by Peter James
At Marble Arch, I turned left down the Bayswater Road, and then threaded my way around the back of Paddington Station. One hundred years ago, this had been the smart side of the Park to live. Then the station had been built, and the smart set fled over to South Kensington to escape the smut and the soot. Now the trains were electric or diesel and there was no smut and no soot, but few of the smart set had moved back. Terrace upon terrace of handsome white buildings sat decaying, with paint flaking off; the ones that weren’t hotels were jam-packed with as many apartments any landlord, with access to a cheap carpenter and even cheaper plumber, could cram in.
My ear plug bleeped; I pressed the button on my pencil. ‘Ursula,’ I said.
‘It’s a Hertz rental. Taken out this morning by one Michael Allen Keating, of 67 Harewood Drive, Leeds. He paid cash in advance for three days’ rental, and left cash deposit for the car. It was taken from the Russell Square branch and was to be returned there. It has been found abandoned north side of Piccadilly. Will check further on Keating. Over.’
‘Thanks. I’m going around the block. I’ll call you later.’
‘Going around the block’ was code for leaving London.
‘Roger Ursula, reply Fairy.’
It was some way down the M40 motorway before the traffic lightened and I could see a clear stretch of road ahead of me. When the gap finally came, I dropped down into third, and pushed the accelerator hard down. The car surged from fifty up to ninety, the engine missing a couple of times as the oil was blown off the plugs, and then on up to ninety-five, where I changed back into fourth. Still the car surged forward, the pit of my stomach trying to force its way into the soft leather seat-back behind me. The needle whipped past one hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-five, and I eased off there, before the rev counter went into the red, and held her at one hundred and twenty. Although she would soon be entering her fourth decade, she felt as if she was hardly run in, and clung to her line on the road like a limpet.
In the event of being stopped by the police, I had a small plastic card in my wallet. It was issued by the Home Office and it had on one side my photograph and a Home Office seal, and on the reverse the words: This person is on special duties. Please give him any help he may require. By authority of the Home Secretary. But I didn’t need to use the card tonight. Whatever any of Britain’s answers to Star-sky and Hutch might have been up to, they weren’t waiting for speedsters down this particular stretch of highway. After a few minutes, I eased down to one hundred.
I mulled things over as I drove. I wondered whether the Marina had been tailing me to see where I was going, or was tailing me to see if I would stop anywhere long enough for them to get some vital part of the top half of my anatomy into the cross-hairs of a telescopic sight. I wasn’t enjoying this assignment, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. Before I could move off it, I had to see it through; and to see it through I had to survive, and right now, that didn’t seem like the easiest of things to do.
I was out of my depth, but so, it seemed, was everyone else – from Fifeshire downwards – out of our depths and in the dark, playing a game of chance that would pay us no prizes if we won, but could cost dearly if we lost. At least they were the kind of options we were used to.
I was so wrapped up in thought that I went straight past the brown Triumph Dolomite, Sarah, the rear of the three tail cars, the grey Chevette, Alison, and the beige Allegro, Debbie. I was about to go straight past Whalley’s Cavalier when the alarm bells started clanging in my head. I braked hard, and dropped back behind the Allegro. We were on the A44, between Worcester and Leominster, having left the motorway a long way back. There were no street lights and no houses; it was pitch dark. The traffic was heavy.
Suddenly, the Allegro’s brake lights came on, and I nearly slammed into the back of the car. A car a short distance ahead of him was turning right. It was Whalley’s Cavalier, and he was turning into a small lane.
The Allegro went straight on. I snapped off my lights and turned into the lane to follow. Whalley was driving very slowly now, obviously looking for something. I saw what appeared to be a cart-track on the left, and swung into it. There was a splintering crash. I cursed; without my lights on, I hadn’t noticed the closed gate. I switched off the engine, leapt out of the car, not worrying about the gate for the moment, ran around to the boot, grabbed a briefcase from it, then sprinted off up the road after Whalley’s car.
I was in luck; around the next corner, I saw him put his brake lights on, and then I saw him shine a torch out of his right-hand window. He held it steady for a moment, then switched it off, turned right, and drove straight in between the bushes. I ran up to where he had gone in. There was a gap which led through to a huge field. Sitting at the edge of the field, glinting slightly in the moonlight, was a dark-coloured Ford Capri. I pressed down the tip of my pencil. ‘Daphne’s stopped for a picnic. She’ll need some ice.’ My code words told the team to keep both ends of this lane covered.
Whalley drove up towards the Capri. I snapped open my case, and drew out my image-intensifier binoculars, and looked firstly at the Capri’s registration. It was different from the last time, but I had little doubt it was the same car. I looked up through the windscreen. The driver wore a large pair of sun-glasses and a cap pulled down over his forehead. His mouth was covered by a thick moustache. Whether by accident or design, he had made it quite impossible to identify any of his facial features.
I took a set of headphones from my case and put them on. There was a wire running from them to a device with a telescopic sight, that was long and pointed, like a gun with no stock or breech. I stared through the image-intensifier sight and picked up Whalley. I pushed the switch on the side of the device, and was nearly deafened by the grating of a handbrake being pulled on. I turned the volume control down.
Whalley, methodical as always, removed his ignition key, then left his car, walked over to the Capri, and got into the front passenger seat of the Capri.
I aimed the cross-hairs of the sight onto the front windscreen of the Capri, midway between their heads. The device was the very latest in eavesdropping from Messrs Trout and Trumbull of the Playroom, British Intelligence’s answer to Alexander Graham Bell, Oppenheimer, the Atari Corporation, and Heath Robinson, all rolled into one. Their inventiveness knew no bounds. Among this month’s collection of essential items for the Spy-Who-Has-Everything were a rubber plant containing a concealed gun that could be aimed with deadly accuracy and fired, by remote control, from a distance of up to five miles; an apple that was a hand grenade – the removal of the stalk primed it; and an aerosol that, if sprayed onto the trunk of a tree, coated it in a substance that turned it into a highly effective radio aerial. Trout and Trumbull were heavily into Mother Earth this month; all the past few years’ publicity on ecology had obviously suddenly got through to them.
The most extraordinary thing about these two pasty-faced boffins, who looked more like elderly sales assistants in a dignified men’s outfitters of a nearly bygone age, was that everything they produced could be relied upon to work. Of the hundreds of weird devices they came up with, few were ever offered by them for service; but, with very rare exceptions indeed, one had the greatest of confidence that, if they did offer something, it would work.
The device I held in my hands now wasn’t actually their invention. In fact, they invented very little. Their brilliance lay in their ability to find and adapt inventions of others to the needs of the British field operative of the 1980s. This particular device was a laser microphone which could pick up a conversation with the most perfect clarity and fidelity of tone from a range of up to five miles. It did this by picking up the vibrations that the words made on any solid object nearby, and translating the vibrations back into speech. Glass was ideal for this, and no piece of glass could have been more ideal than the Triplex toughened-zone windscreen behind which they now sat.
‘You’re late. Jesus, you had me worried.’
‘I’m sorry – the traffic was bad getting out of London.’
‘The traffic’s always bad in London. You got stuck in it last time – why couldn’t you have left earlier?’
I recognized the man’s voice. I had heard it before. I racked my brains to think where, but I couldn’t remember; but I had definitely heard that voice.
‘I couldn’t. It would have looked suspicious.’
‘You were hours late last time. I’ve driven a hundred miles to make your journey shorter for you this time, and you’re still late.’
‘I’m sorry; I’m not good at this sort of thing.’
‘Maybe I should send some of these to your wife – would it help your punctuality?’
There was the sound of stiff paper; they both looked down at something the contact held.
‘You told me the negatives had been destroyed.’
‘Did I? I must have lied.’
‘I’ll be on time in the future.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, but I’m hoping there won’t be too many more times.’
‘Good. I don’t think my nerves can take it much longer.’
‘You’re sure you weren’t followed here?’
‘Of course not. I’ve told you, the Authority has no security worth speaking of.’
‘We’re worried there’s been a leak. I was going to tell you last time, but I didn’t want to frighten you. The Libyans caught a British agent operating in the training camp where we had our briefing sessions. Under torture, he admitted that he had bribed a Libyan friend to go to London and tell his control. The Libyan was tracked down and silenced, but not until after he arrived in London. We know who he contacted, but we don’t know how much he managed to tell. We know it can’t have been a great deal, because the specific details hadn’t been decided then, and I advised we should let the matter drop. But now there’s been a real fuck-up. Wojara didn’t agree. He wanted to have the person the Libyan contacted silenced as well – someone at MI5. They had a go at him and screwed up. You probably read in the paper last week about the bomb in a taxi?’
Whalley nodded.
‘Well, if that MI5 man’s got half a brain, it can’t take him too long to put two and two together and figure out a connection. I knew there was going to be trouble dealing with niggers. You’re going to have to keep your ears to the ground and a careful eye out.’
‘Yes,’ said Whalley unhappily. In the gloom, his face looked as cheerful as the inside of an empty curry house.
‘It could open up a whole can of worms, this screw-up, and this operation has to succeed, Mr Whalley, it has to succeed; and you’re the man that’s going to make it succeed, aren’t you?’
Whalley nodded silently.
‘And you know what will happen if this operation fails for any reason, any reason at all, or even if it has to be aborted, you know what your wife is going to get through the post, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m glad we still understand each other. Now, we have a date: 4 January – provided the wind is right: westerly. If not, it’s the first day after that that it is right.’
‘I can gear for a specific day – but I don’t know how I can delay after that day.’
‘That’s your problem.’
‘I also don’t know if I can be ready by then.’
‘You’ll have to be.’
‘Can you give me to the middle of next week to confirm it?’
‘You can have until next Tuesday.’
‘All right,’ Whalley sighed, ‘how shall I let you know?’
‘You’ll send a postcard to Oxford University with a picture of Westminster Abbey on it. Now, write this down: you’ll send it to Ben Tsenong – I’ll spell that for you: B-E-N T-S-E-N-O-N-G – Balliol College, Oxford; and you’ll write the message: “You’re right, London is beautiful. See you again soon. Marsha.” Got it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll contact you again soon. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’ Whalley got out of the car and walked back to his Cavalier. The man in the Capri did nothing until Whalley had driven back out through the gap. When he had gone, the man started the Capri; but instead of following Whalley’s tracks out through the gap, he turned the Capri in a large arc and, accelerating smartly, headed out across towards the far side of the field. I followed him with my binoculars. He went through an open gate and into a wood which dipped down into a valley. There was no point in my trying to sprint after him – he was driving much too fast. The cunning bastard! I don’t think he knew we were here, but he certainly wasn’t taking any chances. I spoke into the pencil. ‘Contact in Capri SFG 77R. Coming out backstage; send out a soft alert.’
A soft alert is an instruction to all police patrols to look out for the Capri, and to stop it for any traffic offence, however minor, that they can. The intention was, that by stopping the Capri and notifying our surveillance team where it was stopped, it would give them time to get back onto its tail. But there weren’t that many police around in this part of the world, and if the man was a professional, of which there seemed little doubt, then he was likely to stick to the quiet back-roads. It was also likely that by the time he emerged from the other side of those woods, the Capri would have yet another registration number.
I tried hard to remember where I had heard that voice before. It was recently, I knew that. Maybe I was mistaken, but I didn’t think so.
It was half past eleven, and I had a good three and a half hour’s drive back to London; for the moment, I had forgotten all about my birthday, and Gelignite’s treat, because right now there was one thought, and one thought only, racing around inside my skull: for the first time since I had begun this assignment, I felt I was in with a sporting chance of hitting the jackpot.
I rewound the tape a little, pressed the play button, and listened for long enough to be satisfied that the conversation had been safely recorded. So Whalley was being blackmailed. Interesting. Very interesting. The whole dialogue had been most interesting.
The gate was an elaborate, if ancient, job, made from timber and barbed wire, and I had done a damn good job of wrapping the barbed wire through the spokes of the Jaguar’s wire wheels and around the hub wing-nuts. No amount of tugging would do any good; I was faced with the choice of either driving back to London with the gate attached to my wheels, or jacking up the car, removing the wheels, and disentangling the wire in the freezing-cold, pitch dark. Unhappily, the latter was the more realistic of the two alternatives.
I was not, therefore, in the most cheerful of frames of mind when, at a few minutes to six in the morning, I finally drove into the mews, to see that Gelignite’s black Golf GTI was not parked, as it normally was, eight feet away from my front door and blocking the entire mews; in fact, it was not in the mews at all.
I stared again at the note on the hall mirror. Happy fucking birthday. That just about summed it up. I picked up the telephone, and dialled the night operator at Portico.
‘Didn’t you call my home and give the message I asked you to?’
‘We did.’
‘Well – what did she say?’
‘Do you really want to know, Mr Flynn?’ She was hesitant.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well – she said, “Bullshit”.’
I dialled Gelignite’s flat. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, four times, then ‘Hello’. It was the voice of someone arousing from a deep sleep.
‘It’s me.’
There was a long pause. ‘Thanks for a great evening.’ Yawn. ‘What time is it?’
‘Five past six.’
‘Was she a good fuck?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Next time you get your secretary to call up your girlfriend and tell her you’re going to be late because you’re strapped to a totem pole and surrounded by savages brandishing tomahawks deep in the Amazon bush, let me give you some advice: make sure your girlfriend hasn’t seen you driving down Park Lane fifteen minutes earlie
r, and, what’s more, driving like a loony to get out of her line of vision because you think she hasn’t spotted you, because I did spot you, you shit!’ She hung up.
I stood staring into the receiver, and decided that people were right about birthdays: they do get less fun as you get older.
14
Harry Slan entered the plush reception area of Gebruder Sleder GMBH (US) Inc., on the sixty-fourth floor of 101 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, an imposing skyscraper in the United Nations complex between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. His glum mood of the past three weeks had finally been lifted somewhere around his third glass of Dom Perignon 66 consumed aboard Deke Sleder’s personal LearJet, approximately half-way between Adamsville, Ohio, and La Guardia Airport, New York.
Two weeks after the photographs had landed on his desk, a call had come from Sleder’s office, not from Sleder himself but from his personal assistant, saying that Mr Sleder would very much like to see Mr Slan. Mr Slan replied that he would very much like to see Mr Sleder. The assistant sounded perfectly charming – she always did, whoever she spoke to; that was the way Sleder liked his company to sound.
So the plane was laid on, as was a vehicle to collect Slan from his home and transport him to Columbus Airport, as was a limousine at La Guardia to transport him to Sleder’s Manhattan headquarters. If it wasn’t for his silly carelessness in sending souvenir photographs, thought Slan, through his pleasant haze of vintage champagne – if it was him who had sent the photographs – one could get to like Deke Sleder and his way of life one hell of a lot.
He walked slightly unsteadily towards the receptionist. From across the room, she looked to him like a knockout. As he got close up to her, he realized she was a knockout, and he felt a surge of animal lust for her which surprised even him. She wore a loose black dress that hung, as if suspended by air, half-way down her otherwise totally exposed and very firm breasts. As she leaned forward to stub out a cigarette in the ashtray, and greet him with a rich, wanton smile, he too leaned forward, and could see her nipples as her breasts lifted back from the dress; he could see her firm white stomach below her breasts, and, he wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he could see beyond that.