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Synopsis
By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory David Roche, a young double agent, is assigned to recruit British Intelligence Chief Dr David Audley into Soviet service. It isn't long before Roche begins to doubt the information he has been given . . . and it isn't long before he sees how he might use than information to free himself of his obligations to both sides. Roche joins Audley and two friends at an ancient tower in the French countryside, and also meets with Lady Alexandra Champeney-Perowne - who shows him why it is so vital that he get out. And out he goes, in an exciting denouement involving the KGB, British Intelligence and - out of the blue - a team of Algerian terrorists.
Release date: September 6, 2012
Publisher: Orion
Print pages: 416
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Soldier No More
Anthony Price
PROLOGUE: PYREXIA OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
Staring at the blank ceiling above him, Roche knew exactly how poor Adam had felt in the garden, stark naked and scared out of his wits.
But finally God cleared his throat to indicate that he had reached a decision.
“All right, you can put on your clothes, Captain Roche. And don’t look so worried. There’s absolutely nothing to be alarmed about—I’m not going to invalide you out,
or anything drastic like that, if that’s what you’ve been afraid of.”
Despair filled Roche. Ever since they’d decided to refer him to God he’d been buoyed up by the hope that there might be something rather seriously wrong with him, at least
sufficiently for them to throw him out on the grounds of ill-health. To that end he had most scrupulously avoided taking the medication his French doctor had prescribed, and had done everything he
had been told not to do. But he never did have any luck.
“Then what’s wrong with me?” he said plaintively. “There is something wrong, damn it!”
“Oh yes . . . you’ve had a fever, but you’re getting over that now, even if somewhat slowly. . . . What I meant is that there’s nothing organically amiss. You’re
basically healthy.” God reacted to his doubts by increasing his own air of reassurance. “You’ve had . . . and to some extent you still have . . . what my late distinguished
predecessor in this job always diagnosed as ‘a touch of the old PUO.’”
“PUO?” Roche’s spirits fell even lower. PUO sounded rather common, and not at all serious.
“‘Pyrexia of Unknown Origin.’ But then he learnt most of his medicine in the Ypres salient in 1917. . . whereas I learnt most of mine with the Americans in Italy in ’44.
And they called it variously ‘battle fatigue’ or ‘combat fatigue’ when it came to causes, as opposed to symptoms.” The reassurance became even blander.
“I’ve seen much worse than you, Captain—you’ve still got a lot of mileage in you, don’t worry.”
About a quarter of a mile, to the café-bar on the corner of the boulevard to be exact, thought Roche.
God regarded him benignly, then glanced down at the open folder at his elbow. “Military Intelligence here in Paris?”
“Yes sir.”
God looked up. “In the field?”
This was what Roche had feared, for it was easily checkable if it wasn’t down there in front of him already. But fear had given him time to prepare for it.
“Not really, sir. Pretty damn desk-bound at the moment, actually. I’m a communications officer, mostly economic traffic related to military capabilities—that sort of
stuff.” He shrugged modestly. “There are specific additional assignments from time to time, naturally . . .” He left the implication of secret heroism unspoken between them.
“I’m currently working on sources of arms for the Algerian rebels, sir.”
God nodded. “An assignment not without risk, that would be?”
Another modest shrug would do there.
“And they’re working you hard, of course?”
“The French are a bit awkward these days, sir.” He advanced the only truth he could think of with proper diffidence.
“Very true.” God smiled understandingly. “And that’s half the trouble with you people just at the moment. It’s a matter of stress, and it happens to all of you. . .
. You have to understand that you’re only ordinary men, but you have to do extraordinary things from time to time . . . and that exacts a correspondingly extraordinary price. That’s
what battle fatigue was: the overdrawing on men’s emotional current accounts. You, Captain Roche . . . you are probably well-adjusted for normal withdrawals, but not for the contempt in which
your French colleagues now hold the British, since the Suez business.”
The only Frenchman who frightened Roche was Jean-Paul, and he wasn’t at all sure that Jean-Paul was actually French. It was the Comrades who sickened him.
“But I’m not going to pack you back to England, that would only scar you permanently. If you run away now, you’ll run away again.” God picked up his fountain pen.
“Now . . . I’m going to give you a month’s leave—go and find the sun in the south somewhere, and laze in it”—he looked up again quickly—“I see
you’re not married . . . but have you got a girl-friend? If so, take her . . . if not—get one. Right?”
Roche was speechless.
“I’ll give you a tonic—and take that too. But go easy on the alcohol—I want you mended, not drugged. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Roche needed a drink badly now.
“But stay in France. Your French is fluent, I take it?”
“Yes, sir.” His fluent French, thought Roche, was probably why he was still here. “Why France?”
“Because most of your problem is here, and you’ve got to come to terms with it. Take the girl-friend—take the tonic . . . and take a month.” God passed a month across the
desk to him. “And come back and see me in five weeks—”
Five minutes later Roche had the shakes again, right on the street outside God’s house and worse than before. And five minutes after that he was fortifying himself in the
café-bar at the corner, in preparation before phoning in to Major Ballance.
He stared into the drink, trying not to drink it because he already needed another one.
A genuine illness, if not an actual disease, might have been enough to put Jean-Paul off. But what he’d got was the shakes, and a month to get rid of them, which was worse, because in a
month they’d be worse too. And then, or very soon, Jean-Paul would see them; and then it wouldn’t be a tonic and a month’s leave, because it would be a matter of Jean-Paul’s
preservation.
He had drunk the drink, and the waiter, who knew his man, filled his glass without being asked.
God had been right about one thing: it was a sort of disease, even if it wasn’t some bloody pyrexia of unknown origin.
He had caught it on a beach in Japan, and it had been feeding on him for six years without his knowing about it, and then without his understanding the symptoms he had experienced—not
until the first authentic reports had come out of Hungary had he begun to add the facts to those symptoms.
But causes hardly mattered now. All that mattered was the progression of the shakes from his hands to his face, because when that happened Jean-Paul was bound to recognise the tell-tale signs,
which he must be trained to spot.
He left his second drink half-finished and found the phone.
“Roche here—Bill?”
“How are you, young David? What did the quack say?”
“He’s given me a tonic, Bill.”
Major Ballance started to laugh, but the laugh turned into a paroxysm of coughing before Roche could add his month’s leave to the tonic.
Roche waited for the noise to subside. “Bill?”
“A tonic?” Major Ballance managed at last, still wheezing. “Then you will allow me to add a little gin to it—export gin.”
“What?”
“‘Most Urgent from London for Captain Roche.’ Somebody up there loves you after all.”
It was too early for Bill to start drinking. “What d’you mean, Bill?”
“I mean . . . you’ve got a posting—and a very good one too. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer chap.”
Roche leaned against the wall. “A posting?”
“That’s what it amounts to. They want to see you there tomorrow morning at 1100 hours—a nice civilised time—FSMO 1100 hours, best bib and tucker.”
Roche’s hand started to shake again. “What’s so good about that, Bill? Maybe they’re going to bowler-hat me.” That would be the day! But something worse was far
more likely.
“Not what but who, David. And where . . . Sir Eustace Avery in Room 821, Eighth Floor, Abernathy House. So I’m booking you an afternoon flight to give you time
to take a leisurely breakfast tomorrow. Congratulations.”
“Sir Eustace Avery?” Roche dredged his memory. “Isn’t he the one you said was a stuffed shirt?”
“Ah-ha! Stuffed shirt he may be. But he was plain Mr. Avery then, on the RIP sub-committee last year—now he’s been birthday-honoured into Sir Eustace, as a reward for
his great and good services in the late catastrophe . . . So if he wants you, young David, you’ll be hitching your waggon to a star, not vegetating in our communications room here. . . . The
Eighth Floor of the Abernathy overlooks the river, too—on the Embankment, just past Cleopatra’s Needle. Very ’igh class property for very ’igh class operations.”
“What operations, Bill?”
“The new group, dear boy—don’t you ever listen to the in-house gossip?”
Bill always knew everything. “What new group?”
“Ah . . . well, it is a bit secret, I suppose. Maybe I shouldn’t gab about it on an open line.” Major Ballance brightened. “But then the Frogs aren’t really into
wire-tapping, and everyone except you this side of the Kremlin already knows about it. So I don’t suppose it matters much . . . Sir Eustace’s new group—‘Research and
Development’ is the euphemism in current use . . . He’s been recruiting for the last month—everyone hand-picked, true-blue and never been a card-carrying CP member, even as a
child . . . and with automatic promotion, so rumour has it. Big time stuff, in fact . . . so congratulations, Major Roche.”
Roche was horrified. “But Bill . . . I’ve got a chit for a month’s leave in my pocket—sick leave.”
“Then tear it up. This is your great opportunity. Besides which, it’s an order, so you don’t have any choice.” Bill’s voice hardened, then softened again.
“And it’s what you really need for what ails you, young David. A cure is much better than a tonic for a sick man—”
He had to phone Jean-Paul next, but he needed the rest of his drink more than ever.
Room 821 sounded more like a kill than a cure for his sickness. In fact, the only person who’d be really pleased was Jean-Paul himself, who was always reproaching him with the slowness of
his professional advancement and the low grade of his material.
He stared into the colourless liquid. There was no escaping from the truth that he’d always been a great disappointment to the Comrades, as well as to himself. If Bill was right—and
Bill was usually right—it was the cruellest of ironies that he was now about to go up at last when he was at last resolved to get out at the first safe opportunity.
But they’d got him now, both of them: if he fluffed the interview, he’d be on borrowed time with Jean-Paul; but if he didn’t fluff it he’d be exactly where the Comrades
had always wanted him to be, and then they’d never let go.
There was only one option left, but it terrified him utterly.
PUO was a laugh: he hadn’t got PUO and there was no cure for what he’d got.
The only treatment for gangrene was amputation.
I
“Mr. Cox?” inquired a voice, disembodied and slightly metallic, but also recognisably female.
Roche looked round the lift for some evidence of a microphone, and found nothing. There weren’t even any controls. Cox had simply ushered him into the blank box, and the doors had closed
behind them, and the lift had shuddered and moved downwards. Not down to a particular floor, but down to a level, and some level in the Ninth Circle of Nether Hell, which Dante had reserved
for the traitors.
“And Captain Roche,” replied Cox, to no one in particular, unperturbed by the absence of anything into which the reply could be addressed, “Captain Roche’s appointment is
timed for eleven-hundred hours, madam.”
The Ninth Circle was reserved respectively for traitors to their lords, their guests, their country and their kindred, but Roche couldn’t remember in which order the
levels were disposed, down to the great bottomless frozen lake far beneath the fires of Hell. But it did occur to him that—strictly speaking—he was now for the first time in a sort of
limbo between all the circles and levels, since he was at last absolutely open-minded on the subject of betrayal: he was prepared to betray either side, as the occasion and the advantage
offered.
The lift shuddered again, and the doors slid open abruptly. Roche was confronted by a sharp-faced woman of indeterminate age in prison-grey and pearls, against a backdrop of
London roofscape.
“Captain Roche—I-am-so-sorry-you’ve-been-delayed-like-this,” the woman greeted him insincerely. “Have you the documentation, Mr. Cox?”
Cox, apparently struck dumb with awe at this apparition, offered her the blue card with Roche’s photograph on it which he had collected, with Roche, from the porter in the entrance
kiosk.
The woman compared Roche with his photograph, and clearly found the comparison unsatisfactory.
“This is supposed to be you, is it?” she admonished Roche, as though it was his fault that the photographer had failed.
Roche was at a loss to think of any other way that he could prove he was himself when she abruptly reversed the card for him to see. It certainly didn’t look like him, this fresh-faced
subaltern—not like the wary (if not shifty) Roche who faced him in the shaving-mirror each morning.
He took another look at the picture. This was undoubtedly the Tokyo picture of 2/Lt. (T/Capt.) Roche. And, true enough, this Roche had been just twenty-one years of age, while looking all of
eighteen, and the shaving-mirror Roche of this morning, six years of treason on, didn’t look a day under forty.
He grinned at her uncertainly. “I was a lot younger then—Korean War, and all that . . . Mrs.—?”
“Mrs. Harlin, Captain Roche. This photograph needs updating.”
Cox coughed politely by way of a diversion. “Do you wish me to remain, madam? Or will you ring for me?” he asked her humbly, without looking at Roche.
“Just do what the book says, Mr. Cox.”
“Thank you, madam,” said Cox, taking two paces back smartly and thankfully into the lift, still without looking at Roche.
“Captain Roche, Sir Eustace,” said Mrs. Harlin.
Sir Eustace was standing behind a huge desk, half-framed by the great gilded frame of the portrait-of-a-naval-officer behind him.
Roche thought: That must be the Sargent picture of “Blinker” Hall and if Avery’s got that picture for his room then Bill Ballance and Jean-Paul are both right about the new
group.
“David—”
Roche tore himself away from Admiral Hall’s basilisk eye. It was Thain, the only man in Personnel Recruitment who had thought well of him after he’d fluffed half the tests in
training.
“David—let me introduce you—Sir Eustace, this is David Roche, about whom you’ve been hearing so much these last few days.”
Christ! Thain had come up in the world since PRT days, to be in this company, overlooked by Admiral Hall himself. But that at least accounted for his own presence, even if “hearing so
much” could hardly ring true. Since his PRT debacle he’d been little more than a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, in spite of Thain’s approval. So there really wasn’t so
much to hear about.
“Sir Eustace,” he mumbled. But he had to do better than that—here—now—by God! He had to shine—
“Colonel Clinton, David—”
Clinton was another new face, but the name rang faint warning bells: one glance at Colonel Clinton was two glances too many—the thought of Colonel Clinton hearing so much these last few
days was blood-curdling.
Clinton smiled a terrible non-smile, far worse than Jean-Paul’s bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck grin. “Roche.”
“Sir!” Roche did his best to make the word stand to attention for him.
“And St. John Latimer, of course,” concluded Thain.
St. John—Sin-jun—Latimer was very young, and podgy with it; and languid, like an Oxford undergraduate who had strayed into the wrong party but was too idle to do anything
about it.
“Latimer,” said Roche.
“St. John Latimer,” corrected St. John Latimer, swaying at Roche’s faux pas.
Latimer—plain Latimer, damn it—was standing to the right and slightly behind Colonel Clinton, in the creature-to-the-Duke position, so that was what he might very well be
since he was too young to be here by right of experience and seniority. But he might also be some sort of catalyst, introduced to sting a reaction from the provincial and dull Captain Roche.
“Is that so?” Well, if they want a reaction, at least let it be a controlled one. “Jolly good!”
Like all good catalysts, Latimer showed no sign of change at this controlled Roche-reaction, he didn’t seem even to have heard it.
“Yes . . .” It was Thain who produced the reaction, and it was a decidedly uneasy one. “Yes—well, I must be off now”—he gave Roche a glance which was more
charged with doubt than encouragement, like a gladiatorial trainer delivering a novice into the arena—“subject to confirmation and—ah—mutual agreement, David, you will be
transferred from the Paris station to Sir Eustace’s care . . . on a temporary basis, of course—Colonel Clinton will fill you in on the details.”
The figure of speech was unfortunate after the memory of SSM Lark had been conjured up in Roche’s memory: to be filled in at Shaiba Barracks involved the scattering of blood and teeth in
all directions.
“Sir Eustace—Colonel—” Thain looked at Latimer, who was examining the pattern on the carpet, and decided against including him in the general farewell. Perhaps he
hadn’t come up in the world, or not as far as the present company and venue had suggested; perhaps he had only been present to complete the formality of pushing the doomed Roche out on to the
arena’s sunlit ellipse of sand for the killing.
“Thank you, Malcolm. You’ve been a great help,” said Sir Eustace with the easy insincerity of long experience. “I’m sorry you have to go . . .”
He wasn’t sorry. And, what was worse, Thain wasn’t sorry either.
“David—nice to see you again.” Thain nodded.
He wasn’t sorry because he expected Roche to fluff it again. And maybe that had also been what Jean-Paul expected, except the possible benefit of his not fluffing it outweighed the
attendant risk. What was more, his—Roche’s—very presence here, win or lose, increased his value as a bargaining counter on the board. After this, for Jean-Paul, he would be worth
trading in for some other advantage as he had never been before. He was on the way to becoming a blue chip.
And that made his own betrayal of Jean-Paul even better sense. More than ever, he had to do well now simply to keep ahead of them—both of them—until he could bargain on his
own account.
The door closed behind Thain.
“Now then, David—sit down—” Sir Eustace indicated the central chair in front of his enormous desk.
Roche sat down.
There was a file on Sir Eustace’s blotter, which he pushed forward into the sphere of influence within Roche’s reach.
Roche made no attempt to pick up the file, let alone touch it, never mind open it. Instinct was in charge now, preventing him from breaking the taboos.
“We’ve got another David for you, in there,” said Sir Eustace.
“Audley,” said Colonel Clinton. “David Audley.”
“We want him,” said Clinton.
Roche stared at him. “He’s one of theirs?”
“He’s one of nobody’s,” said Clinton. “But we want him to work for us. And you are going to get him for us, Roche.”
II
“It’ll take about an hour, maybe,” said the mechanic.
Roche frowned. “An hour?”
“I’m on the pumps as well, see . . .” The mechanic sized him up. “And then I got to find the right parts.”
“What parts?” Roche hadn’t intended to argue the toss, but with what he’d most carefully done to the engine not an hour before, half an hour’s work was a generous
estimate, and no replacements were necessary. “What parts?”
“Ah . . . well . . .” The mechanic blinked uneasily. “There’s this bracket, for a start”—he reached into the engine and wrenched fiercely at something out of
sight—“you didn’t ought to go round with it like that, it’ll let you down when you’re miles from anywhere.” He shook his head. “An’ it’s a
fiddling old job, too . . . maybe three-quarters of an hour, say?”
Roche realised that he had miscalculated. He had concentrated on the necessary time element, but had not allowed for time being someone else’s profit.
“You’ve got the parts?” he capitulated.
“Oh yes, sir.” The mechanic relaxed. “It’s only I dunno where to put my hand on ’em right off. But I’ve got ’em, don’t you worry.”
“Hmm . . .” Roche looked at his watch. “It’s simply that I’ve this important business engagement and I don’t want to be too late. So if you can hurry it up as
best you can . . .” He left the possibility of extra reward implicit in the plea.
“Half-hour, sir,” said the mechanic cheerfully, recognising a sucker. “There ain’t much traffic today, so it should be quiet on the pumps, with a bit of luck.”
“Can I use your phone?”
“’Elp yourself, sir. In the office—”
Roche dialled the number he’d been given, and a woman answered.
“Roche for Major Stocker . . .” Stocker was also new to him too. They were all new to him, apart from Thain, who was unlikely to appear again. It was like making a fresh start, in a
new job, as a new person . . . with a new personality which he could adjust according to need as he went along.
“Roche here, sir. The car they gave me has broken down—I’m phoning from a garage just outside Leatherhead—yes, sir, Leatherhead—” he didn’t say which
side, but even if the Major offered to come and collect him the distance was nicely calculated.
The Major didn’t offer.
“The man says three-quarters of an hour, but I don’t think it’ll be as much, sir . . . Yes, sir, I’ll ginger him up—I’ll be with you as soon as I can,
sir.”
He didn’t like the sound of the Major. But then he had never liked the sound of majors, who always seemed to exist in a limbo, either embittered with the failure of their hopes or hungry
for the promotion almost within their grasp.
Still, that was a good job well done: he had his half-hour now, and a generous half-hour too, all correct and accounted for and accountable, and above all innocent. The rest depended on others,
and on their correct observance of the routine.
He sauntered across the forecourt towards the workshop feeling reassured, if not happy. It might all be routine, and the Comrades were always sticklers for routine. Yet the effort involved even
in this routine, and the precautions they had taken in communicating with him, made him feel more important than he had felt for years. And if the feeling was a secret one, like the rich
man’s pleasure in stolen masterpieces in his hidden gallery, then that was a small price to pay for the enjoyment of it.
The mechanic withdrew his head from the raised bonnet and bobbed encouragingly at him.
“Found the right bracket, sir—just the job!” He plunged his head back quickly, before Roche could question him or God could strike him down for bearing false witness against
the British Motor Corporation.
Roche nodded uselessly at his back, and continued his aimless saunter, back on to the forecourt, slowly past the pumps, to the very edge of the highway.
He glanced down the road incuriously, and then looked at his watch, hunching himself momentarily against the chill wind of a failed English August. He wished that he hadn’t given up
smoking, but perhaps the new Roche would start smoking again. He had given up cigarettes because Julie didn’t like them, and had started drinking instead; and it had been Jean-Paul who was
always cautioning him to give up drinking, because he was drinking too much and too often. But the new Roche owed allegiance to neither Julie nor Jean-Paul, only to himself; and although the new
Roche now also frowned on drink, which warped the judgement, cigarettes only sapped top physical performance . . . and the ability to run away was no longer an essential requirement, with what he
had in mind for himself.
Meanwhile, he let himself seem to notice the church on the other side of the road for the first time. It was a very ordinary sort of church, old but not ancient, with a squat spire only a few
feet above the roof and a lych-gate entrance to the churchyard. A dozen yards along from the lych-gate there was the opening of a narrow track which appeared to skirt the churchyard wall, leading
to the rear of the church. In the opening of the track a dark-green Morris Minor van was parked, with an overhanging extending ladder fixed to its roof, from the end of which a scrap of red rag
hung as a warning. A nondescript man in blue overalls, with a cigarette end in his mouth and a Daily Sketch in his hands, leaned against the van, the very model of a modern British workman
as portrayed in the cinema and the Tory newspapers, reality imitating the art.
Or not, as the case may be, decided Roche, having already noted the man as he had coaxed the car into the garage and observing now that there was no one else in view.
He took a last look at the garage workshop, waited for a lorry to pass, and then strolled across the road to a point midway between the lych-gate and the track.
Somewhat to his disappointment the man gave no sign of interest in him beyond the briefest blank-eyed glance over the top of his paper.
Roche paused irresolutely for a moment, looking up and down the empty road again. Then his confidence reasserted itself, on the basis that he had nothing to fear.
If he was wrong about the man, it didn’t matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else: if he
was the look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn’t worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely
embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche’s naïveté; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings,
would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.
Nothing to fear. He had told them where he was going, and they had set up this meeting, deliberately within his time schedule; and if it was that important to them—or even if
it wasn’t—they could be relied on to oversee their security; so that if there was the least doubt about that security then there would simply be no contact, and he would have to
soldier on until they were ready to try again.
He pushed through the gate and crossed the few yards to the porch with the unhurried step of a Roche with a clear conscience and half an unscheduled hour to kill. If they didn’t make
contact it would be annoying, because the more he knew about Audley, David Longsdon, the better; but at this stage of the proceedings it was no more than that—merely annoying.
So then he would just look at the church, which might well be more interesting inside than out, because that was very much what he would have done if the delay had been genuine, because looking at
churches was one of his hobbies.
Absolutely nothing to fear. It even occurred to him, and the thought was an added reassurance, that they had orchestrated this scene out of their knowledge of him, for that very reason.
The heavy latch cracked like a pistol shot in the stillness of the empty church beyond.
If they were here, then still nothing to fear. The time might come when he had everything to fear, but at this moment each side trusted him, and valued him, and it was “This is your
big chance, David”—Jean-Paul the Comrade and Eustace Avery, Knight Commander of the British Empire, were in accord on that, if on nothing else.
And so it was, by God!
“Mr. Roche.”
At first sight, half-obscured by a great spray of roses, the fragrance of which filled the church with the odour of sanctity, the speaker might have been the twin brother of the Daily
Sketch reader outside.
“I am a friend of Jean-Paul. You can call me ‘Johnnie,’ Mr. Roche—and I shall call you David.”
The flatness of the features and the height of the cheekbones mocked ‘Johnnie’ into ‘Ivan’; or, if not Ivan, then some other East European equivalent, with a Mongol
horseman riding through the man’s ancestry at about the same time this church had been built.
“Johnnie,” Roche acknowledged the identification.
“How long do we have?” The voice didn’t fit the face—it was too accentless—any more than the face fitted the name; but now, subjectively, the whole man—who
wouldn’t have merited a second glance in a crowded street—the whole man overawed him no less than Clinton had done.
“About half an hour.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Guildford. I’m due to meet a man named Stocker.”
“Major Stocker?”
“That’s right. You know him?”
“Why?” Johnnie ignored the question. But he couldn’t think of Johnnie as Johnnie: the face, and those dark-brown pebble-eyes, neither dull nor bright but half-polished in an
unnatural way, made him think of Genghis Khan.
“He’s going to brief me on this man Audley.”
“He’s your controller—Stocker?”
“No—I don’t know . . . I’m to report to Colonel Clinton when—”
“Clinton?” The eyes and the face remained expressionless, but the voice moved. “Frederick C
Staring at the blank ceiling above him, Roche knew exactly how poor Adam had felt in the garden, stark naked and scared out of his wits.
But finally God cleared his throat to indicate that he had reached a decision.
“All right, you can put on your clothes, Captain Roche. And don’t look so worried. There’s absolutely nothing to be alarmed about—I’m not going to invalide you out,
or anything drastic like that, if that’s what you’ve been afraid of.”
Despair filled Roche. Ever since they’d decided to refer him to God he’d been buoyed up by the hope that there might be something rather seriously wrong with him, at least
sufficiently for them to throw him out on the grounds of ill-health. To that end he had most scrupulously avoided taking the medication his French doctor had prescribed, and had done everything he
had been told not to do. But he never did have any luck.
“Then what’s wrong with me?” he said plaintively. “There is something wrong, damn it!”
“Oh yes . . . you’ve had a fever, but you’re getting over that now, even if somewhat slowly. . . . What I meant is that there’s nothing organically amiss. You’re
basically healthy.” God reacted to his doubts by increasing his own air of reassurance. “You’ve had . . . and to some extent you still have . . . what my late distinguished
predecessor in this job always diagnosed as ‘a touch of the old PUO.’”
“PUO?” Roche’s spirits fell even lower. PUO sounded rather common, and not at all serious.
“‘Pyrexia of Unknown Origin.’ But then he learnt most of his medicine in the Ypres salient in 1917. . . whereas I learnt most of mine with the Americans in Italy in ’44.
And they called it variously ‘battle fatigue’ or ‘combat fatigue’ when it came to causes, as opposed to symptoms.” The reassurance became even blander.
“I’ve seen much worse than you, Captain—you’ve still got a lot of mileage in you, don’t worry.”
About a quarter of a mile, to the café-bar on the corner of the boulevard to be exact, thought Roche.
God regarded him benignly, then glanced down at the open folder at his elbow. “Military Intelligence here in Paris?”
“Yes sir.”
God looked up. “In the field?”
This was what Roche had feared, for it was easily checkable if it wasn’t down there in front of him already. But fear had given him time to prepare for it.
“Not really, sir. Pretty damn desk-bound at the moment, actually. I’m a communications officer, mostly economic traffic related to military capabilities—that sort of
stuff.” He shrugged modestly. “There are specific additional assignments from time to time, naturally . . .” He left the implication of secret heroism unspoken between them.
“I’m currently working on sources of arms for the Algerian rebels, sir.”
God nodded. “An assignment not without risk, that would be?”
Another modest shrug would do there.
“And they’re working you hard, of course?”
“The French are a bit awkward these days, sir.” He advanced the only truth he could think of with proper diffidence.
“Very true.” God smiled understandingly. “And that’s half the trouble with you people just at the moment. It’s a matter of stress, and it happens to all of you. . .
. You have to understand that you’re only ordinary men, but you have to do extraordinary things from time to time . . . and that exacts a correspondingly extraordinary price. That’s
what battle fatigue was: the overdrawing on men’s emotional current accounts. You, Captain Roche . . . you are probably well-adjusted for normal withdrawals, but not for the contempt in which
your French colleagues now hold the British, since the Suez business.”
The only Frenchman who frightened Roche was Jean-Paul, and he wasn’t at all sure that Jean-Paul was actually French. It was the Comrades who sickened him.
“But I’m not going to pack you back to England, that would only scar you permanently. If you run away now, you’ll run away again.” God picked up his fountain pen.
“Now . . . I’m going to give you a month’s leave—go and find the sun in the south somewhere, and laze in it”—he looked up again quickly—“I see
you’re not married . . . but have you got a girl-friend? If so, take her . . . if not—get one. Right?”
Roche was speechless.
“I’ll give you a tonic—and take that too. But go easy on the alcohol—I want you mended, not drugged. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Roche needed a drink badly now.
“But stay in France. Your French is fluent, I take it?”
“Yes, sir.” His fluent French, thought Roche, was probably why he was still here. “Why France?”
“Because most of your problem is here, and you’ve got to come to terms with it. Take the girl-friend—take the tonic . . . and take a month.” God passed a month across the
desk to him. “And come back and see me in five weeks—”
Five minutes later Roche had the shakes again, right on the street outside God’s house and worse than before. And five minutes after that he was fortifying himself in the
café-bar at the corner, in preparation before phoning in to Major Ballance.
He stared into the drink, trying not to drink it because he already needed another one.
A genuine illness, if not an actual disease, might have been enough to put Jean-Paul off. But what he’d got was the shakes, and a month to get rid of them, which was worse, because in a
month they’d be worse too. And then, or very soon, Jean-Paul would see them; and then it wouldn’t be a tonic and a month’s leave, because it would be a matter of Jean-Paul’s
preservation.
He had drunk the drink, and the waiter, who knew his man, filled his glass without being asked.
God had been right about one thing: it was a sort of disease, even if it wasn’t some bloody pyrexia of unknown origin.
He had caught it on a beach in Japan, and it had been feeding on him for six years without his knowing about it, and then without his understanding the symptoms he had experienced—not
until the first authentic reports had come out of Hungary had he begun to add the facts to those symptoms.
But causes hardly mattered now. All that mattered was the progression of the shakes from his hands to his face, because when that happened Jean-Paul was bound to recognise the tell-tale signs,
which he must be trained to spot.
He left his second drink half-finished and found the phone.
“Roche here—Bill?”
“How are you, young David? What did the quack say?”
“He’s given me a tonic, Bill.”
Major Ballance started to laugh, but the laugh turned into a paroxysm of coughing before Roche could add his month’s leave to the tonic.
Roche waited for the noise to subside. “Bill?”
“A tonic?” Major Ballance managed at last, still wheezing. “Then you will allow me to add a little gin to it—export gin.”
“What?”
“‘Most Urgent from London for Captain Roche.’ Somebody up there loves you after all.”
It was too early for Bill to start drinking. “What d’you mean, Bill?”
“I mean . . . you’ve got a posting—and a very good one too. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer chap.”
Roche leaned against the wall. “A posting?”
“That’s what it amounts to. They want to see you there tomorrow morning at 1100 hours—a nice civilised time—FSMO 1100 hours, best bib and tucker.”
Roche’s hand started to shake again. “What’s so good about that, Bill? Maybe they’re going to bowler-hat me.” That would be the day! But something worse was far
more likely.
“Not what but who, David. And where . . . Sir Eustace Avery in Room 821, Eighth Floor, Abernathy House. So I’m booking you an afternoon flight to give you time
to take a leisurely breakfast tomorrow. Congratulations.”
“Sir Eustace Avery?” Roche dredged his memory. “Isn’t he the one you said was a stuffed shirt?”
“Ah-ha! Stuffed shirt he may be. But he was plain Mr. Avery then, on the RIP sub-committee last year—now he’s been birthday-honoured into Sir Eustace, as a reward for
his great and good services in the late catastrophe . . . So if he wants you, young David, you’ll be hitching your waggon to a star, not vegetating in our communications room here. . . . The
Eighth Floor of the Abernathy overlooks the river, too—on the Embankment, just past Cleopatra’s Needle. Very ’igh class property for very ’igh class operations.”
“What operations, Bill?”
“The new group, dear boy—don’t you ever listen to the in-house gossip?”
Bill always knew everything. “What new group?”
“Ah . . . well, it is a bit secret, I suppose. Maybe I shouldn’t gab about it on an open line.” Major Ballance brightened. “But then the Frogs aren’t really into
wire-tapping, and everyone except you this side of the Kremlin already knows about it. So I don’t suppose it matters much . . . Sir Eustace’s new group—‘Research and
Development’ is the euphemism in current use . . . He’s been recruiting for the last month—everyone hand-picked, true-blue and never been a card-carrying CP member, even as a
child . . . and with automatic promotion, so rumour has it. Big time stuff, in fact . . . so congratulations, Major Roche.”
Roche was horrified. “But Bill . . . I’ve got a chit for a month’s leave in my pocket—sick leave.”
“Then tear it up. This is your great opportunity. Besides which, it’s an order, so you don’t have any choice.” Bill’s voice hardened, then softened again.
“And it’s what you really need for what ails you, young David. A cure is much better than a tonic for a sick man—”
He had to phone Jean-Paul next, but he needed the rest of his drink more than ever.
Room 821 sounded more like a kill than a cure for his sickness. In fact, the only person who’d be really pleased was Jean-Paul himself, who was always reproaching him with the slowness of
his professional advancement and the low grade of his material.
He stared into the colourless liquid. There was no escaping from the truth that he’d always been a great disappointment to the Comrades, as well as to himself. If Bill was right—and
Bill was usually right—it was the cruellest of ironies that he was now about to go up at last when he was at last resolved to get out at the first safe opportunity.
But they’d got him now, both of them: if he fluffed the interview, he’d be on borrowed time with Jean-Paul; but if he didn’t fluff it he’d be exactly where the Comrades
had always wanted him to be, and then they’d never let go.
There was only one option left, but it terrified him utterly.
PUO was a laugh: he hadn’t got PUO and there was no cure for what he’d got.
The only treatment for gangrene was amputation.
I
“Mr. Cox?” inquired a voice, disembodied and slightly metallic, but also recognisably female.
Roche looked round the lift for some evidence of a microphone, and found nothing. There weren’t even any controls. Cox had simply ushered him into the blank box, and the doors had closed
behind them, and the lift had shuddered and moved downwards. Not down to a particular floor, but down to a level, and some level in the Ninth Circle of Nether Hell, which Dante had reserved
for the traitors.
“And Captain Roche,” replied Cox, to no one in particular, unperturbed by the absence of anything into which the reply could be addressed, “Captain Roche’s appointment is
timed for eleven-hundred hours, madam.”
The Ninth Circle was reserved respectively for traitors to their lords, their guests, their country and their kindred, but Roche couldn’t remember in which order the
levels were disposed, down to the great bottomless frozen lake far beneath the fires of Hell. But it did occur to him that—strictly speaking—he was now for the first time in a sort of
limbo between all the circles and levels, since he was at last absolutely open-minded on the subject of betrayal: he was prepared to betray either side, as the occasion and the advantage
offered.
The lift shuddered again, and the doors slid open abruptly. Roche was confronted by a sharp-faced woman of indeterminate age in prison-grey and pearls, against a backdrop of
London roofscape.
“Captain Roche—I-am-so-sorry-you’ve-been-delayed-like-this,” the woman greeted him insincerely. “Have you the documentation, Mr. Cox?”
Cox, apparently struck dumb with awe at this apparition, offered her the blue card with Roche’s photograph on it which he had collected, with Roche, from the porter in the entrance
kiosk.
The woman compared Roche with his photograph, and clearly found the comparison unsatisfactory.
“This is supposed to be you, is it?” she admonished Roche, as though it was his fault that the photographer had failed.
Roche was at a loss to think of any other way that he could prove he was himself when she abruptly reversed the card for him to see. It certainly didn’t look like him, this fresh-faced
subaltern—not like the wary (if not shifty) Roche who faced him in the shaving-mirror each morning.
He took another look at the picture. This was undoubtedly the Tokyo picture of 2/Lt. (T/Capt.) Roche. And, true enough, this Roche had been just twenty-one years of age, while looking all of
eighteen, and the shaving-mirror Roche of this morning, six years of treason on, didn’t look a day under forty.
He grinned at her uncertainly. “I was a lot younger then—Korean War, and all that . . . Mrs.—?”
“Mrs. Harlin, Captain Roche. This photograph needs updating.”
Cox coughed politely by way of a diversion. “Do you wish me to remain, madam? Or will you ring for me?” he asked her humbly, without looking at Roche.
“Just do what the book says, Mr. Cox.”
“Thank you, madam,” said Cox, taking two paces back smartly and thankfully into the lift, still without looking at Roche.
“Captain Roche, Sir Eustace,” said Mrs. Harlin.
Sir Eustace was standing behind a huge desk, half-framed by the great gilded frame of the portrait-of-a-naval-officer behind him.
Roche thought: That must be the Sargent picture of “Blinker” Hall and if Avery’s got that picture for his room then Bill Ballance and Jean-Paul are both right about the new
group.
“David—”
Roche tore himself away from Admiral Hall’s basilisk eye. It was Thain, the only man in Personnel Recruitment who had thought well of him after he’d fluffed half the tests in
training.
“David—let me introduce you—Sir Eustace, this is David Roche, about whom you’ve been hearing so much these last few days.”
Christ! Thain had come up in the world since PRT days, to be in this company, overlooked by Admiral Hall himself. But that at least accounted for his own presence, even if “hearing so
much” could hardly ring true. Since his PRT debacle he’d been little more than a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, in spite of Thain’s approval. So there really wasn’t so
much to hear about.
“Sir Eustace,” he mumbled. But he had to do better than that—here—now—by God! He had to shine—
“Colonel Clinton, David—”
Clinton was another new face, but the name rang faint warning bells: one glance at Colonel Clinton was two glances too many—the thought of Colonel Clinton hearing so much these last few
days was blood-curdling.
Clinton smiled a terrible non-smile, far worse than Jean-Paul’s bullet-in-the-back-of-the-neck grin. “Roche.”
“Sir!” Roche did his best to make the word stand to attention for him.
“And St. John Latimer, of course,” concluded Thain.
St. John—Sin-jun—Latimer was very young, and podgy with it; and languid, like an Oxford undergraduate who had strayed into the wrong party but was too idle to do anything
about it.
“Latimer,” said Roche.
“St. John Latimer,” corrected St. John Latimer, swaying at Roche’s faux pas.
Latimer—plain Latimer, damn it—was standing to the right and slightly behind Colonel Clinton, in the creature-to-the-Duke position, so that was what he might very well be
since he was too young to be here by right of experience and seniority. But he might also be some sort of catalyst, introduced to sting a reaction from the provincial and dull Captain Roche.
“Is that so?” Well, if they want a reaction, at least let it be a controlled one. “Jolly good!”
Like all good catalysts, Latimer showed no sign of change at this controlled Roche-reaction, he didn’t seem even to have heard it.
“Yes . . .” It was Thain who produced the reaction, and it was a decidedly uneasy one. “Yes—well, I must be off now”—he gave Roche a glance which was more
charged with doubt than encouragement, like a gladiatorial trainer delivering a novice into the arena—“subject to confirmation and—ah—mutual agreement, David, you will be
transferred from the Paris station to Sir Eustace’s care . . . on a temporary basis, of course—Colonel Clinton will fill you in on the details.”
The figure of speech was unfortunate after the memory of SSM Lark had been conjured up in Roche’s memory: to be filled in at Shaiba Barracks involved the scattering of blood and teeth in
all directions.
“Sir Eustace—Colonel—” Thain looked at Latimer, who was examining the pattern on the carpet, and decided against including him in the general farewell. Perhaps he
hadn’t come up in the world, or not as far as the present company and venue had suggested; perhaps he had only been present to complete the formality of pushing the doomed Roche out on to the
arena’s sunlit ellipse of sand for the killing.
“Thank you, Malcolm. You’ve been a great help,” said Sir Eustace with the easy insincerity of long experience. “I’m sorry you have to go . . .”
He wasn’t sorry. And, what was worse, Thain wasn’t sorry either.
“David—nice to see you again.” Thain nodded.
He wasn’t sorry because he expected Roche to fluff it again. And maybe that had also been what Jean-Paul expected, except the possible benefit of his not fluffing it outweighed the
attendant risk. What was more, his—Roche’s—very presence here, win or lose, increased his value as a bargaining counter on the board. After this, for Jean-Paul, he would be worth
trading in for some other advantage as he had never been before. He was on the way to becoming a blue chip.
And that made his own betrayal of Jean-Paul even better sense. More than ever, he had to do well now simply to keep ahead of them—both of them—until he could bargain on his
own account.
The door closed behind Thain.
“Now then, David—sit down—” Sir Eustace indicated the central chair in front of his enormous desk.
Roche sat down.
There was a file on Sir Eustace’s blotter, which he pushed forward into the sphere of influence within Roche’s reach.
Roche made no attempt to pick up the file, let alone touch it, never mind open it. Instinct was in charge now, preventing him from breaking the taboos.
“We’ve got another David for you, in there,” said Sir Eustace.
“Audley,” said Colonel Clinton. “David Audley.”
“We want him,” said Clinton.
Roche stared at him. “He’s one of theirs?”
“He’s one of nobody’s,” said Clinton. “But we want him to work for us. And you are going to get him for us, Roche.”
II
“It’ll take about an hour, maybe,” said the mechanic.
Roche frowned. “An hour?”
“I’m on the pumps as well, see . . .” The mechanic sized him up. “And then I got to find the right parts.”
“What parts?” Roche hadn’t intended to argue the toss, but with what he’d most carefully done to the engine not an hour before, half an hour’s work was a generous
estimate, and no replacements were necessary. “What parts?”
“Ah . . . well . . .” The mechanic blinked uneasily. “There’s this bracket, for a start”—he reached into the engine and wrenched fiercely at something out of
sight—“you didn’t ought to go round with it like that, it’ll let you down when you’re miles from anywhere.” He shook his head. “An’ it’s a
fiddling old job, too . . . maybe three-quarters of an hour, say?”
Roche realised that he had miscalculated. He had concentrated on the necessary time element, but had not allowed for time being someone else’s profit.
“You’ve got the parts?” he capitulated.
“Oh yes, sir.” The mechanic relaxed. “It’s only I dunno where to put my hand on ’em right off. But I’ve got ’em, don’t you worry.”
“Hmm . . .” Roche looked at his watch. “It’s simply that I’ve this important business engagement and I don’t want to be too late. So if you can hurry it up as
best you can . . .” He left the possibility of extra reward implicit in the plea.
“Half-hour, sir,” said the mechanic cheerfully, recognising a sucker. “There ain’t much traffic today, so it should be quiet on the pumps, with a bit of luck.”
“Can I use your phone?”
“’Elp yourself, sir. In the office—”
Roche dialled the number he’d been given, and a woman answered.
“Roche for Major Stocker . . .” Stocker was also new to him too. They were all new to him, apart from Thain, who was unlikely to appear again. It was like making a fresh start, in a
new job, as a new person . . . with a new personality which he could adjust according to need as he went along.
“Roche here, sir. The car they gave me has broken down—I’m phoning from a garage just outside Leatherhead—yes, sir, Leatherhead—” he didn’t say which
side, but even if the Major offered to come and collect him the distance was nicely calculated.
The Major didn’t offer.
“The man says three-quarters of an hour, but I don’t think it’ll be as much, sir . . . Yes, sir, I’ll ginger him up—I’ll be with you as soon as I can,
sir.”
He didn’t like the sound of the Major. But then he had never liked the sound of majors, who always seemed to exist in a limbo, either embittered with the failure of their hopes or hungry
for the promotion almost within their grasp.
Still, that was a good job well done: he had his half-hour now, and a generous half-hour too, all correct and accounted for and accountable, and above all innocent. The rest depended on others,
and on their correct observance of the routine.
He sauntered across the forecourt towards the workshop feeling reassured, if not happy. It might all be routine, and the Comrades were always sticklers for routine. Yet the effort involved even
in this routine, and the precautions they had taken in communicating with him, made him feel more important than he had felt for years. And if the feeling was a secret one, like the rich
man’s pleasure in stolen masterpieces in his hidden gallery, then that was a small price to pay for the enjoyment of it.
The mechanic withdrew his head from the raised bonnet and bobbed encouragingly at him.
“Found the right bracket, sir—just the job!” He plunged his head back quickly, before Roche could question him or God could strike him down for bearing false witness against
the British Motor Corporation.
Roche nodded uselessly at his back, and continued his aimless saunter, back on to the forecourt, slowly past the pumps, to the very edge of the highway.
He glanced down the road incuriously, and then looked at his watch, hunching himself momentarily against the chill wind of a failed English August. He wished that he hadn’t given up
smoking, but perhaps the new Roche would start smoking again. He had given up cigarettes because Julie didn’t like them, and had started drinking instead; and it had been Jean-Paul who was
always cautioning him to give up drinking, because he was drinking too much and too often. But the new Roche owed allegiance to neither Julie nor Jean-Paul, only to himself; and although the new
Roche now also frowned on drink, which warped the judgement, cigarettes only sapped top physical performance . . . and the ability to run away was no longer an essential requirement, with what he
had in mind for himself.
Meanwhile, he let himself seem to notice the church on the other side of the road for the first time. It was a very ordinary sort of church, old but not ancient, with a squat spire only a few
feet above the roof and a lych-gate entrance to the churchyard. A dozen yards along from the lych-gate there was the opening of a narrow track which appeared to skirt the churchyard wall, leading
to the rear of the church. In the opening of the track a dark-green Morris Minor van was parked, with an overhanging extending ladder fixed to its roof, from the end of which a scrap of red rag
hung as a warning. A nondescript man in blue overalls, with a cigarette end in his mouth and a Daily Sketch in his hands, leaned against the van, the very model of a modern British workman
as portrayed in the cinema and the Tory newspapers, reality imitating the art.
Or not, as the case may be, decided Roche, having already noted the man as he had coaxed the car into the garage and observing now that there was no one else in view.
He took a last look at the garage workshop, waited for a lorry to pass, and then strolled across the road to a point midway between the lych-gate and the track.
Somewhat to his disappointment the man gave no sign of interest in him beyond the briefest blank-eyed glance over the top of his paper.
Roche paused irresolutely for a moment, looking up and down the empty road again. Then his confidence reasserted itself, on the basis that he had nothing to fear.
If he was wrong about the man, it didn’t matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else: if he
was the look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn’t worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely
embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche’s naïveté; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings,
would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.
Nothing to fear. He had told them where he was going, and they had set up this meeting, deliberately within his time schedule; and if it was that important to them—or even if
it wasn’t—they could be relied on to oversee their security; so that if there was the least doubt about that security then there would simply be no contact, and he would have to
soldier on until they were ready to try again.
He pushed through the gate and crossed the few yards to the porch with the unhurried step of a Roche with a clear conscience and half an unscheduled hour to kill. If they didn’t make
contact it would be annoying, because the more he knew about Audley, David Longsdon, the better; but at this stage of the proceedings it was no more than that—merely annoying.
So then he would just look at the church, which might well be more interesting inside than out, because that was very much what he would have done if the delay had been genuine, because looking at
churches was one of his hobbies.
Absolutely nothing to fear. It even occurred to him, and the thought was an added reassurance, that they had orchestrated this scene out of their knowledge of him, for that very reason.
The heavy latch cracked like a pistol shot in the stillness of the empty church beyond.
If they were here, then still nothing to fear. The time might come when he had everything to fear, but at this moment each side trusted him, and valued him, and it was “This is your
big chance, David”—Jean-Paul the Comrade and Eustace Avery, Knight Commander of the British Empire, were in accord on that, if on nothing else.
And so it was, by God!
“Mr. Roche.”
At first sight, half-obscured by a great spray of roses, the fragrance of which filled the church with the odour of sanctity, the speaker might have been the twin brother of the Daily
Sketch reader outside.
“I am a friend of Jean-Paul. You can call me ‘Johnnie,’ Mr. Roche—and I shall call you David.”
The flatness of the features and the height of the cheekbones mocked ‘Johnnie’ into ‘Ivan’; or, if not Ivan, then some other East European equivalent, with a Mongol
horseman riding through the man’s ancestry at about the same time this church had been built.
“Johnnie,” Roche acknowledged the identification.
“How long do we have?” The voice didn’t fit the face—it was too accentless—any more than the face fitted the name; but now, subjectively, the whole man—who
wouldn’t have merited a second glance in a crowded street—the whole man overawed him no less than Clinton had done.
“About half an hour.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Guildford. I’m due to meet a man named Stocker.”
“Major Stocker?”
“That’s right. You know him?”
“Why?” Johnnie ignored the question. But he couldn’t think of Johnnie as Johnnie: the face, and those dark-brown pebble-eyes, neither dull nor bright but half-polished in an
unnatural way, made him think of Genghis Khan.
“He’s going to brief me on this man Audley.”
“He’s your controller—Stocker?”
“No—I don’t know . . . I’m to report to Colonel Clinton when—”
“Clinton?” The eyes and the face remained expressionless, but the voice moved. “Frederick C
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