Snark

by William L. DeAndrea

  “Why we’re cooking up this pack of lies.”

  “National security,” Felicity said. Stingley grunted.

  Felicity went on, “And, you get to give the Yard, from the Special Branch on down, a kick in the arse. And you get the credit for cracking the case.”

  “You’ve talked me into it.”

  Robert Tipton groaned. He was unconscious now, his head pillowed by Stingley’s jacket. His lips were pale, and despite the cold, a thin film of sweat shone on his forehead.

  “That’s shock,” Stingley said. “He lost consciousness just before you got back here. What’s taking Bellman so long about that bloody ambulance? How difficult is it to dial 999?”

  Felicity was beginning to wonder herself, but it was only a few seconds before Bellman dragged his leg over to them.

  “Ambulance should be here in a few minutes, and the Special Branch should make it sooner than that. Let’s go.”

  Stingley looked at him, then at Felicity. “Ridiculous,” he said. “You should go with Tipton to hospital, both of you. You’ve had your head knocked around by some thug, and you’ve got a bullet in your leg.”

  “Fortunately not,” Bellman said. “Two holes. Went right through.”

  “It’ll turn septic,” Stingley said ominously. Felicity was sure he’d heard his mother say it just that way.

  “Well, get going then. You’re crazy, the lot of you.”

  Bellman insisted on driving the car. He said driving one-legged was something he did all the time, whereas she wasn’t yet used to driving one-eyed. Once again, Felicity gave in.

  Felicity sat in the back seat with Bulanin. She kept him covered while the Russian sat with his back in the corner, to avoid crushing his hands, which were now manacled behind him with the handcuffs he had used on Sir Lewis.

  Bulanin wanted to talk. “It has stopped snowing, I see. That’s good. The sky is very clear.”

  Bellman said the snow on the roads still made it hard to drive. Felicity ignored them both. She was busy wondering how she felt about Sir Lewis. She had seen him lying there with the spectacles sticking out of his eye, and for the first time, she could form a clear picture of what she must have looked like when Sir Lewis had attacked her. She had honored Sir Lewis, respected him. And he turned out to have been a monster.

  Or at least partly a monster. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sprang to mind. The truth would be easy to deal with, she decided. Sir Lewis had split in two, and the maniac had destroyed the great man.

  Bellman drove around for a long time. “This isn’t the way to the Tournament Press,” she said at one point.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Bellman said. Then, softening, he said, “Stingley was right, you know. We both should have some medical attention.”

  “Especially you,” Felicity said.

  “Especially me. Before it turns septic.” For some reason they smiled together, and Bellman drove on. He got no closer to the Tournament Press, and he didn’t seem interested in stopping at any hospitals either.

  “Where are we going?” Felicity demanded. “Don’t go onto the bridge—dammit, you’ve taken us back to the South Bank of the Thames again.”

  “That’s easily fixed,” Bellman said.

  “I want to get Bulanin back to headquarters and start his processing.”

  “I haven’t said I’m defecting, you know,” Bulanin put in.

  “You have no choice,” Felicity told him. “After Stingley speaks to the press, you’d be a dead man if you tried to go back.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Bulanin said. “Incidentally, I must tell you I find your natural hair color much more appealing.”

  How about my eyes? Felicity thought. Instead, she said, “You know I’m right.”

  Bellman suddenly turned off onto a drive, said a few words to an attendant at a gate, and drove through.

  Felicity wanted to know what he was doing. This was the Westland Heliport, for God’s sake. What could he possibly...?

  The question was answered by a flutter of rotor blades as a helicopter descended out of the cold, clear night sky and toward the landing pad. The machine was silver, and it bore the words UNITED STATES ARMY.

  Felicity said, “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do,” Bellman said. “I’m sorry, Felicity.”

  “You can’t!”

  “I have to.” He opened the door and struggled to his feet. He limped around the side of the car to let Bulanin out. Bellman kept marking his path through the snow with red spots as blood dripped from his leg.

  “I won’t allow it,” Felicity insisted. “He’s ours!”

  “Then, goddammit, shoot me and take him!” He spread his arms. “Come on. It would be a favor to me. Come on, do it!”

  For a split-second, Felicity was going to do it. In the next, she knew she never could, and in the one after that came the knowledge that he’d known all along she wouldn’t be able to.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  Bellman helped the Russian out of the car. He kept talking as he did so.

  “I’m sorry, Felicity, really. I hate this job, and I’d give anything to be able to stop doing it, but when I’m stuck with it, I have to do it right.”

  Felicity was silent. All she had in her mind was you bastard, and she didn’t like to repeat herself.

  “What’s inside Bulanin’s head is priceless. As valuable to our side as what Sir Lewis knew would have been to the Russians. I can’t afford to—”

  “Can’t afford to what?” Felicity spat. “Trust him to a bunch of incompetents like us?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Bulanin spoke up. “I wanted it this way, Miss Grace. I feel much safer in the hands of the Americans. I know the sources my people—my former people—can reach in London. I, too, am sorry.”

  Felicity told them both to go to hell.

  The helicopter was down, now. Felicity, almost in spite of herself, got out of the car and followed them toward it. As they approached, a door slid open, and a white-haired, rugged-faced old man smiled out at them.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” the old man yelled against the roar of the engine. “I didn’t believe you when I got your call, but here he is, by God.”

  So that’s what took him so long to get an ambulance for Tipton, Felicity thought. He had to call his people first. It occurred to Felicity she might actually be setting eyes on the legendary Congressman. She did not feel especially privileged.

  Then she got a surprise. “This is Miss Grace, of the Section. She’s been instrumental in this whole operation, and she’s here to insist that British interests be taken care of.”

  The old man looked at the young man, and Felicity could see quite a bit of similarity between them.

  Strong American hands were pulling Bulanin into the helicopter. Before he disappeared, the Russian nodded at Felicity, then at Bellman, and said perhaps he would see them again.

  The old man, meanwhile, had stopped grinning. “She’s here to insist, is she?”

  “That’s right,” Bellman said.

  “And she’s in a position to, ain’t she? I mean, now that you let her get a good look at my face, so she can blow my cover if she feels she has to.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Bellman deadpanned. “It never crossed my mind.”

  “I’ll bet,” the Congressman drawled. He turned to Felicity. “Well, don’t you worry, miss. I’ll see that British interests are protected. You’ll have a representative there at any debriefing we do with him, provided it’s you.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Your friend here just staked his life on you, and he knows it. If he trusts you that much, you are the one. I’ll be in touch with Tipton.” Felicity started to tell him about Tipton’s condition, but the old man spoke to Bellman. “What happened to your leg, boy?”

  “Bullet, “Bellman said.

  “Get it attended to. It might get infected.”

  Bellman said, “Yes, sir. Right away.” Felicity watche
d the helicopter take off in a new mini-blizzard of blown snow, and tried to stop her head from whirling enough for her to make some sense of any of it.

  Bellman stood beside her, laughing. That made the least sense of all.

  EPILOGUE

  In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

  In the midst of his laughter and glee,

  He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

  For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

  —The Hunting of the Snark

  Fit the Eighth

  BELLMAN TOOK A RIDE on the moving sidewalk at the airport. He noticed they’d filled in the bullet holes in the list of the cities.

  He was walking with a cane now. Felicity had told him he looked ridiculously distinguished. He had to take antibiotics, and his leg had turned a lovely shade of purple around the wound, especially the exit wound, but he’d be all right.

  It had been a strange operation. Crazy. Double-crosses, cross-purposes, purposeful doubling-back. A daisy chain of violence and death, the first link being formed in the brilliant mind of an old man who’d been disappointed about the way his countrymen had been behaving.

  Bellman had been sent in to stir things up. Which he had. Had he ever. And Felicity had lost an eye, and Tipton had been shot in the stomach, and he’d been shot in the leg, and he’d lost count of how many had died. In a horrible way, it was all kind of funny.

  The funniest thing about it was that it had been a big success. The whole operation had been a big success. The object of the exercise, way back in the dawn of time when he’d first arrived in England, had been to make sure Sir Lewis’s report got delivered, to give clout to the effort to purge the moles from British Intelligence. The report was delivered. On schedule. Robert Tipton had spent his stay in the hospital putting it into palatable, but still hard-hitting form, and the report went out.

  And looked likely to sweep all before it. After all, the beloved Sir Lewis himself had been murdered by the Sussex Cyclops, who now turned out to have been a terrorist working for some enemy of the Realm. The old man tried to work things out, and they got him for it. Sir Lewis must not have died in vain!

  Bulanin got to live. That was a lot less than he’d wanted, but a lot more than he deserved, considering the bullshit he’d let Leo Calvin get away with. They were setting him up in Washington, itching to ask him questions, but bound by the Congressman’s promise to let him be until Felicity got there. That should be in about two weeks, when Tipton went back to work.

  Dave Hamilton got to live, too. He was being groomed now as a conduit for false information to the Russians. His brother had a new, expensive doctor; Dave himself was going to start some important and exciting work. Considering he’d been expecting to be ground up for cattle feed or something, he couldn’t believe his luck. Bellman knew that the day would come when Dave Hamilton would wish he had been ground up for cattle feed, but what the hell, let him enjoy it for now.

  Bellman, meanwhile, was getting used to the idea that Leo Calvin was gone, that at this moment, there was no one in the world actively trying to hunt him down or kill him. He should feel great about it. Instead, he felt empty. It was stupid, and it made him angry, but that was the way he felt.

  And there was Felicity. She hadn’t actually forgiven him for spiriting Bulanin from under her nose. If she’d known he’d been in the control room at the Tombs calling his father at NATO headquarters in Belgium, she might have taken steps to prevent him. With Stingley there (Deputy Chief Inspector Stingley, he was now), she might have had to shoot him, to save face. Now only the two of them and Bulanin knew that she hadn’t been ruthless enough to stop him.

  They’d made love this morning, in the Tournament Press flat. The first time since Felicity’d lost her eye. It pained his leg, but it was worth it. Felicity was beautiful and tender and fierce. She kissed him, cursed him, cried. When it was over, she clung to him as if reluctant to let him go.

  “If we were any other kind of people...” she said. It hadn’t been necessary to finish. Bellman kissed her again.

  “I get my false eye next week. I’ll have it when I’m in Washington. They tell me they’ve matched the color perfectly.”

  “You’re beautiful with it or without it,” Bellman said.

  “Spies are good liars. Will you be working on Bulanin?”

  “No,” Bellman said.

  “Will I see you in Washington at all?”

  “Maybe,” he said. He didn’t think he would; he didn’t even think it was a good idea, but this wasn’t the time to say so.

  He kissed her instead, and kept kissing her until they were ready. This time when they were done, he held her until she went to sleep. Then he got dressed and went to the airport.

  In the cab, he’d begun a mental draft of his report. The Congressman would examine his report; after that, he’d examine his head. It had been lunacy, first to last; madmen hunting madmen, using madmen as their tools.

  Maybe it fit. Maybe the whole espionage world was like this, and since this operation was strictly an intramural Espionage Community affair, by spies, for spies, the essential madness of the enterprise stood out in stark relief.

  The Snark Hunt. Well, Bellman had caught his Snark (though he wasn’t entirely sure exactly who the Snark had been), but not before the Snark (or was it a Boojum?) had bitten everyone in sight. It was time for the Bellman to fade away. Time for the Congressman’s son to find a new name, a new identity. A new life, or reasonable facsimile thereof.

  The escalator dumped him out near the departure board. He’d already checked his bag. He read the gate number for his flight, and limped away toward the other moving sidewalk, the one that would take him there.

  He’d strap himself in, and lean back. He wouldn’t sleep—never when there was someone else around—but he would dream. And he’d let the plane take him back to whatever he could scrape up this time that might pass for home.

  London-Paris, 1984

  Author’s Note

  WARNING—the only thing real about this book is England, which is as real as this foreigner could make it after living there for close to a year. I mention this because, dictionaries to the contrary, the notion seems to have taken hold that the less in a book that is actually made up by the author, the better fiction it is. Despite this, honesty compels me to admit that practically all of this book is pure invention—all characters, events, and organizations (except the KGB) are fictitious, and everything else is used fictitiously. Minor details of history, geography, and architecture have been changed when the story demanded it.

  There is no Agency in the American Intelligence community; the British have no Section like the one described here. As I explained in Cronus, the preceding volume in this series, there is a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives similar to the one described here, and it has a chairman, but the character called the Congressman is in no way intended to portray anyone who has ever held that position.

  The central idea for Snark was given to me by my wife, Orania Papazoglou, and I want to thank her for it, and for everything else.

  Thanks are also due to Marian Babson, a longtime London Yankee who helped me in too many ways to enumerate.

  —W.L.D.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coin
cidental.

  Copyright © 1985 by William L. DeAndrea

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4532-9023-1

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