Murder For Love

The Loving You Get by JOHN GARDNER

Early in the last decade of the Cold War, Godfrey Benyon returned to London unexpectedly from Berlin to find his wife of fifteen years in bed with a senior colleague. For policemen and spies there often can be a high turnover in marriages. Both professions place dreadful strains on the contract between man and woman. The jobs are dangerous and consume a person's time and passion, leaving little space for any normal relationships. Some grains of love and respect can grow into stout and unshakable unions. Others just do not hold up.

Benyon and his wife Susan had married relatively young, and Godfrey had no reason to believe that Susan was anything else but happy and still in love with him. Certainly he still loved her and believed that she had come to terms with the lengthy periods when he was away from home, sometimes not even able to remain in touch.

There used to be a fallacy, commonly believed, that the family of an Intelligence or Security Service officer did not know what the husband or wife did in the way of government work. This, of course, is nonsense. Families always know, just as they know that they are quietly vetted from time to time in order to make sure they have not been suborned by some foreign espionage organization. This regular checking covers all branches of the Foreign Service and those in sensitive situations at the Home Office, not just members of the Secret Intelligence Service.

Ironically, the man with whom Susan Benyon had been committing adultery on a regular basis was the officer detailed to carry out the biannual in-depth examinations of her way of life.

His name was Saunders, commonly known to friends and enemies alike as "Soapy." To begin with, the seduction of Susan Benyon had been a ploy on Soapy's part to ascertain whether she put it about-as the jargon had it-thereby becoming a security risk.

However, after the first time, Saunders had enjoyed the delights of Susan Benyon's body so much that he made certain adjustments in his report and the pair became regular and consistent lovers.

Within a few months, Susan brought up the question of divorce from Godfrey and marriage to Saunders-something old Soapy did not want to happen. He had a decent and loving wife of his own and these extracurricular bouts of sex had livened up his own marriage. Susan had unwittingly assisted in turning Soapy's wilder fantasies into reality, and the result was that he eventually discovered hidden wonders in the sexual behavior of his own wife.

On the afternoon that Godfrey walked in on the lovers, he had naturally been tempted to violence and could easily have killed Saunders with one hand, for he was a born field officer and knew all there was to know about the black arts of death by finger or hand. Happily, he was well disciplined, leaving the room and waiting downstairs for Soapy to leave.

There was no row; no soaring accusations. Godfrey Benyon, being a man with an unforgiving nature, simply told his wife that he would leave that night. She admitted to loving Saunders, yet offered to put him aside and try to make their marriage work. Susan was not a fool and had long realized that, to Saunders, she was merely a bit on the side, to use the common expression of the time.

Even her pleading tears could not move her husband. He was in the business of treachery and knew the price that men and women paid for it within his own sphere of activity. He packed some clothes and a couple of sentimental items, then left the house they had shared for one and a half decades. His last act was to hand her the keys.

On the following morning he contacted his solicitor, set the divorce in motion, then went over to the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service-in those days Century House-and put in a report that he knew would get Saunders dismissed from the organization, almost certainly without a pension.

He did not enjoy these tasks, but his deep love for Susan ended at the moment he opened the door and saw, fleetingly, her body entwined with that of a man whom he had, until that second, respected without question.

Oddly, as he reported back for duty, putting his leave off for a few months, he recalled his father once having said to him, "As far as women are concerned, remember one thing: True and all-consuming love can kill. Sometimes it's not worth it." His parents' marriage had been far from ideal, but now he imagined that he knew what his father had been talking about. There was a coarser saying he had heard from junior officers-"The loving you get ain't worth the loving you get." Only, they substituted another word for loving. This last summed up his feelings exactly and with it came the anger. He felt a fool not to have detected his wife sooner. Part of his job, his livelihood and survival, had been to sense the danger signals, to put his finger on people and situations that were not quite right.

He did not realize it at the time, but the anger spawned a desire to take his revenge. Automatically he had wreaked havoc on Saunders's life, but the need for vengeance was now aimed at his soon to be ex-wife. While this requirement festered deep within his subconscious, Benyon got on with his professional life -though his colleagues later commented that Godfrey Benyon seemed to change into a hard and uncompromising man, something his superiors applauded. Benyon, they decided, would go a long way in the service.

They sent him back to Berlin, and in the next six months he crossed into the East on five separate occasions, servicing dead letter drops and making contact with the one agent he ran- usually from afar-highly placed in the typing pool of the KGB facility at Karlshorst.

This agent, known as Brutus, was a twenty-five-year-old young woman, the daughter of a couple of doctors who lived and worked in the West. Her name was Karen Schmidt-"Such an ordinary name," one of his superiors had said when she first offered herself for active work and cooperation with the Secret Intelligence Service.

Karen's parents were medical P4s for the service: psychiatrists knowledgeable in the ways of what were often known as "deep debriefs"-a term that covered a number of things ranging from counseling of agents who had been through traumas in the field to the kind of interrogations that required the use of certain dangerous drugs allowing inquisitors to reach far into the subconscious of a suspect's mind, trawling for and plundering secrets.

The doctors Schmidt were skilled and respected by the service, their records were squeaky clean, and their work had given Karen her entree into the world of secrets. She was educated at a private, highly regarded school and went on to Oxford where she read foreign languages at St. Anthony's College-sometimes referred to as the spook prep school. Her parents tipped off the Foreign Office that she was interested in working in Intelligence, so the contact was made and she took the one-year course at the place they kept in Wiltshire for training possible field officers.

Benyon had looked after her when they sent her over the Wall and he had played her, normally at long distance, ever since. Now, at just around the time his divorce was becoming final, there was a reason to see her face-to-face again. A signal had made it plain that a meeting was essential, so he went over one evening in early June of 1986, and following the elaborate choreography necessary to this kind of thing, they wound up at a safe house not far from the Berliner Ensemble Theater.

His first surprise came when they made the initial contact on the street. He had seen her only once since she went over three years before. At that time they had given her the appearance of a mousy little thing, advising her about everything from a severe hairstyle, the kind of low-heeled shoes she should wear, to the nondescript clothes with which to equip her wardrobe. When she had gone over, Karen was a girl that no man would even look at twice. Now, her whole persona had changed. She was still the same girl, but the mouse had gone, leaving the most beautiful willowy young woman in its place.

She had let her hair grow, smooth, black and soft, with such a sheen that Benyon wanted to reach out and run splayed fingers through it. Her face was fuller and you could see that the brown eyes glittered with humor, while her lips seemed to have become fuller and more enticing, the corners bracketed by little laugh lines. She wore a white dress, full skirted so that Benyon was aware of her thighs and body moving under the thin material. In short, the almost ugly duckling had become the most attractive swan on the block.

His look must have been transparent, for Karen picked up on it immediately. "You've noticed the change." She smiled, showing that one of her front teeth was crooked. "It was inevitable. You know about the promotions over the past couple of years."

"So the Party insists that you become more glamorous as you move up the ladder?"

"You'd be surprised, but yes. Yes, that's about it. I'm a supervisor now, and they expect supervisors to take care of their appearance. That was one of the things I had to see you about." Her voice had altered as well. The English was, of course, perfect, but the voice was more throaty than he remembered it.

They sat across from one another at the little wooden table. Benyon had brought food: bread, cold ham, potato salad, and a bottle of wine, explaining it away at the checkpoint as a picnic that he and his girlfriend were going to eat before the performance at the Berliner Ensemble, who were doing Brecht's Threepenny Opera that night. The girlfriend had been his backup-a young woman called Bridget Ransom, of whom the more caustic would say that a king's ransom could not buy the pathway to Bridget's secret garden. Maybe, but she was an incredibly good field officer with immaculate German and a Silesian accent, plus the ability to become invisible almost at will. On this occasion she watched Benyon's back during the sit-down with Brutus, and he could not have asked for anyone more professional.

So, in that bedraggled little apartment, not a stone's throw from the theater where Bert Brecht had built his fabled ensemble of actors, Benyon, the agent runner, listened to Brutus, his spy. Over the years he had heard similar stories, but mainly from men. How, in the sensitive position in which they worked, an opportunity had presented itself which, if taken, would lead to a mother lode of hard intelligence. The opportunity always came in the form of a man or woman, depending on the sexual preference of the agent.

It was something Benyon had learned to treat and advise on with great care. An agent in the field was often the loneliest of people, constantly tested, tried, and a prey to every kind of temptation. The common wisdom on field agents likened them to hermits, monks or nuns, living out their days in a hostile environment and denied a normal way of life.

Karen Schmidt's problem was a senior KGB officer, one of the main liaisons between the East German Intelligence and security forces and Moscow Center. That this man, Colonel Viktor Desnikoff, had access to deeply hidden secrets was not in doubt. Back in London, Benyon had read his dossier many times. It was part of his job to keep an eye on Soviet and East German intelligence officers-their comings and goings, any particular strengths or weaknesses, their general profiles, and all the other litter of life so often used by an opposing intelligence service. Desnikoff was undoubtedly a prime target, and here was Benyon's own agent telling him that the colonel had invited her out to dinner on several occasions and had now proposed that she should become his mistress with a later view to marriage.

Karen provided a wealth of detail about the man, and behind the music of her monologue, it was Benyon's job to see if he could detect gins, traps, or snares being laid for his agent. Equally he listened for sounds that might tell him if there were other facts lying just beneath the surface of what she was telling him. Mainly he weighed what advantage they might make of this man should he tell Brutus to go forward, against the possible problems such an operation could cause. He also experienced the constant paranoia of the case officer-had his agent already been quietly turned?

He took his time, keeping the conversation on other matters, ignoring her prods and coaxing for an answer to her main problem-should she commit herself to Desnikoff and the information that would undoubtedly follow? Or should she give the colonel the brush-off?

Benyon, with only one part of his brain on her question, went through the standard drill. Had she detected any changes in attitude to her? Was she comfortable in the double role she was forced to play? Was she aware of any sudden rivalries that might cause her future chaos? These basic questions were important, as they gave him time to think through the right way to determine if Karen was being totally honest with him.

Finally he could put off the subject no longer.

"You fancy the colonel?" Watch her eyes and hands. Read the body language.

There was nothing to read as she shrugged. "He's a bit of a pig, actually. Not unattractive, but his manners are a little boorish."

"I have to ask you this. Even though he's boorish, are you in love with him?"

She gave a little laugh. "No way. That's an absurd thought."

"But you're willing to sleep with him, feign love for him?" "Isn't that part of the job? I know what I can get from him with pillow talk. The information he carries in his head is state-of-the-art stuff. He has the ear of the chairman of the KGB. He swaps information with the Stasi and the other heads of Intelligence. I can tap in to that stuff, but there's only one way, and that lies through sexual favors."

"The giving of favors is not your job. We train people in the art of seduction, Karen. It's not part of your brief. Now, are you sure you don't fancy him?"

She smiled, looked into his eyes, held the gaze for a moment, and then dropped her head. One hand reached out and brushed his hand. In a small voice she said, "Not like I fancy some people."

The meaning was perfectly clear to Benyon. She was telling him that she cared for him, and his mind and body reacted in diametrically opposed ways. It had been some time now since he had been with a woman and he felt the hot stirrings in his groin. Part of him rejected that wink of lust while another part yearned for a young woman as attractive as this one to hold him and tell him she loved him. It was at this moment, in a sudden quick flash, that he wondered if his emotions were motivated by a need for vengeance against his former wife. This he quickly dismissed as irrelevant.

The suspicious, professional side of his mind raised huge doubts. The wiles of women were myriad and complex. There was one of two reasons that Karen Schmidt, Brutus, might come on to him like this. One was what the psychiatrists call transference-where a patient begins to see the doctor as a love object. This same phenomenon was not uncommon among field agents and their case officers. The other reason was more ominous. To get her own way, a turned agent would stop at nothing to convince a case officer that she was right for a highly dubious job, and this included an act of seduction.

He thought-should she, shouldn't she? Will she, won't she? Will she join the dance? Aloud he asked her if she thought the colonel was on the level. "Is it, in your opinion, simply a bit of scalp hunting, or do you think he's serious?"

She thought for a moment. Then-"His reputation with the ladies is not good. I can only go by my intuition and that tells me he's being honest. Yes, he has a letch for me physically, but I sense it's more than that. He's talked to me about many things. It's a scatter effect, not just drawing a bead on my body. Behind all the boorish behavior, the crude manner, the man has a sensitive side. He's been trying to show me that."

"And you really think you can pull this off?"

"I'm not a virgin. I can fake with the best of them. My first priority is to get my hands-my brain, really-on information. If this is the only way to get the really good stuff, then I'll do it."

"You'll do it willingly?"

"I'll do it because I see it as part of my job. I can give you so much, Charles. Much more than I've been able to supply so far." Charles was Benyon's crypto. She knew him only by that name, and as far as he was aware, she was completely ignorant of his real name.

The telephone rang. Only one person knew the number. It would be Bridget Ransom telling him that the performance at the Berliner Ensemble was about to finish. At the distant end Bridget simply said, "Ten minutes," speaking in German just in case they had some kind of a check on the line.

He had to give Karen some instruction. A yes or a no. He counted to ten, then nodded his head. "Do it," he said, and thought he detected fear in her eyes. Fear and a kind of pleading. A woman who hoped the man would make some move; say that he cared, that he wanted her, or even touch her-fondle her after the ways of men and women who are intimately bound to each other.

Benyon did none of these things. "Do it," he said, then added, "I'll come over again in a few weeks-a couple of months if we're getting good information. I think we should talk after you've set the ball rolling, so to speak." He told her to give him at least ten minutes start before she left the little apartment, which smelled of wood rot, rising damp, and the antiseptic they used in safe houses in the East.

It took only three weeks for her first wedge of material to come in, sent as usual in a cryptic high-speed burst of electronic noise, caught in mid-air by the boys and girls at GCHQ in Cheltenham. GCHQ was Government Communications Headquarters, where they did everything from random frequency sweeps to twenty-four-hour listening, to recording reports sent at ultra-high speed from many places in the world.

Other reports followed and Benyon's senior officers in the SIS were more than pleased with the results. Brutus was sending them the pillow talk of Colonel Viktor Desnikoff and the pillow talk was exceptional. Things long hidden were now revealed, and on occasion, they were getting actual conversations between the KGB colonel and his masters in Moscow Center.

"Do we share any of this with the Americans?" Benyon's immediate superior asked of one of their policy-making deputy chiefs.

"Not on your life."

They knew when to share and when to keep quiet. What they were getting back from Brutus, while immediately useful, could also be kept in storage for exchange with the American service for some other secret. The heads of intelligence agencies can be like small boys at times, swapping information like kids swap cards.

Six weeks later, Benyon made another trip over the Wall and had a second face-to-face meeting with Karen Schmidt. This time she was more desirable than ever. She even hugged him and held him close for a good minute when they came together. More desirable, yes, but she was already showing the signs of strain.

When Benyon commented on it, she gave a rueful little smile and said something about maybe she had bitten off more than she could chew. "He's insatiable," she said. "But it opens his mouth."

"Can you keep it up?"

She gave a coarse laugh. "Well, he can, so I suppose I'll have to."

On this occasion, when they parted she looked into his eyes longingly and pulled him close, holding him as though she never wanted to let him go.

Back in London, Godfrey Benyon found that Karen the woman lingered too long in his mind. He worried about her and was concerned for her safety as an agent: after all, that was part of his profession. Yet his thoughts strayed to other things. She came to him in dreams, leaned over him naked and sucked his sex drive from his body in a way that was not merely an act of lust, but a ritual of profound love and care. She was present also in daydreams. He would think that he saw her, suddenly, in a crowd. On a few occasions he even hurried after this phantom Karen only to find, as he drew close, that the woman was not like her at all. There were times when he questioned his obsession with her, but finally he came to terms with the fact that he had fallen in love with his agent, who was now giving herself entirely to a Soviet colonel. Benyon began to feel the claws of jealousy cutting into his soul.

Automatically, it seemed, he also began to take more care in his appearance. He bought new clothes, became conscious of things like regular haircuts and unscuffed shoes. Occasionally he would stand in front of the mirror in the little apartment he rented in Chelsea, wondering how a young girl could possibly be interested in him outside his job. At forty-three his hair was showing signs of gray at the temples, yet his face, like his body, remained lean and firm. He was six foot one in height and had a strong bone structure. He would age well, so perhaps a girl of Karen's age might just be interested in him from a physical aspect. Yet she could know nothing of him as a man, for agent runners always held back their true personality, like actors playing the role expected of them.

The high-grade intelligence kept coming, but with it also came an undertow of strain, detectable not only by Benyon but also by those who ruled over him. Together they began to take precautions, setting up a quick route, a black hole through which they could get Brutus out should it become necessary.

Benyon knew that, inevitably, it would become necessary. It almost always did, particularly with a high-risk operation like this.

He met her in the following spring and thought she looked tired out, frazzled and jumpy, starting at shadows. Once more they embraced and this time-the first time ever-they kissed, not the air, or lips brushing a cheek, but mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, body to body, so that each felt the other through their clothing.

Finally he pulled away, scorched with desire, faint with need and love. "There's no time." He sounded out of breath.

"My darling, we have to make time." She pulled him to her again and he drew away.

"This is far too dangerous. Listen, I have things to tell you…" and he began to outline her escape route, which she immediately turned down.

"Charles, if I have to get out, I'm not going to be treated like someone about to face the Inquisition." Her cheeks flushed. "This has been bloody difficult. Hell, in fact. If I do have to run, then I want you to run with me and I want to be left alone, with you, in some nice quiet place for a couple of weeks before they start pounding on my memory and forcing me to give them a blow-by-blow and fuck-by-fuck commentary…"

Benyon knew how she felt. He had seen it in others, the fear of an immediate interrogation-sometimes hostile-when they were still under the trauma of battle fatigue.

"It won't be that bad, my dearest." His heart was not really in it and he did not even believe himself. Interrogation of agents just in from the cold-as they now said, though the term had been filched from a novelist-was anything but amusing.

"No. Tell them from me that if the worst happens, I have to spend a couple of weeks with you before I speak to any of them. If they don't like it, they can forget about me coming over at all. I'll stick around and suffer the consequences." She reached up and twined her arms around his neck, pulled him close to her, and kissed him again, fiercely and with a violence that took his breath away.

"Just the two of us," she said. "A couple of weeks in the sun. It isn't much to ask after all I've done. It's my final offer, darling Charles, so get it for me."

In London they did not like it. This was going against all the laws of that jungle which is the world of secrets. When you pull someone out, you get at them while they have it all fresh and straight in their minds. Yet, when Benyon laid out her threatened alternative, they finally caved in-if only because the grade A, genuine diamond information kept coming. What she was still giving them confirmed what they believed about certain aspects of the Soviet military, the political leaders, and their future operational plans.

On the next trip over the Wall, Benyon was able to tell her that it was a done deal. He went through all the important moves, which were tricky and needed careful timing. "Once we get you in the West," he smiled and gave her a long squeeze, "once you're over, the pair of us get on a plane and fly to Bermuda. There'll be minders, of course, but you won't even see them. Two weeks in Bermuda can't be bad."

"Right now, two weeks in Bermuda sounds like heaven." "You're okay to go on at the moment?" he asked, concerned, for she had lost weight and had become more jumpy, while her eyes gave away the truth that she was under even greater strain than ever.

"He may suspect something." She bit her lip. "I don't know. I think I should go on a little longer. The stuff he's giving me…?"

"Yes?"

"Does it still check out? Is it still good?" "The best."

They kissed again before she left and he could feel her body pulsing urgently. Needing him, wanting him there and then.

The signal that she was in trouble came only two weeks later. A burst of what sounded like static, beamed directly into GCHQ. It contained the one word-Overcast.

Immediately a team went into action. Benyon was left out, as it was too dangerous for him to make the trip over the Wall. All he could do was sit and wait in the house they had prepared for Karen's return to the West. Even at this late stage, the people who gave him his orders tried to renege on their agreement. She could do nothing about it, they argued. Once she is in the West we can whisk her out of sight.

Benyon said this was no time to begin playing games with her. "She'll shut up like a clam and you'll never get the full story," he cautioned, knowing that the bureaucratic minds of those at the top of the SIS had to cross all their T's and dot all their I's.

So it was that Karen Schmidt was smuggled out of East Berlin and deposited in the West. Within an hour of her arrival, she was on a commercial flight to Paris, with Benyon watching over her with all the tender and loving care he could muster.

She had brought nothing with her, but two of the young women from the West Berlin Residents' office had been sent on a shopping spree armed with Karen's measurements-which were current as from the last time Benyon had seen her. It was one of the more pleasurable jobs he had been given: a tying of every thread so that she would not come near naked into her new life.

From Paris they flew direct to Bermuda and there, in a pleasant little villa on the outskirts of St. George's (they all felt that Hamilton was too risky), she overcame her fatigue and made love to Benyon in a way that surpassed any of his fantasies.

"Darling Charles," she whispered again and again as she lay quietly in his arms after the loving.

"Not my real name, my dearest girl," he said.

She gave him a slow and quaint smile, which showed her one crooked tooth. "I know, but I don't like the name Godfrey."

He thought nothing of the last remark and they drifted into a golden sleep, wrapped around one another like a pair of children.

In the days following, they became true lovers. Benyon caught only odd glimpses of the watchers assigned to them. He also took three telephone calls from the officer in charge of the team minding them. Apart from that, they took occasional walks down into St. George's, eating twice in a very good restaurant, doing a little touristy shopping and buying food, which they took turns in cooking for one another. For the balance of the time they were lovers and proved all the pleasures. They even made plans for the future, talked seriously about life out of the service and what they could do once they were both released from the bondage of secrecy.

The island of Bermuda was the perfect place for them after all. Was this not the island of which Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest-the isle full of noises and rapture, with the great magician Prospero and the tangle of love lives within that play? Karen and Benyon appeared to be enraptured by the place, in thrall as though Prospero were still in control, weaving a delicious and intoxicating spell around them.

Three nights before they were due to be shipped back to the UK for that long and exhausting time which it would take to clean her out, as the interrogators would phrase it, Karen realized that they had forgotten wine to drink with the dinner she was cooking.

Benyon left the charming little pink villa and walked down to King's Square, glimpsing the full-sized replica of the ship Deliverance, built on the island to carry an already shipwrecked group of colonists on to America, standing on Ordnance Island as a piece of living history with the statue of Sir George Somers, ill-fated leader of that expedition, arms raised as if he embraced this magic place. He bought a bottle of Karen's favorite wine and slowly walked back. In all he had been away for less than half an hour, but knew that something was wrong as soon as he saw the villa.

A car stood by the gate leading to the small patch of garden in front of the house, and he recognized one of the watchers, the man's name popping into his head straightaway-Pete Cannon. He had not seen the man for a decade, but knew him instantly, just as he knew something dreadful had occurred.

Inside, standing in the small living room, "Cheezy" Fowles, head of the watchers' unit, stood by the table with another of his men whom Benyon did not recognize.

"What…?" he began.

"We lost her." Fowles, ramrod straight and very angry.

"Lost her? But…"

"But me no buts, Mr. Benyon. My people latched on to a couple of likely lads two days ago. I had one man at the back of the house. Now he's dead and she was away before you were ten yards down the street."

"But I don't…"

"I've got the island swarming with people, plus the local gendarmes, though I think it was done so quickly and professionally that she may even be far away by now. There are plenty of yachts and small boats off the coast, and we can't cover all of them."

"You mean she's been abducted?"

Slowly Fowles shook his head. "I think not. It would seem that she went of her own accord."

In the midst of the shock an old joke flashed through Benyon's head-"My wife's in the Caribbean." " Jamaica?" "No, she went of her own accord."

"Left you a little billet-doux and a package." He gestured to the table.

The package was neatly wrapped with the kind of paper you buy for wedding presents: all white with golden bells and horseshoes. Against it was a pink envelope.

Benyon hesitated for a moment, hovering between the envelope and the parcel. Finally he opened the parcel. Inside was a white box, around seven inches long and a couple of inches high. He raised the lid and lifted the contents from a crunch of thin tissue. It was an almost pornographic little statue.

It was fashioned out of that metal so popular as expensive tourist statues: dark and pitted by what appeared to be verdigris. The figures, arched together in the sexual act, were sticklike, elongated and wastingly thin in the style of Giacometti.

There was a card with the gift, which simply read-We are surely together for eternity now, my darling-Karen.

With a sense of terrible breathlessness, as though some soot-black shadow had crossed over him, Benyon slowly slit the envelope and unfolded the one sheet of pink paper. Karen had written-

I am sorry, my darling Charles, I do care for you. At least that was not a lie, but from the beginning I have worked for KGB. Poor Viktor has been working for the Americans for many years. KGB instructed me to get very close to him, and when I told you the tale, so did you. It is an irony that he was passing the same chicken feed to the Americans, as I was passing to you. In all it looked and sounded authentic because it simply told you what you wanted to hear. What none of us knew then was that Viktor is HIV positive. Now he has full-blown AIDS and I am heading toward it rapidly. You will follow and we will eventually be together. I shall be well cared for until the end, for KGB looks after its own. I hope the same applies in your organization.

Much love until death brings us together again.

Karen.

He heard the silent scream deep within him, knew he was a dead man, heard some words from The Tempest-"But I would fain die a dry death"-heard his father saying that true love sometimes killed, and lastly, as the truth swept over him, heard the old words-"The loving you get ain't worth the loving you get."