Our man in Camelot

'In what sense, then?' asked Shirley.

Morris smiled. 'Your… husband's instinct flattered me, Mrs Sheldon. He's a senior executive adviser to their Joint Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee. Our last assessment ranked him Number Four to Sir Frederick Clinton.'

'The Joint—' She bit the word off.

Jesus, thought Mosby with a swirl of bewilderment: Morris had quite calmly made everything ten times as bad. They were now messing with the topmost brass in the British Intelligence hierarchy, on the fringes of their equivalent of the 40 Committee, if not the National Security Council itself. Ozymandias was just two levels down in direct responsibility from the Queen of England, separated from her only by Sir Frederick Clinton and the Prime Minister.

Ozymandias, with his ordinary family and his ordinary family car… and his sandcastles…

'It isn't quite as crazy as it may sound, Captain,' said Morris.

'It isn't?' The very severity of the shock-wave had the effect of steadying Mosby. Because they couldn't be that crazy they had to be stone-cold sane. Nothing in between would do.

'For a start, this operation isn't directed against the British. The USAF is the target.'

'You mean we do know something about it?' said Shirley.

'We certainly do. In fact we had the first authentic word of it out of Moscow Control nearly five months back— of an operation against the USAF in Britain. Scheduled, some time July through September. We even know who's running it: Party Secretariat Member Comrade Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin.

One of their top men.'

Just great, thought Mosby: two top men and Dr and Mrs Mosby Sheldon III in their appointed roles as a couple of slices of salami.

'And?' said Shirley hopefully.

'And we have their operational codename.' He looked at Mosby. 'Which ought to ring a bell with you now. Operation Bear.'

'Bear?' Mosby frowned. 'It's a pretty common Russian—' He stopped.

'The bell ringing, huh?'

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

'Uh-huh.' Mosby shook his head. 'Or only very faintly if I'm thinking what you want me to think. It's pretty goddamn thin reasoning.'

'But a start.'

'What is?' asked Shirley.

'Bear,' said Mosby. ' 'Bear' is one of Arthur's nicknames, at least according to those who believe he ever existed. 'Artos the Bear'—it's a sort of play on words, because artos, or something like it, means

'bear' in Ancient British. And there's a crack in one of the very early Welsh chronicles about some king being 'the bear's charioteer'. But it's damn obscure— and artos can mean a whole bunch of other things too. In fact it's a typical Arthurian puzzle: you can argue it a dozen different ways and it can mean anything or nothing.'

'Very good—I'm impressed,' said Morris encouragingly. 'You've done your homework.'

'Well, I'm not impressed,' said Mosby. 'It's like if the Thai Intelligence mounted an Operation Elephant and we decided it was connected with the Republican Party. It just doesn't mean a thing.'

'Not by itself, I agree. But we do have one other fact which also didn't mean a thing by itself… You see, we do try to keep tabs on all the top SovCom personnel, especially the KGB controllers. What they do, where they go, who they visit, and the rest of it—it all goes into the data bank for processing.

'So we just happen to know that Comrade Professor Panin went on a trip about nine months back to Gorky, on the Upper Volga. And we also know that while he was there he borrowed a book from the Public Library—as a matter of fact we have that from two independent sources. And he's never returned it, either.'

'He's going to have a big fine to pay, after nine months,' said Mosby.

'The biggest. Because it was the oldest book in the library—it was written in the north of England about twelve hundred years ago.' Morris smiled. 'Does the name Bede ring any bells with you, Captain?'

Unreality again: John Singleton Mosby, William Marshall, Chretien de Troyes, Arthur of the Britons, David Audley… Nikolai Andrievich Panin.

And now Bede. Bede, the monk of the monastery of Saint Paul at Jarrow. Bede the Venerable, just two steps from becoming a saint.

'Sure. He wrote one of the main source-books for the period— A History of the English Church and People. I've got a copy in there—' he pointed to the sitting room behind Harry Finsterwald '—it was on Davies's list.'

'But not this copy, Captain. This is the Novgorod Bede, one of the oldest Bede manuscripts in existence.

That's what Panin has got. And that was what Davies was enquiring about two days before his death.'

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

III

MOSBY FOLLOWED HOWARD MORRIS into the sitting room with misgivings churning up inside him.

Audley and Panin were bad enough, since for sure neither had reached his present eminence by the exercise of