Our Man in Camelot

by Anthony Price

  Not that there were many of them now—that was another of the mental symptoms. What had once seemed important was now no longer important. Or perhaps just in abeyance. What was still in the future mattered little when the future was a matter of very considerable doubt.

  Matters, mattered, matter. All ugly words.

  “Are you all right?” asked the camera man.

  If he was a camera man. He certainly had a camera, so that made him a camera man whether he was or not. Making a movie entitled Le Morte de Mosby.

  They that take the sword… Except that wasn’t strictly correct. They that take the Mothers’ Union banner, that was correct.

  “Sure. It’s just this goddamn bullet-proof vest. I just can’t bend so good.”

  The best vest money could buy, as recommended by the British Army in Northern Ireland. And not really a patrol vest, either, but a custom-built job for look-outs in exposed positions favoured by IRA snipers. The last word in safety first, but with disadvantages, the man said—

  “It’s made for a direct hit. Anything short of an anti-tank shell, and you’ve got a chance—a very good chance. Though we can never be sure, naturally—“

  Great!

  “And, of course, we’re only protecting your chest plus the upper abdomen. We could do more, but you’d hardly be able to move, and I gather you’ve got to do some walking.”

  Mosby looked up the hillside. Walking was right.

  “What you’ve got to pray for is a professional—a natural marksman who’s prepared to take that extra second if he needs to. Sometimes the amateurs try for the head-shot. Or they squeeze off in a panic and miss altogether—“

  Can a miss altogether be bad?

  “Which can be very serious with some of these very high velocity weapons. Tear your bloody arm off without even hitting you, they can. Just a near miss is enough.”

  Yes, a miss altogether can be bad.

  “But you’ll probably have a professional—“

  Trying to cheer me up now.

  “—so my advice to you is move nice and slowly. Let him hit you where he’s been taught to hit you. Then you’ll just have a sore chest next morning, take my word for it.”

  What—no dissatisfied clients? Obviously not.

  As he stepped out on to the side of the road Mosby realised that nice and slowly was the only way he was going to be able to move. Under his red shirt the bullet-proof vest weighed a ton, or seemed to, and he was already sweating… Though maybe that was just good honest fear.

  But Billy Bullitt was no youngster, so that didn’t matter too much. With his combat hat pulled well down and his tinted glasses—and the target shirt—he would do well enough at a distance.

  He was already used to the two physical symptoms he had noticed, the dry mouth and the tightness of his calf muscles. He had experienced them from the moment of getting up. The cup of hot tea had hardly moistened his mouth and the exercise of behaving normally, of walking to the bathroom and then down to breakfast as though it was any other morning of his life, hadn’t eased the muscles.

  Nothing wrong with his stomach, though. It was true that condemned men could eat a hearty breakfast, going to their deaths with a bacon-and-egg cliche inside them.

  It was Shirley who hadn’t eaten.

  Strange that Shirley didn’t matter any more either. Or perhaps it was simply the recognition that he didn’t matter to Shirley.

  But that wasn’t quite true any more, to be honest—and honesty was one of the real luxuries still left.

  “Come to bed, honey.”

  No doubt about the invitation, the first ever of its kind: big soft Camelot bed and little soft Shirley, both inviting him to enjoy the present and forget the future.

  “Just got to clean my teeth, that’s all.”

  Shirley fulfilling—ready to fulfil—the ancient night-before-the-battle-role, so that even if the good guys lost there’d be another generation of good guys to take up the quarrel in the future.

  Future was another ugly word.

  This would be the first time, and there always had to be a first time for everything. Even dying. Mark up another cliche.

  And that made this first time unlucky, as though nothing would more surely ready him for death than the taking of this opportunity which the possibility of death was giving him.

  “I think I’d better get all the sleep I can.”

  The gentlest way he could think of saying it.

  “You don’t have to, Mose.”

  Logical answer. He didn’t have to do anything difficult next morning, just walk a little way up a hill, nice and slow. And either way, he could have all the sleep he wanted after that.

  “I know. And the thought is very much appreciated. Is there any chance of being given a rain-check?”

  She smiled at that: Mosby Sheldon III running true to form to the last.

  “Of course. One rain-check issued.” “I won’t forget—I warn you.” “Neither will I.”

  But now he was already forgetting the softness and the perfume. They were part of the past and the future. Now there was only the present, and the hill in front of him, rising up steeply.

  Foot by foot he went up. The camera man was trudging on his left and the two other men a couple of yards to his right. Not a very big crew, three.

  The turf under his feet was soft and springy now. Further back it had been trampled by cows and was sprinkled with big, round crusted pats of dung. There were flowers growing in it, yellow buttercups and white ox-eye daisies. He reached down and picked a daisy for luck, realising as he did so that he had moved too quickly. For an instant his back tingled with fear.

  And there were birds sweeping over the hillside, skimming and diving like fighter-planes searching for targets over a battlefield. Major Davies would have known what sort of birds they were—or would he?

  Davies was the odd man out who had been bugging him. Even in the middle of the night, when he had woken up to find Shirley breathing softly beside him, the unsettled question of Davies had come between them, like a ghost.

  They had checked out Davies so thoroughly before he had flown to Israel, and he had been clean. And they had checked him out thoroughly after his death, and but for that one letter from old James Barkham, the bookseller, he had been clean again. Indeed, if that letter hadn’t popped through the letterbox slit, then the thing would never have been started. Without that there had been nothing left to connect Major Davies, the bird-watcher, with Major Davies, the expert on Arthurian history, the Badon-hunter.

  So it had been deliberate… He heard a car on the road below him, and turned slowly and deliberately to face it.

  Distance; a little over three hundred yards maybe.

  He closed his eyes behind the tinted glasses and waited.

  The car began to decelerate, presumably as it came towards where they had parked their vehicle half on the grass verge. Then he heard it accelerate.

  Nothing.

  He opened his eyes. Already the countryside was flattening out beneath him, with the chequer-board of tiny English fields becoming visible and the sweep of the new freeway which cut through them less than a mile from where he stood.

  Somewhere out there, carefully hidden, was all the paraphernalia of David Audley’s department, men, cars, helicopters—all waiting for the camera man’s first assistant to fire his flare gun. Perhaps even the men loading the bales of straw in the newly-cut wheatfield away to his left… and for sure those repairmen blocking one of the freeway lanes so conveniently.

  He turned back to the hillside. So the planting of that letter had to be part of the KGB’s trap, the first clue designed to direct their attention first to Davies, then to Billy Bullitt. Nothing too easy, nothing too obvious… They had to work their way to disaster by their own efforts.

  He could hear another car. So let this one be in the back—that would be more appropriate, anyway.

  He stared down at the daisy in his hand. How had they been so sure that the Am
ericans wouldn’t catch up with Davies? And more, how had they managed to place Davies in the exact spot where he had been needed, to feed Billy Bullitt with the great lies so very carefully constructed that it took this walk in the sun to cast doubt on them?

  The second car had passed as peacefully as the first.

  “I think we could get some shots here,” said the camera man.

  “Okay,” said Mosby.

  “Fine. Well, the original script is for you to point up towards the hill-fort on the top. Then down towards the Ridgeway, where the road is… and across over the line of the railway—over there on the far left—which is towards the line of the Roman road from the south-west.”

  Billy Bullitt’s original script. This had been where he had thought it must have happened, at this vital strategic crossroads of Dark Age Britain, where the ancient downland trackway from the north-east crossed the Roman roads from the east and the south.

  Mosby looked up obediently towards the line of the ramparts on the hilltop.

  You are assigned to locate the map reference of Badon Hill, England. Just that.

  Well, this was as close as he’d ever get to fulfilling that assignment, because with Wodden out of the running they were never going to know for sure if this was the place. The old arguments would go on and on, and round and round, as they’d always done.

  They wouldn’t even know who had besieged who—whether there’d been Saxon horse-tail standards waving up there or the banner of Our Lady. Whether the Saxons had been trapped and starved into the open to be caught by one great scything charge of Arthur’s fabled horsemen, or whether the Britons had been trapped and saved at the last by an epic Arthurian ride-to-the-rescue.

  They’d never know, and it didn’t matter a damn because that was how it ought to be: a matter of faith, not fact. Because the enduring value of Arthur existed not in the elusive truth of his historical victory and defeat, but in the vision each generation had of him. Even in Billy Bullitt’s crazy vision.

  For the first time Mosby was utterly sure of himself. This was the place, not Wodden. And this was where they would come for him.

  He wondered, strangely without rancour, whether Schreiner and Morris had envisaged anything remotely like this—whether the strict assignment to hunt Badon Hill, and not the agents of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti as he had been trained to do, had been carefully calculated to achieve the same result.

  But that was another thing which was no longer important.

  “That’s great,” said the photographer. “Now look back the way you’ve come. Admire the view.”

  Mosby turned to the huge open landscape.

  This was the place. But not the place which fitted in with the KGB’s plans, so they had invented a whole new piece of history—

  … usque ad annum obsessionis Badonici montis qui prope Sord’num hostium ex Durnovaria Arturo habetur…

  —which enabled them to work at their leisure on their false Badon, free from the worry that anyone might disturb them.

  “Now look down towards the road,” commanded the photographer.

  Mosby didn’t want to look down. The horizon was so close he could almost reach out and touch it, as though it was a painting. A bird swooped past him, banking away at the last moment.

  Davies the bird-watcher.

  Davies the Arthur-hunter, the Badon-hunter.

  The sun came out from behind a big, fleecy cloud, blinding him even through his dark glasses.

  The only person we can trace he ever spoke to was the bookseller.

  That was Merriwether.

  He insisted I should never contact him at the base.

  Billy Bullitt’s statement.

  But there was something else in the back of his mind— something the Englishman Roskill had said, but about Mosby himself.

  It made us wonder whether you were who you said you were.

  Simple.

  Liddington Hill—the real Badon?

  Wodden—the false Badon.

  Davies—the bird-watcher.

  Davies—the Badon-hunter.

  Just as there had been a false Badon, so there had been a false Davies. Any loner among the pilots would have done. Davies just happened to fit best. But so long as there was a general resemblance it didn’t matter, because there weren’t going to be any witnesses left around long enough to argue the difference. Once the real Davies was dead, the false one automatically ceased to exist, leaving only his lies behind him.

  It was as gloriously simple as the sun in his face was blinding.

  He never even heard the car.

  EPILOGUE

  Captain Finsterwald

  and A1C Merriwether

  CAPTAIN FINSTERWALD WALKED across the tarmac to where Airman First Class Merriwether stood watching the heavily-laden transport preparing for take-off.

  Merriwether sketched a salute. “Everything okay, Harry?”

  “It’ll do. They’ll never love us again, but they don’t hate us any more.”

  “And those two Russians they picked up?”

  “What Russians?” Finsterwald shaded his eyes.

  The transport’s engines roared.

  “That Sheldon’s a lucky son-of-a-bitch,” shouted Finsterwald.

  “Because he’s going home and we’re still here?” Merriwether shouted back. “Don’t fret, man. We’re going to be on one of those big birds ourselves pretty soon. I got the feeling we are now surplus to Air Force requirements… If not pos-it-ively unwanted.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “No? Well, you can’t mean his state of health, with those ribs cracked like he’s been kicked by a Georgia mule.”

  The transport jerked forward.

  “I was thinking of that woman of his.”

  “Uh-huh? Well, he’s not going to enjoy any of that, the way he’s strapped up… not for a while anyway.” Merriwether watched the transport with a professional eye. “That guy’s going to need a lot of runway, the way he’s taking his time.”

  Finsterwald showed no sign of having heard the last sentence. “The way she was fussing him, I wouldn’t bet on that,” he said, finally.

  Merriwether considered the proposition. “Could be you’re right at that… Funny thing, though…”

  “What?” Finsterwald cupped his ear.

  “Nothing really. But he always used to look at her like he was a dog hoping to get scratched behind his ears, and she never took one damn bit of notice of him.”

  The roar of the engines was fading.

  “So what?”

  “So when I saw them just now it was right the other way round, that’s all.”

  Finsterwald shook his head. “So he’s learnt to play it cool. I never said he wasn’t a smart son-of-a-bitch as well as a lucky one.” He turned back towards the car.

  Merriwether watched the transport eat up the last yards of old runway and lift into the air, up and out over the site of Windmill Knob towards distant America.