Eleven: Bedtime Story
I HOISTED myself up onto the drainboard of the sink just beside him so that he could talk to me quietly— and so that I could be near to him. I refused another cigarette, and he lit one and gazed for a long minute into the mirror, watching the two gangsters. I looked too. The two men just stared back with a passive, indifferent hostility that seeped steadily across the room like poison gas. I didn’t much like their indifference and their watchfulness. It seemed so powerful, so implacable, as if the odds were on their side and they had all the time in the world. But this James Bond didn’t seem worried. He just seemed to be weighing them up, like a chess player. There was a certitude of power, of superiority, in his eyes that worried me. He hadn’t seen these men in action. He couldn’t possibly know what they were capable of, how at any moment they might just blaze away with their guns, blowing our heads off like coconuts in a circus sideshow, and then toss our bodies in the lake with stones to keep them down. But then James Bond began talking, and I forgot my nightmares and just watched his face and listened.
“In England,” he said, “when a man, or occasionally a woman, comes over from the other side, from the Russian side, with important information, there’s a fixed routine. Take Berlin, for instance, and that’s the most usual come-over route. To begin with they get taken to intelligence headquarters and get treated at first with extra suspicion. That’s to try and take care of double agents—people who pretend to come over and, once they’ve been cleared by security, begin spying on us from inside, so to speak, and pass their stuff back to the Russians. There are also triple agents—people who do what the doubles have done, but change their minds and, under our control, pass phony intelligence back to the Russians. Do you understand? It’s nothing but a complicated game, really. But then so’s International politics, diplomacy—all the trappings of nationalism and the power complex that goes on between countries. Nobody will stop playing the game. It’s like the hunting instinct.”
“Yes, I see. It all seems idiotic to my generation. Like playing that old game ‘Attaque,’ really. We need some more Jack Kennedys. It’s all these old people about. They ought to hand the world over to younger people who haven’t got the idea of war stuck in their subconscious. As if it were the only solution. Like beating children. It’s much the same thing. It’s all out of date—Stone Age stuff.”
He smiled. “As a matter of fact I agree, but don’t spread your ideas too widely or I’ll find myself out of a job. Anyway, once the come-over has got through the strainer in Berlin, he’s flown to England and the bargain gets made—you tell us all you know about the Russian rocket sites and in exchange we’ll give you a new name, a British passport, and a hideout where the Russians will never find you. That’s what they’re most frightened of, of course, the Russians getting after them and killing them. And, if they play, they get the choice of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Africa. So, when they’ve told all they know, they get flown out to the country they’ve chosen, and there a reception committee run by the local police, a very hush-hush affair, of course, takes them over and they’re gradually eased into a job and into a community just as if they were a bona fide immigrant. It nearly always works all right. They get homesick to begin with, and have trouble settling down, but some member of the reception committee will always be at hand to give them any help they need.”
James Bond lit another cigarette. “I’m not telling you anything the Russians don’t know. The only secret side of the business is the addresses of these people. There’s a man I’ll call Boris. He’s been settled in Canada, in Toronto. He was a prize—twenty-four-carat. He was a top naval constructor in Kronstadt—high up in their nuclear submarine team. He got away to Finland and then to Stockholm. We picked him up and flew him to England. The Russians don’t often say anything about their defectors—just curse and let them go. If they’re important, they round up their families and ship them off to Siberia—to frighten other waverers. But it was different with Boris. They sent out a general call to their secret services to eliminate him. As luck would have it, an organization called SPECTRE somehow listened in.”