Audley nodded. "And that's exactly where I intend to be—
busy with the battle— when it happens."
"When what happens?"
"There's a First Aid box in the tent, right next to the black powder charge for tomorrow's explosion. Last night I put a fifteen-minute time pencil in the box—a grey plastic cylinder, to arm it all your man has to do is twist the head anticlockwise and press it down. He'll know, anyway—it's standard CIA issue." He smiled coldly at Charlie. "That was another thing I lifted from Donaldson's flat. ... So that's all there is to it: twist and press at 5.15, and we both keep our gold. Or do nothing—and we both keep nothing. That's the deal."
dummy5
He gave Charlie one last hard look to go with the ultimatum, and then turned away towards the parapet to examine the progress of the assault.
It was obvious at a glance why the Double R Society found it necessary to rehearse their major operations; the fire-fight had gone according to schedule, and the pioneers had wallowed in the mud to good effect, but the conversion of the lines of pikemen into columns was proving more difficult in practice than in theory. Also, with the advance of the first regiments on to the newly-laid causeways, it was becoming apparent that the width of the column was greater than the width of the causeways.
As he watched, several of the outer files were jostled into the mire, where they quickly discovered that it was one thing to negotiate eight inches of mud unencumbered, but quite another to do so in full seventeenth-century battle order carrying a twelve-foot pike. Nothing could have more effectively illustrated why their ancestors hadn't attacked on this side of the defences until they were confident that treachery would even the odds.
He took a few paces towards the side of the bastion, where the remains of an embrasure still marked the spot from which old Edmund Steyning had intended that the defenders should enfilade any Royalists who might get as far as the ditch below the curtain wall. Not even Sebastian de Vauban could have sited it better, nor could Vauban have used the ground better to shape a peaceful manor house into a dummy5
fortress. The old warrior had deserved a kinder fate than a kinsman's betrayal, no matter what the good cause.
He turned on his heel and faced Charlie, the great cannon between them now, with its flanking pyramids of weathered cannonballs.
"Time's up. Am I your partner? Or do I go back to Robert Donaldson and tell him the meeting's off?"
Charlie watched him intently, brushing nervously at a strand of fair hair which kept falling across his eyes. Audley conjured up the image of Henry Digby, and hardened his heart with the memory. "You still have a problem?"
"That would be one way of putting it." Charlie gave up trying to discipline the look. "I find you . . . intriguing, as pigs go.
But hardly believable."
"No?" Audley stepped forward and placed both hands on the cannon. Then he lent towards Charlie. "You find greed unbelievable—and you know the feel of gold? I find that even harder to believe."
Charlie shook his head. "Oh—not your greed, that I can accept. I can even understand why you're so pig-scared of your own side that you have to give yourself a perfect alibi."
"That's true—I admit it. But then I'm still risking my life for my gold. You only stand to lose your gold and spend a few years in jail."
"Your gold . . . your gold . . ." Suddenly Charlie's expression hardened "Why should I believe in your gold? Why should I dummy5
believe one single word you've said?"
"Why?" Audley drew a deep breath "Well, I'll tell you why. . . . Because your ancestor Edmund Steyning was an artillery expert by profession—a trained gunner."
"So what?"
Audley straightened up. "So he brought his biggest gun— this gun—" he slapped the cannon sharply with the palm of his hand "—and he put it in the one place where it would be absolutely useless."
Charlie frowned. "What d'you mean?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Audley pointed out across the valley towards the earth ramparts of the old castle on the far hillside. "Four hundred yards as the crow flies—that would be point-blank range for this gun. Even the smallest field-pieces could carry far further than that. ... So it's wasted here
—there wasn't anything to fire at anyway: this wasn't the vulnerable side, this wasn't where the Royalist siege works were, or their batteries."
"But this was where they attacked in the end—" Charlie answered automatically, as though he didn't know why he was arguing.
"A surprise attack. So how long d'you think it takes to load and fire this gun? Five minutes—ten minutes? Man, you'd be lucky to get ten shots an hour out of a monster like this—and even if you did you wouldn't hit anything."
"Why not?"
dummy5
"Because it's too big to depress the angle of the barrel down the glacis. All he could do was fire straight ahead—" Audley pointed his finger across the valley "—and that's what Edmund Steyning did for a whole week: he fired point blank into a great bank of wet earth and vexed nobody. Except that he vexed Black Thomas Monson and Oliver Cromwell when they came to look for Nathaniel Parrott's ton of gold and found that it had vanished into thin air. And they didn't find it inside the castle defences because it wasn't inside any more
—it was outside."
Charlie Ratcliffe was staring at the old castle as though hypnotised by its grassy banks.
Audley came round the rear of the cannon and stood at his shoulder. "The night before last I took an electronic metal probe and worked all along there," he murmured. "And after an hour it started to sing like a nightingale to me. ... See that scar of earth spread in the middle there—about half-way along—like a big rabbit-hole? They're planted all around there, most of them, not more than three-foot deep, so far as I can make out ... I dug a couple out from there, anyway." He paused for a second. "Because I thought you might like to see a sample."
Charlie turned his head quickly. "A sample?"
"Call it a souvenir, if you prefer. Or even a present." Audley smiled. "I shall have enough for my modest needs, so I can spare you one—if not a present, say a down-payment?"
He lifted his sword-scabbard and jabbed hard at the topmost dummy5
cannonball on the pyramid in front of them.
The ball quivered very slightly in its concrete socket.
"Forty-pounders—or something more, seeing that this one isn't like the others," said Audley. "I rolled the original one into the ditch."
He held the scabbard in both hands and ran the metal tip of it down the dirt encrusted surface. "A very proper token from one traitor to another—in the best tradition, wouldn't you say?"
The scabbard-tip began to bite deeper into the encrustation as it travelled down the arc of the ball towards its widest circumference, until finally it dislodged a whole flake of dirt.
Under the dirt, bearing the bright new scratch of the scabbard-tip in its softness, lay pale gold.
Epilogue
A Skirmish near Westminster
SOMETIMES it was better not to know a man too well, decided Audley. For just as inevitability took all the fun out of victory, so it removed the blessing of hope out of approaching disaster.
But there it was: Sir Frederick Clinton was standing under the John Singer Sargent portrait of Rear-Admiral Sir dummy5
Reginald Hall, the greatest of all of his predecessors, with a glorious blaze of gladioli in the fireplace behind him and a welcoming smile on his lips, as he was accustomed to do before putting in the boot.
"David—good of you to drop in—sit down. . . . And how was Washington?"
Setzen Sie sich, Herr Audley!
"Too hot."
Like this office.
"Yes, you're a cold weather mortal, aren't you! Next time we'll have to find somewhere cooler for you. . . . But we've been having it quite warm here, you know, as a matter of fact."