"Maybe you don't know it," said Remo, "but we are on the same side. We have been for the last century and I expect we always will be. So where is the Source?"
"You'll never get through to them. They're not some little station disguised off Piccadilly surrounded by plaster walls and a few gunmen. The Source is absolutely British and your newfangled hand tricks couldn't get you within a hundred yards of them."
"Newfangled? I didn't show you anything that wasn't thirteen centuries old when you people were painting yourself blue," said Remo.
The place Remo was not supposed to be able to penetrate was on the way from Malden to London, about twenty miles outside the city limits.
The inpregnable edifice sat on a small hillock surrounded by hundreds of yards of lawn. The lawn was not for decoration. Remo knew that centuries before, all the trees would have been felled by peasants or captives or slaves. The land was always cleared around castles so that the enemy would be vulnerable as it approached. This castle was massive stone, twenty feet thick, smoothed so that attackers could not climb its high walls. There was even a wide moat. And parapets. And slit holes no bigger than a fist for the famous English longbow.
"This? This is supposed to be impenetrable?" asked Remo.
"Yes. Just try your newfangled techniques on that, old chap! "
"That," said Remo, "is your typical Norman castle, perfectly devised to stop Anglo-Saxon rebels, and other Norman lords, It's got a moat, a drawbridge, access to the outer walls from inner ramps to roll up vats of boiling oil. It also has the mandatory escape tunnel that runs under the moat for use if all of the aforesaid shouldn't work."
Remo reeled off this information quickly like a child reciting, which was the way he had learned it. He never thought it would come in handy. It was one of those early lessons in tradition. There was the Norman castle, the Roman stockade, the Japanese palace, the French fortress, and all those old defenses he thought were ridiculous to learn about because they weren't used anymore.
Remo had the car stop two hundred yards from the drawbridge.
"Giving up?" said the intelligence chief.
"No. You don't enter a Norman castle from a drawbridge. You can do the walls, but why bother? I like to surprise people."
Remo smiled and left the car. He would find what he was looking for between two hundred and one hundred and fifty yards from the moat. By now it would be well overgrown, but even when in use, it was disguised by rocks. Usually it was placed west of the castle so that the rising sun would be behind it. They liked to use the passages in daylight, because at night attackers would respond to sound. It was the escape tunnel, its location known only to the reigning Lord. The Japanese had long before abandoned that sort of escape route because of the danger of assassins using it. The British had never had that problem and had left the tunnels.
The beautiful aspect of these tunnels was that they always came from the lord's bedroom, always the safest place, and the point an assassin would invariably have to attack. The lord of the castle would deliver a stirring speech about holding out to the last man, then in the privacy of his sleeping room, don the clothes of his enemies, and with his immediate family make his way into or behind enemy lines. It was a perfect escape from any Saxons or Normans against whom they might be fighting a losing battle.
Remo could have gotten into this castle within the first month of his breath training. He felt the earth under his feet and tried to sense some different stone formation beneath. He stayed very quiet, smelling the fresh grass and sensing the odor of the oak and new life all around him. His steps became smooth glides, his arms like divining rods which seemed to rise so that his fingertips and the ground they hovered over rested on the air between them. A bird chirped in nearby trees away from the castle. Behind him the heavy gasoline chug of the car spit heavy fumes into the pure air.
Remo kept his pace, shutting his eyes because he could not find this place with his eyes. Time had made them useless.
Inside the car, the remaining conscious Britons discussed the peculiar American.
"What's he doing?"
"Damned well waltzing for all I know."
"He's not doing anything. Just gliding around there. His eyes are closed."
"Strange one."
"Bit brutal, yes?"
"I don't know. We're supposed to be his allies, after all. Why are we hiding these things from him?"
"We're not hiding anything."
"We're not exactly giving information freely."
"Well, we're not hiding anything."
"Don't think we should have at the beginning, if you ask me. The Americans are our friends. Who are we really protecting?" asked the military officer.
"You worry too much. Ask too many questions. People won't like you after a while if you behave like that," said the intelligence-unit chief.
"There. He's stopped. Over there. Now what's he doing?"
"By Jove, look at that."
The thin American with the thick wrists paused, quivering, then slowly, as though on some invisible quicksand, slipped down into the earth and was no longer seen.
Remo had found the escape tunnel.
There were those who knew of Guy Philliston, some who even said they knew him personally, and then there were his dear, dear friends.
Guy Philliston's dear, dear friends ran England. Pretty much the way they had always run England since the Industrial Revolution. It was not some great diabolical consortium of vested interests plotting against the common man. Many of them liked to call themselves common men. Guy Philliston's dear, dear friends were those people who generally made things work to a degree. They lunched together, theatered together, sometimes transgressed with one another's wives, and if they were really close, introduced one another to their tailor. They got government posts in whatever government happened to be elected, and generally, when there was a post to fill, filled it with one of their own. Governments might change, the Queen might die, but the dear, dear friends of Guy Philliston went on forever, in empire and in dissolution, in conquest and in defeat.
Thus it was that when Her Majesty's Secret Service found itself riddled with Russian agents, one section chief after another turning up in Moscow with the most sensitive of British secrets, this group turned to one of its own.
It occurred at the races in the right box. The men wore gray gloves and gray top hats and impeccable race attire. The Queen had entered. They rose out of respect.
"Guy," said his friend to Lord Philliston, "bit of a muck-up at MI-5."
"Rather," said Guy Philliston. He had heard at lunch the day before that Russia had not only gotten away with a master list of every British agent in the Middle East, but because the list was so incredibly sensitive, no one had dared make a duplicate. Now only Russia knew who Britain had under the sun where the West's oil energy lay buried.
"Got to do something, you know. Can't go on like this. Be nice if we, not they, knew who we had."
"Quite," said Guy. "Did you try the salmon mousse?" A silver tray of hors d'oeuvres rested on a mahogany stand next to a chilled magnum of champagne of a modest year. Nothing rude, of course, but nothing to make one stop and notice.
His friend thought about the salmon mousse awhile. Then he said:
"Do you want to grab hold of those boys and shake them up a bit, Guy?"
"Don't think it would work."
"What would you do?"
"I would use our misfortune, old boy," said Guy.
"The one thing I want to do with a disaster is forget it."
"Not in this case," said Lord Philliston. He was devastatingly handsome with fine strong features befitting a British lord. Indeed, more than one movie producer had asked him to take a screen test. He had always refused. Acting was too much like work.