Murder For Love

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 Threepe