Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

Philpott sighed. ‘We used to work with people like that, didn’t we?’

‘Everywhere you go in life you work with or near people like that,’ Lewis said. ‘They’re a law of the workplace, something you have to put up with.’

‘Like viruses.’

‘And bilious attacks.’

The food came. Philpott attacked his and didn’t speak again until he had finished. He sat back and watched Lewis toy with the last triangle of his veal.

‘I don’t want to talk any more about Policy Control, Harry.’

‘Then talk to me about work. What’s holding your attention at the moment?’

Philpott outlined a job being handled by Task Force One in Tirana, where criminal elements from former Eastern Bloc countries were taking advantage of the Albanian crisis to set up black market operations and spurious money-for-land deals.

‘We also have a team out in Zaire. Rebels have taken hold of the Kinsangani, in the east, and they’re posing a threat to the diamond mines there. The economy would go downhill without the diamonds, so we’re keeping a watching brief at present, waiting for the usual band of international gem barons to step in and try to rob the country blind. Elsewhere, Task Force Three are investigating a crime-based upheaval in Kashmir that might boil over into big trouble if it’s not defused.’

‘Have they come across Dr Simon Arberry, by any chance?’

‘Graham and Jarwal, an Area Observer, had dinner with him the other evening.’

‘Arberry’s an incredible chap. Brains and drive in equal measure. He’d be a godsend in our Third World aid programmes.’

‘Why so?’

‘He’s a born organizer, and he’s a magnificent persuader.’

‘So your foreign aid work’s suffering?’

‘It’s being undermined.’

Philpott looked interested. ‘By politicians? Criminals?’

‘Today, Malcolm, corruption eats into the heart of every charitable venture. Red Cross aid is stolen and sold in street markets to people with the money to buy luxuries like condensed milk, white sugar and aspirin tablets.’

‘What’s the scale of the loss?’

‘In some areas criminal co-operatives absorb eighty, eighty-five per cent of all material aid from the West.’

‘You’re the Investigative Director, aren’t you?’ Philpott said. ‘What are you doing about it?’

‘I have good, detailed evidence on the worldwide black marketing of charity aid. But I don’t have the resources it would take to root it out.’

Philpott was drumming the table now, thinking. ‘Send me round some details on this, would you?’

‘You mean you’ve never heard about how rotten everything’s gone lately?’

‘I didn’t realize the scale.’

‘I’ll send you the full depressing details, then.’

‘And maybe I’ll find some small way in which I can help.’ Philpott smiled tightly. ‘That’s enough about work. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘Anything you say. You’re buying, after all.’

‘I’ll tell you something about that,’ Philpott said. ‘I just worked it out. The ten per cent tip I’ll leave here today is about fifteen per cent more than I used to spend on a three-course lunch for the two of us in a Fleet Street pub.’

Sabrina crossed the border into Kashmir at Dalhousie, forty kilometres south-west of Jammu. The guard at the border post, after scowling at her and demanding to see her documentation, became suddenly deferential when he saw the UN symbol on her WHO accreditation. He stamped the appropriate blank page with a flourish and waved her through.

It was late afternoon and she had driven since dawn. Assuming her maps were reliable, she estimated that if she drove till dusk, rested and made an early start, she could be in Srinagar by noon the next day.

On a wide stretch of road to the west of Jammu she pulled over, took half a dozen items from her shoulder bag and laid them out on the seat beside her. They were a mirror in a rigid folding case, a comb, a rectangular powder compact, a dog-eared paperback of Jane Eyre , a ballpoint pen and a small pair of opera glasses.

‘Begin with the mirror,’ she muttered, recalling the training session where she had finally managed to work this conversion without looking. That had been two months ago; there was no one here to impress, so on this occasion she would watch what she was doing.

When the mirror case was held open with the hinge pointing upward, the mirror tipped out of its housing and hung down. Sabrina reached behind it and folded out a thin circuit board; from behind that she folded out another. With the mirror and the two boards in place, she was holding a ten-centimetre cube with one open side.

She put down the cube and opened the paperback. The first eighty pages were real but after that it was a box. She took out a flat ten-centimetre panel with a circular hole in the centre and laid it on one side of the cube. By dismantling the opera glasses she produced a neat zoom lens with a ratio of 60 to 1; she added a manual operating ring by combining the ridged bezels of the binoculars. She screwed the lens into the hole in the square panel, put it down and stared. For a moment she was lost.

‘Viewfinder, ‘ she said, remembering.

She opened the compact, carefully removed the powder tray and took out a plastic bag containing a flattened, hinged housing and the four glass viewfinder components. She fitted them together and clipped the unit to the top of the cube. The back of the comb came off and gave access to a slender titanium antenna with a miniature powered booster above its socket plug.

The main power source and electronic storage medium were in the book; she fitted them into slots inside the cube, tipped six screws and a tiny screwdriver from the barrel of the ballpoint pen and used them to stabilize the instrument. Finally she teased a laminated cover from the pen, unrolled it and fixed it with adhesive tape around the body of the cube.

‘Et voilà.’

The neat finished instrument she held between her hands was the EVC12A, designed, refined and perfected at a cost of six million dollars. It was a camera capable of taking and electronically storing twenty colour pictures, which it could transmit in digital form to a satellite, via its boosted antenna.

‘After all that, let’s hope I get a chance to use it.’

Philpott had told her he wanted broad-scale input, which meant he wanted alert observation, creative snooping and, if necessary, selective theft. It also meant pictures. No mission was a failure if it could be reinforced by random intelligence, and although Sabrina had the sheaf of papers she took from Hafi, she didn’t know if they would be any help to anyone. Even if they were, even if they turned out to be solid gold, it would still be marvellous, on top of all that, to knock out the old man’s eye with some top-rate photographic intelligence.

She put the camera carefully in the glove box. Juan Pereda, chief designer on the camera project, had warned her, again and again, that such an instrument would be prized by any foreign power without the resources to spend on advanced electronic development.

‘This is breakthrough technology,’ he told her in his thick Mexican accent. ‘Cutting-edge kit, you understand? You must not expose the camera to jeopardy, señorita.’

Philpott said the best way to safeguard the camera was not to assemble it until she knew she was in relatively safe surroundings.

‘Another way to make sure you don’t let any harm befall the instrument,’ he added, ‘is to bear in mind that if it gets damaged or lost, Juan might just get mad enough to insist a replacement be paid for from my budget. If that were to happen, your salary would be the first indirect casualty.’