The Partridge Kite (19 page)

‘My Poussie for you, Tom. Always.’

They had not made love that night but lay awake together holding hands, listening to the people by the poolside barbecue, and the late-night swimmers and the Thai lady pianist playing quiet Broadway hits, the sounds drifting across the lawns, choking the air with nostalgia.

Tom had said goodbye to Kate early next morning in the hotel foyer with the bellboy and reception clerks looking on. He’d said it politely. And he’d meant it.

After all, he wasn’t to know he would be coming back.

Kate sat on the floor in front of the fire, Tom stretched in front of her, his head in her lap.

She thought he had fallen asleep but he was wide awake, staring at the ceiling.

His row with Kellick, his own newfound theories, his absurd infantile exit line as he’d left Kellick’s office flooded back. He felt suddenly depressed and out of his depth. Maybe the hospital doctors had been right and the drug that had numbed his swollen balls had lifted him away from reality. A few hours ago he thought he was beginning to see it all clearly, the plan, the strategy, the threat. But already most of it was gone.

He desperately wanted to talk about it, to set it out clearly again as he’d done in Kellick’s office.

He pushed his head deeper into Kate’s lap and looked up at her as she looked down.

‘Kate,’ he said, ‘I’m just about to break the Official Secrets Act. I’m going to tell you a story.’

Sunday, 19 December

It was 3.25 a.m. when Fry’s Range Rover did a U-turn at the Cenotaph and stopped ten yards from the security barrier that separated Downing Street from a silent, empty Whitehall.

The snow crunched under their feet as he and Tom walked the fifty yards to the door marked Number 10. The lamp over it shone brightly and inches of snow capped its copper dome. The eternal policeman stood hunched in a heavy dark serge cape, standing on wooden slats to keep his toes from freezing.

Fry showed his identity card and the policeman tapped on the door with his torch. Immediately, as if the attendant inside had been hovering, hand poised over the lock, the heavy door opened.

Kellick was in the hall. He looked more strained than usual. It wasn’t just tiredness. The skin on his face was stretched tight and the normal dark creases across his forehead and around his eyes were white. His jaw muscles were tensing themselves erratically, involuntarily, and there was the smallest fleck of spittle in the corner of his mouth. He hadn’t bothered to change into the clean shirt and tie he always kept hanging in the cupboard in Mrs Hayes’s office for emergencies such as this. His hair, usually immaculate, looked unnaturally flattened by his nervous habit of continually smoothing it. This was uncharacteristic Kellick. He was behind time with himself.

‘The Prime Minister’s waiting,’ he said. ‘And for God’s sake let him do the talking. . . the pair of you. . . speak only when you’re spoken to directly.’

Tom’s eyes narrowed but he said nothing.

The three followed the attendant up the cushioned carpeted stairs to the first-floor landing. Tom found it difficult to equate the expensive splendour of the inside of this house with the dull, cramped-looking exterior. It reminded him, as his hands slid along the mirror-polished mahogany bannisters, of one of those Victorian poor little rich girl’s doll’s houses: the hideously painted mock front that opened to a maze of intricate and beautifully decorated rooms, crammed from miniature cellar to bogus loft with all an underpaid craftswoman’s delicate fingers and a grudging merchant banker father could provide.

They turned right off the landing and into a narrow passage that led, by Tom’s reckoning, to the rear of the house. The attendant opened a door at the end without knocking and stood to one side as the three men in single file, led by Kellick, walked into the room.

‘Fry of my Department, Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘and McCullin.’

The greenness of the room overwhelmed Tom. He peered around him looking for the Prime Minister, following Kellick’s eyeline as he’d spoken. But he saw only the broad teak desk with its green leather top and the single brass table lamp with its green vellum shade. Beyond them he could see nothing . . . only vaguely the folds of the heavy dark green velvet curtains.

The three men waited for an acknowledgement of Kellick’s introduction but none came. Behind them there was just the slightest movement and Tom half turned to see a small man settling himself comfortably into a chair. Knight- ley, the Prime Minister’s secretary, looked at Tom and then lifted his nose, beckoning with it towards the desk and the single source of light.

The lamp lit up only the smallest area, and suddenly there in its centre was a hand, a right hand, the hand of an old man, white with broad blotchy freckles. The hand, holding a gold ballpoint pen, the type with a retractable head, began digging it into the green morocco leather. The three men stood in the darkness waiting obediently as the pen’s head went click-in, click-out, monotonously in the perfect white circle. Knightley was used to it. Tom remembered then Kellick’s same familiar habit.

‘What is this CORDON? How will they try it?’

The voice above the white hand was toneless. Except for the grammar it was hardly a question at all.

‘Sit down,’ it continued, ‘and tell me who you think they are and what and when they will try it on.’

‘Prime Minister’ - Kellick’s voice - ‘you will have read my report on our progress so far and conclusions I have made. You will have seen the recommendations I have made in the light of what we now know, limited though it is. I have recommended caution. There is nothing practical we can do until we know far more about these people and more exactly what their target is. The fact that Sanderson has been taken back by them, whoever they are, makes it essential we retrace a few steps, recheck what we have until now merely assumed to be correct. I have also recommended nothing is done about Major Robert Menzies until we have established exactly what his purpose is. We leave him at Cannon Row, alert no one there for the time being, until we are more certain of his position and what, if anything, they intend him to do.’

There was no response.

‘Prime Minister’ - Tom leant forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, ignoring Kellick’s strictures to make no initiative of his own - ‘we have established the identity of four top people involved. I’m certain we can shortly confirm another two. I’m also certain we are being led by the nose by CORDON, as part of their plan. I’ve no idea why. I just know we could never have got on to them so quickly if they hadn’t helped us.’

There’s no doubt they know you’re on to them?’

‘No doubt. Prime Minister.’

‘So they must know that you’re also suspicious about it, too?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Is that part of their plan, too . . . that you should realise you are being led?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so, but then the whole thing becomes so far-fetched.’

‘Then what alternative do you have? You either carry on with what you’re doing, knowing that is what they want, or you do nothing!’

‘No, Prime Minister, we do have a third option.’

‘Which is?’

‘We break the sequence. Indirectly they’ve handed us six names. One by one we are checking them out and one by one they are leading us closer. But at their pace. The way they want it. Somehow we have to get one move ahead.’ ‘You can do that with only two names left?’

‘I don’t see any other way.’

Kellick’s chair creaked as he shifted his weight in it. ‘Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘I must emphasise again my earlier warning to you that McCullin’s theories are not all shared by me or my Department. These four names, for example, may well be the only ones. We do not know there are more. There may well be another thirty more or there may be none. And if we believe this Master Plan theory then we believe in our own total impotence. Assuming Sanderson was a decoy, how could they possibly have known we would pick up exactly those leads they wanted us to? We may well have missed those six names. We may only have got a few of them.’

‘What about the telephone numbers?’ Tom asked across to Kellick.

‘What numbers, McCullin?’ The Prime Minister spoke Tom’s name for the first time.

‘They are making certain we follow their trail,’ he answered, ‘by giving us part of a telephone number every time we check out one of the six names.’

‘This wasn’t in your report, Kellick?’

‘No, Prime Minister! Because I am not in the habit of forwarding to you every flight of fancy that is presented to me in my office. I report to you what I consider is important for you to know. This numbers game is ridiculous. How on earth could it work? If they wanted to give a sequence of numbers to make up a telephone number, how could they know which six names we would go to first, and in what order we would go to the rest?’

‘Two ways, Mr Kellick,’ Tom replied. ‘The most obvious is that whoever is following me, whether it’s Menzies or someone else, gives CORDON HQ, or somebody with direct access to it, the name I’m visiting. They just set their machines and wait for the panic call to be made.

‘The other way is one I came across once in Czechoslovakia, except then it was a way of giving out a series of codes. You just set your computer to activate only when a certain telephone number is dialled from outside. Now assume that only these six people were given that number to ring for emergencies. As each one in turn rang in, in whatever order they did it, the computer would just give the next number in line, having jammed that one number less.’

‘We assume too much!’ Kellick’s voice was almost shrill. ‘You’re making the theories fit the facts, looking for the elaborate.’

‘You’d make a bad politician, Kellick.’ The Prime Minister spoke. ‘No! You’d not even be that good. Of course we should believe in the elaborate. Everything’s elaborate! There’s always a double deal. Even Yes and No have their qualifiers. There isn’t a monosyllable in the English dictionary that hasn’t a dozen meanings at least. It’s the same with men and the plans men make. You can be damned bloody certain that if this Organisation is going to be the problem we think it will be, they would never have let you catch on to them so easily. Certainly not as quickly as you seem to have done.’ He went on.

‘Now listen to what I have to say because I’ll say it quickly once and then you will leave. It is now four o’clock and in three horns I mean to be on my way to Rome, rested, shaved and breakfasted.

‘You say you want a way to break the sequence. I may have it for you. That is why I called you here.’

Tom stared at the centre of light as the right hand at last laid down the pen; watched the spread of the wide palm over it, like a flabby anaemic spider preparing to digest it.

‘What I am going to tell you is for your ears only.’ The Prime Minister’s voice had lost its sharp edge.

‘It is essential as few people as possible know of it if you are to stand any chance of success. From your report, Kellick, from what I have heard from you all tonight, coupled with what went on at London Airport last night and the warnings from political friends whose judgements I have long had need to respect, I am now convinced “something” is on the way. Now, if we had known more about it earlier, its size, more precisely what it was intending to do, we might have been able to cope with it by now. But we cannot in the present state of our economy, and the present structure of my Government and my Parliamentary Party, afford a public witch-hunt of the Right Wing. Even now we could not arrest the four names you’ve given me without making me a laughingstock up and down the country. It would encourage my enemies on all sides. What a boon it would be for every bit of disaffected rubbish we’ve got to join their ranks. If we started something we couldn’t finish it would have been exactly the kind of desperation my enemies would benefit most from. This Government has many enemies at home and abroad and not all of them wave the red flag, not all of them have black faces. That is why Sanderson and his coy entry on the scene made me wonder whether he wasn’t just a decoy to get us running about. Panic us into making charges in public we could not finally stand up to in public.’

He paused but no one spoke.

‘Now let me tell you of our good luck tonight, and it’s because I’m so certain no one could possibly have planned it that I’m convinced it may be the way you will get your one step ahead, McCullin!

‘Last night a Royal Air Force Nimrod operating out of St Mawgan in North Cornwall reported sighting an object in the south-western approaches to the English Channel. You may or may not know that Strike Command does a sweep of the Channel every four hours. The Nimrod reported at 2045 hours this object in tow moving west-east at about six knots. At first the pilot thought it might have been an oil-rig platform. Exploratory drilling operations have been going on in this area and towards the Scillies for some time now. Checks were made but could not confirm.

‘The Nimrod’s reconnaissance photos showed the object to be forty-five feet square and brilliant white as if it were being illuminated above and from below. A second Nimrod was diverted and took a second sighting ten miles south of Wolf Rock: same speed, same brilliant white. The pilot was ordered to make a sonar beam check and reported it to be a container as deep as it was wide; and empty - at least it contained no physical mass. Don’t ask me how they know. . . something to do with the radio beam not being slowed down as it passed through the container.

‘Anyway, the pilot was ordered to keep watch and at 2348 hours he reported that the towing tug had dropped sea anchors three miles south of the Lizard. Then the crew of the Nimrod realised what they’d been watching. As the container was no longer in tow it sank a little and shortly afterwards sheets of ice came floating to the surface. St Mawgan’s Met confirmed there had been a snowstorm between the Scillies and Land’s End. The container, raised slightly out of the water by the force of the tow, had been covered in snow and ice and that’s how in the black sea it had been sighted.

‘St Mawgan immediately alerted Customs and Excise, but thank God they didn’t rush in like some bloody fools might have done. Instead they scanned the local radio frequencies and finally picked up the tug’s.