But eventually I began to make headway and I was pleased because I hadn’t really expected this particular avenue to turn up much. There was a distinct increase in the number of outgoing calls made from Scatliffe’s office during the period immediately preceding the shooting of Fifeshire, continuing to peak for some while after, and then tailing away again. Whether it was coincidence, or whether it was part and parcel of that whole mystery, was something I had to try and find out. What the bills could not tell me was to whom these calls were actually made; from their charge-band rates it could have been to any of about 5,000 different places within a 100 to 7,000-mile radius of Whitehall. But working slowly and systematically at them, studying the charge-band rates and counting the units, I was able to establish that the calls were mostly made after 1.00 pm. Assuming they were made to another office rather than to a residence, an analysis of the time-zone charts eliminated half the working population of the world who would have either left their offices, or not yet arrived at 1.00 pm Greenwich Mean Time.
The most likely area, I came to the conclusion, was East Coast America, 5 hours behind: 2.00 pm English time would have been 9.00 am there. The East Coast of America contained both New York and Washington, the home of British Intelligence in the US and its main overseas base.
The offices were now very quiet; the cleaning staff, together with their security supervisors, had gone home. I took a walk around; apart from my own office, there were no lights on anywhere near; the only occupants of this floor were myself and the solitary night-security man who was seated in his cubby hole engrossed in a crossword. The other floors would be quiet too now except for the odd prowling security man.
I got up to Scatliffe’s office on the fifth floor without being spotted and started searching it as best I could, using only a small torch. His files produced nothing of interest to me and I turned my attentions to a wall safe. It opened without much trouble and this time I struck lucky: there was a detailed memorandum from MI6, Washington, to Fifeshire. It was dated 3 July and concerned Battanga’s proposed visit to London. It warned Fifeshire that there was a strong likelihood of an assassination attempt on Battanga while he was in London. It was marked Top Secret and was coded for Fifeshire’s attention only. Clipped to it was a smaller sheet of notepaper with Washington Embassy heading. On it were the words: ‘Please see this gets straight to Fifeshire.’ it was signed ‘G’.
There were two things that didn’t make sense: why G, whoever he was, had sent it to Scatliffe and not to Fifeshire, and why it was locked in Scatliffe’s safe. I removed the front casing of my watch to expose the camera lens beneath, another Trout and Trumbull patent, and photographed the documents before returning them to the safe.
All was still quiet and before leaving, I decided to have one further look around. Suddenly the floor-length curtains behind Scatliffe’s desk moved distinctly. I froze. They rocked a little, then stopped. I stayed still but the curtains didn’t move again for several minutes, when they suddenly shot straight forwards. It was only the fact that I heard the sound of the wind gusting that saved me from a certain and fatal coronary arrest.
All the same I still made sure it was only the wind, by marching swiftly over and pulling them back; I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d discovered Scatliffe standing there brandishing a tomahawk, but all there was was a weak reflection of my own face in the dark glass and a small portion of the Whitehall skyline beyond. A tiny window high up had not been properly shut and the wind had caught it, pulling it open, I turned to Scatliffe’s desk. Tucked in the edge of his blotter was a pile of messages which I had missed completely in my first look around. I sat down and read through them. None meant anything to me until I reached the one on the very bottom of the pile: It was dated with today’s date and was taken at 4.15. It said, ‘Mr Wetherby rang. Apologises for missing the meeting — says he went sailing instead (I think that’s what he said — bad line). Please call him immediately. Very urgent.’
I went back down to my office. It was past two and I was once more dog tired. I didn’t know whether I was glad or not to know Wetherby was alive. I didn’t have any feelings about anything at this particular moment. The knowledge that I once more had Fifeshire at the back of me was the only thing that kept up my morale; but if I was mistaken about him, or if anything happened to him before I had a chance to complete my current course of actions, I knew there was an extremely important part of my anatomy that Scatliffe would have delivered up on a golden platter; and if I was wrong with my hunches and my assumptions, and was misreading the still-flimsy evidence, it would be more than a little unfair to want to criticise him for such an action.
Scatliffe had told me to stay put, but as far as I was concerned I was now back under Fifeshire’s instructions and I intended to be on a plane to New York at ten o’clock in the morning. Any further shouting Scatliffe wanted to do at me was going to have to be done from a range of 3½ thousand miles.
I set the alarm on my watch for half six and stretched myself out on the stone-hard heavy-duty carpet of my office. As I lay there trying to lapse into sleep with a continual cold blast shooting up my nose, I wondered if I would ever be able to get used to sleeping in a proper bed again. It didn’t take me too long to decide that I would. Millions upon millions of people were sleeping tonight, as they did all the nights of their lives, in their soft warm beds, quite unaware of what utter luxury it was.
The girl at the airline ticket desk looked like a badly assembled robot. She had evidently studied and mastered the technique of passenger aggravation, and she did it all with the most remarkable economy of words. For the first several minutes in fact she said nothing at all, in spite of the absence of anyone else or any other task to occupy her. When she did finally speak she punctuated all her sentences with the phrase ‘Do you?’
‘I want a ticket on the 10.00 am flight to New York,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ She remained motionless.
After a few more minutes had passed I asked, ‘Are you selling tickets?’
‘I don’t see anyone else,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
I didn’t rise to her bait. I had a cricked neck, a stiff arm, a running nose, a blinding migraine, a toenail that was on its way back into my toe and hurting like hell, and my hair felt like a vulture had thrown up onto it. I was tired out, my teeth felt like they were full of turkey from last year’s Christmas dinner, and my stomach felt like it had a power drill inside it; all I wanted to do was to get my ticket and get my ass onto an airplane seat. ‘14B,’ I asked for and to my surprise got. On a 707 it’s not a particularly great seat but I felt I should keep in the spirit of things.
The plane was half an hour late boarding and nearly full. I sat in the blue nylon seat, hoped no one had booked 14A, and clipped my belt shut so that I didn’t have to endure a brittle reprimand from another ill-assembled robot. I don’t like airline seats in the upright position; I find them extremely uncomfortable. Being already stooped as a result of stiffness from my night’s sleep on the floor I slouched in the seat, hanging forward, partly arrested in mid-slouch by the belt; I felt like a rather gormless marionette.
As I hung in this peculiar but not unrelaxing position a sporadic assortment of the jet-set division of humanity shuffled past, clutching their overstuffed hand baggage and their wafer-thin Samsonite briefcases; fat women in butterfly glasses and cream polyester trouser suits, glaring with menacing bewilderment at the seat numbers; businessmen in pin-striped suits wearing their ‘I always go first class but they hadn’t got any room on this flight’ expressions; students, grandmothers and the rest, struggling through the folding of coats and the slamming of lockers while a motley assortment of hostesses and stewards battled to get them into their seats.