Atom Bomb Angel

  The fairground was code for Hyde Park Corner and the helter skelter was Park Lane. It was highly unlikely that Whalley was eavesdropping on us, but in surveillance we avoid taking risks. Although we changed our frequency daily, and sometimes more often than that, there was always the danger he could stumble across it accidentally, and if he heard places mentioned where he was actually driving at the time, it wouldn’t take him long to put two and two together. So, like the police, we had an elaborate language for tailing, complete with its own vocabulary and key-place nicknames.

  I caught up with Ethel, the back-marker of the cars, going around Swiss Cottage; Ethel was a brown Morris Ital. I overtook Ethel and sat behind Mavis, a mustard Chrysler Horizon. That’s one thing about the security services – they always buy British cars. Anyone worried about being tailed by MI5 can relax if he sees foreign cars behind him.

  We headed onto the M1, and the traffic was thin. About half a mile ahead, I could see Sheila, a navy Ford Escort. Somewhere in front of him was Whalley.

  After about ten minutes, Ethel moved into the fast lane and passed me, then Mavis and Sheila, to give Horace Whalley a change of view in his mirrors. In spite of the seventy miles per hour permitted limit, we maintained a steady fifty-five. Whalley was no speed merchant, but it helped us in tailing him on the exposed motorway, for it meant that plenty of cars passed, reducing further the very slim chance that Whalley might notice us.

  After a while, to break the monotony, I pulled into the fast lane and accelerated past Mavis, and then past Ethel, and saw Whalley’s Cavalier for the first time on this journey. I passed Sheila and drew level, after first making sure there were no turn-offs for a good way ahead, and passed him. As I went past, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye; he was driving like a frightened rabbit, hunched up over the wheel, and concentrating far too much on the business of keeping his car going forward and in a straight line to take notice of anything at all going on around him.

  I carried on pulling away from him until he was nothing but a speck in my rear-view mirror, and then saw a sign for services in one mile, followed by another sign indicating junction fourteen in five miles. I pulled off into the service area, but Whalley carried on down the motorway; I waited some moments, then pulled out and sat some way behind Mavis. None of the cars spoke to each other; there was no need.

  We passed Birmingham and turned off onto the A5. We passed Telford and Shrewsbury and hacked through into Wales. I was glad I had a full tank, as Whalley showed no signs of stopping either for fuel or food. The light was fading fast and I put my sidelights on, and then, after another twenty minutes, my headlights. The road became little more than an Alpine pass, twisting through the Welsh hills, and tiny villages containing ten craft shops per head of their population. It was seven o’clock and for the past two hours our average speed had been no more than thirty miles per hour. For another hour it remained the same, and Ethel made a stop for fuel.

  When Ethel had caught us up, Mavis stopped for fuel, and Sheila sat behind Whalley. Just after half past eight, the left indicator of the Cavalier started flashing, and the car pulled off the road onto the crowded forecourt of a pub. Sheila’s driver, evidently numbed with the monotony of the tail, nearly rammed him up the back, his car snaking about the road with a howl of rubber; he then hooted angrily, flashed his lights and accelerated sharply forwards, which was textbook procedure for a near-accident when tailing. Whalley would never see that car again.

  I pulled up a hundred yards past the pub and spoke into the microphone. ‘She’s gone in the German cruiser.’ German cruiser was rhyming slang for boozer. Cockney was alive and well and living in British Intelligence.

  Ethel went past me, and didn’t stop, but I knew a short way up the road he would turn round, come back and find a discreet place to wait and watch the pub’s entrance. Mavis would be waiting a hundred yards or so back from the pub, also with a clear view of any vehicle or person leaving it.

  I got out of the car and sprinted back towards the pub. As I came in sight, I stopped running and began to walk normally. A dark-coloured Capri – bottle green, I thought, but couldn’t be sure in the poor lighting – pulled out of the parking lot, with one man at the wheel and no one else in the car.

  ‘Pick up a fare, Mavis.’ I spoke into my breast pocket, whilst memorizing the Capri’s number at the same time. I had instructed the Chrysler to follow the Capri. There was probably no connection between the Capri and Whalley’s stop, but having come all this way, I wasn’t in any mood to take chances.

  I could see Whalley’s Cavalier, empty. Whalley must have gone into the pub. I looked through the window into the lounge bar; it was a large L-shaped room, with chintzy, rose-coloured lighting, a long bar with a drab buffet selection at one end, and a battery of slot machines, including an ageing Space Invaders.

  It was a dreary-looking pub, large, granite-walled, with about as much character as a multi-storey car park. Whalley was standing by the buffet, with a pint of beer in his hand, ordering some food. I thought about it for a moment. The pub was fairly full. Horace Whalley wasn’t a man of particularly striking presence. From the time Whalley had pulled off the road into that parking lot, to the time I had driven a hundred yards, stopped, got out of my car and sprinted back up to the pub, a maximum of ninety seconds could have passed. It would have taken Whalley at least twenty seconds to park his car, and another twenty seconds to get to the pub, assuming he was moving like lightning – unlikely after a seven and a half hour drive without a break. If he’d marched straight to the bar, and been served immediately, and had given the exact money, he would have beaten the world record for time taken to get a pint of beer in one’s hand from entering a pub door. There was a throng of people at the bar trying to get served, and the staff behind the bar were slow old biddies. No way.

  The woman behind the buffet buttered two slices of white bread, plonked a couple of pieces of white turkey meat onto one slice, closed the second slice on top of it, placed the sandwich on a plate, added a sprig of parsley that looked like it had been cultured in the Gobi Desert, and passed it over the glass counter to Whalley. He produced his wallet and handed her a bank note. All the while, he kept the elbow of his left arm pressed tightly to his chest, as though there were something in his coat he didn’t want to let drop.

  Dismal though that sandwich looked, I could have paid a very handsome sum for it right now; I was starving. I tried to remember if I’d eaten anything yet today: one Twix bar at about half six this morning on my way in to the Atomic Energy Authority. That was all. I was hungry right now – damned hungry – but something told me I had a long night ahead and that there wasn’t going to be much food in that night for me.

  Whalley took his sandwich and his beer and sat down in a corner on his own. Someone had bought that beer for Whalley, but Whalley had been late, and that someone couldn’t stay to drink with him. Only one person had left the pub since I’d arrived. I decided I had been right to have the Capri tailed. What I needed to know was whether Whalley was collecting, or delivering, or both. From the way he continued to hold his arm tight to his chest, he had certainly done a spot of collecting.

  I left the window and ran back out to the road. Diagonally across from the pub, backed deep into a gap in the bushes, was the Morris Ital, Ethel. I walked over and spoke to the driver, then went to my car, opened the boot, and removed the items I needed. Then I ran back down to the pub and looked in through the window. Whalley had finished his sandwich, and was draining the last of his beer.

  I went to the car park, opened the Cavalier’s door with the duplicate key I had had made a couple of weeks back, and wedged myself down onto the floor behind the front seats, carefully stretching the black blanket I had brought over me. I positioned a gas mask close to my face, and removed the safety cap on the tiny cylinder that I gripped in my hand.

  Some moments later, I heard footsteps approaching the car, the sound of a key in the lock, the sharp click of the black lock-p
in popping up, and the sharp creak of the driver’s door opening – it was in desperate need of oil on its hinges. Even under the black blanket, the glow from the interior light seemed as bright as a floodlit cup-replay football pitch. I felt the seat-back sag as Whalley lowered his body with all the gentleness of an elephant bouncing onto a trampoline.

  The door slammed shut, and the interior light, mercifully, went out. Whalley belched, then let out a loud fart.

  I heard the click of a seat belt, and then the sound of the engine starting, followed by the sound of an unsuccessful attempt at marrying a motionless gear cog with a rotating gear cog without the assistance of a clutch. There was another belch. Whalley to me sounded dangerously drunk on his one pint of bitter. He finally got the sequence right, and I felt the car begin to move forward. We slowed, and then accelerated out, onto what I presumed was the main road. Several hundred yards behind, and without front lights, I knew the Morris would be starting to follow.

  I secured the gas mask over my nose and mouth, and then turned the valve. Whalley would have had to have been listening very closely indeed to have heard the tiny hiss, and right now the organs that conveyed sound waves to his brain were flooded with the sound of one Welsh and seven French radio stations in rapid succession, as he struggled to find the elusive one that played music that was not accompanied by undulating wailings and distant Germans holding earnest conversations.

  I closed the valve and allowed time for Whalley to inhale the sleeping gas into his lungs. I waited some moments, then opened the valve again for a five-second burst. A sudden blast of cold air, accompanied by the noise of rushing wind, told me Whalley must have wound down his window. No one does that on a cold night unless they are getting tired.

  I was a little concerned about the gas. It was the first time I had used this particular type, fresh off the production line of the Playroom – the dirty tricks department of British Intelligence. Messrs Trout and Trumbull, its inventors, claimed it was the first non-inflammable sleeping gas in the world; not having used it before, I had no real idea of its strength.

  I waited the minute and a half it took him to decide he had had enough fresh air and wind up the window, which he did, then opened the valve again, this time for eight seconds. Again he opened the window. I hoped to hell he would do the sensible thing and pull over and stop, and not fall asleep at the wheel with an articulated lorry coming the other way.

  The window went up again, and I released another five-second burst. This time, the car slowed noticeably. Suddenly he braked very hard, the car swerved, and I felt a bumpy surface under the wheels. We carried on for some yards, then stopped, and Whalley switched off the engine. He yawned loudly, and I released another burst as he yawned. There was the click of a lever in front of me, and the driver’s seat tilted back a few degrees. Whalley was sound asleep before he had even leaned back into it.

  Everything was quiet for a few moments. There were some clicking sounds from the engine as the coolant dribbled through the pipes, the roar of a lorry in the distance, then the heavy rhythmic breathing of Whalley. It was pitch dark, we were either in a lay-by or on the grass verge. I put the valve right under Whalley’s nose and opened it for four seconds. According to my instructions, he would wake up in a couple of hours, feeling very thirsty and slightly queasy – neither sensation being particularly out of the ordinary for someone who is attempting to shake off fatigue by sleeping in his motor car.

  A lorry thundered past and the Cavalier shook. I switched on the car’s interior light, and right away saw a small Jiffybag on the front passenger seat. Fortunately, it had not been sealed, and I removed its only content: a thick plastic container. I pulled out my torch and shone it on the container. Nothing was written on the outside, but I knew what it would contain. I had frequently seen such containers before. I opened it, and I was right: it was a video-cassette.

  I searched Whalley thoroughly, but there was nothing else of interest on him. The most common subject matter recorded on unmarked video-cassettes in plain brown wrappers is hard-core pornography. But if it was hard-core pornography my friend Whalley was after, there were easier places for him to obtain it within a few minutes’ walk of his office. He didn’t have to drive half-way across England and Wales. No. I had a distinct feeling that naked girls with thongs and spurs were not going to start performing on any video-screen this particular tape was played into. My feeling told me that the vigil of the past seventeen days had paid its first dividend.

  I put the tap back in the bag. and placed it onto the seat, then I picked up my various bits of equipment, left the Cavalier and walked a couple of hundred yards back up the road to where Mavis was stopped. I opened the front passenger door, and spoke to the two men inside.

  ‘Can you drive back to the pub and pick up my car? I’ll stay here, but I don’t think he’s going anywhere for quite a while.’

  ‘Why don’t you come with us?’

  ‘I’ll wait – just in case he’s got any friends that come looking for him.’

  ‘One of us will stay if you want.’

  ‘No, it’s okay, I’ll do it.’ Until I’d found out where he was taking that tape, I wasn’t going to let either Whalley or the tape out of my sight for one second. I slammed shut the Morris door. Chris Allen, the driver, started up, and put the car into gear, and the car moved forward. I ran after it and tapped on the window. He stopped and wound down the window.

  ‘While you’re at the pub,’ I said, ‘you might get me a turkey sandwich – and ask for a double portion of parsley, preferably green, if they’ve got any.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ he grinned.

  Either the pub was further back than I had thought, or there was a problem finding green parsley, or the pub served a particularly good pint of beer, for it took the crew of Mavis one hell of a lot longer to return with my car and sandwich than I had expected, and standing on a freezing-cold Welsh roadside watching a car with a slumbering man in it wasn’t my idea of fun. They say that food tastes better when you are hungry, and if that is true, I wondered what the hell the sandwich would have tasted like if I hadn’t been hungry. The bread had the texture of mildewed asbestos and the meat tasted as if it had been marinated in creosote. Somewhere between the pub and me the double portion of parsley had gone on the missing list. If I’d had any sense, I should have thrown away the sandwich and eaten the paper napkin it came in – it would have probably been a lot tastier and a damned sight more nourishing.

  I must have been over-generous with the gas, because it was nearly three hours before Whalley started up his engine and drove on. Two cars followed him through the night as he headed back towards London. I sat, yawning dangerously, behind the wheel of one of them. At a quarter to seven, Whalley stopped a short distance from the BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush. He went in, with the Jiffybag, and came out, thirty seconds later, without it.

  I waited until he had driven off, with Mavis following him, then went into the Television Centre myself and up to the twenty-four-hour reception desk.

  6

  Harry Slan stared through the hairs on his plump belly at the thick black bush of the strong German girl, and at her taut stomach, the muscles of which rippled as the stomach contracted and expanded, and then he stared up at her huge breasts that swung down to his face and then up to the heavens, as she rode up and down his diminutive but rigid organ. She held his wrists in a pincer grip against the mattress, and gritted her teeth in a maniacal smile. Although it was only the last week of September, behind her clenched-shut eyes she was working out her Christmas shopping list for her boyfriend, her three sisters, her brother and her two ex-husbands.

  Harry Slan thrust for all he was worth, pushing his tiny circumcized stump deep inside that black patch; he was excited, very excited, for he knew he was driving her wild with ecstasy. He pulled down, then thrust deeper still inside her. She groaned with delight; he sweated with pleasure.

  She had just decided that Griselda, her youngest sist
er, a keen cook, would like a nice casserole dish; yes, she remembered Griselda’s embarrassment at having to serve up a veal stew in a tin saucepan when she had last been to dinner. Unthinkingly, she contracted her pelvis tightly and gave it two sharp gyrations. Before Slan could do anything about it, he found he was coming for the second time since he had arrived on the boat. Uttering a noise not unlike that of a man losing his foot-hold on the roof of a house, he fell back into the soft bedding.

  Eva snapped out of her shopping list just in time to notice and add some finishing touches. As he sank back, she caressed his brow. ‘Wonderful,’ she whispered into his ear, ‘I came so many times, so many times.’

  Slan beamed with delight. Not once in all the forty-eight years of his life, could he remember having come twice in one hour. Then he remembered where he was, and leaned his head over to look at his watch. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to start getting ready for dinner.’

  Eva stayed on top of him. ‘Don’t worry darling, Deke is not a punctual man. Relax, we have plenty of time.’

  Slan looked up into her eyes. He was completely and utterly exhausted, but he was determined to make the most of every minute. Tonight, he was going to set a record that was going to make every man back at the American Fossilized Corporation’s Adamsville, Ohio, plant goddam eat his fucking heart out.

  Unbeknown to Slan, eleven men in eleven cabins similar to his own, on the Chanson II at this very moment, were receiving a not dissimilar treatment. The only thing that singled him out, at this particular moment, was that his host, Deke Sleder, was watching his every action on the twenty-six-inch Bang and Olufsen colour television screen in his private state room, while the video-recorder rolled steadily on.

  During the long weekend that was just beginning, each of the eleven men in turn would be recorded – and not for posterity – on the same Betamax that rolled away now, each performing acts much the same, some more imaginative, some more lazy, as those in which Harry Slan currently wallowed; each with a beautiful girl, stark naked, or clad in anything they fancied, from a morris-dancing costume to a lifebelt. Like Harry Slan, each of these eleven men was reasonably happily married. Each too worked, in some capacity, at senior management level, in their country’s nuclear energy industry. One of the men came from England, two from France, two from Spain, five came from the USA and one from Canada.