Hartinger's Mouse (Commander Shaw Book 12) Page 2

  Max gave me rather a cold smile. “I’ve already apologized for the hour, though I’m damned if I see why I should. Your vast salary is meant to cover twenty-four hours a day. As a matter of fact, we haven’t yet been asked to take this on, but remember we’re at a very early stage just now. The speed with which the Ministry has asked for reports is quite remarkable — and that indicates the degree of anxiety in official circles more clearly than anything else could do! I fully expect to be briefed before much longer, Shaw. If you can’t see the possibilities for yourself, you’re not the man I thought you were.”

  I said, “Oh, I can see the possibilities all right! They’re nasty.” I didn’t want to be too alarmist too soon, but I definitely had the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment in mind. The boys at Porton were deep in the biological warfare game. I asked, “Has Porton Down been brought into it yet?”

  The brigadier came in on that. “Yes,” he said. “Porton was alerted a couple of hours ago, by the Ministry. I’ve a contact there — I’m keeping in personal touch. So far nothing’s emerged.”

  I nodded. “Right,” I said, and looked at Max. “What are the instructions?”

  “Vague enough,” Max answered, shrugging his heavy shoulders. “Until we’re alerted officially we have no standing in the matter, of course, so you’ll have to keep clear of Porton for one thing, and the Ministry of Health. But subject to those provisos, I want you to find out all you can about this dust, or powder, or what-have-you — particularly as to where it’s coming from, where it originates. Keep in constant touch with this office — and don’t forget to have a check on that finger in the morning.”

  I glanced at the gold presentation clock on Max’s chimney-piece. “Morning!” I said. “It’s morning already. Brigadier, I’d like to know immediately what Porton finds out as a result of its own analysis. Can do?”

  “Roger,” Cockburn-Hawkes said.

  I got up; with any luck I could still snatch three or four hours’ sleep. As I went towards the door I said, “One thing occurs to me: Porton could have been making an unannounced test of something new, couldn’t they? Whatever they were testing could have spread a little wider than they intended. How’s that?”

  Cockburn-Hawkes shrugged it off but he looked pretty grim.

  *

  First thing in the morning I rang the girl who had been coming to Connemara with me and told her, without saying precisely why, of course, that the holiday was off. She was disappointed and she sounded cool and I couldn’t blame her. I had a few bitter moments of loathing for Max and Cockburn-Hawkes and the whole frustrating ambience of an agent’s life and then I got the car out and drove through to Focal House, where I shoved the E-type in the underground park and went on up in the lift to the medical section to produce my finger-tip. I saw Doc Carson, whom I knew well. He’d already been briefed by the brigadier so I was able to talk to him about the whole business.

  Carson was as much in the dark, though, as the rest of us. He examined my finger, which still had the skin but was tending to itch more than ever by this time, and said, “Damned if I know what to advise, other than to keep washing it.”

  I asked, “What good’ll that do?”

  “Probably none,” he said, “but it’s all I can think of.”

  He fished out a pad of cottonwool, held it for a moment to the neck of a bottle, and dabbed at the finger with something that stung a little and had a sweetish smell. “I wouldn’t worry too much, seeing you had the sense to wash it straight away. If the itching gets worse, or goes on for more than, say, another couple of days, come and see me again. Let me know if any further symptoms develop — say if the skin starts to peel.” He added, “I’ll put a light bandage on, just in case it turns out to be contagious.”

  “Think it’s likely to be?”

  “I can’t possibly say. It’s just a precaution, that’s all.” He looked at me hard through his spectacles. “Do you know if you’ve touched anybody with that finger, Commander Shaw?”

  I don’t know why, but his question reminded me, suddenly, of Jagger. I had clean forgotten about poor Jagger. I said, “Jagger!”

  “You’ve touched him?”

  “No —”

  “Who’s Jagger, anyway?”

  “Oh, a man in the Home Office. Mind if I telephone him from here before I leave, Doc?”

  “No, of course I don’t. But you haven’t answered my question. Have you touched anybody?”

  I remembered again, at that. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it for myself, really. I said, “There’s a girl.”

  “You’ve — er — touched her?” Oddly for a doctor, I’d have thought, Carson looked embarrassed. “Has she complained?”

  I gave a shout of laughter. “Not about being touched,” I said. “I don’t know that I did touch her, but there may have been some contact. I don’t see how I’m to warn her without breaking security, though. D’you think it’s important?”

  Carson pursed his lips. “It could be. You see, we just don’t know. I don’t think you should take any risks, though. As a doctor, Commander, I must advise you to find some way of warning anybody you may have touched in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “All right,” I said dubiously, and then I rang Jagger at the Home Office. I didn’t give him any information, I just asked him if he’d had any after-effects from touching the spot on his car, and it seemed he had.

  “It’s bloody painful,” he said, whining a little for sympathy. “Skin’s all off — it’s as raw as a beetroot.”

  “See a doctor,” I told him, “and don’t, repeat don’t, touch any part of April Goodhart. That could be important.” April Goodhart was his secretary and though she was a sexy little piece she was in fact the prop and mainstay of, and the only other person in, Jagger’s department, which on the surface had to do with criminology and international law: it was a very special appointment indeed, and the senior civil servants of the Home Office were a bit chuffed about someone of Jason Jagger’s age and dress — Carnaby Street — calling himself a Head of Department. Anyway, having warned him about touching the girl, I rang off before he could start asking any awkward questions; and a little later, from my own flat, I rang my own girl friend and asked her, discreetly, if she had noticed anything amiss. Sounding very surprised, she said no, she hadn’t. I told her, and tried to sound urgent about it, that if she started itching she should ring me at once, and it wasn’t until I had put the handset down that I realized just how many unseemly interpretations could be put on what I’d said. And after that I sat down with a glass of scotch, shook my finger violently in an effort to alleviate my own continuing itch, and tried to dream up a starting point for my investigations. As a means of getting myself switched on, as it were, I studied the reports of the yellow dust in several newspapers. They were not a lot of help. There was widespread interest from all over, on account of the widely dispersed spread of the stuff and because there was a decided element of mystery, but there was absolutely no alarm and very little mention of the effects upon the skin. The Ministry of Health, of course, was not making its anxieties public, and there was no mention of Porton Down anywhere. I got no leads from the Press, and frankly I had none of my own, and I hadn’t an idea in all the world where to begin. My security phone rang twice that morning. The first time it was Brigadier Cockburn-Hawkes. Although that line was a closed one direct to Focal House all he said was, “Porton negative,” and then at once rang off. Well, this was serious now. If Porton was as flummoxed as everyone else, then somebody, somewhere, could have dreamed up some brand-new vileness in the biological warfare line. Such would not be too extreme a thought these days. Yet somehow I couldn’t quite see it; there was no sabre-rattling going on anywhere currently, or no more than the routine stuff anyway, and I couldn’t see any potential enemy chucking away a brand-new secret so wastefully. Not with intent, anyhow. To my mind there were three possible alternatives: Either some unknown Power had let off a cloud of the stuff on
test and it had been blown where it shouldn’t; or the stuff was in fact entirely harmless, which I had to admit was not quite on in view of the skin effects; or, as I still had in mind, Porton itself had hit on something new, had tested it, and in the public interest (a debatable point?) wasn’t going to admit anything in the meantime.

  The second telephone call was from Max, and he said, “It’s on, Shaw. It’s official. The Minister’s been in touch and he’s practically doing his blasted nut.”

  So that was it; all stops had to come out now. I had to think something up — but fast.

  *

  I couldn’t find any particular pattern at first, other than the absolutely obvious one: The curious skin disease had broken out in the areas around those places where the dust had been brought down. I gave myself no marks for establishing that as I doodled on a pad of writing paper. But in point of fact there was another element; the disease was not entirely confined to the dust-drop areas. Word came in to the Ministry and Focal House that cases had been reported from other areas — and not necessarily of people who had passed through the yellow dust districts themselves. So it began to look as if there could be something in Carson’s idea of contagion. And later that day something came in that interested me a lot: London Airport entered the picture. At Heathrow three Customs Officers, an Immigration Officer and an air stewardess were now known to have come out with the skin-loss symptom earlier. The air stewardess had come off a flight that had left New York’s Kennedy Airport a couple of days ago and she’d noticed an itch soon after arrival, which put the thing back to before the yellow dust had been noted in Britain. The Customs and Immigration men involved had all been concerned with the handling of passengers off that flight. All this was handed to me on a plate by Max; the rest was up to me. I went out right away to Heathrow and I talked to a few people, including the men who had come out with the skin loss. In each case it was the fingers that had been affected, and in addition one of the Customs Officers, who had done some rummaging in a suitcase, had an angry-looking patch extending across the back of his hand to his wrist. And, I repeat, all this had happened before the descent of the yellow dust. That seemed to me to let Porton off the hook, and at the same time to implicate the United States. I got the address of the air stewardess — she was a girl named Jane Airdrie and I was told she shared a flat with two other girls in Kensington Park Road. I also got myself a list of all the passengers who had been on that flight from Kennedy, together with their addresses in U.K. Out of the whole list, only four had flown on from London, one to Dublin and three to the Continent.

  I got back in the Jag and went first to see Jane Airdrie.

  By a stroke of luck I found her in and on her own; her flat-mates, it seemed, were still at work. I established my identity and quoted the Official Secrets Act at her, and I asked her to try to remember which of the passengers on her last flight she had been in physical contact with. Not really surprisingly, she couldn’t.

  She was a pretty girl and out to be helpful, but she said, “I could have touched any of them, Commander Shaw. I was serving meals and drinks most of the time.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I realize that, Miss Airdrie. But did you, for instance, shake any hands — that sort of thing?”

  “No,” she said. “Not shake hands … once or twice I did have my hand kind of caught — you know, passengers trying to attract my attention as I passed by them.”

  “You can’t remember who they were?”

  She screwed up her eyes, rather attractively. She had nice eyes and a wonderful figure. If I’d been aboard that aircraft, I guess I’d have been a hand-snatcher. And maybe more than just one or two had had the same idea, because she said, after some thought, “No, I really couldn’t say who they were now.”

  “That’s a pity,” I said. “By the way, how’s the hand?” She looked at the bandage on her fingers. “I didn’t even bother to report it till I saw the papers. But my fingers did get very raw a few hours after touchdown,” she told me, “and they were terribly itchy. It’s wearing off now.”

  So, as a matter of fact, was mine. I said, “I suppose you wash your hands pretty often during a flight?”

  “Oh, yes. All the airlines are very particular about that sort of thing.”

  “I suppose they are. Miss Airdrie … can you tell me anything about your passengers? I mean, was there anyone who seemed interesting, or odd, or just plain nasty? Or anyone, say, with an unusual job?” I was just casting around, being vague because I had to be, not giving too much away. And of course I didn’t get any results.

  She said, “No, I don’t think so. They all seemed a very ordinary sort of bunch. Americans mostly, tourists doing Britain before going on somewhere else … a few returning businessmen, some foreigners. There was a vice-admiral coming back from Washington.” She smiled, regretfully. “I’m terribly sorry. I’m not much help, am I?”

  I returned the smile with pleasure. “You’ve done your best. It’s not your fault if no-one stood up and said he had a bag of itching powder in his briefcase. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Watch those fingers,” I added.

  “I will, don’t worry.” She came to the door with me. I went down the stairs and out and got in the Jag and ran an eye down that passenger list again. Those people were, as Jane Airdrie had said, a pretty ordinary sounding bunch, not that that of itself was any kind of evidence one way or the other. I’d known plenty of apparently ordinary people who’d turned out lethal. Feeling frustrated again I shoved the list back in my pocket and took the Jag out into the stream of traffic. There was a biggish number of names on that passenger list, and they were scattered all over address-wise. Only eighteen were staying in London — that is, only eighteen had given actual London hotel addresses. Quite a number had given accommodation addresses — banks, businesses and the like, plus a hotel where they had spent the first night of their visits. That first night was history by now. I felt it might be a good thing to have a word with that vice-admiral; at least we could talk the same language and I could open up to him rather more than to any of the others. And he might — just might — know something about the more eminent of his fellow-passengers from New York. He was Vice-Admiral Sir Hugh Palfry and he lived in a village outside Portsmouth. It wouldn’t take me long to get down the A3 and there was no time like the present. I went home to my own telephone, not realizing that STD had reached Palfry’s village but suspecting that at this hour of the day the exchange operators merely pulled out the contacts whenever a public call-box disturbed their meditations, and I spoke to Palfry and warned him to expect me — urgent business, I said, for the Home Office, taking Jagger’s employers’ name in vain in the interests of telephone security. I came straight out again and headed for Hammersmith and the A3, and even before I’d reached the right-hand turn out of Roehampton Lane I’d realized there was a tail on me. I had proved that by deliberately taking a wrong left turn at the traffic lights by the Red Rover public house and then threading through to the right road again. The tail was a 3½-litre Rover. Fast, but I reckoned I was faster if I didn’t mind chancing the police. Or on the other hand it might be much more interesting to lead that tail onto a nice quiet stretch of road, if there was one, and see what happened when I stopped.

  Backed up in my decision by the nice feel of the Beretta in my shoulder-holster, and the proximity of a Colt .45 automatic in the glove compartment, I made up my mind to do just that.

  *

  The tail was quite clever, keeping mostly a couple of cars behind me, varying his distance now and again and not trying unduly to stop other cars overtaking him. I turned left off the A3 in the village of Horndean, left again for Rowlands Castle, where Palfry lived, and then, and finally, left once more into a narrow country road. I didn’t know where it led, but it looked handy, and I didn’t intend to go far along it anyway.

  Three hundred yards or so up that road I slammed the brakes on. My tail wasn’t in fact keeping all that close, he still didn’t want to overact
his part — though he must have thought me a nut case if he believed I hadn’t tumbled to him by now — and he was only just inside the corner. He pulled up pretty sharpish as I jumped out of the Jag and then something rather odd happened. Another car came past the end of the road, checked, stopped, reversed. The front near-side window was wound down fast and I saw the snout of a sub-machine-gun come through. There was a burst of fire; bullets spattered the ground much too close to me and some twigs and leaves came off the hedges. At that moment I tripped myself up in a pothole and fell flat. I dare say the involuntary action saved my life. The firing went on a little longer but by the time I had picked myself up the other car — a Renault fastback — had gone and the tail’s car was a mess of holed and opaque triplex and spoilt bodywork. The tail, I found when I got there, was a mess too. He was dead, and he’d died bloodily. His head was smashed. There was gore everywhere, on the upholstery, on the cobwebbed windscreen, on the floor and the dash. There wouldn’t be any hope of catching up with the other car, which had obviously enough been tailing the tail, so I took time to check right through the Rover. I didn’t find a thing, except for a revolver in the glove compartment. It was an American job, with a cylinder that swung out sideways, fully loaded, and there was some spare ammunition with it — .38 Special. This gave no clues to the tail’s identity, neither did anything in his pockets. No letters, no driving licence, British, International or American, no business cards, nothing. But he was probably American, judging from the tailor’s tag in his ready-made suit, or maybe he had just stocked his wardrobe in the States. Anyway, there was nothing I could do for him now. I ran back to my own car and reversed it out of the side road, past the Rover, straightened in the intersection, and headed fast for Rowlands Castle. I soon found Palfry’s house. The vice-admiral was waiting for me with a bottle of gin.

  He greeted me affably. “Nice to meet you, Shaw. Heard of you, y’know. In the Service — weren’t you?”