Poland.” Parker spread his hands. “It was easy as that.”
“The missing years,” Peter said, and his Voice SOLinded strange in his own ears. He cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably under Parker’s piercing but understanding gaze.
“No longer missing, Peter. We have been fed a little glimmering of what happened during those years and we have been able to fill in the rest of it from what we knew already.”
“The Russians?” Peter asked,
and when Parker nodded, Peter went on with a bitter tang to his voice.
“They seem to be very forthcoming, don’t they? I have never heard of them passing information at least not valuable information so readily.”
“They have their reasons in this case,” Parker demurred.
“Very good reasons as it turns out but one will come to those in due course.” “Very well.” The child returned with her uncle to Poland,
Warsaw.
And there was an extravagant family reunion. We are not certain if this was her real family, or whether the child was provided with a foster family for the occasion. In any event, the uncle soon announced that if Magda would submit to examination there was an excellent chance that she would be provided with a scholarship to one of the elite colleges of the USSR. We can imagine that she passed her examination with great distinction and her new masters must have congratulated themselves on their discovery.
“The college is on the shores of the Black Sea near Odessa. It does not have a name, nor an old school tie. The students are very specially selected, the screening is rigorous and only the brightest and most talented are enrolled. They are soon taught that they are an elite group, and are streamed in the special direction that their various talents dictate. In Magda’s case it was languages and politics, finance and mathematics. She excelled and at the age of seventeen graduated to a higher, more specialized branch of the Odessa college. There she was trained in special memory techniques, the already bright mind was honed down to a razor edge. I understand that one of the less difficult exercises was to be given access to a list of a hundred diverse items for sixty seconds. The list had to be repeated from memory, in the correct order, twenty-four hours later.” Parker shook his head again, expressing his admiration.
“At the same time she was also trained to fit naturally into upper-class international Western society. Dress, food, drink,
cosmetics, manners, popular music and literature, cinema theatre,
democratic politics, business procedures, the operation of stocks and commodities markets, the more mundane secretarial skills, modern dancing, the art of lovemaking and pleasuring men that and much else,
all of it taught by experts flying, skiing, weapons, the rudiments of electronics and mechanical engineering and every other skill that a top-class agent might have to call upon.
“She was the star of her course and emerged from it much as the woman you know. Poised, skilled, beautiful, motivated and deadly.
“At the age of nineteen she knew more, was capable of more, than most other human beings, male or female, twice her age. The perfect agent, except for a small flaw in her make-up that only showed up later. She was too intelligent and too personally ambitious.” Kingston
Parker smiled for the first time in twenty minutes. Which of course is a pseudonym for greed. Her masters did not recognize it in her, and perhaps at that age it was only latent greed. She had not yet been fully exposed to the attractions of wealth nor of unlimited power.”
Kingston Parker broke off, leaned across the table towards Peter. then seemed to cLinge direction then, smiling an inward knowledgeable stude,
as though pondering a hidden truth.
“Greed for wealth alone belongs essentially to the lower levels of human intelligence. It is only the developed and advanced mind that can truly appreciate the need for power-” He saw the protest in Peter’s expression. No, no, I don’t mean merely the power to control one’s own limited environment, merely the power of life and death over a few thousand lives not that, but true power. Power to change the destiny of nations, power such as Caesar or Napoleon wielded, such as the
President of the United States wields that is the ultimate greed,
Peter. A magnificent and noble greed.” He was silent a moment, as though glimpsing some vision of splendour. Then he went on: ”
digress. Forgive me,” and turned to Colin Noble. “Do we have some coffee, Colin? I think we could all do with a cup now. Colin went to the machine that blooped and gurgled and winked its red eye in the corner, and while he filled the cups, the charged atmosphere in the room eased a little, and Peter tried to arrange his thoughts in some logical sequence. He looked for the flaws and weak places in the story but could find none instead he remembered only the feel of her mouth, the touch of her hands on his body. Oh God, it was a stab of physical pain, a deep ache in the chest and groin, as he remembered how she had coursed him like a running stag, driving and goading him on to unvisited depths of his being. Could such skills be taught, he wondered, and if so, by whom? He had a horrifying thought of a special room set on the heights above the Black Sea, with that slim, vulnerable tender body practising its skills, learning love as though it were cookery or small arms practice and then he shut his mind firmly against it, and Kingston Parker was speaking again, balancing his coffee cup primly with his pinky finger raised, like an old maid at a tea party.
“So she arrived back in Paris and it fell at her feet. It was a triumphant progress.” Kingston Parker prodded in the file with his free hand, spilling out photographs of Magda Magda dancing in the ballroom of the Elysee Palace, Magda leaving a Rolls-Royce limousine outside
Maxim’s in the rue Royale, Magda skiing, riding, beautiful, smiling,
poised and always there were men. Rich, well-fed, sleek men.
(I told you once there were eight sexual liaisons.” Kingston
Parker used that irritating expression again. “We have had reason to revise that figure. The French take a very close interest in that sort of thing, they have added to the list.” He flicked over the photographs. “Pierre Hammond, Deputy Minister of Defence-” And another. “Mark Vincent, head of mission at the American Consulate-“
“Yes,” Peter cut in short, but still there was a sickly fascination in seeing the faces of these men. He had imagined them accurately, he realized, without particular relish.
“Her masters were delighted as you can imagine. With a male agent it is sometimes necessary to wait a decade or more for results while he moles his way into the system.
With a young and beautiful woman she has her greatest value when those assets are freshest. Magda Kutchinsky gave them magnificent value. We do not know the exact extent of her contributions our
Russian friends have not bared everything to us, I’m afraid, but I
estimate that it was about this time they began to realize her true potential. She had the magical touch, but her beauty and youth could not last for even” Kingston Parker made a deprecating gesture with the slim pianist’s hands. “We do not know if Aaron Altmann was a deliberate choice by her masters. But it seems likely. Think of it one of the richest and most powerful men in Western Europe, one who controlled most of the steel and heavy engineering producers, the single biggest armaments complex, electronics all associated and sensitive secondary industries. He was a widower, childless, so under
French law his wife could inherit his entire estate.
He was known to be fighting a slowly losing battle with cancer, so his life term was limited and he was also a Zionist and one of the most trusted and influential members of Mossad. It was beautiful.
Truly beautiful” said Kingston Parker. “Imagine being able to undermine a man of that stature, perhaps being able to double him!
Though that seemed an extravagant dream not even the most beautiful siren of history could expect to turn a man like Aaron Altmann. He is a separate study on his own, another incredible human being with the strength and courage of a lion until the cancer wore him out. Again
I digress, forgive me. Somebody, either the Director of the NKVD in
Moscow, or Magda Kutchinsky’s control at the Russian Embassy in Paris,
who was, incidentally, the Chief NKVD Commissar for Western Europe,
such was her value, or Magda Kutchinsky herself, picked Aaron Altmann.
