“Yes, your friend Pakeshi has no interest whatever in contradicting whatever case we care to make up against you. He’ll give back some of the money. Some of it, after all, we’ll need to recover at the time of your arrest. We’ll give that straight back, of course, to the INP. The loss of the rest will weaken the Party—but it will be able to function again as a counterweight to the less cautious nationalists. What we don’t recover we’ll tell the world was spent on your disgusting perversions. Pakeshi can then take it and get himself to some part of the world that doesn’t have a Union Flag flying over it. Two birds with one stone—bah!”
“You wouldn’t dare!” I said. “You’re bluffing.” I blew smoke into Stanhope’s face. I even struck the flat of my hand onto the table so that all the glasses and dishes rattled. “You know I’d be believed in court. You couldn’t pervert the course of British justice. This isn’t some woggy place where everything can be fixed.”
“Listen here, Markham,” Stanhope growled with quiet menace. “And don’t try telling me what we can and couldn’t do. There is no limit to what we can and will do to keep chancers like Macmillan and Heath—and certainly Michael Foot—from directing the affairs of this country. You will obey, or the last you know of this world will be the knot of a hangman’s rope. So help me God—but you’ll obey!” I looked once into his red face. I’d have found more humanity looking at Shambleeta. I stared up at the ceiling and ran fingers through my hair.
“Oh, dearest, darling Anthony,” Vicky now broke in, “I don’t think Major Stanhope has told you everything. You see, if you appear in the slightest inclined to speak out in court, he’ll just arrange a suicide for you in prison. You’ll be found hanging one morning with the appropriate note beside you. I really do think you should consider playing along with us. All considered, Michael Foot’s acid bath would be the lesser of two evils. And, if you do get out alive, Daddy and everyone else will be very, very grateful.” She fluttered her eyelashes and inspected the tip of her cigarette.
“So what’s in it for you?” I asked. Still wanting to void my bowels where I sat, I was moving back into my bravery-born-of-despair mood. “Are you in this out of patriotism? Or is it so you can puff up sales of your bastard Hitler biography?”
“Anything for Queen and Country,” she crooned back at me. “But, of course, we’d not want Ayn to be electrocuted, when we have a signed contract for her complementary volume on Mussolini. You probably only know her writings from the play she had put on last year. She has a poor sense of the dramatic—and she did deserve all the critical scorn when she introduced Richard Nixon as a tap-dancing space lizard. But she’s a fine biographer. It would be a loss to the world if Messrs Macmillan and Foot were to get her life cut prematurely short.”
I fell back in my chair. I tried to think everything through. Stanhope and his people had got wind of what Macmillan was up to. They’d brought the Richardsons in to help set me up in America with the Churchill Memorandum, and quietly helped Macmillan and the Rand people get me back to England. Stanhope had then foiled the raid on my flat so that Macmillan could be panicked into early action. The shredding of my reputation had been to push me towards Macmillan. Now, they were trying to force me back into his clutches. I sat up and asked about the Jew Greenspan they’d sacrificed in New York. Or had they sacrificed him?
“Oh, darling Anthony,” Vicky replied, “this isn’t the last chapter of an Agatha Christie novel. We are still very much in the middle of things. Besides, not everything fits that neatly together in real life.
“But, since you haven’t yet walked out of the room, can I take it that you’ll make that telephone call? It really is your patriotic duty, you know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
“Do have one of these Russian cigarettes, dear boy,” Macmillan said with an easy smile. “Michael swears by them.” He pushed the gold box across the table at me. Foot, sitting beside him, gave me one of his blank stares. “I was fully convinced you’d see the force of my reasoning. I would take you upstairs at once to film an interview that I have in mind. Sadly, Michael’s acid has done something to our generators, and it will take a while to get them back up.”
I lit the cigarette on one of the candles Macmillan’s butler had placed all about the dining room. Since Pakeshi was supposed to have gone off in the big car, and the helicopter seemed to be otherwise engaged, I’d been eventually collected from Hungerford by an electric car that had taken much of the day to get me back down to Birch Grove. Whatever I’d thought as Vicky took her gushing leave of me before getting into Stanhope’s own helicopter, and Pakeshi, crestfallen, had sloped off to his taxi—his bag much lighter than it had started—I now felt horribly like a fly who’s gone willingly into a spider’s web.
“I don’t trust the little shit, Harold,” Foot said with cold contempt. He twisted his face into a snarl, then winced as he stretched whatever injury was covered by the sticking plaster that covered his forehead. “I don’t trust him one inch. I’ll take a lot of convincing he’s not made a full report to Powell.” He reached down to the floor and brought up what looked rather like the remote control box for one of the toy boats that boys are given for Christmas. He pointed it at me and slowly twiddled the knobs. It bleeped and grated as Foot went up and down all the frequencies. Still suspicious, he put his radio box away. He got up and came round the table. “Give me your left wrist,” he demanded. “Undo your cuff buttons.” He took a plastic band from his pocket and put it about my wrist. It was one of those fastenings that close on themselves, but can’t be opened without being cut.
“This will track you within a twenty mile radius,” he explained, looking closely into my face. “If you cut it off, it will ooze a clear and subtle poison, one drop of which on your skin will kill in you terrible convulsions. I can, by sending out the appropriate signal, cause it to self-destruct—which, of course, will also kill you. It was perfected in Russia for use on class enemies when shown to the foreign press.”
I swallowed and looked at the opaque, flexible band. It was fastened tightly enough to stretch slightly if I clenched my fist. In the light, I thought I could see a pattern of wires and circuitry just below the surface of the band. There was no point wondering how it worked. No doubt, Foot would be itching to press whatever button activated the thing. I took another drag on his cigarette and looked back at Macmillan.
“I would ask you, Anthony, not to upset Michael,” he said with a slight glower at Foot. “The Russians may not be technically proficient in the all round sense. But they do know about killing.”
“Correction, Harold,” came the humourless reply. “The Workers’ State knows all about the often profound implications of technical changes. It is not, for example, backwardness that causes it to rely on distributed power. I did warn you all ten years ago not to allow Hotpoint to bring its home generators to market. Not since before Hollywood was closed down has there been so powerful a force for raising false consciousness among the masses. The illusory independence that comes of being able to generate electricity in the home did not merely cause every Communist Member to lose his seat at the next election. It has also reinforced a most dangerous spirit of individualism among the people. They think that, because they do not need to rely on a central authority to provide or underwrite the delivery of energy to their homes, they are somehow free. You will take my advice when you come to power, and tax those generators out of existence. You will also forbid further importation of the German sun panels. You might also care to do something about the risible enforcement of the Firearms Acts.”