October Men (26 page)

“For God’s sake!” Richardson snapped. “Mrs. Audley’s got nothing to do with this, General Montuori.”

“Indeed?” The General kept his eyes on Audley. “I’d like to hear you say as much, Dr. Audley.”

“She’s—“

“Shut up, Peter,” said Audley quietly.

“Damn it, David—“

“Shut up!” Audley raised his hand. “You tell me, General—how is my wife?”

“I wish I knew.” The General nodded slowly at Audley. “And I think you wish you knew too—eh?”

Richardson stared at them. “What the hell—?”

“Calm yourself, Captain.” At last the General turned back to him. “I think perhaps you have misunderstood me, boy.”

“I don’t understand you, if that’s what you mean—either of you.”

“No, I believe you don’t—I really believe you don’t!” The General looked at him quizzically. “Where do you think Mrs. Audley is at this moment?”

“In Rome. With her baby.”

“No, not in Rome, Captain. And not with her baby.” The General paused. “We made an error, you see. After Ostia, we looked for Dr. Audley and we forgot to look for his wife. But we took it for granted that she was with him. Fortunately Boselli here had the wit to suggest that she might be engaged on some enterprise of her own when he found that she was
not
with him.”

“Faith—?” Richardson made no attempt to hide his disbelief. The idea of David sending Faith on any dangerous enterprise—and of Faith agreeing to go—was plain ridiculous. “You must be joking!”

“No, Captain Richardson. I am not joking—even though Boselli was quite wrong, of course.”

“Quite—wrong?” Richardson stared at Boselli, whose surprise now clearly equalled his own. “Wrong?”

“Our second mistake. No—I should say my mistake. And Dr. Audley’s in the first place, I’m afraid. To underrate the nature of the beast—“

“I made no mistake,” said Audley sharply. “Except to assume the security of my own department—that was a mistake, I agree. But I didn’t even know the beast was loose, as it happens.”

“Good God Almighty!” exclaimed Richardson as the jigsaw pieces in his mind shook out of the old ill-fitting pattern into a new and hideously better-fitting one.

David’s extraordinary nervousness—his lies and his inconsistency. Even his urgent appeal
Get me out of here
…
and Richardson had let friendship and bitter embarrassment confuse him, stopping his suspicions from crystallising.

“They’ve taken Faith!”

Audley gave no sign that he had even heard: it was Montuori who nodded.

Richardson’s brain accelerated: a kidnapping … the oldest and crudest trick there was, although in high fashion now. And still the cruellest and most effective trick too—in the right circumstances.

Yet although the KGB was capable of it, the more so with someone like Ruelle at the helm of the operation, that still didn’t make this thing explicable, pattern or no pattern.

“But—for God’s sake, David—why? What have they got to gain?”

“I would have thought that was obvious, Captain,” said Montuori. “Since they have not stopped Dr. Audley from taking action, then they must want him to do some of their work for them.”

“But they don’t need him, sir. If they already know about Little Bird—“

“But they don’t,” Audley cut in.

“What do you mean?”

Audley sighed. “I mean the Russians know nothing about Little Bird—or about Faith.”

“But Ruelle—and Korbel—?”

“Ruelle and Korbel—yes, they know… But tell me, Peter, what do you know about Ruelle and Korbel?”

“They work for the KGB, damn it.”

“Ruelle did once maybe, but a long time ago—and Korbel won’t for much longer. They are two old men, Peter. Two failures who have outlived their usefulness, and they know it. And for that reason they have become very dangerous.”

Where do flies go in the wintertime? Nobody knows—they just disappear—

“You think Ruelle is acting independently?” said the General. “Without official sanction?”

“I don’t think, I know.”

“How?”

“Because he told me so, General Montuori. When he abducted my wife at Ostia he made it very clear to me that he was answerable to nobody, and that I was to deal only with him.”

“And what does he want of you, Dr. Audley?”

“He wants the name of the high-ranking official who leaked the North Sea oil strike to Richard von Hotzendorff in 1968. He also wants—or Peter Korbel wants—the details of the report Hotzendorff made.”

“And just what does he propose to do with those items?”

“That he didn’t say. I can only guess that Korbel believes the report is worth a fortune still. But as for Ruelle—“ Audley shook his head “—perhaps he thinks he can use that name to restore his own. I don’t know whether it’s power or mischief that he’s after— maybe both.”

So that was it, thought Richardson: not a deep-laid Russian plot after all, but a stratagem by two twisted, embittered old men!

They had known each other once and had maybe met again to curse the ill-fortune which had betrayed them, and the years which had left them high and dry, and which were now fast running out on them. So naturally they had jumped at the last unexpected chance which Hemingway the librarian had dumped in their laps.

And equally naturally, because they were old men and losers, the chance had gone wrong on them, first on the stairs at Steeple Horley and then in the hot, dusty streets of old Ostia. After that the stakes had become life and liberty as well as money and power.

“Mischief—yes, that is Ruelle,” murmured the General. “And they used someone else to make you do what they know they are not capable of doing—that is Ruelle too. The Bastard still runs true to form.” He looked at Audley shrewdly. “What exactly were his terms, then?”

“They will hold my wife until they have used my information. Then they will let her go.”

“And you believe that?”

“No, not a word of it,” Audley shook his head. “Until I give them what they want Faith is safe, I believe that. But after that we’ll both know too much to be left alive—I know how Ruelle’s mind works.”

“He’d finish both of you, yes—I see you understand the animal.”

“I understand him perfectly, General.”

Audley sounded calm and collected now, as though the hideous problem of saving his wife’s life was an academic one divorced from reality.

“That’s all ruddy fine, David—understanding how the Bastard ticks. But he’s still got Faith and you haven’t got one damn thing to trade for her even if he was on the level.”

“That’s true, Peter.”

“And you don’t know where they’ve taken her, sir?”

“Regrettably—no.” Montuori shook his head. “We have one witness who saw a woman answering to Signora Audley’s description in a car with several men on the road from Ostia Antica to the autostrada to Rome. That is the last we have seen of any of them.”

“Well, if Narva hasn’t got the answers—and if Frau Hotzendorff hasn’t either—what the devil are we going to do?”

“Peter, I never expected them to know. And even if they had, it wouldn’t help Faith.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“Simply to make sure that I had Hotzendorff figured out properly. Only Narva could tell me that.”

“Okay!” Richardson’s irritation splashed over. “So what are we going to do to save her?”

“We’re not going to lose our heads—we’re going to use them.” Audley’s voice tightened. “How badly do you want the Bastard, General?”

“Badly. I’ve waited a long time for him.”

“They wouldn’t let you have him?”

“The Party?” The General’s lip curled. “Oh, they kicked him out, but they’ve kept him in view. Times have been known to change, Dr. Audley.”

“But now—things may be different?”

“They may be. But that will not save your wife, Dr. Audley.” The General eyed Audley closely. “I assume that you have a plan of action?”

“It depends very much on your help.”

The General nodded slowly. “I can afford to wait a little longer— perhaps.”

Audley gave the General an appraising look, as though calculating the odds.

“No state security is involved,” went on the General smoothly. “So go on, Dr. Audley—what do you propose to do?”

Audley looked at them both.

“Why, if you’re going to help me—which I admit I’d hardly hoped for—we can go on with my original plan.”

“Which was—?”

“So far I’ve only lied and bullied and cheated. Now it’s time to start making dirty deals.”

“With whom?”

For the first time, the very first time since they had met again, Audley smiled. But it was not a goodwill smile and the eyes behind the spectacles were not bright with anything remotely like happiness. Richardson found himself hoping that nobody ever had cause to smile at him—or about him—like this. If tigers smiled, as the poets alleged, then this was how they did it.

“Someone who’ll know just how to find where Ruelle’s gone to earth, General.”

Montuori stared at him, stone-faced.

“You mean the Party?”

“They’d know his bolt-holes—you said yourself they’ve kept an eye on him.”

“But I didn’t say they’d give him up—not to me. They might not stand in my way any more, but they wouldn’t help me, and they’d never let me lean on them. They wouldn’t like the precedent.”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t. But I wasn’t thinking of asking you to lean on anyone—and I’m not making the deal with them at all. After all, they don’t really want anything that we’ve got—“

A dirty deal … and a dirty deal not with the Italian Communist Party: premonition was like a punch in the gut. But would David really go so far?

“—but Moscow does.”

David would.

“There’s a man I know in the Kremlin—Nikolai Andrievich Panin. I think he might be persuaded to help us, if the price was right.”

Richardson managed to control his impatience until the door had closed on the Italians, but only just. “Will he come?”

“Panin?” The tiger’s grin returned. “ ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’—that’s always the million-dollar question, Peter—but will they come when I do call for them?”

“Well, will he?”

“Not in person. But of course he doesn’t need to—and we don’t need him to. Just a word from Comrade Professor Panin is what we want. A word from him would be quite enough to start things moving.”

That was certainly true enough. Even a whisper from the very loftiest pinnacles of the Kremlin, which was where Panin now operated, would gather strength as it echoed downwards, like the small fatal sound on an avalanche slope. The trick was to stay clear of the disaster area thus created.

“They’ll get through to him, anyway. No one’ll dare stop a call like that.”

Richardson nodded. Again that was well calculated. By selecting someone so far up the official ladder, Audley had brushed away the danger that some officious bureaucrat would try to be awkward. Just as the name Montuori would clear the Italian lines, so would the name Panin clear the Russian. And night or day, the Kremlin switchboard would know where to put the call.

“So the answer is—yes, Peter, I think I can call this spirit from the deep. I think he’ll talk to
me
.”

That was the final element in the chain of reasoning: not only did Audley know Panin personally, but he judged himself to be of sufficient interest for the Russian’s curiosity to be aroused. And judged correctly, thought Richardson, wryly remembering the flurry in the department dovecote at his unscheduled disappearance. David Audley was too unpredictable to ignore!

Audley was looking at him rather apologetically, though, as though that thought was catching.

“I’m afraid I may have made trouble for you, young Peter.”

Understatement of the year: what this private call to Moscow would do to Sir Frederick’s blood pressure, never mind Fatso Latimer’s mischief-making tendencies, only God Almighty could compute. Not to mention Peter Richardson’s career. It would be back to the 39th Assault Engineers on Salisbury Plain most likely.

But there was Faith Audley to think of … and maybe Peter Richardson had learnt a thing or two himself these twenty-four hours.

“Think nothing of it, David. My main brief was to bring you back in one piece. And they did tell me to be nice to your hosts, so maybe we can blame the General—“

Richardson stopped as a less charitable thought struck him. There was in truth nothing he could do now, and Audley not only knew it, but had intended it to be that way from the start. First he had tried to get free and then he had struck a bargain with the General. But from the moment Faith had been kidnapped he had had this private deal with Moscow in his mind as being the only way he could track down Bastard Ruelle.

“Yes …” Audley considered the lie with a professional’s detachment, “we might confuse the issue that way, at the least.”

“But what I don’t see still is what you’ve got to trade with Panin, David. If the KGB got Little Bird then they must have got his contact, darn it—and as soon as Rat face has briefed the General he’ll realise that too.”

“If I know Raffaele Montuori that’s just what he won’t believe, Peter,” Audley shook his head knowingly. “You’re being gullible now—you’re believing what doesn’t make good sense.”

“I’m believing the ruddy facts, man. That’s all.”

“The facts? But there aren’t many of those—and that’s a fact to start with.”

“Little Bird’s dead. That’s one you can’t argue with.”

“Peter, it’s the key fact. Everything else is powered by it. Without it there’s nothing—nothing at all.”

“Sure—that’s what convinced Narva, I take that point.”

“But you’re not taking it half far enough. Because why the devil should the KGB kill him and then fake it up as a heart attack—on their own patch? And if they picked up his contact, since when have they changed their policy on spy trials? Come to that, why didn’t they pick up his other contacts—our contacts?”

Richardson remembered belatedly what Macready had concluded, which he had somehow forgotten:
someone gave him the injormation, and then snuffed him out the moment he
’
d passed it on so he couldn
’
t split on them
…