A Perfect Spy

“Time to wrap this thing up,” he said grimly as the door was locked. “Meet Gary, everybody. Gary’s head of SISURP. He’s here to report an important breakthrough on Pym and discuss action.”

SISURP, Lederer had recently learned, was the acronym for Surveillance Intelligence, Southern Europe. Gary was your typical Kentuckian — tall, spare and amusing. Lederer already admired him intensely. An aide sat at his elbow with a heap of papers, but Gary did not refer to them. Our quarry, he said baldly, was Petz-Hampel-Zaworski, now known to the indoctrinated familiarly as PHZ. A SISURP team picked him up Tuesday 10:12 a.m. emerging from the Czech Embassy in Vienna. Lederer listened enthralled as Gary noted each tiny detail of PHZ’s day. Where PHZ took his coffee. Where PHZ took his leaks. The bookshops where PHZ browsed. Who PHZ lunched with. Where. What he ate. PHZ’s limp. His ready smile. His charm, particularly with women. His cigars, where he lit them, bought them. PHZ’s ease of association, his apparent unawareness that he was being observed by a field force eighteen strong. The two occasions when “wittingly or otherwise” PHZ placed himself in the vicinity of Mrs. Mary Pym. On one of these occasions, said Gary, eye contact was confirmed. On the other, surveillance was inhibited by the presence of a British pair believed to be the escorts of Mrs. Pym. And thence at last to the crowning moment of the operation and the high point of Grant Lederer’s brilliant marriage and dazzling career so far, when at 8 a.m. local time today three members of Gary’s team found themselves stuck in the rear pews of the English church in Vienna, while twelve more were staked out around the outside of it — mobile units, necessarily, because this was diplomatic-land where loiterers were not well regarded — and PHZ and Mary Pym were placed either side of the aisle. Lederer’s cue had arrived. Gary was looking expectantly towards him.

“Grant, I guess you should take over here. We’re a little out of our depth,” he said, with pleasing gruffness.

As heads at the table shifted in curiosity, Lederer felt the warmth of their interest bear him to new heights. He began speaking at once. Modestly.

“Well hell, I mean I see this whole thing as Bee’s achievement and not mine. Bee is Mrs. Lederer,” he explained to an older man across the table from him, then realised too late that it was Carver, Head of London Station, never a Lederer fan. “She’s Presbyterian. Her parents were Presbyterian too. Mrs. Lederer latterly has been able to reconcile her spirituality with organised religion and has been attending regularly at the Christchurch Anglican church, Vienna, known as the English church, and frankly just the sexiest little church you ever saw. Right, Gary? Cherubs, angels — more like a religious boudoir than a regular church at all. You know, Mick, if anybody’s name is going up in lights at Langley over this, I guess it should be Bee’s,” he added, still somehow not quite able to get to his story.

The rest came out faster. It was Bee after all and not the surveillance team who had managed to slide out into the aisle after PHZ and stand in line right behind him as he and Mary queued for the Sacrament. It was Bee who from a distance of maybe five feet had watched as PHZ leaned forward and whispered real words into Mary’s ear, and watched again as Mary first leaned back to catch them, then went ahead with her devotions as if nothing in the world had happened.

“So I mean it was actually my wife, my helpmate throughout all of this long operation, who witnessed the spoken contact.” He shook his head in marvel. “And it was Bee again who, the first moment the service ended, raced back to our apartment to phone me right here at the Embassy and describe the whole amazing occurrence, using the domestic codewords the two of us had hashed out together for just such a contingency. And I mean Bee did not even know that an Agency surveillance team was present in that church at all. She just went because Mary was going, as much as anything. Yet she scooped SISURP single-handed by like six hours, more. Harry,” said Lederer a little breathlessly, finding Wexler as he put the finishing touch to his narrative, “my only regret is that Mrs. Lederer never learned to lip-read.”

Lederer had not expected applause. It was in the nature of the community he had joined that there should be none. The pregnant silence struck him as a more fitting tribute.

Artelli the cryptographer was the first to break it. “Here at the Embassy,” he repeated, not quite as a question.

“Pardon me?” said Lederer.

“Your wife called you here at the Embassy? From Vienna? Directly after the happening in the church? On the open phone from your apartment?”

“Yes, sir, and I took her news straight upstairs to Mr. Wexler. He had it on his desk by nine a.m.”

“Nine-thirty,” Wexler said.

“And what were these domestic codewords that she used, please?” said Artelli while he wrote.