For the Good of the State (33 page)

Poor old bugger! Getting older was something Tom had occasionally thought about. But not
being
older. But now he didn’t know quite how to react. ‘It’s okay, David.’ He patted the Cortina. ‘In Beirut I used to do this all the time, pretty much. It’s all right.’

‘It isn’t all right. Being too clever by half is bad enough. But not being clever enough is worse. People get killed when I’m not clever enough. And I’m not being clever enough at the moment, I suspect.’

That could really only mean one thing. ‘You think Panin’s up to something—apart from protecting Zarubin?’

‘Hmm … I’ll tell you something about Comrade Panin, Tom—one of the things we
do
know about him. He was the pupil of a man named Berzin, who was a professor of psychology in the Dzerzhinksy KGB Centre in the old days. We’ve got a whole book of his lectures in our archives, which some thoughtful person presented to us. Lots of theories, old Berzin had—some of ’em simple and old hat, some of ‘em devious as hell. “Get your enemy to do your work for you”, was one … and one that Panin likes, too. But there was another one I recall, because it’s pricking my thumbs at the moment. Berzin called it his “Benefit Maximization” theory, or some such jargon—he liked jargon. What he meant, though, was that having a main objective in any operation should never preclude subsidiary objectives. In fact, he even referred to “the single objective heresy”: “
the successful operative must balance caution and calculation with daring, risk-acceptance and greed for windfall benefits in what may seem unrelated sectors of activity
… ” Or something like that—I’m not sure of the translation of “windfall”, but “greed” is the exact word, straight out of the Bible in Russian, apparently.’ Audley nodded. ‘And our Nikolai is nothing if not greedy. Apart from which … if, as he says and I very much suspect, his present position is as uncertain as mine is … he needs to ride home with a whole lot of severed heads attached to his saddle-bow.’

It was a chilly metaphor, as cold as the metal under his hand, thought Tom. ‘And yours may be one of them, you think?’

The brutal mouth twitched upwards. ‘Well, apart from Zarubin, I’m the only target around.’ Another twitch.

‘But it does occur to me now that if the “Sons of the Eagle” just happened to put a bullet through me … then no one could blame
him
, could they? That would have the virtue of neatness.’ The twitch became the old familiar Beast-grin. ‘It just occurred to me out of the blue. And it’s probably quite fanciful.’

The metal was almost burning-cold. ‘We don’t have to keep his next rendezvous, David. We could let him go it alone—’

‘Cut-and-run! For
him?
’ This time the sniff was worthy of the nose. ‘Not on your nelly, Tom! The day I do that for Panin … then he doesn’t have to worry about me ever again. And right now he still does, I tell you.’

It was useless to argue with him, because his pride certainly equalled Panin’s greed.

‘Besides which … I’d never know what he was up to, would I?’ The Beast-grin softened. ‘And I couldn’t abide that—it would make me bully my wife and beat my daughter.’ Audley shook his head almost cheerfully. ‘And we couldn’t have that, could we! So let’s go, then—where glory waits.’

Maybe the car wouldn’t start
, hoped Tom. But he had just looked at the engine under the bonnet, and it had looked the way the garage man said it would—almost as good as the beaten-up Chevy he had used in Beirut.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Audley stopped halfway into the car. ‘What do you want now? Wasn’t it a phone—?’

‘I’d prefer you not to wear that raincoat, for a start.’ Better anger than despair.

Audley raised himself, huge and off-white. ‘Why the hell not?’

‘It stands out like a—like a fucking sore thumb, David.’

‘What?’ The old Audley sparked again. ‘You want me to die of pneumonia, then?’

‘Pneumonia would suit me fine.’ He preferred the old Audley, actually. ‘No one’s going to blame me for that. And it isn’t usually terminal these days, anyway. But … suit yourself.’ He ought to have known that the direct approach never worked with the old man.

But Audley was nevertheless obediently taking the coat off. ‘I shall put it on again if it rains.’ He balled the coat up and threw it into the back of the car. And then looked aggressively at Tom. ‘Which it looks like doing any moment now. Is that all?’

Tom got into the car, And, of course, it started at the first twist of the ignition key, as he knew it would do. But what he needed, short of the protective back-up he had always wanted, was bloody
Dunsterforce
, before some bloody telephone.

He toyed for a moment with the idea of three-point-turning into the farmyard, and bogging down in it. But the thought was beneath him—and it was par for this course that the Cortina wouldn’t bog down, anyway. When inanimate things were against one, it was useless to fight them.

‘Yes.’ He reversed savagely down the track towards the road, knowing that he would stop carefully at the junction, even though there wouldn’t be anything to delay him: if God intended David Audley to rendezvous again with his old comrade, then he would clear the road. Tell me about this fish jam of yours, David.‘

‘Ah … ’ Audley was making a dog’s-breakfast of safety-belting himself up as always, oblivious of all nuances when it suited him. ‘Ah! Now what you really need to know, young Tom, is the story of Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, who was indirectly responsible—if not
ultimately
responsible—for serving up the jam … Which, of course, was good Beluga caviare, as the Comrade Professor well knows—and knows well that I know too, of course. Which is the problem—’

The car bumped and lurched over the pot-holes. And even if it hadn’t it was going to be a bumpy ride, because the old bugger was already playing his games again, in spite of everything—

But it wasn’t, somehow. Not even though they came to a tatty, old-fashioned (but unvandalized) phone-box on an impossible blind corner on the ujpper edge of a hillside village only five or ten minutes away from Bodger’s Farm; which must therefore have been well within the range of Gilbert de Merville’s forced-labour net, when he’d been raising Mountsorrel.

And, even, it was Audley who broke first, trying to snap the thread of his own inconsequential tale, out of fish jam (which the sailors had hated), and the long-dead, far-flung past, from Devon to the high passes of the North-West Frontier, and back to Devon again, and on to the equally distant Caspian Sea, off Enzeli in Persia, and Baku in Transcaucasia, and Astrakhan on one of the mouths of the Volga.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be phoning?’ The old man found his wristwatch with difficulty, on the inside of his wrist. ‘They’ll be there by now, almost—?’

He had to find the number, and reverse the charges, with his imagination still ablaze.

And do the necessary: “This is an open line—‘ It had sounded like the dreadful Harvey on the other end, sweating out his Saturday as duty-creature to Jaggard ’—the number is—‘

But finally Jaggard came on, irascibly. ‘Arkenshaw! Where the hell have you been?’

Jaggard wasn’t to be trusted
, he thought. But then—
but neither am I now
! ‘I’m in Devon, on Exmoor. I’m at—’ He squinted at the name and number again, where he was.

‘I know where you are, damn it! What the devil’s happening?’

So Audley’s bullet and Basil Cole had fully worked themselves through the system since yesterday, ‘We should abort this operation, sir, I think.’

Pause.

‘Just tell me what’s happening, Tom.’ Jaggard had his cool back now.

‘Do you know who the “Sons of the Eagle” are, sir?’

Another pause. But he could imagine what Jaggard was doing, out of his earshot; and then what Harvey would be doing. ‘No.’

Well—let’s see how good Harvey is
! ‘They are a Polish dissident group. Panin says that they’re terrorists, subsidiary to Solidarity.’

‘You’ve talked to Panin?’

Keep to the truth while you can
. ‘Audley has. I’ve just listened in. Panin’s down here with a Polish minder, by name Sadowski. Major Kasimierz Sadowski.’
Wait, and let him feed that also to Harvey
.

‘Yes?’ The pause was just long enough to confirm Tom’s suspicion that Harvey wasn’t monitoring the call on an extension line: this was Jaggard’s privately-taped exchange. And, of course, he knew about Sadowski.

‘Panin says he’s here to stop the Sons of the Eagle from killing General Zarubin.’ Tom gave him only half a second. ‘You know about Zarubin?’

‘Go on.’

So Jaggard didn’t need to put that through either. ‘Zarubin masterminded the murder of Father Popieluszko.’ Tom gave; the dead priest’s name every last Polish inflection, to the point of incomprehensibility. And then waited.

‘Go on. Go on.’

‘Do you know where Zarubin is now?’

Fractional pause. ‘Don’t keep asking me questions. Just tell me what’s happening.’

‘Zarubin’s on the way here. At this very moment.’ Tom shivered helplessly at the meaning of his own words. ‘He’ll be here any time, in the next hour or two. Here on Exmoor, sir. And the Sons of the Eagle will be waiting for him.’

This time it wasn’t so much a pause as a silence while Jaggard digested this disquieting intelligence. But finally he came to life again. ‘Panin told you this?’

Audley was watching from the car. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How does he know?’

Fair question. ‘He’s not saying. Presumably they’ve got someone inside the Sons of the Eagle.’

‘And how do they know—the Poles—about Zarubin?’

Another fair question. ‘He wouldn’t say that, either. He just stated it as a fact, and stuck to it. But … ’

‘But what?’

Tom nodded gratefully to Audley. ‘Dr Audley thinks, if Panin’s got someone on the inside, then maybe he’s set the thing up himself.’

‘What?’ Jaggard sounded irritated. ‘Set up Zarubin as a target? Why the blazes should he do that?’

‘Zarubin is a target already. The Poles have already killed his deputy—a man named Marchuk. Leonid Marchuk—’

‘Spell it.’ Tom’s pronunciation invariably floored native Englishmen.

‘M-A-R-C-H-U-K. L-E—’

‘I’ve got that. Go on.’

‘That was in Poland.’ It wouldn’t take long for the computer to confirm that. ‘Zarubin was posted back to Moscow after that. But now he’s in England, and Panin probably reckons he can’t be protected properly here. So he’s taking the initiative instead.’

‘The initiative—‘ That rocked Jaggard somewhat. ’What initiative?‘

‘He says he doesn’t want any trouble—not with what Zarubin’s doing over here at the moment, especially. He says that’ll be bad for both sides.’

‘He does? Well, he’s going about it in a damn funny way! What does he propose to do, for heaven’s sake?’

‘He wants to make a deal.’

‘A deal—?’ Jaggard stopped suddenly. ‘Hold on.’

Tom waited, focusing on Audley again. He mustn’t forget to ask about Audley’s bullet and Basil Cole’s death to give himself some sort of cover story for all this chat.

‘Arkenshaw?’ Jaggard came on the line again. ‘I have confirmation on Marchuk. A suspicious road accident … Not a nice man, Marchuk. But then neither is Zarubin, by all accounts. But we haven’t got one damn thing on your “Sons of the Eagle”.’ Pause. ‘But you knew about them, did you? But … never mind. What deal? With us?’

‘No, sir. With the Sons of the Eagle.’
Put that in your pipe
! But he could improve on that. ‘With a man named Szymiac.’

‘With—? Shimshe … ack?’

‘That’s right. S-Z-Y-M-I-A-C—one of their top men. Szymiac. Panin knows exactly where to find him. He’s rented a house at East Lyn, just outside Lynmouth, In preparation for welcoming Zarubin to Exmoor.’ Tom wondered what the computer would make of that. But then, if it had fluffed the Sons of the Eagle it was unlikely to throw up Szymiac from its electronic stomach.

Jaggard growled unintelligibly. ‘What sort of deal can Panin possibly make with Sh … Ssshhim-shak?’ Are you—is
he
serious?‘

‘A very obvious deal.’ For an instant Tom heard the wind whistle round his cosy phone-kiosk. It was a cold east wind, which had freshened in the last hour, possibly blowing all the way from the Urals to Exmoor, across the prostrate body of his mother’s country.

‘It isn’t obvious to me, I said,’ said Jaggard sharply. ‘Are you there?’

‘Yes.’ Tom saw that Audley was holding up his wrist and tapping his wristwatch meaningfully. ‘Jaruzelski’s got a whole lot of Solidarity activists under lock-and-key. All he has to do is throw away the key—or worse. And that gives Panin pretty good bargaining power.’

Pause. Then pause-into-silence. And now Audley was shrugging at him. ‘I’m running out of time, sir.’ If Jaggard had forgotten Exmoor realities it was time to remind him. ‘Dr Audley is waiting for me. So I also need to know what you’ve got about everything that happened yesterday … sir.’

‘Yes.’ Was that an intake of breath? ‘What does Audley say about all this? Does he accept it?’ Only half-a-second. ‘But you want to abort—?’

‘I do.’ This was where the truth became too complicated. ‘He doesn’t.’

‘Why not?’ Jaggard ignored what he wanted for the second time.

‘He wants to find out what Panin is really up to.’ Even as he answered, Tom knew that he was on a loser; because Jaggard could no more resist that challenge than Audley could; and also because Jaggard was sitting safe and comfortably, while they were up at the sharp end.

‘Panin’s up to something else?’ Jaggard’s question was hedged with caution.

‘Yes, sir. I think he is.’

‘The hell with what you think! What does Audley say?’

He should have expected this. ‘It relates to why Zarubin is coming here, sir.’ He had thought to enjoy this tall story, but Jaggard had ruined his enjoyment.

‘Ah … yes … ’ Jaggard temporized, as though he’d been untimely switched back to another outstanding question, which had already occurred to him but which he’d decided was relatively unimportant in his scale of priority questions. ‘What the blazes is he doing down there, where you are? Apart from risking his neck—?’