Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

by Desmond Bagley

  I pointed over the sea towards Grimsey. ‘I trust Slade as far as I can throw that island. He’s cooked up a complicated deal and I’d like to find out where I fit in before the chopper falls because it might be designed to fall right on my neck.’

  ‘And what about the package?’

  ‘That’s the ace.’ I lifted the metal box. ‘Slade thinks the opposition have it, but as long as they haven’t there’s no great harm done. The opposition think they have it, assuming they haven’t opened it yet.’

  ‘Is that a fair assumption?’

  ‘I think so. Agents are not encouraged to pry too much. The quartet who took the package from me will have orders to take it to the boss unopened, I think.’

  Elin looked at the box. ‘I wonder what’s in it?’

  I looked at it myself, and it looked right back at me and said nothing. ‘Maybe I’d better get out the can-opener,’ I said. ‘But not just yet. Perhaps it might be better not to know.’

  Elin made a sound of exasperation. ‘Why must you men make everything complicated? So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to lie low,’ I said mendaciously. ‘While I do some heavy thinking. Maybe I’ll post the damned thing to post restante, Akureyri, and telegraph Slade telling him where to pick it up.’

  I hoped Elin would swallow that because I was going to do something quite different and infinitely more dangerous. Somebody was soon going to find out he’d been sold a pup; he was going to scream loudly and I wanted to be around to find out who was screaming. But I didn’t want to have Elin around when that happened.

  ‘Lie low,’ repeated Elin thoughtfully. She turned to me. ‘What about Asbyrgi for tonight?’

  ‘Asbyrgi!’ I laughed and drained my glass. ‘Why not?’

  V

  In that dim and faraway time when the gods were young and Odin rode the arctic wastelands, he was out one day when his horse, Sleipnir, stumbled and planted a hoof in Northern Iceland. The place where the hoof hit the ground is now known as Asbyrgi. So runs the legend but my geologist friends tell it a little differently.

  Asbyrgi is a hoof-shaped rock formation about two miles across. Within it the trees, sheltered from the killing wind, grow quite strongly for Iceland, some of them attaining a height of nearly twenty feet. It is a green and fertile place nestling between the towering rock walls which surround it. There is nothing to draw one there but the legend and the unaccustomed sight of growing trees, but although it is a tourist attraction they don’t stay the night. More to the point, it is quite off the main road.

  We pushed through the narrow entrance to Asbyrgi and along the track made by the wheels of visiting cars until we were well inside at a place where the rock walls drew together and the trees were thick, and there we made camp. It was our custom to sleep on the ground when the climate allowed so I erected the awning which fitted on to the side of the Land-Rover, and brought out the air mattresses and sleeping bags while Elin began to prepare supper.

  Perhaps we were sybaritic about our camping because we certainly didn’t rough it. I took out the folding chairs and the table and set them up and Elin put down a bottle of Scotch and two glasses and joined me in a drink before she broiled the steak. Beef is a luxury I insist upon in Iceland; one can get awfully tired of mutton.

  It was quiet and peaceful and we sat and enjoyed the evening, savouring the peaty taste of the whisky and talking desultorily of the things farthest from our minds. I think we both needed a respite from the nagging problem of Slade and his damned package, and the act of setting out our camp was a return to happier days which we both eagerly grasped.

  Elin got up to cook supper and I poured another drink and wondered how I was to get rid of her. If she wouldn’t go voluntarily then perhaps the best way would be to decamp early in the morning leaving her a couple of cans of food and a water bottle. With those and the sleeping bag she would be all right for a day or two until someone came into Asbyrgi and gave her a lift into civilization. She would be mad as a hornet but she would still be alive.

  Because lying low wasn’t good enough. I had to become visible—set myself up like a tin duck at a shooting gallery so that someone would have a crack at me. I didn’t want Elin around when the action started.

  Elin brought the supper and we started to eat. She said, ‘Alan, why did you leave the…the Department?’

  I hesitated with my fork in the air. ‘I had a difference of opinion,’ I said shortly.

  ‘With Slade?’

  I laid down the fork gently. ‘It was about Slade—yes. I don’t want to talk about it, Elin.’

  She brooded for a while, then said, ‘It might be better if you talked about it. You don’t want to keep things locked up.’

  I laughed silently. ‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘Telling that to an agent of the Department. Haven’t you heard of the Official Secrets Act?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If the Department found I’d talked out of turn I’d be slung into jail for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ she said disparagingly. ‘That doesn’t count—not with me.’

  ‘Try telling that to Sir David Taggart,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you more than enough already.’

  ‘Then why not get it all out? You know I won’t tell anyone.’

  I looked down at my plate. ‘Not of your own free will. I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt you, Elin.’

  ‘Who would hurt me?’ she asked.

  ‘Slade would, for one. Then there’s a character called Kennikin who may be around, but I hope not.’

  Elin said slowly, ‘If I ever marry anyone it will be a man who has no secrets. This is not good, Alan.’

  ‘So you think that a trouble shared is a trouble halved. I don’t think the Department would go along with you on that. The powers that be don’t think confession is good for the soul, and Catholic priests and psychiatrists are looked upon with deep suspicion. But since you’re so persistent I’ll tell you some of it—not enough to be dangerous.’

  I cut into the steak again. ‘It was on an operation in Sweden. I was in a counter-espionage group trying to penetrate the KGB apparat in Scandinavia. Slade was masterminding the operation. I’ll tell you one thing about Slade; he’s very clever—devious and tricky, and he likes a ploy that wins coming and going.’

  I found I had lost my appetite and pushed the plate away. ‘A man called V. V. Kennikin was bossing the opposition, and I got pretty close to him. As far as he was concerned I was a Swedish Finn called Stewartsen, a fellow traveller who was willing to be used. Did you know I was born in Finland?’

  Elin shook her head. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  I shrugged. 1 suppose I’ve tried to close off that part of my life. Anyway, after a lot of work and a lot of fright I was inside and accepted by Kennikin; not that he trusted me, but he used me on minor jobs and I was able to gather a lot of information which was duly passed on to Slade. But it was all trivial stuff. I was close to Kennikin, but not close enough.’

  Elin said, ‘It sounds awful. I’m not surprised you were frightened.’

  ‘I was scared to death most of the time; double agents usually are.’ I paused, trying to think of the simplest way to explain a complicated situation. I said deliberately, ‘The time came when I had to kill a man. Slade warned me that my cover was in danger of being blown. He said the man responsible had not reported to Kennikin and the best thing to do was to eliminate him. So I did it with a bomb.’ I swallowed. ‘I never even saw the man I killed—I just put a bomb in a car.’

  There was horror in Elin’s eyes. I said harshly, ‘We weren’t playing patty-cake out there.’

  ‘But someone you didn’t know—that you had never seen!’

  ‘It’s better that way,’ I said. ‘Ask any bomber pilot. But that’s not the point. The point is that I had trusted Slade and it turned out that the man I killed was a British agent—one of my own side.’

  Elin was looking at me as though I had just crawled ou
t from under a stone. I said, ‘I contacted Slade and asked what the hell was going on. He said the man was a freelance agent whom neither side trusted—the trade is lousy with them. He recommended that I tell Kennikin what I’d done, so I did and my stock went up with Kennikin. Apparently he had been aware of a leak in his organization and there was enough evidence around to point to the man I had killed. So I became one of his blue-eyed boys—we got really chummy—and that was his mistake because we managed to wreck his network completely.’

  Elin let out her breath. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘By Christ, it’s not all!’ I said violently. I reached for the whisky bottle and found my hand was trembling. ‘When it was all over I went back to England. I was congratulated on doing a good job. The Scandinavian branch of the Department was in a state of euphoria and I was a minor hero, for God’s sake! Then I discovered that the man I had killed was no more a freelance agent than I was. His name—if it matters—was Birkby, and he had been a member of the Department, just as I was.’

  I slopped whisky into the glass. ‘Slade had been playing chess with us. Neither Birkby nor I were deep enough in Kennikin’s outfit to suit him so he sacrificed a pawn to put another in a better position. But he had broken the rules as far as I was concerned—it was as though a chess player had knocked off one of his own pieces to checkmate the king, and that’s not in the rules.’

  Elin said in a shaking voice, ‘Are there any rules in your dirty world?’

  ‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any rules. But I thought there were. I tried to raise a stink.’ I knocked back the undiluted whisky and felt it burn my throat. ‘Nobody would listen, of course—the job had been successful and was now being forgotten and the time had come to go on to bigger and better things. Slade had pulled it off and no one wanted to delve too deeply into how he’d done it.’ I laughed humourlessly. ‘In fact, he’d gone up a notch in the Department and any muck-raking would be tactless—a reflection on the superior who had promoted him. I was a nuisance and nuisances are unwanted and to be got rid of.’

  ‘So they got rid of you,’ she said flatly.

  ‘If Slade had his way I’d have been got rid of the hard way—permanently. In fact, he told me so not long ago. But he wasn’t too high in the organization in those days and he didn’t carry enough weight.’ I looked into the bottom of the glass. ‘What happened was that I had a nervous breakdown.’

  I raised my eyes to Elin. ‘Some of it was genuine—I’d say about fifty-fifty. I’d been living on my nerves for a long time and this was the last straw. Anyway, the Department runs a hospital with tame psychiatrists for cases like mine. Right now there’s a file stashed away somewhere full of stuff that would make Freud blush. If I step out of line there’ll be a psychiatrist ready to give evidence that I suffer everything from enuresis to paranoic delusions of grandeur. Who would disbelieve evidence coming from an eminent medical man?’

  Elin was outraged. ‘But that’s unethical! You’re as sane as I am.’

  ‘There are no rules—remember?’ I poured out another drink, more gently this time. ‘So I was allowed to retire. I was no use to the Department anyway; I had become that anomaly, the well-known secret service agent. I crept away to a Scottish glen to lick my wounds. I thought I was safe until Slade showed up.’

  ‘And blackmailed you with Kennikin. Would he tell Kennikin where you are?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him, on his past record. And it’s quite true that Kennikin has a score to settle. The word is that he’s no good to the girls any more, and he blames me for it. I’d just as soon he doesn’t know where to find me.’

  I thought of the last encounter in the dimness of the Swedish forest. I knew I hadn’t killed him; I knew it as soon as I had squeezed the trigger. There is a curious prescience in the gunman which tells him if he has hit the mark at which he aims, and I knew the bullet had gone low and that I had only wounded him. The nature of the wound was something else, and I could expect no mercy from Kennikin if he caught up with me.

  Elin looked away from me and across the little glade which was quiet and still in the fading light apart from the sleepy chirrup of birds bedding down for the night. She shivered and put her arms about her body, ‘You come from another world—a world I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s a world I’m trying to protect you from.’

  ‘Was Birkby married?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘One thing did occur to me. If Slade had thought that Birkby had a better chance of getting next to Kennikin, then he’d have told him to kill me, and for the same reason. Sometimes I think it would have been better that way.’

  ‘No, Alan!’ Elin leaned forward and took my hand in hers. ‘Never think that.’

  ‘Don’t worry; I’m not suicidally minded,’ I said. ‘Anyway, you now know why I don’t like Slade and why I distrust him—and why I’m suspicious of this particular operation.’

  Elin looked at me closely, still holding my hand. ‘Alan, apart from Birkby, have you killed anyone else?’

  ‘I have,’ I said deliberately.

  Her face seemed to close tight and her hand slipped from mine. She nodded slowly. ‘I have a lot to think about, Alan. I’d like to take a walk.’ She rose. ‘Alone—if you don’t mind.’

  I watched her walk into the trees and then picked up the bottle hefting it in my hand and wondering if I wanted another drink. I looked at the level of liquid and discovered that four of my unmeasured slugs had nearly half-emptied the bottle. I put it down again—I have never believed in drowning my problems and this was no time to start.

  I knew what was wrong with Elin. It’s a shock for a woman to realize that the man accepted into her bed is a certified killer, no matter in how laudable a cause. And I had no illusions that the cause for which I had worked was particularly commendable—not to Elin. What would a peaceful Icelander know about the murkier depths of the unceasing undercover war between the nations?

  I collected the dirty dishes and began to wash them, wondering what she would do. All I had going for me were the summers we had spent together and the hope that those days and nights of happiness would weigh in the balance of her mind. I hoped that what she knew of me as a man, a lover and a human being would count for more than my past.

  I finished cleaning up and lit a cigarette. Light was slowly ebbing from the sky towards the long twilight of summer in northern lands. It would never really get dark—it was too close to Midsummer Day—and the sun would not be absent for long.

  I saw Elin coming back, her white shirt glimmering among the trees. As she approached the Land-Rover she looked up at the sky. ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stooped, unzipped the sleeping bags, and then zipped them together to make one large bag. As she turned her head towards me her lips curved in a half-smile. ‘Come to bed, Alan,’ she said, and I knew that nothing was lost and everything was going to be all right.

  Later that night I had an idea. I unzipped my side of the bag and rolled out, trying not to disturb Elin. She said sleepily, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t like Slade’s mysterious box being in the open. I’m going to hide it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somewhere under the chassis.’

  ‘Can’t it wait until morning?’

  I pulled on a sweater. ‘I might as well do it now. I can’t sleep—I’ve been thinking too much.’

  Elin yawned. ‘Can I help—hold a torch or something?’

  ‘Go back to sleep.’ I took the metal box, a roll of insulating tape and a torch, and went over to the Land-Rover. On the theory that I might want to get at the box quickly I taped it inside the rear bumper. I had just finished when a random sweep of my hand inside the bumper gave me pause, because my fingers encountered something that shifted stickily.

  I nearly twisted my head off in an attempt to see what it was. Squinting in the light of the torch I saw another metal box, but much smaller and painted green, t
he same colour as the Land-Rover but definitely not standard equipment as provided by the Rover Company. Gently I grasped it and pulled it away. One side of the small cube was magnetized so it would hold on a metal surface and, as I held it in my hand, I knew that someone was being very clever.

  It was a radio bug of the type known as a ‘bumper-bleeper’ and, at that moment, it would be sending out a steady scream, shouting, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’ Anyone with a radio direction finder turned to the correct frequency would know exactly where to find the Land-Rover any time he cared to switch on.

  I rolled away and got to my feet, still holding the bug, and for a moment was tempted to smash it. How long it had been on the Land-Rover I didn’t know—probably ever since Reykjavik. And who else could have bugged it but Slade or his man, Graham. Not content with warning me to keep Elin out of it, he had coppered his bet by making it easy to check on her. Or was it me he wanted to find?

  I was about to drop it and grind it under my heel when I paused. That wouldn’t be too clever—there were other, and better, ways of using it. Slade knew I was bugged, I knew I was bugged, but Slade didn’t know that I knew, and that fact might yet be turned to account. I bent down and leaned under the Land-Rover to replace the bug. It attached itself to the bumper with a slight click.

  And at that moment something happened. I didn’t know what it was because it was so imperceptible—just a fractional alteration of the quality of the night silence—and if the finding of the bug had not made me preternaturally alert I might have missed it. I held my breath and listened intently and heard it again—the faraway metallic grunt of a gear change. Then there was nothing more, but that was enough.

  THREE

  I leaned over Elin and shook her. ‘Wake up!’ I said quietly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, still half-asleep.

  ‘Keep quiet! Get dressed quickly.’

  ‘But what…?’

  ‘Don’t argue—just get dressed.’ I turned and stared into the trees, dimly visible in the half light. Nothing moved, nor could I hear anything—the quiet of the night was unbroken. The narrow entrance to Asbyrgi lay just under a mile away and I thought it likely that the vehicle would stop there. That would be a natural precaution—the stopper in the neck of the bottle.