and said to Penny, 'Well, that's it, love. The boss wants me back.' She said, 'Just before you went out you said something about Daddy having a gun.
What did you mean?' 'He's armed,' I said. She shook her head disbelievingly but, since so many strange things had occurred that day, she could not combat my statement. 'And will you find him?' 'Oh, we'll find him. What's worrying me is that perhaps someone else is looking for him who will find him first. And the hell of it is we aren't sure, one way or another.' Brent came in. 'You want me?' I waved him out and joined him in the hall. As I stripped off my jacket I said, 'Find anything?' 'Nothing.' I unhitched the shoulder-holster from under my left armpit. 'Take this; you might need it.' I waited until he'd put it on, then took him into the study. 'Penny, this is Jack Brent;, he's your guardian angel from now on. He sticks with you everywhere you go, excepting the loo and the bedroom-and he inspects those first.' Penny looked at me as though she suspected me of joking.
'Are you serious?' 'You'll have to find a room for Jack-he'll be living here as long as you do.' I turned to Brent. 'Make yourself acquainted with the burglar precautions here, and make sure the damn things work.' He nodded, and said, 'Sorry about this, Miss Ashton; I have to do as I'm told.' 'Another man under orders,' she said tightly.
There were pink anger spots in her cheeks. 'Do you really mean that this man goes everywhere I go?' 'As long as you want to keep your schoolgirl complexion.' Maybe I was a bit brutal about it, but the force of what I said hit her hard. She went very pale. 'My God, Malcolm. What is my father?' 'I don't know; but I'm going to wring it out of Ogilvie if it's the last thing I do.' Jack Brent gave me a look as though he thought it would be the last thing I did. Twisting the boss's arm in any organization is not the way to promotion and that indexed pension. I said, 'I have things to do. I'll see you before I go, Penny.' I went to brief Gregory on the latest developments and to hand over to him. I found him with Simpson going over Benson's quarters which were a bit more opulent than you'd expect of a house servant-a three-roomed suite. Gregory and Simpson had torn the place apart on my instructions because I was particularly interested in Benson. 'Any luck?' Gregory grunted. 'Not much. There's this.' He pointed to a small can of oil. 'Recommended for gun actions. And we found a single round of ammunition-unfired. It had rolled under the bed and dropped into a crack near the wall.' It was a 9 mm parabellum round, popular with the military and the police. 'We know he was armed,' I said. 'Now we know what with-not that it helps. Anything else?' 'Not yet.' I told Gregory the score and then went to check the activities of the rest of the team. I had to find something to take to Ogilvie. In the attic I found two of the boys playing trains. 'Oh, Jesus!' I said. 'Cut it out. We're here on business.' Michaelis grinned. 'This is business-all in the line of duty. If you want this place searched thoroughly we'll have to look inside every engine, carriage and truck in this layout. The only way to do it is to bring them to this central control point a trainload at a time.' I examined the layout and saw he had a point. You might have found a more complicated system in an international model engineering exhibition but I doubted it. There were about ten levels of track and a complexity of points and sidings which was baffling, and the whole lot was controlled from a central console which looked like the flight deck of a Concorde. Michaelis seemed to have got the hang of it; maybe he was a budding genius. 'How many trucks and carriages are there?'
'We've looked at about three hundred so far,' he said. 'I reckon that's about a quarter. We're lucky there's an automatic coupling and uncoupling system. See those trucks in the siding over there?' He pointed to a spot about eight yards inside the spider web of rails.
'We'd never be able to get in there without smashing the lot up-so we sent an engine in to pull them out. Like this.'
[missing] affects state security. The whole problem was that our friends to the east have no private firms, so any industrial espionage from that direction was ipso facto state inspired, and that we couldn't have. In our inimitable British fashion a new department was set up to cope. This department.' 'I know what we're doing, but I didn't know how we got started.' Ogilvie drew on his cigarette.
'There's an important point. In an attempt to cut down on duplication of effort, several other departments had to hand over large chunks of their interests to us. In fact, a couple of them lost entirely their raison d'etre and were closed down completely. They were only small fry, though. But it all led to jealousy and bad blood which exists in a dilute form to this day. And that's how we inherited the problem of Ashton.' I said, 'Who did we pinch Ashton from?' 'Lord Cregar's department.' Ogilvie leaned forward. 'This afternoon the Minister came down on our side. Ashton is still our baby and we have to find him.
You are still inside man, and that means you find him. Any help you need just ask for.' 'That suits me,' I said. 'I want clearance for Code Purple.' Ogilvie shook his head. 'Not that.' I blew up. 'For Christ's sake! How can I look for a man when I don't know anything about him? Back in Marlow I had an interesting lecture on trust which has soured me to the belly, and this job has already interfered too much with my private life. Now you either trust me or you don't-and the crunch comes here. I get clearance for Code Purple or my resignation will be on your desk at nine tomorrow morning.' He said sadly, 'I have warned you about being impetuous. To begin with, I couldn't get you clearance in that time, and even if you did you wouldn't find what you're looking for because Ashton is in Code Black.' His voice was grim. 'And you couldn't be cleared for Code Black inside three months-if ever.' Code Black sounded as though it was the end of the rainbow and Ashton was the pot of gold. There was a silence which I broke by saying diffidently, 'That's it, then. I'd better go along to my office and type my resignation.' 'Don't be a young fool!' snapped Ogilvie. He drummed on the desk, then said, 'I've come to a decision. If it gets out I could be fired. Wait here.' He got up and went to an unobtrusive door behind his desk and disappeared. I waited a long time and wondered what I'd done. I knew I'd laid my career on the line. Well, I was prepared for that and with my financial backing I could stand it. Maybe I wouldn't have done it if I had only my pay to depend on. I don't know. And I'd pushed Ogilvie into doing something he might be sorry for, and that was bad because I liked him. Presently he opened the door, and said, 'Come in here.' I followed him into a small room where there was one of the ubiquitous computer terminals. 'I'm cleared for Code Black,' he said.
'The information on Ashton is coming on line. If you sit there you'll know what you need to know. The computer won't know who is pushing the buttons.' He checked the time. 'I'll be back in two hours.' I was a bit subdued. 'All right, sir.' 'I want your word,' he said. 'I don't want you roving at random in Code Black. I want to know that you'll stick to Ashton and only to Ashton. There are other matters in Code Black that are better for you not to know-for your own peace of mind.'
I said, 'You can make sure of that just by sitting in here with me.'
He smiled. 'You made a point just now about trust. Either I trust you or I don't, and there's an end to it.' 'You have my word.' He nodded abruptly and left, closing the door behind him. I glanced at Nellie who was staring at me with an interrogative bright green question mark, and then glanced around the small room which was really more of a cubicle. On one side of the terminal was a small plotter, very much like the one in Ashton's cellar; on the other side was a line printer.
I sat at the console and reflected that if Ashton was so important and had been around and of interest since before the department had started then there was probably reams of stuff about him in Nellie's guts. This idea was reinforced by the two hours Ogilvie had allowed for reviewing the information, so I switched on the printer, and typed: OUTPUT MODE-PRINTER Nellie had an attack of verbal diarrhoea.
She came back with: PRINTER OUTPUT NEGATIVED UNDER CODE BLACK NOTE
WELL: NO WRITTEN RECORD TO BE MADE UNDER CODE BLACK NOTE WELL: NO
PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE TAKEN OF THE CRT UNDER CODE BLACK I sighed and switched off the printer. I've described before how one juggles with Nellie so there's no point in going into that again. What I haven't said is that Nellie is accommodating; if she's going too fast you can slow her down, and if she's producing something of no interest you can speed her up. You can also skip about in the record, going back to items forgotten or neglected. She's quite a toy. I did quite a bit of skipping when swanning around in Ashton's life. He'd lived quite a bit.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Aleksandr Dmitroyitch Chelyuskin was born to poorish, but respectable, parents in the small town of Tesevo-Netyl'skiy, just to the north of Novgorod in Russia. The year was 1919. Both parents were schoolteachers; his mother taught in art infants' school and his father taught mathematics and allied subjects to older boys. These were the years of revolution, and whether the Whites or the Reds were to come on top had not yet been decided in 1919. Armies of foreigners-British, French, American-were on Russian soil, and it was a time of
