War Game

Audley looked at him for a moment, then down at the files on the desk. ' 'Information received', I suppose you might say.'

'Information from whom?' Clinton was clearly puzzled.

'Oh, it's not in the record, Fred.' Audley shook his head slowly. 'It wasn't the sort of information that goes in records.

It was much too subjective for that.'

'But good all the same—obviously.'

'But good . . . yes.' Audley nodded. 'You see, I talked to this—

well, I guess you could call him an expert on human greed. . . . And he said that the possession of gold does things to people. He made it sound like a contagious disease.'

'Contagious?'

'Infectious too—you showed a symptom or two yourself just now. But the contagious variety is the worst, and Charlie had got that badly. Because he'd handled the stuff. . . he'd felt the weight of it, and seen the beautiful colour of it. Which was dummy5

why it didn't surprise him one bit that I was prepared to kill and betray for it—he recognised his own symptoms subconsciously.'

'And twice the gold made him twice as greedy, you mean?'

'Maybe. But I don't think he would have seen it like that at all. Because what the Russians had given him was their gold.

What I'd got—what I might be taking from his land right under his nose—that was his gold. And he couldn't bear the thought of it, it was worth almost any risk to stop that—and he couldn't bear the possibility that Gates or Bishop might say 'no' to the risk being taken. So he had to take it himself.'

Clinton studied him. 'You sound as though you were very sure of him.'

'Not totally. But there was one thing I was sure of.'

'And what was that?'

Audley's eye was caught for an instant by the rich colours of the flowers in the hearth. 'I only met one man who'd actually seen Charlie Ratcliffe in action—who knew him as he was. ...

He was an old gardener who liked growing flowers—the gardener at Standingham Castle.'

Clinton waited.

'He said Ratcliffe was a chancer. So I gave him his chance, Fred. That's all. And he took it.'

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Author's Note

THE Sealed Knot, the King's Army and the Roundhead Association, which are mentioned in passing in this story, are real organisations. The Double R society and its members in no way resemble these admirable and innocent groups, except perhaps in such virtues as they may share. No comparison between the factual and the fictional is intended.

On the other hand, the story of Soviet Russia's acquisition of the gold of the Spanish Republic is a matter of history; as is also that of General Krivitsky, the one-time Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe, who escaped to tell the tale—and to die in suspicious circumstances in a Washington hotel in 1941.

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