Colonel Butler's Wolf (17 page)

“And falling for Polly Epton put the finishing touch on things?”

“Not quite the finishing touch—no.” Audley rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Actually, it had me worried a bit when I first learnt about it. He didn’t seem a very highly-sexed man, and I knew she was no Helen of Troy, but I did wonder if that wasn’t behind what he did.”

“She’s not that sort of girl at all—“

Audley held up his hand. “Precisely. That’s why I’m so grateful to you. A nice girl, that’s what she is.”

“You know what I mean, damn it!”

“I do indeed. And I know that nice girls don’t drive men to treachery and suicide: it’s the little prick-teasing bitches that do that. From what you say of young Polly, she’d more likely have soothed him down and jollied him out of it if she’d been here. But she wasn’t here, and that’s half the point. What had kept him going was Polly Epton—and the fact that he wasn’t having to do any dirty work.”

“And then suddenly up comes the dirty work—and there’s no Polly with her nice soft shoulder … “

“But you don’t know what the dirty work was?”

Audley grimaced. “We don’t know what it
is.
The whole trouble’s been that Smith wasn’t on our watch list.”

“And if I go round asking too many backdated questions my cover’s going to wear out just when we need it most,” said Richardson.

He cocked an unashamed eye at Audley. “Trouble is, David’s right—we made a boob over Smith, a bloody great boob, and that’s a fact.” He paused. “And the back-tracking hasn’t been easy. But as far as I can dope it out Smith kept his nose clean like David says—no dirty work, not even one suspicious contact. Until three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks,” Audley nodded at Butler. “The right time.”

“It’s only circumstantial,” said Richardson tentatively. “The right chap in the right place.”

“What right chap?”

Richardson looked at Audley.

Audley smiled reassuringly. “The truth is, we’ve had a bit of luck in their
apparat
over her. We’ve got a major defector. By autumn we’ll be ready to blow the whole thing sky-high, but in the meantime we’ve got one or two unexpected names. Names they don’t know we’ve got.”

“Like this new chappie in the Moscow Narodny Bank over here—an economic whizz kid,” Richardson took up the tale again. “Only actually he’s a KGB whizz kid, and the word is he’s here on a special emergency job. A top secret one-off job.”

“But he doesn’t know we’re on to him, see? So we’ve given him a nice long lead to see which lamppost he cocks his leg on. And sure enough he took a quick trip to Newcastle three weeks ago. He goes to the University Museum, to the mock-up of a bit of Roman stuff they’ve got there—“

“The Carrawburgh Mithraeum, man—you’re supposed to be a post-graduate student, not a ruddy tourist,” said Audley testily.

Richardson grinned and nodded gracefully, totally unabashed at the rebuke. “As your worship pleases—a facsimile of the temple of Mithras, hard by Coventina’s shrine at Brocolitia—“

“I know the place,” snapped Butler.

Just a few hours earlier, although it seemed an age, he had stood beside the little shrine to the god the Christians had feared most, trying not to watch Protopopov on the hillside behind him. Now, however, he found Richardson’s high spirits even more trying: this was a young man who needed taking down a peg or two. “For God’s sake get on with it!”

“For Mithras’ sake, you mean! Well, they’ve built this mock-up in the Museum: you go behind a curtain and press the tit, and the lights go out and you’re there in the temple with a commentary to tell you what’s what. And we’re pretty sure that this chappie Adashev told Smith what’s what at the same time. They were both in just about the same place at the same time, anyway—that’s almost for sure.”

“For my money it’s sure,” Audley cut in. “Because from that moment on Smith was worried sick. Which means—“

He paused, frowning. “Let me put it this way: I don’t agree with Peter that we missed out on Smith earlier because we were inefficient. We didn’t spot him because his cover was almost perfect and because he didn’t do anything to compromise it. They even took the trouble to bring over someone new to be his contact, someone we weren’t likely to know about.”

“All of which means this could be a big one.”

He blinked nervously at Butler.

So this was the revelation: not so much that a “big one” might be due—the escalating Russian activity in Britain which was common knowledge in the Department made that no surprise—but that Audley, the great Audley, was up a gum-tree at last!

After months of expensive time and trouble he was stumped. And stumped on an assignment which obviously worried the men at the top, the Oxford and Cambridge men who would of all people be appalled at the ability of the KGB to tamper with their university recruiting ground.

And that meant Audley would be for the high jump. He’d pulled off some legendary coups in the past, but that wouldn’t help him now because he’d never tried to make himself loved. Rather, there would be no mourners at the wake.

But then Butler discovered another revelation within himself, one that he had never expected: it was not such a matter of indifference to him, Audley’s professional fate.

He didn’t like Audley, and never would. But there was nothing in the small print about having to like the men one served with. What mattered was the Queen’s service, and that service badly needed bastards like this one.

So if Audley was stuck, it was up to him to unstick him, or die in the attempt.

JUST
“
WHAT HAVE
you been doing in the last year?” Butler asked brutally. Duty might be a harsh and jealous god, but the more he asked of his worshippers the less he expected them to wear kid-gloves and pussy-foot around.

“What have I been doing during my sabbatical year?” Audley gave him a small, tight smile. “Didn’t you know that I had been elected first Nasser Memorial Fellow at Cumbria?”

“Why Cumbria? I thought you were an Oxford and Cambridge man?”

“My dear fellow—only Cambridge, thank God! But I’m afraid I’m a little too well-known down South and we didn’t want to be obvious. .. Besides that, it happens to be an interesting experiment, what Gracey’s trying to do here at Cumbria. We thought it made him a prime KGB target.”

“Quality instead of quantity?”

Audley looked at Butler with sudden interest. “You know about that then?”

“It’s no secret.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t. Well, my contribution is in the realm of medieval Arab history.”

“Packs ‘em in too,” said Richardson admiringly. “Front row full of pretty girls—quality
and
quantity, if you ask me. I know ‘cause I went to those lectures on Edrisi-what’s-his-name-“

“Abu Abdullah Mohammed al-Edrisi, you savage—you remind me that Edrisi said England was set in the Ocean of Darkness in the grip of endless winter!”

“He said the world was round too, clever chap. But I’m only half a savage, remember—my old mum was a Foscolo from Amalfi, so at least half of me’s civilised.”

Richardson’s eyes and teeth flashed support of his ancestry and it struck Butler that there might be more than a touch of Abdullah Mohammed as well as Foscolo in his bloodline. Which was one more reason why the fellow would bear watching.

The bright, dark eyes slanted towards him. “Point is—“ Richardson went on quickly “—this Arab history makes David respectable with the students. Friend of the emergent nations and all that stuff. And he’s had me and a dozen other poor devils rooting around at strategic points ‘cross the country like pigs after truffles while he sat up here and tasted what we found. Or rather, what we didn’t find … “

Audley was staring at the young man with a look of affectionate despair. He turned back towards Butler. “Tell me, Jack, what do you think of Sir Geoffrey’s idea of the great Red Plot now you’ve heard about it from his own lips?”

Butler stared at him for a moment. It was often Audley’s way to start his own answer to a question with a question of his own, and it was no use hoping that he’d ever change.

He shrugged. “There could be something in it, I suppose. Take away the natural leaders of any country and you cut it down in size. My Dad used to say that half the trouble in our bit of Lancashire in the twenties and thirties was all because our lads led the attack on Beaumont Hamel on the Somme in 1916. The men who should have been running the businesses —and the unions—had all died on the German barbed-wire there.”

Every November 11 they had gone down to the War Memorial after the parade had dispersed and the crowds thinned away, leaving the bright red poppy wreaths and the forests of little wooden crosses stuck in the short-trimmed grass like the forests of larger crosses in the war cemeteries across the Channel, only far smaller. Rain or shine they had gone, his father’s heavy boots skidding on the cobbles— 21049844 Butler G., Sergeant, R.E. Lanes R., and his boy, the future colonel who would never command any regiment.

The big calloused hand, always stained with printer’s ink, would grip his tightly while they stood for an age before the ugly white cross and the metal plaque with the long lists of names. And because he could not escape from that hand he had read the names many times, had added them together and had found their highest common factor and their lowest common multiple. He had even tried to identify them: were MURCH A. E. and MURCH G. really the two uncles of Sammy Murch who had sat next to him at school? Was the presence of BURN M. and BURN E. here on the stone the reason why Mr Burn in the sweetshop was so bad-tempered? Once he had almost accrued enough curiosity to ask his father to answer these fascinating questions, but there was something in the fierce freckled face (so like his own now!) that had warned him off. Not anger, it wasn’t, but something never present except on November 11: his father’s Armistice Day Face …

“Hah-hmm!” He cleared his throat noisily. “I suppose there could be something in it, yes. But I have my doubts. It isn’t that it’s a bad idea—if they were very careful and very selective. But the KGB aren’t usually so imaginative, I would have thought. And the benefits can’t be shown in black and white … it isn’t like them to start something where the damage can’t be assessed in black and white as an end-product.”

“Might even do us some good in the long run,” cut in Richardson. “Always thought there were too many brains in the Civil Service, seeing where it’s got us. Bit of mediocrity might do us a bit of good, you never know!”

This time Audley didn’t smile and Butler knew with sudden intuition why. It was not simply fear of failure that was the horror grinning on Audley’s pillow, but also that he too was a product of that privileged world which took its proved quality for granted. It was a world that had taken some hard knocks as the pressure for quantity rather than quality had built up against it, but it was not beaten yet—and Butler rather suspected now that when its last barricade went up he would be on the same side of it as Audley.

Richardson was a similar product, but was as yet too young to identify himself wholly with it and too close to the generation of iconoclasts.

“So?” Audley was watching him warily.

What was immediately important, thought Butler, was to discover whether the man had managed to retain his sense of detachment, and the best way to find out was to play the devil’s advocate—

“There could be something in it, as I say,” he said unsympathetically. “But it’s a damned, vague, airy-fairy notion compared with what the Russians usually put up, if you ask me. It hasn’t got any
body
to it.”

“Phew!” Richardson exclaimed. “For a man who’s been bloody near burnt to death and smashed up in a car you take a darned cool view of things, I must say!”

“He’s not denying something’s up, Peter,” said Audley patiently. “I think we all know there is.”

He met Butler’s eyes again. “Fair enough, Jack. I agree it sounds vague. But as you know we didn’t start all this just because Sir Geoffrey Hobson dropped a word in Theodore Freisler’s ear last summer. We had something to go on before that.”

“What?”

“The Dzerzhinsky Street Report.”

Butler shifted uneasily. But it was no use pretending false knowledge. “Never heard of it.”

“I’m not surprised. It’s sixteen years old.”

“It’s what?”

“Sixteen years old. Came out in ‘55. It was all the work of a committee the KGB set up in Dzerzhinsky Street the year before to look into the origins of the East German rising and the Pilsen revolt. You see, what shook them rigid, and went on shaking them right down to the Budapest rising, was that it was the young who were causing the trouble—the very ones who’d had all the pampering and the brain washing.”

He shook his head sadly. “You know, the pitiful thing about my students at Cumbria is they think they invented student protest, or at least that it was invented here in the West. I can’t seem to get it through their heads that the East European youth started it back in the early fifties.”

“And by God those poor little devils really had something to complain about too—I’d like to show some of our protesters a cadre sheet from the East with a note about a ‘class-hostile’ grandfather, or an uncle who’d got himself on the wrong end of some party purge, and then let ‘em have a look at our college files for comparison!”

“And most of all I’d like to open up
our
file on the Hungarian Revolt—60,000 dead and only God knows how many maimed or deported, and more than half of them under 25, and tell ‘em that was how the Communists settled
their
youth problems in the fifties. Not with a couple of elderly proctors, or a crew of panicky National Guardsmen, but with eight armoured divisions and two MVD special brigades—“

He stopped abruptly, embarrassed at his own sudden flare-up of passion. “Sorry about that—the way people don’t remember Hungary always sticks in my craw.”

“The point is, when the Dzerzhinsky Street committee put in their report they had to be bloody careful not to criticise their own set-up too much, so they dressed it up with half-truths about the inadequacy of the parents, how they’d been over-concerned with material prosperity at the expense of political consciousness, and that had led their kids astray—“