Four SAS officers shared the expenses of this apartment, a base for their frequent London furloughs. Montgomery, however, belonged to Albert; there was nothing communal about him. Albert operated in watertight compartments. There was the regiment, and there was everything else. Because his parents were both dead and he had no brothers or sisters, he felt the need for something alive to call his own. Montgomery was a thorough nuisance: he required feeding and grooming and letting out, which made huge organizational demands whenever Albert went away, which he did often. But Montgomery was worth it. He loved Albert. One day soon, when the time was ripe, Albert would retire to the West Indies with him. Montgomery had all the laidback style required of a successful Caribbean cat.
Albert consulted his stocks. London, following a surge in Wall Street, had risen; it was time to sell a few shares and salt away the profit. At today’s prices he reckoned he needed another fifty thousand. That, together with what he’d inherited, would be enough to buy this dilapidated hotel he’d discovered on tiny Carriacou, not yet a tourist spot. He was going to refurbish the place. Then he and Montgomery were going to run it with the kind of manic fervor that would make a typical Swiss-managed hotel look like an unruly, flyblown pizza parlor.
Fifty thousand pounds, that’s all he needed now. Albert folded up the paper and stared at the phone. Fifty thousand, and it was good-bye to the regiment and the executions he carried out efficiently in its name, the best of the best. To use the SAS’s time-honored phrase, he would have “beaten the clock.” Survived, in other words.
The phone rang. Albert didn’t give it a second chance; the receiver was in his hand and up to his ear in a trice.
“Hello, son,” said the familiar voice.
“Isn’t it a bit early for me?”
Albert’s miraculously resurrected “father,” an MI5 officer whose name was Fox, rested his arm on the car’s window sill and blew a cloud of smoke at the windshield while he considered this. “Not exactly
early,”
he said at last. “At least…”he took another drag on the cigarette and added one more line to the several that already disfigured his forehead. “Not so much early as … um, what’s the word I want now, prophylactic, no that’s something else, isn’t it? Something to do with that horrible disease …”
“Preventive?”
“Ah, preventive.” Happiness reigned, but only temporarily. “Not
exactly,
no.”
Albert sighed and leaned back, stretching his arms as far as the car’s interior would allow. He admired Fox and on the whole enjoyed working with him, because he had a knack for getting things done on time. He was conventional, right-wing, honest—qualities that commanded Albert’s respect. But he found the older man’s circumlocutions tiresome, and he couldn’t stand the way Fox chain-smoked. Albert regarded nicotine as a
drug for those who could not master their own lives but felt a need to pollute the lives of others. Smoking, in his view, was a mixture of weakness and sin.
“What I think you must understand, what I would like to convey to you …” Fox leaned forward to stub out his cigarette, spilling a light shower of ash over his suit “… is that this is probably nothing at all. Trivia.” He nodded his head in an attempt to give his statement weight. “But on the other hand, it could be
the
big one. In which case, the woman has definitely got to be stopped.”
“On the usual terms?”
“Yes. Well, then again, no. You see, there’s rather a lot at stake here. America’s likely to turn nasty.”
Albert’s pulse quickened. “We’re talking about a fee, then, in the upper range?”
“Yes. And if you have to play a part, we’d like you to disappear afterward. For a little while.”
By now Albert was excited, but he did not let Fox see this. “Twenty grand.”
Fox blew out a long, long breath. “Well,” he said. “That
is
at the upper end of the scale. Isn’t it?”
“Twenty.”
“We could have it done a lot cheaper, you know.”
“And a lot worse.” Albert shrugged. He prided himself on the surgical precision with which he carried out his contracts for the state. “Suit yourself.” He grasped the door handle, but Fox reached out to restrain him. “Come inside; form a view. Then we’ll talk.”
“All right. But the risk is yours.”
“Risk?”
“The price can only go up.” Albert had worked with Fox before. He knew he had to put down his marker early, then ensure it stayed in place. “Not down. Up.”
Fox sighed.
“By the way …” Albert seemed to be troubled by a speck of dust; he kept wiping one eye. “Will it involve a sea op.?”
Nobody knew about his single weakness. He fought it continually, keeping it hammered down hard, surrounded by a steel chamber deep inside him where no one might even guess its existence. Albert was wary of the sea.
“I can’t say,” Fox replied. “Why?”
“Nothing.”
As Albert got out he studied the square with interest. A pleasantly middle-class oasis in a difficult part of north London: the word ghetto sprang into his mind. The tall, terraced houses had a well-kept air about them, and if there was money to splash on the exterior it followed that there would be more inside, where wind and rain could do no damage.
“What’s the time scale?”
“Very tight.” Fox pushed on the Lescombes’ front door, which he had left ajar when coming down to greet Albert. “Vancouver’s so close, that’s the problem. I want you to pick it up as we go along. You have to realize—”
He was interrupted by a loud crash from some upper region. Fox grimaced. “You’re doing a search?”
“Category one.”
“Looking for?”
“Whatever it is that we find.”
They climbed the stairs. At the top of the first flight Fox turned left into a drawing room. Albert had a fleeting impression of Liberty fabrics and large bookcases
Then a man was rising to his feet and Albert concentrated on him.
“Mr. Lescombe, can we resume where we left
off …?”
“What the devil was that crash I heard?”
Albert could see that the householder was furious and in the circumstances found it hard to blame him. He liked things to be neat and tidy.
“We have to do a search, Mr. Lescombe, you know that,” Fox said placatingly.
“Search. Not smash the place apart. Who’s going to pay for the breakages?”
“We can discuss all that later. Now I really must ask you to sit down and get back to what we were talking about when I left you.”
It was clear that Fox did not mean to introduce him, so in the pause that followed Albert held out his hand and murmured, “I’m Albert,” with that quiet amusement which both forgives and covers up for an absent-minded host. David shook hands, then his eyes connected with Albert’s face and instantly narrowed as if in recognition. Albert found that intriguing. He was sure they had never met.
“Please, Mr. Lescombe, sit down.”
Albert felt glad to hear Fox take charge. A moment more and Lescombe would have asked what his function was in all this. He quite liked Lescombe for the way he stood up to Fox, and Albert certainly didn’t want to start out by lying to him.
Loud bangs echoed through the house. Two sets of footsteps thundered down the stairs. As they passed by on the landing there was a burst of crackle, followed by a quick exchange on a walkie-talkie.
Fox sat in the dead center of a Chesterfield and
twitched the wings of his waistcoat before resting his hands on his knees. His suit was as near black as made no difference, he wore a white shirt and dark crested tie, a signet ring squeezed the flesh of his right little finger. The sartorial image of a churchwarden was belied by a suspiciously dark head of hair, which had plainly been boufféd with the help of a dryer. The bottom-line impression was of a successful if rather close-to-the-wind nightclub owner. Albert had it in mind to employ someone of Fox’s general appearance as his Caribbean maître d’.
“Mr. Lescombe.” Fox gave his waistcoat another little jerk. “As I was saying earlier, we have considered your preliminary statement. It is very clear and we thank you for that, but we find certain aspects of it unsettling.”
“Oh?” David said. To Albert’s ears his tone sounded a trifle supercilious, implying that Fox found the statement unsettling only because he was too thick to understand it. Albert wandered over to the window embrasure, his liking for Lescombe on the increase. Somewhere above him he could hear a floorboard being prized up.
“Yes.” Fox was not to be deterred. “The seminar you were attending was important, was it not? Yet you departed in a hurry, leaving behind an impression of considerable agitation?”
“What I can’t seem to get you people to understand is that that is the perfectly normal reaction of a husband who’s fond of his wife.”
Albert flicked a fingernail against his upper teeth while he thought about that word “fond.”
“All right, we’ll move on for the moment. Mr. Lescombe. Your wife is a busy professional woman. She
has a career of her own and it’s a distinguished one. She is, if you’ll forgive the phrase, free, white, and over twenty-one.”
“She’s thirty-nine.”
“Leaving aside precise numbers, she’s an adult. She mentioned the possibility of going to Paris, I believe?”
“Yes, although she sounded so tentative I didn’t give it another thought.”
“Nevertheless, her passport’s missing and she may have gone abroad, mm? I take it she’s not done anything like this before?”
“No.”
“No history of mental instability?”
“Of course not. She’s a barrister.”
“She is a barrister. Not the sort of person who goes off the rails. Furthermore, we have your categorical assurance that she does not know the combination of your safe. Yet, when she drops out of sight, your first reaction is to connect her disappearance with the missing file. Why?”
“I’ve told you, we’d had a tiff. I was worried for her. I still am, worried out of my skin, and nobody seems to care.”
“When you quarreled, did she mention the possibility of going away?”
“No. And I said tiff, not quarrel.”
“In any case, what you’re giving us is merely your interpretation?”
“If you like.”
“What do you think has happened to her?”
Albert waited with great interest to hear the answer to that one. He sensed that Lescombe was angry with his wife, as well as with Fox.
“How the hell should I know? Kidnap, murder, anything’s
possible. Perhaps she came in while whoever it was burgled my safe was on the job and they made off with her, to make sure she didn’t talk.”
“Oh, come, come. Taking her passport for good measure?”
“It happens! We know there was a break-in, that cellar window was smashed, that’s how they got in.”
“We know that, do we?”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
When Fox declined to answer, David rushed on, “These things happen!”
“If you say
that,
I have to tell you that your experience of these matters is greatly superior to mine.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. You’ve got a bloody nerve, coming in here—”
“Mr. Lescombe.”
“Accusing me of lying.”
“Nobody’s—”
“Destroying our house. Have you any idea what we’ve spent on this place? And what are you doing about finding her?”
“Her? Nothing. Krysalis is another thing. Your stewardship of that file appears to have been rather less than perfect, does it not?”
Fox tilted his head, awaiting an answer, but Albert, whose instincts were ultra-sharp, sensed that David had begun to eye him sideways, as if trying to fathom who he might be and what he was doing. Lescombe seemed very acute. He did not look to Albert like a man who was guilty of anything.
“Mr. Lescombe?” Fox prompted.
“I … you’re referring to …” David lowered his eyes. “Am I allowed to name it? I mean, I don’t know who this—”
“You may speak freely in front of this gentleman, indeed, I hope you will do so. I beg you to do so.”
Somewhere up above glass shattered. Everyone froze into silent, embarrassed immobility. Then a distant voice shouted,
“Fuck!”
David ran toward the door, but—“Krysalis, yes,” Fox said smoothly, as if nothing had happened. “For the benefit of my colleague, perhaps you would be so good as to outline what Krysalis is.”
David reluctantly stopped his headlong progress and half turned, so that his gaze could embrace Albert, still tapping his teeth over by the window, as well as Fox.
“Krysalis is a file that’s updated once a quarter,” he said to Albert, as if the words had to be dragged out of him. “It contains a lot of things, but what’s troubling your excitable colleague here is that at the moment it’s got in it the entire NATO General Situation Plan, plus the formulas for identifying S and P SP’s on time spans one, two, and three….” He shook his head, angry with himself. “I’m sorry. It gets to be a habit, after a while. It sets out current NATO thinking on strategic and tactical sacrificial pawns in West Germany in the twenty-four-hour period following a Soviet conventional attack.”
As David expounded Krysalis, Albert became conscious of euphoria billowing within him. But instead of revealing his joy he merely raised inquiring eyebrows, and Fox produced a mumble in which the word “pawns” could be heard to end on a high note.
“They’re the places we’d be prepared to see go before using our nuclear weapons.”
Albert’s expression did not change, but his exhilaration continued to expand. Fox had said this might be the big one,
the
big one. Albert now recognized that for
what it was: a negotiating tactic. Nothing came bigger than this.
“Krysalis contains …” Fox had trouble finding the right word. “Shall we say, sensitive material?”
David snorted. “Top secret, sensitive … enough to bring down more than one government if it got out. Krysalis actually uses the phrase sacrificial pawn; can you imagine what the gutter press would do with that?”
“And the list of sacrificial pawns is quite specific,” Fox said to the room at large, before reverting to David. “You brought it home,” he said, and Albert stopped molesting his teeth.