"By which time you will be very dead."
"I will have you to keep me company soon enough."
Ruelle's lips twisted. "Signore—the Fascists couldn't catch me and the Nazis couldn't catch me either. And they knew the score. Your fucking baby cops are still wet behind the ears. If they knew the way I operate they'd be here already—"
"You mean your kennel has a back door to it?"
Ruelle gaped. "Eh?"
"Yes, there's an old acquaintance of yours out there, Ruelle,"
said Audley conversationally. "His name's Raffaele Montuori.
He was a major when you last met him, but he's come a long way since then. He's a general now."
"George—" Korbel hissed, "—Montuori is—"
"—I know what he is—shut up!"
"And he hasn't forgotten you," continued Audley. "In fact he wants you so badly his balls ache. And he's just hoping you'll put a bullet in me so he can come and take you—so badly he's had this place sewn up tight for the last fifteen hours just in case you made a run for it."
"George—"
"Maybe you heard on the radio about the Naples jailbreak,"
said Audley remorselessly, shaking his head slowly. "But of course that was just for your benefit, so he could block this dummy2
place off properly . . . just in case you still might know what the real score is."
In the moment of silence which followed, Boselli heard the distant sound of an engine. He looked down quickly at his watch: the helicopter was one minute early.
Audley had heard too. He leaned forward across the table.
"I'm the only thing that stands between you and Montuori, Ruelle—you talk with me or you take your chance with him.
He doesn't want to talk."
The engine was louder now.
"And you've got ninety seconds to start listening to me."
The room darkened again as Guido Prezzolini appeared in the doorway. "There's a plane coming up the valley from the west—this way, chief!"
"Not a plane," said Audley. "A helicopter. The plane has already been over. The first pass will be just to pinpoint the target. There are armoured personnel carriers on the road, rocket launchers. For all I know he's got Alpini on the mountain behind you. You're getting the V.I.P. treatment today."
Korbel stretched across the table and snatched the handkerchief from Audley's hand. Then, as the sound of the engine increased to the point where Boselli could identify the distinctive racket of the rotor, he disappeared quickly through a doorway just behind him. There was a thumping noise and then a tinkle of broken glass: whatever the state of dummy2
Ruelle's nerves, his partner was ready to talk.
The roar of the helicopter reached a crescendo as the machine clattered low over the farmhouse, and then diminished quickly as it passed over the shoulder of the mountain beyond. Korbel slipped back quickly into the room again.
"Go back and watch, Guido," ordered Ruelle. "Let me know the moment anyone starts up the track."
This time Prezzolini's reaction was not so quick. He looked at Ruelle half mutinously before grunting and slouching back into the yard.
"What are you offering?" said Korbel.
"First—I want to see my wife."
"She's not been hurt."
"Then she can tell me that herself."
Korbel nodded. "Very well."
Audley and Ruelle stared at each other silently for half a minute after Korbel had ducked back through the doorway again.
At length Ruelle spoke. "How did they get on to this place?"
Audley shrugged. "They haven't told me. Maybe they kept tabs on your friend with the gun. They're not so wet behind the ears as you think, anyway—not with Montuori behind them. And they had you spotted, as I've said."
Ruelle's eyes shifted to Boselli. "Who's he?"
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Boselli's heart thumped. Those were butcher's eyes appraising a bullock, and he hoped desperately that Audley wasn't going to let slip that the bullock belonged to Rafiaele Montuori.
But before Audley could reply the door at the back of the room swung open again.
"David!"
The woman was very thin—he remembered that the soft-drinks vendor at Ostia had said as much—and her long hair was so pale as almost to seem white in the gloom, half covering her face. She was not at all the sort of woman he would have associated with the heavily-built Englishman, and also much younger. He was reminded of the German woman back at Positano, though she was much more beautiful and feminine than this one.
Audley took three quick strides round the end of the table, sending a chair spinning.
"Love—it's all right—there, it's all right." The Englishman enfolded his wife in a bear hug.
"Okay—so you've seen her!" Ruelle's voice was loud and harsh, and the automatic was raised and steady, as though he expected Audley to come at him. "You have a deal—I'll hear it. I promise nothing, though."
Audley didn't let go of his wife, but merely loosened his grip.
"You've got fifteen minutes to be out of here, and forty-eight hours to be out of Italy—you two. The others don't matter.
dummy2
They must leave here with you, but after that it's up to them."
"I said a deal. She goes with us."
"David—"
"I said it was all right, love." Audley's arm tightened round his wife again. He looked at Ruelle coldly. "With her you won't get past the first roadblock, I promise you that! They'll let four men through in one car—and then only after I've given them the next signal . . . which will be given the moment you drive out of here, not before."
"That's no deal at all—without her we have nothing!" Korbel said.
"With her you have nothing. Without her you'll be alive."
"No!" Ruelle filled the word with anger. "For your wife there was to be a name—I still want that name!"
"Would you believe any name I gave you now? I could give you a dozen names—good Russian names—and they'd all be false—" Audley paused, "—because there is no name to give you, and there never was. Except one, and you knew that already—Richard von Hotzendorff—Richard von Hotzendorff first and last and all the way through."
Boselli stared at the Englishman.
"He took you for a ride—the clever Little Bird—and me too, and Eugenio Narva. He even took his wife for a ride. He made everyone do what he wanted—he even made Death change his plans. He chose a hill in Moscow and threw his little white pills away, his chlorothiazide and his digitalis—
dummy2
they found them lying in the gutter—and he ran and he ran up the hill. Not very far, but far enough to get where he wanted to go. And there wasn't any KGB man at his back either, just death catching up on him as he intended."
He looked Ruelle full in the face.
"He was getting old and he had nothing to show for it, so he thought—he was dying and he had nothing to give his wife and children. He couldn't even give them freedom, it took too much money. . . .
"So I think he sat down and he realised that he knew just one thing for sure—that one day soon his heart was going to give out on him and he was going to die. So he made a plan around that, so that he could use his death to make it believable—"
"But the oil? The North Sea?" Korbel interrupted feverishly.
"He knew about the oil—he knew it was there!"
"He didn't know. Nobody knew—not the experts, not the oilmen. They just thought it was there—they were giving sixty to forty—but they didn't know, because there wasn't any way of knowing and there still isn't. . . . But that didn't matter to him because he'd worked it out so he couldn't really lose—
because he'd chosen Eugenio Narva for his mark, and Narva's an honourable man. He reckoned even if he was wrong, Narva would see his widow right—and whichever way it went she'd be out of the East with the children. . . . Maybe he even reckoned that she was good-looking and Narva was a widower who liked children—but at the worst they'd be dummy2
better off. And if the oil was there—jackpot!"