Desmond Bagley - The Tightrope Men / The Enemy

‘We’re doing the best we can,’ said Armstrong. ‘We’ll get more later in the day when people have woken up in England.’

‘Keep it coming,’ said Denison. ‘And don’t forget to remind Carey that I’m still waiting for an explanation.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ said Armstrong.

‘Another thing,’ said Denison. ‘She said she’d find me either here in Oslo or in Helsinki in Finland. That baffled me until I realized I don’t know a bloody thing about Meyrick. Carey mentioned a dossier on Meyrick – I want to see it.’

‘I don’t think that will be possible,’ said Armstrong hesitantly. ‘You’re not cleared for security.’

Denison speared him with a cold eye. ‘You bloody fool!’ he said quietly. ‘Right now I am your security – and don’t forget to tell Carey that, too.’ He walked past Armstrong and up the corridor to his room.

Carey walked past the Oslo City Hall in the warm mid-afternoon sunshine and inspected the statuary with a sardonic eye. Each figure represented a different trade and the whole, no doubt, was supposed to represent the Dignity of Labour. He concluded that the Oslo City Fathers must have been socialist at one time.

He sat on a bench and looked out over the harbour and Oslofjord. A ship slid quietly by – the ferry bound for Copenhagen – and there was a constant coming and going of smaller, local ferries bound for Bygdøy, Ingierstrand and other places on the fjord. Camera-hung tourists strolled by and a tour bus stopped, disgorging more of them.

McCready walked up and sat on the bench. Carey did not look at him but said dreamily, ‘Once my job was easy – just simple eyeball stuff. That was back in the days when Joshua sent his spies into the land of Caanan. Then the bloody scientists got busy and ballsed the whole thing up.’

McCready said nothing; he had encountered Carey in this mood before and knew there was nothing to do but wait until Carey got it off his chest.

‘Do you realize the state we’ve got ourselves into now?’ asked Carey rhetorically. ‘I think you’re George McCready, but I could be wrong. What’s more, you could think you’re George McCready and, if Harding is to be believed, still be wrong. How the hell am I supposed to cope with a situation like that?’

He disregarded McCready’s opening mouth. ‘The bloody boffins are lousing up the whole damned world,’ he said violently, and pointed towards the line of statuary. ‘Look at that crowd of working stiffs. There’s not a trade represented there that isn’t obsolete or obsolescent. Pretty soon they’ll put up a statue of me; there’ll be a plaque saying “Intelligence agent, Mark II” and my job’ll be farmed out to a hot-shot computer. Where’s Denison?’

‘Asleep in the hotel.’

‘And the girl?’

‘Also asleep – in her own room.’

‘If he’s had five minutes’ sleep that’s five minutes more than I’ve had. Let’s go and wake the poor bastard up. Mrs Hansen will join us at the hotel.’

He stood up, and McCready said, ‘How much are you going to tell him?’

‘As much as I have to and no more,’ said Carey shortly. ‘Which may be more than I want to tell him. He’s already putting the screws on me through young Ian. He wants to see Meyrick’s dossier.’

‘You can’t expect him to carry out an impersonation without knowing something of Meyrick,’ said McCready reasonably.

‘Why did that damned girl have to turn up?’ grumbled Carey. ‘As though we don’t have enough trouble. I had a row with Harding this morning.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘George – I have no option. With Meyrick gone I have to use Denison. I’ll play fair; I’ll tell him the truth – maybe not all of it, but what I tell him will be true – and let him make up his own mind. And if he wants out that’s my hard luck.’

McCready noticed the reservation and shook his head. The truth, in Carey’s hands, could take on a chameleon-like quality. Denison did not stand a chance.

Carey said, ‘Something Iredale told me gave me the shudders. This silicone stuff that was rammed into Denison’s face is a polymer; it’s injected in liquid form and then it hardens in the tissues to the consistency of fat – and it’s permanent. If Denison wants to get his own face back it will be a major surgical operation – they’ll have to take his face apart to scrape the stuff out.’

McCready grimaced. ‘I take it that’s a part of the truth you’re not going to tell him.’

‘That – and a few other titbits from Harding.’ Carey stopped. ‘Well, here’s the hotel. Let’s get it over with.’

Denison woke from a deep sleep to hear hammering on his door. He got up groggily, put on the bathrobe, and opened the door. Carey said, ‘Sorry to waken you, but it’s about time we had a talk.’

Denison blinked at him. ‘Come in.’ He turned and went into the bathroom, and Carey, McCready and Mrs Hansen walked through into the bedroom. When Denison reappeared he was wiping his face with a towel. He stared at Diana Hansen. ‘I might have known.’

‘You two know each other,’ said Carey. ‘Mrs Hansen was keeping tabs on Meyrick.’ He drew back the curtain, letting sunlight spill into the room, and tossed an envelope on to the dressing-table. ‘Some more stuff on the girl. We have quite a few people in England running about in circles on your behalf.’

‘Not mine,’ corrected Denison. ‘Yours!’ He put down the towel. ‘Any moment from now she’s going to start playing “Do you remember when?” No information you can give me will help in that sort of guessing game.’

‘You’ll just have to develop a bad memory,’ said McCready.

‘I need to know more about Meyrick,’ insisted Denison.

‘And I’m here to tell you.’ Carey pulled the armchair forward. ‘Sit down and get comfortable. This is going to take a while.’ He sat in the other chair and pulled out a stubby pipe which he started to fill. McCready and Diana Hansen sat on the spare bed.

Carey struck a match and puffed at his pipe. ‘Before we start on Meyrick you ought to know that we discovered how, and when, the switch was made. We figured how we’d do a thing like that ourselves and then checked on it. You were brought in on a stretcher on July 8 and put in room three-sixty-three, just across the corridor. Meyrick was probably knocked out by a Mickey Finn in his nightly Ovaltine or something like that, and the switch was made in the wee, small hours.’

‘Meyrick was taken out next morning before you woke up,’ said McCready. ‘He was put into an ambulance, the hotel management co-operating, and driven to Pier Two at Vippetangen where he was put aboard a ship sailing to Copenhagen. Another ambulance was waiting there which took him God knows where.’

Carey said, ‘If you’d contacted the Embassy as soon as it happened we’d have been able to work all that out so damned fast that we could have been waiting at Copenhagen.’

‘For God’s sake!’ said Denison. ‘Would you have believed me any the quicker? It took you long enough to check anyway with your doctor and your tame psychiatrist.’

‘He’s right,’ said McCready.

‘Do you think that’s why it was done this way? To buy time?’

‘Could be,’ said McCready. ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

‘Oh, it worked all right. What puzzles me is what happened at the Spiralen the next day.’ Carey turned to Denison. ‘Have you got the doll and the note?’

Denison opened a drawer and handed them to Carey. He unfolded the single deckle-edged sheet and read the note aloud. ‘“Your Drammen Dolly awaits you at Spiraltoppen. Early morning. July 10.”’ He lifted the paper and sniffed delicately. ‘Scented, too. I thought that went out in the 1920s.’