Soldier No More

'The inquiry into our records is in progress. But now I will inquire more urgently, since we know there is something to look for. Do not despair.'

'I'm not despairing. I just expected more help, that's all—if it's so important.'

'It is important.' Genghis Khan's fractional nod was, by the standard of his immobility, a wild gesture of agreement on that, Roche supposed. 'It is so important that it is all the more important for us not to rush in to help you, I think. We must help you with caution, is better.'

That sounded very much like all aid short of actual help, thought Roche bleakly. Between Sir Eustace's I want him quickly and Genghis Khan's we must help you with caution and St. John Latimer's he's a tricky blighter, not to mention his private plans, he was already in over his head, and he hadn't even started.

'And above all you must be cautious,' Genghis Khan compounded the situation. 'At least until we know what they want, there must be no risk taken, no slightest risk.'

'They want Audley, damn it—we know what they want,'

snapped Roche.

'Sir Eustace Avery wants Audley.' Genghis Khan stared at him un-blinkingly. 'But Oliver Saint-John Latimer does not want Audley—'

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' Sinjun. It's pronounced Sinjun, not 'Saint-John',' said Roche. ' Sinjun Latimer.'

Genghis Khan blinked just once, like a lizard. 'He sees Audley as a rival. And it is also perhaps that Avery intends him to be a rival. . . But that is not enough, there must be more . . . And there is Clinton. There is always Clinton—he must be considered.'

More?'

Genghis Khan ignored him. 'To go to such trouble for one man. There must be more—there will be more.'

He was having difficulty adjusting his thought-processes to the limitations of a decadent fascist-capitalist society, that was it. Recalling Audley's Russian equivalent to the colours would not have presented such problems. 'I don't see why.'

Arguing back was risky, but if there was something else behind the man's certainty he needed to know it. 'They think he'll maybe play hard to get, that's all. He worked for them during the war, and they approached him again a few years ago, but he turned them down flat. They think I can do better.'

The lizard-blink was repeated. 'Why you?'

Roche decided not to be insulted. 'I have what they call 'a sympathetic profile' apparently. It seems we both read history at university.' He could see that sympathetic profiles and history both left Genghis Khan unmoved. 'And I have a high security clearance.'

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That did the trick: Genghis Khan smiled, or almost smiled, and Roche wished he hadn't. It was more like the corpse-grin out of an Asiatic burial mound in which the khan presided over his circle of slaughtered slaves and horses.

But mercifully it lasted only for a moment. 'So you have been cleared to approach this man Audley . . . But that changes nothing. What matters is why they need him so urgently—

that is what we want to know.'

'It may be what you want to know. But if I don't find out a lot more about Audley than there is in the bloody file we'll never get that far,' said Roche bitterly. 'So I hope to God Major Stocker knows what he's about better than you do! Because if I fail—'

'If you fail?' Genghis Khan shook his head slowly at Roche.

'If you fail Sir Eustace Avery will not retain your services?'

Roche's guts knotted. 'It's possible.'

'Then I think you would be well-advised not to fail, David Roche,' said Genghis Khan.

'I mean, what sort of man he is—what makes him tick?' he pressed Major Stocker. 'You must have some ideas about him, more than what's in the file?'

Major Stocker pursed his lips. 'Not really, no—I haven't actually met him, you know. I've just assembled the facts.'

Stocker was Clinton's man, so it seemed, and there was nothing very unnatural about that. In peacetime, you made dummy5

the best with what you could get, and what soldiers could get usually consisted of other soldiers. He himself, although he was hardly a reassuring example of the process, was another instance of it, out of the additional factor of conscription and the accident of the Korean War. But he could have wished for the Audley file to have been assembled by someone more like Latimer.

'Seems a pretty ordinary enough chap on the face of it,'

Major Stocker struggled with his inclination to stay inside the safe defences of the facts in spite of Roche's appeal to him to crawl out into the no-man's-land of opinion.

'On the face of it?'

'Yes . . . That's to say, prep school, public school, then in the war— decent regiment until they pulled him out of the line—'

Stocker made Audley's attachment to Intelligence sound like victimisation, with Audley more sinned against than sinning