The Old Vengeful

better get my report into the pipeline before they made it official.'

'Damnation!' Audley smote his forehead. 'That makes two mistakes I've made—three, counting tonight—' he glanced at the grandfather clock '—or this morning . . . God, I'm slipping!'

'What mistakes?'

'Your Elizabeth Loftus, for one.' Audley looked at Mitchell keenly. 'You like her, do you? That's the reason for this inquisition, is it?'

Steady again. 'I think she's quite a woman—if you must know, David. . .Yes—I like her.'

'Yes.' The look became rueful. 'My dear wife told me as much a couple of nights back—she knew, and I couldn't see dummy3

it! I said she wasn't your type, and she isn't . . . But she said I'd better watch out— that you'd get awkward if things started to go wrong.'

Curiosity. 'And that was your first mistake?'

'That was my third mistake. My first was not to realise quite how bright she really was— is, thank God!' He drew a deep breath. 'It never occurred to me that she'd put the whole thing together—or half the thing . . . and the most dangerous half, too! God Almighty!' He shook his head.

Humiliation. What had Elizabeth put together that Paul Mitchell had missed?

And double humiliation: unlike Elizabeth, who didn't know Audley as he did, he ought to have known that there was something to put together, because with Audley there always was. And what made it worse was that, in a sense, he had known all along—

'I really am rather an idiot,' said Audley. 'I thought I'd got it worked out so well, for once.'

'Oh, yes?' If that was the case, then there was no point in exploding, Mitchell decided. 'But just tell me one thing, David—I am curious about one thing . . .'

Audley blinked at him. 'Yes?'

'Can you tell me what the hell I've been doing?'

'Ah . . .' Audley blinked again, and then looked round the room. 'Now ... if we were in the library I could show you, from David Chandler's book on Marlborough. But then, as dummy3

you're a military historian, you won't need to read about it—

you'll know it already.'

'Know what?'

'The battle of Ramillies—1706.'

'What about the battle of Ramillies?'

'He won it by a diversion: he lured all the French troops to his right flank by attacking there. Then he hit them in the centre.'

A nasty suspicion crystallised in Mitchell. 'Are you telling me that I've been on the right flank of your army?'

'No . . . that's not the point—' Audley's face creased '—the point is that Marlborough didn't actually tell the troops on the right that the real attack was in the centre, any more than Monty told us in Normandy that our job was to draw off all the German armour so that the Americans could break out elsewhere.' He gave Mitchell a twisted smile. 'We wouldn't actually have mutinied if we'd known . . . but he was right not to tell us. Because the Germans would never have believed that we were the main attack if we hadn't believed it first ourselves, you see. And, in a way, we were right to believe in it, Paul, because our diversionary bloodbath was essential to the breakout—it was all the same battle. And I like to think, when I remember absent friends, that we had the place of honour in it, if not the glory.'

Mitchell's eyes strayed to the reports on the table. 'The place of honour' was gift-wrapped bullshit for his benefit. But that dummy3

'diversionary bloodbath' was an accurate description for what had happened on Saturday evening.

Or worse than that, even. 'So those three—' he pointed '—I killed them ... as a diversion?'

'Ah . . . no, you mustn't think of it like that. You saved a valuable life—perhaps a very valuable life. It was like saving a child from three mad dogs—you had no choice.'

'But it wasn't planned—it wasn't part of any plan?'

'It was better than we'd planned.' Audley paused. 'We had to convince Moscow that we were chasing the wrong Vengeful

—just for a few days they had to believe we were off in the wrong direction, and we had to give them those days. And you yourself said that the old Vengeful was exactly the sort of hare I'd be tempted to chase—so they thought so too, which was why they let you spot Novikov so easily, of course.'

'But they didn't know about . . . those three . . . and Loftus's money?'

'Not a thing. But when they did, they must have been as pleased as I was—that was a pure bonus for both sides.'

'But how did they know?'

'Because we made damn sure they did—'

'Wait!' Mitchell felt the plot thickening around him too fast.