Send for the Saint (17 page)

The outline facts weren’t new to the Saint at this point. But for the first time he was beginning to see what Bert Nobbin’s real position in the affair might be; and that dawning realisation, or suspicion, made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and do what felt like an icy little minuet.

“But Pelton put him in regardless,” he said slowly.

“It was a risk,” she admitted, without saying for whom. “But without Bert’s contribution it would have been a lot harder to brief you for your job. And he was keen to prove himself outside his own field.”

“Which is?”

“Information handling,” the girl said. “That’s analysis of incoming reports. For example, from Resident Directors — you know the set-up overseas. Deciphering, extraction, collating, condensing. It’s mostly dull, boring, routine work. But Bert’s good at it. I know — I worked under him for a couple of years.”

Thoughts were chasing each other around in the Saint’s head like wasps in a jam-jar. Somewhere in this whole setup was something — or maybe it was two or three or four things — that didn’t fit, no matter which way up you turned it and no matter what angle you looked at it from. His nose for these matters told him only one thing for certain: somewhere, in some way that it was beyond his present knowledge and understanding to discern, the game was rigged.

It was a little like being in a room where any of the angles or perspectives might be individually possible but which made an impossible whole, so that you felt a weirdly subtle vertigo. The sort of room certain psychological researchers have managed to create to test the disorienting effects of visual incoherence.

And who were the people who formed the corners of this particular psychological test chamber ?

Rockham. Pelton. Ruth Barnaby. Gascott. The Saint himself. Nobbins. Jack Randall …

Jack Randall.

She had said, just now, that Pelton hadn’t wanted to risk sending in another front-line agent.

That might have been just an imprecision of speech on her part.

Or it might mean something the thought of which made the Saint grit his teeth in premonition.

“What made Randall do a damn-fool thing like going in on his own to look at the Squad, without a cover?” he asked bluntly.

She looked at him in surprise.

“Orders, of course,” she said. “Pelton told him to.”

8
It was a still-angry Simon Templar who went back to his room shortly after by an exact reversal of his outward route with its incidental manoeuvres, except for leaving the rope ladder under the bush by the fence, for future use and to safeguard it from being found in any search of his room.

The excursion had taken up little more than half an hour; but in consequence of it he was plunged into continuous if not very productive thought for twice as long again.

It was the sort of session in which, once, he would have smoked and enjoyed one cigarette after another: and several times in the course of that hour he found himself wishing heartily that his chronicler’s nicotine-stained conscience hadn’t insisted, some time back, on the Saint’s following his own example and giving the habit up.

At an obscenely early hour of the morning, Cawber appeared, and took his new charge, with a distinct lack of outward brotherly love, to breakfast in the big hall which had been the school refectory.

Cawber, the Saint decided, was a man nobody could ever have described as chummy.

They were joined by Lembick — not someone either whom he would ever have been tempted to take to his bosom.

But then, if the two of them were unpleasant specimens, he could be just as unpleasant himself, in the person of Gascott. He knew that he had worked himself so thoroughly into the part by now that on a superficial level he could give as good — or as bad — as he got when it came to the sort of sadistic bullying in which these two transplanted drill sergeants evidently specialised.

There was a man called Ungill at the next breakfast table whom Simon had vaguely noticed in Brixton. Ungill had left a week or more before him, and a lot more officially. They nodded to each other now. What amazed the Saint was the evident decline in Ungill’s health. He looked exhausted and ill. His skin was the colour of pale cheddar; he seemed to be in a state of quivering nervous tension, and he hobbled painfully to the table and lowered himself into the chair with obvious difficulty.

“Got a little pain, have we, Ungill?” Lembick leered. “Don’t you worry — we’ll soon get that sorted out for you. A nice brisk little five-mile run with the pack on and you’ll be as right as rain. Or maybe you’d prefer an hour or two’s wrestling with Cawber. You know how he enjoys that!”

Cawber licked his lips. There were flecks of cornflake on them, but Simon had the feeling he would have licked them anyway.

“Yeah,” he grinned. “Lemme have him!”

Ungill’s complexion went a couple of shades paler.

“Please, Lembick,” he whined. “Couldn’t I give training a miss today. My back — “

“Your back my backside!” Lembick cut in sneeringly. You’ll not shirk while I’ve anything to do with it. And stop your snivelling and cringing — you make me sick!” With the air of a judge passing sentence and enjoying it, he added: “Cawber’s going to be busy with me, inducting the new man here. You’ll do the five-mile run — with a fifty-pound pack. Twenty times around the big field.”

Ungill, the Saint knew, was a pretty tough egg by ordinary standards. He was an old lag, and fairly typical of the breed in most ways. He wasn’t old in years — he was maybe in his mid-thirties — so much as in prison experience, having been in and out of penal institutions of one kind and another from the age of twelve. In recent years he had specialised, when he wasn’t actually paying the penalty for his specialisation, in keeping up with the people whose job it was to build bigger and better safes: which he did by devising bigger and better methods of blasting his way into them. And it was presumably for his expertise in explosives that Rockham had wanted him. Though at this rate, he didn’t look like having him for much longer.

With Lembick and Cawber at least, the Saint reflected, it would be a pleasure to exercise Gascott’s sarcastically contemptuous tongue. The only trouble was, they had a certain advantage, for the time being, in any debates that might develop, because he was supposed to knuckle under and obey their orders.

All things considered, he wasn’t looking forward to the next week.

“How’s your judo?” Lembick fired the question at him a little later, when they reached the drill hall, a vast hangar-like structure between the main house, which they had just left, and the block where the Saint’s room was.

“Rusty,” he replied untruthfully, gazing around at the scene of varied combative and callisthenic activity.

He counted five pairs of men practising judo, grunting and flurrying and thudding on to the large canvas mat in one corner. Two pairs of men with boxing gloves, nearer to him, were sparring without pulling many punches. The area in another corner was laid out as a more-or-less conventional gym, with a horse, bars, rings, and the rest; and these facilities too were in full use.

“We believe in total physical fitness,” Lembick commented, with a fanatical glint in his eye. “All this isn’t for fun, or sport.” He spat out the word with distaste. “A man — a soldier — has to be properly fit.”

“We got a system here,” Cawber put in. “For the first two weeks, you train. That means we get you fit, if you ain’t already. And you won’t be,” he added, baring his ill-assorted teeth in what his mother might have called a smile. “And after we’ve gotten you fit, we keep you fit. We have a daily program. Except when you’re on assignments.”

“In your case,” Lembick said as they entered another building, “the training’s going to be squeezed into one week instead of two. The boss seems to think you can take it. Today we’ll start finding out if he’s right.”

“We’re gonna have to work you twice as hard!” said Cawber with exaggerated relish.

They were in a small storage warehouse. The racks that lined the walls were piled up with a bewildering variety of military, police, and other uniforms, that made the Saint catch his breath with amazement.

Lembick followed Simon’s sweeping gaze.

“Nice, eh? You name it, we’ve got it. Naval ratings, police, U.S. Army, all ranks, plenty of British regimental stuff — including some Scottish regiments,” he said with something as close to pride as that hard-edged voice could have come.

In the rest of his brief tour Simon was given a sight of everything in that same cursory way. The armaments store was a real eye-opener; and he quietly filed away what he had seen in his memory for future reference, at the same time noting that some of Pelton’s figures were confirmed as questionable in the light of the racks upon racks of the latest military-issue weapons he had seen: gleaming new Lee-Enfield 303’s, and Webley .38 revolvers, among other interesting items of more specialised issue.

And all the time, in the back of his mind, he was trying to form a hypothesis to explain the persistent sensation that he was a piece in a game he didn’t fully understand. In an obscure way he was reminded a little of another adventure, just a short while ago, when a certain Greek tycoon had made the mistake of thinking that he could manipulate the Saint for his own ends, and had very nearly succeeded.

Simon Templar’s week of fitness training began.

He knew it would be tough — even for him. He knew he was already about as fit, about as general-purpose fit, as a man could be. He had always kept himself that way — not only because his active career demanded it, but also from a sheer zest for living, a zest which quite naturally included a real and enduring pleasure in the perfect functioning of hand and nerve and eye and muscle. And he had started out, he knew, with enviable physical assets. He had the kind of frame that yielded maximum power and speed in relation to its bulk. It is well known that bigger bodies are less efficient machines, other things being equal, than smaller ones, and it was well known to Simon Templar. Size for size, a flyweight Olympic weightlifter is a deal stronger than his more massive counterparts in the heavy division. Yet in life, he also knew, you were usually dealing with absolutes: on the whole, bigger men were stronger, and it was more important to be strong, period, than to be strong for your size.

The Saint was tall, but with not an ounce of surplus weight on his body. His reflexes were razor-sharp, which was another advantage that came partly from the dice-game of heredity and partly from practice and habit. So he was as well equipped to face any challenge to his agility and endurance as any man could have been.

But he knew something else, too. He knew that there was general-purpose fitness, which he had, and there were also various kinds of special-purpose fitness. A man could be in the peak of condition as a boxer, say, but as soon as he tried pole-vaulting, or some other activity out of his usual field, he’d find muscles aching that he never knew he had.

Simon Templar couldn’t have run the hundred yards in nine seconds, but he could sprint creditably enough when the need arose. Equally he could have run or jogged for mile after mile without serious signs of distress, though he wouldn’t have won the marathon. But long hard runs, at pace, and with an increasing weight of stones in the rucksack on his back, were something for which it inevitably took a bit of time to develop the special-purpose fitness.

And until you did develop it, every muscle in your body, after a certain time, felt as if some malefic little arsonist had been at work at its centre; every limb seemed to be encased in concrete which made it weigh half a ton; and every joint felt as if its bearings had seized.

The Saint, in addition to these discomforts and the comparable ones of wrestling with Cawber, practising judo with Lembick, and doing all kinds of exercises for hours at a time, had a strategic problem to settle: how much he should hold his performance back to something nearer the average? By shining too much he might be inviting Lembick and Cawber to make things still harder for him; on the other hand, they seemed to be spurred on to higher sights of happy sadism by any show of weakness in their charges — as witness the case of Ungill. None of the others were having quite as much difficulty as that, but some were a good half-way to exhaustion by the Saint’s second day: for some of them, their eighth or ninth. And whenever any of them showed signs of flagging, Lembick or Cawber would instantly pounce and make still greater demands. In the end, the Saint compromised by doing a little less well than he could have in the weighted runs and other non-combative departments, and considerably less well than he could have in the physical tussles with the two trainers, though just well enough not to get hurt. If he had needed to, he could have taken either of them in any form of unarmed combat, but he judged that that would have been an affront which might have provoked them to some vicious . form of revenge. Also, there could be an advantage in keeping his superiority a secret for the time being.

Rockham had chosen his two trainers well. They might be crude and uncultured, with no interest in the finer things of life, but they were tough and relentless slavedrivers. Perfect, in other words, for what the Saint saw as the main object of that so-called training. It certainly wasn’t to produce what Simon had represented to himself as special-purpose fitness, unless Rockham foresaw significant numbers of missions in which his troops would need to run long distances wearing rock-filled or otherwise weighted rucksacks. It was simply to put new recruits to the test; a tough test that got down to the guts of a man, that took him again and again to the point of physical exhaustion or nausea, whichever came first; that drove him on to find more in reserve, another ounce of effort, when he thought he had been emptied of it all. And this against the continual goading and taunting and beating — sometimes literally — by those two despots of the drill-hall. It was make or break.

To survive in The Squad, you first had to survive Lembick and Cawber’s tender ministrations.

Certainly Albert Nobbins would never have come through; Simon felt sure of that when he met him, on the second day. But the few non-combat staff, luckily for them, were exempted from the process.