War Game (26 page)

For an answer Butler produced an American passport from his pocket and handed it to Audley.

Robert Donaldson. Born: Hartford, Connecticut …

“Preacher” Davenport stared up at him.

“It’s good.” He thumbed through the pages. “It looks perfect.”

“It is perfect—perfectly genuine.”

“Uh-huh? And Robert Davenport’s passport?”

“Just as good. Only the trips are different, nothing else.”

“The Paris trips?”

“The Donaldson trips coincide with Charlie Ratcliffe’s—while Davenport stayed at home.”

Audley nodded slowly. So anyone checking up on Davenport’s movements wouldn’t equate him with Ratcliffe; Davenport was for public consumption, Donaldson for private comings and goings from different points of entry and exit. It was all nice and simple—and professional. And that was what Butler was telling him, just as the man Maitland had told Butler from his own equally professional observations.

It was a pity a hundred or so reliable witnesses put Preacher Davenport on the wrong side of Swine Brook Field at the right time, but that simply meant he wasn’t that sort of professional. And although they had him dead to rights on his two passports, that was a minor grief on a much smaller scale beside the things they really wanted him for.

“And yet he ran,” Audley frowned at the cricketers.

“Maybe he was ordered to run,” said Butler. “Even if he didn’t get cold feet himself, maybe his control did—the way we were pushing him. That’s happened before now.”

His
control
, thought Audley. There it was, staring him in the face again, what he had begun to suspect and fear ever since Digby’s death: that they were playing in a different league from the one he had assumed they were in, and that Charlie Ratcliffe was something very different from the ruthless young political activist he had seemed to be.

It had been there all along, of course. There in the urgency of the Minister’s voice; there in the doctored Ratcliffe file; there in the cool efficiency of James Ratcliffe’s death; and there even in Frances Fitzgibbon’s disquiet at the resources lavished on them for the asking. It had been there, and he had seen it all and ignored it because it didn’t fit his childish preconception of the case.

Butler was right, shrewd and perceptive as ever behind that red military face of his: the young American wasn’t so much worried about his predicament as angry with it.

Audley stared at him across the confined interior of the car. He looked younger in the flesh than in any of his pictures, but not so lean; perhaps the leanness had been an illusion fostered by the Puritan costume he had affected as “Preacher” Davenport, but there was something about the bone-structure of his face which suggested that the Preacher’s face was the shape of the face to come in full maturity. And then it would truly be an Old Testament face to the very life.

“And just who the hell—“ Donaldson began belligerently, and then stopped abruptly, breathing out the rest of his stored anger as a sigh of relief. “Well— am I glad to see you!”

Glad? Audley froze his own face to prevent it betraying his surprise. The last time he’d heard that voice it had been declaiming pure seventeenth-century revolution in the words of Gerard Winstanley out of Frances Fitzgibbon’s mini-tape. It couldn’t have nonplussed him more now if it had continued in the same vein.

“Mr. Donaldson?” His opening gambit of polite disbelief already sounded irrelevant. “Or is it Master Davenport?”

The American grinned at him, the laughter lines in his face at odds with those etched by anxiety. “Davenport, Dr. Audley—Bob Davenport. And I guess I can say I’m pleased to meet you. I’ve certainly heard a lot about you, sir.”

Audley had no choice but to shake the hand offered to him. It had not been his intention to do anything remotely like that, but then it couldn’t be said that this harsh interrogation was going exactly to plan.

“Indeed? Well, I wish I could say the same for you, Mr. Davenport. So perhaps you could give me another name to reassure me—someone else’s name.”

Davenport nodded. “Sure. At the embassy here I think Colonel Morris would be your best bet—Colonel Howard Morris. Or Mr. Legrange at The Hague, he’s my boss. But I think you know them both, so you can take your pick.”

Audley swallowed the lump in his throat. With a couple of casual sentences the ex-Preacher had completely rearranged the pieces of the jigsaw—and in doing so had made them fit as they had never fitted before. The professionalism which Butler and Maitland had sensed, those suspicious trips to Paris in Charlie Ratcliffe’s wake, the precipitate withdrawal to Holland when it looked as though his cover had been blown… . Even the fact that he was talking freely now when he’d maintained his innocence with everyone else —it all added up to the same coherent pattern.

But the emerging picture was not the one on the lid of the box.

“For choice Colonel Morris,” Davenport concluded.

Of course. He could imagine the final briefing almost word for word: if things go wrong play it cool until you reach one of their senior men. If Audley’s back from Washington try for him, he’s the closest we’ve got to a friend over there, and he and Morris understand the real score—if they can cover for you, they will… .

“I see. But your control is in Holland?”

“Yes, sir.”

That was what had thrown Butler. At a pinch they might have been able to identify the CIA’s men in Paris, or even Brussels, but the station in The Hague was small and unimportant, more a presence than an operational centre.

“Then you’re out of your territory, Mr. Davenport—and out of line. We have an agreement with your people about manpower. And also we have an agreement about keeping out of our domestic hair: Charlie Ratcliffe is our problem, not yours.”

“Yes, sir.” The young American nodded. “But as to your first point, we also have a ‘hot pursuit’ agreement with you, if I may remind you, sir—“

“You may.” That “sir” was beginning to make Audley feel old and school-masterish, especially when added to the “heard a lot about you” line. It was one thing for the Minister to use those words, but quite another for this boy to echo them as though he was already a living legend from the past. “You may, but it won’t wash. You’ve been over here for months, and you haven’t been looking for Ratcliffe, you’ve been watching him. And even if you had been pursuing him he’s still ours. He’s domestic.”

“No, sir—with respect.”

“Damn the respect.” This was what Audley had feared, that part of the jigsaw where Charlie Ratcliffe fitted in with the activities of the CIA. Because there could only be one reason for that—the reason which explained the professional precision of the killings of James Ratcliffe and Henry Digby. All he needed now was final confirmation of that mathematical certainty.

“Well … I guess we may have stretched the agreement a piece.” Davenport grinned apologetically. “But it was pursuit—it didn’t start here … for us, that is—it started when he made contact with this guy we’d been watching in Paris—“

“KGB?”

“Oh sure—and top brass too. But don’t ask me who, because they didn’t tell me—“ Davenport qualified the admission before Audley could pounce on it “—they pulled me in to establish the next link in the operational chain.”

“Because you weren’t known here?”

“Or in Paris. They got too many of our men tagged over there… . Plus I had the right educational profile. Early colonial history just happened to be my hobby— it’s not such a jump from New England to Old England. The guys who emigrated and the guys who stayed and made the colonies, they weren’t so different, you know.”

For once history was no temptation to Audley. “Yes, I’m sure they weren’t. But I’m a little more interested in a more modern history, Master Davenport.”

Davenport looked suitably contrite— and very young.

Davenport, little Frances … Mitchell … even Charlie Ratcliffe—he was trapped in a world of young people who seemed to know better what they were about than he did.

Well, they would grow old in their turn.

All except Henry Digby, who would never grow old. He would simply be forgotten.

But not yet, by God, not yet!

“But my job was strictly informational, sir.” The young American was looking at him uncertainly now: perhaps he’d misinterpreted the expression which the memory of Henry Digby had stamped on the living legend’s face, glimpsing hatred and anger behind the mask.

Or perhaps he hadn’t misinterpreted it altogether after all, thought Audley with a flash of self-knowledge. Because this was one time when vengeance was going to make duty a pleasure.

“Even after Swine Brook Field?”

“After the hit?” Davenport was more cautious now. “Well, that only made it more interesting.”

“Who made the hit?”

“We don’t know for sure.” Davenport scratched his head. “But we think it must have been a guy named Tokaev. He works out of Paris, but he was out of circulation at the time—and he speaks English perfectly … with a slight Cockney accent, that is.” He nodded. “’Fact, we’re pretty certain, really. It’s his style.”

“And you found that merely … interesting?”

“Not merely—very. We still didn’t know what Ratcliffe was up to, his cover’s goddamn good.”

But they’d watched him for months nevertheless. The KGB Paris contact must have been top brass indeed for that.

“Not until the gold turned up, anyway,” continued Davenport. “Then we knew, of course. With that sort of finance he can really get
The Rat
off the ground, and with the dirt they can feed him he can pick his targets… . But I guess you know all
that
better than we do.” He gave Audley a rueful look. “When it comes to cover your boys are no slouches either: until you cracked down a week ago we didn’t think you were on to him at all.”

“Until the gold turned up,” Audley repeated the words mechanically.

“Yeah.” Davenport shook his head admiringly. “You’ve got to hand it to the bastards—that was goddamn smart.
Goddamn
smart.”

The distant sound of clapping intruded into Audley’s consciousness, as though the cricket crowd agreed with Davenport. Someone had scored or someone was out.

Someone had scored sure enough: the Russians—
£2½
million in good clean honest untainted money, for no losses.

He nodded wisely at Davenport. “Yes, I have to agree with you there. And all good genuine seventeenth-century Spanish gold too. That threw us, I can tell you.”

“Hah!” Davenport gave a short laugh. “Well, they’ve obviously still got enough of it to pick the genuine article out of stock. But then Krivitsky said at the time that when they unloaded the stuff at Odessa in ‘36 there was enough of it to cover Red Square from end to end, and he had that from one of the NKVD men who was on the quayside. And some of that gold must have been in store in Madrid for centuries.”

Dear God! thought Audley despairingly —how could they have been so stupid, so short-memoried! The Spanish Civil War gold—the gold of the embattled republic which Azana and Prieto had despatched to Russia for safe keeping in October, 1936, and which had turned all subsequent Soviet aid to Spain into a profitable deal that would have brought a blush to any Capitalist cheek; the gold—the Spanish gold—which had been such a bonanza that Stalin had announced shortly after that new mines had been found in the Urals, the old blackguard!

The Spanish gold which hadn’t been found at all in the crater behind the bastion, but which had been planted there.

There was the full design at last. And all the elaborate tapestry of history they had woven was a lie: Matthew Fattorini’s honest facts about cargoes and voyages, Nayler’s painstakingly assembled inferential evidence, Paul Mitchell’s elegant research … even his own smug reconstruction of how Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had schemed to conceal
their
gold—all that was a lie, a self-deception, an edifice built with moonbeams and shadows.

The reality—as recalled by the one-time Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in the West for the benefit of the
Saturday Evening Post
before SMERSH had caught up with him in a Washington hotel—the reality was a convoy of lorries from Madrid to Cartagena, and then an old freighter with its name painted out steaming slowly from there to Odessa, and then the train to Moscow and the Kremlin vaults.

And then, forty years later, a fraction of the loot had travelled West again, to finance another risky but potentially profitable operation… .

Audley superimposed the reality on the lie and came to the instant conclusion that the lie was more convincing. If Spanish gold, the gold of King Philip’s Americas, had to end up in the kitchen garden of a great house in England, it should more likely have come via the son of a Devon sea-dog than by the order of a nameless Russian bureaucrat in some dusty office in Dzerzhinsky Street.

But, by the same token, when the KGB could summon up a man who could twist English history to his own use—and even the CIA could conjure up an agent who knew the difference between New England and Old England—then the English themselves ought to be able to screw them both into the ground.

I elect myself for that job
, decided Audley dispassionately. And I shall break the rules to do it, if that’s the only way it can be done.

Davenport was looking at him with a mixture of hope and expectation in his expression—the hope of freedom and the expectation that the legend would justify his reputation. It would be wrong to disappoint him.

“Well, Master Davenport, you’ve messed us up properly—I can tell you that for free,” he said.

Davenport’s lip drooped. “Once I was out you would have been given everything we had.”

“But you aren’t out. And we thought you were Charlie Ratcliffe’s action man, maybe. So who is—can you give us that?”

Davenport blinked. “Sure. If it’s a trade, that is.”

“Part of a trade. You’re not in a good trading position, but I’m inclined to be generous. I wouldn’t like to see Howard Morris sent back home on the next plane.” Audley smiled.

“Okay. He has two guys to hold his hand.”