'I don't know, David. But it just doesn't feel right.' She frowned at him. 'Killing you, David . . .'
'Yes.' Mitchell wasn't quite ready to quit. 'Now that would have been a scandal, I grant you.' He matched her frown.
'Our David is ... just a bit too grand for sudden death —
you're right there, Lizzie . . .' He trailed off finally, leaving
" This isn't Ireland" unsettled between them. 'So what have we got then? A bit of rogue KGB-GRU private enterprise, David?' They were both looking at him.
'Or ... a third party?' Elizabeth accepted victory diplomatically. 'Have the Germans identified the Arab yet?
He had this suspect passport — and the Israelis were very helpful over that, Schneider said.'
'They were, yes.' Mitchell steadied himself.
'What — ?'
'I talked to Schneider this morning, while I was waiting for you, David.' Mitchell sounded only slightly apologetic.
'Minding you ... I wanted to know who we might be up dummy1
against, just in case . . . just in case your Arab had friends.
That was when he told me all about the gun.'
'And the passport?'
'It was a very good one, actually. What they call a "Bakaa Valley" job — the Israelis do.' He watched Audley. 'They're experts on Arabs and passports, your old Israeli friends are.
And your other old friend, Colonel Benedikt Schneider, is well-in with them. So they obliged him by identifying it for him: it's part of a lot they've picked up examples of elsewhere . . . from Abu Nidal-PFLP distribution. Which doesn't mean much precisely, because any of those splinter groups will provide a hitman if the deal is right, Schneider says. Complete with a one-way ticket, even.' He paused.
'Which fits Berlin rather uncomfortably, I'm afraid, David.
Because whoever hired that Ay-rab must have known you'd have protection. So two shots were the most he'd expect to manage before the Verfassungsschutz took him out. But he knew he was going to paradise afterwards. So he didn't care.'
No wonder Mitchell was twitchy, thought Audley.
Then Mitchell made a face at him. 'Which doesn't get us much further, if you really don't know why you've suddenly become so unpopular all of a sudden. Which ... I take it you don't? Otherwise — ?' He turned away almost casually.
'Lovely view, eh Miss Loftus — Sorrento . . . Capri? And our own transport, too!'
Otherwise you wouldn't be here hung between them for an instant, before the sea-breeze blew it away.
dummy1
'It's a smuggler's boat.' To Audley's surprise she let herself be diverted.
'Is it, indeed?' Mitchell looked up and down the craft. 'Or ex-smuggler's boat, presumably?' He fixed finally on the low wheel-house. 'Although your Guardia friends are certainly dressed for the part, Lizzie. Is that to help us mix with the locals, just to be unobtrusive, then — ?'
They were playing with him. But, they were both scared, he decided. So, in spite of the past and the insuperable present of their relationship, they had suddenly come to an unspoken agreement. Because fear, like politics, made for strange alliances.
Or, anyway, what Elizabeth said next would confirm that-
'Not Guardia, Paul.' She leaned over the paint-flaked gunwale, pretending to study the still-indistinct loom of Capri through the haze. 'Captain Cuccaro is Intelligence, not Guardia . . . Although I don't know about the crew, such as it is . . .'
'They look like a bunch of pirates, whatever they are.' Failing to get any reaction from Audley, Mitchell was forced to prolong the exchange. 'Are we being met, in Capri?'
'I expect so.' Elizabeth wasn't so good at playing games: she couldn't think what to say next.
'You haven't told them where we're going?' Mitchell began to be stretched, in turn.
'No.' Elizabeth leaned further. And Audley found himself dummy1
watching Mitchell study the stretch of her skirt across her hips, never mind whatever else was visible from their different view-points. Because, although Miss Loftus was cursed with the Loftus-face — the Loftus-jaw, particularly . . .
her figure was all her own.
'No.' She straightened up, and looked directly at him.
'Captain Cuccaro doesn't yet know where we're going.
Because I wanted your instructions about that, David. But . . .
he's not very happy. He wants to talk to you about. . .' She almost blundered too far '. . . about Peter Richardson.'
'Yes.' Mitchell nodded, suddenly hard-faced. 'And so do I, by God! Because there's damn all in the records about him since he left us and went back to the army. And then he retired very shortly after that, anyway.'
'I don't see how he could have been a double.' Elizabeth shook her head. 'If he had been he'd never have left us.
They'd never have let him go, once he was inside.'
'So it's more likely something from the old days.' Mitchell watched Audley. 'Something he knows that maybe didn't seem important at the time . . . And you're the expert on that, David.'
'Yes.' It was no good denying what Jack Butler himself had thought. 'Whatever Richardson knows — about Kulik, or anyone else . . . anything else — he's no traitor.'
'What makes you so certain? He was Fred Clinton's man, not yours, surely?'
dummy1
'Wrong profile.' What he wasn't about to do was to discuss the instincts of the late — and, in his time, great also —
Frederick J. Clinton in the small matter of recruitment, let alone that of treachery: Mitchell had hardly known Fred, and never in his heyday — and Elizabeth hadn't know him at all.
And neither of them, anyway, had lived through treason's own heyday, as Fred had done: those infamous years when everyone had been hagridden by doubts, which Fred had once dubbed "the Cambridge Age" to put his star recruit from Cambridge in his place. '"Profiling" went out with the ark.' Mitchell hadn't finished, and wasn't going to let go. 'It went out with Clinton.'
'He was thoroughly vetted.' He hated to hear Fred consigned to history so crudely.
'But not by you, David. Fred Clinton's man — and an old-school-tie recruit, right?'
'Army, actually.' Mitchell knew too much, again. But not quite everything.
'Okay — old-regimental-tie, then.' Mitchell was implacable.
'Failed the old regiment — and then failed us, the way I heard it.'
Elizabeth was frowning at him again. But he had to settle with Mitchell now. 'Then you heard it wrong.' The trouble was, in a perverse way the fellow had it right, all the same.
He could even remember Neville Macready summing up Richardson when the news of his departure was announced:
' Yes . . . well, they can't say I didn't warn them . . . Clever dummy1
fellow, of course — total recall, and all that. And plenty of style with it. But . . . "Tiggers don't like honey", I said to Fred. "And they don't like acorns. And they don't like thistles
— you'll see". But, of course, our Fred's never read "Winnie-the-Pooh" — wrong generation — he simply didn't understand what I was talking about.'
'How should I have heard it, then?'
Where Mitchell had been much more importantly right, however, was that guess about "the old days". But that was where he kept coming up against the blank wall in the records, and the equally blank wall of his memory (which was more reliable than any record). So it couldn't — it damn-well couldn't — be anything that they'd share, he and Richardson, that had made Kulik bracket their names in his last breath.
'He was a very talented man.' He eyed Mitchell reflectively.
'In some respects he was maybe even better than you, Mitchell.'