Here Be Monsters

treatment, semi-disguised subjects - hats, dark glasses, raincoats. All he knew was that they were Anglo- Saxon - or, Anglo-American - mostly youngish, or even young. And he knew the dates, near enough, over these two three-week periods in the summer. That was all.' He nodded to emphasize the last word. 'In the end they took him apart - leaned hard on him. But that was all he had.'

But that wasn't all that was in the record, thought Elizabeth. 'All?'

'They didn't like it, of course.' Audley breathed in deeply, and expelled a sigh of remembrance. 'Most particularly, they didn't like the bit about the semi-disguised VIPs dummy2

being youngish or young. Because that smelt too much like laying down new claret, for drinking in the seventies. Like the Cambridge thirties vintages were laid down.' Audley spoke off-handedly now, reminding Elizabeth that if there was one thing he hated, and invariably referred to in his most casual voice, it was the infamous Cambridge gang. For he was a Cambridge man himself, and desperately proud of it.

'So what did they do?'

'They went for Debrecen, of course.' Audley's voice harshened again. 'This was '57 -

Hungary was still wide-open to us then, after '56, in the sense that the Hungarians all loathed the Russians so much that they'd do anything for us.' The harshness was almost gravelly. 'And we had any number of Hungarians who were prepared to go back, if they knew we wanted something.' He drew another breath. 'That was when we got all the physical data - pictures, measurements, the lot.'

That had certainly been precise: the long-disused Imperial Hapsburg hunting-lodge in the forest, well away from the city and effectively in the middle of nowhere which the Nazis had reanimated and uglified with military perimeter and buildings as a training centre for their Brandenburg elites, which had operated far beyond the battle lines in Russia, which lay only a few miles away; and which, when the wheel had turned full circle, the Russians had in turn occupied, to train a very different elite to fight a very different war in the opposite direction, so it seemed.

All the physical data. 'But they'd gone by then?' She spurred him.

'Uh-huh. The birds had flown.' She just caught him twitch under her spur. 'The eggs had hatched, and the fledglings had departed for warmer climes, never to return.' He looked at her suddenly. 'That was the difference: never to return.'

'Why did they close it down?'

'Ah… well, at first the Three Wise Men thought it was because of the Rising in '56, simply.

And they were half-right, anyway.'

'How - half-right?'

'Because there were Hungarians who'd seen too much, in the nature of things, Elizabeth.'

He made a face at her. 'Because there were AVRM Hungarians - most of them were bastards, and some of them got lynched in '56.' He looked at her again suddenly. But this time he really saw her, as he had not done before. 'Jesus Christ, Elizabeth! You don't really remember '56, do you? When the Iron Curtain was split open wide for a time, and you could drive all the way to Budapest, and the people in the villages would cheer you on, dummy2

and offer you drinks? And Suez - when Radio Cairo went off the air after our Canberras had hit it? You were just a baby then, of course.'

Momentarily his guard was down: Hot heart, cool head was what he preached, which was the old KGB-NKVD axiom. But the recollection of long ago - and perhaps of a mistake he had made in that far-off time - was animating him now, and betraying him as it did so.

'I'm not quite with you, David - ?'

'It was the Age of Innocence, love. Or relative innocence, anyway - when I was young… or, if not quite young, not senile, anyway.' He grinned at her hideously. 'Old memories - senile reminiscences, no more.' He flexed a leg, and massaged its constricted knee. 'The fact of it was that he wasn't the only defector. Because there was this Hungarian AVRM who came over at about the same time - probably for much the same reasons as Gorbatov. Only he went over to the Americans, not our people. But he'd run all the rackets in the Debrecen district, and he was nobody's fool. So it transpired.'

So that was what had happened, Elizabeth realized in a flash: the British had stumbled on something, more or less by accident. But, when it had gone cold on them, they had naturally offered it to the Americans - naturally, because after Suez they must have been hell-bent on ingratiating themselves with their former allies, and Comrade Colonel Gorbatov had said ' or Anglo-American' , so they had something to offer.

'And what did he say?' And that, to clinch the matter, helped to account for those two lists

- one British, but the other American.

'He'd got the other half of the sweepstake ticket.' Audley nodded. 'Which he shouldn't have had. But he was a lot smarter than old Gorbatov, anyway. Because, when he came across, it was Debrecen that he reckoned was his ticket to the good life - the bit printed in Russian, which the Americans would want to read, do you see?'

Elizabeth saw, but didn't quite see. Because the record was inexact here, to say the least, and what Paul had told her about David confirmed its equivocation about the exact nature of Debrecen: ' he never quite says the same thing twice' .

But she had to cut through all that now, after the Pointe du Hoc and their Xenophon interview, and all the miles which were slipping away now, at more than one for each minute, towards Major Turnbull and the onetime Squadron Leader Thomas.

'What was Debrecen, David?' If he'd never said the same thing twice he probably wouldn't say the same thing now, when his neck was on the block. But even the difference between what he said now, and what he had once said, was something she had to establish. 'Really?'

dummy2

He took the point of the question, judging by the mile-or-more he used to think about it, at 70 mph, while estimating both ends against the middle.