Every Secret Thing (36 page)

A neat trick…except it brought Deacon, now, into the picture. And Deacon, disturbingly, chose to make friends with Garcia.

While Garcia didn’t know that his reports to Spain were full of truths and not misinformation, Cayton-Wood knew Deacon wouldn’t be so easy to deceive. One stray comment from Garcia would be all that it might take, and Deacon’s too-sharp brain would do the rest. He’d be on to the game in a heartbeat.

The solution, of course, would have been to have Deacon shipped back to New York, and given Cayton-Wood’s ruthless expertise in all things underhand, it should have been a simple thing to do, but Deacon proved to be a harder person to get rid of than the other men he’d targeted.

And then had come the 28
^th
of January, and the cutting off of Allied oil supplies to Spain. And Cayton-Wood had seen, almost immediately, how he could, with one move, help the Spanish
and
dispose of Deacon.

The idea of an oil embargo was, to him, ridiculous, and reckless. Franco’s forces were already doing all they could to hold a brave line against the communists, but the danger remained. Taking away the country’s oil would hurt the common people, bring them hardship, make them suffer. They would protest, and the communists would use that to their own advantage, seeking to destabilise the government.

That had to be prevented, at all costs.

Cayton-Wood knew, thanks to Spivey, that one of Reynolds’s tankers, the
Hernando
, was already in the
mid-Atlantic
, having just received instructions to change course from Spain to Lisbon. Soon it would be in the harbour, under his control. And if the oil went missing while the ship was at its berth, and somehow found its way to Spain, well…such things happened, in a war.

It would be easy enough to put the blame on Reynolds, with his family connections in Franco’s government, and the daily cables that he’d been receiving from Madrid, begging him to help lift the embargo. Not to mention the fact that he had a Spanish secret agent working on his staff – Manuel Garcia, who had access to a transmitter.

That it would be Cayton-Wood, alone, who used the transmitter to send the needed information to Madrid would never cross the mind of anyone in SIS. Garcia could deny he’d been involved, but he would never be believed. He’d be discredited, and lose his chance to live his dream of starting a new life in England. Unless – and here, thought
Cayton-Wood
, lay the true stroke of brilliance – unless Garcia wanted to do Cayton-Wood a favour, in return for having everything put right with SIS.

All that Garcia would have to do – and Cayton-Wood had no doubt he would do it – would be to say, on the record, that Deacon had also been part of the scheme to ship oil to the Spanish; that Deacon and Reynolds had planned the whole thing, and had tricked him into helping them by making him believe that they were doing it for Britain.

Exit Deacon. And, since the question of Reynolds’s loyalty would have been answered, the SIS wouldn’t bother sending a new agent to take Deacon’s place. Garcia would stay on, and would continue to perform his useful functions, more firmly than ever under Cayton-Wood’s thumb.

As plans went, it came close to perfection.

Putting it in action was an easy thing to do.

He began by taking Deacon out for tea. Across the table, he apologised. ‘I may have been a little heavy-handed when I ordered you to stay clear of Garcia. You were using your best judgement, as you said. In fact, given our latest position with Spain, it appears to me your friendship with Garcia could be useful.’ And he told him why.

Deacon listened quietly, his gaze from time to time drifting around the small restaurant as though he were looking for someone. ‘And I’m to do what, exactly?’

‘Observe him. Just that. Take your drives in the country, the way you were doing. Have dinner at his house, invite him to yours. Be as sociable as you like with the Garcias, provided you keep your eyes open.’

The damnable thing about Deacon, thought
Cayton-Wood
, was that his eyes always seemed to be too fully open; that all of the effort one put into fooling the man was for naught. Deacon’s answer, ‘Understood,’ left Cayton-Wood with the uneasy sense that he
did
understand.

Still, Deacon did as he was told. He met Garcia frequently enough that Cayton-Wood’s spies could assemble a
decent-sized
file, filled with dates, times, and places, and photographs, all of which would, later on, be used to back Garcia’s false ‘confession’ about Deacon’s role in working with the enemy.

Then, when the
Hernando
finally entered Lisbon’s harbour, Cayton-Wood took the next step of contacting Madrid. That, too, was simple. He’d mastered Morse code as a boy, and he had babysat Garcia long enough to learn the Spaniard’s ‘fist’ – his own peculiar way of tapping out the chain of dots and dashes that made letters in the code. Whoever got the message at the other end would think it came straight from Garcia. Cayton-Wood knew this because he had, in fact, transmitted twice on his own, in the past. He didn’t like doing it – he did it only when the information he was sending was so clearly sensitive that even Garcia would have known that it should not be shared with Spain; but he didn’t like making the trek to the transmitter all on his own, in case somebody saw him. Far better to speak through Garcia where possible, safe in the shadows behind him, than risk getting caught.

If he’d needed reminding of that, he got it when he left the windmill after his transmission, to find Deacon and Garcia standing further down the hill, in plain view. He made a dignified retreat, but felt the weight of Deacon’s damned observant eyes. If only he himself had eyes like that, he thought, he’d be invincible.

But in the end, the person to confront him wasn’t Deacon, but Garcia.

It turned out, as luck would have it, that another Spanish agent who had been assigned to Lisbon had dropped in to see Garcia, and had mentioned how impressed the higher-ups were with his facts on the
Hernando
.

Cayton-Wood hadn’t expected this turn of events. He thought he’d allowed for every possible contingency in his carefully structured plan, but twice now, in this same afternoon, he’d been thrown off by people getting in his way. First it had been that young chit of a girl, Jenny Saunders, who’d stopped him from getting the papers he’d needed from Spivey’s desk. Now here was Garcia coming after him, in public – on a sidewalk, of all places, just outside the Reynolds offices – demanding he explain what he was up to.

It was too like a badly staged play to be real, in
Cayton-Wood’s
opinion – the Spaniard might as well have slapped a gauntlet down upon the pavement.

Cayton-Wood considered his options. It wasn’t the most convenient of times for him to deal with the problem. He was due across town for a meeting in half an hour. But this was something he’d known he would have to do, sooner or later. He stood, calm, while Garcia accused him:

‘You used the transmitter. Alone. You used my name. And what you have arranged would not, I think, have the approval of the others at the Embassy.’

‘I shouldn’t bother them, if I were you.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because, Manuel, it might appear to them that
you
made those arrangements, and that would undoubtedly cause you some trouble.’

‘I will tell them. I will tell them that it was not me.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘but which of us would be believed? I wonder.’ He could see some of the righteousness ebb from Garcia’s face. ‘No, I’m afraid, Manuel, that when my colleagues learn of this affair – that is to say, when I inform them the petroleum is gone from the
Hernando
– I’m afraid things will look rather black, for you.’ He paused, for full effect. And then, when he was very sure the implications had struck home, he added casually, ‘Unless, of course, somebody put a good word in. Convinced them it wasn’t your fault.’

‘Yes?’ Garcia asked blackly. ‘And who would do this?’

‘I might.’

‘For what price?’

‘You insult me.’ He smiled. ‘For a very small favour, no more.’ And he said what it was.

Garcia listened. Shook his head. ‘I cannot do this. Not to Mr Reynolds. Not to Deacon.’

‘Oh, I think you can. I think you will. You really have no choice, not if you want to get to England, as you’d planned. Of course, you could go back to Spain, I suppose, when the war’s over, but that might be rather risky for you and your wife, if it were to come out you’d been working for our side. Who knows? With all of Franco’s agents round about these days, you might not even make it back to Spain.’ He smiled again, and left it there, and went to keep his meeting.

It was late when he got back to his own office. Nearly dinnertime. His secretary, a self-martyring girl with a joyless expression, was putting on her coat when the telephone rang.

‘Not to worry, I’ll get it myself,’ he said, waving her on. He wasn’t meaning to be nice. Truth was, he’d simply reached the point where other people were an irritation, and he wanted to be rid of her. He wouldn’t know, till afterwards, how fortunate an impulse it had been.

The telephone kept ringing, an annoyance in itself. He picked it up, his tone impatient.

It was Ivan Reynolds calling. Not the smoothly condescending voice of his assistant, but the man himself, abrasive, demanding that Cayton-Wood come to the house. It was not a request, but a summons.

Cayton-Wood kept his temper with an effort. He was tired. He’d had a long and trying day, and clashing swords with Ivan Reynolds wasn’t how he cared to end it. ‘I’m afraid that’s quite impossible.’

‘The side door. After nine o’clock,’ was Reynolds’s answer, and the line went rudely dead.

He had a mind to go straight home, but he was frankly curious why someone who so publicly despised him should be asking for a meeting. So, of course, he went.

He’d been to Reynolds’s great house on the hill once before, and he knew of the existence of the side door, though he’d never had the privilege of using it. It was the unofficial entrance, unattended, used by close friends and, presumably, the mistresses. A person given access to the side door didn’t have to ring the bell, or knock; he simply let himself in, like a member of the household. Cayton-Wood thought it decidedly odd that he should have been asked to go in by that door. He went in with his guard up.

Inside, it appeared there was only one direction for the visitor to go, and that was upwards. A set of broad stairs, soft with carpet, climbed and turned and climbed again towards a spacious landing. Here again, there was no choice – just one great set of double doors of panelled oak set in the wall ahead.

Cayton-Wood waited a moment, leaning his weight on his walking stick while he recovered from the stairs. He wasn’t about to show weakness to Reynolds. The man was beneath him in every respect, and would need a reminder of that.

With his breath back to normal, he knocked at the doors.

‘Come in.’

The room, which seemed to function as a bedroom and a sitting room, was very large, and furnished all in browns and golds and varnished woods, a masculine domain. A Tiffany lamp by the four-poster bed cast a dragonfly pattern of amber and red on the wall, falling short of the shadows that lay in the corners.

Cayton-Wood hadn’t seen Reynolds since the surgery, and it surprised him to see how thoroughly the cancer had consumed the older man. The fiery American, who once had ruled a room by simply standing in it, now seemed smaller, withered, insubstantial, as though part of him had already begun to cross the grey divide between the living and the dead.

Death was not unfamiliar to Cayton-Wood. He’d seen it often enough, in North Africa; but it had always been quick death, in battle, and nothing like this. This repulsed him, and yet he found it gruesomely intriguing.

‘Taking good care of you, are they?’ he asked, looking round. ‘I thought you had a nurse.’

‘I gave her the night off.’

‘I see. Was that wise?’

‘It was necessary.’ Settling back on his pillows, Reynolds folded his arms in an attitude that suggested his old, imperious self. His features, tightened as they were with pain, were openly contemptuous. ‘I have to say, I didn’t think you’d have the guts to come.’

‘How could I not? Your invitation was so charming.’ He had not been asked to sit, but his leg was throbbing wickedly, and since there was no one to stop him doing so, he took a chair and swung it round to face the bed, and sat. There was no one to stop him lighting a cigar, either, so he did that too, and blew a careless stream of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘What is on your mind?’

‘Manuel Garcia.’

Cayton-Wood purposely didn’t react. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead. He shot himself this afternoon.’

He hadn’t seen
that
coming – it had not been in his plan, and it would complicate things.
Damn
, he thought. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ Reynolds said. ‘Spivey wasn’t on the job today, was he, so he couldn’t tell you, and no one outside of the company knows, yet. Just the Coroner, and I don’t think he’s on your payroll, is he?’

Cayton-Wood smiled a tiny, cold smile that stopped short of his eyes. ‘Not yet, no.’

‘You haven’t asked me why Garcia killed himself.’

‘I can’t say I’m much interested.’

Reynolds’s smile was rather different. It was predatory, satisfied – the smile of a cat that’s backed a mouse into a corner. ‘He explained it all in here,’ he said, and reaching to the table at his bedside he held up an empty envelope. ‘Oh, I don’t have the letter anymore,’ he said, as Cayton-Wood leant forward. ‘I had Roger pass it on to your Ambassador. I thought that he might want to know what you’ve been up to.’

Cayton-Wood sat back. The smoke from his cigar wreathed upward, and he narrowed his eyes against it, trying to look unconcerned. ‘I rather think my word might have more weight with the Ambassador than that of a damned Spanish spy.’

‘Maybe. But I’ll make sure that people get to hear about it. That’s all you have to do in this town to ruin a man – start a rumour, raise suspicion. You know all about that, don’t you?’ The wily eyes were fixed on his in steady accusation. ‘Now you’ll know how it feels. I don’t think you’ll be welcome in Lisbon too long. You’re about to become an embarrassment.’