‘And upset your planning?’
‘Oh, we knew you hadn’t done that.’
‘You did?’
‘Sure. We’d have had complaints if you hadn’t been in the target area. What’s that other number? A second line we didn’t know about?’
I’d already had enough of him. ‘It’s been great hearing your voice, Frank, but it was my old friend I called and my old friend I want to talk to. Is he there?’
‘Not right now, Paul. Later maybe. Meanwhile, I have messages. We’ve been expecting this call for hours, you see. Since last night. Why the delay? We were getting worried. What kept you?’
‘Reaction times must be slowing down.’
He chuckled. ‘Happens to us all, they say. But you’re here now, so never mind. I’ll get to the messages. He says you’ll want various questions answered, and that the first will be, ‘Who?’ After that comes, ‘Why?’. Finally, there’s, ‘What shall we do to be saved?’ That one must be religious, I think, from the way he said it. You still with me?’
‘Listening carefully.’
‘Then I’ll get straight to the why of it. I don’t have to tell you, Paul, that we’ve both been worried. Not about how you’d handle yourself, naturally, because we both of us know and respect you, but worried for and with you. So, we began wondering what we back home could do. We wanted you to feel that, when you were fighting that lonely battle of yours out there, you weren’t alone. We wanted you to know that you had friends right behind you ready to give a helping hand when you needed it. You understand me, Paul?’
‘Frank, it’s those friends right behind me, and what they might do before I can turn around and stop them, that I called about.’
‘Bear with me, Paul, and let me share our thinking with you. Our first thought was that you were, we all were, in bigger trouble than you wanted to admit, and that you were going to need more than a paper towel to clean off all that shit you stepped in. I mean clean if off so there’d be no lingering odour. What you needed, we figured, was one of those deodorants that does more than just freshen up the air. You needed one that would destroy the opposition’s sense of smell. Right?’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Look at it another way. What happens when one of these penny-ante Third-World governments has big trouble on the home front? You know what happens. It looks around for some foreign enemy who’ll take the people’s minds off all the troubles at home by standing up outside the gates and drawing fire. Xenophobia, right? Baddies from outside?’
‘I see.’
‘Of course you do. And you’ll also see that, with the kind of non-belligerents you have there with you right inside the city walls, we couldn’t take chances. You’re not going to fool social scientists of that calibre with Hallowe’en masks and hi-fi scream tracks. They’re serious investigators. You have to give them a taste of the real thing or they don’t believe, do they?’
‘Don’t believe what?’
“That this investigation they’re making is dangerous, physically dangerous. Dangerous for you, dangerous for your employees, and, thus, dangerous for them. In fact, so god-damned dangerous for everybody there, that the quicker they get their asses out the less likely they are to share the terrible fate planned for you. Death through proximity, that’s what they have to fear, Paul.’
‘They’re not going to buy it.’
‘You don’t know yet what you’ll be selling, friend. I’m trying to tell you. That is where we come to the “who” bit. Are you still with me? This is important.’
‘Still with you.’
‘Now, I’m not personally acquainted with the outfit that’s been hired, but I’ve heard of it and I understand that it’s talented enough to rate top money. Can’t say more because I’ve been told to stay with hard fact. The word to you from our friend, though, is that the tab for the operation’s been picked up by three guys acting in concert, three guys whose names he says you’ll know. I have them written down. Let’s see. Yes, here we are. The names are Kleister, Torten and Vic. Vic who, it doesn’t say. Maybe you know.’
‘Yes I know.’ The foot-pump connected to my head was being worked again.
‘Good. Then you’ll also know, Paul, that these three gentlemen are all, as far as you’re concerned, somewhat prejudiced. That means that, although our friend made it very clear to them that harassment was authorized only insofar as it was needed to carry conviction, the possibility of these nuts over-stepping the mark if provoked ought to be borne in mind. He asked me to mention that specially.’
‘I appreciate his concern.’
‘I hope you mean, that, Paul, because it’s something you should appreciate. He’s still fond of you, in spite of everything, and he still wants to protect you if you’ll let him. He says that before you went over the hill you played polo real good, and that if you found yourself in an emergency predicament you might still give these characters more trouble and make them real mad.’
‘I might, yes.’
‘The word is, don’t. You’ll only get hurt a lot instead of a little. That’s only advice, mind. He still has too much respect for you as his old bossman, Paul, to presume to tell you. He’s only asking you to accept a piece of friendly advice.’
‘Is there anything else that I should accept?’
‘He said to tell you that he’ll be thinking of you all the time. He meant it too. All the time.’
‘I’ll be thinking of him.’
‘Have a good day, Paul.’
He hung up.
I switched off and immediately pressed the rewind button. After I had played the whole tape through twice, I listened to the beginning of it a third time before writing a note to Yves and Melanie.
Yves, please meet me at CP now after passing this to Melanie, please distribute File No. 2 and then join us.
I found the cook’s husband and gave him the note to deliver. Then, I took the recorder from my bedroom and went to our ‘Command Post’ in the garage loft.
When Yves joined me everything was set up and ready.
I pointed to the recorder. ‘I’ve just taped a call from London on this. First, I want you to listen to the beginning and tell me if anything occurs to you, anything at all.’
He asked no questions, just nodded and sat down.
I started the play-back. After the first couple of sentences I stopped it and looked at him.
‘Again, please,’ he said, ‘and this time as loudly as possible. The speech quality doesn’t matter.’
I couldn’t get it much louder because induction suckers aren’t all that efficient and the recorder’s amplifier hadn’t much left to give, but I did my best. Oddly enough, Frank’s voice quacking away through the tape-hiss was, though still intelligible, less offensive than it had been with the volume lower. I let it run on for a moment or two longer before switching off.
Yves pursed his lips. ‘Anything that occurs to me?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘You said that the call was from London. I don’t think it was.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Calls from London to here are dialled. With long-distance direct-dialling, an electronic time-and-distance charge counter is activated as soon as the answering phone is picked up. It’s connected to a computer that bills the customer. I don’t know exactly how long it takes to start running — only a small fraction of a second I would think — but if you already have the phone to your ear when the circuit is completed you always hear it. It’s like a sound of a stick being dragged for an instant along iron railings. Your recording here begins while the phone is still ringing. If the call had come from London, or Bonn or Amsterdam, we’d have heard the charge counter coming into action when you picked up the phone. The sound’s not there. That call was made locally from no farther away than Nice or Menton. And it wasn’t made from a pay-phone either. You’d have heard a charge counter start with that too. The sound would have been different from the long-distance counter, but you’d have heard it.’ He paused, then added: ‘Is that what you wanted to hear?’