‘Provided he’s invited again.’
‘He will be.’ Prentice turned off the radio and lit a cigarette. ‘I tracked down some of his financial contacts. He’s a dead cert – like you.’
‘And you, George?’
‘Up to a point. I’m a tame lecturer. They keep one or two up their sleeves. Adds respectability to the set-up. I expect they’ll give me a miss next year. It doesn’t matter which one of us they invite: we all send them to sleep.’
‘So British Intelligence won’t be represented at Bilderberg next year?’
Prentice smiled faintly. ‘I didn’t say that.’ He pointed at the receiver picking up transmissions from Danzer’s apartment. ‘He’s taken to his bed. Shit-scared by the sound of him.’
‘How do you know?’ Anderson asked, sitting down in a leather arm-chair beside the electric fire. The chair sighed beneath his weight.
‘The girl called. He sent her packing. We can’t have that, of course,’ Prentice added.
‘Of course not. He’s got to keep to his pattern.’
‘Exactly. So he’s got to continue his recruitment campaign.’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ Anderson asked, spinning the bloodstone fob on his watchchain, ‘that she could get hurt?’
‘It’s occurred to me,’ Prentice said. ‘Does it matter?’
Anderson gave the fob a last twirl and shook his head. ‘How did you get like this, George?’
‘I worked at it,’ Prentice said.
‘A girl?’
Prentice said flatly: ‘I’m sure you know all there is to know about me.’
‘A little,’ Anderson replied.
He knew, for instance, that Prentice had belonged to a post-war intellectual elite at Oxford who believed in Capitalism as fervently as other young men at Cambridge had once believed in Communism.
‘Any economist,’ he was on record as saying, ‘must be a Capitalist. Unless, that is, they are tapping around economic realities with a white stick.’
Anderson knew also, from a CIA agent at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, that at a remarkably early age Prentice had taught economics at Oxford before gravitating to the more exciting fields of industrial consultancy.
The consultancy, as Danby had told him, was owned by the English financial whizz-kid of the late sixties, Paul Kingdon.
The CIA agent, young and keen, had elaborated in a Mayfair pub. ‘Kingdon is a smart cookie. As you probably know he’s big in mutual funds – or unit trusts as they call them over here. Only, like Cornfeld, he’s gone a step further: his funds invest in other funds. To safeguard the investments he started this industrial consultancy and put Prentice in charge with an office in Zurich. It wasn’t long before Prentice was recruited by British Intelligence.’
‘Does Kingdon know that his prize spook works for MI6?’ Anderson asked.
The agent shrugged. ‘I doubt it. Why should Prentice tell him? At present he’s got the best of two worlds – he’s paid by both. Not only that but he believes in the work he’s doing.’
‘Don’t you?’ Anderson asked.
‘Of course,’ hastily.
‘Does he believe in the work he’s doing for this guy Kingdon?’
‘Just so long as Kingdon is making money for the Honest Joe’s, he does. At the moment Kingdon is doing just that. His funds have made millions for people whose only hope was the Irish Sweep or the football pools.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Anderson drank some beer. ‘Tell me what makes Prentice tick.’
‘Difficult.’ Anderson looked up with interest. ‘He’s deceptively tough. He can read a balance sheet like you or I would read the baseball scores. He’s not above breaking into premises to get what he wants. He once killed a Russian who tried to knife him in West Berlin. But about a year ago he changed ….’
‘His sex?’
‘Apparently he became bitter, introverted. Drank a bit for a while. We don’t know why,’ anticipating Anderson’s question.
‘Sounds like a security risk,’ Anderson remarked.
‘The British don’t seem to think so.’
‘Which means they know why his character changed,’ Anderson said thoughtfully. ‘Prentice sounds an interesting character.’
‘If you can get near him.’
‘I can try,’ Anderson said, finishing his beer.
‘A little,’ Anderson repeated, his thoughts returning to the present.
Prentice said: ‘And that’s what you’ll have to make do with.’ He stretched. ‘I’m going to bed. Tomorrow you must introduce me to Danzer.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ Anderson said, shifting his position and making the leather chair sigh again. ‘He’s got a lot to tell us.’
‘How long?’ Prentice asked, hand on the door to his bedroom.
‘In my experience it can take anything up to six months. We’ve got to bleed him dry. And we can’t have any professional interrogators out here to alert the Russians.’
‘Six months …. As long as that?’ And when Anderson nodded: ‘By that time we’ll have to be briefing him what to tell the Kremlin about Bilderberg. It shouldn’t take the Russians too long to tumble what we’re up to.’
‘Don’t be such a goddam pessimist,’ Anderson said. ‘The Kremlin hasn’t got a smell of what goes on at Bilderberg. If we play it cool we can use Danzer for misinformation for years. We just have to make sure he doesn’t feed them anything which is dramatically wrong.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ Prentice opened the door of his bedroom. ‘Well, good-night; …’
‘The name’s Owen.’
‘Good-night,’ Prentice repeated and closed the door.
So Anderson knew ‘a little’.
He undressed and climbed into bed.
How much was ‘a little’?
He switched out the light and lay still, hands behind his head, thinking, as he did every night, about what he hoped Anderson knew nothing about.
* * *
Annette du Pont had been beautiful.
Flaxen-haired, grey-eyed, full-breasted, just saved from looking like a conventional sort of model advertising tanning cream or toothpaste, by traces of sensitivity on her features that would soon settle into character.
She was, in fact, a student of economics at the old university at Basle, and she came to Prentice for help in her studies.
It was high summer and she was on vacation. While Prentice guided her though the theories of John Maynard Keynes – he had always admired a man who could preach enlightened economics and at the same time make killings on the stock market – he had found that he, too, was learning. How to live.
He bought new suits and Bally shoes, and had his brown hair fashionably cut. He felt ten years younger than his thirty-three years. Even younger when, as they lay in a field printed with flowers overlooking the lake, she stroked his hair and said: ‘You’re very handsome, you know. Not a bit like an economist.’
His own awakening astonished him: he had never realised that such emotions lay dormant. There had been other girls, of course, but never rapport such as this.