Our man in Camelot

grass verge. Then he heard it accelerate.

Nothing.

He opened his eyes. Already the countryside was flattening out beneath him, with the chequer-board of tiny English fields becoming visible and the sweep of the new freeway which cut through them less than a mile from where he stood.

Somewhere out there, carefully hidden, was all the paraphernalia of David Audley's department, men, cars, helicopters—all waiting for the camera man's first assistant to fire his flare gun. Perhaps even the men loading the bales of straw in the newly-cut wheatfield away to his left… and for sure those repairmen blocking one of the freeway lanes so conveniently.

He turned back to the hillside. So the planting of that letter had to be part of the KGB's trap, the first clue designed to direct their attention first to Davies, then to Billy Bullitt. Nothing too easy, nothing too obvious… They had to work their way to disaster by their own efforts.

He could hear another car. So let this one be in the back—that would be more appropriate, anyway.

He stared down at the daisy in his hand. How had they been so sure that the Americans wouldn't catch up with Davies? And more, how had they managed to place Davies in the exact spot where he had been needed, to feed Billy Bullitt with the great lies so very carefully constructed that it took this walk in the sun to cast doubt on them?

The second car had passed as peacefully as the first.

'I think we could get some shots here,' said the camera man.

'Okay,' said Mosby.

'Fine. Well, the original script is for you to point up towards the hill-fort on the top. Then down towards the Ridgeway, where the road is… and across over the line of the railway—over there on the far left—

which is towards the line of the Roman road from the south-west.'

Billy Bullitt's original script. This had been where he had thought it must have happened, at this vital strategic crossroads of Dark Age Britain, where the ancient downland trackway from the north-east crossed the Roman roads from the east and the south.

Mosby looked up obediently towards the line of the ramparts on the hilltop.

You are assigned to locate the map reference of Badon Hill, England. Just that.

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

Well, this was as close as he'd ever get to fulfilling that assignment, because with Wodden out of the running they were never going to know for sure if this was the place. The old arguments would go on and on, and round and round, as they'd always done.

They wouldn't even know who had besieged who—whether there'd been Saxon horse-tail standards waving up there or the banner of Our Lady. Whether the Saxons had been trapped and starved into the open to be caught by one great scything charge of Arthur's fabled horsemen, or whether the Britons had been trapped and saved at the last by an epic Arthurian ride-to-the-rescue.

They'd never know, and it didn't matter a damn because that was how it ought to be: a matter of faith, not fact. Because the enduring value of Arthur existed not in the elusive truth of his historical victory and defeat, but in the vision each generation had of him. Even in Billy Bullitt's crazy vision.

For the first time Mosby was utterly sure of himself. This was the place, not Wodden. And this was where they would come for him.

He wondered, strangely without rancour, whether Schreiner and Morris had envisaged anything remotely like this—whether the strict assignment to hunt Badon Hill, and not the agents of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti as he had been trained to do, had been carefully calculated to achieve the same result.

But that was another thing which was no longer important.

'That's great,' said the photographer. 'Now look back the way you've come. Admire the view.'

Mosby turned to the huge open landscape.

This was the place. But not the place which fitted in with the KGB's plans, so they had invented a whole new piece of history—

… usque ad annum obsessionis Badonici montis qui prope Sord'num hostium ex Durnovaria Arturo habetur…

—which enabled them to work at their leisure on their false Badon, free from the worry that anyone might disturb them.

'Now look down towards the road,' commanded the photographer.

Mosby didn't want to look down. The horizon was so close he could almost reach out and touch it, as though it was a painting. A bird swooped past him, banking away at the last moment.

Davies the bird-watcher.

Davies the Arthur-hunter, the Badon-hunter.

The sun came out from behind a big, fleecy cloud, blinding him even through his dark glasses.

The only person we can trace he ever spoke to was the bookseller.

That was Merriwether.

He insisted I should never contact him at the base.

Billy Bullitt's statement.