I nodded. ‘Thank you; but it’s not easy.’
‘I’m sure it’s not.’
‘Will Fifeshire get the reins back?’
‘Until the call I had from him yesterday I’m afraid I’d written him off. So had everyone else. Now I’m not so sure.’ He shrugged. ‘Commander Scatliffe’s got himself pretty well entrenched and he’s got his hands on most things; if Fifeshire does come back, and please God he does, he’s not going to have an easy task getting back to the real controls. That S.O.B., if you’ll excuse my language, is making sure of that.’
I’d never before heard Arthur express a personal point of view. It indicated to me that he had very strong feelings indeed on the subject. ‘Does Scatliffe know Fifeshire’s coming back?’
‘If he does he’s kept damn quiet about it. Personally I shouldn’t think so — I think he’s written him off. And I shouldn’t be saying all this to you.’
‘So why are you?’ I wanted to get as much out of him as I could and he seemed in the mood to talk.
He pulled out a bag of Turkish delight and proffered it to me. ‘Without the likes of you,’ he said, ‘Wotan, all that clanking stuff out there, me, the rest of us, we’d all be bloody useless. There’s nothing in Wotan’s brain that hasn’t been put there by the sweat of the likes of you. All my job consists of is filing it so I know where to find it. But in my time here I’ve seen a lot of good men on your side of the fence, youngsters like you, and there’s damned few of them make it to their pensions. Too damned few.
‘When you go out on a mission you have no idea what the truth of the situation is; only your chief knows and often he doesn’t know that much, only has the vaguest of ideas — information given to him by other operatives, sometimes false information from double agents, sometimes he’s just acting on a hunch. You and your fellow agents are unfortunately dispensible. Very dispensible. It costs the Government a lot less to train an agent than it does to build a Chieftain tank; to the British Government you people are very cheap indeed. I’m not saying this to demean you, I think you’re one of the best that’s ever come my way, and I want to make sure you keep on digging; but you have to look to your laurels. The next person that starts digging could easily be the chap in your village graveyard and the hole he’d be making could be for you.’
Arthur popped another sweet in his mouth and chewed for a few moments. ‘What I’m saying to you is, don’t antagonise someone like Commander Scatliffe; one day — it could be tomorrow, in a week, a month, or five years, but one day, as sure as the sun rises and sets every morning — he’s going to have a job come up that he knows is going to get one of his agents killed; and when he’s going through that list of those he could easiest spare you don’t want to find your name is at the top. That’s all.’ He handed my plastic chip back to me. ‘I’ve got the gen on this little fellow,’ he said.
Arthur had made it clear that the subject was now closed. He tapped the chip a few times on his desk.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s a booking clerk with a strange bias.’ He went on to tell me exactly what I already knew about the chip. ‘Where did you get it? And don’t tell me it fell off the back of a lorry!’
‘I dug it out of a hole in the ground.’
He smiled. ‘You don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘that there might be any connection in this chip between one Dr Yuri Orchnev and a certain Mr X, not unlikely to be one Charles Harrison, of Intercontinental Plastics Corporation in New York?’
I came close to falling off my chair. ‘How the hell did you find that out?’
‘Old Wotan’s not too bad at digging either.’ He smiled. ‘Have another sweet?’
I thought in silence for some moments. Wotan wasn’t a magician. It was a computer that could do no more than assemble, arrange and occasionally analyse facts that humans fed into it. If Wotan could figure out that Charlie Harrison was a mole, and I had figured it out myself pretty easily, then how, I wondered, did whoever originally hired him let him slip through the security nets? ‘Who else other than you knows this?’
‘Fifeshire. He ordered me to start running checks on all Intercontinental staff back in June. I sent him a memorandum of my view about Harrison on, er, let me see —’ he tapped the keyboard — ‘August 11th.’
I went very cold. ‘How did you send it?’
‘Courier. Security envelope. Usual procedure.’
‘How did you find out about Orchnev?’
‘It’s logicaclass="underline" deputy chief of KGB computer technology; a mole in our own computer concern — this little chip might well be the link.’ He paused and blushed; his beard twitched. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t much feel like facing my wife after I dropped you off,’ he blushed more. ‘So I came straight back here and set to work; I felt that if you’d brought it, it must be pretty interesting — but don’t let that go to your head.’
Now I realised why Arthur had been sheet-white and shaking; it wasn’t that he was about to be bumped off; it was simply lack of sleep. I also realised how he’d got to the position he held: he’d earned it.
‘Surely this method of communication must now have been dropped by the Russians — they must know that Orchnev has defected and passed the information on to either the Americans or the British?’
‘No, I don’t think so at all; our information is that the wretched Orchnev was bumped off shortly after he arrived in the States and before he had a chance to make contact with anyone.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘By tuning in to Charlie Harrison; about an hour and a half ago.’ He gave an extremely broad beam.
For sure, in spite of all that icing sugar that adorned him, there were no flies on Arthur.
‘Who bumped him off?’ I asked.
‘Well — I only came in at the tail end of a message so I didn’t get all the facts — but I would presume the Russians themselves; unless you know better?’ He looked quizzically at me.
‘I wish I did,’ was all I decided to say.
I left Arthur’s office and went out into the corridor; two extremely large men, about my age, nearly tripped over themselves in their hurry to get up from their chairs. They looked as though they had been constructed from a twin-pack Action Man kit. They succeeded in blocking my path in both directions at once. ‘Mr Flynn?’ they asked in stereo.
‘He’s in there,’ I said.
‘One moment, please.’ One of them clamped his hand around my wrist. The other knocked on Arthur’s door. I had taken an instant dislike to the one who held my wrist and I expressed this dislike by swinging my free fist, with all the force I could muster, into the area of his polyester-and-wool mixture, creaseproof, ready-to-wear suit trousers, about half an inch below where the zipper stopped; this caused him to start performing an action not unlike that of a Muslim saying his midday prayers, and I took advantage of the situation by bolting off down the corridor. I cut down through a couple of fire doors, up the back steps, past a couple of security guards, who nodded politely at me, and came out into the middle of a small, tatty barber shop in a basement off North Audley Street; this shop was one of the several camouflaged entrances to the complex. ‘Afternoon, Henry,’ I said.