James Long - Sixth Column

‘Come right now.’

The Deputy Director didn’t have to walk far. The executive offices, on the ninth floor of the Tower building, were on a corridor known as Mahogany Row. Room 9A197 had a bright blue door, set in an equally bright blue wall, decorated with the NSA seal. The man inside was known throughout the Agency by his job title, DIRNSA – they said it like ‘Durnser’. He was waiting.

‘What’s the hurry, Clay?’ said the Director as the Deputy entered the room.

‘The Rage business. Kay’s gonna sell. The whole thing.’ The Deputy Director was Eastern European by origin, thin and white – a sufferer. Normally a dry and methodical man, when he got like this the Director knew something was popping.

‘It’s that guy Arntsen in Germany, the one near Bonn? Kay’s offered him the whole division, the group that makes Rage. Says he’s got all the bugs out and it’s ready to market. Message says he feels the heat’s on in Britain. He says Arntsen gets five per cent of the price if he finds a buyer at two hundred and fifty million.’

‘That’s dollars?’

‘Pounds.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

The Deputy Director, like Deputies everywhere, knew it was really him who ran the show. Sometimes he wondered whether the Director ever retained any important information at all.

‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘that Arntsen sells to the chaos jockeys. Iraq, Qaddaffi in Libya, Syria, whoever. Highest bidder. They got the cash, he ain’t picky. You wanna see CN512 go that way?’

The Director was younger, bigger, funnier than his deputy. He’d only asked the question to give himself thinking time and to see how the man in front of him would lay it out.

‘So? Time to call Langley back again. Tell the CIA we’ve given it to them on a plate like we always do, see what they come up with.’

‘What about Mackeson? What about Kay’s stepson? I thought we were running this one on account of all the angles.’

‘I’ll talk to Langley,’ said the Director, ‘I’ve got an idea. They hate having to listen to my ideas.’ He grinned. ‘This time they won’t have too much choice. We can cover our end separately. Tell Mackeson what’s happening. I want a secure three-way with him and Curtis Walsh in an hour’s time.’

Johnny made his plans for France, plans he’d made several times before, but then it had been for debauched weekends of peculiar upper-crust fun at the French race-tracks. He called Popham, asked Frank to give the Cessna a special check and rang round the partners in the plane to book his three days. It went down badly with one of them, but each partner had the right, once a year, to take the plane against all objections for up to three days. Johnny had always been far too diffident to use the right before. Now he put his foot down.

He did some reckoning. They could all be at Popham by eight o’clock with an early start. Hum at nine, stop there for fuel and customs. That meant they could leave by ten and be in Cherbourg in time for a decent lunch. Hum was a PPR airport, which meant prior permission was required for their visit. He rang Bournemouth and got put through to Hum’s Air Traffic Control.

‘I’m coming in Friday morning,’ he said, ‘Cessna 172 en route Cherbourg. I’ll want fuel and customs.’

‘What time?’

‘I want to leave you at ten a.m.,’ he said, ‘so let’s say nine?’

‘Let’s make that nine oh five,’ said the man, ‘then you won’t have to stooge round waiting for a runway. I’ve got one scheduled and two charters leaving around then. You’ll definitely be out again by ten? It’s busy again after that.’

‘No problem.’

Johnny spent much of the week in a fine state of anticipation, sure that at any moment his mother would ring or come crashing through the door. He replayed the likely scene with all its possible variations in his head a hundred times in the next few days, determined that he wouldn’t give an inch, but the moment never came. He’d posted a second letter to Sibley in case Maggie had failed to pass on the first. No word came from MI7 about his failure to appear there, but then an envelope arrived with a cheque for the balance of his pay and a P45. No note, nothing else.

Nick Mankovitz, in the flat across the hall, was delighted to swap cars for the long weekend, his Volvo estate for Johnny’s sports car. The next question was where to put his guests for the night. A twenty-pound note to Webley secured the key for the unlet furnished flat on the next floor up and he was ready.

He was at King’s Cross absurdly early for the train and when it finally arrived he thought at first they must have missed it until he remembered they’d have Jo’s wheelchair to deal with. He set off up the platform through the dwindling crowd and spotted them getting out of a carriage a long way down the train.

He went to shake Sir Michael’s hand but ended up in a bear hug. Heather kissed him warmly and stayed close to him as he turned to welcome Jo, who looked like a child on a school outing she wasn’t quite sure she was going to enjoy.

‘I’ve got the car over there,’ he said.

‘How are you going to fit us all in?’ asked Heather.

‘I thought we could tow Jo along behind us.’

There was an indignant squawk, but then Jo saw which car he was making for and subsided.

The Magazine Man had already received and passed on his goods by then and picked up his second thousand pounds from the football referee. The goods in question were still inside their protective plastic wrappers in the back of a Peugeot 309GTI parked outside a small guest-house in Winchester. The man who’d bought them was poring over the instructions that came with them, cross-checking with the details gleaned from the telephone intercept, playing with margins of error. Later on, well away from the public view in the back of a derelict garage, he conducted an experiment with a can of petrol and a stopwatch using one of the spares and then made a small correction to the calculations in front of him.

He went to bed early, paid his bill in cash before he did so, telling the landlady he’d have to be off well before she was up. That was certainly true. It was 5 a.m. when he went quietly downstairs and started the car. Before 5.30 he was nosing the car off the main road again, down the bumpy access track, past the warning signs. It was dawn and the glow of the sun hanging over the end of the grass runway to the east glinted on the long row of small aircraft.

He drove along the back of the sheds and the hangars, right to the far end, parked and got out, watching and listening. There should be no one around, and fortunately that seemed to be the case. He was a very methodical man and he’d done a recce the day before. Nothing had changed. The Cessna, white with its blue stripe, was still in the same place, right outside the hangar where the mechanic had left it after the check he’d seen being done. So much the better. As soon as he got out of the car he realized how windy it was. Windy enough to stop them flying? He hoped not.

Even though he knew it was the right plane, he still took out the piece of paper, unfolded it and checked the registration letters. Attention to detail had always been his strong point. Straying into the realm of obsession, he’d even gone all the way up and down the line the day before in case there was another Cessna with similar letters which he might mistake in dawn’s light. There wasn’t.

He fetched the small scaffold tower on wheels which stood outside the hangar, an improvised inspection platform, and pushed it across to the plane, noticing the marks it left in the dewy grass and reminding himself to do something about them. Climbing up on to the platform, he could reach the top wing and he leant across to unscrew one fuel cap. He checked his watch. Too early. He climbed down, moved the platform away from the plane just in case anyone should pass by and used up five minutes pacing up and down, keeping on the alert for anyone, anything, turning up unexpectedly to interrupt him. No one came. It was far too early for the sort of people who flew Cessnas.