Our Man in Camelot (27 page)

“Which is exactly the way Bullitt sees it now. He knows he’s had the best of his life—there’s even a possibility it’s running out on him, because it’s rumoured he saw a heart specialist last year sometime, though we don’t yet know which one. But in any case he appears to be ready to collect on that promise, so the risk simply doesn’t worry him. If anything it makes the whole business more attractive: it’s as though he’s challenging us—his life to prove his case. And that makes it a matter of honour.”

Roskill heaved a sigh. “And that’s why we’re beaten.”

Mosby stared at the great coat-of-arms, with its fiery dragon supporters. He wondered whether there had ever been a Sheldon coat-of-arms. It was a pity William Lancelot Bullitt couldn’t wear full armour on Liddington—

The Sheldon coat-of-arms?

Everybody had a coat-of-arms if you went back far enough.

“No.”

“What d’you mean ‘no’?” said Roskill. “I meant—“ Mosby swung towards Audley, “—screw Billy Bullitt’s honour. What about
my
honour?”

“Your honour?”

“Sure. My honour—and the honour of the CIA.”

“The honour of the CIA?” Frances Fitzgibbon laughed.

Mosby looked at them. “Sure. Do you have to be British to have honour? Is it something lesser mortals can’t have?”

“But—“

“Hush!” said Audley. “Go on, Captain Sheldon.”

“Okay. You said it was a straight challenge. He thinks we’re a bunch of assassins and murderers. Okay—then I accept the challenge. I say we’re not.”

“But how do you accept it?” said Frances. “Do you want to fight him?”

“No. I accept it the way he accepted it. And if he’s a man of honour then he can’t refuse me first go.”

“First go at what?”

“At Liddington Hill. I’ll wear the red shirt—I’ll wear the combat hat. And I’ll prove the truth.” Mosby pointed at Audley. “And you catch the guy that pulls the trigger.”

“Mose—“

“Shut up, honey. I’m challenging Billy Bullitt to his Ordeal by Battle. And he can’t refuse me.”

“What d’you mean—he can’t refuse you? Why not?”

“Because that’s the way the game is played. And once I accept his way of playing it then I take precedence over him because it’s my honour that’s at stake more than his. So if David’s right about the way he thinks he has no choice in the matter.”

Shirley stared at him unbelievingly. “But Mose—if David’s also right about the KGB—“ She stopped.

“Then you get shot.” Frances Fitzgibbon had no scruples about completing the sentence. “And if Bullitt’s right about the CIA you also get shot.”

“But he isn’t right. So then David can scoop up their hit man—in that open country it shouldn’t be too difficult.” Mosby nodded at Audley. “He was probably fixing to try that anyway, and I can make it nice and easy for him by being just where he wants me to be. And then Billy Bullitt can see for himself who’s really gunning for him, which is going to make him think twice about blowing the whistle on us.”

“But you’ll still be shot,” Frances was frowning now, as perplexed as Shirley.

Mosby continued to look at Audley. “Well—do I get my challenge delivered or not?”

For a moment Audley said nothing. Then he nodded slowly. “You realise that he won’t be bluffed? That he’ll take you at your face value?”

“Of course. It won’t work any other way.”

Again Audley was silent for a second or two. “And you realise I can’t guarantee to cover you? If I keep my men away from the hill so as not to scare them off they’ll be bound to get a clear shot—you realise that?”

“Sure.” Mosby nodded. “I’m counting on it.”

“Very well. You’ve got yourself a deal, Captain Sheldon.” Audley’s voice was almost non-committal, but he watched Mosby shrewdly. “What else do you want?”

“He wants his head examining,” said Shirley sharply. She squared up to Mosby. “Mosby Sheldon, have you gone entirely out of your mind? What in hell’s name are you playing at?”

It was nice to be noticed at last, thought Mosby—even when being noticed didn’t matter any more.

“I’m not playing, honey. Or maybe I am at that: it’s an old Arthurian game, carrying someone else’s shield in to battle. Malory’s full of knights doing that in good causes, on the level.”

She shook her head helplessly. “Mosby—you can’t. You just can’t.” She put her hand on his arm.

“I can.” He smiled at her happily. “Don’t fret, honey. Good knights aren’t allowed to get killed in good causes. The book says so. Leastways, not if they remember to put on their magic armour.”

BUT OF COURSE
they did get killed, Mosby thought for the hundredth time as he opened the car door. Good causes, bad causes, they were all the same to bullets.

And Bullitts?

That was one symptom: irritatingly inconsequential thoughts and an even more annoying inability to concentrate on those important matters which still concerned him.

Not that there were many of them now—that was another of the mental symptoms. What had once seemed important was now no longer important. Or perhaps just in abeyance. What was still in the future mattered little when the future was a matter of very considerable doubt.

Matters, mattered, matter. All ugly words.

“Are you all right?” asked the camera man.

If he was a camera man. He certainly had a camera, so that made him a camera man whether he was or not. Making a movie entitled
Le Morte de Mosby
.

They that take the sword… Except that wasn’t strictly correct. They that take the Mothers’ Union banner, that was correct.

“Sure. It’s just this goddamn bullet-proof vest. I just can’t bend so good.”

The best vest money could buy, as recommended by the British Army in Northern Ireland. And not really a patrol vest, either, but a custom-built job for look-outs in exposed positions favoured by IRA snipers. The last word in safety first, but with disadvantages, the man said—

“It’s made for a direct hit. Anything short of an anti-tank shell, and you’ve got a chance—a very good chance. Though we can never be sure, naturally—“

Great!

“And, of course, we’re only protecting your chest plus the upper abdomen. We could do more, but you’d hardly be able to move, and I gather you’ve got to do some walking.”

Mosby looked up the hillside. Walking was right.

“What you’ve got to pray for is a professional—a natural marksman who’s prepared to take that extra second if he needs to. Sometimes the amateurs try for the head-shot. Or they squeeze off in a panic and miss altogether—“

Can a miss altogether be bad?

“Which can be very serious with some of these very high velocity weapons. Tear your bloody arm off without even hitting you, they can. Just a near miss is enough.”

Yes, a miss altogether can be bad.

“But you’ll probably have a professional—“

Trying to cheer me up now.

“—so my advice to you is move nice and slowly. Let him hit you where he’s been taught to hit you. Then you’ll just have a sore chest next morning, take my word for it.”

What—no dissatisfied clients? Obviously not.

As he stepped out on to the side of the road Mosby realised that nice and slowly was the only way he was going to be able to move. Under his red shirt the bullet-proof vest weighed a ton, or seemed to, and he was already sweating… Though maybe that was just good honest fear.

But Billy Bullitt was no youngster, so that didn’t matter too much. With his combat hat pulled well down and his tinted glasses—and the target shirt—he would do well enough at a distance.

He was already used to the two physical symptoms he had noticed, the dry mouth and the tightness of his calf muscles. He had experienced them from the moment of getting up. The cup of hot tea had hardly moistened his mouth and the exercise of behaving normally, of walking to the bathroom and then down to breakfast as though it was any other morning of his life, hadn’t eased the muscles.

Nothing wrong with his stomach, though. It was true that condemned men could eat a hearty breakfast, going to their deaths with a bacon-and-egg cliche inside them.

It was Shirley who hadn’t eaten.

Strange that Shirley didn’t matter any more either. Or perhaps it was simply the recognition that he didn’t matter to Shirley.

But that wasn’t quite true any more, to be honest—and honesty was one of the real luxuries still left.

“Come to bed, honey.”

No doubt about the invitation, the first ever of its kind: big soft Camelot bed and little soft Shirley, both inviting him to enjoy the present and forget the future.

“Just got to clean my teeth, that’s all.”

Shirley fulfilling—ready to fulfil—the ancient night-before-the-battle-role, so that even if the good guys lost there’d be another generation of good guys to take up the quarrel in the future.

Future was another ugly word.

This would be the first time, and there always had to be a first time for everything. Even dying. Mark up another cliche.

And that made this first time unlucky, as though nothing would more surely ready him for death than the taking of this opportunity which the possibility of death was giving him.

“I think I’d better get all the sleep I can.”

The gentlest way he could think of saying it.

“You don’t have to, Mose.”

Logical answer. He didn’t have to do anything difficult next morning, just walk a little way up a hill, nice and slow. And either way, he could have all the sleep he wanted after that.

“I know. And the thought is very much appreciated. Is there any chance of being given a rain-check?”

She smiled at that: Mosby Sheldon III running true to form to the last.

“Of course. One rain-check issued.” “I won’t forget—I warn you.” “Neither will I.”

But now he was already forgetting the softness and the perfume. They were part of the past and the future. Now there was only the present, and the hill in front of him, rising up steeply.

Foot by foot he went up. The camera man was trudging on his left and the two other men a couple of yards to his right. Not a very big crew, three.

The turf under his feet was soft and springy now. Further back it had been trampled by cows and was sprinkled with big, round crusted pats of dung. There were flowers growing in it, yellow buttercups and white ox-eye daisies. He reached down and picked a daisy for luck, realising as he did so that he had moved too quickly. For an instant his back tingled with fear.

And there were birds sweeping over the hillside, skimming and diving like fighter-planes searching for targets over a battlefield. Major Davies would have known what sort of birds they were—or would he?

Davies was the odd man out who had been bugging him. Even in the middle of the night, when he had woken up to find Shirley breathing softly beside him, the unsettled question of Davies had come between them, like a ghost.

They had checked out Davies so thoroughly before he had flown to Israel, and he had been clean. And they had checked him out thoroughly after his death, and but for that one letter from old James Barkham, the bookseller, he had been clean again. Indeed, if that letter hadn’t popped through the letterbox slit, then the thing would never have been started. Without that there had been nothing left to connect Major Davies, the bird-watcher, with Major Davies, the expert on Arthurian history, the Badon-hunter.

So it had been deliberate… He heard a car on the road below him, and turned slowly and deliberately to face it.

Distance; a little over three hundred yards maybe.

He closed his eyes behind the tinted glasses and waited.

The car began to decelerate, presumably as it came towards where they had parked their vehicle half on the grass verge. Then he heard it accelerate.

Nothing.

He opened his eyes. Already the countryside was flattening out beneath him, with the chequer-board of tiny English fields becoming visible and the sweep of the new freeway which cut through them less than a mile from where he stood.

Somewhere out there, carefully hidden, was all the paraphernalia of David Audley’s department, men, cars, helicopters—all waiting for the camera man’s first assistant to fire his flare gun. Perhaps even the men loading the bales of straw in the newly-cut wheatfield away to his left… and for sure those repairmen blocking one of the freeway lanes so conveniently.

He turned back to the hillside. So the planting of that letter had to be part of the KGB’s trap, the first clue designed to direct their attention first to Davies, then to Billy Bullitt. Nothing too easy, nothing too obvious… They had to work their way to disaster by their own efforts.

He could hear another car. So let this one be in the back—that would be more appropriate, anyway.

He stared down at the daisy in his hand. How had they been so sure that the Americans wouldn’t catch up with Davies? And more, how had they managed to place Davies in the exact spot where he had been needed, to feed Billy Bullitt with the great lies so very carefully constructed that it took this walk in the sun to cast doubt on them?

The second car had passed as peacefully as the first.

“I think we could get some shots here,” said the camera man.

“Okay,” said Mosby.

“Fine. Well, the original script is for you to point up towards the hill-fort on the top. Then down towards the Ridgeway, where the road is… and across over the line of the railway—over there on the far left—which is towards the line of the Roman road from the south-west.”

Billy Bullitt’s original script. This had been where he had thought it must have happened, at this vital strategic crossroads of Dark Age Britain, where the ancient downland trackway from the north-east crossed the Roman roads from the east and the south.

Mosby looked up obediently towards the line of the ramparts on the hilltop.

You are assigned to locate the map reference of Badon Hill, England. Just that.

Well, this was as close as he’d ever get to fulfilling that assignment, because with Wodden out of the running they were never going to know for sure if this was the place. The old arguments would go on and on, and round and round, as they’d always done.