He struck a match. 'Stannard, this is a volunteer's job, and I'll have to ask you to make up your mind now. I can't tell you anything more -- I've already told you too much. I suppose I must tell you that if anything goes wrong it'll go badly for you -- and your death may not be the worst thing that can happen. Not in my book, at any fate. It's a tricky and dangerous task and, I don't mind telling you, I wouldn't volunteer for it myself. I can't be more honest than that.'
I lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky, leaf-dappled through the branches of the gum tree. My life in South Africa had been calm and uneventful. Seven years before I had been in pretty bad shape and I'd sworn I'd never do that kind of thing again. I suppose my bosses had seen that frame of mind and had given me the job of a sleeper in South Africa as a sort of sinecure -- a reward for past services. God knows, I had done nothing to earn the retainer that was piling up quite nicely in that British bank account and which I had never touched.
But time heals everything and of late I had been restless, wishing that something would happen -- an earthquake -- anything. And here was my earthquake in the person of this insignificant-looking man, Mackintosh -- a, man who hob-nobbed with the Cabinet, who chit-chatted about security with the Prime Minister. I had a vague idea of what he was getting at and it didn't seem difficult. Risky, perhaps; but not too difficult. I wasn't afraid of a gang of English crooks; they couldn't be worse than the boys I'd been up against in Indonesia. I'd seen whole towns full of corpses there.
I sat up. 'All right; I volunteer.'
Mackintosh looked at me a little sadly and thumped me gently on the arm. 'You're a lunatic,' he said. 'But I'm glad to save you. Perhaps we need a little lunacy on this job; orthodox methods haven't got us anywhere.'
He pointed at me with the stem of his pipe. "This is top-secret. From now on only three people will know about it; you, me and one other -- not even the PM knows." He chuckled sardonically. 'I tried to tell him but he didn't want to know. He knows how my mind works and he said he wanted to keep ibs hands clean -- he said he might have to answer questions in the House and he didn't want to be put in the position of lying.'
I said, 'What about the South African police?"
'They know nothing," said Mackintosh flatly. 'It's a quid pro quo -- a favour returned. They might do a bit of digging into four background, though. Can it stand it?"
'It should,' I said. 'It was designed by experts."
Mackintosh drew gently on his pipe and blew out a plume of smoke. 'Other people have tried to penetrate this damned organization and they've failed -- so we start from there and ask, "Why did they fail?" One of the more promising gambits was to ring in a fake prisoner and wait for advances to be made. At one time there were no less than eight of these decoys scattered through the British prisons. Not one of them was contacted. What does that suggest to you?'
The Scarperers have a good intelligence service,' I said. 'I'll bet they do a preliminary check before contact.'
'I agree -- and that means that our bait, which is Rearden, must stand up to rigorous scrutiny. There must be no cracks in the cover at all. Anything else?'
'Not that I can think of off-hand.'
'Use your loaf,' said Mackintosh with an air of disgust. 'The crime, man; the crime! Rearden -- or, rather, you -- is going to commit a crime in England. You'll be caught -- I'll see to that -- you'll be tried and you'll be jugged. And it has to be a particular form of crime; a crime which involves a lot of money and where the money isn't recovered. The Scarperers have to be convinced that you can pay hard cash for your escape. Now, what does that suggest to you -- in view of what I've already told you?'
'Nothing much,' I said. 'It shouldn't be too difficult to arrange.'
'No, it shouldn't be too difficult,' said Mackintosh in an odd voice. 'Look here, Stannard; this is going to be a genuine crime -- don't you understand that? Nothing else will do. I am going to plan, and you are going to execute, a crime of some magnitude. We are going to steal a considerable sum of money from some inoffensive British citizen who will scream to high heaven. There's going to be no fake about it because ..." He spaced his words very distinctly. '. . . I . . . will . . . not . . . risk ... breaking . .. security.'
He turned and said very earnestly, 'If this is so then when you are tried and gaoled you will be in the jug for a perfectly genuine crime, and if anything goes wrong there will be nothing that I, or anyone else, can do about it. If you get fourteen years then you'll rot in prison for your sentence if the Scarperers don't contact you. And the reason for that is because I cannot compromise security on this operation. Are you willing to risk it?'
I took a deep breath. 'Christ! You're asking a hell of a lot, aren't you?'
'It's the way it's got to be,' he said doggedly. 'A trained man like you should be able to get out of any leaky British prison without half trying. But you won't, damn you! You'll sit on your backside and wait for the Scarperers to get you, no matter how long they take to make up their minds. You'll bloody well wait, do you hear?'
I looked into his fanatical eyes and said very gently, 'I hear. Don't worry; I'm not going to back out now. I gave you my word.'
He took a deep breath and relaxed. "Thanks, Stannard." He grinned at me. 'I wasn't worried about you -- not too worried.'
'I've been wondering about something,' I said. 'Mountbatten investigated the prisons when Blake flew the coop. That was quite a long time ago. Why all the sudden rush now?'
Mackintosh reached out and knocked out his pipe on the trunk of the tree. 'A good question,' he agreed. 'Well, for one thing, the effect of Mountbatten is wearing off. When the Report came out and the prisons tightened security every sociologist and prison reformer in Britain let out an outraged howl -- and I'm not saying they were wrong, either. There are two ways of regarding prisons -- as places of punishment and as places of rehabilitation. The suddenly tightened security knocked rehabilitation right out of the window and the penal reformers say it did ten years of damage in six months.'
He shrugged. 'They're probably right, but that's outside my field. I'm not interested in civil prisoners -- it's the Blakes and Lonsdales of this work! who are my meat. When you catch them you can either put them up against a wall and shoot them, or you can put them in chokey. But you imprison them not to punish and not to rehabilitate, but to keep them out of circulation because of what they know.'
There was nothing in this to explain the question I had asked, so I prompted him. 'So what now?'
'There's a big fish coming down the line,' he said. 'The biggest we've caught yet. God knows, Blake was big enough, but this man is a shark to Blake's tiddler -- and he must not escape. I've pleaded with the PM to establish a special prison for this type of prisoner but he says it's against policy, and so Slade goes into the general prison system, admittedly as a high risk man.'
'Slade!' I said thoughtfully. 'Never heard of him.'
'He's in hospital,' said Mackintosh. 'He was shot through the hips when he was caught. When he's fit he'll stand trial, and if we handed out sentences like the Texans he'd get five thousand years. As it is, we must keep him secure for the next twenty -- after that it won't matter very much.'
Twenty years! He must know a hell of a lot.'
Mackintosh turned a disgusted face towards me. 'Can you imagine that a Russian -- and Slade is a Russian -- could get to be second-in-command of an important department of British Intelligence concerned with counter-espionage in Scandinavia? Well, it happened, and Sir David Taggart, the damned fool who put him there, has been kicked upstairs -- he's now Lord Taggart with a life peerage.' He snorted. 'But he won't be making any speeches or doing any voting. If he knows what's good for him he'll keep his mouth permanently shut.'
He blinked his colourless eyelashes and said in a passionately suppressed voice, "The man who caught Slade was a man whom Taggart had fired for inefficiency, for God's sake!' He rapped his pipe against the tree with such force that I thought it would break. 'Amateurs!' he said in a
scathing voice. 'These bloody amateurs running their piddling private armies. They make me sick.'
'How do I relate to Slade?' I asked. 'I'm going to try to put you next to him,' he said. 'And that will mean breaking the law. What Slade knows is sheer dynamite and I'd break every law in Britain, from sodomy upwards, to keep that bastard inside where he belongs.' He chuckled and thumped my arm. 'We're not just going to bend the laws of England, Stannard; we're going to smash them.'
I said a little shakily, 'Now I know why the Prime Minister wouldn't listen to you.'
'Oh, yes,' said Mackintosh matter-of-factly. 'It would make him accessory to the crime, and he's too much the gentleman to get his hands dirty. Besides, it would lie heavily on his conscience.' He looked up at the sky and said musingly, 'Funny animals, politicians.'
I said, 'Do you know what kind of a tree this is?'
He turned and looked at it. 'No, I don't."
'It's a gum tree,' I said. The thing I'll be up if this operation doesn't pan out. Take a good look at it.'
IV I suppose you could call Mackintosh a patriot -- of sorts. There don't seem to be many avowed patriots around these days; it has become the fashion to sneer at patriotism -- the TV satire programmes jeer at it, and to the with-it, swinging set it's a dead issue. So with patriots so few on the ground you can't pick and choose too freely. Certainly, to a casual eye , Mackintosh bore a remarkable resemblance to a dyed-in-the-wool fascist; his God was Britain -- not the Britain of green fields and pleasant country lanes, of stately buildings and busy towns, but the idea of Britain incorporated in the State. He took his views directly from Plato, Machiavelli and Cromwell who, if you think about it, aren't all that different from Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.
But there was more to him than that as I found out later -much later.
There was a lot of work to be done and not a great deal of time in which to do it. I studied South African prison conditions with a prison officer, temporarily donning the guise of a sociologist for the occasion. He advised me to read the works of Herman Charles Bosman which was a superfluity as I had already done so. Bosman, possibly the best writer in English South Africa has produced, knew all about prison conditions -- he had done a stretch for killing his step-brother and he wrote illuminatingly about his experiences in Pretoria Central Prison -- Pretoria Tronk, in the vernacular -- which conveniently was where Rearden had served his sentence.
I also studied Rearden's record, culled from the files of John Vorster Square. There was not much fact and a hell of a lot of conjecture in that file. Rearden had been imprisoned only once and that for a comparatively minor offence, but the conjecture was lurid. He was suspected of practically every crime in the book from burglary to drug-smuggling, from armed robbery to illicit gold buying. He was a many-faceted character, all nerve and intelligence, whose erratic and unexpected switches in criminal activity had kept him out of trouble. He would have made a good intelligence agent.
I smiled at that. Perhaps Mackintosh had been right when he said that Rearden was like me. I had no illusions about myself or my job. It was a dirty business with no holds barred and precious little honour, and I was good at it, as would have been Rearden if anyone had had the sense to recruit him. So there we were -- birds of a feather -- Mackintosh, Rearden and Stannard.
Mackintosh was busy on the upper levels of the job in South Africa -- pulling strings. From the way people danced to his tune like marionettes I judged he had been right when he said the Prime Minister had given him 'certain facilities'. This was counter-espionage work at diplomatic level and I wondered what was the quid pro quo -- what the hell had we done for the South Africans that we should be given this VIP treatment with no questions asked?
Gradually I was transformed into Rearden. A different style of haircut made a lot of difference and I took much trouble with the Transvaal accent, the accent of the Reef towns. I studied photographs of Rearden and copied his way of dress and his stance. It was a pity we had no films of him in action; the way a man moves means a lot. But that I would have to chance.
I said to Mackintosh once, 'You say I'm not likely to run into any of Rearden's pals in England because I'm not going to be at large for very long. That's all very well, but I'm a hell of a lot more likely to run into his mates when I'm in the nick than when I'm walking up Oxford Street.'
Mackintosh looked thoughtful. 'That's true. What I can do is this; I'll have a check done on the inhabitants of the prison you're in, and any that have been to South Africa I'll have transferred. There shouldn't be too many and it will minimize your risk. The reason for transfer shouldn't become apparent -- prisoners are being transferred all the time.'
He drilled me unmercifully.
'What's your father's name?'
'Joseph Rearden.'
'Occupation?'
'Miner -- retired.'
'Mother's name?'
'Magrit.'
'Maiden name?'
'Van der Oosthuizen.'
'Where were you born?'
'Brakpan.'
'The date?'
'28th May, 1934.'
'Where were you in June, 1968?'
'. . . er . . . in Cape Town.'
'Which hotel did you use?'
'Arthur's Seat.'
Mackintosh stuck his finger under my nose. 'Wrong! That was in November of the same year. You'll have to do better than that.'
'I could get away with it if I had to,' I said.
'Maybe. But this has to be a seamless job -- no cracks which need papering over. You'd better get down to studying again.'
Again I pushed my nose into the files, if a little resentfully. My God, a man wasn't supposed to remember and account for every minute of his life. But I knew Mackintosh was right. The more I knew about Rearden, the safer I'd be.
At last it was over and Mackintosh was due to return to England. He said, The local coppers are a bit worried about you; they're wondering why you've been picked for this job. They're wondering how I was able to lay my hands on an Australian immigrant to impersonate Rearden. I don't think you'll be able to come back here.'
'Will they talk?'
'There'll be no talk,' he said positively. 'There are only a few of the top brass who know about you, and they don't know why -- that's why they're becoming curious. But it's all top-secret, diplomatic-level, hush-hush stuff and that's something the South Africans are good at. They understand security. As far as the middle and lower levels of the police are concerned -- well, they'll be a bit surprised when Rearden gets nabbed in England, but they'll just heave a sigh of relief and cross him off the books for a few years.'
I said, 'If you're right about the Scarperers they'll be doing some extensive checking here in South Africa.'
'It'll stand up,' he said with certainty. 'You've done a good job on this, Stannard.' He smiled. 'When it's all over you'll probably get a medal. There'll be a few private words with the people concerned -- insurance company, whoever we rob, and so on. The Home Secretary will probably issue a free pardon and you won't have a stain on your character.'
'If it comes off,' I said. 'If it doesn't, I'll be up that bloody gum tree.' I looked straight at him. 'I want a bit of insurance on this. I know you're nuts on security -- and rightly so. As you've organized it there'll be only three people who know about this operation -- you, me and one other. I'd like to know who this "other" is, just in case anything happens to you. I'd be in a hell of a mess if you got ran over by a bus.'
He thought about that. 'Fair enough,' he said. 'It's my secretary.'
'Your secretary,' I said expressionlessly.
'Oh, Mrs Smith is a very good secretary,' he said. 'Very efficient. She's hard at work on this case now.'
I nodded. 'There's something else,' I said. 'I've been going over possible eventualities. What happens if I'm sprung and Slade isn't?'
'Then you go for the Scarperers, of course."
'And if Slade is sprung and I'm not?'
Mackintosh shrugged. 'That wou
ldn't be your fault. We'd have to leave it to the ordinary authorities. Not that I'd like it very much.'
Try this on for size,' I said. 'Supposing both Slade and I are sprung. What then?'
'Ah,' he said. 'I see what you mean.'
'Yes; I thought you would. Which is the more important? To smash the Scarperers or to take Slade back to the jug?'
He was silent for a moment. 'Slade is obviously the more important, although ideally I'd like you to pull off both jobs should that eventuality arise. As far as taking Slade back to prison goes you may use your own discretion. If he turned up dead I wouldn't shed a single tear. The important thing about Slade is that he must not get loose -- he must not communicate any information to a third party.' He flicked his pale blue eyes in my direction. 'Dead men tell no tales.'
So that was it. Orders to kill Slade -- at my discretion. I began to understand the Prime Minister's reservations about Mackintosh. A tame hatchet man must be an uncomfortable asset to have around the house. He went to England next day and I followed two months later in response to another letter from Lucy. The crime had been set up.
CHAPTER SIX
I stared at the brandy in the glass. I had been thinking for a long time and I hadn't touched a drop. The time for drinking had gone and the time for thinking had arrived. And I had a hell of a lot to think about.
Everything had gone as Mackintosh had planned. The crime, the trial, the nick, Slade -- and the Scarperers. Then things turned sour. They were a clever mob and as keen on security as any professional espionage ring. Here I was, injected into their organization like a drug, and I was no nearer to cracking it than I had been in South Africa.
It was that damned hypodermic syringe in the moving-van that had turned the trick in their favour. I hadn't expected that, nor had I expected this imprisonment. Still, I could see their point; they worked on the 'need to know' principle, and an escapee didn't need to know how he had escaped -- just that he had done so. This mob was too bloody professional to be true.
And I had lost Slade.
Bagley, Desmond - The Freedom Trap Page 12