Gibraltar Road Read online

  “Remove him, sir?”

  Latymer shrugged. “Snuff him out, I suppose, if necessary—because, as I told you, the end of Ackroyd may well mean the end of Project Sinker, at least for a long time. But, all things being equal, I’d say she’ll try to get him behind the Iron Curtain. . . . Mind you, he’s a bit of an oddity, not the kind of person you’d expect to find at his level, perhaps. Very ordinary Yorkshire background—father was a miner at one time. But he’s a brainy bird—obviously —and stuffed full of vital information. He could be extremely useful to them—and a nightmare to us if ever he reached a Communist country. Of course, there’s no special security about atomic subs as such, but we don’t want too much to get out about the overseas bases yet, and this fuel unit’s hot. So’s Ackroyd.”

  Shaw asked, “This’d be a kidnap job—I mean, his personal loyalty’s not in doubt?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no! He’s a first-rate man, and his security record’s absolutely clear. Wouldn’t be on that particular job otherwise. Every one’s hand-picked—there’s none of the usual Spanish labour on this job, either.”

  Shaw said, “He’ll be pretty carefully watched in Gib, surely? It sounds rather a tough job for one woman.”

  “Not for Karina,” observed Latymer smoothly, “as you should know. Don’t forget she’s damned attractive as well as clever—that counts. She’s worked for us, so she knows something of our methods, and of Admiralty routines. She’s got plenty of friends in high places, and she doesn’t work singlehanded.”

  “True enough, sir.” Shaw pulled at a fresh cigarette, frowned. “I still think she’s taking on something pretty big, though.”

  Latymer warned, “Don’t underestimate what she can do. Now—if she does succeed a very vital chain of fuel-supply units will almost certainly be dished, unless another Mr Ackroyd turns up providentially, which isn’t likely. There just isn’t anyone else of his calibre at the moment, anyway. As a matter of fact, it’s only since we had this intelligence about Karina that high authority has got slightly upset over the way Ackroyd has managed to keep his knowledge to himself—keep himself as the King Pin, with practically nothing delegated. I gather it’s been a mixture of empire-building on his part and a certain amount of laissez-faire on the part of people who should have known better— that, and the chronic shortage of star-quality physicists like Ackroyd. I can’t emphasize this too much, Shaw: if anything happened to him it would be just about the biggest slice of our defence—or perhaps I’d almost better call it our re-emergence strategy—gone for a burton. It’s as vital as that. The main part of your job would be to see that Karina doesn’t succeed, to watch her and Ackroyd as closely as you can. The other part would be to keep a very careful but discreet general eye on the whole project during a very important test which is due to start soon, and will cover three or four days—but, as I say, Ackroyd himself is your main worry. You see, he’s got to open up other bases after Gibraltar and we just can’t do without him.”

  Shaw rubbed the side of his nose reflectively. Latymer went on:

  ‘‘Officially, there’s nothing we can do about Karina so long as she remains on the Spanish side of the frontier— for one thing, this project is so hush-hush that the P.M., on Foreign Office advice, won’t sanction any diplomatic representations being made to Franco. But an agent working into Spain from Gibraltar incognito can at least keep his ear to the ground and forestall anything she may be planning. As usual, I’m not going to give you any hard and fast instructions, but Carberry will fill in the details and give you any practical help you think necessary.” The steely eyes gazed hard into Shaw. “Well? What about it?”

  A little wearily Shaw said, “All right, sir. I’ll go.”

  “Good man!” Latymer’s pleasure was obvious. “And thank you—it’s a load off my mind, though I knew you wouldn’t let me down really. Now—cover.” He sat back again, studied Shaw through smoke. “You know something about naval armament supply.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Still au fait enough to pass as an Inspector of Establishments?”

  Shaw nodded. “That’d be easy enough.”

  “Good—I thought so. Well—you’re going on the retired list, temporarily.” Shaw looked startled. Latymer grinned and went on, “I’ll fiddle all that—I’d better back-date it a bit, I think. And anyone who cares to look at the appointments in The Times or the Telegraph will see you’ve left the Service altogether—with a Golden Bowler, if you like! And you’ve been luck enough to fall into a good job because of your naval contacts . . . you’ve joined the Armament Supply Department as a civilian inspector, and you can go out to Gib on a routine inspecting visit for your first duty.”

  “What’s the Superintending Naval Armament Supply Officer out there going to say?”

  Latymer chuckled. “He’s already been warned to expect you—that’s how sure I was you’d take this job! He’s only got the cover story, of course. All you’ll have to do is to listen to any complaints, suggestions, and so on and pass ’em on to the right quarter. That, and sound intelligent.”

  “Do I use my own identity, sir?”

  Latymer looked irritable. “Course you do . . . you know I’m allergic to these unnecessary complications. That woman’ll have her eyes on our movements in any case. Really, it’s just the ‘already unsuspicious’ that we have to lull, and as Commander Shaw, R.N. (Retired), you’ll mean damn-all to them. If you go out as—as a kind of Bearded Basil you’ll attract unwelcome attentions right away. In Gib, I mean.”

  Shaw grinned. “Quite, quite! How about getting there— do I fly?”

  “No. This full-dress test—which is one of the things we want you there for—isn’t due to begin for a few days. Apart from that, we’re not risking any security break which might follow if we flew you out for what’s ostensibly a mere routine inspection of a store depot—particularly as it happens there’s a cruiser sailing for Gib the day after to-morrow, which is how an inspector would normally be sent—and you’ll need the time to talk to Carberry, and also familiarize yourself with the obscurer workings of the Armament Supply Department!” He paused, then went on:

  “You join the Cambridge at the South Railway jetty in Portsmouth, just before she sails. On arrival in Gibraltar you’ll put up at the Bristol Hotel off Main Street, and make your number with S.N.A.S.O. From then on the game’s yours to play. No reason why you shouldn’t feel free to hop across the La Linea frontier whenever you want to, but just in case you want to make a long stay without questions being asked in Gib, we’ve provided you with an old friend in Spain who’ll be expecting you whenever you care to look him up. He’s Sefior Don Jaime de Castro, and he has a big villa in Torremolihos, just outside Malaga on the Gibraltar side. You were great friends some years ago, when he was attached to the Spanish Embassy staff in London. Captain Carberry will hand you a letter of invitation from him before you leave. Incidentally, the letter’s quite genuine and so’s Don Jaime—he’s a personal friend of mine, and he happens to be pretty friendly towards the British. Of course, you don’t have to stay with him, but on the other hand you might find it useful to do so . . . his half-sister is Lady Hammersley, by the way,” Latymer added casually. Shaw knew that Sir Francis Hammersley was the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar. “There’s also a contact called Domingo Felipe in Malaga who may be useful—he’s a queer fish, though, and even we don’t know his current whereabouts, but there’ll be ways and means of getting in touch— Carberry’ll tell you all that. That’s one of the reasons—geographically speaking—why we thought Don Jaime’s villa would be a handy pied-à-terre for you.”

  “Any other contacts, sir—in La Linea, say, or Algeciras?”

  “No, sorry. We’ve no one we can trust in La Linea, that I do know—but you can always try the British Consul in Algeciras. The consuls generally keep an ear to the ground —as you know. He may be able to put you in touch with somebody—or he may not. But the Malaga man’s good.”

  Shaw no
dded. These things were often a matter of luck.

  Latymer continued, “Well, that’s the lot, Shaw, so far as I’m concerned. Carberry’ll be sending for you to-morrow for special briefing details and supply of any particular items you think you may need in the way of papers, clothing, and so on. When he’s done with you you’ll be passed on to armament supply.”

  A few minutes later Latymer accompanied Shaw down to the entrance hall. Pinkly beaming, he took Shaw’s arm and spoke loudly and within easy hearing of the messengers:

  “You mustn’t worry unduly, my dear fellow . . . people are always leaving things in taxis, and all that was in it—or did I tell you—was a report of some tiresome committee on the supply of toothpaste through the Naffy canteens . . . so wearisome,” he fussed, “and such a waste of time really, but there you are, that’s just one of the things sent to try us, don’t you know . . . good-bye, my dear fellow. Better remember not to be careless again—it could be important another time.”

  Shaw had an amused glint in his eye, but he said smoothly, “I assure you it won’t happen again, Mr Latymer, and I’m sorry you’ve been troubled.”

  Mr Latymer trotted away, pompously demanding the attentions of a messenger for some triviality, and Shaw walked out of the building, passed under Admiralty Arch into Whitehall, felt the seeping drip of rain, and decided to go back to the flat by Underground. Taxis were an easily acquired habit, and too many of them rolling up at the unpretentious flat in West Kensington might be remarked upon; and it was a principle of the outfit that its operatives, who were in fact paid lavishly enough, shouldn’t make a splash —not that Shaw would want to do that—but should live as befitted ordinary officers of their rank doomed to an Admiralty appointment; so Shaw, who believed that easily acquired habits were lost only with difficulty, made a habit of economy in things like that.

  As he was herded down the steps below Trafalgar Square he found himself hoping that Debonnair wouldn’t get delayed in Paris. He had to see her before he left, and her movements were always a little uncertain when she went away on these business trips. His job was always liable to be dangerous . . . his nerves were playing him up again now, and he felt desperately that he couldn’t go away again without getting things sorted out with Debonnair—just in case he didn’t come back.

  In the Tube, swaying westward after he had changed on to the Piccadilly Line, it came to him how you couldn’t trust anybody in this game. Look at them, he thought, sitting there under the adverts for wool, toothpaste, building societies, and London Transport, or standing up against the half-bulkheads . . . bored, indifferent, glazed eyes staring into nothing, blank and wooden and pale. Damp macs and umbrellas. England on a wet day. A couple of teddy boys, a housewife up for the shopping, a man with a bowler hat and a briefcase, a soldier, two Indian students, a couple of nuns . . . the man opposite him, a plum-coloured man who looked like a banker but almost certainly wasn’t if he had to travel by Tube, despite the parking problem, was gazing straight at him without seeing him. Any one of those people in that Tube might be there for a purpose. You couldn’t trust anyone . . . all this and much else passed through Shaw’s mind, and he watched every one in the compartment while he was thinking, but because he was a good operative his eyes remained as blank and his expression as wooden as anyone else’s as the train rocked and racketed him towards Baron’s Court.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The hand-case down by the girl’s long, nyloned legs in the Paris air terminal had a number of old, half-torn off hotel labels on it—the Galle Face, the Barbizon Plaza, the Hotel Australia—but the most recent was a plain one which read:

  Miss Debonnair Delacroix, c/o Eastern

  Petroleum Company, Rue des Feuilles, Paris.

  Nevertheless, the lady was London-bound, had merely forgotten to change the label. The little fat, dapper man with the bow-tie, edging closer through the crowd and trying to catch the girl’s eye, had taken a brief squint at that label because it was always handy to know a girl’s name—but after that brief squint his whole attention was on the girl herself. Debonnair Delacroix was half French, and unmistakably so even to the little fat man who kept a pub in Balham. And even in a crowd which had a fair sprinkling of whole-blooded French girls in it, Miss Delacroix stood out a mile. Figure, hair, clothes all helped to do it, though personality could have managed pretty well on its own. She was a tawny girl, fresh and golden-skinned, with a light, attractive dusting of freckles—lion-coloured, almost, and with the same grace in her movements—and there was just that delightful touch of imperious carelessness, a carelessness which wasn’t in the least studied as it might have been in a wholly English girl, and a faint air of unleonine helplessness, rather appealing helplessness which was actually entirely misleading. Shaw’s own opinion was that for sheer efficiency she had him beat to a frazzle, and Shaw knew what he was talking about, because he’d worked with her in the past.

  The Eastern Petroleum Company, not knowing Shaw, couldn’t have expressed an opinion on their relative efficiency, but they did know that when she had left the Foreign Office she had been given a first-class write-up; and they had given her a pretty high position in their Travel and Service Department, the organization which dealt with the arrangements for transport of the Company’s employees by sea, land, and air throughout the world and the accommodation, entertainment, and customary flapdoodle for General Managers and other V.I.P.’s visiting the London Office from overseas—and that was quite a big job for a girl of not quite twenty-eight to handle.

  A high-heeled shoe tapped rather impatiently as Debonnair’s bright-eyed glance swept over the heads of the crowd. The glance came to rest on the little fat man. The little fat man tweaked at his bow-tie, gave a slight wriggle of an overdressed bottom, and ogled her from under a bald head which reflected back the lighting system of the air terminal; the glance, unsoftened by these tactics, refused to melt into a smile, rested on him coldly, though amusement lurked in the corners of the mouth and in the eyes.

  “Toffee-nosed,” muttered the little man in disgust.

  “Not in the least,” said Miss Delacroix frigidly, “but I think that’s your wife approaching, isn’t it?”

  The little man shrank. Looking round, he saw the large bosom bearing down on him from the Ladies’, a long string of cheap imitation pearls cast round it like a griping-band on the swelling broadside of a lifeboat; the straw brim of the meal-coloured hat, the one with the violet clusters which he’d bought her at the Co-op before they came away on holiday, topped her like a crust on a cottage loaf. The dapper little man had never hated that hat as much as he did at this moment; he looked sad, jowls drooping into a blue-shadowed line like a long-suffering bloodhound baulked once again of its quarry.

  “You win, dear,” he muttered to Miss Delacroix. “Bin different if the old woman ’adn’t a bin here, p’raps?”

  Miss Delacroix smiled then. She was attractive already, but those dimples, the fat man thought, cor! They didn’t ought to ’ave bin allowed. “Perhaps,” she agreed kindly.

  The bosom hove in between them with a glare from a turkey-red face above, and then the loudspeakers hummed and woke into voluble urgency.

  Hie crowd got on the move.

  She hadn’t been back in the tiny flatlet in Albany Street for long when Shaw telephoned.

  She said delightedly, “How lovely of you to ring, darling. I’m just in, only this minute. How’re things with you?”

  “So-so.” Shaw was non-committal. “I thought we might have dinner somewhere. Like to?”

  “Would I?” She thought: I know that tone—he’s off somewhere again. Just for a brief moment she regretted the events which had led to her having to quit the Foreign Office— events which, through no fault of her own, had blown the gaff about her, and rendered her useless in the job she’d been doing. She hadn’t wanted to take a humdrum desk job in the familiar environment of the F.O. where she’d always be in contact with the forbidden past. There had been something about t
hose undercover days that had been so much more exciting than Eastern Petroleum . . . in particular, her career and Shaw’s had touched—that was how they’d met in the first place and it was something she would never, never forget. She came back to the present, said, “I’d love it, Esmonde darling.” She spoke decisively. “I was just wondering what I could possibly face in this kitchen after Paris. This brute of a stove.”

  She jerked out a long leg and kicked the oven door shut. The telephone was in the cubby-hole which passed for a hall, and when it had rung she’d yanked it into the kitchen without getting up from the leatherette-covered revolving high stool; and she was glaring with distaste at half a dozen eggs, a tin of sardines, a stale loaf of hard-looking bread (steam-baked a l’anglaise, and scarcely worthy of the name of bread at all), a hunk of mousetrap cheese aged to a nasty-looking yellow transparency, half a bottle of milk that had gone sour in her absence. A lovely London supper—and it had cost a small fortune. Somehow you didn’t mind so much spending a fortune in Paris. She said into the phone, “Coming round for me?”

  “Of course. I’d thought of Martinez.”

  He hadn’t really; but he was going to Spain, and the name had just at that moment suggested itself—and, of course, the food was excellent. Might be a good thing, too, just to look through a Spanish menu again. He said, “I’ll be round in half an hour, Debbie. Just as quick as I can make it.”