Spy Story

by Len Deighton

  And if you think they would hesitate to knock you off to make their plan work, think again. They are dangerous. Burn this right away. I’ll be around if you run into problems getting away this morning.

  I didn’t remember the Russian skinhead. But if he was from Russian Naval Staff (Security Directorate) he could have been at any one of a dozen Joint Security conferences I’d attended in the ’fifties. If he was from the GRU, the chances we’d met were considerably greater. It was all getting too rich for my blood, and I wasn’t any longer on salary for this kind of action. If Soviet General Staff Directorate were joining Toliver’s troop, they’d put his boy scouts into long trousers and tell them about girls. And I didn’t want to be around when it happened.

  I read the note again, very carefully, and then tore it into small pieces. In a remote country house like this flushing it down the toilet was not good enough – it needs only one man-hole cover lifted between here and the septic tank.

  I burned the paper in the sink when I’d finished washing and shaving but it left scorch marks that I could not completely erase with soap. I started to shave while the water was still warm. To say I didn’t like it was an understatement. If they were going to get rid of me, a secret note – that I must destroy – advising me to take a chance on a rickety footbridge in a snowstorm … that might be the perfect way to arrange it.

  But doctors can’t pass a street accident, nor dips an open handbag, coppers can’t pass a door with a broken lock, Jesuits can’t pass sin in the making, everyone falls prey to their training. The idea of Erikson coming off a submarine weighed heavily upon me. And it would stay that way until I contacted Dawlish’s office via the local engineers, as he’d so thoughtfully explained the latest system. I knew that even if I spent all morning thinking about it I would eventually try to find that damned post office phone, but I couldn’t help thinking that if Toliver had failed to bring that line of communication under his control or surveillance he was a darn sight less efficient than he’d so far shown himself to be.

  Perhaps I should have passed up the post office, and the sandwiches too, and evolved a completely different plan of action, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

  I went down into the hall. It was a gloomy place with amputated pieces of game adorning the walls: lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs joined in a concerted yawn. An elephant’s foot was artfully adapted to hold walking-sticks and umbrellas. There were fishing-rods and gun cases, too. I was tempted to go armed but it would slow me down. I contented myself with borrowing a donkey jacket and a scarf and went through the servants’ corridor into the pantry. There was a smell of wet dogs and the sound of them barking. I could hear the others at breakfast. I recognized the voices of Toliver, Wheeler and Mason and I waited to hear the voice of Erikson before moving on.

  I welcomed the blizzard. The wind roared against the back of the house, and made the windows kaleidoscopes of scurrying white patterns. It would take me two hours, perhaps more, to Angel Gap. I buttoned up tight.

  The south of the peninsula was the high side. It was the best route if I did not stumble over the cliff edge in the snowstorm. The other coastline was a ragged edge of deep gullies, inlets and bog that would provide endless detours for someone like me who didn’t know the geography, and no problems for pursuers who did.

  I didn’t go directly into the kitchen garden, for I would have been in full view of anyone at the stove. I went down the corridor into the laundry room and from there across the yard to the barn. Using that as cover, I made my way along the garden path behind the raspberry canes and along the high wall of the kitchen garden. I stopped behind the shed to have a look round. The wind was blowing at gale force and already the house was only a grey shape in the flying snow.

  The greenhouse was not one of those shiny aluminium and polished-glass affairs that you see outside the garden shops on the by-pass. This was an ancient, wooden-framed monster nearly fifty feet long. Its glass was dark grey with greasy dirt and it was difficult to see into it. I pushed the door open. It creaked, and I saw my sandwiches on the potting bench, conspicuously near the door. It was a shambles inside: old and broken flower pots, dead plants and a false ceiling of spiders’ webs entrapping a thousand dead flies. Outside, the wind howled and thumped the loose panes, while whirling snow pressed little white noses against the glass. I didn’t reach for the sandwiches, I froze, suddenly aware that I was not alone. There was someone in the greenhouse, someone standing unnaturally still.

  ‘Mr Armstrong!’ It was a mocking voice.

  A figure in a dirty white riding mac stepped out from behind a stack of old wooden boxes. My eyes went to the shotgun carried casually underarm, and only then up to the eyes of Sara Shaw.

  ‘Miss Shaw.’

  ‘Life is full of surprises, darling. Have you come for your sandwiches?’ Her coat shoulders were quite dry, she’d been waiting a long time for me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Last night’s pork, and one round of cheese.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were here, even.’

  ‘That building worker’s coat suits you, you know.’ The smile froze on her face, and I turned to see someone coming from the kitchen door. ‘Mason, the little bastard must have seen me,’ she said.

  It was Mason. He was bent into the wind, hurrying after us as fast as his little legs could carry him. She had her left hand under the shotgun’s wooden foregrip and raised it level.

  Mason came into the greenhouse like there was no door. In his fist he had one of those little Astra automatics with a two-inch barrel extender. It was just the sort of gun I would have expected Mason to choose: about thirteen ounces total weight, and small enough to go into a top pocket.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ said Sara. She laughed. ‘Have you discovered the Christmas crackers already?’

  But no one who has seen a .22 fired at close range will smile into its barrel. Except maybe Mickey Spillane. I didn’t laugh and neither did Mason. He pointed the gun at Sara and reached out for her shotgun.

  ‘Give it to him,’ I said. ‘Don’t make headlines.’

  Mason took the gun and, using one hand, he undid the catch and broke it open. He gripped the stock under his arm while he removed the shotgun cartridges, and then let it drop to the floor. He kicked it under the potting bench with enough energy to break some flower pots. The cartridges he put into his pocket. Having disarmed Sara he turned to me. He ran a quick hand over me but he knew I wasn’t armed, they’d searched me immediately after I’d landed in the plane.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s move back up to the house.’ He prodded me in the arm with his automatic and I moved along the bench towards the door, looking at the potting bench in the hope of spotting a suitable weapon.

  Mason was too near. Once outside the greenhouse he’d keep me at a distance and my chance to clobber him would be gone. Lesson one of unarmed combat is that a man with a gun muzzle touching him can knock the barrel aside before the armed man can pull the trigger. I slowed and waited until I felt the muzzle again. I spun round to my left, chopping at his gun with my left hand and punching at where his head should have been with my right fist. I connected only with the side of his head but he stepped back and put an elbow through a panel of glass. The noise of it was amplified by the enclosed space. Again I punched at him. He stumbled. Another panel of glass went and I didn’t dare look round to see if it had alarmed those still at breakfast. The dogs in the courtyard began barking furiously.

  The girl shrank away from us as Mason struggled to bring his gun hand up again. I seized his wrist with my right hand and the gun with my left. I pulled, but Mason had his finger on the trigger. There was a bang. I felt the hot draught as the slug passed my ear and crashed out through the glass roof. I swung my elbow round far enough to hit his face. It must have made his eyes water. He let go and fell to the floor amongst the rusty gardening tools. He rolled away, rubbing at his nose.

  Sara was already reaching for the shotgu
n. ‘Good girl,’ I said. I pushed the little Astra gun into my pocket and ran out into the blizzard. The path was slippery, and I cut off into the cabbages. There was a rubbish heap against the wall at the bottom of the garden. That would be my best place for climbing over it.

  I was halfway down the garden when there was the deafening bang of a twelve bore and a crash of shattering glass that seemed to go on for hours.

  Even before the last few pieces broke there was a second blast that took out another large section of the glass-house. She hit me with the second shot. It knocked me full length into a row of brussels sprouts and I felt a burning pain in the arm and side.

  I had no doubt that more cartridges were going into the breech. In spite of the damaged arm, I set a new world record for the kitchen garden free-style, and went over the wall in a mad scramble. As I fell down the other side of it, another shot hit the weeds along the top of the wall and showered me with finely chopped vegetation. The ground sloped steeply behind the house but my feet didn’t touch the ground for the first half mile. I hoped that she’d have trouble getting over the wall, but with women like that, you can’t be sure they’ll have trouble with anything.

  By the time I reached the stream I realized that Mason – not the girl – was Dawlish’s contact and the author of the note. He’d pressed the gun against me reasoning that I’d know how to break free. It was the best he could do, if he was to have any chance of talking his way out of that one. I felt sorry for him but I was glad I’d hit him hard. He was going to need some corroborative evidence to show Toliver. Sara Shaw must have followed him when he took the sandwiches there for me. Then she’d waited to see who turned up and why. I hoped that she could not guess, for now I suddenly found it easier to believe Mason’s contention that they were a dangerous mob.

  My arm was bleeding enough to leave a trail behind me. I changed course for enough time to make it look as though I might be going to the bridle path. There I slipped the donkey jacket off, bound the silk scarf around the bloody part of my sleeve, and pushed my arm down into the donkey-jacket sleeve to jam it tight. It hurt like hell but there was no time to do anything more. I hoped the pressure would stop the bleeding. A shotgun spreads in inch per yard of range. I’d been far enough to get only the edge of it. My clothes were torn but the bleeding was not serious. I kept repeating that to myself as I hurried on.

  I made good progress, avoiding the outcrops of rock upon which the flailing snow had settled to make a glaze of ice. But losing the use of my arm made keeping my balance more difficult, and twice I fell, yelping with pain and leaving a dull red mark in the snow.

  In spite of the low visibility in the snowstorm, I felt sure that I could find the tail of Great Crag. After that, it was merely a matter of keeping close to the edge without falling over. But everything is more difficult in a blizzard. I even had trouble finding the big clump of conifers that marked the stepping-stones over the burn. When I did get there I became entangled in the brambles and undergrowth and had to kick hard to get out of it.

  I didn’t curse the weather. As soon as it cleared I would become visible to anyone with the sense to ascend to the Crag’s first terrace. And there were plenty of people back there with enough sense for that. And more, much more.

  The clifftop path required care. I had not walked it before, though I had seen the course of it from my solitary picnics on the heights of Great Crag. The path was an old one. Here and there along its course there were metal markers. They were simple rectangles of tin, nailed to stakes that had almost rotted. The paint had long since flaked away and the metal was rusty but there was no mistaking their military origin. There is something common to all artifacts of all armed forces, from tanks to latrines. I hurried along faster whenever I had the rusty patches to guide me. I feared that the snowstorm was passing over. The dark clouds were almost close enough to touch. They sped over me, mingling with flurries of snow and allowing me sudden glimpses of the rocky seashore nearly a hundred feet below.

  Not only the markers, but the path itself, had in places eroded. I stopped for a moment and made sure that my arm was no longer leaving a blood trail. It wasn’t, but there were ugly retching noises from inside my sleeve and I guessed that I was still bleeding. I was looking forward to that period of numbness that doctors say happens after wounding but I was beginning to suspect that that was just their rationalization for prodding the painful bits. Both my side and my arm were throbbing and hurting like hell.

  I looked at the tiny footpath where the metal tags led. It was no better than a man-made ledge along the windy cliff face. Not at all the sort of place I ever visited, outside of nightmares. But ahead of me there was an acre of underbrush, so I took the cliff path, edging along it carefully, but dislodging pieces that spun off into space and fell somewhere that I dared not look.

  After a quarter of a mile the blazed path narrowed suddenly. I stepped even more gingerly now, edging forward a step at a time, cautioned by large sections of path edge that crumbled under the touch of my toe. The edge continued round a gently curving section of cliff. Soon I reached the point at which I could see below me a tiny bay. Through the driving sleet I studied the path ahead. I had hoped it would soon rejoin the clifftop but it continued to be a ledge. The section at the far side of the bay was especially worrying. The sharp edge of cliff resembled the prow of some gigantic ship far out over the fierce green sea. The curved profile of the cliff continued above the path. It looked as though a man would have to bend almost double to pass along it.

  Standing still, in order to see through the whirling snow, brought a resurgence of doubts and fears. I decided to retrace my steps. I would go back to the bridle path and continue up over the higher part of the cliff. But as I studied the face of the promontory I saw that there was a thick tangle of thorn dangling over the cliff, like a lace tablecloth. The men who’d made the path had not laboured on it without good reason. If it was easier to make a path along the cliff face than along the clifftop then surely I would find it easier to follow it.

  The overhang was not such a severe test as I feared. It’s true that I spread my arms and flattened my body against the cliff face in a fearful embrace, leaving a ghost of blood there, but I edged along crablike and gave up the testing probes of the path ahead.

  ‘No atheists in a foxhole,’ they say. And none on a narrow cliff path around a headland either, if my journey was anything to go by. Spreadeagled close against the cold wall of stone, I felt a gust of wind batter against it hard enough to make the prow-like cliff shake as if about to fall. The same wind was provoking the ocean into great white-tops that thumped the shingle far below. Again and again the wind tried to prise me away from the cliff and carry me with it, but I stayed motionless until its brunt was gone. Vertigo, as all its victims know, is not a fear of falling but an atavistic desire to fly, which is why so many of its sufferers are aviators.

  I rounded the headland, and breathed a sigh of relief before seeing another bay and another headland. Worse, this section of the path was blocked. It looked at first like a fall of rubble but the boulders were too evenly matched in colour and size; balanced precariously upon the smallest of toeholds they shimmered as a gust of wind thumped the cliff face, roaring upwards and scooping in its draft both snowflakes and fragments of cliff.

  Alone on this extreme edge of the peninsula I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I could not be seen from anywhere on Blackstone. I released my grasp on the rock and, moving my arm very slowly, I bared my wrist to see the time. Would they by now have mustered their full manpower to form a line across the peninsula’s waist? I shivered with cold, fear and indecision, except that there was no real decision to make. I had to go on, as fast as possible.

  The ledge widened. It was enough for me to quicken my progress to something like walking pace, if I pressed a shoulder to the rock. Still I could not discern the nature of the blobs that covered the cliff face like pox upon an ashen face. Even when I was only ten yards away I st
ill could not see what was waiting in my path. It was then that an extra large breaker, a gust of air, or just my approach seemed to cause the cliff itself to explode into whirling fragments. The grey blobs were all over me: a vast colony of sea-birds, sheltering from the storm. They raised up their enormous wings, and climbed into the blizzard to meet me. Blurred grey shapes circled the intruder who had invaded these ledges to which they returned each year to nest. They dived upon me, screaming, croaking and clawing and beating their giant wings, in the hope that I might fall, or fly away.

  By now I was climbing through the colony itself, my hands lacerated and bloody as I groped through the ancient nests of mud, spittle and bleached vegetation. My feet were crunching them and sliding in the dust and filth of a thousand years of stinking bird droppings.

  I closed my eyes. I was afraid to turn my head as I felt the wings striking my shoulders and felt the fabric tear under their beaks and claws. I still didn’t slacken my speed, even when I found enough courage to look back to where the sea-birds wheeled and jeered and fidgeted in the crevices. The wind had continued the work of destruction and now the brittle nests were shattered by the air current that roared up the cliff face, like a great flame licks a chimney, taking the colony with it and grinding all to dust.

  Ahead of me I saw a bent piece of rusty tin and persuaded myself with all kinds of twisted rationalizations that the path would be easy going from this point onwards. There was still another headland to negotiate, but it was easy only compared with the journey I had already made. After that, the path sloped gently upwards until it regained the cliff edge. I sat down, hardly noticing the thorns and mud. For the first time I became aware of the fast shallow breathing that my anxiety had produced and of the thumping of my heart, as loud as the breakers on the shingle a hundred feet below me.

  From here I was able to look north-west across the width of the peninsula, and I didn’t like what I could see. The blizzard, which was still driving hard against the cliffs at sea level, had thinned enough for visibility to increase to a mile or more in between the flurries. If they were after me, a dozen of them could put me up like a frightened partridge. I stood up and started off again. I forced myself to increase the pace, although my tortuous cliffside journey had left me in no state to attempt records.