Yesterday's Spy

Chapter 9

Geneva. Calvin’s great citadel is perched precariously between the grey mountains of France and the grey waters of Lake Geneva. The city, too, is grey: grey stone buildings, grey-uniformed cops, even its money and its politics are grey. Especially its politics.

I looked out through the hotel’s spotlessly clean windows, and watched the plume of water that is Geneva’s last despairing attempt at gaiety. The tall jet fell back into the lake and hammered the surface into steel. The traffic moving slowly along the lakeside stopped, started and then stopped again. There was no hooting, no flashing headlights, no arguments, no complaining. The citizens of Geneva are as well adjusted as its clocks. It was 10 A.M., but the city was silent except for the rustle of banknotes and the ticking of a couple of billion wristwatches.

‘You were a fool to come here. And so was I.’ He pushed the bowl of cornflakes away untouched.

‘You came because you knew I’d make plenty of trouble for you if you didn’t come. I came because I had to.’

‘You came for yourself! This isn’t official; it’s just for yourself. And it’s bloody dangerous!’ His upper-class voice was pitched high and slightly querulous, like some customer complaining about the caviare in Harrods.

‘Well, it’s too late now, Aziz.’ I poured some tea for him and he gave me a wintry smile. Aziz was working for the World Meteorological Organization headquarters on the Avenue Giuseppe-Motta. His masters here in Geneva would have been astonished perhaps to discover that he was a senior analyst for Egyptian Intelligence. But certainly his masters in Cairo would have been devastated to hear that he’d been on London’s payroll for nearly ten years. ‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘this one is going to become official. Believe me, it is.’

‘You said that in New York.’

‘That was different,’ I said. ‘You got nineteen thousand dollars out of that one. This time it’s free.’

‘I’m glad you told me,’ said Aziz. He sniffed. He was a bird-like little man, with thinning hair, large eyes and a nose like a ploughshare. His dark skin was inherited from the Sudanese peasant girl who bore him, while the chalk-stripe worsted, the hand-made shoes and public-school tie were worn with the aplomb he’d learned from the Egyptian mine-owner who acknowledged the boy as his son. The small turquoise pinned into his tie was taken from a mine that has been worked since the first dynasty of Egyptian kings. For such a man it is not easy to adapt to the stringencies of a nationalized land and high taxation. ‘There will be no money this time?’ He smiled. ‘Surely you are not serious.’

‘Champion,’ I said. ‘Steve Champion.’ I gave him a few seconds to think about that. ‘I need help, Aziz, I really need it.’

‘You must be mad.’

I pushed him a little. ‘London’s request for the Libyan trade figures, the Sinai supplementaries, the Kissinger stuff and the analysis you did in December. That all came through me. You must have stashed away a quarter of a million dollars over the last three years, Aziz. And most of that stuff was a doddle, wasn’t it? It’s the easiest money you ever earned, Aziz. And all of that came through me.’

‘What are you fishing for — a percentage?’ He poured himself more tea, and took a long time spearing the slice of lemon, but he never drank the tea. He toyed with the thin slice of lemon, and then dipped it into the sugar, popped it into his mouth and looked up guiltily. I smiled.

‘You’d better let me phone the office,’ he said. He looked at the gold quartz chronometer on his wrist, and touched his diamond cufflinks to make sure they were still in place. I suppose that must be the problem with diamond cufflinks, apart from the way they slash the red silk lining of your Savile Row suits.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I don’t care how long it takes. We’ll have room service send lunch up here. I’ve spent half the night checking this room for electronic plumbing.’

He looked around the austere Swiss hotel room that cost as much per night as the average British worker received per week. He shuddered. ‘It won’t take that long,’ he said.

‘This time I’ve got more to lose than you have.’

He looked me up and down, from shoes to haircut. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said finally. He sniffed again.

‘Just Champion?’ he said. All these people who sell us information are like that. They categorize it, and husband it, and let it go only grudgingly, as a philatelist disposes of bits of his collection, and tries to get rid of the dud stamps first. Aziz smoothed his hair across the crown of his head. There wasn’t much of it, and he patted it gently. ‘You’ve always played fair with me,’ he said. ‘I’d be the first to admit that.’ I waited while he persuaded himself to tell me what I wanted to know.

‘It’s the same tedious story that we know only too well,’ said Aziz, in his beautifully modulated English public-school accent. ‘London put Champion into some of the rougher bits of the small-arms trade …’

‘Terrorist weapons.’

‘Terrorist weapons. And eventually Champion makes contact with our people.’

‘Political Intelligence.’

‘Political Intelligence,’ repeated Aziz, and nodded. Why the hell he still called them his people, when he’d spent a decade selling them out, was strictly between him and his analyst, but I let him continue uninterrupted. ‘London must have seen what would happen,’ said Aziz. ‘Ask yourself … Champion’s father spent his whole life in Egypt. The Academy gave him a banquet when he retired. Nasser was a student of the old man, you know, as was Sadat. Even the younger Champion has better Arabic than I can put my tongue to.’

‘Do you want to light that cigarette?’ I said, ‘or do you prefer waving it around?’

He smiled and caught the matches I threw to him. He seemed surprised to find they burned as brightly as a gold lighter. ‘We turned him, of course.’ He blew smoke and took a piece of tobacco off his lip with a long fingernail. ‘At first it was all quite straightforward; London knew he was a double, Cairo knew he was a double. It was a convenient method of communication between Egypt and you …’

‘When was that?’

‘Let’s say until the summer before last. It was just before the Fleet exercises that he delivered the NATO wavelengths to us. That was not part of the plan — as far as London was concerned. They found out when Damascus got the wavelengths. London got a rocket from NATO, or so I heard. Yes, Champion burned his boats when he did that.’

‘Champion did it for money?’

‘My dear fellow …’ he protested. ‘What else?’

‘You seem pretty certain about all this, Aziz. Even you have been known to make a mistake.’

‘Have I?’ He frowned. ‘I certainly don’t remember one.’

I got up and went back to the window to watch the lake again. I said, ‘Are you just giving me the gossip from the Cairo Hilton?’

‘This is all top-level stuff, old boy. There’s a very limited circulation for Champion’s material — top bloody secret, all the way.’

‘How did you get it?’

‘My brother-in-law, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I said. His brother-in-law was a one-star general in Cairo’s Department of Political Intelligence that fills — and overflows from — a seven-storey building in Heliopolis.

Aziz was watching me closely as I turned away from the window. ‘I can get you Xerox copies of anything special,’ he offered. ‘But it will take at least two weeks.’

‘We’ll see, Aziz.’

‘Oh, yes, Champion’s deep into it.’ He stubbed out the cigarette and watched me as I figured out what to do next. ‘It’s upset you, hasn’t it,’ said Aziz, with more friendliness than I would have thought him capable of. ‘I’m sorry about that, but Champion has gone a lot too far for London to be running him still — he’s Cairo’s man. He’s ours.’

Ours, I thought, good old Aziz, consummate schizoid, that’s the way to be. I sat down on the leather armchair and closed my eyes. ‘There’s got to be a better way than this to earn a living, Aziz,’ I said. I had to be back in Villefranche that evening. It was a long drive and I was suddenly very, very tired.

‘No doubt about that, old boy,’ said Aziz. ‘Trouble is … a chap’s got to have a little bread, while he’s figuring out what the better way is.’