“I do not believe I did. Also, at least he would not have taken me for a soldier, Colonel. And if he telephones the embassy they will tell him about Dr Wiesehofer—they will confirm what I told him.
Major Herzner will have seen to that.”
The two men exchanged glances.
“He has phoned the embassy?” Benedikt looked from one to the other, and the Colonel nodded to the Special Branch man.
“Somebody phoned the embassy.” Andrew nodded. “Not from there—we’re monitoring all the calls from Duntisbury Royal. And not Audley either.” He studied Benedikt for a moment. “What did you say Herr—Dr— Wiesehofer did for a living?”
“I said he was a civil servant, Chief Inspector.”
“And what does he do?”
“He is a civil servant.” They would know, of course. “He is a procurement advisor on the NATO standardisation committee.”
Andrew half-smiled. “Yes . . . well, it was from the export director of Anglo-American Electronics, the call was. They specialise in micro-systems for missiles for NATO.”
But why the half-smile? “So it was a genuine call?”
Chief Inspector Andrew shrugged. “Could be.”
“The trouble with David Audley ... is that he knows a lot of people, Captain,” said Butler.
dummy1
“Like the managing director of AAE, for one,” said Andrew. “So, if he was going to check up on you, this is exactly the way he might do it—on the old boy network. But there’s no way we can check up on
The contradictions of the situation were beginning to confuse Benedikt. In Germany the managing director of a company specialising in NATO missile-systems would be no problem, he would know where his duty lay, and his best interests too. But then in Germany, when Colonel Butler’s opposite number trusted a senior officer to the extent that Colonel Butler trusted Dr David Audley, there would have been no problem to resolve in the first place. It was all very confusing.
Butler had stopped stroking his chin. “Why would he not take you for a soldier?”
That, at least, was easy. He extracted the spectacle-case from his pocket, and the spectacles from the case.
“Soldiers are not half-blind.” He perched the appalling things on his nose. His eyes hurt and the faces of the two men swam in an opaque sea, and he took the spectacles off quickly. “I use them with contact lenses—I became used to them several years ago—”
He smiled at Colonel Butler, remembering Sonnenstrand “—in Bulgaria. With contact lenses, it is a matter of growing accustomed to them. Then the glasses by themselves are no problem. Also, with contact lenses and the necessary preparations which go with them, no one questions that I should have all that in my baggage too dummy1
—they cannot know that the lenses correct the glasses, not the eye-sight, you see.”
“Huh!” Colonel Butler sniffed. “A gimmick.”
“But a convincing one, sir. And not inappropriate for a student of Roman roads.”
Butler remained unconvinced. “But Audley’s no fool. And I didn’t expect him to surface so quickly. I was expecting him to keep in the background.” He shook his head. “So I wouldn’t bet on it—and that gives us less time, I’m afraid . . . Always supposing that we have any time.”
“The Roman roads weren’t bad, sir,” demurred the Chief Inspector.
“He can hardly have been expecting that, for God’s sake! Not in the time we had—”
“Huh!” This time it was more like a growl. “He once passed
and in a damn sight less time, too!” He grimaced reminiscently.
“But you couldn’t know that—I doubt whether even Captain Schneider’s computer in Wiesbaden knows it!”
The Colonel was plainly worried about his unimpeachably reliable subordinate, notwithstanding that loyalty-to- the-death. And although that added to Benedikt’s confusion, so far as that was possible, it also fed his instinctive liking for the man: Colonel Butler was a leader out of the same mould as Papa’s idols.
“I don’t know what he made of me, sir.” He came back to the original question. “But I was not the man he was waiting for—that dummy1
I know.”
“The man?” Colonel Butler forgot his worries. “The man?”
“It could not have been a woman. He would not have come to look at me if I had been the wrong sex.” He stretched what he believed to its limits. “At the worst ... he was not sure of me—that I was not doing what I was actually doing . . . Looking over the place, that is.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I was never alone, sir. From the moment I entered the Chase, there was always someone, I think, who was watching me.” He struggled with the concept. “At the road-block . . . and in the public house . . . But there was a man on the hillside—on the ridge—
