War Game

certain, really. It's his style.'

'And you found that merely . . . interesting?'

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'Not merely—very. We still didn't know what Ratcliffe was up to, his cover's goddamn good.'

But they'd watched him for months nevertheless. The KGB

Paris contact must have been top brass indeed for that.

'Not until the gold turned up, anyway,' continued Davenport. 'Then we knew, of course. With that sort of finance he can really get The Rat off the ground, and with the dirt they can feed him he can pick his targets. . . . But I guess you know all that better than we do.' He gave Audley a rueful look. 'When it comes to cover your boys are no slouches either: until you cracked down a week ago we didn't think you were on to him at all.'

'Until the gold turned up,' Audley repeated the words mechanically.

'Yeah.' Davenport shook his head admiringly. 'You've got to hand it to the bastards—that was goddamn smart. Goddamn smart.'

The distant sound of clapping intruded into Audley's consciousness, as though the cricket crowd agreed with Davenport. Someone had scored or someone was out.

Someone had scored sure enough: the Russians— ?2?

million in good clean honest untainted money, for no losses.

He nodded wisely at Davenport. 'Yes, I have to agree with you there. And all good genuine seventeenth- century Spanish gold too. That threw us, I can tell you.'

'Hah!' Davenport gave a short laugh. 'Well, they've dummy5

obviously still got enough of it to pick the genuine article out of stock. But then Krivitsky said at the time that when they unloaded the stuff at Odessa in '36 there was enough of it to cover Red Square from end to end, and he had that from one of the NKVD men who was on the quayside. And some of that gold must have been in store in Madrid for centuries.'

Dear God! thought Audley despairingly —how could they have been so stupid, so short-memoried! The Spanish Civil War gold—the gold of the embattled republic which Azana and Prieto had despatched to Russia for safe keeping in October, 1936, and which had turned all subsequent Soviet aid to Spain into a profitable deal that would have brought a blush to any Capitalist cheek; the gold—the Spanish gold—

which had been such a bonanza that Stalin had announced shortly after that new mines had been found in the Urals, the old blackguard!

The Spanish gold which hadn't been found at all in the crater behind the bastion, but which had been planted there.

There was the full design at last. And all the elaborate tapestry of history they had woven was a lie: Matthew Fattorini's honest facts about cargoes and voyages, Nayler's painstakingly assembled inferential evidence, Paul Mitchell's elegant research . . . even his own smug reconstruction of how Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had schemed to conceal their gold—all that was a lie, a self-deception, an edifice built with moonbeams and shadows.

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The reality—as recalled by the one-time Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in the West for the benefit of the Saturday Evening Post before SMERSH had caught up with him in a Washington hotel— the reality was a convoy of lorries from Madrid to Cartagena, and then an old freighter with its name painted out steaming slowly from there to Odessa, and then the train to Moscow and the Kremlin vaults.

And then, forty years later, a fraction of the loot had travelled West again, to finance another risky but potentially profitable operation. . . .

Audley superimposed the reality on the lie and came to the instant conclusion that the lie was more convincing. If Spanish gold, the gold of King Philip's Americas, had to end up in the kitchen garden of a great house in England, it should more likely have come via the son of a Devon sea-dog than by the order of a nameless Russian bureaucrat in some dusty office in Dzerzhinsky Street.

But, by the same token, when the KGB could summon up a man who could twist English history to his own use—and even the CIA could conjure up an agent who knew the difference between New England and Old England—then the English themselves ought to be able to screw them both into the ground.

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I elect myself for that job, decided Audley dispassionately.

And I shall break the rules to do it, if that's the only way it can be done.

Davenport was looking at him with a mixture of hope and expectation in his expression—the hope of freedom and the expectation that the legend would justify his reputation. It would be wrong to disappoint him.

'Well, Master Davenport, you've messed us up properly—I can tell you that for free,' he said.

Davenport's lip drooped. 'Once I was out you would have been given everything we had.'

'But you aren't out. And we thought you were Charlie Ratcliffe's action man, maybe. So who is—can you give us that?'

Davenport blinked. 'Sure. If it's a trade, that is.'

'Part of a trade. You're not in a good trading position, but I'm inclined to be generous. I wouldn't like to see Howard Morris sent back home on the next plane.' Audley smiled.

'Okay. He has two guys to hold his hand.'

'In his—ah—his regiment?'

'No. In one of the militia regiments.'

Well, well!