Our man in Camelot

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Anthony Price

OUR MAN IN CAMELOT

For John Grassi

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Prologue:

Captain Finsterwald and AIC Merriwether

THE MAILMAN DELIVERED the packet just as Captain Finsterwald and Airman First Class Merriwether had finished searching Major Davies's cottage.

The click of the letterbox flap caught Harry Finsterwald halfway down the stairs. With letter-bombs uppermost in his mind he froze where he was and waited until the delivery had been accomplished. By that time, however, he was reassured about the packet's contents, because with the treatment it had received, if it could ever have exploded it, would have done so already. It had been too wide for the aperture, and folded double it was almost too fat, but not quite; with a dry rasp of disintegrating paper it tore its way into the cottage, hung for a moment by a tattered corner, and finally dropped with a dull thump on to the mat.

Merriwether's black face appeared round the sitting room door as the sound of the mailman's footsteps died away in the distance.

'He got some mail?' Merriwether sounded surprised.

Finsterwald looked down at the crumpled packet. 'Some sort of catalogue. Or maybe a circular.' He turned it over with his foot. 'Nothing interesting.'

'That figures. You finished upstairs, Harry?'

Finsterwald nodded. 'Uh-huh. He's clean.'

'Same here. He's so clean it hurts.'

' Was so clean. Nothing in the desk? Nobody write to him?'

'If they did he didn't keep their letters. Just bills in the desk, and not many of them. Seems he liked to pay cash.'

Finsterwald frowned at him. 'You don't reckon so clean is too clean, maybe?'

The big negro shrugged. 'Nothing to say it is, and they checked him out good before he did that little job for them in Israel. No next-of-kin, no girlfriends, far as we know, so no one to write him. Like they say, he was a loner. Some pilots, they're like that.'

Finsterwald grunted disapprovingly. 'Just a goddamn birdwatcher, and birds don't write letters.'

'Not his kind, anyway.' Merriwether wiped his face with his handkerchief. 'There's a pile of his bird books back there…' He thumbed over his shoulder, '… funny thing though…'

'Funny thing?'

'They's all brand new, almost never been opened. You'd have thought, the way he was always looking out for them, they'd have been more- dog-eared, I guess. Like my Air Force Manual.'

Finsterwald nodded. It had become a standing joke between them which no longer required even a smile, the Air Force Manual. 'Maybe he knew it all too.'

'Which is more than we know about him.' Merriwether looked round uneasily. 'Eighteen years in the Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

service, but nobody really knew him. High security rating, flew planes, watched birds. Period.'

'He was one damn good pilot. Remember that citation in the file for those Hanoi bridge pictures—like he was a little bird perching on the girders?'

Merriwether looked down at the Busy Lizzie plant on the window-sill. It was just beginning to droop for lack of water.

He shrugged again. 'So he was a good pilot. But not good enough when it came to the crunch.'

'We don't know that, Cal.' Finsterwald sat down on the stairs.

'That's right. We don't know that. Nice day, not too high, not too fast, no malfunctions, navigator transmitting, radar plot on course—then pow! No pilot, no co-pilot, no plane, no nothing.' He pointed a long brown finger like a stick of milk chocolate at Finsterwald. 'And that's what we got—nothing.'

' 'Like it was a missile',' quoted Finsterwald.

'Except we know it wasn't, because there was nothing in that whole bit of sea to throw it at them.'

'Which the British confirm,' agreed Finsterwald. 'And their radar cover's on the top line in the Irish Sea these days, you can bet.' He paused. 'So it had to be the plane —okay. So we'll recover the wreckage and then we'll know. Don't get so hot.'

'Then we'll still know nothing—' the chocolate finger jabbed the air savagely '— because we'll still not know why.'

'Means they got a man on the base at High Wodden.'

Merriwether laughed. 'Oh, man—tell me something I don't know. They got a man at Wodden—we got a man at Archangel. Every base with a major nuclear strike capability we got men at, they got men at, sweeping away the snow, tending to the garbage, delivering the goddamn laundry… But you tell me, Harry—you just tell me why their