Atom Bomb Angel

15

After Gelignite hung up on me, I despatched the least incompetent of my fresh-faced minions to go and watch Whalley for me, and then crashed out for a couple of hours. I woke up at eight feeling considerably worse than when I had lain down, made myself three cups of thick black coffee in a row, then drove in to Portico. I drove past the entrance of all three ramps to see if anyone was keeping watch, and it didn’t seem that anyone was.

I first made a couple of calls. The navy Marina of the night before hadn’t yielded any clues, and the address on the licence the driver had given Hertz was false. The contact with the Capri had got away without being spotted. It was a good start.

I switched on the tape recorder and played the tape of Whalley and his contact several times. After an hour and a half, I was satisfied I had picked up all that was of interest: the name Wojara, which at the moment meant nothing; and the name Ben Tsenong, which also meant nothing; the contact’s voice, which I had heard before, meant something, although right now, I didn’t know what. He had driven one hundred miles; that was interesting, but there are one hell of a lot of places within a one-hundred-mile radius of Worcester. The contact had said ‘niggers’; that was very interesting. Up until now, we had only encountered Arabs; Arabs weren’t blacks. Whalley talked about gearing for a specific day, what did he mean by that? 4 January or the first day after that on which there is a westerly wind. Wind; Fifeshire had talked about wind — wind spread radiation. Westerlies were the prevailing winds over the British Isles. 4 January; I tried to figure out the significance of that date; it was a Monday. New Year’s Day was on the Friday. I went down to the library, one floor below, and looked up religious holidays; there were none on 4 January. There was no event scheduled for 4 January in any publication at all. I turned my attention to the wind, and pulled out the massive Times atlas of the world, and furrowed through until I came to the world wind-flow charts. The January chart showed the westerly winds sweeping across the Atlantic, across Spain, France and the British Isles, and then on, up towards the Arctic. In the months following January, the charts showed the same wind direction across the Atlantic, but after crossing Northern Europe, instead of curving up towards the Arctic, the winds curved down and across Russia. I thought about it for some moments; if nuclear power stations in England were going to be blown up and Fifeshire was right with his figures that fall-out could be damaging two thousand miles downwind, if the Russians wanted to be sure of not being swept by winds that had crossed England, then the safest month for them would be January.

It could well be that there was a completely different and much better explanation for the significance of 4 January, but I had to start trying to put the pieces somewhere. I went back up to my tiny office — cubicle would be a more accurate definition. The Security Services’ answer to defence-budget cuts was to reduce the amount of space its staff occupied. If they cut the size of my office much further, it was going to require a shoe-horn to get me in and out. Part of the idea was, of course, to discourage us from spending too much time indoors on our backsides; it was very effective.

I telephoned the bursar’s office at Balliol College, Oxford. The woman who answered was polite and helpful. I told her I was from The Times, preparing an article for the next Educational Supplement, on overseas students at Britain’s universities, and asked her what she could tell me about Ben Tsenong. She confirmed that a Ben Tsenong was registered. He was studying nuclear physics, in his third year; he came from Namibia, and was on a United Nations scholarship. She suggested that if I wanted more information, I should write to him.

Not having any great conviction that becoming a pen pal with Tsenong would provide me with the sort of information I was after, I decided to go and pay his room a visit. Two hours later, I was in my Jag, negotiating the double hazard of driving rain and a thick wadge of cyclists pedalling with their eyes shut against it. Oxford didn’t look its best in the November rain; it wasn’t the sort of day for whipping out the Instamatic and snapping the sights. The windscreen had decided it was going to fog up and stay fogged up, and no amount of persuasion from either the de-mister or a duster could make it change its mind.

There was a parking bay in the centre of the street past the Sheldonian Theatre, and I pulled in there. I shoved three coins in the parking ticket dispenser and lost them all. I banged the machine with my fist, then walked across to Balliol and into the porter’s lodge. A list of students was pinned up on the wall; Tsenong’s name and room number was on it, and I was relieved that he was staying in college, and I didn’t have to go traipsing around Oxford looking for his lodgings.

On the wall behind the porter’s desk was a plaque which read: Ezra Hancock d. 1911 A better friend no man had. I hoped the same applied to his replacement. ‘Can you tell me where 11/7 is, please?’

Ezra Hancock’s replacement turned out to be a chip off the old block. I got the directions to Tsenong’s room, and I got the names of all his immediate neighbours. Other than knowing he was black, the porter couldn’t give me much information about Tsenong. I thanked him and went out. I stopped in the shelter of the arch outside the lodge door, checked to make sure no one was looking, then pulled a cap from my pocket and pulled it over my head; I also put on a large pair of dark glasses, pulled my coat collar right up, then took a scarf from my pocket and wrapped it around my neck several times. It would have taken someone with X-ray eyes to know it was me inside that lot.

I walked through the arch, round the edge of the oval lawn of the Front Quad, with its grass that would make the surface of the snooker table look like a derelict golf course, through the Old Balliol gates and across the Garden Quad. I went in the entrance to staircase eleven, and climbed the steps. Number seven was on the second floor. I knocked on the door. A rather strained voice said, ‘Come in,’ and I cursed. I had hoped no one would be in. I pushed the door open, and saw a thin black youth seated at a desk by the window. His face could have been good-looking but for a pallor of tiredness and a scowl that made thick lines across it. He looked over his shoulder at me and I saw hatred in his eyes. It wasn’t hatred of me in particular. The hatred in those eyes had been there a long time before I knocked on the door.

‘James Gilbert?’ I said.

‘No — the floor below.’

‘The floor below? That’s where I was — they said he was on this floor.’

‘Well, he isn’t; he’s right below me.’

‘Ah — you must be Mr Kershaw?’

‘No. My name is Tsenong. Kershaw is further down the corridor.’

‘I thought that porter was a bit dim. Sorry to have bothered you.’

Tsenong turned back to his studies without replying. I closed the door. Right. Now I knew what he looked like. The next step was to wait until he went out. I walked back across the Quad and into the shelter of the archway. The porter had told me there were only two exits from Tsenong’s room — either the door or the fire escape. Both would bring him out into the Quad, and from the shelter of the arch I had a clear view. I removed my cap, glasses and scarf, and turned my coat inside out; it was reversible, and now showed black on the outside instead of white. If Tsenong walked right past me, he would have no reason to recognize me. I had a feeling I was in for a long wait, because he had looked settled into his books. I looked idly out at the teeming rain, and thought about the events of the day.

After leaving Portico, by a different exit from the one I had used the previous night, I spotted a shiny green Ford Escort slide out into the traffic. There was only a driver in the car; no one else. I turned down to the Mall, around Buckingham Palace and up towards Hyde Park Corner. The Escort sat well back. More for amusement than anything else, I turned from Hyde Park Corner into St George’s Street and drove into Belgrave Square, where I suddenly pulled over sharply to the left to a florist stand. The Escort was caught completely on the hop. I left him to circle several times around Belgrave Square, while I made a slow and ponderous attempt to decide which bunch to buy for my sick aunt in Maidenhead, before telling the not very amused vendor that I had just remembered she was allergic to flowers, and then drove off.

I decided I would take the Escort for a drive down Walton Street. Walton Street is a smart, narrow street, lined with restaurants, art galleries, and precious little shops staffed by horsey ladies who talk to each other as if they are shouting from distant lavatory seats.

The doyen of the Walton Street restaurants is Walton’s, which once had the dubious distinction of being blown up by the IRA. In front of this restaurant, the road hooks sharply to the right and comes to a traffic light. It is rare to find an occasion, day or night, when there isn’t a bottleneck in Walton Street and today, fortunately, was no exception. I ground to a halt in the jam, about fifty yards back from Walton’s, with the Escort four cars behind me. I pulled the handbrake on, then, ducking my head, I slid across and climbed out the passenger door.

Crouched right down, and ignoring the curious gaze of the driver in the van behind me, I crept down the side of the van, and down the side of the two cars behind it. As I reached the Escort, out of the driver’s line of vision, with one hand I unholstered my Beretta from an inside pocket — clicking off the safety catch in the process — and with the other hand I opened the Escort’s door.

‘Good morning,’ I said, climbing in.

He looked at me, at the gun, and at me again. It was either the gun or me that he didn’t like the look of, but I couldn’t immediately tell which. He was a youngster, no more than twenty, in a cheap brown suit, nylon shirt with broad stripes, and a vulgar blue tie with red blobs and yellow zig-zags. He had a thin layer of hair on his upper lip, where he thought he was growing a moustache, and a comb and a short ruler sticking out of his breast pocket. His eyes were open wide, and getting wider; his initial expression of dislike was fast turning to one of fear.

‘You’ve got five seconds to tell me who you’re working for before I shoot your balls off,’ I said. ‘One… two…’ A car in front started hooting — the traffic in front of the Jaguar had started to move. ‘Three…’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He spoke with an Irish accent.

‘Unless you tell me, I am going to pull the trigger in two seconds’ time — and I don’t really care whether you tell me or not,’ I said.

He got the message.

‘Four…’

‘Cleary.’

‘Clever boy!’

Another car and the van joined in the hooting.

‘Patrick Cleary,’ he said.

‘And who is Uncle Patrick and how do you come to be working for him?’

He looked at the gun again. It was a particularly large and menacing-looking weapon. The wrong end of a Beretta 93R is not the most comforting sight in the world, and it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to scare, as much as blast, the living daylights out of people.

‘I don’t know who he is. I was offered the job by a bloke I met in a pub.’

It seemed to me that the underworld led a pretty cushy life. Its inhabitants appeared to spend all their daytimes — when they weren’t on holiday on the Costa Brava — collecting things that had fallen off the backs of trucks, and all their evenings getting offered large sums of money for doing simple jobs for strangers they met in any pub they entered. ‘Bullshit. Who is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What was the name of the pub?’

‘Ring of Bells, Highgate.’

‘Who is he?’

The car behind started hooting as well.

‘I don’t know, I told you.’

‘Who was the bloke you met in the pub?’

‘Mick.’

‘Describe him.’

‘Short guy, ginger hair.’

‘Smile, please!’

‘You what?’

‘I’m taking your photo.’ I pointed my watch at him, and pushed a small button above the winder. There was a sharp click and a tiny whirr. A cacophony of hooting began both in front of us and behind us, simultaneously. ‘Mick who?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

‘What did he ask you to do?’

‘Said I had to follow you; see where you went.’

‘And then what?’

‘That’s all.’

‘How were you going to tell him?’

‘He said he would contact me.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘John — McEliney.’

‘Where are you from, John?’

‘London.’

‘Can I see your driving licence?’

He pulled it out; it had his name on it and an address in Kilburn, North London. I photographed it and handed it back. The hooting was getting even worse.

‘How long have you been following me, John?’

‘This is the first time — just now.’

‘How many days have you waited?’

‘I just started today. He said you didn’t show for long periods sometimes.’

‘Who did?’

‘Mick.’

‘Mick who?’

‘I told you, I don’t know.’

I pulled out my notebook, and from the back I tugged a plastic strip; a sheet of plastic came out. ‘Put your hands on that,’ I said. He did so. ‘Now push hard.’ He was shaking like a leaf. I took his fingerprints. ‘Now your thumb… good boy.’

I put the plastic back in the notebook and put it in my pocket.

‘Was there anything else you wanted to see me about, John?’

He looked at me oddly, then shook his head.

‘Good, then I’ll be off.’ I took hold of his ignition keys, switched off the ignition, then removed them, pocketing them as I left the car.

The van driver in front had gone puce. He leaned his head out of the window and recited a very inadequate list of sexual organs and what can be done with them. He finished just as I shut my car door. ‘If that’s all you know,’ I said, ‘you can’t have a very interesting sex life.’

He could certainly run fast. Luckily the light was green, and I accelerated through it, leaving him to shake his fist impotently. I forgot him, and concentrated on McEliney.

I reckoned that McEliney had been telling the truth. He spoke with an Irish accent; Kilburn was an Irish colony in London. It was becoming pretty clear it wasn’t only Arabs and Russians and blacks that were involved in this little bit of no good; it was also the IRA. After the failure of the Arab to kill me, they had probably been instructed to watch me and see if they could figure out anything from my movements. The first time I had spotted them had been last night, in the blue Marina, and then again this morning. I wondered if they had been following me last week, and decided they hadn’t. I would have noticed them. No, the reason they hadn’t followed me last week was almost certainly because they hadn’t been able to find me. They had probably presumed I would be in my office at Portico, and had been keeping watch on that. They wouldn’t have had any reason to know I was at the Atomic Energy Authority; if they had known, they would have been tailing me from there. That was a big relief. If they had tumbled me at the AEA, I would have been blown; the whole damn thing would have been blown. Last night was the first time I had been in to Carlton House Terrace since my somewhat bumpy taxi-ride. It was also the first time a tail had picked me up. It made sense, and I felt a bit better; they had no idea what we were up to.

Tsenong came through the doorway sooner than I had expected. He wore a yellow plastic anorak, and carried a barrel-shaped red and white nylon hold-all, which he was probably using as a satchel. He ran across the exposed Quad, and went out through the Back Gate into Magdalen Street, and disappeared from view. I would have liked to follow him to see where he was going and get some idea how long that would give me, but I was worried that I would waste valuable time if I did so, so I went straight up to his room.

It had an old-fashioned lock which was dead easy to pick. I locked it again from the inside and jammed the lock with a piece of metal so that if he did come back suddenly, he wouldn’t be able to get in.

The room was a standard Oxford undergraduate room. It was very small, which indicated that Tsenong did not have much private means. There was an old green filing cabinet, a shelf full of books, a large battered armchair, a wooden chair at a small modern desk, a coffee table, an elderly wardrobe, a lumpy bed and a single-bar electric heater. The window overlooked Magdalen Street, and didn’t do much of a job of keeping out the traffic noise.

What made this room different from the rooms of most undergraduates was a complete lack of personal touches. There were no photographs, pictures, decorative objects, nothing, except piles upon piles of books on the subjects of nuclear physics and nuclear energy.

I began with his desk. In the first drawer was an assortment of bills, an invitation to an Oxford Union debate on nuclear power, and a packet of Fisherman’s throat lozenges. In the second drawer, on their own, were two telegrams. Both bore the same date: 10 August. One was from Otjosundu, Namibia; it said simply: Dadda pass away yesterday morning. Stop. He is more peaceful now. Stop. Love you son. Stop. Mama. The second was from Marzuc, Libya; it said: All has been agreed. Stop. Will be in touch. Stop. Lukas.

Most of the other drawers were filled with technical notes and papers. I scanned sheets at random, but there didn’t seem to be much of interest. It looked mostly like university work, but I couldn’t be sure as most of it was highly technical and way above my head. I photographed the sheets I pulled out, for the boffins at CCI to decide whether there was anything Tsenong was working on that he had no business to be working on.

I took each book off the shelf in turn, held it by the cover and shook it. Nothing fell out of any of them. I felt underneath the furniture, and went systematically through the entire list of possible hiding places: under the mattress, loose floorboards, cracks in the wall, everywhere — and nothing further turned up. Then I tried the most obvious place in the room: the filing cabinet. Inside the first drawer was a map of the world, with every nuclear power station clearly marked. I had no doubt that the map was an item he required for his studies, but I wondered for what particular reason someone had shaded in red pencil the whole of Britain, France, Spain, Canada and the United States of America. In addition, there was a flow of arrows around the world, and the flow struck me as looking not a bit unlike the flow of the January wind that I had studied earlier that morning. After the arrows passed through the shaded countries, they assumed the colour of the shading for some considerable distance. I photographed the map and replaced it. I went through the rest of the files, took a number of photographs, but did not come across anything else that struck me as being of particular interest.

I unlocked the door, listening carefully for any footsteps. This was always the moment I hated the most. I took a deep breath and marched out. The corridor was empty.

I got myself out of the building, out of the Quadrangle, out of the parking bay and out of Oxford. So far it had been a fruitful, if a trifle long, day — two hours’ sleep was not my body’s idea of a good night’s kip; it wasn’t my brain’s idea either. The rain battered down, the wipers continued their mournful clumping, the de-mister fought with the damp for domination of the windscreen. It was three in the afternoon and growing very dark. I was pleased with my progress.

There was the sound of a horn blaring. It continued blaring, getting louder. I opened my eyes. ‘Christ!’ I swung the steering wheel hard to the left, and thirty-five tons of articulated Mercedes lorry thundered over the fourteen and a half feet of tarmac I had vacated about one thousandth of a second earlier. Shaking from the shock, and cursing myself for allowing myself to be so stupid as to fall asleep at the wheel, I slowed right down, pulled into a lay-by, slouched down in my seat, and slept for an hour and a quarter.

The rain had stopped by the time I drove into the mews. It was nearly eight o’clock. I turned the corner, swinging out wide in order to position myself for the garage, and missed a large dark shape in the middle of the mews by a good quarter of an inch. I didn’t need to take a second look at the dark shape to know it was Gelignite’s Golf. All of a sudden, I felt one whole lot better. Behind the thick curtains, I could see lights were on in the house. I put the Jag in the garage and opened the front door.

There was a smell of cooking. I went into the kitchen. Gelignite didn’t look up. ‘You’re a shit, Max Flynn, you know that? You’re a shit.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ I said wearily.

‘What do you mean, you’ve heard?’

‘If you think you’re the first person on earth to discover that I am a shit, then you’re badly mistaken. You’re about seventy-five girls too late.’

Le Creuset were not particularly concerned with aerodynamics when they designed their casserole dish range. If they had been, the massive one Gelignite flung at me would have probably killed me. Fortunately, its full payload of couscous did not improve its airborne stability, and it crashed into the wall a good arm’s length from my right ear. We both stood glaring at each other. A full minute passed before Gelignite broke the silence. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘You look awful.’

‘I feel it.’

‘Shall I fix you a drink?’

I nodded. ‘I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again.’

‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘I had to get my toothbrush.’ Somewhere beneath her crazy hair, I thought I detected the merest trace of a smile.