Colonel Butler's Wolf

The thought of it made Butler's soul cringe—that cynical delight in manipulating the innocent. And though he had heard Audley argue that it was no worse than conscription, the analogy seemed to him.as false and as dangerous as ever: it was far more like the guerrilla trick of pushing civilians out into a no-man's-land to draw the enemy fire.

McLachlan stared at his injured hand for a moment, and then raised his eyes to Butler's, a frown of concentration on his face. "Whatever Boozy knew, it hadn't anything to do with Oxford," he began reflectively, speaking aloud to himself. "There's been nothing cooking here lately—the last lot of Proctors had things buttoned down nicely . . . And if he hadn't been up since he went down . . ."

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Butler grappled with the jargon: coming to Oxford was always "up" and leaving it was "down", no matter what one's direction.

"So it was likely at Cumbria . . ." He nodded to himself. "I seem to remember they've been having their troubles there with the lefties—"

"But nothing like—" Polly searched for a word "—like this."

They looked at each other solemnly across the kitchen table, oblivious of Butler. He saw with a pang of sympathetic insight what their trouble was: it was to keep hold of reality—to convince themselves that they were inside a nightmare from which no morning alarm clock would free them, and that the anguish and involvement this time was not of their own choice. It had not been a Bengali or a Vietnamese or a Bantu who had been murdered by the 20th century this time; but Neil Smith, who had sat with them at this very same table in this very room.

He wanted desperately to help them, or at least to leave them alone. But Neil Smith had not been Neil Smith, so there was no escape for any of them.

"No," McLachlan murmured to himself. "Nothing like this before. But now. . ." He paused, frowning to himself. "You know, now I come to think of it Hobson's been acting rather strangely just recently. He's been full of dire warnings about dangerous influences."

Polly shrugged. "Uncle Geoff's always been pathological about the Communists and the Revolutionary Left. And he's got much worse ever since he ducked his retirement."

"Oh, I know that," McLachlan agreed only in order to disagree. "But this was different. He's usually pretty explicit, but this time he was . . . mysterious. It was almost as though he was warning me that someone was gunning for me."

He stared at Butler speculatively. "And not just me. Mike Klobucki got much the same feeling . . . Mike said it was like there was something prowling the crags up at Castleshields and we ought to lock our doors at night. He said it was like being told that Grendel was loose again." Grendel? Who the devil was Grendel? "So, Colonel sir—" McLachlan's tone was too elaborately I casual to be anything but deadly serious "—if Grendel's loose up at Castleshields you're going to have to tell us why. Because we're going to be there as well, and you're going to need our help."

Butler looked at the boy in surprise for a moment before realising that he had let his mouth fall open.

Then he closed his teeth on the irony of it: by refusing to take Audley's way he had done better than even Audley might have done—he had turned conscripts into volunteers.

With a little help from Sir Geoffrey Hobson—and from Grendel, whoever Grendel was.

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XI

IT TOOK BUTLER just over twenty-four hours to find out what he was really doing on Hadrian's Wall, and then he didn't much fancy what he'd discovered.

But there was nothing he could do about it except mutter mutinously under his breath: the thing had gone too far for any protest to be dignified, and in any case he was hamstrung by his own reputation. He could only go forward.

And by God—he couldn't grumble about lack of instructions; he had never had so many orders, or so precise, in all his life.

So precise that he ought to have seen through them from the start.

. . . Take three days on the Wall first, Butler—we can spare as much because the full session at Castleshields doesn't begin until Friday. Take your time and get the feel of it—in fact I'll send you some books and an itinerary— . . .

An itinerary! It had been that right enough. For on the face of it Audley simply wanted him to play the false Butler to the life, rubbernecking his way from Newcastle to Castleshields, stopping at every heap of stones and undulation in the ground to gawp at the pathetic remains of the greatest military work ever undertaken by the finest army in history—

. . . and you'll enjoy the Wall, you know, Butler. It'll appeal to your military mind . . .

Military mind—military bullshit! He should have known Audley better than that.

And yet, undeniably, Audley knew this Wall and had learnt his facts—and took it for granted that Butler was prepared to do the same.

Except that there was a world of difference between the facts in the books and the facts on the ground.

Because time, fifteen centuries of time, had not been kind to this Wall of Audley's with its seventy-six miles of battlements, its turrets and mile-castles and fighting ditches, its chain of fortresses and supply dumps and roads. Whatever they had been once, there wasn't much of them now for a plain man to see.

But if there was one thing the plain man understood it was a clear order, and the order encapsulated in Audley's itinerary was clear indeed: Walk the Wall, Colonel Butler.

So Butler had toured the Newcastle Museum and had dutifully admired the vallum crossing at Condercum, with the little temple of Antenocitius (for God's sake, who ever heard of Antenocitius?) which was wedged incongruously in the middle of a modern housing estate.

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Then he had shivered among the wind-swept footings of the granaries at Corstopitum (always use the Latin names, Butler— get used to them), and had climbed, tape-measure in hand, over the cyclopean stones of the Tyne abutment at Fort Cilurnum.

... a tiddler compared with Trajan's Danube bridge, but good for conversation at Castleshields, so don't miss the good luck phallus carved in relief on the s. water-face . . .

He had noted the phallus and had stared enviously across the river towards the ruins of the regimental bath-house of the Second Asturian Cavalry, wishing himself there and fifteen hundred years back in time, where there would have been hot running water and mulled wine and good conversation.

But if Fort Cilurnum had the feel of a good posting about it, snug in the shelter of the river valley, the same was not true of Fort Brocolitia.

Ten miles westward, along the road the General Wade had built right on top of the Wall back in Bonnie Prince Charlie's day, Fort Brocolitia lay in the middle of nowhere. And even Audley, the unmilitary Audley, seemed to have sensed that Brocolitia was a bad posting—

. . . the First Cugernians and the First Aquitanians in the 2nd century, the Batavians from the Low Country—at least they would have been at home at Coventina's Well, sw. of the fort. You'll need your gumboots for that. But the main thing is the Mithraeum s. of the fort—you can't miss it, even if it doesn't compare with the one under San Clemente in Rome and with all those you're supposed to know on the Persian frontier. But quite something up here in the back of beyond.

Note the vicus site beyond the Mithraeum, marked by a rash of molehills . . .

After Handforth-Jones's lecture any vicus seemed like home, and Butler had kicked his way from molehill to molehill, idly picking out tiny pieces of pot and tile and glass from the finely broken earth.

It had been at that point precisely in the itinerary that he had spotted his watcher.

The fellow was snugged hull-down in the dripping grass, above and to the left, and the knowledge of him was like a drop of ice-water between Butler's shoulder blades. For ten seconds he had stared down blindly at the molehill between his feet, knowing that he was naked in that open, treeless little valley—

as naked as those Chinese infantrymen had been on the Chonggo-Song.

Then common sense had reasserted itself. After two close calls in the last few days his nerves were fraying somewhat at the edges, but that was no excuse for abandoning logical thought.

So—it could hardly be a casual stranger up there, since no sane man would skulk on the cold, wet ground, but it could just as easily be a protecting friend as a watching enemy.

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True or false?

False. Friends did not need to watch so closely, especially when they knew exactly where he was.

He moved on to the next molehill, slowly.

An enemy then.

But not a murderous enemy yet, surely?

Eden Hall had not made sense: the fellow there must have panicked or exceeded his orders. The bridge at Millford was more to the point: he had been in full view of that rifleman for two or three seconds before he had grabbed McLachlan, at little short of point-blank range. And then the man had fired to miss.

True or false?

True. They had him spotted, and he was no use to them dead. He was much more worth watching. That was logical and he could take comfort from it. There was nothing even surprising about it; with the paper-thin cover he had, even Audley must have expected it.

Even Audley must have expected it!

Butler grunted with vexation as the light dawned on him. He'd prided himself that he knew the Audley technique, but he'd been mighty slow recognising it this time, that habit of telling the truth, but not all the truth.

So sure, it was true that he was here on the Wall to do Audley's dirty work, because Audley's reputation in university circles must be preserved for the future.

But before the future there was a present problem to be solved.

". . . It'll appeal to your military mind. Did you ever serve in the north of England?"

"I was at Catterick for a while."

"Only just the north. Northumberland and Cumberland —they're the real north, where the Wall runs.

We'll save the best bit for the third day. You can send your bags ahead to Castleshields and walk the stretch from Milecastle 34. Then you'll be at the house in time for tea . . ."

Butler watched the hire car out of sight before turning towards the rough pasture at the side of the road.

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There was not going to be anything to see at Milecastle 34, he could read the Ordnance Survey map of the Wall well enough now to know that.

But it was 0910 and at 0915 he was due to start walking westwards along that red line on the map. And whether he got the feel of it or not didn't much matter, because that wasn't the object of the walk. At least he knew that if he understood little else.

Trouble was—when it came to it, it wasn't so easy to be a stalking horse (or was he decoy-duck or Judas goat?): it was remarkably difficult not to remember his training, consciously to keep his eyes away from the back of his neck. In fact it was not just difficult, it was damned impossible.

There were two of them and they took point in turn.

One, the medium-sized older one, had a reversible three-quarter length overcoat, not really quite the most suitable garment for wall-walking, no matter which side out; the other, distinctively tall and gangling, at least looked like a hiker, with his green hooded-windcheater and khaki rucksack.

Possibly—no, almost certainly—there was a third man out of sight, driving slowly back and forward along General Wade's road, which had left the line of the Wall just before Milecastle 34. There might even be others for all Butler knew.

But of these two he was certain; it was their bad luck that the wind was so piercing today that it had driven everyone else indoors, or so it seemed. Even the traffic on the road away to the south seemed light for a Friday morning, with few private cars and only a spatter of lorries and army vehicles to be seen.

Carefully he kept his pace steady. He mustn't test them with variable speeds, or awkward delays, or little tricky detours; mustn't notice that they set the rooks flapping from the copse in the last hollow or sent the jackdaws sailing out of the cliffs. Mustn't do a damn thing except follow his itinerary to the letter.

In the end he began to follow it in spirit too, not so much from inclination as from the necessity of occupying his mind with something.

Audley had been right about this land he had entered at 0915. Hitherto the line of the Wall had run through neutral territory, first in the sprawl of Newcastle, then over rolling farmland, and more recently through the poorer upland pastures. Across such terrain one military engineer's line was as good as any other's.

But now he had come to a place which God had landscaped to be a frontier, with wave after wave of rising crags, their cliffs always rearing to the north.

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And along those crags the Romans had built their Wall.

But it was more than a mere wall, this Wall, he saw that now. For here at last, here and now, he could relate what he knew to what he saw. It mattered not at all any longer that the famous line was often no more than a few courses high, or a mere jumble of stones buried in the turf, or even nothing at all. Here undoubtedly there had been a great wall, with all those turrets and forts he had read about. Even when he couldn't see it he knew it was there.

And yet at the same time he knew—and knew it as these academics could never know, he told himself—

that this was not the true wall.

The true wall was made of men.

In its day there had been half-trained frontier guards here, little better than customs officers, on the Wall itself. But the real strength of the Wall would have been in those tough, long-enlistment regiments in the fortresses, which the books described stupidly as "auxiliaries", but which he guessed had been the Gurkhas and Sikhs of their day, those Dacians and Lusitanians.

And for them the Wall itself would have been a mere start line.

Indeed, the world hadn't changed so much as people imagined. Life up here would have added up to the same endless quest for information which he knew so well, and peace would have depended on the ability of the Wall's intelligence officers to smell out trouble in advance.

What mischief were the troublemakers in the northern tribes hatching? Had their harvest been dangerously bad or dangerously good—were the young warriors restive because of hunger or idleness?

And that, exactly, was what he and Audley were engaged in now: there were troublemakers loose and the young men were restive.

Butler sighed. The historians seemed agreed that the Wall had been an expensive failure. Certainly it had been breached disastrously three times in three centuries.

Yet twice that had been because of the treachery of Roman governors who had stripped it of men to pursue their continental ambitions, and only once—as far as he could see— had its own intelligence system failed.

Once in three hundred years—once in ten generations—did not seem to him so very disgraceful. For how many other times had the system met the challenge and won?

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That was the bugger of this game: you only won in private and always lost in public!

. . . Vercovicium—or Borovicium, if you prefer—one of the Wall's showplaces and full of things to see, like the regimental loo where the arses of the Frisian Light Cavalry and Notfried's German Irregulars were bared many a time. Keep to the time schedule closely here and ponder whether there'll be any tourists to gape at British Army latrines in India fifteen hundred years from now . . .

There were people at Vercovicium, the first he had seen since Milecastle 34, though they had come along a track from the main road, instead of along the Wall as Butler had done.

Not that they were enjoying themselves: it was all very well marching along the Wall, but the wind made cold work of sightseeing on that hillside and they were hunched and pinch-faced against it.

Follow the schedule exactly.

So here, probably, Audley had set up the cameras to snapshot his followers—if he hadn't already identified them.

Obediently Butler traversed the ruins and toured the little museum, deviating only to purchase a postcard of three heavily cloaked little Celtic goddesses to send on some future trip to his own little goddesses at Reigate.

By the time his orders allowed him to leave, his mood had cooled with his body, allowing doubt into his mind again.

But maybe Vercovicium was a place for doubting; how many times in the blinding white winters and broiling, shimmering midsummers had the officers of the Army of the Wall doubted the Emperor's wisdom in not letting General Gnaeus Julius Agricola complete the conquest of Scotland when it had been almost within his

grasp?

In the end it came down (as it always did) to the only philosophy a soldier could afford: you take your pay and try to make some sense out of your orders in the faint hope that there was any in the first place.

But you keep your powder dry just in case.

Maybe it was the place. But certainly the further he left Vercovicium behind, the better he felt again, with steady marching transforming the chill of the fortress into a comforting warmth.

The Wall ran firm and true here, shoulder high—even though the damn fools of engineers had sited dummy2.htm

some of the turrets and milecastles with shameful disregard for elementary defensive sense.

But it was the countryside itself which was irresistible now, tricky, uncompromising and beautiful.

There would have been game worth hunting here, four-legged as well as two-legged: deer in plenty, the big Red Deer that was now only rich man's sport; and bear for danger —they'd prized the Caledonian bear highly enough to send it all the way to the Colosseum at Rome.

And wolves, above all thousands of wolves! When the tribes to the north were licking their wounds and the southern taxes had all been collected, then would be the time of the great wolf-drives, not only to make the roads halfway safe in the winter, but also to keep the horses in condition and the men on their toes. That would be the life.

But now there were only the jackdaws sailing out of their nesting places on the cliffs, and the invisible curlews calling to each other, and a solitary heron stalking along the shrinking margin of the lough far below. The long wars of extermination down the centuries had put paid to the bears and the wolves as well as the Romans and the Picts.

Or perhaps not all the wolves.

He came strongly down the Peel Crags and began the longest climb of all, up towards Winshields, high point and halfway mark from sea to sea.

But first there was a road to cross, the only one to break the line since beyond Carraburgh, miles back.

There was a gaggle of Army vehicles by the roadside under a thin screen of trees; a Landrover, a couple of personnel carriers and a big radio truck. He remembered now that he had seen a similar procession tearing up the main road as he had left Homesteads. Somewhere inside the truck a nasal voice was intoning figures in the traditional clipped tones of R/T operators the world over, As he ducked behind the truck one of the rear doors swung open and a long, swarthy face beamed down at him—a grinning, familiar face set unfamiliarly between a dark beret and a combat jacket.

"Spot on time, sir—David said you would be! Hop up smartly now, but give us your titfer first if you don't mind."

A brown hand tweaked Butler's deerstalker from his head before he could protest at the indignity.

"The one thing we couldn't get a double of—would you believe it?" said Richardson, cramming the hat on the head of a second man, a civilian who pushed wordlessly past Butler and was away across the road before he could articulate the words rising in his throat.

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"F—what—?"

It was himself walking away from himself!

Richardson's hand was on his shoulder, propelling him into the confined space of the truck, between banks of equipment. He had one last glimpse of himself—a blurred look of navy-blue donkey-jacket, brown breeches and high-laced boots, stained khaki pack, all now surmounted by the much-loved deerstalker—disappearing over the wall across the road on the path up towards Winshields Crag.

"Not so bad, eh?" Richardson's long brown face was split by that characteristic good humour of his.

"The front view's not quite so convincing close up, but from here on we're making damn sure no one gets that close. They can get their eyeful from afar . . . But in the meantime we must make ourselves scarce just in case. So we must squeeze down the other end—Corporal Gibson!"

"Sir?"

"Message transmitted?"

"Sir!"

"Bang on! Now I'm going to leave the doors open so Korbel can peek inside, but I want you in the way if he gets too inquisitive."

"Sir."

"Korbel?" Butler growled. "Peter Korbel?"

"You know him?" Richardson beamed, nodding. "Poor old Korbel's doing this stretch, yes. He picked you up at where's it—Housesteads. Took over from a new chappie by the name of Protopopov, believe it or not—Protopopov—tall chappie with long arms like an orangutan. Long legs too, so he kept up with you nicely, whereas Korbel's been having a hell of a time ever since he twisted his ankle at Castle Nick.

'Fact we got quite worried about him in case he lost you completely— that wasn't in the script at all, you know. Even David didn't reckon on that."

Richardson was relatively new to the department, a product of one of Sir Frederick's university forays, but already he was on familiar terms with Audley, Butler noted disapprovingly. But then, they were joined by the freemasonry of rugger, he remembered—they'd played for the same London club, or something like that.

He grunted irritably, dismissing the triviality from his mind; it was no business of his how Audley conducted himself with his underlings. More to the point, this underling knew very much better than he did what was now going on and what was intended.

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Richardson reached up and slid open a narrow grill in the side of the truck, applying his eye to an inch crack of daylight.

"But he's coming along very nicely now. He should be just about right to get his reward if he keeps up that pace." He closed the grill. "But if you don't mind we must take cover now, sir. If you get down on the floor here you'll be nicely out of sight."

Butler wedged himself down in the shadow of a jutting section of transmitting equipment, thinking furiously. Korbel was pretty small beer, a bit of Ukranian flotsam that had been left high and dry by the Second World War only to be picked up and recruited by his ex-fatherland after ten blameless but unrewarding years of freedom in the West. It had never been satisfactorily established whether it had been belated patriotism or blackmail, or sheer desperation, that had turned him into an enemy, but in any case he had never graduated beyond fetching and carrying and watching so that it had never seemed worthwhile picking him up. Butler had never met him or crossed his path, but he had watched the sad, moon-shaped face age and sag, creasing with stress-lines, in a whole succession of photographs taken over the years and exposed to him by routine in the periodical rogues' gallery sessions.

But now his face in its turn had been exposed to the near-pensionable Korbel and the spidery Protopopov

—and now Korbel was hurrying after the latest in the line of false Butlers to get his reward up on the crag.

His reward . . . Butler lent back uncomfortably against his pack. All he had to do was to ask Richardson, and Richardson would dutifully tell him that everything was going according to plan—Audley's plan.

A crafty plan, without doubt, full of elaborate twists and turns. But a sight too twisty and elaborate for Butler's taste.

The primary aim was to identify the opposition—no bonus for that conclusion, it was inherent in his instructions—because the enemy's strength and quality must always be a valuable pointer to the importance of the operation. And with all the advantages of a well-prepared battlefield and apparently unlimited equipment that aim ought to be attainable.

But being Audley's the plan included a deception: Peter Korbel's reward was to be deceived about something.

"Your man, sir—he's just crossed the road." The stocky Signals corporal murmured, deadpan. "He's limpin' a bit, but he's goin' like the clappers,"

Richardson stood up and peered through a crack in the grill on the other side of the truck.

"So he is, Corporal—so he is! Bloody, but unbowed. I think he'll make it now, you know. You can send dummy2.htm

off the all clear then, and tell 'em we'll rendezvous according to schedule." He turned back to Butler.

"You know what we've got for him up there? Not up there, actually—he's waiting down in Lodham Slack valley, just before Turret 4ob: Oliver St John Latimer in person!"

Butler frowned. Oliver Latimer was one of the more orotund of the resident kremlinologists in the department—a man with whom Audley was notoriously at odds too.

"Hah!" Richardson's teeth flashed. "I thought you'd take the point! David don't like Oliver—and Oliver don't like David. Which is why David has had Oliver dragged all the way up here from his fleshpots in the Big Smoke just to confuse poor old Korbel. Two birds with one stone—just like David!"

Just like Audley. That was true enough, thought Butler grimly: the man was too shrewd to go out of his way to settle his private scores but could never resist settling them in the line of duty if the opportunity presented itself. Young Roskill had said as much from his hospital bed only a few days before.

But Latimer was the private bird; it was Korbel who mattered, and Protopropov, and whoever was behind them.

"He wants to find out if you're meeting anyone on the Wall, see," continued Richardson, "and we didn't like to disappoint him. So we're giving him Latimer, and with a bit of -luck that'll set their dovecotes all aflutter, specially if they've got a line on David, because they'll know David and Latimer aren't yoked together, see—"

"I see perfectly well." Butler cut off the string of mixed metaphors harshly. "For God's sake, man, let's get on with the job. Let's get moving."

The Russians had followed him, and Audley's men were no doubt pinpointing the Russians. It was an old game, and the trick of it was still the same: you could never be quite sure who was outsmarting whom—who was the cat, and who the mouse.

XII

CORPORAL GIBSON SWUNG the big signals truck between the stone uprights of the farm gate, round an immaculate army scout car which was parked beside a Fordson tractor, and backed it accurately into the mouth of the barn.

A stone barn, Butler noted through the gap in the grill— everything in this countryside was in stone, and judging by the recurrent shape of the stones most of them had first seen the light of day under a Roman legionary's chisel: the Wall, away on the skyline at his back, had been this land's quarry for a thousand years or more.

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The rear doors swung smartly open from the outside and Butler looked down on his reception committee.

"Ah, colonel!" Audley began formally.

The Royal Signals subaltern at his side stiffened at the rank instinctively, and then relaxed as Audley ruined the effect with a casual gesture of welcome. "Come on down, Jack! We've only got about half an hour, and a lot of ground to cover. And you too, Peter. Everything according to plan?"

Butler sniffed derisively. According to plan! It was a sad thing to see a man like Audley take pleasure in the shadow of events rather than their substance.

"Like a dream." Richardson swung out of the truck gracefully behind. "Korbel went up Winshields like a lamb, apart from his limp."

"Good, good." For a fearful moment Butler thought Audley was going to clap him on the back, but the movement changed at the last instant to a smoothing of the hair.

"If you like to carry on, Mr Masters. Just let us know if any of the suspects behave out of pattern."

"Very good, sir." The Subaltern fell back deferentially.

Audley indicated a doorway ahead of them. "I've got what used to be called a cold collation for you, Jack. Hard-boiled eggs and ham and salad. But a little hot soup from a thermos —we weren't quite sure whether things really would work out. You know what you've been taking part in?"

He eyed Butler momentarily before continuing. "It's what young Masters calls a 'Low Intensity Operation', by which I gather he means what the Gestapo and the Abwehr used to call 'Search and Identify'. Only now I think we could teach them a thing or two, after all the practice we've had. And with all the equipment!"

"You can say that again," said Richardson. "That frequency scanning thing they've got—the American thing—it's bloody miraculous."

"But just what does it add up to?" Butler growled.

"Add up to? Here—sit on the bale of straw, and Peter will serve your soup." Audley perched himself on a bale opposite Butler. "Add up to? Well, at the moment Korbel talks to Protopopov on a very neat little East German walkie-talkie. And Protopopov talks to another colleague of his just over the crest of the ridge back there, down towards Vindolanda— someone we shall be identifying very soon now. Then perhaps we shall know what we're about a little better."

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"But we don't at the moment," said Butler obstinately, staring at Audley through the steam of his hot cup of soup. "We don't know what they are about."

Audley blinked uncomfortably, and Butler's earlier intuition was confirmed. Back in the flat in London the fellow had been uncharacteristically nervous. But now he was evidently no closer to an answer, and what had happened this morning was a fumbling attempt to find out more by injecting Butler into the action in the hope that the enemy would reveal more of himself. It was little better than grasping at straws.

"Perhaps I shall know better when you've made your report," Audley said rather primly. "I hope you've got something worth listening to."

"Not a lot, really. You've had my report on the accident."

"Yes," Audley nodded. "He invited his own death, and the invitation was accepted. In effect he committed suicide."

"I wouldn't put it quite as strongly as that. It depends on whether he decided to ride to Oxford before he started drinking or after, which is something we don't know. But he was cracking, that's sure enough."

"The Epton girl corroborated that?"

The Epton girl. Butler felt a stirring of irritation at the memory of her involvement: somebody had not done his job very thoroughly in delving into Smith's background for her to have been overlooked.

"She hadn't seen him for three weeks, but she'd been worried about him for some time. She reckoned he was working too hard—he didn't write to her at all that last week."

"It wasn't exactly a great love affair though?" Audley cocked his head on one side. "Not a very passionate affair, would you say?"

"She may not have been his mistress, if that's what you mean." Butler could hear the distaste in his own voice.

"I'd say that's exactly what I mean. If she had been I think it would have been known up at Cumbria.

Would you say that it was a genuine engagement even?"

"I think it was."

"Hmm . . ." Audley considered the proposition. "He should have been a bit wary of emotional entanglements—and she's no great beauty, is she."

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"I found her a rather attractive young woman myself."

Audley's eyebrows lifted. "A bit overblown—but then she certainly has some attractive family connections, I admit. The vice-chancellor of Cumbria is her godfather."

Beside Polly Epton's apple-cheeked charm Audley's own wife was a thin, washed-out thing, thought Butler unkindly. But it was Smith's taste in women, not Audley's, that mattered.

"I'm aware of it," he rasped. "The Master of King's is her godfather too, as a matter of fact."

"Hah! Yet you still think it was a real romance?"

"If it had been bogus, then I don't think Smith would have kept quiet about it," Butler began awkwardly, fumbling for words to describe what he knew he was ill-equipped to imagine. "It was... a very private thing they had, just between the two of them."

Audley looked at him curiously.

"Well-—damn it!—she's a nice sort of girl—"

He saw Audley's face contort in bewilderment: nice was another of those words which had been twisted and blunted until its meaning was hopelessly compromised.

He felt embarrassment and irritation tighten his shirtcollar round his neck. But what he wanted to say had to be said somehow—

"Damn it all! What I mean is—I don't mean she keeps her legs crossed tight all the time," he plunged onwards. "It's possible they did sleep together now and then when he came down to Oxford. But I don't think it was just a physical thing with them—I'd say she was full of life when a man needed it, but full of

—well, quietness and comfort when he needed that. And she thinks now—because of what I've told her

—that if she'd been up at Cumbria instead of studying—whatever it is —occupational therapy, it maybe wouldn't have happened."

"She thinks it was an accident?"

"No, not after what happened at the bridge. But if she'd been there with him . . ." He shook his head hopelessly. "I'm afraid I'm not expressing myself very efficiently."

"Efficiently?" Surprisingly, the bewilderment had faded from Audley's face. "On the contrary, you've put it very well indeed. If you think this of her—and of them!" Audley nodded to himself. "A girl for all seasons—if she strikes you that way, then that would explain it very well, too."

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"How would it do that?" Butler frowned.

"Well, you had me worried for a moment. But now I think I see the way it was." Audley looked at him.

"You see, our friend Smith had it made—as Peter here would say—he had it made. He had this two-year research fellowship, and after that he was dead certain of a lectureship."

"Certain?"

"So Gracey tells me. Nothing but the best at Cumbria— and Neil Smith was the best. Why does that interest you?"

"Miss Epton thought that might be why he was working so hard: to make sure of a permanent post there.

He wanted that very much."

"He wanted it and he'd got it. It was right in the palm of his hand. He'd got it, and we weren't on to him.

Not even near him. And this engagement with the Epton girl would have made things perfect, socially as well as academically."

Audley paused, watching Butler over his spectacles.

"He should have been on top of the world then. But he was right at the bottom—thanks to Sir Geoffrey we know that, and Gracey checks it out. The last two, three weeks he was one worried young man—a ball of fire with the fire burnt out, Gracey says. Which means that things hadn't gone according to plan after all."

"He had himself pretty well under control at Oxford. Whatever happened to him happened up here."

"I wouldn't be too sure about that. I'd guess you were closer to the mark in your report when you suggested that he took a spiritual knock at Oxford. Freedom of everything must have been a strong drug for a man with his background—"

"You know what his background was then?"

"We've a fair idea now, according to Peter here."

Butler turned towards Richardson.

"Not for sure," said Richardson quickly. "These things take time to establish, and time we haven't had.

What we've got— and Stocker had to go cap in hand to the CIA for it—is that the KGB pulled out one of their old-established 'illegals' from New Zealand a few years back to give someone some polish at their Higher School in Moscow. And we've got a tentative identification for Smith at the School for just dummy2.htm

about that time —only tentative, mind you. And the New Zealand angle fits."

"You think he was never in New Zealand?"

"We reckon he was there, but not for long. Way we see it was that they pulled the switch just before the real Smith was due to fly out. Our Smith wasn't really a very good likeness. Or he was only right in a fairly general way—height and colouring and so on. But he was starting out fresh here, and in a year or two when he'd filled out a bit and grown his hair we think he could have bluffed it out with anyone he'd known back there."

"Even with his aunt?"

"Great-aunt, to be exact. Half-blind, and if she ever leaves New Zealand, then I'll be a greater spotted kiwi. As far as false identities go, they had it pretty well made."

"But a KGB graduate nonetheless," cut in Audley incisively. "And then an Oxford graduate."

"You can't say he wasn't well qualified," murmured Richardson irreverently. "And of course David thinks Oxford cancels out Moscow!"

"Not Oxford by itself. I think he was the wrong man for the job. But it was when he stopped learning freedom of thought and started to teach it that it began to get under his skin." Audley stared directly at Butler. "What I believe is there was one thing about him that his bosses didn't realise— or they didn't realise how important it was going to become: the fellow was a natural born teacher!"

Butler nodded cautiously. "That was what Hobson thought."

"Gracey did too, and he's a sharp man. The crunch came when Smith found out he was in the wrong business. Poor devil, I'd guess he'd become what he was pretending to be— and he liked it better."

Poor devil indeed! thought Butler: the Devil himself had been a mixed-up archangel, and this poor devil had straightened himself out only to discover that there was no escape from Hell. . .

"And falling for Polly Epton put the finishing touch on things?"

"Not quite the finishing touch—no." Audley rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Actually, it had me worried a bit when I first learnt about it. He didn't seem a very highly-sexed man, and I knew she was no Helen of Troy, but I did wonder if that wasn't behind what he did."

"She's not that sort of girl at all—"

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Audley held up his hand. "Precisely. That's why I'm so grateful to you. A nice girl, that's what she is."

"You know what I mean, damn it!"

"I do indeed. And I know that nice girls don't drive men to treachery and suicide: it's the little prick-teasing bitches that do that. From what you say of young Polly, she'd more likely have soothed him down and jollied him out of it if she'd been here. But she wasn't here, and that's half the point. What had kept him going was Polly Epton—and the fact that he wasn't having to do any dirty work."

"And then suddenly up comes the dirty work-—and there's no Polly with her nice soft shoulder . . ."

"But you don't know what the dirty work was?"

Audley grimaced. "We don't know what it is. The whole trouble's been that Smith wasn't on our watch list."

"And if I go round asking too many backdated questions my cover's going to wear out just when we need it most," said Richardson.

He cocked an unashamed eye at Audley. "Trouble is, David's right—we made a boob over Smith, a bloody great boob, and that's a fact." He paused. "And the back-tracking hasn't been easy. But as far as I can dope it out Smith kept his nose clean like David says—no dirty work, not even one suspicious contact. Until three weeks ago."

"Three weeks," Audley nodded at Butler. "The right time."

"It's only circumstantial," said Richardson tentatively. "The right chap in the right place."

"What right chap?"

Richardson looked at Audley.

Audley smiled reassuringly. "The truth is, we've had a bit of luck in their apparat over her. We've got a major defector. By autumn we'll be ready to blow the whole thing sky-high, but in the meantime we've got one or two unexpected names. Names they don't know we've got."

"Like this new chappie in the Moscow Narodny Bank over here—an economic whizz kid," Richardson took up the tale again. "Only actually he's a KGB whizz kid, and the word is he's here on a special emergency job. A top secret one-off job."

"But he doesn't know we're on to him, see? So we've given him a nice long lead to see which lamppost dummy2.htm

he cocks his leg on. And sure enough he took a quick trip to Newcastle three weeks ago. He goes to the University Museum, to the mock-up of a bit of Roman stuff they've got there—"

"The Carrawburgh Mithraeum, man—you're supposed to be a post-graduate student, not a ruddy tourist," said Audley testily.

Richardson grinned and nodded gracefully, totally unabashed at the rebuke. "As your worship pleases—

a facsimile of the temple of Mithras, hard by Coventina's shrine at Brocolitia—"

"I know the place," snapped Butler.

Just a few hours earlier, although it seemed an age, he had stood beside the little shrine to the god the Christians had feared most, trying not to watch Protopopov on the hillside behind him. Now, however, he found Richardson's high spirits even more trying: this was a young man who needed taking down a peg or two. "For God's sake get on with it!"

"For Mithras' sake, you mean! Well, they've built this mock-up in the Museum: you go behind a curtain and press the tit, and the lights go out and you're there in the temple with a commentary to tell you what's what. And we're pretty sure that this chappie Adashev told Smith what's what at the same time.

They were both in just about the same place at the same time, anyway—that's almost for sure."

"For my money it's sure," Audley cut in. "Because from that moment on Smith was worried sick. Which means—"

He paused, frowning. "Let me put it this way: I don't agree with Peter that we missed out on Smith earlier because we were inefficient. We didn't spot him because his cover was almost perfect and because he didn't do anything to compromise it. They even took the trouble to bring over someone new to be his contact, someone we weren't likely to know about."

"All of which means this could be a big one."

He blinked nervously at Butler.

So this was the revelation: not so much that a "big one" might be due—the escalating Russian activity in Britain which was common knowledge in the Department made that no surprise—but that Audley, the great Audley, was up a gum-tree at last!

After months of expensive time and trouble he was stumped. And stumped on an assignment which obviously worried the men at the top, the Oxford and Cambridge men who would of all people be appalled at the ability of the KGB to tamper with their university recruiting ground.

And that meant Audley would be for the high jump. He'd pulled off some legendary coups in the past, dummy2.htm

but that wouldn't help him now because he'd never tried to make himself loved. Rather, there would be no mourners at the wake.

But then Butler discovered another revelation within himself, one that he had never expected: it was not such a matter of indifference to him, Audley's professional fate.

He didn't like Audley, and never would. But there was nothing in the small print about having to like the men one served with. What mattered was the Queen's service, and that service badly needed bastards like this one.

So if Audley was stuck, it was up to him to unstick him, or die in the attempt.

XIII

JUST "WHAT HAVE you been doing in the last year?" Butler asked brutally. Duty might be a harsh and jealous god, but the more he asked of his worshippers the less he expected them to wear kid-gloves and pussy-foot around.

"What have I been doing during my sabbatical year?" Audley gave him a small, tight smile. "Didn't you know that I had been elected first Nasser Memorial Fellow at Cumbria?"

"Why Cumbria? I thought you were an Oxford and Cambridge man?"

"My dear fellow—only Cambridge, thank God! But I'm afraid I'm a little too well-known down South and we didn't want to be obvious. .. Besides that, it happens to be an interesting experiment, what Gracey's trying to do here at Cumbria. We thought it made him a prime KGB target."

"Quality instead of quantity?"

Audley looked at Butler with sudden interest. "You know about that then?"

"It's no secret."

"No, I suppose it isn't. Well, my contribution is in the realm of medieval Arab history."

"Packs 'em in too," said Richardson admiringly. "Front row full of pretty girls—quality and quantity, if you ask me. I know 'cause I went to those lectures on Edrisi-what's-his-name-"

"Abu Abdullah Mohammed al-Edrisi, you savage—you remind me that Edrisi said England was set in the Ocean of Darkness in the grip of endless winter!"

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"He said the world was round too, clever chap. But I'm only half a savage, remember—my old mum was a Foscolo from Amalfi, so at least half of me's civilised."

Richardson's eyes and teeth flashed support of his ancestry and it struck Butler that there might be more than a touch of Abdullah Mohammed as well as Foscolo in his bloodline. Which was one more reason why the fellow would bear watching.

The bright, dark eyes slanted towards him. "Point is—" Richardson went on quickly "—this Arab history makes David respectable with the students. Friend of the emergent nations and all that stuff. And he's had me and a dozen other poor devils rooting around at strategic points 'cross the country like pigs after truffles while he sat up here and tasted what we found. Or rather, what we didn't find . . ."

Audley was staring at the young man with a look of affectionate despair. He turned back towards Butler.

"Tell me, Jack, what do you think of Sir Geoffrey's idea of the great Red Plot now you've heard about it from his own lips?"

Butler stared at him for a moment. It was often Audley's way to start his own answer to a question with a question of his own, and it was no use hoping that he'd ever change.

He shrugged. "There could be something in it, I suppose. Take away the natural leaders of any country and you cut it down in size. My Dad used to say that half the trouble in our bit of Lancashire in the twenties and thirties was all because our lads led the attack on Beaumont Hamel on the Somme in 1916.

The men who should have been running the businesses —and the unions—had all died on the German barbed-wire there."

Every November 11 they had gone down to the War Memorial after the parade had dispersed and the crowds thinned away, leaving the bright red poppy wreaths and the forests of little wooden crosses stuck in the short-trimmed grass like the forests of larger crosses in the war cemeteries across the Channel, only far smaller. Rain or shine they had gone, his father's heavy boots skidding on the cobbles—

21049844 Butler G., Sergeant, R.E. Lanes R., and his boy, the future colonel who would never command any regiment.

The big calloused hand, always stained with printer's ink, would grip his tightly while they stood for an age before the ugly white cross and the metal plaque with the long lists of names. And because he could not escape from that hand he had read the names many times, had added them together and had found their highest common factor and their lowest common multiple. He had even tried to identify them: were MURCH A. E. and MURCH G. really the two uncles of Sammy Murch who had sat next to him at school? Was the presence of BURN M. and BURN E. here on the stone the reason why Mr Burn in the sweetshop was so bad-tempered? Once he had almost accrued enough curiosity to ask his father to answer these fascinating questions, but there was something in the fierce freckled face (so like his own now!) that had warned him off. Not anger, it wasn't, but something never present except on November dummy2.htm

11: his father's Armistice Day Face...

"Hah-hmm!" He cleared his throat noisily. "I suppose there could be something in it, yes. But I have my doubts. It isn't that it's a bad idea—if they were very careful and very selective. But the KGB aren't usually so imaginative, I would have thought. And the benefits can't be shown in black and white... it isn't like them to start something where the damage can't be assessed in black and white as an end-product."

"Might even do us some good in the long run," cut in Richardson. "Always thought there were too many brains in the Civil Service, seeing where it's got us. Bit of mediocrity might do us a bit of good, you never know!"

This time Audley didn't smile and Butler knew with sudden intuition why. It was not simply fear of failure that was the horror grinning on Audley's pillow, but also that he too was a product of that privileged world which took its proved quality for granted. It was a world that had taken some hard knocks as the pressure for quantity rather than quality had built up against it, but it was not beaten yet—

and Butler rather suspected now that when its last barricade went up he would be on the same side of it as Audley.

Richardson was a similar product, but was as yet too young to identify himself wholly with it and too close to the generation of iconoclasts.

"So?" Audley was watching him warily.

What was immediately important, thought Butler, was to discover whether the man had managed to retain his sense of detachment, and the best way to find out was to play the devil's advocate—

"There could be something in it, as I say," he said unsympathetically. "But it's a damned, vague, airy-fairy notion compared with what the Russians usually put up, if you ask me. It hasn't got any body to it."

"Phew!" Richardson exclaimed. "For a man who's been bloody near burnt to death and smashed up in a car you take a darned cool view of things, I must say!"

"He's not denying something's up, Peter," said Audley patiently. "I think we all know there is."

He met Butler's eyes again. "Fair enough, Jack. I agree it sounds vague. But as you know we didn't start all this just because Sir Geoffrey Hobson dropped a word in Theodore Freisler's ear last summer. We had something to go on before that."

"What?"

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"The Dzerzhinsky Street Report."

Butler shifted uneasily. But it was no use pretending false knowledge. "Never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. It's sixteen years old."

"It's what?"

"Sixteen years old. Came out in '55. It was all the work of a committee the KGB set up in Dzerzhinsky Street the year before to look into the origins of the East German rising and the Pilsen revolt. You see, what shook them rigid, and went on shaking them right down to the Budapest rising, was that it was the young who were causing the trouble—the very ones who'd had all the pampering and the brain washing."

He shook his head sadly. "You know, the pitiful thing about my students at Cumbria is they think they invented student protest, or at least that it was invented here in the West. I can't seem to get it through their heads that the East European youth started it back in the early fifties."

"And by God those poor little devils really had something to complain about too—I'd like to show some of our protesters a cadre sheet from the East with a note about a 'class-hostile' grandfather, or an uncle who'd got himself on the wrong end of some party purge, and then let 'em have a look at our college files for comparison!"

"And most of all I'd like to open up our file on the Hungarian Revolt—60,000 dead and only God knows how many maimed or deported, and more than half of them under 25, and tell 'em that was how the Communists settled their youth problems in the fifties. Not with a couple of elderly proctors, or a crew of panicky National Guardsmen, but with eight armoured divisions and two MVD special brigades—"

He stopped abruptly, embarrassed at his own sudden flare-up of passion. "Sorry about that—the way people don't remember Hungary always sticks in my craw."

"The point is, when the Dzerzhinsky Street committee put in their report they had to be bloody careful not to criticise their own set-up too much, so they dressed it up with half-truths about the inadequacy of the parents, how they'd been over-concerned with material prosperity at the expense of political consciousness, and that had led their kids astray—"

"This report," Butler interrupted him, "I've never seen it on the check list. Damn it—I've never even heard of it."

"The famous Dzerzhinsky Street Report?" Audley's lips curled. "You're not the only one. We only got it from the CIA last summer, and it was more than ten years old when they got it."

"Why the hell—?" Butler frowned at Audley.

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"Why didn't they pass it on earlier?" Audley smiled thinly. "For the same reason—the same basic reason

—as the Russians managed to conceal it so well. They simply didn't reckon there was any value to it."

"You see, when the KGB turned it down as useless it was declassified, so no one took any notice of it. It wasn't until the mid-sixties that someone in their K Section remembered about it. He was swotting up the latest American campus riots in Newsweek and Time—at least, that's how the story goes—and he remembered reading one of the recommendations of the Dzerzhinsky Street committee. They'd reckoned that it was in the nature of youth to revolt under a given set of circumstances, and the Party ought to watch out for them developing in the West. They reckoned they could cash in on them because the Western governments wouldn't be capable of handling them with 'revolutionary firmness'."

"Meaning eight armoured divisions and a couple of MVD special brigades," murmured Richardson.

"And a thousand cattle trucks for the lucky survivors . . ."

"Maybe not so lucky, Peter," said Audley. "But that was the start of it anyway. Because all of a sudden the Dzerzhinsky Street formula—pampered students and materialist parents—seemed to fit the West like a glove."

Butler frowned. "You mean the Russians have had a hand in the student power movements? Because I rather understood the students didn't approve of the Kremlin any more than the Pentagon—"

Audley raised an admonitory finger. "Now that is precisely the point: they didn't and they don't! You've got it exactly, Butler. There was a bit of Maoism or Castroism on the edges —and a lunatic fringe of Weathermen and such like—but none of them was amenable to anything like effective manipulation.

The KGB agents in the States reported back that it was hopeless to try anything with them. It seems the activists were either too darned intelligent or too active to toe their sort of line."

"We know this for a fact?"

"For a fact we know it. The CIA had a priority instruction to watch for it, and the moment they spotted the KGB's men on the campuses they went to work in a big way—right the way back to their own Kremlin cell. And the result was a big zero—the right wing in the CIA would have liked to have found just the opposite, but they didn't. You see, what the KGB found was loads of trouble for the American establishment, but it wasn't trouble they could either direct or control. And what's more, it frightened them."

"It frightened them?"

"I have that straight from the horse's mouth—from my old buddy Howard Morris, in the State Department security. What Sukhanov, the KGB top man over there, told Andropov was that it was a damn dangerous disease, and the sooner the Yanks stamped on it the better for everyone."

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Butler stared at the big man, and then past him at the wall of baled hay at his back. He had seen the symptoms of this dreadful disease, which apparently struck down healthy little communists and coddled capitalist toddlers alike, scrawled on the ancient stones of Oxford: Beat the system— Smile and Make love, not war. For all his ambition, clever Dan McLachlan had it—and maybe the man who called himself Smith had died for it. And back in his Reigate terrace home there were three little girls incubating it for sure.

And the name of the disease was Youth.

If the societies of the West were still fundamentally healthy, they wouldn't die of it; they would slowly change and grow stronger because of it. Maybe they would even grow up!

But Sukhanov's society, which relied on such quack remedies as tanks and cattle trucks and censorship, would die of it sooner or later, if only the West could hold on.

Except—the disquiet twisted inside Butler—except if the KGB had failed in Britain as it had failed in the States, what was he doing here with Audley?

He focussed on Audley again.

"So what's happened here to change the pattern?" he growled. "Is Sir Geoffrey Hobson really on to something after all?"

Audley shook his head and spread his big hands in a gesture of near despair. "Up until a few days ago I'd have said almost certainly not. There are a few suspicious cases, but not enough to add up to a conspiracy. What we've found this year adds up substantially to what the Americans found —and much the same goes for the French too apparently: from the KGB's point of view the whole thing's been a flop

— and it never was more than a reconnaissance . . ."

"But now?"

"But now—I don't know, Butler. I really don't know. Because we've got a whole houseful of the best young brains from King's and Cumbria up at Castleshields and there's something damned odd cooking up there."

XIV

"... THE DEVIL OF it is, Jack, that just when we need it most we haven't got anyone of our own in the house at student level. Peter's not really in with them—he's been off on his own too much. And when it comes to it they don't really trust me, of course."

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That might be the truth of it. Or it might be that Audley was still not quite desperate enough to compromise either himself or Richardson. There was no way of telling.

"You've no idea at all what they might be up to?"

Audley spread his hands. "If it's a demo of some kind there are only two places up here—there's the satellite tracking station at Pike Edge and the missile range on the coast. But they'd need to hire transport to get to them. They haven't got enough of their own."

"Are those the sort of places they'd be likely to demonstrate at?"

"Not this bright lot, I shouldn't have thought. The Americans have been helping us at Pike Edge, it's true, so we've had the usual crop of rumours. But it isn't like Fylingdales, and these boys would know it."

"And the missile range?"

"Only very short range stuff—anti-aircraft and antisubmarine. It's the better bet of the two though."

"Why?"

"Well, it's a long shot, but there has been a rumour or two that the South Africans are interested in some of the weaponry there."

"I like the sound of that."

"It isn't true, that's the trouble. And the Russians know it, which is more to the point."

"Damn the Russians! If they want to compromise these lads it doesn't matter whether it's claptrap or not

—it might be better if it was, but it doesn't matter either way. South Africa's the one thing all the young idiots can be led by the nose on."

Audley blinked and frowned. "It still doesn't fit. These boys aren't fools to be led by rumours." He paused. "But the real objection isn't that at all, to my mind."

"What is, then?"

Audley sighed and shook his head. "It's simply that I agree with you. This thing of Hobson's—it's a bloody intelligent project, but it just isn't the sort of ploy that would appeal to the Russians. Industrial sabotage, or trade union infiltration, yes. But there's evidence there, and until Smith phoned up Hobson there wasn't a shred of real evidence we'd picked up at Cumbria. Yet now there seems to be, and there's something that smells all wrong somewhere."

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"Aye, you're right about that, man," Butler agreed harshly. "And I'll tell you what smells wrong to me, too: by all the laws, they should have dropped whatever they're up to like a red-hot poker the moment Smith went round the bend. They know we're on to them—the whole thing's compromised for them.

And yet it looks as if they're going on regardless."

"So bully for them!" Richardson grinned. "So we get an extra chance of putting the skids under them—"

"If you think that, then you're a fool," snapped Butler. "If they haven't disengaged, it's because they can't disengage. And you better pray that it never happens to you like that— that you're on the wrong side of the wall and the other side's on to you, and the word comes back that you've got to stay with it. Because that means it is more important than you. That's when you become expendable, Richardson."

He glared at the young man fiercely, partly because it was time someone cut him down to size and partly because he had no wish to catch Audley's eye. It had not been so long ago that he had warned Hugh Roskill in the same way, but Hugh had trusted his own judgement and because of that Hugh would never fly for the RAF again. And Hugh had been lucky at that: if he couldn't fly he could still limp to his pension.

"All right, Colonel Butler, I'll pray that day never comes," replied Richardson coolly, his long face tilted towards Butler. "But I don't have to get scared in advance by the thought of it."

"No—you don't have to. But their day has come and I'll bet they are scared, Richardson. And that makes them very dangerous. So if you haven't the wit to be frightened, I have!"

"Gentlemen!" The embarrassment was unconcealed in Audley's voice. "This isn't leading any place, is it?"

"But it is, David." Something of his former banter was back in Richardson's voice. "Colonel Butler agrees with you —and this is a big one. The question is whether he can help us find out what it is before it goes off bang underneath us."

"Maybe I could at that."

They both stared at him.

"I've already recruited your inside man for you," said Butler heavily. "And your inside girl."

"McLachlan?" Audley's eyebrows lifted. "And Polly Epton?"

"Aye. The boy and the girl."

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The eyebrows lowered. "I thought you were against that sort of thing—using civilian labour?"

"I am dead against it. But in this instance I haven't any choice. They volunteered."

"And you accepted?"

"After the business at the bridge they tumbled to a few false conclusions of their own. They think Smith was murdered and they'd like to see the killers put down—"

"And naturally you let them go on thinking that?" Audley looked at Butler curiously, nodding to himself at the same time. "So naturally they would want to help. That was neatly done—though not quite your usual style, surely?"

"They made it a condition for agreeing to tell me about Smith," said Butler unwillingly. "It was not much my doing."

"Of course not. Not so much volunteers as blackmailers." Audley smiled. "And just what did they tell you in exchange for lies?"

Butler glowered at him. "Not anything that's of much use, damn it all! In fact, what Miss Epton knew made nonsense of what happened at the bridge."

"I doubt that." Audley shook his head. "The Russians simply didn't know how much she knew. And they couldn't come round and ask her, so they had to prepare for the worst. I'd guess they were ready to leave her alone as long as we did —much the same as they left Eden Hall intact until you turned up there.

When they spotted you in Oxford they went into action—not quite quickly enough, fortunately."

Butler stared at him. "It wasn't good fortune—it was young McLachlan's reflexes."

"Was it indeed?" Audley said, as though his mind was no longer entirely on the job. "But it was still what people would call lucky."

"It's all in my full Oxford report, anyway," said Butler, feeling in his breastpocket for the photocopy.

"I shall enjoy reading that. But there was nothing you could put your finger on—nothing that stands out?"

Butler shrugged. "She said they once had an argument— several of them—about the nature of treason.

Smith was very hot against traitors, surprisingly so she thought, because he was normally an internationalist. But he said they were no good to anybody, or any side. But everyone had had a few more drinks than usual and she put it down to that."

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"Whereas you think it was a case of in vino veritas?"

"If he thought he had become a traitor he wouldn't value himself very highly, I think that."

Audley bowed his head. "Very well, then. And now we come to McLachlan of the fast reflexes—what about him?"

"Hah—hmm. I asked the Department to run a report on him. I only have what he—and the others—told me."

"Peter has the report and we'll hear from him in a moment. It's your opinion I want. You think highly of him?"

"If we don't expect too much of him we can use him."

"Too much? Is he a weakling then?"

"Far from it. He's a tough boy." Butler searched for the image of Daniel McLachlan as he was and found only the image of what he would be in a few years' time: there was a submerged hardness about the boy

—a maturity beneath the immaturity—which in a subaltern would make him as a man worth the watching, a man for responsibility soon, and beyond that eventual command far above the regiment. Far was the operative word for Dan McLachlan: he was at the beginning of a career which stretched out of Butler's sight. Sir Geoffrey Hobson, who ought to know a flier when he saw one, subaltern or scholar, had forecast as much: he should go far, unless—

That 'unless' was the stumbling block. In war there was always the necessary risk to be taken when the McLachlans were blooded, the risk of the malevolent chance bullet that missed all the empty heads and spilled the brains out of the bright one. But this wasn't McLachlan's war.

Or was it?

"He's quick and he's bright," said Butler, coming to an instant decision. "He'll do right enough."

If Hobson's theory held water, then it was McLachlan's war more than anyone's: he was already in the front-line.

"If there's anything in the South African angle he's just the chap for us," Richardson said eagerly. "With his background he's a dead cert to be in on anything that's cooked up."

Audley nodded slowly, still eyeing Butler. "How does that sound to you, Jack?"

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"He's no firebrand politically. But—aye, if he could be stirred up by anything it'd be that. From what he said I'd say he feels pretty deeply about it. It's mixed up with the bad time his father gave him too."

"Does that check out with you, Peter?"

"On the nose!" Richardson's dark curls bobbed. "Old man McLachlan sounds a right swine for anyone's money. Inherited a farm at Fort Hawes, somewhere down south in Mashonaland—enough to keep him in whiskey and comfort for a few years. The boy was OK while his mother was alive, but after she died he was packed off as a boarder down to the Orange Free State, to the J. P. Malan Government School in Eenperdedorp, no less—real backwoods agricultural area that's 99 per cent Afrikaans. What our South African section describes as 'the absolute bloody end'."

"Not the place for Mama's little liberal boy?"

"You can say that again! Of course, the section hasn't any first-hand account of life in Eenperdedorp—

reading between the lines I reckon it took 'em an hour or two to find the ruddy place on the map. But McLachlan junior must have been a stout chap to survive it in one mental piece." Richardson turned towards Butler. "Is he much of a sportsman?"

"He was in the running for a rugby blue at Oxford last year."

"Ah! Well that might account for it. It seems they'll put up with quite a lot even from a bleddy Ingelsman if he can do that sort of thing." Richardson grinned at Audley, his spirits effervescent again.

"As a rugger type he ought to be right up your street, David. But as he let friend Zoshchenko pass himself off as his old pal Boozy Smith, I don't see how he can be quite as sharp as Colonel Butler here says he is."

"Smith wasn't his old pal," snapped Butler. "He was two years McLachlan's senior at Eden Hall, and they hadn't seen each other for maybe four or five years. You said yourself they'd matched him up reasonably accurately."

"True enough," Richardson conceded. "And Smith must have been pretty confident to go out of his way to meet him again—so I guess we're both right after all."

"Never mind Smith, Peter," said Audley. "If McLachlan's father was such a bastard, how did the boy get out of Africa to Oxford?"

"The suggestion is that they made some sort of deal—that's according to the Notting Hill Gate crammer who prepared him for his Oxford scholarship papers. You see, the mother left what money she had to her son, not to the husband, and by the time the boy was through school his father'd begun to run short again."

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"So it seems young Daniel bought his freedom with half of his inheritance, or something like that. What he told the crammer was he'd left his old man enough cash to drink himself to death in maybe three or four years, and bloody good riddance!" Richardson shook his head disapprovingly. "Not a happy family, the McLachlans."

No, thought Butler, but it would account for the coldness with which young McLachlan was already calculating life. He had taken its first blows young and learnt how to bargain his way from survival to success. There might very well be an element of calculation in the act of volunteering to help avenge his friend Smith—he might have seen and grasped the chance of proving his discretion in matters of state security.

If it were so, then the calculation was a shrewd one, even shrewder than McLachlan himself might have guessed. For if all went well, he would start his career with some influential men in his debt, Audley and Sir Frederick among them. And even if things went badly (which seemed a likelier probability at the moment) it would not count against him; he would be safely marked as a youngster ready to do his duty.

"Hmm . . ." Audley looked into space meditatively. "He certainly sounds as though he's possessed of the right credentials for us. It's a wonder Fred hasn't got him on the 'possible' list already. In fact—"

A sharp knock at the door cut him off in mid-sentence. He looked at his watch and then at Butler before continuing.

"Time's getting on. Just how much does McLachlan know?"

"Nothing of value. I let him believe that Smith's accident wasn't accidental. He already suspected something wasn't quite right up here from the warning hints Hobson's been dropping."

"Hah! So the Master has been talking." Audley nodded to himself. "I rather thought he lacked confidence in us."

"But the boy doesn't know who's behind it—fascists or communists. He simply thinks Smith found out more than was healthy."

The knocking was repeated, more insistently.

"WAIT!" Audley commanded. "So what did you tell him to do?"

"He'll pretend he's willing to take part in any mischief that's brewing. If there is, then he'll let me know at once."

"Good. We'll let that ride then." Audley stood up abruptly. "All right, Masters! Come in!"

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The door banged open and the young Signals officer entered the harness room apologetically.

"Sir—I'm sorry to disturb you, but we're cutting it a bit fine if we're to get the—ah—" he looked at Butler "—ah— Colonel to Caw Gap for the exchange."

Audley regarded the subaltern distantly. "I've been watching the time, and we're still inside it. Is everything all right?"

"On the crag, sir? Oh, yes!" Masters began eagerly. "Lion Two met Unicorn at Lodham Slack, and Tweedledum observed them from the rocks above—it's marked 'Green Slack' there on my map, and the ground's nicely broken, so he didn't have much trouble."

"And he got through to Tweedledee?"

"Straight away, and he sounded jolly excited. And then Tweedledee called up Red Queen."

"Ah! Now that's what I wanted to hear. Have you got Red Queen pinpointed now?"

"Yes, sir. He was just about where we'd estimated him, on the reverse slope. He's driving a dark green Morris 1800 Mark II S, registration SOU 8436, which means he can outrun anything we've got here. But Sergeant Steele says he hasn't tumbled to us yet—"

"Has he got the pictures?"

"We're processing the first lot now, sir. Steele reckoned there were perhaps four really good ones—"

"Don't stand there, man!" Audley cut him short. "Go and put some ginger into 'em. I want Colonel—I want Lion One to see 'em. Go on—and then you can run him to Caw Gap. Go on with you!"

He shooshed Masters out like a governess driving a small boy, then turned back to face them with a smile of triumph on his face.

"If Steele says they're good, then they damn well are good," he said, rubbing his hands. "I saw a set he got in the Shankhill Road in Belfast last year—a couple of top IRA Provisionals from Dublin—taken in far worse conditions than today. Peter, you must remind me after this is over to see if we can't get Sergeant Steele for ourselves. He's wasted in the army."

"Who are you expecting?" Butler asked.

"I'm not expecting anyone in particular. There had to be a third man somewhere at hand, I knew that—

Korbel is too low in the apparat and Protopopov hasn't been here long enough to know his way around."

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"Adashev?"

"It could be. Logically perhaps it ought to be, because we're not supposed to know about him."

Butler watched Audley gloomily. It was pathetic to see the fellow so happy over so little: Audley, whose reputation was founded on the popular superstition that he always knew better than anyone else what was really happening, even though he rarely bothered to tell anyone what he knew until it was all over.

Butler had always disliked him for that, more than for anything else. Now he found he disliked him somewhat less, but the discovery was not in the least reassuring: the staked goat in the clearing ought to be able to hope that the tiger-hunter in the tree above him knew what he was going to do.

"I don't like it, whoever it is," Butler growled. "I don't like the way they're acting—it doesn't have the right feel about it."

"What do you mean, the feel of it?" Richardson asked. "You are the bait, and they've swallowed you. So maybe they're a bit thick this time—"

"And maybe they're not so thick—let's suppose that for a change, for God's sake! We've laid all this on for them." He gestured towards the door. "Wireless trucks and mobile dark rooms, and—and bloody lions and unicorns! But how much have they laid on for us?"

"That's the whole point, surely," Richardson persisted equably. "They've laid something on right enough.

What they're trying to do is to make sure we don't mess it up for them. So that means they have to take a risk—you were right about that, and I was maybe a bit simple. But the object of bringing you into the act was to make them react—and now you're grumbling because that's what they've done."

The boy was right, however galling it might be, Butler told himself. It was a familiar enough situation in all conscience: each side knew its own intentions, but was in the dark about its enemy's plans to frustrate them. So as usual they were groping in that darkness for each other.

And to that groping Richardson brought all the confidence of his youth and quickness, while he himself was weighed down by the knowledge of his own mortality and by his girls in Reigate, his immortality.

They were too often in his mind when he was working nowadays, those girls. There had been a time when he could forget them quite easily from dawn to dusk, in the knowledge that there was a stack of bright postcards ready written which were unfailingly dispatched to them at intervals from different parts of the British Isles when he was away from home. Sunny postcards and rainy postcards—this time it would be the turn of the cold, windy ones from Edinburgh. And this time on his way home he would buy them each a box of Edinburgh rock to give substance to the deceit.

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Richardson was staring at him, but before he could concede the argument the door banged open again—

in his eagerness Masters had wholly forgotten his manners as well as his training.

"Three, sir!" Masters thrust the limp prints towards Audley. "Three beauties—all side-face, but clear as a bell. There are several others, but these are the ones that count."

Audley took the pictures carefully, studying each in silence before passing one to Richardson and another to Butler.

The face of the Red Queen was framed in unfocussed blurs —the objects through which Steele had aimed the camera— so that the effect was rather like a Victorian daguerreotype: a young-old face, plump and round still, acne-scarred, but the stubble and the curly hair was grey and the gold-framed spectacles added an old-fashioned schoolmasterish touch. A beautiful photograph—Audley was right about the Sergeant's special talent.

He looked up from the picture to Audley.

"I don't know him," he said.

They both looked at Richardson.

"Search me." Richardson's shoulders lifted. "I don't know him either. It certainly isn't Adashev—he's a whole lot prettier."

"So!" whispered Audley. "So indeed!"

"So what?" Butler barked.

"So I know him." Audley smiled. "You might say he worked for me once."

"He worked for you?"

"Oh, only indirectly." He looked at them, the shadow of the smile still on his lips. "But don't worry: you haven't lost your memories. It was out in the Middle East I knew him— knew of him, to be exact. We had a nasty little job up the Gulf, just about the time we were pulling out of Aden. The Chinese were all set to move into a place called Mina al Khasab, and we weren't in any state to do anything to stop them—

for reasons I won't go into."

"But it didn't suit the Russians either, as it happened. Trouble they'd got elsewhere, with the Israelis on the Canal, the Egyptians screaming for missile units, without pulling us back. So—we gave it to them on a plate. And they organised what used to be called in the bad old NKVD days a 'Mobile Group'—crude, dummy2.htm

but efficient, because you can still get away with being crude on the Gulf. Or you could then, anyway."

For a moment he was far away, and then suddenly both he and the smile came back simultaneously.

"What it means is that you and Richardson go on as scheduled. But I shall have to leave you for a time to do some checking of my own—quite unavoidable. All you have to do is to keep your ear to the ground. And make sure Daniel McLachlan doesn't go running out of your sight, too."

"But who the hell is he?" Richardson waved his photograph despairingly.

"Alek?"

"Alek who?"

"All I knew was plain Alek. But Alek isn't a 'who'—he's a 'what'. He's what they used to call in the Mobile Groups a 'marksman'. With a rifle he's as sure as the wrath of God."

XV

THE KNOT IN his regimental tie was far too small, Butler decided, checking his reflection in the big gilt-framed mirror in the hallway. Too small, too tight and too old-fashioned. It was a knot that pinned him in status and time as surely as did the tie itself, probably more surely since there wouldn't be many here at Castleshields who would recognise the magenta and yellow stripes of the 143rd.

He worried the knot with a few savage little tugs. It was no use, of course: the tie was old and this was the only way it permitted itself to be tied now. And in any case it didn't matter, for the face above it was equally old-fashioned and regimental. Only the eyes mocked and betrayed the face's brutality, reminding him of the sole virtues his old grandma had found in it: "Ah'll say this f t' little lad—'is years be close to

'is 'ead an' 'e's got 'is mother's eyen . . ."

He abandoned the tie in disgust and continued towards the noise of the common room. This, it seemed, was the first convivial hour of the day, the beginning of a carefully graduated loosening of tongues and nerves designed to prepare these young mental athletes for record-breaking assaults on the summer's exam papers. Modern educationists would probably condemn it, but Gracey and Hobson were unashamedly old-fashioned, and they had this system of theirs all worked out and laid on, despite the superficial casualness of the place.

He paused beside the open window at the end of the passage, outside the common room door. The volume of noise coming through indicated that the tea was doing its job—and from the noise coming from the lawn outside the game of croquet there fulfilled much the same function.

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It was a fiercely played game, judging by the powerful swing of the player directly in front of the window—more a golf stroke than a croquet tap; players and onlookers scattered and the striker shook the fair hair out of his eyes and waved his mallet in triumph.

McLachlan.

Instantly Butler craned his neck out of the window to take in the whole setting of the game.

The grey sky still had a wind-driven look about it, but in the protection of the great L-shaped house with the fir tree plantation on its third side the croquet lawn seemed to draw the last heat from the westering sun. Away to the south the land fell away for a mile or more and he could glimpse the smooth, dull expanse of the lake. Beyond and above lay the rolling skyline of the crags; here they were north of the wall, in the ancient no-man's-land of the Picts.

"It's all right, Colonel. I've got my eye on him," a quiet voice murmured. For a moment a shadow blocked out the sun and then Richardson sauntered past along the terrace, a tea cup nursed to his chest.

Butler grunted to himself and drew his head back inside the house. It was well enough to risk one's own precious skin and perfectly proper to hazard a subordinate like Richardson, who should know the score.

But it was a hard thing to send an innocent into danger, and a risky thing too, no matter how well the thing could be justified.

Audley didn't care, because he'd done it before and because deep down he liked doing it. And Richardson didn't care because as far as Butler could see Richardson didn't care very deeply about anything: life was just a joke to him, because it had never been a struggle.

But Butler knew that it damn well wasn't in the least funny—least of all as it concerned young Daniel McLachlan. The man Alek was loose somewhere out there and young McLachlan was happily swinging his croquet mallet, and if they ever came within range of each other then he, Butler would be to blame and must answer to himself for it. He had undertaken to see to the boy's safety and he had let himself offer the boy to Audley—like any damn black-coated, pin-striped politician he had mortgaged away his honour to conflicting requirements. It was duty's plain need and he would do it again, but that didn't make him dislike it less. Nor was it reassuring to tell himself that Audley and Richardson had accepted responsibility for watching over the action outside Castleshields House.

Richardson's attitude was too cavalier by half, and Audley's skill lay more in making things happen and then drawing his own clever conclusions than in preventing them. Even so, all these were surface worries. Beneath them was an atavistic disquiet, the caveman's instinct that warned him of danger when his fourth sense had failed him.

"Colonel—hullo there!"

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Polly Epton waved at him vigorously from behind a miniature bar. No danger in Polly!

"I'm duty maid this afternoon, Colonel, so you've got nothing to worry about. Daddy, Colonel Butler's here."

A kaleidoscope of images. Young men and young-old men, long hair and open shirts, eyes bold and appraising. More brains, more potential, packed in this panelled room than in any regimental mess, more even than in Staff College.

Polly's voice opened up an avenue in them to where Epton himself stood, cup in hand.

No small talk, Epton. Not much, anyway. Left-wing, sociologist—blue-blooded intellectual—you know the type, Colonel. Doesn't like the Yankees, but he dam well doesn't trust the Russians either—had a bellyful of them when he was with the International Brigade in Teruel in '37. If you wonder how he sired a filly like Polly, just remember Teruel. And they think the world of him, the students do —he doesn't talk down to them, or round them either . . .

He must have been a mere baby in the Spanish Civil War, thought Butler, looking up again into the grey, gaunt face above the outstretched hand. But Richardson confirmed Stacker: Epton was a man to be wary of. No traitor, but no establishment man either.

"Glad you could make it, Butler."

Grunt. The man would keep his mouth shut even though it might be the ruin of him, which was what a sudden demo out of Castleshields House might well be.

"We're looking forward to hearing what you've got to say about Belisarius. I'm afraid most of us only know what Robert Graves wrote about him in that novel of his."

"Hah!" That one at least he could parry. "Graves lifted it all from Procopius of Gaesarea, and maybe some from Agathias. But I'm more interested in the purely military implications."

"And are the purely military implications of any relevance for today?"

The new voice had a slight upward inflection of challenge that had been absent from Epton's—for all his lack of small talk, Epton was still the host in the house that had once been his, and that blue blood would tell no matter what he thought of the strange colonel who had been foisted on him. Whereas this young puppy—

"Oh, hell, Terry—don't start pitching into the Colonel as soon as he's arrived."

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Polly materialised at his elbow with a cup for him in her hand. "You mustn't mind about Terry. He's got a bee in his bonnet about the military. Which is jolly funny because Terry's about the most militant civilian you're likely to meet up here."

Terry—?

Terry Richmond—if there's anything going he'll be in it, you can bet on that. Not a Communist, he wouldn't give the Russians the time of day, not since Prague. And he was over in Paris in '68, and he got the message then because I've heard him talk about 'communist racism' among the old-timers. He's bloody bright, but he does believe in action and he was damned lucky not to get sent down in his first year at Oxford . . .

If this was Richardson's Terry Richmond, then it would be as well for the brutal Colonel Butler to keep his cool.

He smiled at Polly—it was very easy to smile at Polly.

"Nothing unusual about hating the military, Miss Epton," he said, deliberately letting a touch of Lancashire creep into his voice. "Old Wully Robertson's mother—Field-Marshal Robertson's mother—

said she'd rather see him dead than in a red coat when she heard he'd joined up. And my Dad said much the same thing when I told him I wanted to make a career of it. The old attitudes die hard, you know."

"They're not the only things that die," said Terry.

"No, Mr—" Butler looked questioningly at the young man, but received no enlightenment.

"Richmond is his name," said Polly. "You are a bore sometimes, Terry!"

"No, Mr Richmond. Soldiers also die. In fact, they die quite often. But we are only the extension of the civil arm, you know—we are your fist, no more."

"Not in Greece or Portugal—or Vietnam."

"I'd question Vietnam, but we'll let that pass. I'm only a British soldier, so I obey your orders."

"Even when you don't approve of them?" Epton cut in softly.

"Quite often when I don't approve of them. To be quite honest, I find civilians too bloodthirsty for my taste—the more incompetent, the more bloodthirsty. I've lost a number of friends that way. And there was a sergeant I knew—he was shot down in a street in Cyprus, with his little son by his side. Two or three years old the little boy was, and the crowds in the street stood and watched him cry while his father dummy2.htm

bled to death. They didn't lift a finger, Mr Epton. They were civilians, of course, and he was only the son of a British soldier."

There was a moment of silence.

"But you still obey your orders," said Terry. "Even when you don't like them. Isn't that dangerous?"

"Well, you see, Mr Richmond, that's what I promised King George VI to do in the first place—" Butler closed his eyes "—'And We do hereby Command you to observe and follow such Orders and Directions as from time to time you shall receive from Us, and any your superior Officer, according to the Rules and Discipline of War, in pursuance of the Trust hereby reposed in you'."

"That's what the King laid down, and in my reckoning it would be much more dangerous if I decided that I knew better than my lawful government, because that's how you get military juntas and dictators.

Would you prefer me to be that sort of colonel?"

"Oh, for goodness sake!" exclaimed Polly. "You're all looking so serious, and this is supposed to be Rest and Recreation Hour. Mike—come and rescue us!"

"Rest and Recreation my fanny!" The rich tones of the American mid-west sounded from behind Butler.

"This is always Drink and Dissension time, and you know it darned well, Polly-Anna."

"Well, just rescue us anyway, Mike—they're arguing about—"

"I heard good what they're arguing about," the American edged his way into the circle. "And believe me it's all been said before, way back we know enough if we know we are the king's subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes out the crime of it for us. As usual William S. got there before us."

Butler looked down into the ugly, bespectacled face. It was an earnest face that fitted the serious voice, and yet there was a self-mocking twinkle behind the thick-lensed glasses.

"So you think Shakespeare gets all soldiers off the hook?"

Richmond grinned at the American with something suspiciously like friendship in his expression.

"I think he cuts us all down to size. The Colonel's got you on the hip when he says he only does what the civilians tell him to do, seein's as how in a democracy the people are the king—

Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, - , Our children, and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all. O hard condition!

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Poor old King Harry-—and poor old us."

"Don't you ever think for yourself, Mike?"

"Don't have to, Terry-—not when there's someone sharper done it all for me. But you don't get off scot-free either, Colonel—the Bard's got you too. Same play, same act, same scene."

"Indeed?" Butler felt himself smiling foolishly, like Richmond. The young American, his accent horribly at odds with the poetry, was making fun of them all, and of himself at the same time.

"Sure as my name's Klobucki. You and Lieutenant Galley and Marshal Ney and Julius Caesar—

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own !"

The magnified eyes flashed. "You may be able to beat the rap legally-—"

Michael Klobucki—Pittsburg slum Polish and top Rhodes Scholar of his year. A real protester from way back: the Chicago cops scooped him up at the Democratic Convention of '68 and he was in the People's Park business at Berkeley in '69, so don't go sounding off about Law and Order. We've got nothing against him, but he hasn't any cause to love the Government, theirs or ours. . .

"—but there's still a moral rap to come."

Indeed there was, thought Butler. He had read about the People's Park riot, and his sympathies in that instance were for once wholly on the side of the students. Or, at any rate, it was a classic instance of ham-handed over-reaction of the sort that mocked everything law and order stood for.

And there was something else that he knew about Klobucki, but from McLachlan not Richardson: "Don't let him fool you into thinking he's short-witted as well as short-sighted. Mike's a poet and he sees better than most of us."

"You're just as bad as the rest of them, Mike," Polly said severely. "As of now I'm banning politics."

"And poetry, ma'am?"

"Your sort of poetry. Come and watch Cumbria make mincemeat of the King's, Colonel. Excuse us, Daddy."

Butler allowed himself to be shepherded towards the window.

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"I'm sorry about that," Polly murmured. "Actually they're all jolly nice if you can keep off current affairs."

"It's current affairs I'm here for, Miss Epton."

"Not your first night though."

"I'm afraid we may not have a first night to spare. Has Dan anything to report?"

"Well, I know he wants to see you. He didn't have time to say what for because Handforth-Jones was just about to drag him off on a seminar."

Butler eyed the croquet game. "I'll try and catch his eye, I think."

"Whose eye do you want?" said Klobucki, at his elbow.

"The Colonel doesn't want anyone's eye," said Polly hastily. "But I want that hound McLachlan."

"He won't thank you for disturbing his game just now, Polly-Anna." Klobucki turned back to Butler.

"You know, sir, when I came to this country I thought croquet was a limey game for old English ladies—

tea and muffins and croquet. But I've played it and it isn't like that at all. It's the most goddam ruthless, cut-throat business you ever saw—"

"Yes, I've heard it's a—ah—a demanding game," replied Butler politely, still watching for McLachlan to look up.

"That isn't the half of it. It's a game for managing directors and Obergruppenführers!" Klobucki shook his head. "Say—but if you're waiting for Dan to spot you, you've got a long wait. He's our only hope, and he plays a real mean game—and when he does something like this he really concentrates on it."

Butler sensed that the American was right. That early swipe of McLachlan's must have been a limbering up stroke, designed to unnerve his opponents; now he was holding his mallet in a different way, swinging it between his legs, as absorbed and watchful as a billiard player in a championship match.

"Yes, I think you're right," he murmured.

"I am right—I know our Danny," said Klobucki ruefully. "But what I came to say was—well, I guess I wasn't all that polite by the bar back there, with the smart-alec quotations. I've come to make amends."

Butler looked at the young American in surprise.

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"My dear chap, I wasn't offended. It was an extremely apposite bit of verse. I'm only sorry that I lack the education to answer you in the same way."

Polly laughed. "Don't give him the chance, Colonel. Mike's got the quote for every occasion—it's the cross we have to bear for his obsession with English literature."

"You can giggle, Polly. I just happen to find other men's flowers more beautiful than my own. And that's my cross, not yours, Polly-Anna." There was no glint behind the spectacles now. "As it happens, there are a few lines for you, Colonel, to put people like me in my place. And I seem to remember they were written about an army of Britishers—

Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

That's Housman, but I could give you plenty more—Kipling knew it too, and we Americans know how to value him even if you don't over here."

"I don't know whether Colonel Butler understood a word of what you're saying, Mike," said Polly. "But I certainly don't."

"You darned well ought to, honey—living where you do." Klobucki pointed out of the window, southwards towards the line of crags. "How many times do you think the fat guys down in Londinium—

or the Roman-Britishers in the nice centrally-heated villas—how many times do you think they spared a thought for these poor cats up on the Wall? Only when the tax-man came round, I guess—and then they'd curse the over-fed, over-paid, licentious soldiery. Maybe they were all that, too. But they were still all that stood between the central-heating and the barbarians—the barbari."

"Well!" Polly looked at Butler, her eyebrows raised. "Mike really is making amends."

"Not at all," Klobucki shook his head vigorously. "Truth doesn't make amends by itself. My amends are more—more edible." He turned, peering back into the room. "Sir! Dr Gracey, sir!"

"Why must you be so formal, Mike?" The voice that boomed in reply was startlingly deep, but with the quality of a bass pipe on a cathedral organ.

"In deference to your great age and seniority, sir," replied the American, straightfaced. "And your stature, of course."

Stature indeed, thought Butler. The man was even bigger than Audley, and yet without a hint of surplus flesh: simply a larger-than-life man.

"I'd like you to meet my guest for tomorrow night, sir," continued Klobucki. "Colonel Butler—Dr dummy2.htm

Gracey."

"Ah, Butler!" Gracey extended a huge, serviceable hand. "Charles Epton has been telling me about you—

and so has my godless god-daughter. And I gather you've met my old friend Geoffrey Hobson when you were up in Oxford."

"Hah!" Butler grunted, gripping the hand and meeting the shrewd eyes in the same moment. He felt the years stripping away from him, leaving him naked and unprotected: Second Lieutenant Butler, green and desperately worried about his Lancashire accent, reporting to battalion headquarters on the edge of the Reichswald, with the rumble of the distant German guns echoing in his empty stomach.

"And you are the authority on the Byzantine army, I gather, Butler?"

"Hardly the authority, sir. I've made a special study of their siege operations on the eastern front in the 6th century," said Butter ponderously. "From Belisarius to the Emperor Maurice, you know."

"Indeed." There was a reassuring lack of interest in Gracey's voice; it would have been altogether too gruesome if he had turned out to be himself an expert in the subject. "Well, the man you want to talk to is our Dr Audley, though he'd tend to take the Persian and the Arab side more than the Byzantine . . ."

Gracey looked around the room ". . . but he doesn't appear to be thirsty this afternoon. Where is David, Polly?"

"Oh, he phoned to say he'd got hung up somewhere. He probably won't be back until tomorrow some time—he said for me to apologise to you, but apparently there aren't any seminars tomorrow anyway."

"There aren't indeed. And there aren't many senior members either." Gracey frowned.

"And Dr Handforth-Jones sent his apologies too—"

"Ah, I know about Tony Handforth-Jones. He's in the middle of another of his fund-raising frauds,"

Gracey's gaze returned to Butler. "I trust you haven't any charitable funds in your gift, Butler. Because if you have, then you'll have Handforth-Jones after you for a contribution to his archaeological enterprises.

I never knew a man who was better at raising money from unlikely sources. And at spending it. He has a passion for hiring expensive machinery."

He smiled, shaking his head in mock disapproval, and it struck Butler that Audley's apparent hold over the archaeologist might well stem from a use of departmental funds never envisaged by the Defense Minister.

"On the other hand, if nobody's doing any work tomorrow, that may solve the problem of tomorrow night's dinner party —eh, Mike?"

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"Sir?" Klobucki cocked his head questioningly.

"My dear boy, if I'm to honour you with a dinner cooked with my own hand, then I must have something to cook— and something worth cooking. So you're going to have to work for your supper in the manner of your ancestors in the days when Pittsburg was Fort Pitt."

"Sir?"

Gracey considered the young American gravely for a moment, then shook his head. "On the other hand, I doubt very much whether you could hit a barn door. But as it happens you have anticipated me in your choice of guest. I assume you are a crack shot, Colonel Butler?"

Butler stared back at him utterly at a loss.

"I'm a—a tolerable shot," he spluttered finally.

"Better than tolerable, I hope! Could you hit a moving target. . ." Gracey paused dramatically ". . . if your dinner depended on it?"

Polly burst out laughing. "Uncle John—the poor man doesn't understand a word anyone's been saying to him this afternoon. First Terry and Mike—and now you!" She turned apologetically to Butler. "Colonel, you see Uncle John just fancies he's one of the world's great cooks—"

"My dear, I don't fancy anything of the sort. I am a very good cook—"

"And once in a while he has to prove it. And when this frightful American won the Newdigate Poetry Prize with a perfectly incomprehensible bit of doggerel—"

"Now hold on, Polly-Anna!"

"Perfectly incomprehensible—Uncle John promised him one of his dinners. And it seems you're going to be honoured too."

"If he can bag a brace of good Cumberland hares before lunch, that is," amended Gracey. "I know it is a bit late in the year, but we're far enough north here for them to be still in their prime. By rights I should jug them—hares always ought to be jugged—but that would take ten days, or seven at the very least, and we haven't time for that. So it must be a stew, a hare stew ..."

Butler gaped at him, but the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cumbria had passed beyond his immediate audience into a paradisal world of his own.

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". . . a cream of vegetable soup, the imported celery is very acceptable just now. And quenelles—we shouldn't have them at this time of year either, but I can't resist them even though you can't get pike . . .

haddock poached in a bouillon of good chicken stock with a drop of white wine. Loire—or a bottle of Charles's Vouvray-—we can start with that and end with it... And something sweet to go with it then—

like a syllabub. Yes, a syllabub." Gracey looked accusingly at Butler. "And none of that nonsense about syllabub being too difficult, either. People in England just can't cook the way they used to. Why, syllabub used to be one of the glories of the English table."

His voice dropped an octave into the reverential range. "And the hare—in a fine brown stock, with lots of onions and carrots and just a hint of curry powder—just a hint, mind you."

He swung towards Polly. "How many guns has your father got locked in that cupboard of his? He's got two or three 12-bores, hasn't he?"

Polly nodded. "He's got a matched pair of Ferguson 12-bores, and there's an old 410."

"Good, very good!" Gracey rubbed his hands. "Well tomorrow, my girl, you will take a shooting party up on the Wall—you can start from the Gap up there and go westward towards Aesica."

"Are there really hares there, sir?"

"My dear Mike, it is hare stew, not wild goose, that I intend to serve—of course there are hares there. I have it on good authority that there are. Just stay south of the Wall—along the Vallum is as good a line as any—and you should be able to bag something there, Colonel. And if you can get 'em back to me before lunch, there'll just be time to have it all ready for a late dinner."

Dr Gracey's eyes glinted again. "We shall drink the Chateau Pape Clement with it. And at the end you and I will drink a bottle of Cockburn '45, which we will not waste on these young people, beyond one small glass anyway."

Butler did his best to look enthusiastic. He had encountered this terrifying enthusiasm for food and wine before, and he knew better than to trifle with it. It was certainly no time to explain that it would all be wasted on him, that a couple of decent whiskeys and one good plateful of meat and vegetables was enough for him, and that rich concoctions and sweet kickshaws—and of all things port—only made him liverish next day.

"Hah! Well—ah—I'll do my best," he growled. "I'm most honoured to be your guest."

"Not at all man, not at. all! I'm glad of the opportunity of preparing dinner for someone who's used to something better than—" Gracey waved towards his god-daughter and the American "—than cardboard slimming biscuits and predigested hamburgers. But tell me, Butler, how long have you been a friend of Mike's?"

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Butler looked at Klobucki for support.

"About five minutes, sir," Klobucki said without the least hesitation.

"Five minutes?"

"Well—" A refreshing note of diffidence crept into Klobucki's voice "—to be strictly accurate we first met about ten minutes ago, and we haven't actually been introduced to one another."

"Mike was making amends," said Polly mischievously.

"Amends? Amends for what?"

"We gave Colonel Butler a rather rough welcome, I guess." Klobucki turned apologetically to Butler.

"We aren't usually as argumentative, at least not so quickly, sir. You'll just have to put it down to the natives being a bit restless tonight—the air's a bit thundery, you might say."

"Thundery?" Gracey frowned.

"Grendel's loose," Polly murmured mischievously.

"Now that's right! But how—?" The American stared at the girl in surprise. "Have you been talking to Dan McLachlan?"

"It was Dan, actually." Polly nodded.

"What do you mean 'Grendel's loose'?" snapped Gracey, looking from Polly to Klobucki quickly.

"Search me, Uncle John," said Polly. "It was Dan at his most mysterious—he never got round to telling us who this character Grendel is, did he, Colonel? Or should I know him?"

Gracey raised an eyebrow. "Hardly, my dear. But what the devil is this all about, Mike?"

"Well—" Klobucki began awkwardly "—it's kind of difficult to explain . . ."

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Polly interrupted him hotly. "Will someone kindly tell me who Grendel is?"

"Beowulf" Butler rasped. "He comes in Beowulf."

"And who's B—?" Polly turned accusingly on the American. "Darn it, isn't that one of those hairy Anglo-dummy2.htm

Saxon poems you're always complaining about?"

"My dear girl," said Gracey, "so far from being a hairy Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf happens to be the only surviving Old English epic and one of the greatest pieces of early medieval literature. Now, Michael Klobucki, what is all this nonsense about Grendel?"

"Sir—it's like this—"

"Explain so that my ignorant god-daughter can understand, if you don't mind."

"Mind? Why, surely, sir! You see, Polly-Anna, your ancestors had this thing about trolls—sort of half-men, half-monsters. The trolls had it in for the humans, on account of their being descended from Cain, and they lived out on the moors or in the fens and lakes . . . like the one under the crag out there. .. and if a troll moved in on the humans he'd first come at night and sit on the roof and drum his heels on it. And if they didn't take the hint, then he'd wait until they were all dead asleep—and probably dead-drunk too-

—and he'd creep in and kill a few and drink their blood. And there wasn't a thing they could do about it except pack up and go and live somewhere else."

"Unless they had a really great warrior among them," said Gracey softly. "A Hero."

"Sure—if they had a genuine Hero, preferably with a magic sword and a miraculous chain mail vest,"

Klobucki nodded. "A sort of John Wayne and Wyatt Earp—or like maybe Shane."

"And Grendel was a troll?"

"That's it, honey—a Troll First Class who moved in on King Hrothgar's great hall of Heorot, so no one dared live in it for twelve years, until young Beowulf showed up for the show-down."

"You make it sound more like a cowboy film."

"Hell, that's what it is! All good epics are the same, just the costumes are different—it don't matter whether they're set in Camelot or Dodge City—and the O.K. Corral's no different from Heorot Great Hall, see."

No different, thought Butler. No different the same way as Agincourt and Waterloo and Mons and Alamein had been no different: take away the legend and the common factors were dirt and death.

"So exactly where does Castleshields House figure in this interesting theory?" asked Gracey. "Because if you intended to cast it as Heorot, with Charles or myself as the unfortunate King Hrothgar, I should be obliged if you'd explain your reasons."

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"Well, sir—" Klobucki's ugly face flushed. "The way Dan's got it doped out, there's something goddamn queer going on— the way the Master of King's told us to watch our step . . . but you'd better ask him than me, the Master, I mean."

McLachlan had been indiscreet to a degree, but not completely loose-mouthed, for Klobucki did not appear able to extrapolate from Grendel to Neil Smith's death. That at least was something.

"I see." Gracey looked at the American narrowly now. Unlike Klobucki, he might well guess that there was more to that tragic accident at Petts Pond than was generally known, but he could know nothing for certain unless Audley had primed him. "And just what is this goddamn queer something, eh?"

"Oh, no—don't you ask me!" Klobucki shook his head warily. "I've seen enough trouble and strife of my own to want any of yours just now. I don't want any part of it. Back home I'd guess you call me a two-time loser already, but here I'm just a foreigner who wants to keep his snotty nose clean— and I don't want to be sent home just yet."

"You said the natives are restless, though."

"So I did, sure." Klobucki's eyes flashed behind the thick lenses. "That's just a feeling down in my gut.

Maybe it's imagination—or indigestion. Or maybe I just fancied I'd heard those heels drumming on the roof beam."

Gracey looked round the room meditatively. Following his gaze, Butler noticed that they had been left high and dry in their own corner by a tide of interest which seemed to have drawn everyone else to the windows overlooking the croquet lawn.

"Hmm . . ." The Vice-Chancellor nodded to himself uneasily. Then he drew a deep breath and straightened his massive shoulders: King Hrothgar had been warned, and had taken note of the warning.

"Well, I think we'd better join the natives in that case."

"It looks as if King's are giving us a run for our money for once," said Polly, craning her neck over the group before one window.

"A run?" A slender, dandelion-haired young man made way for her. "They've got us licked this time, Polly—it's that boyfriend of yours. And he's about to give us the coup de grace—watch!" Butler followed the pointing finger through the open window. The light was failing fast and the morning's cold wind had risen again—it ruffled Dan's straw coloured hair wildly, but without diminishing his fierce concentration as he stooped over the ball.

"Beowulf!"

"I beg your pardon?" Butler bent his head towards Klobucki.

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"There's our Beowulf—Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, son of Hrethel. He sure looks the part, anyway."

Butler looked at the American suspiciously, and then back at McLachlan.

"Probably more Viking blood in Dan than Anglo-Saxon, when you come down to it," Klobucki went on appraisingly. "But it's the same stock, I guess."

"Aye," Butler growled uneasily. But who was Grendel? he caught himself thinking.

Anglo-Saxons and Vikings and Romans—it was all damn nonsense, and he was letting it throw him simply because it was strange to him. Trolls drumming their feet on the roof indeed! There were no trolls

—but there were cold facts to be related into meaning.

There was a shout of triumph from the croquet lawn. McLachlan straightened up with a yell of triumph, brandishing his mallet like a battle-axe.

The trick was to get the facts in the right order. The trouble was that there were no facts before Adashev had met Smith-had met Zoshchenko, damn it—in the museum at Newcastle. And even that had been an undeserved bit of luck due to a tip-off from that defector in the KGB's British section.

There was a ripple of clapping and applause around him.

Audley had failed. Months in the field, with Richardson and God only knew how many others, and he had failed to establish one worthwhile fact— that was the incredible thing.

Someone bowled a croquet ball towards Dan, who took a wild swing at it, missed, straightened up, caught Butler's eye at last and waved at him, smiling.

The one sure thing was—The one sure thing!

"Richardson!" Butler shouted across the terrace.

Richardson sauntered over towards him casually.

"Steady on," he murmured, looking carefully away from Butler. "I don't think you're supposed to be on shouting terms with me, you know."

"Where's Audley?"

"I haven't the slightest idea, Colonel."

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"Get in touch with him. Tell him I have to see him."

"I don't know that I can—hullo there, Polly!" Richardson waved gaily. "I have my cover to think of."

"I'm not asking you—I'm ordering you," Butler grated. "You've got no cover."

Richardson flicked a quick glance at Butler, then coolly looked at his wristwatch as though Butler had asked him the time. "Right," he murmured. "And would there be anything you'd like him to know?"

Polly was coming towards them.

"Tell him—damn it, tell him we aren't the cat. We're the mouse."

XVI

AFTER FIFTEEN HUNDRED years of neglect the Roman defenses at Boghole Gap were still formidable: they were like belt and braces attached to self-supporting trousers.

In any age the long, reedy lake and the treacherous bog on either side of the causeway would have been a sufficient obstacle to a regular military assault. But after those hazards the cliffs of the crag line themselves rose sheer, making the approach not so much difficult as impossible, so long as there was a corporal's guard of pensioners on the Wall, which the Romans had built along the crest regardless of all these advantages.

Butler shook his head in admiration. The tattooed Picts must have been spunky little devils if they'd ever attacked here; it would have been no joke with rocket-assisted lines, and smoke and a full range of support weapons.

Probably they never had—and probably that was why the Romans had run the causeway northwards here, straight through the Boghole milecastle. In peacetime it would have been a well-defined customs post, while in time of trouble it would have been an easily-defended sally-port for flying columns of Dacians and Lusitanians from the fortress less than a mile to the south of it.

Nevertheless the Roman military engineers (a corps apparently accustomed to obeying all orders to the letter) had taken no chances in the gap itself: for twenty-five yards on each side of the causeway's junction with the milecastle, they had laboriously scooped out the standard fighting ditch. Now half-full of fetid, green-scummed water, it was still clearly discernible on either side of him now as he reached the Wall.

By contrast the milecastle itself had come down sadly in the world. The fine ashlar stonework—Christ, dummy2.htm

what stonemasons the men had been!—still stood almost shoulder-high, but the old gateways were plugged with a depressing jumble of hurdles, old iron railings and barbed-wire, festooned with trailing knots of wool.

Butler found a foothold and heaved himself up and over the stonework. He had plenty of time in hand before Polly Epton and the American came to this spot for the start of the hare shoot, so there was no call for undignified haste. From here to Ortolanacum was no more than a light infantryman's five-minute march, on the good firm going of the old military road.

But he could no longer fool himself by pretending to study this historic ground through a soldier's eye: the moment of decision was almost at hand and after a night's sober reappraisal he was still uncertain of the better course—whether to settle the account now, cutting both profit and loss, or whether to raise the stakes by waiting and watching a little longer.

There was no text-book answer—there never was and there never would be—to this hoary intelligence dilemma. You acted or you waited according to your instinct and your experience, knowing that each time the only measure of your prudence would be the outcome. That was the name of the game, and when it started worrying you too much it was time to quit while you still could.

Ortolanacum lay clear ahead now, a confusion of mounds and stones and low, grey-weathered walls, like a half-disinterred skeleton in the level between the two rising shoulders of the crags.

But not really a confusion; nothing these Romans did was ever confused—even the fortress's ridiculous defensive site was simply their assertion that it was built to house attackers, not to shelter defenders.

And built, too, to that logical, invariable plan which Handforth-Jones found so dull, but which in its day meant a man could ride from Arabia to Scotland and still find the same welcoming pattern of barracks waiting for him—and could give his report to someone waiting for him there in the same Headquarters building, where Audley was waiting for him now.

"Hullo, Butler," Audley said equably. "A bit chilly this morning." He nodded towards the 12-bore.

"Going shooting?"

Butler looked down at him. "Aye, for my supper."

"For—?" Audley raised a mocking eyebrow. "Not for one of Gracey's famous dinners?"

"Aye."

"My dear fellow! You must have made a considerable impression on him. He doesn't cook for just anybody, you know. He—"

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"You got my message?"

"That's why I'm here."

"We've got it all wrong."

"Yes, I know."

Butler felt the back of his neck taughten under the raised collar of the donkey-jacket.

"Not quite all of it, actually. Just some of it," said Audley.

"How long have you known?" Butler kept a tight rein on his temper, listening to the bitter end without interrupting.

"What I've just told you?" Audley shrugged. "Not very long. But I suspected they'd set this student business up just for our benefit, even before you made your report yesterday. And when they put Alek on view for me to identify—then I was certain. After that it wasn't so very difficult." He smiled. "Eden Hall and Oxford—it was all there once we knew what to look for, as I've just said. You saw it for yourself in the end, too."

Butler stared at him, balanced between irritation and admiration.

"What made you suspicious—at the start?"

"My dear Jack," Audley waved airily, "it was a great little nightmare of Sir Geoffrey Hobson's, but that's all it ever was. It wasn't like the Russians—Theodore Friesler said so, and you said so, and I couldn't find one bit of real evidence to back it—" Audley's voice hardened suddenly "—and I don't make that sort of mistake."

"Then what the hell was all that rigmarole on the Wall yesterday?"

"Rigmarole?" Audley shook his head. "Say rather that was just Adashev and I playing chess with each other. I needed to give him the chance of telling me what he wanted me to know."

"Why?"

"Because this student thing is for real, too, Jack. It's not a blind—even a new boy like Adashev didn't reckon he could draw off my attention from the real thing with an imaginary operation. The real thing dummy2.htm

stood a chance only if the diversion was real too."

Butler nodded grimly. "I take it you know what the real diversionary target is now."

"If I was a betting man I'd bet on it. The coastal missile range."

"But yesterday you said it didn't fit, not well enough anyway."

"Yesterday it didn't fit—because I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know I was the one who was meant to get the answer. Today's different." Audley paused. "Look at it this way: they let me see Alek, and Alek's a man who needs a specific target—and a target they could rely on me identifying. And then a target I'd know the lads at Castleshields would identify too. That's enough for even an old square like me to come up with an answer."

"Which is—?"

"The Beast of Cazombo, no less."

"The beast of—where?" Butler frowned.

"Cazombo. It's in Angola, out near the Zambian border. It isn't a name that's been in the news over here, but in certain circles it's known right enough. The point is that last term at Cumbria we had an MPIA guerrilla leader talk to their Free Africa Society, of which I'm an honorary vice-president. He talked all about genocide and chemical warfare, and all the other things the guerrillas accuse the Portuguese of, and by the grace of god the name Negreiros stuck in my mind—"

"Negreiros!"

"You've heard of him?"

"There's a Portuguese General called Negreiros." Butler wrinkled his forehead. "He was an intelligence major in Brussels when I was there in '61."

"That's the man. A specialist in air cavalry, and the guerrillas don't like him one little bit. He also happens to be a link man with the South Africa general staff. And he happens to be leading the present Portuguese military delegation here."

"The one there was that London demonstration against just recently?"

"Now you're on target, like Alek. Because the Negreiros delegation is due to visit the Missile Range this afternoon at 3.30—they're driving up from Birmingham."

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Butler whistled softly. A target indeed—ripe for a demo and riper still for a bullet.

Audley nodded. "Yes, I don't need to spell it out, do I. But we don't need to worry about it any more either, thank God."

"You've turned it over to the Special Branch?"

Audley laughed. "Not bloody likely! As it happens, Negreiros has got a private engagement elsewhere, according to the Department, but just in case he changes his mind I've got 'em to take the whole delegation down to Filton instead to see the Concorde. There isn't going to be a missile range visit at all."

"And Alek?"

"Alek and Adashev can fold up their tents and steal away into the night. In a day or two Latimer's going to drop a word into the embassy pipeline that we don't want them hanging around, but the word from on high is that we're to play this whole thing very cool. As far as the demo goes, or whatever the lads had got planned, if they want to demonstrate against the Beast of Cazombo outside the Missile Range gate now, they're welcome. There won't be any scandal—that's the password all round—no scandal."

"Everybody goes free, you mean?"

"Everybody goes home. Even you, Butler—after you've given your lecture on Belisarius, of course. We want to keep things neat."

Everybody?

"Except me, of course," Audley went on, unruffled by the strange expression on Butler's face. "I've got the rest of my mock sabbatical year to serve at Cumbria. Not that it'll be any great hardship. In fact, in some ways I've learnt quite a lot. Having to teach Gracey's bright young men is rather like the prospect of being hanged: it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Take this place now—"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said 'Take this place'." Audley paused. "Do you know where we are, Butler?"

Butler stared at him stupidly. "Where we are?"

"This is what they called the Principia, Butler—the headquarters building—"

"I'm aware of that, yes," Butler said curtly.

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The big man gave him an oddly confiding sidelong glance. "Yes, I rather thought you'd know it." He smiled. "I knew I'd got you summed up correctly. You're a romantic at heart, no matter what you pretend to be. I know you wouldn't let me down, here of all places."

"I don't see what you think I am-—" Butler began stiffly, and then reared up against the implication of it.

"I don't see what that's got to do with—"

"Oh, but it has! It has everything to do with it." Audley gestured over the fortress and on towards the crags. "This place has the right atmosphere for us. What it is and what it was—

Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen, the work of the giants, the stone-smiths, mouldereth .. "

He seemed undeterred by Butler's wooden expression. "You didn't walk the Wall yesterday and not think about it."

It wasn't a question. Or rather the man was so maddeningly sure of the answer that it had come out as a statement.

Butler flushed. Its very accuracy made it offensive, like an invasion of the private part of his mind. It was none of Audley's damn business what he thought. And even if by some rogue intuition he could see so clearly, he had no call to speak of it. It was an act of intellectual ill-breeding.

" 'The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish'," said Audley.

Butler exploded. "Oh, for Christ's sake, man—spare me the quotations. I've had a bellyful these last few hours. Say what you mean and have done with it."

Audley gave him a shrewd look. "I'm not getting through to you? Or am I getting through a bit too well?"

He paused, then gave Butler a grin that was disarmingly shy. "I apologise, Colonel. Sometimes I say what should be unsaid, I'm afraid. But you must remember I've been up on this bit of frontier longer than you. It's got under my skin."

He paused, staring northwards at the skyline.

"What I mean is that there must have been times when the Wall was strong and times when it was weak

—more like a confidence trick than a real defense. The way they'd have held it then was by good intelligence work. And by keeping their nerve."

Butler nodded slowly.

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"And by a little judicious contempt too, Butler."

"Contempt?"

"Contempt. Just that." Audley's eyes were cold now. "You and I—we're on our Wall when it's weak.

Weak on the Wall, and weak behind it." He pointed northwards. "Some of our people don't believe there are any savages out there. And of course the intellectuels gauchistes are quite happy to pick us off from behind—they think it's high time for the Wall to fall."

It was hard for a plain man to make sense of what he was driving at, Butler fretted. It was almost as though they were all conspiring to confuse him, Audley as much as any of them.

"But I don't happen to agree with them. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I find their alternatives altogether cretinous. I suppose that makes me a dedicated counter-revolutionary capitalist..."

Butler grunted non-committally. He could only presume that the blighter was simply restating his oath of allegiance in his own tortuous jargon.

"Which means—" The eyes glinted suddenly "—we've got to teach these fucking Russians a lesson without stirring up any trouble."

Momentarily the shift from the pedantic to the vulgar took Butler aback.

"And that means that we let them go home—scot-free," Audley concluded.

"Where's the lesson in that, for God's sake?"

Audley smiled. "The lesson, my dear Butler, is in the pack of lies we give them to take home."

He broke off abruptly to squint down the valley towards the main road, where Butler saw a long grey estate car tip slowly off the tarmac past Audley's car into the gateway of the grass track leading up to the fortress.

"Now, who the hell—?" Then he relaxed. "It's all right. It's only Tony Handforth-Jones. He must be getting ready for the new season's vicus dig." He turned back to Butler. "You don't need to worry about Handforth-Jones, he's one of mine. It's lies that we've got to worry about now."

Butler tore his gaze unwillingly from the estate car. All these outsiders of Audley's made him uneasy.

"What lies?"

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Audley regarded him in silence for a moment. "Let's look at the truth first, Butler. In reality we're letting them all go because we're weak: we can kick 'em out, but we can't afford any scandal. We can deal with the Negreiros business, of course. But that doesn't alter the fact that if it hadn't been for Zoshchenko cracking up on them, they wouldn't have needed any Negreiros business to put us off the scent."

Butler nodded. "Aye. They just had bad luck."

"It was bad judgement too. They chose the wrong man. What we've got to do is to rub that in."

"How?"

"We're going to leak it to them we've been on to them from the start. With what we've got on Adashev, and that fellow they pulled out of New Zealand to train Zoshchenko, we can maybe just about make that stick without giving away our contact in the KGB apparat in London."

"Hmm . . . You think they'll swallow that?"

"When they think of me they will, yes." Audley wagged a blunt finger. "I've been wasting my time for months looking for Hobson's non-existent KGB conspiracy in the universities. But you're going to tell how Audley's been watching them all the time and the conspiracy was our bluff to keep them happy.

And you can say that I'm bloody livid that they can't conduct their wretched little operations properly—

that if this is the best they can do, they'd better stay home until they know a hawk from a handsaw. Then they can try again. That's the message: contempt!"

The estate car pulled to a halt beside a chequer-board of trenches on the slope below the fortress, and Audley acknowledged Handforth-Jones's wave.

If the credibility of a lie was related in any way to its size, then this shameless monster falsehood truly might pass, thought Butler. Indeed, it was not so much a lie as the exact inversion of the truth—

something only a supremely arrogant man would dare think of. And what gave it the shape and hue of reality was that it fitted not only the facts, but also the man: this was a lie which Audley himself wished to believe.

"Good morning, Tony," Audley raised his voice and pointed to the three workmen who were unloading equipment from the estate car. "You're not going to dig in this weather?"

"Good exercise!" Handforth-Jones shouted. "Morning, Colonel! Seen any Picts yet ?"

Butler grunted unintelligibly as the archaeologist strode up to them, rubbing his hands and grinning wickedly.

"Not that there'll be any Picts abroad today," Handforth-Jones added cheerfully. "Mornings like this dummy2.htm

remind me of what Camden thought of this part of the world—'nothing agreeable in the Air or the Soil'—-and Camden never even dared come this far. He said the Eptons were no better than bandits and he wouldn't set foot on their land."

"Then what brings you out, Tony?" said Audley, laughing.

"Money, as usual, David." Handforth-Jones waved suddenly to his brutish followers. "Over here, Alfred!

Put the headquarters marker just here and the hospital one over there."

He swung back to Audley. "It's Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, and I'm planning for the unfortunate Lusitanians to pick up the bill. You are welcome to watch if you've the time. You can even try to look like an archaeologist, if you like. I could do with a bit more local colour."

"Local colour for whose benefit?"

"Hah! The Lusitanians, that's who." Handforth-Jones's attention was less with them than with his followers, who were engaged in setting up stencilled notices on small wooden pegs outside each group of ruins.

"We're about to turn the place into a scene of frenzied archaeological activity for an hour or two. I only hope to God the weather holds." He sniffed the air and scanned the low clouds anxiously. "Which it doesn't look like doing, naturally. Over here, Arthur. Jesus, he's put the headquarters marker on the latrines. Not that they'll know the difference, but excuse me—this joke's getting out of hand already.

Over here, Arthur, over here!"

He strode away abruptly, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

Butler looked at his watch. "I ought to be getting back to the Milecastle pretty soon. If you want me to handle that end of it."

The dirty end, naturally. The end that had sickened him yesterday afternoon and sickened him no less now. But he had known in his heart that it would be his end: it was what the Butlers of the world were here for.

"Audley?"

But Audley wasn't listening to him: he was staring down the hillside at the retreating figure, his face fixed in an appalled expression of disbelief.

"Oh, dear God," he exclaimed. "Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day!"

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Butler felt the blood drain from his own cheeks, though without knowing why. In anyone else this sudden confusion would be almost comical, but in Audley—in self-confident, omniscient Audley—it was like the moment of awful stillness before an earthquake shock.

Audley faced him.

"Whose idea was it for you to come up here?"

"Up here?" Butler repeated the words stupidly.

"To shoot your supper."

"To shoot—?" Butler frowned. "It was Gracey's. The Vice-Chancellor."

Audley blinked. "His idea?"

"There are hares up here, so he said."

"He said so?"

"Aye." Butler grappled with his memory. "He said he had it on good authority."

Audley relaxed. "On good authority. I'll bet it was on good authority!" He turned to look down the hillside. "TONY!"

Handforth-Jones paused in the act of climbing aboard a small yellow dumper truck. Audley signalled furiously to him to rejoin them.

"What the devil's up?"

"Up?" Audley groaned. "Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, that's what's up. I haven't been as clever as they thought I'd be, that's what's up."

Handforth-Jones advanced over the hillside towards them again.

"Hullo there! What's the matter, David?"

"Anglo-Lusitanian Friendship Day, Tony: what is it?"

"That's just our name for this little fund-raising venture." Handforth-Jones chuckled. "The First Lusitanians were stationed here during the Severan reconstruction. Hadrian's Own First Cohort of Loyal dummy2.htm

Lusitanians. They rebuilt the headquarters. There's a very fine dedication slab to them in Newcastle Museum, Collingwood Bruce found it here—it was reused as a paving stone in the Theodosian reconstruction—"

"For God's sake, Tony—are you getting money from the Portuguese?"

"Well, yes. That's what I'm trying to explain. There's a whole batch of them over here on some junket or other. The Reader in Portuguese History is a Fellow of King's, he laid this on for me."

"Portuguese?" Butler frowned in bewilderment.

"Lusitanian, same thing. Lusitania was Roman Portugal," Handforth-Jones explained. "Portugal's supposed to be 'Our Oldest Ally'. It occurred to us they might like to see the one and only place where Portuguese troops served in Britain, which is Ortolanacum. Might make them feel generous, you know."

"And they're coming here?" Audley cut in.

"That's right." Handforth-Jones nodded. "Some time in the next hour or so. Not all of them, of course.

Just the top man." He grinned again. "Which is a good thing, because I'm standing him lunch in Newcastle after he's seen the inscription on the slab in the museum just to prove I'm not making it all up.

Not that he'll make much of COH I AEL LUS, but no matter."

Audley looked quickly and hopelessly at Butler.

"Was this common knowledge, this visit, Dr Handforth-Jones?" Butler asked.

Handforth-Jones stared from one to the other suspiciously. "Well, I haven't tried to hide it. We've talked about it at dinner quite often."

Common knowledge. So the visit of the Beast of Cazombo to Ortolanacum had been bandied around both King's and Cumbria—and by the cruelest mischance had not come to the ears of the one man who mattered.

"Damnation!" Audley studied the rock-strewn slopes of the crags above them on each side of the Boghole Gap.

Might as well look for a flea on a sheepdog's back, thought Butler bleakly. If Alek was up there already, it would take supernatural luck to spot him now.

"Damnation," Audley muttered again, reaching the same conclusion a second later.

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He turned to Handforth-Jones. "Tony, we're going to pull the curtain down on Anglo-Lusitanian friendship for the time being. I'm sorry."

"Do I get to know why?" There was a mixture of resignation and curiosity in the archaeologist's voice.

"Or is this another bit of your top secret cloak and dagger?"

"I'm afraid more dagger than cloak this time, Tony. There may be a sniper up in the rocks waiting for your chief guest. And if there is, then we should be due for a student demo from Castleshields at just about the time he arrives."

Handforth-Jones looked hard at Audley for a moment without speaking, presumably to satisfy himself that a silly question had not elicited a silly answer. But Audley's face was set too firm for that.

Butler hefted the shotgun in his grip.

"High Crags is the likeliest," he grunted. "He'll have a clearer shot from the right, and the ground's that bit more broken. I'll take that one."

"No." Audley shook his head. "There's too much ground to cover. The only way to stop Alek now is to stop those young idiots from meeting Negreiros. Which means stopping Negreiros from getting here."

"He'll be on the road by now," said Handforth-Jones.

"Which way will he be coming?"

Handforth-Jones shrugged. "It all depends whether he comes up the M1 or the"M6. I don't know where he's coming from. More likely the M1, I suppose, then turning off through Durham and Corbridge."

Audley nodded. "That'd mean he'll come from the east. I'll take my car down the road and try and head him off. Butler, you take the west—the Carlisle side. And just don't let him get in range of these crags."

"No."

Audley frowned at him.

"I was meant to be here, was I?" Butler spoke harshly. "Meant to be in the way of the demo?"

"Out of the house but in the way. You weren't meant to miss the fun, I'd guess, Jack. I reckon we were all meant to be here. They planned it this way."

"Aye, that's what I thought." It vexed him strangely to think that Dr Gracey's hospitality and culinary dummy2.htm

pride should have been twisted by the enemy to that end. He nodded towards the archaeologist. "Dr Handforth-Jones can try the Carlisle road. I'll see what I can do to stop the demonstration getting here."

"To stop it? How?"

Butler addressed Handforth-Jones. "They'll take the path through Boghole Gap, won't they?"

"They're sure to, yes. It's a hell of a way round by the road."

"Do you think you can stop them?" Audley asked in surprise.

"If they use the Gap, I can have a damn good try," said Butler, still eyeing Handforth-Jones. "That is, if I can have those three men of yours."

"Those three—?" Handforth-Jones's eyebrows lifted. Then he looked at the three labourers calculatingly.

"Well, maybe they might at that, if the money was right. . . Arthur."

The smallest and most shifty-looking of the three instantly dropped his spade and jog-trotted towards them.

"Arthur is the negotiator," said Handforth-Jones quickly. "They're Ulstermen. They say they're 'resting'

between motorway engagements. But I know there's been bad blood between the English and the Irish on several jobs since the trouble got worse in Ireland. And from what Arthur let slip I rather suspect they left there in a hurry too."

His voice tailed off as Arthur came to a halt in front of him. But the quick, darting eyes flicked over Audley and Butler before settling on the archaeologist, testing for gold, thought Butler—or copper.

"Sorr?"

Londonderry Irish.

"Like to earn a quick fiver, Arthur?"

"Each," Butler snapped. Whatever the rates archeology paid, ex-motorway workers would not be bought for a mere pound or two.

"Doin' what?" Arthur concentrated on Butler now.

"Most likely standing still for half an hour. But there could be a punch-up in it."

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Arthur's expression blanked over.

"But there could be a punch-up," he repeated, as though adding an item to a bill. "An' if there was a punch-up would the police be in on it, sorr?"

"No police."

"Argh, but them fellas have a way uv—"

"I said no police," Butler fixed his fiercest military eye on the little man.

Londonderry Irish. Dirty in the trenches, his father used to say, the Papists more so than the Prods. And not as steady when things looked blackest as the English North Country regiments. But real scrappers when it came to the attack, none better. Because they liked it.

Arthur cocked his head on one side and screwed up his seamed little face in preparation for the bargaining.

"Well, sorr—"

"I've no time to waste. Five pounds each for maybe half an hour's work and no questions. Take it or leave it."

The Irishman risked a glance at Handforth-Jones, but received no help. The trick was somehow to tip the balance, but Butler's frugal soul revolted against tipping it with more money. Then it came to him, the despicable insight.

"Man, they're only students I want you to stand up to, not Provisionals or B Specials."

"Students?" Arthur sprayed the sibilants through his teeth in disdain. "Why did ye not say so before, sorr! Fi' pound apiece it is, then. I'll just go tell me friends." He started down the hillside. "Hah! Students is it... Hah !"

He stumped away, still playing the stage Irishman for his paymaster's benefit, and Butler turned just in time to catch Audley and Handforth-Jones exchanging glances.

"The spirit of St Scholastica's Day," murmured the archaeologist cryptically.

"Alive and kicking after six hundred years," agreed Audley. "So much for 'Workers of the hand and the mind unite'. But can you hold the pass with those three, Jack?"

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"If I was meant to be here, then I'm pretty sure I shall have reinforcements," said Butler dryly.

XVII

As THEY CAME within sight of the milecastle, Butler thought for one horrible moment they were too late. But in the next instant he recognised the dark, tousled hair.

"Sorr—" Arthur hissed urgently beside him.

"It's all right. He's one of mine."

"Aargh—that's grand!" Arthur slapped the pick-handle into his open palm joyfully. "D'ya hear that, boys

—'tis one of the Colonel's fellas!"

Richardson waved, leapt from the Wall to the ground and ran towards them.

"Phew! I'm out of training, and that's a fact." He grinned breathlessly. "It's this sedentary life of scholarship I've been leading."

"Report!" snapped Butler. "You're supposed to be looking after McLachlan."

"He's just coming—phew—on the other side of the Wall," panted Richardson. "And he's not the only one

—they'll all be here soon."

"He's with them, you mean."

Richardson caught his breath. "Hell, no. It was Dan who blew the gaff on the others—he's with Polly and Mike Klobucki just back there. I ran ahead hoping to catch David— we've got to get word to him.

It's this thing of Handforth-Jones's—the bloody Portuguese—"

"We know. When are they coming?"

"You know!" Richardson gaped at him. "How the devil do you know?"

"Never mind that. When are they coming? How far are they behind you?"

Richardson shook his head. "I don't know for sure. Dan said they were just putting the resolution to the meeting when he walked out. But it can't be long because there wasn't going to be any disagreement, Dan said. Terry Richmond and a chap called Greenslade from King's had got 'em properly steamed up."

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"So what did you do?"

"I tried to ring out, but the phone's dead."

"What about Dr Gracey?"

"There was a call from Cumbria this morning early—a fire in the admin block—" Richardson grinned wolfishly. "The bastards got him off the premises before they tried anything, and Epton won't stop 'em so long as they promise to be nonviolent. Christ—non-violent!"

Butler stared at Richardson. So easily—so ingeniously—was the thing done. A false call, and then a little well-placed sabotage. After that the time factor would take care of everything.

"I thought of taking my car, but it was right in front of the room where they're holding the meeting,"

went on Richardson. He spread his hands, "and even then if the lodge gates were locked—and if the car started—Dan and I thought it would be better to get up here to you."

"He doesn't know about Audley?"

"No, of course he doesn't. But he reckoned you might know what to do. And we caught up with Polly and Mike on the way." Richardson paused. "What are we going to do?"

Butler thought for a moment. "Are you armed?"

Richardson looked at him, shame-faced, knowing well how Butler felt about firearms.

"Well, ever since David said—"

"Are you armed, man?"

"I've got a little automatic." Richardson admitted. "A Beretta."

A whore's gun, thought Butler contemptuously. But it made the next order easier.

He nodded towards Low Crags. "Have a quick scout up there—no more than ten minutes. Alek might be up there, somewhere where he has a line of fire on Ortolanacum. Don't try to flush him if he's there—

just come back and tell me."

Richardson started to say something, and then stopped before the first word had formed. Then he nodded and started up the hillside on the track beside the Wall.

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For the very first time Butler's heart lifted to the young man. When the crunch came he had acted quickly and now he had proved that he could obey a dirty order without argument. He had passed the test.

"Sorr!" Arthur called to him from his vantage point on the hillside to the right of the milecastle. "There's some more of 'em comin'—just the three, an' I think one of 'em's a female."

Butler climbed up beside him.

" 'Tis not the hair—some of 'em have it to their shoulders— 'tis the hips, see," Arthur confided. "An'

there—see—she's got a fine pair uv tits too—that's a girl an' no mistake!"

Butler followed the stained finger. McLachlan would fight, that was sure beyond a doubt. But whether the American would, and whether Polly would, with her father on the other side in spirit if not in body, was another thing.

"See here," he growled to the Irishman, pointing down to the gap beneath them. "We're not waiting on the Wall for them to come—not these three, they're friends—we're going to move in front—"

That was how the Wall had been designed, though never for anything like this . . .

"On the causeway there, by the ditch. Three of us on the causeway, and one at each end of the ditch by the cliff.—"

"Heh-heh-heh!" The little man beside him cackled. "Push 'em into the water—that'll damp 'em down!"

"That's exactly what I don't want you to do," snapped Butler. "Once they go in the water, they've got nothing to lose crossing the ditch, and we can't hold them. I'm depending that they won't want to go into it—at least not for a time, anyway."

"Ah, I see what ye're drivin' at, sorr. 'Tis a terrible muddy ditch. I wouldn't like to go in it for the Holy Father himself!" Arthur nodded wisely. "So we pushes 'em back, an' we cracks 'em on the shins."

"I don't want any injuries."

"No injuries, sorr. We pushes 'em back gentle, like the little lost lambs they are."

There was a light in the man's eyes that belied the innocence in his voice. It was clear that he could not be relied on for any delicacy in action, and it was unlikely that his comrades would be any better. The plain fact was that Arthur could smell a fight, and if it was within his power to provoke, one, a fight there would be.

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Shaking his head irritably, Butler scrambled across the Wall, leaving the Irishman in the look-out post, and went forward doubtfully to meet his reinforcements.

"Have you seen Peter Richardson?" McLachlan called as they approached each other. "Has he told you what's happening?"

"Aye. He's scouting up on Low Crags. You were at the meeting?"

"To start with. But it was pretty much cut-and-dried— Terry's even got the banners ready. I'm sorry, sir

—I ought to have known. But it just never occurred to me."

"You knew about the Portuguese coming to Ortolanacum?"

McLachlan grimaced. "Well, Dr Handforth-Jones was talking about his Lusitanians at dinner a couple of nights ago—"

"Oh, we've known about it for ages," interrupted Polly. "But what are we going to do? I mean, Peter got very steamed up, but I can't see that they'll do any harm really. Terry's militant, but strictly non-violent—

Daddy would have stopped them otherwise."

Butler turned to Klobucki. "And where do you stand in this, young man?"

Klobucki stared at him shrewdly. "I was going to ask you the same thing, sir. I'm getting the feeling that you aren't quite the simple soldier I took you for last evening. I think I'd sure like to know where you stand before I go any further."

He jerked his head towards the Wall. "And I guess I'd like to know who your buddies are."

Butler met the young American's stare squarely. No lies now—or as few as were necessary: they deserved as much, and like it or not he needed whatever help he could get to hold Boghole Gap.

"It doesn't matter who I am," he began slowly. "But you're wrong about the harm they can do, Polly. If they get to Ortolanacum somebody else may die."

"Die?" Klobucki looked quickly at Polly. "Who—what the hell is this?"

"Neil Smith died—"

"Neil—?" Klobucki's voice squeaked.

"Now a man called Negreiros may die." Butler overrode the squeak. "If your friends get to Ortolanacum dummy2.htm

and Negreiros gets there too, there's a Russian sniper who could make it a front page meeting."

"Jeeze!" The American whispered. "A Russian—jeezels— are you sure, Colonel?"

"No, I'm not sure. But I'm damned if I'm going to wait and see. We're trying to stop Negreiros—and in the meantime I'm going to hold this gap for as long as I can. If you'll help me then, I can use your help."

"Count me in, Colonel sir!" McLachlan turned to Klobucki. "Come on, Mike—Negreiros may be a 21-carat bastard, but the Commies are taking old Terry for a ride this time. Where's your spirit of adventure?"

He turned on Polly. "And you've got a stake in it too, Polly my girl! Because if we don't turn 'em back, your Daddy'll be in dead trouble, and it won't do a damn bit of good for him to say he thought it was a peaceful demo."

"Oh, shut up, Dan—it isn't a joke," Polly spat. Then she looked at Butler fiercely. "Is it true?"

"About your father?" There was a good deal of truth in McLachlan's conclusion, as usual. For a quickly mounted bit of wickedness, this smokescreen operation might well do a fair bit of damage to quite a number of reputations.

But Polly shook her head. "I mean about Neil dying for the same reason?"

Butler gazed at her steadily, searching for something that wasn't wholly dishonourable. But in this web the dishonourable truth and the decent and necessary deceits were now so mixed that all options were equally odious.

"My dear—" he began heavily "—it is because of Neil that all this has happened, that I promise you."

She gripped the big Ferguson 12-bore convulsively.

"All-right, then—I'll stick with you, Colonel."

"Bravo!"cried Dan.

"Can it, Dan—put the lid on it!" Klobucki hissed.

"But I'm not joking, Mike," McLachlan protested vehemently. "Polly's only running true to form. The Eptons always used to hold this gap back in the old days when the Scots raided England. The question is, where do you stand now—with the fuzz or against them?"

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"It isn't your fight, Mike," said Polly. "It's not fair to involve you. And Terry's a friend of yours, anyway."

"Maybe so, Polly-Anna, maybe so. . ." Klobucki shook his head to himself. "But then, I don't want to see Terry taken for a ride. And if the Colonel's on the level it sure looks like one time when the fuzz could do with some citizen help—"

"Here comes Peter Richardson," McLachlan interrupted him.

Richardson was dropping skilfully down the steep slope of Low Crags from level to level, like a Gurkha rifleman. He paused for a moment on a smooth outcrop of rock, shook his head at Butler, and then continued down. So Low Crags were clean—for the moment.

"Okay, Colonel," Klobucki said firmly. "And just how do you figure on stopping them?"

Butler drew a deep breath. Then, as the incongruity of it hit him, he smiled to himself despite his misgivings. In the ancient past, when the tumble of stones behind him had been the greatest military work in Europe, there had been perhaps a platoon here, and a whole regiment within shouting distance.

And now he had one man, two youths and three shiftless layabouts and a girl to hold the Gap which had once belonged to Hadrian's Own Lusitanians.

"You on the causeway with me, Richardson. And you—" he pointed to the largest of the Irishmen "—

with us. And Mr Klobucki behind us in reserve. Then one of you covering the ditch on each side."

"And I want you, Miss Epton, up on the crest of Low Crags—you'll be out of our sight, but it doesn't matter. I want you to keep an eye for a stranger—about my size, but grey-haired. Round face, gold-rimmed spectacles. If you spot anyone, then head back here as fast as you can. Otherwise stay there until I come for you."

"And I want you on High Crags, McLachlan. Same job— if you spot anyone then come back and tell me."

Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, son of Hrethel.

Well, that remained to be seen!

XVIII

"THIS IS WHEN one of us should say, 'It's quiet, Sergeant'."

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Butler frowned at the American. "I beg your pardon?"

"In the movies," Klobucki explained patiently, "the young trooper always says 'It's quiet, Sergeant', and the sergeant says 'Too quiet, son'—and then the whole Apache nation comes over the ridge at them. It happens all the time."

"I see," murmured Butler abstractedly, watching McLachlan disappear over the brow of the first false crest of High Crags. The wind rushed along the cliffs, driving the jackdaws soaring before it. But there was the faintest touch of rain in it now, like a spider's web brushing against his face.

"Taking a bit of a risk, aren't you—sending Dan up there on his own? I mean, if that Russian of yours is really going to show up?"

"Maybe."

That was what Richardson had thought too—the doubt had been written clearly on his face, although he had held his tongue then and was still holding it. And that was another point to young Richardson, proof not only of self-control but also of that indefinable instinct that told him the game had got ahead of him and the time to argue was past.

He caught himself staring at Richardson, who seemed to read his thoughts with embarrassing ease.

"It's no good trying to draw him, Mike." Richardson grinned and shook his head at Klobucki. "We're just the ruddy cannon-fodder—ours not to reason why!"

Klobucki's expression twisted wryly. "Don't quote Tennyson at me, Limey. This—" he gestured theatrically "—this isn't a Tennyson set-up. It's pure Thomas Babington Macaulay—

Now who will stand on either hand

And keep the bridge with me?

If you're going to quote at me you gotta get the right quotation."

Richardson chuckled. "Phooey ! It's all the same, anyway— fearful odds and the rest of it. It'll all be over soon, anyway, so don't you fret."

"Oh, sure ! It's okay for you," Klobucki said bitterly. "You aren't goin to kiss your liberal reputation goodbye when Teny turns up. But I am, and I'd sure as hell like to know what I'm doing it for." He eyed Butler doubtfully. "Is this really what old man Hobson's been warning us about—and what Dan's got so steamed up about?"

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Butler regarded him curiously. Sharp—they were all too damned sharp for mere boys. They probed and questioned more than he had ever dreamed of doing at their age, accepting nothing but their own skepticism.

"What makes you think it isn't?"

The American shrugged. "I don't really know. It isn't that I didn't think there was going to be some sort of trouble—not with the way Dan's been prophesying doom. But I kind of thought the Russians didn't go in for this James Bond stuff in real life—guys with guns in the rocks up there, that sort of thing."

"We could be deceiving you, eh?"

"The thought did cross my mind." Klobucki regarded Butler candidly. "The trouble is I don't really think you are, though. I guess I could be wrong there—but maybe you're wrong instead. That's the other possibility."

Butler felt another twinge of admiration: sharp again. Without knowing why, the boy had got close to the heart of the matter. And there was something of a debt here, too, owing to this young foreigner, of all people.

"Aye," he nodded soberly. "In a way you're quite right about the deceit. But it isn't our deceit, you know."

"I don't get you," Klobucki said, frowning. "You mean this isn't for real? No bullets for—what's his name

—the Portuguese guy Negreiros?"

"Oh, they'll be real enough. That is, if your friends meet General Negreiros down there at Ortolanacum, they'll be real enough then."

"Hell—now you've really lost me, sir."

"What I mean, young man, is that the Russians are not really concerned with the general—and certainly not with your fire-eating friends."

Klobucki's face screwed up in puzzlement. "Well, sir, they've sure got a funny way of not being concerned. Who the heck are they concerned with?"

"Why, with us, of course. What you call the fuzz. And with themselves—with themselves most of all."

Butler felt the words swell up in his throat as the American stared at him, bewildered. For once he felt he wanted to talk—

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I could tell you a tale, boy!

A tale of two operations—three now—and how they all failed. Maybe four if we let those young idiots through now—

Audley looked for Russians under your bed, but he didn't find any. Because there weren't any, that's why.

But that poor devil Zoshchenko tried to demobilise himself out of his own operation because he was in love with Polly Epton—and in love with being Neil Haig Smith too.

And when he cracked, then the KGB had to cover up for him, so they tried to give Audley just what he was looking for.

Tried and failed.

All for nothing, boy: an old man's nightmare and a young man's dream of freedom are about to coalesce here in Boghole Gap, and come to nothing—

"They're comin'!" Arthur came stumbling down the track beside the Wall, stabbing northwards with his finger. Butler looked across the causeway. They were coming.

"Not much of a demo there if you ask me," murmured Richardson contemptuously. "There can't be more than a couple of dozen, if that."

It was true enough. In the confined space of the common room and the dining room of Castleshields House there had seemed enough of them, but in this wide open wasteland they were lost: a pathetic straggle of innocents in a cold and barren landscape.

"I make it twenty-five to be exact," said Klobucki. "With Dan and me on this side that means there were only seven who didn't succumb to Terry's eloquence. He didn't do so badly."

"Ah, but half of 'em are only coming for kicks. It's the hard-core ones we've got to worry about. We'll soon sort the sheep from the goats, mark my words, Mike old lad. Besides, isn't Terry supposed to be non-violent?"

"So he darn well is." The mid-western accent thickened as irritation rose to its surface. "But if you think he hasn't got any guts—he's got a whole heap of guts, Terry has."

Richardson shrugged. "So long as they're non-violent guts—"

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"That's enough of that," Butler snapped angrily.

He had sensed the natural antipathy which lay between the American and the Englishman—between the Transatlantic Slav and the Anglicised Latin—but this was no time to let them indulge it. Not when he needed them both, Richardson because he was trained for trouble and Klobucki because his very presence on this side of the ditch would confuse the demonstrators.

"It sure doesn't mean he won't try to get past if we try to stop him." Klobucki spoke to Butler, ignoring Richardson. "Saying 'Stop' to Terry just puts him on his mettle. He'll come on, he'll come on—you can be damn sure about that."

Butler ran his hand over the stubble on his head, staring at the American. He could feel the damp on his palm; imperceptibly the gossamer-fine rain on the wind was building up to wetness. If only it would deluge down. But the bloody weather never closed in when you needed it, only when you didn't. That was always when rain stopped play.

"Then what can I say to him? What would you say?"

"You could try the truth, I suppose." Klobucki cocked his head, testing the idea. Then his shoulders lifted, acknowledging the uselessness of it. "But I guess that isn't really on. And he probably wouldn't believe it if you could tell it... I just don't know, Colonel. I just don't know. I don't have the gift of the gab."

Neither do I, thought Butler bitterly. Maybe David Audley could have swung it, could have found the right formula of words. But all Jack Butler knew was how to command and to obey. To wheedle and argue and convince had never figured among the required skills.

He turned back towards the causeway.

"All right, then." He looked left and right, injecting confidence into his voice. "You all know what to do.

Close up behind me if they come on, and then just stand your ground. But no undue violence. Push 'em back, don't hit 'em. Like a rugger scrum—"

"Rugby Union, not Rugby League," murmured Richardson. "No rough play except when the ref's looking t'other way. No eye-gouging, rabbit-punching or swinging on each other's testicles in the loose ruck, or boring like David Audley used to do when he was the Saracen's prop forward. Just good clean dirty play . . ."

Butler caught the younger man's eye for one fraction of a second and saw in it the wish that was his own

—the wish that it was Audley in charge here now, not Butler.

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With that flash of insight the anger came welling up in his throat like vomit: to dither in the face of a handful of students was despicable, gift of the gab or no. One got on with the job that was to hand, whatever it was, without crying. And this was his job now.

He locked his eyes on Terry across the fifty yards which was all that separated them and stepped forward on to the causeway.

Five more paces brought him abreast of the ditch. He stopped.

"That's far enough, chaps," he called.

The tone was right, more a request than a command, and the distance made shouting unnecessary. But that "chaps" had been the wrong word, false even to his own ears. Too late to unsay it though.

But they were slowing down all the same.

"You can't come any further." He managed to hold most of the neutrality in his tone, but with a suggestion of finality in it, as though it was a friendly warning that somewhere behind him, just out of sight, lay a far greater obstacle, impassable and far more hostile.

They stopped.

Butler knew instinctively that this was how it had been—how it must have been—when some band of young Pictish warriors, half cut on heather-beer or whatever they soused themselves in, came strutting up to the frontier post looking for trouble. The guard-commander's trick would be to get it into their addled heads in a stern but fatherly way that there was a regiment of Lusitanians just down the valley and that he was only the point of a thousand spears.

There was a murmur, confused and rising until Terry stilled it with a raised hand.

"This is a right-of-way, Colonel," he said coolly. "You can't stop us using it."

"I'm afraid I must stop you."

"By whose authority?"

By whose authority? Butler searched frantically in his memory for some authority these young men might accept, and found not one. It was precisely because they recognised no authority but their own judgement that they were here now: it was a question without an answer, and Terry, a veteran of so many confrontations, had known that before he asked it. He had out-manoeuvred Butler with ridiculous dummy2.htm

ease.

"It's for your own good," he growled desperately, aware that whatever he said now would be wrong. The moment of earlier confidence faded like a dream.

"Of course. It always is." Terry smiled. "But our own good isn't good enough any more—"

"Come on, Terry!" came a rude shout from behind. There was a bunching of the crowd on the causeway.

Another second and they would be coming on.

Butler knew he had lost. There had never been a chance that he wouldn't lose—Klobucki had been right.

"WAIT!" Butler bellowed above the rising hubbub. If reason wouldn't work, lies at least might delay them. "I tell you—Negreiros isn't coming! He won't be there!"

The noise subsided, then redoubled.

"Then why are you here?" Someone shouted, unanswerably, to be echoed instantly and derisively.

"Quiet!" Terry faced the demonstrators for a moment before turning back to Butler. "If Negreiros isn't there, Colonel, you can't possibly object to us coming over the Wall. But even if he is there, all we're going to do is to demonstrate peacefully—we're not going to cause any trouble—"

"Kick him out of the way, Terry!"

They were moving, but even as they did so Butler saw Klobucki corning up on his left.

"Terry—" Klobucki yelped "—he's right. You're being taken for a ride. For God's sake—"

He was seconds too late, his words lost in the shouting. For a moment it looked as though Terry was trying to hold them to an organised movement, but as his mouth opened a stocky young man ducked past him and made to pass Butler. He slowed as Richardson came into the gap and Butler caught him by the arm and swung him backwards the way he had come—he tripped over his own feet and sprawled in front of the crowd. There was an angry growl and the whole body surged forward.

Butler closed an arm round first one man on his left and then another on his right, hugging them to him and bending forward into the press in an attempt to form a solid obstacle in the centre of the causeway.

But the weight of bodies was overwhelming and he felt himself slipping and slithering backwards, his boots searching for some solid anchorage in the mud.

He seemed suddenly surrounded by grunts and curses. The prisoner of his left arm—it was Terry—

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wriggled furiously. Feeling him slipping from his grasp Butler shifted his grip to take hold of a handful of windbreaker, only to feel the material rip under his hand. Then there was a joyful yell and a meaty thunk just outside his vision and Terry stumbled and was left behind in the mud.

Arthur had abandoned his post to join the fight.

"Bastards! Pigs!" someone was shouting, and a fist glanced off Butler's cheekbone. He looked up just in time to see the fist flying again and ducked smartly to take it on the side of his head. With his newly-freed left hand he seized the wrist and twisted it fiercely, bringing the puncher to his knees. But now the prisoner of his right arm had stopped trying to break away and was battering him on the body with short but hard jabs which made him wince with pain. At the same time someone tried to wrap an arm round his neck: he was inexorably being pulled down on to the muddy roadway, dragged to the ground like a bear under the weight of the dogs—he heard himself growling fiercely, bearlike and helpless.

The sound of the shot, when it came, seemed so unnaturally loud that he thought for a moment it was a noise inside his head. It was the slackening of the press around him rather than the report itself echoing from the cliffs which corrected the misinformation in his brain.

The hands on him loosened, and instinctively he slipped his own holds, shaking himself free backwards and upwards. He felt Richardson's hand under his elbow steadying him, lifting him. As the gap between defenders and demonstrators opened up he could see a confusion of bodies squirming on the causeway, scrabbling for footholds.

But they weren't looking at him.

"Well—I'll be buggered!" exclaimed Richardson.

Butler turned, his eye running up the line of the Wall on High Crags.

The one thing about amateurs, the one thing you could rely on, was that they would ignore the plainest and simplest orders.

Dan McLachlan had plainly and simply ignored his, anyway: the Russian Alek—the deadly man with the gun— walked five yards ahead of him along the beaten path on the top of the Wall, his hands held stiffly above his head. The stiffness, even at this distance, suggested to Butler that Alek was extremely nervous, which was reasonable enough with a shotgun in the hands of an amateur pointed at the base of his spine; a shotgun held one-handed, too—over his left shoulder McLachlan carried the spoils of war, a delicate-looking long-barrelled sniper's rifle.

Butler understood the reason for Alek's nervousness. Apart from the public humiliation of it, that casually-held shotgun was enough to frighten anyone. And that shot, a feu de joie rather than a warning, must have given him a nasty jolt. He walked as if he realised only too well that he was lucky to be alive.

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Even as they watched him McLachlan raised the captured rifle in the air triumphantly, very much as he had waved the croquet mallet the evening before.

"The cheeky devil!" murmured Richardson. "You know, David's never going to believe this. Never."

Butler grunted non-committally.

"You think not?" Richardson's tone indicated that he found Butler's reaction ungracious. "Well, I tell you one thing for sure: he's damn well saved our bacon. We don't have to mix it with Mike Klobucki's nonviolent friends any more. They can demonstrate until they're blue in the face now, thank God."

Butler was slightly surprised at the feeling in Richardson's voice. Then he noticed, with an ignoble sense of satisfaction, that Richardson had the beginnings of a fine black eye.

"True. They can go or stay as they please now," he replied curtly.

"And Alek?"

"You take him back to Castleshields. Then drive him to Carlisle or Newcastle and turn him loose."

"Turn him loose!" Richardson's dented nonchalance cracked.

"Aye. He hasn't done anything."

That was the irony of it all: nobody had done anything. Apart from a few punches on the causeway, which the demonstrators would soon forget in the interest of their own self-respect, the slate was clean.

Because of that, this operation would never go down as a famous victory, a close-run thing. Only a handful of people would know that the realm had been successfully defended without fuss, which was the mark of the most desirable conclusion.

Only one job remained now, to finish what Neil Haig Smith had started.

XIX

NOW THAT IT was no longer required, the drizzle perversely thickened into steady, slanting rain. With it the visibility quickly closed in around them, blotting out first the more distant ridges to the north and south, and then the crags on each side.

Butler stood silent, watching the bedraggled procession fading into the mist beyond the causeway. Their dummy2.htm

heads were down and their shoulders hunched against the downpour. Only Alek walked with any suggestion of spirit.

But then the sun shone for Alek, a sun of survival that no English weather could dim. How much he had known, or how much he had hoped, Butler couldn't tell. But knowing the way the KGB worked he guessed Alek had known little beyond the inescapable truth that he was the expendable man in this operation; the man with the dangerous and thankless task, the one-time tiger who had been demoted, like Butler, to the role of staked goat.

Butler had recalled that same feeling of bitter impotence so vividly—he had been prey to it himself less than twenty-four hours before—that it had softened the rough edges from the few words he had spoken to the man. It had not exactly warmed him to say those words—that would have betrayed a most dangerous and wrong-headed sentimentality. But it felt like an assertion of humanity as well as strength to grant freedom to an enemy.

So now Alek knew one more thing: that against all the likely odds he had once more survived. Until the next time, anyway.

McLachlan coughed diplomatically behind him.

"If we don't go and collect Polly soon we're all going to get soaked to the skin." A lock of damp hair fell across the boy's face in agreement with his statement. "I think the rain up here's wetter than the stuff down south, you know."

Butler nodded. "All right. Let's go then."

McLachlan picked up the shotgun and fell into step beside him.

"That chap with the rifle—that was a bit of luck, you know."

"I don't doubt it."

"I mean... I just stumbled on him. He was fiddling with his gun—it wasn't loaded. I think he was putting it together."

"You were lucky then, weren't you!"

"What I mean is, I didn't forget what you told me, sir," McLachlan went on stiffly. "But I didn't have any choice."

"Aye, I can believe that," said Butler.

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McLachlan started to say something, then stopped in deference to Butler's taciturn mood, shaking his head to himself at the unfairness of it nonetheless.

They climbed in silence for a while along the track beside the Wall. The rain-mist thickened around them as they ascended, while the Wall itself rose and fell beside them, sometimes only waist-high and sometimes head-high, cutting off the edge of the cliff beyond it. And as they went higher the rocky outcrops on the open southern side began to build up too, enclosing them on the narrow path as between two walls, one natural and the other man-made.

"This will do," Butler muttered. He stopped and turned to McLachlan, who had fallen half-a-dozen paces behind him. "I've got some instructions for you."

"Instructions?"

"Orders would be more accurate."

McLachlan grinned at him uncertainly. "More orders? We've not finished, do you mean? I hope to God they aren't too complicated."

"They're not complicated." Butler stared directly into the wary eyes. "And this really is the finish, boy.

The game's over."

"What game?"

"Our game—and your game. All you have to do is to go back from here and pack your things up. Don't bother to see Epton—we'd rather you simply left him a note saying you've had to return to Oxford to see Sir Geoffrey Hobson—"

"See the Master? What about?"

"You aren't going to see him. You will write him a letter. You'll tell him you're resigning your scholarship and you're leaving Oxford."

"Leaving—?" McLachlan tossed the damp hair across his forehead. "Are you crazy?"

"We want it in writing, but you can keep it short. Tell him the family business makes it necessary for you to return to Rhodesia."

"Rhodesia! I'm damned if I—"

Butler overrode the angry words. "Of course we don't expect you to go there. There's a ship in the Pool dummy2.htm

of London that will suit you better—the Baltika. You have my word that no one will stop you going aboard."

McLachlan stared at him incredulously.

A good one, thought Butler with dispassionate approval. And a good one would quite naturally play to the last ball of the last over. It made it all the easier to obey Audley's parting words: we don't want any trouble, so don't make it too difficult for him. Just make the lie stick.

"It's over, lad—all kaput," he began gruffly. "It never did stand a chance, even before Zoshchenko cracked up."

McLachlan continued to stare at him for one long, bitter moment. Then slowly, almost as if the hands were disobeying the brain, the muzzle of the shotgun came up until it was in line with Butler's stomach.

Only it wasn't McLachlan any more.

It was subjective, of course; Butler knew that even as he recalled the Master's words, 'He's more mature than the usual run of undergraduates'.

And yet not wholly subjective, because the acceptance of failure was putting back those concealed years into the face, just as it must have done with Zoshchenko as his hold on Neil Smith's identity weakened at the last. Now he was watching the same struggle for that inner adjustment: he was watching the false McLachlan wither and die.

What was left was older and harder—this had been the vital half of the pair, after all. But it was still a pathetically young face, even over the shotgun's mouth.

"Don't be foolish now," said Butler gently. "Not when we're giving you the easy way out."

McLachlan licked a runnel of rain from his lip. "The— easy way?"

"Aye. I meant what I said: we're letting you go home. You've been damn lucky, lad. If Zoshchenko hadn't gone sour on you, we might have let you go and hang yourself. I think we would have done, too."

The damp strands of straw hair fell forward across the face again. Viking hair, thought Butler. But then he had read somewhere that the Vikings had also sailed eastwards, down the Russian rivers, leaving their ruthless seed there as well as in the West.

The young man licked his lips again.

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"I could have sworn you didn't know. At the bridge, I mean—" McLachlan bit off the end of the sentence as though ashamed of it.

Butler shook his head slowly. A touch of truth now, to gild the big untruth.

"I didn't know, not then. You weren't my business." Let the boy wonder which of his friends hadn't been his friend. "I didn't know until yesterday afternoon."

"Yesterday afternoon?"

"McLachlan was partially left-handed, wasn't he?"

"Yes, but—"

"Oh, you were good. You must have put in a great deal of practice. I didn't notice anything wrong, anyway."

"I don't understand. If you didn't notice anything wrong, what did you notice?"

"You made me think, lad, you made me think! You see, your left-handedness—or McLachlan's—is the rarer variety. There are plenty who bat right-handed and bowl left—Denis Compton does, and so does Derek Underwood for Kent. But not many do it the other way round. The last time I saw it was years ago, a chap named Robbie Smeaton in the Lancashire League, a spin-bowler."

"No, you were damn good." He smiled patronisingly into the young man's frowning face. "A little clumsy at times, maybe. But you even held the croquet mallet like a lefthander when you swung it between your knees."

He gestured casually at the shotgun. "Do we really need that now, lad?"

The muzzle didn't move. "Go on, Colonel."

Butler shrugged. It had been bad luck, that rare variety of left-handedness. But then the false McLachlan had dropped every game where it showed—cricket and golf and hockey— and concentrated on rugby, where it didn't show.

Every game except croquet. And in that he had schooled himself to play as the real McLachlan would have played.

"You made me think about you. You see, we had a file put together quickly on you, but it didn't mention that. It wasn't important, I suppose they thought—if they even thought about it."

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The rain rolled down McLachlan's white face. There was a strained, blank look about it now which made Butler uneasy. For the first time he found himself measuring the distance between them. It was no more than four paces, but there rose a sharp little outcrop of rock in the middle of it, like the tip of an iceberg thrusting through the turf. He hadn't noticed it before because it hadn't mattered. Only now it seemed to matter.

He shook the rain from his face, stamping his feet and edging to the left of the rock.

The shotgun jerked peremptorily. "Just stand where you are, Colonel. . . And stop talking in riddles."

"Riddles?"

"You didn't see anything. But you saw something. What did you see ?"

"You could be on your way home now. This isn't getting you anywhere."

Again the gun lifted. "What did you see?"

The boy was frightened: for some reason he was scared rigid. That pinched look was unmistakable.

"What did you see?"

And the fear was catching. To be at the end of a gun held by a frightened boy wasn't what he had expected.

"I saw the reason why your man set fire to Eden Hall," Butler growled. "I never could understand why he did it— Smith's records weren't important any more—we knew who he was, and he was dead. So killing me didn't make sense."

"But when I saw you playing croquet out there on the lawn, it was then I realised that your files would have been in that attic too—that if I'd known about you then, I'd have looked at them too. Then I really saw you and Smith together for the first time, as a pair, and that was all I needed, really." He paused.

"Just what was there in those records?"

McLachlan looked at him blankly for a moment. Then his lips twisted.

"We never did know. It was the only piece of his life we never properly covered, because the man we sent down originally, back in '68, couldn't find any of those old records. But when Smith was killed we reckoned someone might go down, someone of yours. We couldn't risk you seeing what we hadn't seen."

"What made you think we'd check on Smith?"

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"He said he was going to give himself up. Just himself, not me. He hadn't the guts to be a traitor. But we weren't sure how far he'd gone with it." McLachlan checked himself suddenly. "It doesn't matter now, anyway."

Butler shrugged again, elaborately. "It never did matter. We were on to you from the start. I tell you, boy, you've been lucky."

"Lucky?"

"Aye. Luckier than most. You're young—it isn't the end of your career. You've had a valuable experience, you might say. And it wasn't your fault you failed. They won't hold it against you."

McLachlan looked at him narrowly, a little of his old self-possession reasserting itself.

"I wonder about that—whether you really were on to us."

Butler snorted derisively. "Think what you like. If you think a man like David Audley would waste his time ..."

"Audley?"

"You young fool, do you think Audley's been at Cumbria all these months chasing shadows?" Butler snapped. "Put that bloody fool gun down and be thankful we don't take you seriously. Go back home and tell 'em not to send a boy to do man's work." He ran his hand over his head and shook the rain from it.

"Just go home and stop being a nuisance. There's nothing else you can do now."

The gun came up convulsively from Butler's stomach to his face.

"Oh, but there is—th-there is!" McLachlan stuttered. "The boy can still do m-man's work."

Butler stared into the twin black holes, trying to show a contempt which he didn't feel.

"What man's work?"

"I'll be a nuisance." McLachlan's voice was eager now. "If that's the only thing I can be, I'll be that then."

"What—?" The word stuck in Butler's throat.

"I'll give the Press a field day. The bastards are afraid of the students as it is. But I'll give them something to get their teeth into—I'll give them Paul Zoshchenko and Peter Ryleiev."

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"Poppycock!" Butler tried desperately to force derision into the word. But he could only remember what Audley had said back in London: You can imagine what the Press would do with Comrade Zoshchenko if they got hold of him! "You're crazy!"

"Crazy!" McLachlan laughed. "Terry Richmond tipped the papers off about Ortolanacum—they know something's up. I'll tell 'em a lot more."

"They'll not believe you—nothing happened at Ortolanacum, damn it."

"I'll give them something happening—something they'll have to believe. I'll give them you, Colonel Butler!" He giggled. "I'll give them you with your head blown off!"

Butler looked down the twin barrels: the black holes seemed enormous now, like the mouths of cannon.

Tomorrow the girls would get his Edinburgh postcards— Princes Street for Diana, Arthur's Seat for Jane and Mons Meg the Cannon for little Sally.

And he was looking down Mons Meg—this mad boy who was too scared to go home empty-handed would squeeze the trigger and he'd be dead when the postman knocked and the girls came scampering down the stairs.

"Don't be a fool," he croaked. "Put it down!"

"Put it down, Dan!" Polly Epton commanded out of the mist.

XX

SHE WAS SOMEWHERE away to the left, ahead of him and behind McLachlan, but he couldn't see her.

"Don't turn round, Dan—you couldn't do it quick enough. And, you're in the open." Polly's voice sounded preternaturally clear in the silence between the rocks and the stones. "Put it down."

She was behind the Wall. Alongside them it rose head high, but it dropped abruptly a yard or two behind McLachlan, who would have to swing the shotgun almost 180 degrees to get in a shot at her.

But the muzzle covering Butler only shook a little.

"If he shoots me, tell Audley, Polly—nobody else!" Butler barked urgently.

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He let the breath drain out of his lungs; until that second he hadn't felt them strained to bursting point.

Now he let himself relax without taking his eyes off McLachlan.

"You can't win now, boy. Do as she says."

"I can still pull the trigger. Then it'd be too late for you."

"Aye. But so can she. Then Audley would deal with things. You'd still lose."

"Another tragic accident?" McLachlan was getting a grip on himself. He raised his voice to carry over his shoulder. "Would you really shoot me, Polly dear?"

"Try me."

"Have you ever killed anyone before? With a shotgun?"

Polly said nothing. The stillness was thick on the crag, as though the rain and mist had blanketed every sound as well as every object outside the twenty yards of visibility that was left to them.

"Makes an awful mess of a man, you know, Polly. At this range you'd make an awful mess of me."

"You wouldn't be the first man the Eptons killed on the Wall," Polly said. "I'm running true to form."

Good girl.

"Touché!" McLachlan laughed. "But tell me—"

"He's talking to put you off your guard, Miss Epton," Butler cut in. "He's cornered and he knows it."

"Cornered?" McLachlan shook his head. "It's you who are cornered, Colonel. If Polly pulls the trigger, then my finger's just as likely to squeeze too. It seems to me you get it either way."

"I don't see that's going to do you much good, boy. The only hope you've got is to put down your gun."

"And the only hope you've got is for Polly to go away." McLachlan's eyes flickered. "Do you hear that, Polly. If you clear off smartly I won't kill him. That's fair."

"If you go away, Miss Epton, he'll kill us both. Me first, then you."

"I'm not going away. Put the gun down, Dan."

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"No." McLachlan's mouth tightened. "I'll count ten."

"It won't do any good."

"One."

"I only heard the last part of what you were saying to him, Colonel—"

"Two."

"—Who is he?"

"Three."

"I think his real name's Ryleiev. Peter Ryleiev."

"Four."

"He's a Russian?"

"Aye. An agent of their KGB."

"Five."

"But I thought—spies—were older."

"He's a new junior sort, Miss Epton. Specially trained for one job."

"Six."

"What job?"

"To join our Civil Service, I'd guess. Foreign Office most likely. He's very bright."

"But why?"

"Seven."

"Everybody likes to have an agent in the heart of the enemy camp, Miss Epton. The trouble is you have to find a traitor. Someone like Burgess or MacLean, or Penkovsky."

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"What's wrong with them?"

"They're flawed men, my dear. They do good work, but it's as though they wear out more easily than patriots. The head-shrinkers could probably explain it better than I can, but it's almost as though they want to get caught in the end."

"EIGHT!"

There was a touch of panic there, and the girl snapped it up like a spider on a fly.

"You can count until you're ruddy well blue in the face, Peter whatever-it-is. I'm not going."

"You bitch!"

"You see, Miss Epton, what all intelligence directors dream of is getting one of their own men—not a traitor but a patriot —into the other camp. But it's almost impossible to do, because the outsiders and latecomers are always screened so carefully. And even if they pass they're never really trusted."

"So even the ordinary candidates from the universities are screened thoroughly now. A lot more thoroughly than Peter Ryleiev's masters expected."

He stared at Ryleiev coldly. It wasn't true, of course. But it would be true in future—the swine had seen to that!

"They thought if they could slip one of their men in between school and university. Someone they'd specially groomed for the job, someone who looked younger than he was. To take the place of the boy they'd short-listed."

There was a pause.

"You mean he's the real Dan McLachlan's double?"

Butler met Ryleiev's eyes through the drizzle.

"No. I'd guess the resemblance was only a general one. Because no one over here had seen the boy for years, and he had no relatives here."

"But his father?"

"A drunken blackguard in Rhodesia? They chose the McLachlans almost as much for the father as the son, Miss Epton. They needed someone they could lean on."

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"But the real Dan, what did they do with him?"

The voice out of the mist faltered as the only likely answer hung between them in the damp air: six-foot of Rhodesian dirt somewhere in the bush, with stones piled on it to stop the hyenas from digging.

Nineteen years old. From Eden Hall to a backwoods farm in Mashonaland and a backwoods school in the Orange Free State. And then a grave in the bush.

"And now tell her about Paul Zoshchenko."

Ryleiev grinned at him.

"You should have taken my offer, Polly. Now you have to take it on the chin about poor dear Neil—

have you forgotten about him, Polly?"

"What about Neil?"

"Miss Epton—" Butler began, tensing.

"The other half of the team, Polly, Neil was. Just another dirty little spy. My other half." The shotgun came up an inch. "Don't try it, Colonel!"

Butler clenched his fists impotently.

"You nearly bought it that time, Colonel. . . You see, he wasn't quite honest with us back at the cottage, Polly, the Colonel wasn't. He didn't come up here to avenge Neil. He came up here to finish the job."

"That isn't true, Miss Epton," Butler snapped. "Neil wanted to get away from it. He'd finished with it."

"Not a dirty little spy any more. Only a dirty little traitor," Ryleiev sneered. "Another of the flawed men

—"

"Shut up!" Polly's voice came shrill from the Wall, its coolness gone. There was a moment's silence, then she spoke again. "How did—Neil—how did he die, Colonel? How did he die?"

"He died by accident." Butler tried to reach out to her with his voice. "He was going to see your godfather at Oxford, to tell him the truth. It was dark and he was going too fast. It was an accident."

"He was—" McLachlan started scornfully.

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"But I can tell you why he died—" Butler overrode the words and the gun barrel. "He was this man's colleague, that's true."

"His colleague?"

Zoshchenko had been cast as the go-between and messenger: the old schoolfriend whom Ryleiev could always meet with perfect propriety without exposing himself to suspicion. But nothing would be served by spelling it all out to the unfortunate girl now; it could only shake her nerve more when she needed steadying most.