or the necessary accommodation for its guardians.
Only a farm (a private house would have been too small, if not too obvious) would have answered all those needs. And perhaps that had been the starting point in the Russians'
desperate reconstruction of that one vital piece of information which the computer conspirators had erased from the records with all the rest, both essential and inessential: the co-ordinates of its map reference.
Only a farm! But that was easy to say now that he was actually looking at it. Given time, perhaps he would have got this far, eliminating one possibility after another to pinpoint this place after Richardson had narrowed the search area. And yet that itself was only an excuse, in dummy1
dismal retrospect: there was never enough time, and in spite of Jake's warning he had squandered what he had had of it: he had allowed himself to be trapped by self-admiration of his wonderful memory, which had come up with so many answers but had foiled him in the end.
'Dr Audley — can you help me?'
'Help — ?' He realized that he had forgotten everything else, and everyone else with it, in his contemplation of the muddy farmyard and his own foolishness after he had climbed out of the truck. But what had been easy for him in the damp wreck of his second-best suit was proving not so easy for Mary Franklin. 'Yes — I'm sorry, Miss Franklin.'
She was light as a feather, and soft with it. And she still smelt good.
'Thank you, Dr Audley.' Liberated from the discomfort of the truck, she immediately put up her little red umbrella again, smoothed down her skirt, and then looked around as though she owned the place, ignoring only the Spetsnaz corporal who was covering them again with his automatic rifle. 'Where are we?'
She didn't just smell good, she was good. Because, for all that she must be bloody scared and was standing in thick mud, she hadn't lost her cool: she appeared as self-possessed as she might have been on an unfortunately inclement day at Henley or Ascot. And that served to concentrate his mind properly, away from self-pity.
'Russian headquarters in Wales, Miss Franklin.' He pointed dummy1
towards another truck, which had been outside a tumbledown barn. 'But I rather think they're busy pulling out now.'
'Yes.' She watched two curiously-garbed Spetsnaz men place a small metal container in a larger one, which was then itself hydraulically lifted, to disappear into the truck. 'I suppose we should be pleased.'
'Pulling out.' Richardson joined them. 'Just like Afghanistan, eh?'
It seemed that Mary Franklin had set the tone. Or perhaps he himself had pointed the way towards it, with his desperate bluff on the roadside, when Zimin had appeared.
And they had had time to draw their own conclusion from that in the truck, while silenced by the corporal's presence as much as the muzzle of his rifle. Or (but with these three it was perhaps unlikely) it might be that old resignation he remembered from the war, when that curious jokey lethargy had set in before they moved up to the start-line on what looked like the dawn of a bad day: When rape is inevitable, 'Daddy' Higgs had always said, you just lie back and enjoy it, sir.
'But where are all the rest of them?' Richardson looked round at the otherwise empty farmyard. 'I don't doubt that the farmer and his wife are heading for foreign parts by now — like those bastards who hired out their van for me to find . . . yes?' He came back to Audley. 'Or are they going to load up one-by-one, and take the stuff somewhere else —
dummy1
David?'
'My God!' exclaimed Paul Mitchell. 'God, David!'
Mitchell had come out last. But then he had taken several steps beyond them, towards the second truck, before being confronted by their own truck's driver and shepherded back towards them. And now he was staring at Audley.
'David — ' Mitchell rolled his eyes at the corporal, whose rifle was pointed directly at him. Then the sound of Zimin's command car, rather than the rifle, cut him off.
Audley watched as the vehicle slowed slightly to negotiate the farmyard gateway. Then, without warning, it accelerated past them, spraying mud in all directions before it skidded to a halt blocking their view of the loading.
'David — ' Mitchell's face and clothing were mud-spotted ' —
did you see — ?'
'See what?' He had been halfway to reminding himself simply that Mitchell was still twitchy, and never with better reason. But that wasn't it at all.
'Not guns, David.' Somewhere on the other side of the vehicle Zimin
