Fifeshire watched the speech in stunned silence. At the end, Coleman pushed the pause button, and the picture froze. The chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority stood silhouetted against Lenin’s Mausoleum, looking much as I had seen him in the flesh, on a couple of occasions, in the corridors of the Charles II Street building. He was, I remembered, much more jovial-looking than the strained and tired man he appeared to be here. He was a good six foot tall and very bulky, with a deeply sagging treble chin. The top of his head was completely bald, but tufts of unkempt curly hair sprouted either side of his head and stuck out over his ears. His raincoat was unbuttoned and he wore a Prince of Wales check suit underneath, with all three buttons on his jacket awkwardly done up. He looked like a cross between an eccentric scientist, a giant teddy bear and a Dickensian publican. He was fifty-nine years of age, but had married late in life and had four children all still at school, the youngest being only seven. Although his expression was serious, his eyes had a strange warmth in them.
Fifeshire shook his head slowly, then looked at me. ‘He’s lost his trolley. He’s had a brainstorm, flipped his lid – must have done. I know him well. Dammit, I had a drink with him two weeks ago, he’s as straight as they come, dedicated to his work – absolutely dedicated. There’s something very strange about all this – very strange.’
‘Take a look at Sir Isaac’s wrist-watch, sir.’
I nodded at Coleman who pushed the pause button again, and the tape started rolling. Quoit remained on the screen, but now there was a zoom shot in to his right wrist, until the wrist filled the screen. We could see the time clearly on his Rolex wrist-watch: it was seven ten. The second hand was moving steadily around, so the watch wasn’t broken.
‘Seven ten,’ I said, ‘yet Red Square is in broad daylight and humming with people. At this time of the year, Moscow is in darkness at both seven in the morning and seven in the evening.’
‘Moscow is three hours ahead of us,’ said Fifeshire, ‘It’s probably ten thirty in the morning, Quoit has forgotten to adjust his watch – it’s still on English time.’
‘Possibly, sir. I think you might change your mind about that.’
The picture changed to a close-up of Quoit’s feet and the cobbled ground right beside them, then a series of closeups of the feet of other people in the Square.
‘I asked Ken Wardle and Dick Coleman to take a close look at this videotape and see if they could come up with anything interesting, and I think you’ll agree with me, shortly, that they have. The time on Sir Isaac’s watch is one thing, and it doesn’t prove anything at all, but the next thing certainly does. Ken perhaps you’d be good enough to explain?’
‘Certainly, Max,’ said Wardle. ‘What you’re looking at right now is a close-up of Sir Isaac’s feet and the feet of other people in the Square through a magnification of the videotape; what you cannot see with the naked eye, even on this magnification, are the shadows on the ground. If it had been a bright sunny day, you could have seen those shadows reasonably clearly, but it was obviously an overcast day, the lighting is flat, and the only shadow that there is, is beyond the range of normal television contrast. You are now going to see this same section of tape put through what we call an image booster – and what I mean by that, in layman’s terms, is that we have put it under a microscope.’
The image on the screen changed from feet on the ground to a mass of large and small, dark and less dark shapes. Always, there were two large dark shapes with two smaller, less dark shapes attached.
‘What you are now seeing are the feet of people in the Square, and the ground beside their feet, greatly magnified. The dark shapes are the feet themselves, the lighter shapes are the shadows on the ground. Now, there is one pair of feet – these here, that do not have a lighter shape attached – that do not have a shadow. This is most extraordinary. Everyone in Red Square is casting a shadow, except for one person; those feet belong to Sir Isaac.’
‘Are you implying what I think you are implying?’ said Fifeshire.
‘The only possible explanation,’ said Wardle, ‘is that Sir Isaac was not in Red Square whilst this was being filmed. He was either in a studio with a clever front-projection system, or else was filmed against a neutral background and then superimposed onto a tape of Red Square.’
‘The next thing is even more interesting,’ I said before Fifeshire could comment, and I nodded at Wardle.
The picture rolled on. The shadows went and two graphs appeared, one above the other. They looked like annual sales comparison charts of some company, the top one showing a good year, the lower one a horrendous year. Coleman again froze the image, and Wardle spoke.
‘As you are no doubt aware, Sir Charles, we have the ability now, from recordings of people’s voices, to make what we call voice-prints. These are as individual as finger-prints: no two people have the same voice-prints. On the screen you are looking at, the top graph is a voice-print made from a recording of a speech Sir Isaac made three months ago at Oxford University. The bottom graph is a voice-print made from part of the speech we have just heard. Without any doubt at all, these voice-prints were from different people.’ Wardle pulled out a pack of Du Maurier cigarettes and offered them around; I took one and lit it. Fifeshire removed a large Havana from the silver box on his desk, and began a surgical operation on it. After some moments, he spoke.
‘So who is the person we have just been watching?’
‘Sir Isaac Quoit,’ said Wardle. ‘But he wasn’t in Red Square and it wasn’t his voice that you heard. You are familiar, I am sure, with the term dubbing when applied to a motion picture – when the film is made in one language, but a different language is recorded onto the sound-track, in as close synchronization with the lip movements of the characters talking as is possible?’
‘Yes. I prefer subtitles, but go on.’
‘In video, there are techniques available now that are far more sophisticated than the method of dubbing used for celluloid. An electronic dubbing job has been done that would be quite impossible to detect with the naked eye – the only possible way of detection is through the voice-print technique.’
‘The thing that baffles me,’ said Coleman, ‘is that it seems very naive of the Russians to believe no one would run the checks that we have done.’
‘You must remember,’ said Fifeshire, ‘that although the Russians are bang up-to-date – and, indeed, even ahead of us in some areas, particularly medicine, and some space technology – there are many technological areas where they are way behind the West. Just look at their motor cars, their cameras, their navigational equipment! It’s more than likely that in this particular field, they are simply not aware of these detection capabilities you have demonstrated.’
Coleman nodded.
‘I must say,’ continued Fifeshire, ‘this certainly sheds a new light on Quoit’s disappearance, wouldn’t you agree, Flynn?’
‘I think one would be a trifle unwise to ignore it completely.’ I grinned. ‘I think the Director General of the BBC would be more than a little miffed as well. He has kindly given us the best half hour of video he’s likely to have all week, and I’m sure he would be most upset if he felt it wasn’t fully appreciated.’
‘How very kind of him to put his country before his viewer ratings,’ said Fifeshire cuttingly. ‘It was only because I threatened to have banned completely the six-part series on British Intelligence they’ve just finished making that he agreed to hand the tape over to you at all. I wouldn’t lose a great deal of sleep over his feelings; we’ve got enough to lose sleep over as it is. We have on the surface a straightforward defection. Quoit goes on television and delivers his justification for his defection – something he feels strongly enough about to give up everything, family, dog, friends, the lot, and plump for Russia, a country where, so far as we know, he has never set foot before. An unusual action to take, but it has been done by others before.
‘However, look beneath the surface, and we find three in
teresting facts. Firstly, Quoit has not adjusted his watch to local time – unusual, for someone as meticulous as Quoit. Secondly, while the impression given is that Quoit is in Red Square, he is in fact not there at all. Thirdly, it is not the voice of Quoit we hear, but of someone else.’ Fifeshire looked at me, then at Coleman, then Wardle. ‘Does the cassette tell us anything?’
‘No, sir,’ said Wardle. ‘It’s a Philips which could have been bought almost anywhere in the world.’
‘What about the lines – doesn’t Russian television operate on a different lines system from our own?’
‘Yes,’ said Wardle, ‘it does. But they could have taped it on their own system and then converted it to our 625 lines system and the fact that it had been taped on their system wouldn’t show up.’
‘So apart from some footage of Red Square, is there anything in this videotape that proves beyond doubt that Quoit was not actually in Russia when it was made?’
Wardle and Coleman looked at each other. Wardle spoke. ‘Nothing at all, Sir Charles. Sir Isaac could have been taped anywhere. The footage of Red Square could have come from any stock footage library. The superimposing and the dubbing could have been done by a competent tape-editor with the right facilities – which are not hard to come by – anywhere in the world.’
Fifeshire nodded. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he addressed Wardle and Coleman, ‘you have given us plenty to chew on. I am sure you are both extremely busy, so I won’t keep you any longer. You have been most helpful. Do you have any more questions, Flynn?’
‘No, Sir Charles.’
Fifeshire stood up. It was a technique he must have perfected years ago, because he had it to a fine art and it always worked. I knew, because he had used it on me a hundred times. It was his way of getting rid of people quickly, with the minimum loss of time wasted on common courtesies, and yet with extraordinary grace and politeness. He would stand up, looking as though he had to dash somewhere in a hurry. This had the effect of making anyone in his presence want to help him by getting out of his way quickly. They would leap to their feet, grab briefcases or any other articles they had brought, give him a hasty handshake and sprint for the door. Fifeshire would stand rooted to the spot, looking like an athlete awaiting the starting gun for the marathon, until the door had closed, whereupon he would relax and sink back into his chair, with a slightly smug grin on his face. It was by means of this technique that Wardle and Coleman were despatched from the room.
Fifeshire put his cigar in his mouth and lit it. He drew on it slowly and deliberately. ‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘it is quite possible that Quoit is in England. But wherever he is, is he a free man or is he a captive?’
‘Captive. Must be. If he was doing this of his own free will, there wouldn’t be any need for his voice to be faked.’
Fifeshire nodded. ‘I agree with you. And what’s more, he’s in this country.’
The last time I had come here, Fifeshire had chewed my head off. He wasn’t a man who had bad moods often, but when he did, the last place on earth to be was in his office. I had made that mistake two days after the unfortunate Ahmed had shuffled off his mortal coil in the men’s lavatory in the Royal Lancaster. In Fifeshire’s words, severed heads rolling about four-star-hotel lavatory floors were in extreme cases, perhaps, just about tolerable. Severed heads rolling about lavatory floors, playing dodgems with stolen taxis, and a car-load of flat Arabs under the wheels of an articulated lorry, was, in the none too superfluous wordage of Fifeshire’s oratorial flow, ‘Not bloody tolerable’.
‘No, sir,’ I’d agreed.
‘I’ve got Scotland Yard down my throat. I’ve got Special Branch down my throat. I’ve got the Home Secretary down my throat. I’ve got the Foreign Office down my throat. I’ve got MI6 down my throat. I’ve got the Minister of Defence down my throat, and now I’ve got the bloody Libyans down my throat as well. It’s bloody lucky I had my tonsils out, or I’d be choking to death. The Prime Minister wants a special report, the press are crawling in every orifice in the wall. Did you have to kill them all? Did you really have to shunt them under that lorry?’
‘I was just trying to stop them.’
‘Well, you succeeded, Flynn, didn’t you? You certainly stopped them. The Cultural Attaché to the Libyan Embassy, his private secretary, the Deputy Minister for Arts, and Libya’s leading expert on icons.’
‘They shouldn’t go around cutting people’s heads off and shooting at people.’
‘There were no knives and no guns found in the wreckage of that car.’
‘Then, with no disrespect, sir, they must have eaten them.’
Fifeshire had been very upset by the news Ahmed had given about Donald Frome. Reports had stopped coming through, which indicated Frome was in trouble. He was one of Fifeshire’s key moles, and had successfully infiltrated the international terrorist circuit and gained a position of considerable trust. If he was blown or dead, it would take years to replace him, and if what Ahmed had said was true, by now he was almost certainly both. Further, the news Ahmed had relayed, about the threat to nuclear power stations, did nothing to alter his mood. It fitted in with a lot of feedback Fifeshire had been getting lately from some of his other sources.
It was this not entirely amicable meeting with Fifeshire which had led to my study of the British nuclear energy industry, its power stations and its organizations; which in tum had led to the twenty-four-hour surveillance of Whalley; which led to the tape frozen on the screen to the right of Fifeshire’s desk. Nothing suspicious whatsoever had checked out about the four Arabs who had been crushed to death in their car, and it was on my persuasion alone that Fifeshire had, with not a little reluctance, sanctioned the whole study. I was going to have a lot to answer for if I didn’t come up with the goods. Today, however, was the first bright day. I could tell by the expression on Fifeshire’s face that, although we hadn’t yet found the pot of gold, we had at least stumbled across what might turn out to be a rainbow.
‘What makes you so sure Sir Isaac is still in Britain, sir? He might not be in Russia, but he could be anywhere.’
‘All the passport staff at Britain’s seaports and airports who have been on duty since Quoit disappeared have been interviewed. Flight lists of all airlines have been checked; the flight crews of almost all aircraft on which anyone remotely fitting his description has travelled, and, likewise, all ferry staff, have been interviewed. No one has seen him. And yet he is an unusual-looking man, a distinctive man, a man whom, once seen, is never forgotten, and yet no one saw him. That in itself is no proof at all – thousands of flights and boats leave this country every hour – but I have an Intelligence report from Moscow that seems to tie in with this.
‘Someone is going to be smuggled out of England next Monday, on the 10.00 a.m. Aeroflot flight to Moscow. Our contact does not know who this person is, but believes he is either a scientist or has detailed knowledge of certain scientific advances in this country.’
‘Our friend could fit that bill,’ I said.
‘Very neatly indeed.’ Fifeshire relit his cigar, which was burning down one side only.
‘If we’re on the right track with our thinking, Sir Isaac has been kidnapped by the Russians. The Russians have taken him to a secret television studio somewhere in England and got him to speak. Maybe he didn’t realize it was a studio, and maybe he didn’t realize he was being videotaped. Afterwards, they dub over, in perfect lip-sync, someone who sounds very like him making a strong defection and anti-nuclear speech. Then they bang him against a back-drop of Red Square and send the tape off to the BBC. All perfectly possible, except it doesn’t make any sense. It sounds more like a prank pulled by the anti-nuclear people – the Ecologists – some group like that.’
‘Possible,’ said Fifeshire, ‘but I would have thought most unlikely.’
I nodded, and lit a cigarette.
The Honourable Violet-Elizabeth Trepp produced coffee. It was the colour of tea made with a five-year-old tea bag, and tasted li
ke paraffin. Fifeshire waited until she had left, then poured his into an ornate pot containing a rubber plant. ‘She doesn’t understand why none of my plants ever live more than a few weeks,’ he said, then continued.
‘If it is the Russians, and I’m certain it is, I cannot think why they want Quoit. Information about our nuclear energy programme is freely available, and the Russians themselves are more advanced in many areas of nuclear energy technology than we are. This scaremongering speech is most peculiar. What do the Russians hope to gain by kicking up dirt about nuclear power stations? All right, they get the anti-nuclear protestors out, and get public feeling going against everything nuclear, and disarmament will no doubt rear its head and become a major issue. The government may back down a few steps on its current nuclear policies, perhaps make a token cut in some area which doesn’t matter, and agree to look into the situation regarding US missile bases. But the Russians have got easier ways to whip up public feeling than this. They’ve got dozens of members of CND on their payroll, doing a good noisy job. Maybe they feel they’re not doing a good enough job – but I don’t think that’s what’s behind this.’