Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

The Saint inclined his head, acknowledging the point but with reservations.

“Still,” he said. “Gambits can be refuted, and often are. This one included. And the best way to refute a gambit is to accept it.” With one swift pass of his hand the presumptuous white pawn was gone and the black bishop was in its place. “Do your worst.”

He dropped the pawn into one of the recesses in the table; Rockham blinked at the prestidigitatory feat, and then moved up another pawn to threaten the black bishop again.

“The second pawn,” he said, eyeing the Saint keenly, “is properly protected. Now you’re going to have to withdraw that episcopal venturer in one direction or another, I’m afraid.”

“True enough,” admitted the Saint, imperturbably making just such a strategic retreat.

They played on for a while, without any serious edge of competition to the game; until Rockham suggested they abandon it as a draw.

“The position’s more or less equal,” he said. “I can see you’re a worthy opponent. Sometime we’ll have a marathon. Soon. But there’s something I want to show you, now.”

The Saint watched as he crossed to the wall safe and twiddled the combination dial. He brought out a small leather bag and spilled the contents out on the table.

The contents consisted of a large handful of irregularly shaped glassy beads with a semi-opaque sheen to them.

“Uncut diamonds,” Rockham said. “One hundred thousand pounds in negotiable, transportable pebbles!” And Simon Templar knew at a glance that those pebbles were exactly what Rockham said they were, and were worth every penny of the figure he had named.

“Nice,” said the Saint, and meant it.

“A down payment on Friday’s job,” Rockham crowed. “It’s a form of currency I much prefer to large cheques.” He picked up a half-handful of the diamonds and let them trickle in a miniature waterfall into the other hand. “Beautiful, aren’t they? Concentrated wealth.”

“Friday’s job must be a big one,” Simon observed casually, “if that little lot’s just the down payment.”

Rockham eyed him speculatively.

“You’ll be briefed in the morning,” he said. “But you’ll have a starring role, all right. And I can tell you one thing: the prize you’ll be after, the prize that my — clients put such a high value on, is a man!”

Rockham gathered up the diamonds carefully and poured them back into the little leather bag. His eyes had never left them for one instant the whole time they had been on the table.

Simon Templar too had his moments of concentrated attention from which it would have been difficult to deflect him. For example, he watched now with expert interest as Rockham locked the little bag of diamonds away in the safe; and he had watched with even greater interest a little earlier, when that same safe was being opened.

When he kept a prearranged rendezvous at Ruth’s car that night, outside the wall, she drove him just a few miles towards Petersfield for a conference with Pelton — and an Albert Nobbins who was somewhat the worse for wear.

“I’m glad you managed to keep all the bullets in the area of the bullet-proofing,” Nobbins told him.

“I’m only sorry you had to go through the experience at all,” Simon sympathised, looking hard at Pelton. “A Wilkinson vest is a lot better than nothing, but you must be feeling pretty sore all the same.”

“Badly bruised, all right.” Nobbins put a brave face on it, but he looked pale and shaken.

“At least, I hope there are no bones broken.” To Pelton the Saint said: “But why the conference?”

Colonel Pelton put his neat fingertips together and tilted his head over, pigeon- like.

“The answer’s in a name,” he said. “James Anthony Instrood. Head of the European Desk, Chinese espionage. In other words, the man in charge of their whole network in Western Europe. The man the Resident Directors take their orders from.”

The Saint raised a lazy eyebrow and looked politely impressed.

“What about him?”

“Normally he stays in Peking. But a couple of days ago he slipped over to Hong Kong — there’s a girl, it seems. And we managed to grab him. We’ve been waiting for this chance for years.”

“Sounds like quite a prize,” Simon agreed. “What are you doing with him?”

“Bringing him to the UK for interrogation.” Pelton smiled faintly. “Which Mr Nobbins here will begin.”

Nobbins went a little pinker.

“He’s got more useful information in his little finger than a whole sackful of Chinese agents,” he said. “Of course, he’ll take time to break. But when he does...”

“When he does, we could knock out half the Chinese Network,” Pelton said drily. “ If he does. So you can see how important he is to us — and to the Chinese.”

“They’ll want him back pretty badly...” The Saint tugged reflectively at his moustache. The connection was obvious enough, but the words had to be said, so he said them. “You’re working on the assumption that the Chinese may be Rockham’s current employers — bearing in mind his recent visitors?”

“I believe that to be an hypothesis to which we should give consideration,” Pelton said pedantically.

Simon Templar gave consideration to the hypothesis for a moment.

“Rockham’s certainly hatching something big,” he said feeling under no obligation at that moment to mention the down payment he had seen.

“And it’s a man-snatch all right — of some kind. But that’s about all I know. Except that I’m going to be in on it myself, and I’m due for a briefing in the morning, and the job’s scheduled for the next day — Friday.”

Pelton’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“That would fit the hypothesis very well,” he said. “Instrood’s plane arrives late tomorrow night. We’re landing him at Blackbushe and he’ll be driven under convoy guard straight to Braizedown Hall, which is just a few miles away. The debriefing will begin at once. Any operation to abduct him would need to be mounted very fast.”

“Instrood won’t be worth a red cent to the Chinks once he’s spilled the beans,” Nobbins put in superfluously.

“And Friday,” Pelton continued, undeflected by his subordinate’s contribution, “is about as soon as Rockham could sensibly plan to make some kind of rescue bid. I’m assuming that if he is aiming to snatch Instrood back for the Chinese, then he has access to inside information, as usual. Which means he knows when and how we’re bringing Instrood into the country, and he may even know where we’re taking him.”

“All this is more or less speculative for the present,” Simon pointed out. “But if your analysis is correct, what’s to stop you changing the venue for putting the matches under Comrade Instrood’s toes, preferably at the last minute?”

David Pelton’s glittering dark eyes darted over the faces of the other three.

“We’ve given it careful thought.” He looked at Nobbins, who nodded. “And our conclusion is that if Rockham has got this commission from the Chinese, then the time has come when we can’t afford to leave his activities unchecked any longer. The Squad will have to be wiped out. If that’s the league they’ve got into, they’re too dangerous to be left alone any longer.”

“I see,” said the Saint slowly; and he meant more by that than either Pelton or Nobbins or Ruth Barnaby realised. “So if Rockham’s a big enough fish to be dangerous, he’ll swim straight into the net. Or you hope he will.”

“Exactly.” Pelton smiled faintly again, the merest quiver of the lips. “If Rockham makes a bid to get James Anthony Instrood away from us, he’s going to run into much more than he bargained for. His forces will be divided — one party on the raid, and the rest back at base. And we’ll have the advantage of surprise — as well as a man in the enemy camp.”