Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

Sir Nigel nodded. Both men knew that human voices, reduced to a series of electronically registered blips and pulses, are as individual as fingerprints. No two are ever quite alike.

“Very well,” he said, “but Barry, I insist on two things. For the moment, no one knows about this outside of you, me, and Munro. If it’s a phony, we don’t want to raise false hopes; if it’s not, it’s high explosive. None of the technical side must know the whole. Secondly, I don’t want to hear the name of Anatoly Krivoi again. Devise a cover name for this asset and use it in future.”

Two hours later Barry Ferndale called Munro after lunch at his club. The telephone line being open, they used the commercial parlance that was habitual.

“The managing director’s terribly happy with the sales re­port,” Ferndale told Munro. “He’s very keen that you take a fortnight’s leave to enable us to break it right down and see where we go from here. Have you any ideas for a spot of leave?”

Munro hadn’t, but he made up his mind. This was not a request; it was an order.

“I’d like to go back to Scotland for a while,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to walk during the summer from Lochaber up the coast to Sutherland.”

Ferndale was ecstatic. “The Highlands, the glens of Bonnie Scotland. So pretty at this time of year. Never could stand physical exercise myself, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Stay in touch with me—say, every second day. You have my home number, don’t you?”

A week later, Miroslav Kaminsky arrived in England on his Red Cross travel papers. He had come across Europe by train, the ticket paid for by Drake, who was nearing the end of his financial resources.

Kaminsky and Krim were introduced, and Kaminsky given his orders.

“You learn English,” Drake told him. “Morning, noon, and night. Books and gramophone records, faster than you’ve ever learned anything before. Meanwhile, I’m going to get you some decent papers. You can’t travel on Red Cross documents forever. Until I do, and until you can make your­self understood in English, don’t leave the flat.”

Adam Munro had walked for ten days through the Highlands of Inverness, Ross, and Cromarty and finally into Sutherland County. He had arrived at the small town of Lochinver, where the waters of the North Minch stretch away westward to the Isle of Lewis, when he made his sixth call to Barry Ferndale’s home on the outskirts of London.

“Glad you called,” said Ferndale down the line. “Could you come back to the office? The managing director would like a word.”

Munro promised to leave within the hour and make his way as fast as possible to Inverness. There he could pick up a flight for London.

At his home on the outskirts of Sheffield, the great steel town of Yorkshire, Norman Pickering kissed his wife and daughter farewell that brilliant late-July morning and drove off to the bank of which he was manager.

Twenty minutes later a small van bearing the name of an electrical appliance company drove up to the house and dis­gorged two men in white coats. One carried a large card­board carton up to the front door, preceded by his companion bearing a clipboard. Mrs. Pickering answered the door, and the two men went inside. None of the neighbors took any notice.

Ten minutes later the man with the clipboard came out and drove away. His companion had apparently stayed to fix and test the appliance they had delivered.

Thirty minutes after that, the van was parked about two corners from the bank, and the driver, without his white coat and wearing a charcoal-gray business suit, carrying not a clip­board but a large attache case, entered the bank. He prof­fered an envelope to one of the women clerks, who looked at it, saw that it was addressed personally to Mr. Pickering, and took it in to him. The businessman waited patiently.

Two minutes later the manager opened his office door and looked out. His eye caught the waiting businessman.

“Mr. Partington?” he asked. “Do come in.”

Andrew Drake did not speak until the door had closed be­hind him. When he did, his voice had no trace of his native Yorkshire, but a guttural edge as if it came from Europe. His hair was carrot-red, and heavy-rimmed, tinted glasses masked his eyes to some extent.

“I wish to open an account,” he said, “and to make a with­drawal in cash.”

Pickering was perplexed; his chief clerk could have handled this transaction.

“A large account, and a large transaction,” said Drake. He slid a check across the desk. It was a bank check, the sort that can be obtained across the counter. It was issued by the Holborn, London, branch of Pickering’s own bank, and was drawn to thirty thousand pounds.

“I see,” said Pickering. That kind of money was definitely the manager’s business. “And the withdrawal?”

“Twenty thousand pounds in cash.”

“Twenty thousand pounds in cash?” asked Pickering. He reached for the phone. “Well, of course I shall have to call the Holborn branch and—”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Drake, and pushed a copy of that morning’s London Times over the desk. Pickering stared at it. What Drake handed him next caused him to stare even more. It was a photograph, taken with a Polaroid camera. He recognized his wife, whom he had left ninety minutes earlier, sitting round-eyed with fear in his own fireside chair. He could make out a portion of his own sitting room. His wife held their child close to her with one arm. Across her knees was the same issue of the London Times.

“Taken sixty minutes ago,” said Drake.

Pickering’s stomach tightened. The photo would win no prizes for photographic quality, but the shape of the man’s shoulder in the foreground and the sawed-off shotgun point­ing at his family was quite clear enough.

“If you raise the alarm,” said Drake quietly, “the police will come here, not to your home. Before they break in, you will be dead. In exactly sixty minutes, unless I make a phone call to say I am safely away with the money, that man is go­ing to pull that trigger. Please don’t think we are joking; we are quite prepared to die if we have to. We are the Red Army Faction.”

Pickering swallowed hard. Under his desk, a foot from his knee, was a button linked to a silent alarm. He looked at the photograph again and moved his knee away.

“Call your chief clerk,” said Drake, “and instruct him to open the account, credit the check to it, and provide the check for the twenty-thousand-pound withdrawal. Tell him you have telephoned London and all is in order. If he expresses surprise, tell him the sum is for a very big commer­cial promotion campaign in which prize money will be given away in cash. Pull yourself together and make it good.”

The chief clerk was surprised, but his manager seemed calm enough; a little subdued, perhaps, but otherwise normal. And the dark-suited man before him looked relaxed and friendly. There was even a glass of the manager’s sherry before each of them, though the businessman had kept his light gloves on—odd for such warm weather. Thirty minutes later the chief clerk brought the money from the vault, deposited it on the manager’s desk, and left.

Drake packed it calmly into the attache case.

“There are thirty minutes left,” he told Pickering, “In twenty-five I shall make my phone call. My colleague will leave your wife and child perfectly unharmed. If you raise the alarm before that, he will shoot first and take his chances with the police later.”

When he had gone, Pickering sat frozen for half an hour. In fact, Drake phoned the house five minutes later from a call box. Krim took the call, smiled briefly at the woman on the floor with her hands and ankles bound with adhesive tape, and left. Neither used the van, which had been stolen the previous day. Krim used a motorcycle parked in readiness farther down the road. Drake took a motorcycle helmet from the van to cover his flaming red hair, and used a second mo­torcycle parked near the van. Both were out of Sheffield within thirty minutes. They abandoned the vehicles north of London and met again in Drake’s flat, where he washed the red dye out of his hair and crushed the eyeglasses to frag­ments.