Colonel Butler's Wolf

by Anthony Price

Butler stared at him, balanced between irritation and admiration.

  “What made you suspicious—at the start?”

  “My dear Jack,” Audley waved airily, “it was a great little nightmare of Sir Geoffrey Hobson’s, but that’s all it ever was. It wasn’t like the Russians—Theodore Friesler said so, and you said so, and I couldn’t find one bit of real evidence to back it—“ Audley’s voice hardened suddenly “—and I don’t make that sort of mistake.”

  “Then what the hell was all that rigmarole on the Wall yesterday?”

  “Rigmarole?” Audley shook his head. “Say rather that was just Adashev and I playing chess with each other. I needed to give him the chance of telling me what he wanted me to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this student thing is for real, too, Jack. It’s not a blind—even a new boy like Adashev didn’t reckon he could draw off my attention from the real thing with an imaginary operation. The real thing stood a chance only if the diversion was real too.”

  Butler nodded grimly. “I take it you know what the real diversionary target is now.”

  “If I was a betting man I’d bet on it. The coastal missile range.”

  “But yesterday you said it didn’t fit, not well enough anyway.”

  “Yesterday it didn’t fit—because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know I was the one who was meant to get the answer. Today’s different.” Audley paused. “Look at it this way: they let me see Alek, and Alek’s a man who needs a specific target—and a target they could rely on me identifying. And then a target I’d know the lads at Castleshields would identify too. That’s enough for even an old square like me to come up with an answer.”

  “Which is—?”

  “The Beast of Cazombo, no less.”

  “The beast of—where?” Butler frowned.

  “Cazombo. It’s in Angola, out near the Zambian border. It isn’t a name that’s been in the news over here, but in certain circles it’s known right enough. The point is that last term at Cumbria we had an MPIA guerrilla leader talk to their Free Africa Society, of which I’m an honorary vice-president. He talked all about genocide and chemical warfare, and all the other things the guerrillas accuse the Portuguese of, and by the grace of god the name Negreiros stuck in my mind—“

  “Negreiros!”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “There’s a Portuguese General called Negreiros.” Butler wrinkled his forehead. “He was an intelligence major in Brussels when I was there in ‘61.”

  “That’s the man. A specialist in air cavalry, and the guerrillas don’t like him one little bit. He also happens to be a link man with the South Africa general staff. And he happens to be leading the present Portuguese military delegation here.”

  “The one there was that London demonstration against just recently?”

  “Now you’re on target, like Alek. Because the Negreiros delegation is due to visit the Missile Range this afternoon at 3.30—they’re driving up from Birmingham.”

  Butler whistled softly. A target indeed—ripe for a demo and riper still for a bullet.

  Audley nodded. “Yes, I don’t need to spell it out, do I. But we don’t need to worry about it any more either, thank God.”

  “You’ve turned it over to the Special Branch?”

  Audley laughed. “Not bloody likely! As it happens, Negreiros has got a private engagement elsewhere, according to the Department, but just in case he changes his mind I’ve got ‘em to take the whole delegation down to Filton instead to see the Concorde. There isn’t going to be a missile range visit at all.”

  “And Alek?”

  “Alek and Adashev can fold up their tents and steal away into the night. In a day or two Latimer’s going to drop a word into the embassy pipeline that we don’t want them hanging around, but the word from on high is that we’re to play this whole thing very cool. As far as the demo goes, or whatever the lads had got planned, if they want to demonstrate against the Beast of Cazombo outside the Missile Range gate now, they’re welcome. There won’t be any scandal—that’s the password all round—no scandal.”

  “Everybody goes free, you mean?”

  “Everybody goes home. Even you, Butler—after you’ve given your lecture on Belisarius, of course. We want to keep things neat.”

  Everybody?

  “Except me, of course,” Audley went on, unruffled by the strange expression on Butler’s face. “I’ve got the rest of my mock sabbatical year to serve at Cumbria. Not that it’ll be any great hardship. In fact, in some ways I’ve learnt quite a lot. Having to teach Gracey’s bright young men is rather like the prospect of being hanged: it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Take this place now—“

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said ‘Take this place’.” Audley paused. “Do you know where we are, Butler?”

  Butler stared at him stupidly. “Where we are?”

  “This is what they called the Principia, Butler—the headquarters building—“

  “I’m aware of that, yes,” Butler said curtly.

  The big man gave him an oddly confiding sidelong glance. “Yes, I rather thought you’d know it.” He smiled. “I knew I’d got you summed up correctly. You’re a romantic at heart, no matter what you pretend to be. I know you wouldn’t let me down, here of all places.”

  “I don’t see what you think I am—“ Butler began stiffly, and then reared up against the implication of it. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with—“

  “Oh, but it has! It has everything to do with it.” Audley gestured over the fortress and on towards the crags. “This place has the right atmosphere for us. What it is and what it was—

  Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen, the work of the giants, the stone-smiths, mouldereth .. “

  He seemed undeterred by Butler’s wooden expression. “You didn’t walk the Wall yesterday and not think about it.”

  It wasn’t a question. Or rather the man was so maddeningly sure of the answer that it had come out as a statement.

  Butler flushed. Its very accuracy made it offensive, like an invasion of the private part of his mind. It was none of Audley’s damn business what he thought. And even if by some rogue intuition he could see so clearly, he had no call to speak of it. It was an act of intellectual ill-breeding.

  “ ‘The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish’,” said Audley.

  Butler exploded. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, man—spare me the quotations. I’ve had a bellyful these last few hours. Say what you mean and have done with it.”

  Audley gave him a shrewd look. “I’m not getting through to you? Or am I getting through a bit too well?”

  He paused, then gave Butler a grin that was disarmingly shy. “I apologise, Colonel. Sometimes I say what should be unsaid, I’m afraid. But you must remember I’ve been up on this bit of frontier longer than you. It’s got under my skin.”

  He paused, staring northwards at the skyline.

  “What I mean is that there must have been times when the Wall was strong and times when it was weak—more like a confidence trick than a real defense. The way they’d have held it then was by good intelligence work. And by keeping their nerve.”

  Butler nodded slowly.

  “And by a little judicious contempt too, Butler.”

  “Contempt?”

  “Contempt. Just that.” Audley’s eyes were cold now. “You and I—we’re on our Wall when it’s weak. Weak on the Wall, and weak behind it.” He pointed northwards. “Some of our people don’t believe there are any savages out there. And of course the intellectuels gauchistes are quite happy to pick us off from behind—they think it’s high time for the Wall to fall.”

  It was hard for a plain man to make sense of what he was driving at, Butler fretted. It was almost as though they were all conspiring to confuse him, Audley as much as any of them.

  “But I don’t happen to agree with them. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I find their alternatives altoge
ther cretinous. I suppose that makes me a dedicated counter-revolutionary capitalist … “

  Butler grunted non-committally. He could only presume that the blighter was simply restating his oath of allegiance in his own tortuous jargon.

  “Which means—“ The eyes glinted suddenly “—we’ve got to teach these fucking Russians a lesson without stirring up any trouble.”

  Momentarily the shift from the pedantic to the vulgar took Butler aback.

  “And that means that we let them go home—scot-free,” Audley concluded.

  “Where’s the lesson in that, for God’s sake?”

  Audley smiled. “The lesson, my dear Butler, is in the pack of lies we give them to take home.”

  He broke off abruptly to squint down the valley towards the main road, where Butler saw a long grey estate car tip slowly off the tarmac past Audley’s car into the gateway of the grass track leading up to the fortress.

  “Now, who the hell—?” Then he relaxed. “It’s all right. It’s only Tony Handforth-Jones. He must be getting ready for the new season’s vicus dig.” He turned back to Butler. “You don’t need to worry about Handforth-Jones, he’s one of mine. It’s lies that we’ve got to worry about now.”

  Butler tore his gaze unwillingly from the estate car. All these outsiders of Audley’s made him uneasy.

  “What lies?”

  Audley regarded him in silence for a moment. “Let’s look at the truth first, Butler. In reality we’re letting them all go because we’re weak: we can kick ‘em out, but we can’t afford any scandal. We can deal with the Negreiros business, of course. But that doesn’t alter the fact that if it hadn’t been for Zoshchenko cracking up on them, they wouldn’t have needed any Negreiros business to put us off the scent.”

  Butler nodded. “Aye. They just had bad luck.”

  “It was bad judgement too. They chose the wrong man. What we’ve got to do is to rub that in.”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to leak it to them we’ve been on to them from the start. With what we’ve got on Adashev, and that fellow they pulled out of New Zealand to train Zoshchenko, we can maybe just about make that stick without giving away our contact in the KGB apparat in London.”

  “Hmm … You think they’ll swallow that?”

  “When they think of me they will, yes.” Audley wagged a blunt finger. “I’ve been wasting my time for months looking for Hobson’s non-existent KGB conspiracy in the universities. But you’re going to tell how Audley’s been watching them all the time and the conspiracy was our bluff to keep them happy. And you can say that I’m bloody livid that they can’t conduct their wretched little operations properly—that if this is the best they can do, they’d better stay home until they know a hawk from a handsaw. Then they can try again. That’s the message: contempt!”

  The estate car pulled to a halt beside a chequer-board of trenches on the slope below the fortress, and Audley acknowledged Handforth-Jones’s wave.

  If the credibility of a lie was related in any way to its size, then this shameless monster falsehood truly might pass, thought Butler. Indeed, it was not so much a lie as the exact inversion of the truth—something only a supremely arrogant man would dare think of. And what gave it the shape and hue of reality was that it fitted not only the facts, but also the man: this was a lie which Audley himself wished to believe.

  “Good morning, Tony,” Audley raised his voice and pointed to the three workmen who were unloading equipment from the estate car. “You’re not going to dig in this weather?”

  “Good exercise!” Handforth-Jones shouted. “Morning, Colonel! Seen any Picts yet ?”

  Butler grunted unintelligibly as the archaeologist strode up to them, rubbing his hands and grinning wickedly.

  “Not that there’ll be any Picts abroad today,” Handforth-Jones added cheerfully. “Mornings like this remind me of what Camden thought of this part of the world—‘nothing agreeable in the Air or the Soil’—and Camden never even dared come this far. He said the Eptons were no better than bandits and he wouldn’t set foot on their land.”

  “Then what brings you out, Tony?” said Audley, laughing.

  “Money, as usual, David.” Handforth-Jones waved suddenly to his brutish followers. “Over here, Alfred! Put the headquarters marker just here and the hospital one over there.”

  He swung back to Audley. “It’s Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, and I’m planning for the unfortunate Lusitanians to pick up the bill. You are welcome to watch if you’ve the time. You can even try to look like an archaeologist, if you like. I could do with a bit more local colour.”

  “Local colour for whose benefit?”

  “Hah! The Lusitanians, that’s who.” Handforth-Jones’s attention was less with them than with his followers, who were engaged in setting up stencilled notices on small wooden pegs outside each group of ruins.

  “We’re about to turn the place into a scene of frenzied archaeological activity for an hour or two. I only hope to God the weather holds.” He sniffed the air and scanned the low clouds anxiously. “Which it doesn’t look like doing, naturally. Over here, Arthur. Jesus, he’s put the headquarters marker on the latrines. Not that they’ll know the difference, but excuse me—this joke’s getting out of hand already. Over here, Arthur, over here!”

  He strode away abruptly, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

  Butler looked at his watch. “I ought to be getting back to the Milecastle pretty soon. If you want me to handle that end of it.”

  The dirty end, naturally. The end that had sickened him yesterday afternoon and sickened him no less now. But he had known in his heart that it would be his end: it was what the Butlers of the world were here for.

  “Audley?”

  But Audley wasn’t listening to him: he was staring down the hillside at the retreating figure, his face fixed in an appalled expression of disbelief.

  “Oh, dear God,” he exclaimed. “Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day!”

  Butler felt the blood drain from his own cheeks, though without knowing why. In anyone else this sudden confusion would be almost comical, but in Audley—in self-confident, omniscient Audley—it was like the moment of awful stillness before an earthquake shock.

  Audley faced him.

  “Whose idea was it for you to come up here?”

  “Up here?” Butler repeated the words stupidly.

  “To shoot your supper.”

  “To shoot—?” Butler frowned. “It was Gracey’s. The Vice-Chancellor.”

  Audley blinked. “His idea?”

  “There are hares up here, so he said.”

  “He said so?”

  “Aye.” Butler grappled with his memory. “He said he had it on good authority.”

  Audley relaxed. “On good authority. I’ll bet it was on good authority!” He turned to look down the hillside. “TONY!”

  Handforth-Jones paused in the act of climbing aboard a small yellow dumper truck. Audley signalled furiously to him to rejoin them.

  “What the devil’s up?”

  “Up?” Audley groaned. “Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, that’s what’s up. I haven’t been as clever as they thought I’d be, that’s what’s up.”

  Handforth-Jones advanced over the hillside towards them again.

  “Hullo there! What’s the matter, David?”

  “Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, Tony: what is it?”

  “That’s just our name for this little fund-raising venture.” Handforth-Jones chuckled. “The First Lusitanians were stationed here during the Severan reconstruction. Hadrian’s Own First Cohort of Loyal Lusitanians. They rebuilt the headquarters. There’s a very fine dedication slab to them in Newcastle Museum, Collingwood Bruce found it here—it was reused as a paving stone in the Theodosian reconstruction—“

  “For God’s sake, Tony—are you getting money from the Portuguese?”

  “Well, yes. That’s what I’m trying to explain. There’s a whole batch of them over here
on some junket or other. The Reader in Portuguese History is a Fellow of King’s, he laid this on for me.”

  “Portuguese?” Butler frowned in bewilderment.

  “Lusitanian, same thing. Lusitania was Roman Portugal,” Handforth-Jones explained. “Portugal’s supposed to be ‘Our Oldest Ally’. It occurred to us they might like to see the one and only place where Portuguese troops served in Britain, which is Ortolanacum. Might make them feel generous, you know.”

  “And they’re coming here?” Audley cut in.

  “That’s right.” Handforth-Jones nodded. “Some time in the next hour or so. Not all of them, of course. Just the top man.” He grinned again. “Which is a good thing, because I’m standing him lunch in Newcastle after he’s seen the inscription on the slab in the museum just to prove I’m not making it all up. Not that he’ll make much of COH I AEL LUS, but no matter.”

  Audley looked quickly and hopelessly at Butler.

  “Was this common knowledge, this visit, Dr Handforth-Jones?” Butler asked.

  Handforth-Jones stared from one to the other suspiciously. “Well, I haven’t tried to hide it. We’ve talked about it at dinner quite often.”

  Common knowledge. So the visit of the Beast of Cazombo to Ortolanacum had been bandied around both King’s and Cumbria—and by the cruelest mischance had not come to the ears of the one man who mattered.

  “Damnation!” Audley studied the rock-strewn slopes of the crags above them on each side of the Boghole Gap.

  Might as well look for a flea on a sheepdog’s back, thought Butler bleakly. If Alek was up there already, it would take supernatural luck to spot him now.

  “Damnation,” Audley muttered again, reaching the same conclusion a second later.

  He turned to Handforth-Jones. “Tony, we’re going to pull the curtain down on Anglo-Lusitanian friendship for the time being. I’m sorry.”

  “Do I get to know why?” There was a mixture of resignation and curiosity in the archaeologist’s voice. “Or is this another bit of your top secret cloak and dagger?”

  “I’m afraid more dagger than cloak this time, Tony. There may be a sniper up in the rocks waiting for your chief guest. And if there is, then we should be due for a student demo from Castleshields at just about the time he arrives.”