October Men

Ruelle's eyes shifted to Boselli. 'Who's he?'

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Boselli's heart thumped. Those were butcher's eyes appraising a bullock, and he hoped desperately that Audley wasn't going to let slip that the bullock belonged to Rafiaele Montuori.

But before Audley could reply the door at the back of the room swung open again.

'David!'

The woman was very thin—he remembered that the soft-drinks vendor at Ostia had said as much—and her long hair was so pale as almost to seem white in the gloom, half covering her face. She was not at all the sort of woman he would have associated with the heavily-built Englishman, and also much younger. He was reminded of the German woman back at Positano, though she was much more beautiful and feminine than this one.

Audley took three quick strides round the end of the table, sending a chair spinning.

'Love—it's all right—there, it's all right.' The Englishman enfolded his wife in a bear hug.

'Okay—so you've seen her!' Ruelle's voice was loud and harsh, and the automatic was raised and steady, as though he expected Audley to come at him. 'You have a deal—I'll hear it. I promise nothing, though.'

Audley didn't let go of his wife, but merely loosened his grip.

'You've got fifteen minutes to be out of here, and forty-eight hours to be out of Italy—you two. The others don't matter.

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They must leave here with you, but after that it's up to them.'

'I said a deal. She goes with us.'

'David—'

'I said it was all right, love.' Audley's arm tightened round his wife again. He looked at Ruelle coldly. 'With her you won't get past the first roadblock, I promise you that! They'll let four men through in one car—and then only after I've given them the next signal . . . which will be given the moment you drive out of here, not before.'

'That's no deal at all—without her we have nothing!' Korbel said.

'With her you have nothing. Without her you'll be alive.'

'No!' Ruelle filled the word with anger. 'For your wife there was to be a name—I still want that name!'

'Would you believe any name I gave you now? I could give you a dozen names—good Russian names—and they'd all be false—' Audley paused, '—because there is no name to give you, and there never was. Except one, and you knew that already—Richard von Hotzendorff—Richard von Hotzendorff first and last and all the way through.'

Boselli stared at the Englishman.

'He took you for a ride—the clever Little Bird—and me too, and Eugenio Narva. He even took his wife for a ride. He made everyone do what he wanted—he even made Death change his plans. He chose a hill in Moscow and threw his little white pills away, his chlorothiazide and his digitalis—

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they found them lying in the gutter—and he ran and he ran up the hill. Not very far, but far enough to get where he wanted to go. And there wasn't any KGB man at his back either, just death catching up on him as he intended.'

He looked Ruelle full in the face.

'He was getting old and he had nothing to show for it, so he thought—he was dying and he had nothing to give his wife and children. He couldn't even give them freedom, it took too much money. . . .

'So I think he sat down and he realised that he knew just one thing for sure—that one day soon his heart was going to give out on him and he was going to die. So he made a plan around that, so that he could use his death to make it believable—'

'But the oil? The North Sea?' Korbel interrupted feverishly.

'He knew about the oil—he knew it was there!'

'He didn't know. Nobody knew—not the experts, not the oilmen. They just thought it was there—they were giving sixty to forty—but they didn't know, because there wasn't any way of knowing and there still isn't. . . . But that didn't matter to him because he'd worked it out so he couldn't really lose—

because he'd chosen Eugenio Narva for his mark, and Narva's an honourable man. He reckoned even if he was wrong, Narva would see his widow right—and whichever way it went she'd be out of the East with the children. . . . Maybe he even reckoned that she was good-looking and Narva was a widower who liked children—but at the worst they'd be dummy2

better off. And if the oil was there—jackpot!'

'But how do you know this?' Korbel's voice was hoarse.

'I've talked to Narva, and to the woman—and the thing had the smell of a trick. Only I thought there was a Russian behind it somewhere.' Audley shook his head slowly. 'And then I talked to—a contact of mine who'd checked the man's death again. ... I never could understand why it had been made to look like a heart attack, I couldn't accept that it really was that until he told me about the pills and the hill.

And then I knew it wasn't a killing made to look like a natural death, but exactly the opposite—a self-induced natural death that no one would believe was natural.'

The pills and the hill. Boselli had heard of them on the telephone tape, and they hadn't registered. And now he saw them in an altogether different sequence of events on the very margin of credibility, yet somehow more credible than anything he had heard before.

He could see incredulity in their faces, and then the dawning of bitter realisation.

And he knew instinctively why they understood, as the Englishman had gambled they would: Little Bird was getting old and he had nothing to show for it. And neither had