Harry's Game (27 page)

Always play it that way, Davidson liked to say. Kick them a bit, then produce the magic sponge.

They like it better. The agent was still declining to name a contact point. Not refusing, but declining. Don't want to make an order of it. Told him it's stupid, but can't do more than that.

As he says, it's his neck. Our scandal if he catches it, mind, but his neck for all that. Now the bonus. Good information out of our chap. He'll like that.

'Keep that for a moment," snapped the civil servant. "I've had calls in the night. GOC has been on, and that man of his, Frost of intelligence. Bloody misnomer that. They want our fellow out, and kicking up a hell of a scene. They think he's blown.'

Davidson bit at his tongue. He heard at the end of the line the call for the rest of the family to go on.

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'There's been some sort of leak. Like a sieve, that place. The papers have got a story from the opposition that they know a big man has been put in. There's panic stations over there.

Anyway, the order is get the chap out or the General says he'll go to the PM. Consolation is that the men over there say they don't think the IRA have a name. But that'll come soon enough. And you haven't an idea where we could go and just take hold of him?'

'All I have is that he works in a scrap merchant's in Andersonstown. Nothing more.'

'That won't do us much good till Monday morning.'

'He's done well again, our chap. The man we want was actually at the dance where Harry was the other night. The military had him, and must have let him go, or are holding him on something else ...'

'Look, for God's sake, Davidson, I'm at home. I'm going to church. There's no point feeding me that sort of material over the phone. Talk to Frost direct. He'll be in his office, prancing about.

He's having a field day. But if this Harry man should call again get him out. That now is an instruction.'

Davidson had always had to admit that he enjoyed the compli

cated paraphernalia of introducing the agent into the operations theatre. He could reflect on it now, with the phone quiet, and his superior racing down the country lanes late for his communion. Davidsori had been on the old Albania team. There had been the months with the undercover Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. Three years" secondment to the Singapore government to train bright‐faced little policemen in the techniques of urban infiltration and maintaining men in a hostile environment. There was a gap in his wide experience.'He recognized it. The men he sent into the field or discussed sending were all, as Davidson saw them, foreigners. The involvement with the men who listened to his lectures or acted under his orders was loose, and in no way binding.

With Harry it had become quite different. The danger that he now knew his agent to be facing numbed Davidson to a degree that almost shamed him. He had long seen himself as a tough, near ruthless figure, the man in charge who put his agents on to the ground without sentiment or personal feeling. His defensive walls were being breached, he realized, as he thought of his man across the water, with the enemy closing on him.

And Harry didn't just not know of it: he'd just been told that all was well and looked good. That made him vulnerable.

Davidson had a growing feeling of nausea when he remembered how Harry had been brought

to Dorking. Damn‐all chance he'd had of backing out of the operation. The Prime Minister personally authorized the setting up of the team, and we've chosen you as the most suitable 142

man. What chance did he have of side‐stepping that little lot? He'd been belted off on the plane on a wild‐goose chase. If he's not out of there soon he'll be number a thousand and bloody something pushing up daisies.

He picked up his phone and called Frost direct, in his office where he'd been told he'd be. At the other end of the line the serving colonel in intelligence left the London‐based civilian with no illusions as to what he thought of armchair administrators organizing undercover work without consultation or know‐how. Davidson resigned himself to it, letting it blaze over him.

Between the interruptions he read over the transcript of Harry's message. He ended on a high note.

'He did pretty well with the first lot of stuff we gave you. We were disappointed in our team it didn't come to much. You should have it sewn up this time, don't you think, old boy?'

Frost didn't rise. It was a juicy and wriggling bait, but the office

was crowded, and it was not the day for telephone brawling. That would come after this merry little show was wrapped up and in mothballs‐‐what was left of it. He called the Springfield Road police to request the locating and picking up of the girl Josephine Laverty of Clonard, and then turned his attention to the matter of the man having been in and presumably out of military hands on Saturday night two weeks back. Cool bastard he must be, appraised the colonel. In between the calls he cancelled his Sunday‐morning nine holes with G2 Ops.

Other operations had gone wrong before, Davidson recalled. There were those endless nights when they parachuted Albanians into the marshlands between the sea and Tirana and waited in vain with their CIA colleagues for the chatter of radio signals that would let them know all was well. When the Cypriot agents he had controlled had disappeared there had been days of nagging uncertainty until the bodies showed up‐‐generally tortured, and always shot through the back of the head. But they were only aliens, so that the recriminations were short‐lived, the kickbacks muted. But if they lost Harry then the ramifications would be huge, and public. The round‐up of scapegoats would be spectacular, Davidson had no doubt of that. The Permanent Under Secretary would have faded from the picture by then, would have fetched his sliding carpet out. The old hack would be left holding the baby.

He called his assistant in from the outer office where, thank God, the man spent most of his time, and told him to watch the phones. He was to tape all calls, regardless, on the casette recorder, whichever phone they came through on. He slipped out of the building. Sunday morning in Covent Garden. Some sunlight about on the upper reaches of the big buildings.

Piles of fruit and vegetable boxes. No people. Davidson walked to the small grocer, that he knew would be open to serve the flats, big and grey‐smeared, to the north of the market square. He bought bread, and cartons of milk, coffee and biscuits, some butter, and lemon curd. He'd liked that ever since boarding school thirty‐five years ago. The total was about all his cooking facilities would cope with.

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There had been no calls when he returned. He phoned his wife, told her he would be in town for a day or so, and not to worry. She didn't sound as if she was. There was an army‐issue camp bed kept in the wardrobe behind his desk, excruciatingly uncomfortable but better than nothing. It would be a long wait, and no one to spend it with but the boring young man they'd sent along to give him a hand.

Davidson had realized soon that they had not fully briefed his assistant on what was happening. He had no intention himself of enlightening him. They were on stand‐by now, operational twenty four hours.

The boys ran intricately between the towering regimented lines of the pine trunks, hurtling their way over the bending carpet of needles and cones in perpetual games of chase and hide and seek. Their voices were shrill, loud as if to fight off the cold attacking wind that heralded the real winter of the great plain east of Hanover. This was where Harry liked to bring them, to search for trout in the streams in high summer and spend weekends in a wooden chalet, to run round to keep warm in the early winter, and then, when the snow came, to bring their toboggans. Sometimes they would set up a fox that had hidden in the sparse, stunted undergrowth under the pine umbrella hoping to avoid detection, then when its nerve went and it bounded clear there would be the noisy, clumsy chase, the ground giving under their boots before the quarry made its escape. It would take them deep into the forest, and when the brown flash was well lost they would stop and ponder and think of the direction of the firebreak path where they had left their mother, Mary Brown.

She had brought sandwiches full of sausage and a Thermos of tomato soup today, and they would have that later sitting at a wooden table in the picnic area beside the car park.

From the wide path she could hear the distant noise of their voices, as she walked with a taller, older woman, her mother. A week after Harry had gone she had written to her home in the English

midlands countryside. There the three‐page letter had been recognized as a distress flare, a call for help. Arrangements had been

made. Father could look after himself for a week, cook his own meals, get the garden into shape for the long winter lay‐off.

When the children were in bed the conversation often, and hardly accidentally, strayed to Harry's abrupt departure, and now that they were again out of earshot it continued.

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'It's just so difficult to understand," said Mary's mother, "that no one should be able to tell you anything about it. You'd have thought someone could have had the gumption, even the courtesy, to say something to you.'

'There's been nothing," said Mary, "not a word from anyone since they came and packed his case. Rummaged around in the wardrobe, right down the bottom where his old things are‐‐half of them should

have gone this week to the sergeants" wives" Jumble Sale‐‐things he'd only wear if he was gardening or painting or cleaning out the cellar, or something like that. We've had two postcards from somewhere down the Gulf, and otherwise nothing.'

The postcards had shown a camel corps contingent of the Sultan, and a gold‐domed mosque.

The messages had been brief and facetious. 'Having a wonderful time, got a very red nose from the heat, don't think there'll be snow here this Christmas, love to the boys and to you, my darling, Harry," and "Giving church parade a miss this week. Missing you all. Sorry about the nonsense but it will all seem clear when I'm home. Love you all, Harry." They'd taken a long time to arrive, and now they decorated the mantelpiece above the fire in their front room.

'But tell me again, dear, exactly what they said when you asked the people in the office."

Mother had the infuriating habit of demanding endless, word‐by‐word repetitions of conversations she'd already heard umpteen times.

'Just what I told you. That it was as a result of a signal from London, that everyone here was as much in the dark as I was. That Harry would be away six weeks" minimum, probably not more than eight. And that if I were short of anything or having problems not to hesitate to call the Families Officer. He's an awful old bore‐‐a passed‐over major. I'd really be on my last legs if I called him. I just don't think they know.'

'It must be to do with the Aden business, I suppose. The thing he was awarded the Military Cross for. Your father and I were very proud for you...'

Mary cut in, "I cannot believe it's anything to do with that. It was years ago, and Harry was really knocked out by that. He had weeks of sick leave. He doesn't talk much about it. But it must have been awful from what I was told. He just lived in amongst them then, wasn't even fluent on Arabic. Passable but not even fluent.'

'Well, it has to be something secret.'

'Has to be." She was wearing her hair up, and the wind was pulling it away from the big tortoiseshell clip at the back of her head. It was whisping away‐‐she hadn't taken enough time to settle it properly in the hurry to get the food ready and the kids dressed for the expedition.

She had little make‐up on, lipstick untidy. Not how she'd want Harry to see her. "But I don't 145

think he'd volunteer for anything like this now, and I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would just pick him out over all the people they've

got and rush him down to the Gulf. It just doesn't make sense. I thought he'd burned all the spook stuff out of him.'

'Still, it's not long now, only a fortnight or so," comforted her mother.

'That's what they said. We've no option but to believe them.'

Mary Brown could not confide the depth of her unhappiness to her mother. Too many years of marriage and before that secretarial college in London had dulled the relationship. Their marriage was too confidential to gossip about. What hurt most was that she had thought she had understood the man she had been living with for so long, and now she had discovered that there was a different compartment in his make‐up.

'Well, at least we know he can look after himself," said her mother, sensing the barriers going up.

'Let's hope he doesn't have to. We'll get the kids back and have lunch.'

She called for them, and when they emerged filthy from the forest they all walked back to the car.

That same lunchtime Seamus Duffryn was summoned to a house in Beachmount and told by

the Battalion intelligence officer to resume close surveillance on McEvoy. Duffryn was told a squad was going out in the afternoon to find a friend of McEvoy, a girl who had been out with him. Josephine Laverty from Clonard.

A few hundred yards away in the Springfield Road the British army unit that had been asked to find the girl was puzzled that it had no record of her or her mother living in the area. There was no reason why they should have done, as the house was in the name of