There was a knock on the door, somewhere on Tom’s left side, and a little behind him. There was movement, and two pairs of hands lifted him bodily into a sitting position. He found he was in a large wing-backed armchair.
On his left was a fire in a large, open, stone fireplace burning peat. That was the smell. Above the fireplace he saw a small circle of intense light and inside it six letters that made up the word CORDON.
Across from the fire there was only shadow, but as his eyes adjusted he saw, fifteen or so feet from him, the outline of another wingback. In it, protected by the shadow, was the silhouette of a man, a large man. In the glow of the fire he could make out a heavy tartan rug wrapped around his legs covering his shoes.
Tom felt the swelling around his ear thumping against the wing of the chair. But he’d forgotten his pain.
‘Who are you?’ he said across to the shadow. ‘I know your voice.’
‘Most likely you do. But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for my name.’
‘Tomorrow’s Christmas. Are you Santa Claus?’
The man in the shadow suddenly laughed. He seemed genuinely amused. But the laugh just as quickly became a cough. Tom had heard sounds like it walking at night between diseased sleeping beggars on the pavements of Calcutta.
He watched the chair: a hand moved out of the shadow, tucked the rug tighter around the legs and moved back into the darkness again.
‘On Christmas Day my name will be broadcast to the people of this country and the world. I shall win the hearts and minds of the majority of the British people and by their support I shall stand the test of the world’s consequent hostility.’
His words echoed around the room. The words of that so- familiar voice, promising civil war so reasonably, so inevitably.
‘And there is nothing to be done to stop you?’ Tom asked.
‘No! Nothing.’
‘Do you have the Army with you?’
‘We cannot do it without them.’
‘All three Services? And the Police?’
‘Enough in each. We do not have to vouch for every last man, but our support will be sufficient at the hour.’
‘Kellick was convinced,’ Tom said, ‘that the Services could not be bought. So was Military Intelligence.’
‘Kellick made many mistakes, Mr McCullin. And Military Intelligence was so totally confident of Service loyalty that they were afraid to dig too thoroughly for fear of offending it.’
‘How did you do it. . . infiltrate all three?’
‘We had many willing converts, believe me. We have the finest armed forces in the world but for years now they have been made to look fools by successive governments. From Suez to Anguilla they have humiliated our Military with absurd decisions, leaving us finally to be ridiculed in Ulster.’
He paused for some seconds.
‘There were opportunities enough to exploit. But our deliberate infiltration was modelled on a Soviet plan.’
The coughing began again. Tom watched the hand, strong and large, come out into the fire-light again, reach down between the folds of the rug and pull out what looked like a small silver snuffbox. It withdrew, and Tom could just make out the movement of the hand towards the face. Within seconds the coughing stopped.
‘You’ve probably never heard of the Prague Convention, Mr McCullin?’ His voice was now hoarse and almost a whisper. ‘1956 it was, and squeezed in between a thousand other items on the agenda was Resolution Number 289. It stated simply that Portuguese University graduates with secretly-held Left-Wing sympathies would be directed to join the Portuguese Army as officer cadets.
‘Now that was a long time ago but the Communists’ plan for a revolution in Portugal did take place just as they knew it would. The Flower Revolution, as it was called in April 1974, was born out of that resolution in Prague, a military coup led by Left-Wing officers who were the children of that Convention.
‘The Communists are the world’s masters in long-term strategy, Mr McCullin, and I took a leaf out of their book. For many years now we have been placing our own young Turks into the Services, watching them rise to seniority.’
‘Only in the Services?’
‘No. Just as the Communists in this country have been placing their people throughout Government and industry, so have we. From local constituency level to the Front Bench, from the boardroom to the shop floor. And our advantage is that, unlike our enemy’s, our strength is not known. Our people have not shown themselves. They have been what I think you refer to in your business as “sleepers”.’ ‘Why did you give us their names?’ Tom asked. ‘I’d have thought they were some of your more important sleepers.’ ‘The most important,’ the voice said.
‘Why, then?’
‘You realised almost at the start, didn’t you, that you were part of a plan?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you never knew why?’
‘Once I thought I’d glimpsed something of it, but not enough.’
‘I gave you their names through Sanderson and his confession because they were suspect.’
‘But you’ve said they were important to you.’
‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘so vital in fact that we could not have proceeded without them.’
‘So how could they have been suspect?’
‘We had no choice but to treat them as suspect. They were so vital to the Organisation, we had to be absolutely certain of their loyalty. They were holding up the entire operation, our planning was delayed again and again. My machines were not convinced of their infallibility. So we devised the final test. We gave their identities to SSO. The idea was Sanderson’s.
‘In my mind I saw them as birds and Sanderson the beater sent in to flush them out. You, Mr McCullin, became the Kite, the Partridge Kite. It was something I’d seen used as a lad at shoots. They flew a large kite, five feet high, cut out of canvas in the shape of a hawk. When the partridge were flushed out they would see above them the silhouette of the hawk and fly low. . . within easy range of the guns. It never failed.
‘So we flew you above my suspects, like that kite, to keep them low. . . keep them close to me.
‘Previously, you see, many had failed us at the last moment. In those early days we used more primitive methods to test our people’s faith: different beaters, different guns. But without the Partridge Kite to keep them down, within range, they flew high and wild and we came close on many occasions to disasters because of it.
‘Lord Bremmer was one who lost his head at the last moment. So did Dr Richard Lemmings, one of our founder members and a brilliant scientist, much of whose work you see all around you. General Sir William Tendale lost his nerve and found gin and a loose tongue. Air Vice Marshal Gosling was another, one of many wartime heroes who joined us. He was overtaken by his conscience, alarmed at some of our methods.’
‘But,’ Tom interrupted, ‘Gosling works for Haig . . . he was adjutant.’
‘Yes, and it was young Gosling we wanted you to check, not Haig as you thought. Haig is totally, blindly loyal. But it was our need to destroy the father that made the son suspect. He knows so much of the detail of our Organisation and everything about our military connections. Thankfully the boy proved his faith. His love of our ideals has shown itself stronger than his respect for his once very brave father.’
‘So,’ Tom asked, ‘one by one, as I checked them out, they alerted you directly. Was that enough proof they were loyal?’
‘No! As I’ve said, Mr McCullin, it wasn’t our only check but it was our last. As each one telephoned his Alert, each one proved his loyalty. All but one did exactly that.’
‘What if we’d arrested them? You’d have lost them and proved nothing.’
‘How could you arrest such people?’ the voice continued. Internationally respected pillars of the Establishment. On what charge? On what evidence? Sanders
on’s? And where was he to support you? He was here. All you had was a tape recording.
‘No! Your Prime Minister would never have survived it. And, as you realised, you quicker than anyone, they were being deliberately flushed out for you. The only chance you had of finding me and my Board was to keep them in sight, to keep them under you as it were. After all, the Kite is useless once the birds fly above it. You had no need, after all, to hurry. You had no idea of the date of my new government. Only if you had would you have risked arresting my people. Only I knew that date. Only I knew when the countdown ended.’
There was a sudden silence in the room, so sudden that Tom felt as if he had lost all sense of hearing. Like a man who wakes at night in a room so black that he feels in a moment of panic he is blind. Tom leant forward in his chair as if he was reaching for something to listen to.
Hands held him by the shoulders and gently pulled him back. Just as suddenly the crackle of the fire and the hiss of the peat burning there filled the room again. He could hear the movement of wind outside, a rumble, a hum, like the sound of a fast approaching train. But he knew there were no trains here or anywhere near here. He knew there was nothing near except the pine forest and the fortress of snow surrounding it.
He watched the flying sparks off the logs drawn by vacuum up the wide chimney, sometimes so fast they looked like a beam of flame, or so slow they would hover just in sight below the stone lintel before being scooped up by the draught of air and thrown into the sky above the house.
He felt drowsy. His head and his limbs felt heavy. He looked across the fireplace to the armchair and the plaid rug.
‘You said a moment ago,’ he said, ‘that one of them had failed you. But everyone I saw must have telephoned you. They all reacted the same way.’
The coughing began again very softly. Again, Tom could just make out a hand raised towards the shadow where the face was.
‘Unhappily, Mr McCullin, you are wrong. We gave you six names, and they were known to only eight people. Myself, Sanderson, Menzies, your Prime Minister, his PPS Knightley, Fry, yourself and Kellick. And only I and Sanderson knew about Kellick.’
He was not one of you!’
‘No, he was not one of us, not in the sense that he belonged to CORDON. Kellick was not a man with strong enough convictions to belong to anyone or anything. He was, after all, a very typical product of the British Civil Service, always looking in two directions at once. Not to either side of him, which is often very necessary to a man in high position, but backwards and forwards. Always looking ahead to safeguard himself, avoiding the swamps and land mines of political and bureaucratic infighting and always looking back, summing up the past, making certain in his own mind that his life had been properly arranged. Many wise men are governed by caution. But Kellick’s life was obsessed with precaution - and it was fatal to him.
‘You see, although he was not part of us, he knew of us, at least he knew something of our strength throughout the country and the extent of our support. As you’d expect, as Head of SSO he had access to computer data on many of our people and many of the organisations that were affiliated to us. But I was puzzled, and so were my machines. We assumed that he was compiling a dossier, gathering information for an eventual attack on us. But our own people in Government and in the Service told us he was keeping it to himself. Even Fry wasn’t told. In the three years that Kellick collected on us, he told no one. We know he didn’t, because his secretary, Mrs Hayes, kept in close touch with her Area Director. Through her we knew he had microfilm, recordings, and original computer data tape. We knew too that he kept it in his flat.
‘In a way our hands were tied. We couldn’t have burgled his flat because he would most certainly have panicked and done something that would have embarrassed us. He thought he was neatly arranging his future, but a snowstorm upset his plans. As it almost upset ours.’
‘The container?’
‘Yes, the container. You see, the discovery of our container was known to very few of your people. There was an immediate security clampdown. Your Military Intelligence worked very fast and very thoroughly, unusual for them. So thoroughly in fact that for once even our people were kept on the outside. As you were probably aware, every person who knew of the events last Saturday night and Sunday morning was immediately confined. Only Kellick was given the names of everybody involved and as far as he could tell none of them were CORDON members.
‘Suddenly early that morning, he realised, as your Prime Minister and your Intelligence did, that something was really on. It was time for Kellick to take sides. And he chose the wrong one.’
‘He chose our side,’ said Tom. ‘Give the man credit for some guts!’
‘Not quite, Mr McCullin. Not guts. When a man panics and runs to the nearest side you can’t call it courage. If he’d had it he would have called the tune a long time ago. It would have made your job considerably easier and made our existence, at best, precarious. But he was a man who lacked courage totally and even his final decision was made walking backwards, watching his rear for a last chance to change his mind.’
‘And he walked into Major Menzies?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why,’ Tom asked, ‘did he set up the system to try and find you? He and Fry first discovered Sanderson’s leads, the Bremmer clue which gave them the Trust and the names. Why was he so efficient if he wanted to protect his knowledge of you?’
‘Don’t you see?’ The voice began to sound tired. The large strong hands tucked the tartan rug tighter around the legs.
‘Once Sanderson had walked into Cannon Row, Kellick had to pursue every lead that presented itself if he was to be sure he was still ahead of everyone else. He was convinced from the beginning that Sanderson was a genuine defector, so it was absolutely essential that he should retain every ounce of knowledge Sanderson had to give. Which was why he kept Sanderson to himself and refused all other Liaison Units permission to see him unless he was present.
‘His worries began the day you suggested that Sanderson was a decoy. It was a double-deal that Kellick with all his ability to manoeuvre should have recognised straight away, but didn’t. For a man who spent his life protecting himself he showed extraordinary shortsightedness in the end.’
There was a rustle as the man eased himself to a more comfortable position in the chair.
The conversation was ending and Tom felt sudden despair. He had walked a long road and turned the last comer to find a brick wall across it.
‘Why did Kellick pick me?’ he asked.
The voice continued. Tie did not want us uncovered too quickly. He wanted to be in charge. . . to govern the pace of inquiries, to be the first to know anything new.
‘He felt certain of Fry, he hired him for that reason. Certain he could bully him, govern him, tell him when to stand up and sit down. And when after Sanderson’s arrival he was instructed by your Prime Minister to engage someone outside his Department, he was delighted. It meant again he could nominate his own man, someone who would report only to him.
He found what he wanted in the A.D. file, someone he thought would be just as ineffective, just as vulnerable to threats and bullying as Fry. He couldn’t pick an obvious nincompoop without raising suspicion. So he selected who he thought, looking at the records, was the least effective of all the Red Star names. Someone he felt certain would not have the initiative or the intellectual make-up to move faster than himself.’
‘And he picked me?’
‘Yes, Mr McCullin. Tailormade for the job, he told Fry. He thought you would be ideal!’
The room they put him in was two floors below ground level, a small room, adequate but absurdly clinical. White glazed tiles covered the floor and the walls, and there was the distinctive smell of disinfectant.
Before they had closed and locked the heavy white Formica-covered door, he had heard a low-pitched hum coming from farther d
own the corridor.
His overcoat had been carefully laid over a chair and the small pewter hip flask was on a low glass-topped table by the side of it. He shook it. The whisky was still there.
The single bunk bed was hinged to the wall. He unclipped it, carefully lowered his aching head on to it and kicked off his shoes.
So this, he thought, is as much as I’m going to see of Revolution and Civil War. And when it’s all over will someone come and unlock the door?
He slept, woke, ached, walked about the room, drank a little of the whisky from the flask and slept again. When he opened his eyes again, he knew even in the neon-lit room that it was morning, and light outside.
He looked at his wristwatch: 8.30 a.m. The morning of Christmas Day.
The key turned slowly in the lock and the door opened. He came in and gently closed it behind him.
‘My name is Sanderson.’
Tom pushed himself up on one elbow. The man stood with his back to the door, his shoulders pressed hard against it, his hands hanging limp at his side. He looked directly at Tom but there was nothing in his face, no expression, nothing showed in the eyes except fatigue, red, as if he’d been rubbing them hard.
‘You have come too late, Mr McCullin,’ he said.
Tom reached down for his shoes and began untying the laces. Some part of his mind refused to accept it all as real. He looked at the man by the door, tall with greying hair and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. That was something else he couldn’t accept. Sanderson’s spectacles. In all the images Tom had invented of the man, thinking about him, listening to the taped interview, he’d never thought of him in spectacles.
He tied a double bow in his shoelaces and looked up again.
‘Too late for what?’ he asked.
‘Too late to help,’ the man said simply.
‘I didn’t come here to help.’
‘It’s too late,’ Sanderson repeated, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘The Chairman has just this minute given us the time the countdown ends. There’s nothing we can do now to stop it.’ ‘Stop it? Christ! Whose side are you on?’
The Partridge Kite Page 25