She had seen me arrive at the party, and had decided, for whatever mysterious reason that sometimes triggers the jackpot switch in a woman’s brain, that I was to be the lucky man. She had gone to my coat, taken my keys, made a wax impression of them, then put them back. Noticing that the car keys had a Jaguar tag, she had gone outside, walked up the street to the first Jaguar she had come to. It was an old one, a 1953 XK120 convertible, and as far as she was concerned it fitted me. To be sure, she had felt the radiator. It was hot, so she knew it had recently been driven, and figured it was definitely mine.
She had then telephoned what she described as ‘a chum’ at Scotland Yard, given him the Jaguar licence number, and asked for the name and address of the owner. Then she went to a late-opening locksmith in the Earls Court Road and had a duplicate of my keys made, then went straight to my Holland Park mews house. Somehow, the talent scouts for British Intelligence had missed her. She wasn’t a spy. She had a trendy up-market gym-cum-solarium for trimming the fat and tanning the face of anyone willing to stump up eighteen pounds an hour to lie in a make-believe tropical island, listening to taped sounds of Pacific breakers, and tropical monkeys fucking.
‘How did you know I was coming back alone?’ I asked.
‘There were only two spare girls at the party, and neither of them was your type. I decided that if you hadn’t come with a girl, then you wouldn’t be going home with one.’
‘I didn’t see you at the party.’
‘I was there – all six foot three of me.’
‘I can’t have been looking high enough.’
I felt something cool and firm grip an important part of my reproductive apparatus. ‘Careful what you say, Max Flynn. I don’t want any gags about the mountain going to Muhammad because Muhammad wouldn’t go to the mountain.’
‘You’re one hell of a gorgeous mountain,’ I said.
She released her grip, and set to work on my body again, and we didn’t talk for another hour. When we did, it was she who opened the dialogue; she did it by prodding me very hard in the stomach and bringing me out of my not entirely unpleasant coma.
‘Max Flynn,’ she said, ‘what do you do?’
‘What? You don’t already know?’
‘No. I can tell you’re not an interior decorator.’
‘Is that a compliment or an insult?’
She stuck a Rothmans in my mouth, then held the flame of a platinum-cased Zippo to the end of it. Then she took the cigarette, lit her own with it, and put it back. ‘It’s an insult!’ she said.
‘Thanks a lot. It’s my home you’re talking about, and I don’t think it’s the role of a housebreaker to criticize the victim’s taste.’
‘I love your taste,’ she said. ‘Thousands wouldn’t, but I do. It’s sort of post nuclear holocaust.’
‘The cleaning lady’s away sick.’
‘Has she been away long?’
‘About eighteen months.’
‘You haven’t answered my question. What do you do?’
‘I’m a spy. I work for MI5.’
She giggled. ‘Spies are short and fat and old, and wear grubby mackintoshes. I don’t believe you. What do you really do?’
‘I work for a venture capital company.’
‘Your own firm?’
‘Afraid not. If it was, I’d have a mansion in Belgravia, with a pet interior decorator in a cage, and an unpickable butler on the door.’
‘Wouldn’t even I be able to pick him?’
‘No, not even you, Sherlock. Not unless you asked him very, very nicely.’
‘I think I would,’ she said. ‘Very, very nicely. What does your venture capital firm put venture capital into?’
‘Almost anything that’s risky but has a chance of a fat profit: a mini-computer firm; a company with a revolutionary method of making maps; a chain of do-it-yourself shops; a cargo airline; a shipping firm; an oil-exploration company; a chain of medical clinics specializing in sports injuries; a firm that manufactures mini tractors; a geological exploration company; a nickel-mining company in Australia; and a whole load of other things.’
‘My father owns a mine,’ she said.
‘Does he? What do they mine? Front-door keys?’
She ignored the taunt. ‘No, plutonium, I think it is.’
‘You don’t mine plutonium; it isn’t a raw material.’
‘Oh, well, it’s the raw material – whatever you call it.’
‘Uranium?’
‘Yes, that sounds right. I’m not really sure though, he does so many different things. It’s in Namibia, I think.’
‘Where the hell’s that?’
‘South West Africa, ignoramus.’
‘All right, Einstein, don’t get smart with me.’
She took the cigarette out of my mouth and placed it in the ashtray. Her hand started moving menacingly down my body.
Suddenly, something ice-cold hit my stomach, and for a moment I tensed right up. It was a trap. She had stabbed me. Then the coldness spread further over my stomach. I pulled back the sheet. In her hand was a blue-and-white tube out of which she was squirting a clear-coloured liquid.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, moving further down my anatomy.
Talking became difficult. ‘I wondered what it was,’ I was able to gasp.
‘KY Jelly,’ she said, ‘like it?’
I liked it a lot. After a few minutes I didn’t know whether I was going to come or die. I lived.
When I came around, she was dozing. Bright daylight was shoving its way through the curtains. She opened her eyes. ‘You haven’t told me your name,’ I said.
‘You never asked.’
‘I’m asking you now.’
‘You’ve got to guess.’
I thought hard for some moments, and memories of a short while ago came flooding back. ‘I’ve got it,’ I said.
‘What is it?’
‘Gelignite.’
That had been four months ago. Since then she had all but moved into the house, and the normal far too few hours of sleep I usually snatched had been reduced by a good seventy-five per cent. She couldn’t understand why the job I did required me to arrive home late some nights, extremely late other nights, and quite frequently not at all.
After a while the explanations began to wear a bit thin. It was a problem that wasn’t new to me; after all, there is a limit to the amount of times any intelligent girl will accept the excuse that one’s car has broken down, her feminine logic will cut across the problem with one clear solution: ‘Why don’t you scrap that old banger and get yourself a sensible car?’
To have my Jaguar XK120 referred to as an ‘old banger’ was hardly music to my ears, but for four months I’d been heaping the blame, quite unfairly, on the car’s shoulders, so Gelignite’s comment, in the circumstances, was perhaps not entirely unreasonable. At least, from her point of view.
It was clear from the message on the mirror that last night, my birthday, had seen the end of her patience. She had said she was going to cook me a special birthday dinner, and I had promised to be back by seven. After Whalley had left the Atomic Energy Authority as usual at five o’clock, I had gone over to Carlton House Terrace to check through a list of owners of dark-coloured Ford Capris with police or Intelligence files on them for whatever reason.
At twenty-five to seven, I got up from my desk. I had timed it so that if I left now, I should be home on the dot of seven. The phone rang. I was tempted not to answer it, but like a lot of people I know, I just can’t leave a telephone ringing.
‘Hallo?’ I said.
‘Daphne’s not going home. She’s heading down the M40.’
‘Shit.’ Why did Whalley have to pick tonight? Stupid miserable bastard! If he didn’t one day swing from the gallows for what he was doing to my country, he was damned well going to swing from his testicles for what he was doing to my sex life. ‘All three of you there?’
‘Yes, sir. Don’t worry.’
With the tea
m of surveillance monkeys I had under me, I knew I had every reason to worry. They were all so good at losing things they could have made a fortune on the stage making members of audiences disappear – the only problem being that they would have been incapable of bringing them back. Since my press-ganging into MI5, I had never had people working under me and I didn’t like it. I understood now why most agents prefer to operate on their own; at least that way, if there are any screw-ups, you know who’s made them and what they are. But as I didn’t have wings on my back and jet-packs attached to my ankles, and there wasn’t always a handy telephone kiosk around to charge into, I had to use the services of others to be in three places at once for me. But if it looked as if anything interesting was going to happen, I wanted to be right there in the front line. I especially wanted to be there the next time Whalley met up with his chum in the dark Capri.
‘I’m on my way. Daphne going as fast as usual?’
‘Yes.’
‘Call me if she deviates. I’ll catch you up at the Porn Shop.’ Deviation meant turning off the motorway. Porn Shop was code for Oxford – derived from the Oxford colour of blue. Cambridge, with its lighter blue, was coded Cinema, implying soft porn. I hung up, and bashed my elbow on the edge of the desk. It was still sore as hell from where I had landed on it after being blown out of the taxi a week before.
I picked up the phone again, and dialled my home number. It rang on without being answered. After fifteen rings I hung up. I decided Gelignite couldn’t have got in yet. I buzzed down to one of the three night-operators who would have just come on duty. ‘Could you please ring my home in half an hour’s time and tell the lady that answers that I had to fly to Shannon to look at a weaving plant, and the plane’s got engine trouble, and I won’t be back until very late – and give her my apologies.’
‘Yes, Mr Flynn.’
I took the lift down into the underground car park, and walked over to my Jaguar. Her midnight-blue paintwork still managed to gleam under a heavy layer of London grime, and her wire wheels needed an energetic Sunday afternoon with a tin of spirit, a toothbrush and a duster, but they were going to have to wait a good while yet for that. Gelignite and the XK had no need to be jealous of each other: they both received an equal amount of neglect.
I climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut by the red leather tongue, pushed in the ignition key, and turned it. There was a deep clunk sound, followed by a rapid ticking sound, and the gauges in front of me began to quiver with life. I pulled out the choke and waited for the fuel pump to finish its ticking. I pressed the starter button. There was a woosh from the air intakes followed by a boom from the twin exhaust pipes as she fired first time. She sat, vibrating with energy, engine thumping on full choke, sounding a little lumpy, as she usually did until she warmed up.
I removed some dust from the boss of the four-spoked steering wheel, a thick conical boss that would have made a hole in my chest the size of a cannon ball had I been flung against it in an accident, but then this gorgeous brute had been built in the days before padded dashes and collapsible steering columns, and progressive body crumple. She had a solid steel chassis, and the theory was that if anything got in her path once she was under steam, she would shunt it clean out of the way, or cut it in half like a battleship slicing through a smuggler’s yawl. I let the choke in a little, pushed the clutch pedal down hard, pushed the short thin gear lever into first, let off the handbrake, and we moved forward. I stayed in first gear as we went up the steep ramp. The guard just inside the metal gate pushed the button that sent it clattering upwards, and nodded me a goodnight; I waved a finger back at him in reply.
The Jag is not the best car in which to try and follow someone discreetly, but it was dark, and I didn’t feel like driving one of the department’s dreary machines tonight. I felt, it being my birthday, I had a right to some compensation for missing what had promised to be, as Gelignite had put it, an ‘interesting’ celebration. Since she had an extremely fertile mind regarding pastimes not unrelated to the reproductive processes, I had a feeling that I was going to be missing out on something that ought not to be missed out on.
I wrenched my thoughts away from Gelignite and onto more mundane matters, such as remaining alive, at least for long enough to complete my exploration of her mental and physical erotic treasure-chest. One week ago an Arab had tried to murder me. He had failed, but he had escaped, and it was possible he might try again. The taxi had been stolen the day before and had false plates. There was more than a little evidence to suggest that he was not just a lone crackpot with a grudge against people who travelled in taxis. But there was no evidence yet to suggest exactly who he was. He was probably a Libyan hit man, flown over for the one job, chosen because there were no records on him in England. I didn’t know either, what his purpose in trying to kill me had been. Possibly it was to silence me in case I had picked up any information from Ahmed in the Royal Lancaster lavatory, but if that was the case, they had left it a long time. Possibly, it was to avenge the deaths of the four Libyans. The third possibility was that it may have been to get me off Whalley’s back. That was the possibility I most feared, for it would have meant Whalley knew he was being followed, and would therefore do nothing except waste our time. But I didn’t think whoever it was could be so naive as to think that if they got rid of me everyone would leave Whalley alone.
Possibly it was someone settling an old score. In this game, we never know when we are making enemies, nor, often, who our enemies are.
There were too many possibilities and not enough clues. I would have to wait until whoever it was tried again, and endeavour not to break his neck before he talked.
The three exit ramps from the car park were rotated in irregular sequence, to make life harder for anyone trying to keep tabs on the movements of the staff of 46 Carlton House Terrace. The one in use tonight took me out into Cockspur Street, opposite Canada House. Whether they didn’t know there were any other ramps, or whether they knew which one was in use tonight, or whether they had all three covered, I did not find out, but I spotted them before the registration number of my car had even sunk into their brain cells – not that they could have learned a lot from it; the day after Gelignite had succeeded in cracking my private fortress, I had had the name and address of the owner of the Jaguar changed on the police files, and on the Swansea central vehicle registration files, to one Angus McTavish, who resided on a remote atoll thirty miles north-west off the coast of John o’Groats, Scotland’s most northern tip. McTavish did not exist, but the island did. Anyone else who had the bright idea of trying to track me down through my car licence number was in for one hell of a long journey, with little to show for their efforts, other than, perhaps, some snapshots of an uninhabitable rock covered in bird-shit.
The dark blue Marina crept up through the busy traffic in the Mall, and stuck two cars back from me; it stayed with me up St James’s, and down left into Piccadilly. There were still scorch marks on the tarmac from the previous week. The Marina forked left behind me into Hyde Park Corner, but still I couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure. I still couldn’t be completely sure as I went around and took the Park Lane turn-off, and held my speed to thirty, although the legal limit was forty. The Marina stayed back, letting other cars pass. There were two men in the Marina. Caucasians.
I turned sharply left, down the ramp to the filling station; they didn’t follow. If I was right and they were tailing me, they had just shown that I wasn’t dealing with complete amateurs. I stuck five pounds worth of petrol in the tank, which topped it to the brim, and drove out again. The Marina was circling Marble Arch.
I drove around Marble Arch and headed back down Park Lane, sticking to the inside lane. The Marina came down, three cars back, also in the inside lane. No one but an idiot, or someone wanting to turn left, drives down the inside lane of this part of Park Lane. We crossed the Brook Street lights, then on down, past the Dorchester lights, still in the left lane, the Marina two cars bac
k now. The traffic was thick ahead and to the right of me; then there was a gap. I cursed the side-screens of the Jag, wishing that at this moment I had glass windows with clearer vision. I looked out; there was a truck coming down fast. I slammed the gear-lever into first, flattened the accelerator, hung the tail out all over the road, rev counter thrashing into the red, blast of horn from the truck, ferocious hoot from a taxi as I rocketed clean across his bows – Christ, a bicycle – missed the back wheel by an inch. MGB going slowly down the outside lane, but I won’t get in front. Hurry, MGB, for chrissake – oh shit, XJ6 belting down second lane – move your ass MGB. The gap opened and I got out of the path of the XJ6, and behind the ass of the MGB, down the tiny slip road in the central divider which was the last exit before Hyde Park Corner, and away from the jam that the Marina now had no chance of missing.
As I started to drive back up Park Lane, I could see the Marina, still in the inside lane on the far side of the carriageway. Both driver and passenger were looking my way, and while I was too far away to see and memorize their features, I could, even from this distance, make out the expression on their faces: they looked very pissed off.
I pulled a receiver from my pocket and put it in my ear. Then I took my propelling pencil out, and spoke into the clip. ‘This is Ursula’ – Ursula was my code name for the day – ‘I want urgent tail on navy Marina registration AEX 659Y. Currently in southbound jam at Park Lane-Hyde Park junction. And gen too.’
‘Roger Ursula. Reply Halo.’
The words ‘Reply Halo’ told me on which of the channels the reply would be coming. When we were in contact with Central London Control, or with any other central control point – there were several in key cities across Britain – to minimize the risk of one’s conversation being monitored, each radio transmission would be made on a different frequency. If I wanted to speak to CLC again, it would next be on the frequency for which Halo was the code. I set the dial on the pencil to this frequency and switched the transmitter off to conserve the battery; it would be some minutes before the reply came.