jammed with traffic.
'You said — ' The movement of the Porsche once more cut her off. Keeping up with Major Richardson was still part of her priorities, until she'd got him safe under SAS lock-and-key. Or, him and that other bastard, Audley, for an informed guess.
'Yes.' There was a jam of vehicles ahead of them. And one element of it, on the main road which they were trying to join, was a tail-back of military vehicles which was not giving way, complete with a goggled motor-cyclist who was holding back the traffic on the side road in his unit's favour.
'Castles, I was saying: how the 'quadrilateral' group controls the road into England, to Hereford and Cheltenham — yes? Very interesting, they are, too. Skenfrith dummy1
and Grosmont are in the middle of villages. But White and Maerdy are in the middle of nowhere, pretty much.
Particularly Maerdy, up beyond Monmouth a few miles.'
'Dr Audley —' Mary Franklin's fingers drummed on the steering-wheel impatiently ' — you said —'
'To Hereford and Cheltenham, Miss Franklin — Mary. A few days' march, in the old days. But only half-an-hour's drive to Hereford now. And little more than an hour to GCHQ
Cheltenham, using the motorways. Right?'
'What?' The last of the military convoy was passing. And maybe ... it was at least just possible that he had done Henry Jaggard an injustice, at that. Or even that Henry Jaggard knew more than he'd let on, and was actually hedging his bets — ?
'What are you saying, Dr Audley?' She was torn down the middle by his sudden shift from ancient to disturbingly modern, and the crawl of the Porsche ahead.
He smiled at her. 'Up ahead, north beyond Monmouth, on the Maerdy road, Mary — that's where Major Richardson chanced upon that crashed van, with the Spetsnaz spade in it. So it was somewhere up there where they must have planted one of their arms dumps, back in the eary 1970s, it looks like.'
The Porsche was moving and they were moving with it, as though at the end of an invisible tow-rope.
'The old days, Miss Franklin.' He spoke into her ear. She had dummy1
a beautiful little shell-like ear, which didn't need an earring.
'You won't remember them. And they probably wouldn't have been your concern, anyway. Just as they weren't mine ... or Peter Richardson's as it happens. But everyone knew the theory of it, of course — it was a theoretical near-certainty that they had to be establishing such dumps, little by little.'
They were on the bridge now, although still moving only yard-by-yard with the town beyond shrouded in rain-mist.
So this would have been dangerous weather in the very old days, when the war-beacons, burning in the Black Mountains ahead to warn that the Welsh raiders were coming, would have been blotted out.
'Those were the Brezhnev days, Miss Franklin — post-Vietnam, early Brezhnev ... the deep Cold War days.' The days of Audley, he thought: the years of endurance! Not like now — eh, Audley? 'The targets were obvious. Like, the early warning stations. And the communications centres.
And, of course, SAS headquarters and GCHQ Cheltenham —
those were both prime targets, inevitably, for Spetsnaz assault groups. But their problem wasn't getting the men in, ahead of D-Day: there are a thousand ways of getting in good-looking fellows like General Lukianov — or Captain Lukianov, he would have been then . . . Lorry-drivers, tourists, mock- Irishmen to Milford Haven and Holyhead and Liverpool. . . sailors with a bit of shore-leave, with friendly passports.' He paused. 'The problem was their dummy1
weapons and equipment —machine-guns and mortars, rocket-launchers and the rest. And plenty of Semtex, naturally.'
The traffic had clogged up completely, so that she was able to face him again at last.
'A complete do-it-yourself arsenal, Miss Franklin. All neatly packed and ready to use — worth a fortune to any terrorist group.' He could see from her lack of colour that every word had entered that pretty ear. 'Arabs — why the PFLP, or Abu Nidal, you're going to ask? Or maybe it would suit the Arabs to make a deal with the IRA, on the side. Or they've got an export- cover of some sort — who knows? And they want to queer Yasser Arafat's pitch, if he gets too close to making a deal with Israel.'
She drew a breath. 'How do you know this?'
'I don't know it — any of it. But Lukianov was Spetsnaz. And no Spetsnaz arms dumps have ever been found. Only a couple of communications outfits, in North Wales and Yorkshire. And then only by pure accident.' He shook his head. 'I'm simply trying to string all that together, with what we've got, to make some sort of sense of it — ' He frowned ahead. 'What the hell's happening here, in
