He could almost feel sorry for the GRU, whose trail had been much colder and harder than his own. Indeed, all they had to work with were the clues Panin had carefully doled out to them and Audley's own movements.
Not for them the luxury of names and addresses. The best they could do was to pick him up at Asham churchyard, follow him and try to overtake him at Guildford. But they had been baulked there by Morrison's weak heart and then betrayed by Mrs Clark's geese, which left them only Panin to follow.
They had taken all the bad luck, and even so they had nearly pulled it off at the last. Whereas he had had all the undeserved good luck . . .
Audley groped for something to offset his feeling of humiliation.
'But supposing your bluff had been called?'
'But it was no bluff, Dr Audley. There is no one left alive now except me who saw those documents. Until you discovered that aircraft, they were no more than a memory. Recreating them was no problem–we have far better forgers now than the Nazis ever had.
dummy4
'The problem was to create confidence in them. To create confidence in their–what is the word?–their provenance. As a historian you should understand that.'
'But there's only one way you could really prove that,' Audley grasped at the inconsistency. 'You had to have the Schliemann Collection–and you couldn't forge that!'
The Russian nodded. 'Of course I needed the collection. But you are forgetting how I lost it and to whom I lost it. A gang of petty black marketeers, Dr Audley–German riff-raff and Ukrainian deserters dressed in Russian uniforms! And what does the world think they did with it, eh? What
He didn't wait for an answer. 'They ought to have melted it down into crude bars of gold and silver, not to have had the wit to smuggle it out as it was. I tell you, Dr Audley, my fiction was far more believable than your truth!'
It was damnable, thought Audley–but it was logical: a few bars of gold for the East Germans, and deep regrets for a tragic case of vandalism. That had been Sir Kenneth Allen's guess exactly.
And all so damnably simple from Panin's point of view, too. In laying a trail of false information and recreating the lost cargo he was independent of events; the more the GRU and the British did, the more they would build up the illusion and baffle each other.
It was perfect except for that one reasonable but fatal miscalculation . . .
And now the consequences of that error had to be faced by both of dummy4
them.
'But the collection is of no importance.' Panin calmly relegated Schliemann and Troy to the dustbin of history. 'It is enough that it exists. In fact, if you want it for your British Museum that can be arranged–one museum is the same as another. It is only the documents which concern me. And I do not think your superiors will withhold them from me either, Dr Audley. There are pressures which can be brought to bear, believe me.'
Again, just like that! First, the carrot–a golden carrot belonging to someone else, casually offered. Then, the stick–and Audley didn't doubt that it was a real stick. It was the matter-of-fact assumption of authority that took his breath away. The man was brutally sure of himself even now.
Audley walked slowly back towards the others, leaving Panin beside the line of mounds. In a way this was what he always dreamed of having: the power to shift a political balance decisively one way or the other. But he had never imagined that balance would be in the Kremlin. Nor had he expected it to be the reward of false reasoning. Perhaps he'd be able to see the funny side of that one day. But in the meantime he intended to keep the joke to himself.
The group around the box had split up. Butler and Roskill sat on the grass beside it, each engrossed in a buff- coloured file. Beyond them Sheremetev stood alone and miserable –though not as miserable as Guriev, quarantined by Richardson's Sterling.
Predictably, the long-haired Jenkins was chatting up Faith, demonstrating his own addition to DECCO.
dummy4
Audley paused beside her apologetically.
'I'm sorry for the theatricals, Faith. I really didn't intend you should be mixed up in them.'
She smiled. 'It's all right, David. Mr Jenkins has been explaining how he was ready to come to our rescue. But he hasn't told me how you knew there was going to be trouble.'
It was hardly the time to tell her that he hadn't really known and that he'd been mortally afraid that nothing would happen at all. Or that what had actually happened had utterly crushed his self-esteem.
He shrugged modestly. 'If there was going to be trouble I wanted to have it here in the open. They all thought they were safe here. They didn't know DECCO was bugged.'
' 'Jenkins' Ear' we call it,' said Jenkins. 'It transmits a whisper over a mile as clear as a bell.'
'The only difficulty was bringing the rescue team in without any fuss,' Audley explained. 'And Warren was very helpful there.'
Keith Warren had been only too pleased to help. He hadn't believed a word of Sunday's cover story, but found the bizarre truth instantly acceptable.
Jenkins and Faith both regarded him with evident admiration. Like everyone else–everyone but Panin–they would always believe that he had stage-managed events perfectly. And as the Russians would never talk, no one need ever know just how imperfect the stage-management had been.
'What happens now?' asked Faith.
dummy4
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.
