The Alamut Ambush

by Anthony Price

  Audley grunted and nodded. ‘You mean you were right. I was reasonably sure you would be, whether you found anything or not. But I’m glad to hear it; it’s always nicer to be certain.’

  He subsided into silence and it occurred to Roskill that he wasn’t going to ask for details. That might indeed be proof of a touching confidence, but now seemed far more likely to indicate that Audley was trying to forget how very nearly he had missed the chance of making a laughing-stock of his enemy.

  But he wasn’t going to get off as easily as that.

  ‘They pulled it down with a Land-Rover,’ said Roskill, ‘Not the whole tree – just one big branch. The tyre-marks are perfectly plain when you know what you’re looking for.’

  He reached under the dashboard for the envelope.

  ‘Photographs, diagram and report – all in there.’

  Audley slid the material half out of the envelope, riffled through the photos briefly and then pushed it all back.

  ‘You didn’t talk to anyone?’

  ‘I didn’t talk to anyone. Nobody saw me. And I developed the pictures myself.’ Roskill kept his tone neutral. ‘It’s our own little Top Secret.’

  ‘We’ll keep it that way, then.’ Audley slipped the envelope between the pages of his magazine. ‘I don’t want anyone round while we’re checking up on Jenkins. I don’t even want them to know that we’re checking on him, in fact. The chances are that they’ll find out sooner or later, but I want to put that off as long as possible. But I don’t want to tell any lies, so I think our lines should be what Kipling called “suppressio veri, suggestio falsi” – do you understand, Hugh?’

  Roskill understood very well, and bitterly too: once Llewelyn found out that they were investigating Jenkins he would soon put two and two together. And the moment he realised he was in no danger the joke was over. Indeed, to get a full and perfect revenge Audley needed to complete his assignment first, for only then would it become a matter of record and unsuppressible.

  But it was a sad thing that the only way Jenkins could be avenged was by enabling Audley to indulge his own private feud…

  ‘I understand that perfectly well,’ he said evenly. ‘We’re going to make him sweat.’

  ‘Make him sweat – yes.’ Audley turned in his seat and looked hard at Roskill for a moment. ‘But I don’t think you do fully understand, all the same. At a guess I’d say you’re thiking that there’s not much to choose between Llewelyn and me – a couple of right bastards. But I just happen to be the bastard who suits you at the moment – is that right?’

  It was a question that didn’t admit equivocation.

  ‘I think,’ said Roskill reluctantly, ‘that you can do the right thing for a paltry reason. In this case your reason doesn’t – dignify – what we’re doing.’

  Audley nodded thoughtfully. ‘A petty vendetta? Yes, I can see your line of thought. I ought to have seen it before. And there’s something in it, too. But you knew that when you came back to tempt me last night, and it didn’t stop you.’

  ‘I’m not complaining. You asked rne a question and I gave you an honest answer. And as you said, it suits me well enough.’

  Then perhaps I ought to question your motives too, my dear Hugh – I ought to wonder why they were so sure of you.’

  ‘I told you last night – I recruited Jenkins in the first place.’

  “Not good enough.”

  ‘I know his family too.’

  ‘Still not good enough. You also admitted last night that you weren’t to blame. There isn’t enough there for a guilt complex.’

  Audley paused, waiting in vain for an answer.

  ‘Very well, then! Let’s get back to my base motives for a moment. I admit that the chance of making a fool of Dai Llewelyn did attract me – it still does. But it wasn’t enough to make me change my mind. It was the fact that it was Jenkins and not Llewelyn who was the target – I find that very interesting. The poor boy said it was interesting the moment before he died, and by God he was right!’

  Roskill frowned. He had been so busy with practical problems that he hadn’t really faced up to the ultimate one. It had simply hidden itself at the back of his mind, nagging at him: why the hell would anyone blow up Alan?

  ‘You see, Hugh,’ Audley continued, ‘Llewelyn isn’t such a bad candidate for assassination, because in his own way he’s a pretty important person. I know Butler said he wasn’t up to anything. But when you wield the sort of influence Llewelyn does there’ll always be sufficient motive for somebody to have a go, if that’s the way they’re inclined.

  ‘But Jenkins wasn’t important. At least, he shouldn’t have been. Yet he suddenly became supremely important to somebody.’

  ‘Somebody who knew too bloody much about the way the Department works, too,’ said Roskill. ‘They must have known exactly what would happen if Maitland couldn’t be contacted.’

  ‘They also knew where Llewelyn was. They knew how everyone’s mind worked.’ There was a note of puzzlement in Audley’s voice. ‘Yet if it was accidental death they wanted to simulate they set about it in the most extraordinary manner. A simple road accident would have been so much neater. Nobody would have thought twice about it. Unless of course they didn’t know where Jenkins lived. Did he live in some inaccessible place?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’ Roskill thought hard. ‘He was always changing his digs, certainly. I think he did it to get his old girlfriends off his back – he’d never leave a forwarding address.’

  ‘Well, that might account for it.’ Audley’s head bobbed. ‘They had to catch up with him quickly and they didn’t know where to find him. But they knew what his job was – that really might explain it!’

  It was a cold thought: failing to find him, they had created a situation in which Jenkins and his death had converged on each other, with death riding in a Vanden Plas Princess.

  They were both silent for a time. Then Audley spoke.

  ‘The point is, Hugh, I don’t think other people will see things quite the way we do. When they realise that the heat’s off Llewelyn I think there’ll be a great big sigh of relief higher up. Then the reaction will set in; they won’t want too much fuss and bother. They won’t want any awkwardness. And that will mean that they won’t want us poking around, because we’re liable to become awkward. They know me too well already – and you’ve got this mysterious personal stake of yours…’

  Audley tailed off, waiting once more for an explanation. But that was in line with what everyone said about the man: the facts and figures were never enough for him – he nagged endlessly at the whys behind them. So now he’d never give up, he’d never leave such a loose end as Roskill’s motive for vengeance untied behind him.

  ‘Let me put it another way, Hugh. There’s got to be some mutual trust between us. I’ve trusted you. Don’t you think you can trust me?’

  Roskill looked at him in surprise. ‘You’ve trusted me?’

  ‘I have indeed! Last night I chose to believe that you thought out the Jenkins angle on your own, without any prompting from Butler. I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt, in fact.’

  ‘What doubt?’

  ‘My dear fellow – hasn’t it occurred to you that Llewelyn might have calculated that I couldn’t resist making a fool of him? I wouldn’t put it past him, you know!’

  ‘But the facts – when you look at the facts, David. Llewelyn didn’t bring down that tree, damn it!’

  ‘Facts can be arranged. But, as I say – I chose to believe you. That’s why I’ve let you convince me – which is what they’d planned in the beginning. If Butler failed, there was Faith. If Faith failed, there was you – I simply want to know why in the end it was you!’

  Koskill sighed. It would have been better if he had revealed rather more the previous night, when Audley wasn’t concentrating on him. Now, in simple self-defence, he’d have to give him Harry.

  Harry …

  ‘I didn’t know Alan Jenkins very well really, David. H
e was in electronic counter-measures, the bugging business. It was his brother I knew – his elder brother.’

  He paused, searching for the right words. But how could one explain a man like Harry to a man like Audley? He would know all the theory of it, from David and Jonathan onwards, but his understanding would be as two-dimentional as the pages he’d gathered it from.

  To talk about comradeship and friendship was inadequate; to mention affection debased it with physical undertones – though by God if it had been the army of Alexander the Great instead of Queen Elizabeth’s air force, there probably would have been that too!

  Harry …

  ‘Harry Jenkins – he was a good friend of mine in the squadron. My wing-man. He was a first-rate chap.’

  Friendship is Love without his wings – was that Byron? But they had had their wings too.

  ‘I spent several leaves at Harry’s family place at East Firle, down in Sussex.’

  East Firle …

  Up in the morning at cock-crow and over the hills, past the old burial mounds and down into Alfriston. On over the Cuckmere, up the hillside again, down under the Long Man, beer and pickles at Jevington. Then onwards more slowly until Pevensey Levels spread out below, along the last magnificent roll of the Downs towards Beachy Head, where the car would be waiting for them with Mrs Jenkins at the wheel. It was a golden memory.

  ‘We used to walk a lot. I got to know the family pretty well – nice people. Harry’s father had a fighter wing in ‘45. He’s dead now.’

  Dead too, thank God. All the Jenkins males were dead now, but at least the old man hadn’t been the last, chafing in a house full of women, even women as delightful as Aunt Mary.

  ‘Oddly enough it was Alan I knew least – he was always away at school. I didn’t actually meet him until just after I’d left the squadron. He’d just started with Alpha Electronics and he didn’t much like ‘em. And you know how Sir Frederick is always on about keeping our eyes open for talent.’

  ‘What happened to Harry?’ Audley drew him gently back to the point.

  ‘Harry had my flight – my job – on my recommendation. He took over from me when I came to the department.’

  For Roskill, read Jenkins.

  ‘He flew into a hillside in Wales a week later.’

  Carnedd Dafydd – he’d seen it from the pass beyond Capel Curig on the way to Holyhead a few months afterwards, the clouds driving like smoke across it.

  ‘And you feel it should have been you, not him?’

  ‘No, hardly that.’ Roskill shook his head sadly.

  Poor Harry! The better man by far, but never the better pilot. “It was Harry’s mountainside.”

  ‘But your guilt nevertheless?’

  ‘You might call it that – I don’t know what else you could call it. I suppose I might feel better if I’d left the squadron for pure patriotic reasons…’

  Instinctively Roskill felt that a shadow of the truth would satisfy Audley now.

  ‘The fact is, David, that I was rather bored with flying. Fred dangled this job in front of me – this job and a step in rank. So Harry and Alan are dead because I was bored. I know I didn’t kill them – I just recommended them. And now I’d feel a lot better if I could wipe someone’s eye. Silly, isn’t it?’

  Audley nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s silly. But I know the feeling, Hugh. It’s like slashing a bed of stinging nettles when you’ve been stung – silly, but very satisfying.’

  Roskill relaxed carefully. More by good luck than calculation he had struck the right note for Audley.

  ‘Tell me, Hugh,’ said Audley conversationally, ‘how would they accept you down at – where was it – East Firle now? Do they blame you in any way?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! They don’t know I had a hand in anything. They probably wouldn’t blame me if they did know, either — they aren’t that sort of people.’

  With his mind on a parking space thirty yards ahead Roskill’s guard was momentarily down and it wasn’t until he was actually swinging into the space that the significance of the question hit him.

  ‘You don’t mean – Christ, David! You’re not going to ask me to go down to East Firle?’

  ‘Someone’s got to go.’

  Roskill grabbed blindly for the handbrake, grappling with the implications of what appeared so obvious to Audley. That anything could have happened at East Firle, snuggled so peacefully under the Beacon, seemed not only unlikely, but unthinkable. Yet–

  ‘Don’t play dumb, Hugh, just because you don’t want to go. It has to be you, because you can go down there as a friend of the family. You’ve got a perfectly innocent motive for being there. If I was spotted there our game would be up. But they may take you for granted – for a time anyway.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘That’s for you to find out. Maybe nobody now. But something happened when Jenkins was on leave. Otherwise they’d have had time to set up a different sort of accident – a more accidental one. But something happened so quickly that they didn’t have time to catch up with him, remember? Something so important they had to take the devil of a risk to make sure they shut him up quickly.’

  ‘But what makes you think it happened at East Firle?’

  ‘I don’t know where it happened. But we have to start there.’ Roskill sighed. Alan would most likely have spent part of his leave at home – like Harry, he had had a strong homing instinct. It was unarguably his assignment: he was cornered. But a beastly assignment, for of all places he least relished snooping around that one, where he had once been happy.

  ‘Very well, David. I’ll go to Firle. And you haven’t the least idea what I’m supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘At this moment not the slightest. But we may pick up a clue or two in a short while.’

  ‘From whoever’s waiting for us in the Queensway? But they’re going to be obsessed with Arabs and Israelis, whichever of ‘em had the biggest down on Llewelyn. And that’s not going to help us much.’

  Or was it? He looked searchingly at Audley. Jenkins’s death, botched or not, had not been a small-time operation. It had involved manpower and equipment and murderous determination. And information – above all information. There would hardly have been the time to acquire the relevant intelligence about Llewelyn and Jenkins simply to set up the operation, therefore the likelihood was that the killers had merely used what was already known to them.

  And that eliminated all the jealous boyfriends, wronged husbands and vengeful fathers Jenkins might have left in his wake; it narrowed the field to the professionals, beyond all doubt – the very men who could have killed Llewelyn if they had wanted to do so.

  ‘Let’s just wait and see for the moment, Hugh – let’s see what they’ve got in Room 104. But first let’s find out what they don’t want me to know – so you go on up and see them now. I’ll give you a few minutes on your own with them.’

  Roskill frowned at him across the Triumph’s bonnet. What the hell was the man playing at now?

  Audley’s eyes glinted behind his glasses. ‘One of your little jobs on the side is going to be to keep an eye on me, you know. At least, I hope it will be, because then we needn’t worry about anyone else from the department dogging us. So I want to have time to recruit you.’

  Roskill tried to immobilise his face. The one and only time he had actually worked with Audley, that had been his job exactly; it wasn’t Audley’s loyalty that had worried them then either, but simply his unwillingness to explain what he was up to until after he’d been up to it. Secretiveness was apparently the man’s besetting sin.

  One couldn’t blame them, but he hadn’t liked the job then and he didn’t relish it now, with its insane subdivision of loyalties mocking the real job in hand.

  Audley mistook his exasperation for honest reluctance.

  ‘I know how you feel, Hugh,’ he apologised. ‘It isn’t quite cricket, is it? But we didn’t make the rules and we have to play the game their way.’

  Alan and
Harry and East Firle – and now Audley was making a game of it all, damn him! For the first time Roskill almost regretted the chance that had allowed him to escape from flying. The sooner he could pick those tricky brains clean, the better.

  IV

  OF THE FIVE faces which turned towards him as he entered the room Roskill recognised only two. Worse, the friendly one was scowling angrily and the dangerous one welcomed him with a smile.

  ‘Ah, Roskill,’ said Stocker. ‘I’m glad you were able to come.’

  Butler’s scowl deepened. But that at least was understandable: the night before he had loyally obeyed orders he disliked, and had appeared to fail. Obedience, ambition and incongruously active conscience had been fighting inside Butler for years, each one baulked by the other two.

  Roskill looked coldly at Stocker. What was it Audley had said they thought him to be – ‘an overgrown ex-fighter pilot with a crafty streak’? Best to oblige them then.

  He shrugged. ‘I can’t say I’m glad. But Jack’s very persuasive when he puts his mind to it.’

  ‘And Audley?’

  It was the big man sitting in the easy chair in the corner who spoke. The other two were nondescripts, Special Branch or Stacker’s Joint Intelligence. Committee understrappers. But the big man’s rather battered face and unquestionable air of authority would have identified him even without the faintest suspicion of Welsh intonation.

  ‘Mr. Llewelyn, I presume?’

  ‘Is Audley coming?’ Stocker echoed the question this time, and he was no longer smiling.

  ‘He should be here any moment.’

  The smile came back. So it had been Stocker’s idea – and sure enough there was a suggestion of surprise crossing Llewelyn’s face. One up to him: he had judged Audley better than Stocker, even after all these years. Two of a kind, evidently.

  ‘You are very persuasive too it would seem, Squadron-Leader Roskill,’ said Llewelyn softly.

  ‘I had moral support from another quarter.’ They had counted on Faith so he might as well throw her into the scales. ‘But I wouldn’t say he’s any happier than I am.’ Casually, now. ‘In fact neither of us go much for your methods.’