The Memory Trap

He winced within himself. Those were almost the exact words he had been accustomed to feed Cathy on long car-journeys. Which reminded him that, however stimulating, this wasn't the homecoming he'd planned for next week, just in time for her birthday. And he hadn't even got her a present now.

Damn!

'Your bag, sir.'

The civilian was offering him his hand luggage while standing outside an anonymous door on which the uniformed man was about to knock.

'Thank you.' On the other hand, depending on the nature of this emergency, it might get him home earlier. And, however important his Washington job was supposed to have been, it dummy1

had also been ineffably boring most of the time. So all this might yet be a time-bonus. 'And my other luggage?'

'That's being transferred directly to your onwards flight, sir.'

The words took a second to register. 'My onwards flight — '

He just managed to clip the humiliating question mark off the end.

'Don't worry, sir. I shall attend to it myself.' The man was wearily accustomed to querulous questions from VIPs. 'And I shall be returning here to collect you — ' He looked at his wrist-watch. ' — in exactly thirty minutes from now, sir.'

If this was Hell, then he wasn't even properly in it, thought Audley irritably: he was in the limbo of transit to somewhere else. And wherever it was, he already didn't want to go there.

Then he realized that the uniformed man was opening the door for him — he hadn't heard either a knock or any reply to it, but the thunderous VIP scowl he had fixed on the poor fellow had rendered the man expressionless.

'Yes — thirty minutes. Thank you.' He heard himself reply to them both as he strode into the room like the wrath of God.

'What the devil — '

'Hullo, David,' said Sir Jack Butler.

Audley felt the wrath of God deflate, collapsing him to his true size in an instant. 'Hullo, Jack.'

'Close the door, there's a good chap.'

'Yes, Jack.' He had expected an underling, he realized. Or an equal, anyway. But, equal or underling — or civil servant of dummy1

any variety and seniority, bearing whatever instructions and orders, and whatever material to be quickly studied, and then signed for or returned — or even the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, with the Thirty-Nine Articles — it would have been all the same. But it was Jack Butler. So he closed the door.

'David, I'm sorry to pull you off a job like this — in this way.'

'That's all right, Jack.' What he hated about Jack Butler apologies was their sincerity. Anyone else's apologies he could treat with the disdain they deserved. But when Jack said he was sorry, then that was what he was.

'I wouldn't have done it if it wasn't necessary.' Butler regarded him steadily.

'No? I mean — no — ' From having been suddenly embarrassed, Audley became even more suddenly apprehensive: that Jack himself should come to brief him was not in itself too worrying, because knighthood and promotion hadn't changed him one bit; but this elaboration of his apology was out of character ' — no, of course not, I mean.'

'Sit down, David.'

Audley sat down — only to discover that the chairs in this particular VIP safe-room were somewhat lower and very much softer than he expected, so that for a moment he felt that he was never going to stop sitting down until he reached the floor. 'Ah — yes, Jack?'

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Butler had seated himself without difficulty. 'You are here because I made a grave error of judgement,' he said simply.

'As a result of which we have lost someone.'

Audley's brain went into over-drive. Taking responsibility for mistakes had never been one of Jack Butler's problems: he had been taking it for upwards of forty years, ever since he had first sewn his lance-corporal's single stripe on to his battle-dress blouse. But losing someone was always unsettling, and all the more so in these somewhat less violent days.

'Who's dead?' It came out brutally before he could stop it, as the possible names of those at risk presented themselves —

names, faces and next-of-kin.

'No one you know.' Butler drew a single breath. 'But it should have been you, David.'

'Me?' Taken together with that 'error of judgement' that had all the makings of a sick little joke. But Butler had never been a man for jokes, sick or otherwise. And he certainly wasn't joking now. 'What d'you mean — me?'

'Jaggard asked us to make a contact with someone from the other side.' Coming straight to the point was more Butler's style. 'From the Arbatskaya Ploshchad.'

'From — ?' That was even more precisely from 'the other side': it was from the other side of the Kremlin —not the KGB side (from which, in the Dark Ages, orders to kill had so often emanated), but the GRU . . . which, in the present dummy1

climate, was even more surprising. 'From military intelligence, Jack?' But then, coming from anywhere over there at this moment, it was not so much surprising as —