War Game

Blushing to the roots of his hair, Master Nigel bent over and whispered in her ear urgently.

'Oh!' Mistress Henrietta's gaze shifted from Audley to Mitchell. Then, as her brother straightened up, she searched in the leather bag which hung from her wrist and triumphantly produced a handful of rather crushed parsley.

'For you,' she said, holding it out to Mitchell.

Mitchell accepted the gift with one hand, and then swept off his plumed hat in the elaborate figure-of-eight bow with the other. 'My lady . . . and you, sir—' he looked down at Master Nigel '—remember what I told you—

God for King Charles! To Pym and such carles The devil that prompts 'em their treasons parles!

—don't forget. And if they want to know where your father is, dummy5

tell them he's riding with Prince Rupert, like every other true-hearted English gentleman.'

Audley slid the photographs out of the envelope.

Robert Davenport—a lean, nondescript face sandwiched between the tall black hat and the plain white collar of the Puritan divine.

David Bishop—button nose and chubby cheeks, a baby-face made more for laughter than for the steel helmet perched incongruously above it.

Philip Gates—another ordinary Anglo-Saxon face, fair hair falling across eyes which stared in surprise directly into the camera.

John Lumley—those at least were memorable features, the arched nose and jutting chin framed by the black cavalier wig and beard: it had to be a disguise because that sort of expression went with short hair in the twentieth century, no matter what the fashions of the seventeenth might have decreed.

He watched as Frances and Mitchell swopped the prints between them, noting Mitchell's cheek muscles tighten with irritation as he came to Lumley's.

'Philip Oates knew he was being photographed,' said Frances, holding up the snap.

'I hope they all knew they were being photographed,' said dummy5

Audley. 'These are four people we're leaning on—I told you.

Plus Charlie Ratcliffe himself. All five of them, they're going to hear their phones go 'click' when they lift the receiver.

They're going to notice cars parked across the street from where they live—the same cars that were parked across the road from where they work. Their friends are going to tell them that people have been asking questions about them.

And the people they see aren't going to be the people who are doing the real watching, either. They're each getting the VIP

treatment.'

Frances frowned. 'You mean . . . Fail-Safe Surveillance?'

'For a week, yes.'

'Even for a week, that's pretty expensive stuff.' Frances's brow furrowed with the effort of the mental arithmetic she was doing. 'I didn't know your budget stretched to that sort of thing just now.'

Mitchell laughed suddenly. 'Maybe we're expecting a profit for once. A ton of gold would pay a fairish dividend on the deal.'

'Don't be silly, Paul.'

'I'm not being silly, honeybunch. If David does pull this rabbit out of the hat not even the Tribune Group will be able to complain about the high cost of security —we could probably put in for a Queen's Award for Industry, I shouldn't wonder.'

'But there's something not right about this.' Frances dummy5

shrugged him off simply by staring at Audley. 'There are too many people getting involved, David. First there were just the three of us—or four, with that policeman of yours. But now there are five surveillance teams . . . and they can't possibly operate at fail-safe level without four to a team. Plus a field controller and a technical services adviser for the electronics.' She shook her head. 'That's an awful lot of people, David.'

'Plus the red-haired, red-faced gentleman,' murmured Mitchell. 'But of course we do have 'friends' helping us this time, according to David.'

'Special Branch,' said Frances, still watching Audley.

'Special Branch doing the harassment bit—which they hate doing. And we hate making them do it... So you can talk about us leaning on Charlie Ratcliffe, but it feels more like someone's leaning on us.'

Another bright one, thought Audley. But then Mitchell, the trained military historian, had enjoyed his part of the assignment, which was little more than doing what came naturally to him. Whereas Frances, who had cut her teeth on very different problems, would have little sympathy for her task, and none at all for dressing up like this. And that had spurred her on to question its nature.

But with such a bright one, doubt was a corrosive which had to be treated seriously. 'There's a political angle to this, Frances,' he said gently. 'Sometimes the politicians require us to pick their chestnuts out of the fire, and we have to do it.

dummy5

'Of course there's a political angle,” said Mitchell dismissively. 'Charlie Ratcliffe is a political animal. And the lunatic left is a political force—a disproportionate force too, even without a war-chest full of gold. We've got to take his goodies away from him, Frances. It's as simple as that.'

'It isn't simple at all,' snapped Frances.