The Peace Machine

CHAPTER 14

Beaton had been born in the town of Oradea, near the northwest border of Rumania, the son of a pottery worker. His name for the first thirty-two years of his life had been Vladimir Khaikin, but he had been known as Clive Beaton for a long time now and his original name sounded foreign even to his own ears. He had joined the army at an early age, worked hard, and shown certain aptitudes and attitudes which brought him to the attention of a discreet organization known, in some places, as the LKV. The offer of employment he received was sufficiently interesting for him to agree to quit the army while still a captain, and to disappear from normal life while he was being retrained. At that point his new career became less exciting and less glamorous — he had found himself spending a lot of time observing the activities of tourists and visiting Western businessmen. Khaikin was becoming thoroughly bored when a door, not to a new career, but to an entirely new life swung open.

It happened when a coach full of British tourists went off the road and smashed its way down a hillside less than a hundred kilometers from his hometown. Some of the party were killed instantly and a few died later in hospital from burns. As is customary in such cases, the LKV ran a thorough check on all the dead and — as only occasionally happens — they found one victim who was worth resurrecting. He was Clive Beaton, age thirtyone; unmarried, no close relatives, occupation — postage-stamp dealer, hometown — Salford, Lancashire. The LKV then went through their files of members who were cleared for unlimited service and came up with one whose height, build, and colouring matched those of the dead man.

Khaikin had no hesitation in accepting the assignment, even when he learned that a certain amount of plastic surgery would be performed on him and that some of it would simulate heat scars on his face. He spent three weeks in an isolated room in the hospital, while surgeons supposedly fought to restore his ravaged face. This period gave the surgeons a chance to simulate severe injuries without actually destroying facial tissue, but it was more valuable to the LKV who used the time for an intensive study of Clive Beaton’s background, friends, and habits. Every scrap of information they garnered was memorized by Khaikin, and a voice coach overlaid his standard English with a Lancashire accent. Khaihin’s retentive mind absorbed everything without effort and when he was flown to London, and eventually reached Salford, he settled into his new life in a matter of days. There were times during the following years when he almost wished that some difficulty would arise to exercise and test him, but there were compensations, among them — absolute freedom.

The LKV made few demands beyond requiring him to live in obscurity as Clive Beaton, to be in England, and to wait. He allowed the stamp dealership to die a natural death and devoted himself to other pursuits to which his instincts were more attuned. His native love of horses, coupled with a flair for probability maths, led him into the penumbra of occupations surrounding the turf. He gambled successfully, worked as a private handicapper for several small stables, and opened his own book when betting shops became legal. This was something he would have done earlier but for the fact that one of his prime directives forbade any conflict with authority. Once established as a bookmaker he attracted, almost against his will, a wide range of associations with men who lived beyond the law; but Beaton never set a foot across the finely drawn line. Although he thought of himself as Clive Beaton, although he had learned to like Scotch whisky and English beer, he never married — and he never answered a telephone without half-expecting to hear a voice from the past.

The special calls came very rarely. Once, when he had been in England about two years, the nameless caller — who was identified by code only — instructed him to kill a man who lived at a given address in Liverpool. Beaton had found the man, who looked like a retired sailor, and had knifed him the same night in a dark street. Back in Salford, he had read all the papers carefully, but the police seemed to be treating the affair as a simple dockland stabbing; it quickly faded from the regional news and there were no repercussions of any kind. Beaton wondered afterward if the killing had had no motive other than the checking of his own efficiency and loyalty, but such thoughts troubled him infrequently. In general the sort of assignments he received, at roughly yearly intervals, reminded him of his old tourist watching days — tasks like making sure that a given individual really was staying at a given hotel.

The Hutchman case, however, had all the portents of a major job right from the start. It had begun a day earlier with a notification of a high priority number, a statement that Hutchman was considered a focus of “continuing interest”, and an instruction to place himself on round-the-clock standby. Since then Beaton had not strayed more than a few paces from his private telephone.

The voice, when it came, sounded both urgent and grim.

“Mr. Beaton,” it said, “I’m a friend of Steel’s. He asked me to call you about the outstanding account.”

Beaton acknowledged the code by responding with his own credentials. “I’m sorry I haven’t paid — can you send me another statement?”

“This is ultimate priority,” the voice said without preamble. “You have been following the news about the disappearance of the mathematician, Lucas Hutchman?”

“Yes.” Beaton listened to all news broadcasts very carefully, and a less sensitive ear than his would have picked up its undertones. “I know about him.”

“Hutchman is believed to be in your area and his papers must be transferred to folio seven immediately. Is that clear?”

“Yes.” Beaton felt cold and excited at the same time. He had, for the first time in many years, been instructed to kill another human being.

“Folio seven. Immediately. We have no exact location for him, but we picked up a police radio report that a black Ford Sierra had been found abandoned between Bolton and Salford in Gorton Road.”

“Wasn’t Hutchman driving a blue—?”

“The police reported that the car did not match the description of the tax disc. The disc said blue.”

“That’s all very well, but if Hutchman has abandoned the car he certainly won’t have stayed in the vicinity. I mean “We believe the car was stolen from him, and then dumped.”

An alarming thought struck Beaton. “Just a minute. We’re discussing this thing very openly on the phone. Supposing somebody’s listening? What happens to my cover?”

“Your cover is no longer important.” The urgency in the voice had been replaced by a raw edge of panic. “There is no time to arrange meeting places and private talks. All efforts must be devoted to the Hutchman transfer. We are sending every available man, but you are the closest and must take what steps you can. This is ultimate priority — do you understand?”

“I understand.” Beaton set the phone down and walked across his apartment to a mirror. He was not the same man who had come to England. His hair was gray now, and the years of good living had thickened and softened his body. More dismaying was the abrupt realization that the years had also softened his thinking — he did not want to hurt anybody, or to kill anybody. And yet, what would an ideal be worth unless one was prepared to serve it? And what would life itself be worth without an ideal to bring some meaning to the endless alternation of pleasure and pain? Beaton removed a cloth-wrapped bundle from the recess behind a drawer in his writing table. From it he took a well-oiled automatic pistol, a clip of 9-mm. cartridges, a tubular silencer, and a black-handled switchblade knife. He assembled the pistol, slipped it into an inside pocket, put on his overcoat, and went out with the closed knife growing warm in his right hand.

It was early in the afternoon and a blue-gray mist was veiling the more distant buildings. The sun could be stared at without discomfort, a disc of electrum, slowly falling. Beaton got into his Jaguar and drove toward Bolton. Fifteen minutes later he parked in a narrow street and walked up an alley. It was not raining but there was enough moisture in the air to make the paving stones glisten blackly. Near the end of the alley he opened a small door and went through it into a cavernous brick building which had once been stables and now served as a garage. A mechanic looked up from the engine of an elderly sedan and eyed him incuriously.

Beaton nodded. “Is Raphoe in?”

“In the office.”

Beaton walked across the oil-blackened floor and up a stair to where a boxlike office clung to the ancient wall. Paraffin fumes gusted hotly around him as he opened the door. A fat man with a pendulous strawberry nose was seated at a desk in the office.

“Hello, Clive,” he said resentfully. “That was some horse you gave me for Friday.”

Beaton shrugged. “If you could pick winners every time there’d be no books.”

“So I hear, but I don’t take to the idea of my money being used to push up the odds on the real trier.”

“You don’t think I’d do that to you, Randy.”

“Not much, I don’t. Are you going to give me my hundred notes back?” Raphoe sneered.

“No, but I’ve one for Devon and Exeter on Saturday which is already over the line.” Beaton watched and saw the predictable flicker of interest in Raphoe’s eyes.

“How much?”

“The syndicate is charging me the odds of two thousand on this one, and that’s a lot of money to lay off, but you can have it free, Randy.”

“Free!” Raphoe gently pressed the end of his ruinous nose, as though hoping to mold it into a more conventional shape. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” Beaton made it sound casual. “I just want to know where your boys picked up the black Ford Sierra they dumped in Gorton Road.”

“I knew it!” Raphoe slapped his desk gleefully. “I knew that one was radioactive as soon as Fred drove it through that gate. As soon as I saw the bum paint job and the brand-new plates I said to Fred, ‘Get that heap out of here and bury it.’ I said to him, ‘Never nick a car that somebody else has just nicked.’

“You told him the right thing, Randy. Where did he pick it up?”

“You say this horse is over the line?” Raphoe asked significantly.

“Master Auckland II,” Beaton said, giving a genuine tip. Raphoe was a notorious loudmouth, and giving him the information would set up a chain reaction of tip-offs which would bring the odds tumbling down and cost Beaton a considerable sum of money. He had an intuition, however, that he was not going to be worried about horses in the immediate future.

“It’ll be really trying, will it?”

“Randy, this time it doesn’t need to try. Now, about the car — where did you get it?”

“In the car park of the Cricketers. Do you know it? It’s a good alehouse out Breightmet way.”

“I’ll find it,” Beaton assured him, and now the knife seemed to be generating a pulsing warmth of its own, bathing his palm with sweat.