Алистер Маклин - Prime Target

‘For what?’

‘Copy. An embarrassment of copy. More, maybe, than I can use.’

‘I think I speak for the others as well as myself,’ Philpott drawled, ‘when I say I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.’

‘Yes you do, Mr Beamish.’ Whitlock flashed his smile again. ‘You all do. I came here to put the finishing touches to a book about a profoundly bad man, and I have to tell you I got everything I came for. Rest assured, all three of you have a place in the text that should guarantee you some kind of immortality.’

‘Just you back off,’ Pearce snarled.

Whitlock shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you something. There was a point when I was two-thirds the way into the book and I thought, maybe I’m being way too hard on these guys. But now I see you here, and I catch the rancid atmosphere of bigotry and graft, I’m glad I checked every fact and put down every word.’

‘Just go away, will you?’ Philpott said.

Whitlock stepped back and nodded to all three. ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘Let me remember you like this.’ He laughed and walked away.

For a couple of minutes nobody spoke. Chadwick filled their glasses with wine, snatched up his own and drank it in three gulps. Philpott took a sip from his glass. Pearce had his hands over his face. When he brought them down he was staring at Philpott.

‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘Urgently.’

Two hours later Whitlock had a telephone call at his hotel.

‘Me and the boys talked it over,’ Philpott told him. ‘We reached a decision.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m going to kill you.’

‘Well, you’re the boss. I’ll put my affairs in order.’

‘I think they would sooner have had their own man do the job, but I couldn’t let them loose on you, could I? Besides, they’re pretty scared of anyone looking in their direction just at the moment, and in the end they even agreed to defray my considerable expenses for the job. I promised them something clean, with no reverberations.’

‘When should I clear out?’

‘I suggest you get back to New York overnight and do some co-ordinating on my behalf. As of some time early tomorrow, you cease to exist.’

‘Anything you need?’

‘Some penta-methylenediamine. Street-name cadaverine.’

Whitlock thought for a moment. ‘Grundy could get you some. Should I call him?’

‘No need, I’ll talk to him myself. I have another job for him.’

‘A word of warning about the cadaverine,’ Whitlock said. ‘Don’t even open it until you need it. And don’t open it in the hotel under any circumstances. Is there anything else?’

‘Nothing at all. I’ll just say goodbye and RIP, old chap. Bang goes another alias, eh?’

‘Plenty more where that came from,’ Whitlock said.

Andreas Wolff lived in a top-floor apartment in an elegant eighteenth-century building which overlooked the Hermann Gmeiner park in the Freyung district of Vienna.

‘From my work table,’ he told Mike Graham, ‘I can look into the park and see the children playing in the Wendy houses and gambolling around the nice green open spaces over there. Gmeiner worked most of his life in the service of orphans, you know. He was quite a guy.’

Mike’s initial impression was that Wolff himself was a pretty extraordinary person. He was a robustly middle-aged man who exuded compact, restless energy. He had wiry grey-black hair above a wide, furrowed brow; when he spoke his eyes moved incessantly behind the lenses of his glasses, and when he described something his long-fingered hands made shapes in the air. He insisted Mike call him by his first name, and showed no surprise when Mike explained he was an undercover agent attached to the United Nations. ‘I already have two murderous-looking police marksmen in residence, so a murderous secret agent will fit the setting very well.’

From that point on, it had been difficult to get Wolff to address the matter of his security. After a conducted tour of the sprawling apartment he insisted Mike try out one of his prototype computer games. After that he decided it was time for coffee. They took their cups to the spacious sitting room where the police bodyguard sat in easy chairs, looking uncomfortable as they pretended to read newspapers with their machine pistols on the floor at their feet. At Mike’s request they had been told he was an American computer engineer engaged on collaborative work with Andreas Wolff. When he arrived they had inspected his ID which backed the impersonation.

‘Life is so damned short,’ Wolff said now. His words were clipped and meticulously delivered. He stood by a tall window, watching the traffic down on the Börseplatz. ‘I could use three lifetimes, no problem, just turning my games from wild ideas into software. And in between I could maybe use up another couple of seventy-five-year spans to deal with the serious stuff.’

‘ICON,’ Mike said.

Wolff made a sour mouth. ‘I sometimes wish I’d never gone near the thing. You can’t imagine how those security codes disrupt my sleep.’

‘I’d assume they command a lot of brain space.’

‘They sprawl. And apart from that, they constitute a severe discipline. One I did not seek. I am tied to it now of course, and in many ways I find it fulfilling. The new protocols are moving towards a kind of digital perfection. I can sense it. I can even visualize the completed project before I have written the finalizing code.’

‘You’re saying the protocols aren’t finished? I thought they were at the testing stage.’

‘They are being tested, that is true,’ Wolff said, ‘but the test stage is a period with a lot of ruthless chopping. More code has to be written, and that has to be seamlessly incorporated into the body of software which has just undergone merciless surgery.’ Wolff jerked his arms upwards, slopping coffee on the back of his hand. ‘I take some measure of Frohsinn from the effort – glee, you understand?’

‘From facing the challenge?’

‘Quite so. It is good to take on such substantial difficulties, such threats to the symmetry of my reasoning processes. And it is a deep pleasure to overcome them, to win. But I feel it is endless work. As one challenge is cancelled another springs up.’ Wolff turned from the window and grinned at Mike, showing large even teeth. ‘Worst of all are the occasions, late at night, when I realize how much of my precious time is being eroded.’

Mike looked at his watch.

‘And your precious time, too,’ Wolff said, ‘is being eaten away. I’m sorry, I respond to visitors the way children do. With a kind of excitement that travels in all directions. Come, let’s sit down and we can discuss your business. I assure you again, the sharpshooters don’t have a word of English.’ As they sat at a table by the window Wolff added, ‘Their German isn’t much good, either.’

Mike explained his masters’ anxiety that Wolff’s security might not be good enough. ‘The possible threat to your life has gotten more serious, too.’

‘You mean it’s not just the possibility of criminals eliminating me, to make sure they have the time to break open ICON once and for all?’

‘Well, no.’

‘I must say I find that threat a trifle hard to take seriously. It’s the kind of thing criminals might talk about doing, but going to the trouble of doing it means stepping beyond whatever safety they’ve created for themselves. I think perhaps the criminals are not so organized and not so well informed that they would consider killing me a worthwhile risk.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Listen, Mr Graham, I have fathered a few rumours about a computer genius who is even now overtaking me in the field of computer data security. A lot of people already believe that no matter what happens to me, the future of ICON is going to be in very safe hands.’