Atom Bomb Angel

  Toronto has a special kind of cold in winter; there are plenty of places where the temperature in winter is lower, but nowhere I have ever been feels as cold as Toronto in winter. As I stepped down the gangway I could have told where I was, even if I had been blindfolded, by the icy blast that engulfed me.

  I hired a Ford from Avis and drove out of Malden airport. The car had a tag on the ignition which warned that it ran on low-lead gasoline; it also had a catalytic converter to re-burn the exhaust gases, an economy metering device, a computer which worked out the consumption, several hundredweight of plasticized rubber glued to both ends of the car to absorb impacts, and a pint-sized engine that with the best will in the world, a steep hill and a following wind, was going to be hard pushed to propel this frugal, ecology-minded, four-wheeled battering ram up to anywhere near the eighty-five miles per hour mark on the speedometer, which, in the States, is the maximum speedometers on new cars are permitted to read. The Canadians will soon be stuck with it too.

  I drove onto the massive Highway 401 West which had a battery of central lanes running in each direction, a similar battery of feeder lanes either side of the central lanes, and twin slip-lanes on either side of those. There was enough room on that road for the RAF to have landed a squadron of bombers abreast. I turned off onto Highway 400 and then onto Highway 7 North towards the village of Kleinburg, home of Canadian art.

  I turned off before Kleinburg and headed across country towards a village called Terra Cotta. I kept the map sprawled out on the seat beside me, but the route I had worked out was simple to remember, and I didn’t need to look at it. This road was packed with snow, and the over-light power steering gave me no sensation at all through the steering wheel as to what the front wheels might be up to. There is a knack to driving on hard snow, and since I managed to keep the car out of the ditches, on the road, and pointing vaguely forwards, I assumed I must have acquired that knack.

  Some miles before Terra Cotta, I passed a gas station with a tumbled-down-looking café beside it. A large, rotting sign on the front of the café informed the world that its name was Rita’s Rest-Up, and that it offered a wide range of gourmet delights from hamburgers to cheeseburgers. A couple of trucks and a beat-up old Chevvy indicated that trade for Rita, whilst not altogether booming, was not dead either.

  Past Rita’s Rest-Up was some wasteland, and then a crossroads with traffic lights. To the left was a furniture warehouse. I looked down to the right and saw the sign I wanted. It said Antiques in large white letters on a black background, and there was the mandatory, rotting, wooden cartwheel, bolted to the front wall of the building. I drove onto the patch of snow in front, which I presumed was the place referred to in a smaller sign which said Patrons’ Car Park, and switched off the ignition. Before getting out of the car, I reached my hand inside the breast pocket of my jacket, unclipped the top of my holster, and switched the safety catch on my Beretta to the off position. Then I went into the shop.

  It was dark, and piled high with the usual paraphernalia to be found in the type of shop that keeps itself one rung above the category of junk shop, not by the quality of its merchandize, but keeping its merchandize in some semblance of order and cleanliness. Anything that could be dusted had been dusted, and anything that could be polished had been polished, and anything that could be included had been included. There were bottles, jars, china with willow patterns, china with floral patterns, china with geometric patterns, Coronation mugs, a porcelain ashtray in the school of late twentieth-century Frank J. Woolworth, a chipped jardinière, a fading reproduction of a portrait of Lester Pearson, a former Prime Minister of Canada of whom Winston Churchill once asked, ‘Who is that funny Canadian with the squeaky voice?’; a small paper-roll organ stood out from the rest of the artefacts as actually being quite old and quite pretty.

  There was no one in the shop although a bell had pinged as I walked in. After some moments a woman appeared and stood in the doorway, watching me idly. She was in her late thirties, but looked older. She was underweight and had no make-up on her face; she wore a cheap cotton dress with a thin, badly worn cardigan over it. Her skin was pale with thick wrinkles, and there were dark rings around her eyes. She might once have been very pretty, but now she was wracked with misery and more than a little trace of fear.

  I turned the handle of the organ and a few tinny strands of ‘Silent Night’ twanged out. I looked over towards the woman. ‘How much is this?’

  ‘Isn’t there a price ticket?’ She had an English accent, North Country, probably Yorkshire.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m afraid – I can find out later for you.’

  ‘Is the boss out?’

  ‘No – he’s asleep upstairs.’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘He won’t be up until after midday.’ She looked at a clock on the wall. It said ten fifty.

  ‘Are you Mrs Sparrow?’

  Her eyes widened and she jumped, as though she had put her finger into a live electric socket. Her face went even whiter and then flushed red. ‘No,’ she said.

  She was.

  ‘I am Mrs Barker.’

  ‘How is Harvey?’

  ‘I don’t know any Harvey.’

  ‘You’ve been married to him for fourteen years.’

  ‘My husband’s name is John,’ she said coldly, trying to be matter-of-fact and not succeeding. She looked nervously at me.

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘And what do you want?’

  ‘I want to buy a Victorian paper-roll organ.’

  ‘If you come back in a couple of hours, my husband should be – er – back. He’ll be able to tell you the price.’

  ‘You just said he was asleep upstairs.’

  ‘Did I? I made a mistake. He’s out. It’s just a store room upstairs.’

  ‘Mind if I take a look? There might be some more interesting objects up there.’

  ‘No, please. Why don’t you go away and leave us? Leave us alone.’

  I looked at her; there was suffering across every inch of her face.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked again. ‘Why have you come here? Didn’t you people promise us a new life? New names, money to start a business, a new country? Wasn’t that the deal? Hasn’t he done enough for you? Didn’t you promise that for the rest of his life he would be left alone?’

  ‘Not me personally.’

  ‘Well – your bloody government.’

  ‘We’re not entirely convinced he kept to his side of the bargain. You know what they say about a sailor having a girl in every port?’

  She nodded, puzzled.

  ‘Well, where I come from, they say that Harvey Sparrow has got a skeleton in every closet.’

  Tears began to roll down her face. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I shook my head.

  ‘I’m sick of him, sick to death of him and this life, this place, the constant deceit. I didn’t want to go up and wake him, not because I didn’t want to disturb him, but because I’d sooner lose a sale than look at his bloody face one more time than is absolutely necessary.’ She started to weep, and sat down on the stool of a Spinning Jenny. ‘Is it wrong to speak like that about one’s husband?’

  ‘Not if his name’s Harvey Sparrow.’

  ‘I want to go back to England.’

  ‘You’re free to do that. It’s not you that’s upset anybody – only him.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ she said, ‘maybe I just bloody will.’

  I left her weeping and went up the stairs and found the bedroom. The former MI5 agent, who had earned for himself the not particularly flattering nickname of the Stoat, was still slumbering. He was on more hit lists than it was possible to count. Three different factions of the IRA wanted him dead, so did a dozen other terrorist organizations; the French, Italian, German and Dutch Secret Services would have given their back teeth for a pot-shot at him, and if they a
ll failed, there was many a person inside MI5 who would have paid good money to have had his head in a cross-haired sight.

  I crept into the room, my gun in one hand, and walked over to the bed. I ripped the bedclothes back, and rammed my gun into his naked stomach. ‘Wakey wakey!’

  He tried to sit up, but I pushed the gun further into his stomach. ‘Sorry to remove your bedclothes, Harvey, I wanted to make sure you didn’t have your tool wrapped around a trigger.’

  ‘Flynn?’

  ‘You got it in one.’

  ‘What the hell do you want?’

  ‘Got a little assignment for you.’

  ‘Oh no. I finished with all that. Remember?’

  ‘Yes, I remember. I remember how you near as dammit got me killed sending me into a goddam booby-trapped house, because you’d been out fucking a woman instead of doing your job – or was it perhaps that you wanted me to get blown up?’

  ‘So, you’re still alive. Don’t get so uptight – and get out of my room. I got a deal from the British government whether you like it or not, and that deal sticks.’

  ‘The government gave you a golden handshake because it believed that you had become a prime target for the Russians, not to mention half the rest of the world. That’s why it let you retire at forty with a new identity and gave you enough money to set up your antique business. It didn’t expect you to go promptly and make your peace with the Russians, and start to flog them secrets.’

  ‘You’re mad. This is rubbish.’

  ‘Two months ago a KGB officer defected. His name was Anatole Mijkov. He told us all about you. Happier?’

  Sparrow scowled. ‘So you’ve come to tell me the picnic’s over? You think this is a fucking picnic – here in this God-forsaken dump with a manic-depressive wife? Is that what you think?’

  ‘You make your bed, you’ve got to sleep in it.’

  ‘That’s what I was trying to do.’

  ‘Canada’s obviously good for you, Sparrow, it’s given you a sense of humour.’ I lifted the gun from his stomach and tossed his bedclothes back over him. ‘You’ve got a horrible body, Sparrow, I can’t stand looking at it any longer.’

  ‘Nobody invited you to in the first place.’

  ‘I’ve got an assignment for you, Sparrow,’

  ‘You can stuff it.’

  ‘Then you’re coming with me to Toronto.’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘I’m taking you to the police and I’m going to ask them to charge you, under the British Official Secrets Act, with selling classified information to the Soviet Union.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No, my friend, Canada hasn’t given me a sense of humour. I am most definitely not joking.’

  There was a silence, then Sparrow spoke. ‘What’s involved?’

  ‘I knew you’d come round to our way of thinking.’

  ‘I’m not agreeing – I want to know what’s involved.’

  ‘Nothing much. A little burglary and a long train ride. Get dressed. I’ll explain everything in the car.’

  ‘Car? Where are we going?’

  ‘I’m taking you to the airport. You’ve got to make a flight to Seattle in exactly—’ I looked at my watch – ‘seventy-five minutes.’ I pulled out of my pocket a thick brown envelope. ‘Put this in your pocket before you forget it. It’s plane tickets, train ticket and ten thousand dollars expenses.’

  His eyes opened wide.

  ‘And I want every cent accounted for. You aren’t going on a freeloading holiday jaunt.’

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘You could have fooled me.’

  I dropped Sparrow at the airport, then drove into Toronto and checked into the Four Seasons Hotel. It was twenty to one. I went to the cashier’s desk and changed thirty dollars into quarters, then left the hotel and found a call box down the street. A few seconds before one o’clock, I dialled the number of a call box in Manhattan. It was answered before it even rang once.

  ‘Hallo?’ It was Martha’s voice.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, Max. And you?’

  ‘I’m okay; I got what I wanted, or at least a lot of it.’ I decided not to tell her about Bruhnler. ‘Anybody twig me?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Good. When exactly is Sleder due back from Gstaad?’ She had told me he had flown over there to spend Christmas.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘He’s not going to Hamburg today?’

  ‘Definitely not. He’s going to a luncheon in Monaco and then flying out here tomorrow morning.’

  ‘As soon as he’s arrived in the office tomorrow, I want you to send a telex to AtomSled Hamburg – can you get to the telex machine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. When you’ve sent the telex, I want you to jam the machine up.’

  ‘How badly?’

  ‘Enough to stop it receiving any replies for the rest of the day.’

  It was unlikely there would be any reply the same day, since it would be late afternoon at the earliest in Hamburg before they received the telex, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I took the pieces of paper on which I had written down numbers from the pages of Fear of Flying from my wallet, and read the numbers out over the phone. ‘Good luck,’ I said.

  ‘You too, Max. Take care.’

  ‘I’ll call you Wednesday, 8.00 a.m.’ I hung up, then dialled Fifeshire’s number in London. I needed one boffin to be despatched smartly.

  After I had spoken to Fifeshire, I went to the Toronto branch of Thomas Cook and had a good look at aircraft schedules and railway timetables, and then there wasn’t a great deal more I could do until the following morning. Oscar Wilde once described the Niagara Falls as ‘a vast, unnecessary amount of water, flowing the wrong way, and falling over an unnecessary amount of rocks. Sooner or later,’ he said, ‘every American groom takes every American bride to the Niagara Falls, and they must surely be the second biggest disappointment in American married life.’

  His observations did not deter eight million tourists a year from making the pilgrimage down the Niagara peninsular – where, incidentally, the grapes for some of the world’s most revolting wine are grown – to see for themselves, and I decided to do likewise. I stood in the teeming spray, as the water slid gently over the lip, before thundering down into the foaming abyss with a demonstration of power it would be hard to rival, and I decided his estimation of the cunning of the Marquis of Queensbury wasn’t the only thing poor Oscar had been wrong about.

  23

  The train’s horn blasted twice, and we flashed through a tiny station. Short Richard’s offspring divides nation with friendly underground railroad. I looked at the clue for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours since I had boarded the train at Winnipeg. It was 6.45 p.m., Thursday, New Year’s Eve, and Operation Angel was due to start in five days’ time. The ground outside now was thick with snow, and the sky, which had been dark grey all day, was now black.

  In a first-class compartment two carriages down, with drawn curtains and a locked door, Douglas Yeodal, the nuclear energy expert, ace lecturer and pacifier of the press, from Huntspill Head, was quietly dismantling and examining a nuclear fuel bundle with the letter B clearly stamped after the third digit of its serial number. The bundle had been obtained by Harvey Sparrow after a lengthy search, not a little bribery, and not a lot of burglary, from the storage depot of American Fossilized’s Seattle plant.

  I lifted my eyes from the baffling clue to fourteen across of the New York Sunday Times crossword and rested my gaze on Harvey Sparrow, who sat opposite me, finger working away at a bogey, with a generally indifferent expression on his face to his surroundings, his task, and probably to his life. He was under instructions that we did not know each other, had never met before, and were not to speak one word to each other, except for necessary courtesies, throughout the journey. To his credit, he had been professional enough not to have disobeyed my instructions, even though
he must have discovered by now that at some point, in between his arriving at Winnipeg station and his ordering of a beer in the buffet car an hour after boarding the train, an unseen hand had removed his wallet from his breast pocket and replaced it with my own.

  Between Sparrow and the window sat a man who constantly ran a hand across his face, as if checking his stubble. If he was worried about his appearance, he needn’t have bothered; none of us looked too hot after a night of sleeping in our seats. There were beds in first class, but except for the one compartment I had been able to get for Yeodal, all the accommodation on the train with beds had been taken, and so we were slumming it.

  The other person who didn’t appear to be slumming it was Sleder. He wasn’t in any of the open carriages, so if he was on the train, and I was damned sure he was, then he must have been behind one of the curtained windows of the first-class bedroom compartments. It hadn’t taken me long to get put through to him on the telephone on Tuesday. The girl on the switchboard had answered on the first ring, and used the current jargon popular with the switchboard operators of all go-ahead New York corporations.

  ‘Good morning, AtomSled, how can I help you?’

  ‘By putting me through to Deke Sleder, please.’

  ‘Just one moment. May I say who’s calling, please?’

  ‘My name is Max Flynn.’

  ‘One moment, Mr Flynn, I’ll see if he’s in.’

  Click.

  ‘Mr Sleder’s office,’ said a new girl.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mr Sleder.’

  ‘Oh I am sorry, Mr Sleder’s in a meeting all day. Can anyone else help you?’

  ‘No, this is very important. I’d like you to give him a message; I’ll hold because I think he’ll want to reply.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir – he is not to be interrupted.’

  ‘You’ll have to interrupt him, this is an emergency. Will you please tell him that there is a problem with his B-grade fuel.’