Anticipating the hunter’s moves was always dicey. You might be too slow, too stupid; there was also the chance of being too clever—expecting them to move faster than they actually moved. That could be equally dangerous.
The British would put Chartermain on it. About a thousand RAF pilots—the few to whom so many owed so much—had won the Battle of Britain; half of them had been killed; among the surviving Spitfire pilots had been Chartermain but he’d lost his left leg to a Messerschmidt in September 1940 and they’d transferred him into Intelligence. He’d run some of the Double-Cross agents until the end of the war and then he’d moved over to MI6. Kendig was now in the jurisdiction of MI5 but that wouldn’t take it out of Chartermain’s control any more than the FBI business had taken it out of Cutter’s control in Georgia.
So he was dealing with Cutter, Yaskov, Chartermain and indeterminate lesser fry from the French SDECE, the ex-Abwehr West Germans, the East German BND and whatever peanut agencies felt too vain to delegate the responsibility to the big boys. It made for an obvious question: to what extent would they reinforce one another and to what extent would they get in one another’s way?
In keeping with that would be the internal abrasions in the American operation. Cutter would be using Follett’s personnel because there was no other source. Cutter had despised Glenn Follett for years. Myerson wisely had seen to it that the two men worked in separate districts but now that safety device had been neutralized. Follett spent his life playing the role of bumbleheaded loudmouth and Cutter never had been willing to see past that defensive screen; actually while Follett ran a loose ship he had a good talent and his achievements were commendable. But Cutter wasn’t comfortable with people who acted as if they didn’t know what they were doing; he had a few blind spots and one of them was a tendency to refuse to credit professionalism to those who lacked the appearance of professionalism.
Yaskov was a different artifact; he had the difficulties of bureaucracy but no one in his organization disputed his leadership. There was a temptation in nearly every human being to imitate that which he hated: men often displayed the very characteristics they most loathed in their fathers. Philosophically Yaskov was a dedicated Marxist, according to his lights; he believed honestly in the sort of society that encouraged five-year plans for the proletariat; but he was the son of a czarist officer and preferred elegance to efficiency, noblesse oblige to democraticization. In the elitist hierarchy of the Soviet KGB he enjoyed the privileged position of a Richelieu. He was a romantic and vanity dominated him; he would run the hunt with all his brilliant skill and energy because Kendig’s freedom would be a personal challenge to his pride.
Chartermain was yet another factor: Chartermain was an imperial colonialist. He surrounded himself with staff who possessed ultra-English names like Colin and Derek. Most of the world was inhabited by poor ruddy bastards or bloody wogs. Chartermain’s wife was “the memsahib.” His operations displayed a genteel and sophisticated casualness that took civil service bureaucracy into account and assumed that they should muddle through anyhow. In his chortling fashion Chartermain probably had found and blown the whistle on more Soviet plants than had any other counter-espionage chief in the West.
Kendig had invited only the very best people to the ball.
They would run the usual drilclass="underline" question airline counter people at Heathrow, taxi drivers, rent-a-car girls. They’d put people on the taxi stand outside the West End terminal. They’d keep bumping into one another and the people interviewed would let their questioners know that they’d been interviewed more than once. Gradually each agency would accrete a picture of its opponents’ operations. Either they’d begin to confer or they’d proceed independently with the jealous pretense that the others didn’t exist.
In any case they’d achieve facts which were mainly negative but no less important on that account. They’d find out he hadn’t flown on from Heathrow. Cutter, with the advantage of knowing through Saint-Breheret that Kendig had a blank French passport, might treat with Chartermain to have all ports of embarkation watched for both Jules Parker and a French emigrant who fitted Kendig’s description. The fact was that Kendig didn’t have the French passport—he’d left it in the safe in Paris.
They’d find out he hadn’t taken a taxi from the airport or from the West End terminal. They might find out he’d taken the limo bus from Heathrow to the terminal but in any event they’d lose the trail there; he’d covered his tracks between terminal and hotel. They’d canvass hotels for Jules Parker, not for Reginald Davies.
They’d know quite positively that he was in England. But that was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Knowing he was on the island but not knowing where, they’d get snappish. Irritably they’d blame one another. They’d get into a hell of a flap. It was fun to contemplate.
But it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t sit cooped up and satisfy himself with visualizations of their confusion. Passivity wasn’t the object of the game.
He’d have to come out in the open. Sting them.
Six years ago he’d spent months in the Middle East pulling the camouflage off the Soviet-sponsored arms traffic in heavy arms to Al Fatah. They were getting armored vehicles, field guns, long-range mortars, even ground-to-air missiles. These came from various sources—Arab governments, Czechs, arms merchants in the West—but the job was to determine how the stuff found its way to the secluded desert camps of the Palestinian liberation armies. It had become evident the smugglers’ route was as neatly laid out and maintained as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It had befallen Kendig to find and close it.
The job had required liaison with MI6 because Aden, which was British-occupied, was a key distribution point on the arms route. Local apparatchiks kept kicking the buck upstairs until Kendig had been obliged to fly out to London, meet with the top man and smooth out the arrangements.
The top man had been Chartermain and the meeting had taken place on a Sunday—not in White-hall but in Chartermain’s home in Knightsbridge, a detached Victorian manse in a mews: too large for practical living but then Chartermain and his memsahib were given to lavish entertaining. Chartermain used his study there as a second office; it was a good deal more than the usual gentleman’s library.
An excellent way to enrage a lion was to disturb its den.
Luck could run bad; there was always the danger of the unhappy coincidence; there’d be scores or hundreds of them searching for him and if he spent a lot of time in public places there was the risk of someone’s fortuitously spotting him. Pure accident like that accounted for a large number of man-hunting coups; pure accident like that was not accident at all but a mere mathematical long shot—if they kept enough people searching long enough then the chances of their finding him increased geometrically with the passage of time and the accretion of clues.
When he went out of the hotel he avoided using the lift which could be a trap; he used the stairs. When he set out for the first time he did it during the morning rush and melted into crowds. Impulse made him cache the manuscript: he removed the pages from the false-bottomed suitcase, crept to the basement with them and found the domestic supply cupboard, a fair-sized room filled with mops and dustcloths and bedding fresh from the laundry, hampers on wheels for the daily room changings, cartons of loo paper and hotel-size bars of soap, brooms, vacuum cleaners, spray polishes and the like. He opened a bar-soap carton and counted the contents and multiplied that figure by the three dozen cartons stacked against the wall and concluded it would be at least seven weeks before they got down to the last carton in the stack, if they didn’t cover it again with fresh supplies; he emptied the carton he’d opened, put the manuscript in it, filled the rest with soap bars and rearranged the stack with the manuscript carton at the back and bottom of everything. He marked it with a little pencil cross that nobody would notice unless he was looking for it and knew what it meant. He carried the excess bars of soap out of the hotel in an ordinary paper bag and disposed of them miles away in a sidewalk dustbin.