“It’s human weakness.”
“Whatever happened to human strength?” He smiled wanly, as if embarrassed by that rather Victorian question.
“Tired, Johnnie?”
“Very. See here, I don’t want this one getting away, Tarp. I won’t have another bolt for Moscow!”
“I don’t think this one will do that. Anyway, we won’t give him the chance.”
“We’d damned well better not. I can’t afford to be a fool twice.”
Pope-Ginna came in then, and after him a male stenographer, who passed right through the room and out of the house, snapping the lid on a portable typewriter as he went. Pope-Ginna looked pleased with himself, although he showed the usual tic when he looked at Tarp. It seemed unfair that he should look relieved and Carrington should look burdened, but that was what had happened — the burden of knowledge had passed from one to the other.
Tarp cleared his throat. “I’d like to go through it once more, Admiral.”
“Certainly.”
“Each time you contacted Maxudov, you first called John Bull in London, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Did you think that John Bull then contacted Maxudov immediately?”
Pope-Ginna hesitated, and Carrington looked sharply at him. “I always thought there was contact. I’m not at all sure it was immediate. It seemed to me that …”
“Well?”
“You people are the experts at this sort of thing, but it seemed to me that Maxudov was in the sort of situation where he’d want as much confirmation as possible. So that my call to him in Moscow didn’t simply come out of the blue.”
“But you never said anything to John Bull about Maxudov?”
“Oh, no. I just did as I was told — made the telephone call-three, actually, the series of three. Then I waited two days and flew to Moscow. Always after two days. That was part of the system.”
Tarp looked at Carrington. “So John Bull didn’t flag Maxudov until after he got his own payoff, I suspect.”
“Yes, looks like.”
“Let’s do it, Johnnie.”
“I agree.”
“Ordinarily, you could go slow, but time’s very important to us. They’ll get scared soon. I’ve got to move.”
Carrington looked at his watch. “There’s still time today. Three hours between the first two calls, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Exactly three hours.”
“To a machine at the other end.”
“An answering device, yes.”
Carrington swung toward Tarp. “He can make the first call from here; we’ll be in England for the second one.”
Tarp touched Pope-Ginna’s arm, and the old man’s face twisted quickly in its tic. “Don’t screw us up, Admiral,” he said. “Do it exactly right, or else. If we don’t get our man — you’ve bought it.”
“I understand. Perfectly.” The old eyes, which Tarp had once thought merry but which now looked anxious, flicked from one to another. “I have to know what was playing at the Barbican Theatre last night. That was the identification signal.”
“We’ll find that out. Let’s go.”
“Good.”
Tarp breathed deeply. Action.
*
The third telephone call was placed from a kiosk on the Embankment, an arrangement insisted upon by John Bull so that he could make visual confirmation that it was Pope-Ginna calling. That meant that the quarry was there somewhere, in a taxi or walking a dog or watching through binoculars from a window. There were three MI-5 people near the telephone so that Pope-Ginna could not make a run for it if such a thing was in his head, while Tarp and Carrington waited well out of sight in a taxicab, an MI-5 car behind them with three more officers in it.
“Will he bolt, do you think?” Carrington said.
“John Bull? Why should he? It all looks right.”
“The admiral.”
“No, I doubt it. You’ve promised him everything but a knighthood.”
“I don’t care about him. Although he is a bit of a swine, I suppose. Lying about that ship, and so on.”
A bit of a swine. That seemed to sum it up — the dilution of moral outrage down to a faintly disapproving tolerance. In another generation, Hitler will be a bit of swine. Stalin, too. Beria.
“Here comes the admiral. He didn’t bolt, you see.”
Pope-Ginna passed them without acknowledgment and went on along the Embankment, crossed the street, and turned toward the city. They picked him up a block away.
“Problems?”
“None. Just like always.” He seemed very pleased with himself. It was often like that. After years of duplicity, the straightforward act became a cause for self-congratulation.
They drove southeast out of the metropolitan tangle and into rolling green countryside, where the late afternoon sun broke through and the clouds looked as if their tops had been gilded for the occasion. They passed the gate of a military installation, where a little village of tents had been put up where they could not be ignored by anyone driving on the main road or turning into the gate. As the car slowed for a turning vehicle, a line of women were forming across the road into the base. They wore raincoats and plastic rain bonnets, and they were carrying signs and other objects. Tarp saw the words No More Missiles.
“What’s that?” Tarp said.
Carrington was on the side nearest them. “A protest,” he said.
“Of what?” Pope-Ginna, on the far side, said. He seemed not to understand any of it.
Carrington put his hand above his eyes and looked out at the women with his face close to the glass. “Nuclear missiles,” he said.
“Whatever are they carrying?”
“Signs. Photographs.”
“Photographs! Of what?”
Again, he had to peer under his hand. They had passed now, and he had to turn to look.
“Children,” he said.
On the outskirts of Rochester, Pope-Ginna directed the driver through smaller streets until they reached a new business building, where he directed them down into its underground garage.
“The tube goes on the second steel rafter over there,” the admiral said. He pointed along the rows of steel girders that held up the ceiling. Already the garage was beginning to empty as businessmen headed home at the end of the day.
“He’ll be here soon,” Tarp said. “It’s a good time. Nobody would notice.” He turned to Carrington. “You’re sure he didn’t follow us?”
“My people saw no one. I had a third car several miles back. They’re to take the admiral with them now.”
“Okay. He must always come late enough that the admiral never gets a look at him.”
Tarp waited with Carrington while Pope-Ginna was taken to another unmarked car and driven away. Tarp saw his old face as a blur in the rear window as the car disappeared up the ramp of the garage. Only when it was gone did he walk toward the place where the tube was to be hidden and take the tube from an inner pocket. “I didn’t want him to see this,” he said to Carrington as he put it in place.
“Obviously he’s seen them before.”
“Yes. But he doesn’t know that I have.”
Carrington put a man in a car at each exit of the garage, and then Tarp and Carrington and another MI-5 man waited in a janitor’s closet that had only one window the size of a playing card.
“Are you armed?” Carrington said.
“No. I didn’t think you’d want me to be.”
“I’d only have had to take it away, yes. We’re armed.” Tarp was thinking of the last time Carrington had been around guns. His people had been armed then, too.
“Here he comes,” Carrington whispered.
“How can you tell?”
Carrington smiled wanly. “I know the car.”
Tarp watched a maroon BMW coast down the ramp and turn into an empty space. Two men were standing at the rear of a Renault sedan, and the driver of the BMW waited for them to leave. After two minut
es, however, they had still made no move to go, and the driver got out of his car with elaborate casualness and made his way slowly along the oily concrete between the cars.
It was Ramsey Matthiessen, the man who had given Tarp the lecture at Prong’s and Carrington’s superior at MI-5.
“Wait until he has the tube,” Carrington said.
“I know.”
“We must have his fingerprints on it and the photo of him taking it.”
“I know.”
Tarp watched Matthiessen stroll toward the hiding place. He stopped and tied his shoe. As he straightened, the two men who had been talking with such vitality raised their hands in almost military salutes and jumped into their cars; engines roared, and the smell of exhaust grew stronger. Then, with waves and grins and blasts from their horns, they pretended to lunge at each other with the vehicles and then went up the ramp and were gone. Matthiessen watched them go, for some reason with a smile on his unhealthy face. Only then did he go to the hiding place and take down the tube. He slipped it into a pocket and turned back.
Tarp let Carrington go ahead of him as they moved between Matthiessen and his car. He saw them at once. He gave Carrington an odd smile, almost of condescension, but he could not keep the smile up when he looked at Tarp. “I’d rather it was almost anybody than you,” he said to Tarp.
“Keep your hands where we can see them,” Carrington said briskly. “The entrances are blocked. We are armed.”
Matthiessen’s face seemed to darken and the discolored pouches under his eyes looked purple. “I won’t give any trouble,” he said. He glanced at Carrington’s empty sleeve. “I always knew I’d be —” His grin turned sickly, yet he seemed genuinely amused. “We all say the same thing in this spot, don’t we.”
“I’m very sorry, Ramsey.” Carrington went close to Matthiessen. “Ramsey Matthiessen, I charge you with violation of your oath of fidelity to Her Majesty and her government; I charge you with crimes grave and heinous; I warn you that anything you say at this time may be used against you when these matters are brought before a magistrate. I suggest you engage counsel at once.” His voice fell for the last sentence, becoming conversational and almost intimate.
“I know how it goes, Carrington,” Matthiessen said with artificial weariness, trying to recover some of the supercilious hauteur that had marked his behavior in office. One of the MI-5 men came down from the entrance to their right and began to search Matthiessen, murmuring his apologies but going ahead resolutely. “I don’t have a gun, you fool,” Matthiessen said with contempt.
The man used white tissue to extract the tube, which he wrapped in clear plastic. Matthiessen watched it hungrily.
“There’s nothing in it this time,” Tarp said.
Matthiessen looked at him with hatred.
“I suppose they’re for your wife?”
Matthiessen looked at him with hatred. Matthiessen’s wife had multiple sclerosis. “I think if you’ll cooperate with some information, you’ll be able to go on taking care of her.”
“That’s despicable.”
“Yes.” Tarp looked back without expression. “I’m a bit of a swine.”
*
It was still afternoon in the eastern United States, and Tarp was able to put through a call from Carrington’s office to a biological researcher in New Jersey. It was to her that Gance had taken the phials Tarp had given him.
“What’s in them, then?” Tarp said when the necessary greetings were done.
“I haven’t really done a job on them yet.” The woman had a remarkably nasal voice, and really sounded like the screeching of brakes.
“Do you have any idea?”
“Oh, sure. It’s a live virus vaccine of some kind. Was a live virus vaccine; it was mostly dead when it got to me. The temp is very critical. Real critical. Actually, you sent me two samples and they were different. Different viruses. Different structure, you know? Do you know viruses?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, I won’t go into all that. Actually, I’m pretty puzzled by some of it. Really oddball stuff in some ways. You know anything about the background of this stuff?”
Tarp thought of the habitat, the drawers, the dead fetuses. “I suspect there was some genetic doctoring done.”
“Yeah! Now that would resolve just a lot of problems!” She began to talk in technical jargon Tarp could not understand, and he interrupted her and said, “Would there be a reason to experiment with such a vaccine on — live human beings?”
She thought about that. “Well, if you were really out to lick one of the big ones — cancer and like that — on an individual basis, you could be trying to turn on an individual’s immune system with stuff like this. Do you follow me? What I mean is, not go for something that would work on just anybody, but tailor it to the individual and his/her immune system. You follow?”
“Yes.”
“And then you’d do a lot of testing to make sure you weren’t going to get a reaction for the same reason. Like organ-transplant syndrome. You follow?”
“I think so.”
“And you’d want to find a way to test on individuals just like your individual; I mean, with the same genetic fingerprint. Except it would be very dangerous for your individuals, you follow? You could kill people.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Could you fill me in on this stuff and where it came from, Mr. Tarp? I mean, it’s real strange stuff. And very unique. Could you give me some background?”
“No, I’m afraid I couldn’t. Thank you.”
“There’s lots more I haven’t said.”
“Yes, I’ll take a written report. Later. That’s enough for now …”
*
Matthiessen told them that he had served for more than two years as the go-between for Buenos Aires and Moscow, signaling Maxudov when Pope-Ginna was in London and ready to make a delivery; at the same time, he placed a call to Buenos Aires and left a message with an answering machine.
It was well after midnight when he had gone through it. Tarp had come in only toward the end, when most of it was clear and Matthiessen’s dislike for him would not get in the way.
“Did you order the attempt to kill me in London?” Tarp said.
“Certainly not. I was told to keep track of you if I could, and when the meeting was set up at Prong’s, I passed that along.”
“To whom?”
Matthiessen hesitated. He looked at Carrington, who was lying on a sofa, awake but tired out. “A telephone number in London. I’ve already given all of that.”
“We’re checking it,” Carrington said from the couch. “It’s probably long since abandoned. “They were in an office in the MI-5 annex, which was rather rundown and whose seediness suggested that it belonged to a firm of not very respectable lawyers.
“Do you know who Maxudov is?” Tarp said to Matthiessen.
“Certainly not.”
“Do you know whom you were dealing with in Buenos Aires?”
“Never.”
“How was the arrangement set up?”
“The offer — if one may call it an offer — came through an intermediary. A Swiss at a clinic where I’d taken Marjorie — my wife — for treatment when her symptoms first appeared.”
“Did he set it up?”
“No. Somebody else, here in London. A Bulgarian. I’ve given all this to Carrington.”
“He has, Tarp.” Carrington’s voice came from his stretched-out form like a voice from sleep. “It’s all in the transcript. We’re after the fellow now, but it was more than two years ago and we think he’s left London.”
“All right. You passed Maxudov’s messages to Buenos Aires?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know what was involved?”
“Never.”
“Did you suspect?”
“I wasn’t interested. Didn’t want to know. Sorry.”
“All right. The last message you sent from Maxudov to Buenos Aires. Was it different from
the others?”
Matthiessen was both tired and jumpy from missing his evening ration of alcohol. “Yes!” he snapped.
“How?”
“It was longer.”
“Was it coded?”
“Yes.”
“Did you understand the code?”
Matthiessen hesitated. “I’d worked some of it out. It was very simpleminded.”
“What was the message about?”
“It was about Beranyi. Something about his going to Buenos Aires, and he was to count as a shipment.”
“All right. Will you send a message to Maxudov for us?”
Matthiessen still had the self-confidence to sneer, “Out of the goodness of my heart? Never!” He bent toward Carrington. “Is this to be part of our arrangement?”
Sepulchrally, Carrington’s voice entered the room. “Yes.” His eyes were closed now.
“Then I’ll send your damned message.”
“You are to tell Maxudov that another payment is coming because the last shipment was so valuable.”
“I don’t care what the message is. ‘The line is immaterial’!” “Then I want you to send a message to Buenos Aires.”
“Oh, do you!”
Carrington swung his legs to the floor and sat up; he rubbed his eyes and muttered, “Don’t be rude, Ramsey; it’s so pointless.” Already he had asserted himself. Matthiessen’s treason moved him up a notch in the MI-5 pecking order; his getting credit for the discovery might move him into Matthiessen’s job. “I must have some tea, I think. There’s got to be a porter about, doesn’t there?”
“Dial five,” Matthiessen said blandly. His acid smile returned. “Sorry. I’ve used this place so often, myself.”
Carrington stood up. “I’ve been instructed to tell you, Tarp, that the government will now cooperate with you on what’s left of your Moscow venture. The tilt in the other direction, it seems, was in good part Ramsey’s doing, anyway. We’ve made an arrangement with Ramsey, which, if everything he says checks out, will allow him to resign without public prejudice and to withdraw from public life to take care of his wife. That assumes, of course, that his dealings with Moscow were limited strictly to this Maxudov thing.”
“They were,” Matthiessen said.
Carrington ignored him. “And it assumes that you will not press the matter of the attack on you here in London — press his involvement in it, I mean.”
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