October Men

by Anthony Price

  And equally naturally, because they were old men and losers, the chance had gone wrong on them, first on the stairs at Steeple Horley and then in the hot, dusty streets of old Ostia. After that the stakes had become life and liberty as well as money and power.

  “Mischief—yes, that is Ruelle,” murmured the General. “And they used someone else to make you do what they know they are not capable of doing—that is Ruelle too. The Bastard still runs true to form.” He looked at Audley shrewdly. “What exactly were his terms, then?”

  “They will hold my wife until they have used my information. Then they will let her go.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “No, not a word of it,” Audley shook his head. “Until I give them what they want Faith is safe, I believe that. But after that we’ll both know too much to be left alive—I know how Ruelle’s mind works.”

  “He’d finish both of you, yes—I see you understand the animal.”

  “I understand him perfectly, General.”

  Audley sounded calm and collected now, as though the hideous problem of saving his wife’s life was an academic one divorced from reality.

  “That’s all ruddy fine, David—understanding how the Bastard ticks. But he’s still got Faith and you haven’t got one damn thing to trade for her even if he was on the level.”

  “That’s true, Peter.”

  “And you don’t know where they’ve taken her, sir?”

  “Regrettably—no.” Montuori shook his head. “We have one witness who saw a woman answering to Signora Audley’s description in a car with several men on the road from Ostia Antica to the autostrada to Rome. That is the last we have seen of any of them.”

  “Well, if Narva hasn’t got the answers—and if Frau Hotzendorff hasn’t either—what the devil are we going to do?”

  “Peter, I never expected them to know. And even if they had, it wouldn’t help Faith.”

  “Then why did you come here?”

  “Simply to make sure that I had Hotzendorff figured out properly. Only Narva could tell me that.”

  “Okay!” Richardson’s irritation splashed over. “So what are we going to do to save her?”

  “We’re not going to lose our heads—we’re going to use them.” Audley’s voice tightened. “How badly do you want the Bastard, General?”

  “Badly. I’ve waited a long time for him.”

  “They wouldn’t let you have him?”

  “The Party?” The General’s lip curled. “Oh, they kicked him out, but they’ve kept him in view. Times have been known to change, Dr. Audley.”

  “But now—things may be different?”

  “They may be. But that will not save your wife, Dr. Audley.” The General eyed Audley closely. “I assume that you have a plan of action?”

  “It depends very much on your help.”

  The General nodded slowly. “I can afford to wait a little longer— perhaps.”

  Audley gave the General an appraising look, as though calculating the odds.

  “No state security is involved,” went on the General smoothly. “So go on, Dr. Audley—what do you propose to do?”

  Audley looked at them both.

  “Why, if you’re going to help me—which I admit I’d hardly hoped for—we can go on with my original plan.”

  “Which was—?”

  “So far I’ve only lied and bullied and cheated. Now it’s time to start making dirty deals.”

  “With whom?”

  For the first time, the very first time since they had met again, Audley smiled. But it was not a goodwill smile and the eyes behind the spectacles were not bright with anything remotely like happiness. Richardson found himself hoping that nobody ever had cause to smile at him—or about him—like this. If tigers smiled, as the poets alleged, then this was how they did it.

  “Someone who’ll know just how to find where Ruelle’s gone to earth, General.”

  Montuori stared at him, stone-faced.

  “You mean the Party?”

  “They’d know his bolt-holes—you said yourself they’ve kept an eye on him.”

  “But I didn’t say they’d give him up—not to me. They might not stand in my way any more, but they wouldn’t help me, and they’d never let me lean on them. They wouldn’t like the precedent.”

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t. But I wasn’t thinking of asking you to lean on anyone—and I’m not making the deal with them at all. After all, they don’t really want anything that we’ve got—“

  A dirty deal … and a dirty deal not with the Italian Communist Party: premonition was like a punch in the gut. But would David really go so far?

  “—but Moscow does.”

  David would.

  “There’s a man I know in the Kremlin—Nikolai Andrievich Panin. I think he might be persuaded to help us, if the price was right.”

  Richardson managed to control his impatience until the door had closed on the Italians, but only just. “Will he come?”

  “Panin?” The tiger’s grin returned. “ ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’—that’s always the million-dollar question, Peter—but will they come when I do call for them?”

  “Well, will he?”

  “Not in person. But of course he doesn’t need to—and we don’t need him to. Just a word from Comrade Professor Panin is what we want. A word from him would be quite enough to start things moving.”

  That was certainly true enough. Even a whisper from the very loftiest pinnacles of the Kremlin, which was where Panin now operated, would gather strength as it echoed downwards, like the small fatal sound on an avalanche slope. The trick was to stay clear of the disaster area thus created.

  “They’ll get through to him, anyway. No one’ll dare stop a call like that.”

  Richardson nodded. Again that was well calculated. By selecting someone so far up the official ladder, Audley had brushed away the danger that some officious bureaucrat would try to be awkward. Just as the name Montuori would clear the Italian lines, so would the name Panin clear the Russian. And night or day, the Kremlin switchboard would know where to put the call.

  “So the answer is—yes, Peter, I think I can call this spirit from the deep. I think he’ll talk to me.”

  That was the final element in the chain of reasoning: not only did Audley know Panin personally, but he judged himself to be of sufficient interest for the Russian’s curiosity to be aroused. And judged correctly, thought Richardson, wryly remembering the flurry in the department dovecote at his unscheduled disappearance. David Audley was too unpredictable to ignore!

  Audley was looking at him rather apologetically, though, as though that thought was catching.

  “I’m afraid I may have made trouble for you, young Peter.”

  Understatement of the year: what this private call to Moscow would do to Sir Frederick’s blood pressure, never mind Fatso Latimer’s mischief-making tendencies, only God Almighty could compute. Not to mention Peter Richardson’s career. It would be back to the 39th Assault Engineers on Salisbury Plain most likely.

  But there was Faith Audley to think of … and maybe Peter Richardson had learnt a thing or two himself these twenty-four hours.

  “Think nothing of it, David. My main brief was to bring you back in one piece. And they did tell me to be nice to your hosts, so maybe we can blame the General—“

  Richardson stopped as a less charitable thought struck him. There was in truth nothing he could do now, and Audley not only knew it, but had intended it to be that way from the start. First he had tried to get free and then he had struck a bargain with the General. But from the moment Faith had been kidnapped he had had this private deal with Moscow in his mind as being the only way he could track down Bastard Ruelle.

  “Yes …” Audley considered the lie with a professional’s detachment, “we might confuse the issue that way, at the least.”

  “But what I don’t see still is what you’ve got to trade with Panin, David. If the KGB got Little Bird
then they must have got his contact, darn it—and as soon as Rat face has briefed the General he’ll realise that too.”

  “If I know Raffaele Montuori that’s just what he won’t believe, Peter,” Audley shook his head knowingly. “You’re being gullible now—you’re believing what doesn’t make good sense.”

  “I’m believing the ruddy facts, man. That’s all.”

  “The facts? But there aren’t many of those—and that’s a fact to start with.”

  “Little Bird’s dead. That’s one you can’t argue with.”

  “Peter, it’s the key fact. Everything else is powered by it. Without it there’s nothing—nothing at all.”

  “Sure—that’s what convinced Narva, I take that point.”

  “But you’re not taking it half far enough. Because why the devil should the KGB kill him and then fake it up as a heart attack—on their own patch? And if they picked up his contact, since when have they changed their policy on spy trials? Come to that, why didn’t they pick up his other contacts—our contacts?”

  Richardson remembered belatedly what Macready had concluded, which he had somehow forgotten: someone gave him the injormation, and then snuffed him out the moment he’d passed it on so he couldn’t split on them…

  But—

  “And you might ask how the KGB let his family get out too, Peter. I don’t care how efficient Westphal is—they had the time to get her under surveillance first. And Westphal’s men wouldn’t have stirred a finger then—they’d smell an ambush a mile off, they’re experts at it.”

  “But, David—Narva said—“

  “Phooey to what Narva said. Narva was set up, just as Little Bird was set up.”

  “Set up for what, for God’s sake? Why should they be set up?” Richardson tried not to let his impatience show. “You’re not going to tell me there’s no oil in the North Sea, because there’s a ruddy lake of the stuff.”

  “But has it ever occurred to you, my lad, why Narva never received that final report on it—the one that really counted?”

  “Because the KGB got it first, of course.”

  “And then staged a false heart attack and let everyone else go home?” Audley shook his head. “That just doesn’t wash, I tell you.”

  “Then what does?”

  Audley stared at him over his spectacles for a moment, like an Oxford professor with a hitherto bright pupil suddenly afflicted with culpable intellectual blindness.

  “Do you recall the Garbo network during the last war, Peter?” he said.

  The professorial look was too much—after so much.

  “A little before my time, that was.”

  “A pity.” Audley chose to ignore the sarcasm. “Garbo was a Spaniard who worked for us—for the Twenty Committee. Masterman called him the Bradman of the double-cross world. He was a perfect genius at inventing imaginary sources of information—imaginary agents—to deceive the Germans.”

  “So what?”

  “So Little Bird’s Russian contact, the one who passed on useless information from Western Siberia—he has the smell of Garbo about him.”

  “The smell—?” Richardson screwed up his memory, trying to pinpoint the moment of falseness in Little Bird’s tale.

  “Garbo—“

  “I—I have read about him, actually,” Richardson admitted, already regretting the sarcasm. “But I seem to recall he passed on false information. And this certainly wasn’t false—two hundred million tons of oil a year say it isn’t.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “Then what are you saying, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I’m saying there has to be a man somewhere in the Kremlin who wanted to slip the word about the North Sea—someone high up. Why—well, maybe Neville Macready could answer that for us, but it doesn’t really matter now. What matters is he wasn’t a traitor. He just wanted to make sure that we kept drilling.”

  “Why didn’t he tell us then? Why did he tell Narva?”

  “Because we would have wanted to know too much, and he didn’t want to give away technological secrets. To convince us he’d have to put himself is our hands and he’d be at our mercy then. But if he could get Narva to switch his investment to the North Sea he reckoned he would tip the balance without betraying his country or risking his neck.

  “But his problem was to sell the truth without the proof, and that’s where Little Bird served a double purpose, poor little sod—“

  A double purpose—

  “—Alive he sold Narva the truth. And dead he proved it.”

  The best proof in the world!

  Richardson saw the plot in the round at last: Little Bird had been manipulated into conning Narva with a mixture of truth and falsehood, only to be conned himself. And if that was how it was, then Comrade X was a true cold-hearted bastard, who deserved to be sold down the river in his turn.

  “The only thing that went wrong was—“

  Audley stopped abruptly as a small figure burst through the French windows, skidded to a halt and stared at them in speechless surprise.

  “Manfred! I told you not to run on the terrace—you will slip and then—“

  The gently chiding voice tailed off as its owner appeared framed in the opening behind the little boy, to stare at them both with the same wide-spaced eyes.

  Mother and son, as like as two flowers on the same stem, blue and rich honey and spun gold.

  It couldn’t be—and yet it ruddy well had to be, thought Richardson, seeing the evident look of recognition on the woman’s face as the cornflower blue eyes settled on Audley. Of course Richard von Hotzendorff had lost his first family in the war, and it was reasonable to expect him to have married a younger woman the second time round. But he had somehow expected a competent, muscular Hausfrau, and Narva’s description of the man had reinforced the expectation. Yet the real somehow was wholly unexpected: somehow the grey Goebbels-figure had captured this gorgeous Rhinemaiden.

  “Dr. Audley!”

  “Frau von Hotzendorff—I—I—regret—“

  Audley had the grace to sound genuinely regretful, at least. And with good reason, since this whole KGB scare was a thing of his own making to twist Narva’s arm … except perhaps if Audley failed the Bastard Ruelle might indeed turn his attentions to the Rhinemaiden.

  The door opened behind them.

  “Sophie, my dear—“ Narva went forward quickly and embraced the woman “—it is good to see you.”

  “Eugenio, I’m sorry I rushed away as we came in, but Manfred will go off to the ramparts—“

  “Ah!” Narva swept Manfred into his arms, lifting him up high. The little boy’s arms and legs wound round him affectionately. “So Manfred wishes to go on sentry duty on the ramparts!”

  “Uncle, there should be cannon there. Why do you not have cannon to drive away the pirates?”

  “Because cannon will not deal with pirates, my love—pirates do not attack castles, they are too cowardly. To deal with pirates you put your cannon in a tall ship and you hunt them and seek them out and blow them out of the water—that is what you do with pirates— you blow them to bits!”

  “I know! I know! It is all in that book you gave me, the one with the big coloured pictures.”

  “Good—so you liked my book?” Narva set the boy down. “Now there are many other books in your bedroom for you to see. Your brother and sister are there already, and there is a tall glass of fizzy orange for you, but if you don’t hurry the fizz will have all fizzed away. So off you go and I will come and see you tucked up in bed and we will discuss pirates—“

  “—And how to blow them out of the water?”

  “Exactly!” Narva watched Manfred scuttle away, his eyes warm. Nor did their warmth diminish as he raised them to Manfred’s mother, Richardson noted. What had once been a debt of guilt and honour was something more than that now, evidently.

  Sophie von Hotzendorff’s glance shuttled uneasily between Audley and Narva. “There is trouble, Eugenio—for you to want me to b
ring the children—?”

  Narva nodded. “But you will be safe here, Sophie.”

  “Safe?” She looked at Audley.

  “It concerns your husband, Frau von Hotzendorff,” said Audley. “It is to do with what he was doing when—before he died.”

  “But I do not—did not—know in detail what he was doing. He would never tell me, apart from his work for the business. I told you so when we met, Dr. Audley—and it was the truth.”

  “Yet you did not tell me everything that was the truth—there were things you didn’t tell me.”

  The blue eyes turned in doubt to Narva.

  “It’s all right, Sophie my dear,” Narva’s voice was reassuring. “He knows about Westphal.”

  “Then there is nothing else to know. I didn’t lie to you, or to the man I saw in London, except in that.”

  “Your husband told you what to say if … if he didn’t come out?”

  Sophie nodded. “Yes, Dr. Audley. If a man named Westphal—or giving that name—came to me I was to go at once with him, with the children. He said we were to take nothing with us, just to lock the door and go as though we were visiting the neighbours next door.”

  That was the Westphal trademark. For every client everything was laid on, everything prepared. And paid for.

  “But not to tell us?”

  The delicate hair shook the answer.

  “He sent that message to you?”

  “No. He told me before he left … for the last time.”

  “So you knew he was doing something very dangerous?”

  “I knew he was risking his life for us.” Sophie swallowed and her neck muscles tightened momentarily. “But I’d known that for some time, Dr. Audley.”

  “How did you know—if he didn’t tell you about it?”

  “How does a wife know anything?” Sophie swallowed again. “The man—the man in London—he said Richard was a good agent, that he was always very careful. But I know even better that … he was a good man … that he was a good husband and a good father. Although he was older he never seemed like it to us—he used to say we had given him a second lease of life. And it was true…”