The Alamut Ambush

by Anthony Price

  There was no point in doing a victory roll, however. It might even be premature if he failed to handle Havergal with compassion now, of all times.

  ‘We don’t want to injure the Foundation, Colonel. That isn’t the object at all. And we’re not going to let the Special Branch loose on it.’ Strictly, that might not be true, but it sounded reassuring. ‘But there are things we’ve got to know – like how you got wind of what was going on.’

  He prayed that Havergal wouldn’t turn that question against him, because Cox’s hunch was based on extremely tenuous circumstantial evidence, and not on anything that was ‘going on’ at all.

  But Havergal’s defences were breached. He sighed and squared his shoulders in resignation.

  ‘I’d been expecting it for a long time, if you must know.’

  ‘Because you think any Arab worthy of his salt would be up to something?’

  ‘Not just that.’ Havergal shook his head. ‘Have you got the Ryle Map, my dear?’ he said to Isobel.

  Isobel nodded. ‘It’s in the study.’

  ‘Would you get it for me?’ Havergal turned back to Roskill. ‘Do you know how the Foundation works?’

  ‘Not in detail.’

  ‘Not many people do. And perhaps that’s why this has happened,’ said Havergal mournfully. ‘We’re a pretty unobtrusive lot. We don’t turn out top people – or damn students. Just good mechanics and midwives, and that sort of thing … You know why old Jacob Ryle set it up like that?’

  ‘Didn’t a railway have something to do with it?’ Roskill could remember that disastrous railway, old Ryle’s first charitable enterprise, had been a family joke.

  ‘A railway – yes. He built a line as a present for one of his tame sheikhs. It cost a fortune. And then he found that there was no freight to run and precious few passengers – the local camel train did the job perfectly well at a hundredth of the cost. He’d simply put the camel drivers out of work – until they knifed the engine driver, that is! They say you can still see some of the track when the sand gets blown away…’

  He looked at Roskill. ‘The point is that after that Ryle decreed that we’d work from the bottom. Each area has its own local committee – they set up the projects and they send us suitable young people to train. We arrange for the training at our own technical centres, and then we shunt the trainees round the projects – they work their passage, and that makes the projects cheap to run. And the young people see a bit of the world and learn what hard work is before they go back to their own patches.’

  There was a note of pride in Havergal’s voice now. ‘So we get useful jobs done, and we don’t make trouble for the countries we work in. Wherever we’re established we’re just part of the landscape.’

  He moved the mugs to one side as Isobel spread a map of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East on the coffee table: a map with a rash of little coloured symbols on it.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ said Havergal. ‘The green stars are the selection committees, the red squares are the training centres and the blue triangles are the work projects. Do you get the picture?’

  Roskill got the picture very well indeed. He had no idea that the Foundation operated on so grand a scale: the green stars were spread thickly over the Middle East, as were the blue triangles. The red shapes were thickest there too, but spread out also into Europe, from Italy to Sweden and Scotland – and behind the Iron Curtain even.

  Roskill bent over the map in awe: there were also red squares in Israeli-held Jordan and in the Gaza strip – the ultimate purity test!

  As a self-supporting educational foundation in a war-torn world it was a remarkable achievement and the Colonel had just cause for pride.

  But another possibility sprang from the map in red, blue and green: as the cover for an illegal network it was ready-made and perfect – secure in its well-established respectability and accepted without question as part of the landscape, with its members and trainees moving unobtrusively back and forth. No wonder Havergal had been expecting the worst!

  But his suspicions had to be founded on more than mere assumption of the worst, nevertheless.

  ‘What actually put you on to them?’

  Havergal smiled bitterly. ‘The failure rate.’

  Koskill waited patiently while Havergal nodded knowingly to himself, his bitterness fading at the recollection of his cleverness in spotting the reason for it.

  ‘Jacob Ryle couldn’t bear the idea that any of his charity might be wasted – particularly after what happened to the railway. So he framed the organisation of the Foundation to avoid wasting money on trainees who wouldn’t finish the course – or who didn’t do what they’d been trained for.’

  ‘Drop-outs, you mean?’

  ‘That’s the modern jargon, yes,’ Havergal nodded. ‘Not enough intelligence or not enough guts. In the early days some of the local committees weren’t too choosy – usually they were just trying to do favours for their friends. Ryle wouldn’t stand for that, though; if a committee failed to deliver the right goods he changed the committee.

  ‘After a time everyone got the message. There were still the odd failures, but they were rare – there were years when there weren’t any that couldn’t be explained.’

  Ryle had wanted his money’s worth, thought Roskill, and quite naturally the old bandit had applied his business methods to his charitable enterprise: shape up or get out. Once the tradition was established firmly all it needed was a competent statistical section to keep an eye on it.

  ‘That was the pattern when I joined the Foundation – even lasted through the decade after Suez,’ Havergal continued. ‘But it began to change about six months after the June War.’

  ‘You mean the drop-outs began?’

  ‘The drop-outs. I didn’t spot them at the time, of course. The figures take time to show up. And even then I didn’t smell a rat until I realised that the wrong ones were quitting.’

  Roskill nodded. The drift of the Colonel’s argument was clear enough. The drop-outs of the old days would be due to stupidity, idleness or instability: the new drop-outs would be young men with exactly the opposite qualities, but with other fish to fry.

  ‘And what have you done about it?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’ Havergal gazed unblinkingly at Roskill. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘I thought you sacked committees that didn’t deliver the goods?’

  ‘We used to, but not any more. Times have changed since Jacob Ryle’s days – and particularly since ‘56. We have to tread more delicately now. And the committees that are up to mischief aren’t in my territory, anyway.’

  The look in Havergal’s eye suggested that times had not chiinged so much in his territory, and wouldn’t change as long as he was in charge.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – we’ve got fifteen committees in the four of them. According to my reckoning there are only seven doing their proper job now.’

  ‘Whose territory would that be?’ Roskill fumbled in his memory. ‘Elliott Wilkinson’s?’

  Havergal pointed his chin at Roskill, his loyalty to the Foundation in collision with the plain implication of Roskill’s question. It occurred to Roskill that if the Colonel already suspected Wilkinson of chicanery he probably had his own plans for dealing with him. But there was no point in pressing the matter – it would only shut the old boy up altogether.

  Roskill hurriedly led him off at a tangent. ‘But all this is circumstantial evidence – statistical stuff. It takes one hell of a lot of statistics to make one piece of real truth.’

  He looked at the Colonel narrowly. ‘If you can supply us with names and details of the drop-outs, that would be a start, anyway. And names of the committee men too. If you can do that there’s a fair chance I can get my bosses to cross-check them and leave the Foundation itself alone.’

  Havergal thought for a time. ‘If it ever got out there’d be hell to pay, Roskill.’

  �
��If it doesn’t get out there may be hell anyway. But I tell you what I’ll do to prove good faith: I’ll give you some of the names we’ve got. And I’ll show you some of the faces we’ve got that haven’t got names.’

  He reached down beside the chair for the projector. This had been what the man had been after all along, and it was ironic that Roskill had intended from the start to give it to him: the names and faces of the Hassan suspects and every contact of theirs Cox had been able to dig from British files and coax from European ones.

  Five suspects and twenty-five contacts: not a great many and most of them looked alike to Roskill anyway. But maybe Havergal, with all his years of Arabian experience, could distinguish them from one another. He might even do more, for as Cox had gently pointed out exactly half of them were graduates or officials of the Jacob Ryle Memorial Foundation Trust.

  VII

  ROSKILL LEANT GINGERLY against the wall of the Bunnock Street phone box and listened to the buzz of the bell on the other end of the line, far away in Hampshire.

  He settled down to wait, resigned in the knowledge that Audley would put off answering as long as possible in the hope that the noise would pack up and go away. His only hope of a speedy answer was Faith.

  For the second time during the evening his eye was caught by the carefully inscribed line of Latin: Meum est proposiium in tabema mori. ‘Meum’ was ‘my’ and ‘est’ was ‘is’ – ‘my something is.’ He dredged into his vestigial Latin. ‘Mori’, he recalled from the rolls of honour, was ‘to die’ – Pro Patria mori. Which left him with ‘My something is to die in a something’. The nearest word to ‘taberna’ was ‘tabernacle’, but the idea of dying in a tabernacle was plainly ridiculous – the sort of guess he had chanced in Latin translations so often, only to elicit the Latin master’s eternal complaint: nonsense must be wrong …

  The buzz-buzz stopped with a click at last and Faith answered rather breathlessly.

  ‘You want David? Who’s calling – who shall I say? Isn’t that – ‘ Faith stopped short, turning Roskill’s Christian name into an exhalation of air. It was odd how although she affected to despise the rigmarole of security she was quick to apply the rules.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ she concluded grimly.

  Again Roskill waited. She’d probably been in the bath or the lavatory and Audley himself had been sitting in the room next to the phone, obstinately deaf to it.

  It couldn’t be ‘tabernacle’, but without knowing what ‘propositum’ was there was no way of guessing. He rather sympathised with the other anonymous commentator who had scrawled ‘Sod the Students’ directly underneath the inscription – the authentic voice of Bunnock Street.

  ‘Hullo, Hugh!’ Amdley’s voice rang loud and clear in his ear, disdainful of rules and caution alike.

  ‘Is this a safe line?’ Roskill exclaimed, more in surprise than annoyance.

  ‘Safe? Safe line?’ Audley repeated vaguely. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But if it isn’t, then some poor devil’s been wasting an awful lot of time listening to nothing. What’s up?’

  Roskill gritted his teeth. ‘I think I’m blown, for a start,’ he said. ‘Somebody recognised me at – at that meeting I went to.’

  ‘The Ryle do?’

  Roskill beat his fist against the side of the telephone box. Audley had to be doing this deliberately.

  ‘You’re quite sure this line’s safe?’

  ‘I tell you – I haven’t a clue,’ said Audley. ‘But it doesn’t matter anyway. All that sort of thing is grossly exaggerated. Nobody’s got the manpower or equipment to tap phones just on the off-chance – they only tap when they’re sure. And if anyone’s on my line, God help them – they’ll have had a job breaking the code Faith uses when she orders her groceries. I tell you, Hugh, you’re all hagridden with bugging and half the time it’s a lot of cock!’

  He snorted derisively down the line at Roskill. ‘And if they’ve got one of those voice-actuated things clipped on somewhere, how do they know we don’t know about it? We could be staging this for their sole benefit… So you were spotted. Well, who spotted you?’

  Roskill carefully described the fat Arab.

  ‘A Lebanese?’ Audley demurred. ‘No, he’s certainly not a Lebanese. Before I was kicked out I’d already been sidetracked there for six months and I know all their top men – he can’t be all that new. But never mind: I’ll identify him for you tomorrow morning. It shouldn’t be difficult. Now – tell me about the Ryle Foundation. Obviously Cox was right about that!’

  ‘Yes, but – ‘ The trouble was that Havergal’s memory had proved suspiciously disappointing when it came down to hard identifications. The session had left him with the feeling that the old man had to some extent outsmarted him in the end, and he tried hard to conceal this now in reporting the dialogue.

  But Audley merely grunted approvingly as he listened.

  ‘A neat line of reasoning – I think I’d like this Colonel Havergal of yours, Hugh. He was before my time, of course, but I can see why Fred would have wanted to get hold of him – if it was Fred. And I agree with you it might be Elliott Wilkinson he’s gunning for. The Arabs would be damn difficult to unseat with things as they are, but Wilkinson’s not quite invulnerable.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I used to. But I didn’t know he was mixed up with the Ryle people. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that he’s up to no good, though.’

  ‘He’s pro-Arab?’

  ‘He isn’t pro anything – it wouldn’t be so bad if he was. He’s just old-fashioned anti-semitic. Thirty years ago he’d have ended up behind the wire on the Isle of Man – if he hadn’t got to Berlin first. Horrible bloody character. If it wasn’t Jews it’d be Catholics or blacks – if he’d lived in the sixteenth century he’d have been a champion witch-smeller. The devil of it is that he’s got some very close contacts with our Arab section now – too damn close. And Llewelyn trusts him, the fool.’

  ‘But there’s still nothing to connect him with Hassan. We’ve only got Cox’s instinct and a handful of names.’

  ‘Cox is a good man, Hugh. And we’ve got more than that now. Things are beginning to come together.’

  ‘Things?’

  It was all very well for Audley to retire comfortably to his country seat to think beautiful, complicated thoughts while he, Roskill, crouched in smelly Bunnock Street.

  ‘I’ve been doing my homework, Hugh – catching up on Master Llewelyn.’

  Llewelyn. Always the Welshman was uppermost in Audley’s thoughts. Alan Jenkins’s killers were probably a secondary consideration, a mere means to an end, whatever he might maintain. They were still each looking for revenge, but not the same revenge.

  ‘It seems he’s one of the errand boys between the Americans and the Russians at Jarring, the U.N. mediator – strictly an errand boy, whatever he likes to think. But a busy one. I can see how mortifying he’d find being blown up just now, when things are moving.’

  ‘He said there was a chance of peace in the Middle East.’

  ‘I doubt that. But there is going to be a cease-fire, that’s certain – the Rogers Plan is definitely on.’

  The radio that morning had seemed very much less certain, but Audley obviously had better sources.

  ‘It’s all cut and dried. The Egyptians will accept first, and the Russians are going to lean on the Syrians … Then the Israelis will argue among themselves – that’s probably laid on so that the Gahal right-wing bloc can be kicked out of the government – but they’ll agree in the end. It’s all set for early August. Myself, I don’t think it’ll go as smoothly as – as my informant thinks.’

  ‘So what’s all this got to do with us?’

  ‘With us? Well, in the long run God only knows what will happen – I’ve been out too long to make any useful guesses. I suppose it depends on what sort of deal the Americans and the Russians have cooked up … and whether the Middle East hawks can queer things … But in the short run they’re just comin
g up to the maximum risk period. Once the cease-fire’s agreed, maybe it can stand up to a certain amount of double-crossing, I don’t know. But just before – that’s right now – this is the time the guerrilla groups ought to be trying to wreck it.’

  Audley paused. ‘And there’s one thing that’s gingering up the Great Powers – there’s a rumour that Nasser is a sick man. The word is that when he was in Russia earlier this year the doctors there told him to take things very easy. But the way doings are, he can’t, and that’s what’s got the Russians moving – they don’t want peace, but they want to take the steam out of things just in case.’

  ‘Whereas Hassan wants trouble?’

  ‘Exactly. In fact I think that’s what Llewelyn’s been expecting. And not just him either – there’s an unofficial clampdown in Israel at the moment, and Egypt’s on the alert too. There are a lot of nervous people in the Middle East just now, Hugh, and that’s a fact!’

  It was all high-powered, big league stuff and it made Roskill’s own research seem a schoolboy enterprise in comparison. But it didn’t get them any closer to knowing what to do next.

  ‘There are some bloody nervous people here in London, too, David,’ Roskill reminded Audley. ‘It’s them we’ve got to worry about.’

  ‘Ah – I was coming to them. There are two men who could really tell us what all this is about – Jake Shapiro and the Egyptian, Razzak.’

  ‘Did Razzak get the early boat from Newhaven?’

  ‘If he did it took him a remarkably long time to get to his eribassy in Paris. He seems to have lost a few hours on the way somewhere, that’s certain.’ Audley paused. ‘As a working theory I agree with your reading of things this morning. It’s far too much of a coincidence, all three of them being roughly in the same place. It does sound as though Razzak met someone down there, and Shapiro was watching them. And one way or another your friend Jenkins saw something he wasn’t meant to. And if it was big enough to get Jake out of bed that early it could be a killing matter right enough!’