Atom Bomb Angel

13

Happy fucking birthday. The note was written on my hall mirror in lipstick, in big scrawling letters. Her car was gone and so was she, and I could hardly blame her for going. I had promised, faithfully, that I would be home by seven; it was now eleven hours later. Being a spy isn’t a good career for steady relationships; it’s even worse for rocky relationships, and ours would have been described, in nautical terms, as a ‘force 10 gale on the nose’.

The first time I met her, she was in my bed. She had a shock of hair that was bright green on one side and bright orange on the other. I didn’t know whether to make love to her or to dust my furniture with her; either way, I decided it would be courteous to wake her up first.

‘Screw off,’ were her first words to me. She rolled over and her feet came out the end of the bed. I didn’t need a tape measure to figure out she was tall, very tall — quite a bit taller than me; I ruled out dusting the furniture.

I shook her again gently. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ I said, ‘you’ve broken into my house and now you’re sleeping in my bed.’

‘How very observant you are,’ she replied sleepily. ‘Anyhow, what kept you?’

‘What kept me? Who the hell are you?’

‘Light me a cigarette, sit down and I’ll tell you.’ She had an Australian accent. It’s normally an accent I don’t care for, but she made it sound good. I lit a cigarette, handed it to her and sat down in the chair at the end of the bed.

‘If you’re that scared of me, why don’t you go stand in the street and I’ll shout to you through the window?’

It was one o’clock in the morning, I was feeling more than a little drunk, and my brain was taking a little time to figure out all this.

She sat up a little. ‘You can sit nearer,’ she said, ‘I won’t bite.’

‘None of you?’

‘I don’t like jokes about my height — I’m sensitive about it.’

I went and sat down beside her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know you were sensitive about your height. All I can see is your head and your feet — how do I know how much is in between?’

I looked at her face carefully. It was a sulky face, about twenty-four years old, with pouting lips and a small chin on top of a very long neck; she had rich blue eyes, with fair eyebrows, and a beautifully clear skin with the trace of a tan. She smiled, and the face sprang to life. Apart from a little mascara and a couple of dashes of rouge, she wore no makeup at all, and didn’t need to. Her hair really didn’t do her justice at all. She had the kind of face men shoot each other over.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

For a reply, I got a long deep kiss — in about forty different places. It was four o’clock in the morning before I was able to talk again.

She had seen me arrive at the party, and had decided, for whatever mysterious reason that sometimes triggers the jackpot switch in a woman’s brain, that I was to be the lucky man. She had gone to my coat, taken my keys, made a wax impression of them, then put them back. Noticing that the car keys had a Jaguar tag, she had gone outside, walked up the street to the first Jaguar she had come to. It was an old one, a 1953 XK120 convertible, and as far as she was concerned it fitted me. To be sure, she had felt the radiator. It was hot, so she knew it had recently been driven, and figured it was definitely mine.

She had then telephoned what she described as ‘a chum’ at Scotland Yard, given him the Jaguar licence number, and asked for the name and address of the owner. Then she went to a late-opening locksmith in the Earls Court Road and had a duplicate of my keys made, then went straight to my Holland Park mews house. Somehow, the talent scouts for British Intelligence had missed her. She wasn’t a spy. She had a trendy up-market gym-cum-solarium for trimming the fat and tanning the face of anyone willing to stump up eighteen pounds an hour to lie in a make-believe tropical island, listening to taped sounds of Pacific breakers, and tropical monkeys fucking.

‘How did you know I was coming back alone?’ I asked.

‘There were only two spare girls at the party, and neither of them was your type. I decided that if you hadn’t come with a girl, then you wouldn’t be going home with one.’

‘I didn’t see you at the party.’

‘I was there — all six foot three of me.’

‘I can’t have been looking high enough.’

I felt something cool and firm grip an important part of my reproductive apparatus. ‘Careful what you say, Max Flynn. I don’t want any gags about the mountain going to Muhammad because Muhammad wouldn’t go to the mountain.’

‘You’re one hell of a gorgeous mountain,’ I said.

She released her grip, and set to work on my body again, and we didn’t talk for another hour. When we did, it was she who opened the dialogue; she did it by prodding me very hard in the stomach and bringing me out of my not entirely unpleasant coma.

‘Max Flynn,’ she said, ‘what do you do?’

‘What? You don’t already know?’

‘No. I can tell you’re not an interior decorator.’

‘Is that a compliment or an insult?’

She stuck a Rothmans in my mouth, then held the flame of a platinum-cased Zippo to the end of it. Then she took the cigarette, lit her own with it, and put it back. ‘It’s an insult!’ she said.

‘Thanks a lot. It’s my home you’re talking about, and I don’t think it’s the role of a housebreaker to criticize the victim’s taste.’

‘I love your taste,’ she said. ‘Thousands wouldn’t, but I do. It’s sort of post nuclear holocaust.’

‘The cleaning lady’s away sick.’

‘Has she been away long?’

‘About eighteen months.’

‘You haven’t answered my question. What do you do?’

‘I’m a spy. I work for MI5.’

She giggled. ‘Spies are short and fat and old, and wear grubby mackintoshes. I don’t believe you. What do you really do?’

‘I work for a venture capital company.’

‘Your own firm?’

‘Afraid not. If it was, I’d have a mansion in Belgravia, with a pet interior decorator in a cage, and an unpickable butler on the door.’

‘Wouldn’t even I be able to pick him?’

‘No, not even you, Sherlock. Not unless you asked him very, very nicely.’

‘I think I would,’ she said. ‘Very, very nicely. What does your venture capital firm put venture capital into?’

‘Almost anything that’s risky but has a chance of a fat profit: a mini-computer firm; a company with a revolutionary method of making maps; a chain of do-it-yourself shops; a cargo airline; a shipping firm; an oil-exploration company; a chain of medical clinics specializing in sports injuries; a firm that manufactures mini tractors; a geological exploration company; a nickel-mining company in Australia; and a whole load of other things.’

‘My father owns a mine,’ she said.

‘Does he? What do they mine? Front-door keys?’

She ignored the taunt. ‘No, plutonium, I think it is.’

‘You don’t mine plutonium; it isn’t a raw material.’

‘Oh, well, it’s the raw material — whatever you call it.’

‘Uranium?’

‘Yes, that sounds right. I’m not really sure though, he does so many different things. It’s in Namibia, I think.’

‘Where the hell’s that?’

‘South West Africa, ignoramus.’

‘All right, Einstein, don’t get smart with me.’

She took the cigarette out of my mouth and placed it in the ashtray. Her hand started moving menacingly down my body.

Suddenly, something ice-cold hit my stomach, and for a moment I tensed right up. It was a trap. She had stabbed me. Then the coldness spread further over my stomach. I pulled back the sheet. In her hand was a blue-and-white tube out of which she was squirting a clear-coloured liquid.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, moving further down my anatomy.

Talking became difficult. ‘I wondered what it was,’ I was able to gasp.

‘KY Jelly,’ she said, ‘like it?’

I liked it a lot. After a few minutes I didn’t know whether I was going to come or die. I lived.

When I came around, she was dozing. Bright daylight was shoving its way through the curtains. She opened her eyes. ‘You haven’t told me your name,’ I said.

‘You never asked.’

‘I’m asking you now.’

‘You’ve got to guess.’

I thought hard for some moments, and memories of a short while ago came flooding back. ‘I’ve got it,’ I said.

‘What is it?’

‘Gelignite.’

That had been four months ago. Since then she had all but moved into the house, and the normal far too few hours of sleep I usually snatched had been reduced by a good seventy-five per cent. She couldn’t understand why the job I did required me to arrive home late some nights, extremely late other nights, and quite frequently not at all.

After a while the explanations began to wear a bit thin. It was a problem that wasn’t new to me; after all, there is a limit to the amount of times any intelligent girl will accept the excuse that one’s car has broken down, her feminine logic will cut across the problem with one clear solution: ‘Why don’t you scrap that old banger and get yourself a sensible car?’

To have my Jaguar XK120 referred to as an ‘old banger’ was hardly music to my ears, but for four months I’d been heaping the blame, quite unfairly, on the car’s shoulders, so Gelignite’s comment, in the circumstances, was perhaps not entirely unreasonable. At least, from her point of view.

It was clear from the message on the mirror that last night, my birthday, had seen the end of her patience. She had said she was going to cook me a special birthday dinner, and I had promised to be back by seven. After Whalley had left the Atomic Energy Authority as usual at five o’clock, I had gone over to Carlton House Terrace to check through a list of owners of dark-coloured Ford Capris with police or Intelligence files on them for whatever reason.

At twenty-five to seven, I got up from my desk. I had timed it so that if I left now, I should be home on the dot of seven. The phone rang. I was tempted not to answer it, but like a lot of people I know, I just can’t leave a telephone ringing.

‘Hallo?’ I said.

‘Daphne’s not going home. She’s heading down the M40.’

‘Shit.’ Why did Whalley have to pick tonight? Stupid miserable bastard! If he didn’t one day swing from the gallows for what he was doing to my country, he was damned well going to swing from his testicles for what he was doing to my sex life. ‘All three of you there?’

‘Yes, sir. Don’t worry.’

With the team of surveillance monkeys I had under me, I knew I had every reason to worry. They were all so good at losing things they could have made a fortune on the stage making members of audiences disappear — the only problem being that they would have been incapable of bringing them back. Since my press-ganging into MI5, I had never had people working under me and I didn’t like it. I understood now why most agents prefer to operate on their own; at least that way, if there are any screw-ups, you know who’s made them and what they are. But as I didn’t have wings on my back and jet-packs attached to my ankles, and there wasn’t always a handy telephone kiosk around to charge into, I had to use the services of others to be in three places at once for me. But if it looked as if anything interesting was going to happen, I wanted to be right there in the front line. I especially wanted to be there the next time Whalley met up with his chum in the dark Capri.

‘I’m on my way. Daphne going as fast as usual?’

‘Yes.’

‘Call me if she deviates. I’ll catch you up at the Porn Shop.’ Deviation meant turning off the motorway. Porn Shop was code for Oxford — derived from the Oxford colour of blue. Cambridge, with its lighter blue, was coded Cinema, implying soft porn. I hung up, and bashed my elbow on the edge of the desk. It was still sore as hell from where I had landed on it after being blown out of the taxi a week before.

I picked up the phone again, and dialled my home number. It rang on without being answered. After fifteen rings I hung up. I decided Gelignite couldn’t have got in yet. I buzzed down to one of the three night-operators who would have just come on duty. ‘Could you please ring my home in half an hour’s time and tell the lady that answers that I had to fly to Shannon to look at a weaving plant, and the plane’s got engine trouble, and I won’t be back until very late — and give her my apologies.’

‘Yes, Mr Flynn.’

I took the lift down into the underground car park, and walked over to my Jaguar. Her midnight-blue paintwork still managed to gleam under a heavy layer of London grime, and her wire wheels needed an energetic Sunday afternoon with a tin of spirit, a toothbrush and a duster, but they were going to have to wait a good while yet for that. Gelignite and the XK had no need to be jealous of each other: they both received an equal amount of neglect.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut by the red leather tongue, pushed in the ignition key, and turned it. There was a deep clunk sound, followed by a rapid ticking sound, and the gauges in front of me began to quiver with life. I pulled out the choke and waited for the fuel pump to finish its ticking. I pressed the starter button. There was a woosh from the air intakes followed by a boom from the twin exhaust pipes as she fired first time. She sat, vibrating with energy, engine thumping on full choke, sounding a little lumpy, as she usually did until she warmed up.

I removed some dust from the boss of the four-spoked steering wheel, a thick conical boss that would have made a hole in my chest the size of a cannon ball had I been flung against it in an accident, but then this gorgeous brute had been built in the days before padded dashes and collapsible steering columns, and progressive body crumple. She had a solid steel chassis, and the theory was that if anything got in her path once she was under steam, she would shunt it clean out of the way, or cut it in half like a battleship slicing through a smuggler’s yawl. I let the choke in a little, pushed the clutch pedal down hard, pushed the short thin gear lever into first, let off the handbrake, and we moved forward. I stayed in first gear as we went up the steep ramp. The guard just inside the metal gate pushed the button that sent it clattering upwards, and nodded me a goodnight; I waved a finger back at him in reply.

The Jag is not the best car in which to try and follow someone discreetly, but it was dark, and I didn’t feel like driving one of the department’s dreary machines tonight. I felt, it being my birthday, I had a right to some compensation for missing what had promised to be, as Gelignite had put it, an ‘interesting’ celebration. Since she had an extremely fertile mind regarding pastimes not unrelated to the reproductive processes, I had a feeling that I was going to be missing out on something that ought not to be missed out on.

I wrenched my thoughts away from Gelignite and onto more mundane matters, such as remaining alive, at least for long enough to complete my exploration of her mental and physical erotic treasure-chest. One week ago an Arab had tried to murder me. He had failed, but he had escaped, and it was possible he might try again. The taxi had been stolen the day before and had false plates. There was more than a little evidence to suggest that he was not just a lone crackpot with a grudge against people who travelled in taxis. But there was no evidence yet to suggest exactly who he was. He was probably a Libyan hit man, flown over for the one job, chosen because there were no records on him in England. I didn’t know either, what his purpose in trying to kill me had been. Possibly it was to silence me in case I had picked up any information from Ahmed in the Royal Lancaster lavatory, but if that was the case, they had left it a long time. Possibly, it was to avenge the deaths of the four Libyans. The third possibility was that it may have been to get me off Whalley’s back. That was the possibility I most feared, for it would have meant Whalley knew he was being followed, and would therefore do nothing except waste our time. But I didn’t think whoever it was could be so naive as to think that if they got rid of me everyone would leave Whalley alone.

Possibly it was someone settling an old score. In this game, we never know when we are making enemies, nor, often, who our enemies are.

There were too many possibilities and not enough clues. I would have to wait until whoever it was tried again, and endeavour not to break his neck before he talked.

The three exit ramps from the car park were rotated in irregular sequence, to make life harder for anyone trying to keep tabs on the movements of the staff of 46 Carlton House Terrace. The one in use tonight took me out into Cockspur Street, opposite Canada House. Whether they didn’t know there were any other ramps, or whether they knew which one was in use tonight, or whether they had all three covered, I did not find out, but I spotted them before the registration number of my car had even sunk into their brain cells — not that they could have learned a lot from it; the day after Gelignite had succeeded in cracking my private fortress, I had had the name and address of the owner of the Jaguar changed on the police files, and on the Swansea central vehicle registration files, to one Angus McTavish, who resided on a remote atoll thirty miles north-west off the coast of John o’Groats, Scotland’s most northern tip. McTavish did not exist, but the island did. Anyone else who had the bright idea of trying to track me down through my car licence number was in for one hell of a long journey, with little to show for their efforts, other than, perhaps, some snapshots of an uninhabitable rock covered in bird-shit.

The dark blue Marina crept up through the busy traffic in the Mall, and stuck two cars back from me; it stayed with me up St James’s, and down left into Piccadilly. There were still scorch marks on the tarmac from the previous week. The Marina forked left behind me into Hyde Park Corner, but still I couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure. I still couldn’t be completely sure as I went around and took the Park Lane turn-off, and held my speed to thirty, although the legal limit was forty. The Marina stayed back, letting other cars pass. There were two men in the Marina. Caucasians.

I turned sharply left, down the ramp to the filling station; they didn’t follow. If I was right and they were tailing me, they had just shown that I wasn’t dealing with complete amateurs. I stuck five pounds worth of petrol in the tank, which topped it to the brim, and drove out again. The Marina was circling Marble Arch.

I drove around Marble Arch and headed back down Park Lane, sticking to the inside lane. The Marina came down, three cars back, also in the inside lane. No one but an idiot, or someone wanting to turn left, drives down the inside lane of this part of Park Lane. We crossed the Brook Street lights, then on down, past the Dorchester lights, still in the left lane, the Marina two cars back now. The traffic was thick ahead and to the right of me; then there was a gap. I cursed the side-screens of the Jag, wishing that at this moment I had glass windows with clearer vision. I looked out; there was a truck coming down fast. I slammed the gear-lever into first, flattened the accelerator, hung the tail out all over the road, rev counter thrashing into the red, blast of horn from the truck, ferocious hoot from a taxi as I rocketed clean across his bows — Christ, a bicycle — missed the back wheel by an inch. MGB going slowly down the outside lane, but I won’t get in front. Hurry, MGB, for chrissake — oh shit, XJ6 belting down second lane — move your ass MGB. The gap opened and I got out of the path of the XJ6, and behind the ass of the MGB, down the tiny slip road in the central divider which was the last exit before Hyde Park Corner, and away from the jam that the Marina now had no chance of missing.

As I started to drive back up Park Lane, I could see the Marina, still in the inside lane on the far side of the carriageway. Both driver and passenger were looking my way, and while I was too far away to see and memorize their features, I could, even from this distance, make out the expression on their faces: they looked very pissed off.

I pulled a receiver from my pocket and put it in my ear. Then I took my propelling pencil out, and spoke into the clip. ‘This is Ursula’ — Ursula was my code name for the day — ‘I want urgent tail on navy Marina registration AEX 659Y. Currently in southbound jam at Park Lane-Hyde Park junction. And gen too.’

‘Roger Ursula. Reply Halo.’

The words ‘Reply Halo’ told me on which of the channels the reply would be coming. When we were in contact with Central London Control, or with any other central control point — there were several in key cities across Britain — to minimize the risk of one’s conversation being monitored, each radio transmission would be made on a different frequency. If I wanted to speak to CLC again, it would next be on the frequency for which Halo was the code. I set the dial on the pencil to this frequency and switched the transmitter off to conserve the battery; it would be some minutes before the reply came.

At Marble Arch, I turned left down the Bayswater Road, and then threaded my way around the back of Paddington Station. One hundred years ago, this had been the smart side of the Park to live. Then the station had been built, and the smart set fled over to South Kensington to escape the smut and the soot. Now the trains were electric or diesel and there was no smut and no soot, but few of the smart set had moved back. Terrace upon terrace of handsome white buildings sat decaying, with paint flaking off; the ones that weren’t hotels were jam-packed with as many apartments any landlord, with access to a cheap carpenter and even cheaper plumber, could cram in.

My ear plug bleeped; I pressed the button on my pencil. ‘Ursula,’ I said.

‘It’s a Hertz rental. Taken out this morning by one Michael Allen Keating, of 67 Harewood Drive, Leeds. He paid cash in advance for three days’ rental, and left cash deposit for the car. It was taken from the Russell Square branch and was to be returned there. It has been found abandoned north side of Piccadilly. Will check further on Keating. Over.’

‘Thanks. I’m going around the block. I’ll call you later.’

‘Going around the block’ was code for leaving London.

‘Roger Ursula, reply Fairy.’

It was some way down the M40 motorway before the traffic lightened and I could see a clear stretch of road ahead of me. When the gap finally came, I dropped down into third, and pushed the accelerator hard down. The car surged from fifty up to ninety, the engine missing a couple of times as the oil was blown off the plugs, and then on up to ninety-five, where I changed back into fourth. Still the car surged forward, the pit of my stomach trying to force its way into the soft leather seat-back behind me. The needle whipped past one hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-five, and I eased off there, before the rev counter went into the red, and held her at one hundred and twenty. Although she would soon be entering her fourth decade, she felt as if she was hardly run in, and clung to her line on the road like a limpet.

In the event of being stopped by the police, I had a small plastic card in my wallet. It was issued by the Home Office and it had on one side my photograph and a Home Office seal, and on the reverse the words: This person is on special duties. Please give him any help he may require. By authority of the Home Secretary. But I didn’t need to use the card tonight. Whatever any of Britain’s answers to Star-sky and Hutch might have been up to, they weren’t waiting for speedsters down this particular stretch of highway. After a few minutes, I eased down to one hundred.

I mulled things over as I drove. I wondered whether the Marina had been tailing me to see where I was going, or was tailing me to see if I would stop anywhere long enough for them to get some vital part of the top half of my anatomy into the cross-hairs of a telescopic sight. I wasn’t enjoying this assignment, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. Before I could move off it, I had to see it through; and to see it through I had to survive, and right now, that didn’t seem like the easiest of things to do.

I was out of my depth, but so, it seemed, was everyone else — from Fifeshire downwards — out of our depths and in the dark, playing a game of chance that would pay us no prizes if we won, but could cost dearly if we lost. At least they were the kind of options we were used to.

I was so wrapped up in thought that I went straight past the brown Triumph Dolomite, Sarah, the rear of the three tail cars, the grey Chevette, Alison, and the beige Allegro, Debbie. I was about to go straight past Whalley’s Cavalier when the alarm bells started clanging in my head. I braked hard, and dropped back behind the Allegro. We were on the A44, between Worcester and Leominster, having left the motorway a long way back. There were no street lights and no houses; it was pitch dark. The traffic was heavy.

Suddenly, the Allegro’s brake lights came on, and I nearly slammed into the back of the car. A car a short distance ahead of him was turning right. It was Whalley’s Cavalier, and he was turning into a small lane.

The Allegro went straight on. I snapped off my lights and turned into the lane to follow. Whalley was driving very slowly now, obviously looking for something. I saw what appeared to be a cart-track on the left, and swung into it. There was a splintering crash. I cursed; without my lights on, I hadn’t noticed the closed gate. I switched off the engine, leapt out of the car, not worrying about the gate for the moment, ran around to the boot, grabbed a briefcase from it, then sprinted off up the road after Whalley’s car.

I was in luck; around the next corner, I saw him put his brake lights on, and then I saw him shine a torch out of his right-hand window. He held it steady for a moment, then switched it off, turned right, and drove straight in between the bushes. I ran up to where he had gone in. There was a gap which led through to a huge field. Sitting at the edge of the field, glinting slightly in the moonlight, was a dark-coloured Ford Capri. I pressed down the tip of my pencil. ‘Daphne’s stopped for a picnic. She’ll need some ice.’ My code words told the team to keep both ends of this lane covered.

Whalley drove up towards the Capri. I snapped open my case, and drew out my image-intensifier binoculars, and looked firstly at the Capri’s registration. It was different from the last time, but I had little doubt it was the same car. I looked up through the windscreen. The driver wore a large pair of sun-glasses and a cap pulled down over his forehead. His mouth was covered by a thick moustache. Whether by accident or design, he had made it quite impossible to identify any of his facial features.

I took a set of headphones from my case and put them on. There was a wire running from them to a device with a telescopic sight, that was long and pointed, like a gun with no stock or breech. I stared through the image-intensifier sight and picked up Whalley. I pushed the switch on the side of the device, and was nearly deafened by the grating of a handbrake being pulled on. I turned the volume control down.

Whalley, methodical as always, removed his ignition key, then left his car, walked over to the Capri, and got into the front passenger seat of the Capri.

I aimed the cross-hairs of the sight onto the front windscreen of the Capri, midway between their heads. The device was the very latest in eavesdropping from Messrs Trout and Trumbull of the Playroom, British Intelligence’s answer to Alexander Graham Bell, Oppenheimer, the Atari Corporation, and Heath Robinson, all rolled into one. Their inventiveness knew no bounds. Among this month’s collection of essential items for the Spy-Who-Has-Everything were a rubber plant containing a concealed gun that could be aimed with deadly accuracy and fired, by remote control, from a distance of up to five miles; an apple that was a hand grenade — the removal of the stalk primed it; and an aerosol that, if sprayed onto the trunk of a tree, coated it in a substance that turned it into a highly effective radio aerial. Trout and Trumbull were heavily into Mother Earth this month; all the past few years’ publicity on ecology had obviously suddenly got through to them.

The most extraordinary thing about these two pasty-faced boffins, who looked more like elderly sales assistants in a dignified men’s outfitters of a nearly bygone age, was that everything they produced could be relied upon to work. Of the hundreds of weird devices they came up with, few were ever offered by them for service; but, with very rare exceptions indeed, one had the greatest of confidence that, if they did offer something, it would work.

The device I held in my hands now wasn’t actually their invention. In fact, they invented very little. Their brilliance lay in their ability to find and adapt inventions of others to the needs of the British field operative of the 1980s. This particular device was a laser microphone which could pick up a conversation with the most perfect clarity and fidelity of tone from a range of up to five miles. It did this by picking up the vibrations that the words made on any solid object nearby, and translating the vibrations back into speech. Glass was ideal for this, and no piece of glass could have been more ideal than the Triplex toughened-zone windscreen behind which they now sat.

‘You’re late. Jesus, you had me worried.’

‘I’m sorry — the traffic was bad getting out of London.’

‘The traffic’s always bad in London. You got stuck in it last time — why couldn’t you have left earlier?’

I recognized the man’s voice. I had heard it before. I racked my brains to think where, but I couldn’t remember; but I had definitely heard that voice.

‘I couldn’t. It would have looked suspicious.’

‘You were hours late last time. I’ve driven a hundred miles to make your journey shorter for you this time, and you’re still late.’

‘I’m sorry; I’m not good at this sort of thing.’

‘Maybe I should send some of these to your wife — would it help your punctuality?’

There was the sound of stiff paper; they both looked down at something the contact held.

‘You told me the negatives had been destroyed.’

‘Did I? I must have lied.’

‘I’ll be on time in the future.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, but I’m hoping there won’t be too many more times.’

‘Good. I don’t think my nerves can take it much longer.’

‘You’re sure you weren’t followed here?’

‘Of course not. I’ve told you, the Authority has no security worth speaking of.’

‘We’re worried there’s been a leak. I was going to tell you last time, but I didn’t want to frighten you. The Libyans caught a British agent operating in the training camp where we had our briefing sessions. Under torture, he admitted that he had bribed a Libyan friend to go to London and tell his control. The Libyan was tracked down and silenced, but not until after he arrived in London. We know who he contacted, but we don’t know how much he managed to tell. We know it can’t have been a great deal, because the specific details hadn’t been decided then, and I advised we should let the matter drop. But now there’s been a real fuck-up. Wojara didn’t agree. He wanted to have the person the Libyan contacted silenced as well — someone at MI5. They had a go at him and screwed up. You probably read in the paper last week about the bomb in a taxi?’

Whalley nodded.

‘Well, if that MI5 man’s got half a brain, it can’t take him too long to put two and two together and figure out a connection. I knew there was going to be trouble dealing with niggers. You’re going to have to keep your ears to the ground and a careful eye out.’

‘Yes,’ said Whalley unhappily. In the gloom, his face looked as cheerful as the inside of an empty curry house.

‘It could open up a whole can of worms, this screw-up, and this operation has to succeed, Mr Whalley, it has to succeed; and you’re the man that’s going to make it succeed, aren’t you?’

Whalley nodded silently.

‘And you know what will happen if this operation fails for any reason, any reason at all, or even if it has to be aborted, you know what your wife is going to get through the post, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad we still understand each other. Now, we have a date: 4 January — provided the wind is right: westerly. If not, it’s the first day after that that it is right.’

‘I can gear for a specific day — but I don’t know how I can delay after that day.’

‘That’s your problem.’

‘I also don’t know if I can be ready by then.’

‘You’ll have to be.’

‘Can you give me to the middle of next week to confirm it?’

‘You can have until next Tuesday.’

‘All right,’ Whalley sighed, ‘how shall I let you know?’

‘You’ll send a postcard to Oxford University with a picture of Westminster Abbey on it. Now, write this down: you’ll send it to Ben Tsenong — I’ll spell that for you: B-E-N T-S-E-N-O-N-G — Balliol College, Oxford; and you’ll write the message: “You’re right, London is beautiful. See you again soon. Marsha.” Got it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll contact you again soon. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’ Whalley got out of the car and walked back to his Cavalier. The man in the Capri did nothing until Whalley had driven back out through the gap. When he had gone, the man started the Capri; but instead of following Whalley’s tracks out through the gap, he turned the Capri in a large arc and, accelerating smartly, headed out across towards the far side of the field. I followed him with my binoculars. He went through an open gate and into a wood which dipped down into a valley. There was no point in my trying to sprint after him — he was driving much too fast. The cunning bastard! I don’t think he knew we were here, but he certainly wasn’t taking any chances. I spoke into the pencil. ‘Contact in Capri SFG 77R. Coming out backstage; send out a soft alert.’

A soft alert is an instruction to all police patrols to look out for the Capri, and to stop it for any traffic offence, however minor, that they can. The intention was, that by stopping the Capri and notifying our surveillance team where it was stopped, it would give them time to get back onto its tail. But there weren’t that many police around in this part of the world, and if the man was a professional, of which there seemed little doubt, then he was likely to stick to the quiet back-roads. It was also likely that by the time he emerged from the other side of those woods, the Capri would have yet another registration number.

I tried hard to remember where I had heard that voice before. It was recently, I knew that. Maybe I was mistaken, but I didn’t think so.

It was half past eleven, and I had a good three and a half hour’s drive back to London; for the moment, I had forgotten all about my birthday, and Gelignite’s treat, because right now there was one thought, and one thought only, racing around inside my skull: for the first time since I had begun this assignment, I felt I was in with a sporting chance of hitting the jackpot.

I rewound the tape a little, pressed the play button, and listened for long enough to be satisfied that the conversation had been safely recorded. So Whalley was being blackmailed. Interesting. Very interesting. The whole dialogue had been most interesting.

The gate was an elaborate, if ancient, job, made from timber and barbed wire, and I had done a damn good job of wrapping the barbed wire through the spokes of the Jaguar’s wire wheels and around the hub wing-nuts. No amount of tugging would do any good; I was faced with the choice of either driving back to London with the gate attached to my wheels, or jacking up the car, removing the wheels, and disentangling the wire in the freezing-cold, pitch dark. Unhappily, the latter was the more realistic of the two alternatives.

I was not, therefore, in the most cheerful of frames of mind when, at a few minutes to six in the morning, I finally drove into the mews, to see that Gelignite’s black Golf GTI was not parked, as it normally was, eight feet away from my front door and blocking the entire mews; in fact, it was not in the mews at all.

I stared again at the note on the hall mirror. Happy fucking birthday. That just about summed it up. I picked up the telephone, and dialled the night operator at Portico.

‘Didn’t you call my home and give the message I asked you to?’

‘We did.’

‘Well — what did she say?’

‘Do you really want to know, Mr Flynn?’ She was hesitant.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well — she said, “Bullshit”.’

I dialled Gelignite’s flat. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, four times, then ‘Hello’. It was the voice of someone arousing from a deep sleep.

‘It’s me.’

There was a long pause. ‘Thanks for a great evening.’ Yawn. ‘What time is it?’

‘Five past six.’

‘Was she a good fuck?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Next time you get your secretary to call up your girlfriend and tell her you’re going to be late because you’re strapped to a totem pole and surrounded by savages brandishing tomahawks deep in the Amazon bush, let me give you some advice: make sure your girlfriend hasn’t seen you driving down Park Lane fifteen minutes earlier, and, what’s more, driving like a loony to get out of her line of vision because you think she hasn’t spotted you, because I did spot you, you shit!’ She hung up.

I stood staring into the receiver, and decided that people were right about birthdays: they do get less fun as you get older.