Blackstone and the Endgame (29 page)

‘About what?'

‘About how difficult it is, when you're continually being spun round on a whirligig, to see things as they really are. And I've been on a whirligig for some considerable time.'

‘I'm not sure I know what you mean.'

‘You're playing another of your games, aren't you?'

Vladimir smiled. ‘Am I?'

‘And this particular game is designed to find out just how smart I am,' Blackstone said.

‘And just how smart are you?' Vladimir wondered.

‘Is it at all likely that a minor official in the German navy would come across secret submarine plans?' Blackstone asked, postponing the question of his own intelligence until later.

‘I should think it is highly likely,' Vladimir said. ‘War sweeps away old-established procedures and demands new ones. And while these new procedures are being put in place, there will always be minor failings which the watchful can quickly exploit.'

‘True,' Blackstone agreed. ‘But how likely is it that this same minor official would be able to get several weeks' leave in the middle of the war?'

‘That is less likely,' Vladimir conceded. ‘But he could have just deserted, of course.'

‘And if he did desert, what are the chances that this
minor
official – on the run from the German authorities – could get himself smuggled into England? And once he was in England, how would he go about recruiting at least two other men – and possibly more – to help him in his scheme?'

‘When this Max of yours lived in England, he seemed to have more money than he could ever have earned legally, so perhaps he looked up some of his old criminal associates,' Vladimir suggested.

‘How would you know what Max did in England before the war?' Blackstone asked.

Vladimir smiled. ‘Ah, a mistake,' he said.

But it wasn't a mistake – it was all part of the game.

The soldiers were not the cannon fodder sent into battle unarmed to exhaust the enemy's supply of bullets, but crack troops who had seen heavy fighting on the Eastern Front and emerged from it bloody but unbowed. They had been spilt into teams, each one carefully briefed on its part in the death trap, and now that trap was about to be sprung.

They moved with speed, making little noise on the freshly fallen snow which had yet to become crisp.

The best marksmen – dressed in white camouflage uniforms – set up their rifles and tripods in the street and lay behind them on their stomachs, almost invisible in the snow.

Other teams entered the houses on the middle section of the prospekt through the back entrances and immediately began knocking on apartment doors.

‘This apartment is being commandeered for a military operation,' they told those tenants whose lounges overlooked the prospekt. ‘You are to go to one of the apartments at the rear, where you will be given shelter.'

‘You will soon be receiving some unexpected guests,' they told the tenants at the back of the building. ‘Once they have been admitted, you are to lower your blinds and lock your doors. You will not come out again until you are told to do so.'

They met with no resistance – no argument – because only a fool argues with heavily armed soldiers with bloodlust in their eyes.

‘You hav' der money?' Blackstone asked Vladimir, in a fair imitation of the voice he had heard on the docks.

Vladimir's smile widened. ‘I could easily have sent someone else, but – as you know – I have always had a flair for the melodramatic,' he said. ‘When did you realize it was me?'

‘About two minutes ago,' Blackstone admitted.

‘And what tipped you off?'

‘The fact that whoever it was waiting for me at the docks didn't have the two coppers who were on duty there killed. It would have been easier to kill them than to tie them up. It would have been safer to kill them. And Max – who we now know to be Vladimir – would have been hanged anyway if the police had got their hands on him, so he had nothing to lose by killing them.'

‘So why didn't I kill them?' Vladimir asked.

‘Because you knew that if I eventually found out, there would be no forgiveness, and I wouldn't rest until I'd avenged them by killing you.'

‘Yes, you do seem to have an exaggerated sense of loyalty to your fellow officers,' Vladimir agreed.

‘Do you want to tell me about the rest of it?' Blackstone suggested.

‘Yes, why not?' Vladimir agreed. ‘When the snippet of German submarine intelligence came into my hands, I saw immediately how I could make money out of it. And I needed the money. As the war progresses, my department is having to do more and more on less and less cash.'

‘So you decided to steal it from us?'

‘I decided to seek a subsidy from one of our allies without that ally actually realizing it was subsidizing me.'

‘And so you became Max. And at what point did your devious mind work out that this operation could achieve not just one objective but two?'

‘Almost immediately.'

‘So you set it all up to make it look as if I had been a part of the conspiracy to steal the money?'

‘Yes.'

‘And then, after allowing me to wander around London as a fugitive, stewing in my own juice, for a week …'

‘You were quite safe. I had my men watching you all the time, and nothing would have been allowed to happen to you.'

‘… after allowing me to wander around London as a fugitive, stewing in my own juice, for a week, you appeared and rescued me.'

‘Correct.'

‘The old gentleman I found collapsed in the alley was working for you, of course.'

‘How can you be sure of that?'

‘Because now I've got off the whirligig, I've started asking myself the questions that I should have asked at the time. And one of those questions was: if the old gentleman wanted some air because he was feeling faint, why didn't he take his coachman with him for support?'

‘Quite right,' Vladimir agreed.

‘Then the two thugs attacked me, and just before you slit the throat of the one straddling me, he screamed something like “Listen, this wasn't never part …” That wasn't a plea for mercy, Vladimir – it was a desperate complaint that things weren't going as they were supposed to.' Blackstone paused for a second. ‘Was it really necessary to kill them both?'

‘Strictly speaking, no,' Vladimir admitted. ‘But it did add a certain extra verisimilitude to the scene. And you shouldn't mourn for them, Sam. They were quite willing to kill you. In fact, they were very disappointed when I told them that they couldn't.'

‘It was just
too much
of a coincidence that you should appear on Battle Bridge Lane at just the right time,' Blackstone said.

‘Yes, I always knew that was the weakest part of the whole plan,' Vladimir admitted, ‘but fortunately you were too busy spinning on your whirligig to see the flaw.'

‘What would you have done if Archie Patterson hadn't decided to rescue me from the Black Maria?' Blackstone asked.

Vladimir roared with laughter. ‘You don't really think I'd have relied on fat Archie to spring you from the Black Maria, do you?'

‘Wasn't it him?'

‘Of course not! One of my operatives slipped Patterson a drug in the Goldsmiths' Arms, and while another of my men was freeing you, your fat sergeant was quite happily snoring away in a back alley.'

‘Why was it necessary to implicate Archie by dressing your man in a coat just like his?' Blackstone asked, a hint of anger in his voice.

‘Why should you be so concerned about that?' Vladimir wondered. ‘It's true that Patterson went through two weeks of minor discomfort, but he did emerge at the end of it with a promotion.'

‘I don't think his family will have considered it a minor
discomfort
,' Blackstone said stonily. ‘Why
did
you implicate him?'

‘For the same reason that I implicated you – but we'll come to that later,' Vladimir said airily. ‘The important point is that once my excellent lawyer – Mr Hartington – had secured his release on bail, I set Patterson on the trail that would eventually – and inevitably – lead him to Brighton.'

‘
You
set him on the trail?'

‘Oh yes, I planted lots of clues. I even told Hartington to make sure he used the words “paper trail”, which made Archie think – as I knew it would – of the government warehouse containing all those records.'

‘You planted the attaché case and the railway ticket to Brighton in Max's lodgings.'

‘Yes.'

‘I know now why you insisted I should be the one to buy the case in the first place,' Blackstone said. ‘You knew I'd mark it in some way, so it could be identified later. And it was very important that when Archie found the bag, he
could
positively identify it.'

‘Just so,' Vladimir agreed.

‘But why did you insist that I buy it from Harrods?'

‘I knew that would worry you – and I wanted you worrying over the details that didn't matter, because that might stop you thinking about the details that did.'

‘It was your men who placed the photograph of Max and Brigham in the photographer's window in Brighton, wasn't it?'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Because if the photographer had taken the picture himself, he would have given Brigham a ticket for it, and once Brigham was aware of the photograph's existence, he would have bought up all the copies of it.'

‘You're quite right,' Vladimir agreed. ‘One of my people took the photograph and then bribed the photographer to display it in his window. I had several ingenious schemes in play to make sure that Ellie Carr actually saw the photograph, but none of them proved necessary.'

‘Why did you select Brigham to take the fall?'

‘That had more to do with Max than with Brigham. In 1911, he was conscripted into the submarine service. He never did join it, of course, but you didn't know that, so he was the ideal person to hide behind.'

‘So you knew Max before the war?'

‘Yes.'

‘
How
did you know him?'

‘When he was lodging with Mrs Wilson, he held wild parties with the sole aim of making the other tenants leave, and when they did go, Max took over their rooms and moved his friends in.'

‘I know about that from Patterson's notes.'

‘And do Patterson's notes tell you
why
Mrs Wilson tolerated such behaviour?'

‘She told him Max's friends were prepared to pay twice as much for the rooms.'

‘And so they were. They could afford to, because what Mrs Wilson
didn't
tell Patterson was that she and Max were in partnership and were running a male brothel. And that brothel had some very interesting clients – military men and civil servants, for example.'

‘So that's how you got to know Max – he was spying for you.'

‘Yes, he did feed me a titbit of information now and again, though nothing of very great importance. Then he got his call-up papers from the German submarine service, and he went on the run. He still continued in his chosen profession – a man has to live – but now he was working independently. I kept tabs on him, because I knew that one day he might be useful to me again. And once I got the submarine plans, I knew exactly
how
I could use him, though, of course, he would know absolutely nothing about it.'

‘Brigham was one of his clients,' Blackstone guessed.

‘He was – and that made him perfect for what I had in mind. Even now, I'm willing to wager, he'd rather be thought of as a spy than as a pederast.'

‘If the police had caught Max, the whole plot would have fallen apart,' Blackstone said.

‘Yes, it would. And that is why I had him packaged up and sent home to dear old dad.'

As well as the camouflaged soldiers lying in the street, there were now men at the apartment windows and on the roofs. Twenty rifles were pointed at the window of the apartment on the first floor, another dozen at the front door of the building.

They were only waiting for the team with the battering ram to arrive, and then they were ready to go.

‘I've been very patient, but now I'd like to know why you felt it was necessary to frame Archie Patterson?' Blackstone said.

‘I did it because I knew that while you'd never come to Russia to save yourself, you might come to save Patterson.'

‘You must have wanted me here very badly.'

‘I did. I never really tried to hide that.'

‘No, you didn't,' Blackstone agreed. ‘I always knew you brought me here for a purpose, but I still don't know what the purpose was.'

Vladimir sighed. ‘I will do all I can to prevent a revolution, but it will come anyway,' he said. ‘At first, it will be a liberal kind of revolution, and the government will be made up of lawyers and journalists and other well-meaning – but ineffective – people. That will not last long. Within months, the Bolsheviks will have taken over, and then the situation will turn very nasty. They will hunt down anyone who has worked for the old regime, and they will eliminate them.'

‘Then you'd better make sure you get out before that happens,' Blackstone said.

‘I will stay,' Vladimir told him. ‘I will die for my tsar, even though, by that time, there will probably be no tsar to die for. But Tanya must be saved.'

‘And you think I can save her?'

‘
I
will save her! Me!' Vladimir said fiercely. ‘But you,' he continued, softening a little, ‘will have the job of looking after her once she is safely in England.'

‘You could have written to me and asked me to look after her. I would have agreed.'

‘I know you would. You're a good man.'

‘So if that was all you wanted from me, there was no need to bring me to Russia at all.'