‘Such as?’
Cox considered Audley in silence for several seconds. ‘The one that worries me at this moment in time hasn’t even got a name yet. Not a name I can put to it,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Or at best only part of a name.’
It wasn’t reluctance, but diffidence. Cox had never met Audley before, but he would know the big man’s reputation well enough. Roskill remembered his own first traumatic encounter with him again: he had been desperately afraid of having his own cherished theories disdainfully shot down in flames.
He looked at Cox carefully for the first time. He didn’t look like a policeman – not the bulldog, bloodhound or alsatian varieties anyway. Mongrel with a discernible fox terrier bloodline, unremarkable in any gathering. But that, of course, was the modern Special Branch trend; a hairy hitchhiking student had only recently complained to him that the special fuzz was becoming hard to pinpoint.
What was certain, though, was that Cox’s ability would belie his appearance: there’d be no dead wood around Llewelyn and Stocker.
The same thoughts, or something like, must have been running through Audley’s head. ‘Even part of a name is a beginning,’ he said encouragingly. ‘A name and a feeling about it. I’ve started with no more man that often enough.’
Cox nodded. ‘That’s about it – a name and a feeling.’
‘And the name?’
‘Hassan.’ Cox paused. ‘It’s a man, or the code name for a man, not a group. The man who gives the orders to a group, maybe an inner P.F.L.P. wing, or an off-shoot, or maybe some-tiling entirely new – we don’t know.’
‘And what has Hassan done so far?’
‘Apparently nothing. The only references we’ve had to Hassan are in the nature of forecasts. Rather messianic forecasts, too.’
‘Such as?’
‘We’ve had four, possibly five. And when I say “we” I mean the joint committee we set up with the Interpol people in ‘69. The West Germans got the first when they were rounding up everyone after the Zurich air crash. They all add up to the same thing, anyway – when Hassan gets going he won’t make any mistakes.’
‘Then that would seem to rule out Hassan in this instance, Tom,’ said Llewelyn.
‘That depends, sir, on whether he intended to get you or merely to frighten you.’
‘He’s frightened me – no doubt about that. But he could have done that with far less trouble – and without any accidental bloodshed.’
Cox shook his head. ‘I don’t think he’s fussy about that.’
‘Which means, I take it,’ said Audley, ‘that something unpleasant happened to your five sources?’
Cox looked at him sharply. ‘Yes – and no. Two of them were released – three if you count the one in France, but we don’t really know for sure about him. The French aren’t very cooperative these days. All three of them have disappeared, anyway.’
‘And the other two?’
‘They were held on weapons charges. Each of them had a sub-machine gun hidden in his digs – in each case, oddly enough, it was an Israeli Uzi they’d got, too.’
‘Not so odd, really,’ said Stocker. ‘The Uzi happens to be the best thing on the market. It’s standard issue in four or five gentile armies – what you might call an Israeli export triumph.’
‘Well, the Germans didn’t take kindly to it in the hands of a couple of Arab students – one was a Syrian, actually, and the other an Iraqi. They were going to throw the book at them.’
‘But they didn’t?’
‘They never got the chance. The Syrian committed suicide – he was in a secure jail in Bonn. But the Iraqi was picked up in a little town near the Swiss border.’ Cox paused for effect. ‘He was sprung by four masked men armed with Uzis. It was only a little police station, of course – and they weren’t expecting anything. But it was a neat job all the same, and the Germans haven’t had a smell of him since. And believe me, they’ve looked hard.’
‘All of which is vastly exciting,’ said Llewelyn, ‘but doesn’t prove a thing. I’ve seen your Hassan file, Tom. It’s interesting, even disturbing. But if Hassan exists he doesn’t appear to have reached England. And if he is here we don’t even know what his aims are. You just can’t give me one single, useful, tangible fact to back this “feeling” of yours.’
Llewelyn spoke lazily, only a few degrees from contempt, his Welsh origins again rich beneath his words — Roskill was reminded of a mineworkers’ union organiser rejecting an absurd wage offer made by a not very bright Coal Board spokesman. For a man under possible sentence of death the union organiser was admirably cool, but nonetheless exasperating. The temptation to come to Cox’s support was irresistible.
‘I don’t agree at all.’ He tried to match the Welshman’s lilt with the sort of public school drawl that would be most offensive. ‘I don’t know much about your Arab-Israeli feuds, but I do know that whoever fixed your car was well organised and ruthless and bloody-minded. And that goes for suicide and jail-breaking too. It means that this character Hassan looks after his own – one way or another. Which makes him a good prospect.’
He looked to Audley for support and was disconcerted to receive a blank stare.
‘We’ll check him out,’ said Audley noncommittsilly.
Like Llewelyn – irritatingly like Llewelyn – he was also playing it cool now. Roskill shrugged and relapsed into silence, masking his annoyance; this was presumably how the poor bloody pawns always felt.
Llewelyn smiled ait him. ‘All are prospects and all must be checked out. Quite right again. But checking takes time and I can’t go on living a – how shall I put it? – restricted life for ever. It’s boring and it wastes a lot of valuable time. So – ‘ he turned to Audley – ‘just what do you suppose to do about it?’
A muscle twitched momentarily in Audley’s cheek, as though a boring and restricted life of indefinite duration might be no bad thing for Llewelyn.
‘Forty-eight hours,’ he said. ‘Give me that long to look up a few old acquaintances and do a little horse-trading. Then I may be able to tell you where you stand.’
‘Horse-trading?’ Stocker looked at him curiously. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had much to trade with?’
‘I haven’t. But I’ve no doubt Roskill has. If you’ve no objection to his letting slip something here and there I think we might make out well enough.’
‘Yes, I suppose you might at that.’ Stocker eyed Roskill. ‘You must have quite a few marketable titbits about the Middle Eastern air forces tucked away by now — and I’ve no objection to your disbursing a few in a good cause.’
‘You haven’t?’ Roskill looked from, one to the other incredulously, dismayed at their calm assumption that he would so easily squander his hard-won capital. It went against all his instincts – and worse, if it ever leaked out it would ruin his reputation. ‘Well, I bloody well have! I’m not going to play both ends against the middle for anyone, no matter what!’
‘Don’t worry, Hugh,’ Audley reassured him. ‘We won’t sour your contacts. In fact I may be able to provide you with a few very useful ones. There’s no cause for alarm.’
Roskill subsided sullenly. The bugger of it was that playing both ends against the middle just about described what he was doing already – and the middle against each end, too. And. God only knew what Audley and Llewelyn and Stocker were really up to.
‘Talking of contacts, Squadron Leader Roskill, I think you’ve one exceedingly useful one of which you may not be aware,’ said Cox. ‘The Ryle Foundation.’
The Ryle – ‘ A moment earlier Roskill had been halfway to telling himself that at least there could hardly be any more unpleasant surprises ahead, but evidently there was no limit to them.
‘The Ryle Foundation?’ He heard his own voice echo Cox uncertainly.
‘I believe you know Lady Ryle quite well,’ said Cox. ‘And Sir John Ryle.’
‘I know the Ryles, yes.’ The voice sounded more like his own this time, no matter how he felt i
nside. ‘But I’ve never had anything to do with the Foundation – and I don’t think the Ryles have either.’ But obviously they did; or one of them did. He couldn’t even remember whether it was relief or education or both, for the life of him. ‘But Lady Ryle does a lot of charity committee work,’ he concluded cautiously.
‘She’s an honorary life vice-president, as a matter of fact. And she’s on the educational grants sub-committee.’ Cox sounded as though he had expected Roskill to know much better what Lady Ryle did or did not do.
Education rang a bell. Old man Ryle – or was it the grandfather? – had robbed the Persian Gulf blind in the days when anything within range of a British gunboat was fair game for British mercantile enterprise. And then in a fit of conscience had divided his loot in half, one to buy the family into respectability and one to bring the blessings of education to the Arab world.
It was coming back now, a word here and a sentence there. Grandfather Ryle had been in on the ground floor in oil. But when he’d sold out he’d wrapped the share he gave back to the Arabs so tight there’d never been a breath of either scandal or do-gooding inefficiency about his Foundation; it had been constructed to show solid annual profits in terms of S.R.N.s and agricultural diplomas. No bloody arts and crafts for granddad – the words had been John’s. He remembered them quite clearly now.
‘You’re not going to tell me that there’s anything subversive about the Foundation, for God’s sake?’ Roskill came out of his nose-dive and climbed to counter-attack. ‘It’s as solid as UNESCO – probably a damn sight solider in terms of secure finance.’
‘You do know something about the Ryle Foundation then?’
Roskill gestured vaguely. ‘Second-hand stuff – I remember the Ryles talking about it now. They said – ‘
The penny dropped. Butler had said as much the night before: They know you got Jenkins in … and Audley likes you … but I think there’s something else behind that too … His connection with the Ryles had been the clincher: what they knew about that – the thought that they knew anything – made his flesh creep. But that wouldn’t be what interested them now: there must be something very wrong with the Foundation, whatever its appearance of respectability might be.
‘What did they say?’ Cox prompted.
Jenkins and Audley and the Ryles, thought Roskill bitterly: no wonder they’d changed their own rules to recruit him! What would have trebly disqualified him under normal circumstances made him the ideal candidate with time pressing them so hard. No time to plant a professional carefully and painstakingly in the Foundation; they needed someone with a ready-made introduction to it. And in him they had the one with the other – the sinking feeling in his stomach told him they knew it, too …
‘What’s wrong with the Ryle Foundation?’ he asked harshly.
Cox looked to Llewelyn.
‘I know some of your Arab specialists think the Foundation’s clean,’ he began.
‘Elliott Wilkinson swears it is, and he works for them,’ said Llewelyn.
Audley snorted derisively.
‘Well, I don’t agree with them,’ said Cox bluntly. ‘If Hassan’s men are here, I think they could well have come in through it. And frankly, I think they are here.’
V
ROSKILL WAS TIRED and uncomfortable and thirsty and bored.
He couldn’t quite decide which sensation led the others; as he thought of each one in turn it took over the lead, but they were all jostling one another for a dead-heat.
On the whole the discomfort was probably the most acceptable. The chairs in the lecture hall were plastic and form-fitting, but the form they had been designed to fit was not his, no matter how he tried to rearrange himself. But at least he was accustomed to such a state of affairs and even expected it.
The thirst would have been bearable but for one daunting possibility which had occurred to him three seconds after he had realised he was thirsty: since this was primarily an Arab occasion the drinks promised after the lectures might be aggressively non-alcoholic, in strict deference to the Prophet’s ordinance. True, it was an Anglo-Arab evening, but the nature of the refreshment would depend on which half dominated the organising committee – the Arabs would want to cater for the boozy British, and the British would want to defer to nonexistent Arab sensibilities. He could only pray that the Arab faction had come out on top.
At the moment boredom was ahead. The speaker droned on and Roskill looked again helplessly at his watch. Theoretically the fellow should have finished ten minutes earlier, but somewhere along what he had disingenuously called his ‘lightning journey through Arab literature’ he had taken a wrong turning and had become lost in medieval Persia. It had taken a good – or bad – quarter of an hour to talk his way back to the main road and he was still two centuries behind schedule.
The organisers had unwisely kept their dullest speaker at the end. Or perhaps they hadn’t expected him to be so goddamn awful; on paper the opening session on the problems of aid and education had sounded even drearier and in practice only the obvious competence and intelligence of the young American-trained Arab who conducted it had saved it.
But then the young Arab had been a Ryle man, and the Foundation always paid for the best. Judging by the lightning traveller they needed the best, too: he was an educational stumbling block in himself.
Roskill tried to stretch his legs into another position. His tiredness was not so much the product of his early morning expedition along Maitland’s telephone line as the result of the afternoon’s Middle Eastern cramming lesson which had followed hard on the morning’s head-shrinking conference. The idea had been that he should not betray himself too fatuously at this evening’s bun-fight by confusing the National Liberation Movement with the Popular Democratic Front or the Palestine Liberation Movement with the Palestine Armed Struggle Command, should those mutually hostile bodies crop up casually in the conversation.
But the Foreign Office crammer had waxed something too eloquent for a good teacher. Names and initials had flowed from him: Ashbal, Mapam, Group 62, Friends of Jerusalem, Friends of Arabia, Saiqa, P.L.O., P.L.A., P.L.M., P.O.L.P., A.N.S.A.R. and A.L.F. – as an incantation, repeated quickly enough, it would probably summon djinns from the desert, but it had gone in one of Roskill’s ears and out the other.
Unfortunately it had stayed between the ears just long enough to answer the crammer’s quiz with deceptive competence.
‘Bravo, Squadron Leader,’ the crammer had beamed at him. ‘Another two or three afternoons and we’ll make an Arabist of you! And a Zionist too if you can spare a morning. The right jargon’s half the battle — just string it together with a few slogans and you can pass anywhere…
‘In action this evening? Is that the C.A.A.B.U. gathering at the Dorchester? No – the Ryle Foundation one, isn’t it? Well, not to worry, Squadron Leader – the Ryle people are as near non-partisan as it’s possible to be these days – they don’t encourage too much P.L.O. talk. Can’t afford to with all that real estate of theirs on the West Bank in Israeli hands, you know. If you don’t stick your neck out you’ll get by – you can say you’re a desalination expert. No one’s likely to know much about that … Just remember half of what I’ve told you and be a good listener – they all want to talk all the time, so that shouldn’t be too difficult…”
Boredom and tiredness combined to pull away from thirst and discomfort at last, and Roskill’s thoughts wandered back to the morning, when Audley had stood by the Triumph grinning at him triumphantly.
‘We got more than we gave away, Hugh – you put up a first-rate show, too. Not too smart to make them think twice — that was just the right note to strike!’
But that not-too-smartness had not been a consciously-struck note, Roskill had reflected uphappily, grinning back at Audley.
‘A put-up job from start to finish, of course,’ Audley had said. ‘They no more suspect Jake Shapiro than I do. It’s this Hassan they’re scared of – Llewelyn believes in him as much as C
ox. Which probably means they’ve got more on him than they’re willing to admit. They just want to double-check it through me.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We shall do what they want us to do – today, at any rate. You’d better go and see that Foreign Office crammer of theirs this afternoon – and then you can go to that Ryle meeting tonight as Cox suggested. It might even be useful, you never know.’ Audley had rubbed his hands. ‘And I’ve got a lot of catching up to do to find out what the hell’s really happening …’
Very pleased with himself, David Audley had been, like an old warhorse smelling battle on familiar territory.
Roskill had been very much less pleased; it might be a jolly game for Audley, but he sensed that in Audley’s game he was becoming something less even than a junior partner. And yet he could see no way of avoiding his downgrading: without Audley he didn’t stand a chance of attaining his own vengeance, and the big man was incapable of playing second fiddle to anyone. So all he could do was to follow instructions, keeping his own counsel and never forgetting his objective.
‘And first thing tomorrow you can slip down to Firle and scout around,’ said Audley. ‘You can reach me at home if you turn anything up. After that we may have something of our own to work on.’
Slip down to Firle! Roskill’s jaw had tightened at that – so easy to say and so agonising to carry out!
Well, there would come a time maybe when Audley wouldn’t find it so easy to control the action … there would come a time…
Roskill started guiltily, catching himself in the very act of falling off his chair. He looked around him, fearful lest he had drawn attention to himself, but the rest of the audience seemed either equally withdrawn or, like the fat Arab with the scarred face in the row ahead of him, unhappily restless. There was a subdued undercurrent of movement – of legs stretching and bottoms searching for comfort.
He looked at his watch again, to find that only another five tortoise-minutes had crawled past. The bloody man was still only at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Alamut Ambush Page 6