"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 dummy2.htm
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, dummy2.htm
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.
XIII
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!"
dummy2.htm
"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.