“You can say that again.” Mosby studied the big Englishman. It was almost like he too was relieved to see Clinton’s back, though that could hardly be due to fear—more likely he just had no taste for playing second fiddle. “Top brass always makes me rattle… And he’s your boss, eh?”
“You could say so.”
“And that makes you—“ Mosby clamped his mouth shut as though he’d thought better of what he’d been about to say.
“Makes me what?”
Mosby shook his head. “Just… I was remembering your wife said you worked for the Government, that’s all.”
“Does it worry you?”
“Not so you believe I’m telling the truth. Was that on the level?”
“I chose not to believe you work for the CIA, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’ll sure do for a start. But do I get to ask why?” Mosby grinned nervously. “Or you could tell me why everyone else thinks the opposite, I don’t mind which, so I get some sort of answer.”
“But of course.” Audley sounded positively amiable now, almost friendly. “To take the uncharitable view first, quite simply—they were expecting you.”
“Me?”
“You meaning the CIA… Let me put it another way: if you were a policeman and a rich man came to you and said he thought he was about to be burgled, what would you do?”
“Well, if I was a cop… I guess I’d stake out his place—is that what you want me to say?”
“Exactly. And then when a stranger turns up—a stranger with the wrong sort of accent, carrying a sack and a set of house-breaking tools—you’d be inclined to take that uncharitable view, I rather think. Wouldn’t you?”
Mosby frowned. “Sure. But—“
Audley cut him off. “I know what you’re going to say: if the burglar arrived in company with a detective superintendent—and if he could prove the detective himself had suggested they should visit the rich man’s house in the first place? Is that it?”
“Something like, I guess.”
“Then you could have a bent copper, or a stupid one. So it was fortunate for me that I checked up with my police station first, otherwise I might be in quite a spot now.” This time there was no amusement in Audley’s smile, and some of the friendliness had drained from his voice. “But I did check. And so the official view is that the CIA was perhaps trying to be a little too clever for its own good.”
Mosby cursed Howard Morris and Schreiner both for so grossly miscalculating Audley’s reaction. How could they have been so hopelessly off beam, though?
“The official view? But not yours?”
“No, not mine. I knew the CIA has its little moments of weakness, but I can’t see my old friend Howard Morris dropping a clanger like that. He knows me much too well.”
It was macabre, the way Audley’s mind had travelled along the same line, to the same destination. And the wrong one, too.
“Howard—?”
“Morris. CIA Field Control, UK. Quite a sharp fellow. He’d never have sent his burglar to me—unless he wanted me to know about the burglary…”
Unless? The word pumped Mosby’s heart painfully. It wasn’t possible, it surely wasn’t possible, that Shirley and he had been deliberately sacrificed to stir up the British. That had been a contingency, but not the objective. And yet unless was there now, squeezing his chest—
“… which is just about the last thing in the world that he’d be wanting at this moment,” Audley continued reflectively. “Which means you aren’t his burglar “
“But I’m still a burglar?” It was no sweat to sound puzzled.
“Oh, yes—you are a burglar. I’ve no doubt about that.”
Mosby nodded. “Uh-huh? And just what am I supposed to be stealing?”
“Why, Mons Badonicus, of course, Captain Sheldon—or may I call you Mosby? It fits your character better.”
“It does? Well, be my guest. You can call me William Clarke Quantrill or John Wilkes Booth for all I care, just so you tell me how I can steal a battlefield, that’s all.”
“By finding it.”
“That’s no crime.”
Audley pursed his lips. “Now there you’re wrong. In most civilised countries ‘stealing by finding’ is a crime. If your Confederate ancestor had made away with that Yankee payroll he happened to find behind the lines…”
“But a battlefield isn’t a payroll.”
“This isn’t just any battlefield. This is an extra special one—King Arthur’s greatest victory, no less. Knowledge like that could be worth more than a Yankee payroll. Not only could be—but is.”
Audley’s sudden conversion to King Arthur was curious, to say the least, thought Mosby. But if he really believed that money was the objective then it was time to let a little honest avarice show through.
“You really think so?” He looked at the Englishman sidelong.
“I know so. In fact one of the ironies of your position, Mosby, is that you don’t seem to know just how valuable it is. It’s so valuable it’s already killed four men, and maybe as many as seven.”
“Killed—?” Mosby’s mind reeled at the arithmetic: Davies and his navigator—the airman Sergeant Gallagher had phoned him about… that made three. And if the British knew about Thickset and Tall and Thin… Jesus! But even that only made five.
“And destroyed a four million dollar aircraft,” added Audley. “Or whatever the going price of a Phantom is these days.”
“You can’t mean it!” Mosby whispered.
“But I do mean it.” Audley focussed on a point midway between them. “It’s rather like an old Richard Widmark film I saw years ago, when I was still going to the cinema… What was it—‘Panic in the Streets’ its title was, I think.
All the police in this seaport—New Orleans, somewhere like that—were hunting this petty thief, so the other criminals thought he had pulled off a big job of some sort and they hunted him too. Only the truth was he had the plague—the Black Death. Which is what Mons Badonicus would have been for you, Mosby… If you’d found it on your own it would have killed you, almost certainly.”
There was a clatter of tea-cups beyond the door to the hall.
“That’s the second irony,” said Audley. “And the third one is that you never really needed to look for Mons Badonicus at all: it was right under your feet all the time.”
Mosby looked at his feet.
“Not here, man, not here—Wodden.”
Wodden?
“Wodden equals Mons Badonicus,” said Audley. “You’ve got our battle under the new runway extension, so far as we can make out.”
The door opened behind Mosby.
“Tea up,” said Roskill. “And one American wife, undamaged, as per specification.”
XI
THE AMERICAN WIFE certainly appeared undamaged; indeed, with every hair in place right down to the two artfully arranged tendrils curling on her cheeks, she looked as though she’d just stepped out of a beauty salon. Which could mean that the female of the British dragon species was less daunting than the male, even allowing for the fact that Shirley would have seemed just as edible to him on the tilting boat-deck of the Titanic.
Which, when he thought about it, was how the floor of Camelot House felt now.
She stared at him from the doorway. “You okay, honey?”
“I’m fine.”
Fine meaning unsinkable.
“You look a bit peaky. I guess you know they think you’re some kind of spy, huh?” She moved to one side to let a diminutive grey-uniformed maid push in the tea-trolley, fixing Audley with a hostile frown which remained on target like a gyroscopically-controlled cannon.
“David doesn’t think so,” said Mosby.
“He doesn’t?” She assimilated the information without blinking. “Well, I should think not… Some spy!” Hostility for Audley was replaced by derision for absent idiots.
“He thinks I’m a burglar.”
“A—what?” The frown came back
on target. ‘What has he burgled? The plans of the Round Table and the formula for getting the Sword out of the Stone?” Mosby winced at the Arthurian reminder—under the new runway extension at Wodden—but before he could react the little maid came towards him with a tray.
“With milk?”
Small upturned nose, frizzy blonde hair and that famous sensual gap between the large upper incisors reinforced by a trim little body in the well-cut grey uniform. Only the candid brown eyes belied the general impression of childish sexiness.
“Thank you.”
What the hell was he doing, fancying the hired help when the ship was sinking under him?
“And sugar, Captain Sheldon?”
He did a double-take. The voice was wrong and the manner was wrong and the uniform was too well cut to be a uniform. Plus, above all, no mere maid would know his name… But she still looked no more than eighteen.
She smiled into his confusion. “My name’s Fitzgibbon, Captain. I’m the ‘they’ your wife was talking about.”
He added ten years to his estimate, thought still against the visual evidence. Perhaps the British were recruiting them straight from High School now.
“Pleased to meet you all, Mrs Fitzgibbon—and no sugar, thank you,” he heard himself drawl in his best Virginian. “I’m sorry to disappoint you… by not being a CIA man, that is.”
“That’s quite all right, Captain. I was only asking a routine question.”
“Routine fiddlesticks,” said Shirley. “And she wanted to know more about Di Davies than about you, honey.”
“And were you able to satisfy her, Mrs Sheldon?” asked Audley.
“Seeing as how I hardly knew the man, the whole thing was a waste of time. He was my husband’s friend, not mine.”
Audley looked towards Mrs Fitzgibbon. “Well, Frances?”
“I agree… Except I’d go further: I very much doubt that Mrs Sheldon ever met Major Davies, beyond perhaps saying ‘good morning’ to him.”
“That’s ridiculous!” snapped Shirley.
“She knows her cover story perfectly,” continued Frances Fitzgibbon. “She is extremely resourceful in blocking questions beyond it. I would think it unlikely that anything she has told me will conflict seriously with what her husband may have told you. Not so far, anyway— But I don’t think the story would stand up to separate in-depth interrogation. Either they didn’t have time to put it together in total detail, or they never expected it to be professionally tested.”
“Or they are amateurs,” said Audley.
Frances Fitzgibbon considered Shirley for a moment. “If she is, she’s a natural.”
Mosby could feel the water-tight bulkheads beneath him giving way one after another. If he was going to save anything from this disaster, never mind Shirley’s skin and his own, it would be from a lifeboat. It was time to abandon the ship.
“Is everyone going crazy?” said Shirley. “I just don’t understand what’s—“
“Shut up, honey,” said Mosby in a flat voice.
“What?” she rounded on him. “Are you going to stand there and—“
“I said ‘shut up’. So shut up.” Mosby stared round him with what he hoped was the air of a defiant trapped rat. His eyes met Hugh Roskill’s over a steaming teacup. “And don’t drink that tea, Squadron Leader—it’ll blow your abscess through your jaw.”
Roskill lowered his cup as hurriedly as if he had smelt bitter almonds in it. “Damnation! I’d clean forgotten.” He grinned at Mosby. “Thanks, Sheldon.”
“Think nothing of it. I guess I’m a better dentist than I am a burglar.” He shrugged at Audley. “I should have stuck to teeth.”
Audley nodded slowly. “You didn’t really know Davies, did you? Not as a friend.”
“Not really. I just fixed his teeth.”
Shirley drew in a sharp breath. “Mose—what are you saying?”
“I’m letting it go, honey. It’s gotten too rich for us—and too dangerous.”
“Too dangerous?”
“David says it’s already killed a bunch of guys.”
“Killed?” Shirley’s voice cracked. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. But he’s not kidding. And it wouldn’t be any use to us if he was. Because he already knows where Badon is: it’s under the goddamn runway at Wodden, that’s where it is. Right—under—the—goddamn—runway.”
“Runway extension,” corrected Audley.
“The runway extension.” Mosby loaded the words with bitterness and kept his eyes on Shirley. “Davies must have talked to someone else after all.”
Shirley licked her lips. “It can’t be—you said it was a hill. Badon Hill.”
“But it is a hill,” said Roskill. “The whole of RAF Wodden is high ground: it’s a plateau. And the western spur slopes up to the highest point, where the old windmill used to be—Windmill Knob, they used to call it. They demolished it in 1940, when the RAF moved in, but the foundations were still there in the grass when I was training there twelve years ago.”
But not there any more, thought Mosby with growing dismay. The whole of the western end had been thoroughly levelled, bulldozed and landscaped like a pool table, and the spoil spread far and wide into every undulation of the main ridge.
If Badon had been there—
“And you never suspected it was on the base?” Roskill sounded almost sympathetic. “You didn’t—“
“Let it be, Hugh,” said Audley. “There’s no need to probe the wound now.”
It took every bit of Mosby’s self-restraint not to look at Audley in surprise. This was the exact moment to probe the wound, while it was raw and painful; and ever since the drift of Audley’s new scenario had become clear he had been feverishly constructing his role in it as a greedy little interloper who had planned to cash in on accidental knowledge of the dead pilot’s discovery. Yet now Audley was deliberately passing up his best chance of quizzing him.
“The only thing I would like to know,” said Audley casually, as though it was an afterthought, “is how you acquired the Badon artefacts—just for the record.”
Mosby felt almost relieved at getting one of the key questions after all, no matter how awkward; it reassured him that Audley was still running to form.
“Yeah… well, what I told you wasn’t so far off the real thing…” He shrugged. If you have to make up a story quickly, keep it simple and don’t bother about the loose ends. Let the other guy try and tie them up for you—he knows that the truth is untidy. “He asked me to look after them for him. I got this storeroom behind my surgery—“
“Although he hardly knew you?” cut in Frances Fitzgibbon.
“Not ‘although’, but ‘because’,” said Audley. “Davies chose Mosby because he didn’t know him. And because there’s nothing suspicious about visiting a dentist. If there had been we’d have one very dead dentist by now.”
“What do you mean—dead dentist?” Shirley had entirely abandoned her Scarlett O’Hara characterisation for a more classical one: this was Lady Macbeth frightened and beginning to crack under the pressure of unforeseen disasters.
“Exactly what I say, I’m afraid, Mrs Sheldon. The fact is, you’ve both had a very narrow escape. If Davies had really confided in you—or if you had started looking for Badon in the right place, then the odds against your survival would have been very high. But he didn’t, and you didn’t… which is why you are here safe and sound now.”
“But—but we haven’t done anything wrong!” Shirley wailed. “Not really.”
“So your husband keeps telling me. But then neither had Major Davies—really. Nor that young navigator of his—Captain—what was his name?”
“Collier,” said Roskill.
“Collier. He hadn’t done anything at all, poor fellow. He certainly didn’t deserve to be eliminated.”
“That was an accident—they crashed in the sea.”
“And very conveniently, too. You’ve no idea how many convenient deaths have occu
rred just recently. Deaths and disappearances… Let me have the photographs, Hugh. It’s time for a bit of positive co-operation.”
Roskill snapped open a black briefcase and withdrew a square buff-coloured envelope from it.
“Thank you.” Audley in turn slipped out a collection of photographs of different sizes from the envelope, shuffling them like cards into what was presumably the desired sequence. “Now I want you both to have a look at these… Mosby first, then Mrs Sheldon… and I’d like you to try to identify them. I’m afraid one or two of them aren’t awfully clear, and a couple aren’t very nice to look at, either, but I’ll warn you about them in advance. Just do your best.”
He handed Mosby a photograph.
It was a typical USAF mug-shot of a typical American service face, right down to the stern, Defender of Liberty expression, even if the crew-cut and the uniform hadn’t placed identification beyond doubt. Four days ago he would hardly have been able to tell this one from a hundred others whose jaws he knew better than their features.
“This is Di Davies,” said Mosby.
Audley put his finger to his lips. “Let your wife see them first, if you don’t mind. Pass it on.”
Mosby handed the mug-shot to Shirley.
Another picture. This one for sure he wouldn’t have known until four days ago, mug-shot though it was.
“This one’s Di Davies,” agreed Shirley. “But this other one… I’ve seen him around, but I don’t know his name.”
“Captain Collier,” said Mosby. “He’d only been over here a few weeks.”
“Now a nasty one,” said Audley gently. “Be prepared, Mrs Sheldon.”
A dead face, slack and blankly staring nowhere. Someone had attempted to arrange it into a more or less life-like appearance, but there was obviously something very wrong with the left side of the head.
Shirley shuddered and drew in a quick breath. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Nor me,” Mosby shook his head.
“I think possibly you have, but maybe not,” said Audley. “His name is—or was—Pennebaker. He was an airman on the base at Wodden. Shot himself a couple of days ago.”
Our Man in Camelot Page 18