“It’s a long shot all right, but it’s all we have.”
“Possibly an ordinary transmitter might do it … but then I suppose you don’t know what the tripping signal is, nor the frequency of the thing?”
“No,” I had to admit.
Max threw up his arms and scowled at me. Then something struck him. “This man in purple, Shaw. He’s got you where he wants you because he believes the device still to be inside you — right?”
“Right,” I said, “but — ”
“Then why can’t he blow his bloody HQ ship up himself, for God’s sake? All you have to do is to step badly out of line, and be positively seen to be a danger to CORPSE, and he presses the tit doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” I answered patiently, and explained why that wouldn’t work except maybe as a very last resort. There would be extreme danger to the Clyde coasts when that device blew, since not only was the Sendar Maru herself nuclear powered but she was said to be carrying some of the nuclear waste for the Windscale ponds and could in fact have been the parent-ship for supplying the small death-ships with their cargoes after they had cleared from their official loading ports as per manifests. If she still had some of that cargo aboard, and if that lot blew in the Clyde, the effects of the resulting fall-out would be too appalling to contemplate. True, Mirko Zambellis had said that my stomach bug would merely sink the ship straight down and that there would be no explosion big enough to trigger the devices aboard the death-ships, and I was prepared to believe he had known his job. Something could still go wrong, though, and I didn’t care to chance it at this stage. And Her Majesty’s Government was aboard the Sendar Maru, while the interims were lording it around Whitehall. Another point: I feared that a lot of the Sendar Maru’s superstructure could, depending on her position at the time — she could be in comparatively shallow water for her draught if we were out of luck — remain above sea level when her bottom fell out. She had to go down like a stone in very deep water or CORPSE would still blow the nuclear-waste ships, and they were all too close for comfort even though they had been withdrawn from the ports.
“Then what do we do?” Max asked impatiently.
I said, “We get a line on Zambellis’s laboratory and hope it’s still intact. I reckon it will be — the CORPSE thugs who killed Zambellis won’t have rampaged around the equipment in case they happened to trip something nasty. Much too chancy. And if the set’s okay, then it’s quite possible his transmitter will be found lined up ready on the right frequency, and it’s also possible that just a touch on the key will do the job.” I forestalled the coming remark: “A long shot as we’ve agreed, but all we have. And I’m going to try it.’’
“And the Sendar Maru? How do we get her out of the Clyde for your purposes — and get the damn cabinet off first?”
I grinned and said, “Oh, by acting clever … the CORPSE boys are not fully organised at the moment. For one thing. I’m pretty certain I had no tail on me from FH to here. How are you fixed for contacting persons who’ll remain loyal to HMG?”
“I can manage,” Max said briefly. “What’s in your mind?”
I said, “I was told when I went up to Greenock — when the Johann K/ompé came in — that the nuclear submarine fleet had been ordered to sea from the Gareloch, with their Polaris and Poseidon missiles. They’ll still be at sea right now. And those submarines are the one bit of Britain that is right outside CORPSE control. They’re independent, out of sight, unattackable, and lethal. All they need is orders. Orders that can be picked up by the Sendar Maru — if you get me.”
*
Max got me: the Sendar Maru could hopefully be sent right out to sea by a nicely-worded last-ditch signal calculated to put the fear of God into CORPSE unexpectedly. The Polaris fleet had so far remained without orders simply because no one wanted to use the missiles where they might send radiation over Britain, and I had no doubt at all that the man in purple had realised this and was confident they would not be used. Now they could remain in their nice safe submerged nests and merely have their awful power, equal to CORPSE’S own, invoked in a good cause. It might not work — CORPSE might not believe they would really be used against the Clyde even at our last gasp — but it would be interesting to see what happened. Of course, we had not yet found salvation for the shipbound cabinet, but something might emerge. If not. they might have to be sacrificed for the greater good. In the meantime I had other matters on my mind and on leaving Max’s house I drove to Scotland Yard. I sought an interview with the Commissioner, and this was granted. Once again, I had to chance bugs, relying on CORPSE not yet having had the time to fix things behind the Commissioner’s back. The Commissioner was, of course, loyal. He had made a pretence at co-operation, but didn’t expect to remain in his job for more than another day. I asked him to busy himself in the meantime and do what I wouldn’t have a hope of doing, which was to find means, like Max, of contacting other loyal persons in Foreign Office security, or possibly via Interpol’s network, and dig out all he could about Mirko Zambellis, deceased. Firstly, where he had died, and if this had not been in his laboratory, where his laboratory was. Secondly, names and current whereabouts of his associates. The Commissioner promised to do all he could and would arrange to report to me. Not, I said, by telephone to FH or my flat: loyalties inside FH must now be regarded as suspect, which was why I couldn’t make use of our own files Zambelliswise. That name would spread and I wouldn’t last long. I was in a particularly vulnerable and tricky position, I said — vis-a-vis CORPSE, I had to be whiter than white. And I added that the line to my flat was out of action via an explosive device, as was the flat itself. This, he knew. I said I intended getting accommodation at my club, and the line there could be considered reasonably safe.
From Scotland Yard I went back to Focal House and set about my whitening. I called a conference of heads of departments and formally confirmed my appointment in Max’s place. The new order, I said, was a fact in being. It was up to us all to smoothe the transition and I knew I could rely on all present, et cetera. I tried to assess the expressions and reactions, find the loyal faces and the time-servers, sort the sheep from the goats. I didn’t get far. Most of them looked just one thing, and that was scared stiff. No one knew where or when the axe would fall, the bullet come. Fear and the awful suddenness had in fact made time-servers of all the admin side at any rate.
I felt utterly depressed, utterly useless. I brought the session to an abrupt end and went back to the suite and found Mrs Dodge moping too. I was going to be at a loose end until the Commissioner contacted me and I knew that wouldn’t be for a while yet. Meanwhile Miss Mandrake was recuperating in St Thomas’s and suddenly I couldn’t wait to see her. All else could wait, Britain included. I was on the point of telling Mrs Dodge that I could be contacted at the hospital when something funny happened. The security telephone on Mrs Dodge’s desk burred and she answered. It was the Foreign Office, for me. I took the call.
“Shaw here,” I said.
“Ah, Commander Shaw … this is Mellowes.” I knew Mellowes; a good man, straight as a die, in fact one of the people I expected the Commissioner to contact about Zambellis; I hoped he was not about to be indiscreet enough to mention Zambellis on the telephone, but I needn’t have worried. He went on, “Someone’s been put on to us by our consular section. Name of Barnsley. I’m sure you understand. This person would like to meet you and I’ve suggested the Captain’s Cabin off Lower Regent Street in one hour’s time.”
Mellowes rang off, no time even to say he hoped the time was convenient. It was, if I neglected Miss Mandrake. I had no idea who Barnsley was, I didn’t understand at all, but duty was duty and Mellowes had been mysterious enough to interest me. I decided reluctantly against St Thomas’s and went down and took a taxi to Lower Regent Street and walked through to the Captain’s Cabin, a congenial pub that I knew slightly but where I would not be known, and bought myself a whisky and looked around for Barnsley or for anyone who might look like Barns
ley looking out for me. Mr Barnsley, I took it to be.
I was dead wrong, and when I saw her I clicked. Barnsley … quite clever really, I supposed. Staring at me from a corner with a glass of something on a table in front of her was Mrs Pumfrct spelled Pontefract, next door to Barnsley on the map of Yorkshire. She looked mightily out of place in the casual camaraderie of the Captain’s Cabin, the Women’s Institute come to town, hat and all. And gloves, as in the Rood Fearers’ church in distant Andalusia. She made a sign, and indicated without pointing, since ladies didn’t point, an empty chair. Obviously, she’d been keeping it for me, but I pushed through the crowd and asked politely if the chair was engaged, and she said no, it wasn’t, and do sit down.
I sat. I said, “I thought my name was Jones.”
“Isn’t it?” she said. She looked surprised. I said it didn’t really matter but how had she contacted me? It turned out that she had rung ‘the Government’ which to her as an expatriate seemed to mean the Foreign Office and had asked for the Mr Jones who had been on a secret mission in Spain; from there the rest had followed: one up to the FO, I thought, they’d ticked over remarkably fast.
“Well?” I asked. “What do you want me for, Mrs Pontefract?”
“It’s about that girl,” she said.
“You came to England because of her?” I leaned closer. “Look, Mrs Pontefract, you know what’s happening here in England. Or didn’t you get to hear, in Spain?”
“Yes,” she said. “I knew. That’s why I came. I came to strike a blow for England. If her own daughters can’t rally round in a time of danger, well, it’s very sad, that’s all I can say.” There was no self-consciousness about her utterances; nor was there any unction. She was just a good old-fashioned patriot at heart and never mind the expatriation. When danger threatened, the Empire, which lived on in the mind of Mrs Pontefract, stood to. She was much ruffled by her reception at Gatwick, where CORPSE had taken over immigration and Customs, or anyway were very obvious in the background with nasty uniforms reminiscent of Hitler — she had been a Wren I939-46. However, she hadn’t come just to rally round. She had come to make a report to me; and she made it. It wasn’t directly about La Ina as it turned out: it was to do with La Ina’s lover, the Reverend Clay Petersen. Mrs Pontefract had entered the Flood Fearers’ church for purposes of worship early the day before, and who should be there but the missing pastor. He had been doing something to the altar, she didn’t know what, and hearing her entry he had turned, and had suddenly fired a gun at her.
“It was dreadful,” she said. “Really dreadful.” Her grip tightened on the handbag in her lap. She was living the moment all over again. The bullet had missed her and she had dived behind the gunwale of one of the pews. Then a terrible thing had happened, though really it was only retribution for sacrilege and attempted murder: the sudden noise, she thought it must have been, had dislodged Noah with wife and angels and the great figure had come crashing down, minus its lower portion. Noah had come in half. Joining his two portions had been a long pointed steel shah, and this had entered Mr Petersen’s skull and killed him stone dead. After a period of trepidation behind the gunwale, Mrs Pontefract had steeled herself and had remembered my visit, and what had been below the altar cloth, and England. She had emerged and she had gone through Mr Petersen’s pockets.
She handed me what she had found. It was small, oval, and plastic, like a mock-up of a bantam’s egg. A bantam’s egg that had been ‘blown’ by a collector of such: there were small holes at each end. I turned it round and round, curiously, though fearful that it might explode at any moment. Mrs Pontefract held out her hand and said, “I’ll show you, Mr Jones.” She removed a safety pin from somewhere around her breasts, opened it and dug the end into one of the holes. She fished around for a moment, then pulled. A very thin metal rod came out behind the pin, a rod with a tiny hook at its end: it could have been an aerial. I brought out something I always carry just in case: an optician’s lens. I screwed it into my eye and made a close examination. The thing was beautifully made and the join was still not very noticeable, but it was there all right, around the middle. I fiddled and pulled and twisted; after a while I found movement, and I unscrewed and laid bare the two halves. It was a tiny transmitter.
Frowning, I put it together again.
I asked, “What made you wonder about this, Mrs Pontefract? What made you think I might be interested?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I said. “But to outside appearances it must have looked fairly ordinary and never mind the steel rod. So what?”
She reached into her handbag again. “There was this too,” she said. She passed across a sheet of paper and said it had been wrapped round the bantam’s egg. It was a very interesting document, containing a mass of figures and numbers forming very obvious code groups, and the plain language version of the message had been written in above the groups, Petersen having probably written out his message first and then coded it up for transmission. It read: Zambellis dead also wife and daughter transmitter found and retained. I met the eye of Mrs Pontefract.
“Well done,” I said inadequately.
“Have I helped?”
I reached out and squeezed her hand. “You’ve been wonderful. You may have helped more than I’ll ever be able to tell you. England,” I added, “will be grateful.”
She seemed immensely pleased.
*
I went to see Max again, by taxi. Ed told Mrs Pontefract to lie low and not breathe a word. She assured me no one else had been anywhere around when the lethal half of Noah had dropped on Mr Petersen and the Spanish authorities had not been in evidence for some while; and although the body could perhaps have been found by now, no one would know she had been present at the time of death. She was in the clear; as soon as she had recovered her equilibrium she had shut up her cottage and driven to Malaga and the Gatwick flight, and she wouldn’t be going back. Not yet, anyway. And she was very disillusioned with the Flood Fearers. Mr Petersen had behaved abominably.
When I reached Oakley Street in Chelsea, I paid off the taxi and walked on for Max’s house in Cheyne Row’. But I went no further than the corner: I saw the CORPSE uniform at the top of the steps leading to Max’s front door. House arrest had set in, and for my purposes Max was a dead duck. I went back down Oakley Street and found a taxi in the King’s Road, and was driven to Scotland Yard again. The Commissioner was in conference and I had to wait. I waited in growing impatience and much anxiety: I believed I had Zambellis’s stomach-bug transmitter in my pocket, and thus possible salvation for Britain, but what I still didn’t have was the frequency or the particular signal that would blow the device, though once again I thought it was possible that just a plain bleep could do it. I waited an hour for the Commissioner and when I was taken to his office his face was pale.
“You won’t have long with me, Shaw,” he said. “I’m being relieved of my appointment. One of the CORPSE mob’s taking over.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “Have you any news?”
He had: Max had been in touch, but the call had been cut before he’d finished. That must have been when CORPSE had moved in for house arrest. Anyway, Max had used his private methods in time and contact had been made with the Flag Officer, Submarines. A mendacious signal had already gone out; it had gone in naval cipher in the interest of authenticity, but we all knew that CORPSE would by now have access to the deciphering tables. The signal had been made to the Pentagon, intimating that the British contingent of the NATO Polaris-carrying submarine force was about to be ordered to stand by to send off the missiles into the Firth of Clyde and it was up to the Americans either to assist with their Poseidons or detach as they might decide. The Commissioner passed me the naval communications frequency as used by the submarine fleet and a Top Secret code group that, should I have a need to be in touch with the submarines at sea, would, by its use, authenticate me as the caller. After this I felt slightly more confident, the more so s
ince the Commissioner had other information to impart from his own sources: Interpol had been in contact, he didn’t say how. A communist named Josip Humo, another Yugoslav and a close friend and associate of Mirko Zambellis, had reported to the guardia civil in Barcelona: he had found the butchered body of his good friend Zambellis, also the equally butchered bodies of the family, right there in Barcelona, and he was willing to help. Currently he was in 6D2 HQ in Madrid, and no risk was being taken of trying to get him into Britain. Somebody had to go to Madrid — me. I felt there was at least some chance that this Josip Humo might know the stomach-bug frequency, but there was too much risk in trying to get it sent across by radio: CORPSE might go into premature action right there in the Clyde if they picked it up. And the Commissioner had a big over-riding worry: once the members of the CORPSE directorate aboard the Sendar Maru were in possession of the breakdown of the signal to the Pentagon, would they not bring the death-ships back into the ports?
“Probably,” I said. “It’s something we have to chance. It’s all a question of timing now.”
I left the Yard with a worry closely associated with that of the Commissioner: it was also a question of how long it would be before CORPSE brought me in and put me back aboard the Sendar Maru for questioning. I hadn’t done anything yet to assist them, apart from the purely propagandic pep talk I’d given the heads of departments in Focal House. I decided the one thing I could do was try to get myself to Madrid, in company with Zambellis’s little bantam’s egg. It could be presumed — or anyway hoped — that the transmission could reach the Sendar Maru wherever she might be when the big moment came. And since CORPSE hadn’t yet taken over the Continent, I would have freer personal movement.
In the meantime I hadn’t an idea in my head as to how I was going to get Her Majesty’s Government off the Sendar Maru.
SIXTEEN
Corpse (Commander Shaw Book 15) Page 18
