Running Blind / The Freedom Trap Page 8

  ‘Who the hell is Philips?’ I interjected.

  ‘Oh! You might know him better as Buchner—or Graham.’

  ‘His contract I did terminate,’ I said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ yelled Taggart. ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’

  ‘I got in first just before he tried to terminate my contract,’ I said. ‘The competition is awful fierce here in Iceland. Slade sent him.’

  ‘Slade tells it differently.’

  ‘I’ll bet he does,’ I said. ‘Either he’s gone off his rocker or he’s joined a competing firm. I came across some of their representatives over here, too.’

  ‘Impossible!’ said Taggart flatly.

  ‘The competing representatives?’

  ‘No—Slade. It’s unthinkable.’

  ‘How can it be unthinkable when I’m thinking it?’ I said reasonably.

  ‘He’s been with us so long. You know the good work he’s done.’

  ‘Maclean,’ I said. ‘Burgess, Kim Philby. Blake, the Krogers, Lonsdale—all good men and true. What’s wrong with adding Slade?’

  Taggart’s voice got an edge to it. ‘This is an open line—watch your language. Stewart, you don’t know the score. Slade says you still have the merchandise—is that true?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  Taggart breathed hard. ‘Then you must go back to Akureyri. I’ll fix it so that Slade finds you there. Let him have it.’

  ‘The only thing I’ll let Slade have is a final dismissal notice,’ I said. ‘The same thing I gave Graham—or whatever his name was.’

  ‘You mean you’re not going to obey orders,’ said Taggart dangerously.

  ‘Not so far as Slade is concerned,’ I said. ‘When Slade sent Graham my fiancĂe happened to be in the way.’

  There was a long pause before Taggart said in a more conciliatory tone. ‘Did anything…? Is she…?’

  ‘She’s got a hole in her,’ I said baldly, and not giving a damn if it was an open line. ‘Keep Slade away from me, Taggart.’

  He had been called Sir David for so long that he didn’t relish the unadorned sound of his own name, and it took some time for him to swallow it. At last he said, in a subdued voice, ‘So you won’t accept Slade.’

  ‘I wouldn’t accept Slade with a packet of Little Noddy’s Rice Crispies. I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Who would you accept?’

  That I had to think about. It had been a long time since I had been with the Department and I didn’t know what the turnover had been. Taggart said, ‘Would you accept Case?’

  Case was a good man; I knew him and trusted him as far as I’d trust anyone in the Department. ‘I’ll accept Jack Case.’

  ‘Where will you meet him? And when?’

  I figured out the logic of time and distance. ‘At Geysir—five p.m. the day after tomorrow.’

  Taggart was silent and all I heard were the waves of static beating against my eardrum. Then he said, ‘Can’t be done—I still have to get him back here. Make it twenty-four hours later.’ He slipped in a fast one. ‘Where are you now?’

  I grinned at Elin. ‘Iceland.’

  Even the distortion could not disguise the rasp in Taggart’s voice; he sounded like a concrete-mixer. ‘Stewart, I hope you know that you’re well on your way to ruining a most important operation. When you meet Case you take your orders from him and you’ll do precisely as he says. Understand?’

  ‘He’d better not have Slade with him,’ I said. ‘Or all bets are off. Are you putting your dog on a leash, Taggart?’

  ‘All right,’ said Taggart reluctantly. ‘I’ll pull him back to London. But you’re wrong about him, Stewart. Look what he did to Kennikin in Sweden.’

  It happened so suddenly that I gasped. The irritant that had been festering at the back of my mind came to the surface and it was like a bomb going off. ‘I want some information,’ I said quickly. ‘I might need it if I’m to do this job properly.’

  ‘All right; what is it?’ said Taggart impatiently.

  ‘What have you got on file about Kennikin’s drinking habits?’

  ‘What the hell!’ he roared. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

  ‘I need the information,’ I repeated patiently. I had Taggart by the short hairs and he knew it. I had the electronic gadget and he didn’t know where I was. I was bargaining from strength and I didn’t think he’d hold back apparently irrelevant information just to antagonize me. But he tried.

  ‘It’ll take time,’ he said. ‘Ring me back.’

  ‘Now you’re being funny,’ I said. ‘You have so many computers around you that electrons shoot out of your ears. All you have to do is to push a button and you’ll have the answer in two minutes. Push it!’

  ‘All right,’ he said in an annoyed voice. ‘Hold on.’ He had every right to be annoyed—the boss isn’t usually spoken to in that way.

  I could imagine what was going on. The fast, computer-controlled retrieval of microfilm combined with the wonders of closed circuit television would put the answer on to the screen on his desk in much less than two minutes providing the right coding was dialled. Every known member of the opposition was listed in that microfilm file together with every known fact about him, so that his life was spread out like a butterfly pinned in a glass case. Apparent irrelevancies about a man could come in awfully useful if known at the right time or in the right place.

  Presently Taggart said in a dim voice, ‘I’ve got it.’ The static was much worse and he was very far away. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Speak up—I can hardly hear you. I want to know about his drinking habits.’

  Taggart’s voice came through stronger, but not much. ‘Kennikin seems to be a bit of a puritan. He doesn’t drink and, since his last encounter with you, he doesn’t go out with women.’ His voice was sardonic. ‘Apparently you ruined him for the only pleasure in his life. You’d better watch…’ The rest of the sentence was washed out in noise.

  ‘What was that?’ I shouted.

  Taggart’s voice came through the crashing static like a thin ghost. ‘…best of…knowledge…Kenni…Iceland…he’s…’

  And that was all I got, but it was enough. I tried unavailingly to restore the connection but nothing could be done. Elin pointed to the sky in the west which was black with cloud. ‘The storm is moving east; you won’t get anything more until it’s over.’

  I put the handset back into its clip. ‘That bastard, Slade!’ I said. ‘I was right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Elin.

  I looked at the clouds which were beginning to boil over Dyngjufjöll. ‘I’d like to get off this track,’ I said. ‘We have twenty-four hours to waste and I’d rather not do it right here. Let’s get up into Askja before that storm really breaks.’

  FOUR

  The great caldera of Askja is beautiful—but not in a storm. The wind lashed the waters of the crater lake far below and someone, possibly old Odin, pulled the plug out of the sky so that the rain fell in sheets and wind-driven curtains. It was impossible to get down to the lake until the water-slippery ash had dried out so I pulled off the track and we stayed right there, just inside the crater wall.

  Some people I know get jumpy even at the thought of being inside the crater of what is, after all, a live volcano; but Askja had said his piece very loudly in 1961 and would probably be quiet for a while apart from a few minor exuberancies. Statistically speaking, we were fairly safe. I put up the top of the Land-Rover so as to get headroom, and presently there were lamb chops under the grill and eggs spluttering in the pan, and we were dry, warm and comfortable.

  While Elin fried the eggs I checked the fuel situation. The tank held sixteen gallons and we carried another eighteen gallons in four jerrycans, enough for over 600 miles on good roads. But we weren’t on good roads and, in the ìbyggdir, we’d be lucky to get even ten miles from a gallon. The gradients and the general roughness meant a lot of low gear work and that swallows fuel greedily, and the neares
t filling station was a long way south. Still, I reckoned we’d have enough to get to Geysir.

  Miraculously, Elin produced two bottles of Carlsberg from the refrigerator, and I filled a glass gratefully. I watched her as she spooned melted fat over the eggs and thought she looked pale and withdrawn. ‘How’s the shoulder?’

  ‘Stiff and tender,’ she said.

  It would be. I said, ‘I’ll put another dressing on it after supper.’ I drank from the glass and felt the sharp tingle of cold beer. ‘I wish I could have kept you out of this, Elin.’

  She turned her head and offered me a brief smile. ‘But you haven’t.’ With a dextrous twist of a spatula she lifted an egg on to a plate. ‘I can’t say I’m enjoying it much, though.’

  ‘Entertainment isn’t the object,’ I said.

  She put the plate down before me. ‘Why did you ask about Kennikin’s drinking habits? It seems pointless.’

  ‘That goes back a long way,’ I said. ‘As a very young man Kennikin fought in Spain on the Republican side, and when that war was lost he lived in France for a while, stirring things up for Leon Blum’s Popular Front, but I think even then he was an undercover man. Anyway, it was there he picked up a taste for Calvados—the Normandy applejack. Got any salt?’

  Elin passed the salt cellar. ‘I think maybe he had a drinking problem at one time and decided to cut it out because, as far as the Department is aware, he’s a non-drinker. You heard Taggart on that.’

  Elin began to cut into a loaf of bread. ‘I don’t see the point of all this,’ she complained.

  ‘I’m coming to it. Like a lot of men with an alcohol problem he can keep off the stuff for months at a time, but when the going becomes tough and the pressures build up then he goes on a toot. And, by God, there are enough tensions in our line of work. But the point is that he’s a secret drinker; I only found out when I got next to him in Sweden. I visited him unexpectedly and found him cut to the eyeballs on Calvados—it’s the only stuff he inhales. He was drunk enough to talk about it, too. Anyway, I poured him into bed and tactfully made my exit, and he never referred to the incident again when I was with him.’

  I accepted a piece of bread and dabbed at the yolk of an egg. ‘When an agent goes back to the Department after a job he is debriefed thoroughly and by experts. That happened to me when I got back from Sweden, but because I was raising a stink about what had happened to Jimmy Birkby maybe the debriefing wasn’t as thorough as it should have been, and the fact that Kennikin drinks never got put on record. It still isn’t on record, as I’ve just found out.’

  ‘I still don’t see the point,’ said Elin helplessly.

  ‘I’m just about to make it,’ I said. ‘When Slade came to see me in Scotland he told me of the way I had wounded Kennikin, and made the crack that Kennikin would rather operate on me with a sharp knife than offer to split a bottle of Calvados. How in hell would Slade know about the Calvados? He’s never been within a hundred miles of Kennikin and the fact isn’t on file in the Department. It’s been niggling at me for a long time, but the penny only dropped this afternoon.’

  Elin sighed. ‘It’s a very small point.’

  ‘Have you ever witnessed a murder trial? The point which can hang a man can be very small. But add this to it—the Russians took a package which they presumably discovered to be a fake. You’d expect them to come after the real thing, wouldn’t you? But who did come after it, and with blood in his eye? None other than friend Slade.’

  ‘You’re trying to make out a case that Slade is a Russian agent,’ said Elin. ‘But it won’t work. Who was really responsible for the destruction of Kennikin’s network in Sweden?’

  ‘Slade master-minded it,’ I said. ‘He pointed me in the right direction and pulled the trigger.’

  Elin shrugged. ‘Well, then? Would a Russian agent do that to his own side?’

  ‘Slade’s a big boy now,’ I said. ‘Right next to Taggart in a very important area of British Intelligence. He even lunches with the Prime Minister—he told me so. How important would it be to the Russians to get a man into that position?’

  Elin looked at me as though I’d gone crazy. I said quietly, ‘Whoever planned this has a mind like a pretzel, but it’s all of a piece. Slade is in a top slot in British Intelligence—but how did he get there? Answer—by wrecking the Russian organization in Sweden. Which is more important to the Russians? To retain their Swedish network—which could be replaced if necessary? Or to put Slade where he is now?’

  I tapped the table with the handle of my knife. ‘You can see the same twisted thinking throughout. Slade put me next to Kennikin by sacrificing Birkby; the Russkies put Slade next to Taggart by sacrificing Kennikin and his outfit.’

  ‘But this is silly!’ burst out Elin. ‘Why would Slade have to go to all that trouble with Birkby and you when the Russians would be co-operating with him, anyway?’

  ‘Because it had to look good,’ I said. ‘The operation would be examined by men with very hard eyes and there had to be real blood, not tomato ketchup—no fakery at all. The blood was provided by poor Birkby—and Kennikin added some to it.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘I wonder if Kennikin knew what was going on? I’ll bet his organization was blasted from under him—the poor bastard wouldn’t know his masters were selling him out just to bring Slade up a notch.’ I rubbed my chin. ‘I wonder if he’s still ignorant of that?’

  ‘This is all theory,’ said Elin. ‘Things don’t happen that way.’

  ‘Don’t they? My God, you only have to read the published accounts of some of the spy trials to realize that bloody funny things happen. Do you know why Blake got a sentence of forty-two years in jail?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t read about it.’

  ‘You won’t find it in print, but the rumour around the Department was that forty-two was the number of our agents who came to a sticky end because he’d betrayed them. I wouldn’t know the truth of it because he was in a different outfit—but think of what Slade could do!’

  ‘So you can’t trust anyone,’ said Elin. ‘What a life to lead!’

  ‘It’s not as bad as that. I trust Taggart to a point—and I trust Jack Case, the man I’m meeting at Geysir. But Slade is different; he’s become careless and made two mistakes—one about the Calvados, and the other in coming after the package himself.’

  Elin laughed derisively. ‘And the only reason you trust Taggart and Case is because they’ve made no mistakes, as you call them?’

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ I said. ‘I’ve killed Graham, a British intelligence agent, and so I’m in a hot spot. The only way I can get out of it is to prove that Slade is a Russian agent. If I can do that I’ll be a bloody hero and the record will be wiped clean. And it helps a lot that I hate Slade’s guts.’

  ‘But what if you’re wrong?’

  I put as much finality into my voice as I could. ‘I’m not wrong,’ I said, and hoped it was true. ‘We’ve had a long hard day, Elin; but we can rest tomorrow. Let me put a dressing on your shoulder.’

  As I smoothed down the last piece of surgical tape, she said, ‘What did you make of what Taggart said just before the storm came?’

  I didn’t like to think of that. ‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that he was telling me that Kennikin is in Iceland.’

  II

  Tired though I was after a hard day’s driving I slept badly. The wind howled from the west across the crater of Askja, buffeting the Land-Rover until it rocked on its springs, and the heavy rain drummed against the side. Once I heard a clatter as though something metallic had moved and I got up to investigate only to find nothing of consequence and got drenched to the skin for my pains. At last I fell into a heavy sleep, shot through with bad dreams.

  Still, I felt better in the morning when I got up and looked out. The sun was shining and the lake was a deep blue reflecting the cloudless sky, and in the clear, rain-washed air the far side of the crater seemed a mere kilometre away instead of the ten kilometres it rea
lly was. I put water to boil for coffee and when it was ready I leaned over and dug Elin gently in the ribs.

  ‘Umph!’ she said indistinctly, and snuggled deeper into the sleeping bag. I prodded her again and one blue eye opened and looked at me malignantly through tumbled blonde hair. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Coffee,’ I said, and waved the cup under her nose.

  She came to life and clutched the cup with both hands. I took my coffee and a jug of hot water and went outside where I laid my shaving kit on the bonnet and began to whisk up a lather. After shaving, I thought, it would be nice to go down to the lake and clean up. I was beginning to feel grubby—the Odòdahraun is a dusty place—and the thought of clean water was good.

  I finished scraping my face and, as I rinsed the lather away, I ran through in my mind the things I had to do, the most important of which was to contact Taggart as soon as it was a reasonable hour to find him in his office. I wanted to give him the detailed case against Slade.

  Elin came up with the coffee pot. ‘More?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, holding out my cup. ‘We’ll have a lazy day.’ I nodded towards the lake at the bottom of the crater. ‘Fancy a swim?’

  She pulled a face and moved her wounded shoulder. ‘I can’t do the crawl, but perhaps I can paddle with one arm.’ She looked up at the sky, and said, ‘It’s a lovely day.’

  I watched her face change. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The radio antenna,’ she said. ‘It’s not there.’

  I whirled around. ‘Damn!’ That was very bad. I climbed up and looked at the damage. It was easy to see what had happened. The rough ground in Central Iceland is enough to shake anything loose that isn’t welded down; nuts you couldn’t shift with a wrench somehow loosen themselves and wind off the bolts; split-pins jump out, even rivets pop. A whip antenna with its swaying motion is particularly vulnerable; I know one geologist who lost three in a month. The question here was when did we lose it?