"No," said Craig.
"I didn't think you would. You can go down there tomorrow. I'll tell Pascoe to expect you."
The school was in Sussex, an isolated Elizabethan manor house in fifty acres of grounds enclosed by an eight-foot granite wall. There were always two men at the gates, and they were armed. Closed-circuit television warned them of every approaching car, and day and night Alsatians roamed the grounds. They were good dogs; Pascoe had trained them himself. The nearest village was seven miles away, and the villagers had kept well away from the manor house ever since the dogs had caught a poacher ten years ago. The villagers believed that the manor house was a nursing home for wealthy, dangerous maniacs, and
Pascoe did all he could to encourage that belief. Once he'd even faked an escape: a red-bearded schizoid armed with a crowbar, trapped in the snug of The Black Bull just before opening time; dogs and straitjackets and a tremendous smashing of glass. It had cost Pascoe fifty pounds in breakages, and the village had never forgotten.
His pupils were driven hard. They had to be: there was a great deal to learn. The school existed only for the benefit of Department K, and those who worked for Department K were specialists of the highest order. Their business was destruction—of plans, of aspirations, of life when the need arose. And those who wished to serve Department K had first to master many trades. In the school Pascoe had a language laboratory, a small-arms range, a unit dealing with arson and sabotage, a gymnasium, and a garage. There were daily sessions in unarmed combat, there were visiting lecturers who taught safe-breaking, the extraction of information, the use of the knife, the improvisation of weapons, the picking of pockets, on every conceivable subject from desert survival to everyday life in the Soviet Union. There was a course on how to resist methodically applied pain to the limits of physical and mental strength. At the end of each course— and courses were held only when there were a sufficient number of likely candidates—the school turned over to Loomis a handful of men and women who were afraid of nothing but their master's power. If they disobeyed, defected, or used their skills against anyone but the targets Loomis selected he could have them killed, and they knew it.
They had been deviously recruited, those who served Loomis: from the Intelligence Services some of them, or the Special Branch of CID; from the armed forces, the universities, the business desk, and the factory floor. Some, not many, from prison. One of Loomis's experts spent his whole working life reading photostated personnel files acquired via his cover as director for the Unit of Psychological and Statistical Research. Likely candidates were spotted, observed, tailed, unknowingly interviewed, and tested. Loomis's expert was good. Of the candidates he spotted, perhaps four per cent reached the school, and after that they belonged to Department K forever, whether they reached the standard of field operative or not. Loomis's security was absolute. No one who knew about the department ever left it alive.
Craig waited at the gate while one of the men on duty examined his pass. The other one wasn't in sight, but he'd be there, Craig knew, with a gun on him. The man he could see handed back the pass and said, "Straight on up to the house, please, sir. And don't get out of the car till Mr. Pascoe comes to fetch you. There's dogs about." He went back to the gatehouse, pressed a button, and the gates swung open. Craig drove the Lamborghini through and at once the gates were closed. As he drove slowly up the drive, the car whispering, Craig spotted the dogs. They used cover like leopards, and they followed him all the time. He reached the main doors of the house, switched off the engine, pulled up the hand brake, and waited. The six dogs settled in a great arc round the car, ears back, the hair on their necks bristling. If he left the car they would kill him, for all his slull, and Pascoe wasn't there to meet him; Pascoe was enjoying the fact that Craig was helpless in the face of something that he, Pascoe, had created.
He appeared at last, and whistled to the dogs. At once they moved off back into the grounds and their endless patrol. Craig got out of the Lamborghini and moved up the steps, not hurrying, to where Pascoe waited. Pascoe had been a colonel in military intelligence and a liaison officer with the maquis, and had survived three months in a Gestapo prison. He was tall, thin, whipcord hard, and proud of his school. The people he turned out were the best there were, except that Craig had been better than any of them. Craig was the only Department K operator who had never attended the school. Pascoe detested him.
"You do yourself well," he said, and looked at the Lamborghini, its insolent scarlet blaring at a bed of soft Mayflowers. Craig walked past him into a hall that held a Shiraz rug, a Jacobean chest, an oil by Srubbs.
"You don't do too badly yourself," he said. "For a schoolmaster."
Pascoe's hands clenched. Sooner or later they always did, when Craig appeared. He had never met the man who could beat him, until he met Craig. The thought was bitter to him. Then he remembered what Loomis had said to him over the scrambler phone. Craig was getting past it. The fists loosened, became hands again.
"Can I get you something?" he said. "A drink?"
Craig looked at his watch.
"I'm not quite that far gone," he said. "Eleven o'clock in the morning is a shade too early, even for old dipsos like me. Where are all the pupils?"
"At a lecture," Pascoe said. "They won't know you've been here."
"Can I see them?" Craig asked.
"Of course," said Pascoe. "They're watched all the time." He took a key from his pocket, inserted it into the back of a television set, and switched on. As its picture formed Craig saw five men and two women listening to a doctor. He was explaining how to set a broken arm. Craig thought he had never seen such an intensity of concentration.
"No one-way glass?" he asked.
"Certainly—if you'd prefer it," Pascoe said.
He took the key from the set, then led the way toward the lecture room. Set in one wall of it was a mirror, and behind it Craig stood. From his side the mirror became a window, and he looked at the seven faces, the set of their bodies, the way they used their hands. After the lecture they went to the target range, and again Craig watched, unseen. Then it was unarmed combat, and he watched them on the dojo mat. Lunch then, with Pascoe presiding, the meal conducted with the formal stiffness of an embassy reception, butler and footman wary for mistakes with glasses, forks, knives, as Craig spied on them. After lunch Pascoe held his class in situations. You have to get information out of a man, but you must make no noise. What do you do? . . . You pretend to speak no Russian, and the KGB have trapped you into showing a knowledge of Russian. What do you do? . . . You have a message that must be delivered; a live drop. The courier who turns up seems impeccable—and yet you are not quite sure. What do you do? . . . Craig eavesdropped, and ate sandwiches.
By the end of the class he had made his choice. He went to Pascoe's office, and Pascoe joined him.
"They're in the language lab for half an hour," he said. "After that I really should turn them loose for a bit or they'll start to wonder."
"The one you called David," said Craig. "David Branch. I'd like a copy of his file. And the fair lad—Andrew Royce." He paused, and Pascoe said:
"You were asked to pick three."
At last Craig said, "The rest of the men were pretty average."
"And the girls?"
Slowly, reluctantly, Craig said, "The tall one had possibilities."
"Joanna Benson? I quite agree," said Pascoe. "They're the three I'd have picked myself."
He went to a cabinet and took out three files. Craig signed for them.
"How do you propose to organize these tests?"