October Men

by Anthony Price

  He had not been pulled out of Ireland because he was the only man who could make Mrs. Clark talk: Hugh Roskill was also one of Clarkie’s favourites, and Hugh was still convalescing from his last operation and would therefore have been much more easily usable. So it had all along been planned that if the case developed the assignment would be his, and that most obviously because of his special fitness for Italian operations.

  But for once the thought of his second homeland aroused no light in his soul, for it was overshadowed by the realisation of what had really happened at Steeple Horley. What had seemed like a daring display of independence had in fact been nothing of the kind: he had not outfaced anyone with his demand to go straight to the top on David Audley’s behalf—he had merely anticipated his own orders.

  “You don’t look happy, Peter,” said Sir Frederick.

  Well, it still might all be conjecture, because it was no good kidding himself that he was up to calculating all their angles yet. But one thing wasn’t conjecture, and it ruddy well cooled his ardour now: Superintendent Cox had seized his dismissal like a thirty-year prisoner snatching a Royal Pardon, without asking questions or waiting for answers. And it wasn’t just because Cox preferred the safe routine of checking on a dead Hemingway to the mind-bending frustrations of handling live Macreadys and Audleys, but because he knew enough not to want to know more.

  “Should I be, then?” Richardson grinned insecurely. It was just like David had once said, the time to worry was when other people looked sorry for you as they said goodbye.

  “You don’t fancy a trip to Italy?”

  Ten out of ten for Answer Number One.

  “To bring David back in chains? Not especially, no.”

  “Not in chains… Would you rather go back to Dublin?”

  “You must be joking!” Richardson shuddered.

  “Then what’s so awful about Italy?”

  “Nothing—about Italy.” Richardson hardened his voice. “But there are too many loose ends in England.”

  “For example?”

  “Hemingway, for a start. If he’s the man old Charlie shot—their inside man here on an outside job—it doesn’t damn well make sense—“

  “And neither does that.” Macready tossed the file on to the table irritably.

  “Why not, Neville?”

  “Because the idea of Hotzendorff bringing a plum out of Russia verges on the ridiculous, that’s why.”

  “He didn’t bring it out. He sent it. And he didn’t send it to us, so it seems.” Sir Frederick paused. “And it rather looks as though he died for it.”

  “He died of a heart attack—“ Macready frowned suddenly. “You know what’s in the file, then?”

  “I read it when the news of his death finally reached us. And then there was the—ah—question of the widow’s pension to be settled.”

  There was a half-second of awkwardness, lost on Macready, whose pension and life expectancy were matters of black and white actuarial certainty, but not lost on Richardson.

  “You see, Peter—“ Sir Frederick ignored Macready, “—Hotzendorff worked for us for fifteen years as a courier in Russia.”

  “A sort of postman,” amended Macready.

  “But useful enough. He travelled for an East German farm machinery company—he was our main source for the Virgin Lands scheme for example.”

  “In North Kazakhstan, which happens to be about 3,000 miles from the North Sea,” said Macready, “and has no oil.”

  “He covered a great deal of territory elsewhere. And he was always very careful—and they trusted him.”

  “So did we.”

  “With very much better reason. You don’t have to play the devil’s advocate, Neville.”

  “I’m not trying to. It’s simply that he wasn’t the sort of man to pick up this sort of information. He was just a delivery agent for second-class mail.”

  “He put in his own reports too.”

  “Most of which he could have copied from the magazines and papers he bought in the streets. For the sort of thing we’ve been talking about he just didn’t have the background—and he certainly didn’t have the contacts, Fred.”

  Sir Frederick sighed, then shook his head. “You can say what you like, Neville. But at the end of the day the only clue we’ve got points to him. And—“ he tapped the file, “there’s circumstantial evidence in here that backs it up, too.”

  Richardson grasped thankfully at last at the answer to the question which had been nagging him increasingly: “What clue?”

  Sir Frederick half smiled. “The one you brought to us, Peter—the one Narva gave to David’s friend, and he gave to David, and Professor Freisler handed on to you: the Little Bird from East Berlin.”

  “The little dickey bird?”

  “He started as Dickey Bird, curiously enough, short for Richard von Hotzendorff. He was rechristened Little Bird in ‘61. Born in Konigsberg, which is now Kaliningrad, in 1914. David would have recognised him straight away, naturally—“

  “David’s signature is on the authorisation transferring the file from active to dead,” said Macready. “His and Latimer’s. July 1970—that would be the yearly clear-out.”

  “So he’d have remembered the circumstantial evidence too, then,” Sir Frederick nodded.

  Richardson looked at him expectantly.

  “Nothing to do with oil, I’m afraid, Peter—Neville’s right there. There isn’t a smell of it.”

  “What is there a smell of?”

  “The warm South—Italy. Three smells of it, too: Hotzendorff was there first with the German army in ‘42 and ‘43. The second time was twenty-five years later.”

  “Twenty-five?” The addition rolled in Richardson’s brain like a jackpot number. “1968.”

  “Early in that year. He was dead before the end of it.”

  “And Narva was buying into the North Sea.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The Italian trip isn’t in the file.” Macready’s tone was aggrieved.

  “No. We didn’t know it until after he was dead.”

  “And there was a third time.” Now there was nothing casual about Macready’s question, his voice was sharp.

  “Not for Hotzendorff, there wasn’t. Not long after he died his wife —his widow—got out of East Germany with her three children. She came to us to enquire about his pension. Or at least his gratuity—“

  “She got out? You mean we didn’t get her out?” Macready cut in quickly.

  “We didn’t—she did.”

  “On her own, with three children? She must be a woman of considerable initiative. The East Germans don’t like losing children—did she say how she’d done it?”

  “She had friends, she said. And some money saved—it can be done with that. She also said that her husband had placed some money in Italy on his last trip. With a bit of a pension it would be enough to bring the family up, if we could drop a word here and there.” Sir Frederick looked from one to the other of them. “She said they’d always planned to retire there one day. We had no reason to doubt her story…”

  Oh, brother! thought Richardson—a woman of considerable initiative!

  “I suppose Little Bird really is dead—or that he hasn’t just migrated to sunnier climes?”

  Sir Frederick looked at him a little reproachfully. “I said we didn’t doubt her story, Peter—I didn’t say we didn’t check on it. Although it might have been better in this instance if we hadn’t.”

  The obvious question hung in the air between them for a moment, unasked.

  “We checked his death in the hospital files in Moscow, and we closed down his contact network—that was all routine. And then we ran another check on her eight months later in Italy, just to make sure he hadn’t been clever.” Sir Frederick looked from one to the other of them bleakly. “And it was David Audley who had the job of setting up the checks.”

  “Okay—that does it.” Macready turned away from the desk to stare directly out of the window in
to nowhere, nodding spasmodically to himself.

  “You mean David had the necessary information to spark him off?”

  “More than that—he had enough to guess he’d been taken for a ride by someone.”

  There was no need to expand on that: it would bug David Audley to hell and back to find out that—it would light his blue touchpaper as nothing else would.

  Richardson turned back to Sir Frederick. “So Little Bird sold us out to Narva—he went private on us?”

  “That’s not important.” Macready swung back again, the excitement rising in his voice. “It isn’t the first time something like that’s happened. A little bit on the side for a rainy day, put away somewhere nice and safe abroad—it’s much safer than defecting, and Italy’s a darned sight more comfortable than anywhere behind the Curtain, especially when it’s your old age you’re thinking of. … And he was getting on, Hotzendorff was—this wasn’t his September Song, he was well into October…” Macready trailed off, head cocked on one side, half smiling to himself as though suddenly taken with that thought, his excitement of a moment earlier apparently quite forgotten. “Where do flies go in the wintertime? Nobody knows. They just disappear—once they’re gone nobody cares where they go. Same with spies. But if they survive they’ve got to live somehow, just like the flies.”

  Well into October, and Little Bird had been a small, unimportant creature, thought Richardson. A delivery agent for second-class mail, a pedlar of secondhand facts. Useful, but a foreigner and not irreplaceable, as his very code names seemed to suggest.

  And yet a human being, with a wife and a family—maybe more of a human being than the superbright, egocentric Macready—and with human plans for his old age that didn’t include risking his neck on second-class mail.

  No wonder it wasn’t the first time!

  “What is important, Neville?” said Sir Frederick coolly recalling Macready to reality.

  “Yes!” Macready snapped awake again, looking around him with a curiously distracted expression. “You’d do better to ask David, of course.”

  “If he was here I’d do just that,” said Sir Frederick with a touch of asperity. “As it is I must make do with you, Neville.”

  Macready looked at him sharply. He was still not in the least overawed, but it seemed to Richardson that he was already regretting the brief flare of excitement which he could not now leave unexplained.

  Then he shrugged. “I can only guess, naturally.”

  “Guess then.”

  Macready bowed to the word of command. “So long as you realise it is a guess—the Russians are no damn business of mine, any more than oil is David’s.”

  He stopped.

  “Get to the point.”

  “That is the point. Oil isn’t David’s speciality. He wouldn’t understand all the angles.”

  “You underrate him.”

  “Oh, I know he’s well informed. But technology isn’t his thing. And the Russians are.”

  He stopped again. He was wrapping something up, thought Richardson; but wrapping up what— The North Sea, Narva, Little Bird—the Russians?

  Forecasting where the oil lay was impossible, or a ruddy miracle. But the Russians seemed to have done it.

  And for Little Bird to lay his hands on a piece of knowledge as hot as that was a miracle too—but he seemed to have done it. (It didn’t matter what he had done with it afterwards—that was no miracle, certainly.)

  So—two miracles.

  The light dawned like a flash of morning sun through a wind-blown curtain revealing bright day outside.

  “They gave it to him,” said Richardson. “He couldn’t have got it on his own, Little Bird couldn’t. So the Russians gave it to him—on a plate.”

  Macready raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Someone gave it to him anyway. But that’s only the half of it.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “I’m still only guessing—“

  “For Christ’s sake—“ Richardson exploded.

  “Okay, okay! I mean I’m trying to see it through David’s eyes, that’s all!” Macready sounded quite alarmed at encountering consumer hostility. “It’s there in the file—Hotzendorff never complained of any heart trouble. I know people do go out like a light sometimes, but there’s usually a couple of warnings. So it looks to me as though someone gave him the information and then snuffed him out the moment he’d passed it on so he couldn’t split on them—“

  “Which means—“ Sir Frederick paused, “—if that is it, then it was an unofficial leak, because they’d never have needed him for an official one.”

  “And at a high level, too.” Macready nodded quickly to emphasise his point. “That’s what’s grabbed David—not the oil.”

  Someone at a high level: someone who knew about Hotzendorff— they must have got on to him after all, even if they weren’t ready to pick him up. And that meant someone with access to KGB surveillance lists.

  And someone who knew about the North Sea bonanza and for some reason, some convoluted political reason, wanted to make sure the British and the other Western nations knew about it too.

  And someone with the resources and the ruthlessness to stop Hotzendorff’s mouth once he had served his purpose.

  Except the irony of that had been that Hotzendorff had passed on the information to the wrong address after all, even though it had added up to the same result in the end.

  Always supposing that had been the design.

  “And you really think that was how David put it together?”

  It was odd: he had tried to make the question sound casual, but it came out abrasively, as though he not only questioned Macready’s ability to get inside David’s mind, but also objected to it. He had already had his knuckles rapped for letting friendship influence him, and he’d do better to remember an older piece of advice: Gladiator, make no friends of gladiators.

  “Eh?” Macready blinked at him defensively. “I tell you I’m guessing. I don’t know what goes on in anyone’s head, least of all David Audley’s. I’m not claiming to.” He stared at Richardson for a moment, then rounded on Sir Frederick. “It’s the questions he asked. It wasn’t just Narva he was interested in—he knew about him, I told you. Or about the North Sea. It was the Russians he kept coming back to.”

  “What about them, Neville?”

  “Mostly questions I couldn’t answer off the cuff. He wanted to know what their future projected fuel consumption was, and their percentage increase rate. And where they planned to make up the difference—things like that… And who would be in the know, and how their policies were formulated. But it was the Russians he was interested in—I don’t think he gave a damn for the North Sea.”

  Richardson now saw the encounter in the Reading Room in much clearer perspective. Faced with the same piece of information Audley and Macready had reacted according to their own specialist knowledge, each flying off on his own tangent, oblivious of the other’s obsession.

  Mention of the North Sea had been enough to launch Macready on his hobbyhorse; and if he had disbelieved the first miracle he had been none the less bugged by the unresolved mystery of Narva’s investment. But Audley was already ranging beyond the second miracle to its possible explanation: the existence of someone high in the Kremlin who was prepared to leak valuable information to the West in pursuit of his own ends.

  And it was no ruddy wonder David found that possibility irresistible: if there was such a man, and his identity could be established, he would be wide open to every pressure from genteel suggestion to outright blackmail.

  Or would have been if David and Macready had been more discreet—and less unlucky—in their behaviour.

  “Whoever it was, the Russians’ll get him now before we can, damn it,” he muttered.

  “Via Hemingway?” Sir Frederick had evidently advanced along an identical line of thought. “I’m afraid that seems all too likely, Peter. Though I find their behaviour a little strange all the same. We shall just have t
o see what Cox turns up there. In the meantime—“

  He stopped abruptly, frowning down at the intercom.

  “—Yes, Mrs. Harlin?”

  “I have a call from Rome for you, Sir Frederick.” This time there was no apology in the voice, and no hesitation.

  “They’ve got through to Dr. Audley?”

  “It isn’t from Mr. Cable, Sir Frederick. This is an official call from General Montuori. He is using the NATO scrambler line, priority green. He is on the line now—“

  XI

  THE WORST OF the sweltering day was over at last, but that brought no consolation to Boselli: the concrete perimeter strip of the airfield had baked for hours and now it was restoring every particle of stored heat to the atmosphere around him.

  Also his head ached abominably, as though the racket of the rotor of the Pubblica Sicurezza helicopter which had brought him south was still revolving noisily in his brain; it had been just another of the day’s awful ironies that those two hours of relative coolness had been an agony of incessant din in which neither thought nor comfort had been possible.

  And now there was also the unseasonable humidity to contend with, more enervating than the dry Roman heat to which he was at least resigned. He had expected blue Campanian skies—the General’s secretary had made the trip sound like a holiday jaunt—and instead he was enclosed by a haze which obscured the hills in the distance.

  But the heat and the ache and the humidity were all in the natural order of things, the old conspiracy of his feeble body and hostile environment against his unclouded mind. It was fear now that dominated him, both the sick stomach fear of physical danger and the chest-tightening panic of professional failure.

  The two hard-faced PS plainclothesmen behind him in the car did nothing to alleviate the physical fear. Sergeant Depretis had obviously been an officer of vast experience and proven ability to have made one of the special squads, but that had not prevented him choking in his own blood in the dust of Ostia; and even Villari’s miraculous reflexes had not been fast enough to duck a bullet.

  The very thought of Villari clouded his mind with confusion and guilt. The man had saved his life and taken his bullet, and the uncontrollable inner wish that the wound might prove mortal was therefore ungrateful and dishonourable as well as an act of treason and a mortal sin.