Len Deighton - Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

The pilot turned tightly as he came to the roadway. He circled the burning car and then came back again before he was satisfied about his task. He turned his nose eastwards. At that altitude he was out of sight within a second or two.

‘How did you guess?’ I asked Mann.

‘The way he was sitting there above the road. I’ve seen gun-ships in Nam. I knew what he was going to pull.’ He smacked the dust off his trousers. ‘OK, Professor?’

Bekuv nodded grimly. Obviously it had removed any last thoughts he might have had about driving back to Mali to kiss and make up.

‘Then let’s get the hell out of here, before the cops arrive to mop up the mess.’

We slowed as we passed through the smoke and the stink of rubber and carbonized flesh. Bekuv and I both turned to make sure that there was no last chance that the boy could have survived it. Then Mann accelerated, but behind us we saw the Land Rover stop.

Mann was looking in the rear-view mirror. He saw it too. ‘What’s the old fool stopping for?’

I didn’t answer.

‘You got cloth ears?’

‘To bury the kid.’

‘He can’t be that dumb!’

‘There are traditions in the desert,’ I said.

‘You mean that’s what the dummy is going to tell the cops when they get here and find him carving a headstone.’

‘Probably.’

‘They’ll shake him,’ said Mann. ‘The cops will shake Percy Dempsey, and you know what will fall out of his pockets?’

‘Nothing will.’

‘We will!’ said Mann, still watching in the mirror. ‘Goddamned stupid fruit.’

‘I make it twenty k.’s to the turn-off for the airstrip.’

‘Unless our fly-boy was scared shitless by that gunship, and went back to Morocco again.’

‘Our boy hasn’t even faked his flight plan yet,’ I said. ‘He’s only fifteen minutes’ flying time away from here.’

‘OK, OK, OK,’ said Mann. ‘I don’t need any of that Dunkirk spirit crap.’ For a long time we drove in silence.

‘Watch for that cairn at the turn-off,’ I said. ‘It’s no more than half a dozen stones, and the sand has drifted since we came down this road.’

‘There’s no spade in the Land Rover,’ said Mann. ‘You don’t think he’d bury him with his bare hands, do you.’

‘Slow a little now,’ I said. ‘The cairn is on this side.’

An aircraft came dune-hopping in from the north-west. It was one of a fleet of Dornier Skyservant short-haul machines, contracted to take Moroccan civil servants, politicians and technicians down to the phosphate workings near the Algerian border. The world demand for phosphates had made the workings the most pampered industry in Morocco.

The pilot landed at the first approach. It was part of his job to be able to land on any treeless piece of hard dirt. The Dornier taxied over to us and flipped the throttle of the port engine, so that it turned on its own axis, and was ready to fly out again. ‘Watch out for the prop-wash!’ Mann warned me.

Mann’s father had been an airline pilot, and Mann had a ten-year subscription to Aviation Week . Flying machines brought out the worst in him. He rapped the metal skin of this one before climbing through the door. ‘Great ships, these Dorniers,’ he told me. ‘Ever see a Dornier before?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My uncle George shot one down in 1940.’

‘Just make sure you lock the door,’ said Mann.

‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ said the pilot, a young Swede with a droopy moustache and ‘Elsa’ tattooed on his bicep.

I pushed Bekuv ahead of me. There were a dozen or more seats in the cabin, and Mann had already planted himself nearest the door.

‘Hurry!’ said the pilot. ‘I want to get back on to my flight plan.’

‘Casablanca?’ said Mann.

‘And all the couscous you can eat,’ said the pilot, and he opened the throttles even before I had locked the door.

The place from which the twin-engined Dornier climbed steeply was a disused site left by the road-builders. There were the usual piles of oil-drums, two tractor chassis and some stone markers. Everything else had been taken by the nomads. Now a bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours was parked in the shallow depression of a wadi.

‘That’s screwed this one up for ever,’ said Mann. ‘When the cops find the VW they’ll be watching this airstrip for ever.’

‘Dempsey will collect it,’ I said.

‘He’s a regular little Lawrence of Arabia, your pal Dempsey.’

‘He could have done this job on his own,’ I said. ‘There was no need for us to come down here.’

‘You’re even dumber than you look.’ Mann looked round to make sure that Bekuv couldn’t hear.

‘Why then …?’

‘Because if the prof yells loud enough for his spouse, someone is going to have to go in and get her.’

‘They’ll use one of the people in the field,’ I said.

‘They’ll use someone who talked to the professor … and you know it! Someone who was here, who can talk to his old lady and make it sound convincing.’

‘Bloody risky,’ I said.

‘Yep!’ said Mann. ‘If the Russkies are going to send gun-ships here and blast cars out of the desert, they are not going to let his old lady out of their clutches without a struggle.’

‘Perhaps they’ll write Bekuv off as dead,’ I said.

Mann turned in his seat to look at the professor. His head was thrown back over the edge of the seat-back. His mouth was open and his eyes closed. ‘Maybe,’ said Mann.

Now I could see the mountains of the High Atlas. They were almost hidden behind the shimmer of heat that rose from the colourless desert below us, but above the heat haze I could distinguish the snow-capped tops of the highest peaks. Soon we’d see the Atlantic Ocean.

I never discovered whether New York University realized that they had acquired a chair of Interstellar Communication; certainly it was not mentioned in the press analysis. The house we used was on Washington Square, facing across the trees to the university buildings. It had been owned by the CIA – through a land-management front – for many years, and used for various clandestine purposes that included extra-marital exploits by certain senior members of the Operations Division.

Technically, Major Mann was responsible for Bekuv’s safety – which was a polite way of saying custody, as Bekuv himself pointed out at least three times a day. But it was Mann’s overt role of custodian that enabled Bekuv to believe that the interrogation team were the NYU academics that they pretended to be. The interrogators’ first hurdle was to steer Bekuv away from pure administration. Perhaps it was inevitable that a Soviet academic would want to know the floor-area his department would occupy, spending restrictions, the secretarial staff he was entitled to, his voting power in the university, his access to printing, photography and computer and his priority for student and postgraduate enrolment.

The research team was becoming more and more fretful. The reported leakage of scientific information eastwards was reflected by the querulous memos that were piling up in my ‘classified incoming’.

Pretending to be Professor Bekuv’s assistants, the interrogators were hoping to recognize the character of the data he already knew, and hoping to trace the American sources from which it had been stolen. With this in mind, slightly modified data had been released to selected staff at various government labs. So far, none of this ‘seeded’ material had come back through Bekuv, and now, in spite of strenuous protests from his ‘staff’, Bekuv declared a beginning to the Christmas vacation. He imperiously dismissed his interrogators back to their homes and families. Bekuv was therefore free to spend all his days designing a million-dollar heap of electronic junk that was guaranteed to make contact with one of those super-civilizations that were sitting around in space waiting to be introduced.