kid who’s playing a game of cowboys and Indians; unless you want to spoil the fun you have to go along with him. The name of the General’s game wasn’t cowboys and Indians but something a little more complicated; let’s say, ‘good spies, bad spies and international plots’. The effect, though, was the same. He wasn’t interested in reality. No, that’s wrong. He believed that the game he played
was
reality and that anyone who doubted this was either a good
guy living in a dream world or a bad guy trying to lull the good guys into a sense of false security. He was a crackpot, of course, a nut, but in his way a very impressive one. I only heard him lecture once; it was at the American Club here. He was a terrible ham; he waved dossiers and quoted phony facts and figures by the yard; everything he said was complete balls; but, my God, he was effective. You see, he really
believed
what he was saying.

He was great at starting hares. For him, anything that happened, simply anything, could be part of a plot or conspiracy. The smallest thing would set him off. Then away he’d go, piling suspicion on suspicion, twisting the facts if there were any, imagining them if there weren’t, until he had arrived at what he decided was the truth of the matter. Then I’d write it up and we’d print it.

No wonder they got mad at us in Washington. Every Senator and every Congressman – every Canadian and British M.P., too, for that matter – got a copy of
Intercom
, whether they paid their subscriptions or not. You’d be surprised how many of those hares we started ran and kept on running. Well, maybe
you
wouldn’t be surprised. You know a bit about politicians. They got so steamed up in Washington about one story we ran – some crap we’d cooked up about the range of a new Red Chinese nuclear missile delivery system – that the President himself had to issue a denial. That didn’t faze the General, of course. He loved denials. All he did was cable me to run the story again along with additional supporting evidence. He didn’t say where this additional supporting evidence was to come from, of course; that wasn’t his way. And, of course, I didn’t waste time asking questions. As the whole of the original supporting evidence had been dreamed up, obviously any additional supporting evidence would have to be dreamed up, too. Naturally, I’d never have used a phrase like ‘dreamed up’ to him. That would have been like saying that good guys rode black horses. He believed what he wanted to believe, and he always knew that whatever he imagined counted as evidence.

He was still imagining when he died. That last time I drove him from the airport he started talking about an item he’d read
in a magazine on the plane. The item said that there was an outfit called the World Meteorological Organisation and that they had an advisory committee examining the consequences of large-scale interference with the atmosphere.

‘How do you like that, Ted?’ he said darkly.

I played it down; I knew the signs and I didn’t want to be up all night. ‘Something to do with cloud-seeding, isn’t it, General?’ I said. ‘A plane drops dry ice or some chemical into a cloud and that makes it rain. Nice for the farmer whose land’s underneath, not so good for the farmer who’d have had that cloud later.’

But he wasn’t put off. ‘No, Ted. There’s more to it than that.
Large-scale
interference with our atmosphere, that’s what it said. I want the inside stuff on this World Meteorological Organisation and the way it operates, and I want it fast. I think we ought to dig deep here.’

Once he’d started talking about digging deep there was no holding him. Usually, when we got to the hotel, we’d have a few drinks in his suite before dinner, but that evening he was high on the WMO and I had to go chasing off to see what we had on it in the office.

I found a piece about rainmaking and the WMO in a scientific yearbook. There wasn’t much to it. A paper had been prepared discussing the possibilities for international cooperation in research in the field of cloud and precipitation physics. As a result of this paper, the WMO Commission for Aerology (whatever that is) had created a working group of scientists to take the thing a stage further. An international conference under the auspices of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics was to be held shortly.