“What is this piss?” he demanded.
Felicity said nothing.
“Come on, darling,” Stan said. “Answer the man.”
“It’s all written on the can,” Felicity said. “Can’t he read?”
“Of course I can read,” Grunter said. “‘Schlitz,’” he read, “‘Lager beer. The beer that made Milwaukee famous.’ What the bloody hell is Milwaukee?”
“It’s a city, Grunter. In America. She got it for the Bellman character, doubtless. He’d probably sit in front of the telly on a Sunday evening, watch American Football on Channel Four, drink American beer, and pretend he was back home.”
“It tastes like piss,” Grunter said.
“Where is Bellman, miss?” Stan said.
“I don’t know,” Felicity said.
“I’m tired of this bitch,” Grunter said conversationally. “When can we ring Leo? I want to finish here and get going.”
“Seven o’clock,” Stan said. “What’s your hurry? I’m sure our charming hostess will be much more talkative when her neighbor wakes up.”
Mrs. Pettison lay at his feet like a trophy rug. There was a slow trickle of blood from her scalp. Stan prodded her with a toe. She groaned.
“Must have hit her harder than I thought,” he said. “I was upset. Still, she’ll come round. I want her awake. It’s important for her to be awake when I ask you questions. Grunter, any more of the American piss left?”
“Bloody gallons.”
“Give us another, then.”
Good, Felicity thought, drink up. She looked toward the hallway, to the end of it, where the door to the loo was. It was innocent and white, and looked as if nothing at all was going on behind it.
Damn. All right. The thing to do now was not to jerk her head away, but to turn away smoothly. Her head hurt where Grunter had hit her; it hurt worse from all this thinking.
Leo. They were going to ring Leo at seven o’clock. When they’d been talking about it, she’d seen Grunter pat the side pocket of his jacket. Undoubtedly the telephone number. If she could get hold of it, she could find out where Jeffrey’s friend Leo would be at seven o’clock. He might have a lead to Sir Lewis, which would make the Section happy.
All she had to do was get it. All she needed to do that was a little luck.
Grunter had his face pressed to the metal circle at the top of another beer can. “I’m leaving off this garbage,” he said, throwing the can to the floor. “It smells of bloody bleach.”
“You’re just put out because it’s American beer.” Stan smiled at his friend through a haze of smoke, the smoke, Felicity realized, that was keeping him from picking up the faint, but detectable odor of chlorine. Dammit, how much beer could these bastards drink before one of them had to go to the loo?
They’d let her go, earlier. Just after the fight. Stan had been a proper gentleman about it. He had Grunter cover her while he went inside and checked for concealed weapons and made sure the window was too small to get out of. Then he’d held the door for her like a Harrods Green Man and told her that if she came out any way but sweet she was dead.
“I’ll be standing far enough away from the door so that you won’t be able to reach me with soap or bleach or whatever, throw it in my face. But a bullet will reach you, so be careful.”
Felicity had been careful. She’d had no intention of coming out of the loo with anything. As soon as she closed the door behind her, she’d got the can of drain opener Bellman had left inside, broken three nails getting it open. She used the facilities (she knew she wouldn’t get another chance), flushed, and used the noise of the tank refilling to cover her next actions. She poured the rest of the drain opener into the bowl, about two cups. Then she got the plastic bottle of thick bleach she used for cleaning the bowl, and poured that in.
Bellman had laughed at her when she’d warned him not to mix them. The drain opener was sodium hydroxide. The thick bleach was basically chlorine dissolved in water. Bellman had called it basic chemistry. Dissolved in water, the drain opener would free sodium ions. These in turn would work on the water itself, both in the bowl and in the bleach. This would serve to liberate chlorine gas.
Felicity heard the hiss of the reaction, and saw the first faint greenish-yellow wisps of chlorine before she hurriedly left the loo and shut the door behind her. Stan ushered her back to the parlor, where he and Grunter drank beer.
And Felicity waited for the gas to build up in the little room.
Chlorine gas. Poisonous. Caustic. Extremely flammable.
It had to be thick in there by now. Felicity’s nose fairly itched with it. It was hard to believe even the cigarette smoke could keep Stan from smelling it.
Maybe he should smell it. Maybe he’ll go to investigate. It would be best if it were Stan, but she could deal with things if it was Grunter who went. One eye, sore head, broken, bleeding nails and all—she could deal with it. She was a trained professional, after all, and these two were just thugs.
But one way or another, for one reason or another, if one of them didn’t open the door to the loo, and damned bloody soon, Felicity was going to go mad.
6
DAVE HAMILTON DIDN’T KNOW how to take it when the American asked him to come next door to the flat. Dave hadn’t even known there was a flat, and he wasn’t sure that Mr. Bellman had the authority to take him off the job in the middle of the day. In as polite a way as he could manage, Dave told him as much.
Bellman smiled at him. “It’s all right, Dave. Pick up the phone and clear it with Mr. Tipton. Tell him I want to take you to the company flat. He’ll understand.”
“If you’re sure it’s all right...”
“Of course it’s all right. What’s the matter?” Bellman assumed the air of someone extremely narked. “Think I’m a faggot or something, after your body?”
It had never crossed Dave’s mind until this instant.
“Relax,” the American told him. “It’s the British spies who are poofs. Americans sell their country out for money. At least,” he said, “that’s the way it usually happens.”
“Er...do you mind waiting a little while? I’ve...er...just got some of these accommodation lists to finish up—”
“Nope. Can’t wait. You ring Mr. Tipton’s office and tell him. Come on. Time’s wasting. For Queen and Country, and all that.”
Dave rang up, and to his surprise, was connected with Mr. Tipton in person. The Acting Section Chief seemed dubious, especially when Dave told him it was Mr. Bellman’s idea to clear it with him, but he said Dave should go ahead, by all means.
Dave spent the first few moments in the flat just looking at it. He thought you had to be a character on the telly to live in a place like this. When he thought of his mum and Mike and him living in a cramped, cold Council flat, he envied the person who lived here. Then he remembered it was a company flat, and no one lived here, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or bust up the place.
To hell with it, he thought. I don’t like this. I don’t like being around this man, for some reason never have. Let me just see what he wants and get back to my keyboard.
“There’s an awful lot of work waiting for me, Mr. Bellman,” Dave said. “So if you’ll just tell me what you want of me...”
Bellman’s fist hit him in the jaw and cracked his head back like a boxer’s bag. The salty taste of blood filled his mouth as his teeth sliced into the soft flesh of his inner cheek.
The actual pain of the blow hadn’t had a chance to register yet when Bellman hit him again, in the belly this time. The air whooshed from him, bringing with it a fine spray of blood. Dave thought he was going to be sick. He clutched at his stomach and sank to his knees on the thick white rug.
He tried to speak. “The matter with you? Bloody crazy?”
Bellman bent over, jammed his thumb into the flesh below Dave’s ear, just behind the jawbone.
The pain was like nothing Dave had ever imagined in his life. Globes of colored light danced on a field
of red. He could hear inarticulate moans—“ahh—ahh”—like a dumb animal whimpering. Was that him? Dave couldn’t tell. There was the pain, and nothing past that could make an impression.
The pressure against his jaw stopped, and the red drained from in front of his eyes. With it went the strength that had been keeping him up. He flopped over sideways and whimpered. It made him ashamed, but there was no fighting it.
“What do you want?” he demanded. “Why are you fucking doing this?”
“We’re going to talk, Dave,” Bellman said. His voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as if he did this sort of thing every day. In a way, it was worse than the pain. The pain was now—this voice promised trouble for the future. For all of the future.
“I’m going to get information from you, and this is how I’m going to do it. I could trick it out of you. I could drug it out of you. You’re an amateur, I’m a professional, there are a dozen ways I could do this. They’d all work. But they all take time. I haven’t got time. I’m going to get it out of you by beating it out of you. How much of it you stand depends on you.”
“That’s...that’s bloody torture.”
“How about that?” Bellman asked. He cracked his knuckles. Dave heard himself whimper again, cursed himself for a coward.
“What do you want to know?”
“For openers, how much have you been getting to sell out the Agency? And was it worth Felicity Grace’s eye, or the other man’s life?” He reached down and slapped Dave across the face. “Was it?”
7
IT WAS INSIDIOUS, THIS spy business. It was like a drug that your body could manufacture for itself. All you had to do was let it. And then ride the high. Watch yourself figure out how knowledge of your whereabouts had been reaching Leo Calvin, and through him (when he wanted it to) the Russians. Feel the pieces fit together in your mind.
Hear the poor stupid kid yell as you beat on him.
Bellman hated himself at this moment. It never should have come to this. He should have known. He shouldn’t have let himself be dragged back into the game, Leo Calvin or no Leo Calvin. It was worse than that—he had volunteered. Maybe his father was right; maybe it was in his genes too deep for him ever to be free of it. “You tryin’ to stay out of the game, son, is like a duck tryin’ to fly north for the winter. Just can’t be done.”
It was beginning to look that way.
And, if he had to come back, he should have come back all the way. Suspicious of everyone. Thinking the worst, imagining worse that that, about anyone he happened to meet.
Bellman had made an unforgivable mistake. He liked Dave Hamilton. He liked this kid because he seemed to have faced some tough breaks with courage, and had taken steps toward taking his future in his own hands. Britain, he had thought in his smugness, needed more people like young Dave Hamilton.
So Bellman had sat there and let the kid sell him out. And Sir Lewis remained at large. And Felicity was blind in one eye. One of Tipton’s men was dead. The Section Sir Lewis and Tipton had built was in big trouble. And what was going to happen to Dave Hamilton didn’t bear thinking about.
It didn’t take much more to get him talking. Bellman hadn’t expected it to. When Dave took hold of the future, he grabbed more than he could hang on to.
“I did it for me brother,” Dave said. “He needs better doctors. Smarter. Who care more. Than the bloody National Health. The job was good, but it’s not enough. I didn’t expect Mike to walk again or nothing, it’s just the pain—”
“I don’t care why you did it,” Bellman said.
“I thought he was a journalist. He said he was a bloody journalist. He told me I wouldn’t be doing no harm. And he paid me. A lot. Told me it was leads, you know, so that he might find stories, and all. I saved up a lot of money from what he paid me.”
Dave was sitting on the floor. His back was against the front of an overstuffed armchair, his head thrown back on the seat. It was if he were talking to the ceiling, or to God. Now his head snapped forward, and anger flashed in his eyes.
“I never told him anything! Nothing. I just told him the bloody hotel rooms I booked. How can all this be my fault?”
Bellman shook his head. He could almost believe the boy had been that naive. Almost.
“Don’t try that on, Dave,” he said. “You knew it was your fault when you visited Miss Grace in the hospital. When you came to fix the resistor on the TV set. If I had any brains, all I had to do was look at you to know.”
Bellman looked at him now. “Was it an American?”
“Who?”
“The person you told. The one who recruited you for this business. Or was it the balloon man?”
“No. It was an American. The...the first time. I don’t know about the balloon man. Whether he was an American. Once the system was set up, I never had to speak to anybody. I just went to the market on Sunday.”
Bellman nodded. He could see the way Leo had set it up; or at least he could see the way he himself would have set it up. You hang around, you listen. You talk to people. You hear who’s getting the Civil Service jobs, or who’s already got one. You come on as a journalist—an American journalist, no less. You offer money for information.
It doesn’t have to be earth-shaking information. You can get useful intelligence just by looking at a list of who’s studying what in technical schools—that kind of thing can show you what fields of research are hot in the target country at the moment. Bulanin’s job as Agricultural Attaché was a cover, yes, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to find out how much food Britain would grow in a given year and how much it would have to import. That situation would affect the pound, which would affect politics, which would affect everything.
You could build yourself a nice little network of low-level informants, each passing you secrets worth far more than the people providing them suspected. If you’re Leo Calvin, you’re looking for something, anything, that will please the Russians enough to get them off your back.
The one day you hit pay dirt. You find a kid who is in charge of booking rooms, flats, houses, and hotels for the agents of a spy organization. Of course, he doesn’t tell you it’s a spy organization. Maybe he doesn’t even know when you sign him up. But you know, thanks to your Russian friends, that anything Sir Lewis Alfot is connected with, or had been connected with, is hot. Anyhow you can trace any of the people who work there.
And you get even luckier. The kid needs money. It never occurs to the kid (it wouldn’t, Bellman thought) to go to his boss and explain his concern over his brother, and try to get help that way.
Besides, it’s exciting to be a mole for a journalist. Real cloak-and-dagger stuff. If you get found out, you do a short stretch in jail, and the newspapers call you a hero. And when you start doing it, you think you’re only working for a publishing company. By the time you find out otherwise, it’s too late. The system has been set up, and the kid is caught in it.
And the system, Bellman thought. The system was beautiful. The kid works with computers. As Dave himself said, the fascination of computers is that anything, any kind of information, can be reduced to a string of numbers. And numbers, in turn, could be represented by anything. Letters, as in a department store code. Sounds, as in a touch-tone phone.
Colors. As in the resistor code.
Bad boys rape other young girls, but Violet gives willingly. Black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white. Zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. That’s all you needed. He should have known as soon as he saw the brown balloons. Nobody wanted a brown balloon for a decoration, but you needed the digit for the code.
Bellman wanted to know just how the code worked. Dave explained that the system worked various ways. The balloons would code out a question like “Anybody working in Brighton...”
“Brighton,” Bellman said.
Dave swallowed hard, and continued. Or lately, they’d want to know where Bellman was. “Mostly, he’d give me a phone number and a
time to call it,” he concluded.
“Sometimes you’d pass a coded message back by way of your earrings, though, wouldn’t you?”
“Sometimes. Not much.” Dave swallowed again. He’d managed to pull himself together a little during the questioning, but he hadn’t forgotten the pain. Or that it could start again at any second.
“Could...could I ask you a question?”
“Ask,” Bellman said. “No promises that I’ll answer.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“What do you think?”
Dave bit his lower lip. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Oh, Christ.”
“No, I’m not going to kill you,” Bellman said.
Dave looked at him. “You’re not?” Then the face fell. “Oh, right. That’s Mr. Tipton’s department, and all.”
“Tipton’s not going to kill you, either.”
“He will when he finds out. Unless...” Dave was fighting a hope he didn’t dare let himself feel. “Unless you’re not going to tell him.”
“I don’t have to tell him. He already knows. This place is bugged.”
“That’s why you told me—”
“That’s why I told you to let him know I was taking you here. He’s heard it all. Probably seen it, too.”
“Then...” Dave licked his lips. “Then what is going to happen to me?”
“Something that will make death look good by comparison,” Bellman told him. “You’re in it, now. Leo Calvin has probably told the Russians about you, or he’s told them enough to make them believe you when you go to them.”
“I’m not going to go to—”
“You have no choice!” Bellman was surprised at the anger in his own voice. “You can stay alive, because you can be of use. You can sell false information to the Russians for Tipton. You’ll have no friends. You’ll be able to trust no one. You’ll get no promotions, because you’ve shown nobody will be able to trust you. If you try to get out, you’re a dead man. If you get caught by the Russians, you’re a dead man. And you’ll be thrown to the wolves the minute someone decides you’ll be of more use that way.”
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