Colonel Butler's Wolf

It wasn't a question. Or rather the man was so maddeningly sure of the answer that it had come out as a statement.

Butler flushed. Its very accuracy made it offensive, like an invasion of the private part of his mind. It was none of Audley's damn business what he thought. And even if by some rogue intuition he could see so clearly, he had no call to speak of it. It was an act of intellectual ill-breeding.

' 'The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish',' said Audley.

Butler exploded. 'Oh, for Christ's sake, man—spare me the quotations. I've had a bellyful these last few hours. Say what you mean and have done with it.'

Audley gave him a shrewd look. 'I'm not getting through to you? Or am I getting through a bit too well?'

He paused, then gave Butler a grin that was disarmingly shy. 'I apologise, Colonel. Sometimes I say what should be unsaid, I'm afraid. But you must remember I've been up on this bit of frontier longer than you. It's got under my skin.'

He paused, staring northwards at the skyline.

'What I mean is that there must have been times when the Wall was strong and times when it was weak

—more like a confidence trick than a real defense. The way they'd have held it then was by good intelligence work. And by keeping their nerve.'

Butler nodded slowly.

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'And by a little judicious contempt too, Butler.'

'Contempt?'

'Contempt. Just that.' Audley's eyes were cold now. 'You and I—we're on our Wall when it's weak.

Weak on the Wall, and weak behind it.' He pointed northwards. 'Some of our people don't believe there are any savages out there. And of course the intellectuels gauchistes are quite happy to pick us off from behind—they think it's high time for the Wall to fall.'

It was hard for a plain man to make sense of what he was driving at, Butler fretted. It was almost as though they were all conspiring to confuse him, Audley as much as any of them.

'But I don't happen to agree with them. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I find their alternatives altogether cretinous. I suppose that makes me a dedicated counter-revolutionary capitalist...'

Butler grunted non-committally. He could only presume that the blighter was simply restating his oath of allegiance in his own tortuous jargon.

'Which means—' The eyes glinted suddenly '—we've got to teach these fucking Russians a lesson without stirring up any trouble.'

Momentarily the shift from the pedantic to the vulgar took Butler aback.

'And that means that we let them go home—scot-free,' Audley concluded.

'Where's the lesson in that, for God's sake?'

Audley smiled. 'The lesson, my dear Butler, is in the pack of lies we give them to take home.'

He broke off abruptly to squint down the valley towards the main road, where Butler saw a long grey estate car tip slowly off the tarmac past Audley's car into the gateway of the grass track leading up to the fortress.

'Now, who the hell—?' Then he relaxed. 'It's all right. It's only Tony Handforth-Jones. He must be getting ready for the new season's vicus dig.' He turned back to Butler. 'You don't need to worry about Handforth-Jones, he's one of mine. It's lies that we've got to worry about now.'

Butler tore his gaze unwillingly from the estate car. All these outsiders of Audley's made him uneasy.

'What lies?'

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Audley regarded him in silence for a moment. 'Let's look at the truth first, Butler. In reality we're letting them all go because we're weak: we can kick 'em out, but we can't afford any scandal. We can deal with the Negreiros business, of course. But that doesn't alter the fact that if it hadn't been for Zoshchenko cracking up on them, they wouldn't have needed any Negreiros business to put us off the scent.'

Butler nodded. 'Aye. They just had bad luck.'

'It was bad judgement too. They chose the wrong man. What we've got to do is to rub that in.'

'How?'

'We're going to leak it to them we've been on to them from the start. With what we've got on Adashev, and that fellow they pulled out of New Zealand to train Zoshchenko, we can maybe just about make that stick without giving away our contact in the KGB apparat in London.'

'Hmm . . . You think they'll swallow that?'

'When they think of me they will, yes.' Audley wagged a blunt finger. 'I've been wasting my time for months looking for Hobson's non-existent KGB conspiracy in the universities. But you're going to tell how Audley's been watching them all the time and the conspiracy was our bluff to keep them happy.

And you can say that I'm bloody livid that they can't conduct their wretched little operations properly—

that if this is the best they can do, they'd better stay home until they know a hawk from a handsaw. Then they can try again. That's the message: contempt!'

The estate car pulled to a halt beside a chequer-board of trenches on the slope below the fortress, and Audley acknowledged Handforth-Jones's wave.

If the credibility of a lie was related in any way to its size, then this shameless monster falsehood truly might