the Americans has been issued to every officer on duty in London and environs. Every man’s been told it’s a grave matter and I can assure you gentlemen there’s not a policeman in London who isn’t comparing every passing face with the drawing in his hand.” Merritt’s teeth clicked and he sat down as abruptly as he’d stood.
Chartermain reclaimed their attention. “I should remind all of you that the Soviets have a keen interest in finding our man. He possesses information they’d find quite useful. In concert with the Americans we’ve agreed to obstruct the Russians’ efforts wherever possible. If any of them proves to be in your men’s way, he should be arrested on the spot. We shall worry about the specific charges later as time permits; for the moment the purpose is to harass them and deny them whatever we can. The Soviet operation is being run personally by Mikhail Yaskov, who is a high senior member of KGB staff. The order to arrest Russian agents does not exclude Comrade Yaskov if he should happen to turn up. But let me emphasize that no effort is to be deleted from the hunt for Kendig for the purpose of throwing spanners in the Russian works. No one’s to go out of his way in search of Communist spies.” He said the last with dry sarcasm, poked a stubby finger at Cutter and sat down.
Cutter didn’t stand but he had enough magnetism to command undistracted attention from every pair of eyes in the room. “He won’t make it easy for us. It’ll be a fluke if he falls into our hands very fast. The purpose of this maximum effort is to wear him down, deny him escape routes, push him as inexorably as we can into a box. Every airport has to be under massive surveillance until further notice. The same for boat marinas, private airfields, shipping docks, boat-trains, ferry landings, helicopter pads. Our first objective is to be certain we’ve got him bottled up on this island. It’s a huge effort and a complicated one.” Cutter smiled coolly. “In any case our departments are obliged to spend their budget allocations before the end of the fiscal year because otherwise our budgets might be reduced next year. So never mind the expense. Pour everything into it. Don’t let your people get discouraged when every gambit seems to lead into a cul-de-sac, And for God’s sake make sure everybody tells us exactly what he knows, not what he thinks we want to hear.
“Now then,” Cutter continued, “we’ll want special emphasis on the surveillance of rental lockers. We know Kendig didn’t have his manuscript when he was arrested last night. It wasn’t in his hotel room. It’s hidden somewhere, and in due course he’s going to have to collect it.”
Glenn Follett stirred. Ross thought he’d been dozing but Follett said mildly, without his usual ebullience of gestures, “You mind if I toss out a little suggestion there?”
Cutter’s teeth formed an accidental smile; the interruption-and Follett-annoyed him. In a visible effort to be patient and reasonable he said, “Fire away, Glenn.”
“Well I may be on the wrong track.” Follett rocked his hand, fingers splayed. “But it kind of seems to me his whole modus operandi involves harassing us. He’s thumbing his nose, toying with us, right? He sends notes and postcards to people, he makes funny phone calls. And he slaps us in the face every now and then with another one of those Xeroxed chapters. I’m trying to pin down a pattern, Joe. Tell me if I’ve gone wrong so far.”
“You haven’t. But I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
But Ross saw it, just a split second before Follett spoke; and he was beginning to grin before the words were out of Follett’s mouth.
Follett put on a broad smile but his eyes lay unblinking against Cutter. He flapped his hands. “Well Joe let’s just assume we don’t nail him to some railroad locker. Let’s assume he hid his manuscript where we won’t find it. Seems to me he’s going to drop another chapter in the mail sooner or later. Now as long as we’re spending half the national debt and committing all this manpower to the job anyway, my little suggestion would be this: Let’s put surveillance on the Goddamned post offices.”
— 22 -
He’d been looking for a parked car to steal when an Evening Standard van had stopped for the light at the corner; its bed had been empty, evidently it was returning to the printery from its last delivery, and he’d hopped up into the dark open back just as it started moving so that the driver wouldn’t notice the shift of weight.
When it slowed to make its turn into Fleet Street he’d jumped off and walked along the Embankment into the tangle of busy activity in the Black-friars area-the wholesale lorries banging in and out of warehouses. It was no great trick to hop onto a slow-moving staked produce truck; the driver never knew he was there.
Somewhere along the Archway Road, not quite sure of his bearings, he dropped off the truck and made his way afoot off the lighted thoroughfare into a dreary lane of grim Victorian brick-identical attached row houses of Dickensian bleakness. Cars were jammed together along both curbs but it wasn’t transport he needed just now.
He went the length of the lane-two hundred yards, not much more. It ended against a parapet; a steep slope fed down into a railway cut. He saw no signal lights along the tracks; perhaps it was an abandoned line. Garden allotments were terraced into the slope, each with its little padlocked tool shed, a few with greenhouses.
He’d worn no topcoat because he hadn’t wanted the clumsiness of flapping skirts in his burglary; he was chilled to the bone in shirt and jacket but what mattered was that they knew the clothes he was wearing and they knew he had no money to buy different garb. He couldn’t very well go back to his hotel for a change of clothes; they’d have that sealed off first thing because one or another of them was bound to be inspired by that plastic calendar with the hotel’s advertisement on it.
He got up on the stone retaining wall and made his way around behind the row of houses. The back gardens had their degrees of individuality and some of them were fenced but none of the fences was too high to scale. He began to explore.
Each house appeared to have been subdivided into flats, one apartment to each floor; the three ground-floor windows at the rear of a house represented kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Toward the front he surmised there’d be a sitting room and a stair hall. They weren’t tenements but neither were they upper-middle-class digs; these were workingmen’s flats.
The windows were of two kinds: casements on the baths and kitchens, old-fashioned bay windows on the bedrooms. These were vertically hinged-in panels and could be held open at specific apertures by ratchet-holed interior levers that lay at angles across metal pins on the sills. The Englishman was a creature who had a mystical faith in the curative powers of fresh air irrespective of chill, humidity or pollution. Nearly every bedroom window in the row was open at least one notch.
He judged it near three in the morning; they were as sound asleep as they’d ever be. He went along the row exploring. It was only a matter of reaching the fingertips inside, lifting each lever off its pin and swinging the window gently wider; then quietly press a curtain aside far enough to see inside.
They weren’t people of uniform habits. Some were married, some slept alone; some were pin-neat and must have hung their clothes in the cupboards while others had left jackets and trousers strewn across chairs or dressing tables. One flat was postered with psychedelic colors and ban-the-bomb slogans and the bed seemed to be occupied by at least three people. It was the only iconoclast; the other bedrooms he investigated were sedate.
He retraced his way to the stone wall, climbed over and went carefully down the allotment paths. He broke into a splintered tool shed and picked the longest-handled tool he could find, a garden rake, and worked the rake head off the handle. It gave him a pole the length of a short fishing rod. He scrounged in the bins, found an old nail that would do and banged the nail at a right angle into one end of the pole, using the head of the rake for a hammer. He was thinking: if they’d found the manuscript he’d cached in the hotel basement than he’d have to grant them the victory and call off the game. The carbon copy was still safe in Florida but it would stay there untouched; he’d hidden it there for use only in the event some blind accident should destroy the original. But if Cutter’s minions found it in the soap carton that wouldn’t be blind accident; he’d have to concede Cutter the game.
But he didn’t think they’d look for it there. They’d be more clever than that. They’d stake out terminal lockers and they might canvass the banks to find out if a man answering Kendig’s description had rented a safe-deposit box. Probably it wouldn’t occur to them to search the rest of the hotel if they didn’t find the script in his room. And even if they did think of it they’d have to make it no more than a cursory search and the odds against their looking in that particular carton among many were pretty good.
He carried the hooked rod back up to the wall, went over it and started to work through the bedroom window of the second house. He used the pole to reach in through the narrow window, hook the trousers off the chair and
