Author: Peter James
Category: Literature
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Arthur popped another sweet in his mouth and chewed for a few moments. ‘What I’m saying to you is, don’t antagonise someone like Commander Scatliffe; one day – it could be tomorrow, in a week, a month, or five years, but one day, as sure as the sun rises and sets every morning – he’s going to have a job come up that he knows is going to get one of his agents killed; and when he’s going through that list of those he could easiest spare you don’t want to find your name is at the top. That’s all.’ He handed my plastic chip back to me. ‘I’ve got the gen on this little fellow,’ he said.
Arthur had made it clear that the subject was now closed. He tapped the chip a few times on his desk.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s a booking clerk with a strange bias.’ He went on to tell me exactly what I already knew about the chip. ‘Where did you get it? And don’t tell me it fell off the back of a lorry!’
‘I dug it out of a hole in the ground.’
He smiled. ‘You don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that there might be any connection in this chip between one Dr Yuri Orchnev and a certain Mr X, not unlikely to be one Charles Harrison, of Intercontinental Plastics Corporation in New York?’
I came close to falling off my chair. ‘How the hell did you find that out?’
‘Old Wotan’s not too bad at digging either.’ He smiled. ‘Have another sweet?’
I thought in silence for some moments. Wotan wasn’t a magician. It was a computer that could do no more than assemble, arrange and occasionally analyse facts that humans fed into it. If Wotan could figure out that Charlie Harrison was a mole, and I had figured it out myself pretty easily, then how, I wondered, did whoever originally hired him let him slip through the security nets? ‘Who else other than you knows this?’
‘Fifeshire. He ordered me to start running checks on all Intercontinental staff back in June. I sent him a memorandum of my view about Harrison on, er, let me see –’ he tapped the keyboard – ‘August 11th.’
I went very cold. ‘How did you send it?’
‘Courier. Security envelope. Usual procedure.’
‘How did you find out about Orchnev?’
‘It’s logical: deputy chief of KGB computer technology; a mole in our own computer concern – this little chip might well be the link.’ He paused and blushed; his beard twitched. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t much feel like facing my wife after I dropped you off,’ he blushed more. ‘So I came straight back here and set to work; I felt that if you’d brought it, it must be pretty interesting – but don’t let that go to your head.’
Now I realised why Arthur had been sheet-white and shaking; it wasn’t that he was about to be bumped off; it was simply lack of sleep. I also realised how he’d got to the position he held: he’d earned it.
‘Surely this method of communication must now have been dropped by the Russians – they must know that Orchnev has defected and passed the information on to either the Americans or the British?’
‘No, I don’t think so at all; our information is that the wretched Orchnev was bumped off shortly after he arrived in the States and before he had a chance to make contact with anyone.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘By tuning in to Charlie Harrison; about an hour and a half ago.’ He gave an extremely broad beam.
For sure, in spite of all that icing sugar that adorned him, there were no flies on Arthur.
‘Who bumped him off?’ I asked.
‘Well – I only came in at the tail end of a message so I didn’t get all the facts – but I would presume the Russians themselves; unless you know better?’ He looked quizzically at me.
‘I wish I did,’ was all I decided to say.
I left Arthur’s office and went out into the corridor; two extremely large men, about my age, nearly tripped over themselves in their hurry to get up from their chairs. They looked as though they had been constructed from a twin-pack Action Man kit. They succeeded in blocking my path in both directions at once. ‘Mr Flynn?’ they asked in stereo.
‘He’s in there,’ I said.
‘One moment, please.’ One of them clamped his hand around my wrist. The other knocked on Arthur’s door. I had taken an instant dislike to the one who held my wrist and I expressed this dislike by swinging my free fist, with all the force I could muster, into the area of his polyester-and-wool mixture, creaseproof, ready-to-wear suit trousers, about half an inch below where the zipper stopped; this caused him to start performing an action not unlike that of a Muslim saying his midday prayers, and I took advantage of the situation by bolting off down the corridor. I cut down through a couple of fire doors, up the back steps, past a couple of security guards, who nodded politely at me, and came out into the middle of a small, tatty barber shop in a basement off North Audley Street; this shop was one of the several camouflaged entrances to the complex. ‘Afternoon, Henry,’ I said.
The barber lifted his scissors from the short back and sides he was performing. ‘Afternoon, sir.’
I was out into the street, doubled round into Park Lane, and managed to get straight into a taxi that was unloading a fare at an apartment building.
‘Carlton House Terrace,’ I said, ‘56.’
I got out at 56, flashed my security pass and, avoiding the excruciatingly slow lift, sprinted the four flights of stairs up to the Control floor.
There was the hawk-nosed, skinny, wrinkly tartar perched at the typewriter in the ante-room to Scatliffe’s office; she lifted her bill to enquire the purpose of my visit and then promptly had to duck it under her desk in order to retrieve the pile of papers my slipstream had swept off it. I stormed straight into Scatliffe’s office and caught him well and truly on the hop, one hand holding a telephone receiver to his ear, the other supporting a finger up his nose. The finger came out smartly and he snapped into the telephone, ‘He’s here now,’ and replaced the receiver.
‘I want to know what the hell’s going on, Scatliffe. I’m just about through with you and everything else, I’ve had it up to here.’ I swung my hand up under my chin. ‘I’ve been kidnapped, shot at, my car’s been blown up, my home’s been destroyed. I’m mad and I’m fed up, Scatliffe, I’m fed up with the whole damn thing and I want some explanations.’
He stood in rock silence for a long time, his cold eyes colder than ever, his small frame cosseted inside his expensive and natty tweed suit, his pasty-white face shaking like a blancmange in a breeze. He clenched and opened his hands, pushing his white knuckles down on the leather top of his desk, and lifting them up again. Slowly he leaned forward; his lips curved into a circle and he began to spit out his words like a machine gun. ‘I have been trying to get hold of you for eight days. You have gone absent without leave and I’m going to have you very severely disciplined. You have caused this department untold damage with your crazy recklessness, God alone knows what you have been up to but you must have taken complete and utter leave of your senses, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, breaking into my house, breaking into Mr Wetherby’s flat, breaking your cover and returning to England, going here, going there, going bloody everywhere. Who the hell do you think you are? Have you gone completely and utterly mad? How much of the Secret Service do you intend to destroy before you’ve finished? Half of it? Three quarters of it? Or all of it? You’re not above the law – who the hell gave you permission to start rummaging in my house? Who the hell gave you permission to beat up a member of staff less than ten minutes ago? I’ve got a million questions for you, Flynn, and I want every single one of them answered and answered thoroughly, and if you don’t have some damn good answers, the consequences for you are going to be grave, very grave indeed. Do I make myself clear?’
I looked at him and with great restraint said, ‘Yes. Perfectly clear.’
‘You’re removed from your assignment as from now. You’ll work inside this building on your report and when you have finished it you will be suspended from this Service until we have decided wh
at to do about you. You are not to leave London and you are to keep this office informed of your exact whereabouts, day and night. Is that also clear?’
‘It is. And I want my house put back into order within half an hour.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know because I won’t believe it. My house has been taken apart at the seams.’
‘I don’t know anything about your house; I didn’t even know you had a house. Perhaps you’ve had burglars. You do get them in England, you know.’
‘Burglars don’t saw your radiators in half.’
‘If you’re accusing me I’d like it in writing.’
‘You’ll get it.’ I stormed back out and sent the siren’s pile scattering back onto the floor again.
I went down to the third floor to my office. It was just about an office, at any rate: it made the average changing room of a King’s Road boutique look like the Mansion House banqueting hall. It had one chair, one desk and one light, and had to be entered sideways, and then by someone slim and agile. It was tucked away at the back of the accounts department; all agents’ offices were tucked away in different parts of different buildings so that no one would know who were agents and who were lesser or greater minions. For all the accounts department knew, I could be a humble costings clerk; for all I knew, the entire accounts department could actually be field operatives in disguise – except that most of them didn’t look as though they were capable of going to the bathroom unaided.
I filled in a requisition form and took it along to the filing clerk; he looked like he lived in a cosy little bed inside one of his filing cabinets. He was about 50, very short indeed, with an immaculate three-piece pin-stripe suit, watch chain, tie chain, chain-link sleeve bands and no doubt chain-link garters. His shirt was clean, his suit immaculately pressed, and every hair on his head perfectly and permanently ironed into place. Unfortunately the wretched man had filthy body odour and the rest of the staff permanently kept well clear of him.
Whilst accepting my requisition form with his usual dispassionate seriousness his face expressed the merest trace of excitement at the prospect of actually having a task to do. Without a word he scurried to a cabinet immediately behind him, pulled out a drawer about halfway up it, and had to stand on tiptoe in order to see into it; he shovelled his two arms in over the top and gave the impression from behind of an errant schoolboy trying to peer into someone else’s Christmas stocking. He rummaged about for some while then produced a sheath of papers. He came back over, slipped them inside an envelope and handed them to me.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He nodded silently and I realised I had never in all the time I had been here heard him speak. I wondered if perhaps he was a mute. I turned to go back to my office when behind me I heard him suddenly and loudly say, ‘High!’
I turned around thinking he must have discovered his personal problem, but he was pointing at the filing cabinet.
‘Difficult for me to reach up there,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t bother me,’ he went on. ‘Any time I can oblige,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
I decided the Department must have got him cheap. I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope. Inside was a wadge of phone bills attached to massive breakdowns of times, zones and units; these breakdowns had been instigated by Scatliffe so that they could be analysed for cost-effective use of the telephones. Even MI5 had budget problems.
The wadge I held was all the telephone bills of the Department for the past six months; it was a hefty wadge – the Department didn’t scrimp on phone calls. I began with the April, May, June quarter and turned to May 1st, three and a half months before Fifeshire’s shooting.
21
The British telephone bill, as interpreted by Commander Clive Scatliffe, deserved to be in the Guinness Book of Records. The heading should be: ‘Most unintelligible communication ever produced.’ It was after eleven o’clock that night and I was just beginning to master those portions of it that it was in any way possible to master. I had sorted out inland call charges, peak rate, standard rate, cheap rate, direct dialled and operator dialled, exclusive of Value Added Tax, inclusive of Value Added Tax, analysed the lower operator charge calls and the normal operator charge calls, the international call charges, standard rate, cheap rate, reverse-charge call rate; even without Scatliffe’s interference, I wondered how any normal human being could take such an unwise step as to have a telephone installed in his home without owning the latest data-processing equipment with which to decipher the bills.
But eventually I began to make headway and I was pleased because I hadn’t really expected this particular avenue to turn up much. There was a distinct increase in the number of outgoing calls made from Scatliffe’s office during the period immediately preceding the shooting of Fifeshire, continuing to peak for some while after, and then tailing away again. Whether it was coincidence, or whether it was part and parcel of that whole mystery, was something I had to try and find out. What the bills could not tell me was to whom these calls were actually made; from their charge-band rates it could have been to any of about 5,000 different places within a 100 to 7,000-mile radius of Whitehall. But working slowly and systematically at them, studying the charge-band rates and counting the units, I was able to establish that the calls were mostly made after 1.00 pm. Assuming they were made to another office rather than to a residence, an analysis of the time-zone charts eliminated half the working population of the world who would have either left their offices, or not yet arrived at 1.00 pm Greenwich Mean Time.
The most likely area, I came to the conclusion, was East Coast America, 5 hours behind: 2.00 pm English time would have been 9.00 am there. The East Coast of America contained both New York and Washington, the home of British Intelligence in the US and its main overseas base.
The offices were now very quiet; the cleaning staff, together with their security supervisors, had gone home. I took a walk around; apart from my own office, there were no lights on anywhere near; the only occupants of this floor were myself and the solitary night-security man who was seated in his cubby hole engrossed in a crossword. The other floors would be quiet too now except for the odd prowling security man.
I got up to Scatliffe’s office on the fifth floor without being spotted and started searching it as best I could, using only a small torch. His files produced nothing of interest to me and I turned my attentions to a wall safe. It opened without much trouble and this time I struck lucky: there was a detailed memorandum from MI6, Washington, to Fifeshire. It was dated 3 July and concerned Battanga’s proposed visit to London. It warned Fifeshire that there was a strong likelihood of an assassination attempt on Battanga while he was in London. It was marked Top Secret and was coded for Fifeshire’s attention only. Clipped to it was a smaller sheet of notepaper with Washington Embassy heading. On it were the words: ‘Please see this gets straight to Fifeshire.’ it was signed ‘G’.
There were two things that didn’t make sense: why G, whoever he was, had sent it to Scatliffe and not to Fifeshire, and why it was locked in Scatliffe’s safe. I removed the front casing of my watch to expose the camera lens beneath, another Trout and Trumbull patent, and photographed the documents before returning them to the safe.
All was still quiet and before leaving, I decided to have one further look around. Suddenly the floor-length curtains behind Scatliffe’s desk moved distinctly. I froze. They rocked a little, then stopped. I stayed still but the curtains didn’t move again for several minutes, when they suddenly shot straight forwards. It was only the fact that I heard the sound of the wind gusting that saved me from a certain and fatal coronary arrest.
All the same I still made sure it was only the wind, by marching swiftly over and pulling them back; I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d discovered Scatliffe standing there brandishing a tomahawk, but all there was was a weak reflection of my own face in the dark glass an
d a small portion of the Whitehall skyline beyond. A tiny window high up had not been properly shut and the wind had caught it, pulling it open, I turned to Scatliffe’s desk. Tucked in the edge of his blotter was a pile of messages which I had missed completely in my first look around. I sat down and read through them. None meant anything to me until I reached the one on the very bottom of the pile: It was dated with today’s date and was taken at 4.15. It said, ‘Mr Wetherby rang. Apologises for missing the meeting – says he went sailing instead (I think that’s what he said – bad line). Please call him immediately. Very urgent.’
I went back down to my office. It was past two and I was once more dog tired. I didn’t know whether I was glad or not to know Wetherby was alive. I didn’t have any feelings about anything at this particular moment. The knowledge that I once more had Fifeshire at the back of me was the only thing that kept up my morale; but if I was mistaken about him, or if anything happened to him before I had a chance to complete my current course of actions, I knew there was an extremely important part of my anatomy that Scatliffe would have delivered up on a golden platter; and if I was wrong with my hunches and my assumptions, and was misreading the still-flimsy evidence, it would be more than a little unfair to want to criticise him for such an action.