‘Why are you so sure?’
‘Right now, I don’t have proof; give me a few days, and I’ll get it for you. Surely you can see that it’s possible there’s another side to the story? Battanga was an unpopular ruler and by all accounts not a particularly pleasant fellow — you may know better; if anybody wanted to kill you, whilst you were together with him would have been the ideal time: pretend they’re assassinating him but actually you were the real target. To the whole world it looks as though it was unfortunate for you that you were in the car with him. The assassin telephones a newspaper, claiming to be a Mwoaban terrorist group — it all sounds perfectly logical to everyone; the assassin, whilst failing to actually kill you, finds things are working out even better than he thought, for that very reason — that he hasn’t killed you! You are effectively silenced but because Battanga is dead, and not you, there is no suspicion that you might have been the target.’
‘I think you’re letting your imagination run away a little,’ he smiled.
‘I’m not, sir, I’m damn sure I’m not.’
‘So whoever it was that shot me was a Pink Envelope and not a Black Lefty?’
I ignored the sudden snideness. ‘I’m absolutely certain that it was either the Pink Envelope himself or more likely someone hired by him, or even working with him.’
‘It’s possible, I must admit. You could be right — but, frankly, I doubt it very much.’
‘Let me continue, sir. Since the letter and the chip came into my possession, there have been several attempts to kill me: to give you an example, three nights ago my car was blown to pieces by a bomb; someone is trying very hard to silence me.’
‘Probably the Russians themselves,’ Fifeshire interrupted.
‘It would seem likely,’ I agreed, ‘but I can’t see how that fits in with the attempt made the night before last: I got to the assailant first, before he had a chance to do anything, and I very positively identified him.’
‘Who was he?’
‘The man you spoke of so highly only a few minutes ago. Wetherby.’
There was a long pause. Fifeshire lit his cigar, slowly and carefully, then took several long puffs on it; he leaned forward. He didn’t give the impression of being in a hospital room any more; he was once more at his Whitehall desk. ‘Go back to the start,’ he said, ‘go back to 15 August. I want to hear every single thing that’s happened since then, every single detail.’
It was after 2.00 when I finally emerged into the Wimpole Street afternoon. It was late November yet the temperature was pushing 60, and I was sweltering in the heavy gear I had been wearing for over two days. During this same time I hadn’t bathed or shaved; I had done all my sleeping either in car, airport or aeroplane seats; and I was suffering a severe bout of everything-lag. I felt revolting; my nerves were jangling, and the 4-hour dialogue with Fifeshire hadn’t improved them much.
I’d told him most of what I knew, although I told him I’d shot Orchnev, not that Orchnev had shot himself. Fifeshire himself had disturbing news about the department: Victor Hattan, his personal choice as successor, had drowned in a sailing accident three weeks after the shooting; a further three of his top field men had died on reasonably routine assignments; and his own secretary, Margaret, had jumped to her death from a 9th-floor hotel room while on holiday in Spain — nobody had even bothered to tell him until he had telephoned some weeks later to try and speak to her.
The good news that came out of the session was that Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope had abandoned all thoughts of retiring. My head was crammed to its exhausted gills with instructions. It was comforting to have instructions; they had been singularly lacking during recent times.
As the final coup de grace of whatever evil spirits currently lurked in my charts, my rented car had been towed away. Not that its destination was much out of my way. I removed my wolf coat, and started to walk. I walked among people; among old ladies and mothers with shopping baskets and children indiscriminately slung about their arms; among hurrying men in their work suits; among fruit sellers and Indian-necklace sellers and leather-belt sellers and personalised horoscope-badge sellers; among brightly coloured cars and brightly coloured shop fronts; and among pretty girls going about their day, being pretty girls in a hundred thousand different tantalising ways. I walked mostly among pretty girls.
17
The nerve centre of British Intelligence consists of just over 3 square miles of atom-bomb proof knowledge. It lies several hundred feet underground, below the vast acreage of greenery in the centre of London that is Hyde Park. It lies deep down beneath the famous underground car park, beneath the lowest reaches of the underground railway network, and is encased in an awesome tonnage of concrete and lead.
Underneath the calm green of the park and the dim gloom of the police car pound — where my rent-a-wreck was no doubt languishing — and the layers upon layers of concrete, are some 5,000 men and women, all with faces pallid from lack of sunlight, from an eternal diet of civil service coffee and civil service ham sandwiches, and made worse by the cold stark glare of the neon strip lighting.
In this weird white-walled, white-lit, white-sound-deadened grotto of corridors and windowless rooms, computers clatter and flash as far away into the distance as the eye can see; people move from department to department on electric tricycles, always clutching wads of files, always in a desperate rush. The casual observer would rapidly form the impression that everyone down here knows exactly what they are doing — much like the impression given to the casual observer of a column of ants — not that there were any casual observers down here; none that British Intelligence knew of, anyway.
When Ian Fleming wrote his Bond books the futuristic headquarters of the lunatic megalomaniacs that adorned the finales of many of his books did not come entirely from his imagination, but in part from his own direct observations of this place during his own service in Intelligence.
Down here everything works; in a matter of seconds one can find out what the weather was like at 3.30 pm on 8 May 1953 in Botswana; or the political affiliation of any professional football-player in the world; or the names of all the owners in England of cars made behind the Iron Curtain, their political affiliations, and probably, if one looked hard enough, the favourite colours and shoe sizes of their grandmothers. At the push of another button the name of the 927th convicted housebreaker in Durham would appear, where he bought his cigarettes from, what his favourite television programme was and what he ate while watching it. Another button would reveal all the known and suspected Communist schoolteachers there were at the present time in Wooton-Under-Edge, or in Ongar, or in Bognor Regis, together with details ranging from their family trees, down, sometimes, to as much as their menstrual cycles or which after-shave their wives gave them for Christmas.
These 3 square miles make Big Brother look like the village idiot. The only thing I wouldn’t be able to find out down here would be when the next 2 x 4 would come swinging my way so that I’d know when to duck; on the other hand, it might be able to give me a lot of clues.
Arthur Jephcott was a jolly fellow, tweedy and slightly clumsily built, with a thin bony head, an unkempt beard at the bottom and a short pile of tangled hair on top, sparkling eyes, and a pair of hands he never knew quite where to put. He looked as if he would have been more at home marching country lanes with a stout stick, or buried behind piles of dusty books and yellowing manuscripts, in an office crammed full of curios, in a publishing company in Bloomsbury; behind him should have been a window with a view out over dismal, murky streets, and the office should have had an overriding smell of faded leather, damp and dust.