it is. It's so valuable it's already killed four men, and maybe as many as seven.'
'
'And destroyed a four million dollar aircraft,' added Audley. 'Or whatever the going price of a Phantom is these days.'
'You can't mean it!' Mosby whispered.
'But I do mean it.' Audley focussed on a point midway between them. 'It's rather like an old Richard Widmark film I saw years ago, when I was still going to the cinema… What was it—'Panic in the Streets' its title was, I think.
All the police in this seaport—New Orleans, somewhere like that—were hunting this petty thief, so the other criminals thought he had pulled off a big job of some sort and they hunted him too. Only the truth was he had the plague—the Black Death. Which is what Mons Badonicus would have been for you, Mosby… If you'd found it on your own it would have killed you, almost certainly.'
There was a clatter of tea-cups beyond the door to the hall.
'That's the second irony,' said Audley. 'And the third one is that you never really needed to look for Mons Badonicus at all: it was right under your feet all the time.'
Mosby looked at his feet.
'Not here, man, not here—Wodden.'
'Wodden equals Mons Badonicus,' said Audley. 'You've got our battle under the new runway Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
extension, so far as we can make out.'
The door opened behind Mosby.
'Tea up,' said Roskill. 'And one American wife, undamaged, as per specification.'
Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
XI
THE AMERICAN WIFE certainly appeared undamaged; indeed, with every hair in place right down to the two artfully arranged tendrils curling on her cheeks, she looked as though she'd just stepped out of a beauty salon. Which could mean that the female of the British dragon species was less daunting than the male, even allowing for the fact that Shirley would have seemed just as edible to him on the tilting boat-deck of the
Which, when he thought about it, was how the floor of Camelot House felt now.
She stared at him from the doorway. 'You okay, honey?'
'I'm fine.'
Fine meaning unsinkable.
'You look a bit peaky. I guess you know they think you're some kind of spy, huh?' She moved to one side to let a diminutive grey-uniformed maid push in the tea-trolley, fixing Audley with a hostile frown which remained on target like a gyroscopically-controlled cannon.
'David doesn't think so,' said Mosby.
'He doesn't?' She assimilated the information without blinking. 'Well, I should think not… Some spy!'
Hostility for Audley was replaced by derision for absent idiots.
'He thinks I'm a burglar.'
'A—what?' The frown came back on target. 'What has he burgled? The plans of the Round Table and the formula for getting the Sword out of the Stone?' Mosby winced at the Arthurian reminder—
'With milk?'
Small upturned nose, frizzy blonde hair and that famous sensual gap between the large upper incisors reinforced by a trim little body in the well-cut grey uniform. Only the candid brown eyes belied the general impression of childish sexiness.
'Thank you.'
What the hell was he doing, fancying the hired help when the ship was sinking under him?
'And sugar, Captain Sheldon?'
He did a double-take. The voice was wrong and the manner was wrong and the uniform was too well cut to be a uniform. Plus, above all, no mere maid would know his name… But she still looked no more than eighteen.
She smiled into his confusion. 'My name's Fitzgibbon, Captain. I'm the 'they' your wife was talking about.'
He added ten years to his estimate, thought still against the visual evidence. Perhaps the British were recruiting them straight from High School now.
'Pleased to meet you all, Mrs Fitzgibbon—and no sugar, thank you,' he heard himself drawl in his best Virginian. 'I'm sorry to disappoint you… by not being a CIA man, that is.'
'That's quite all right, Captain. I was only asking a routine question.'
