Dead Letter Drop

20

Trout and Trumbull would have looked more at home in a dusty gentleman’s outfitters — probably the school clothing department of an old-fashioned provincial department store. They were pasty-faced men, both well into their fifties, Trout short and stocky, Trumbull short and thin, and both wore dark flannel suits, white shirts and grey-and-black patterned ties knotted very precisely.

They had clean hands, white, with a few veins showing, their shoes were brilliantly polished, and what hair remained to them was neatly lacquered to their heads. They smelt, ever so slightly, of a mixture of talcum powder and hair cream.

Trout and Trumbull ran the Playroom. This is the name given to the area of the underground offices at Hyde Park that houses the agents’ weapons, or toys as they are better known. These two gentlemen were the agents’ armourers; they doled out the weapons, cleaned the weapons, serviced the weapons, and spent much of their time trying to devise new weapons, some brilliant, some not so brilliant, but always weapons that could be trusted to work. Their reputation for reliability was legendary. Once, some years ago, a bullet had failed to go off; Trout and Trumbull were in tears for a week. The agent wasn’t; he was dead. Now they packed every single bullet themselves.

Messrs Trout and Trumbull were not the world’s liveliest people, nor did they have much of a sense of humour, or if they did they never made it apparent to me or to anybody else; but I had to take my hat off to them. ‘I would take my hat off to any pair of grey-haired gentlemen who could hand me in all solemnity a packet of exploding parrot seeds without the faintest hint of a smile. They were showing me the latest they had to offer.

‘Exploding parrot seeds?’

‘Correct, Mr 4404,’ said Trumbull. Due to regulations, they had to address everyone by their number only; but it was beyond their dignity not to place the correct title before the number. Accordingly my number was always prefixed by Mister.

‘What do I do? Fill some poor parrot’s food tray with these things and wait for him to explode?’ I had visions of perplexed customs officials all over the world wondering why a small percentage of English businessmen and businesswomen had taken to carrying packets of parrot seed in their baggage.

‘Mr Trout.’ Trumbull indicated with a short movement of his hand.

Trout solemnly took a packet and held it up. It read: ‘Oldham’s sunflower seeds for parrots and other tropical cage birds.’

‘Vacuum-packed,’ said Trout, tapping the packet. ‘No air inside. Open the top’ — he proceeded to rip off the top — ‘and the air reacts with the seeds, fuses them.’ He took out a seed and held it up. ‘Come, Mr 4404.’ He walked over to the firing range and I followed. He pushed a button and a dummy man was automatically lowered down on a web of wires. The dummy was a complete life-size replica of a 200-pound human, authentic in every possible detail, including internally. Trout and Trumbull had invented this type of dummy, which were now produced in vast quantities for a great variety of testing purposes.

Trout tossed a parrot seed at the dummy and it landed at his feet; there followed an explosion which shattered the dummy completely, blowing him in forty different directions. I was impressed. Trout turned to me quite unemotionally. ‘Don’t leave an opened packet lying around. Best used for dealing with a crowd; throw the whole lot at once — don’t want to go tripping over with an open packet.’

Trout could have spared his breath.

Trumbull handed me a cigarette lighter. ‘Click one way and it lights cigarettes. Click another way and it takes pictures. Click another way and it records sound. Click another way and it’s a radio receiver. Click another way’ — he pointed it away from me, and a flame about 10 foot long seared out. ‘Click another way,’ this time he just pointed, ‘and in ten seconds it blows to smithereens.’ Trout and Trumbull were big licks on bangs this year.

‘If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I think I’ll take a rain check on those two and stick to what I’m used to right now.’ I handed them my Beretta and they gave me a shiny, stripped, repaired, oiled and tested replacement. Along with it they handed me a new pair of hand-made leather boots. I tugged my old ones off and pulled the new ones on. They were a good snug fit. One heel was packed with spare ammunition, the other contained a silencer.

Away down a corridor I heard the dull ‘plunk’ of a silenced gun, followed by the whang of the bullet hitting some metal target. The ‘plunk’ got louder at each shot until it became a loud ‘crack’. It has always been a problem for the ballistics boys to produce an effective silencer. They were trying out a new lightweight silencer. From the sound of it, Trout and Trumbull had a long way to go.

In another direction a steady ‘crack-whang-crack-whang-crack-whang’ of target practice started up. Open-plan offices were all right in some places. Here it was downright mournful. Maybe if it wasn’t for Trout and Trumbull it would be all the fun of the fair. Somehow I doubted it.

There was one specific item I wanted from Trout and Trumbull; I filled in a requisition form and Trumbull marched off into the racks of stores, moments later he returned, holding it with all the emotion of a man holding a replacement set of wiper blades; but it wasn’t wiper blades in his hand. It was something that looked a good deal more innocent even than that: it was a slim object that to all outward appearances was one of a standard brand of slimline pocket calculators, complete with chimes. I slipped it inside my jacket pocket, left Trout and Trumbull to their devices, and look the elevator two floors up to Wotan’s domain.

Arthur was white and shaking and looking very agitated when I went in. ‘You’re for the high jump!’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘which particular high jump are you referring to?’

‘Your boss, Commander Scatliffe.’

‘My boss is Fifeshire.’

‘I know that and you know that,’ he gave me a long warm smile, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘It would appear that Commander Scatliffe isn’t aware of that. Not that it’s any of my business — and you can be sure I haven’t told him a thing — but he’s out for your blood.’

I refrained from telling him that that was more than a small hunch of my own. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘He’s left a message in no uncertain terms that the moment you turn up here I’m to tell you to go straight to Whitehall. He’s really hopping mad, old boy.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing very much at all; he just shouted down the phone at me, the same instructions about three times, then hung up. I damn near shouted back at him. Been rubbing him up the wrong way?’ He smiled wryly.

‘I don’t have to try very hard with him.’

‘Take a tip from me — it’s not my business to be telling you this, but I think you should listen to me for a moment. I get to hear a lot; not everything, but a lot of what goes on in this outfit sooner or later ends up down here. I don’t listen through keyholes but it’s unavoidable, doing this job, that I should hear things. Scatliffe’s going to the top. Whatever your view on him might be it’s going to be better for you in the long term to stay on the right side of him. He’s very good at rubbing people up the wrong way himself but he is going to the top, and he’s a relatively young man so when he does get to the top he’s going to remain there a long time. If you’re going to stay in this game, really make this your career, your chances of promotion and getting into the plum jobs aren’t going to be too clever if you remain on the wrong side of him.’

I nodded. ‘Thank you; but it’s not easy.’

‘I’m sure it’s not.’

‘Will Fifeshire get the reins back?’

‘Until the call I had from him yesterday I’m afraid I’d written him off. So had everyone else. Now I’m not so sure.’ He shrugged. ‘Commander Scatliffe’s got himself pretty well entrenched and he’s got his hands on most things; if Fifeshire does come back, and please God he does, he’s not going to have an easy task getting back to the real controls. That S.O.B., if you’ll excuse my language, is making sure of that.’

I’d never before heard Arthur express a personal point of view. It indicated to me that he had very strong feelings indeed on the subject. ‘Does Scatliffe know Fifeshire’s coming back?’

‘If he does he’s kept damn quiet about it. Personally I shouldn’t think so — I think he’s written him off. And I shouldn’t be saying all this to you.’

‘So why are you?’ I wanted to get as much out of him as I could and he seemed in the mood to talk.

He pulled out a bag of Turkish delight and proffered it to me. ‘Without the likes of you,’ he said, ‘Wotan, all that clanking stuff out there, me, the rest of us, we’d all be bloody useless. There’s nothing in Wotan’s brain that hasn’t been put there by the sweat of the likes of you. All my job consists of is filing it so I know where to find it. But in my time here I’ve seen a lot of good men on your side of the fence, youngsters like you, and there’s damned few of them make it to their pensions. Too damned few.

‘When you go out on a mission you have no idea what the truth of the situation is; only your chief knows and often he doesn’t know that much, only has the vaguest of ideas — information given to him by other operatives, sometimes false information from double agents, sometimes he’s just acting on a hunch. You and your fellow agents are unfortunately dispensible. Very dispensible. It costs the Government a lot less to train an agent than it does to build a Chieftain tank; to the British Government you people are very cheap indeed. I’m not saying this to demean you, I think you’re one of the best that’s ever come my way, and I want to make sure you keep on digging; but you have to look to your laurels. The next person that starts digging could easily be the chap in your village graveyard and the hole he’d be making could be for you.’

Arthur popped another sweet in his mouth and chewed for a few moments. ‘What I’m saying to you is, don’t antagonise someone like Commander Scatliffe; one day — it could be tomorrow, in a week, a month, or five years, but one day, as sure as the sun rises and sets every morning — he’s going to have a job come up that he knows is going to get one of his agents killed; and when he’s going through that list of those he could easiest spare you don’t want to find your name is at the top. That’s all.’ He handed my plastic chip back to me. ‘I’ve got the gen on this little fellow,’ he said.

Arthur had made it clear that the subject was now closed. He tapped the chip a few times on his desk.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s a booking clerk with a strange bias.’ He went on to tell me exactly what I already knew about the chip. ‘Where did you get it? And don’t tell me it fell off the back of a lorry!’

‘I dug it out of a hole in the ground.’

He smiled. ‘You don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that there might be any connection in this chip between one Dr Yuri Orchnev and a certain Mr X, not unlikely to be one Charles Harrison, of Intercontinental Plastics Corporation in New York?’

I came close to falling off my chair. ‘How the hell did you find that out?’

‘Old Wotan’s not too bad at digging either.’ He smiled. ‘Have another sweet?’

I thought in silence for some moments. Wotan wasn’t a magician. It was a computer that could do no more than assemble, arrange and occasionally analyse facts that humans fed into it. If Wotan could figure out that Charlie Harrison was a mole, and I had figured it out myself pretty easily, then how, I wondered, did whoever originally hired him let him slip through the security nets? ‘Who else other than you knows this?’

‘Fifeshire. He ordered me to start running checks on all Intercontinental staff back in June. I sent him a memorandum of my view about Harrison on, er, let me see —’ he tapped the keyboard — ‘August 11th.’

I went very cold. ‘How did you send it?’

‘Courier. Security envelope. Usual procedure.’

‘How did you find out about Orchnev?’

‘It’s logical: deputy chief of KGB computer technology; a mole in our own computer concern — this little chip might well be the link.’ He paused and blushed; his beard twitched. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t much feel like facing my wife after I dropped you off,’ he blushed more. ‘So I came straight back here and set to work; I felt that if you’d brought it, it must be pretty interesting — but don’t let that go to your head.’

Now I realised why Arthur had been sheet-white and shaking; it wasn’t that he was about to be bumped off; it was simply lack of sleep. I also realised how he’d got to the position he held: he’d earned it.

‘Surely this method of communication must now have been dropped by the Russians — they must know that Orchnev has defected and passed the information on to either the Americans or the British?’

‘No, I don’t think so at all; our information is that the wretched Orchnev was bumped off shortly after he arrived in the States and before he had a chance to make contact with anyone.’

‘Where did you get that from?’

‘By tuning in to Charlie Harrison; about an hour and a half ago.’ He gave an extremely broad beam.

For sure, in spite of all that icing sugar that adorned him, there were no flies on Arthur.

‘Who bumped him off?’ I asked.

‘Well — I only came in at the tail end of a message so I didn’t get all the facts — but I would presume the Russians themselves; unless you know better?’ He looked quizzically at me.

‘I wish I did,’ was all I decided to say.

I left Arthur’s office and went out into the corridor; two extremely large men, about my age, nearly tripped over themselves in their hurry to get up from their chairs. They looked as though they had been constructed from a twin-pack Action Man kit. They succeeded in blocking my path in both directions at once. ‘Mr Flynn?’ they asked in stereo.

‘He’s in there,’ I said.

‘One moment, please.’ One of them clamped his hand around my wrist. The other knocked on Arthur’s door. I had taken an instant dislike to the one who held my wrist and I expressed this dislike by swinging my free fist, with all the force I could muster, into the area of his polyester-and-wool mixture, creaseproof, ready-to-wear suit trousers, about half an inch below where the zipper stopped; this caused him to start performing an action not unlike that of a Muslim saying his midday prayers, and I took advantage of the situation by bolting off down the corridor. I cut down through a couple of fire doors, up the back steps, past a couple of security guards, who nodded politely at me, and came out into the middle of a small, tatty barber shop in a basement off North Audley Street; this shop was one of the several camouflaged entrances to the complex. ‘Afternoon, Henry,’ I said.

The barber lifted his scissors from the short back and sides he was performing. ‘Afternoon, sir.’

I was out into the street, doubled round into Park Lane, and managed to get straight into a taxi that was unloading a fare at an apartment building.

‘Carlton House Terrace,’ I said, ‘56.’

I got out at 56, flashed my security pass and, avoiding the excruciatingly slow lift, sprinted the four flights of stairs up to the Control floor.

There was the hawk-nosed, skinny, wrinkly tartar perched at the typewriter in the ante-room to Scatliffe’s office; she lifted her bill to enquire the purpose of my visit and then promptly had to duck it under her desk in order to retrieve the pile of papers my slipstream had swept off it. I stormed straight into Scatliffe’s office and caught him well and truly on the hop, one hand holding a telephone receiver to his ear, the other supporting a finger up his nose. The finger came out smartly and he snapped into the telephone, ‘He’s here now,’ and replaced the receiver.

‘I want to know what the hell’s going on, Scatliffe. I’m just about through with you and everything else, I’ve had it up to here.’ I swung my hand up under my chin. ‘I’ve been kidnapped, shot at, my car’s been blown up, my home’s been destroyed. I’m mad and I’m fed up, Scatliffe, I’m fed up with the whole damn thing and I want some explanations.’

He stood in rock silence for a long time, his cold eyes colder than ever, his small frame cosseted inside his expensive and natty tweed suit, his pasty-white face shaking like a blancmange in a breeze. He clenched and opened his hands, pushing his white knuckles down on the leather top of his desk, and lifting them up again. Slowly he leaned forward; his lips curved into a circle and he began to spit out his words like a machine gun. ‘I have been trying to get hold of you for eight days. You have gone absent without leave and I’m going to have you very severely disciplined. You have caused this department untold damage with your crazy recklessness, God alone knows what you have been up to but you must have taken complete and utter leave of your senses, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, breaking into my house, breaking into Mr Wetherby’s flat, breaking your cover and returning to England, going here, going there, going bloody everywhere. Who the hell do you think you are? Have you gone completely and utterly mad? How much of the Secret Service do you intend to destroy before you’ve finished? Half of it? Three quarters of it? Or all of it? You’re not above the law — who the hell gave you permission to start rummaging in my house? Who the hell gave you permission to beat up a member of staff less than ten minutes ago? I’ve got a million questions for you, Flynn, and I want every single one of them answered and answered thoroughly, and if you don’t have some damn good answers, the consequences for you are going to be grave, very grave indeed. Do I make myself clear?’

I looked at him and with great restraint said, ‘Yes. Perfectly clear.’

‘You’re removed from your assignment as from now. You’ll work inside this building on your report and when you have finished it you will be suspended from this Service until we have decided what to do about you. You are not to leave London and you are to keep this office informed of your exact whereabouts, day and night. Is that also clear?’

‘It is. And I want my house put back into order within half an hour.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know because I won’t believe it. My house has been taken apart at the seams.’

‘I don’t know anything about your house; I didn’t even know you had a house. Perhaps you’ve had burglars. You do get them in England, you know.’

‘Burglars don’t saw your radiators in half.’

‘If you’re accusing me I’d like it in writing.’

‘You’ll get it.’ I stormed back out and sent the siren’s pile scattering back onto the floor again.

I went down to the third floor to my office. It was just about an office, at any rate: it made the average changing room of a King’s Road boutique look like the Mansion House banqueting hall. It had one chair, one desk and one light, and had to be entered sideways, and then by someone slim and agile. It was tucked away at the back of the accounts department; all agents’ offices were tucked away in different parts of different buildings so that no one would know who were agents and who were lesser or greater minions. For all the accounts department knew, I could be a humble costings clerk; for all I knew, the entire accounts department could actually be field operatives in disguise — except that most of them didn’t look as though they were capable of going to the bathroom unaided.

I filled in a requisition form and took it along to the filing clerk; he looked like he lived in a cosy little bed inside one of his filing cabinets. He was about 50, very short indeed, with an immaculate three-piece pin-stripe suit, watch chain, tie chain, chain-link sleeve bands and no doubt chain-link garters. His shirt was clean, his suit immaculately pressed, and every hair on his head perfectly and permanently ironed into place. Unfortunately the wretched man had filthy body odour and the rest of the staff permanently kept well clear of him.

Whilst accepting my requisition form with his usual dispassionate seriousness his face expressed the merest trace of excitement at the prospect of actually having a task to do. Without a word he scurried to a cabinet immediately behind him, pulled out a drawer about halfway up it, and had to stand on tiptoe in order to see into it; he shovelled his two arms in over the top and gave the impression from behind of an errant schoolboy trying to peer into someone else’s Christmas stocking. He rummaged about for some while then produced a sheath of papers. He came back over, slipped them inside an envelope and handed them to me.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He nodded silently and I realised I had never in all the time I had been here heard him speak. I wondered if perhaps he was a mute. I turned to go back to my office when behind me I heard him suddenly and loudly say, ‘High!’

I turned around thinking he must have discovered his personal problem, but he was pointing at the filing cabinet.

‘Difficult for me to reach up there,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t bother me,’ he went on. ‘Any time I can oblige,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

I decided the Department must have got him cheap. I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope. Inside was a wadge of phone bills attached to massive breakdowns of times, zones and units; these breakdowns had been instigated by Scatliffe so that they could be analysed for cost-effective use of the telephones. Even MI5 had budget problems.

The wadge I held was all the telephone bills of the Department for the past six months; it was a hefty wadge — the Department didn’t scrimp on phone calls. I began with the April, May, June quarter and turned to May 1st, three and a half months before Fifeshire’s shooting.