Our man in Camelot

The confirmation of his fear was immediate. Finsterwald hadn't walked boldly up to the church porch, as he ought to have done, but had slipped to his right behind the cover of one of the trees which flanked the gate. And now he was reaching under his shirt for something in his right hip-pocket.

Mosby stared down incredulously, hypnotised both by the unfolding scene below and by the thought of the sequence of events which must have produced it.

Finsterwald had been tailed off the base, but hadn't spotted his tail and had believed until too late that he was in the clear.

Which wasn't altogether reassuring, because if Harry Finsterwald was no intellectual giant the mechanical things like spotting and shaking inconvenient tails would be right up his alley. Which in turn meant a whole lot of even less reassuring things, like for a start that the tail was smarter than Finsterwald

—and also that Finsterwald would be goddamn mad at having been outsmarted at his own game.

Mosby's pulse quickened. There was only one thing Harry could do, having screwed things up so beautifully, to unscrew them, which was to take out the tail before the tail could report back. That was what he was now preparing to do, and he, Mosby, had a grandstand seat for the performance. And there was nothing he could do about it except pray that Harry had the sense and skill to take the man alive.

Except, of course, it could be just Harry's imagination. Or merely Harry's prudent double-check against the remote possibility that someone had played it cleverer than he had. Lord, let it be pure imagination or prudence.

Trouble was that the Lord must know, since Mosby already knew, that Harry Finsterwald was short on imagination and long on arrogance. So—Lord, let him not foul it up right here in front of me. Just let him do it right.

For a minute nothing moved below him. The churchyard was as still as a churchyard ought to be. Even the blackbirds seemed to have decamped. Above the shielding trees he could hear the hum of the traffic away on the main road three-quarters of a mile away on the ridge, but down there it would be dead quiet, giving Harry the edge.

The minute lengthened. A pigeon—presumably the one he had disturbed—flapped heavily out of one of the elms towards the tower, saw Mosby crouching against the pinnacle, and banked off steeply to head away over the valley, following the meandering stream.

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Hope flickered within Mosby. It was going to be all right after all. Or maybe it wasn't all right; maybe he ought to wish that there had been a tail on Harry Finsterwald, someone they could catch and interrogate.

Someone who could give them any sort of lead more solid and believable than the incomprehensible one he'd been following these last few days.

Then both conflicting hopes were extinguished in a brief glimpse of movement between the tree trunks outside the churchyard wall to his right. For the next two or three yards an inconvenient branch obscured the view, then he caught the movement again. Someone was moving warily—too warily for anyone on his lawful occasion—along the line of trees towards the gate.

Where Harry was ideally placed to take him. Mosby felt a pang of sympathy for the tail, remembering how he'd flunked three tests of this game hopelessly in training. On an unsuspecting, untrained, innocent subject it was easy, but no one had yet found a practical reason for following unsuspecting, untrained innocents, and against a properly trained pro with a bad conscience it was damn near impossible.

He remembered his instructor shaking his head at him phlegmatically, a squint-eyed, honey-faced ex-cop who'd done it all and seen it all.

'You gotta tail you don't make till too late, you gotta be blind. You do the thing right, and you make him

—he does the thing right, you still make him. Just ain't no way he can get the edge on you except—'

Holy damn! The memory of the next words punched Mosby's panic button sickeningly. Forty minutes'

drive from the base, it could hardly be less, and Harry still hadn't spotted his follower until too late to try anything except this. But no matter he was a fool, there was nothing wrong with his eyesight.

' Just ain't no way he can get the edge on you less he's got a partner doubling with him—'

A partner?

Now he couldn't even see the first man, let alone a second one. Just Harry waiting to jump—and be jumped.

Because that was what was going to happen, sure as fate. If the sole object was to watch Harry to see what he was doing and who he was contacting they wouldn't make the first move. But the moment they realised he was on to them—and, Christ, maybe they already suspected it—it would be the Davies-Pennebaker treatment.

He felt the seconds draining away, and seconds were all he had to figure the angles.

Too few seconds, too many angles.

He could shout a warning—nothing easier. Maybe scare the bastards off; they sure as hell wouldn't know the nearest thing he had to a weapon was a Mothers' Union banner down in the vestry—

But maybe they wouldn't scare that easy—

And maybe throw Harry's attention the wrong way at the wrong moment—

And, either way, blow his cover—

And screw the mission.

The man said: When in doubt, do it by the book.

The book said: When the success of a mission conflicts with the survival of an operative, no operative shall abort a mission without first having evaluated comparatively its