Wilt on High

Chapter 15

Fifteen miles away Wilt's Escort beeped its erratic way towards Ipford. Since no one had thought to provide the Corporal with adequate directions and he had distrusted Glaushof's assurances that he would be well protected by the Major and the men in the truck behind him, he had taken his own precautions before and after leaving the base. He had provided himself with a heavy automatic and had computed a route which would cause maximum confusion to anyone trying to cross-reference his position on their receivers. He had achieved his object. In short, he had travelled twenty quite extraordinarily complicated miles in no time at all. Half an hour after leaving Baconheath he was still only five miles from the base. After that he had shot off towards Ipford and had spent twenty minutes pretending to change a tyre in a tunnel under the motorway before emerging on a minor road which ran for several miles very conveniently next to a line of high-tension electricity pylons. Two more tunnels and fifteen miles on a road that wound along below the bank of a dyked river, and Inspector Hodge and the men in the other listening van were desperately transmitting messages to one another in an attempt to make out where the hell he had got to. More awkwardly still, they couldn't be entirely sure where they were either.

The Major shared their dilemma. He hadn't expected the Corporal to take evasive action or to drivewhen he wasn't lurking in tunnelsat excessive speed along winding roads that had presumably been designed for single-file horse traffic and had been dangerous even then. But the Major didn't care. If the Corporal wanted to take off like a scalded cat that was his problem. 'He wants an armed escort he better stay with us,' he told his driver as they skidded round a muddy ninety-degree bend and nearly landed in a deep water-filled drain. 'I'm not ending my life in a ditch so slow down for Chrissake.'

'So how do we keep up with him?' asked the driver, who had been thoroughly enjoying himself.

'We don't. If he's going any place outside hell it's Ipford. I've got the address here. Take the motorway first chance you get and we'll wait for him where he's supposed to be going.'

'Yes sir,' said the driver reluctantly and switched back to the main road at the next turn-off.

Sergeant Runk would have done the same had he been given the chance but the Corporal's tactics had confirmed all Inspector Hodge's wildest dreams. 'He's trying to lose us,' he shouted shortly after the Corporal left the airbase and began to dice with death. 'That must mean he's carrying dope.'

'That or he's practising for the Monte Carlo Rally,' said Runk.

Hodge wasn't amused. 'Rubbish. The little bastard goes into Baconheath, spends an hour and a half and comes out doing eighty along mud roads no one in their right minds would do forty on in daylight and backtrack five times the way he's donehe must have something he values in that car.'

'Can't be his life, and that's for certain,' said Runk who was struggling to keep his seat. 'Why don't we just call up a patrol car and pull him for speeding? That way we can have him searched for whatever he's carrying.'

'Good idea,' said Hodge and had been about to send out instructions when the Corporal had taken radio refuge in the motorway tunnel and they'd lost him for twenty minutes. Hodge had spent the time blaming Runk for failing to have an accurate fix on his last position and calling for help from the second van. The Corporal's subsequent route near the power lines and below the river bank had made matters still more awkward. By then the Inspector had no idea what to do, but his conviction that he was dealing with a master-criminal had been confirmed beyond doubt.

'He's obviously passed the stuff on to a third party and if we go for a search he'll plead innocence,' he muttered.

Even Runk had to agree that all the evidence pointed that way. 'He also happens to know his car's been wired for sound,' he said. The route he's following he's got to know. So where do we go from here?'

Hodge hesitated. For a moment he considered applying for a warrant and conducting so thorough a search of the Wilts' house that even the minutest trace of heroin or Embalming Fluid would come to light. But if it didn't...'There's always the tape recorder,' he said finally. 'He may have missed that in which case we'll get the conversations he had with the pick-up artist.'

Sergeant Runk doubted it. 'If you ask me,' he said, 'the only way you're going to get solid evidence on this bugger is by sending Forensic in to do a search with vacuum-cleaners that'd suck an elephant through a drain pipe. He may be as canny as they come but those lab blokes know their onions. I reckon that's the sane way of going about it.'

But Hodge wasn't to be persuaded. He had no intention of handing the case over to someone else when it was patently obvious he was on the right track. 'We'll see what's on that tape first,' he said as they headed back towards Ipford. 'We'll give him an hour to get to sleep and then you can move in and get it.'

'And have the rest of the bloody day off,' said Runk. 'You may be one of Nature's insomniacs but if I don't get my eight hours I won't be fit for'

'I am not an insomniac,' snapped the Inspector. They drove on in silence broken only by the bleeps coming from Wilt's car. They were louder now. Ten minutes later the van was parked at the bottom of Perry Road and Wilt's car was announcing its presence from Oakhurst Avenue.

'You've got to hand it to the little sod,' said Hodge. 'I mean you'd never dream to look at him he could drive like that. Just shows you can never tell.'

An hour later Sergeant Runk stumbled out of his van and walked up Perry Road. 'It's not there,' he said when he got back.

'Not there? It's bloody well got to be,' said the Inspector, 'it's still coming over loud and clear.'

'That's as may be,' said Runk. 'For all I care the little shit's tucked up in bed with the fucking transmitters but what I do know is that it's not outside his house.'

'What about the garage?' Runk snorted.

'The garage? Have you ever had a dekko in that garage? It's a ruddy furniture depository, that garage is. Stuffed to the roof with junk when I saw it and if you're telling me he's spent the last two days shifting it all out into the back garden so as he could get his car in there...'

'We'll soon see about that,' said Hodge and presently the van was driving slowly past 45 Oakhurst Avenue and the Sergeant had been proved right.

'What did I tell you?' he said. 'I said he hadn't put it in the garage.'

'What you didn't say was he'd parked the thing there,' said Hodge, pointing through the windscreen at the mud-stained Escort which the Corporal, who hadn't been prepared to waste time checking house numbers in the middle of the night, had left outside Number 65.

'Well I'm buggered,' said Runk. 'Why'd he want to do a thing like that?'

'We'll see if that tape has anything to tell us,' said the Inspector. 'You hop out here and we'll go on round the corner.'

But for once Sergeant Runk wasn't to be budged. 'If you want that bloody tape you go and get it,' he said. 'A bloke like this Wilt doesn't leave his car down the road without a good reason and I'm not learning too bleeding late what that reason is, and that's final.'

In the end it was Hodge who approached the car warily and had just started to grope under the front seat when Mrs Willoughby's Great Dane gave tongue inside the house.

'What did I tell you?' said Runk as the Inspector clambered in beside him puffing frantically. 'I knew there was a trap there somewhere but you wouldn't listen.'

Inspector Hodge was too preoccupied to listen to him even now. In his mind's ear he could still hear the baying of that dreadful dog and the sound of its terrible paws on the front door of the Willoughby's house.

He was still shaken by the experience when they arrived back at the station. 'I'll get him, I'll get him,' he muttered as he made his way wearily up the steps. But the threat lacked substance. He had been outwitted yet again and for the first time he appreciated Sergeant Runk's need for sleep. Perhaps after a few hours his mind would come up with a new plan.

In Wilt's case the need for sleep was paramount too. The effects of Agent Incapacitating on a body already weakened by the administration of Dr Kores' sexual cordial had reduced him to a state in which he hardly knew who he was and was quite incapable of answering questions. He vaguely remembered escaping from a cubicle, or rather of being locked in one, but for the rest his mind was a jumble of images, the sum total of which made no sense at all. Men with masks, guns, being dragged, thrown into a jeep, driven, more dragging, lights in a bare room and a man shouting dementedly at him, all formed kaleidoscopic patterns which constantly rearranged themselves in his mind and made no sense at all. They just happened or were happening or even, because the man shouting at him still seemed somehow remote, had happened to him in some previous existence and one he would prefer not to relive. And even when Wilt tried to explain that things, whatever they were, were not what they seemed, the shouting man wasn't prepared to listen.

It was hardly surprising. The strange noises Wilt was in fact making hardly came into the category of utterances and certainly weren't explanations.

'Scrambled,' said the doctor Glaushof had summoned to try and inject some sense into Wilt's communications system. 'That's what you get with AI Two. You'll be lucky if he ever talks sense again.'

'AI Two? We used standard issue Agent Incapacitating,' said Glaushof. 'Nobody's been throwing AI Two around. That's reserved for Soviet suicide squads.'

'Sure,' said the doctor, 'I'm just telling you what I diagnose. You'd better check the canisters out.'

'I'll check that lunatic Harah out too,' said Glaushof and hurried from the room. When he returned Wilt had assumed a foetal position and was fast asleep.

'AI Two,' Glaushof admitted lugubriously. 'What do we do now?'

'I've done what I can,' said the doctor, dispensing with two hypodermics. 'Loaded him with enough Antidote AI to keep him out of the official brain-death category...'

'Brain-death category? But I've got to interrogate the bastard. I can't have him cabbaging on me. He's some sort of infiltrating fucking agent and I got to find out where he's from.'

'Major Glaushof,' said the doctor wearily, 'it is now like zero three hundred hours and there's eight women, three men, one lieutenant and this...' he pointed at Wilt, 'and all of them suffering from nerve-gas toxicity and you think I can save any of them from chemically induced psychosisI'll do it but I'm not putting a suspected terrorist wearing a scrotal guard at the head of my list of priorities. If you want to interrogate him you'll have to wait. And pray. Oh yes, and if he doesn't come out of coma in eight hours let me know, maybe we can use him for spare-part surgery.'

'Hold it there, doctor,' he said. 'One word out of any of these people about there being'

'Gassed?' said the doctor incredulously. 'I don't think you realize what you've done, Major. They're not going to remember a thing.'

'There being an agent here,' shouted Glaushof. 'Of course they've been gassed. Lieutenant Harah did that.'

'If you say so,' said the doctor. 'My business is physical welfare not base security and I guess you'll be able to explain Mrs Ofrey's condition to the General. Just don't call on me to say she and seven other women are naturally psychotic.'

Glaushof considered the implications of this request and found them decidedly awkward. On the other hand there was always Lieutenant Harah...'Tell me, doc,' he said, 'just how sick is Harah?'

'About as sick as a man who's been kicked in the groin and inhaled AI Two can be,' said the doctor. 'And that's not taking his mental condition beforehand into account either. He should have been wearing one of these.' He held up the box.

Glaushof looked at it speculatively and then glanced at Wilt. 'What would a terrorist want with one of those things?' he asked.

'Could be he expected what Lieutenant Harah got,' said the doctor, and left the room.

Glaushof followed him into the next office and sent for Captain Clodiak. 'Take a seat, Captain,' he said. 'Now I want a breakdown of exactly what happened in there tonight.'

'What happened in there? You think I know? There's this maniac Harah...'

Glaushof held up a hand. 'I think you should know that Lieutenant Harah is an extremely sick man right now.'

'What's with the now?' said Clodiak. 'He always was. Sick in the head.'

'It's not his head I'm thinking about.'

Captain Clodiak chewed gum. 'So he's got balls where his brain should be. Do I care?'

'I'd advise you to,' said Glaushof. 'Assaulting a junior officer carries a very heavy penalty.'

'Yea, well the same goes for sexually assaulting a senior one.'

'Could be,' said Glaushof, 'but I think you're going to have a hard time proving it.'

'Are you telling me I'm a liar?' demanded the Captain.

'No. Definitely not. I believe you but what I'm asking is, will anyone else?'

'I've got witnesses.'

'Had,' said Glaushof. 'From what the doctors tell me they're not going to be very reliable. In fact I'd go so far as to say they don't even come into the category of witnesses any longer. Agent Incapacitating does things to the memory. I think you ought to know that. And Lieutenant Harah's injuries have been medically documented. I don't think you're going to be in a position to dispute them. Doesn't mean you have to, but I'd advise you to co-operate with this department.'

Captain Clodiak studied his face. It wasn't a pleasant face but there was no disputing the fact that her situation wasn't one which allowed her too many options. 'What do you want me to do?' she asked.

'I want to hear what this Wilt said and all. In his lectures. Did he give any indications he was a communist?'

'Not that I knew,' said the Captain. 'I'd have reported it if he had.'

'So what did he say?'

'Mostly talked about things like parliament and voting patterns and how people in England see things.'

'See things?' said Glaushof, trying to think why an attractive woman like Ms Clodiak would want to go to lectures he'd have paid money to avoid. 'What sort of things?'

'Religion and marriage and...just things.'

At the end of an hour, Glaushof had learnt nothing.