by John Glasby
The stewardess stopped beside his seat, looked down at him with a faint expression of concern on her face. “Can I get you anything, sir?”
“If you’ve got anything that can blot out memories – yes; if not, then there’s nothing anyone can do for me.” He smiled a little, saw her brows crease slightly.
“Sorry, I suppose I shouldn’t be talking like this. I’m all right, really. Just finding it hard to get to sleep. Maybe a straight bourbon if you have one.”
“Certainly, sir.” She gave him another sideways look, then hurriedly went back to the rear of the plane. The jet whined on, high above the clouds, which were clearly visible as a great sea of billowy cotton-wool, gleaming like opalescent pearl in the bright moonlight which flooded down on them. When the bourbon came, he sipped it slowly, savouring the touch of it on his tongue and the back of his throat. The stewardess had stood beside his seat for a few moments longer than were absolutely necessary, clearly concerned about him, but not wanting to show it too clearly, then she had returned to her place and the long passenger cabin was quiet and undisturbed.
Carradine gave a deep sigh, rubbed his shoulders against the back of the seat, holding the glass in his right hand, watching the amber liquid swirl around it as the plane banked to starboard. He saw the great white mass of moonlit cloud tilt up towards him, then slip away as they straightened out on course again. What lay below that vast mass he did not know.
Finishing his drink, he set the empty glass on the small tray beside him. Perhaps he would be able to get some sleep now, he thought. Stretching his legs out straight in front of him, he closed his eyes, hands resting in his lap. The muted whine of the engines acted as a soporific and the faint swaying motion of the plane was a strangely pleasant sensation.
*
All the lights were on the whole length of the plane when he woke. He stood and fought his way up from the depths of exhausted sleep. Painfully, he eased himself back up from his inclined position until he was sitting straight. A quick glance out of the window confirmed that it was still night but there was no sign of the moon in his field of view and if anything the cloud layer seemed closer now. Then he was fully awake, tired, his heavy eyes focusing automatically on the luminous dial of his watch. Five-thirty. He had been asleep a little more than an hour and a half. No wonder he still felt dog-tired.
“Coffee, sir?” The stewardess stood beside him, a tray with several cups of steaming coffee in her hands.
“Thank you.” Carradine struggled upright, rubbed the muscles at the nape of his neck with his left hand while reaching for one of the coffees with his right. “Where are we now?”
“We’ll be arriving in London in fifteen minutes. There was a storm over northern France and we had to make a diversion around it.”
Carradine nodded. The cup burned his fingers and the coffee was hot and strong, but it shocked some of the life and feeling back into his body and he sipped luxuriously, sighing in contentment. The note of the engines changed. The plane had dropped lower through the misty cloud and for several moments it was impossible to make out anything through the window. Over the pilot’s door a red light flashed into being and beneath it the instruction to fasten his safety belt and extinguish any cigarette he might be smoking.
A quarter of an hour later, the plane touched down. There was a faint bleat of tortured rubber from the wheels, then their speed was slackening appreciably as they neared the end of the runway, turning on to the wider concrete of the perimeter track, taxiing around towards the control buildings.
Inside the building, he moved through the passport check, into Customs and waited for his luggage to come off the plane. He was cleared with the minimum of fuss and delay and at the entrance to the airport found a car waiting for him. The chauffeur, a tall, quiet man, placed his luggage in the boot, then slid behind the wheel.
In the greying light of an early dawn, the streets looked oddly depressing. There was a faint sheen on them, which told him it had been raining through the night and in spite of himself, he shivered. If there was anything he hated, it was London during or just after rain.
The driver was one of the Chief’s men, silent and taciturn it was true, but a man who might know a little as to why he had been recalled with all of this vital urgency.
“Are we driving straight to Headquarters?” he asked, lighting a cigarette and letting the smoke trickle in twin streams through his nostrils.
“Those were my orders,” replied the other. He hesitated. “However, if you wish to –”
“No, go ahead. I’ve no doubt the Chief has something pretty important on his mind to interrupt my holiday just as things were getting interesting in Spain. But seriously, have you any idea what he wants in such a goddamned hurry?”
“All I know is that you’re to check with him as soon as we get there.”
Carradine turned his head and stared at the other in disbelief for a moment, then let his breath go in a long, muted whistle through his teeth. “Hell, it must be important for the Chief to be there at this hour, waiting for me.”
That was quite true, he reflected, as he leaned back and watched the tall, grey buildings, all curiously stereotyped in a strange grey anonymity in the early morning light. There had been many occasions, he himself knew of, when the Chief had remained on duty all night, and all through the next day too, looking his immaculate self late the next evening, in spite of having had no sleep for more than thirty-six hours. What kind of life was it for the other? he wondered. The man who sat at the very centre of the web of secret agents, scattered throughout the world, directing and controlling this empire, giving the necessary orders, having the entire picture filed away in his mind. It was difficult to visualise the kind of outlook, the sort of mind, which the other must have. And the odd thing about it all was that he looked no different from a thousand men one might meet in the streets of London at any hour of the day.
“I suppose that everything will be top priority.”
“I gather that is the case,” nodded the other. “The Chief, however, does not take me into his full confidence.”
It was a mildly delivered rebuff and Carradine knew better than to keep on plying the other with questions. He would doubtless discover the reasons for his urgent summons in due course.
When they drew up outside the tall building in Regent’s Park, the moon was sliding down towards the western horizon, and there was a brightening speak of grey in the other direction, the tops of the building standing out in dark silhouette against the sky.
“I’ll take your luggage along to your flat,” said the chauffeur, opening the door for him.
“Thanks.” Carradine got out, stood for a moment on the pavement outside the building, sniffing the air. It was still cold and the smell of the rain was in his nostrils. He thought of the warm, balmy air of the tiny fishing village in Spain, of the great stretch of blue ocean that rolled out to the skyline, of the cloudless skies and the contrast with what he saw all about him was even more painful.
Inside, he made his way quickly to the room on the fifth floor. From the outside, the room looked no different from all the others in the building which was the Headquarters of the Secret Service; but this was only an external appearance. He knocked loudly on the door, heard the gruff voice bidding him enter, and walked inside, closing the door softly behind him.
“Sit down, Carradine,” said the other, motioning to the chair placed in front of his desk. Like the man who sat behind it, the desk was highly polished, immaculate, and the papers stacked neatly in three piles, to the left and one on the right. Even to Carradine’s keen gaze, it seemed that they had been meticulously arranged with a millimetric accuracy.
Carradine lowered himself into the chair, crossed his legs and sat back with a faintly audible sigh, forcing himself to relax. He could tell nothing of the nature of the summons from the other’s features. The bright, sharp eyes glanced over him, missing nothing. There was a faintly humorous smile on the other’s face and Carrad
ine felt an odd tightening of his mind. He could be prepared for anything, he told himself inwardly. Whenever the other’s features were creased in that strangely beatific smile, there was something really sickly in store for him. From past experience, he had learned to notice these things.
The Chief cleared his throat, placed the tips of his square-ended fingers together and stared at him over the pyramid they formed. “You appeared to be having quite a time with yourself at Tamariu. Sorry to have to drag you away from the easy life.”
“That’s quite all right, sir. Things change, I suppose.”
“How were things at Tamariu?” The shrewd gaze fixed on Carradine’s face.
Damn him, thought the other with a faint sense of irritated surprise, he knows that something happened there, although God alone how.
“A little trouble, sir.”
The Chief’s brows went up a little. “Trouble?”
“There was a girl there at the hotel who – ”
“As far as you’re concerned, Carradine,” murmured the other softly, “there usually is. But go on. What proved to be so interesting about her?”
“I’m not sure, sir.” Carradine furrowed his brow a little. This was not going to be an easy thing to put into words. He had the odd feeling that if he went into it in any detail at all, he might find himself sitting behind his desk, spending the next day writing a report on the incident. “Her name was Francesca Romano. Most of the time she spent at the window of her room watching what was going on along the beach with a pair of high-powered binoculars. She was evidently onto something. Someone tried to kill me with a spear-gun while I was skin-diving and since I thought it possible she might have seen who it was, I asked her about it at dinner. She denied having seen anyone, but I’m sure she was lying.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Again I’m not sure. Unless she didn’t want to involve me in what was going on. I received a clear-cut warning not to probe into things that didn’t concern me over the telephone. While I was away, she vanished. I followed her and the last I saw of her, she was being taken out into the bay in a multi-boat. I’d like to have got to the bottom of it, but then your message came and I had to leave.” Carradine grinned wryly. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s leaving something half-done.”
The other’s eyes regarded Carradine attentively until he had finished, then he nodded his head sympathetically. “I understand how you feel. Unfortunately this business has come up and I’ve had orders from the PM to look into it right away.”
Carradine’s nod was taut. It was coming now, he thought to himself.
The Chief was silent for a long moment, watching Carradine speculatively. When he did speak, his question took Carradine by surprise.
“Have you ever wondered what would be one of the most important industrial acquisitions in a time of war, Carradine?”
Carradine shrugged. “There must be a lot of things, sir,” he said softly. “Rocket missiles, nuclear fuel.” He searched his mind for others.
The Chief shook his head slowly. “All of those are important, I’ll admit. But the wheels of industry, particularly the specialised industry one must have to fight a modern war, would never turn without diamonds – industrial diamonds. A country needs them by the thousand, possibly by the million. And I think you can realise that a process of manufacturing these diamonds which is both quick and cheap would be of immense value to the country possessing it.”
“But where do we come in, sir?”
“I’ll explain that.” the Chief said. “Throughout the past ten decades or so, several attempts have been made to make artificial diamonds. The five attempts, to obtain sufficiently high temperatures and pressures to simulate nature’s way of producing diamonds in the Earth’s crust ended in disaster, but from one or two of these experiments, rough diamonds were found in the debris. The present process is firmly in the hands of the Oppenheimer Group – at least, they had the secrets of the best, workable method until a little while ago.”
Carradine could feel the tightness coming on again. He had the feeling that the other was getting to the point of his interview. Outside, there was a soft drizzle against the windows and a mist seemed to have developed.
“We stumbled on this quite by accident,” the Chief resumed. “A member of our scientific delegations to Russia was approached by one of their scientists who wanted to defect to the West. He spoke of the process that he had developed for producing industrial diamonds in large quantities at a cost far less than any process now known. Naturally this report filtered back to us, but we decided to treat it with a great deal of caution. After all, there have been several instances of trouble whenever we sent a delegation to Russia, especially if any member of the delegation speaks the language fluently as Foster apparently did.”
“Foster?”
“That’s right. Foster was the man approached. You see, there was just the chance that someone was hoping to trick him into an indiscreet act, if that happened, there would be the usual arrests, followed by several weeks before our Consul in Moscow could get in touch with him and then the public trial with a trumped up charge which they would make stick by some means or other. It has happened before and I foresaw that it could well happen again.”
“But you changed your mind, sir.”
“I made more inquiries through one or two of our agents inside Russia about this Professor Ubyenkov. It seems that he has been working on some secret process, but it was impossible to obtain any details about it, other than that it was being financed by the Russian Government. If it does deal with a new and revolutionary method for producing quantities of industrial diamonds, then it is vital that we get this information.”
Carradine nodded his head, but said nothing; waiting for the other to go on.
“It has to be done the hard way, I’m afraid.”
“Do we know where Ubyenkov is at the moment?”
“Only vaguely. We know that he isn’t in Russia. Three weeks ago, he apparently left the laboratories where he works and managed to give his guards—supervisors, call them what you will – the slip. How he did it we don’t know, but you can imagine the unholy flap which followed.”
“I can indeed. A man with that sort of knowledge in his mind would be worth a king’s ransom to the West.”
“Exactly. We received this report from one of our men the day before yesterday.” The Chief passed the piece of paper across to Carradine who read it quickly.
It said: ‘Small consignment of gems no longer available. Regret shipped abroad, possibly Black Seven. Will require urgent investigation, other parties interested. Would request contact be re-established as soon as possible.’
Carradine handed the slip of paper back to the other. The Chief flickered a glance at him, then looked away. “Black Seven,” he said softly. “That’s Bulgaria.” He paused for a very long time, then repeated the words softly, expressionlessly, as one would express some strangely powerful occult incantation in the hope that it would ward off something evil and terrifying.
“Bulgaria. That makes things very difficult.”
Carradine sat, saying nothing. This was undoubtedly it, he thought.
“We must get this man out of Bulgaria and back to London,” went on the other quietly. “I don’t care how it’s done, but I want him here, you understand.”
“Perfectly, sir. But as you said yourself it isn’t going to be easy. Do we have any idea what this man looks like?”
“Nothing much. I’ve had the man whom he first contacted brought here and he’s given something for Jones to come up with using the Identikit. See what you can make of that when you’ve got a free moment. Unfortunately, Ubyenkov was not one of the men we were interested in until now. We have nothing else on him. About all we do know of him is that his father was killed fighting under General Denikin during the attack on Moscow in October 1919. This, perhaps, would explain why he is willing to come over to the west. It’s evident he has no love for the present re
gime in Russia.”
Carradine gave a quick nod. He cast his mind back to the history of the Russian Revolution and the years immediately following it. His memory was good, but his information of that period sketchy. A little of it came back to him. Stalin had organised the Battle of Orel when the Red Army had halted General Denikin’s advance on Moscow and turned the retreat into a counter-offensive. Things had been patched up between the White and Red Armies following the end of the Civil War that had split Russia, but perhaps the old rivalries and enmities still smouldered beneath the surface, the old wounds not fully healed.
“Do we have anyone in Bulgaria I could contact?”
The chief nodded. “Man called Volescu. He’s a good man. You can trust him completely. He’s been working for us since before the war. The Reds were somewhat suspicious of him when they marched into Bulgaria, but since then he’s managed to keep them off his trail.”
“But it’s unlikely that he knows where Ubyenkov may be hiding out?”
“Afraid so. Wherever he is, you can be sure he is well hidden, and there must be someone helping him stay out of sight. From what we know of conditions inside Bulgaria, their big Red cousins have only to put on the squeeze, diplomatic or otherwise, and they go out of their way to find men like Ubyenkov and hand him back. The flap over the U2 incident was one thing, and the corresponding flap over this will be of a similar sort of magnitude. They simply can’t afford to let him slip through their fingers and reach the West with everything he knows of this process.” The chief pointed a finger at the message on the desk. “You can see from that, that they have already put the machinery into motion. They will have several of their best men on the look-out for him, tracking down every clue. I’m afraid I'm really throwing you in at the deep end this time, but perhaps you can see how vital it is that you get out there as soon as possible, even though it did mean breaking up your holiday.”