Peters was writing all the time now. Leamas assumed there was a tape recorder hidden somewhere in the room but the subsequent transcription would take time. What Peters wrote down now would provide the background for this evening’s telegram to Moscow, while at the Soviet Embassy in The Hague the girls would sit up all night telegraphing the verbatim transcript on hourly schedules.
“Tell me,” said Peters; “these are large sums of money. The arrangements for paying them were elaborate and very expensive. What did you make of it yourself?”
Leamas shrugged. “What could I make of it? I thought Control must have a bloody good source, but I never saw the material so I don’t know. I didn’tlike the way it was done–it was too high-powered, too complicated, too clever. Why couldn’t they just meet him and give him the money in cash? Did they really let him cross borders on his own passport with a forged one in his pocket? I doubt it,” said Leamas. It was time he clouded the issue, let him chase a hare.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that for all I know the money was never drawn from the bank. Supposing he was a highly placed agent behind the Curtain–the money would be on deposit for him when he could get at it. That was what I reckoned anyway. I didn’t think about it all that much. Why should I? It’s part of our work only to know pieces of the whole setup. You know that. If you’re curious, Clod help you.”
“If the money wasn’t collected, as you suggest, why all the trouble with passports?”
“When I was in Berlin we made an arrangement for Karl Riemeck in case he ever needed to run and couldn’t get hold of us. We kept a bogus West German passport for him at an address in Düsseldorf. He could collect it any time by following a prearranged procedure. It never expired–Special Travel renewed the passport and the visas as they expired. Control might have followed the same technique with this man. I don’t know–it’s only a guess.”
“How do you know for certain that passports were issued?”
“There were minutes on the file between Banking Section and Special Travel. Special Travel is the section which arranges false identity papers and visas.”
“I see.” Peters thought for a moment and then he asked: “What names did you use in Copenhagen and Helsinki?”
“Robert Lang, electrical engineer from Derby. That was in Copenhagen.”
“When exactly were you in Copenhagen?” Peters asked.
“I told you, June the fifteenth. I got there in the morning at about eleven-thirty.”
“Which bank did you use?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Peters,” said Leamas, suddenly angry, “the Royal Scandinavian. You’ve got it written down.”
“I just wanted to be sure,” the other replied evenly, and continued writing. “And for Helsinki, what name?”
“Stephen Bennett, marine engineer from Plymouth. I was there,” he – added sarcastically, “at the end of September.”
“You visited the bank on the day you arrived?”
“Yes. It was the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth, I can’t be sure, as I told you.”
“Did you take the money with you from England?”
“Of course not. We just transferred it to the Resident’s account in each case. The Resident drew it, met me at the airport with the money in a suitcase and I took it to the bank.”
“Who’s the Resident in Copenhagen?”
“Peter Jensen, a bookseller in the University bookshop.”
“And what were the names which would be used by the agent?”
“Horst Karlsdorf in Copenhagen. I think that was it, yes it was, I remember. Karlsdorf. I kept on wanting to say Karlshorst.”
“Description?”
“Manager, from Klagenfurt in Austria.”
“And the other? The Helsinki name?”
“Fechtmann, Adolf Fechtmann from St. Gallen, Switzerland. He had a title–yes, that’s right: Doctor Fechtmann, archivist.”
“I see; both German-speaking.”
“Yes, I noticed that. But it can’t be a German.”
“Why not?”
“I was head of the Berlin setup, wasn’t I? I’d have been in on it. A high-level agent in East Germany would have to be run from Berlin. I’d have known.” Leamas got up, went to the sideboard and poured himself some whisky. He didn’t bother about Peters.