The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (9 page)

The tension eased from her and she lay on the bed again. ‘First I need experience,’ she said seriously. ‘General experience. Then I want to specialize. After that, if I’m going to have a lot of money I might as well put it to use.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll have to know more about what I’m doing before I can tell you that.’

Denison wondered how this youthful idealism would stand up to the battering of the world. Still, a lot could be done with enthusiasm and money. He smiled, and said, ‘You seem to have settled on a lifetime plan. Is there room in the programme for marriage and a family?’

‘Of course; but he’ll have to be the right man—he’ll have to want what I want.’ She shrugged. ‘So far no one like that has come my way. The men at university could be divided into two classes; the stodges who are happy with the present system, and the idealists who aren’t. The stodges are already working out their retirement pensions before they get a job and the idealists are so damned naive and impractical. Neither of them suit me.’

‘Someone will come along who will,’ predicted Denison.

‘How can you be so sure?’

He laughed. ‘How do you suppose the population explosion came about? Men and women usually get together somehow. It’s in the nature of the animal.’

She put out her cigarette and lay back and closed her eyes. ‘I’m prepared to wait.’

‘My guess is that you won’t have to wait long.’ She did not respond and he regarded her intently. She had fallen asleep as readily as a puppy might, which was not surprising considering she had been up all night. So had he, but sleep was the last thing he could afford.

He put on his jacket and took the keys from the zippered compartment of her bag. In the lobby he saw two suitcases standing before the desk and, after checking to make sure they were Lyn’s, he said to the porter, ‘I’d like these taken to my daughter’s room. What’s the number?’

‘Did she have a reservation, Mr Meyrick?’

‘It’s possible.’

The porter checked and took down a key. ‘Room four-thirty. I’ll take the bags up.’

In Lyn’s room Denison tipped the porter and put the two cases on the bed as soon as the door closed. He took out the keys and unlocked them and searched them quickly, trying not to disturb the contents too much. There was little that was of value to him directly, but there were one or two items which cast a light on Lyn Meyrick. There was a photograph
of himself—or, rather, of Harry Meyrick—in a leather case. The opposing frame was empty. In a corner of one suitcase was a small Teddy-bear, tattered with much childish loving and presumably retained as a mascot. In the other suitcase he found two textbooks, one on the theory and practice of teaching, the other on child psychology; both heavyweights, the pages sprinkled with diagrams and graphs.

He closed and locked the suitcases and put them on the rack, then went down to his own room. As the lift door opened on to the third floor he saw Armstrong just stepping out of the other lift. Armstrong held out an envelope. ‘Mr Carey told me to give you this.’

Denison ripped open the envelope and scanned the sparse typescript on the single sheet. The only thing it told him that he had not learned already was that Lyn Meyrick’s sport was gymnastics. ‘Carey will have to do better than this,’ he said curtly.

‘We’re doing the best we can,’ said Armstrong. ‘We’ll get more later in the day when people have woken up in England.’

‘Keep it coming,’ said Denison. ‘And don’t forget to remind Carey that I’m still waiting for an explanation.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ said Armstrong.

‘Another thing,’ said Denison. ‘She said she’d find me either here in Oslo or in Helsinki in Finland. That baffled me until I realized I don’t know a bloody thing about Meyrick. Carey mentioned a dossier on Meyrick—I want to see it.’

‘I don’t think that will be possible,’ said Armstrong hesitantly. ‘You’re not cleared for security.’

Denison speared him with a cold eye. ‘You bloody fool!’ he said quietly. ‘Right now
I
am your security—and don’t forget to tell Carey that, too.’ He walked past Armstrong and up the corridor to his room.

Carey walked past the Oslo City Hall in the warm midafternoon sunshine and inspected the statuary with a sardonic eye. Each figure represented a different trade and the whole, no doubt, was supposed to represent the Dignity of Labour. He concluded that the Oslo City Fathers must have been socialist at one time.

He sat on a bench and looked out over the harbour and Oslofjord. A ship slid quietly by—the ferry bound for Copenhagen—and there was a constant coming and going of smaller, local ferries bound for Bygdøy, Ingierstrand and other places on the fjord. Camera-hung tourists strolled by and a tour bus stopped, disgorging more of them.

McCready walked up and sat on the bench. Carey did not look at him but said dreamily, ‘Once my job was easy—just simple eyeball stuff. That was back in the days when Joshua sent his spies into the land of Caanan. Then the bloody scientists got busy and ballsed the whole thing up.’

McCready said nothing; he had encountered Carey in this mood before and knew there was nothing to do but wait until Carey got it off his chest.

‘Do you realize the state we’ve got ourselves into now?’ asked Carey rhetorically. ‘I think you’re George McCready, but I could be wrong. What’s more,
you
could think you’re
George McCready and, if Harding is to be believed, still be wrong. How the hell am I supposed to cope with a situation like that?’

He disregarded McCready’s opening mouth. ‘The bloody boffins are lousing up the whole damned world,’ he said violently, and pointed towards the line of statuary. ‘Look at that crowd of working stiffs. There’s not a trade represented there that isn’t obsolete or obsolescent. Pretty soon they’ll put up a statue of me; there’ll be a plaque saying “Intelligence agent, Mark II” and my job’ll be farmed out to a hot-shot computer. Where’s Denison?’

‘Asleep in the hotel.’

‘And the girl?’

‘Also asleep—in her own room.’

‘If he’s had five minutes’ sleep that’s five minutes more than I’ve had. Let’s go and wake the poor bastard up. Mrs Hansen will join us at the hotel.’

He stood up, and McCready said, ‘How much are you going to tell him?’

‘As much as I have to and no more,’ said Carey shortly. ‘Which may be more than I want to tell him. He’s already putting the screws on me through young Ian. He wants to see Meyrick’s dossier.’

‘You can’t expect him to carry out an impersonation without knowing something of Meyrick,’ said McCready reasonably.

‘Why did that damned girl have to turn up?’ grumbled Carey. ‘As though we don’t have enough trouble. I had a row with Harding this morning.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘George—I have no option. With Meyrick gone I have to use Denison. I’ll play fair; I’ll tell him the truth—maybe not all of it, but what I tell him will be true—and let him make up his own mind. And if he wants out that’s my hard luck.’

McCready noticed the reservation and shook his head. The truth, in Carey’s hands, could take on a chameleon-like quality. Denison did not stand a chance.

Carey said, ‘Something Iredale told me gave me the shudders. This silicone stuff that was rammed into Denison’s face is a polymer; it’s injected in liquid form and then it hardens in the tissues to the consistency of fat—and it’s permanent. If Denison wants to get his own face back it will be a major surgical operation—they’ll have to take his face apart to scrape the stuff out.’

McCready grimaced. ‘I take it that’s a part of the truth you’re not going to tell him.’

‘That—and a few other titbits from Harding.’ Carey stopped. ‘Well, here’s the hotel. Let’s get it over with.’

Denison woke from a deep sleep to hear hammering on his door. He got up groggily, put on the bathrobe, and opened the door. Carey said, ‘Sorry to waken you, but it’s about time we had a talk.’

Denison blinked at him. ‘Come in.’ He turned and went into the bathroom, and Carey, McCready and Mrs Hansen walked through into the bedroom. When Denison reappeared he was wiping his face with a towel. He stared at Diana Hansen. ‘I might have known.’

‘You two know each other,’ said Carey. ‘Mrs Hansen was keeping tabs on Meyrick.’ He drew back the curtain, letting sunlight spill into the room, and tossed an envelope on to the dressing-table. ‘Some more stuff on the girl. We have quite a few people in England running about in circles on your behalf.’

‘Not mine,’ corrected Denison. ‘Yours!’ He put down the towel. ‘Any moment from now she’s going to start playing “Do you remember when?” No information you can give me will help in that sort of guessing game.’

‘You’ll just have to develop a bad memory,’ said McCready.

‘I need to know more about Meyrick,’ insisted Denison.

‘And I’m here to tell you.’ Carey pulled the armchair forward. ‘Sit down and get comfortable. This is going to take a while.’ He sat in the other chair and pulled out a stubby pipe which he started to fill. McCready and Diana Hansen sat on the spare bed.

Carey struck a match and puffed at his pipe. ‘Before we start on Meyrick you ought to know that we discovered how, and when, the switch was made. We figured how we’d do a thing like that ourselves and then checked on it. You were brought in on a stretcher on July 8 and put in room three-sixty-three, just across the corridor. Meyrick was probably knocked out by a Mickey Finn in his nightly Ovaltine or something like that, and the switch was made in the wee, small hours.’

‘Meyrick was taken out next morning before you woke up,’ said McCready. ‘He was put into an ambulance, the hotel management co-operating, and driven to Pier Two at Vippetangen where he was put aboard a ship sailing to Copenhagen. Another ambulance was waiting there which took him God knows where.’

Carey said, ‘If you’d contacted the Embassy as soon as it happened we’d have been able to work all that out so damned fast that
we
could have been waiting at Copenhagen.’

‘For God’s sake!’ said Denison. ‘Would you have believed me any the quicker? It took you long enough to check anyway with your doctor and your tame psychiatrist.’

‘He’s right,’ said McCready.

‘Do you think that’s why it was done this way? To buy time?’

‘Could be,’ said McCready. ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

‘Oh, it worked all right. What puzzles me is what happened at the Spiralen the next day.’ Carey turned to Denison. ‘Have you got the doll and the note?’

Denison opened a drawer and handed them to Carey. He unfolded the single deckle-edged sheet and read the note aloud. ‘ “Your Drammen Dolly awaits you at Spiraltoppen. Early morning. July 10.” ’ He lifted the paper and sniffed delicately. ‘Scented, too. I thought that went out in the 1920s.’

Diana Hansen said, ‘This is the first I’ve heard of a note. I know about the doll, but not the note.’

‘It’s what took Denison to the Spiralen,’ said McCready.

‘Could I see it?’ said Diana, and Carey passed it to her. She read it and said pensively, ‘It could have been…’

‘What is it, Mrs Hansen?’ said Carey sharply.

‘Well, when Meyrick and I went to Drammen last week we lunched at the Spiraltoppen Restaurant.’ She looked a little embarrassed. ‘I had to go to the lavatory and I was away rather a long time. I had stomach trouble—some kind of diarrhoea.’

McCready grinned. ‘Even Intelligence agents are human,’ he said kindly.

‘When I got back Meyrick was talking to a woman and they seemed to be getting on well together. When I came up she went away.’

‘That’s all?’ asked Carey.

‘That’s all.’

He regarded her thoughtfully. ‘I think there’s something you’re not telling us, Mrs Hansen.’

‘Well, it’s something about Meyrick. I was with him quite a lot during the last few weeks and he gave me the impression of being something of a womanizer—perhaps even a sexual athlete.’

A chuckle escaped from McCready. ‘Did he proposition you?’

‘He had as many arms as an octopus,’ she said. ‘I thought I wasn’t going to last out this operation without being raped. I think he’d go for anything on two legs that wore skirts, with the possible exception of Scotsmen—and I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

‘Well, well,’ said Carey. ‘How little we know of our fellow men.’

Denison said, ‘He was divorced twice.’

‘So you think this note was to set up an assignation.’

‘Yes,’ said Diana.

‘But Meyrick wouldn’t have fallen for that, no matter how horny he was,’ said Carey. ‘He was too intelligent a man. When you and he went to Drammen last week he checked with me according to instructions. Since you were going with him I gave him the okay.’

‘Did Meyrick know Diana was working for you?’ asked Denison.

Carey shook his head. ‘No—we like to play loose. But Meyrick didn’t find the note.’ He pointed his pipe stem at Denison. ‘You did—and you went to the Spiralen. Tell me, did the men who attacked you give the impression that they wanted to capture or to kill you?’

‘I didn’t stop to ask them,’ said Denison acidly.

‘Um,’ said Carey, and lapsed into thought, his pipe working overtime. After a while he stirred, and said, ‘All right, Mrs Hansen; I think that’s all.’

She nodded briefly and left the room, and Carey glanced at McCready. ‘I suppose we must tell him about Meyrick.’

McCready grinned. ‘I don’t see how you can get out of it.’

‘I have to know,’ said Denison, ‘if I’m going to carry on with this impersonation.’

‘I trust Mrs Hansen and she doesn’t know,’ said Carey. ‘Not the whole story. I work on the “need to know” principle.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you need to know, so here goes. The first thing to know about Meyrick is that he’s a Finn.’

‘With a name like that?’

‘Oddly enough, it’s his own name. In 1609 the English sent a diplomat to the court of Michael, the first Romanov Czar, to negotiate a trade treaty and to open up the fur trade. The courtiers of James I had to get their bloody ermine somewhere. The name of the diplomat was John Merick—or Meyrick—and he was highly philoprogenitive. He left by-blows all over the Baltic and Harry Meyrick is the end result of that.’

‘It seems that Harry takes after his ancestor,’ commented McCready.

Carey ignored him. ‘Of course, Meyrick’s name was a bit different in Finnish, but when he went to England he reverted to the family name. But that’s by the way.’ He laid down his pipe. ‘More to the point, Meyrick is a Karelian Finn; to be pedantic, if he’d stayed at home in the town where he was born he’d now be a Russian. How good is your modern history?’

‘Average I suppose,’ said Denison.

‘And that means bloody awful,’ observed Carey. ‘All right; in 1939 Russia attacked Finland and the Finns held them off in what was known as the Winter War. In 1941 Germany attacked Russia and the Finns thought it a good opportunity to have another go at the Russkies, which was a pity because that put them on the losing side. Still, it’s difficult to see what else they could have done.

‘At the end of this war, which the Finns know as the Continuation War, there was a peace treaty and the frontier was withdrawn. The old frontier was too close, to Leningrad, which had the Russians edgy. An artilleryman could stand in Finland and lob shells right into the middle of Leningrad, so the Russians took over the whole of the Karelian Isthmus, together with a few other bits and pieces. This put Meyrick’s home town, Enso, on the Russian side, and the Russians renamed it Svetogorsk.’

Carey sucked on his pipe which had gone out. It gurgled unpleasantly. ‘Am I making myself clear?’

‘You’re clear enough,’ said Denison. ‘But I want more than a history lesson.’

‘We’re getting there,’ said Carey. ‘Meyrick was seventeen at the end of the war. Finland was in a hell of a mess; all the Karelian Finns cleared out of the isthmus because they didn’t want to live under the Russians and this put the pressure on the rest of Finland because there was nowhere for them to go. The Finns had to work so bloody hard producing the reparations the Russians demanded that there was no money or men or time left over to build housing. So they turned to the Swedes and asked calmly if they’d take 100,000 immigrants.’ Carey snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that—and the Swedes agreed.’

Denison said, ‘Noble of them.’

Carey nodded. ‘So young Meyrick went to Sweden. He didn’t stay long because he came here, to Oslo, where he lived until he was twenty-four. Then he went to England. He was quite alone all this time—his family had been killed during the war—but as soon as he arrived in England he married his first wife. She had what he needed, which was money.’

‘Who doesn’t need money?’ asked McCready cynically.

‘We’ll get on faster if you stop asking silly questions,’ said Carey. ‘The second thing you have to know about Meyrick is that he’s a bright boy. He has a flair for invention, particularly in electronics, and he has something else which the run-of-the-mill inventor doesn’t have—the ability to turn his inventions into money. The first Mrs Meyrick had a few thousand quid which was all he needed to get started. When they got divorced he’d turned her into a millionairess and he’d made as much for himself. And he went on making it.’

Carey struck a match and applied it to his pipe. ‘By this time he was a big boy as well as a bright boy. He owned a
couple of factories and was deep in defence contracts. There’s a lot of his electronics in the Anglo-French Jaguar fighter as well as in Concorde. He also did some bits and pieces for the Chieftain main battle tank. He’s now at the stage where he heads special committees on technical matters concerning defence, and the Prime Minister has pulled him into a Think Tank. He’s a hell of a big boy but the man-in-the-street knows nothing about him. Got the picture?’

‘I think so,’ said Denison. ‘But it doesn’t help me a damn.’

Carey blew a plume of smoke into the air. ‘I think Meyrick inherited his brains from his father, so let’s take a look at the old boy.’

Denison sighed. ‘Must we?’

‘It’s relevant,’ said Carey flatly. ‘Hannu Merikken was a physicist and, by all accounts, a good one. The way the story runs is that if he hadn’t been killed during the war he’d have been in line for the Nobel Prize. The war put a stop to his immediate researches and he went to work for the Finnish government in Viipuri, which was then the second biggest city in Finland. But it’s in Karelia and it’s now a Russian city and the Russians call it Vyborg.’ He looked at Denison’s closed eyes, and said sharply, ‘I trust I’m not boring you.’