by Hilary Green
Leo shook her head. ‘I think we should leave Farnaby alone for the time being.’
‘But we’ve got everything we need to put him away,’ Nick protested, ‘especially if we can catch him actually in possession of the stuff.’
‘I know,’ said Leo, ‘but Stone’s right when he says Zahran is top priority. If he’s back in the country there must be something big brewing up. We may be able to find out where he is from those two but apart from that Farnaby’s our only link with him.’
‘Do you think he might be at Swancombe?’ Stone asked.
‘Not very likely, is it?’ Nick replied. ‘Those three who jumped us were keeping well out of sight until Farnaby had gone. My guess is they don’t want Farnaby to know where he is—or even perhaps who he is.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with Nick,’ Stone said.
‘Just the same,’ Leo persisted, ‘if you arrest Farnaby Zahran will know that his men didn’t finish you off and he’ll be on his guard. Better to leave Farnaby for the time being. There’s always the chance that Zahran, or whoever he’s working for, plans to use him again. You get back to London with those two and put Pascoe in the picture. I’ll stay close to Farnaby.’
‘You mean you’re going back to the house?’ Stone frowned at her doubtfully.
‘Why not? When Farnaby left I was fast asleep, thanks to whatever it was he put in my tea. When he gets back I shall just be waking up. There’s no reason why he should suspect that I’ve ever been out of bed.’
‘Unless someone has checked up on you,’ Nick suggested.
Leo shrugged. ‘I left some pillows in the bed—good enough to fool someone just looking in from the door. I’ll have to take a chance on it.’
Stone shook his head. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Whether you like it or not isn’t important,’ she told him crisply; then her mouth softened. ‘Look, I shall go back to town later today just as he expects. I know he’s coming back too because I heard him making a date with someone for this evening. I’ll just carry on exactly as before, keeping tabs on him. You get on with looking for Zahran. I’ll keep in touch through Pascoe.’ She rose. ‘Where’s your car?’
‘Hidden by some farm buildings up on the main road,’ Stone said. ‘I’ll go and fetch it. You keep an eye on those two, Nick. Do you want us to drop you, Leo—if you insist on going back?’
She grinned. ‘No thanks. I’ve got my own transport.’
They walked with her to the edge of the landing-stage. She said,
‘By the way, did you get the girl settled OK, Nick?’
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘They’ll look after her at the clinic—and I contacted the parents.’
They paused above the point where the dinghy was moored. The two men looked at Leo, then glanced at each other. Stone said,
‘I guess we owe you, Leo.’
She smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.’
They watched her scramble down into the boat and take up the oars.
‘Why don’t you use the engine?’ Nick asked. ‘You’ve got a long pull back against the current.’
Leo looked at the outboard wistfully and sighed.
‘No, it’s too risky. Better get back as silently as I came.
Stone untied the mooring line and dropped it into the bows. Leo tugged at the oars and the boat moved away into the middle of the stream. They waited until the faint splash of the oars was no longer audible. Then Stone said,
‘That is one tough lady!’
‘Yeah,’ Nick said thoughtfully. ‘The remarkable thing is—she’s also a bloody marvellous…’ he hesitated.
‘Cook?’ Stone offered.
‘Yeah. That as well,’ Nick agreed.
Stone turned and caught his eye and they both grinned. Then they walked back towards the boat-house.
Chapter 8
Nick suppressed a yawn, flexed tense muscles in his shoulders and rubbed a hand cautiously across the back of his neck. This was Tuesday. He had scarcely been to bed over the weekend and a snatched six hours the previous night had done little to make up the deficit. Added to that, his head still hurt where he had been hit. He got up from the desk where he had been checking through reports of sightings of men who might have answered to Zahran’s description and went to join Pascoe and Stone.
They were standing in the control room from which all Triple S operations were directed. Down the centre of the room was a bank of computer terminals, while ranged along the walls was a comprehensive selection of communications equipment—telephones, teleprinters, radios. Practically every position was occupied by a Triple S operative and almost all of them were working on locating Stratos Zahran. Pascoe looked up as Nick arrived. Nick shook his head.
‘There isn’t a single sighting there that looks really hopeful. I’ve marked the ones that might be worth following up, but I don’t think they’ll turn up anything.’
Pascoe allowed the computer print-out which he had been studying to drop gently from his hand onto the desk and wandered back towards his own room. The computer operator looked after him.
‘Sid’s not happy,’ she remarked.
It was a matter of argument among Triple S agents whether it was simply Pascoe’s position as head of what they referred to as ‘the Snake Pit’ which had earned him his nickname of Hissing Sid, or whether it was a direct reference to his own personality. Certainly there was something about the urbane manner and the silky inflections of the voice which was reminiscent of the original character, but most of his subordinates agreed that the chief reason for the name was the habit he had of listening to reports with his eyes half closed, his whole manner as somnolent as a snake basking in the sun, until some slight inaccuracy, some bit of woolly thinking, was seized upon with the deadly rapidity of a striking cobra.
‘Well, you know why, don’t you?’ Stone asked, picking up the computer print-out. ‘Because all this adds up to precisely nothing. We’re no further forward than we were this time yesterday.’
The door of Pascoe’s office reopened.
‘If I could interrupt you two gentlemen at your meditations for a moment…’ The voice was at its smoothest.
Stone and Marriot exchanged a quick glance and followed him into the other room. Pascoe seated himself behind his desk and leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in front of his chin, elbows on the chair arms, eyelids drooping.
‘So…’ he said after a moment, ‘Let us review the situation.’
He glanced up and made a brief gesture towards chairs on the other side of the desk. Stone and Marriot sat gratefully.
‘So far,’ Pascoe went on, ‘we have no reports of anyone answering Zahran’s description registering at any hotel or boarding-house. None of our Arab contacts seem to have any inkling of his whereabouts—or if they have they’re too frightened to say anything. And he hasn’t made contact with any of his known associates. However, he is obviously being looked after somewhere.’
‘My guess is they’ve got him stashed away in a private house somewhere,’ Stone said. ‘If he’s got someone to fetch and carry—do the shopping and so on—there’s no reason why he should show his face outside until the time comes to do whatever it is he’s here to do.’
‘And what is he here to do?’ ruminated Pascoe. ‘That is the question.’
‘Are we making any progress with the two men we brought in?’ Nick asked.
Pascoe sighed. ‘Our experts are leaning on them—but what can you expect? They’ve been trained by people to whom torture and mutilation are part of a way of life. They’re not going to be frightened by anything we can do to them. Oh, we shall break them in the end— our methods make up in sophistication what they lack in brutality—but it will take time. And time is something we may have very little of.’
‘So, what do we try next?’ Stone asked.
The heavy eyelids lifted and Pascoe met his eyes. ‘There are always two ends to a piece of string, Stone. The one we were following may have disa
ppeared into the tangle for the moment, but we can always look for the other one.’
‘You mean Zahran’s target?’ Nick suggested.
‘Precisely,’ agreed Pascoe.
‘But that could be anyone of several hundred people,’ Stone objected. ‘We know from past experience that Zahran’s not particularly choosy about who he knocks off, as long as the money’s right.’
‘I think we can narrow the field considerably from that number,’ Pascoe said meditatively. ‘After all, we know who brought him in. His current masters are the same people who have been supplying Farnaby with drugs; and we know that one of their agents was Ahmed Khalil. Khalil, we have good reason to believe, was involved in blowing up Sheik Mahoud, who was here on a trade mission, the outcome of which was that his country was to receive a considerable quantity of our latest and most sophisticated armaments. In return he had guaranteed his support in our efforts to obtain a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I think we can conclude, therefore, that whoever is behind Khalil and Zahran is opposed to our Government’s position with regard to that settlement.’
‘You mean the PLO,’ said Stone succinctly.
‘Them, or someone who sympathizes with them.’
‘Gadhafi?’ suggested Nick.
‘The precise entity is not important,’ Pascoe commented. ‘What we are interested in is the object of their intentions.’
‘Someone prominent in the Jewish community?’ Nick offered. ‘Someone with Zionist connections.’
‘But why now? Why at this precise point in time?’ Pascoe asked. ‘I think we need to be more topical in our thinking. What is happening next week which is relevant to what we are discussing?’ Then, as they both hesitated, ‘Come, come, you read the papers— I hope.’
‘We haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately,’ Stone said pointedly.
Pascoe ignored the comment.
‘Got it!’ Nick exclaimed. ‘Conference of all the interested parties, starting Tuesday in Geneva.’
‘Precisely,’ Pascoe said, with a gentle sibilance that recalled his nickname.
‘So you reckon Zahran is over here to get at someone who can affect that conference?’ Stone looked dubious. ‘It’s hard to see how.’
‘I admit that,’ Pascoe agreed, ‘but I think the idea is worth pursuing.’
‘Who is our delegate at the conference?’ Nick asked.
‘The Foreign Secretary himself.’
‘Would there be any advantage to the PLO if he was—unable to attend, for any reason?’
‘Not so far as I can see,’ Pascoe lifted his shoulders.
‘A delay, perhaps, if their action caused some reorganization among the Government benches; but not a change in policy. After all, it is a Cabinet decision and there is only one person in the Cabinet whose views really carry any weight.’
‘The PM,’ said Stone.
‘Could that be who they’re aiming for?’ Nick asked.
‘It is possible, I suppose; but it’s hard to see what they could hope to gain in the long run, except a hardening of attitudes.’
‘Unless they could pin the blame on the other side,’ Stone murmured, thinking aloud.
‘Or unless they reckoned on getting someone more sympathetic to their views instead,’ Nick suggested.
Pascoe sighed and shook his head. ‘It doesn’t feel right. Something doesn’t add up. Still, it’s the nearest thing to a lead we’ve got at the moment. We’ll warn everyone concerned to tighten up on routine security and meanwhile we’ll just have to go on keeping our ears to the ground and hope to pick up some vibrations.’ He looked at the two men in front of him. ‘You two look about as alert as a couple of dead ferrets. Go home, for God’s sake, get some sleep; and come back when you don’t need matchsticks to prop your eyes open.’
They rose, but Stone lingered. ‘Has Leo been in contact today?’ he asked at length.
Pascoe looked at him, his head tilted slightly on one side.
‘She came in for a short while this morning. Of course, you knew she was back in London. She told me you both telephoned last night.’
Stone caught Nick’s eyes briefly and looked away.
‘Don’t you think we ought to be keeping an eye on her—now more than ever?’
‘Oh quite,’ agreed Pascoe smoothly. ‘But I take the point you made a few days ago. In the present situation I can’t afford to waste experienced agents like you two on “baby-minding”. I’ve assigned someone else to watch over Miss Cavendish—from a discreet distance, of course.’
‘From a discreet distance!’ Stone muttered, as they walked down the corridor towards the lift. ‘It had bloody well better be, otherwise when I find out who it is I’ll…’
He left the sentence unfinished. ‘Yeah,’ agreed Nick, ‘so will I.’
They were both back in Pascoe’s office at nine that evening. There had been no further progress in locating Zahran and Pascoe’s eyelids were drooping more heavily than ever.
‘What about the two birds we brought in?’ Stone asked. ‘Have they started to sing yet?’
‘Not to any tune we want to hear,’ Pascoe replied. ‘We know a little more than we did, but it doesn’t help us greatly. The English one is known to Special Branch as one of the leaders of a neo-Fascist organization which calls itself the “Sons of Empire”; though what they hope to gain from shacking up with the PLO we have yet to discover.’
‘What nationality is the other one?’ Nick asked.
‘His passport says Cypriot, but we suspect he is probably Palestinian.’
‘I was just wondering…’ Nick murmured. ‘Did we tell you that Leo spoke to him in his own language—I suppose it was his own language?’
Pascoe pursed his lips. ‘Oh, quite probably. That might have been Arabic, Turkish, Demotic Greek—or any one of a number of Middle Eastern languages. She’s fluent in several.’
Stone took a pace or two forward, leaned on the back of a chair and fixed Pascoe with an unwavering stare.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘apart from triple somersaults off a high wire, is there anything she doesn’t do?’ Then he stepped back and made a quick negating movement with his hand. ‘No, don’t tell me—she actually grew up in a circus and she’s been an accomplished trapeze artist since the age of 5.’
Pascoe gave one of his rare chuckles. ‘Not so far as I know. But she is an accomplished linguist. Which isn’t surprising considering it was her original field of study.’
‘In what sense?’ Nick asked, eager to extract any information while Pascoe was in an expansive mood.
‘When she left school she went up to Oxford to read modern languages.’
‘You mean she has a degree from Oxford as well,’ said Stone heavily.
‘No.’ Pascoe paused and Nick sensed that he felt he had said too much. ‘No, she left the university before taking her degree.’
Nick would have liked to press the conversation further but there was something about the way his chief’s mouth had closed on the last sentence that told him it would be useless.
Pascoe was sorting through some papers on his desk.
‘I’ve gone through those possible sightings which you marked,’ he said, ‘and there are two others which have come in since which also seem worth following up. I want you two to go and check them out on the spot, since you have seen Zahran more recently than anyone else. They’re fairly well dispersed—Bristol, Chichester, Essex, the far side of Birmingham and beyond. Divide them between you. If you get on the road tonight you should be able to start making enquiries first thing in the morning.’
* * *
It was late afternoon when Nick got back. He found Stone seated behind the desk in a spare office, reading a computer print-out. He looked up as Nick came in.
‘Any luck?’
Nick shook his head. ‘Not even the faintest sniff of the old fox. You?’
‘No, nothing. Complete waste of time.’
Nick indicated the print-out. ‘Got somet
hing useful there?’
‘Not useful exactly,’ Stone said thoughtfully. ‘Interesting.’
Nick dropped into a chair on the other side of the desk, took off his jacket and eased his arm out of the shoulder holster. ‘How long have you been back?’ he asked.
‘About an hour.’
‘How come you always get to finish before me?’ Nick complained.
Stone looked up and grinned. ‘Greater efficiency.’
‘You mean you break more speed limits,’ retorted his partner. Then, ‘Well, come on— interest me. I could do with something to stimulate my mind.’
Stone leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes. ‘I’m not sure that this is something I want to tell you about.’
‘So wait till next time you want me to change shifts with you or something…’ Nick returned.
Stone sighed. ‘OK, OK. What does the name Frank Wainwright mean to you?’
‘Nothing,’ said Nick blankly. ‘Should it?’
‘Suppose I add “Oxford—1973”?’
‘Good God,’ said Nick. ‘That’s a bit before my time!’
‘Yes, well,’ Stone replied, his voice heavily weighted with irony, ‘I appreciate that you were hardly out of nappies—’ he moved his feet neatly to avoid the kick which Nick aimed at him under the desk—‘but it was rather before mine too.’
‘So?’ queried Nick.
Stone looked at the printout. ‘Frank Wainwright was a biologist doing postgraduate research into genetic engineering. His work had a potential application to biological warfare. In November 1973 he was suspected of and subsequently proved to have been, passing on his results to the Russians; but before any action could be taken against him he committed suicide, which is why the matter never came to court.’
Nick looked puzzled. ‘I still don’t see how this is relevant.’
‘I didn’t say it was relevant,’ Stone returned. ‘I said it was interesting.’
‘In what way, interesting?’
Stone shook his head despairingly. ‘Oxford,’ he said slowly. ‘1973. Pascoe said Leo went up to Oxford immediately after leaving school, so that would have been…?’