by Colin Dunne
BLACK ICE
Colin Dunne
© Colin Dunne 2012
Collin Dunne has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
1
If you've never come to in the middle of the night to find yourself approximately halfway between New York and Moscow, right up on top of the world, standing outside a block of flats wearing nothing other than a ladies' silk dressing-robe and that decorated with large scarlet kisses - allow me to describe the sensation.
Confused. That's the word, I think. Confused, and cold around the knees.
I shivered, yawned and did a few push-ups with my eyelids while I applied my brain to some basic questions: like was it night or day? That isn't quite as easy as it sounds. In the summer, about the only way you can tell is by the life in the city. From where I was standing, outside the flats high up on Vesturbrun, the place looked like early-closing day on the Marie Celeste.
That made it night. Still.
I looked and listened. Nothing. Only, in the distance, a car chugging and spluttering. An early worker. Or, here in Reykjavik, more likely a late reveller.
I called out her name, then stood there feeling silly. Solrun isn't the sort of name you can go round shouting, not unless you've strayed into one of those operas where all the women look like sixteen-stone milkmaids. In any case, my cry fell into that damp silence like a stone down a well.
Then it struck me. If this was my debut in international espionage, I wasn't doing too well. I mean, how would it look on my c.v.? 'On his first operation, Craven actually lost the subject of his surveillance while she was in bed with him.'
Roger Moore never seemed to have these problems.
Once more I called out her name. The wind whipped it away and then frisked me with cold and cheeky fingers. Even with the scarlet kisses, the silk robe wasn't much protection against a breeze that had trained in the Arctic.
Dammit. What the hell was she playing at? Baffled? Oh yes, I was baffled all right. But I wasn't too worried because I knew Solrun. She was a twenty-four carat madcap, that one. Alongside her, other women were prisoners of iron logic. She was governed entirely by inexplicable whim.
Otherwise - let me say it first - what would she be doing in bed with me?
Anyway, at that point I wasn't too serious about my career as a spy. For one thing- as I'd said to Batty- those international organisations who were known by a deadly trio of initials always sounded like television stations to me. 'There's nothing on the KGB tonight, shall we watch the news on CIA?'
Come to that, no one had mentioned spying. 'Give history a bit of a nudge', was the expression Batty had used. From his prissy mouth, it sounded about as strenuous as stamp collecting.
Right now it was either too early or too late to do anything significant by way of history-nudging. I gave one last shout, one last yawn, one last shiver, and shot back indoors with as much dignity as man can muster when he's dressed like something from a boudoir catalogue. Which wasn't much.
As I waited for the lift, I recalled what she'd said about the two men. Perhaps they'd kill her, she'd said. For a moment, I felt uneasy, until I realised it was a minor attack of those just before-dawn doubts. She was always saying things like that. That was Solrun, living life downhill without brakes. Death threats, either real or imaginary, probably played the same part in her life as parking tickets in mine. So I shrugged the thought off and hopped into the lift.
That was my first day there. I didn't know what it was all about. Then it was just a good laugh spiced up with a bit of mystery.
Later, the spicing sort of outweighed the laughs.
2
The strongest phrase that William Batty did use, that morning he came sneezing up to my office four floors above Farringdon Road, was 'spot of trouble'. That wasn't much preparation for what was to come, either.
He mumbled on about keeping the old eyes open and a word in the right ear at the right time, and for quite a while I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I wasn't much wiser when he left, come to think of it.
When I'd moved into that office two years earlier, a pal of
mine had said that the sight of all those barrows loaded with second-hand books in the street below would depress anyone attempting to earn a living by arranging words into sentences of interest. It did depress me, but then that was never too difficult. In the film of grease and dust on the window, the same bloke had written 'Sam Craven, Diurnalist and Wordsmith Extraordinaire'. Funny thing about journalists: because their trade obliges them to reduce the English language to a level comprehensible to a four-year-old, they tend to go round talking like Sir Roger de Coverley by way of compensation.
It caught Batty's eye. 'Most amusing,' he said, stooping to read it against the one shaft of sunlight that somehow managed to sneak through the chimneys.
Then he stood up with his hand on his chest, still searching for breath after the stairs. 'My word, young man, you must be very healthy to tackle those every day.'
'You know what they say? You can have all the health in the world but it won't buy you money.'
I took pity on his puzzled face. 'Joke,' I said.
'Joke?' he repeated, then, suddenly smiling: 'Oh yes, I love a joke.'
He sat down gingerly on the rackety bentwood chair I reserved for my most favoured guests. My least favoured guests too, since it was the only one. I had a good look at him.
Late fifties: grey nondescript suit and tie and black shoes, suggesting academic non-strivers rather than commercial rat racer; pale, podgy, with hair that looked like an old tabby that had crawled up there to die, depositing a small kitten on his upper lip on the way.
I was just beginning to wonder about the red rims round his eyes and nose when he suddenly began gasping for air, and tearing a sheet-sized hankie from his pocket he buried his head in it with a volcanic sneeze. 'Hay fever,' his muffled voice explained. 'Dreadful.'
Behind him, the wire coat-hangers on the door-hook tinkled a salute to his effort. He sneezed again, this time a planned and controlled explosion. Afterwards, he gave me a weak smile.
Now it was his turn to have a look. Topless jar of paste with plastic teaspoon replacing lost brush. Chain of paper-clips dangling from large bulldog clip which secured dished shade over desk lamp. Small dented tin teapot wearing sm
art prophylactic red-rubber spout. Scarred, chipped, scratched and stained desk, with filing cabinet to tone. Two empty lager bottles beside photo of young Sally, clasping kitten. In the loo next door, an echoing baritone's claim that he'd left his heart somewhere was drowned in a noisy gush of water.
'This is what you get for twenty years of honest endeavour,' I said.
Batty nodded uncertainly. If he was impressed by what he'd seen, he managed to restrain himself from showing it.
'Still,' he said, brightly, 'I dare say all a professional like you needs is a typewriter and a bit of paper.'
'And an employer,' I said. I gave him an encouraging smile in case he'd forgotten why he was here. On the telephone an hour earlier, he'd said he was from some international features agency which was interested in commissioning me. I didn't have so many customers that I could afford to let him sneeze himself to death before I'd got the job.
'Ah, yes,' he said, giving me an unexpectedly foxy look. 'Can I ask you something a little ... well, a little unusual?'
I opened my hands to present an easy target. 'What do you want to know? Shorthand of seventeen words a minute, I can spell Mediterranean some of the time, and my litotes is the talk of Hammersmith- if you'll forgive the hyperbole.'
'Solrun,' he said, ignoring that lot. 'Ring a bell, perhaps, Solrun?'
After a pause, I asked: 'The model?' And he nodded, without taking his eyes off my face.
Whatever I'd been expecting, that wasn't it. While I ran through the implications, I got up and banged the button on the electric kettle on top of the filing cabinet. It began to boil almost immediately. I still hadn't finished my last cup of tea but I needed time to think.
'Yes, I know her,' I said, topping up the tin teapot. 'But you know that already or you wouldn't be here. Tea?'
'Thank you, no,' he said, with a quick glance at the encrusted mug which was the only spare in my catering division. 'You're quite right, of course. Am I right in thinking she is was rather a close friend?'
'You could say that,' I replied. For one heart-stopping moment, it occurred to me he might be collecting divorce evidence. Then I remembered that I was divorced and that Solrun wasn't married, and anyway I hadn't seen her for two years. 'Yes, she's a great lass,' I added.
'Good, good,' he hummed happily. 'You see, she seems to be in a spot of trouble.'
When wasn't she? I nearly asked, then didn't. I sipped my tea and waited for him to explain.
'What it is, Mr Craven, is that she's got mixed up with some rather dangerous types. Undesirables.'
Well, you certainly couldn't call Solrun an undesirable. On the other hand she was very, very dangerous.
These thoughts, together with other warm and pleasant memories, quite distracted me from Batty's explanation - something about a Foreign Office department concerned with British interests abroad - but I retuned quickly when he said they understood I was a close (ahem ahem) friend who could possibly use my influence to advise her. That was when he started going on about words in ears and open eyes. At that point I had to intervene.
'I don't really know what the hell you're on about,' I said.
He vanished into his hankie for some more secret H-bomb testing and when he came out his face was as pink as his eyes.
'What we're asking is for you to pop up to Reykjavik as an old friend, see what's going on, and do what you can to steer her away from any foolishness. I'm sure it will all become clear once you're there.
It certainly isn't clear now.'
He shrugged and dabbed at his face with the hankie. 'We're offering you rather a splendid opportunity, Mr Craven.'
'Are you?'
'I think so. You could have the chance to give history a bit of a nudge in the right direction. Tempting, don't you think?'
I'd never seen myself as a history-nudger. Personally, I had every confidence that the professionals in charge of our affairs could find the shortest route to Armageddon without any help from me.
'Hang on,' I said, doing a recap to try to straighten it out in my mind. 'You want me to go to Iceland as a sort of temporary diplomat ...'
'Dear me, no. No, no, no.' He shook his head so quickly that his moustache nearly flew off. 'For us, you see, the whole attraction of employing someone like yourself is that you are not traceable. To us, of course.'
For a moment I had a chilling vision of myself in a mortuary drawer with a question mark on the tag tied to my toe. He must have picked up my reaction because he quickly went on: 'What I mean is that no one will know you're working for us.'
'Ah,' I said, wagging a finger at his beaming face. 'If you're in the line of work I think you're in, Mr Batty, shouldn't you be coming striding out of the sea half-naked with a bloody big knife strapped to your sunburned thigh?'
He straightened in his chair. 'Should I? Why ever do you say that?'
'Ursula Andress did.'
A crafty little smile twisted his lips. 'Really? Was she a civil servant too, Mr Craven?'
'Mr Batty,' I said. 'I do believe you're a bit of a tease.'
3
Just for a minute there, I wasn't sure who was taking the mickey out of who. Or whom, as we diurnalists like to say. By way of celebrating this new rapport, Mr Batty agreed to risk a mug of tea as he told me about his plans for my future.
Not all that surprisingly, I suppose, he had it all worked out. They- his department, presumably- would arrange for one of the Fleet Street newspapers to send me to Iceland on a job. That should give me enough justification to go round asking questions and generally making a nuisance of myself.
'Which one?' I offered him a turn with the sugar-bag containing a damp spoon. He declined. Our new rapport wasn't that good.
'One of the pops, we thought,' he replied. 'We have a little pull with them, and they'd be rather fun to work for, wouldn't you say?'
I worked mostly for magazines and the heavies. I'd steered clear of the tabloids ever since they'd taken to printing fiction. Still, this wasn't really work, was it?
'Of course, we'd cover your basic costs and I think we could arrange to put, say, five hundred in your bank account now.'
'That should bring my early retirement forward a couple of seconds.'
'It's all taxpayers' money, Mr Craven,' he said, with some indignation. 'We do have to spend it responsibly. Do you know, I'm convinced that tea tastes much better out of a mug like this, but my secretary won't hear of it.'
I shook my head at him. 'Great mistake, getting physically involved with your secretary.'
'I do assure you ... let me make it clear immed ... ah, you're joking again I do believe, Mr Craven.'
'Caught me, Mr Batty. Tell me one thing- how can you be sure I won't nudge history in the wrong direction?'
'Excellent point.' He looked at me as, with one stiffened finger, he stroked his sad moustache as though he expected it to bolt for cover down his throat. 'Yes, excellent question. You see, we rather assume that you have the usual sort of loyalty to your country.'
'You could be making a mistake.'
The moustache twitched into a small smile. 'I don't think so.'
'Well.' I looked around my crumbling cabin of an office. 'It's only fair to tell you that I don't feel any sentimental bond to a particular acreage just because that's where my parents succumbed to an attack of lust.'
He went on smiling.
'If they'd had the same attack in the South Seas, we might be having this conversation on the beach over a glass of fresh coconut juice. If you take my point.
His smile still hadn't shifted.
'Look, let me put it this way. My sole concern is to get this admittedly pathetic little body through from breakfast to bedtime each day with minimum damage. That's my only serious commitment to a philosophical ideal.'
'But you don't have any loyalties which might, shall we say, conflict. It was more of a statement than a question and I realised, foolishly, that of course he would've had me checked out, even for this errand-boy sort of job.
'Not really.'
He made a brave try at drinking his tea and leaned forward to slide the mug on to my desk. 'Very fair of you to try to explain your position. These days, I think we're inclined to trust someone with your sort of healthy cynicism rather than an old fashioned patriot. And you do have the incentive of wishing to see that your friend Solrun makes the right decision. Oh, no, Mr Craven. We've made the right choice. You must trust us to do that.'
'In that case .. .'
He was halfway out of the door before I realised what I'd let myself in for.
'One thing,' I said, before he vanished down the stairs. 'This job for the paper - will it be real or is it just ... window dressing?'
Well, I couldn't say 'cover', could I? Normal people don't go round talking about cover.
'Oh, yes, definitely. We shall see that it's put into their minds to give you a commission up there. You will have to do it, I'm afraid, but no doubt you will be generously paid for it.' He gave my arm a sympathetic pat. 'From what little I've seen of the popular papers, it shouldn't be anything too intellectually demanding. You'll cope, Mr Craven, you'll cope.'
The last I heard of him was a vast sneeze echoing up the stairs. I made another pot of tea and watched the gold dust dance in the one beam of sunlight I was permitted by city by laws.
That was when it struck me. However they dressed it up in homely jargon, the British Government were employing me - at least, indirectly- to go up to Iceland to see what Solrun was getting up to. And, presumably, to do something about it. That made me a spy. Okay, only Acting, Temporary, and Without Pension Rights, but I was still a spy. I looked around my broken-down office. At least I had one qualification - the ribbon on my typewriter was so worn I could use it as invisible ink.
But exactly what did they expect me to do about it? That was the big puzzle. If Batty had checked me out, which he must've done, then he'd know that I wouldn't be likely to have a deep sense of historic continuity. You don't have a lot of that if you haven't got a mum or dad, like me.
No man is an island? You want to bet? This one is. A private island, and I don't allow picnickers either.