The Crocus List

37

George phoned Annette, then the DDCR, from a telephone box in the little village just before Eastbourne, while Maxim sat in the car sorting the dead man's belongings and guessing how long it would take to establish that he had bullet wounds as well as the other problems of being dead. But just empty pockets would be suspicious enough.

"Charles Henderson," he told George, when he got back. "Address in Bath. He's got credit cards, too, so it's probably genuine. He wasn't on the CCOAC list, as I remember." He started the car, then slipped a cassette into the player. After a moment, it launched into a rock number.

He turned down the volume. George glared: "Harry, I didn't think even you liked this syncopated rubbish."

"It's pretty much unsyncopated, really. Almost everything on the beat. Mr Henderson had it in his pocket."

They listened to five minutes of it, George hunched and miserable. Abruptly, it became a sequence of bleeps, then a gabble of electronic noise. With one pause, it lasted about a minute. The rock music started again in mid-track.

Maxim wound the tape back and listened again.

"For all I know," George said, "that could be number one on the Hit Parade."

"I think it's more likely to be a computer program."

"Do they use those things in computers?"

"Normal thing, for the household computer. The trouble is, we don't know what brand of computer. "

"They're different?"

"Yes."

"Do you mean these blasted things are supposed to be revolutionising the world and they don't even speak the same language? How d'you know about computers, anyway?"

"I'd like to say it's because I belong to the computerised Army. In fact, it's because Chris has gone crazy about them. I'm going to have to buy him one for Christmas."

Mollified by Maxim's ignorance, George said: "Well, if he knows more about it than you do, why don't we ask him what brand it is? Your parents don't live far from here, do they?"

Crawling around Brighton and through Worthing stretched the thirty-mile journey to over an hour, and it was almost dark when they had picked Chris up from his school and reached the centre of Littlehampton. Or not quite, because it was one of those small towns which had closed off its centre to make a pedestrian precinct; Maxim parked as close as he could, but on a yellow line. Chris's eleven-year-old morality made him draw in his breath with solemn disapproval.

"I know," Maxim said, "but I've been mixing with some corrupting influences. Anyway, Mr Harbinger will pay if we get nicked."

Chris led them straight to a small home-computer shop, and Maxim realised how many Saturday mornings the boy must have spent with his nose pressed to the window. The proprietor, small and elderly, greeted them warmly. Two men-one expensively dressed-with a boy seemed a certain sale.

Maxim held out the cassette. "There's a program on this. Can you tell us what computer it's written for?"

The proprietor's smile faded.

George said: "If you've got the one it fits, I'll buy it."

"No, I will," Maxim corrected.

The proprietor didn't care who won that argument. Chris, however, cared very much. He stood very still, his golden-brown eyes following the discussion, and only reluctantly switching away to watch the proprietor run the cassette into one machine after another.

"I've been meaning to get one for months," George insisted.

"You? You need an instruction book with a pair of scissors."

"I have two daughters," George said with dignity.

"And I intend to see them raised properly on the principles of Kinder, Kücheand computing. "

"I promised Chris-"

"Daddy." Chris touched his arm: the screen had flashed up a sequence of incomprehensible instructions and the proprietor was beaming.

"Is that all we get?" George demanded.

"No, sir," Chris assured him. "That's just the listing. You have to run it."

"We'll do that at home," Maxim said quickly. "You can make it work?"

The proprietor said: "From the look of the program, you'll need an interface and a joystick as well, sir. I would recommend…"

One way and another, the price had doubled by the time they got out of the shop, and Maxim let George pay it. In the car, he asked the disappointed Chris: "Is this the model you'd have chosen for yourself?"

"Well… there's nothingwrong with it… I think I would have preferred…"He just hated to see any computer slip away from his grasp, and he was grasping the keyboard of this one very tightly on his knees.

"You can hang on to that until my daughters get back from school," George assured him.

Once inside Maxim's parents' house, they worked as a team. Maxim hauled his father and mother away from the TV to introduce George, whilst Chris started linking the keyboard, transformer, interface, joystick and cassette recorder to the TV screen in a tangle of wires and plugs recruited from all over the house.

With puzzled joviality, Mr Maxim said: "So you've hired Chris, now, have you?"

"It's the age of theenfant savant," George said, looking at the mess. "But is my drawing-room going to look like a Tac HQ?"

"Can I offer you a cup of tea, or a drink…?"

"A drink would be absolutely splendid. I've had a rather trying day."

"Make it a big one, Dad," Maxim suggested, not trying to catch George's eye. Perhaps there is a time to reform, and a time not to reform. But he watched surreptitiouslyas George took his first huge swallow and stood there, letting it flow through him, a transfusion of new life. How many years since George had his first drink of the day after sundown? he wondered.

Chris said: "I'm ready, Daddy." The screen was lit but blank except for a small heading: takeoff west r.

Maxim ushered his father into the kitchen. "I'm sorry, Dad, but some of this could be rather secret. We can't help Chris seeing it, but… I hope I can tell you one day."

With the three of them alone, Maxim said: "Run it, please."

An irregular line of battlements appeared at the bottom of the screen: perhaps a symbolic city skyline. Low over them, a small aeroplane shape rose, coming towards them but slanting slightly to the left. The screen went blank for a moment; when it cleared, there was a small red dot in the middle of it. The aeroplane carried on steadily and vanished at the top left-hand corner. The screen went blank again, except fortakeoff west l. It was a mirror image of the other, with the aeroplane rising towards the right.

Chris said: "I think I can make that red spot move…"

"Try it."

The screen saidtakeoff east r. The aeroplane rose, slanting left, then began a positive turn even further left-a right turn for the aeroplane. As Chris experimented, the red dot jumped, wavered, crawled towards the aeroplane and had just reached it as the plane finished a half-circle and the screen blanked. The same thing happened withtakeoff east l, except that the aeroplane slanted to the right, then did the same turn back across the screen. This time, Chris had the red dot over it much earlier.

"It's just one of those games," he said sadly. "You know, where you shoot down aeroplanes."

Maxim ignored George's stare. "Just one of those games," he said. "Sorry, Chris."

With Chris also banished to the kitchen, they sat at one end of the little dining-table, the telephone between them and George's hand creeping towards it, then drawing back as his thoughts blurred again. Beyond the green plushcurtains, doors slammed on -home-coming cars, a metal garage door creaked open, a child rumbled past on a skateboard.

"We're dealing with a Blowpipe missile," Maxim said, trying to find a point of certainty. "It's the only man-portable one that you can control on to the target. The rest are infra-red, fire-and-forget stuff. Control makes simulation training vital: I met a Gunner who said they did seventeen hundred simulations before they even got near a practice round. And we know a Blowpipe's missing from an export order: they couldn't pinch a simulator as well, so they made up their own."

Perhaps that plastic case in the back of the Land-Roverhad been a similar home computer.

"I take your word for all that," George acknowledged. "But it doesn't tell us what aeroplane, nor where. Unless you're having the same horrible thoughts that I am."

"The Russian delegation. They're here, are they? When do they fly out?"

"It's open-ended. When we know when it'll end we'lltry and keep it secret, but they'll have people popping back and forth to Moscow all the time. "

"If it's all vague and ad hoc, it'll be that for the Crocus List, too."

"They don't have to be gunning for a particular Russian group or aircraft. If they hitany one it might be enough. It'd certainly be enough for me and most of Western civilisation."

"Let's think about the airport: it must be a specific one, with two parallel runways heading east-west. They're planning to be on a line between the two, firing slightly left or right. But on an east take-off the aeroplane turns 180 degrees to its right… Look, there must be some pilots' handbook that gives all this sortofthing. Get on to your office before they all go home."

In the relief of having something to do, George barely noticed that Maxim was giving the orders. He passed them on crisply: "-and never bloody mind what/or, justhave it there, on my desk." He put the phone down. "And let us hope we are still dealing in prediction and not history."