The Devil's Alternative

sitting room. His wife held their child close to her with one arm. Across her knees was the same issue of the London Times.

“Taken sixty minutes ago,” said Drake.

Pickering’s stomach tightened. The photo would win no prizes for photographic quality, but the shape of the man’s shoulder in the foreground and the sawed-off shotgun point­ing at his family was quite clear enough.

“If you raise the alarm,” said Drake quietly, “the police will come here, not to your home. Before they break in, you will be dead. In exactly sixty minutes, unless I make a phone call to say I am safely away with the money, that man is go­ing to pull that trigger. Please don’t think we are joking; we are quite prepared to die if we have to. We are the Red Army Faction.”

Pickering swallowed hard. Under his desk, a foot from his knee, was a button linked to a silent alarm. He looked at the photograph again and moved his knee away.

“Call your chief clerk,” said Drake, “and instruct him to open the account, credit the check to it, and provide the check for the twenty-thousand-pound withdrawal. Tell him you have telephoned London and all is in order. If he expresses surprise, tell him the sum is for a very big commer­cial promotion campaign in which prize money will be given away in cash. Pull yourself together and make it good.”

The chief clerk was surprised, but his manager seemed calm enough; a little subdued, perhaps, but otherwise normal. And the dark-suited man before him looked relaxed and friendly. There was even a glass of the manager’s sherry before each of them, though the businessman had kept his light gloves on—odd for such warm weather. Thirty minutes later the chief clerk brought the money from the vault, deposited it on the manager’s desk, and left.

Drake packed it calmly into the attache case.

“There are thirty minutes left,” he told Pickering, “In twenty-five I shall make my phone call. My colleague will leave your wife and child perfectly unharmed. If you raise the alarm before that, he will shoot first and take his chances with the police later.”

When he had gone, Pickering sat frozen for half an hour. In fact, Drake phoned the house five minutes later from a call box. Krim took the call, smiled briefly at the woman on the floor with her hands and ankles bound with adhesive tape, and left. Neither used the van, which had been stolen the previous day. Krim used a motorcycle parked in readiness farther down the road. Drake took a motorcycle helmet from the van to cover his flaming red hair, and used a second mo­torcycle parked near the van. Both were out of Sheffield within thirty minutes. They abandoned the vehicles north of London and met again in Drake’s flat, where he washed the red dye out of his hair and crushed the eyeglasses to frag­ments.

Munro caught the following morning’s breakfast flight south from Inverness. When the plastic trays were cleared away, the hostess offered the passengers newspapers fresh up from London. Being at the back of the aircraft, Munro missed the Times and the Telegraph, but secured a copy of the Daily Express. The headline story concerned two unidentified men, believed to be Germans from the Red Army Faction, who had robbed a Sheffield bank of twenty thousand pounds.

“Bloody bastards,” said the English oilman from the North Sea rigs who was in the seat next to Munro. He tapped the Express headline. “Bloody Commies. I’d string them all up.”

Munro conceded that upstringing would definitely have to be considered in future.

At Heathrow he took a taxi almost to the office and was shown straight into Barry Ferndale’s room.

“Adam, my dear chap, you’re looking a new man.”

He sat Munro down and proffered coffee.

“Well now, the tape. You must be dying to know. Fact is, m’dear chap, it’s genuine. No doubt about it. Everything checks. There’s been a fearful blowup in the Soviet Agricul­ture Ministry. Six or seven senior functionaries ousted, in­cluding one we think must be that unfortunate fellow in the Lubyanka.

“That helps corroborate it. But the voices are genuine. No doubt, according to the lab boys. Now for the big one. One of our assets working out of Leningrad managed to take a drive out of town. There’s not much wheat grown up there in the north, but there is a little. He stopped his car for a pee and swiped a stalk of the afflicted wheat. It came home in the bag three days ago. I got the report from the lab last night. They confirm there is an excess of this lindane stuff present in the root of the seedling.

“So, there we are. You’ve hit what our American cousins so charmingly call pay dirt. In fact, twenty-four-carat gold. By the way, the Master wants to see you. You’re going back to Moscow tonight.”

Munro’s meeting with Sir Nigel Irvine was friendly but brief.

“Well done,” said the Master. “Now, I understand your next meeting will be in a fortnight.”

Munro nodded.

“This might be a long-term operation,” Sir Nigel resumed, “which makes it a good thing you are new to Moscow. There will be no raised eyebrows if you stay on for a couple of years. But just in case this fellow changes his mind, I want you to press for more—everything we can squeeze out Do you want any help, any backup?”

“No, thank you,” said Munro. “Now that he’s taken the plunge, the asset has insisted he’ll talk only to me. I don’t think I want to scare him off at this stage by bringing others in. Nor do I think he can travel, as Penkovsky could. Vishnayev never travels, so there’s no cause for Krivoi to, ei­ther. I’ll have to handle it alone.”

Sir Nigel nodded. “Very well, you’ve got it.”

When Munro had gone, Sir Nigel Irvine turned over the file on his desk, which was Munro’s personal record. He had his misgivings. The man was a loner, ill at ease working in a team. A man who walked alone in the mountains of Scotland for relaxation.

There was an adage in the Firm: there are old agents and there are bold agents, but there are no old, bold agents. Sir Nigel was an old agent, and he appreciated caution. This op­portunity had come swinging in from the outfield, unexpected, unprepared for. And it was moving fast. But then, the tape was genuine, no doubt of it. So was the summons on his desk to see the Prime Minister that evening at Downing Street. He had of course informed the Foreign Secretary when the tape had passed muster, and this was the outcome.

The black door of No. 10 Downing Street, residence of the British Prime Minister, is perhaps one of the best- known doors in the world. It stands on the right, two-thirds down a small cul-de-sac off Whitehall, an alley almost, sandwiched between the imposing piles of the Cabinet Office and the For­eign Office.

In front of this door, with its simple white figure 10 and brass knocker, attended by a single, unarmed police con­stable, the tourists gather to take each other’s photograph and watch the comings and goings of the messengers and the well-known.

In fact, it is the men of words who go in through the front door; the men of influence tend to use the side. The house called No. 10 stands at ninety degrees to the Cabinet Office block, and the rear corners almost touch each other, enclos­ing a small lawn behind black railings. Where the corners al­most meet, the gap is covered by a passageway leading to a small side door, and it was through this that the Director General of the SIS, accompanied by Sir Julian Flannery, the Cabinet Secretary, passed that last evening of July. The pair were shown straight to the second floor, past the Cabinet Room, to the Prime Minister’s private study.

The Prime Minister had read the transcript of the Polit­buro tape, passed to her by the Foreign Secretary.

“Have you informed the Americans of this matter?” she asked directly.

“Not yet, ma’am,” Sir Nigel answered. “Our final confir­mation of its authenticity is only three days old.”

“I would like you to do it personally,” said the Prime Min­ister. Sir Nigel inclined his head. “The political perspectives of this pending wheat famine in the Soviet Union are im­measurable, of course, and as the world’s biggest surplus wheat producer, the United States should be involved from the outset.”

“I would not wish the Cousins to move in on this agent of ours,” said Sir Nigel. “The running of this asset may be extremely delicate. I think we should handle it ourselves, alone.”

“Will they try to move in?” asked the Prime Minister.

“They may, ma’am. They may. We ran Penkovsky jointly, even though it was we who recruited him. But there were rea­sons why. This time, I think we should go it alone.”

The Prime Minister was not slow to see the value in politi­cal terms of controlling such an agent as one who had access to the Politburo transcripts.

“If pressure is brought,” she said, “refer back to me, and I will speak to President Matthews personally about