"They want Audley, damn it—we know what they want,"
snapped Roche.
"Sir Eustace Avery wants Audley." Genghis Khan stared at him un-blinkingly. "But Oliver Saint-John Latimer does not want Audley—"
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" Sinjun. It's pronounced Sinjun, not 'Saint-John'," said Roche. " Sinjun Latimer."
Genghis Khan blinked just once, like a lizard. "He sees Audley as a rival. And it is also perhaps that Avery intends him to be a rival. . . But that is not enough, there must be more . . . And there is Clinton. There is always Clinton—he must be considered."
More?"
Genghis Khan ignored him. "To go to such trouble for one man. There must be more—there will be more."
He was having difficulty adjusting his thought-processes to the limitations of a decadent fascist-capitalist society, that was it. Recalling Audley's Russian equivalent to the colours would not have presented such problems. "I don't see why."
Arguing back was risky, but if there was something else behind the man's certainty he needed to know it. "They think he'll maybe play hard to get, that's all. He worked for them during the war, and they approached him again a few years ago, but he turned them down flat. They think I can do better."
The lizard-blink was repeated. "Why you?"
Roche decided not to be insulted. "I have what they call 'a sympathetic profile' apparently. It seems we both read history at university." He could see that sympathetic profiles and history both left Genghis Khan unmoved. "And I have a high security clearance."
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That did the trick: Genghis Khan smiled, or almost smiled, and Roche wished he hadn't. It was more like the corpse-grin out of an Asiatic burial mound in which the khan presided over his circle of slaughtered slaves and horses.
But mercifully it lasted only for a moment. "So you have been cleared to approach this man Audley . . . But that changes nothing. What matters is why they need him so urgently—
that is what we want to know."
"It may be what you want to know. But if I don't find out a lot more about Audley than there is in the bloody file we'll never get that far," said Roche bitterly. "So I hope to God Major Stocker knows what he's about better than you do! Because if I fail—"
"If you fail?" Genghis Khan shook his head slowly at Roche.
"If you fail Sir Eustace Avery will not retain your services?"
Roche's guts knotted. "It's possible."
"Then I think you would be well-advised not to fail, David Roche," said Genghis Khan.
"I mean, what sort of man he is—what makes him tick?" he pressed Major Stocker. "You must have some ideas about him, more than what's in the file?"
Major Stocker pursed his lips. "Not really, no—I haven't actually met him, you know. I've just assembled the facts."
Stocker was Clinton's man, so it seemed, and there was nothing very unnatural about that. In peacetime, you made dummy5
the best with what you could get, and what soldiers could get usually consisted of other soldiers. He himself, although he was hardly a reassuring example of the process, was another instance of it, out of the additional factor of conscription and the accident of the Korean War. But he could have wished for the Audley file to have been assembled by someone more like Latimer.
"Seems a pretty ordinary enough chap on the face of it,"
Major Stocker struggled with his inclination to stay inside the safe defences of the facts in spite of Roche's appeal to him to crawl out into the no-man's-land of opinion.
"On the face of it?"
"Yes . . . That's to say, prep school, public school, then in the war— decent regiment until they pulled him out of the line—"
Stocker made Audley's attachment to Intelligence sound like victimisation, with Audley more sinned against than sinning
"—doesn't look as though he fitted in awfully well there, but he did his time."
No remission for good behaviour?"
"What?"
"They kept him on right to the end—October '46. And the university term starts in October. I seem to recall chaps getting special release in my day," said Roche politely, to make up for his lapse into facetiousness.
"Nothing unusual about that, if he was on a job. His fitness assessments were pretty damning, certainly—looks like dummy5
maybe someone had it in for him for something he'd done."
"You don't know what he'd done—what he'd been doing?"
"Yes . . . that is, no." Stocker shook his head. "I put in a request on a 'Need to Know' basis, but it was denied. I was told that it wasn't relevant."
"Is that unusual, in your experience?"
"Oh yes—quite usual. They hold on to that sort of thing as long as they can, as a matter of course. But in this case Colonel Clinton also turned down my request. He said there was no need for me to know."
"You went to Clinton after your request had been denied?"
"Naturally." Stocker regarded him candidly. "I never take the first no as the final answer .... But, at any rate, Audley made up for all that at university—he's bright, no doubt about that.
Not popular, but very bright. Good at games . . . rugger mostly, almost first-class at that, but not quite. Club level—
helped to found a local club on his home territory—funny name—"
"The Visigoths."
"That's right—it's in the file ... they won the Wessex League in '54 ... and the usual squash and fives, at college level, nothing special."
"Clubbable, in fact?" Audley did seem a depressingly normal public school product—school, regiment, university, work-and-games, mens sana in corpore sano. Apart, that was, from St. John Latimer's assessment.
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Stocker was looking at him, and Stocker hadn't answered.
Perhaps he hadn't heard?
"Clubbable?" Perhaps Stocker was unacquainted with the word.
"Joins in, plays the game, and all that?"
"Yes." Stocker continued to look at him. "Yes and no."
"What d'you mean—'yes and no'?"
Stocker considered his contradictory answer. "I rather think I mean 'no', actually."
Roche waited for the Major to elaborate the contradiction.
"You know ... we don't know where his money comes from?"
Stocker went off at a surprising tangent.
"The file said 'private means'," said Roche, deciding not to press the Major on that 'yes-and-no-meaning-no' on the assumption that he would come back to it in his own good time.
"Yes—that's what they are— private." Stocker nodded.
"They're so damn private we don't know what they are, or where they are, or where they come from."
Audley was living in France at the moment, in the south near Cahors. But before that he had been on the move constantly, through Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, and even in the Middle East, only returning to England at carefully spaced tax-evasive intervals. And while it wasn't the sort of life-style that necessarily needed vast resources, its funding could be dummy5
made very difficult to check, and with only a little ingenuity too.
"He's officially domiciled in Switzerland," continued Stocker.
"But I've half an idea the money is in Lebanon. The difficulty is that Colonel Clinton doesn't want him alerted that anyone is sniffing around, so we're having to move very slowly. So slowly as to be practically stationary."
Roche frowned. "But I thought his money was inherited?
Wasn't his father well off?"
Stocker shook his head. "Just a façade. Or ... there must have been money there at some time, but by the time the father was killed early in the war it had nearly all gone. The flat in London went in '39, and most of the land had already been sold by then. There was the house ... it isn't so big actually, but it's very old and it is rather nice . . . but even that was in a very poor state of repair, and the father was dickering to sell that too. He was posted to France just as he was about to sign on the dotted line."