“What number do I ring?” she asked.
Marcus straightened, went for the car door and brought a handbook from the door pocket. He looked something up and gave Felicity a number. He said, “Take the book. It’ll give you more authenticity.”
“We hope,” she said. She was looking a shade helpless; that was no bad thing in a young woman stranded in a broken-down vehicle. Like all good field operatives, she had a fair acting ability but I wasn’t sure she was acting now. To me, probably because of my recent experiences, there was something daunting about that house, some sort of atmosphere, and as if to add to it I had become aware, as I looked across, of old Gallepe’s reported cemetery. It was around fifty yards clear of the garden, which was walled. The cemetery was L-shaped with an arm extending close to the house, and it looked derelict, overgrown with grass, the tops of crosses and other memorials just visible in a few places, with drooping cypresses here and there.
I said, “We’ll give you ten minutes. Then we come in, asking for a glass of water or something.”
“And guns,” she said.
“And guns, nicely concealed. You don’t have to worry.”
“Well, it’s nice to know that,” she said. She gave me a kiss; I think it was meant for authenticity’s sake, again in case of observation, but to me it had the feel of goodbye and I very nearly called her back again. I didn’t, because my first duty was to 6D2 and I didn’t want to hear Max say later that Miss Mandrake was bad for efficiency.
Marcus and I watched her walk away, moving quickly up a gravelled drive, anxious for that telephone. We saw her reach the front door and tug at an old-fashioned bell-pull. The door was quite quickly answered, and after some conversation it was opened fully and she was admitted.
The door shut behind her. I started clock-watching, but once again bent with Marcus into the bonnet. The ten minutes went past, slowly. I was imagining all kinds of nastiness and blaming myself for sending Miss Mandrake into danger. Monsieur Perro took on the aspect of the devil, a retired civil servant with forked tail and horns. I knew now that I’d come to the right house as per map: the presence of the cemetery seemed to me to be proof, at any rate of old Gallepe’s correct identification. Which confirmed Perro’s ownership, and that part of it still failed to add up, in spite of the emigrated son.
“Time we moved in,” I said, after allowing one more minute to pass.
We did so, leaving the car’s bonnet up as we advanced along the drive with holstered guns concealed, mine making a rather nasty bulge beneath my left armpit, despite a loosely-fitting jacket.
We never made the front door. When we were within around twelve feet of it the gravel gave way beneath our feet, very suddenly, like one of those scrub-covered pits they use in parts of the world to catch wild animals. Amid a small shower of loose gravel we shot down what felt like a polished steel slope and heard something thud back into place above our heads, so the wild animal theory wasn’t quite right; something was hinged, and electrically controlled. And since not much gravel had come down with us, most of the covering must have been stuck in place with just a thin camouflage layer over it. It was clever.
*
Felicity was there ahead of us.
When our slide stopped in a lighted compartment and behind us a steel door came down to block off the slope, we found her in a heap on the floor, which was also steel lined, as were the walls, with a big bruise on her forehead and blood running down her cheeks. I went to her and dabbed with a handkerchief and she managed a smile.
“Sorry,” she said. “I ballsed it.”
“How?” I was angry, but mostly with myself.
She said, “I reacted when I heard something. I shouldn’t have. I’ve had enough experience. But it rocked me.”
“What did, for God’s sake?”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, obviously in pain. Then she said, “There’s a child there. I heard a scream. Then I heard him call out. He said, ‘you just wait till the cops get here’.” She paused. “The accent was American.”
I sat beside her and took her in my arms and rested her head against my shoulder. I said, “After that, they wouldn’t need your reaction, Felicity. They just couldn’t let you go, whoever you were. And they’d have known you had a deadline. They’d just have waited for us to come. So you don’t have to blame yourself in any way.”
We had certainly come to the right house, retired civil servant or not. I had an idea my seventy-two hours were going to need a long extension. I had another idea too: now that we’d turned up, the hideout was going to be shifted. They wouldn’t take the risk of further investigation. The French authorities would draw a blank if ever they found this place at all.
I was thinking all this when there was a slight sound, nothing very much, just a muted crackle followed by a voice, a disembodied one, coming from high up in the steel wall in the vicinity of what looked like the eye, or camera, of a closed-circuit TV set-up. The voice, a French one speaking English, gave us welcome. In my case, welcome back. I had been recognised on the hidden camera. I was addressed as Commander Shaw. I didn’t recognise the voice from my previous captivity; and it wasn’t giving much away. It said, “Now you will see a warning.”
On the heels of those words there was another slight sound and a section of the wall on my right began to lift so that we had a view of another, similar compartment. This compartment contained a huddled figure with a contorted face, obviously dead, and very painfully so. It was, or had been, a youngish woman in a brown dress and what one would call sensible shoes. Also a brown hat, now crammed – after death probably – about the ears. In the short space of time we were allowed to see it before the wall slid shut again, I recognised the Norland uniform. A good old English nanny, the reliable sort.
It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. But the result didn’t really help very much. Felicity was still staring at the wall after it had shut. Her face was white, haunted, and she retched a little.
“Steady,” I said. “Keep a grip, Felicity. Just try not to think.”
“It’s still there,” she said. “Not thinking … that won’t take it away. How long are they going to keep us here?” Her voice was high; I couldn’t blame her.
I said they’d be unlikely to leave us for long. They would want to ask questions. But I guessed they could probably conduct a question-and-answer session via the TV camera and the microphone, whilst leaving us in situ.
I wondered how long the corpse had been there. Maybe a long time; it may have been induced imagination but I fancied the steel wall wasn’t entirely sealing it off. There was a heavy, sweet odour already. I thought about that other cell, where I’d found Neskuke’s gold medallion. In its rough way, it had been preferable to this. I wondered if the boy was shut up in it now. It was more of a permanent cell than this steel box, which was probably just the catchment area, a place of transit. For one thing the air was very stale and getting staler; we couldn’t be left in it for long, assuming they wanted to keep us alive. But maybe they didn’t.
On the other hand, there was that thought that they would want to ask questions. They would be anxious to know how we had come to find the house, keen to learn how close they were to a sudden descent of the gendarmerie. If they did but know, they were currently safe from that; but I whispered reassurances into Miss Mandrake’s ear. She wasn’t convinced. Neither was I. We were in just about the tightest spot we could imaginably be in. And time was passing fast towards the signing of the arms deal and it was certain, now, that there was a connection there.
*
We were left for some time, about an hour. By the end of the hour the atmosphere was thick and we were all breathing with difficulty. Our body heat had warmed the small space up almost unbearably and there was the sickly smell still coming through from the next-door compartment. The wall between wasn’t all that snugly fitting, obviously. I wondered if it could provide a way out but knew that was being unrealistic. I had seen mor
e steel lining beyond the body; and anyway we would be under watch from the camera’s eye. Blind ourselves, we could be seen. But we were not deaf. And at last the microphone spoke to us again.
The same voice as before said, “You will lay down your guns.”
I looked at Marcus Bright and shrugged: we had no choice. But to hasten matters the voice said, “There is a means of gas injection.”
I managed a strained laugh. I said into space, “You won’t want us to die. Not yet.”
“The gas is not lethal.”
I shrugged again. Something to put us out, so they could come in and get us without risk to themselves. I unfastened my holster and threw it to the steel floor; Marcus did the same. Felicity brought out a small revolver from somewhere inside her T-shirt.
“Thank you,” the voice said. Soon after this the small noise started up again and the section of wall opposite the slope began to lift slowly. It showed a kind of lobby, a square space, brick-lined, with a stone stairway leading up from it.
“Climb,” the voice said. We moved out into the lobby. The steel wall slid back into place behind us and I led the way up the steps. There was a heavy door at the top and as I reached it this door opened and I walked into three automatics. Two men and a woman, the ones from my last visit, the ones who’d been left behind when I’d gone on that last car journey. They were all looking grim, very hard-faced: they were not going to lose me again, the faces said. We were led into the same room as before, the interrogation room with the good furniture and the grand piano. All that was missing was the Pekinese dog.
When we were in the room we were told to put our hands behind our backs. When we had done so, the woman, Tanya, came behind us and snapped handcuffs over our wrists. Then the questioning began. I didn’t hold back on our main source of information. I said, “Louis Leclerc. He’s in custody. He talked.”
“He told you of this address?”
“Not directly.” I said that came from a scrap of paper, found on a man dead from falling into the pit in the Buttertubs Pass, where it had been intended I should go.
“What else did Leclerc say?”
“Plenty,” I answered. “He mentioned your name, Tanya,” I added to the scarred woman, who I imagined had charge of the American boy.
She just smiled at that. “I am not worried. It is too late for your people, and we shall never be found afterwards.”
“Afterwards?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
There was an exchange of looks between the woman and the two men. “You do not know?” the woman asked.
I said, “I know there’s been a kidnap. And I know the boy’s here.”
There was a muttered consultation; I didn’t catch any of it. But suddenly and surprisingly another person came into the picture. A short, bulky man with a domed head, totally bald, manifested from a big armchair that had had its high back turned towards us, its front facing one of the big windows. He came towards us on short legs that supported an immense torso: he had the build of a bison. His skin was dark, his face square and commanding. I made a guess as to who he was: Monsieur Perro, retired civil servant from the Paris. He stopped in front of me and smiled. It was an oily smile, full of threat.
“How do you do, Commander Shaw.” I recognised the voice as that of the man on the intercom. He extended a hand, then laughed. “Of course, the hand you cannot shake, I am forgetful. But you were speaking of Louis Leclerc. Leclerc was never entrusted with the facts, Commander. Not all the facts, that is. I do not believe we need worry about Leclerc. He was – is – a cat’s paw insofar as – ”
“He was a big boy at his own game once,” I said. “Blackmail and murder, or didn’t you know?”
The bulky man nodded. “Yes, I knew. Or my father did. My father, however, who is still with us but is currently in Paris, was cleverer than Louis Leclerc … but it is not of Leclerc’s past that we are speaking now, Commander Shaw. We are in the present and the future is fast approaching.” He turned away and looked through the windows, across the garden where beyond the wall I saw again the cypresses in the graveyard. He had spoken of his father; he himself was perhaps not more than in his middle forties, as I’d seen when he’d come close to me. The Perro of the French Civil Service was probably the father, and he’d crossed swords with Louis Leclerc by the sound of it. The man here present was the son, back from New Zealand and the emigration spoken of by the old man Gallepe in Clermont-Ferrand. Unless there were other sons, of course. In any case, I thought it wiser not to show any knowledge of the Perro family: it would only complicate matters, and lead to more questioning. For one thing, old Gallepe had to be kept out of this. That sickness-racked body had enough to contend with, without a visit from the Montignac thugs.
The bulky man swung round suddenly and once again came back towards me. He said abruptly, “I am going to tell you the facts, Commander Shaw.”
Surprised, I said, “Thank you.”
The oily smile again. The teeth were very white, could be crowns. There was the glint of gold farther back in the mouth. “Do not thank. I tell you for my own reasons. You shall be useful to me. You are a trusted man in Britain. This I know.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
“A polite one also.”
“Ironically so,” I said.
“Yes. Now you will listen, and then we shall speak again together. You will listen about the young boy and you shall know his part in what we propose to do. I shall be brief and to the point. The boy is James Kennedy Jervolino.” He paused, looking at me closely. “The name means nothing to you, Commander Shaw?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“He is of an Italian family, the third generation living in the United States, all now American citizens. The father, Giovanni Jervolino, who with the mother was killed in a road accident, was in real estate in California.”
“A rich man.”
“Yes, a very rich man, a very rich family. But you will not be supposing this kidnap to be for money, Commander Shaw.” The bulky man chuckled. “It is for more than that. Much more! The grandfather on the mother’s side is original American from before the War of Independence, and his name is Ross Mackenzie. That name I think you know?”
I did indeed. And the affair began to form, to take shape, though as yet I couldn’t identify the particular shape that would finally emerge. Ross Mackenzie was a big name in the US administration and currently was almost larger than life. He was the chief arms negotiator in the ongoing arms reduction talks in Washington, the man who was dealing with Kulachev.
“I know the name,” I said. “What sort of squeeze are you putting on Ross Mackenzie?”
The bulky man smiled again and said, “The talks are to fail, Commander Shaw. When they fail, the boy will be released. If they do not fail, the boy will die. It is Ross Mackenzie who holds the key to the life of his small grandson James, an attractive child whom no one would wish to see harmed, least of all a grandfather with the means at hand to prevent it.”
I tried to keep my mind steady in face of horror, of brutal cruelty, of the vileness of putting a six-year-old child under threat of this sort. According to Felicity the boy had called out about waiting till the cops came. I knew the cops never would come. His life was in my hands now, as well as in his grandfather’s. I asked as coolly as I knew how, what the grandfather was expected to do, with the world hanging on the fate of the talks.
“He has the choice,” the big man said. “To concede, or not to concede. To fail America – or to fail us.”
“He can’t concede – you must know that. It would be on his conscience the rest of his life.”
“As would the life of James Jervolino, his little grandson. What would you do, Commander Shaw?”
I said I hadn’t a grandson. No one can say truly what his or her reaction would be until they were in a position to feel the close reality of blood relationship. But I added, “A man like Ross Mackenzie has been conditioned to duty all his life. Perhaps you forget that, m’s
ieur.”
He shook his head, and laughed. “I think not! As the Americans say, when the chips are down … and with the sound of the child’s voice, and your help … no, we believe we shall be successful.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s just suppose you are. What then?”
“You are asking, I think, why we should wish the arms talks to fail. I tell you this: if the talks fail, then Kulachev fails also. His fate inside Russia is bound up with the success of the talks, with the emergent glasnost begun by Mikhail Gorbachev.” He went on to say what I knew already: that Kulachev had his enemies in the Kremlin and in the Communist Party, what I but evidently not Perro thought of as the jackals waiting in the wings to rip him apart if he should fail or even falter, the men of the old guard who believed that the Soviet Union was being weakened, was going down the primrose path of wishy-washy liberalism, was giving way to western ideas of capitalism and freedom, apeing the American way of life. If the talks should fail, then Russia would once again, with Kulachev disgraced, move backwards into a sterner past.
I made the obvious comment: “So you’re in the pay of the anti-Kulachev faction in Russia. You’re acting for the old style, blood-red communism. Right?”
“Not so, Commander Shaw. Not for the money, I mean. I act, as do my friends here and elsewhere, for the Party and the ideals of a fully communist state – ”
“In France, m’sieur?”
“Not in France. Not yet. I speak of Russia only for now – ”
“And you’re prepared to act against the west, against the interest of your own country, against peace?”
He laughed. “They used to speak once of peaceful coexistence. It is a stupid concept! I – ”
“I believe the Russians used that phrase, m’sieur.”
Impatiently, he brushed that aside. “It is a concept that cannot work, it is not in human nature. There must be one power, one world power to ensure total peace for all time, and that power is the Soviet Union – the Soviet Union with the ideas of such as Kulachev for ever eradicated. That is my ideal, Commander Shaw. To the extent that I can assist it to come about, I shall lay down my life for it if necessary.”
The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19) Page 10
