that.'
'But unofficially?'
'Unofficially? There is no unofficially. I do not have the dummy2
resources to investigate a man's death in Moscow. All I have is his last message, and there was no heart attack in that.'
'What was there in it, then?'
'I will tell you first how it came about, professore. In the first place I pressed him for proof that this was not a mere precautionary plan. And then I said it was not even enough to know that the Russians were convinced there was oil there, I had to know how they knew this. And above all I had to have the locations of the fields—whether these were in the British sector, or the Norwegian or the Dutch. I told him that without this certainty his information was without value.
And I told him there was very little time left.
'He replied that it would be dangerous to try to go too fast. I would have to be patient, but that he would do his best. In the meantime he asked me to get him a camera—something like the Exakta, which was the East German camera made for espionage work. He said that as a courier he had no such equipment, and couldn't get any without drawing attention to himself—'
Narva fell silent suddenly. Then he squared his shoulders. 'I had a suitable camera sent to him. But—I told him that he had better use it quickly.'
'You had begun to believe him?'
Narva looked at Audley for a moment without replying. 'I would like to think so, professore. But I think also I had become greedy. The new Xenophon rig was almost ready for dummy2
sea, and I had the opportunity of buying a large block of their shares at a competitive price. If what Little Bird said was true I could make a killing. For me the time was exactly right.'
'But not for Little Bird?'
'The Little Bird sent me one more message,' said Narva. 'It was very short, the shortest he ever sent. He said his contact had conclusive proofs—submarine survey methods, scientific data and locations in British and Norwegian areas. But there was a risk that someone was on their track, so they were both coming out at once. They would meet my representative in Helsinki in one week's time. But in the meantime I must get his family out of East Germany as fast as possible. His wife would be ready with the children.'
There was no longer any hint of feeling, of emotion, in the Italian's voice, and by God there didn't need to be, thought Richardson—because everyone in the room knew too well how to dress that last message in the widow's weeds of reality.
It was a dead man communicating, a man who already knew he was as good as dead when he transmitted it but was still reaching against hope for life. Even now, long after the thing was over and done, Little Bird's despair was like a view of some distant star exploding—an event at once ancient history and immediate tragedy.
'I had already approached Westphal and we had a contingency contract. He took thirty-six hours to get Frau Hotzendorff and the children out of East Germany into dummy2
Czechoslovakia, and another thirty-six to get them into Austria. And I had the Xenophon stock within a fortnight. Six weeks later Phillips found their condensate field in the Norwegian sector, next to the British block 23/37.'
'But you never saw the Exakta film?'
'Since then Phillips has proved the Ekofisk field, and West Ekofisk and Eldfisk—' Narva ignored Audley's question '—
Xenophon has Freya and Valkyrie, British Petroleum has Forties, Shell-Esso has proved Auk, Amoco has Montrose.
And there will be more, Professore Audley, you can be sure of that. . . . And I made my killing. Or killings, if I am to include those who enriched me.'
Again, a rare bird—even rarer than he had seemed before: a tycoon with a sense of sin. And of one sin in particular, and that the occupational sin of tycoons—greed! Clearly, whatever turned Eugenic Narva on, it wasn't the piling up of mere treasure on earth: he was driven by much more complex motives.
'So you have no idea about the identity of his contact?'
Richardson looked sidelong at Audley. Now, there was a man with no sense of sin at all . . . and a man now totally cured of that fourth sin of his which had set all the hungry cats among the pigeons again. The problem evidently absorbed him so much that it would never occur to him to be sorry for Narva's good Catholic conscience, only to gamble on its existence.
The only real sin David Audley might recognise now was dummy2
failure.
'No. I have told you so already.'
'And the woman—the widow Hotzendorff?' Audley went on remorselessly.
Narva looked at Audley coldly for a moment, then shook his head. 'She knows nothing.'
'What makes you so sure?'
Narva was saved from replying by the click of the door behind him. Without turning away from them he inclined his head to listen to the white-coated doorman's urgent whisper.
Only in that concentrated silence the whisper was just that bit too loud for secrecy.
This was the second of the day's conversations which had been unexpectedly disturbed by General Raffaele Montuori, thought Richardson.
