Here Be Monsters (35 page)

The DST men who came through the gate were old Mr Willis’s creatures: hounds who moved left and right, ready for anything while they made way for the huntsmen behind them who would make the arrest, if not the kill.

But they were moving, and Audley wasn’t.

At least, he wasn’t until he raised his glass to Haddock without turning round.

‘My mistake—this time, if not last time, Haddock.’ He sipped the wine. ‘But then, you got me into a lot of trouble then, too, I seem to remember.’ He took another sip.

‘Oh no!’ Suddenly Haddock was very Welsh. ‘It wasn’t me then, and it isn’t me now. We all make our own mistakes in the end, David. We don’t need any help from outsiders.’

Mistakes and Monsters

COLONEL BUTLER
had an atavistic preference for handling difficult situations standing up, like any old red-coated infantryman facing cavalry. So when Audley finally arrived he had positioned himself by the window, away from the funk-hole of the Director’s desk.

‘Well, David?’ For one last moment he pretended to admire the view across the Thames, which he considered vastly inferior to both his neat Surrey hedgerows and his native Lancashire dales.

‘Jack.’ Audley sounded unabashed. But then he had never been an easily abashed man. ‘Good leave?’

‘Curtailed leave.’ Neither did Audley look more crumpled—tie always carelessly knotted, good suit always creased—than he habitually did. ‘What the hell have you been doing?’

‘Ah … now
latterly
I have been in the pokey, in a gentlemanly sort of way.’ Audley grinned disarmingly. “The French didn’t treat us badly, actually—thanks to Peter Richardson getting off a call to Dale just before they swooped. It was all really more embarrassing than unpleasant.’

‘Oh yes?’ Colonel Butler was not disarmed. ‘And is that how you would describe what happened to Brian Turnbull, David?’

The grin vanished and the shutters which Butler knew of old came down. ‘Yes. That was a bad scene, Jack. But not my fault.’

Butler concealed his astonishment with some difficulty: he had not expected Audley, of all people, to weasel out of it like that. For tactical reasons, if not for moral ones, Audley had always been ready to take the blame in the past, even when it had not been properly his. ‘No?’ He tested his incredulity casually.

‘No, Jack.’ Audley shook his head.

Another tack, then. ‘Yes. That’s what Oliver Latimer says.’

‘What?’ Audley frowned. ‘
What
?’

‘Latimer says you were only obeying orders. He has taken full responsibility for everything that has happened.’

‘Well—‘ There was a flicker of fire behind the shutters ‘—well, you can fuck that for a game of soldiers, Jack—for a start!’

‘Indeed?’ Torture would not have wrung that from Audley. But, as Butler had calculated, he was never going to let himself owe anything to Oliver St John Latimer. ‘But he did give you an order. Is that not so?’

‘
Phooey!
Audley gestured angrily. ‘I wouldn’t have obeyed it if I hadn’t wanted to.’ He tugged at his tie. ‘Christ, Jack—I was all ready to make a bust at Cheltenham … or almost ready, anyway. I could have gone to the DG—or the Joint Committee—
no trouble
. You know that as well as I do!’

‘But you didn’t.’ Butler controlled his own anger. ‘So your man in Cheltenham is probably in Moscow by now, with all those American transmissions in his head.
And
… we lost Brian Turnbull.’ He almost added
Who was one of my subalterns in Korea, under another name, in another time, damn you
! But there was nothing to be gained from that: the letter he had to write, to that elderly maiden aunt in Eastbourne who was all the next-of-kin Brian Turner had, was his business, not Audley’s.

Audley was staring at him. ‘We would have lost Turnbull anyway, Jack. Even if I hadn’t screwed things up. Or someone, if not him.’

Now they were coming to it. ‘What do you mean?’

Audley took time to think. ‘You asked me what the hell I’ve been doing, Jack. And the answer is that I’ve been making the mistake I was supposed to make—no question about that. I let myself be taken, and they took me. And, at a guess, it was Panin.’

‘Panin?’

‘Uh-huh. Old Nikolai’s been laying for me for years—he knows me as well as I know him, from way back. You should remember, Jack. It was about the time we met again, long after the war, you and I. And he was one of Professor Kryzhanovsky’s recruits too, so he’d know about the whole Debrecen nonsense without even having to look it up: he knows exactly how I tick—all he had to do was to wind me up. And killing people has never worried him, because he’s a monster: he kills people selectively, like daisies in his lawn.’

Butler remembered Professor Nikolai Panin: that deceptively gentle face, slightly sheep-like with its badly-set broken nose; he had been … he had been a scholar once, not a psychologist—or archaeologist—?

‘They wanted to get the Cheltenham man out, Jack. And I made another mistake there, because I didn’t think he was on to me … Or, anyway, I didn’t think he was going to run quite so quickly. But if I’d been there, in Cheltenham, I’d have maybe picked up the signs last week, when those American transmissions were coming through.’ Audley shook his head. ‘I don’t know …
But they didn
’
t know
—
that’s the point. So they wanted to get me out of there. But I’m just a bit too senior to have a convenient accident—‘ He cocked his head at Butler ‘—which would have resulted in a reciprocal sanction, maybe? Or something like?’

Butler said nothing. Audley might guess how the land lay there, but it was still beyond his certain competence.

‘Okay.’ Audley accepted his silence. ‘But my guess is that, with what the Americans were doing to him, the man Parker was ready to run, so he was expendable. So Parker was to hand, and he was also one of their possibles from the alleged Debrecen List. And they must have known that he had a connection—an
innocent
connection—with Haddock Thomas, whom I had cleared back in ‘58. So they set Haddock up with Parker, and then killed Parker rather crudely, so as to set
me
up, Jack. Because they were pretty sure we’d react to the Debrecen List, after what happened to Latimer in America last year.’

Butler thought about Elizabeth Loftus’s Interim Report, which lay in his top drawer a few feet away, and understood what Audley had left unsaid there: the unanswered questions in the whole Debrecen affair had been festering in the files for a quarter of a century—that was an unacceptable truth of it.

‘But the way it worked out—‘ Audley spread his hands ‘—it worked out the way things always do: better than they’d planned in one way, and worse in another—‘

Butler held his tongue with a shrewd idea of what must be coming.

‘And you don’t need to look so bloody innocent, Jack.’ Audley was too quick for him. ‘We both know that Oliver
Saint
John Latimer has made himself a Debrecen-expert since last year. And maybe Nikolai Panin was relying on that—I wouldn’t put it past him, by God! In which case he would have reckoned that the fat sod would be only too pleased to set me up—right?’

Colonel Butler knew he couldn’t have that. ‘Oliver acted perfectly correctly, David. Apart from accepting all the responsibility.’

‘Oh, sure! Oliver’s not
stupid
,’ agreed Audley. ‘He didn’t pull
me
out of Cheltenham until Turnbull had sussed things out. And he put poor little Elizabeth in charge—‘ He held up his hand to cut Colonel Butler off ‘—because it looked like a good training … Don’t tell me, Jack! I can just hear the sainted Oliver justifying himself.’ He sniffed contemptuously. ‘So what happened was that I was hooked—partly because I thought Latimer was after me, and partly because I suspected that I was about to be framed by the Other Side—the Other Side being Professor N. A. Panin … All of which pushed me into making a mistake at Cheltenham, I agree! But I was
hooked
, anyway: Oliver had to do what he did, and so I had to do what I did, not only to watch my back, but also to protect poor old Haddock. And Peter Barrie, too.’

Butler thought of the other memo in his drawer, from Neville Macready, warning him away from Sir Peter Barrie of Xenophon Oil, whose peace of mind was not on any account to be disturbed by any persecution, pending the completion of the Egyptian talks. And, as always, Macready was extremely persuasive.

‘But I didn’t turn up on the Pointe du Hoc,’ continued Audley. ‘Poor old Turnbull did, instead. And although I did leave Cheltenham for a day or two, there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t return there. So they had to do something to make sure of me.’ Audley’s face became blank. ‘If Latimer had sent Elizabeth to the Pointe du Hoc it would have been her. But he sent Turnbull, so it was him. But once we’d lost someone in the field, whoever it was … Jack, I couldn’t quit then.’

They had been taken
, thought Butler. It had been Latimer and Audley, but it might very well have been
Butler
and Audley. So the final and inescapable responsibility was his.

But then he thought:
why was Audley so relaxed, for God
’
s sake
?

And then he thought:
it couldn
’
t be because David was in the clear, technically (on Latimer
’
s order), or even actually (because even a clever man couldn
’
t be condemned officially for being not quite clever enough, in these labyrinthine circumstances
—
not so long as he was Director, anyway!)
.

Audley’s face broke up. ‘Sorry, Jack. I fucked it up—I know!’ But then he gave Butler a sly look. ‘But all is not lost, actually.’

The sly look accelerated Butler’s post-mortem thoughts. He had already prepared himself for the Minister’s anger, and Number 10’s recriminations: the fact that GCHQ Cheltenham still wasn’t secure would actually strengthen the Government’s stand on hard vetting and de-unionization. So, when this particular defector surfaced in Moscow eventually, Research and Development would survive, if only because it would be politically convenient for it to continue to do its important duties, beyond the scope of normal intelligence. But that still left a fearsome problem unsolved which Audley had overlooked.

‘And the Americans?’ It was unfair, when the CIA had raised the hare in the first place. But the British had let the animal escape, and that was what mattered. ‘We’ve lost their transmissions, David.’

The sly look remained. ‘They won’t make waves this time. And you can thank Paul Mitchell for that, Jack.’

Butler schooled his face. Putting David Audley and Paul Mitchell on anything together should have warned him that they would exceed their brief. ‘What have you done?’

‘Nothing really.’ Audley trod the pattern of the carpet geometrically. ‘It was just … he was handling the signals traffic the fellow was receiving.’ He twisted at a right angle towards Butler. ‘And … we were monitoring it to see what he was particularly interested in, to get a back-bearing on it, to find out what they wanted to know—eh?’ Their eyes met briefly. ‘Yes?’

‘Paul had this idea.’ Audley twisted again. ‘He cleared it with Latimer, and then he talked to the Americans. And—so—they adjusted some of their figures for him, on a one-off irrational deviation, to destroy the readings. Which means that in about a month’s time the Russians will have some inexplicable decimal points. Nothing very serious at the moment … but it will become serious.’ He looked at Butler sidelong. ‘And then they’ll begin to wonder whether I didn’t leave Cheltenham deliberately, if we play our cards right—whether
their
Cheltenham man isn’t really
our
Cheltenham man in drag, do you see?’

Butler saw.

‘The choice is ours, strictly speaking,’ said Audley. ‘I didn’t know he was going to run, as I say. So we can play it in a lot of different ways, for the time being. And, if you like—in fact, I’d recommend it—you can ask the Americans which way they want to play it. Because that way you can tell them you let him run—that you deliberately ordered me away from Cheltenham, to give them the choice … Only, you’ll have to do that bloody quick, Jack. Othewise, they’ll smell a rat.’

What Butler thought was that Audley had covered himself, on both flanks and in the rear. In fact, both Oliver St John Latimer and David Audley had covered themselves, although in very different ways, even as they had made different mistakes. But that was mere professionalism. Except that there was still one complication, which could not be overlooked.

He could send Audley away, and think of it at leisure. But that was not the way he had once commanded his company in the best days of his life. So it was not something to be fudged now, as though it didn’t matter. ‘Elizabeth Loftus, David.’

Audley’s mouth lifted, one-sided. ‘Dear Elizabeth—yes, Jack?’

He underrated her, thought Butler. In the last analysis women were still merely sex-objects for David Audley: he was a product of his class and his education, pickled in the aspic of time in spite of his intelligence, when neither Mitchell nor Cable would have made the same mistake. ‘She has submitted an interim report, David.’

The corner of the mouth remained contemptuous. “That was her brief. And she’s had a couple of days to think about it. So what?’

So Audley was about to learn something, thought Butler. And that must be a lesson for him, too. ‘She wants more time, to consult the record, David.’

‘I don’t bloody wonder! She was rather pitched into the deep end, poor woman!’ Audley was still innocent. ‘And with me, too. So she was a bit out of her depth, Jack.’

There were times when cruelty was satisfying. ‘What do you think of her?’

Audley drew a magisterial sniff. ‘She’ll do, Jack—she’ll do.’ He nodded. ‘She doesn’t panic in adversity. In fact, she’s one tough lady … But, you must remember, she’s my recommendation … for our obligatory female—‘ Much too late, he caught a hint of something hostile in the question. ‘What does she say, then?’