Gunner Kelly

specials, but also the foreigners that they really trusted, who could lecture on political conditions in their own countries . . . Like, what they couldn’t do and what they could do—what they’d done wrong in the past, but where the opportunities lay in the future . . . The sort of thing Philby and Co. did a few years later—okay?”

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Philby and Co. had cut the British deep—so deep that for some of them the very names were taboo. But in this, as in so many other things, Audley was different, even though as a Cambridge man himself his wound must be particularly painful.

“And then, over the next year or so, they slipped in people from the West one by one—the promising ones they wanted properly educated for the long-term future . . . Not types connected with the intelligence services—not people who were already actively working for them, nothing like that. . . . These were the young ones who had good prospects in civilian life—in business and industry, and banking and the law, and the arts and academic life . . . The sort who might go over to politics eventually, or turn up in think-tanks. The policy-makers, if you like.” The Englishman regarded Benedikt bleakly. “They came for just a week, or a fortnight at the most . . . The sort of time they could lose quite easily in a European holiday—almost untraceable ... As I well know, because I was eventually one of those who drew the shitty job of trying to short-list our Debreczen possibles. And without alerting them, that we were vetting the vacation they’d taken five or six years before . . . whether they’d really been tasting the wine in Burgundy, or skiing in Austria, or counting the Madonnas and Children in the Uffizi. And it was damn near impossible: I got two

‘certainties’— one of which turned out to be wrong . . . and two probables, both of which were probably wrong . . . and four possibles, who could be pure as driven snow but have my black question mark against their names for evermore, because I couldn’t absolutely clear them.” He scowled, and shook his head at the dummy1

memory. “The best part of four months’ work, and really only one name to show for it. I wished to God I’d never heard of Colonel Gorbatov and Debreczen by the end of it—it was a damned shitty job!”

The adjective was not inappropriate this time, thought Benedikt: an assignment which left other men soiled by unconfirmed suspicion was a dirty one, however prudent and necessary in a dirty world.

“But Aloysius Kelly was the name you obtained?”

“Good God—no!” Audley blinked at him. “Aloysius wasn’t one of the pupils—he was one of the teachers, man—one of the experts running the course. One of the trusted foreigners, don’t you see.”

One of the trusted ones—

“He’d been on the game for years by then,” Audley elaborated.

“He’d nothing to learn, but a hell of a lot to teach.”

Benedikt kicked himself. Both Aloysius Kelly’s years of service, from the Spanish Civil War onwards, and the implacability of the KGB’s pursuit pointed to that truth. And, more than that, of all men a defecting instructor could not be allowed to live: where any Debreczen ‘student’ might, or might not, have glimpsed a fellow-student, their instructors would know them all—

“It was the CIA who identified him, when they squeezed their Debreczen graduate.” Audley’s eyes clouded. “Ours shot himself before we could get to him—he got wind that we were on his tail . . . But the Yanks got theirs—the one they managed to identify. He was an Irish-American, that’s probably why he remembered Aloysius particularly: there were no names in dummy1

Debreczen, only numbers and letters . . . The pupils never saw each other, only their teachers—it was a sort of Oxbridge tutorial system, very elitist and security-conscious. . . . Anyway, this Irish American made Aloysius sure enough—ex-Abraham Lincoln battalion in the International Brigade, ex-sidekick of Frank Ryan . . . But he had a low opinion of the IRA at that time, did Aloysius—it was the early fifties, and he said they weren’t worth a row of beans in Ireland then, but there was good anti-British work the American end could do, playing up British colonialism to weaken the Atlantic alliance, that sort of thing . . .” Audley paused.

“Unfortunately, the third day the Yanks had this chap—in a supposedly safe house outside Washington— somebody sniped him at about seven hundred yards while he was taking a breath of air.”

Audley’s shoulders lifted. “A real good shot. . . and I always wondered whether our chap really pulled his own trigger . . . But it goes to show how much they valued Debreczen, eh?”

Benedikt nodded, and thought of the wide-open view of Duntisbury Manor from the ridge, down across the lawn to the terrace . . . And was the fate of the Irish American—and possibly that unknown English traitor too—one of the things that Aloysius Kelly had passed on to Michael Kelly?

“So the Yanks never finished squeezing their man, anyway— who was the only one they got a line on. And they put Aloysius Kelly’s name on the red side of the tablets—” Audley looked at his watch suddenly “—and didn’t forget about him either.” He looked up at Benedikt equally suddenly. “You saw how our loyal ally perked up at the mention of him?”

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“Yes.” Benedikt’s mind was beginning to accelerate, moving from his own thought— one of the things that Aloysius had passed on to Michael—even before Audley had reminded him that the CIA was in the game now. “How much do you trust your American friend, David?”

“To leave the field to us?” Audley pursed his lip. “In theory quite a lot.” Then he frowned. “But Aloysius Kelly’s memoirs—or whatever he may have passed on to Michael to make a target of him . . . that’ll be a sore temptation to him, I fear. A sore temptation.”

“And he didn’t give his word to Mr Smith.”

“Nor he did! And he’s got Mr Smith, too.” Audley’s features contorted into ugliness. “And any lead to those Debreczen graduates . . . They were just the likely lads in the mid-fifties—

they’ll be the top dogs and the bosses now, the ones who’ve stayed the course.” He shook his head. “A sore temptation!”

Quite suddenly the only course of action open to him became clear to Benedikt: there would have been Germans among those Debreczen traitors— graduates was a weak euphemism for such swine—so his service had an equal interest now in what had started as a purely British affair.

“We cannot sit on this any longer, David.” He shook his head at the big Englishman. “Neither of us can. It is too big for us both.”