Colonel Butler's Wolf

going to become: the fellow was a natural born teacher!'

Butler nodded cautiously. 'That was what Hobson thought.'

'Gracey did too, and he's a sharp man. The crunch came when Smith found out he was in the wrong business. Poor devil, I'd guess he'd become what he was pretending to be— and he liked it better.'

Poor devil indeed! thought Butler: the Devil himself had been a mixed-up archangel, and this poor devil had straightened himself out only to discover that there was no escape from Hell. . .

'And falling for Polly Epton put the finishing touch on things?'

'Not quite the finishing touch—no.' Audley rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'Actually, it had me worried a bit when I first learnt about it. He didn't seem a very highly-sexed man, and I knew she was no Helen of Troy, but I did wonder if that wasn't behind what he did.'

'She's not that sort of girl at all—'

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Audley held up his hand. 'Precisely. That's why I'm so grateful to you. A nice girl, that's what she is.'

'You know what I mean, damn it!'

'I do indeed. And I know that nice girls don't drive men to treachery and suicide: it's the little prick-teasing bitches that do that. From what you say of young Polly, she'd more likely have soothed him down and jollied him out of it if she'd been here. But she wasn't here, and that's half the point. What had kept him going was Polly Epton— and the fact that he wasn't having to do any dirty work.'

'And then suddenly up comes the dirty work-—and there's no Polly with her nice soft shoulder . . .'

'But you don't know what the dirty work was?'

Audley grimaced. 'We don't know what it is. The whole trouble's been that Smith wasn't on our watch list.'

'And if I go round asking too many backdated questions my cover's going to wear out just when we need it most,' said Richardson.

He cocked an unashamed eye at Audley. 'Trouble is, David's right—we made a boob over Smith, a bloody great boob, and that's a fact.' He paused. 'And the back-tracking hasn't been easy. But as far as I can dope it out Smith kept his nose clean like David says—no dirty work, not even one suspicious contact. Until three weeks ago.'

'Three weeks,' Audley nodded at Butler. 'The right time.'

'It's only circumstantial,' said Richardson tentatively. 'The right chap in the right place.'

'What right chap?'

Richardson looked at Audley.

Audley smiled reassuringly. 'The truth is, we've had a bit of luck in their apparat over her. We've got a major defector. By autumn we'll be ready to blow the whole thing sky-high, but in the meantime we've got one or two unexpected names. Names they don't know we've got.'

'Like this new chappie in the Moscow Narodny Bank over here—an economic whizz kid,' Richardson took up the tale again. 'Only actually he's a KGB whizz kid, and the word is he's here on a special emergency job. A top secret one-off job.'

'But he doesn't know we're on to him, see? So we've given him a nice long lead to see which lamppost dummy2.htm

he cocks his leg on. And sure enough he took a quick trip to Newcastle three weeks ago. He goes to the University Museum, to the mock-up of a bit of Roman stuff they've got there—'

'The Carrawburgh Mithraeum, man—you're supposed to be a post-graduate student, not a ruddy tourist,' said Audley testily.

Richardson grinned and nodded gracefully, totally unabashed at the rebuke. 'As your worship pleases—

a facsimile of the temple of Mithras, hard by Coventina's shrine at Brocolitia—'

'I know the place,' snapped Butler.

Just a few hours earlier, although it seemed an age, he had stood beside the little shrine to the god the Christians had feared most, trying not to watch Protopopov on the hillside behind him. Now, however, he found Richardson's high spirits even more trying: this was a young man who needed taking down a peg or two. 'For God's sake get on with it!'

'For Mithras' sake, you mean! Well, they've built this mock-up in the Museum: you go behind a curtain and press the tit, and the lights go out and you're there in the temple with a commentary to tell you what's what. And we're pretty sure that this chappie Adashev told Smith what's what at the same time.

They were both in just about the same place at the same time, anyway—that's almost for sure.'

'For my money it's sure,' Audley cut in. 'Because from that moment on Smith was worried sick. Which means—'

He paused, frowning. 'Let me put it this way: I don't agree with Peter that we missed out on Smith earlier because we were inefficient. We didn't spot him because his cover was almost perfect and because he didn't do anything to compromise it. They even took the trouble to bring over someone new to be his contact, someone we weren't likely to know about.'

'All of which means this could be a big one.'

He blinked nervously at Butler.

So this was the revelation: not so much that a 'big one' might be due—the escalating Russian activity in Britain which was common knowledge in the Department made that no surprise—but that Audley, the great Audley, was up a gum-tree at last!