War Game (33 page)

Audley sat down.

“How did he blow himself up?” asked Clinton.

Audley smiled. “With what they call a ‘Judas’.”

“Who call?”

“The CIA. When they lost all those fifteen-minute sabotage pencils in Vietnam they were pretty pissed off. And then one of their dirty tricks specialists thought of a simple way of getting even. They withdrew all the existing stocks and doctored ‘em for instantaneous detonation, then they shipped them out to Vietnam again on the quiet to add to the other stocks. Which is why there have been so many terrorist accidents of late, I should guess.”

“And you … acquired one from your friend Davenport?”

“Could be.”

“But—you picked up that information in Washington?” Clinton’s tone was hostile suddenly.

“I picked up a lot of information in Washington.”

“And didn’t report it?”

“I put in a separate technical report to the Equipment Section.” Audley paused. “Yesterday.”

They were now at the exact point of balance, he judged. It must be clear to Clinton that however improperly he had acted, nobody was in any position to prove otherwise, no matter what they might suspect. And if there was one thing that Clinton loved—although he would never have admitted it—it was low cunning.

All he had to do to keep his job was to throw a few more words into the balance.

And then, to his surprise, he realised that it wasn’t the choice of words which mattered to him, but whether he wanted to say them. Faith wouldn’t mind if he didn’t, she would be glad. But there was still Sergeant Digby’s opinion to be consulted.

The sad truth was that he could no longer recall Sergeant Digby’s features with absolute clarity, only the colour and texture of the boy’s threadbare dressing-gown. He remembered thinking that he had once had a dressing-gown exactly like that, which had been threadbare in exactly the same places. You probably couldn’t buy dressing-gowns like that any more, not of that durable quality. He should never have let Faith get rid of it—

“Tell me one thing, David—“ Clinton was staring at him with unconcealed curiosity. “Tell me one thing—“

I’ve missed my opportunity, thought Audley. Now he thinks I don’t give a damn either way!

“—as between friends—“ Clinton’s eyes were no longer angry.

It was too late. The balance had tipped of its own accord.

“—how the devil did you con a smart fellow like Charlie Ratcliffe into doing a damn silly thing like that?”

When he’d finished Clinton sat silent for a few moments.

“A golden cannonball! God bless my soul!” His eyes narrowed. “A solid gold cannonball?”

“No, not solid gold. Just a thick coating of gold on lead—like a big toffee-apple, really.”

“I see. But even that would have taken quite a lot of gold.”

“It did.”

“Not from the CIA, I trust.”

“No. I have a … friend who has a tame goldsmith.”

“Matthew Fattorini?”

Audley ignored the question.

Clinton frowned suddenly. “But is it possible? I mean, is it ballistically possible? Wouldn’t the gold have distorted in the barrel—and have blown the whole thing to kingdom come?” He paused, no longer really looking at Audley. “Though … I suppose they did use lead bullets in muskets—even in rifled muskets … and if the muzzle velocity was very low—

The eyes came back to Audley. “Is it possible?”

Well, well!
thought Audley.
Even Fred Clinton
.

“Nobody knows.” He shrugged. “Because nobody’s ever tried. It would take a metallurgist who’s been a gunner to tell you off the cuff, and even he wouldn’t know for sure. Charlie Ratcliffe was only a sociologist.”

“But you didn’t actually check—with a metal detector?” Clinton looked at him, his eyes narrowed again. “You just dug a hole at random?”

Audley stifled the rising temptation to laugh. “It isn’t there, Fred. Cromwell got it.”

“We shall have to look all the same.” Clinton shook his head as though to clear it. “But he believed you, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. I’d guess he saw the possibilities, though.”

“The possibilities?”

“Oh yes. … He saw that if I betrayed my own side—and the CIA as well—then I wouldn’t have a friend in the world. And that would change me from a greedy pig into a sitting duck—for him and his friends. And the fact that I’d not asked him to do the job himself reassured him that he wasn’t in danger.”

“Except you’d made sure they wouldn’t be there—Gates and Bishop—so he couldn’t ask them to do it.” Clinton frowned. “But he didn’t try to ask them, did he? He didn’t even look for them?”

“No. But taking them out of circulation was really just… insurance. I was relying on his doing it himself.”

“How could you rely on that?”

Audley looked at him for a moment, then down at the files on the desk. “ ‘Information received’, I suppose you might say.”

“Information from whom?” Clinton was clearly puzzled.

“Oh, it’s not in the record, Fred.” Audley shook his head slowly. “It wasn’t the sort of information that goes in records. It was much too subjective for that.”

“But good all the same—obviously.”

“But good … yes.” Audley nodded. “You see, I talked to this—well, I guess you could call him an expert on human greed… . And he said that the possession of gold does things to people. He made it sound like a contagious disease.”

“Contagious?”

“Infectious too—you showed a symptom or two yourself just now. But the contagious variety is the worst, and Charlie had got that badly. Because he’d handled the stuff… he’d felt the weight of it, and seen the beautiful colour of it. Which was why it didn’t surprise him one bit that I was prepared to kill and betray for it—he recognised his own symptoms subconsciously.”

“And twice the gold made him twice as greedy, you mean?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think he would have seen it like that at all. Because what the Russians had given him was
their
gold. What I’d got—what I might be taking from his land right under his nose—that was
his gold
. And he couldn’t bear the thought of it, it was worth almost any risk to stop that—and he couldn’t bear the possibility that Gates or Bishop might say ‘no’ to the risk being taken. So he had to take it himself.”

Clinton studied him. “You sound as though you were very sure of him.”

“Not totally. But there was one thing I was sure of.”

“And what was that?”

Audley’s eye was caught for an instant by the rich colours of the flowers in the hearth. “I only met one man who’d actually seen Charlie Ratcliffe in action—who knew him as he was. … He was an old gardener who liked growing flowers—the gardener at Standingham Castle.”

Clinton waited.

“He said Ratcliffe was a chancer. So I gave him his chance, Fred. That’s all. And he took it.”

THE
SEALED KNOT
, the King’s Army and the Roundhead Association, which are mentioned in passing in this story, are real organisations. The Double R society and its members in no way resemble these admirable and innocent groups, except perhaps in such virtues as they may share. No comparison between the factual and the fictional is intended.

On the other hand, the story of Soviet Russia’s acquisition of the gold of the Spanish Republic is a matter of history; as is also that of General Krivitsky, the one-time Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe, who escaped to tell the tale—and to die in suspicious circumstances in a Washington hotel in 1941.