Tremor of Intent

'Do you mean,' asked Hillier, beginning to feel that he could feel sick, 'that my own people instructed you to kill me?'

'I personally wasn't instructed. Panleth, our agency -delightful name, isn't it? Cosy, somehow. Kill all pan-germs with Panleth – Panleth passed on the assignment. It seems to me, having studied the matter, that there's neither wantonness nor ingratitude in the desire of your late friends to have you killed. I should think you were even given a sporting chance. Naturally, I had a look at that letter I handed to you when you embarked at Venice. I couldn't be bothered to decipher it, but I guessed at its content. I should think there was an apology there for what was coming. There are gentlemen in England now abed, sleeping sound in the knowledge that the decent thing was done. You should by rights have spent your voyage puzzling out that message, but you decided to dedicate it to a sort of fling. A last fling, as it happens. The pattern of things proves you were right to do that. I would have got you anyway, though not perhaps here. You've had a final rich spoonful of life. Gorblimey, sir,' he added, in his steward voice, 'that's a bit of a bleedin' understatement.' And, in the Harrow voice, 'You can be thankful for that.'

'I still want to know why,' sweated Hillier.

'I think I can give the answer,' said Roper. 'You know too much.'

'Too much for what}'

'You're being deliberately obtuse,' said Wriste. 'Too much to be let loose into a retirement. Mr Roper is perfectly right. I should imagine you've already sold information to Theodorescu. That money on your naked lap -what a stupid story you told me about a wager. Your generous hand-outs to me, incidentally, seem to attest a sense of guilt. Anyway, were you to live you'd sell more information or even give it away. That you were brought up a Roman Catholic was always one thing against you. You left your Church, but you'd probably go back to it in retirement. A sort of hobby, I suppose. As with Mr Roper here, that old loyalty tended always to militate against another. You could never be wholly patriotic. Add to this your known sensuality – itself a kind of substitute for faith-and you have, I should have thought, enough grounds for a quiet and regretful liquidation. Think about it, Mr Hillier. Put yourself in the position of those English gentlemen who, when they're not on the golf-course, worry about security.'

Roper seemed less fearful than interested. He frankly leered his admiration of Wriste's lucidity of exposition. He said: 'Where do I come into this?'

'A pendent, as I told you. It was considered, for obvious reasons, better that Mr Hillier should be given his quietus on Soviet soil. You, Mr Roper, were never thought of as more than a mere pretext for getting Mr Hillier here. This will be unpalatable, I know. You are – and I have this on the highest authority – not wanted back in England.'

Roper, despite all he had spat out at Roper-burning England, now seemed to tamp down indignation. 'I'm not having that, you know.'

'Come now, think it over. You've already done your best work. Scientists, like poets, mature early and decay early. It is young scientists that are wanted. The stock fictional image of the grey-haired doddering genius being smuggled in or out is totally false. Your value to the Russians is mostly symbolic. The British are more concerned at the moment with luring Alexeyev over to the West than with reclaiming you.'

'Alexeyev?' went Roper. 'But Alexeyev's only a bloody kid.'

'It's the bloody kids that are needed,' said Wriste. The locution, in Wriste's pedantic tones, carried connotations of sacrifice. Ritual, it was all ritual. 'As for the moral implications of your defection, it's only a vocal minority in Parliament that's crying out for your head. A treason-trial would spill too much muck into the headlines. That muck has to be buried, not spread.'

Roper went crimson. Hillier asked: 'What muck?'

'I don't know the whole of it,' said Wriste. 'Those passages of Mr Roper's autobiography that I've read-'

'How did he get hold of that?' asked Roper in red anger. 'That bugger you mentioned – Theo something-or-other-'

Wriste shrugged. 'Apparently you've had a double agent snooping in your vicinity. Perhaps a lab-boy or room-cleaner or something. He sold a Xerox copy of your completed chapters to a man who sold it to a man who sold it to a man who sold it to Mr Theodorescu. Mr Theodorescu is voracious for information. Of course, a typescript – top copy or carbon – is valueless in any market other than the literary. It's holographs that are needed. Though to the student of human motivation, the chronicler of that specific kind that produces the traitor, your typescript isn't without interest. The trouble is that anybody with a moderately inflamed imagination could have written it. And your typescript seems to leave off, as though with fright, on the threshold of the really significant revelation. I should be interested to know why you embarked on this task at all.'

'It was suggested to me,' said Roper, mumbling again. 'Clarify my ideas. Examine myself. It was an exercise. But you still haven't said why-'

'I think all that's clear now, isn't it? The client I have to serve in respect of you, Mr Roper-'

'Look,' said Roper, 'I'm sick to death of this bloody mister. I'm Doctor Roper, got it? Doctor, doctor, doctor.' It was like a stoic cry out of Jacobean drama: / am Duchess of Malfi still.

'Alas, Mister Roper, your doctorate was taken away from you. It was publicly announced, I gather, but you personally evidently weren't informed. The senate of the university concerned announced that they'd discovered evidences of plagiarism.'

'That's a bloody lie.'

'Probably. But it was in the national interest that you should seem to be a fraud and a fake. The British public could sleep sound. A man of straw had gone over to the Russians. The news of your dedoctorisation, if that's the right term, never appeared in the Daily Worker, and certainly Pravda wouldn't mention it. You remained ignorant.'

'So did I,' said Hillier. 'A great deal of what you're saying grows more and more suspect.'

'As you please. But you, Mr Hillier, began to opt out of the modern world long before you sent in your resignation. You read mostly menus and the moles oil whores' bellies. All this is unimportant. What I say now is far from unimportant. A certain cabinet minister, Mr Roper, be- came agitated when he learned, at a little dinner party in Albany, that you were to be forcibly repatriated. About the autobiography he knew nothing. I deduced that he feared revelations which would affect him privily if you should be brought to trial. I can guess at the nature of the revelations. If only you had gone further in your autobiography I should know absolutely how this high personage was involved in your career. But no matter. It was important, so far as he was concerned, that you should not return to England. He had made use of Panleth before. It was a matter of trying to make the last government fall. The government's majority was down to two; the member of a certain marginal constituency was known to be suffering from heart disease; Panleth arranged for the progress of that ailment to gallop to a premature consummation. When he learned, in the strictest confidence, that you, Mr Roper, were coming home, he contacted Panleth again. Hence my two assignments, their respective provenances quite independent, united only by place. Panleth is an efficient agency. It looks after its clients and consults their convenience. It takes only ten per cent.'

'Well,' said Roper, more cheerfully, 'you don't have to do the job, do you? You're going to kill Hillier, and H illier won't be taking me-' He nearly said 'home'.