Our man in Camelot

'No, honey,' said Mosby, 'let him have his say.'

Audley looked at them for a moment. 'Every year thousands of ancient sites are destroyed—half the time without anyone even knowing. We've even got an organisation called 'Rescue' which tries to save them, or at least to record them, before the damned motorways cut through them—or the runway extensions. This year the Government's given Rescue over a million pounds, when we're flat broke—

that's the measure of it. People care.

'And Badon isn't just another Roman villa, another mediaeval pottery. Badon's King Arthur—the lost battle. Nine-tenths of the people have never heard of it, but they've all heard of Arthur. So for a start, it isn't just a piece of ground, do you understand that, Mrs Sheldon?'

Mosby stuck his jaw out. 'Okay, Audley. We both understand what it is.'

'Good. But your General Ellsworth didn't understand.'

'General Ellsworth?'

'That's right. 'Build the runway' he says. And that was the first bad decision, because at that point you could have saved the whole thing. Wodden isn't the only base surplus to RAF requirements by any means, if you want longer runways.'

'General Ellsworth said that?'

'He said it. And then when they'd bulldozed Windmill Knob flat and the thing started to blow up in his face, the CIA made another bad decision. They said cover up.'

He looked at Mosby expectantly, but this time Mosby had nothing to say. General Ellsworth?

Audley shook his head. 'If they'd come to us instead, we couldn't have stopped the bad publicity. Not by then, anyway. But we could have taken Ellsworth's head on a plate, and we could have just about survived it one way or another. Only someone in the State Department must have realised how bad the Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

publicity would be—someone who knew his Arthurian history, for all I know. Someone who could see the headlines and thought he couldn't handle them. So Davies had to have his big mouth shut for good.'

'And bingo!' murmured Roskill. 'Watergate!'

'Only the name will be 'Wodden' in future,' said Frances.

'Or 'Badon', more likely,' said Roskill.

Audley silenced them with a look. 'And that was the dirty job the CIA had given to them: cover it all up.

Bury it.'

For five seconds—ten seconds—nobody spoke. It was as though the last two words had told the whole story.

Then Shirley spoke: 'How can you be so sure that's the way it was? You said it was—circumstantial?'

'It's more than that. I wish to God it wasn't, otherwise we'd still have a chance of smothering it. And don't think I wouldn't if I could, Mrs Sheldon.'

She stared at him. 'But—but Badon's been destroyed. And Davies is dead. I know it's—horrible. But he is dead.'

'But Billy Bullitt isn't,' said Audley.

'And we can't shut his mouth, Mrs Sheldon,' said Frances. 'Because he's already opened it.'

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

XII

MOSBY SQUINTED AT the villainous typescript. If British Intelligence couldn't rise to anything better than this for its top secret documents then it was small wonder that they were about to preside over the biggest Anglo- American debacle since the Boston Tea Party.

'I am sorry about the typing,' said Frances Fitzgibbon. 'It's absolutely accurate—my shorthand's one hundred per cent. But I don't get much typing practise, and it was a rackety old machine—I had to put in all the g's by hand, as you can see.'

'Excuses, excuses—and qui's'excuse,'s'accuse,' said Roskill. 'There you are, Mrs Sheldon—I've given you a slightly better copy than your lord and master… If that typewriter was good enough for Billy Bullitt's grandfather, little Olga, it ought to be good enough for you. And his thrifty use of old worn-out carbon-paper matches our thrifty use of you as a tape-recorder. If the Civil Estimates chaps knew how we operate, they'd sleep a lot sounder after lunch.'

There were nine or ten closely typed pages, Mosby estimated, but no indication of what they contained by way of title—

' This country has lost nothing but its honour, and having lost that has lost everything—'

What the hell?

He looked up to find Audley's eyes on him.

'I want you to read just the first page, to show you what we're up against,' said Audley. 'Then you can skip the next few pages and go straight to the meaty part. But that first page to start with, please.'

'What is it?' asked Shirley.

'It's Billy Bullitt's credo,' said Frances. 'And it also explains why he's going to evict the CIA from Britain—and how he intends to do it. That's all.'

Mosby bent over Page One—