Solo - Jack Higgins [85]
'And the alternative?' Deville asked.
'The French - you are a French citizen, are you not, Maitre Deville? - would have the right to demand your extradition and their Intelligence people have been highly sensitive about Russian agents since the Sapphire affair in 'sixty-eight and the suggestion that they had been penetrated by the KGB. You would undoubtedly be handed over to Service Five and they really are very old-fashioned when it comes to squeezing information out of people. They still believe in the power of electricity, I hear, especially when wired to various portions of some unfortunate individual's anatomy.'
'And you?' Deville said. 'What would you have to offer?'
'Oh, death, of course,' Ferguson said cheerfully. 'We'll think of something. Car accidents are always good, especially when there's a fire. It makes the identification usually a matter of what's in the pockets.'
'And afterwards?'
'Peace, anonymity, a quiet life. Plastic surgery can do wonders.'
'In return for the right kind of information?'
Ferguson went to the decanter and poured himself another whisky, then he turned, sitting on the edge of the table.
'In nineteen forty-three, when I was with SOE and working with the French underground, I found myself, thanks to an informer, in the hands of the Gestapo in Paris in their old headquarters in the Rue de Saussaies at the back of the Ministry of the Interior. They still believed in rubber hoses then. Very unpleasant.'
'You escaped?'
'From a train on the way to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but it's an old story.' He walked to the window and peered down into the street again. 'It was simpler then. We knew where we were. What we were fighting for. But now...'
There was a lengthy silence before he said without turning round, 'Of course, there's still the cyanide capsule.'
'You give me a choice?'
'British sense of fair play, old man. I was a prefect at Winchester, you see.'
He turned and found Deville holding out his right hand, the small black capsule in the centre of the palm. 'I don't think so, thank you very much.'
'Excellent.' Ferguson took it from him gingerly. 'Nasty tilings.' He dropped it on the parquet floor and ground his heel into it.
'What now?' Deville asked.
'Oh, a little good music, I think,' Ferguson said. 'You'd like that. I hear John Mikali's playing Rachmaninov's Fourth at the Albert Hall tonight. Something of an occasion.'
'I'm sure it will be.' Deville pulled on his dark overcoat, took his black Homburg from the stand by the door and picked up his silver-headed walking stick.
'One thing,' Ferguson said. 'Just to settle my idle curiosity. KGB or GRU?'
'GRU,' Deville said. 'Colonel Nikolay Ashimov.'
The name sounded strange on his tongue. Ferguson smiled. 'Just as I thought. I told Morgan I thought you had too much style to be KGB. Shall we go?'
He opened the door, standing courteously to one side and Deville led the way out.
And at that moment, Katherine Riley, proceeding in heavy traffic and driving rain along the North Circular Road, swung the wheel of her MGB sports car into a side street and braked to a halt.
She switched off the engine and sat there for a moment, aware of the beating of her own heart, hands gripping the wheel tightly. Finally, the breath went out of her in a long sigh. There was only one place in the world she wanted to go now and it certainly wasn't Cambridge.
She started the engine, drove to the end of the street and turned back towards central London.
15
In the Green Room