"Here you are, Captain Roche—one brief-case!"
Roche's left hand, feeling in his pocket among his loose change, closed over the key. It was the same case, and there hadn't been time for anyone to pick the lock, even if anyone had had reason to pick it.
His right hand took the case for Galles to see. He had entered the château without it, but now he was leaving with it— and dummy5
d'Auberon had given it to him.
The thing was done—and if anyone else was watching, it could only be Genghis Khan's man who had witnessed it, he decided. And that would just give him even more time.
"Just one thing—"
Another thing? He looked at d'Auberon questioningly, the case weighing down his arm to his side, but there was something else weighing down his mind at the same time.
"Why did you really come to see me, Captain Roche?"
"I beg your pardon?" He heard the lack of conviction in his own voice.
"It's simply that . . . I've never seen a man more nervous than you, Captain—underneath the polite civilities, that is."
D'Auberon smiled— half-smiled—at him. "But of course you don't have to tell me ... though you make me nervous too, because now I come to think of it, there is one man you remind me of: he despatched me into the Chausse Mejean in
'43, to work with the Bir Hakim maquis when things were bad
—and that only makes me more nervous."
"Why?" He knew what the other thing was: it had been there in the back of his mind ever since the plan had taken shape.
"Why? Well ... I think he thought the Germans were waiting for me. And so they were . . . but the drop went wrong—there was low cloud and we never saw the dropping zone, so I jumped almost blind, and broke my ankle five miles away, falling through a pigsty roof outside Brassac. A fortunate dummy5
disaster . . . but he didn't know that when I jumped, you see.”
Roche hardly heard him. He was trapped by his own knowledge of what the Comrades must do next.
Up until now they had had no incentive to do anything about Etienne d'Auberon, with his secret already safely in their possession; if anything, he was more useful to them alive than dead. But now ... it was always possible that sooner or later the British would get round to checking Captain Roche's story, just to be on the safe side, in spite of Galles' eye-witness account of the transfer. Then it would be his word against d'Auberon's, but even if they took his word there would always be a niggling doubt—and there would be no place for any niggling doubts in Sir Eustace Avery's operations.
"What is your work in Paris, Captain?" D'Auberon weakened enough to ask directly the question which must have been uppermost in his mind from the start.
Simply, they couldn't afford to leave the Frenchman alive now. They wouldn't do it today or tomorrow—they'd allow just enough time to allow Roche to win his spurs, but not a minute more—maybe the day after tomorrow, trusting that the French themselves would handle the problem of the other two copies. But they would do it.
"I shouldn't be here." He felt strangely relieved to hear his own voice. "I shouldn't be here . . . but we owe you."
"You owe me?" D'Auberon seemed puzzled.
dummy5
"Audley does, anyway." He'd promised not to mention Audley's role in this, but he hadn't promised anything else.
"From the war."
"Mon Dieu! He doesn't still remember that, does he!"
D'Auberon reacted as Audley had predicted he would do at the mention of his name.
"It doesn't matter. The fact is, the Russians know what you've got. So you'd best go to ground somewhere safe—at once."
"The Russians?" With the thirty-foot walls of his home behind him d'Auberon didn't appear scared.
But there was one sure way of changing that. "The KGB."
To his chagrin, he watched d'Auberon's face relax. "The KGB? My dear Captain Roche—the Russians are the least of my worries! There might be some people who could misunderstand the situation . . . owing to the nature of my work when I resigned . . . but not the Russians—not them, of all people, Captain."
Roche was already beginning to regret his idiotic moment of altruism. If the KGB didn't frighten the man, then nothing would.
D'Auberon was almost smiling. "Obviously, you've never read my report— obviously!''
His report? But if that was the encyphered part of the papers weighing him down now . . . then the Comrades would have broken it long since, with all the advanced Enigma machines they captured in '45.
dummy5
"But you came to warn me—and on your own initiative?" The suggestion of amusement was suddenly tempered by an even more humiliating cast of gratitude. "So . . . my people haven't ever told the British—in spite of everything?" In turn, gratitude became tempered by anger. "Even in spite of my resignation?" Roche held his tongue.
"Oh yes, Captain—that was also part of it. It was mostly Algeria, but it was also the matter of my report, which should not have been withheld from your people in the circumstances—not in any circumstances, in honour—no matter that your Government had so shamefully withdrawn from the Egyptian operation—so shamefully." He shook his head at Roche, the very incarnation of Bill Ballance's 'best Frenchman' sorrowing over a once-honourable enemy's declension into the role of dishonourable ally.
Roche wondered nervously about what Raymond Galles would be making of this exchange, even while not knowing what to make of it himself.
"So . . . it is still a matter of honour. But you have changed the rules now, Captain—because now it is I who owe you.
And if the Russians know everything, then it is only right that the British should know everything also, I think."
This was going to be something Genghis Khan hadn't told him, thought Roche. But then no bugger had told him everything, but mostly as little as possible. It was this old-fashioned Frenchman's weird sense of personal honour—and his own equally inexplicable rush-of-blood-to-the-head—
dummy5
which was going to blow the gaff.
"You see, Captain, I handled all the special material from Moscow last year, from spring to late autumn—it came through the diplomatic bag, it was judged too important for any other method—and also too important to pass directly to the British. Commandant Roux and I made a digest of it for them."
Good old Philippe! So that settled one outstanding problem very simply: Philippe had been the stage-manager.
"Then I was promoted, to take charge of our plans for the fortification of the Tunisian frontier, as a reward for my good work ..."
It had been promotion all round for the RIP beneficiaries of the 'special material' from Moscow, naturally—Eustace Avery and Etienne d'Auberon both!
"But then I started to think about it—all that had happened, and how it had gone wrong for us."
That was where Avery and d'Auberon had parted company, thought Roche grimly: Avery had capitalised on his good work, and d'Auberon had started to think about it. And now, one step ahead of the Frenchman's debt repayment, he knew what was coming.
"I managed to draw the file out—nobody had any reason to question that, as I'd written most of it myself."
Philippe Roux had been slow off the mark there.
"The truth is, Captain, we were 'taken for a ride', as the dummy5
Americans say. Everything we got from Moscow was correct—
it was genuine top-level material—but it was deliberately given to us to direct our policies in a particular direction, and we never questioned it. And, as a result, we gave the Russians a free hand in Central Europe . . . and ruined ourselves into the bargain. That was the report I wrote—you understand?"
Roche understood—he even understood more than d'Auberon was actually telling him. "So what happened then?"