The Memory Trap

'It was a very good one, actually. What they call a 'Bakaa Valley' job — the Israelis do.' He watched Audley. 'They're experts on Arabs and passports, your old Israeli friends are.

And your other old friend, Colonel Benedikt Schneider, is well-in with them. So they obliged him by identifying it for him: it's part of a lot they've picked up examples of elsewhere . . . from Abu Nidal-PFLP distribution. Which doesn't mean much precisely, because any of those splinter groups will provide a hitman if the deal is right, Schneider says. Complete with a one-way ticket, even.' He paused.

'Which fits Berlin rather uncomfortably, I'm afraid, David.

Because whoever hired that Ay-rab must have known you'd have protection. So two shots were the most he'd expect to manage before the Verfassungsschutz took him out. But he knew he was going to paradise afterwards. So he didn't care.'

No wonder Mitchell was twitchy, thought Audley.

Then Mitchell made a face at him. 'Which doesn't get us much further, if you really don't know why you've suddenly become so unpopular all of a sudden. Which ... I take it you don't? Otherwise — ?' He turned away almost casually.

'Lovely view, eh Miss Loftus — Sorrento . . . Capri? And our own transport, too!'

Otherwise you wouldn't be here hung between them for an instant, before the sea- breeze blew it away.

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'It's a smuggler's boat.' To Audley's surprise she let herself be diverted.

'Is it, indeed?' Mitchell looked up and down the craft. 'Or ex-smuggler's boat, presumably?' He fixed finally on the low wheel-house. 'Although your Guardia friends are certainly dressed for the part, Lizzie. Is that to help us mix with the locals, just to be unobtrusive, then — ?'

They were playing with him. But, they were both scared, he decided. So, in spite of the past and the insuperable present of their relationship, they had suddenly come to an unspoken agreement. Because fear, like politics, made for strange alliances.

Or, anyway, what Elizabeth said next would confirm that-

'Not Guardia, Paul.' She leaned over the paint-flaked gunwale, pretending to study the still-indistinct loom of Capri through the haze. 'Captain Cuccaro is Intelligence, not Guardia . . . Although I don't know about the crew, such as it is . . .'

'They look like a bunch of pirates, whatever they are.' Failing to get any reaction from Audley, Mitchell was forced to prolong the exchange. 'Are we being met, in Capri?'

'I expect so.' Elizabeth wasn't so good at playing games: she couldn't think what to say next.

'You haven't told them where we're going?' Mitchell began to be stretched, in turn.

'No.' Elizabeth leaned further. And Audley found himself dummy1

watching Mitchell study the stretch of her skirt across her hips, never mind whatever else was visible from their different view-points. Because, although Miss Loftus was cursed with the Loftus-face — the Loftus-jaw, particularly . . .

her figure was all her own.

'No.' She straightened up, and looked directly at him.

'Captain Cuccaro doesn't yet know where we're going.

Because I wanted your instructions about that, David. But . . .

he's not very happy. He wants to talk to you about. . .' She almost blundered too far '. . . about Peter Richardson.'

'Yes.' Mitchell nodded, suddenly hard-faced. 'And so do I, by God! Because there's damn all in the records about him since he left us and went back to the army. And then he retired very shortly after that, anyway.'

'I don't see how he could have been a double.' Elizabeth shook her head. 'If he had been he'd never have left us.

They'd never have let him go, once he was inside.'

'So it's more likely something from the old days.' Mitchell watched Audley. 'Something he knows that maybe didn't seem important at the time . . . And you're the expert on that, David.'

'Yes.' It was no good denying what Jack Butler himself had thought. 'Whatever Richardson knows — about Kulik, or anyone else . . . anything else — he's no traitor.'

'What makes you so certain? He was Fred Clinton's man, not yours, surely?'

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'Wrong profile.' What he wasn't about to do was to discuss the instincts of the late — and, in his time, great also —

Frederick J. Clinton in the small matter of recruitment, let alone that of treachery: Mitchell had hardly known Fred, and never in his heyday — and Elizabeth hadn't know him at all.

And neither of them, anyway, had lived through treason's own heyday, as Fred had done: those infamous years when everyone had been hagridden by doubts, which Fred had once dubbed 'the Cambridge Age' to put his star recruit from Cambridge in his place. ''Profiling' went out with the ark.' Mitchell hadn't finished, and wasn't going to let go. 'It went out with Clinton.'

'He was thoroughly vetted.' He hated to hear Fred consigned to history so crudely.

'But not by you, David. Fred Clinton's man — and an old-school-tie recruit, right?'

'Army, actually.' Mitchell knew too much, again. But not quite everything.