The Memory Trap dda-19

by Anthony Price

  'I don't know, Dr Audley.' Her lips tightened.

  It wasn't like working for Jack Butler. Although even Jack might have had scruples about rocking the boat, the way things were. And that left only Jake Shapiro. But it wasn't going to be so easy to get through to Jake with Mary Franklin on his own back again.

  'So what do you know?' He heard the snap in his voice. 'Is there nothing new on Lukianov? Or the others — what they were up to, between them?'

  She relaxed slightly. 'We've heard from Washington . . . they believe Prusakov and Kulik sabotaged their respective computers, to remove information from them. And either dummy1

  they, or maybe General Lukianov shredded certain files in their Central Records. But that's all —except there's been a joint KGB/GRU committee set up, to try and reconstruct what's missing. And that's been working round the clock — '

  she frowned at him suddenly ' — but you said — ?'

  That about wraps it up? Or does it? Damn Henry Jaggard!

  The brake-lights of the Porsche glowed ahead, almost as though its driver had heard his uneasy thoughts. But other brake-lights were also winking on and off: they were approaching the junction of the Monmouth-Gloucester (and Cheltenham!) road, with the old bridge and the fast road to Hereford just ahead. And this early, in this weather, both the junction and the old bridge could be jammed with traffic.

  'You said — ' The movement of the Porsche once more cut her off. Keeping up with Major Richardson was still part of her priorities, until she'd got him safe under SAS lock-and-key. Or, him and that other bastard, Audley, for an informed guess.

  'Yes.' There was a jam of vehicles ahead of them. And one element of it, on the main road which they were trying to join, was a tail-back of military vehicles which was not giving way, complete with a goggled motor-cyclist who was holding back the traffic on the side road in his unit's favour.

  'Castles, I was saying: how the "quadrilateral" group controls the road into England, to Hereford and Cheltenham — yes? Very interesting, they are, too. Skenfrith dummy1

  and Grosmont are in the middle of villages. But White and Maerdy are in the middle of nowhere, pretty much.

  Particularly Maerdy, up beyond Monmouth a few miles.'

  'Dr Audley —' Mary Franklin's fingers drummed on the steering-wheel impatiently ' — you said —'

  'To Hereford and Cheltenham, Miss Franklin — Mary. A few days' march, in the old days. But only half-an-hour's drive to Hereford now. And little more than an hour to GCHQ

  Cheltenham, using the motorways. Right?'

  'What?' The last of the military convoy was passing. And maybe ... it was at least just possible that he had done Henry Jaggard an injustice, at that. Or even that Henry Jaggard knew more than he'd let on, and was actually hedging his bets — ?

  'What are you saying, Dr Audley?' She was torn down the middle by his sudden shift from ancient to disturbingly modern, and the crawl of the Porsche ahead.

  He smiled at her. 'Up ahead, north beyond Monmouth, on the Maerdy road, Mary — that's where Major Richardson chanced upon that crashed van, with the Spetsnaz spade in it. So it was somewhere up there where they must have planted one of their arms dumps, back in the eary 1970s, it looks like.'

  The Porsche was moving and they were moving with it, as though at the end of an invisible tow-rope.

  'The old days, Miss Franklin.' He spoke into her ear. She had dummy1

  a beautiful little shell-like ear, which didn't need an earring.

  'You won't remember them. And they probably wouldn't have been your concern, anyway. Just as they weren't mine ... or Peter Richardson's as it happens. But everyone knew the theory of it, of course — it was a theoretical near-certainty that they had to be establishing such dumps, little by little.'

  They were on the bridge now, although still moving only yard-by-yard with the town beyond shrouded in rain-mist.

  So this would have been dangerous weather in the very old days, when the war-beacons, burning in the Black Mountains ahead to warn that the Welsh raiders were coming, would have been blotted out.

  'Those were the Brezhnev days, Miss Franklin — post-Vietnam, early Brezhnev ... the deep Cold War days.' The days of Audley, he thought: the years of endurance! Not like now — eh, Audley? 'The targets were obvious. Like, the early warning stations. And the communications centres.

  And, of course, SAS headquarters and GCHQ Cheltenham —

  those were both prime targets, inevitably, for Spetsnaz assault groups. But their problem wasn't getting the men in, ahead of D-Day: there are a thousand ways of getting in good-looking fellows like General Lukianov — or Captain Lukianov, he would have been then . . . Lorry-drivers, tourists, mock-Irishmen to Milford Haven and Holyhead and Liverpool. . . sailors with a bit of shore-leave, with friendly passports.' He paused. 'The problem was their dummy1

  weapons and equipment —machine-guns and mortars, rocket-launchers and the rest. And plenty of Semtex, naturally.'

  The traffic had clogged up completely, so that she was able to face him again at last.

  'A complete do-it-yourself arsenal, Miss Franklin. All neatly packed and ready to use — worth a fortune to any terrorist group.' He could see from her lack of colour that every word had entered that pretty ear. 'Arabs — why the PFLP, or Abu Nidal, you're going to ask? Or maybe it would suit the Arabs to make a deal with the IRA, on the side. Or they've got an export-cover of some sort — who knows? And they want to queer Yasser Arafat's pitch, if he gets too close to making a deal with Israel.'

  She drew a breath. 'How do you know this?'

  'I don't know it — any of it. But Lukianov was Spetsnaz. And no Spetsnaz arms dumps have ever been found. Only a couple of communications outfits, in North Wales and Yorkshire. And then only by pure accident.' He shook his head. 'I'm simply trying to string all that together, with what we've got, to make some sort of sense of it — ' He frowned ahead. 'What the hell's happening here, in the meantime — ?'

  'I think the traffic-lights have broken down.' She shook her head helplessly at him. 'But ... the spade, David — ?'

  'Ah! That was the start of it, yes.' He could see Mitchell dummy1

  nodding at Richardson through the rear-window of the Porsche. 'What I think is, one of Lukianov's pals — or his men, rather — ran out of road one day, purely by accident.

  Because some of those little back-roads are tricky, believe me ... But he'd maybe been making a delivery. And he was hurt, but he didn't want to hang around.' He turned back to her. 'He shouldn't have had his spade with him, that's for sure. But he did have it. And he was sufficiently knocked-about to forget it. And then he remembered too late.

  Because the police were there. And Peter Richardson.'

  The car jerked forward this time, reminding Audley of Mitchell at Naples. But then it stopped again. 'Wasn't that a remarkable coincidence, Dr Audley?'

  'If you like to call it that.' She had been taught to mistrust coincidences. 'I'd prefer to call it carelessness, plus accident, plus bad luck. Richardson was visiting one of his girlfriends, at Pen-y-ffin, just up the valley, on the way back from one of his trips to Hereford. Coincidence or not, that's what happened.' But that, of course, had been the whole point: they had been taught the same thing — the Russians too.

  'When they sent someone back, the police were there. And so was Richardson. And once they'd picked up his name — or maybe even someone identified him, for all I know . . .

  Because they'd sure as hell be on the look-out for anyone who wasn't local, sniffing around the Maerdy area: you can be damn sure of that, anyway . . . But, when they picked up his name or his face they'd have checked up, one way or dummy1

  another . . . then they'd ask exactly the same questions, Miss Franklin: "who's this Major Richardson?". And then they'd start to wonder about coincidences, too. Just like you.'

  They were up to the far side of the bridge at last, and the cause of the confusion was instantly apparent.

  'How's that for coinci
dence?' He craned his neck to emphasize what she could hardly miss. The traffic-lights had failed, and there were two angry drivers blaming each other for their recent collision, while a rain-soaked policeman attempted to sort out the doubled traffic jam.

  'You were right about the lights. So what does that make this? It looks more like carelessness, plus bad luck and accident to me.'

  'Yes . . .' But for a moment she was more concerned to remain behind the Porsche '. . . maybe.'

  'No "maybe" about it after that. They'd have had Peter Richardson on file. And me with him — because, we were at the sharp end in Italy the year before, Mary. And they certainly knew all about me. So when Lukianov decided to use his special knowledge, we were part of all the information which had to be erased from the record, just in case. Along with everything else from this other little episode.'

  'Erased — ?' Mitchell was accelerating. But there looked like another related traffic jam ahead. 'But ... if they thought Richardson was on to them — ' She slammed her brakes on, slithering to within an inch of Mitchell's pride-and-joy ' —

  dummy1

  sorry! But... his accident, what about that?' She shook her head at him. 'Why didn't they kill him?'

  'Maybe they bodged it. Or "Murphy" did ... Or maybe they were smart.'

  'Smart?'

  "They weren't sure about him. He'd resigned from R and D . . . And they'd got their little spade back. And killing him wouldn't have seemed so "accidental", they might have reckoned — not if he was still working for us ... It all depends how much they'd got in their dump, too: if they'd only just started they might have been able to re-locate. And then all they really needed was a little time — just to slow him up, and take his mind off his work.' He nodded, as much to himself as to her. 'Because that's what they damn-well did, anyway: they took his mind off everything, Mary, is the way it looks.' The second traffic jam was moving again. 'The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, don't you think?'

  'Until now.' She put her foot down. 'But I still don't see why Lukianov was so worried about you and Richardson —

  after he'd removed you from the record.'

  'Yes. But now we're talking about Lukianov. And the other two . . . And that's quite different.' They were almost free now, on the approach to a big new roundabout. 'I don't know . . . It's possible that Lukianov wanted to get rid of his partners, as well as Peter and me. And that would have dummy1

  been a neat way of doing it. Or he may have been afraid that there was still someone alive who could fill in enough of the blanks in the record to point the Russians back to the Richardson episode, if not to the location of his arms dump.

  In which case they might even try to make a deal of some sort with us — the sort of deal I've suggested to Henry Jaggard.' He shook his head sadly. 'Isn't that par for the course now?'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'What do I mean?' What he really meant was the old Audley days were very different from the new Renshaw-Jaggard-Gorbachev ones. But he could never explain that. 'I suppose . . . they don't want trouble here, any more than we do. So ... I was rather hoping they might just come clean and apologize. And then pool resources, for the good of glasnost and perestroika.' He studied her beautiful pink ear again. "They must have some sort of idea what Lukianov is up to by now. And . . . Henry Jaggard would love that sort of deal — wouldn't he?'

  But she wasn't listening to him: she was swinging the wheel furiously —

  'What the hell — ?' The car swerved violently, and the driver behind hooted at them.

  'What — ?' He had been momentarily distracted by the extension of his own innermost thought, which had filled him with sudden bitterness: that these were the days of Henry Jaggard most of all, and that the days of Audley, dummy1

  when everything had been so black and white, were passing

  — if not already past? 'What?'

  'He's not going to Hereford — Mitchell.' She hung on to the Porsche's tail grimly. 'He's going back into the town.'

  Audley looked around. They had been on a new dual-carriageway before the roundabout, neither of which had been there in the old days, any more than this maelstrom of modern traffic.

  'No. It's all right, Mary.' Memory came to his aid. 'That must be the new route to Hereford. He's just taking the old one.'

  His own reassuring words relaxed her. But they turned him inwards on himself again, with their unintentional double-meaning.

  The old roads he had travelled, in the days of Audley —of Audley and Sir Frederick Clinton — had been tortuous, and very dangerous sometimes too, at their black spots. But at least they had been mostly clear and well-signposted, and he had always known where he was going. Whereas on Henry Jaggard's congested multi-lane political motorways

  —

  'No he's not,' snapped Mary sharply.

  No, he wasn't! They had twisted and turned. And now they were undeniably on a side-road . . . going where — ?

  Then he saw the little river beside him, and the question was instantly answered. And another one, as yet unasked, with dummy1

  it!

  'This is the beginning of the Monow valley, Mary. We cross the river over a little bridge just ahead, to the left.' Such a little river, to have so many castles: that was what he remembered. 'Skenfrith and Grosmont are up ahead, then.

  With Maerdy and White to the west.' And no prizes for guessing which, now. 'But Maerdy's the nearest. And that's where they're going — Richardson's going to show Paul where he found the spade.'

  Mary slapped the driving-wheel angrily. 'That's ridiculous!'

  She reached forward to flash the car-lights just as the Porsche disappeared round a corner ahead. 'Damn them!'

  'Yes.' She wanted Richardson safely-confined. She wanted them all safely-confined.

  'I said we'd be at Hereford by ten.' This time she caught the Porsche. But Mitchell too turned his blind eye to the angry flash in his "mirror, just as Audley had expected him to do.

  'Damn! How far is this village — Maerdy?'

  'Not very far... at this speed.' With Richardson beside him, Mitchell was demonstrating his car's performance, it looked like. 'It's not a village. It's just a ruined castle, Mary. With ...

  I think there's a farm nearby, if I remember correctly . . . All private, not National Trust. Or it was — ' How many years ago? God! Too many! ' —or it was when I was last there, anyway.' He could almost sympathize with her. But he had to remember also that she was Henry Jaggard's woman, not his. 'We shouldn't be too late. Because it's only a few dummy1

  miles on to the Abergavenny-Hereford main road, near Ewyas Harold. And that's an interesting place, too: a pre-Conquest castle site, Mary. Before 1066 and All That. Very rare indeed. In fact —'

  'Spare me the castles, Dr Audley.'

  'Very well.' He had never subscribed to the theory that angry women became more beautiful until now. But he saw also that she was not just angry. 'What I should have said is ... from Ewyas Harold to Hereford can't be more than ten or twelve miles, Miss Franklin. It's just. . . some people measure distance from one public house to the next. But my knowledge of the Welsh borders happens to be historical. So I measure from castle to castle, I'm afraid —'

  'You should be afraid of more than that, Dr Audley — '

  She was too busy matching Mitchell's fierce decelerations and accelerations to look at him, but her voice was as tightly-controlled as her driving ' — you should be afraid because we don't know where General Lukianov is right now — damn them!'

  'Lukianov?' As Audley peered ahead the brake-lights of the Porsche glared at him suddenly, and he caught a glimpse of the vehicle beyond which had forced Mitchell to slow down.

  'Yes . . . well I don't think you should worry too much there.

  Not any more.'

  'Why not?' They were suddenly on all of two hundred yards of straight road, down into a dip and then uphill towards a dummy1

  crest. So she could actually frown at him.

  He mus
tn't smile. 'Because he's finally caught up with that military convoy we tangled with near Monmouth.' He pointed ahead. 'See that truck just disappearing over the top

  — and the motor-cyclist? He overtook us a few miles back.'

  'Yes — ' She had switched back quickly to the road ahead

  'but — ?'

  'Nobody's going to try anything with the British Army leading the way — Lukianov or any of his clients. General Lukianov will be lying very low right now if he's anywhere on this road. Having the army ahead is providential, don't you think?' He paused deliberately. 'Or maybe it isn't.'

  The army disappeared over the brow of the hill as he spoke, its place being taken an instant later by the Porsche. 'What d'you mean?'

  'I mean — ' he hated the next bit ' — maybe your Mr Jaggard hasn't been so slow off the mark after all. If he had any sort of informal contact with their new man in the embassy, and they have any sort of idea what Lukianov might be up to ... They might have suggested that a military presence in this general area would be prudent, even if they don't know the exact map reference. Just vehicles and men swanning around would be enough . . . Not that it matters, either way — whether it's just our good luck or Henry being smart. It amounts to the same thing, because Lukianov won't know which. But he'll have to assume the worst — at least for the time being.'

  dummy1

  They breasted the hilltop in turn, and for a moment the countryside was spread out below them: a rich landscape fading into the rain-mist, as deceptively peaceful now as it would have seemed in those other treacherous times when the quadrilateral castles had been garrisoned to protect it from the Welsh — when Moscow had been no more than a muddy provincial town and the Middle East "the Holy Land" of exotic crusading legend.

  Then the rearmost of the army vehicles disappeared from sight among the trees and hedgerows, and the countryside closed in again on them as they descended on to the valley floor.

  'Anyway, as long as we're behind them — ' An idea struck him, out of nowhere, as he broke the silence to reassure her, cutting him short.