Audley swallowed the lump in his throat. With a couple of casual sentences the ex-Preacher had completely rearranged the pieces of the jigsaw—and in doing so had made them fit as they had never fitted before. The professionalism which Butler and Maitland had sensed, those suspicious trips to Paris in Charlie Ratcliffe's wake, the precipitate withdrawal to Holland when it looked as though his cover had been blown. . . . Even the fact that he was talking freely now when he'd maintained his innocence with everyone else —it all added up to the same coherent pattern.
But the emerging picture was not the one on the lid of the box.
"For choice Colonel Morris," Davenport concluded.
Of course. He could imagine the final briefing almost word for word: if things go wrong play it cool until you reach one of their senior men. If Audley's back from Washington try for him, he's the closest we've got to a friend over there, and he and Morris understand the real score—if they can cover for you, they will. . . .
"I see. But your control is in Holland?"
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"Yes, sir."
That was what had thrown Butler. At a pinch they might have been able to identify the CIA's men in Paris, or even Brussels, but the station in The Hague was small and unimportant, more a presence than an operational centre.
"Then you're out of your territory, Mr. Davenport—and out of line. We have an agreement with your people about manpower. And also we have an agreement about keeping out of our domestic hair: Charlie Ratcliffe is our problem, not yours."
"Yes, sir." The young American nodded. "But as to your first point, we also have a 'hot pursuit' agreement with you, if I may remind you, sir—"
"You may." That "sir" was beginning to make Audley feel old and school-masterish, especially when added to the "heard a lot about you" line. It was one thing for the Minister to use those words, but quite another for this boy to echo them as though he was already a living legend from the past. "You may, but it won't wash. You've been over here for months, and you haven't been looking for Ratcliffe, you've been watching him. And even if you had been pursuing him he's still ours. He's domestic."
"No, sir—with respect."
"Damn the respect." This was what Audley had feared, that part of the jigsaw where Charlie Ratcliffe fitted in with the activities of the CIA. Because there could only be one reason dummy5
for that—the reason which explained the professional precision of the killings of James Ratcliffe and Henry Digby.
All he needed now was final confirmation of that mathematical certainty.
"Well ... I guess we may have stretched the agreement a piece." Davenport grinned apologetically. "But it was pursuit
—it didn't start here ... for us, that is—it started when he made contact with this guy we'd been watching in Paris—"
"KGB?"
"Oh sure—and top brass too. But don't ask me who, because they didn't tell me—" Davenport qualified the admission before Audley could pounce on it "—they pulled me in to establish the next link in the operational chain."
"Because you weren't known here?"
"Or in Paris. They got too many of our men tagged over there. . . . Plus I had the right educational profile. Early colonial history just happened to be my hobby— it's not such a jump from New England to Old England. The guys who emigrated and the guys who stayed and made the colonies, they weren't so different, you know."
For once history was no temptation to Audley. "Yes, I'm sure they weren't. But I'm a little more interested in a more modern history, Master Davenport."
Davenport looked suitably contrite— and very young.
Davenport, little Frances . . . Mitchell . . . even Charlie Ratcliffe—he was trapped in a world of young people who dummy5
seemed to know better what they were about than he did.
Well, they would grow old in their turn.
All except Henry Digby, who would never grow old. He would simply be forgotten.
But not yet, by God, not yet!
"But my job was strictly informational, sir." The young American was looking at him uncertainly now: perhaps he'd misinterpreted the expression which the memory of Henry Digby had stamped on the living legend's face, glimpsing hatred and anger behind the mask.
Or perhaps he hadn't misinterpreted it altogether after all, thought Audley with a flash of self-knowledge. Because this was one time when vengeance was going to make duty a pleasure.
"Even after Swine Brook Field?"
"After the hit?" Davenport was more cautious now. "Well, that only made it more interesting."
"Who made the hit?"
"We don't know for sure." Davenport scratched his head.
"But we think it must have been a guy named Tokaev. He works out of Paris, but he was out of circulation at the time—
and he speaks English perfectly . . . with a slight Cockney accent, that is." He nodded. "'Fact, we're pretty certain, really. It's his style."
"And you found that merely . . . interesting?"
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"Not merely—very. We still didn't know what Ratcliffe was up to, his cover's goddamn good."
But they'd watched him for months nevertheless. The KGB
Paris contact must have been top brass indeed for that.
"Not until the gold turned up, anyway," continued Davenport. "Then we knew, of course. With that sort of finance he can really get The Rat off the ground, and with the dirt they can feed him he can pick his targets. . . . But I guess you know all that better than we do." He gave Audley a rueful look. "When it comes to cover your boys are no slouches either: until you cracked down a week ago we didn't think you were on to him at all."
"Until the gold turned up," Audley repeated the words mechanically.
"Yeah." Davenport shook his head admiringly. "You've got to hand it to the bastards—that was goddamn smart. Goddamn smart."
The distant sound of clapping intruded into Audley's consciousness, as though the cricket crowd agreed with Davenport. Someone had scored or someone was out.
Someone had scored sure enough: the Russians— £2½
million in good clean honest untainted money, for no losses.
He nodded wisely at Davenport. "Yes, I have to agree with you there. And all good genuine seventeenth-century Spanish gold too. That threw us, I can tell you."
"Hah!" Davenport gave a short laugh. "Well, they've dummy5
obviously still got enough of it to pick the genuine article out of stock. But then Krivitsky said at the time that when they unloaded the stuff at Odessa in '36 there was enough of it to cover Red Square from end to end, and he had that from one of the NKVD men who was on the quayside. And some of that gold must have been in store in Madrid for centuries."
Dear God! thought Audley despairingly —how could they have been so stupid, so short-memoried! The Spanish Civil War gold—the gold of the embattled republic which Azana and Prieto had despatched to Russia for safe keeping in October, 1936, and which had turned all subsequent Soviet aid to Spain into a profitable deal that would have brought a blush to any Capitalist cheek; the gold—the Spanish gold—
which had been such a bonanza that Stalin had announced shortly after that new mines had been found in the Urals, the old blackguard!
The Spanish gold which hadn't been found at all in the crater behind the bastion, but which had been planted there.
There was the full design at last. And all the elaborate tapestry of history they had woven was a lie: Matthew Fattorini's honest facts about cargoes and voyages, Nayler's painstakingly assembled inferential evidence, Paul Mitchell's elegant research . . . even his own smug reconstruction of how Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had schemed to conceal their gold—all that was a lie, a self-deception, an edifice built with moonbeams and shadows.
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The reality—as recalled by the one-time Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in the West for the benefit of the Saturday Evening Post before SMERSH had caught up with him in a Washington hotel—the reality was a convoy of lorries from Madrid to Cartagena, and then an old freighter with its name painted out steaming slowly from there to Odessa, and then the train to Moscow and the Kremlin vaults.