Our Man in Camelot (22 page)

“Today’s Thursday. The deadline is midday Friday for Sunday—and that was a personal favour to me.”

Whose deadline?

“Not even with a D-Notice?” Audley shook his head, rejecting his own question before it had been answered. “No, that wouldn’t hold them this time. You couldn’t make it stick.”

“I wouldn’t even try. The Government wouldn’t wear it if I did—we’d be tarred with the same brush, and so would they. They wouldn’t wear it, and they’d be right: we’d just be trying to hold the lid down, and it would blow us to kingdom come. If not in our own press, then for sure in the foreign press—including the American. They’d make a meal of it.”

The two Englishmen gazed at each other, oblivious of Mosby.

Finally Sir Frederick nodded. “So it’s your way or no way at all.”

“I get whatever I need?”

“Just ask. If anyone talks back to you refer them to me. I shall be on the end of a phone.”

“And they’re both mine?” Audley pointed to Mosby.

“Hey! What is this?” exclaimed Mosby.

“They are yours until midday tomorrow.” Sir Frederick turned to Mosby. “As of this moment, Captain Sheldon, you and your wife are in the absolute charge of Dr Audley. What he says, you will listen to. What he orders, you will do.”

“Like hell I will!”

“I agree, though I would place the emphasis differently: like hell you
will
.” Sir Frederick’s tone was still conversational, as though he was clarifying a minor point of semantics. But that figured easily enough, because big dragons like Sir Frederick Clinton didn’t have to breathe fire to get their own way; with them a glance was as good as a roasting.

“That sounds like a threat.”

“A threat? My dear Sheldon, I don’t need to threaten you. The situation you are in threatens you. You maintain that you don’t know what is happening, that you are innocent… and as it happens I do not believe you—I believe you are a most absolute and accomplished liar… but your innocence or guilt are now completely irrelevant—“

“Well, it damn well isn’t to me! You can’t—“

Sir Frederick raised his hand. “Please hear me out, Captain. It is for your own good, I do assure you… You see, if you are a CIA operative you are in very great trouble at this moment—the biggest you are ever likely to be in this side of the Iron Curtain. But if you are what you claim to be you are almost certainly in even greater trouble, both you and your wife.”

Mosby stared at him. “Greater—? I don’t understand.”

“David will explain to you. And then he will require your co-operation.” Sir Frederick paused to let the words sink in. “And I want you to give him that co-operation as though your life and your liberty depended on it. Because they do, Captain—yours and your wife’s.”

“Our
lives?
”

“If you are innocent.” Sir Frederick nodded. “And your liberty if you are guilty.”

“Guilty of what, for God’s sake?”

“That again David will tell you. But look at it this way, if you like, Captain: you approached him two days ago and asked him to help you. And that’s just what he’s going to do… And a few minutes ago you offered Squadron Leader Roskill a deal—a gentleman’s agreement. So now if David offers you another deal… my advice to you is
take it
. Because you’ll never get a better offer.”

Mosby felt his cheek muscles tighten uncontrollably. Maybe that passage between the two of them a few moments before had been for his sole benefit—
the Government wouldn
’
t wear it
…
it would blow us to kingdom come
—as part of the psychological process of scaring the bejasus out of him. But now he had a gut feeling that it hadn’t been at all, and that Clinton was here not so much to see him as for an emergency briefing with Audley, his Number Four top trouble-shooter. Which meant that beneath the Ivy League urbanity the British were running even more shit-scared and desperate than the Americans.

Jesus
! And what made that worse was that the British knew why they were running—

Sir Frederick’s eyes were on him—the Big Dragon’s eyes that burned little dragons into crisps.

“Well, Sheldon?”

He could almost feel the heat.

“Okay. Whatever you want. Just so you protect my wife.”

“We shall try to protect you both… By that I take it you still deny any connection with your CIA people?”

No choice. Even with Shirley at risk, no choice.

“It’s the truth. But since you all think I’m a liar I guess there’s not much point saying so.”

“Not all of us.” Sir Frederick stood up. “David over there believes you, for one.”

“David?” Mosby looked at Audley in surprise. “Well—that’s great.”

Great like a gift-wrapped time-bomb.

“Convenient, certainly.” Sir Frederick nodded to Audley before turning finally back to Mosby as he began to move towards the door. “Make the most of it, Sheldon, that’s all. Good afternoon to you.”

Mosby watched the door close. For the second time in one day he’d been badly frightened, but each time he’d been too busy—or too stupid—to realise the extent of the danger until it had passed.

“Phew!” he breathed out gratefully. There was nothing to be gained from trying to hide what must be pretty damn obvious.

Audley settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “He had you rattled, then?”

“You can say that again.” Mosby studied the big Englishman. It was almost like he too was relieved to see Clinton’s back, though that could hardly be due to fear—more likely he just had no taste for playing second fiddle. “Top brass always makes me rattle… And he’s your boss, eh?”

“You could say so.”

“And that makes you—“ Mosby clamped his mouth shut as though he’d thought better of what he’d been about to say.

“Makes me what?”

Mosby shook his head. “Just… I was remembering your wife said you worked for the Government, that’s all.”

“Does it worry you?”

“Not so you believe I’m telling the truth. Was that on the level?”

“I chose not to believe you work for the CIA, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’ll sure do for a start. But do I get to ask why?” Mosby grinned nervously. “Or you could tell me why everyone else thinks the opposite, I don’t mind which, so I get some sort of answer.”

“But of course.” Audley sounded positively amiable now, almost friendly. “To take the uncharitable view first, quite simply—they were expecting you.”

“Me?”

“You meaning the CIA… Let me put it another way: if you were a policeman and a rich man came to you and said he thought he was about to be burgled, what would you do?”

“Well, if I was a cop… I guess I’d stake out his place—is that what you want me to say?”

“Exactly. And then when a stranger turns up—a stranger with the wrong sort of accent, carrying a sack and a set of house-breaking tools—you’d be inclined to take that uncharitable view, I rather think. Wouldn’t you?”

Mosby frowned. “Sure. But—“

Audley cut him off. “I know what you’re going to say: if the burglar arrived in company with a detective superintendent—and if he could prove the detective himself had suggested they should visit the rich man’s house in the first place? Is that it?”

“Something like, I guess.”

“Then you could have a bent copper, or a stupid one. So it was fortunate for me that I checked up with my police station first, otherwise I might be in quite a spot now.” This time there was no amusement in Audley’s smile, and some of the friendliness had drained from his voice. “But I did check. And so the official view is that the CIA was perhaps trying to be a little too clever for its own good.”

Mosby cursed Howard Morris and Schreiner both for so grossly miscalculating Audley’s reaction. How could they have been so hopelessly off beam, though?

“The official view? But not yours?”

“No, not mine. I knew the CIA has its little moments of weakness, but I can’t see my old friend Howard Morris dropping a clanger like that. He knows me much too well.”

It was macabre, the way Audley’s mind had travelled along the same line, to the same destination. And the wrong one, too.

“Howard—?”

“Morris. CIA Field Control, UK. Quite a sharp fellow. He’d never have sent his burglar to me—unless he wanted me to know about the burglary…”

Unless? The word pumped Mosby’s heart painfully. It wasn’t possible, it surely wasn’t possible, that Shirley and he had been deliberately sacrificed to stir up the British. That had been a contingency, but not the objective. And yet
unless
was there now, squeezing his chest—

“… which is just about the last thing in the world that he’d be wanting at this moment,” Audley continued reflectively. “Which means you aren’t his burglar “

“But I’m still a burglar?” It was no sweat to sound puzzled.

“Oh, yes—you are a burglar. I’ve no doubt about that.”

Mosby nodded. “Uh-huh? And just what am I supposed to be stealing?”

“Why, Mons Badonicus, of course, Captain Sheldon—or may I call you Mosby? It fits your character better.”

“It does? Well, be my guest. You can call me William Clarke Quantrill or John Wilkes Booth for all I care, just so you tell me how I can steal a battlefield, that’s all.”

“By finding it.”

“That’s no crime.”

Audley pursed his lips. “Now there you’re wrong. In most civilised countries ‘stealing by finding’ is a crime. If your Confederate ancestor had made away with that Yankee payroll he happened to find behind the lines…”

“But a battlefield isn’t a payroll.”

“This isn’t just any battlefield. This is an extra special one—King Arthur’s greatest victory, no less. Knowledge like that could be worth more than a Yankee payroll. Not only could be—but is.”

Audley’s sudden conversion to King Arthur was curious, to say the least, thought Mosby. But if he really believed that money was the objective then it was time to let a little honest avarice show through.

“You really think so?” He looked at the Englishman sidelong.

“I know so. In fact one of the ironies of your position, Mosby, is that you don’t seem to know just how valuable it is. It’s so valuable it’s already killed four men, and maybe as many as seven.”

“
Killed
—?” Mosby’s mind reeled at the arithmetic: Davies and his navigator—the airman Sergeant Gallagher had phoned him about… that made three. And if the British knew about Thickset and Tall and Thin…
Jesus
! But even that only made five.

“And destroyed a four million dollar aircraft,” added Audley. “Or whatever the going price of a Phantom is these days.”

“You can’t mean it!” Mosby whispered.

“But I do mean it.” Audley focussed on a point midway between them. “It’s rather like an old Richard Widmark film I saw years ago, when I was still going to the cinema… What was it—‘Panic in the Streets’ its title was, I think.

All the police in this seaport—New Orleans, somewhere like that—were hunting this petty thief, so the other criminals thought he had pulled off a big job of some sort and they hunted him too. Only the truth was he had the plague—the Black Death. Which is what Mons Badonicus would have been for you, Mosby… If you’d found it on your own it would have killed you, almost certainly.”

There was a clatter of tea-cups beyond the door to the hall.

“That’s the second irony,” said Audley. “And the third one is that you never really needed to look for Mons Badonicus at all: it was right under your feet all the time.”

Mosby looked at his feet.

“Not here, man, not here—Wodden.”

Wodden?

“Wodden equals Mons Badonicus,” said Audley. “You’ve got our battle under the new runway extension, so far as we can make out.”

The door opened behind Mosby.

“Tea up,” said Roskill. “And one American wife, undamaged, as per specification.”

THE AMERICAN WIFE
certainly appeared undamaged; indeed, with every hair in place right down to the two artfully arranged tendrils curling on her cheeks, she looked as though she’d just stepped out of a beauty salon. Which could mean that the female of the British dragon species was less daunting than the male, even allowing for the fact that Shirley would have seemed just as edible to him on the tilting boat-deck of the
Titanic
.

Which, when he thought about it, was how the floor of Camelot House felt now.

She stared at him from the doorway. “You okay, honey?”

“I’m fine.”

Fine meaning unsinkable.

“You look a bit peaky. I guess you know they think you’re some kind of spy, huh?” She moved to one side to let a diminutive grey-uniformed maid push in the tea-trolley, fixing Audley with a hostile frown which remained on target like a gyroscopically-controlled cannon.

“David doesn’t think so,” said Mosby.

“He doesn’t?” She assimilated the information without blinking. “Well, I should think not… Some spy!” Hostility for Audley was replaced by derision for absent idiots.

“He thinks I’m a burglar.”

“A—what?” The frown came back on target. ‘What has he burgled? The plans of the Round Table and the formula for getting the Sword out of the Stone?” Mosby winced at the Arthurian reminder—
under the new runway extension at Wodden
—but before he could react the little maid came towards him with a tray.

“With milk?”

Small upturned nose, frizzy blonde hair and that famous sensual gap between the large upper incisors reinforced by a trim little body in the well-cut grey uniform. Only the candid brown eyes belied the general impression of childish sexiness.

“Thank you.”

What the hell was he doing, fancying the hired help when the ship was sinking under him?

“And sugar, Captain Sheldon?”

He did a double-take. The voice was wrong and the manner was wrong and the uniform was too well cut to be a uniform. Plus, above all, no mere maid would know his name… But she still looked no more than eighteen.

She smiled into his confusion. “My name’s Fitzgibbon, Captain. I’m the ‘they’ your wife was talking about.”

He added ten years to his estimate, thought still against the visual evidence. Perhaps the British were recruiting them straight from High School now.