Hopscotch

— 20 -

From a kiosk in Stockmann in Helsinki he made one call to London and then he rode a taxi to the airport and made it onto the British Airways Boeing with only a few minutes to spare. Snow-flakes drifted past in the night when they lifted off. He catnapped most of the way to Heathrow and walked through customs with only a routine glance at the Jules Parker passport. He rode the bus in from the airport to the terminal in Kensington and then did a little charade designed to disclose a tail, transferring from tube-train to red bus to taxi; he left the taxi in Regent Street and backtracked by bus into Kensington and walked down to the Kingston Close Hotel in its mewsish seclusion behind the boutique that used to be Derry amp; Toms.

He told the hall porter he was in London on business from Bradford in the north; he put on a broad Yorkshire accent and therefore wasn’t asked for a passport. He signed in as Reginald Davies and let a porter carry his bag up to the room.

The hotel was comfortable but neither grandiose nor luxurious; it attracted commercial travelers from New Zealand and Scotland, dowager aunts from South Africa. He’d met a contact here once but he’d never booked into the hotel; it wasn’t a place where they’d start looking for him.

He sent down for a pint of Dewar’s. Afterward he had to think a moment why he’d done that-it wasn’t his usual Scotch but it would not have been prudent to order Haig. Then he remembered who it was that drank Dewar’s.

He had a shower and found the bottle in the room; he poured two fingers into a tumbler and sat in the easy chair to think out the moves-his and theirs.

Yaskov knew three things he hadn’t known before. One: he’d seen the manuscript so he realized Kendig knew far more than anyone had thought he knew. Two: Kendig had been in Stockholm fourteen hours ago. Three: Kendig was traveling as Jules Parker and had flown from Stockholm to Helsinki under that name.

Cutter would have him out of Madrid by now; he’d have traced Kendig through Orly at least as far as Copenhagen by now and he too would know the Jules Parker ID. That was because Cutter and Yaskov had their stringers out-they’d have to have them out by now-and it would have been no great trick for them to canvass the airports in the guise of national or Interpol officers; they’d have sifted descriptions and names, eliminated the genuine travelers and narrowed the suspect list to not more than three or four, of whom the only repeat would be Jules Parker.

The teaser phone call he’d made from Helsinki would bring the British into it as well. Yaskov might be a few hours ahead of the Americans, a few hours behind the British; but quite likely they’d all collide at Heathrow. The odds were that within twelve hours both Cutter and Yaskov would bring their physical presences into London.

Anticipating the hunter’s moves was always dicey. You might be too slow, too stupid; there was also the chance of being too clever-expecting them to move faster than they actually moved. That could be equally dangerous.

The British would put Chartermain on it. About a thousand RAF pilots-the few to whom so many owed so much-had won the Battle of Britain; half of them had been killed; among the surviving Spitfire pilots had been Chartermain but he’d lost his left leg to a Messerschmidt in September 1940 and they’d transferred him into Intelligence. He’d run some of the Double-Cross agents until the end of the war and then he’d moved over to MI6. Kendig was now in the jurisdiction of MI5 but that wouldn’t take it out of Chartermain’s control any more than the FBI business had taken it out of Cutter’s control in Georgia.

So he was dealing with Cutter, Yaskov, Chartermain and indeterminate lesser fry from the French SDECE, the ex-Abwehr West Germans, the East German BND and whatever peanut agencies felt too vain to delegate the responsibility to the big boys. It made for an obvious question: to what extent would they reinforce one another and to what extent would they get in one another’s way?

In keeping with that would be the internal abrasions in the American operation. Cutter would be using Follett’s personnel because there was no other source. Cutter had despised Glenn Follett for years. Myerson wisely had seen to it that the two men worked in separate districts but now that safety device had been neutralized. Follett spent his life playing the role of bumbleheaded loudmouth and Cutter never had been willing to see past that defensive screen; actually while Follett ran a loose ship he had a good talent and his achievements were commendable. But Cutter wasn’t comfortable with people who acted as if they didn’t know what they were doing; he had a few blind spots and one of them was a tendency to refuse to credit professionalism to those who lacked the appearance of professionalism.

Yaskov was a different artifact; he had the difficulties of bureaucracy but no one in his organization disputed his leadership. There was a temptation in nearly every human being to imitate that which he hated: men often displayed the very characteristics they most loathed in their fathers. Philosophically Yaskov was a dedicated Marxist, according to his lights; he believed honestly in the sort of society that encouraged five-year plans for the proletariat; but he was the son of a czarist officer and preferred elegance to efficiency, noblesse oblige to democraticization. In the elitist hierarchy of the Soviet KGB he enjoyed the privileged position of a Richelieu. He was a romantic and vanity dominated him; he would run the hunt with all his brilliant skill and energy because Kendig’s freedom would be a personal challenge to his pride.

Chartermain was yet another factor: Chartermain was an imperial colonialist. He surrounded himself with staff who possessed ultra-English names like Colin and Derek. Most of the world was inhabited by poor ruddy bastards or bloody wogs. Chartermain’s wife was “the memsahib.” His operations displayed a genteel and sophisticated casualness that took civil service bureaucracy into account and assumed that they should muddle through anyhow. In his chortling fashion Chartermain probably had found and blown the whistle on more Soviet plants than had any other counter-espionage chief in the West.

Kendig had invited only the very best people to the ball.

They would run the usual drill: question airline counter people at Heathrow, taxi drivers, rent-a-car girls. They’d put people on the taxi stand outside the West End terminal. They’d keep bumping into one another and the people interviewed would let their questioners know that they’d been interviewed more than once. Gradually each agency would accrete a picture of its opponents’ operations. Either they’d begin to confer or they’d proceed independently with the jealous pretense that the others didn’t exist.

In any case they’d achieve facts which were mainly negative but no less important on that account. They’d find out he hadn’t flown on from Heathrow. Cutter, with the advantage of knowing through Saint-Breheret that Kendig had a blank French passport, might treat with Chartermain to have all ports of embarkation watched for both Jules Parker and a French emigrant who fitted Kendig’s description. The fact was that Kendig didn’t have the French passport-he’d left it in the safe in Paris.

They’d find out he hadn’t taken a taxi from the airport or from the West End terminal. They might find out he’d taken the limo bus from Heathrow to the terminal but in any event they’d lose the trail there; he’d covered his tracks between terminal and hotel. They’d canvass hotels for Jules Parker, not for Reginald Davies.

They’d know quite positively that he was in England. But that was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Knowing he was on the island but not knowing where, they’d get snappish. Irritably they’d blame one another. They’d get into a hell of a flap. It was fun to contemplate.

But it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t sit cooped up and satisfy himself with visualizations of their confusion. Passivity wasn’t the object of the game.

He’d have to come out in the open. Sting them.

Six years ago he’d spent months in the Middle East pulling the camouflage off the Soviet-sponsored arms traffic in heavy arms to Al Fatah. They were getting armored vehicles, field guns, long-range mortars, even ground-to-air missiles. These came from various sources-Arab governments, Czechs, arms merchants in the West-but the job was to determine how the stuff found its way to the secluded desert camps of the Palestinian liberation armies. It had become evident the smugglers’ route was as neatly laid out and maintained as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It had befallen Kendig to find and close it.

The job had required liaison with MI6 because Aden, which was British-occupied, was a key distribution point on the arms route. Local apparatchiks kept kicking the buck upstairs until Kendig had been obliged to fly out to London, meet with the top man and smooth out the arrangements.

The top man had been Chartermain and the meeting had taken place on a Sunday-not in White-hall but in Chartermain’s home in Knightsbridge, a detached Victorian manse in a mews: too large for practical living but then Chartermain and his memsahib were given to lavish entertaining. Chartermain used his study there as a second office; it was a good deal more than the usual gentleman’s library.

An excellent way to enrage a lion was to disturb its den.

Luck could run bad; there was always the danger of the unhappy coincidence; there’d be scores or hundreds of them searching for him and if he spent a lot of time in public places there was the risk of someone’s fortuitously spotting him. Pure accident like that accounted for a large number of man-hunting coups; pure accident like that was not accident at all but a mere mathematical long shot-if they kept enough people searching long enough then the chances of their finding him increased geometrically with the passage of time and the accretion of clues.

When he went out of the hotel he avoided using the lift which could be a trap; he used the stairs. When he set out for the first time he did it during the morning rush and melted into crowds. Impulse made him cache the manuscript: he removed the pages from the false-bottomed suitcase, crept to the basement with them and found the domestic supply cupboard, a fair-sized room filled with mops and dustcloths and bedding fresh from the laundry, hampers on wheels for the daily room changings, cartons of loo paper and hotel-size bars of soap, brooms, vacuum cleaners, spray polishes and the like. He opened a bar-soap carton and counted the contents and multiplied that figure by the three dozen cartons stacked against the wall and concluded it would be at least seven weeks before they got down to the last carton in the stack, if they didn’t cover it again with fresh supplies; he emptied the carton he’d opened, put the manuscript in it, filled the rest with soap bars and rearranged the stack with the manuscript carton at the back and bottom of everything. He marked it with a little pencil cross that nobody would notice unless he was looking for it and knew what it meant. He carried the excess bars of soap out of the hotel in an ordinary paper bag and disposed of them miles away in a sidewalk dustbin.

When he made his first evening reconnaissance he went out at dusk when the light was poorest. He used the underground a bit but mostly buses; never taxis.

Chartermain’s garden was a horseshoe around the house, well tended but drab this late in the year. On the fourth side-the left-a paved lane ran past the kitchen door, made a little dogleg at the rear corner of the house and ran on through the back garden to a coach house that had been converted into a garage with servants’ quarters upstairs-a remodeling job that had been done in the 1920s when occupants of such a house could afford a large staff. Goosenecked streetlamps bathed the front garden and the porte-cochere but the lane went back through a patch of shadow beyond the kitchen; the illumination at the rear was poor, thrown by a single lamp high on the side of the coach house at the head of an outside stair that clung to the ivied wall.

Past the garage the lane continued in a gentle bend, going on between two five-story Georgian monoliths into a street beyond. But there was a gate across the front of the lane and at its other end a chain hung across it to prevent traffic; it was no thoroughfare out of the mews.

It took him several days to work out the population and routines of the household. There were two servants; they looked like husband and wife; they lived in the quarters above the coach house. Presumably the maids’ and butler’s quarters in the main house were unoccupied-perhaps closed off to conserve heat. The wife evidently performed as housekeeper and cook, the husband as butler, chauffeur, gardener and handyman. On the second night of his surveillance there was a gathering of eight couples among whom Kendig recognized a member of Parliament and a man who had been, and perhaps still was, the Deputy F. O. Secretary to whom Chartermain’s department reported through the Chief of MI6. On that occasion two additional servants worked in the house but they went home afterward and presumably had been supplied by some agency on a temporary basis.

Each morning a Humber saloon piloted by a liveried driver-a government employee-collected Chartermain and drove him away to his duties. The garage housed two automobiles-an Austin Mini which the servant husband used for errands and the wife for shopping, and a Jaguar 3.8 saloon which the memsahib used twice in the four days, both times for afternoon excursions lasting several hours (shopping? hairdresser? liaison with lover?); she drove herself. When she returned she let herself into the house with a single key, indicating there was no burglar alarm system. That conformed with what he knew of Chartermain; the man was as old-fashioned as Yaskov, he probably had contempt for gadgets and gimmicks and the electronics of modern espionage.

He performed his surveillance from stolen cars, He would boost a car, park it somewhere in the mews and watch the house; he would drive the car to another part of London and abandon it within a few hours before the description could have got onto the hot-sheets.

His break came on the Thursday evening. The servant husband emerged from the kitchen door carrying two valises; the memsahib, who was quite trim and attractive in her lean fifties, came along a moment later tugging on her gloves with brisk little jerks. She wore a topcoat and a little pincushion hat-a traveling outfit. The servant fed the luggage into the boot of the Jaguar and the memsahib smiled and spoke, got into the car and backed it out into the mews and drove away. Chartermain had private means and a country estate; quite likely she was going down to Kent for the weekend.

He’d had the Cortina since morning and it would be heating up by now. He drove out of the mews ten minutes behind the memsahib.

After dinner and a movie he purloined a Rover from the car park of a block of high-priced flats near Victoria Station. He chose it for three reasons: it was expensive enough to be in keeping with Chartermain’s quarter; it had a Spanish plate and diplomatic tags which meant it wouldn’t be disturbed by traffic patrols for illegal parking; and the keys had been left in it.

By the time its operator discovered the theft in the morning Kendig would have abandoned it like the others; in time it would be returned to its owner with the apologies of the Foreign Office and a shrug of the shoulders and a word of advice about leaving keys in the ignition.

He drove into the mews at half-past ten and made a three-point U-turn at the end of it and drove out again. It happened five times a day, drivers losing their bearings and not knowing they were going down a dead end. He drove slowly out of the mews again, scrutinizing the house. Two windows were alight upstairs; and a light burned in the bedroom of the apartment above the garage.

Both servants would be in the coach house by this hour. The two lights in the house were at the head of the main stair and in the memsahib’s room-some sort of reading or sewing chamber where she seemed to spend part of each evening when they weren’t entertaining. It didn’t seem a room to which Chartermain repaired. The conclusion to be drawn was that there was no one in the house; the lights had been left on purposefully by the servants. Chartermain might have gone from his office straight down to Kent but it was more likely he was working late trying to collate the clues to Kendig’s whereabouts.

He made three successive left-hand turns and parked the Rover in a no-parking space within fifty feet of the gap between the two Georgian blocks where the rear of Chartermain’s lane emerged, chained off at the pavement. The Watney’s pub at the corner was getting ready to close but he squeezed in and used the pay phone. He let it ring seven times; there was no answer. He went back to the lane and stepped over the chain and walked into deep shadow between the two five-story buildings, guiding on the weak lamp at the head of the servants’ stair.

He stopped under the stair and studied the rear of the main house. There was a light burning in the cupola over the kitchen door, illuminating the steps down to the lane. Beyond at the head of the lane was a streetlamp. But the back of the house was dark; upstairs the middle window showed a vague glow from the stair-head chandelier at the far end of the corridor. He’d been up the main staircase, along that corridor and inside Chartermain’s study which was at the rear of the house on that floor.

He wasn’t a second-story human fly and that sort of ivy probably wouldn’t hold his weight. An expert might do it but Kendig’s expertise didn’t run in that direction. He’d have to enter at the ground floor and go upstairs inside the house.

He crossed the lane, stepped over a cultivated bed that had held annuals in the summer, crossed the back lawn and stood in the shrubbery examining one window. It was a casement affair, latched on the inside with a heavy brass fitting. The only way to get at it would be to cut or smash a pane, reach inside and undo the latch. He had no glass cutter and he couldn’t risk breaking a pane because the servants’ bedrom window looked out on the house and they’d hear the glass shatter.

He tried four windows-all there were. They were latched firmly. He had no better luck with windows on both sides of the house toward the rear and he couldn’t try the ones nearer the front because he’d be exposed to the mews there.

It left only the kitchen door. It could be seen from a small area in the end of the mews but he didn’t see anyone there; it also would be plainly visible to the servants if they happened to look out their bedroom window but their curtains were drawn.

He had with him the only tools he’d bothered to improvise-a coiled length of coat-hanger wire and one of the hotel’s plastic pocket calendars. The latch was a modern spring-loaded affair and the plastic sheet unlocked it easily and without sound but when he pushed the door open it creaked a bit on an unoiled hinge. He made a face, slipped inside and slowly pushed the door shut behind him, twistting the knob to prevent the latch from clicking when it closed. Then he turned to the window and looked out toward the coach house.

Did the servants’ curtain stir? He couldn’t be sure; he watched it but it didn’t move.

Well the uncertainty put a little spice into it. He moved very slowly through the unfamiliar room, feeling his way with the backs of his fingertips: if the fingernail touched an object it would flinch away rather than toward and there was less likelihood of knocking anything over.

The door to the hallway was open; once he’d passed through it there was some light-it filtered along the hall from the foyer which was lit from above by the chandelier at the head of the stairs. He could see his way now and he moved rapidly to the foot of the steps. The staircase was a sweeping carpeted affair with a handsomely carved hardwood bannister. There was a bust of Churchill on a marble side table, a filigreed mirror beside the cloakroom and a portrait that probably was a likeness of the memsahib’s father or grandfather.

Going up the stairs with the chandelier in his eyes made him uneasy; he passed beneath it quickly and retreated along the upstairs corridor before he stopped to double-check his bearings. The study would be the third of the three doors on the left. He went along opening doors and looking into the rooms on both sides; that was elementary caution-better to be surprised while he was in the open corridor than to be trapped in the study. But he didn’t really expect the house to be crawling with agents waiting to nail him. They hadn’t enough evidence to lay that sort of trap. He hadn’t confided his wild-hair scheme to anyone and it wasn’t the sort of thing any of them could have anticipated.

The door to the study was locked and that pleased him because it meant there was something beyond the door that Chartermain wanted to protect.

Just as he was not an accomplished cat burglar, so he was not an expert lockpick; but he’d had rudimentary training in the art and he was not pressed for time and after several minutes with the coat-hanger wire he had the old throw-bolt lock whipped and he was ready to open the door. But first he reached up and unscrewed the bulbs in the wall fixtures. They weren’t burning but if there was a trap set up he didn’t want them to throw a switch and silhouette him in the doorway like a cardboard shooting-range dummy.

He took several very deep breaths. If he was jumped it would help to have his lungs full of air. Then he went in.

He was alone in the room. He left the door open behind him; he wanted an available exit in case of trouble and besides he didn’t want to light a lamp because that could be seen from the servants’ window and he wasn’t sure the drapes here would be opaque. The indirect illumination from the distant chandelier made the room dim but it would be enough to work by.

Something creaked. He froze until he was satisfied it had been natural settling; it was an old house.

He commenced his search, not sure what he might find, keenly hoping for one thing but not counting on it. If Chartermain wasn’t carrying his passport it would be in his office in Whitehall or it would be here. With luck it would be here.

There was a wall safe; he didn’t examine it-it would be impregnable to him, its contents largely composed of documents in binders with stern warnings from the Official Secrets Act on the jackets. He wasn’t interested in stealing state secrets. He went through the desk drawer by drawer and had his piece of good luck: it was an old wallet, very thin pliable expensive pigskin of the old-fashioned diplomatic style, containing Chartermain’s official red passport, the memsahib’s civilian black-bound one and an assortment of documents and foreign currencies.

Kendig took everything out of the wallet; he left the currency, the memsahib’s papers and the rest of the things on the desk. Then he tore his photo out of his own passport; he put that back in his pocket along with Chartermain’s VIP passport. He put the Jules Parker passport into Chartermain’s wallet and placed the wallet on top of the other things in the middle of the desk blotter.

He wrote a little note in Chartermain’s pad and propped the note against the wallet; and left the room.

The house creaked again but he went right along the corridor and retraced his path to the kitchen. He paused by the door before opening it and had a glance through the window at the coach house. The servants’ light still burned upstairs; the curtains remained as they had been before.

He opened the door silently and slipped outside, unable to eliminate the click when he pulled it shut behind him; he went down the steps and then paused and turned his head, and wondered why he had hestitated; then he had it-a trace of tobacco smoke on the air.

They jumped him from either side of the steps. One of them pinioned his arms; the other whipped around in front of him and he saw the billy club.

“Red-handed, mate,” said the one behind him with relish.

They were London police, not Chartermain’s agents. He had to do it very quickly: he said, “Cor stone the crows, you give me such a fright!”

“Give you a heart attack mate, if I had my way.”

At the head of the coach-house stair the door opened and the butler-chauffeur came hurrying down. “Good work, officers!”

In his Cockney rasp Kendig said, “’Ow’d you get onto me then?”

“Mr. Musgrove saw you in the act of breaking and entering.”

The old man bobbed his head vehemently. “Heard something, looked out my window, saw the door just closing behind the thief. Called you right the instant.”

The policeman still had his arms in a vise lock and his partner was frisking Kendig for weapons, sliding around like a contortionist to keep out of range of any kicking Kendig might have in mind to do. The man holding his arms had the exact positioning of long practice; both wrists high under the shoulderblades, twisting him forward in a half-bow; there was no way out of that hold. Then the partner locked the handcuffs on him.

“You’ve a keen eye, Mr. Musgrove. You’ll want to come down in the morning, I’m afraid, to give us a statement.”

“Glad to do my duty,” the old man said, rearing back on his dignity.

“I imagine the governor’ll give you a rise for this, old boy.”

Musgrove smiled. His wife stood at the head of the outside stair, watching with suspicion. The policeman hustled Kendig along the lane into the mews. Their car was a Morris 1100 with a globe light on the roof; he went into the back with the muscular officer who’d pinioned him. “Bloody crackers,” Kendig mumbled.

“What’s that, mate?”

“Crackers I said. Old fool ought’ve been fast asleep, this hour. Tell you I never had nothin’ but hard luck my whole life.”

“Ruddy well asked for every bit of it, didn’t you,” said the second policeman; he started the car and they rolled out of the mews.

It was a small police station, casual and Edwardian; a dozen police officers roamed in and out. His captors delivered him to a sergeant in a partitioned office. The sergeant said, “Give a squeal to in the morning to find out if he has any form, Good work, you two,”

“It was the butler did it,” the first policeman said and they all laughed at the little joke, all except Kendig who sat deep in a feigned gloom of self-pity, his senses cataloging everything and his mind racing with calculation.

The two arresting officers retrieved their handcuffs and left the room. A youth in the dark uniform passed them on his way in; he had a stenographic note pad. The sergeant said, “Very well now. Your name?”

“… Alfred Booker.” He said it as if with heavy reluctance; he kept shifting his baleful guilty stare from one patch of floor to another.

“How’s it spelled?”

He snarled. “Spell it yourself, copper.”

The sergeant’s weary eyes sought inspiration and patience from the ceiling. “Come on now Alfie.”

“Booker. Bee double-oh kay ee are.”

The young cop wrote it down; the sergeant said, “Vite stats now, Alfie.”

His whine got more resentful. “I’m forty-six, right? No permanent address.”

“Got a job, Alfie?”

“No.”

“Got a wife? A mother, a dad, anybody we should notify?”

“No. Let’s get this over with.”

“Solicitor?”

“Don’t they give you one?”

“If you haven’t got your own the court will appoint one for you. What’s this, Alfie, you new at this game?”

“I got no bleeding record if that’s what you mean. I’m clean as her ladyship’s fingernails, copper.”

“Not after tonight you’re not. All right, come over here and empty out the pockets, that’s a good lad-let’s see what you made off with.”

There was no helping it. Physical reluctance would only make them treat him with greater caution and he didn’t want that. He emptied everything out onto the desk. He managed to turn while he was doing it so that he had a good view through the sergeant’s open door-the back of the officer on the desk, the counter, the small squad room, the outside door beyond. A hell of a gamut to run but he had one thing in his favor: none of them was armed, they didn’t carry sidearms.

The sergeant watched him with shrewd cop’s eyes. Kendig passed his jacket to the sergeant and turned his pants pockets inside out to show he’d emptied everything. The sergeant went through the jacket meticulously. “Swank stuff for a Soho tramp. Paris label. Where’d you steal the threads, Alfie?”

“I paid good money.”

“Whose?”

“You got me on nothing, copper. I stand on me rights.”

“Rights? It’s dead to rights for you, Alfie. But have it your own way. Now there’s a money belt under your shirt. You can take it off or we can take it off for you. Which’ll it be?”

He pulled his shirttails out and undid the canvas belt and dropped it on the desk. The sergeant gave his jacket back to him. He thrust his shirt back into his waistband and put the jacket on. He had a reason for doing that but it didn’t arouse the sergeant’s suspicion.

The sergeant intoned, “One length wire, heavy gauge, coiled. Probably coat hanger. One pocket calendar, plastic, Kensington Close Hotel. One knife, pocket clasp, two blades, one awl.”

“That ain’t no switchblade,” Kendig snapped. “Just you make it clear, copper.”

“Not a switchblade,” the sergeant drawled wryly. “Pocket coins-let’s see, fifteen, seventeen, shilling, hate this bloody coinage mess-make that thirty-five new pence. Pounds sterling, loose”-the eyebrows went up as the sergeant counted it like a bank teller, moistening his thumb and flipping up the corners of the notes-“blimey. I make it three hundred forty-six quid. Hit yourself a jackpot, didn’t you Alfie.”

“I didn’t lift that money. Nobody can prove I did.” In the outer office the cops were milling to and fro. The telephones rang now and then; two men laughed easily at something one of them said.

“Stole the governor’s pasport, I see,” the sergeant observed. “Know whose house that was you chose to break and enter, Alfie?”

“Boffin or something, in’t he? But what’s it matter anyhow.”

“Hardly a boffin, mate.” The sergeant chuckled. “Bit of a laugh, old Chartermain getting invaded by a common thief.”

“I ain’t no common thief,” Kendig said loudly. “I was just-”

“You were just what?”

“Nemmind. I talk to my solicitor.”

“Do that,” the sergeant said. “One passport, diplomatic, property of William David Chartermain, Esquire. One wallet-size photograph of suspect identified by himself as Alfred Booker. One money belt, canvas. One ring of car keys to fit a Rover automobile. Rover, Alfie? Traveling in style, aren’t we.”

“I just happened to find those keys.”

The sergeant glanced at the youth who was copying down the items. “Those aren’t Chartermain’s keys-I think it’s a Jaguar he drives.”

“And a Mini. No Rover-I know the house, sir.”

“Right. Let’s have a look for a stolen Rover in the neighborhood. Just getting in deeper every minute, aren’t we Alfie.”

“You can go right to bloody hell, copper.”

“Let’s have a look at the inside of this belt now… Well well well! Seems our friend the master spy must keep a devil of a cash fund in his library-and American dollars at that… Let me make the count… mmmhm… Roll me over, laddie, this would dent the bloody Westminster Bank… five one, five one fifty, five two… Mark this now, seven thousand one hundred fifty dollars in notes of fifty and one hundred denominations. We’ll run a list of serial numbers but you’d best keep it to a single original, no copies. Chartermain may prefer there be no record. We’ll have to clear it with him.”

“Aye Sergeant.”

The sergeant hit his intercom key. “Are you chaps ready to fingerprint our boy?” He released the key and said to the youth, “Ought to find a proper way to hint to the old boy he ought to put first-class locks and alarms on his house if he means to keep this sort of lot on hand-”

Kendig scooped up the little photograph from the desk and made his break. He went out like a projectile: vaulted the phone desk, rammed shoulder-first into a policeman and hurled the man against his partner, dodged among the desks, caught glimpses of their faces agape, elbowed a third in the ribs, slithered past a belatedly swinging club, stiff-armed the last cop off his feet, wheeled through the door and sprinted into the night.

He had a forty-yard jump on them before they came boiling out into the street. There was the shrill silly bleat of their whistles, the clamor of their voices, the rattle of their feet; he rah around the corner and pushed along as fast as his legs could pump, aiming straight for the traffic light at the intersection. That was his only prayer of reprieve, the traffic light. Cars flowed through it along the high street; it was changing as he ran and they were stopping in their neat obedient column. He flung a glance over his shoulder-some of them were a lot younger than he was, some of them had longer legs and better wind; the pack was dissipating but the leaders were gaining on him frighteningly fast.

He heard himself gasping when he shot across the curb. The light held; the cars hadn’t started to roll. He aimed for the front car of the row. If that door was locked…

He jerked it open. The man stared at him open-mouthed. Kendig gripped the man’s arm and yanked him bodily out of the driver’s seat. Crammed himself into the car and searched for the gearshift with his left hand. It had been in gear and when the original driver’s foot came off the clutch it had stalled out and now he had to find the key and the pack was just into the intersection now and the driver was lurching to his feet shouting.

Kendig punched the door-lock button and the driver heaved helplessly on the outside handle. The key turned, the ignition meshed. Behind him a burly fool was emerging threateningly from a van. Kendig popped the clutch and roared away through the red light.

They’d be in cars within ninety seconds. He’d ditch this one within five minutes. The escape had worked but he had nothing now, nothing but his wits and the clothes on his back-no money, no papers, not a single possession except the two-inch-square photograph of himself that had been the most important object on the sergeant’s desk.

Now they had him naked and running and when he left the car in a dark passage and dogtrotted away into the night he was breathing deep and grinning from ear to ear.