October Men

'And at a high level, too.' Macready nodded quickly to emphasise his point. 'That's what's grabbed David—not the dummy2

oil.'

Someone at a high level: someone who knew about Hotzendorff— they must have got on to him after all, even if they weren't ready to pick him up. And that meant someone with access to KGB surveillance lists.

And someone who knew about the North Sea bonanza and for some reason, some convoluted political reason, wanted to make sure the British and the other Western nations knew about it too.

And someone with the resources and the ruthlessness to stop Hotzendorff's mouth once he had served his purpose.

Except the irony of that had been that Hotzendorff had passed on the information to the wrong address after all, even though it had added up to the same result in the end.

Always supposing that had been the design.

'And you really think that was how David put it together?'

It was odd: he had tried to make the question sound casual, but it came out abrasively, as though he not only questioned Macready's ability to get inside David's mind, but also objected to it. He had already had his knuckles rapped for letting friendship influence him, and he'd do better to remember an older piece of advice: Gladiator, make no friends of gladiators.

'Eh?' Macready blinked at him defensively. 'I tell you I'm guessing. I don't know what goes on in anyone's head, least of all David Audley's. I'm not claiming to.' He stared at dummy2

Richardson for a moment, then rounded on Sir Frederick.

'It's the questions he asked. It wasn't just Narva he was interested in—he knew about him, I told you. Or about the North Sea. It was the Russians he kept coming back to.'

'What about them, Neville?'

'Mostly questions I couldn't answer off the cuff. He wanted to know what their future projected fuel consumption was, and their percentage increase rate. And where they planned to make up the difference—things like that. . . . And who would be in the know, and how their policies were formulated. But it was the Russians he was interested in—I don't think he gave a damn for the North Sea.'

Richardson now saw the encounter in the Reading Room in much clearer perspective. Faced with the same piece of information Audley and Macready had reacted according to their own specialist knowledge, each flying off on his own tangent, oblivious of the other's obsession.

Mention of the North Sea had been enough to launch Macready on his hobbyhorse; and if he had disbelieved the first miracle he had been none the less bugged by the unresolved mystery of Narva's investment. But Audley was already ranging beyond the second miracle to its possible explanation: the existence of someone high in the Kremlin who was prepared to leak valuable information to the West in pursuit of his own ends.

And it was no ruddy wonder David found that possibility irresistible: if there was such a man, and his identity could be dummy2

established, he would be wide open to every pressure from genteel suggestion to outright blackmail.

Or would have been if David and Macready had been more discreet—and less unlucky—in their behaviour.

'Whoever it was, the Russians'll get him now before we can, damn it,' he muttered.

'Via Hemingway?' Sir Frederick had evidently advanced along an identical line of thought. 'I'm afraid that seems all too likely, Peter. Though I find their behaviour a little strange all the same. We shall just have to see what Cox turns up there. In the meantime—'

He stopped abruptly, frowning down at the intercom.

'—Yes, Mrs. Harlin?'

'I have a call from Rome for you, Sir Frederick.' This time there was no apology in the voice, and no hesitation.

'They've got through to Dr. Audley?'

'It isn't from Mr. Cable, Sir Frederick. This is an official call from General Montuori. He is using the NATO scrambler line, priority green. He is on the line now—'

XI

THE WORST OF the sweltering day was over at last, but that brought no consolation to Boselli: the concrete perimeter strip of the airfield had baked for hours and now it was restoring every particle of stored heat to the atmosphere dummy2

around him.

Also his head ached abominably, as though the racket of the rotor of the Pubblica Sicurezza helicopter which had brought him south was still revolving noisily in his brain; it had been just another of the day's awful ironies that those two hours of relative coolness had been an agony of incessant din in which neither thought nor comfort had been possible.

And now there was also the unseasonable humidity to contend with, more enervating than the dry Roman heat to which he was at least resigned. He had expected blue Campanian skies—the General's secretary had made the trip sound like a holiday jaunt—and instead he was enclosed by a haze which obscured the hills in the distance.

But the heat and the ache and the humidity were all in the natural order of things, the old conspiracy of his feeble body and hostile environment against his unclouded mind. It was fear now that dominated him, both the sick stomach fear of physical danger and the chest-tightening panic of professional failure.

The two hard-faced PS plainclothesmen behind him in the car did nothing to alleviate the physical fear. Sergeant Depretis had obviously been an officer of vast experience and proven ability to have made one of the special squads, but that had not prevented him choking in his own blood in the dust of Ostia; and even Villari's miraculous reflexes had not been fast enough to duck a bullet.

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