The Partridge Kite (9 page)

CORDON had nominated Curran-Price as the Minister responsible for transport, road, rail, sea and air, a totally integrated Ministry, once the takeover was under way. Curran-Price, an odd choice perhaps with his intimate knowledge of finance and his dabbling in Law, nominated Transport Minister. But he could guess at their reasoning and was well satisfied.

The two men were drinking their coffee and cognac when the table waiter came holding a telephone. Would Mr Curran-Price take a call at the table? The white receiver was plugged into a socket hidden by the draped tablecloth.

Curran-Price introduced himself to the caller but said no more. The caller replied with a number followed by three letters and the four words ‘CORDON London Area One’.

Curran-Price smiled across to the knight who was busying himself with a Rules Havana, and turned his chair and his back to him.

‘Go ahead. I’m listening.’

The voice spoke evenly, quickly and quietly. There’s been a computer program on all members of the British Heritage Trust. It’s been very thorough. . . there have been four run-outs on you alone and I haven’t seen it all yet. We’re still waiting for the final. But there are some very obvious knock-ons . . . you and Meredith. . . Meredith and Tendale. . . and . . . you can see where it’s leading. . .?’

The voice continued. ‘When the data has been scanned properly it’s to be forwarded to an outside agent working to Kellick. . . a man called Tom McCullin. . . that’s M, small c, capital C, for further checking door to door.’

‘You’ve done well - very prompt of you.’ Curran-Price kept up his cheerful voice. ‘Ring me when you have more. I’ll be going home from here to finish off a few things, so call me when you can. Goodbye.’

His pleasant, unaffected voice gave nothing away, attracted no attention in the now full restaurant.

At half-past three, with the help of the doorman, Curran- Price bundled the knight into a taxi, pushed three pound notes into the driver’s hand, shouted an address, and within fifteen minutes the man was asleep on the leather couch in a room off his office at the industry’s headquarters in the Euston Road. It would have comforted his staff to know that it would be the last drunken lunch their chairman would have with the man from the City. The snoring bundle on the couch had passed on all he knew. He’d now outlunched his utility.

Curran-Price walked the sixty yards along Maiden Lane from Rules down to the Strand, crossed over, dodging the traffic - and into the courtyard of the Savoy Hotel. He passed into the foyer, smiling in return at the nod of recognition from the doorman. He changed a ten-pound note at the cashier’s and then walked to the public telephone booths. He dialled and waited.

No voice answered, merely a low-pitched hum, like the sound of a bassoon.

He spoke: ‘CORDON Director Area 7 . . . Alert!’

There was a pause; he heard a click and then a voice said, ‘Go ahead. Area 7.’

‘SSO have begun a computer search on the British Heritage Trust which should finish printing within the next few hours. They’re going right back, it seems. . . all associations. They’ve got an outside man, named Tom McCullin, must be one of their contract men, to do the checkouts. He’ll want to see me of course. I’d have thought I’d be one of the first. What instructions do you have?’

‘Area 7,’ the distant voice came back, ‘postpone appointment with him as long as possible. You will receive our recommendations within the next twenty-four hours.’

The line went dead. But Curran-Price was not put out. He had thought too long, too often of this moment, the moment when he would suddenly be suspect. He felt safe; he was confident of CORDON and the direction and protection it offered.

He left the Savoy and caught a taxi to his London home in Eaton Square. There was a reception at the Mansion House that evening at eight. Tonight he was taking his wife to meet the Lord Mayor of London.

Six hundred miles north in a rambling black granite house the man sat still. There was no movement in the room nor any to be heard outside. The room was in darkness except for a single spotlight that shone on to the wall over the large stone fireplace. It was a circle of light, so bright that it dazzled . . . But as the eye adjusted, inside the circle could be seen six gold letters which made up the word CORDON.

The man rose from the chair by the telephone and walked to a round marble table in the far comer of the room. As he moved he began coughing very softly, the sound coming low from his stomach, every third or fourth step.

He stopped and his foot pressed a rubber button on the floor. Another spotlight shone down emphasising the perfect white circle of the tabletop. He opened a leather folder and ran his finger down a short column of handwritten names. From the binding of the folder he pulled out a solid red wax marker and ringed a name halfway down the list. . . John Curran-Price.

He replaced the marker and closed the folder. The light went out. He walked slowly towards the side door, still coughing, into the next room to join the other members of the board of CORDON. They rose as their Chairman entered. He seemed unusually pleased, they all thought, with his telephone call.

Outside they could hear the beginnings of a wind, the sudden rush of air, a silence and then the rush again. The barometer was dropping fast, so was the temperature. It would snow tonight - the first this season. By morning the greys and reds, the greens and the browns of this remote comer of Inverness-shire Forest would be covered white and would stay that way until the spring of next year.

The death under a London Transport bus of the Department’s tail, whose name was Brown - which made his anonymity complete - did serve one immediately useful purpose. It jolted Kellick out of what had until then been rather casual researches. It confirmed in his mind the existence of CORDON as described by Francis Sanderson. He had yet to test its strength or gauge accurately the number of people involved.

Kellick had several more interviews with Sanderson but the defector would say no more. His own taped interview was played back to him in his prison room at the top of the closely-guarded house in Holland Park in West London. But it neither encouraged him to expand nor did it remind him of anything he might have forgotten.

It was, Kellick had said afterwards, as if he had been primed to say so much and no more. It was a reasonable suspicion. Fry thought, so reasonable that he tucked it away

in his memory for future reference.

Again for the second time in three days he reminded Kellick that McCullin was still being deliberately kept in the dark, working for a non-existent Swedish security firm, getting instructions third-hand over the telephone; still ignorant of the real motives of the people he was being asked to investigate, unaware of their objective.

‘It’s an absurd charade the Prime Minister has got us to agree to,’ he said. ‘A man was murdered this afternoon within yards of McCullin, a man paid by us to follow and protect him and as far as McCullin is concerned it was an accident to a total stranger. CORDON knows about us, what we’re doing, what we’re asking McCullin to do and still we go on with this silly routine of recording messages. Let’s make direct contact. Let him meet Sanderson!’

‘No, Fry, the Prime Minister’s instructions were absolutely firm; no trace-back should things go wrong.’

‘But there’ll be no Prime Minister if CORDON takes over!’

‘I’ve said “No”. I can’t change my mind.’ But there was none of the usual hostility in Kellick’s voice. It was almost as if he was consoling himself. ‘If they really do know the setup there’s nothing we can do about it. But if we change our planning now it will be because they have made us do it - which may be precisely what they want. I don’t pretend to know what’s happening yet. Fry, but I will and then I’ll see whether we must drop the playacting.’

The feeling of panic was returning to the pit of his stomach. He had a momentary vision of dirty dishes in a sink of cold greasy washing-up water. He recognised his own kitchen.

How much in control of events was CORDON? Who was chasing who? Sanderson had defected to help destroy it but maybe he had left it too late - maybe the process was already under way? Had the date of the attempted coup already been set?

Kellick sat staring at the small red leather travelling clock on his desk. His gaze shifted a few inches right to the calendar propped up against the angle-lamp. There, had he known it, was the answer.

The date of the takeover was already clearly ringed for quite another reason: December 25th . . . Christmas Day!

The Department’s computers gave their information on the twenty-two members of the British Heritage Trust a little before six o’clock that evening just as John Curran-Price had warned his Chairman they would do.

Of the twenty-two, eleven were cleared by the machines, as having no other compromising interests in affairs concerning the State. Five more were judged to be marginals; the remaining six had very definite involvements; they listed what the six had subscribed to, what they had done, what they had written, what they had said, what they may have been overheard to say.

Kellick gave the five marginals back to Fry for reprogramming using different parameters and kept the six to himself. He would assess them, adding any biographical detail he thought relevant and then hand them on that evening to McCullin via the recording machine so that his search and (possible) destroy contract proper could begin. The midday call routine would already have to be dropped. Fry’s Mr Hampton would have to telephone McCullin. They could not afford to wait until tomorrow with the new information.

Tom took down the names slowly, telephone in one hand, pen in the other, pad resting on his knee, as the recording machine in Kellick’s office annexe spelt them out letter by letter. Six names; all men, all of them known to Tom, known at least in the way that any newspaper reader or television viewer knows the public faces that circulate in British society.

Other than their association with the British Heritage Trust they all shared one other thing, a common denominator. They all belonged to what Tom called the English Mafia, that select band of people who by reason of their preparatory and public schools, by reason of the professions they followed, the clubs they shared, the country mansions they met at for weekend shoots, the marriages they negotiated, the complicated and closely-guarded network they had over a hundred and more years established for the protection of all their members . . . all this had guaranteed the certain survival of the British upper class.

‘So there they are,’ Tom muttered to himself, as he went back over the list, ‘the bloody vanguards of neo-Fascism.’

A picture of each of the six began to form in his mind, the names becoming a face, a voice, an accent, a stance. Right- Wingers. Nationalists, Patriots. All active in a Trust established to protect the British ‘way of life’, its countryside, its customs, language; influential reactionaries, some extraordinarily wealthy, each wielding very real power within his own sphere, and with enormous potential power should they act together.

Two military men, both retired; one. General Meredith, only recently retired from the Imperial General Staff, that small committee of men who govern the British Army. And Colonel Haig.

Tom thumbed through the biographical detail Kellick, through the recording machine, had supplied. Colonel Gerald Haig, holder of the Military Cross for his extraordinary actions behind German lines in Hitler’s War, and famous or notorious depending on whether you were a Malay-Chinese for his unorthodox methods of counter insurgency during the Malayan crisis.

There had been stories of him in certain Sunday newspapers alleging how he had frequently, in efforts to make captured Chinese insurgents talk, tied an alarm clock detonator and six ounces of explosives to the stomachs of two of them. They were then tied facing each other, each seeing the clock face on the stomach of the other. And the crayon mark on the dial indicating when the electrical contacts would meet. He claimed many successes this way; said its deviousness appealed to the Chinese mind. His only regret, he was quoted as saying, was that it was a waste of explosive; ‘an ounce would have done the trick just as well!’

During the past two years Haig had made the headlines again when the
Sunday Times
revealed that he was canvassing for a private army from his farmhouse in Dartmouth, South Devon. Recruited from British ex-servicemen - many of them men from his old company, they were to be called the British Volunteers. Their duty was ‘to combat the threatening shadow of trade union power as the reins of government were being wrested from the elected Parliamentarians by a handful of working-class Mandarins’. They would help maintain essential services in a General Strike. Haig had problems with the Director of Public Prosecutions on whether a beret and an armband constituted a uniform.

Tom sat back on his bed, took some more Scotch from the large tumbler and rested his head against the wooden headboard. The angle hurt his neck but he couldn’t be bothered to move. He continued scanning the list of names, his own memory supplementing the background detail he’d been given. Thirty minutes later, relaxed by the Scotch, he felt he could almost touch the people on the notepad. They were no longer strangers. And Tom was no longer out in the cold.

Wednesday, 15 December

The suspicion had begun with Colonel Haig and his recruits, but bit by bit as the pictures grew Tom came very slowly to the truth. This was a Right-Wing Takeover. Hampton - or whatever his real name was - had given him the caucus of a coup.

Tom was feeling cold. It was below freezing outside and the fountains in Trafalgar Square, according to the evening news, had frozen for the first time in six years. The forecast was a prolonged cold spell, much frost and probably snow. The winds were sweeping off the Russian Urals thousands of miles away, crossing Northern Europe uninterrupted until they froze the ground like concrete in the coastal villages of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

The last item on the television bulletin reported that on the A9 crossing the Cairngorms in Scotland, an old man had got out of his car to urinate, couldn’t open the car doors again because his hands were so cold, and had died of frostbite sitting on the rear bumper. Tom, hugging his whisky, felt a sudden uncharacteristic surge of sorrow as he glimpsed in his mind the old Scot slowly freezing to death on the rear bumper.