The Partridge Kite (2 page)

‘He began by saying there was no way we could crosscheck what he was to tell me, nor was there any way of preventing the events he would warn me of; events, he said, that had already been set into motion. Three things would happen: a bank raid of some proportions, a bombing of some symbolic importance, and a political murder. He said it would not be a murder of a politician but of political significance. He referred directly to you. Prime Minister, in his next sentence, implying that the victim might be an enemy of yours or an opponent.

‘In the event he was wrong, if of course Scammill was the man they intended to kill. Most of the newspapers I see today have used the agency photos taken at this year’s Party Conference with you and Scammill arm in arm singing “Auld Lang Syne”.’

‘Go on, Kellick. Don’t bloody well ramble!’ The Prime Minister hardly moved and the round grey head seemed to sink lower into the shoulders. In his right hand he held a gold ballpoint pen, the retractable type. He began digging the tip on to the open desk diary, irritatingly monotonous.

Kellick continued. ‘Now, no amount of interrogation by me that evening managed to get an ounce more out of Sanderson concerning these threats of violence. He acknowledged that he had placed himself on record as being an accomplice before the event. We promised him he’d be prosecuted and would certainly never see the outside of a prison again. He didn’t seem at all put out by this. All he said was that by coming to us he had virtually signed his own death warrant anyway. In the eyes of his former employers he had committed high treason and they would find their own way to carry out his execution long before he went into court. The second part of the interview was about this organisation’s structure. The third confined to why he had defected.’

‘“Defected” has political overtones. Did you mean to use it?’

‘Of course, Prime Minister.’

Knightley shuffled papers on his desk.

‘Prime Minister,’ Kellick said, ‘I’ll read verbatim, with your permission, the remaining part. It’s short and to the point.’

‘Play it to me. Let me hear his voice.’

The Prime Minister reached backwards and with both hands outstretched pulled the heavy curtains together to hide the wet evening.

The effort flushed him. Blood rose to his cheeks, but unevenly, as if he had been daubed clumsily with rouge. His head fell back against the swivel armchair and he stared at the ceiling.

Kellick pulled a small Sony tape cassette recorder from his briefcase. He pushed the forward play button, watching the numbers counter-spin until the number coincided with the number at the left-hand column on the open page of the report on his lap. He pressed the play button.

Sanderson’s voice was low, steady and precise.

‘The Organisation I’ve left means to take control of this country by force. It means to take over this government and create a government of National Unity, in a one-party state. It will control the means of production. Much of the early planning for the takeover of industry and commerce has been based very much on Italian Fascism, the Fascio di Combattimento of the twenties, and the Organisation is confident of support from influential people in vital areas of the armed services. It has canvassed support carefully but indirectly over the past eight years, and directly as an Organisation proper for the past thirty months.

‘It is not a political organisation as such, that is it has no political dogma. It is not revolutionary and the people at the top would not like to be called reactionary. They might call themselves “Right-Wing” if that didn’t mean so many different things to so many people. It might be easier for you to understand it better if you thought less in political definitives and more in nationalist terms.’

‘You mean the National Front,’ Kellick’s voice interrupted.

‘I’ve just said,’ Sanderson went on, ‘you’re not to be bound by political titles. The Organisation is made up of thousands of ordinary British people - and by British I mean non-immigrant. Obviously “British” is the best way I can describe them. Membership is unofficial and unrecorded as far as I know. But all members are bound by the same sentiment. They are people sickened by the state of the nation, and the men who supposedly govern it. They are people who have agreed, implicit in their membership, to be led by a group of men who are prepared to take over the duties of government. Hundreds of thousands of people, committed in a way that would surprise and shock you!’

‘And what are they committed to?’ asked the voice of Kellick from the slowly turning tape.

‘The-Greatness-of-a-Nation. A Britain made new again by strong, certain government: a government made strong by the certainty of the support from the mass of the British people - support made certain by the sincerity of government and governed, desperate to see their island nation strong and integral again.’ The words rolled off his tongue, campaign words, repeated like the Holy Mary.

‘The name of this Organisation is CORDON. It signifies the unbroken circle.’

‘Sanderson!’ Kellick’s taped voice interrupted, ‘You told me a few minutes ago not to be bound by political titles, yet you’re talking nothing but third-rate political Fascist propaganda. It’s not the first time we’ve heard that kind of rubbish in this office. You have not convinced me yet that your Organisation means a tinker’s cuss. Where does its finance come from? How will they achieve the Organisation’s aim?’

There was a long pause, long enough for Knightley to look to Kellick, wondering if the tape had jammed. The Prime Minister made no movement. He might have been asleep except for the haze above the table lamp to his right as the pipe smoke rose up into the green shade, resting like a low cloud above the table. Kellick caught Knightley’s eye, held a finger to his lips and pointed to the tape machine.

Kellick smoothed his short greying hair, palms on each side of his temples, and began slowly moving them across his head until the fingers met at the nape of his neck . . . a very precise symmetrical movement, one he did often.

He was a handsome man - looked every part an invention of Buchan. It would have pleased him to have been told so: Hannay and Crawford were his childhood heroes. He looked exactly what the Head of Special State Operations should look like which was perhaps why, despite his exalted position and twenty-eight years in the Civil Service, he had remained relatively anonymous; he looked so much the part that no one could ever take seriously the rumours about him that were revived periodically.

A good thirty seconds passed until Sanderson’s voice began again.

‘They rob banks to get money. They murder to make a point. The annual budget of the Organisation is now running at a hundred and twenty-five million pounds - that’s nearly two and a half million pounds every week!

‘A great deal of this comes in the form of discreet contributions from all kinds of people and institutions, but that does not meet the budget. The balance is made up in a number of other ways. Enforced contributions from a number of banks is just one way. In the past twelve months alone the Organisation has taken upwards of thirty-five million pounds from banks in London, Zurich, Basle, Lyon, Zagreb, Stockholm, Prague and a dozen other cities. Much of this money is being reinvested by very well-known brokers in Europe and America: some of the British brokers, as it happens, are also very committed members of the Organisation. They manage to channel money to other brokers who are not, and who know nothing of the money’s origin or eventual purpose. A simple exercise and something the Mafia has managed to do for a long time now. The Organisation’s assets would surprise you. I would estimate that half of the Organisation’s budget is paid for just out of the interest on loan capital. That’s what CORDON has to do with banks!’

‘And murder?’

‘In the eight years the Organisation has been active, it has been responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven people - people considered to be enemies of the New Britain and therefore enemies of CORDON. I can write down all their names for you if you wish but if I mention just a few of the more celebrated you may begin to understand. Professor Jan Berg of the Institute of Economic Studies, Dr Richard Lemmings of the Roldorf Foundation, Arthur Leggett of the AEU and General Sir William Tendale . . .’

The Prime Minister began speaking loudly over Sanderson’s voice:

‘How
did
these men die, Kellick? Surely Leggett had a heart attack, there’s never been any doubt of that; and General Tendale scalded himself to death in his bath.’

Kellick had already stopped the tape recorder and was flipping through the pages of the folder, checking the number on the machine’s counter indicator again, and he began reading from pencilled notes he’d made in the margin.

‘Dr Lemmings,’ he answered, ‘died skiing in Aviemore, Scotland, hit a tree and broke his neck. Local coroner reported death as instantaneous, no suspicion of foul play. Berg drowned off Constantine Bay in North Cornwall - a well-known hazard spot. It seems that he’d ignored all the warnings on the beach. Washed up three days later at Newquay, barely recognisable. His dog drowned with him.

‘Leggett in fact died of a clot, a pulmonary embolism, not strictly speaking a thrombosis, during an emergency operation for appendicitis. There was never any mention in any reports, official or otherwise, of hospital negligence. General Tendale was found dead on the twelfth of January last, in his bath. Apparently scalded himself. What wasn’t released for public knowledge, I remember, was the embarrassing 210 mls. of alcohol in his bloodstream at the time. Thankfully, no one outside my Department and his own people in CIGS HQ knew of his newfound addiction to neat gin.’

‘You put all this to . . . Sanderson?’ The Prime Minister spoke the surname for the first time, reluctantly.

‘Yes, sir, I suggested that he was merely using a number of unfortunate but totally explicable deaths to fit his story!’

‘And?’

He wouldn’t expand. He would only say that he hadn’t the desire or the proof but that we could convince ourselves merely by examining who these men were and what they represented. Having done that, he said, we might begin to understand the reasons for their assassinations.

‘And have you examined them, Kellick?’

‘Yes!’

‘And are you convinced?’

‘Yes, Prime Minister, I am convinced - at least in part convinced. If we are to take this man’s allegations seriously - and after last night I don’t see that we have any choice - there is every reason why this Organisation of Sanderson’s, with all that it stands for, should want to see these men dead. Leggett, the Marxist militant, for example, managed to keep half the British motor industry closed down for most of the working year before he died.’

‘Christ! Kellick’ - the Prime Minister was almost shouting - ‘if you start arguing that way you might just as well write off half the General Secretaries in the British Trade Union Movement.’

‘But Leggett was a man, Prime Minister, whose own union’s support was not only constant; he was a man whose individual power within the Movement was rapidly rising. You can’t have forgotten. Prime Minister, your own litany at his funeral, that he might one day have become General Secretary of the TUC. Most thought he most certainly would have been; also, as it happens, the first Communist General Secretary of the TUC.

‘Given that threat, any psychopathic Right-Winger had his motive, and it’s not hard, I’m reliably told, Prime Minister, to infuse an air clot before or during an operation if your assassin is one of the theatre team. Ten CCs, I’m told, is all that’s necessary.’

‘And Professor Berg?’ The Prime Minister continued to look straight at Kellick.

‘Berg, Prime Minister, as you are well aware, right up until the time of his death was the most active member of your own Economic Advisory Committee.’

‘You’re talking about Berg’s draft for our Bill on Industrial . . .?’

‘Of course.’

‘But I’m responsible for that Bill: so is Cabinet: its direct author is the Industry Secretary and it was voted law by every member of my Parliamentary Party. Are they going to kill the lot of us? Why Berg?’

Kellick flushed slightly. ‘Because of the violent public hostility to it. Berg was publicly acknowledged as its author proper. Hostile fingers could be pointed at one man - a foreign Jew at that - and fingers were pointed. Berg had countless threats to his life, he received a letter bomb. . . you must remember. Prime Minister!’

The Prime Minister nodded but said nothing. He remembered it all too well. Berg had been the prime mover of the most drastic takeover of British industry and investment ever presented to Parliament. Yes, he had had many enemies.

‘Run the tape again, Kellick,’ he said aloud. ‘Let me hear how this man became involved. . . why he ran away. . . why
he. . .
defected.’

The acidness had left his voice and he cupped his hands over his eyes, elbows resting on his desk, the light from the table picking out the thick purple veins on the back of his hands. The freckles were fading into khaki blotches, the fingers spread white, purple fingernails - the hand of an old man.

Kellick ran the tape on to the point where Sanderson’s voice began again.

‘When I joined CORDON just over six and a half years ago, I was totally committed. A great deal of the work in organising the cell structure of our membership then was done by me, supervising and vetting. At that time, starting almost from scratch, we had to be sensitive in who we approached and how we dealt with people who made the initiative to us. We relied much on our intuition and a probationary period for suspect newcomers. We protected ourselves then by merely promoting an image of ourselves as some kind of crank offshoot of the Empire Loyalists, dead and gone.

The present success of CORDON is a direct result of the care we took in those days in admitting the right people and rejecting the suspect. We were guided then not by any new ideology: there were no pep talks or conditioning programmes. We were not trying to change people.

‘When people came to us it was because they shared our convictions, people who were witness to and sickened by Britain’s steady slide into ruin: sickened by the total bankruptcy of political talent in government at all levels; angry at the awful power of the Trade Unions and of particular men in that Movement with whom certain Government Ministers were beginning to share the responsibility of government in a practical daily way.