Redcap (7 page)

“So long, Judith. I’ll be seeing you again soon. And—try not to think too much, my dear.”

Then he turned and ran down the steps, got into the car. Long and sleek and shining black, the car pulled away. Debonnair walked slowly back into the sitting-room and she looked for a long, long time at the smoke spiralling up from that cigarette, the cigarette which Shaw had lit so short a while ago. Her heart seemed to contract painfully as she watched the lengthening ash.

Latymer said briefly, “Well—there you are.” He pushed a neat cardboard folder across the desk. “It’s all there.”

“Yes, sir.” Shaw took the folder and opened it. There was a ticket for the next B.E.A. flight to Naples, leaving London at 3.20 in the morning. There was a first-class passage ticket from Naples to Sydney in the
New South Wales
, and there was a hotel reservation for one night at the Hotel Vittorio in the Via Podana.

Latymer said, “While you’re in Naples, you can keep your eyes skinned—you’ll have nearly two days and you may pick up something perhaps. Now—once you’re aboard the liner make your number with the Captain and with Colonel Gresham. They’ll have been warned to expect you. When you land at Sydney, get in touch with a certain Captain James of the R.A.N. You’ll find him at the base at Garden Island. He’s a friend of mine, and he’s the Intelligence man out there— he’s an Australian—and Foster’s there too, of course.”

Shaw nodded. Tommy Foster had worked in the Outfit in England, had been transferred some time before to the RA.N. Latymer went on, “Captain James will help you all he can whenever you need it, and you can contact him ahead if there’s anything you want done before you get to Sydney yourself. I’ll see he’s put fully in the picture at once, so that he can be working on this from his end meanwhile, but I want you to regard yourself throughout as personally responsible to me. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, as to your cover-story, just in case you need one, that’s simple. You’re going out as a plain naval officer on a normal exchange basis for duty with the R.A.N. That’s all been faked up with the Navy Board in Melbourne to-day. Right. Any questions?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“All right, then.” Latymer got up. He said, “Carberry’s waiting for you now, you’d better go straight down. Usual background stuff.” He accompanied Shaw to the door, looking grave. “Well—good-bye and good luck. You know what’s in the balance now, and from now on it’s up to you. We’ll be relying on you—all of us, Shaw.”

“I’ll do my best, sir, of course,” Shaw said, feeling inadequate. Then he turned and left the room. He went down to Captain Carberry’s section in the basement, where he had a long session with the man who was known as The Voice. That deceptive man—Carberry, the man who always seemed to boom out in exclamation marks rather than just speak, the man whose voice was so oddly bigger and plummier than his thin, dried-up body. Full of bonhomie, inane-sounding, a guffawing ass—on the surface only. Underneath, the best brain in the Outfit. Carberry explained in technical detail the whole principle of REDCAP.

Shaw, slightly baffled by science, asked: “What about the signals themselves—the ones that put REDCAP into operation? Do they change at regular intervals?”

Carberry gave his booming laugh. “Oh, great Scott, no! Good heavens! They don’t change at all. Look, old boy, I’ll explain again.” He leaned back in a cloud of pipe-smoke. “The operating signals are no use to anybody except the MAPIACCIND operating staff, the boys who actually have REDCAP in their possession. So it’s just a once-for-all setting. Same with the frequencies—each country has its own, and it remains constant. That’s not to say the signals aren’t fearfully secret—of course they are, just as a normal precaution! Actually, there’s only the two copies in existence. One’s always with the MAPIACCIND H.Q. in Geneva, and the other’s for actual operational use, the one they’ll refer to if they ever want to transmit. Temporarily, that one is with Colonel Gresham, and he hands it over to the Commandant at Bandagong when he delivers REDCAP.”

“Uh-huh. Would Lubin know what these signals are?”

Carberry put his finger-tips together pontifically and gazed up at the ceiling. “Our information,” he said, “is that he would not. No one person was allowed to get the whole picture complete. It was this way: after Lubin had built the set in such a way that it could operate on any combination of letters, the Secretary-General of MAPIACCIND had a little lucky dip in private! What I mean is, old boy—he selected the actual three-letter groups and these were then set by another radio expert—our own man, actually, a Professor MacGregor. And he made the settings on the stockpiles, too.”

“Fair enough. Thank you . . . and now, what about photographs? Have you got one of Lubin?”

“Yes.” Carberry went over to a filing cabinet, pulled out a deep drawer, foraged about for a moment, then brought out a photograph. Shaw looked at it, memorized it carefully. Lubin could have altered—either by nature or cosmetics— since this was taken, but the physical structure would remain: a short, skinny man, puny. As to the rest . . . thick grey hair, dome-shaped head, clean-shaven, bad teeth, big ears . . . almost a typical man-in-the-street’s idea of an egghead, but so much of the adornments and appendages could be given a new look.

Carberry came round the desk, glanced over his shoulder. He said, as though confirming Shaw’s own thoughts: “Genuine, dyed-in-the-wool egghead, guaranteed harmless in himself. Rumour has it he’s rather a retiring sort of chap. Tell you something, old boy. It’s the lads behind Lubin that you’ve got to break through! They’re going to be the tough nuts.”

Shaw said thoughtfully, “I’ve just an idea you’re dead right. By the way, have you a photo of Karstad, just in case?”

Carberry lifted his shoulders sadly. “We never had one of Karstad, I’m sorry to say. Bad—but there it is! Didn’t you meet him once, though?”

“I saw him, that’s all. I can hardly remember him now. I didn’t actually meet him, and he didn’t see me at all.”

Carberry’s laugh boomed out. “Probably just as well, old man, probably just as well!”

Later, as the plain black car turned down the Mall and headed through the night along the wide, deserted thoroughfare past Buckingham Palace bound for Heathrow, Shaw found himself thinking back and wishing Latymer hadn’t said what he had about relying on him. For some reason or other, that kind of remark always made him so terribly aware of his own shortcomings, his inadequacies. Reluctantly almost, in the back of that comfortable car, he felt for the hard reassurance of his Service revolver, handy in the shoulder-holster beneath his plain grey worsted jacket.

He felt he’d be needing that again before long. . . .

The car swept up to the airport. Shaw got out and said good-bye to Thompson, who drove off. As Shaw walked quickly into the building, a man with a bowler hat and a brief case who had been sitting in a chair reading the
Evening Standard
folded up his newspaper and got to his feet. Taking a cigarette from a silver case, he watched unobtrusively as the baggage for the Naples flight was collected together. Then he strolled about aimlessly and when Shaw had disappeared he went away towards a telephone kiosk. Four pennies dropped into the box metallically . . .
clang, clang, clang, clang.

The man thought, and he smiled faintly as he thought it, that they sounded like four separate knells of doom—if doom could be said to come four times. Maybe one of them would be for the man he’d just seen joining the Naples plane . . . himself, he was only one of many minor operatives, so he couldn’t make any guesses as to who the other three might be for.

Within a few hours a carefully worded cable was received in the radio office of the
New South Wales
and was sent down to the heavily built man who had embarked at Tilbury.

At eight o’clock in the morning Shaw was looking down through the cabin windows as the airliner began to lose height, circling to touch down at Capodichino. He saw the fabulous city and environs of Naples rushing up below him, the city fringing the deep blue water of the bay; beyond, Vesuvius reared into the sky, its summit issuing faint trails of smoke as Shaw watched, trails which lost themselves in a clear sky. It was a wonderful morning; Shaw had managed to snatch an hour or two of much-needed sleep during the flight, and he felt refreshed and invigorated as, shortly after, he bent his tall frame through the doorway and stepped out of the airliner, stepped into brilliant sunshine which was as yet not so strong that it took away the clear freshness of the morning.

Some eighty minutes after completing the entry formalities, Shaw was at the Naples air terminal. From there he walked along to the Australia and Pacific Line’s agents in the Via Roma, where he was told that the
New South Wales
would enter the bay at 8 a.m. next day, land her transit passengers at the Maritima Stazione for a day’s sight-seeing, and then embark the Naples contingent at 3 p.m. After that he collected his gear from the air terminal, left some of it at the Maritima Stazione, and then walked along the waterfront to his hotel.

Shaw spent that day looking around the city, strolling along the hot, busy, opulent streets interspersed with depressing slum alleys, going casually into bars and eating-places, keeping his senses well on the alert. And, as he had suspected, this was in vain.

As Latymer had said, it was just a vague chance that he might pick up something in Naples and it was no good getting worried because he’d failed to do so. Nevertheless, as he walked back to his hotel, Shaw began to feel the utter hopelessness of his job. To look for one man who might in point of fact be anywhere in the triangle China-England-Australia was a pretty large assignment.

Next day at 3 p.m. Shaw was at the Maritima Stazione and going aboard the ship. The liner’s deck seemed to loft over the embarking passengers like a skyscraper as they crossed the telescopic gangway from the jetty into the great side with its rows of ports. Shaw, as he went through the gunport door into the foyer, felt himself at once enfolded in an atmosphere of luxury and efficiency, a scene of controlled bustle.

There was the familiar ship-smell, the familiar background noise of ventilating systems at work, of forced-draught blowers, a noise which at first beat on the ears and then became just one more of many ship-noises. A line of white-jacketed stewards waited to take the Naples passengers’ hand-gear and lead them to their cabins, up or down spotless, gleaming staircases, and along cabin corridors in whose decks one could see one’s own reflection. Shaw was only just aboard when a man came forward to take his grip; but not before he had been peremptorily barked at by the Chief Steward, who was standing just inside the gunport. Shaw glanced briefly at the Chief Steward, wondered if that order had been really necessary.

He moved on behind his guide, deep into that glittering world of luxury and service, the world of the first-class section of a modern liner. As he went up the main staircase towards his stateroom on A deck, the liner’s topmost accommodation deck immediately below the main lounges of the veranda deck, he saw a man leaning nonchalantly back against a bulkhead in the square at the top, smoking a cigar. Just for a second, their eyes met and then Shaw had passed on.

But he had an uncomfortable feeling that the man knew him and was now looking at his back. He had noticed the eyes; curiously penetrating eyes which were, in some vague way, almost familiar. The eyes apart, there was nothing in the least outstanding about the man—he was heavily built, pasty, expensively dressed, going a little bald. Very ordinary really; liners were full of such people. But all at once Shaw’s tautened nerves seemed to detect a note of unease in the customary throb of a ship . . . he looked back over his shoulder. The man had gone, and he shrugged slightly. A few moments later they reached his stateroom, a big compartment with a small entrance lobby and a private shower in a bathroom leading off it, and a square port which looked out on to the promenade deck.

Shaw looked round. The cabin was as luxurious as he might have expected from what he had already seen of the ship, luxurious and sophisticated enough to attract wealthy men and women on holiday and business. And yet, despite the elegance, Shaw felt the beginnings of a sense of apprehension, almost a fear of the unknown . . . there was something wrong in the air, a tenseness. The steward who’d brought him along, for one thing ... the man had been perfectly attentive, but there had been a curious lack of warmth, the warmth which one learns to associate with cabin stewards in liners. The efficiency was there all right, but it was a little machine-like, glum and cold, unsmiling. The man had seemed like a soulless automaton.

Shaw sighed and began to unpack.

Two hours later a bugle sounded over the loudspeakers, calling the crew to stations for leaving harbour. Fifteen minutes after that the engines of the
New South Wales
throbbed into life, a cufuffle formed beneath her stem and she came off the pierhead and turned slowly, ponderously, headed outwards, faster and faster under the tremendous power of her nuclear reactor’s energy. She headed out of Naples Bay past Capri, and into the Tyrrhenian Sea to come south into the Mediterranean and set her course for Port Said and the Suez Canal, a mighty ship with over three thousand men, women, and children in her Captain’s charge. And—as it seemed to Shaw it must be regarded—the future of the world crated in her hold.

And under threat.

The first, the incredible, thing happened shortly after the ship had cleared the berth.

Shaw was in his cabin when the tap came at his door and when the girl walked in he could scarcely believe his eyes. He said harshly, “What the devil are you doing here?” He felt his hackles rising, nails digging into his palms. He stared down at her, long jaw thrust out, face stiff with anger. Then, remembering her purposeful look back in his flat, he said with thin-lipped bitterness: “You’d planned this from

the start, hadn’t you! You’ve no right—”

“No right? Of course I’ve a right!” Judith Donovan’s dark eyes flashed up at him angrily. She pushed her hair away from her forehead, gave her head a determined little toss. “I can go just where I please, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. There.” She opened her handbag, produced a folder similar to the one Latymer had given Shaw. “Here’s the carbon of my ticket. Naples to Sydney. It’s fully paid for, and my passport’s in order.” The girl’s eyes glistened a little as she went on, “There was money in my name at the bank and there was no reason why I shouldn’t come.”