A Conflict of Interests (30 page)

"Where did you say we were making for, Nick?" he asked, his voice plaintive.

"Thetford," Vaudrey said. "It's a small town in Norfolk roughly eighty miles from London."

"It's going to seem more like eight hundred." Zellick smiled ruefully. "I guess I'm the wrong build for these compact models."

Serves you right, Vaudrey thought. Friend Walter had been a thorn in his side, badgering him every hour on the hour, wanting to know how the trace was going. He'd also insisted he should be present when Patterson was finally apprehended, otherwise there would be no deal. That being the case, Vaudrey had insured he sat directly behind the driver who, being well over six feet tall, had moved his seat back, thereby restricting the amount of leg room. Petty or not, revenge was sweet.

"I hope this isn't going to be a wild-goose chase, Nick."

Vaudrey was under the impression that he'd already explained why it was necessary to base themselves at Thetford, but clearly he'd failed to convince Zellick and would have to go over the same ground again. The telephone engineers, he reminded him, were convinced both calls had been made from a private number and had traced the initial one as far as the Thetford exchange. It was therefore reasonable to assume Patterson was somewhere in the vicinity and was unlikely to move from his present hideout before 2100 hours, when he was due to contact ECAS again. When he did so, Vaudrey anticipated that his final instructions to Urquhart would help to pinpoint his location.

"Urquhart will need to know from which direction the final approach is to be made and how he'll recognize the landing strip."

"Patterson could talk him down," Zellick said thoughtfully.

"He could, but ground-to-air sets in the appropriate megahertz waveband are practically unobtainable on the open market in this country. And anyway," Vaudrey continued, "even if he had managed to lay his hands on one, the pilot would still require some form of lighting to line himself up with the runway. Urquhart won't be the only one looking for those lights."

"But have we got the manpower to do it? That's the jackpot question, Nick."

Vaudrey liked the royal "we"; to his way of thinking, it showed Zellick had identified himself and the CIA with the operation.

"Manpower isn't a problem, Walter." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the other Cortina three car-lengths behind them. "And we can pick the sort of place we'll be looking for off the map — an isolated house somewhere in the Thetford area with a suitable landing strip nearby which is obstacle free. At the moment, I figure there are about a dozen potential sites, but we should be able to eliminate a number of these before 2100 hours. Thereafter, we'll have roughly forty minutes to find the exact location."

The calculations were simple enough. Thetford was sixty miles from Southend and the Piper Cherokee had a cruising speed of 140. The plane would therefore arrive in the area twenty-five minutes after takeoff, but the final telephone call was a quarter of an hour before the estimated time of departure. There was also a chance that the pilot might be able to steal a few extra minutes, though Vaudrey wasn't banking on it.

"Naturally I'm not relying entirely on dead reckoning. Urquhart will have company — three men from our field support unit."

"Armed?"

"They'll have more than a couple of truncheons between them," Vaudrey said.

The field support unit was composed of ex-servicemen, most of whom had been senior NCOs. The team he'd handpicked consisted of two former SAS men and a royal marine commando who'd served with the Special Boat Section.

"Can you keep the law out of it?" Zellick asked.

"They've got more leads than they can handle. That's the beauty of good public relations, Walter."

"And that good-looking assistant of yours, Caroline Brooke? She's not making any waves, is she, Nick?"

"No. Why should she?"

"I don't know. I just got the impression she wasn't a hundred percent enthusiastic when I met her on Sunday."

"You're imagining it," Vaudrey told him.

"Yeah? Well, you know her better than I do, Nick."

Vaudrey was beginning to wonder if he did. From a very early stage, Caroline had shown something less than a wholehearted commitment to the project. There was the fuss she'd made about the address book and her increasingly voluble opposition to anything that smacked of a cover-up. However, until a few hours ago, he'd believed that whatever her misgivings, she would remain loyal. Now he wasn't quite so sure. Shortly after lunch, Caroline had rung him up at the office and had sounded very skeptical when he'd assured her the phone tap had indeed been authorized by the Home Secretary. He suspected she had allowed herself to become emotionally involved with Coghill, to the point where his interests were now her interests. If this were so, then despite what he'd said to Zellick, it might be extremely difficult to keep the police out of it. In the circumstances, he decided it would be prudent to head off a potentially dangerous situation by releasing all the information he had on Patterson. There was, however, a proviso; he would only do that when he was quite sure it would be too late for Scotland Yard to act on it.

"I think we're in for a storm, Nick."

Vaudrey reared back, felt his stomach lurch. It wasn't until he glanced out of the window and saw the lowering sky that he realized Zellick had been referring to the weather.

There were times when it seemed there was nothing Anthea Deane wouldn't do for him. She had bathed his feet, lanced the blisters and dressed the festering sore on his cheek. She had prepared his meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and had produced a cup of coffee whenever he wanted. She had even shown him how to disconnect the burglar alarm on the display cabinet after he'd been through her husband's desk and found four live rounds. They were resting in the Luger now, three in the magazine, one in the breech, 1942 issue 9mm, their brass cases turning green with age. She hadn't raised too many objections either when he'd cut eighteen inches off the shotgun with a hacksaw.

But there had been other times when he'd suspected her passive attitude was a sham. There had been two occasions when he was sure she had tried to put one over on him; once, earlier, when she'd phoned the girl who cleaned house for her, and again, much later in the day, when one of her friends had rung to say how much she had enjoyed the dinner party. Anthea had been subtle about it, spinning the conversation out and making some very odd remarks along the way, but luckily for him, neither party had been smart enough to realize that something was wrong. Afterward, he'd frightened the wits out of her, but she was far too resilient and tough underneath for his liking and had soon bounced back again. Looking at her now across the kitchen table, Patterson decided it was time he reminded her again just who was calling the tune.

"Your husband ever kill anybody?" he asked abruptly.

The question took her by surprise and it was some moments before she answered him. "I suppose he must have," she said slowly. "Rupert was posted to Egypt in 1938, two years after he was commissioned from Sandhurst at the age of nineteen. He was with the 7th Armored Division from El Alamein to the Baltic."

That made him at least sixty-seven and much older than he looked. Recalling the signed photograph in the study, Patterson also figured he must have had a very good war to make brigadier by the time he was thirty.

"Yeah?" he grunted. "Doing what?"

"He spent part of the time on the staff, but mostly he was with his regiment, the 3rd Hussars."

"A cavalryman?"

"Yes."

"You've got to be a dogfoot infantryman to know what war is really all about," Patterson said dreamily. "I mean, you take those four VC that the 16th AVRN took prisoner at Hoc Tran in the Mekong Delta. Three men and a young woman; they came out of the jungle an hour or so before first light and walked straight into the village we'd occupied during the night. It was questionable which bunch of gooks were the more surprised, the AVRN or the VC. Anyway, our gooks were all for deep sixing them, but the U. S. adviser managed to persuade their company commander to send them back to the I-and-R platoon at battalion headquarters for interrogation. See, he figured they just hadn't appeared out of the blue and he could tell they hadn't been on the move all that long. You follow me?"

"I think so."

"Yeah. Well, I was running the intelligence and recon outfit and the battalion commander ordered me to get the location of their base and no holds barred. Furthermore he wanted the information fast, before the VC realized the patrol was missing and cleared out of the area. Trouble was, those VC weren't in a talkative mood, so after a while, we put them into a whirlybird and dropped the first one off at two thousand. We gave the others a few minutes to think about it, then we drew lots to see who would go next. He was only a little guy, ninety pounds and five foot nothing, but he put up one hell of a struggle, bracing his legs and leaning into us as we shoved him toward the door. And hollering? You never heard such a noise when he went out. Still, after that two-act drama, we didn't have any trouble getting the information we wanted. Both remaining gooks, the man and the girl, started chattering like magpies."

Patterson lapsed into silence and waited for the inevitable question. It wasn't long in coming.

"I suppose there's some moral to be drawn from that ghastly story?" Anthea said in a low voice.

"There surely is. From there on, we had this rapport going between us. Matter of fact, those two survivors became the best damned scouts I ever had. And you know why? Because they knew their lives depended on my every whim."

"Like me and Rupert?"

"You're sharp, Anthea, real sharp." Patterson looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall. "Eight thirty-four," he said. "Not much longer now."

"No."

"You want to make me another cup of coffee?"

Anthea got up from the table, walked over to the sink, filled the electric kettle under the tap and plugged it in. When she turned about, the sawed-off shotgun was leveled at her stomach.

"Relax," Patterson told her, smiling. "I'm only practicing."

Coghill walked over to the window and looked out into the gathering dusk. The trio from the field support unit hadn't moved from their previous position and were still lying on the grass within ten feet of the Piper Cherokee. Despite their casual attitude and the occasional ripple of laughter, he knew they were guarding the plane and was equally certain they'd been ordered to make sure he wasn't aboard when Urquhart took off.

They'd arrived on the dot of 2000 hours, barely ten minutes after the duty officer at Leconfield House had rung Caroline Brooke to inform her they were on the way. That had been surprise number one; surprise number two had occurred when Caroline had decided to phone the DI5 contact at Scotland Yard and give him all the information she had on Patterson, only to discover that Vaudrey had beaten her to the punch. Exactly what Vaudrey had in mind was far from clear to Coghill, but the timing of his move suggested that, despite appearances to the contrary, he was still pursuing his original goal.

"I know what you're thinking, old sport," Urquhart said. "And believe me, you've got problems."

"Have I?" Coghill turned about to face him.

"Ah, come on, don't try to bullshit me. The Cherokee's a fourseater and there are seven of us."

"Six," Jalud said tersely. "I'm going home the moment you've heard from Patterson."

"Okay, six then." Urquhart shrugged. "What's the difference? We're still over the top."

Coghill wondered how the trio from the field support unit would react when it came to the crunch. Vaudrey must have foreseen the situation and might have intimated that if necessary, one of them should stand down to make room for him. No doubt Vaudrey was confident the other two would be able to deal with him if he stepped out of line, and of course he was plumb right. Nobody ever got the better of two powerful adversaries, except in the movies.

"What are they doing now, Tom?" Caroline asked him, as though he'd spoken his thoughts aloud.

Coghill turned and looked out of the open window again. The light had deteriorated in the last few minutes and he could barely see them. A cigarette end curled through the dusk like a firefly and he caught the low murmur of their voices in the still, oppressive air. Then somebody grunted and he heard them get up and move toward the control tower.

"They're coming this way," he said in a flat voice.

"Well they would, wouldn't they? They know Patterson will phone us at any moment."

He watched them draw nearer, three look-alikes, same height and build, same hard faces, as though they'd been cast in a mold. And they were armed; their leader, Stanton, had made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was carrying a Browning 9mm automatic in a shoulder holster.

They were still some distance from the control tower when the phone rang in the outer office, but they heard it and froze instinctively. Turning his back on them, Coghill walked over to the table and picked up the eavesdropper a split second before Urquhart answered the incoming call on the extension.

Patterson said, "Take this down. You fly a dogleg to Newmarket, then change course to zero three nine degrees and descend to four hundred feet. Eleven minutes later, you'll see two orange-colored winking lights spaced a hundred yards apart. Immediately beyond them, the runway will be marked with white tracing tape. If you haven't touched down by the time you see a couple of hazard warning signs, you'll know you're in danger of overshooting the landing strip."

"Thanks for the tip," Urquhart said drily.

"You're allowed one pass, that's all. You go round and round like a spinning top and the deal's off; Qadhafi gets the porno movie and Jalud will put his frighteners on you if it's the last thing he does."

"I'm not looking for trouble," Urquhart told him. "I'll go around once and then come straight in."

"You'd better," Patterson said. "Now put Raschid on the line."

"What about our final destination?"