Roche forbore to let slip that in his opinion it was d'Auberon's placing of the documents in Audley's care in the first place which was surprising, not his hasty recovery of them at the first sign of danger. And yet it seemed that the Frenchman had judged his Englishman just about right in the end.
"Or are you holding out on me?" Audley gave him a sharp look.
"Holding out?"
"Who else knows about d'Auberon—and me? My God—if the British know, and d'Auberon's got the wind up, then half the world probably knows!" Mr Hyde was back again.
"What's the matter?" The Hyde-look alarmed Roche.
"Steffy," snapped Audley.
Roche manned his defences. "I don't know."
"Don't know if it was an accident? Who was she working for?
The Israelis?"
"Yes. And Bradford is with the CIA, we think."
"Are you suggesting that Mike had her run off the road last dummy5
night?"
"I'm not suggesting anything. I don't even know that it wasn't an accident!" Roche snapped back.
"You know far too little for my peace of mind. If Steffy worked for the Israelis—"
"She did. No 'if'."
"All right. Let's put it together then. Steffy worked for Mossad, and she showed up ten days ago. Mike may be cloak-and-dagger for the CIA as well as Hollywood, and he arrived a week before she did. And you finally made it trop tard yesterday." Audley's voice became grimmer with each arrival.
"So what about the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti?"
Audley's Russian accent was worse than his French, but there was nothing wrong with his logic, thought Roche equally grimly.
"What about them?"
"Running little girls off the road is more their style, or it used to be in my young days. If the Yankees didn't do it—and I can't see them getting violent over the d'Auberon papers, which don't involve their security . . . and your lot didn't do it, because the same applies . . . and the French themselves didn't need to do it, because they would have simply run her out of the country as an undesirable . . . and the Israelis wouldn't want to cause the French trouble anyway. And that just leaves the KGB, who also happen to have the best reason of all for wanting the papers, to find out who was telling tales dummy5
out of school... So what about them, then?"
Roche was uneasily aware that this was one question to which he had the exact answer, but one which he still could make no sense of.
"You're not about to tell me once again that you don't know?"
Audley mistook his unease for embarrassment.
"We haven't spotted them if they are here." Unbelievable was more like it: with the way the Comrades had French security sewn up it was unbelievable that they hadn't known about d'Auberon long ago. And yet, if Genghis Khan wasn't playing some other, much deeper game, he had no choice but to believe the unbelievable.
"Well, if they aren't it's a bloody miracle," said Audley. "And if it is a miracle it isn't going to last much longer, because if they've got Steffy on their books they'll be likely to want to know why she ran out of road. And then they'll start picking up names . . . and then this place will become extremely unhealthy ..." Audley's eyes unfocussed as the probabilities unfolded ". . . in fact, I'm damn glad I'm not safe-keeping
'Tienne's wretched insurance policy any more—it's about to transmogrify into his death certificate, I shouldn't wonder."
The eyes focussed on Roche again. 'In fact, since I can no longer work my passage back into the old firm . . . and I have no wish to be caught in your cross-fire ... I think I'm just about to remember some pressing business a long way from here, Roche." He started moving downhill once more, without another word.
dummy5
"No—wait!" Roche swivelled to follow him. "Where are you going, Audley—"
"To get the bread, of course." The words were thrown back at him over Audley's shoulder. "Breakfast first—then a prudent retreat, old boy."
"But you can't go—just like that!" Roche started after him, accelerating desperately to overtake him.
"You just watch me. I think I'll get Bradford to take me to see Hollywood. That should be far enough."
Everything seemed to have crumbled into ruins just when it had all seemed in his grasp, thought Roche wildly: Audley was quite wrong, but there was no way that he could tell him so. Or was he wrong?
The mist had almost swallowed up Audley. Above him, but far beyond, the crest of the ridge on the other side of the valley rose up out of the misty sea, the trees on it standing out sharply against the deepening blue of the sky. It was going to be a fine, hot day—a fine, hot, cloudless, utterly disastrous day.
Audley's figure hadn't disappeared yet. Just when it was losing definition altogether it had firmed up again— Audley was coming back!
Roche watched the big man stumping uphill towards him, a ghostly figure regaining the substance of life with every step, even at last to the expression on his face.
It was a curious face, he thought: the big nose, which looked dummy5
as if it had been broken more than once in rough scrimmages on the rugger field, divided a boxer's chin from the high forehead. And yet it was the mouth and the eyes, with their manic changes, which dominated these permanent hereditary features—the same features he had seen in the picture on the staircase in The Old House.
The mouth smiled at him. "Our deal is still on, is it?"
Roche nodded.
"If I show you how to get the papers . . . I'm back in?"
Roche nodded again.
"With seniority? I have your word on it?"
Yes." Roche could just about manage that word.
"Jolly good! Because I've just had second thoughts."
Second thoughts?"
"Yes. I don't know about Avery— Sir Eustace—but Clinton was always a man of his word. So I accept." Audley nodded.
"I'm afraid you'll have to do the work—I insist you don't mention my name, in fact . . . that might well turn him against you. But I'll tell you what to say. Okay?"
It wasn't an occasion for caution. "Okay."
“Okay. So we have our deaclass="underline" if we succeed I'm in, if we fail I shall work for Mike Bradford, who will undoubtedly pay me better. Heads—I win . . . tails—I don't lose. That's the sort of deal I like, old boy."
Arrogant, selfish, ruthless and cunning, Latimer had said, dummy5
among other defects. But that would be Avery's problem in the future, if there was one.
"So what's your plan, Audley?" Clinton and Avery were both welcome to this bastard, thought Roche.
"My plan? All you have to do is to make him an offer he can't refuse." The smile was pure Hyde now. "If the KGB isn't here yet it soon will be, and that's our lever. If he gives the stuff to us, we'll let them know we've got it—and we'll get the French off his back. That won't be difficult. And if he won't play, we'll feed him to the KGB."
The bastard! "Straight blackmail, you mean?"
"Blackmail?" Mr Hyde continued to smile. "My dear chap, we're saving his life for him!"
BATTLE:
No plan survives reality
XV
ROCHE ARRIVED AT the southern gateway of Neuville exactly on time.
Below him, the old military road along which help or trouble had marched to Neuville from Cahors ran away into the farmland, empty except for two children playing in the dust dummy5
with a dog and a ball. The first flush of morning had passed, and the sun was rising fast into its cloudless sky. God was in His heaven, and Jilly Baker was at Les Eyzies, or Le Bugue, or wherever the formalities of death had to be transacted, with Davey Stein along for moral support; and Lexy was still in her bath, for all the good bathing would do her; and Audley was packing, ready for whichever master he would be serving tomorrow, in London or Hollywood, and grunting instructions for the maintenance of the cottage to Bradford, who was staying on to continue his quest (or not, as the case might be, according to which of those masters Audley finally served . . .).