The Alamut Ambush

Llewelyn smiled ait him. 'All are prospects and all must be checked out. Quite right again. But checking takes time and I can't go on living a – how shall I put it? – restricted life for ever. It's boring and it wastes a lot of valuable time. So – ' he turned to Audley – 'just what do you suppose to do about it?'

A muscle twitched momentarily in Audley's cheek, as though a boring and restricted life of indefinite duration might be no bad thing for Llewelyn.

'Forty-eight hours,' he said. 'Give me that long to look up a few old acquaintances and do a little horse-trading. Then I may be able to tell you where you stand.'

'Horse-trading?' Stocker looked at him curiously. 'I wouldn't have thought you had much to trade with?'

'I haven't. But I've no doubt Roskill has. If you've no objection to his letting slip something here and there I think we might make out well enough.'

'Yes, I suppose you might at that.' Stocker eyed Roskill. 'You must have quite a few marketable titbits about the Middle Eastern air forces tucked away by now — and I've no objection to your disbursing a few in a good cause.'

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'You haven't?' Roskill looked from, one to the other incredulously, dismayed at their calm assumption that he would so easily squander his hard-won capital. It went against all his instincts –

and worse, if it ever leaked out it would ruin his reputation. 'Well, I bloody well have! I'm not going to play both ends against the middle for anyone, no matter what!'

'Don't worry, Hugh,' Audley reassured him. 'We won't sour your contacts. In fact I may be able to provide you with a few very useful ones. There's no cause for alarm.'

Roskill subsided sullenly. The bugger of it was that playing both ends against the middle just about described what he was doing already – and the middle against each end, too. And. God only knew what Audley and Llewelyn and Stocker were really up to.

'Talking of contacts, Squadron Leader Roskill, I think you've one exceedingly useful one of which you may not be aware,' said Cox.

'The Ryle Foundation.'

The Ryle – ' A moment earlier Roskill had been halfway to telling himself that at least there could hardly be any more unpleasant surprises ahead, but evidently there was no limit to them.

'The Ryle Foundation?' He heard his own voice echo Cox uncertainly.

'I believe you know Lady Ryle quite well,' said Cox. 'And Sir John Ryle.'

'I know the Ryles, yes.' The voice sounded more like his own this time, no matter how he felt inside. 'But I've never had anything to do with the Foundation – and I don't think the Ryles have either.'

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But obviously they did; or one of them did. He couldn't even remember whether it was relief or education or both, for the life of him. 'But Lady Ryle does a lot of charity committee work,' he concluded cautiously.

'She's an honorary life vice-president, as a matter of fact. And she's on the educational grants sub-committee.' Cox sounded as though he had expected Roskill to know much better what Lady Ryle did or did not do.

Education rang a bell. Old man Ryle – or was it the grandfather? –

had robbed the Persian Gulf blind in the days when anything within range of a British gunboat was fair game for British mercantile enterprise. And then in a fit of conscience had divided his loot in half, one to buy the family into respectability and one to bring the blessings of education to the Arab world.

It was coming back now, a word here and a sentence there.

Grandfather Ryle had been in on the ground floor in oil. But when he'd sold out he'd wrapped the share he gave back to the Arabs so tight there'd never been a breath of either scandal or do-gooding inefficiency about his Foundation; it had been constructed to show solid annual profits in terms of S.R.N.s and agricultural diplomas.

No bloody arts and crafts for granddad – the words had been John's. He remembered them quite clearly now.

'You're not going to tell me that there's anything subversive about the Foundation, for God's sake?' Roskill came out of his nose-dive and climbed to counter-attack. 'It's as solid as UNESCO – probably a damn sight solider in terms of secure finance.'

'You do know something about the Ryle Foundation then?'

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Roskill gestured vaguely. 'Second-hand stuff – I remember the Ryles talking about it now. They said – '

The penny dropped. Butler had said as much the night before: They know you got Jenkins in . . . and Audley likes you . . . but I think there's something else behind that too . . . His connection with the Ryles had been the clincher: what they knew about that – the thought that they knew anything – made his flesh creep. But that wouldn't be what interested them now: there must be something very wrong with the Foundation, whatever its appearance of respectability might be.

'What did they say?' Cox prompted.

Jenkins and Audley and the Ryles, thought Roskill bitterly: no wonder they'd changed their own rules to recruit him! What would have trebly disqualified him under normal circumstances made him the ideal candidate with time pressing them so hard. No time to plant a professional carefully and painstakingly in the Foundation; they needed someone with a ready-made introduction to it. And in him they had the one with the other – the sinking feeling in his stomach told him they knew it, too ...

'What's wrong with the Ryle Foundation?' he asked harshly.

Cox looked to Llewelyn.

'I know some of your Arab specialists think the Foundation's clean,' he began.