“You’re mad!”
“Take a look outside. That’s the Metropolitan Police, Special Branch, Uncle Tom Cobley and all out there.”
“You’ve been under a lot of strain. I am sure we...”
“Ah, yes! We! The plural.” Quayle turned to Hugh Cockburn. “You’re slipping, Hugh. Did you really think you could get away with it?” Cockburn sat, absolutely poker-faced. “That business in Hong Kong. Only you could have set up Fung Wa’s killing so fast. Very amateur. Had Milburn written all over it. And, when you’d fucked that up, you ran home to daddy’s apron strings and daddy himself had to get involved.”
“It’s not too late to join us, Ti,” Cockburn finally said. “You don’t know what you’re destroying here.”
“Yes I do. This went beyond just fear of reform the day you killed my friend. That day you became the beast – and I have just driven a stake into your fucking heart.”
“Now see here!” Burmeister snapped, stepping forward.
“You don’t learn, do you?” Quayle’s fist flicked forward, the punch taking Burmeister full in the face, shattering his nose. He fell, spitting blood and teeth onto the carpet by the window.
A gun had appeared in Tansey-Williams’ hand.
“And big daddy himself,” Quayle said. “Henry Arnold became concerned you had him killed. Then, when Oberon called, you had to get personally involved yourself. The saviour. The gun isn’t your style, Sir Gordon. Unless you want to point it at your head and do the honourable thing, put it away – or I’ll take it from you, and that will be very painful.”
Tansey-Williams stood up, straightening his coat.
“Think about it Quayle. What reform will really mean! Thirty bickering mini-states, most of them with nuclear weapons, pointing them at each other, threatening each other, threatening us! Selling them to Iran and Iraq, North Korea! Age old hatreds surfacing. Islamic fundamentalists. The threat is real. On top of all that: a united Germany, ready to...”
“So you and the Generals decided that it was your job to prevent it?”
“Tasks fall on the shoulders of men,” Tansey-Williams said, raising his head and squaring his chin like a preacher.
“Spare me that shit,” Quayle said. “You’re responsible for the deaths of many. No less than the Nazis were.”
“And if your proof fails?”
“Just hope it doesn’t. Because then I’ll take care of it myself, like the CIA have just done with Leo Gershin. He just had an accident. Believe me – you are better off in prison.”
Callows stood, reached across and took the little silver gun from his Director General as Quayle turned and walked down the stairs.
*
She could feel it. He was tense and looking out of the window as they drove and she had to say something.
“I had to,” she said fiercely.
“What? Lie to me?”
“I didn’t lie!”
“You knew, dammit! You knew from the time you arrived.”
“I didn’t know. I suspected, that’s all. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on.” She began to cry silently beside him, turning to her window so that he wouldn’t see.
Even so, he must have known – because his next words more gentle.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Remember I said I’d seen Hugh? He was odd. Behaving strangely. Wanted to know how I was getting along. He’d never cared before. Afterwards, I realised he had turned the flat over. There was nothing missing that I could tell, except a few files of daddy’s. There was a photograph too. Not an old one. New. It had been taken only days before he went to Australia. But it was missing. Only Hugh could have taken it. I was scared, then. And I knew you were a long way away and out of it.”
“What was the photo of?”
“A group of men at a ‘club’ dinner,” she snorted, sarcastically blowing her nose. “It was Daddy, Sir Martin, Sir Gordon, and one or two others. I think it was his farewell dinner.”
“How long have you been working for Martin Callows?” The question came fast and caught her off guard.
“What?” Her face was a mask of surprise.
“Answer me!” The car screeched to a halt and he turned to face her. “How long, damn you?”
“Since the flat was searched,” she answered in a wiser tone of voice. “He suspected too. He suggested I come to you. That then I’d be safe. But he also said that there was a chance that you might be involved. I had to take that chance…”
“And tell him what you found?”
She nodded. Then, wiping the tears from her eyes, she abruptly opened the door, climbed from the car and walked away into the rain.
*
The round up had begun immediately in a total of seven European countries, with simultaneous arrests in the USA. Charges varying from high treason to breaches of the Official Secrets Act had been laid in Britain, with many senior people agreeing to turn Queens evidence in exchange for guarantees.
The controversy had been raging in the press for two months now, some supporting what the media had called the ‘Doomsday Group’, and others labelling them common criminals. In the Soviet Union, the whole scenario had been played down by an administration with its own problems – but an oblique reference in Tass had been made to the round ups in the West after some European leaders had talked of the conspiracy and its fast demise as a step along the path of trust and a move towards disarmament.
The fact that massive restructuring had taken place within the Red Army and its GRU had not escaped the notice of the West, and several senior KGB and Politburo men had dropped out of sight. The Chinese-attempted deal with the Hong Kong triads and the Broken Square group had, so far, escaped publicity – and, as Quayle expected, they had remained silent and xenophobic throughout, making no comment to the world.
He walked up from the village just before lunch, a bag of groceries in his arms and some English newspapers stuffed down his shirt front. Nico had ordered new chairs and
