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Philip McCutchan

Skyprobe

ONE

“Excuse me, please,” the man said, pushing past Shaw to the bar. Shaw knew the man had been tailing him from Savile Row. He’d spotted him for what he was outside the Civil Service Commission in Burlington Gardens. Shaw’s intention had been to take advantage of one of London’s really nice winter mornings — it was a clear day, with puffy white clouds scudding before a light wind across a blue sky — by walking through to the London Hilton where later a girl would be expecting him to buy her lunch. But the tail, who wasn’t particularly skilful, had looked interesting; so Shaw, strolling casually on into Bond Street and crossing into Stafford Street, had paused for a moment outside The Goat tavern. He had gone in. The bar was packed. Shaw had pushed through the crowd and ordered a Scotch-on-the-rocks and from the corner of his eye he’d seen the tail coming in. A roll-your-own cigarette was dangling messily from the man’s lower lip.

Shaw said genially as the man pushed past, “Don’t mind me, squeeze in.”

The man looked flustered. “Thank you so much,” he said, taking up the invitation without further pressing. He ordered a Worthington. Shaw fancied there was more than a trace of a Polish accent. The tail was a tall man, thin, balding and grey — around sixty-five at a guess, could be more, and far from robust, though he had an ex-officer look about him. Army — he carried the stamp of it, in spite of the dangling roll-your-own cigarette. That wasn’t in character, was probably part of the tail act, a pathetic attempt to alter his image. Taking the change from a ten-shilling note the man turned over the few pennies he had been given, examining them closely.

Shaw had a feeling he wasn’t all that unfamiliar with the British coinage. “Interested in numismatics?” he asked casually.

The man looked up, looked back at Shaw with large, dark eyes, sad eyes like a spaniel’s. “When they are worth more than their face value, yes,” he answered. The crowd at the bar jostled him; his thin, fragile body swayed, then was held against the bar by a fat, heavy man whose red neck over-bulged a stiff white collar. The tail looked with wry envy at Shaw’s slim-waisted, deep-chested steadfastness. “Pennies of the 1950’s are worth, perhaps, ten shillings each. You see, not many were minted in those years.” Shaw put on a look of interest. He said, “Yes, I’d heard that.” The man wanted to talk to him, but not about pennies. He lifted his whisky, looked at the man over the rim of the glass. “I wonder if you happen to know any other… out-of-the-way facts, by any chance?”

The man stiffened, swallowed, then nodded. The pupils of his eyes seemed to contract, and sweat broke out in beads on his forehead. He was very close to Shaw now and his mouth wasn’t far from Shaw’s ear. He said in a whisper, scarcely moving his lips, “Commander… I would like to talk to you privately. It is urgent — believe me.”

“Tell me a little more, if you can.” As an agent Shaw was always on duty and he had no quarrel with the fact; but the girl in the Hilton was attractive and she didn’t enjoy being kept waiting, and he’d had his share of cranks. Also, he disliked wasting his time.

The voice only just reached him. “Not here. I dare not. There is a man who would kill me — a man named Rudolf Rencke, of whom you have perhaps heard.”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t.” Shaw felt certain he’d been right about the man being a Pole. “Who are you, if I may ask?” The man hesitated. “I prefer not to say.”

“You’ve been a soldier. Polish Army?”

The man didn’t answer but Shaw could tell from the look in his eyes that he’d been right chi the beam. Shaw waited, looking unco-operative; there was a long silence and then the Pole whispered, “There is a threat to the American spacecraft, Skyprobe IV, now in orbit. I will say no more here.”

Shaw felt a stab of alarm, automatically took a swift look around the bar. Skyprobe IV was hot, very hot. He said, “You don’t need to. That’s good enough. Leave here as soon as you’ve finished your drink. Be in Green Park in twenty minutes… the centre path running down to the Palace from immediately opposite 94 Piccadilly. Find a bench — join me when I walk past you. We’ll go for a stroll.” He gave the man a sharp, appraising look. “You’re sure you haven’t been tailed here?”

“I am sure.”

“Right, then.” He nodded; the Pole finished his drink and left, the cigarette still dangling. Shaw took his time over his whisky, wondering what form a threat to a spacecraft that had already been thirteen days in orbit could possibly take. After ten minutes he left The Goat and headed for the rendezvous. It wasn’t the lunch-hour yet and there were not so many people about as there would be soon. Half-way along the path, beneath the trees, he saw the Pole, sitting in the corner of a bench by himself. He was leaning against the arm-rest and he looked ill, but when Shaw reached him he saw the man was stone cold dead. He opened the jacket. Blood was draining down the front of the shirt and a razor-sharp tip of steel protruded a fraction of an inch through the chest wall and the shirt. That steel had been slid through from the back and had probably penetrated the heart on the way. Shaw pulled the body towards him and saw an inch of metal, round like a rod, sticking out between the shoulderblades. The steel was no more than a quarter of an inch in diameter and it had two deep grooves ringing it. The killer had most probably used a detachable haft, and very possibly this had been spring-loaded, so that the spike would drive in without anyone who happened to be around seeing more than a piece of wood. The dead man’s skinny body wouldn’t have needed more than six or seven inches of steel at the most. There probably hadn’t been time for the killer to withdraw the spike; somebody would have been coming along the path.

Rudolf Rencke, whoever he was, evidently couldn’t be trifled with.…

Shaw let the body sink back in its corner; to the casual eye, the Pole merely looked as if he were sleeping. Shaw went back fast for Piccadilly and got hold of a policeman. He took the officer into the park and showed him his special pass from the Ministry of Defence. “From now on,” he said crisply, “I don’t come into this. I want you to have the body taken to the Yard — and then you forget about me. All right?”

“I don’t know about that, sir,” the constable objected. He leafed through his notebook. “You’ll have to—” Firmly, Shaw interrupted. “I’ll have to do precisely nothing at all. You’ll find your own bosses’ll confirm that. In the meantime, do as I say and leave me out of your notebook and your conversation in the canteen, or you’ll have the Home Secretary himself hurling you pensionless out of the Force with his own hands!”

Shaw made for a telephone box. He rang the Hilton and left a message. Then he called the Defence Ministry. When he was put through to the Special Services Division of Defence Intelligence he spoke to Latymer’s confidential secretary. “Tell the Chief I’m on my way to see him,” he said. “This is urgent and it won’t keep.”

* * *

Thirteen days before at Kennedy, in the very early hours, the men had walked one behind the other towards the gantry elevator, past the central blockhouse where the technicians were scanning the control panels as the countdown drew inexorably to its end. Awkward in their cumbersome gear the men rode up in the elevator, tense now, not speaking at this stage as they approached the final moment of separation from the earth. That separation would last for twenty-one days in an orbit farther from the earth than had ever yet been attempted by a manned vehicle. There was an aeromedic with them as well — a slight, fair man with a pink-cheeked face who was also silent as they rode up along the length of the great rocket that stood caged in the gantry’s framework. Without appearing to do so, he was watching the men’s reactions closely, making a last-minute appraisal of their fitness to endure an extended orbital flight that would open up wider possibilities of space exploration than had so far been thought possible, and would put even the moon-probe miracle in the shade eventually.