‘I don’t know. I suppose so, but then the whole thing becomes so far-fetched.’
‘Then what alternative do you have? You either carry on with what you’re doing, knowing that is what they want, or you do nothing!’
‘No, Prime Minister, we do have a third option.’
‘Which is?’
‘We break the sequence. Indirectly they’ve handed us six names. One by one we are checking them out and one by one they are leading us closer. But at their pace. The way they want it. Somehow we have to get one move ahead.’ ‘You can do that with only two names left?’
‘I don’t see any other way.’
Kellick’s chair creaked as he shifted his weight in it. ‘Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘I must emphasise again my earlier warning to you that McCullin’s theories are not all shared by me or my Department. These four names, for example, may well be the only ones. We do not know there are more. There may well be another thirty more or there may be none. And if we believe this Master Plan theory then we believe in our own total impotence. Assuming Sanderson was a decoy, how could they possibly have known we would pick up exactly those leads they wanted us to? We may well have missed those six names. We may only have got a few of them.’
‘What about the telephone numbers?’ Tom asked across to Kellick.
‘What numbers, McCullin?’ The Prime Minister spoke Tom’s name for the first time.
‘They are making certain we follow their trail,’ he answered, ‘by giving us part of a telephone number every time we check out one of the six names.’
‘This wasn’t in your report, Kellick?’
‘No, Prime Minister! Because I am not in the habit of forwarding to you every flight of fancy that is presented to me in my office. I report to you what I consider is important for you to know. This numbers game is ridiculous. How on earth could it work? If they wanted to give a sequence of numbers to make up a telephone number, how could they know which six names we would go to first, and in what order we would go to the rest?’
‘Two ways, Mr Kellick,’ Tom replied. ‘The most obvious is that whoever is following me, whether it’s Menzies or someone else, gives CORDON HQ, or somebody with direct access to it, the name I’m visiting. They just set their machines and wait for the panic call to be made.
‘The other way is one I came across once in Czechoslovakia, except then it was a way of giving out a series of codes. You just set your computer to activate only when a certain telephone number is dialled from outside. Now assume that only these six people were given that number to ring for emergencies. As each one in turn rang in, in whatever order they did it, the computer would just give the next number in line, having jammed that one number less.’
‘We assume too much!’ Kellick’s voice was almost shrill. ‘You’re making the theories fit the facts, looking for the elaborate.’
‘You’d make a bad politician, Kellick.’ The Prime Minister spoke. ‘No! You’d not even be that good. Of course we should believe in the elaborate. Everything’s elaborate! There’s always a double deal. Even Yes and No have their qualifiers. There isn’t a monosyllable in the English dictionary that hasn’t a dozen meanings at least. It’s the same with men and the plans men make. You can be damned bloody certain that if this Organisation is going to be the problem we think it will be, they would never have let you catch on to them so easily. Certainly not as quickly as you seem to have done.’ He went on.
‘Now listen to what I have to say because I’ll say it quickly once and then you will leave. It is now four o’clock and in three horns I mean to be on my way to Rome, rested, shaved and breakfasted.
‘You say you want a way to break the sequence. I may have it for you. That is why I called you here.’
Tom stared at the centre of light as the right hand at last laid down the pen; watched the spread of the wide palm over it, like a flabby anaemic spider preparing to digest it.
‘What I am going to tell you is for your ears only.’ The Prime Minister’s voice had lost its sharp edge.
‘It is essential as few people as possible know of it if you are to stand any chance of success. From your report, Kellick, from what I have heard from you all tonight, coupled with what went on at London Airport last night and the warnings from political friends whose judgements I have long had need to respect, I am now convinced “something” is on the way. Now, if we had known more about it earlier, its size, more precisely what it was intending to do, we might have been able to cope with it by now. But we cannot in the present state of our economy, and the present structure of my Government and my Parliamentary Party, afford a public witch-hunt of the Right Wing. Even now we could not arrest the four names you’ve given me without making me a laughingstock up and down the country. It would encourage my enemies on all sides. What a boon it would be for every bit of disaffected rubbish we’ve got to join their ranks. If we started something we couldn’t finish it would have been exactly the kind of desperation my enemies would benefit most from. This Government has many enemies at home and abroad and not all of them wave the red flag, not all of them have black faces. That is why Sanderson and his coy entry on the scene made me wonder whether he wasn’t just a decoy to get us running about. Panic us into making charges in public we could not finally stand up to in public.’
He paused but no one spoke.
‘Now let me tell you of our good luck tonight, and it’s because I’m so certain no one could possibly have planned it that I’m convinced it may be the way you will get your one step ahead, McCullin!
‘Last night a Royal Air Force Nimrod operating out of St Mawgan in North Cornwall reported sighting an object in the south-western approaches to the English Channel. You may or may not know that Strike Command does a sweep of the Channel every four hours. The Nimrod reported at 2045 hours this object in tow moving west-east at about six knots. At first the pilot thought it might have been an oil-rig platform. Exploratory drilling operations have been going on in this area and towards the Scillies for some time now. Checks were made but could not confirm.
‘The Nimrod’s reconnaissance photos showed the object to be forty-five feet square and brilliant white as if it were being illuminated above and from below. A second Nimrod was diverted and took a second sighting ten miles south of Wolf Rock: same speed, same brilliant white. The pilot was ordered to make a sonar beam check and reported it to be a container as deep as it was wide; and empty - at least it contained no physical mass. Don’t ask me how they know. . . something to do with the radio beam not being slowed down as it passed through the container.
‘Anyway, the pilot was ordered to keep watch and at 2348 hours he reported that the towing tug had dropped sea anchors three miles south of the Lizard. Then the crew of the Nimrod realised what they’d been watching. As the container was no longer in tow it sank a little and shortly afterwards sheets of ice came floating to the surface. St Mawgan’s Met confirmed there had been a snowstorm between the Scillies and Land’s End. The container, raised slightly out of the water by the force of the tow, had been covered in snow and ice and that’s how in the black sea it had been sighted.
‘St Mawgan immediately alerted Customs and Excise, but thank God they didn’t rush in like some bloody fools might have done. Instead they scanned the local radio frequencies and finally picked up the tug’s.
‘It was talking to a local transmitter on the Lizard and at first Customs thought they’d hit on a smuggling ring. One wag thought the container might be full of French wine! But it became very quickly obvious to everyone listening that the tug and the land station were not bringing in wine or anything like it. No mention was made of it by name, but Military Intelligence, having read a transcript of the radio transmissions an horn: ago, are convinced it is something deadly. It could be, they say, something explosive like nitroglycerine or napalm. It might be a gas or a toxic or a bacterial dust.’
He paus
ed but the hand in the circle of light did not move. The purply blue veins stood out from the white flesh but there was not the slightest evidence that lifeblood was flowing through them.
‘It ail sounds a little like a bad science fiction story, doesn’t it? Something out there in the English Channel, three miles from land, and we don’t have the knowledge or the nerve to find out what it is. It’s a bit like this CORDON itself. We know it amounts to something but we can’t risk disaster by just rushing in to find out what. And all because it just happened to snow!’
‘You’re certain there’s a connection. Prime Minister, between this container and CORDON?’
‘Yes, McCullin, quite certain.’
‘And how does this give us the breakthrough you spoke of?’
‘Are you convinced that the discovery of this container was an accident and in no way part of this CORDON plan you say exists?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Tom.
‘Kellick?’
‘Yes, Prime Minister.’
‘And what if we have now established, by taking co-ordinates of the transmitter on the Lizard and by actually pinpointing the actual room in the house where the radio was kept, the identity of the person making contact with the tug? And without their knowing it had been done? What then?’
‘Well, sir,’ Tom said, ‘the container is a breakthrough, I agree. But the name itself won’t give us the break. . . not as I see it, anyway. We’ll still have to go through the same routine of checks and wait for the telephone call to be made, like the other four.’
‘But that’s just the point, McCullin,’ the Prime Minister replied. This is a name they don’t want you to check out.
This name is not on your list! This is one we’re not supposed to know about!’
Kellick said he would take the chauffeur car, make a detour back to his flat and see them in his office in forty-five minutes. Tom noticed Kellick’s hands were trembling. He assumed it was fatigue or the anxiety of the Nimrod’s discovery and the new problems it introduced.
Tom and Fry left ahead of Kellick, so they did not see the dark blue Lancia Beta turn out of Richmond Terrace and follow Kellick’s grey Departmental Rover, crossing Parliament Square past the House of Lords and on to Millbank.
As the Rover slowed to take the Lambeth Bridge roundabout the Lancia accelerated ahead of it. Kellick sat hunched in the back seat so he didn’t see the other driver pull the collar of his heavy woollen overcoat high about his neck to keep out the draughts and protect his deformed left ear which pained him dreadfully in the cold weather.
He arrived at Kellick’s flat well ahead of the more cautious chauffeur and stopped the Lancia short of the unlit porch, twenty yards from the sprawling red brick apartment block. Within a minute he had climbed the fire escape in the rear yard to Kellick’s second-floor flat scattering powdered snow to the window sills below. He stood in the darkness of Kellick’s balcony that ran at an angle to the road, so that he could see his own car. Back to the wall, hands in black kid gloves resting lightly on his umbrella, the stock perfectly centred between his highly-polished black Oxford brogues, covered for this evening in rubber overshoes.
There was a moon but also fast-moving cloud, and he watched the untouched snow lit up by the moonlight in scattered patches for brief moments, catching sight of a dustbin, then a garage door, a cat crouched by a sheet of corrugated iron, a piece of dirty towelling wrapped around a leaking overflow pipe, hanging with icicles that made it like a glorious stalactite; it was all around him like a backyard Son et Lumière.
He pushed his head and shoulders against the wall as Kellick’s car drew up below. He watched Kellick move from it to the porch and saw the chauffeur touch his cap and move quickly back into the warmth again to wait and sleep.
Like all chauffeurs with long experience of waiting, he could sleep in an erect sitting position, hands on wheel, and flip wide awake with a ‘beg your pardon, sir!’ the instant a hand touched the rear passenger door handle.
Kellick’s balcony stretched the length of his flat, with French windows opening from both the living-room and the bedroom. The man stood hidden from the rooms by the partition wall that separated them. He turned his head right and saw Kellick enter the living-room and turn on the standard lamp by the bookshelves. He saw Kellick pull out an edition in red leather from the bottom shelf and take, from the inside cover, a wafer-thin strip of metal, like a feeler gauge used by mechanics to check spark plug gaps.
He watched as Kellick knelt on the floor by the door and raised a comer of the large beige Indian carpet that stretched from wall to wall. He saw Kellick push the metal strip in between the floorboards and pull it gently along the crack three inches, maybe four. A short length of floorboard then clicked up on a hinge and Kellick took from the cavity beneath two tape cassettes, some rolls of 35mm film and a computer tape. He packed them carefully into his briefcase, closed the floor-safe, relaid the carpet, careful to smooth out the smallest ridges, replaced the magnetic key into the book and eased it back into its place in the shelf.
He picked up his white telephone, dialled, paused and spoke.
The man on the balcony edged closer to the French windows and he could feel the draught of warm air fan his face as he quietly prised open the wooden frames with his penknife.
‘Kellick here. Fry. . . I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Alert Warner and all three liaison units and have them there soonest. And have Duty Night call in as many of the morning computer shift as he can muster. . . I’ll settle any overtime problems later. . .’
There was no goodbye. Fry took the abruptness as typical.
But this time the fault was not Kellick’s. He had no warning. Perhaps just the slightest sound behind him as a shoe brushed the pile of the carpet. The six-inch-long stainless steel needle at the tip of the umbrella pierced the back of his neck, severing the spinal cord and his trachea.
He fell forward, eyes open, with no expression of surprise on his face, and hit the bookcase with his forehead. Just for a second his head and feet wedged his body perfectly straight at an angle of 45 degrees to the wall, which reminded his assassin, patiently watching, of some ridiculous trick men play at party time!
Kellick’s body collapsed to the floor and a very small trickle of blood eased itself from the puncture in his nape and ran down the side of his neck into the folds of his shirt- collar. It congealed long before it reached the Kashmir.
The man picked up the briefcase of secrets, crooked the umbrella over his right arm and went out the way he came in.
As the French windows closed, by one of the tricks of the body’s nervous system Kellick’s left lower arm jerked twice across the carpet.
It looked, for that one instant, as if he was waving his assassin goodbye.
Monday, 20 December
Nothing in the flat had been touched. But as Fry was the only one except the cleaning woman who was known to have been in it, there wasn’t a great deal of comparative evidence. The only thing the charwoman noticed wrong was the bookshelves in slight disarray.
‘Mr Kellick,’ she told the inspector, ‘would never have left them like that!’
All agreed. It was a professional who had stood on the balcony waiting his time. But only Tom, Fry and Warner of Photos knew his name, his face, and where he worked. They did not, though, expect to find him there this Monday morning. And of course he was not. And never would be again.
‘He had something. The way he went off so quickly to his flat, the telephone call, getting everybody up to his office at five in the morning.’
It was ten o’clock. Two cups of coffee had just arrived on Mrs Hayes’s tray.
Fry stood by Kellick’s empty desk almost to attention, hands clasped in front of him, head slightly bowed. As if Kellick was lying on top of it.
‘He had something for some time now,’ Tom answered. ‘Didn’t you see the change.
. . the way he changed? The constant hassle every time we hit on something. Always wanting to slow down, go back, recheck. Didn’t you notice him last night? The way he was when he met us? When he left us?’
‘I noticed he had on a dirty shirt,’ Fry answered.
Fry was obviously very upset by Kellick’s death, which surprised Tom. Fry, he accepted, was a very sensitive man but surely sensitive men, especially sensitive men, are relieved when their tormentors at last go away.
‘Fry,’ he said, ‘don’t mourn. We don’t have to wear black. Be realistic. Kellick found out something last night. Something happened between the time we left him in this office and when we met him again at Number Ten. Maybe it had to do with the container, maybe something else. Perhaps he had decided to tell us something he’d been hanging on to for his own reasons. Either way CORDON found out and decided he shouldn’t.
‘Two things that happened last night were not in CORDON’S plan. We can be certain of that at least. We’ve known all along the only way we would get ahead of them was to break the control they have over events. I’ve a feeling we’re about to do exactly that.
‘Fry you are going to ring Transport Ops right now and authorise a private Cessna flight from Heathrow. We’ll have tea in Cornwall.’
Monkey puzzle trees lined the drive to the house. It was a long drive shaped like an extended ‘S’ with worn gravelled tracks divided by a centre strip of grass; in summer it had the quality of a cultivated lawn but now it was lightly covered in snow, brushed level by car engine sumps that occasionally swept over it.
The house was quite secluded, enclosed in a copse of tall and magnificent beeches, two hundred and fifty years old, with trunks the look and feel of elephant skin. The house was built of stone, brought all the way from Portland by hard labour and much money, at a time when the masons who cut and shaped it earned two shillings a day and a midday meal of cider and a baked dough turnover filled with onion and potato. It had been designed in 1742 by a young man from Truro, poor but with aspirations. He’d once spent a weekend in Blandford Forum, a five-day ride away in Dorset, and sketched the best creations of the two men who designed and masterminded the new Georgian town, a pair with the unlikely name of the Bastard Brothers. The young man then returned with the sketched copies to Cornwall and claimed them to be his own inspired originals. His clients, merchants and landowners, paid him well, and when he died forty years later his own estates were enormous. His profits were carefully distributed to his large family, enabling them eventually to ease their way into the aristocracy and become part of the ruling class of an expanding world empire.
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