The Labyrinth Makers (28 page)

'What happens now?' asked Faith.

Audley smiled falsely. 'We divide up the loot, love. That's what happens.'

He made his way past the new excavation to where Butler and Roskill were sitting.

Butler got up stiffly.

'Not much here, Dr Audley. Unmarked metal box–we forced the lock. Just two packets wrapped in oilskins, and the rest packing.'

'And the packets?'

'I've got what appears to be a blueprint for a military takeover of Moscow,' said Butler, 'planned to coincide with simultaneous moves in Leningrad, Minsk, Kiev and one or two other places. I've only skimmed it so far, though. There are some letters from military district commanders and a lot of coded material. It's dated 1937, so I can't place any of the names.'

'I expect the names are all placed in my half,' said Roskill. 'Mine's a sort of who's who of the Soviet army in '37 –brigade commander and above. Six or seven hundred names, I'd say–and more than half have been joyfully stamped "deceased" in German. The mortality of the Russian peacetime establishment appears to have been remarkable.'

Audley nodded.

'Major Butler–I'd like you to take the Land-Rover and go and phone Stocker. Tell him what you've told me. Tell him that Panin's a hard-line KGB undercover man from way back. Back to NKVD days.'

The KGB had sleepers in most countries, men who had nothing to do but to climb to positions of power and wait for their moment of usefulness. And naturally they had sleepers in the homeland too.

'Now the cover's off because the KGB needs to put the Army in its place, and these files are the skeleton in the Army's closet. It's a straight blackmail job, tell him that.'

He looked back at Panin. The cover was off, but there'd be no holding the man now. A success like this would put him into the Secretariat and eventually even into the Presidium, maybe. To have done a Presidium member a good turn would be something to tell Steerforth's grandchildren.

'Tell Stocker that I'm fulfilling his orders to the letter. In exactly one hour I shall give Panin what he wants. If Stocker doesn't like it he can come down and explain to Panin himself– stay by the phone for his answer.'

KGB, GRU–they were all bastards. And in the last analysis Nikolai Panin was probably the biggest bastard of them all. But at least he was an imaginative one, not a crude second-rater like so many at the top of the Soviet pyramid. And if there was any hope for Russia it would start at the top, not from the voiceless, unprotesting masses.

Either way it was Stocker's headache now.

And yet there was one more thing! A small thing to Panin, but no small thing all the same.

'And tell Stocker that all Panin cares about are the two files.'

He looked down at the other boxes peeping out of the loose earth in the bottom of the trench. Inevitably it would go back to the East Germans. Or maybe the West Germans would dispute its ownership. There was precedent enough, in all conscience: a citizen of the world had stolen it from the Turks, who never really owned it, long before the Russians, the Germans and an Englishman had got their thieving hands on it. It had been hidden and lost and stolen so many times that it belonged to everyone now, like the legend of Troy itself.

'Tell him he's got the Schliemann Collection on his hands, poor devil.'

Stocker could do what he liked with Steerforth's loot. Audley would settle for Steerforth's daughter.

STEERFORTH.
John Adair Steerforth, Flt Lieut, DFC, RAFVR, killed in a flying accident, September 1945. On this, his birthday
–
Mother
.

The End