The Partridge Kite (30 page)

‘Lord Bremmer was one who lost his head at the last moment. So did Dr Richard Lemmings, one of our founder members and a brilliant scientist, much of whose work you see all around you. General Sir William Tendale lost his nerve and found gin and a loose tongue. Air Vice Marshal Gosling was another, one of many wartime heroes who joined us. He was overtaken by his conscience, alarmed at some of our methods.’

‘But,’ Tom interrupted, ‘Gosling works for Haig . . . he was adjutant.’

‘Yes, and it was young Gosling we wanted you to check, not Haig as you thought. Haig is totally, blindly loyal. But it was our need to destroy the father that made the son suspect. He knows so much of the detail of our Organisation and everything about our military connections. Thankfully the boy proved his faith. His love of our ideals has shown itself stronger than his respect for his once very brave father.’

‘So,’ Tom asked, ‘one by one, as I checked them out, they alerted you directly. Was that enough proof they were loyal?’

‘No! As I’ve said, Mr McCullin, it wasn’t our only check but it was our last. As each one telephoned his Alert, each one proved his loyalty. All but one did exactly that.’

‘What if we’d arrested them? You’d have lost them and proved nothing.’

‘How could you arrest such people?’ the voice continued. Internationally respected pillars of the Establishment. On what charge? On what evidence? Sanderson’s? And where was he to support you? He was here. All you had was a tape recording.

‘No! Your Prime Minister would never have survived it. And, as you realised,
you
quicker than anyone, they were being deliberately flushed out for you. The only chance you had of finding me and my Board was to keep them in sight, to keep them under you as it were. After all, the Kite is useless once the birds fly above it. You had no need, after all, to hurry. You had no idea of the date of my new government. Only if you had would you have risked arresting my people. Only
I
knew that date. Only I knew when the countdown ended.’

There was a sudden silence in the room, so sudden that Tom felt as if he had lost all sense of hearing. Like a man who wakes at night in a room so black that he feels in a moment of panic he is blind. Tom leant forward in his chair as if he was reaching for something to listen to.

Hands held him by the shoulders and gently pulled him back. Just as suddenly the crackle of the fire and the hiss of the peat burning there filled the room again. He could hear the movement of wind outside, a rumble, a hum, like the sound of a fast approaching train. But he knew there were no trains here or anywhere near here. He knew there was nothing near except the pine forest and the fortress of snow surrounding it.

He watched the flying sparks off the logs drawn by vacuum up the wide chimney, sometimes so fast they looked like a beam of flame, or so slow they would hover just in sight below the stone lintel before being scooped up by the draught of air and thrown into the sky above the house.

He felt drowsy. His head and his limbs felt heavy. He looked across the fireplace to the armchair and the plaid rug.

‘You said a moment ago,’ he said, ‘that one of them had failed you. But everyone I saw must have telephoned you. They all reacted the same way.’

The coughing began again very softly. Again, Tom could just make out a hand raised towards the shadow where the face was.

‘Unhappily, Mr McCullin, you are wrong. We gave you six names, and they were known to only eight people. Myself, Sanderson, Menzies, your Prime Minister, his PPS Knightley, Fry, yourself and Kellick. And only I and Sanderson knew about Kellick.’

He was not one of you!’

‘No, he was not one of us, not in the sense that he belonged to CORDON. Kellick was not a man with strong enough convictions to belong to anyone or anything. He was, after all, a very typical product of the British Civil Service, always looking in two directions at once. Not to either side of him, which is often very necessary to a man in high position, but backwards and forwards. Always looking ahead to safeguard himself, avoiding the swamps and land mines of political and bureaucratic infighting and always looking back, summing up the past, making certain in his own mind that his life had been properly arranged. Many wise men are governed by caution. But Kellick’s life was obsessed with precaution - and it was fatal to him.

‘You see, although he was not part of us, he knew of us, at least he knew something of our strength throughout the country and the extent of our support. As you’d expect, as Head of SSO he had access to computer data on many of our people and many of the organisations that were affiliated to us. But I was puzzled, and so were my machines. We assumed that he was compiling a dossier, gathering information for an eventual attack on us. But our own people in Government and in the Service told us he was keeping it to himself. Even Fry wasn’t told. In the three years that Kellick collected on us, he told no one. We know he didn’t, because his secretary, Mrs Hayes, kept in close touch with her Area Director. Through her we knew he had microfilm, recordings, and original computer data tape. We knew too that he kept it in his flat.

‘In a way our hands were tied. We couldn’t have burgled his flat because he would most certainly have panicked and done something that would have embarrassed us. He thought he was neatly arranging his future, but a snowstorm upset his plans. As it almost upset ours.’

‘The container?’

‘Yes, the container. You see, the discovery of our container was known to very few of your people. There was an immediate security clampdown. Your Military Intelligence worked very fast and very thoroughly, unusual for them. So thoroughly in fact that for once even our people were kept on the outside. As you were probably aware, every person who knew of the events last Saturday night and Sunday morning was immediately confined. Only Kellick was given the names of everybody involved and as far as he could tell none of them were CORDON members.

‘Suddenly early that morning, he realised, as your Prime Minister and your Intelligence did, that something was really on. It was time for Kellick to take sides. And he chose the wrong one.’

‘He chose our side,’ said Tom. ‘Give the man credit for some guts!’

‘Not quite, Mr McCullin. Not guts. When a man panics and runs to the nearest side you can’t call it courage. If he’d had it he would have called the tune a long time ago. It would have made your job considerably easier and made our existence, at best, precarious. But he was a man who lacked courage totally and even his final decision was made walking backwards, watching his rear for a last chance to change his mind.’

‘And he walked into Major Menzies?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why,’ Tom asked, ‘did he set up the system to try and find you? He and Fry first discovered Sanderson’s leads, the Bremmer clue which gave them the Trust and the names. Why was he so efficient if he wanted to protect his knowledge of you?’

‘Don’t you see?’ The voice began to sound tired. The large strong hands tucked the tartan rug tighter around the legs.

‘Once Sanderson had walked into Cannon Row, Kellick had to pursue every lead that presented itself if he was to be sure he was still ahead of everyone else. He was convinced from the beginning that Sanderson was a genuine defector, so it was absolutely essential that he should retain every ounce of knowledge Sanderson had to give. Which was why he kept Sanderson to himself and refused all other Liaison Units permission to see him unless he was present.

‘His worries began the day you suggested that Sanderson was a decoy. It was a double-deal that Kellick with all his ability to manoeuvre should have recognised straight away, but didn’t. For a man who spent his life protecting himself he showed extraordinary shortsightedness in the end.’

There was a rustle as the man eased himself to a more comfortable position in the chair.

The conversation was ending and Tom felt sudden despair. He had walked a long road and turned the last comer to find a brick wall across it.

‘Why did Kellick pick me?’ he asked.

The voice continued. Tie did not want us uncovered too quickly. He wanted to be in charge. . . to govern the pace of inquiries, to be the first to know anything new.

‘He felt certain of Fry, he hired him for that reason. Certain he could bully him, govern him, tell him when to stand up and sit down. And when after Sanderson’s arrival he was instructed by your Prime Minister to engage someone outside his Department, he was delighted. It meant again he could nominate his own man, someone who would report only to him.

He found what he wanted in the A.D. file, someone he thought would be just as ineffective, just as vulnerable to threats and bullying as Fry. He couldn’t pick an obvious nincompoop without raising suspicion. So he selected who he thought, looking at the records, was the least effective of all the Red Star names. Someone he felt certain would not have the initiative or the intellectual make-up to move faster than himself.’

‘And he picked me?’

‘Yes, Mr McCullin. Tailormade for the job, he told Fry. He thought you would be ideal!’

The room they put him in was two floors below ground level, a small room, adequate but absurdly clinical. White glazed tiles covered the floor and the walls, and there was the distinctive smell of disinfectant.

Before they had closed and locked the heavy white Formica-covered door, he had heard a low-pitched hum coming from farther down the corridor.

His overcoat had been carefully laid over a chair and the small pewter hip flask was on a low glass-topped table by the side of it. He shook it. The whisky was still there.

The single bunk bed was hinged to the wall. He unclipped it, carefully lowered his aching head on to it and kicked off his shoes.

So this, he thought, is as much as I’m going to see of Revolution and Civil War. And when it’s all over will someone come and unlock the door?

He slept, woke, ached, walked about the room, drank a little of the whisky from the flask and slept again. When he opened his eyes again, he knew even in the neon-lit room that it was morning, and light outside.

He looked at his wristwatch: 8.30 a.m. The morning of Christmas Day.

The key turned slowly in the lock and the door opened. He came in and gently closed it behind him.

‘My name is Sanderson.’

Tom pushed himself up on one elbow. The man stood with his back to the door, his shoulders pressed hard against it, his hands hanging limp at his side. He looked directly at Tom but there was nothing in his face, no expression, nothing showed in the eyes except fatigue, red, as if he’d been rubbing them hard.

‘You have come too late, Mr McCullin,’ he said.

Tom reached down for his shoes and began untying the laces. Some part of his mind refused to accept it all as real. He looked at the man by the door, tall with greying hair and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. That was something else he couldn’t accept. Sanderson’s spectacles. In all the images Tom had invented of the man, thinking about him, listening to the taped interview, he’d never thought of him in spectacles.

He tied a double bow in his shoelaces and looked up again.

‘Too late for what?’ he asked.

‘Too late to help,’ the man said simply.

‘I didn’t come here to help.’

‘It’s too late,’ Sanderson repeated, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘The Chairman has just this minute given us the time the countdown ends. There’s nothing we can do now to stop it.’ ‘Stop it? Christ! Whose side are you on?’

‘Mr McCullin, I haven’t much time. There’s another Board meeting in ten minutes and I must attend. I have come to ask you whether your people know you are here?’ ‘In Scotland?’

‘No, here. Do they know the location of this house?’

‘As it happens, a squadron of fighters are on their way here at this moment to blow you into the North Sea.’

The man rested his head back against the door and closed his eyes. The hands at his side began to twitch and then to clench and unclench.

‘I am genuine, Mr McCullin,’ he said.

‘Damn bloody right you are. The best con in the game. You double very nicely, Sanderson, if that is your name. You had them running around like chickens in Whitehall until we cottoned on that you were a plant.’

‘I
am
genuine and my name
is
Sanderson. I have nothing to lose now and you have nothing to gain either. You must believe me. Someone must know what I tried to do.’

‘As you say, it doesn’t matter,’ Tom said.

‘Did you come on your own?’ Sanderson asked. ‘Or did you make arrangements with your people before you left London?’

‘And if I said no?’

‘Then we are finished.’

‘If I said yes?’

‘You would be lying. I can tell now you didn’t.’

Then you’d better go off to your Board and tell them so.’ ‘Mr McCullin, I purposely went to London to lead you here.’

‘I know that,’ Tom said. ‘Your Chairman told me so half an hour ago.’

‘It was my idea from the start,’ Sanderson insisted.

‘He told me that too.’

‘But he doesn’t know that I am a genuine defector. He doesn’t know I went hoping to destroy CORDON.’ Sanderson was looking at the ceiling. His hands were limp again. But there was something in his manner and in his voice that alerted Tom. Not the words but the voice.

‘Can you begin at the beginning?’

‘No, not at the beginning, not so far back. You know most of it anyway, how we started, and why. What I said in my interview was correct, biographically anyway. We all started with the same high ideals, to make this country great again, good again, a Leader again. To get a mandate to re-establish its identity. But we were not to know, my God! how could we, that those fine things were to corrupt more quickly and more absolutely than the coaxings of the Devil.’

His voice broke and he paused for some seconds. He cleared his throat.

‘Did the Chairman tell you that some of our founder members tried to get out of here?’

‘Yes, but I gather they didn’t get very far.’

‘No one who defected survived. I know because they were all my friends, good men who believed in good things. Then one day one of the finest of them was murdered and I realised I had been a coward too long. I decided I would find a way to kill CORDON before it mutilated the very things we had all come together so many years ago to preserve.’