He lifted the telephone again and asked for the name of the original proposer of Lady Joanna Forster and the name of her seconder. He waited. His eyes drifted to the fire. With his right hand he felt his heart beat. It was returning to normal; the anger was draining from him. The fireplace glowed and for the first time he was aware of the sweet smell of burning peat.
The computer answered. The proposer and seconder had been the same, the person who had just rung in the Alert. The usual crosschecks had been deliberately bypassed and the relationship of one to the other had not been recorded. The computers themselves had been deceived because the initial proposal had been made under the name of Blakeney and the acceptance under the name Forster.
The lovers had carefully contrived, and had succeeded.
He walked towards the marble table and opened the folder. He ran his finger slowly down the names there, and began to relax. The machines would attempt to compensate for the error but he was thinking ahead of them. He looked at the names ringed red, and those still untouched. One plan, necessary to the countdown, would have to be adapted to a rescue now vital to it.
It was a dilemma, one that might have appealed to a lesser man. He knew well enough, because it had been at his own insistence, that unless the computers, which now controlled the countdown, agreed to any change in it, they would abort. The machines would insist Plan One continued. But CORDON itself now suddenly needed to be protected, at least until Christmas Day when it would announce itself to the country and the world.
He made his decision.
Military Intelligence, he knew, was thorough but also cumbersome and anyway infiltrated. It would not be a risk because it would not be able to correlate the information it had until it was too late.
SSO was the danger now. It knew as much as, if not more than, MI and because of the character and pretensions of the dead Kellick it had kept much information to itself. Fry and McCullin were the most immediate threat. They had from the start moved independently of the Government’s traditional Intelligence machinery. Now they would move even faster and, if they used their heads - as he was sure they would - in a direction that was dangerous to CORDON. They had by accident gone ahead of the planned schedule.
So, like Kellick, they must be destroyed. And the names still to be ringed in red looking up at him from the folder would be instrumental in their assassinations. Both ends would be served, one supplementing the other. The simplicity would appeal to the machines. They would decide the method and the timing, of course, as they did in all such things. But with four days to go they would have to decide tonight. He would insist on it.
The telephone rang again and he began coughing into his hand as he walked, ambled almost, to it.
He listened for half a minute, nodded and put the receiver back on to the rest. Two signals, just decoded. Both excellent if not unexpected news.
From the south-west, confirmation that the container had been successfully secured and that pumping operations were about to begin. And from London, three items: five members of the Imperial General Staff had resigned in protest following the total withdrawal of the British Army of the Rhine as part of the British Government’s NATO cuts; the pound sterling had as a result plummeted to a new psychological breakpoint, selling for the first time on international markets at parity with the US dollar, and the British Prime Minister had collapsed at the start of the Council of Ministers’ meeting in Rome and had been flown to the Intensive Heart Care Unit there.
The Chairman sat down in his armchair by the fire and pushed at the mound of white-hot peat with a poker. He tucked a heavy woollen tartan rug around his legs and leant back, his face hidden in the shadow of the wingbacks. He pressed a button on the armrest.
It was time for his medicines and injections; time, too, to inform his machines of this last decision. It would be a long night. But there were only three more; three more to the dawn of the New Order.
The telephone number was traced to an address in Leicester, a large mock-Tudor house standing in its own grounds in the residential suburb of Knighton.
But by the time the Cessna carrying Tom and Fry was airborne on its way out of Royal Naval Culdrose local control, a radio message relayed by the control tower from Military Intelligence told them that the house was already on fire. Seven pumps could not cope and several small explosions inside were preventing firemen from doing much else but stand at a safe distance and watch it slowly disintegrate.
The body of a woman, still burning, had been pulled out by two firemen, as part of a secondary exercise to test new breathing apparatus, but too much of her had been destroyed for easy identification to be made. MI, though, had established from neighbours that a woman had been resident-owner and a recluse. Their casual mention of her name meant nothing to Tom or Fry. MI’s information, that until eight years ago she had been involved in three large affiliated Nationalist groups, including the National Front, seemed irrelevant now.
What mattered most was that any clue that might have been in the house was now turning to carbon dust.
Tom leant forward and told the pilot to change destination. He nodded, began scribbling with a crayon on a map case, and held up the new estimated time of arrival at London Heathrow, two minutes to midnight.
Tom sat back in his seat. What had they got, having started the day expecting so much? A telephone number of a house that was now on fire. And the names of two women, one whose scorched body was at that moment probably being cut up by a pathologist for certain identification. The other had disappeared just as easily and just as completely as the container.
This morning he’d thought that he and Fry had at last got them on the run. But they had merely run away!
Tom looked up at Fry. He hadn’t spoken since the radio message came through. He was staring across the pilot’s shoulder to the blackness beyond the cockpit windscreen, his sharp, delicate profile highlighted by the luminous red of the instrument panel.
Maybe something would come out of MI’s search of Lady Joanna’s house at Trewythian but it was most unlikely. It was too much to expect that someone like her would make more than one mistake in a lifetime. They would have the land radio but that was useless with no tug to answer it. And that too had gone.
So, if Leicester had not been CORDON’S HQ, what had it been? The home of a very important Area Director certainly. Maybe it had been a staging point. Or a relay. Maybe that was it, a relay for communications to and from CORDON. CORDON would need a buffer, a kind of cartilage between Headquarters and the rest. The house and the woman had had many secrets but CORDON had now taken them back. CORDON had caught up again.
Still Tom could hear the anger and despair in the woman’s voice. Especially the despair.
‘Elsa Pilkington!’ Fry suddenly spoke.
Tom looked up. ‘Who?’
‘Elsa Pilkington. The burnt woman in the house. I’ve remembered who she is. Or was.’
‘Who was she then?’
But Fry continued staring an inch or two to the right of the pilot’s neck. Tom could almost hear the recall machinery in Fry’s head clicking into place - ready for delivery.
‘She was British Women’s Downhill Ski Champion, and the only British skier ever to make the final three in the Winter Olympics. She was British Champion for five years until she was forced to give it up.’
‘Why?’
‘Her politics. Remember MI just told us she was involved in Right-Wing politics. Well, she was involved in a great deal and with far more influential groups than the National Front. When her activities became public it caused a stir. Lots of people threatened to send their OBE’s back to the Palace if she didn’t send hers back first.’
‘And did she?’
‘No. She didn’t. And neither did many of them. In fact she became the Celebrity of the Right. All the Rightist groups she’d been involved in boasted they couldn’t keep count of everyone wanting
to join.’
‘So Elsa Pilkington is dead!’ said Tom. ‘Long live –’
Tom, listen to me! I’ve never skied in my life, but I was stuck on winter sports in those days as a watcher. The idol used to be John Curry. Then it became Elsa Pilkington. When she became British Champion she was living in the Cairngorms. Had been there since she was a child. Must know every square yard of those mountains.’
‘So?’
Tom, think! Concentrate! She was publicly active in Rightist politics until eight years ago, which is when Sanderson said CORDON was formed. So let’s assume she was a founder member, in at the start of it all.
‘Now, assume that CORDON wanted to establish its headquarters somewhere completely protected and isolated: why not in Scotland? Nowhere else is so depopulated now. And who better to find them somewhere than this woman who must have walked those mountains year after year in summer, and skied them for as long in winter?
‘She must know places and routes very few others could possibly know about. What if her real utility to CORDON in the beginning was for exactly that reason?’
‘So their headquarters is in the Cairngorms?’
‘Yes. In or around.’
‘Just because she happened to ski? Christ, Fry! It’s a bloody long shot. You might also find out that she liked rock climbing and we’ll have to start looking for CORDON on the top of the Old Man of Hoy!’
He was feeling sick. He loathed flying, especially in small aircraft. He loathed many things in his daily routine, like self-service stores and Japanese two-strokes, but flying in dingy light aircraft he hated most of all.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it’s all too far-fetched. We’re grabbing at straws or reeds or whatever it is we grab at when there’s nothing else left.’
‘Tom, this is it, I know it is!’
You don’t know. Fry. It’s just one of a hundred dozen options. We could just as easily find them on any random Hand-Picked Tour of Britain!’
Fry loosened his seat belt and turned in his seat so that he was facing Tom square on.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that one of the people Sanderson mentioned in his interview was a man called Lemmings? Dr Richard Lemmings of the Roldorf Foundation? Sanderson said Lemmings had been killed by CORDON, one of twenty-seven people who were considered enemies.’ Tom nodded.
‘Kellick did some research that first evening when he met the Prime Minister with Sanderson’s tape. For some reason Kellick didn’t tell me about it and I only came across it yesterday, looking through his stuff in the office.
‘Well, according to Kellick’s notes. Lemmings broke his neck skiing. No foul play, the coroner said, though his body wasn’t found for four days.
‘Snag was, Tom - and Kellick in his notes underlined this - he hadn’t been staying anywhere locally. It was assumed by the local police that Lemmings had been on his way into Aviemore from somewhere else.’
‘So Lemmings was staying with a shepherdess. Fry. It doesn’t prove that. . .!’
‘The body was finally brought down by a woman skier, actually towed down on his skis, it was so frozen. The woman said the body had been buried in a snow drift and she’d only stopped because she’d seen the skis nearby.
‘Lemmings died, Tom, four thousand feet up on the Cairngorms, two miles from any of the usual runs.’
‘And you’re going to tell me that the woman who brought the body down was. . .’
‘Elsa Pilkington!’
Tom said nothing for a while. Then, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘I did an awful lot of reading in Kellick’s office yesterday; the piece about Lemmings was just a little bit of it all. It wasn’t important until now. It wasn’t relevant until Elsa’s name clicked. But it makes sense all of a sudden, doesn’t it?’ ‘Is that why she was so desperate?’ Tom said. ‘Dead or alive, she would point the way? Is that why she tried to destroy herself?’ He continued, ‘They killed Lemmings because he wanted to get out. But then no one found the body and it had to be found because how else would the other faint hearts be warned? So they waited four days and then they had to send up the only person who knew where the body was. And the only person capable of bringing it down.’
‘One last thing, Tom.’
‘Try me. I’m becoming receptive all of a sudden.’
‘What if it could be established that Lemmings was not staying anywhere around Aviemore when he disappeared? You’d expect him to - it is the ski centre. What if he was on his way in from somewhere else, as the police thought possible? What if he was trying to ski his way out of CORDON and they caught up with him and broke his neck?’
They continued looking at each other for a full thirty seconds. Slowly Tom began to nod his head. It was as if Fry was offering him final convincing proof by telepathy.
‘Do you know what else Kellick once said?’ he asked.
‘Go on.’
‘“Fry”’ - Tom tried to affect Kellick’s stem clipped upper-class accent - “‘sometimes I find your powers of recall quite frightening!”’
Fry smiled for the second time in their ten-day association. ‘And,’ Tom said, ‘he was bloody well right!’
Fry actually began laughing.
The pilot’s hand reached back between the seats to the radio set. He changed the radio frequency to London’s Heathrow approach. A voice crackling from the speaker in the headlining answered the pilot’s call with runway, atmospheric pressure, wind direction and other aircraft in the vicinity.
The light plane buffeted through the cloud, yawing violently as it dropped towards the runway and the funnel of red fights below. The manual undercarriage release clanged against the panel and three tiny green lights flickered on in a triangle.
They hit the tarmac on one wheel and then the other, bouncing from side to side. Heavy slush from the melting snow hit the underside of the fuselage as the pilot began braking. The voice from the speaker confirmed landing time as 2357 hours and wished them goodnight.
They walked through the snow to the Department’s car waiting by the hangar and waved the pilot goodbye. He, in the bonhomie of the season, shouted back a ‘Merry Christmas!’ to them.
‘Just one thing, Tom.’
Fry spoke across the top of the Department’s car, silhouetted in the yellow lights of the hangar.
‘What do we do with the last two names? Do we check
them out or do we go straight to Scotland?’
‘We go quickly through with the routine,’ Tom said. ‘Not for them or the numbers. They don’t matter any more, even if CORDON was still giving them, which I doubt. But if we stop now they’ll know we’re moving. And they’ll move, too.’
‘Who’s next?’
‘Wilde. Evil bastard. Odd habits. Does strange things to himself.’
‘Oh! Mr McCullin, that’s the message.’ The Department’s driver spoke from the front seat as Tom and Fry got in and slammed the back doors together.
‘What message?’
‘It came through on the radio as I was on my way here. Duty Night says he’s had a message pushed through to him from a Mr Wilde of Hobart Place; says you probably know of him. Would you be sure to see him at his house tomorrow. At five o’clock.’
Tuesday, 21 December
It was a pretty sight. And a pretty sound.
Despite their certain place on the calendar, Christmas carols, like Guy Fawkes and fireworks, always catch by surprise. Even after weeks of preparation, with every piggy bank emptied and every ribbon tied, the first ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in a cold December street is always unexpected.
So when Tom turned the corner and saw them there, stamping their feet in the snow, fur hats, scarves and mufflers bobbing with the rhythm, lanterns held high above their music sheets, he was surprised.
Even the house in Hobart Place at the corner
of Grosvenor Gardens seemed perfectly and suddenly Dickensian. A small red-brick house with a broad shiny black door, tucked back from the pavement, almost completely hidden by the brand new concrete wall of a brand new office block.
Tom folded a one-pound note and slipped it into the slot of the carol singers’ collection box. A poster hanging from it showed a Bengali child with bulging eyes and bulging ribcage. He felt offended. Christ! he thought. Save the Children by all means but spare us the pictures at Christmas. He wondered how much of his pound would find its way to the slums of Dacca.
There was no bell so Tom hammered the black door with a large brass lion’s head. The carol singers began ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. He waited. There was no answer. He hit the door again so hard with the lion that it shook in its frame. A key turned and yellow light shone out across the pavement.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the man. ‘I thought you were one of them.’ He stood to one side as Tom edged past him into the narrow passage.
‘I never know,’ the man went on, ‘whether I am mean or merely embarrassed. But I would do almost anything to avoid answering the door to them.’
Tom walked into a study at the end of the passage as it seemed to lead nowhere else.
‘Maybe,’ Tom said, over his shoulder, ‘you should arrange a standing order and save yourself the trouble!’ He heard the front door slam and the lock turn.
‘I didn’t expect a sense of humour, Mr McCullin,’ the man said as he entered the study. He carefully closed the door from the passage and locked that as well. ‘I have none myself. I am an introvert, a very private man. I am one of those extraordinary beings, Mr McCullin, who has a thorough dislike of his fellow man. I tend to dislike everyone. Especially people who sing in the streets.’
‘They were singing to feed a hungry Bengali,’ Tom said. Then that’s some comfort to me. I wouldn’t want to feel mean without cause.’ He smiled. The tight grey skin around his mouth that might once have been lips looked as if it would break.
Tom said, ‘Why have you asked me here, and why have you locked both doors?’
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