He was going far out on a limb. He imagined the reaction to his signaclass="underline" chaos. Then the enquiries: new on station, wasn't he? Had he the experience to assess the supposed intelligence? No bloody option but to send what was another agent's, another national's, hunch…It went to code, was transmitted. For a long time he stared into the night and could not lose sight of his source. Then the call-backs started.
To each of them, Simon Dunkley had the same answer: 'I have sent what I have been told but, personally, I'd rest my life in Joe Hegner's hands. It's the man he is.'
Chapter 7
The phone rang. Spread across the kitchen table, among the coffee mugs, toast crumbs and the plate on which he had been served scrambled egg and grilled tomatoes, were the brochures. With his breakfast, Anne had been feeding her husband on holidays and the choice was Dickie's. He could plump for an early-season Mediterranean cruise, last-minute booking and therefore at a cut-rate price, or a railway journey to the Swiss Alps, or a boat trip up the Rhône with excursions to vineyards. But the phone yelled to be answered and he saw irritation on his wife's forehead. Under duress, he was looking at the train trip to the mountains. She beat him to it and Naylor was only half out of his chair by the time she was at the door and heading for the hall table. She'd said that as soon as he had erected the flat-pack greenhouse, and put in the tomato plants — she had already arranged for Mrs Sandham next door to water them — they should be off to the Mediterranean, Switzerland or France.
The ringing had stopped.
Did he care which it was? Not a great deal. He wasn't good on holidays. Whether it was Bournemouth, Bruges or Bordeaux, he would do the tramping, the galleries and museums, then buy a newspaper and, back in the hotel room or cabin, he'd flick for the running news channel on the television, and the books he'd brought stayed unread. She told him each time they went that he only lightened up when they were travelling with home as the destination, and work the next Monday morning.
She was at the door. 'It's Penny, doing night duty. She wants to speak. I said she'd caught us just before we went out — she said she needs to talk to you.'
She stood aside, arms akimbo, hands on hips, her familiar gesture of annoyance.
He smiled as if helpless. 'On a Saturday morning — funny, that.'
Naylor went to the phone, paused and looked down at the receiver. It lay off the cradle and on the Yellow Pages. He hesitated, then lifted it. 'Dickie here — good morning, Penny'
From Riverside Villas, it was not a secure line to 47 Kennedy Avenue in Worcester Park. Guardedly, he was told of a signal that had come across the river from the 'Sister' crowd, and that it had created 'something of a flap'.
'Who's in?' he asked.
'All the minor bosses, and the major boss is on stand-by and might be in by mid-morning. From what I can see, Dickie, it's a big, big flap.'
'And is it ours?'
'Yes. It's what we do.'
'Is Mary in?'
'Been here an hour. She said it wasn't necessary to spoil your weekend, it being the last. Now she's in a meeting, and I thought it right to call you. I wouldn't have bothered you but nobody's walking, everybody's running.'
'I'll be straight there,' he said.
Back at the kitchen door he offered a curt apology to Anne. What was she supposed to do? Go to the travel agent on her own? She should. And book? Whichever option she preferred. He was on the stairs when he heard her angry hiss: 'Daddy never went in at weekends. What do they want you for when you're virtually out of the door? Daddy would have told them to go jump.' He thought, reaching the landing, that only if he were blessed would he never again hear of her father. In their bedroom, he dragged a suit out of the wardrobe, a work shirt and tie from a drawer. His black London shoes were under a chair. He stripped off his Saturday clothes and dressed again.
Back in the hail, unhooking his coat from the stand, he called, to the kitchen, 'I don't know when I'll be back.'
'How much do I spend?'
He grinned cheerfully, 'As much as you can lay your hands on. Splash out, why don't you?'
Naylor was gone. A brisk stride down Kennedy Avenue, as much of a shambling run along the main road's pavement as his sixty-five years permitted, then a scramble up the steps at the station.
On the train, he sat sandwiched in a football team of teenagers with their bags restricting his leg room. Of course he would never be free of her father. Naylor had been a junior inspector in the colonial police and serving in the Trucial States in the early 1960s, transferred to Aden when internal security had collapsed and been seconded to the RAF's police investigation branch. She had been a secretary at Government House. They'd met at a drinks party. Rather unpleasant, but he'd done the right thing — she'd told him, two and a half months after a late-night swim session on Gold Mohur beach, that she was pregnant, and they'd married in the main salon of the Residence. A month later she'd said that she'd got her dates wrong and that no sprog was on the way. No sprog had been on the way since.
Aden had ended and Government House had been abandoned to the apparatchiks of the National Liberation Front; the RAF and he had flown home. The dust had not gathered under his feet. Daddy, once of the Palestine Police, was now a senior M15 officer with an empire at Leconfield House and had slipped the word that his son-in-law was a.'good sort and reliable', which had been more than enough for his recruitment into the Security Service. He was not privy to whether he had been a disappointment to Daddy or not but the introduction had ensured his employment for thirty-nine years, and he was grudgingly grateful for it. It gave him, and had done since he joined, a thrill to work for an organization charged with the Defence of the Realm, to see the innocent and ignorant around him and know that he — anonymous and unnoticed — was charged with their safety. God, he would miss it.
It had taken Dickie Naylor an hour and three minutes to make the seamless transition from domesticity to his professional workplace.
If he had been under oath and cross-examined, he would have sworn that the face of Mary Reakes fell as he swept into the outer office — she would have known that treason was abroad, and he'd been telephoned. Penny, the guilty one, had her face close to her screen and seemed to hide behind it — she'd earned, at the very least, a box of chocolates. He would make his point and give not a damn if he verged on rudeness.
'So that everybody understands, from this coming Friday evening I will not be called in if the heavens open. Up to this coming Friday evening, while 1 am charged with the running of this section, I have responsibilities and will exercise them. So, please, Mary, would you bring me up to speed?'
It was done with reluctance, but he was handed the digest of the signal that had come across the Thames from the sisters at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He read it. He thought that at last something meaningful was before his eyes. He read the name of Ibrahim Hussein, medical student and citizen of Saudi Arabia, then his movements. Suddenly the final days had purpose, and he was not ashamed of his excitement. As he held the signal his hands trembled. He studied the photograph of an open, pleasant face. Then a winnow of fear: would the matter run beyond the stretch of the coming week at the end of which his swipe card would be taken from him? There was a reference to the Twentyman, then the signal's two bottom lines: 'The information given is a hunch, no more than guesswork, but the source (Josiah Hegner, FBI agent/Riyadh) has unique and personal experience in his field.'