Soldier No More

to Jean-Paul, either British or French, let alone Russian.

But now he had a name.

'I heard d'Auberon mentioned in connection with it.' He needed more time to think, but there was no time. 'I'd never heard of him—he isn't an Army man.' Stocker shouldn't expect him to place Quai d'Orsay names. 'Until I got down here I didn't know he'd resigned.'

But what the hell did Sir Eustace want with information about meetings which he had jointly chaired, for God's sake?

'Where did you get all this?'

'Sir?' Playing stupid was easy, once the role was accepted.

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'Who told you about RIP—and d'Auberon?'

'Bill Ballance told me about RIP, sir.' Betrayal, always providing it wasn't himself he was betraying, was even easier than stupidity, and Bill didn't give a damn, anyway. 'And one of the girls down here told me about d'Auberon's resignation

—she knows him socially—Lady Alexandra Champeney-Perowne.' That bit of truth could do no harm, but he would keep Madame Peyrony up his sleeve. 'She met him through Audley, I think . . . Anyway, with what she said and what I already knew, all I had to do was put two and two together.'

He watched the Frenchman tuck into his potage. Whether or not Stocker was enjoying his omelette Roche equally, with its tiny truffle-specks of truth, could not be deduced from the silence at the other end of the line. But it might be as well not to let him test its quality too long in case he caught the flavour of lies in it too.

'I'm running out of time, sir. I was supposed to meet Audley five minutes ago.'

'Yes.' Stocker came to life instantly. 'So you don't actually know what d'Auberon's got, then?'

D'Auberon had got something.

But of course d'Auberon had got something. If he had quit his job in anger and disgrace with top secrets merely locked up in his head he would never have got out of Paris alive, let alone been allowed to settle comfortably in the Dordogne: the SDECE's Bureau 24 would have seen to that, if 'Colonel dummy5

Lamy' hadn't simply farmed out the job to the West German contract assassin who was working his way through the foreign arms dealers at the moment. . .

It didn't matter—what mattered was what was obvious: Jilly's guess that d'Auberon had 'beans' to spill had been right, but she hadn't taken the guess to its logical conclusion . . . which was that those beans had to be in a can somewhere safe, rigged to spill in the event of d'Auberon's untimely demise. It was so obvious that Stocker hadn't bothered to add that two-and-two for Roche's benefit.

'No, sir.' But now other twos-and-twos presented themselves in a natural progression, following that obvious one, plus what Bill Ballance had said at Christmas: it would be the name of the inside man—it must be that, nothing else fitted so well, nothing was more likely to arouse such greed.

That name would be worth almost any risk.

Any new department, starting out secure but in the cold, needed something hot to get things moving; and Avery of all people would have desired to get his hands on d'Auberon's can of beans, because Avery of all people would know its value—it had already turned him into Sir Eustace when his colleagues were being demoted or passed over or bowler-hatted. If he could lay his hands on the one intelligence source that was accurate and secure and came from the very top in the Kremlin, then he could write his own ticket in both London and Paris—the poor bloody French wouldn't have any choice, knowing that the perfidious British would shop dummy5

them otherwise.

'Now, listen here, Roche—'

Roche could feel his heart thump in his chest, not with fear and simple arithmetic but with the multiplication of excitement at last: not Avery— not Sir-bloody-Eustace— but he himself— poor-bloody- Roche— could write his ticket with that name anywhere in the world, from Washington to Moscow and back—

'. . . this is why we have to get Audley . . .'

Audley! He had forgotten Audley!

'... because we have good reason to believe that he can supply us with the d'Auberon material.'

Audley!

'. . .we had originally intended for you to bring him back to us first, and then to take it off him as a bonus . . .'

The red flare cooled instantly into icy determination, all Roche's anger chilled into bitterness by Stacker's crude lie.

Perhaps they did want Audley, he seemed a natural candidate, sure enough; but what he had was what they really wanted, he was just the bonus. And Roche himself had originally been cast as the recruiter, not to be trusted with the important work and not to be given the full credit and the proper reward.

'. . . but now we can't wait, Roche.'

They couldn't wait because they hadn't bargained on the arrival of the Americans, let alone the Israelis, on the scene dummy5

ahead of them—probably ahead of them because Mossad and the CIA had also heard of Audley's peculiar virtue, and had moved more quickly to exploit it. 'You understand?'

He was expected to understand about the Israelis and the Americans. What he didn't understand was why they