The Alamut Ambush (11 page)

‘Hugh!’ Isobel sounded like a fencing master who’d discovered that her two favourite pupils were using unbuttoned foils.

‘It’s perfectly all right, my dear,’ said Havergal. ‘Threats are part of Roskill’s stock-in-trade. Mostly empty threats now, though. The Foundation’s too widely based for them to do it any real damage – they might even do it a bit of good in some quarters.’

He looked at Roskill shrewdly. ‘And I don’t think they would try anyway. Their hearts aren’t really in the game these days – they don’t care who kills who in the Middle East so long as the oil flows.’

So that was what had nerved Havergal to hold out for information without giving it: he’d reckoned any threat against the well-respected Foundation had to be backed by bluff only. And until two nights ago he’d probably have been right.

But now by giving him the information he wanted Roskill could win the game, not lose it…

‘In the Middle East perhaps they don’t care, Colonel. But at home they do.’

Havergal frowned.

‘The night before last we lost a man – a friend of mine – right here in London,’ said Roskill. ‘And we nearly lost another one. One of my bosses, as a matter of fact – one of your top shysters. I think you could say his heart’s in the game this time. Just this once, Colonel Havergal, we mean exactly what we say.’

‘A friend? Hugh – who was it?’ Isobel’s incredulous expression mirrored Faith’s – to both of them death was always an unforeseen accident on the road or a hushed prognosis in the consulting room, never a deliberate act.

He’d meant to break it to her gently, choosing the time and place, but now he saw that her distress would serve to bring extra pressure on Havergal. In any case he had to tell her now: he could see her already conjuring up in her mind the faces of the friends of his that she’d met and liked – Jack Butler and Colin Monroe, young Richardson who had captivated her, even David Audley, who had rather frightened her. But it would be a worse shock than any of those.

‘It was Alan Jenkins.’

‘Alan!’

With Faith it had been shock, but with Isobel it was at once more than that. For Isobel alone knew about Harry, and being Isobel grasped all the implications of Alan’s death instantly – they had talked Harry’s death into the ground enough times.

Havergal gave Roskill a look of mingled distaste and curiosity: he knew that the play had been reversed, but he didn’t quite know whether it had been deliberate or accidental – whether he was dealing with a cold-hearted bastard who had set the whole thing up, or an officer and a gentleman who had made the best of a dirty job and struck lucky.

Roskill knew the feeling — he had felt it himself about others, Audley among them: you never really knew whether it was luck or cleverness. And now he had learnt ithat it was possible not even to know the truth about oneself.

Whatever it was, though, it served. Havergal’s shoulders sagged half an inch and for the first time he looked his age. Roskill began almost to feel sorry for him, only to check himself before the feeling took root: the old man should have stuck to his retirement – or at least served the Ryle Foundation in a way that didn’t play ducks and drakes with his oath of allegiance. Personal definitions of the national interest and the nature of illegal organisations might be all right for debating societies, but those who indulged such fancies in real life couldn’t complain when real life caught up with them.

There was no point in doing a victory roll, however. It might even be premature if he failed to handle Havergal with compassion now, of all times.

‘We don’t want to injure the Foundation, Colonel. That isn’t the object at all. And we’re not going to let the Special Branch loose on it.’ Strictly, that might not be true, but it sounded reassuring. ‘But there are things we’ve got to know – like how you got wind of what was going on.’

He prayed that Havergal wouldn’t turn that question against him, because Cox’s hunch was based on extremely tenuous circumstantial evidence, and not on anything that was ‘going on’ at all.

But Havergal’s defences were breached. He sighed and squared his shoulders in resignation.

‘I’d been expecting it for a long time, if you must know.’

‘Because you think any Arab worthy of his salt would be up to something?’

‘Not just that.’ Havergal shook his head. ‘Have you got the Ryle Map, my dear?’ he said to Isobel.

Isobel nodded. ‘It’s in the study.’

‘Would you get it for me?’ Havergal turned back to Roskill. ‘Do you know how the Foundation works?’

‘Not in detail.’

‘Not many people do. And perhaps that’s why this has happened,’ said Havergal mournfully. ‘We’re a pretty unobtrusive lot. We don’t turn out top people – or damn students. Just good mechanics and midwives, and that sort of thing … You know why old Jacob Ryle set it up like that?’

‘Didn’t a railway have something to do with it?’ Roskill could remember that disastrous railway, old Ryle’s first charitable enterprise, had been a family joke.

‘A railway – yes. He built a line as a present for one of his tame sheikhs. It cost a fortune. And then he found that there was no freight to run and precious few passengers – the local camel train did the job perfectly well at a hundredth of the cost. He’d simply put the camel drivers out of work – until they knifed the engine driver, that is! They say you can still see some of the track when the sand gets blown away…’

He looked at Roskill. ‘The point is that after that Ryle decreed that we’d work from the bottom. Each area has its own local committee – they set up the projects and they send us suitable young people to train. We arrange for the training at our own technical centres, and then we shunt the trainees round the projects – they work their passage, and that makes the projects cheap to run. And the young people see a bit of the world and learn what hard work is before they go back to their own patches.’

There was a note of pride in Havergal’s voice now. ‘So we get useful jobs done, and we don’t make trouble for the countries we work in. Wherever we’re established we’re just part of the landscape.’

He moved the mugs to one side as Isobel spread a map of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East on the coffee table: a map with a rash of little coloured symbols on it.

‘It’s quite simple,’ said Havergal. ‘The green stars are the selection committees, the red squares are the training centres and the blue triangles are the work projects. Do you get the picture?’

Roskill got the picture very well indeed. He had no idea that the Foundation operated on so grand a scale: the green stars were spread thickly over the Middle East, as were the blue triangles. The red shapes were thickest there too, but spread out also into Europe, from Italy to Sweden and Scotland – and behind the Iron Curtain even.

Roskill bent over the map in awe: there were also red squares in Israeli-held Jordan and in the Gaza strip – the ultimate purity test!

As a self-supporting educational foundation in a war-torn world it was a remarkable achievement and the Colonel had just cause for pride.

But another possibility sprang from the map in red, blue and green: as the cover for an illegal network it was ready-made and perfect – secure in its well-established respectability and accepted without question as part of the landscape, with its members and trainees moving unobtrusively back and forth. No wonder Havergal had been expecting the worst!

But his suspicions had to be founded on more than mere assumption of the worst, nevertheless.

‘What actually put you on to them?’

Havergal smiled bitterly. ‘The failure rate.’

Koskill waited patiently while Havergal nodded knowingly to himself, his bitterness fading at the recollection of his cleverness in spotting the reason for it.

‘Jacob Ryle couldn’t bear the idea that any of his charity might be wasted – particularly after what happened to the railway. So he framed the organisation of the Foundation to avoid wasting money on trainees who wouldn’t finish the course – or who didn’t do what they’d been trained for.’

‘Drop-outs, you mean?’

‘That’s the modern jargon, yes,’ Havergal nodded. ‘Not enough intelligence or not enough guts. In the early days some of the local committees weren’t too choosy – usually they were just trying to do favours for their friends. Ryle wouldn’t stand for that, though; if a committee failed to deliver the right goods he changed the committee.

‘After a time everyone got the message. There were still the odd failures, but they were rare – there were years when there weren’t any that couldn’t be explained.’

Ryle had wanted his money’s worth, thought Roskill, and quite naturally the old bandit had applied his business methods to his charitable enterprise: shape up or get out. Once the tradition was established firmly all it needed was a competent statistical section to keep an eye on it.

‘That was the pattern when I joined the Foundation – even lasted through the decade after Suez,’ Havergal continued. ‘But it began to change about six months after the June War.’

‘You mean the drop-outs began?’

‘The drop-outs. I didn’t spot them at the time, of course. The figures take time to show up. And even then I didn’t smell a rat until I realised that the wrong ones were quitting.’

Roskill nodded. The drift of the Colonel’s argument was clear enough. The drop-outs of the old days would be due to stupidity, idleness or instability: the new drop-outs would be young men with exactly the opposite qualities, but with other fish to fry.

‘And what have you done about it?’

‘Nothing at all.’ Havergal gazed unblinkingly at Roskill. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘I thought you sacked committees that didn’t deliver the goods?’

‘We used to, but not any more. Times have changed since Jacob Ryle’s days – and particularly since ‘56. We have to tread more delicately now. And the committees that are up to mischief aren’t in my territory, anyway.’

The look in Havergal’s eye suggested that times had not chiinged so much in his territory, and wouldn’t change as long as he was in charge.

‘Where are they?’

‘Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – we’ve got fifteen committees in the four of them. According to my reckoning there are only seven doing their proper job now.’

‘Whose territory would that be?’ Roskill fumbled in his memory. ‘Elliott Wilkinson’s?’

Havergal pointed his chin at Roskill, his loyalty to the Foundation in collision with the plain implication of Roskill’s question. It occurred to Roskill that if the Colonel already suspected Wilkinson of chicanery he probably had his own plans for dealing with him. But there was no point
in
pressing the matter – it would only shut the old boy up altogether.

Roskill hurriedly led him off at a tangent. ‘But all this is circumstantial evidence – statistical stuff. It takes one hell of a lot of statistics to make one piece of real truth.’

He looked at the Colonel narrowly. ‘If you can supply us with names and details of the drop-outs, that would be a start, anyway. And names of the committee men too. If you can do that there’s a fair chance I can get my bosses to cross-check them and leave the Foundation itself alone.’

Havergal thought for a time. ‘If it ever got out there’d be hell to pay, Roskill.’

‘If it doesn’t get out there may be hell anyway. But I tell you what I’ll do to prove good faith: I’ll give you some of the names we’ve got. And I’ll show you some of the faces we’ve got that haven’t got names.’

He reached down beside the chair for the projector. This had been what the man had been after all along, and it was ironic that Roskill had intended from the start to give it to him: the names and faces of the Hassan suspects and every contact of theirs Cox had been able to dig from British files and coax from European ones.

Five suspects and twenty-five contacts: not a great many and most of them looked alike to Roskill anyway. But maybe Havergal, with all his years of Arabian experience, could distinguish them from one another. He might even do more, for as Cox had gently pointed out exactly half of them were graduates or officials of the Jacob Ryle Memorial Foundation Trust.

ROSKILL LEANT GINGERLY
against the wall of the Bunnock Street phone box and listened to the buzz of the bell on the other end of the line, far away in Hampshire.

He settled down to wait, resigned in the knowledge that Audley would put off answering as long as possible in the hope that the noise would pack up and go away. His only hope of a speedy answer was Faith.

For the second time during the evening his eye was caught by the carefully inscribed line of Latin:
Meum est proposiium in tabema mori
. ‘Meum’ was ‘my’ and ‘est’ was ‘is’ – ‘my something is.’ He dredged into his vestigial Latin. ‘Mori’, he recalled from the rolls of honour, was ‘to die’ – Pro Patria mori. Which left him with ‘My something is to die in a something’. The nearest word to ‘taberna’ was ‘tabernacle’, but the idea of dying in a tabernacle was plainly ridiculous – the sort of guess he had chanced in Latin translations so often, only to elicit the Latin master’s eternal complaint: nonsense
must
be wrong …

The buzz-buzz stopped with a click at last and Faith answered rather breathlessly.

‘You want David? Who’s calling – who shall I say? Isn’t that – ‘ Faith stopped short, turning Roskill’s Christian name into an exhalation of air. It was odd how although she affected to despise the rigmarole of security she was quick to apply the rules.

‘I’ll get him,’ she concluded grimly.

Again Roskill waited. She’d probably been in the bath or the lavatory and Audley himself had been sitting in the room next to the phone, obstinately deaf to it.

It couldn’t be ‘tabernacle’, but without knowing what ‘propositum’ was there was no way of guessing. He rather sympathised with the other anonymous commentator who had scrawled ‘Sod the Students’ directly underneath the inscription – the authentic voice of Bunnock Street.

‘Hullo, Hugh!’ Amdley’s voice rang loud and clear in his ear, disdainful of rules and caution alike.

‘Is this a safe line?’ Roskill exclaimed, more in surprise than annoyance.