The Partridge Kite (12 page)

‘We’ve just had a call,’ he said. ‘Our two men at Holland Park have been killed. And Sanderson’s gone!’

Friday, 17 December

The meeting took place in Tom’s flat shortly after four o’clock that morning. The two pickup men, their car now cocooned in snow, let Kellick and Fry into the front door at the side of the bookshop and led them up the stairs to the cold green flat off the first-floor landing.

Kellick sat on the edge of Tom’s bed and watched him sleep. Fry busied himself in the tiny kitchen and eventually made coffee after a desperate search for the kettle. He couldn’t make out why McCullin had taken such pains to hide it behind the pots and pans in the sink unit.

The flat was cold and both men sat, one either side of the bed, shivering in their heavy overcoats, cradling the hot mugs of coffee in their hands. They sat like that for nearly an hour and a half, waiting for Tom to stir. In those ninety minutes neither spoke a word.

It was all over by the time it got light, a little after eight a.m..

Kellick talked non-stop for nearly two hours and Tom, from the moment he woke and sat up painfully in bed, fully dressed and totally confused, listened to him without a word.

At the end of it, Tom was offered a find-and-kill contract and he accepted with a nod of his head. Tom then related his previous day’s events - Haig, Gosling, the classrooms, the chanting squad.

A second meeting was arranged at the Department for midday. Kellick and Fry then left in the grey Rover to drive through the snow to Victoria Street. The hostility between them had gone, the immediate point of friction erased.

Tom got up and immediately began shivering. He pulled the heater fan from under his bed and switched it on. Then he went into the kitchen and lit the three gas rings on the cooker and the oven too, leaving the door open. Gradually the warmth drifted into the bedroom and his shivering stopped.

He still felt sick and dizzy. His head ached and he could not turn his neck. The many mugs of coffee Fry had made him rolled about in his stomach and he wondered why he reeked of whisky. He turned on the bath taps and began to undress: he stood in the bath naked, staring blankly at the water, feeling the warmth creeping around his feet, his ankles, slowly rising up his calves. He recognised an old mood, something he would always feel whenever he was on a kill contract. Crouched with his rifle in an attic room or parked lorry, finger gently stroking the trigger, waiting for the target to walk into view - the target he would kill with a single bullet. He’d never had to use a second.

There was the same tight excitement now as he stood staring down into the steam. He raised his arm and looked down at his wristwatch. Five minutes to nine. The tiny date marker on the right of the dial showed 17.

The kidnapping of Francis Sanderson had been simply done. The work of professionals. So simply and so well-timed that Kellick, Fry and Tom McCullin, sitting in the seventh-floor Victoria Street office, looking at the photographs and the brief report, were all agreed: there had been co-operation from the inside.

It had happened when the two-man shift guarding Sanderson on the top floor of the white four-storey house in Holland Park had swopped over at midnight.

The two night shift men had let themselves in through the front door with a pass key, had switched off the alarm on the wall of the black-and-white-tiled hall. . . an alarm set to go off with a thirty-second delay once the front door was opened, reset it again with a special key issued only by the Duty Officer Day or Night, primed it for the next entry and then walked the three flights of carpetless stairs to the top room overlooking the public recreation ground at the rear of the house where Sanderson was kept.

Names were exchanged informally through the closed door - the only casual part of the whole shift change routine - and the door was opened.

The two bogus night shift men fired together. The first guard in the room was hit through the left eye, the second, just behind him, through the jugular on the left of his neck. His body convulsed and began jerking about the floor, blood spurting from the torn vein. His murderer bent low over him and fired a second bullet into the nape of the neck, just below the hair-line.

It took no more than four seconds and was over before Sanderson, in his pyjamas, had time to raise himself from his bed and focus.

The alarm bell in the hall sounded thirty seconds after Sanderson, covered by one of the dead men’s overcoats, his kidnappers each side of him, left the house. He’d been held for exactly one week.

The checks had been made. The two genuine Department night shift guards had been hijacked. Their car was found abandoned on the south side of Kew Bridge; their bodies in the mud just downstream from Kew Pier.

Tom couldn’t help feeling that the only unprofessional part of it all was the loss of life. There had been no logistical reason why four men should have died so that Francis Sanderson could be taken. Nothing had gone wrong - they had not been panic killings. It puzzled him that the murders had been deliberately planned in advance, whether they had been necessary or not - whether the guards had offered resistance or not.

This and the certainty of a CORDON agent on the inside provided the next step forward. Kellick and Fry hadn’t seen the significance. Tom saw it immediately. He began to reason it out, thinking aloud as Kellick and Fry listened. Three plastic beakers of tea and three packets of sandwiches were neatly arranged by Kellick in three separate rows on the top of his desk, dumped there in disarray some minutes before by his secretary, Mrs Hayes.

She’d never shared his love of exactitude. In fact she had shared very little with him in the eighteen years she’d worked from her small office on the other side of the plywood door. She wasn’t altogether certain she didn’t loathe him, but hate was something she couldn’t be sure she’d recognise.

Tom began. ‘CORDON wanted Sanderson back. They needed basic information to do it, information privy to very few people in the Department.’

‘Eleven,’ said Fry. ‘I’ve checked.’

‘So we have to assume,’ Tom went on, ‘the address, the key impressions, the timings, the alarm and the rest came from the inside. Now, to protect their inside man, to avoid any suspicion there was one, you’d imagine them to plan the kidnap in such a way as to avoid the give-away. That makes sense. They would build in clumsiness, make some timing mistakes, open the wrong doors. They didn’t! In fact, they went out of their way to show us that they could not have done it without help from somebody here in the Department. Conclusion, they want to advertise the fact. Question, why?’

Fry interrupted, ‘Why did Haig let you go with the knowledge you’d picked up down there? Why did they kill your tail? Why are they pointing the way?’

They are convinced of their strength and invulnerability,’ Tom answered. ‘But they are using us to help them. Somehow, for some reason, we are essential to their plan.’

Fry looked across to Kellick. ‘Do you remember the last time you went to see Sanderson? I remember something you said when you got back. You’d gone over old ground with him, replayed the tape. He wouldn’t budge. You said, “It’s as if he’s been primed to say so much and no more!” ’

‘You’re saying he was a plant?’ Kellick asked.

Tom answered, ‘Let’s assume that Fry is right. Let’s assume Sanderson was sent to set us up - a decoy.’

‘Except that it’s suicidal,’ Kellick said. ‘What kind of general sends his battle plans to the enemy?’

‘But they haven’t. All they’ve given us is a bit of background and a threat. We haven’t got a battle plan. Something is missing, something vital. We are being used. Don’t you see how clever your general is?’

‘And they’re so certain of themselves,’ Kellick asked, ‘that they’ve taken on the very Government Department that was invented to deal with exactly their threat?’

‘What’s the next best thing to your own opinion of your strength if it isn’t the opinion of your opponent?’ asked Fry.

‘You think it makes sense, then?’ Tom asked.

‘I think it’s beginning to.’

‘So it was planned,’ Fry said, ‘before he came to us. Once he’d given all he was supposed to, they would take him back.’

‘Exactly! Remember,’ Tom continued, ‘the care you say he took to make sure he was totally anonymous - new clothes, the hair wash.’

‘And,’ said Fry, ‘right from the start he said, “it’s on tape” . . .
that. . .
what was it? . . . “You really can’t expect police protection against CORDON . . . sooner or later they’ll come and take me”.’

‘You do have the most remarkable powers of recall. Fry!’ Kellick spoke from his favourite position by the window and the red-topped buses.

‘Our only progress so far,’ Fry replied, ‘has been because of our regard to detail on that tape.’

Tie’s right again, Mr Kellick,’ Tom said. ‘The tape is the only thing we have now - and that’s how they want it to be. It’s put us on to Bremmer and the Trust. It was meant
to. . .
because it has led us to the six names, and that was meant, too. We must listen to the tape again and again, and move in whatever direction Sanderson points us. We must continue to act, especially in the daily routine of this Department, as if we’re unaware we’re responding to CORDON’S plan - even though we’re convinced we are: if you see what I mean?’

‘And the names - the checkouts?’ asked Kellick.

‘I’ll carry on down the list. Sooner or later one of them will point the way to CORDON. One of them has been set up to do it. He probably doesn’t even know it himself. And that,’ he said, looking at Kellick and Fry in turn, ‘is how we get that one step in front. Somehow we have to get ahead of their plan, just one name ahead before they expect it. We’ve got six names. Haig is one down, so it’s five to go!’ ‘Four!’ said Kellick from the window. ‘John Curran-Price flew to Rome yesterday, unexpectedly. Some rubbish about a relative dying. He has no family in Italy. We know where he is but we can’t touch him without making a lot of fuss. Christ knows how he got to know we were on to him.’

‘Haig and Curran-Price then know they’re suspect,’ Tom said. ‘They must have contacted CORDON immediately for instructions: certainly Haig’s own ideas yesterday of what to do with me must have been countermanded by CORDON. Curran-Price was told to get out.’

‘So as each of our six know they’re suspect they contact CORDON and are given their next move?’ Fry asked.

‘Yes, and that’s what we wait for. I do the contacts - you trace the call when it’s made.’

‘Just one thing, McCullin!’ Fry walked closer to Tom. ‘If Haig and Curran-Price have alerted CORDON, won’t CORDON already have alerted the other four?’

Tom looked at Fry full in the face. He said, ‘And if they don’t. . . why not?’

Tom, still looking directly at Fry, began to smile. Really only a movement of the mouth backwards so that the corners rose slightly, but it was enough for Fry.

The instant Fry asked his questions he thought he’d glimpsed something of CORDON’S plan . . . not enough to remember even now, only one second later. But he’d seen something and it had gone into his brain to be stored. It would generate something later, he was certain of it.

And from that slightest of smiles, he knew that Tom had glimpsed it, too.

‘The Press is the most effective conspiracy of the twentieth century. It knits Society together for the purpose of government which makes it vital to government. It allows our most vicious opponents to explode in newsprint . . . the most harmless of all explosions. And a carefully regulated Opposition, like well-encouraged Support, is what makes the wheels of government turn. So an effective government naturally ensures it is part of the Great Conspiracy: the controlling part!’

Anthony Mostyn conducted all his conversations this way. As if he was quoting aloud from the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

He was a large-boned, very fat man and like all very fat men he made the normal process of breathing sound involuntary and painful, taken between profound half-sentences. It made his listeners breathless themselves and begin wondering how they’d ever managed to breathe so easily for so long.

He had a large head, well proportioned to his body so it was a very large head indeed, covered in thick black curly hair and well greased. His sideburns stopped level with his red mouth, pouting lips constantly on the move whether he was speaking or not. His eyes, set deep within the flesh, were small and brown.

Mostyn had the most enormous girth which comfortably accommodated an enormous appetite. He adored good food, old wine and young boys. He was discreet about his affairs, necessarily so as he was known to be a happily married man with a fond wife and two sons. As a cover he would affect the image of harmless lecher after pretty women. It helped allay the suspicions of anyone who might notice his occasional lapses into careless pederasty.

Anthony Mostyn was fifty-two years old and wealthy. He was owner-publisher of an international weekly news digest, the Deputy Editor of a Right-of-Centre newspaper with a 1,400,000 circulation, and the Managing Editor of a widely syndicated political column. Occasionally he would contribute to
The Economist, Punch
and the
Spectator.
Once he’d written an article for British Airways’
Highlife
inflight magazine on the history of theatrical costume, his only nonpolitical, non-sexual interest.

He had two brothers. The younger one, Stephen, was MP for Winchester South and Chancellor in the Shadow Cabinet. The other, Rowland, older by three years, was a Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office.

He was, to sum up, Britain’s most influential political writer on the Right. He was close to government, held high among the ruling upper class and wholly committed to leading opinion and revolution.

No one in CORDON had better qualifications.

Anthony Mostyn was to be Minister of Information and Re-Education in the Government of National Unity. In the three years he had been Director of London Area 4, he had read and digested a thorough summary of all that had been written on the science of propaganda: Goebbels, Dietrich, Kircher, Amann.