‘Oh!’ I said uncertainly.
‘Oh!’ he echoed disgustedly. ‘Look at it this way. We put Blake away for forty-two years, not altogether as a punishment but to keep him out of the hands of the Russians. Within five years he flies the coop and pops up in Moscow where he chirps his head off.’
He looked broodingly into his glass. ‘Suppose Blake hadn’t got clean away—suppose he’d been picked up in a month. The police would be happy and so would the prison officers, but damn it all to hell, I wouldn’t! I’d want to know what the devil he’d been doing that month—who he’d been talking to. See my point?’
I nodded. ‘If that happened the major reason for gaoling him would disappear. To slap him back in chokey for another forty years would be like closing the stable door after the horse has gone.’
‘The horse being the information in Blake’s head—not the man himself.’ Mackintosh moved restlessly. ‘They’re building a high-security prison on the Isle of Wight. Mountbatten wants to call it Vectis which shows that, among other things, he’s had a classical education. A very able man, Mountbatten. He took one look at the plans of this high class chicken coop and demonstrated how easy it would be to get a man out.’
He looked at me expectantly as though he wanted me to say something, so I obliged. ‘To get a man out?’
He grinned. ‘I’m pleased to see you live up to the good things your dossier records of you.’ He held out his glass. ‘I rather like this wine.’
I gave him a refill. ‘It’s nice to know I’m appreciated.’
‘If you read the Mountbatten Report—particularly the bits towards the end where he discusses this new prison—you’ll find yourself wondering if you haven’t come across a major work of science fiction. Closed-circuit television with delay lines and electronic logic circuits which trigger an alarm if anything moves in the field of vision is one nice idea—that’s for the defence, of course. For the attack there are helicopters and rocket-powered jump suits, for God’s sake! Very James Bondery. Do you get the drift of it?’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘Organization.’
‘Right!’ said Mackintosh. ‘For the first time in years someone has come up with a brand new crime. Crime is just like any other business—it’s conducted only for profit—and someone has figured a way to make a profit out of getting people out of prison. I suppose it started with the Great Train Robbery; those boys were given exceptionally heavy sentences—Biggs and Wilson got thirty years each—but they had money and were able to buy an organization.’
He sighed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the judges know what the devil they’re doing. A murderer can be out in ten years or less, but watch your step if you commit a crime against property. Anyway, an organization was set up, dedicated to springing long-term prisoners who could pay enough, and you’d be surprised how many of those there are. And once such an organization gets going, like any other business it tends to expand, and whoever is running it has gone looking for custom—and he doesn’t care where the money comes from, either.’
‘The Russians?’
‘Who else,’ said Mackintosh sourly. ‘I don’t care if all the train robbers fly the coop and live the life of Riley on the Riviera, but when it comes to state security then something must be done.’ He frowned. ‘If I had my way such security risks would be collected together in a special prison and guarded by the army—military police empower to kill if necessary. But our masters prefer not to do it that way.’
I said curiously, ‘Where do I come into all this?’
‘I haven’t finished putting you in the picture,’ he said irritably. ‘The PM wanted something done about it—so something was done. The police had a crack at it, and so did the Special Branch and the more shady and esoteric counterintelligence units. They all got nowhere. There was one occasion when they did get a bit close to it; a prisoner already in gaol expressed a willingness to talk. Guess what happened to him.’
I’m a realist, so I said flatly, ‘He died suddenly.’
‘Oh, he was killed, all right,’ said Mackintosh. ‘But this gang sprung him from prison to do it. Can’t you see the flaming impudence of it? This organization is so bloody sure of itself that it can take a man out of one of Her Majesty’s prisons who doesn’t want to go. One cheep from him and he’d still be alive—but they were still able to spring him. His body was found three days later; he’d been shot through the back of the head.’
‘I didn’t see any reports on that,’ I said.
‘It was put under security wraps immediately,’ said Mackintosh a little tiredly. ‘Nobody wanted a thing like that to be aired publicly. There’s a veiled reference to it in the Mountbatten Report—look at paragraph 260.’
‘Where do I come in?’ I asked again.
‘I’ll come to you when I’m good and ready. Now, my business is state security, and you can put out of your head any guff about counter-intelligence cloak-and-dagger stuff. I work on a quite different plane, at Cabinet level, in fact—responsible and reporting to only the Prime Minister. Since everybody else has fallen down on this job he has given me the sole and total responsibility of getting the job done in my own peculiar way—but not in my own time.’ He rubbed the top of his head. ‘Of course, time is a relative thing, as I explained to the PM and he agreed. But let’s hope there are no more security escapes while I’m in charge, because it’s my head that’s on the block.’
He looked around and waved at a waiter. ‘Let’s have coffee—and I think I’ll have a van der Hum; I believe in sampling the wine of the country. Will you join me?’
‘I’ll have a Drambuie,’ I said drily.
He ordered the coffee and the liqueurs, then said abruptly, ‘Ever heard of a man called Rearden—Joseph Rearden?’
I thought about it for a while. ‘No.’
‘I didn’t think you would. Rearden is—or was—a criminal. A very good one, too. Clever, intelligent and resourceful; somewhat like you, I’d say.’
‘Thanks for the compliment,’ I said. ‘He’s dead?’
‘He was killed three weeks ago in South-West Africa. No funny business suspected—just a plain ordinary car crash. The God of Motorists sacrifices good and bad alike. The point is that no one knows he’s dead, except you, me and a few highly placed South African coppers. When the PM gave me this Godawful job certain facilities were placed at my disposal, and I immediately began to look for someone like Rearden—a newly dead rotten egg whose death could be hushed up. He could have been found in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the States or, even, South Africa. The fact is that he turned up in South Africa. Here’s his photograph.’
I laid it face down on the table as the waiter served the coffee and only turned it up when we were alone again. Mackintosh watched me approvingly as I scanned the picture. He said, ‘As soon as I had Rearden I began to look for someone who looked like Rearden, someone who could pass for a South African. Computers are marvellous gadgets—one came up with you in twenty minutes.’
‘So it’s going to be a substitution,’ I said. ‘I’ve done that kind of thing before, but it’s risky. I could be spotted very easily.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mackintosh confidently. ‘To begin with, you’ll be in England where Rearden has never been and, even so, you won’t be moving about England much so it’s unlikely you’ll bump into any of his old pals.’
I said, ‘What happened to Rearden’s body?’
‘He was buried under another name. I pulled some strings.’
‘Tough luck on his family,’ I said. ‘Did he have a wife?’
‘No wife—and his parents will get along without him.’
I looked at this spare man with the thinning sandy hair and the colourless eyelashes and thought that he was a pretty ruthless bastard. I wondered how I would get along with him in this peculiar arrangement he was planning. ‘So I’m Rearden,’ I said. ‘And I’m in England. What then?’
‘Not so fast,’ said Mackintosh. ‘Although Rearden was clever
he lost—once only. He served a prison sentence in Pretoria quite a while ago. Do you know anything about South African prisons?’
‘Not a thing, thank God!’
‘You’d better learn. I’ll have a man give you a course on prison conditions and the slang—especially the slang.’ He offered me a twisted smile. ‘It might be a good idea if you did time for a month to get the right idea. I can arrange that.’ I could see him turning the idea over in his mind and rejecting it. He shook his head. ‘No, that won’t do. It’s too risky.’
I was glad of that; I don’t particularly like gaols. He drained his coffee cup. ‘Let’s leave here; the place is filling up and I’d like to discuss the rest of it in greater privacy.’ He paid the bill and we left the restaurant and strolled into the middle distance to sit under a gum tree where there were no ears within fifty yards.
He took out a pipe and started to fill it. ‘All the people who have tried to crack this organization have failed. They’ve tried it from the outside and failed, and they’ve tried penetration and failed. They’ve tried to ring in fake gaolbirds—and failed. The organization has fantastically good security because we know as much now as we did at the beginning—and that’s only one thing. The organization is known to the underworld as the Scarperers, and that doesn’t get us very far.’
He struck a match. ‘Stannard, this is a volunteer’s job, and I’ll have to ask you to make up your mind now. I can’t tell you anything more—I’ve already told you too much. I suppose I must tell you that if anything goes wrong it’ll go badly for you—and your death may not be the worst thing that can happen. Not in my book, at any rate. It’s a tricky and dangerous task and, I don’t mind telling you, I wouldn’t volunteer for it myself. I can’t be more honest than that.’
I lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky, leaf-dappled through the branches of the gum tree. My life in South Africa had been calm and uneventful. Seven years before I had been in pretty bad shape and I’d sworn I’d never do that kind of thing again. I suppose my bosses had seen that frame of mind and had given me the job of a sleeper in South Africa as a sort of sinecure—a reward for past services. God knows, I had done nothing to earn the retainer that was piling up quite nicely in that British bank account and which I had never touched.
But time heals everything and of late I had been restless, wishing that something would happen—an earthquake—anything. And here was my earthquake in the person of this insignificant-looking man, Mackintosh—a man who hobnobbed with the Cabinet, who chit-chatted about security with the Prime Minister. I had a vague idea of what he was getting at and it didn’t seem difficult. Risky, perhaps; but not too difficult. I wasn’t afraid of a gang of English crooks; they couldn’t be worse than the boys I’d been up against in Indonesia. I’d seen whole towns full of corpses there.
I sat up. ‘All right; I volunteer.’
Mackintosh looked at me a little sadly and thumped me gently on the arm. ‘You’re a lunatic,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad to have you. Perhaps we need a little lunacy on this job; orthodox methods haven’t got us anywhere.’
He pointed at me with the stem of his pipe. ‘This is top-secret. From now on only three people will know about it; you, me and one other—not even the PM knows.’ He chuckled sardonically. ‘I tried to tell him but he didn’t want to know. He knows how my mind works and he said he wanted to keep his hands clean—he said he might have to answer questions in the House and he didn’t want to be put in the position of lying.’
I said, ‘What about the South African police?’
‘They know nothing,’ said Mackintosh flatly. ‘It’s a quid pro quo—a favour returned. They might do a bit of digging into your background, though. Can it stand it?’
‘It should,’ I said. ‘It was designed by experts.’
Mackintosh drew gently on his pipe and blew out a plume of smoke. ‘Other people have tried to penetrate this damned organization and they’ve failed—so we start from there and ask, “Why did they fail? “ One of the more promising gambits was to ring in a fake prisoner and wait for advances to be made. At one time there were no less than eight of these decoys scattered through the British prisons. Not one of them was contacted. What does that suggest to you?’
‘The Scarperers have a good intelligence service,’ I said. ‘I’ll bet they do a preliminary check before contact.’
‘I agree—and that means that our bait, which is Rearden, must stand up to rigorous scrutiny. There must be no cracks in the cover at all. Anything else?’
‘Not that I can think of off-hand.’
‘Use your loaf,’ said Mackintosh with an air of disgust. ‘The crime, man; the crime! Rearden—or, rather, you—is going to commit a crime in England. You’ll be caught—I’ll see to that—you’ll be tried and you’ll be jugged. And it has to be a particular form of crime; a crime which involves a lot of money and where the money isn’t recovered. The Scarperers have to be convinced that you can pay hard cash for your escape. Now, what does that suggest to you—in view of what I’ve already told you?’
‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange.’
‘No, it shouldn’t be too difficult,’ said Mackintosh in an odd voice. ‘Look here, Stannard; this is going to be a genuine crime—don’t you understand that? Nothing else will do. I am going to plan, and you are going to execute, a crime of some magnitude. We are going to steal a considerable sum of money from some inoffensive British citizen who will scream to high heaven. There’s going to be no fake about it because…’ He spaced his words very distinctly. ‘…I…will…not…risk…breaking…security.’
He turned and said very earnestly, ‘If this is so then when you are tried and gaoled you will be in the jug for a perfectly genuine crime, and if anything goes wrong there will be nothing that I, or anyone else, can do about it. If you get fourteen years then you’ll rot in prison for your sentence if the Scarperers don’t contact you. And the reason for that is because I cannot compromise security on this operation. Are you willing to risk it?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Christ! You’re asking a hell of a lot, aren’t you?’
‘It’s the way it’s got to be,’ he said doggedly. ‘A trained man like you should be able to get out of any leaky British prison without half trying. But you won’t, damn you! You’ll sit on your backside and wait for the Scarperers to get you, no matter how long they take to make up their minds. You’ll bloody well wait, do you hear?’
I looked into his fanatical eyes and said very gently, ‘I hear. Don’t worry; I’m not going to back out now. I gave you my word.’
He took a deep breath and relaxed. ‘Thanks, Stannard.’ He grinned at me. ‘I wasn’t worried about you—not too worried.’
‘I’ve been wondering about something,’ I said. ‘Mountbatten investigated the prisons when Blake flew the coop. That was quite a long time ago. Why all the sudden rush now?’
Mackintosh reached out and knocked out his pipe on the trunk of the tree. ‘A good question,’ he agreed. ‘Well, for one thing, the effect of Mountbatten is wearing off. When the Report came out and the prisons tightened security every sociologist and prison reformer in Britain let out an outraged howl—and I’m not saying they were wrong, either. There are two ways of regarding prisons—as places of punishment and as places of rehabilitation. The suddenly tightened security knocked rehabilitation right out of the window and the penal reformers say it did ten years of damage in six months.’
He shrugged. ‘They’re probably right, but that’s outside my field. I’m not interested in civil prisoners—it’s the Blakes and Lonsdales of this world who are my meat. When you catch them you can either put them up against a wall and shoot them, or you can put them in chokey. But you imprison them not to punish and not to rehabilitate, but to keep them out of circulation because of what they know.’
There was nothing in this to explain the question I had asked, so I prompted him. ‘So what now?’
�
��There’s a big fish coming down the line,’ he said. ‘The biggest we’ve caught yet. God knows, Blake was big enough, but this man is a shark to Blake’s tiddler—and he must not escape. I’ve pleaded with the PM to establish a special prison for this type of prisoner but he says it’s against policy, and so Slade goes into the general prison system, admittedly as a high-risk man.’
‘Slade!’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘He’s in hospital,’ said Mackintosh. ‘He was shot through the hips when he was caught. When he’s fit he’ll stand trial, and if we handed out sentences like the Texans he’d get five thousand years. As it is, we must keep him secure for the next twenty—after that it won’t matter very much.’
‘Twenty years! He must know a hell of a lot.’
Mackintosh turned a disgusted face towards me. ‘Can you imagine that a Russian—and Slade is a Russian—could get to be second-in-command of an important department of British Intelligence concerned with counter-espionage in Scandinavia? Well, it happened, and Sir David Taggart, the damned fool who put him there, has been kicked upstairs—he’s now Lord Taggart with a life peerage.’ He snorted. ‘But he won’t be making any speeches or doing any voting. If he knows what’s good for him he’ll keep his mouth permanently shut.’
He blinked his colourless eyelashes and said in a passionately suppressed voice, ‘The man who caught Slade was a man whom Taggart had fired for inefficiency, for God’s sake!’ He rapped his pipe against the tree with such force that I thought it would break. ‘Amateurs!’ he said in a scathing voice. ‘These bloody amateurs running their piddling private armies. They make me sick.’
‘How do I relate to Slade?’ I asked.
‘I’m going to try to put you next to him,’ he said. ‘And that will mean breaking the law. What Slade knows is sheer dynamite and I’d break every law in Britain, from sodomy upwards, to keep that bastard inside where he belongs.’ He chuckled and thumped my arm. ‘We’re not just going to bend the laws of England, Stannard; we’re going to smash them.’
Running Blind / The Freedom Trap Page 37