The Partridge Kite (23 page)

The disappearance of the tug and container puzzled Fry and McCullin. But they knew that the tug’s skipper was unaware of the furore the Nimrod’s sighting had caused. In her panic. Lady Joanna had thought it best to telephone for instructions before radioing the alert and then never did. It followed that the skipper would deliver his container as planned and assume that the sudden silence from the land radio was an emergency precaution to protect him.

It was still somewhere in the Lizard area because it had not penetrated the radar screen encircling the Peninsula since the sighting last night.

Fry and McCullin sat in the small debriefing room at the Royal Naval Station, Culdrose, where their Cessna had landed, a twenty-minute drive from Trewythian House. Three times now they had replayed the tape of the frenetic telephone conversation between the two women members of CORDON, which in itself gave them very little. Certainly no clue to the rather tragic ending of one of them.

They, like the countless millions of fans, would know nothing of Lady Joanna’s apparently inexplicable accident until two days later when her tom and battered body, stripped of clothing, face and left arm missing, surprised an early morning beachcomber scrambling over the rocks at a place called Devil’s Frying Pan a mile and half down coast from the Volvo’s wreckage on Kennack Sands.

But they had the telephone number. Which was why they were sitting in the cold prefabricated hut, surrounded by maps, and aircraft silhouettes stapled to the plasterboard walls, sipping cocoa from chipped white pint mugs.

Any minute now the telephone by the stove would ring and Military Intelligence would tell them they had traced the number. And give them the address.

The alert came through CORDON on the single incoming call circuit governed by the computer whose job it was to decipher and allocate. Within seconds, activated by a number and word code, the message was recorded and immediately relayed to the Chairman’s own telephone.

He would not have recognised the woman by her voice, but the machine, referring to its memory bank, prefaced her message with a fifteen-second biographical résumé which included her status and security rating within CORDON.

The Chairman then remembered. She had been one of the founder members eight years ago and now coordinated the Area Directors of the Midlands. She was totally dedicated, totally competent.

What the memory bank and the Chairman had not known was that she had also been in love. And what they were about to be told was that this woman had given her lover her own direct dialling CORDON telephone number.

The Chairman listened to the recorded voice and the bad news it brought. Two vital Area Directors suddenly flushed out. Identities known to MI and SSO. The container sighted but safe under fog cover and would remain safe as long as the fog stuck to the sea as Met said it would. The sinking would go ahead as planned.

The Chairman slowly replaced the receiver but continued standing by the table. He stared through the darkness of the room towards the small round marble-topped table in the far comer, and the folder lying on it. Four names ringed in red, two more to go, and now there was no more time. Unless the computers could compensate, the system was now at risk. His heart beat hard against the small pocket- book in his breast pocket. He could feel the pressure of blood behind his eyes. His left hand gripped the table for support

He was suddenly, unexpectedly, under strain, ten days into countdown. Because of two women who, from the very first day of their dedicated membership, had been CORDON’S weakest point.

But why hadn’t the system’s built-in fail-safe not seen it? Having been recommended by one Area Director, whose job it was to research every corner of a potential member’s background, how was it that the second Director, sent in from another Area to make the final check before the final recommendation for acceptance was made, had not discovered the weakness?

He lifted the telephone again and asked for the name of the original proposer of Lady Joanna Forster and the name of her seconder. He waited. His eyes drifted to the fire. With his right hand he felt his heart beat. It was returning to normal; the anger was draining from him. The fireplace glowed and for the first time he was aware of the sweet smell of burning peat.

The computer answered. The proposer and seconder had been the same, the person who had just rung in the Alert. The usual crosschecks had been deliberately bypassed and the relationship of one to the other had not been recorded. The computers themselves had been deceived because the initial proposal had been made under the name of Blakeney and the acceptance under the name Forster.

The lovers had carefully contrived, and had succeeded.

He walked towards the marble table and opened the folder. He ran his finger slowly down the names there, and began to relax. The machines would attempt to compensate for the error but he was thinking ahead of them. He looked at the names ringed red, and those still untouched. One plan, necessary to the countdown, would have to be adapted to a rescue now vital to it.

It was a dilemma, one that might have appealed to a lesser man. He knew well enough, because it had been at his own insistence, that unless the computers, which now controlled the countdown, agreed to any change in it, they would abort. The machines would insist Plan One continued. But CORDON itself now suddenly needed to be protected, at least until Christmas Day when it would announce itself to the country and the world.

He made his decision.

Military Intelligence, he knew, was thorough but also cumbersome and anyway infiltrated. It would not be a risk because it would not be able to correlate the information it had until it was too late.

SSO was the danger now. It knew as much as, if not more than, MI and because of the character and pretensions of the dead Kellick it had kept much information to itself. Fry and McCullin were the most immediate threat. They had from the start moved independently of the Government’s traditional Intelligence machinery. Now they would move even faster and, if they used their heads - as he was sure they would - in a direction that was dangerous to CORDON. They had by accident gone ahead of the planned schedule.

So, like Kellick, they must be destroyed. And the names still to be ringed in red looking up at him from the folder would be instrumental in their assassinations. Both ends would be served, one supplementing the other. The simplicity would appeal to the machines. They would decide the method and the timing, of course, as they did in all such things. But with four days to go they would have to decide tonight. He would insist on it.

The telephone rang again and he began coughing into his hand as he walked, ambled almost, to it.

He listened for half a minute, nodded and put the receiver back on to the rest. Two signals, just decoded. Both excellent if not unexpected news.

From the south-west, confirmation that the container had been successfully secured and that pumping operations were about to begin. And from London, three items: five members of the Imperial General Staff had resigned in protest following the total withdrawal of the British Army of the Rhine as part of the British Government’s NATO cuts; the pound sterling had as a result plummeted to a new psychological breakpoint, selling for the first time on international markets at parity with the US dollar, and the British Prime Minister had collapsed at the start of the Council of Ministers’ meeting in Rome and had been flown to the Intensive Heart Care Unit there.

The Chairman sat down in his armchair by the fire and pushed at the mound of white-hot peat with a poker. He tucked a heavy woollen tartan rug around his legs and leant back, his face hidden in the shadow of the wingbacks. He pressed a button on the armrest.

It was time for his medicines and injections; time, too, to inform his machines of this last decision. It would be a long night. But there were only three more; three more to the dawn of the New Order.

The telephone number was traced to an address in Leicester, a large mock-Tudor house standing in its own grounds in the residential suburb of Knighton.

But by the time the Cessna carrying Tom and Fry was airborne on its way out of Royal Naval Culdrose local control, a radio message relayed by the control tower from Military Intelligence told them that the house was already on fire. Seven pumps could not cope and several small explosions inside were preventing firemen from doing much else but stand at a safe distance and watch it slowly disintegrate.

The body of a woman, still burning, had been pulled out by two firemen, as part of a secondary exercise to test new breathing apparatus, but too much of her had been destroyed for easy identification to be made. MI, though, had established from neighbours that a woman had been resident-owner and a recluse. Their casual mention of her name meant nothing to Tom or Fry. MI’s information, that until eight years ago she had been involved in three large affiliated Nationalist groups, including the National Front, seemed irrelevant now.

What mattered most was that any clue that might have been in the house was now turning to carbon dust.

Tom leant forward and told the pilot to change destination. He nodded, began scribbling with a crayon on a map case, and held up the new estimated time of arrival at London Heathrow, two minutes to midnight.

Tom sat back in his seat. What had they got, having started the day expecting so much? A telephone number of a house that was now on fire. And the names of two women, one whose scorched body was at that moment probably being cut up by a pathologist for certain identification. The other had disappeared just as easily and just as completely as the container.

This morning he’d thought that he and Fry had at last got them on the run. But they had merely run away!

Tom looked up at Fry. He hadn’t spoken since the radio message came through. He was staring across the pilot’s shoulder to the blackness beyond the cockpit windscreen, his sharp, delicate profile highlighted by the luminous red of the instrument panel.

Maybe something would come out of MI’s search of Lady Joanna’s house at Trewythian but it was most unlikely. It was too much to expect that someone like her would make more than one mistake in a lifetime. They would have the land radio but that was useless with no tug to answer it. And that too had gone.

So, if Leicester had not been CORDON’S HQ, what had it been? The home of a very important Area Director certainly. Maybe it had been a staging point. Or a relay. Maybe that was it, a relay for communications to and from CORDON. CORDON would need a buffer, a kind of cartilage between Headquarters and the rest. The house and the woman had had many secrets but CORDON had now taken them back. CORDON had caught up again.

Still Tom could hear the anger and despair in the woman’s voice. Especially the despair.

‘Elsa Pilkington!’ Fry suddenly spoke.

Tom looked up. ‘Who?’

‘Elsa Pilkington. The burnt woman in the house. I’ve remembered who she is. Or was.’

‘Who was she then?’

But Fry continued staring an inch or two to the right of the pilot’s neck. Tom could almost hear the recall machinery in Fry’s head clicking into place - ready for delivery.

‘She was British Women’s Downhill Ski Champion, and the only British skier ever to make the final three in the Winter Olympics. She was British Champion for five years until she was forced to give it up.’

‘Why?’

‘Her politics. Remember MI just told us she was involved in Right-Wing politics. Well, she was involved in a great deal and with far more influential groups than the National Front. When her activities became public it caused a stir. Lots of people threatened to send their OBE’s back to the Palace if she didn’t send hers back first.’

‘And did she?’

‘No. She didn’t. And neither did many of them. In fact she became the Celebrity of the Right. All the Rightist groups she’d been involved in boasted they couldn’t keep count of everyone wanting to join.’

‘So Elsa Pilkington is dead!’ said Tom. ‘Long live –’

Tom, listen to me! I’ve never skied in my life, but I was stuck on winter sports in those days as a watcher. The idol used to be John Curry. Then it became Elsa Pilkington. When she became British Champion she was living in the Cairngorms. Had been there since she was a child. Must know every square yard of those mountains.’

‘So?’

Tom, think! Concentrate! She was publicly active in Rightist politics until eight years ago, which is when Sanderson said CORDON was formed. So let’s assume she was a founder member, in at the start of it all.

‘Now, assume that CORDON wanted to establish its headquarters somewhere completely protected and isolated: why not in Scotland? Nowhere else is so depopulated now. And who better to find them somewhere than this woman who must have walked those mountains year after year in summer, and skied them for as long in winter?

‘She must know places and routes very few others could possibly know about. What if her real utility to CORDON in the beginning was for exactly that reason?’

‘So their headquarters is in the Cairngorms?’

‘Yes. In or around.’

‘Just because she happened to ski? Christ, Fry! It’s a bloody long shot. You might also find out that she liked rock climbing and we’ll have to start looking for CORDON on the top of the Old Man of Hoy!’

He was feeling sick. He loathed flying, especially in small aircraft. He loathed many things in his daily routine, like self-service stores and Japanese two-strokes, but flying in dingy light aircraft he hated most of all.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it’s all too far-fetched. We’re grabbing at straws or reeds or whatever it is we grab at when there’s nothing else left.’

‘Tom, this is it, I know it is!’

You don’t know. Fry. It’s just one of a hundred dozen options. We could just as easily find them on any random Hand-Picked Tour of Britain!’

Fry loosened his seat belt and turned in his seat so that he was facing Tom square on.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that one of the people Sanderson mentioned in his interview was a man called Lemmings? Dr Richard Lemmings of the Roldorf Foundation? Sanderson said Lemmings had been killed by CORDON, one of twenty-seven people who were considered enemies.’ Tom nodded.