The Partridge Kite (3 page)

The “collapse of democracy” was the subject in those days. The unify of CORDON, its
raison d’être,
was how to

reverse the slide. Patriotism was not a word that had disappeared from the vocabulary of the people who joined us, a love of one’s country! But what we were really talking about was already history. It took a little time for us to appreciate how archaic we were.

‘We found we were talking about a countryside that existed only in back copies of
Country Life.
The good looks and civilities of the British way of life were more obsolete than we’d imagined. We’d lost our currency, our weights and measures, our pint, our mile. And when we realised we had become caricatures of ourselves, our attitudes hardened.

‘I suppose I represented what you might call the centre- cut of British society - those who had so little but felt they had so much to lose. Like so many of those around me at that time I felt the need to belong to something because I felt I was no longer part of anything. CORDON put fire into me and into those around me who joined then. It hit me in the way National Socialism must have hit those millions of Germans in the twenties and thirties. It was a force: something hard, something new, something
actual
in a lazy, careless, nondescript society. It was the only definite thing I’d ever known. Maybe if I had been born fifty years earlier I should have followed Keir Hardie with the same enthusiasm.’

Across the darkened room lit only by the single brass lamp with the green shade, across from the disembodied taped voice, there was only the slightest stir in the Prime Minister’s chair. Kellick took it as a cue to stop the machine.

‘Sanderson goes on for some time like this, Prime Minister,’ he said.

There was no answer from the chair, only a new breeze of sickeningly sweet pipe smoke unfolding through the lampshade.

‘I’ll move another ten minutes into the tape. Prime Minister, to where he begins to explain the structure of CORDON.’

‘CORDON. . .’ - Sanderson went on - ‘has a cell structure but nowhere for a very sensible security reason will you find a membership file. The country is divided into fifty-two regions and each has its CORDON leader or Director. Their names are known only to six men - six anonymous men who make up the Board of CORDON, five Directors and the Chairman. The Chairman makes the decisions.’

‘How are members recruited?’ . . . Kellick’s taped voice again.

‘Are you a Mason, Mr Kellick?’

‘No!’

‘But you know something of how the first approaches are made before an invitation to join a Lodge is offered.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we owe much to that system. We owe much to the Lodges: some of our best members were recruited from them. That wouldn’t be surprising, though, would it?’

Kellick said nothing.

‘Well, much the same kind of approach was made by us to prospective members. Usually it was left to the Area Director. K a man’s views were known to be close to those of CORDON, and consistent, then a first approach was made. The Director would engineer a casual meeting. . . the familiar places, the golf club. Rotary, trade associations, the man’s business. If the Director was convinced of the man’s availability he would sponsor the candidate to CORDON’S HQ staff.

‘To my knowledge over the past two and a half years the system has failed us so infrequently that it has never posed any real threat, certainly nothing to embarrass us. On only very few occasions in those thirty months did CORDON have to issue an execution order on people who had the authority to damage us because a mistake was made in our first approaches to them. Of course, this kind of vetting was only necessary in a fraction of the considerable number of our members - only among those we would call opinion leaders, men who would be privy to information that we could never afford to become public. The vast mass of our support, the fodder that provided the strength and money, the hundreds of thousands who will rally on the day, were recruited more casually because they did not know, will not know, until after the event exactly what it is they have pledged their support to. Our disguise to them was simple enough and we used many titles.’

‘Why have you defected, Mr Sanderson?’ Kellick’s voice cut in hard. ‘And why are you telling us all this?’

‘Because I am afraid. Not for myself: I consider myself dead anyway in my own mind. You really cannot expect police protection against CORDON. They’ll come and take me. They have marked me dead.

‘I am afraid for my country, for the friends I have, for the family I once had. CORDON is a monster, Mr Kellick. I’ve seen enough of its workings to be afraid. I’ve seen it grow out of its ideals, which were to me once fine and worthwhile, to become totally evil. All those like me who have sworn loyalty to it are caught up in its filth.

‘CORDON is preparing us for a society that would shock Orwell. Shall I tell you that
1984
is forbidden reading in CORDON - and can you guess why? I have seen the spectre of a Britain under CORDON. It is the end of a Nation and the rebirth I had dreamed of. We are to be governed by the Board. It will have powers no King of England and Empire could ever have dreamt of. We are to be employees of a monopolistic greyness, a corporation governed by computers programmed by the Chairman. CORDON’S control will be total. The word “individual” will be scratched from our language.

‘I am dead, Mr Kellick. I died the moment I saw that vision. I am a renegade “Brownshirt” - and I am giving your employers, the political bankrupts I once despised, enough currency now to destroy CORDON and the organisation within Britain they now control. Kill them, Mr Kellick, before they destroy a thousand years of democracy!’

The cassette tape continued turning a few moments more before it stopped. Even then the slight hum from the machine was the only sound in the room. Gradually they became aware of the muffled noise of traffic in Whitehall seeping under the door and the sharp hiss beyond the curtains as the wind and rain hit the window.

The three, in the brown and green room overlooking grey and wet London, said nothing. Kellick made no attempt to switch off the machine but stared across the room to a borrowed Turner original of Melham Cove on the wall opposite. The PPS Knightley was staring at the green lampshade that hid the face of the Prime Minister from him.

The Prime Minister was emerging from the semi-sleep that Sanderson’s story had lulled him into. Both Kellick and Knightley know the form, he thought. They’ll keep their mouths closed. And then we sit it out. We are paid for our waiting time, the art of inactivity, the sharpest weapon in government. But all the same . . . his mind was already moving ahead of him, manoeuvring and side-stepping, placing him in the most protected position . . . all the same, we must chase them, sort out whatever it is they stand for. Must have, at least in the beginning, some elementary kind of intelligence report. Then move.

‘Kellick,’ he said, ‘I’m not taking this to Cabinet.’

‘No, Prime Minister.’

‘It goes no further than the three of us.’

‘Four, Prime Minister. Fry, my second in command, taped the interview and transcribed the report.’

‘Fry can keep his bloody mouth shut, I trust. He won’t begin to have pangs of conscience like Sanderson, will he?’ ‘He’s sound, of course.’

‘Of course! There’s no “of course”, Mr Kellick, you should know that, no bloody “of course”. This man is mad and those who employ him and those he directs are mad. But do they have the capability to do what you think they did last night? Blow a bank, bomb the rig and kill Scammill all in one evening? Do we take him seriously?’

They waited. Half a minute passed. Slowly the Prime Minister lowered his head and faced them directly, both hands clasped, index fingers only pointing upwards, tip to tip. It reminded Knightley, watching from his corner, of a silly rhyme he’d been taught as a child: ‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, look inside, there’s the people.’

‘Kellick!’ The Prime Minister was sharp-voiced. ‘You will treat this as genuine. It has my priority. You will employ a man to seek out CORDON, a man not on your staff. I don’t want a regular. Get him by another agent, second or third remove. I don’t want him traceable to you, because you are traceable to me. I’ll hear nothing more from you, officially or otherwise, Kellick, until this man of yours can convince us that the Organisation Sanderson describes exists. If you are ever in such a position, I shall want to know on that date what you intend to do. If a threat exists you will tell me how you plan to erase it. Until then, Kellick, I am out of it!’

Kellick left Downing Street, crossing the Foreign Office Square into King Charles Street. At the second arch he stopped at the row of telephone kiosks and found one that worked, keeping the door open with his foot to let out the stench of urine. He dialled a London number.

‘Fry,’ he said, ‘I’ve just left him. He’s heard the tape and wants a contract but he’s covered his tracks. If we’re all wrong only you and I lose. I’ll walk back home. The air will help sort things out a bit. Meet me there in forty minutes. Bring with you the A.D. files and make certain all the photographs are there too. And bring some chicken pieces from that place near you.’

Kellick buttoned his raincoat tight under his chin, but as he turned into Whitehall, water was already trickling down between the collar and his neck. The rain like ice stung his face and the backs of his hands. The walk to his flat in Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, would take forty minutes at this pace. By the time he got there he knew he would have settled on a short list of four, maybe five men. One would check out the fact or nonsense of CORDON; the threat or the farce.

The paper seller on the corner of Parliament Square was shouting something Kellick couldn’t quite make out over the din of the passing traffic. But there was only one headline today and Kellick knew it now by heart. He crossed the square and passed the policemen at the gates of the House of Commons car park.

The man with the umbrella followed ten yards behind.

Kellick’s flat was as stereotyped as himself: austere, nothing ever out of place. If the cleaning woman cleared the chessboard for dusting, he would afterwards spend much time ensuring that each piece was back in its place, perfectly centred. Once, in one of his rare moments of carelessness, he’d put Black Queen on White Square and hadn’t realised until the next morning. It had depressed him.

He made no apologies to himself for his fretfulness in matters concerning tidiness. It was why he insisted on wall- to-wall fitted carpets throughout his flat; no dust, no rugs to slide askew. It was why he preferred Venetian blinds to curtains, duvets to blankets and sheets. They were tidy, symmetrical, no fuss. The colour of his flat never changed, it was merely repainted the same colour every spring; cream and white to match the light-coloured natural bentwood chairs and dark brown upholstery. Being in Kellick’s flat was like being in the middle of a coffee cream.

But the events of the past three days had upset his routine, so that he had ignored his daily chores. The sight this evening of the greasy washing-up water with last night’s dinner dishes jutting out of it like greasy shipwrecks had jarred him. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. But then, neither had Sanderson!

By midnight he and Fry had sifted through the twenty- two references on the A.D. file. All but three were back in the thick brown folder. Those three were neatly in a line on the sofa, a photograph of each man stapled to the top right- hand comer of the reference sheet. The A.D. file contained the names, photographs, fingerprints, voice tapes, biographies and security ratings of men not on the permanent staff of the Special State Operations. They were men employed on a freelance basis to do particular jobs - jobs that might prove embarrassing to the Department and Government if things went wrong, as things occasionally did. Sometimes a man on an A.D. contract, caught by foreign police, would throw his cover, admit in the hope of leniency or exchange to be an agent working for British Intelligence, The British Government in turn would appear outraged by the claim, identify him as a convicted bank robber or whatever his past form was, and sit and watch foreign justice take its course. It was a Catch 22 that never failed.

Among the twenty men Kellick and Fry had looked at, two had been convicted bank robbers - one of them convicted of armed robbery and recently completing a ten-year sentence; another was a pleasant-faced confidence trickster, another a stuntman; there was a mercenary, and a forger. But on the three faces staring up from the sofa there was a small red star stuck at the bottom of each photo. It meant they were clean: no police record, no embassy contacts, hopefully unknown abroad. It meant they were professionals, and costly!

Tom McCullin was Kellick’s first choice but Fry suggested they checked out the other two as standbys. Kellick propped up McCullin’s file on the mantelpiece, the photo on the left, the biography in a neat column on the right-hand side. Tom’s photo was not a posed one. He looked startled. His mouth was open, his hair ruffled and a bow tie crooked. He looked, as Kellick said sourly, like a second-hand car salesman caught pouring sawdust into a sump. But there was no mistaking the eyes. Few men, sober, looking into those eyes would protest too loudly at Tom’s misdemeanours.

Kellick read out aloud to Fry, his finger passing down the typed column.

‘Aged forty-one, birthday January 9th. Height a fraction under six feet; weight twelve stone as of last medical two months ago. Service history, RAF Regiment National Service, transferred after two years to SAS on short service commission. Five years in Hong Kong, Cyprus, seconded to British Embassy Saigon on Military Attach^ staff, unofficially assigned to South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for intelligence feedback. Did not renew commission after fifteen months on-off duty, Ulster. Pioneered the use of the night-sight there and established eighteen kills; previous kill ratings not known.’

Kellick noticed the figure eighteen had been underlined in pencil by someone in the Department. He made a mental note to find out who and why. A postscript at the foot of the page noted that McCullin had left NI after his photograph had been found in a search on a Provisional HQ in Crossmaglen, South Armagh. It meant his work as a sniper and instructor on night-sights and the new M.10 rifles had been leaked to the IRA. Left with Captain’s rank. Ordnance, one service medal. Since 1974, Tom had been employed on separate contracts by the Department. He’d been away seven months on the last. All had been successful. There had been no kickbacks from inside the Department or from the foreign embassies whose various employees had sometimes been the subjects of Tom’s hard work and marksmanship.