Our Man in Camelot

by Anthony Price

  “He isn’t exactly an agent. Not in the formal sense, anyway.”

  “In what sense, then?” asked Shirley.

  Morris smiled. “Your… husband’s instinct flattered me, Mrs Sheldon. He’s a senior executive adviser to their Joint Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee. Our last assessment ranked him Number Four to Sir Frederick Clinton.”

  “The Joint—“ She bit the word off.

  Jesus, thought Mosby with a swirl of bewilderment: Morris had quite calmly made everything ten times as bad. They were now messing with the topmost brass in the British Intelligence hierarchy, on the fringes of their equivalent of the 40 Committee, if not the National Security Council itself. Ozymandias was just two levels down in direct responsibility from the Queen of England, separated from her only by Sir Frederick Clinton and the Prime Minister.

  Ozymandias, with his ordinary family and his ordinary family car… and his sandcastles…

  “It isn’t quite as crazy as it may sound, Captain,” said Morris.

  “It isn’t?” The very severity of the shock-wave had the effect of steadying Mosby. Because they couldn’t be that crazy they had to be stone-cold sane. Nothing in between would do.

  “For a start, this operation isn’t directed against the British. The USAF is the target.”

  “You mean we do know something about it?” said Shirley.

  “We certainly do. In fact we had the first authentic word of it out of Moscow Control nearly five months back—of an operation against the USAF in Britain. Scheduled, some time July through September. We even know who’s running it: Party Secretariat Member Comrade Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin. One of their top men.”

  Just great, thought Mosby: two top men and Dr and Mrs Mosby Sheldon III in their appointed roles as a couple of slices of salami.

  “And?” said Shirley hopefully.

  “And we have their operational codename.” He looked at Mosby. “Which ought to ring a bell with you now. Operation Bear.”

  “Bear?” Mosby frowned. “It’s a pretty common Russian—“ He stopped.

  “The bell ringing, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.” Mosby shook his head. “Or only very faintly if I’m thinking what you want me to think. It’s pretty goddamn thin reasoning.”

  “But a start.”

  “What is?” asked Shirley.

  “Bear,” said Mosby. “ ‘Bear’ is one of Arthur’s nicknames, at least according to those who believe he ever existed. ‘Artos the Bear’—it’s a sort of play on words, because artos, or something like it, means ‘bear’ in Ancient British. And there’s a crack in one of the very early Welsh chronicles about some king being ‘the bear’s charioteer’. But it’s damn obscure— and artos can mean a whole bunch of other things too. In fact it’s a typical Arthurian puzzle: you can argue it a dozen different ways and it can mean anything or nothing.”

  “Very good—I’m impressed,” said Morris encouragingly. “You’ve done your homework.”

  “Well, I’m not impressed,” said Mosby. “It’s like if the Thai Intelligence mounted an Operation Elephant and we decided it was connected with the Republican Party. It just doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Not by itself, I agree. But we do have one other fact which also didn’t mean a thing by itself… You see, we do try to keep tabs on all the top SovCom personnel, especially the KGB controllers. What they do, where they go, who they visit, and the rest of it—it all goes into the data bank for processing.

  “So we just happen to know that Comrade Professor Panin went on a trip about nine months back to Gorky, on the Upper Volga. And we also know that while he was there he borrowed a book from the Public Library—as a matter of fact we have that from two independent sources. And he’s never returned it, either.”

  “He’s going to have a big fine to pay, after nine months,” said Mosby.

  “The biggest. Because it was the oldest book in the library—it was written in the north of England about twelve hundred years ago.” Morris smiled. “Does the name Bede ring any bells with you, Captain?”

  Unreality again: John Singleton Mosby, William Marshall, Chretien de Troyes, Arthur of the Britons, David Audley… Nikolai Andrievich Panin.

  And now Bede. Bede, the monk of the monastery of Saint Paul at Jarrow. Bede the Venerable, just two steps from becoming a saint.

  “Sure. He wrote one of the main source-books for the period—A History of the English Church and People. I’ve got a copy in there—“ he pointed to the sitting room behind Harry Finsterwald “—it was on Davies’s list.”

  “But not this copy, Captain. This is the Novgorod Bede, one of the oldest Bede manuscripts in existence. That’s what Panin has got. And that was what Davies was enquiring about two days before his death.”

  III

  MOSBY FOLLOWED HOWARD MORRIS into the sitting room with misgivings churning up inside him.

  Audley and Panin were bad enough, since for sure neither had reached his present eminence by the exercise of brotherly love. But at least they were bad enough in a known way: it was like meeting two tigers on his first trip in a foreign jungle where the larger predators usually remained deep in the undergrowth—just plain bad luck.

  But Arthur and Badon were something totally different, totally unexpected. The pile of books on the table directly ahead of him was a reminder that up until now he’d managed to rationalise them, so that they had become part of his cover and a way of manipulating Audley, fundamentally no different from any other disguise or deception plan. Yet now, after what Morris had revealed, they were no longer the means to some unknown end; they were somehow part of the end itself.

  Morris waved a hand towards the occupants of the room. “Dick Schreiner—State Department. Cal Merriwether—Harry’s other half.”

  “Mrs Sheldon—Captain.” Schreiner was too well schooled by his trade to look at Mosby with envy.

  But it was Merriwether who caught Mosby’s eye. He couldn’t place the coloured man at all, not even when he’d mentally replaced the sober grey polo-necked pullover and well-worn blue jeans with uniform.

  He frowned with embarrassment. “The BRU configuration crew? I’ll place you in a minute—“

  Merriwetber grinned hugely. “You ought to, Doc. You had me in your chair three-four weeks back.”

  “I did?” Mosby’s embarrassment began to turn to annoyance with himself. “The name’s familiar. If I could see inside your mouth there’d be no trouble, I tell you. I never forget a mouth.”

  “How about this, then?” But instead of opening his mouth Merriwether abruptly changed his expression from one of lively amusement to sullen vacuity. “That help you any, sir?” “The car pool—you’re a driver… and I did fillings on your lower left—posterior four and six—right?” Merriwether signalled success by restoring his face. “I hope I didn’t hurt you,” said Mosby. “I didn’t feel a thing, Doc. You’ve got the magic touch.” He bowed towards Shirley. “Mrs Sheldon.”

  “Looks like we’re going to need a magic touch,” said Shirley.

  “Audley’ll need it too—to find Badon Hill,” said Mosby. Schreiner glanced at Morris quickly, then back at Mosby. “It really is impossible?”

  “Nothing’s impossible—at least, according to General Ellsworth.”

  “Your base commander at Wodden?” “That’s the one and only.” Mosby nodded towards Finsterwald. “You know the Holy of Holies?” “Huh?”

  “Harry, Harry—the General’s reception office. Where he keeps his flags and his model planes—and the desk you could land a B-52 on.”

  Finsterwald returned the nod unwillingly, as though he’d been too busy smartening his salute in Ellsworth’s presence to notice whether the General had a desk or a brass bedstead.

  “Well, there’s a plaque on the wall right behind his chair—an oak plaque with gold lettering, remember?”

  The flicker in Finsterwald’s eyes indicated that the plaque had registered. Which figured, because it was fixed just six inches above th
e General’s head, and that was where Finsterwald would have looked. Finsterwald and most everyone else, to be fair; so it was probably the way the General intended.

  “No Mission is Impossible—remember?”

  “Sure, I remember.” The nod was more confident. “Matter of fact I go along with the idea.”

  “Great.”

  “A man says a thing can’t be done he usually means he can’t do it.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, maybe you should be looking for Badon Hill, not Audley.” Mosby turned back to Schreiner. “Let’s settle for improbable, then.”

  “But there is such a place—that’s definite?”

  “There was.” Mosby ran his eye over the table, and from there to the pile of books beside Shirley’s chair. “By your foot, honey—the little dark blue book.”

  The pages fell open obediently at the marked passage. “This is the earliest thing there is—On the Destruction of Britain. Written by a monk named Gildas in the middle of the sixth century. ‘Gildas the Wise’ they called him, but he’s really rather a pain in the ass.”

  “A history book?” asked Shirley.

  “The hell it is! It’s about as much a proper history of Britain as the collected Washington Post editorials on Richard Nixon are to a history of the United States. Gildas wasn’t interested in history—he was in the business of denouncing the rulers of Britain as a bunch of rat-finks who were letting the country go to the dogs. They’d won the war against the Saxons and now they were losing the peace—the old story.”

  “So where does Badon come in?”

  “Ah—it comes in sort of incidentally when he’s preaching about the good old days of Ambrosius Aurelianus, ‘the last of the Romans’—a sort of George Washington who started the war of liberation against the Saxons. It’s like he’s reminiscing on the side…” He scanned the page for his pencil mark. “Here it is:

  …nowadays his descendants in our time have declined from the integrity of their ancestors…

  —that’s typical Gildas—

  …From then on the citizens and the enemy were by turns victorious, so that God might test in this people, the modern Israel, whether it loves Him or not; until the year of the seige of Badon Hill, almost the last and not the least slaughter of those bandits, which was forty-four years and one month ago, as I should know for it was also the year of my birth…

  He was a Badon baby, and he never forgot it.”

  “So when was he born?” asked Shirley.

  “That’s the trouble, honey—and it’s also absolutely typical of the whole subject: nobody’s quite sure. But round about A.D. 500, give or take ten or fifteen years.”

  “So the Britons had beaten the Saxons—the Anglo-Saxons?” said Schreiner. “I thought it was the other way round.”

  “So it was—in the end. Gildas was writing in about 550, maybe a year or two earlier. At that time the Britons had been on top for the best part of half a century, since the battle of Badon. The Saxons just had toe-holds on the coast in a few places. But the next really reliable account of what happened dates from two hundred years later.” Mosby nodded at Howard Morris. “From a monk named Bede.”

  He reached across the table for the orange-backed paperback. “A History of the English Church and People.”

  “Bede was like Gildas, then?” asked Shirley.

  “He was a monk like Gildas. But that was about the only thing they had in common, honey. Because for a start he was one of the Anglo-Saxon bandits—by then they’d kicked out the Britons from most of the island, like Gildas had said they would. And the Anglo-Saxons had become the English and the Britons had become the Welsh, more or less.”

  “My God!” said Finsterwald fervently. “And who were the goddamn Scotch?”

  “They were mostly Irish, man,” said Merriwether helpfully. “And you can tell that because of the whisky and the bagpipes, which they both got out of the deal.”

  So Merriwether was the real brains of the Finsterwald/Merriwether partnership, thought Mosby.

  “That’s about right, actually.” He nodded. “But the big difference is that Bede was a real historian, not a Biblethumper like Gildas—

  …Ambrosius Aurelius, a virtuous man of Roman origin, the only survivor of a disaster in which his royal parents were killed…

  —and so on… Let’s see… Here we are:

  Thenceforth victory went first to one side, then to the other, until the Battle of Badon Hill, when the Britons made a great slaughter of the invaders. This took place forty-four years after their invasion of Britain…

  You see, he’d obviously got a Gildas manuscript to work from, but not quite the same one. Only he had a lot more material as well, and he knew how to use it. Not only oral tradition and local stuff—he even sent someone to Rome to check on the Papal archives, which must have been a haify trip in those days. As I say, he was a real historian, all the modern historians agree on that.”

  “And he doesn’t mention Arthur,” said Howard Morris. “Neither does—what’s his name—Gildas.”

  “You got it in one.” Mosby nodded at him. “Arthur doesn’t get a mention for another hundred years nearly—about A.D. 800, at least not one that ties him in with the right things.”

  “The right things?”

  “Yeah. There’s some early mention of an Arthur of some sort in the far north—‘Artorius’ was an old Roman name. But it doesn’t look like our guy.” He searched through the pile again. “Nennius is what we want now—“

  “Another monk?” asked Shirley.

  “Bishop of Bangor in North Wales, but it amounts to the same thing. Only the clergy could read and write in those days… Here we are: Historia Britonum—‘History of the Britons’. Except it wasn’t a history.”

  “What was it?”

  “Just you wait and see…” He opened the book at its marker.

  “Then Arthur fought against them with the kings of the Britons, but he was the war leader—‘them’ being the Saxons. Then he lists all the battles Arthur fought… one at the mouth of the river Glein, four beside the river Dobglas, the sixth beside the river Bassass, the seventh in the forest of Celidon—“

  “I’ve never heard of any of them,” said Shirley.

  “Nor has anyone else, seems. The next one was at Castle Guinnion—

  when Arthur bore the image of the blessed Mary, ever virgin, on his shoulders, and through the strength of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mary, his maiden-mother, there was great slaughter of the heathen and they were put to flight—

  —and the ninth was in the City of the Legion. That just might be either Chester or Caerleon. The tenth beside the river Tribuit; the eleventh on Agned Hill. And now we come to it—

  The twelth battle was at Badon Hill, where Arthur slew 960 men in one charge, single-handed. And he was victor of all these battles.”

  “Phew! Nine-hundred-and-sixty at one go!” exclaimed Shirley. “That even beats General Ellsworth.”

  “Yeah, well let’s say it runs him close. But that sums up Nennius: a lot of folk-history and superstitious hot air, plus one or two facts. It could be all true and it could be all hooey.”

  “Except Badon Hill,” said Schreiner from the depths of the armchair into which he had sunk.

  “That’s right, exactly right. And Badon also turns up in the Annales Cambriae, which is a sort of calendar of important dates in Welsh history compiled by a bunch of monks in the eleventh century. It says in that for ‘Year 72’, which is somewhere about A.D. 500: Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights and the Britons were victorious.”

  “Sounds like they had it mixed up with one of Nennius’s battles,” said Shirley.

  “Honey, when you start digging into the Dark Ages, and especially into Arthur, most everyone seems to have everything mixed up. But when you come down to it out of this lot—“ he waved his hand over the table “—apart from the serious modern history books,
the only two worth a damn are Gildas and Bede. Gildas because he actually lived in the period, and Bede because he was way ahead of his time as a historian. All the rest is strictly ‘maybe’.”

  “But what about the Knights of the Round Table and Lancelot—and Camelot?” said Schreiner. “Is that all pure invention then?”

  “Not quite pure, but damn nearly, so far as I can make out. I haven’t read all the stuff—the further it gets away from the actual historical time, the more there is of it. Seems a lot was made up by a man named Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century—a lot of the traditional ‘King Arthur’ bits. It even had a political angle then, because the Kings of England wanted to keep up with the French kings—“

  Harry Finsterwald stirred. “For God’s sake, we have to have the history of France too?”

  Howard Morris started to speak, but Schreiner overrode him. “Until we know the exact specification of Operation Bear—and why Panin took the Novgorod Bede back to Dzerzhinsky Street with him—you’re damn right, Captain. The history of France and the history of Britain, and the history of ancient Peru, if need be. Plus how many archangels can dance on the point of a needle too.”

  Mosby hurriedly revised his estimate of Schreiner: not just State Department Intelligence, but pure State Department. And not just State Department holding a watching brief if he was ready to slap down a CIA operative in the presence of UK Control—to do that required National Security Council authorisation for sure.

  Another tiger?

  Well, maybe he could find that out by giving the beast a gentle prod—

  “I don’t know, maybe Harry’s right,” he said doubtfully. “It’s getting kind of way out, where we could end up.”

  Schreiner looked at him sharply. “You let me be the judge of that, Captain Sheldon.”

  “But—“

  Howard Morris raised a finger. “Tell the man, Doc. Just tell him.”