Atom Bomb Angel

7

The small brass plate to the right of the front door of the building had engraved on it the words Portico Investments Ltd. Nothing else gave the casual passer-by any clue as to the activities that went on behind the white-painted, five-storey Regency façade of 46 Carlton House Terrace.

There was nothing to hint to the casual passer-by that number forty-six did not in fact stop at basement level, but continued down into the ground for another five storeys, and continued along, down the Mall, occupying five more houses.

Inside the entrance hall of number forty-six was an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties. What singled her out from the thousands of receptionists in London that looked not unlike her was a cabinet on her sitting-room wall at home which contained some forty-five cups and medals; most were from Bisley, but one had pride of place: it was an Olympic Silver for Rapid Pistol Fire. By making the most local of movements with the hand she used for pushing her intercom buttons, she could, within one and a half seconds of anyone coming through that front door, have produced a hefty Colt revolver and started firing it.

To her left was a glass display booth featuring an array of extremely large uncut gemstones, including a diamond, sapphire, emerald and ruby. A montage of colour photographs behind the stones depicted a drill-bit grinding into the earth, with the caption Amarillo, 1935, a pair of tongs holding up a ruby ring, with the caption Nairobi, 1955, and an aerial photograph of an area of hilly desert.

The display was for the benefit of visitors, not that this building had many strangers visit it, nor did it encourage them. The regular inhabitants of the building knew that the gemstones were nothing but bits of glass, and the photographs were prints from a handful of negatives found in the vaults of the Science Museum.

The entire complex onto which the front door of number forty-six opened housed a daytime staff of seven hundred and fifty people, the majority of whom entered and left via a battery of innocent-looking doorways dotted around the Mall, Trafalgar Square and Cockspur Street, or by one of the three entrances to the car park which sprawled below the complex.

On the fifth floor, through a secretary’s anteroom, and through a massive, heavily beaded double door, was the man who presided over this domain. He was a powerfully built man with a bullet-shaped head rising from a bull-neck; a nose that was long, but did not protrude much, and was broken in a couple of places like a prize fighter’s; his hair was a mixture of dark greys, with occasional black strands, and there were elegant silver streaks either side of his temples. He wore a Turnbull and Asser lawn-cotton shirt, pin-striped down the chest, but with plain white collar and cuffs, a very up-to-date Lanvin tie, and the entire package elegantly wrapped in five hundred pounds’ worth of Dormeuil navy-blue chalk-striped cloth and Hawes and Curtis expertise. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, being no more than five foot nine, but he had the sort of presence that would make the most belligerently drunk of rugger-buggers move over to make room for him at crowded pub bars.

A close look at the wrinkles around his eyes would indicate he was in his late sixties, but in spite of that age, he looked capable of vaulting the giant desk, which he dwarfed with his presence, in one leap — that was, unless you knew that, tucked somewhere under the back of that massive expanse of mahogany, was a thin but strong walking stick. It wasn’t age that had brought on the necessity of this stick, but a hail of bullets from a would-be assassin’s sub-machine gun just over a year ago.

Closeted behind the front door of 46 Carlton House Terrace, behind the brass plate with Portico Investments Ltd engraved on it, was an organization that could trace its roots back to the days of Queen Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada. It was a secret organization, so secret, in fact, that it did not officially exist, in spite of the fact that it spent its way, annually, through some one hundred and forty million pounds’ worth of British taxpayers’ money. Outside the organization itself, there were only two people, at any one time, who had the faintest clue what it was up to: the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, and what they knew could be written with a fairly thick felt-tipped marker on the back of a postage stamp.

The organization sprawled across three other complexes of its own in London, largely as a result of Fifeshire’s expansion plans, as well as sharing a massive complex beneath the Hyde Park underground car park with the Army, the police Special Branch, the Secret Intelligence Service — MI6 — and no doubt, half the leading Russian moles in England. The organization was MI5, and the man who sat on the fifth floor of Portico Investments, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope OBE, better known by his code name, Fifeshire, was its Director General.

Fifeshire rarely saw most of his operatives from year in to year out, but I was privileged — if any of the hundred, different, rotten assignments I have had could be called a privilege — to work directly for him. He was my control. We had got on extremely well at my first ever interview with him — whether he had taken pity on a waif in distress, or had spotted a gullible mark who could be manipulated, or had any of a thousand other reasons, I could not tell, so I consoled myself by believing that Fifeshire was intelligent enough to recognize a fine man when he saw one.

Fifeshire’s ace agent had, however, little desire to be the most admired man in the graveyard, and for that reason I kept more than a wary eye open whenever I went to see him. I walked in to the familiar room, and he stood up behind his desk, and stretched out his massive hand. It was the kind of hand that leaves delicate ladies who shake it with speechless smiles on their faces, while their cheeks flush bright red, and they transfer their weight from one foot to the other for several moments, until the numbness in their hand subsides and the full strength of the agony hits them; then they let out a short, sharp, but elegant and restrained, ‘Owww’.

I was prepared for his clamp, and braced my hand against it; he held my hand for a few seconds, shaking it hard, and just at the moment at which the knuckles were about to crumble to dust, he mercifully let go and waved me to sit down. Beside his desk was a twenty-six-inch television monitor, wired to a video-cassette player. They had been put there on my instructions.

‘How are you, Flynn?’ he asked.

‘A bit better than last week,’ I replied. It was last week that I had reported that I was bored stiff watching Whalley do nothing. I wasn’t bored any more.

Fifeshire looked wryly at the monitor. ‘How kind of you to be concerned I might miss Coronation Street.’

‘I know you like to be kept informed,’ I said.

‘Well I wish more people did,’ he said. He threw a copy of the morning’s Times across the desk top. ‘Did you read the paper this morning?’

‘No, I was busy watching a television programme called Horace Whalley Goes to the Office.’

Fifeshire grinned for a brief moment. ‘Look at the front page.’

The headline read: Prince and Princess of Wales start Belfast Tour.

‘Did you know they were going on a Belfast tour?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Well, nor did I. Forty million pounds is the budget I have this year to spend on spying on Northern Ireland terrorism, and there isn’t anyone that knows more about the subject than I do, yet they go and send the Prince and Princess over there without even asking our opinion. Anyhow,’ he said, abruptly changing the subject, ‘that’s not your problem. Let’s hear what you have to say.’

‘On Monday Whalley left his office and drove to a pub ten miles this side of Porthmadog in Wales. Moments after he arrived, a Ford Capri drove out. I had the Capri tailed, and whether or not the Capri knew he was being tailed, I don’t know, but he shook our men off after about fifteen minutes. From the description of the way he did it, my guess is he’s a professional, but didn’t know whether he was being followed and just went through a standard routine — a security procedure. What is interesting is that he had false plates on his car — he certainly wasn’t taking any chances. The plates bore the registration number of a Datsun that was written off in a smash four years ago. Now there might not be any connection between him and Whalley, but I watched Whalley most of the time he was in the pub and he didn’t communicate with anybody, yet when he came out he had a package on him, which contained the videotape he delivered to the BBC, a copy of which is ready to roll on your machine.’

Fifeshire nodded. ‘As you don’t have any information about this man in the Capri and, by the sound of it, little chance of finding out any more unless he shows himself again, it’s not of much help is it?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again?’

‘No, I might recognize the car. I’m having all possible leads followed up — anyone that might have sold the fake plates, all the usual.’

The intercom buzzed and Fifeshire pushed a button on the machine on his desk. The voice of his secretary, the Honourable Violet-Elizabeth Trepp, came out. ‘Mr Wardle and Captain Coleman are here to see you, Sir Charles.’

‘Send them in please, Miss Trepp.’

To call the Honourable V.-E. Trepp a battleaxe would be to do a cruel injustice to battleaxes. She was to gorgons what a neutron bomb is to a pea-shooter. The whole of MI5, Fifeshire included, were terrified of her. If one didn’t know the personnel department better, one might have thought she was a joke perpetrated by them; but personnel didn’t have a sense of humour.

Her efficiency, or at least her view of what efficiency should be, drove everyone to the depths of despair. She was not merely protective towards Fifeshire, she protected him like a nuclear-blast shelter. To get a telephone call put through to Fifeshire required a university degree in diplomacy, an enormous amount of patience, and plenty of time to spare. ‘Who is calling?’ she would say, followed by, ‘Is he expecting you?’, followed by ‘I’ll see if he wishes to speak to you.’ No one escaped this treatment — not even those who called every day; nor those who called several times every day; not the low-grade bosses, nor the middle-grade bosses, nor the top bosses; not even the Home Secretary, nor the Prime Minister. All got exactly the same treatment. She had been mentally strangled a thousand times, and several hundred of those times by me alone.

By an act of secrecy worthy of the entire organization, Fifeshire had had installed a direct line of which she was unaware, so that he could once again receive urgent calls in time to take some action.

The double doors opened and two men came in; one, a short man, balding, with greying strands of hair, aged about fifty-five, in a green worsted suit that was too small for him and a cream shirt that was too big; the other was in his late thirties, with jet black hair, about six foot tall, wearing a brown double-breasted blazer with plain gold buttons and dark-grey flannel trousers.

‘Sir Charles,’ I said, introducing them, ‘this is Ken Wardle and Dick Coleman from the Playroom.’ The Playroom was the nickname given to the gadgetry department of the Combined Central Information base underneath Hyde Park. Some of the most up-to-date equipment in the world was down there, constantly being improved and adapted and applied to all forms of Intelligence work by a team of some of the finest underpaid technicians in the country. Wardle and Coleman were two of these.

‘How do you do,’ said Fifeshire. ‘How very nice of you to come. I’m looking forward to seeing the show!’

Wardle and Coleman smiled politely, and caught my eye. Without moving an eyelid, the three of us winked at each other. We were together in the big boss man’s room, like privileged schoolboys; we had to be on our best behaviour and as time was even more precious to Fifeshire than to most people, we hoped he wasn’t going to feel we’d wasted his time.

‘Shall we start?’ I said.

Fifeshire nodded. Wardle switched on the monitor, and Coleman pushed the play button on the video-cassette machine.

The picture that came on the screen was a steady pan across Moscow’s Red Square. Into the camera, wearing a Burberry mackintosh over a suit, walked Sir Isaac Quoit. He strode straight up towards the camera, until he was in full close-up, and then stopped.

‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘I am Sir Isaac Quoit and I am the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. For those of you who have not heard of this organization, it is the body responsible for the development and organization of the nuclear energy industry in the United Kingdom.

‘The reason I am here in Russia is that I do not feel safe in England, nor virtually anywhere in the free world. You may wonder if I have gone mad. The answer is no, I have not gone mad; but I am tired of lying to you, the British public, of feeding you an endless farrago of twisted statistics, of statements from corrupt scientists who have been paid to make statements that they do not themselves believe; I am fed up with doing nothing but heading and running a massive propaganda machine that has been set in motion by the government to cover up its complete inability to understand the implications and dangers of nuclear power, to cover up the fact that it has ruinously overestimated the demand for electricity for both the immediate and the long term, and has, even more ruinously, underestimated the cost of generating this electricity.

‘I am tired, in a nutshell, of lying to you that nuclear power is safe and cheap. It is not. It is immensely dangerous; not only has it been responsible, almost totally, for the ever-increasing incidence of death from cancer in the last twenty years, but it can, and almost certainly will, one day wipe out our entire country. And during the next five years, the cost of nuclear-generated electricity will become as much as eight times higher than the cost of conventionally generated electricity.

‘These lies are put upon you to protect the face of the government, and to protect the jobs of the many thousands involved in the nuclear energy industry. On the question of jobs, I can say that many thousands more jobs would be created as a result of generating electricity by conventional methods, and exploring new methods, than are currently available in the nuclear energy industry.

‘Why, you might ask, is this massive and lethal deceit maintained? Look back to the origins of the nuclear industry in this country, and an answer may begin to emerge.

‘Our first reactor, Calder Hall, became operational — went critical, as they say — in 1956. In front of the press of the whole world, the Queen switched the power from Calder Hall into the national grid, and the nuclear age was born. But the amount of power Calder Hall put into the grid was miniscule. That was not the reason why Calder Hall was built; it was built to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The electricity was a by-product.

‘The answer becomes clearer still if you look behind the scenes at the British government’s commitments to NATO; that same answer emerges again if you look behind the scenes at the British government’s commitments to the US — and we do have a major, very secret, defence treaty with the US. With regard to both these commitments, the major part of our contribution is not in ships, or in tanks, or in guns, or aircraft, or personnel; it is in plutonium. Our contribution is to supply NATO and the US with plutonium for nuclear weapons. The easiest way to manufacture plutonium is through nuclear power stations. Plutonium, at close to the ideal level of enrichment for nuclear weapons, is a waste product of nuclear power stations. The major percentage of the defence budget of the British government is concealed in your electricity bills.’

Sir Isaac continued for a further twenty minutes’ worth of impassioned and highly plausible-sounding speech. His theme seemed to drift at times, and he didn’t always explain clearly what he meant, but he got the basics of his message through loud and clear: the British public were being conned by a government that was too clever by half, and the result of this conning was a spreading network of nuclear power stations on an island far too small to cope with them. Britain, he said, was on the edge of a dark and deep nuclear abyss. She was about to ride, like her countrymen a century and a half before in the Charge of the Light Brigade, into a valley of death and despair from which she could never return. She was too small a land to have so many nuclear power stations, not to mention the fuel-reprocessing plants and the waste plants. One major accident in any of a couple of dozen of nuclear establishments could distribute, across every inch of the land, a cocktail of radioactive horrors so thick and so strong, that nobody would be able to inhabit Britain for generations to come.

Fifeshire watched the speech in stunned silence. At the end, Coleman pushed the pause button, and the picture froze. The chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority stood silhouetted against Lenin’s Mausoleum, looking much as I had seen him in the flesh, on a couple of occasions, in the corridors of the Charles II Street building. He was, I remembered, much more jovial-looking than the strained and tired man he appeared to be here. He was a good six foot tall and very bulky, with a deeply sagging treble chin. The top of his head was completely bald, but tufts of unkempt curly hair sprouted either side of his head and stuck out over his ears. His raincoat was unbuttoned and he wore a Prince of Wales check suit underneath, with all three buttons on his jacket awkwardly done up. He looked like a cross between an eccentric scientist, a giant teddy bear and a Dickensian publican. He was fifty-nine years of age, but had married late in life and had four children all still at school, the youngest being only seven. Although his expression was serious, his eyes had a strange warmth in them.

Fifeshire shook his head slowly, then looked at me. ‘He’s lost his trolley. He’s had a brainstorm, flipped his lid — must have done. I know him well. Dammit, I had a drink with him two weeks ago, he’s as straight as they come, dedicated to his work — absolutely dedicated. There’s something very strange about all this — very strange.’

‘Take a look at Sir Isaac’s wrist-watch, sir.’

I nodded at Coleman who pushed the pause button again, and the tape started rolling. Quoit remained on the screen, but now there was a zoom shot in to his right wrist, until the wrist filled the screen. We could see the time clearly on his Rolex wrist-watch: it was seven ten. The second hand was moving steadily around, so the watch wasn’t broken.

‘Seven ten,’ I said, ‘yet Red Square is in broad daylight and humming with people. At this time of the year, Moscow is in darkness at both seven in the morning and seven in the evening.’

‘Moscow is three hours ahead of us,’ said Fifeshire, ‘It’s probably ten thirty in the morning, Quoit has forgotten to adjust his watch — it’s still on English time.’

‘Possibly, sir. I think you might change your mind about that.’

The picture changed to a close-up of Quoit’s feet and the cobbled ground right beside them, then a series of closeups of the feet of other people in the Square.

‘I asked Ken Wardle and Dick Coleman to take a close look at this videotape and see if they could come up with anything interesting, and I think you’ll agree with me, shortly, that they have. The time on Sir Isaac’s watch is one thing, and it doesn’t prove anything at all, but the next thing certainly does. Ken perhaps you’d be good enough to explain?’

‘Certainly, Max,’ said Wardle. ‘What you’re looking at right now is a close-up of Sir Isaac’s feet and the feet of other people in the Square through a magnification of the videotape; what you cannot see with the naked eye, even on this magnification, are the shadows on the ground. If it had been a bright sunny day, you could have seen those shadows reasonably clearly, but it was obviously an overcast day, the lighting is flat, and the only shadow that there is, is beyond the range of normal television contrast. You are now going to see this same section of tape put through what we call an image booster — and what I mean by that, in layman’s terms, is that we have put it under a microscope.’

The image on the screen changed from feet on the ground to a mass of large and small, dark and less dark shapes. Always, there were two large dark shapes with two smaller, less dark shapes attached.

‘What you are now seeing are the feet of people in the Square, and the ground beside their feet, greatly magnified. The dark shapes are the feet themselves, the lighter shapes are the shadows on the ground. Now, there is one pair of feet — these here, that do not have a lighter shape attached — that do not have a shadow. This is most extraordinary. Everyone in Red Square is casting a shadow, except for one person; those feet belong to Sir Isaac.’

‘Are you implying what I think you are implying?’ said Fifeshire.

‘The only possible explanation,’ said Wardle, ‘is that Sir Isaac was not in Red Square whilst this was being filmed. He was either in a studio with a clever front-projection system, or else was filmed against a neutral background and then superimposed onto a tape of Red Square.’

‘The next thing is even more interesting,’ I said before Fifeshire could comment, and I nodded at Wardle.

The picture rolled on. The shadows went and two graphs appeared, one above the other. They looked like annual sales comparison charts of some company, the top one showing a good year, the lower one a horrendous year. Coleman again froze the image, and Wardle spoke.

‘As you are no doubt aware, Sir Charles, we have the ability now, from recordings of people’s voices, to make what we call voice-prints. These are as individual as finger-prints: no two people have the same voice-prints. On the screen you are looking at, the top graph is a voice-print made from a recording of a speech Sir Isaac made three months ago at Oxford University. The bottom graph is a voice-print made from part of the speech we have just heard. Without any doubt at all, these voice-prints were from different people.’ Wardle pulled out a pack of Du Maurier cigarettes and offered them around; I took one and lit it. Fifeshire removed a large Havana from the silver box on his desk, and began a surgical operation on it. After some moments, he spoke.

‘So who is the person we have just been watching?’

‘Sir Isaac Quoit,’ said Wardle. ‘But he wasn’t in Red Square and it wasn’t his voice that you heard. You are familiar, I am sure, with the term dubbing when applied to a motion picture — when the film is made in one language, but a different language is recorded onto the sound-track, in as close synchronization with the lip movements of the characters talking as is possible?’

‘Yes. I prefer subtitles, but go on.’

‘In video, there are techniques available now that are far more sophisticated than the method of dubbing used for celluloid. An electronic dubbing job has been done that would be quite impossible to detect with the naked eye — the only possible way of detection is through the voice-print technique.’

‘The thing that baffles me,’ said Coleman, ‘is that it seems very naive of the Russians to believe no one would run the checks that we have done.’

‘You must remember,’ said Fifeshire, ‘that although the Russians are bang up-to-date — and, indeed, even ahead of us in some areas, particularly medicine, and some space technology — there are many technological areas where they are way behind the West. Just look at their motor cars, their cameras, their navigational equipment! It’s more than likely that in this particular field, they are simply not aware of these detection capabilities you have demonstrated.’

Coleman nodded.

‘I must say,’ continued Fifeshire, ‘this certainly sheds a new light on Quoit’s disappearance, wouldn’t you agree, Flynn?’

‘I think one would be a trifle unwise to ignore it completely.’ I grinned. ‘I think the Director General of the BBC would be more than a little miffed as well. He has kindly given us the best half hour of video he’s likely to have all week, and I’m sure he would be most upset if he felt it wasn’t fully appreciated.’

‘How very kind of him to put his country before his viewer ratings,’ said Fifeshire cuttingly. ‘It was only because I threatened to have banned completely the six-part series on British Intelligence they’ve just finished making that he agreed to hand the tape over to you at all. I wouldn’t lose a great deal of sleep over his feelings; we’ve got enough to lose sleep over as it is. We have on the surface a straightforward defection. Quoit goes on television and delivers his justification for his defection — something he feels strongly enough about to give up everything, family, dog, friends, the lot, and plump for Russia, a country where, so far as we know, he has never set foot before. An unusual action to take, but it has been done by others before.

‘However, look beneath the surface, and we find three interesting facts. Firstly, Quoit has not adjusted his watch to local time — unusual, for someone as meticulous as Quoit. Secondly, while the impression given is that Quoit is in Red Square, he is in fact not there at all. Thirdly, it is not the voice of Quoit we hear, but of someone else.’ Fifeshire looked at me, then at Coleman, then Wardle. ‘Does the cassette tell us anything?’

‘No, sir,’ said Wardle. ‘It’s a Philips which could have been bought almost anywhere in the world.’

‘What about the lines — doesn’t Russian television operate on a different lines system from our own?’

‘Yes,’ said Wardle, ‘it does. But they could have taped it on their own system and then converted it to our 625 lines system and the fact that it had been taped on their system wouldn’t show up.’

‘So apart from some footage of Red Square, is there anything in this videotape that proves beyond doubt that Quoit was not actually in Russia when it was made?’

Wardle and Coleman looked at each other. Wardle spoke. ‘Nothing at all, Sir Charles. Sir Isaac could have been taped anywhere. The footage of Red Square could have come from any stock footage library. The superimposing and the dubbing could have been done by a competent tape-editor with the right facilities — which are not hard to come by — anywhere in the world.’

Fifeshire nodded. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he addressed Wardle and Coleman, ‘you have given us plenty to chew on. I am sure you are both extremely busy, so I won’t keep you any longer. You have been most helpful. Do you have any more questions, Flynn?’

‘No, Sir Charles.’

Fifeshire stood up. It was a technique he must have perfected years ago, because he had it to a fine art and it always worked. I knew, because he had used it on me a hundred times. It was his way of getting rid of people quickly, with the minimum loss of time wasted on common courtesies, and yet with extraordinary grace and politeness. He would stand up, looking as though he had to dash somewhere in a hurry. This had the effect of making anyone in his presence want to help him by getting out of his way quickly. They would leap to their feet, grab briefcases or any other articles they had brought, give him a hasty handshake and sprint for the door. Fifeshire would stand rooted to the spot, looking like an athlete awaiting the starting gun for the marathon, until the door had closed, whereupon he would relax and sink back into his chair, with a slightly smug grin on his face. It was by means of this technique that Wardle and Coleman were despatched from the room.

Fifeshire put his cigar in his mouth and lit it. He drew on it slowly and deliberately. ‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘it is quite possible that Quoit is in England. But wherever he is, is he a free man or is he a captive?’

‘Captive. Must be. If he was doing this of his own free will, there wouldn’t be any need for his voice to be faked.’

Fifeshire nodded. ‘I agree with you. And what’s more, he’s in this country.’

The last time I had come here, Fifeshire had chewed my head off. He wasn’t a man who had bad moods often, but when he did, the last place on earth to be was in his office. I had made that mistake two days after the unfortunate Ahmed had shuffled off his mortal coil in the men’s lavatory in the Royal Lancaster. In Fifeshire’s words, severed heads rolling about four-star-hotel lavatory floors were in extreme cases, perhaps, just about tolerable. Severed heads rolling about lavatory floors, playing dodgems with stolen taxis, and a car-load of flat Arabs under the wheels of an articulated lorry, was, in the none too superfluous wordage of Fifeshire’s oratorial flow, ‘Not bloody tolerable’.

‘No, sir,’ I’d agreed.

‘I’ve got Scotland Yard down my throat. I’ve got Special Branch down my throat. I’ve got the Home Secretary down my throat. I’ve got the Foreign Office down my throat. I’ve got MI6 down my throat. I’ve got the Minister of Defence down my throat, and now I’ve got the bloody Libyans down my throat as well. It’s bloody lucky I had my tonsils out, or I’d be choking to death. The Prime Minister wants a special report, the press are crawling in every orifice in the wall. Did you have to kill them all? Did you really have to shunt them under that lorry?’

‘I was just trying to stop them.’

‘Well, you succeeded, Flynn, didn’t you? You certainly stopped them. The Cultural Attaché to the Libyan Embassy, his private secretary, the Deputy Minister for Arts, and Libya’s leading expert on icons.’

‘They shouldn’t go around cutting people’s heads off and shooting at people.’

‘There were no knives and no guns found in the wreckage of that car.’

‘Then, with no disrespect, sir, they must have eaten them.’

Fifeshire had been very upset by the news Ahmed had given about Donald Frome. Reports had stopped coming through, which indicated Frome was in trouble. He was one of Fifeshire’s key moles, and had successfully infiltrated the international terrorist circuit and gained a position of considerable trust. If he was blown or dead, it would take years to replace him, and if what Ahmed had said was true, by now he was almost certainly both. Further, the news Ahmed had relayed, about the threat to nuclear power stations, did nothing to alter his mood. It fitted in with a lot of feedback Fifeshire had been getting lately from some of his other sources.

It was this not entirely amicable meeting with Fifeshire which had led to my study of the British nuclear energy industry, its power stations and its organizations; which in tum had led to the twenty-four-hour surveillance of Whalley; which led to the tape frozen on the screen to the right of Fifeshire’s desk. Nothing suspicious whatsoever had checked out about the four Arabs who had been crushed to death in their car, and it was on my persuasion alone that Fifeshire had, with not a little reluctance, sanctioned the whole study. I was going to have a lot to answer for if I didn’t come up with the goods. Today, however, was the first bright day. I could tell by the expression on Fifeshire’s face that, although we hadn’t yet found the pot of gold, we had at least stumbled across what might turn out to be a rainbow.

‘What makes you so sure Sir Isaac is still in Britain, sir? He might not be in Russia, but he could be anywhere.’

‘All the passport staff at Britain’s seaports and airports who have been on duty since Quoit disappeared have been interviewed. Flight lists of all airlines have been checked; the flight crews of almost all aircraft on which anyone remotely fitting his description has travelled, and, likewise, all ferry staff, have been interviewed. No one has seen him. And yet he is an unusual-looking man, a distinctive man, a man whom, once seen, is never forgotten, and yet no one saw him. That in itself is no proof at all — thousands of flights and boats leave this country every hour — but I have an Intelligence report from Moscow that seems to tie in with this.

‘Someone is going to be smuggled out of England next Monday, on the 10.00 a.m. Aeroflot flight to Moscow. Our contact does not know who this person is, but believes he is either a scientist or has detailed knowledge of certain scientific advances in this country.’

‘Our friend could fit that bill,’ I said.

‘Very neatly indeed.’ Fifeshire relit his cigar, which was burning down one side only.

‘If we’re on the right track with our thinking, Sir Isaac has been kidnapped by the Russians. The Russians have taken him to a secret television studio somewhere in England and got him to speak. Maybe he didn’t realize it was a studio, and maybe he didn’t realize he was being videotaped. Afterwards, they dub over, in perfect lip-sync, someone who sounds very like him making a strong defection and anti-nuclear speech. Then they bang him against a back-drop of Red Square and send the tape off to the BBC. All perfectly possible, except it doesn’t make any sense. It sounds more like a prank pulled by the anti-nuclear people — the Ecologists — some group like that.’

‘Possible,’ said Fifeshire, ‘but I would have thought most unlikely.’

I nodded, and lit a cigarette.

The Honourable Violet-Elizabeth Trepp produced coffee. It was the colour of tea made with a five-year-old tea bag, and tasted like paraffin. Fifeshire waited until she had left, then poured his into an ornate pot containing a rubber plant. ‘She doesn’t understand why none of my plants ever live more than a few weeks,’ he said, then continued.

‘If it is the Russians, and I’m certain it is, I cannot think why they want Quoit. Information about our nuclear energy programme is freely available, and the Russians themselves are more advanced in many areas of nuclear energy technology than we are. This scaremongering speech is most peculiar. What do the Russians hope to gain by kicking up dirt about nuclear power stations? All right, they get the anti-nuclear protestors out, and get public feeling going against everything nuclear, and disarmament will no doubt rear its head and become a major issue. The government may back down a few steps on its current nuclear policies, perhaps make a token cut in some area which doesn’t matter, and agree to look into the situation regarding US missile bases. But the Russians have got easier ways to whip up public feeling than this. They’ve got dozens of members of CND on their payroll, doing a good noisy job. Maybe they feel they’re not doing a good enough job — but I don’t think that’s what’s behind this.’

‘You think it’s a cover for something?’

‘It must be — Operation Angel, whatever that is. Horace Whalley, Operation Angel, Libya, Deke Sleder, the Russians — what a pretty package. We need to open it up, Flynn, and I think we need to open it up quick. There’s an international game going on, and they’ve forgotten to send us a copy of the rules; we’ll have to figure them out for ourselves.’

‘I don’t understand about Whalley and this cassette — why on earth did he have to drive all the way to Wales to pick up the tape and take it to London? It seems very odd to me.’

‘Could be a number of reasons: to see if he is being tailed; or, more likely, to help break him in — start him off doing fairly simple jobs, get him used to operating. It was a simple job, but a bit demanding, physically, and clandestine enough to give him a small taste of excitement. They could have been checking to see whether he would obey instructions — standard practice with a new recruit. It also gets him implicated — makes it harder for him to back out at a later stage if he suddenly decides he wants out. And besides, you don’t know for sure that he wasn’t delivering anything. What did he do after he dropped the tape off?’

‘Nothing. After I dropped the tape in to you on Tuesday morning, I went in and took his office apart, but I couldn’t find anything. I had a damn good look through it — I had the whole day. He drove straight home after going to the BBC, and telephoned the office to say he wouldn’t be coming in because he felt under the weather. I’m not surprised; I was bloody knackered too — and at least he’d had three hours’ kip. He stayed home the whole day — slept, did a bit of gardening, watched some television.’

‘Didn’t his wife wonder where he had been?’

‘No. It’s normal in his job — he does midnight swoop operations on various power stations quite regularly. Yesterday, he went into work and didn’t speak to a soul all day — no phone calls, nothing.’

‘Proper little Jekyll and Hyde,’ said Fifeshire.

‘Aren’t the Russians going to think it odd if the BBC don’t put this tape out — or don’t mention it at least? Surely they would expect that in the search for Quoit, news of this tape would spread across every paper and every television screen in the country?’

‘I think the BBC should put it out, put the whole thing out. They can explain the delay by saying they wanted to check whether or not it was a hoax, and now they are satisfied that it is genuine. After all, we don’t want our Russian chums to think we know something do we?’

‘Not if we’re to have any chance of finding Quoit before they get him on that plane.’

‘Finding Quoit isn’t exactly going to be easy.’

‘If he’s going on a plane, and a schedule flight at that, then he’ll have to go to Heathrow Airport — they can hardly get the plane to swoop low over wherever they’re holding him and hoist him up on the end of a rope.’

‘And where do you suppose he’s going to be at Heathrow?’ said Fifeshire, dryly. ‘In the first-class lounge carrying a big placard which says, “I’m defecting to Russia”?’

I ignored his remark. ‘The baggage hold.’

‘The Russians don’t let anyone near their baggage or their holds. We wouldn’t have a hope of getting a look-in there.’

‘Couldn’t we pick him up before they get him to the baggage hold?’

‘You’d have to stop and search every single vehicle coming into Heathrow, both to the passenger and the cargo terminals; there’d be a traffic jam fifty miles long — and still no guarantee of finding him. He could be packed away in a container at the back of a goods truck — you couldn’t possibly search every container going into Heathrow.’

‘Maybe we could find him before they move him to the airport. He’s probably in a Russian safe-house — there must be a list of Russian safe-houses?’

‘There’s a terraced house in north-west Leeds. There’s a twenty-seven-bedroom mansion outside Sevenoaks; there’s an eleven-bedroom manor house near Cirencester. There’s a forty-four-bedroomed castle near Angmering in Sussex which is used as a country club. There’s a nine-bedroomed house with an estate of 18,500 acres, including two villages and forty-eight outbuildings, thirty miles from Aberdeen in Scotland. There are seven houses of varying sizes dotted across London. Those are twelve of the safe-houses that we know about; and we are certain, that sprinkled around the British Isles, there are at least another twenty-five more. It’s Thursday morning, and Quoit’s plane leaves at 10.00 a.m. next Monday — which gives us somewhat less than four days. You’d have to get an awful lot of search warrants, knock on an awful lot of front doors, and look inside a great many cupboards.’

I got Fifeshire’s point.

There was a long pause, while Fifeshire drew on his cigar a few times in slow succession.

‘If we can get our hands on Quoit,’ I said, ‘then we might find out what the Russians are up to; if we let him go, we might have to wait for their next move. What about Whalley’s yachting holiday with Sleder — have you found out anything more about Sleder?’

‘Yes,’ said Fifeshire grimly, ‘rather a lot.’