I, Said the Spy

‘It’s got to come out,’ Anderson said.

Danby took off his spectacles and stared at Anderson. If Danby had a weakness, it was his admiration for American big business. He had been on intimate terms with corruption for most of his professional life, but he still found it difficult to distinguish between business practice and bribery. It didn’t bother him that the smiling extrovert husband of the Queen of Holland might take a fall, as Anderson put it; it bothered him that those who had paid him money might be hurt. And the American image with them.

His finger moved on down the list. ‘Rockefellers, Rothschilds … British members of Parliament … financiers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland …. You seem to have concentrated your attentions on the Swiss, Mr Anderson.’

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A grey-haired woman wearing a pink knitted cardigan placed two plastic cups of coffee on the desk and retired. Danby and Anderson sipped their coffee and regarded each other through the steam.

Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘Have you anything to substantiate your suspicions about Herr Danzer? If you’re right, it’s a considerable coup considering it was your first Bilderberg.’

Anderson put his cup down on the desk. He opened his jacket and stuck his thumbs in the pocket of his waistcoat, where the gold watch and the cigar-cutter resided. An assertive gesture, Danby decided. Or was it defensive?

Anderson said: ‘We put a tail on him in New York.’

‘And?’

‘He made a drop. A Soviet agent picked up his briefcase.’

‘I see. How —’

‘The agent was followed to the Soviet Mission at 136, East 67th Street.’

‘Then there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I’m glad for your sake,’ Danby remarked. ‘The coffee,’ he said, ‘gets worse,’ but he finished it.

Danby stood up and walked round the spacious office. He ran his fingers along the bookshelves of weighty volumes, spun the globe in the corner – the world in which his 12,000-strong army fought daily for American interests. Against enemies outside and inside the States. Danby envied Anderson’s lack of appreciation of the canker within.

As the world spun beneath his fingers he said: ‘You may smoke if you wish.’

‘I don’t smoke, sir.’

‘Of course, I forgot.’

Danby moved to the desk and picked up the green dossier on Anderson. ‘One of your economies to enable you to live in the style to which you are accustomed.’

Danby opened the dossier.

Here we go, Anderson thought.

By style he knew that Danby referred to his apartment. It wasn’t the first time the apartment had cropped up during interrogation.

And what was about to follow would be a form of interrogation. A tactic to quell over-confidence, to hone the blade of Anderson’s perception. A man such as Danby was incapable of conducting an analytical conversation without employing psychological stratagem.

Anderson admired him for it. And it worked! He felt the assurance ebb from him as Danby turned the pages of the dossier. There in between green cardboard covers is my life.

The adolescent years in the hovel in Harlem when he was a runner in a numbers racket. (A lot of question marks there, a lot of heavy underlining.)

The street brawls re-directed by an unusually enlightened social worker into the boxing ring. Showed promise …. But who wants to make money with his fists when he has brain?

Night school resented by his parents, ridiculed by his friends. Long solitary hours with a second-hand speech-training course on a phonograph – ‘Now repeat after me ….’ the invisible tutor’s plummy voice scratched by a score of needles.

Danby said: ‘I see you play chess.’

‘Sir?’

‘I see you’re a chess-player.’

‘Pretty low grade, sir.’

‘It’s good training,’ Danby said, turning a couple of years of Anderson’s life.

And then a scholarship to Columbia. (Exclamation marks here probably. Black, street-fighter, ambitious, educated. Possibilities.)

Perhaps he had been ear-marked as early as that.

The Army. Military Intelligence. Vietnam with the U.S. Military Assistance Command in 1962. And then the approach (names, assessments, cross references here) by the CIA, followed by another two years in Vietnam, two years in Washington and then New York in a sub-division of the Secret Service.

‘Do you know what finally swayed us in your favour for the Bilderberg job?’ Danby asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘French,’ Danby said. ‘You speak excellent French.’

‘I learned it in Vietnam. I believe I have a slight colonial accent.’

‘And I see you shoot straight’ (Anderson was Army Reserve pistol champion, having scored 2581 points in the 1970 championships.)

‘I’m not popular in amusement parks.’ Instinctively Anderson felt for the gun he normally wore in a shoulder-holster; but it wasn’t there; you didn’t arm yourself to meet the DCI.

‘How do you manage to live, Mr Anderson?’

Anderson sighed. ‘I believe it’s all there, sir,’ pointing at the dossier.

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘You mean the apartment?’

‘And that suit you’re wearing.’

Blue with a silky sheen to it, lapels beautifully rolled.

‘I buy one suit a year,’ Anderson told him, ‘The apartment is mine. I didn’t blow my money in Saigon.’

‘But the apartment is not quite paid for, I gather.’

‘Not quite,’ Anderson said, the anger that was his weakness (all there in the dossier) beginning to rise.