Dead Secret

by Alan Williams

  DEAD SECRET

  Charles Pol Espionage Thrillers

  Book Five

  Alan Williams

  Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as though nothing had happened.

  Sir Winston Churchill

  What is truth?

  Pontius Pilate

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  ALSO BY ALAN WILLIAMS

  PROLOGUE

  There were four men in the room. At least two of them looked out of place, though they were quite at ease. Big square-shouldered men with square-cut black hair, black moustaches, each wearing a chocolate-brown suit with a broad chalk stripe, wide lapels, and a silk handkerchief sprouting from the breast pocket like a fresh orchid. The third man was slighter, with grey cropped hair and a narrow face: he had a military bearing, with a suggestion of the scholar. The three of them were drinking Scotch, sitting in a semicircle facing their host, who was elderly, distinguished.

  It was an exquisite room, part of a bachelor flat in Albemarle Street, behind Piccadilly.

  One of the big men said, ‘We’d better have some music.’

  ‘Nothing too loud, too obvious,’ the grey man said.

  The other got up and strolled over to a complicated hi-fi system, selected a cassette and slotted it into the machine. A Mozart piano sonata flowed through the room. ‘Quiet enough?’ he said, and returned to his chair.

  The grey man addressed his host, who sat stiff and upright in a Sheraton chair. ‘You know why we are here. Further explanations are unnecessary. We are carrying out orders.’ His English was pedantic and correct.

  The first big man turned to him and said, in their own language: ‘I thought the fat man was joining us?’ He spoke a heavy dialect, which the elderly man opposite obviously did not understand.

  The grey man said, ‘He’s at the hotel. We’re to call him when it’s finished.’

  ‘Typical. Always keeps out of the firing line.’

  ‘He was in the line with poor Serge, remember.’

  ‘I’d like to know how the hell he got out of East Germany. Those people keep you locked up for a long time.’

  ‘You know the fat man. He’s very clever. He has excellent contacts. It is a serious mistake to underestimate him. But come on — this talk is wasting time.’

  The big man looked up at the stout chandelier suspended from a ring in the moulded ceiling. ‘Right, let’s get going.’ He and the second man put down their drinks and stood up.

  Their host remained where he was, staring at them, wide-eyed. He did not speak because a strip of masking tape had been stretched across his mouth, from ear to ear; he was now beginning to have difficulty breathing.

  One of them had produced a length of wire from under his jacket: pulled his chair up under the chandelier and climbed on to the silk seat. He could not quite reach the top of the chandelier, so the first man lifted him by the hips and held him still, while the second swiftly knotted the wire around the ring in the ceiling. He climbed down again, and the two of them took up their positions on either side of the elderly man on the chair. The grey man lit a cigarette and watched.

  The man in the chair had turned the colour of clay; his nose had begun to run, and his eyes were watering.

  ‘Take his shoes off,’ the grey man said. ‘We don’t want him kicking.’

  ‘Has he emptied his bowels, do you think? We don’t want that smell around either.’

  ‘How should I know? Anyway, we shan’t be around to smell it. Now get on it — it’s late, but somebody might come up. We want this to be tidy.’

  The two big men went about their task silently, methodically, like doctors performing a routine operation. One of them removed the elderly man’s black hand-made shoes, then they hauled him up and stood him in his stockinged feet directly under the chandelier. He had begun to make a muffled, whimpering noise. One of them slapped his cheek, gently, like smacking a newborn baby. The tape had begun to come loose, and there was spittle on his chin. His wet eyes rolled round, trying to focus on the slipknot which the second man had arranged just behind his head. He let out a gurgling sound and the first man pulled the wire tight, then slipped the loop over the man’s head. The second man kicked the chair away and the body dropped sharply and went rigid for a moment, then began to jig about like a puppet, swinging slowly in the middle of the room. The throat was squeezed to the size of a man’s wrist and the face became unrecognizable. From the taped mouth came a series of clicking sounds, barely audible above the music.

  The grey man stood up and led the way to the door. They let themselves out, quietly, leaving the music playing, the locks undamaged. They met no one on the stairs or in the hallway. The caretaker’s glass cubicle was still empty. He would probably not return until the pub closed.

  The street was quiet. Here they separated — the two big men getting into a Volvo saloon, the grey man walking towards Bond Street where he caught a taxi to the Ritz. He would telephone Brown’s Hotel from there.

  It was too late for the morning papers, but the evening editions carried the story on the front page.

  STRANGE ‘SUICIDE’ OF ABCO CHIEF

  Sir James Milward-Smith, aged 64, Chairman of the America-Britannic Consortium, was found hanged this morning in his Mayfair flat in Albemarle Street, W1. No note was left, and Sir James’s colleagues report that he seemed in good health yesterday. Police are not ruling out foul play.

  CHAPTER 1

  Perhaps it was the car radio which first implanted in Tom Hawn the seed of the whole outrageous, perilous idea, on that fifty-mile stretch of autostrada between Bologna and Florence. At any rate, it laid the topsoil in which the idea could find refuge, sprout, and later flourish.

  It was a news flash — the first news which Hawn had heard or read since arriving from England in early summer. A Greek supertanker, under a flag of convenience, had rammed a ferry off Ancona and spilled its cargo of oil — an estimated 200,000 tons — which was now despoiling the entire Adriatic coast, threatening Venice’s Lido and its fetid canals.

  The commentator spoke with a shrill note of artificial urgency and outrage: the Government, as usual, was under attack for inactivity; the ecological lobby, in holy alliance with the Communist Party and other benefit groups, was continuing to stage demonstrations ‘of a serious nature’ in Venice, where the owners of the spilt oil — ABCO, the America-Britannic Consortium, the largest oil company in the world — were hinted to be in corrupt confabulation with local officials within the sumptuous fastness of the Hotel Danieli Royal Excelsior, which appeared to be under some sort of siege. One policeman had been shot in the arm (apparently by mistake); and a Molotov cocktail in a Coca-Cola bottle had been thrown without effect at Quadri’s, on the Piazza San Marco.

  Hawn heard the news with divided enthusiasm. He was driving to Venice to rejoin his girl, Anna, after four months’ exile, alone, in a farmhouse in Tuscany where he had been working on his opus about the Me
dicis. His mind, like his body, felt parched: he wanted to be enlivened, exhilarated, but not just by Anna — beautiful, practical, gentle Anna who cared about seal culling and extinct whales and the sacking of our ancient heritage by big business. (The reported state of Venice today would be leaven to her soulful bread, Hawn reflected gloomily.) But as a journalist at the end of a sterile sabbatical, he wanted to get his teeth into something — something harder than just a worthy mob of Italian Friends of the Earth, and their docile Communist comrades, shouting rude things about the abominable ABCO outside the Danieli.

  Still, any story was better than none. Hawn had little empathy for ecopneuma: by both inclination and the nature of his trade, he had a touch of the romantic about him: but a robust, destructive romanticism. An unkind observer might have called him Philistine, war-lover, voyeur. He liked to see history being made. Secretly, the spectacle of an ancient city, tranquil and splendid under a peaceful moon, was less to his taste than that of the same city being put to the sack by mobs of crazed fanatics, so guaranteeing Hawn — providing the telex still worked — a front page lead in tomorrow’s paper.

  However, the news bulletins were not entirely without hope. He rather warmed to the idea of riot police and bombs in San Marco. It made a difference from Ruskin and Peggy Guggenheim and all those German tourists trying to civilize themselves. But perhaps the seed had already taken root, to be nurtured in these first hours by a circumstance that had nothing to do with the scrappy radio bulletins.

  Hawn had been hidden too long on his dusty perch in the Tuscan hills to have remembered that he was beginning his holiday on the worst day for motorists in the Italian calendar — the start of the Ferragosto, when the entire middle class migrates by car from the industrial suburbs to the coast.

  On this steaming first day, the country’s petrol station attendants had declared one of their regular lightning strikes. Hawn had collected his hired car from Siena that morning, with a full tank, and reckoned he had just enough to make it up this last eight-mile leg of the journey to Mestre.

  Just north of Bologna one filling station was open; and already the queue of cars stretched back nearly a mile, clogging both emergency and slow lanes. The heavy traffic — mostly tankers bound for the oil refineries of Mestre and the port of Trieste — was being forced into the centre lane; and before the turning off to Mantua the traffic was moving at walking pace.

  At Padua it stopped altogether. Men got out in shirtsleeves and stared impotently ahead. Rumour passed down the queue that a Lamborghini had blown up several kilometres further on. Hawn looked anxiously at his watch. It was now past three o’clock, and he had been allowing himself four comfortable hours for the drive, arriving in Venice by five at the latest. Anna had few obvious faults, but she did not like being kept waiting; and Venice in the tourist season is not a convenient place for a foreign girl to be left on her own.

  Not that Hawn had anything to fear: he accepted her loyalty without question, and had himself never given her true cause to distrust him. But their four months’ separation, aggravated by the chronic Italian postal service, would have opened a distance between them; and if he was now going to be late, he imagined her keeping to that scruffy hotel she had chosen, alone, biding her impatience, quietly, imperceptibly resentful.

  Hawn was going to be late, and there was nothing he could do about it. She could hardly blame him for the tantrums of Italian industrial relations. And as he sat in the hot airless car, stopping and starting every few yards, he forced him to stop fretting over this temporary fuel crisis, and began — idly at first — to consider its broader, more technical dimensions.

  He remembered hearing that in England, during those bloody bank holidays, the motorways in and out of London each carried between six and seven thousand vehicles an hour. He wouldn’t be surprised if this autostrada to Venice was now log-jammed with as many as ten thousand, with more piling up behind him with the afternoon traffic arriving from Milan.

  He thought: if the average Italian car does twenty-five miles to the gallon, how many gallons do 10,000 cars burn over eighty kilometres, or exactly fifty miles, of autostrada? The puzzle at least passed the time.

  One car burns two gallons per fifty miles, ergo, 10,000 cars an hour would burn 20,000 gallons — and at approximately 300 gallons to a tonne of crude oil, that worked out at just over 66 tonnes per hour, on the short stretch between Bologna and Venice.

  For the four days of the Ferragosto, with the traffic almost as dense at night as by day, and taking a mean average of 50 tonnes per hour, the total could be as high as 4,800 tonnes. Even if he halved the figure, to account for the average day in summer, it would only cover a fraction of the thousands of miles of Italian autostrada, not including Italy’s secondary roads.

  As a journalist, Hawn considered statistics the necessary grist to the greater drama of things. His mind now seized on the enormity of these figures, and while bogged down on this fifty-mile stretch of shimmering concrete, he let his imagination take flight over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of kilometres. How many millions were there in Western Europe alone? How many million cars doing twenty-five mpg over an average twenty-four hours?

  Since working on the Rhodesian sanction-busting story, Hawn had come to know quite a lot about the oil industry. It was fascinating and formidable. But until now he had never considered it in its entirety; he merely knew of what had found its way ‘illegally’ up from South Africa, and that had been a dribble in the ocean of the world market. If his present, rough calculations were anything like correct, the total world consumption of oil on any one day — let alone year — must run into millions of tonnes.

  The largest supertanker can carry a quarter of a million tonnes of crude: and he knew that approximately four thousand tankers were at sea at any one time. An industry operating on that scale would have to be more powerful than any government — as the sanction-busting fiasco had so hilariously, miserably proved. Any one of the major oil companies would have to have the resources and organization which only the super powers, and certain Arab states, could hope to rival. Yet a handful of peasants, working a few dozen pumps in Northern Italy, had managed to bring this corner of the country to near standstill.

  He thought what fun one of those Soviet subs would have off the Gulf or round the Cape.

  Perhaps the story was there — though it was not a new one. Nor did it help the traffic on the autostrada. The crippled Lamborghini had been shifted; but over the last few kilometres past Padua the going was painfully slow.

  It was early evening when he at last came in sight of the ugly sprawl of Mestre, with towers of burning waste-gas flapping in the thick, damp air. The oil refineries had been built up to the limit of the water where the causeway runs across to Venice. There was a smell of unrefined fuel.

  Helmeted leather-caped police stood at the head of the causeway, slowly processing each car. Hawn was warned to proceed at no more than five kilometres per hour. The police carried submachine pistols, with the safety catches off. With the Red Brigades still at large, these lads from the peasant South were taking no chances. Nor was Hawn. He was a careful journalist who knew when to play the odds. To be shot in the back by a trigger-happy Italian policeman would be a poor epitaph.

  With some difficulty, he left the Fiat in one of the multi-storey car parks behind the station; then carried his scarred leather holdall down to the jetty. There were more police here and, at a distance, crowds of demonstrators — men with beards and slogans and pretty girls in raincoats who chanted a dismal litany which sounded like ‘ABCO fuori! La Nazione per il Popolo!’ (Shades of Mussolini here? he wondered maliciously.) Then occasionally a voice, less timid than the others, would call out, ‘Death to the imperialist Industrial Military Fascist Complex! Death to ABCOF’ — like a street vendor hawking his wares to an uninterested crowd. Some of the police would spit and rock back on the heels of their boots; and a few of them would smack their rolled-up caps into the palms of their glo
ves.

  It was small beer for Hawn, with his blasé memories of Hué and Paris and Prague and Teheran. This was not so much an event, more a tiresome Italian ritual, a demonstration of thwarted machismo that was almost burlesque. There was not even a whiff of CS gas to wipe away the green stench of the canals; but at least it was a change from the arid stillness of those hills, with his textbooks and sheets of foolscap curling up in the heat. He wanted Anna badly.

  The police here stood in a double row, looking menacing only on account of their guns and shiny black uniforms and visored helmets, and because they were unshaven and red-eyed with exhaustion. Hawn knew at once that they didn’t have the stomach for a fight, and the demonstrators were too innocent, too idealistic to give them one.

  He became more concerned that there was no vaporetto, no motorscafo, to take him to his hotel. His reunion with Anna was now well overdue.

  A gondolier finally sidled up beside him and negotiated an exorbitant sum. Hawn did not argue. He was too old a hand to stand on petty principles in a crisis.

  The gondolier moved off with a lulling lapping pace; it began to grow dark and lights came on in the palaces along the Grand Canal. A couple of times they heard the howl of sirens from police motor launches; then, rounding the bend under the Rialto Bridge, they ran into a blockade of launches, two of which picked out the gondola in the blinding pencil-beams of their searchlights. The gondolier paddled apologetically to the shore. There was no refund.

  Hawn got through the cordon by producing his Press pass, and allowing himself to be searched. The police seemed bored and irritated that he should not be an obvious troublemaker. He then cut through a couple of side streets, the corners and bridges all guarded by pairs of riot police, several of them smoking in the dark sweating recesses of stone, of arch and alcove. He emerged on the Lagoon, close to Harry’s Bar. No police here.