A Perfect Spy

“When we did this, we at once began to detect a progression in the structure. Right now it’s still algebra. But it’s there. It’s a logical linguistic progression. Maybe it’s a piece of Shakespeare. Maybe it’s a Hottentot nursery rhyme. But there is a pattern emerging that is based upon the continuous text of some such analogue. And that analogue is in effect the codebook for those transmissions. And we feel — maybe it’s a little mystical — that the analogue is — well, like a bond between the field and base. We see it as having almost a human identity. All we need is one word. Preferably but not necessarily the first. After that it’s only a question of time before we identify the rest of the text. Then we’ll break those messages wide open.”

“So when will that be?” says Mountjoy. “About 1990, I suppose.”

“Could be. Could be tonight.”

Suddenly it becomes apparent that Artelli means more than he is saying. The hypothetical has become the specific. Brotherhood is the first to take him up on his innuendo.

“So why tonight?” he says. “Why not 1990?”

“There’s something very peculiar going on with the Czech transmissions overall,” Artelli confesses with a smile. “They’re throwing stuff out at random everywhere. Last night Prague Radio put out a world-wide spook call using some phoney professor who doesn’t exist. Like a cry for help to somebody who’s only in a position to receive spoken word. Then all around the clock we get Mayday calls — for example a high-speed transmission from your Czech Embassy here in London. For four days now, they’ve been bumping high-speed signals into your mainline BBC transmissions. It’s as if the Czechs had lost a kid in the forest and were shouting out any messages that might conceivably get through to him.”

Even before Artelli’s echoless voice has died, Brotherhood is speaking. “Of course there’s a London transmission,” he declares vehemently, laying his fist on the table like a challenge. “Of course the Czechs are stirring it. My goodness, how many times do we have to put this to you? For two damned years, there have been Czech transmissions in any part of the globe where Pym sets foot and they do, naturally, coincide with his movements. It’s a radio game. That’s how you play the radio game when you’re framing a man. You persist and you repeat and you wait till the other fellow’s nerve cracks. The Czechs are not fools. Sometimes I think we are.”

Unbothered, Artelli turns his twisted smile to Lederer as if to say, “See if you can impress them.” At which Grant Lederer allows himself an irrelevant memory of his wife Bee splayed above him in her naked glory, making love to him like all the angels in Heaven.

“Sir Michael, I have to start at the other end,” Lederer says brightly in a prepared opening, straight at Brammel. “I have to pick up in Vienna just ten days ago, if you don’t mind, sir, and track back from there to Washington.”

Nobody is looking at him. Start wherever you must, they were saying, and get it over with.

* * *

A different Lederer has broken loose inside him and he greets this version of himself with pleasure. I am the bounty hunter, shuttling between London, Washington and Vienna with Pym perpetually in my sights. I am the Lederer who, as Bee vociferously complained when we were safe from microphones, took Pym into bed with us every night, woke sweating with self-doubt in the fitful hours, woke again in the morning with Pym once more firmly between us: “I’ll get you, boy. I’ll nail you.” The Lederer who for the last twelve months — ever since Pym’s name began to wink at me from the computer screen — has tracked him first as an abstraction, then as a fellow screwball. Has posed with him on spurious committees as his earnest and admiring colleague. Shared jolly drunken picnics with family Pym in the Vienna woods, then rushed back to my desk and set to work with fresh vigour to rip apart what I have just enjoyed. I am the Lederer who too easily attaches himself, then punishes whatever holds him tight; the Lederer who is grateful for every wiry smile and casual pat of encouragement from the great Wexler, my master, only to round on him minutes later, lampooning him, degrading him in my overheated mind, punishing him for being yet another disappointment to me.

Never mind that I am twenty years Pym’s junior. What I recognise in Pym is what I recognise in myself: a spirit so wayward that, even while I am playing a game of Scrabble with my kids it can swing between the options of suicide, rape and assassination. “He’s one of us, for Christ’s sake!” Lederer wants to scream at the sleeping potentates around him. “Not one of you. One of me. We’re howling psychopaths, the both of us.” But of course Lederer doesn’t scream that or anything else. He talks sanely and wisely about his computer. And about a man named Petz, also known as Hampel and Zaworski, who travels almost as much as Lederer and exactly as much as Pym, but takes more trouble than either of us to conceal his tracks.