“I think it stinks.” The less comforting thing about Butler was that his virtues encouraged honesty, against better judgement. “If it was me I’d pull him out.”
“You think Oliver Latimer is up to something?”
Dearly as he would have loved to nod, Mitchell found himself shaking his head, and instantly regretted doing so. “No. But I think someone is, sir.”
“Who?”
But even honesty went only so far. “What does David say?”
“I’m asking you, not David,” Butler chided him gently.
Put your money where your mouth is, Mitchell. “Okay. But he knows Howard Morris better than I do. They’re old chums.”
“So this is CIA business, you think?”
The honesty came back. “Not the way Howard Morris tells it. It seems he doesn’t like it either. In fact … if you ask me, I think Colonel Howard Morris is a rather worried man.”
“And what is it that is worrying him? Apart, that is, from the involvement of Senator Thomas Cookridge in whatever it is—?”
Ordinarily, Mitchell might have smiled. “I’d say … the same two things that are worrying me now. He stuck his nose into something which wasn’t his business. And now his nose is caught, and he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.”
“Yes …” Sympathy was not within Butler’s range of emotions. Without moving the hand covering the file he reached out to the buttons of his intercom.
Nothing happened. The blunt bricklayer’s fingers tapped on the file, and then the intercom fingers tapped another number.
“Sir?” inquired the voice.
“Is Dr Audley in?” Butler stared through Mitchell.
“Yes, sir.” The voice didn’t need to consult the book. Research and Development was no hive of industry on any August Sunday evening.
“Find him for me.” Butler paused. “Try Records. Thank you.” Butler stabbed another button and focussed on Mitchell. “You have no call to worry. You should have spoken directly to me, instead of to James. But that’s a minor detail. Just remember that it’s always better to be safe than sorry next time.”
“Yes, sir.” On Butler’s lips the most banal cliché was somehow acceptable. And also there was the underlying suspicion that beneath that veneer of soldierly simplicity lay all the vast resources of peasant cunning Butler had inherited from his humble northern origins. It was at moments like this that Mitchell always remembered Field-Marshal “Wully” Robertson, who had risen from the ranks to head the Imperial General Staff of the biggest and best British Army of all time.
Buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz—
Butler jabbed the intercom. “David?”
“Jack—I’m busy with this dreadful Beast of yours—”
“Come up out of there.” Butler brushed aside Audley’s dislike of the wonderful new technology in the basement, which summoned up distilled information on to the screen at a touch of the finger in a fraction of a second. But then, of course, what Audley didn’t like was that the dreadful instrument not only logged the user’s identity, but also—as a prerequisite of use—the requirement reason as well as the date and time of the inquiry.
“But I haven’t finished, Jack.”
Butler swivelled in his chair, towards the screen at his right, and punched its keys confidently. The blank screen came alive, with a pre-ordained list of questions with which Mitchell himself was well acquainted: the dreadful Beast was asking Colonel Butler not only what he wanted, but also by what right and authority he wanted this information.
Butler stabbed a finger at Mitchell. “You look out of that window, Dr Mitchell.”
Mitchell looked into the pale blue of Sunday evening over the Thames. One day, when he sat in that chair, his unique voice-print would be enough; but, for the time being, Butler had to print his own master’s code to satisfy the computer, to override all its prohibitions.
“Right.” Butler released him, and the screen was full of words now—the exact words which Audley must be reading on his own screen far below them. Once upon a time he could have browsed at leisure on those words, when he had at last found them, and no one but he would have known what he had consumed. But now he was betrayed on record.
“For God’s sake, Jack—”
“Come up. I’ve got a print-out of all that. Don’t waste your time with it—or mine.” The north-country vowels were undisguised in Colonel Butler’s voice. “And I’ve got Dr Mitchell here too, and you’re wasting his time—you coom oop, an’ don’t argue the toss with me, David!”
Jack Butler had been bullying David Audley for years, as long as Mitchell had known them—ever since they had first looked him over in his own days of innocence. As a subordinate, an equal and now as his master, Butler had bullied Audley, and chivvied him, and protected him, and cherished him; even, until the cause had become plainly hopeless, since Audley would have none of it, old Jack had schemed (as far as he was capable of that sort of scheming) to sit old David in the very chair in which he now sat.
“Oh—all right, Jack! Have it your own way, if you must!” Audley grumbled peevishly. “You’ve got my bloody report—you know how much sleep I had last night? You know how late I got home? All the bloody week at Cheltenham—back here Friday afternoon—back on the job last night—back here again now … If I was in a trade union I’d be on overtime and double time-and-a-half now, and you couldn’t bloody afford me—you know that?”
“Up here on the double.” Butler’s finger cut off the complaint, and then punched another number on the intercom. Then he looked at Mitchell. “He doesn’t change, does he?”
That was true: the nice thing, and the nasty one, was that David was always David, which was his strength and his weakness. But what was more interesting, was that there was a subtle change in Butler himself: from being Acting-Director he was Director now; and, although he would not have sought that promotion, he had accepted it because it was his duty to obey his sovereign’s orders, and that was that.
The intercom buzzed. But the blunt finger first tapped a key in the visual display unit, to bring up more of what Audley had been looking at on the Beast in the basement, before moving across to accept the intercom’s call.
“Steeple Horley—Dr and Mrs Audley and Cathy Audley—?” A childish voice answered the acceptance.
Butler was rolling back what Dr David Audley had been looking at in the basement: the curse of the Beast was that the Director could now recall exactly what any of his subordinates had been recalling out of the department’s records, and from those in all other linked computer memory banks integrated with the system and cleared for the Director’s scrutiny.
“Cathy?” Butler stopped the screen for a moment, then rolled it back some more.
“Uncle Jack!” Audley’s daughter needed no computer to identify her godfather. “Where’s Daddy?”
“That’s why I’m phoning, my lass.” Butler studied the screen, then rolled it back further.
“I’ll get Mummy—”
“No need to bother your Mother.” This bit of screen clearly interested Butler. “Just tell ’er your Dad’ll be late again, and it’s all my fault. She’ll understand—right?”
“Oh?” Miss Audley was evidently not such a soft touch. “Well … she may—but I don’t, Uncle Jack … Honestly—he promised us—he really did!”
“Then he had no right to.” Butler treated his god-daughter as an equal. “You know what it says in the book—because I’ve showed it to you: ‘Duty is a jealous God’, it says. And wives and little girls come second to duty. So now I’m busy too—an’ I’ve got little girls of my own—”
“Big girls, they are—”
“Aye—an’ big girls are more trouble than little ones … at least, they used to be.” As he spoke, Butler cleared the screen. “Now, don’t you trouble me, my lass—you look after your Mother, that’s your job, an’ I’ll do mine—right?”
There was a fractional pause. “Yes, Uncle Jack.”
Butler avoided Mi
tchell’s eye. “Nay, my lass—you don’t fret now, eh? I have him here, under my hand—you tell your Mother that—right? So goodbye, then.”
“Good—” The rest of Cathy Audley’s goodbye was guillotined by the jealous god’s finger, ruthlessly.
Marvellous! thought Mitchell. One day, when I’m old and equally horrible, and if we’ve held the line for Cathy, maybe I’ll say to some god-daughter of mine ‘I remember hearing old Colonel Butler talk to David Audley’s daughter, and he said—’
“What actually happened last night, Paul?” said Colonel Butler.
Mitchell was caught between imagining the distant future and expecting Audley to come barging in without knocking, in the immediate present.
“He’ll take his time.” Butler identified half his fear, in allowing for what had been in Audley’s report of last night’s passage-of-arms, and what hadn’t been.
Once again, the truth was called for. “We tracked Howard Morris down in one of his pubs, sir. And he’d had a fair skinful by then already.”
“Aye.” Butler knew all about Howard Morris.
“David pushed him.” How could he adequately describe it? “I think they exchanged their own signals … And then they stopped, and we went on to another pub, and then we had a meal in another pub, and a lot more to drink. And I’m a bit vague about what happened after that—except that I think David put a watch on him, after we poured him back into his flat after midnight.” Truth. “I was a bit the worse for wear by then, sir. I came back here and slept it off until Latimer phoned up at the crack of dawn.”
Butler accepted the truth without dismay. “But since then you haven’t attempted to check with the computer about anything Colonel Morris gave you both. Why not?”
Truth? “I thought about it. But David seems to know all those answers already. And then there was Latimer’s call.”
“And you had a hangover to deal with.”
“That too,” agreed Mitchell. “But I thought you’d rather know about Sion Crossing, anyway.” He stared at Colonel Butler for a moment. “I suppose I could have inquired about a dead American by the name of Macallan, ex-CIA, and also ex-father to Senator Thomas Cookridge’s step-daughter, who apparently has long eyelashes and longer legs—the stepdaughter, I mean … And I’d be running a trace on her, if David hasn’t done that already. Because from what Howard Morris said it looks like she’s been Mata Hari-ing him and poor old Oliver St John Latimer both on behalf of her stepfather.” He watched Colonel Butler. “But David’ll have done that for sure.”
“Yes.” Butler met his scrutiny in the middle of the no-man’s-land between them, and drove it back into his own trenches. “And?”
How much had Audley reported? Well, he wasn’t about to play games with Jack Butler himself anyway, Mitchell decided. Friendship did not go as far as that on this occasion.
“David threw in a name which isn’t in my book. Before my time, he said … but it certainly put the fear of God—or the Devil—into Howard Morris. Because they both clammed up about the job after that, and concentrated on drinking themselves and me under the table.” Mitchell made a face at his lord and master. “Which they certainly succeeded in doing in my case.”
Butler regarded him unsympathetically. “What name?”
For a guess, Colonel Butler probably hadn’t thrown his heart up the morning after since King George VI had first addressed him as a trusty and well-beloved second-lieutenant all those years ago.
“Debreczen.” Mitchell’s tongue felt like a corpse on a three-day-old battlefield.
The console on the Colonel’s display unit emitted a nasty little beeping sound, and a light on it flashed red, to offer a transmission. Butler poked a key, and the screen filled up with words again. Someone, somewhere, had been busy this early Sunday evening, and knew where the Colonel could be found.
Butler was reading the screen. “Debreczen?”
“A place or a person, but probably a place. ‘Debreczen List’ was what he actually said—‘from the Debreczen List’. Sounds like anywhere east of the Oder-Neisse line. Though I suppose it could be a mining town in Pennsylvania.”
Butler finished reading, and methodically put the words back into the Beast’s memory before turning to Mitchell. “Debreczen—yes. It’s a place.” He nodded unhelpfully.
But such unhelpfulness was a challenge. And that was perhaps what it was meant to be. “Well, when you’re through with me I can always go and try my luck in the basement.”
“You could try.”
There was a distinctive thump on the door. In the absence of the presiding dragon-lady outside, Audley had penetrated to the Holy of Holies by himself, ignoring the red lights on the way while taking his time. But the last red light was physically impassable.
Another thump. That was Audley, for sure: not a light-handed man, he had never merely knocked on a door in his life, preferring to pummel it with the soft side of his clenched fist as though to warn those on the other side that he was about to come in whether they liked it or not.
Butler pressed another of his buttons, to release the lock.
“Come in, David.”
Audley came in frowning, and Mitchell was half-pleased and half-frightened to observe that he looked somewhat under the weather. Over the years, Faith had done her best with him, but there was still no one who could wear good suits more scruffily: he looked as though he had slept in this one—in fact, he looked curiously as though he’d stepped straight out of one of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, unpressed and unshaven and unwashed. All that was needed was a stovepipe hat, a chewed cigar and the strong smell of whisky.
“Christ, Jack—one of these days I’m going to take a sledgehammer to that bloody contraption of yours in the basement!” Audley gave Mitchell a grimace. “I swear I will! I’ll boil its chips, and serve them up mashed.”
Butler sat back. “It’s been tried before. The Luddites tried to smash the industrial revolution. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.” He folded his arms. “You’ll be the one who gets mashed—like Ned Ludd.”
Audley gave him a sidelong look. “You think progress can’t be held up? Ask Attila the Hun—and ask the National Graphical Association, Jack. They’ve not done too badly.”
Butler sniffed. “You read too much ancient history—and you hobnob with too many journalists. Besides … I thought our Two-Four-Thousand was commonly known as ‘The Beast’, not as ‘a contraption’?”
“Huh!” It must be a matching hangover that was making Audley so vulnerable. But Butler was handling him with more authority, also; and the sooner Audley accepted the fact, the better for both of them. “And so it is—a beastly contraption! It’s a Jabberwock, Jack—and it needs a vorpal blade to go snicker-snack, and the sooner the better, before it dishes us all!” Plainly, Audley had not got the message yet. “You know what it did to me?”
Mitchell stole a glance at Colonel Butler. But Colonel Butler was still looking as nearly benign as he was capable of looking. Which meant—friendship aside—that the Colonel understood the Two-Four-Thousand Beast’s limitations, and how he needed Audley to work with it … even though he must know exactly what it had done to cause offence.
“It refused to give me what I wanted.” Outrage, rather than amazement, sat on Audley’s brow. “‘Not available’, it said—a bloody machine! ‘Not available’, when I know that half the stuff that’s not available is what I damn well put into the files myself! A contraption, Jack!” He pointed accusingly at Colonel Butler. “If you’d said ‘Not available’—damn it, I could have argued with you … but you wouldn’t have said that—but … contraption—is that the shape of things to come, now you’re boss? How soon before the Beast is the organ-grinder, and we’re all just the monkeys?”
Butler unfolded his arms. “I’m the organ-grinder. And the sooner you understand that, the better. What it won’t give you is what I don’t intend it to give you—or anyone else.”
Audley cooled. In fact, h
e cooled so quickly that Mitchell found a whole new set of reasons why Butler needed Audley as well as the Beast.
“Okay.” Audley gave his friend his coldest smile. “If you think I can’t reconstruct Bill Macallan’s last years from my own sources … then up yours, Jack! Because I’ve got contacts who’ll talk to me, who wouldn’t give your Beast the time of day—okay?”
Mitchell glanced at Colonel Butler uneasily, in the knowledge that he had just lost a bet with himself. Because it wasn’t Debreczen which had been embargoed, wherever it might be, but the long-time-a-dying Macallan, the Senator’s wife’s first husband, on whom Audley’s curiosity was centred.
“I don’t doubt it for a moment.” Butler was never as polite with Audley as with the rest of mankind, but he was always more long-suffering.
“No.” And Audley, for his part, was more quickly defused by Butler than anyone else. “But when you do, my redundancy letter will be in the post, eh Jack?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jack—you’re right, and I’m wrong … I’m Captain Swing, if not Ned Ludd … But that Beast of yours is a beast … And after last night I’m a bit fragile—” he looked at Mitchell “—when you get to my age you don’t get drunk so easily, Paul … you just begin to feel your age next day, and that isn’t pleasant.” He smiled. “How do you feel?”
He was with two very dangerous old men again, thought Mitchell. And it was because they were both good men—old-fashioned good, as well as good at their job—that they were so very dangerous.
“Don’t ask, David!” No pretence was required. “At the moment I feel your age rather than mine, if you must know.”
“Yes. Boozing is so tiring.” Audley switched back to Butler. “But we were only doing our duty, Jack. Old Howard Morris is a First Division drinker, but he’ll not be thinking straight for twenty-four hours. And, short of taking him into custody, that was the best we could do.”
“And what will he be doing then?” Butler leaned forward.
“He’ll start trying to put two and two together. And then, as he would put it, the shit will be in the fan, I rather think.”
Sion Crossing Page 14
