Cynthia Manson (ed) (58 page)

Rand showed his identity card. “It’s
official business.”

The woman hesitated, then stood
firm. “I’m sorry. Roger would be terrified if I left him.”

“Could I come along, then, as your
husband?”

She stared at the card again, as if
memorizing the name. “I suppose so, if it’s official business. No violence or
anything, though?”

“I promise.”

They stood in line together and Rand
took the little boy’s hand. Roger stared up at him with his big brown eyes, but
his mother was there to give him confidence. “I hate shopping on Christmas
Eve,” she told Rand. “I always spend too much when I wait until the last
minute.”

“I think most of us do that.” He
smiled at the boy. “Are you ready, Roger? We’re getting closer to Father
Christmas.”

In a moment the boy was on the
bearded man’s knee, having his head patted as he told him what he wanted to
find under the tree next day. Then he received his brightly wrapped gift box
and they were on their way back down the ramp.

“Thank you,” Rand told the woman.
“You’ve been a big help.” He went back up to the terrace level and spent the
next hour watching Ivan St. Ives. double agent, passing out gifts to a long
line of little children.

“It’s St. Ives,” Rand told Hastings
when he returned to the office. “No doubt of it.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“I doubt it.” He explained how he’d
accompanied himself with the woman and child. “If he did, he might have assumed
I was with my family.”

“So he’s just making a little extra
Christmas money?”

“I’m afraid it’s more than that.”

“You spotted something.”

“A great deal, but I don’t know what
it means. I watched him for more than an hour in all. After he listened to each
child, he handed them a small gift. I watched one little girl opening hers. It
was a clear plastic ball to hang on a Christmas tree, with figures of cartoon
characters inside.”

“Seems harmless enough.”

“I’m sure the store wouldn’t be
giving out anything that wasn’t. The trouble is, while I watched him I noticed
a slight deviation from his routine on three different occasions. In these
cases, he chose the gift box from a separate pile, and handed it to the parent
rather than the child.”

“Well, some of the children are
quite small, I imagine.”

“In those three cases, none of the
boxes were opened in the store. They were stowed away in shopping bags by the
mother or father. One little boy started crying for his gift, but he didn’t get
it.”

Hastings thought about it.

“Do you think an agent would take a
position as a department store Father Christmas to distribute some sort of
message to his network?”

“I think we should see one of those
boxes, Hastings.”

“If there
is
a message, it
probably says ‘Merry Christmas. ‘ “

“St. Ives has worked for some odd
people in the past, including terrorists. When I left the store, there were
still seven or eight boxes left on his special pile. If I went back there now
with a couple of men—”

“Very well,” Hastings said. “But
please be discreet, Rand. It’s the day before Christmas.”

It’s not easy to be discreet when
seizing a suspected spy in the midst of a crowd of Christmas shoppers. Rand
finally decided he wanted one of the free gifts more than he wanted the agents
at this point, so he took only Parkinson with him. As they passed through the
Oxford Street entrance of Perkins and Simplex, the younger man asked, “Is this
case likely to run through the holidays? I was hoping to spend Christmas and
Boxing Day with the family.”

“I hope there won’t even be a case,”
Rand told him. “Hastings heard Ivan St. Ives was back in the city, working as
Father Christmas for the holidays. I confirmed the fact and that’s why we’re
here.”

“To steal a child’s gift?”

“Not exactly steal, Parkinson. I
have another idea.”

They encountered a woman and child
about to leave the store with the familiar square box. “Pardon me. but is that
a gift from Father Christmas?” Rand asked her.

“Yes, it is.”

“Then this is your lucky day. As a
special holiday treat. Perkins and Simplex is paying every tenth person ten
pounds for their gift.” He held up a crisp new bill. “Would you like to
exchange yours for a tenner?”

“I sure would!” The woman handed
over the opened box and accepted the ten-pound note.

“That was easy,” Parkinson commented
when the woman and child were gone. “What next?”

“This might be a bit more
difficult,” Rand admitted. They retreated to a men’s room where Rand fastened
the festive paper around the gift box once more, resticking the piece of tape
that held it together. ‘There, looks as good as new.”

Parkinson got the point. “You’re
going to substitute this for one of the special ones.”

“Exactly. And you’re going to help.”

They resumed Rand’s earlier position
on the terrace level, where he observed that the previous stack of boxes had
dwindled to three. If he was right, they would be gone shortly, too. “How about
that man?” Parkinson pointed out. “The one with the little boy.”

“Why him?”

“He doesn’t look that fatherly to
me. And the boy seems a bit old to believe in Father Christmas.”

“You’re right.” Rand said a moment
later. “He’s getting one of the special boxes. Come on!”

As the man and the boy came down off
the ramp and mingled with the crowd. Rand moved in. The man was clutching the
box just as the others had when Rand managed to jostle him. The box didn’t come
loose, so Rand jostled again with his elbow, this time using his other hand to
yank it free. The man, in his twenties with black hair and a vaguely foreign
look, muttered something in a language Rand didn’t understand. There was a
trace of panic in his face as he bent to retrieve the box. Rand pretended to
lose his footing then, and came down on top of the man. The crowd of shoppers
parted as they tumbled to the floor.

“Terribly sorry,” Rand muttered,
helping the man to his feet.

At the same moment, Parkinson held
out the brightly wrapped package. “I believe you dropped this, sir.”

Anyone else might have cursed Rand
and made a scene, but this strange man merely grasped the box and hurried away
without a word, the small boy trailing along behind. “Good work.” Rand said,
brushing off his jacket. “Let’s get this back to the office.”

“Aren’t we going to open it?”

“Not here.”

Thirty minutes later, Rand was
carefully unwrapping the gift on Hastings’ desk. Both Parkinson and Hastings
were watching apprehensively, as if expecting a snake to spring out like a
jack-in-the-box. “My money’s on drugs,” Parkinson said. “What else could it
be?”

“Is the box exactly the same as the
others?” Hastings asked.

“Just a bit heavier,” Rand decided.
“A few ounces.”

But inside there seemed to be
nothing but the same plastic tree ornament. Rand removed the tissue paper and
stared at the bottom of the box.

“Nothing,” Parkinson said.

“Wait a minute. Something had to
make it heavier.” Rand reached in and pried up the bottom piece of cardboard
with his fingernails. It was a snugly fitted false bottom. Beneath it was a
thin layer of a grey puttylike substance. “Better not touch it,” Hastings
cautioned.

“That’s plastique—plastic
explosive.”

The man from the bomb squad
explained that it was harmless without a detonator of some sort, but they were
still relieved when he removed it from the office. “How much damage would that
much plastic explosive do?” Rand wanted to know.

“It would make a mess of this room.
That’s about all.”

“What about twelve or fifteen times
that much?”

“Molded together into one bomb? It
could take out a house or a small building.”

They looked at each other glumly.
“It’s a pretty bizarre method for distributing explosives,” Parkinson said.

“It has its advantages,” Hastings
said. “The bomb is of little use until enough of the explosive is gathered
together. If one small box falls into government hands, as this one did, the
rest is still safe. No doubt it was delivered to St. Ives only recently, and
this served as the perfect method for getting it to his network—certainly
better than the mails during the Christmas rush.”

“Then you think it’s to be
reassembled into one bomb?” Rand asked.

“Of course. And it’s to be used
sometime soon.”

“The IRA? Russians? Arabs?”

Hastings shrugged. “Take your pick.
St. Ives has worked for all of them.”

Rand held the box up to the light,
studying the bottom. “This may be some writing, some sort of invisible ink
that’s beginning to become visible. Get one of the technicians up here to see
if we can bring it out.”

Heating the bottom of the box to
bring out the message proved an easy task, but the letters that appeared were
anything but easy to read: MPPMP MBSHG OEXAS-EWHMR AWPGG GBEBH PMBWE ALGHQ.

“A substitution cipher,” Parkinson
decided at once. “We’ll get to work on

it.”

“Forty letters,” Rand observed, “in
the usual five-letter groups. There are five Ms, five Ps, and five Gs. Using
letter frequencies, one of them could be E. but in such a short message you
can’t be sure.”

“GHQ at the end could stand for
General Headquarters.” Hastings suggested.

Rand shook his head. “The entire
message would be enciphered. Chances are that’s just a coincidence.”

Parkinson took the message off to
the deciphering room and Rand confidently predicted he’d have the answer within
an hour.

He didn’t.

“It’s tougher than it looks,”
Parkinson told them. “There may not be any Es at all.”

“Run it through the computer,” Rand
suggested. “Use a program that substitutes various frequently used letters for
the most frequently used letters in the message. See if you hit on anything.”

Hastings glanced at the clock. “It’s
after six and my niece has invited me for Christmas Eve. Can you manage without
me?”

“Of course. Merry Christmas.”

After he’d gone, Rand picked up the
phone and told Leila he’d be late. She was living in England now. and he’d
planned to spend the holiday with her.

“How late?” she asked.

“These things have been known to
last all night.”

“Oh. Jeffrey. On Christmas Eve?”

“I’ll call you later if I can,” Rand
promised. “It might not take that long.”

He went down the hall and stood for
a time watching the computer experts work on the message. They seemed to be
having no better luck than Parkinson’s people. “How long?” he asked one.

“In the worst possible case it could
take us until morning to run all the combinations.”

Rand nodded. “I’ll be back.”

They had to know what the message
said, but they also had to find Ivan St. Ives. The employment office at Perkins
and Simplex would be closed now. His only chance was that pub where Hastings
had spoken with Daphne Sollis. The Crown and Piper.

It was on a corner, as London pubs
often are, and the night before Christmas didn’t seem to have made much of a
dent in the early-evening business. The bar was crowded and all the tables and
booths were occupied. Rand let his eyes wander over the faces, seeking out
either St. Ives or Daphne, but neither one seemed to be there. He didn’t know
either of them well, though he thought he would recognize St. Ives out of his
Father Christmas garb. He was less certain about recognizing Daphne Sollis.

“Seen Daphne around?” he asked the
bartender as he ordered a pint.

“Daphne Jenkins?”

“Daphne Sollis.”

“Do I know her?”

“She was in here last night, talking
to a grey-haired man wearing rimless glasses. He was probably dressed in a
plaid topcoat.”

“I don’t— Wait a minute, you must
mean Rusty. Does she have red hair?”

“Not the last time I knew her, but
these things change.”

“Well, if it’s Rusty she comes in a
couple of nights a week, usually alone. Once recently she was with a
creepy-looking gent who kept laughing like Father Christmas. I sure wouldn’t
want
him
bringing gifts to my kids. He’d scare ‘em half to death.”

“Does she live around here?”

“No idea, mate.” He went off to wait
on another customer.

So whatever Daphne had told Hastings
about her relationship with Ivan St. Ives, they were hardly enemies. He’d been
with her recently in the Crown and Piper, apparently since he took on the job
as Father Christmas.

Rand thought it unlikely that Daphne
would visit the pub two nights in a row, but on the other hand she might stop
by if she was lonely on Christmas Eve. He decided to linger over his pint and
see if she appeared. Thirty minutes later he was about to give it up and head
for Leila’s flat when he heard the bartender say, “Hey, Rusty! Fellow here’s
been askin’ after you.”