The Ipcress File. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ prepared to help him in the matter of finding some other type of employment, and I won’t blame him. It was 3.32 A.M. when I saw the headlights coming down the mountain road. Through the night glasses I could see it was wide and rolled like an American car. I switched in my set and saw the movement up the road as the radio man gave it to Dalby. ‘One motor, over a thousand yards. No traffic. Out.’ Dalby grunted.

      I read off the ranges army style until finally the large grey Pontiac slid under me, headlights probing the soft sides of the road. The beams were way above Dalby’s head. I could imagine him, crouching there, perfectly still. In these sorts of situation Dalby sat back and let his subconscious take over; he didn’t have to think – he was a natural hooligan. The car had slowed as Dalby knew it must, and as it neared him he stood up and posed, like the statue of the discus thrower, aimed – then lobbed his parcel of trouble. It was a sticky bomb about as big as two cans of soup end to end; on impact its very small explosive charge spread a sort of napalm through tank visors. Burnt cars and contents don’t worry policemen the way blown-up shot-up ones do. The charge exploded. Dalby dropped almost flat, some flaming pieces of horror narrowly missed him, but mostly they hit radiator and tyre. The car hadn’t slackened speed, and now Dalby was on his feet and running behind it. We’d parked the old car from Beirut obliquely across the path; the man driving our target must have been dead from the first impact, for he made no attempt to collide side to side in sheer, but just ploughed into the old Simca carrying it about eight feet. By now Dalby was alongside. He had the door open and I heard pistol shots as he groped into the rear seat. My trans-receiver made a click as someone switched in and said in a panicky voice, which forgot procedure, ‘What you doing, what you doing?’ For a fraction of a second I thought he was asking Dalby; then I saw it.

      Below me on the road was another car. Maybe he had been following all the time with lights off, or perhaps he’d come down the other valley road from Baalbek and Homs. I looked down on this stretch of road which was as light as day now; the figures frozen like a photo in the intense light of the white hot flames. I could see Dalby’s radio man from the Embassy standing there in an anorak like a scoutmaster on holiday, his white horse-like face staring thunderstruck at me. Dalby’s feet were visible under the open door and I noticed that Simon was standing behind him instead of going around the other side of the car to help. In this second of time I so badly wanted it to be the duty of someone else to do it. Someone else for blaming when this little Nash turned round and roared away. But I had let it approach unseen, I had volunteered for the look-out so as not to do what Dalby was doing – lying on his belly over a red hot petrol tank among people with no reason to be friendly. So I did what I had to do. I did it quickly and I didn’t watch. I needn’t have used two sticky bombs; it had a flimsy roof.

      Simon had got Dalby’s car out on to the roadway by the time I had scrambled down. In the back the radio man was sitting guarding our one captive – the smooth stockbroker whose picture both Fatso and I had carried. The man I had seen lying unconscious upon the gaming table. Dalby had gone to look at the Nash while I vomited as inconspicuously as possible. The heavy smell hung across the roadway and was worse than a brewed-up tank ever made. This smell was a special smell, an evil smell, and my lungs were heavy with it. The two burnt out cars still flickered and spat flames as something dripped on to the red glowing metal. We each of us had removed our overalls and thrown them into the flames. It was Simon’s job to make sure they burnt enough to be unrecognizable. I remember wondering if the zips would melt, but I said nothing.

      The sky had begun to lighten in the east, and the silence had turned brittle in the way it does when night gives way to dawn. The hills had grown lighter, too, and I thought I could discern a goat here and there. Soon the villages would be awake in the land that St Paul walked, and men would be milking by day where we had been killing by night.

      Dalby came back out of earshot and said, ‘Nobody likes it.’

      I said, ‘At first.’

      ‘Not ever, if they work with me.’

      Dalby got into the rear seat next to Raven, and the radio man sat watching them with his pistol cocked.

      I heard Dalby say, ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ in a firm flat voice, and then he produced one of those tiny toothpaste tubes with the needle that were in wartime first-aid kits. Drawing back the man’s sleeve Dalby stabbed it into him. He made no attempt to say or do anything. He sat there in a state of shock. Dalby put the used morphia syrette tube into a matchbox, and the car pulled away, past the whitened twisted wrecks of the three cars; the melted rubber was dribbling and flaring in the road. We turned off the Beirut road at Shtora and headed north up the valley through Baalbek. The pagan and Roman ruins were strategically placed to guard the valley. The six gigantic pillars of the Great Temple were visible through the poplar trees in the streaky dawn light, as they had stood each dawn since the standards of Imperial Rome stood alongside them. I felt Dalby lean forward across my seat-back; he was passing me a rose-tinted pair of spectacles. ‘They came from the Nash.’ I saw that one pane was cracked. I turned them over in my hand. If there’s anything more pathetic than a dead man’s dog, it’s a dead man’s spectacles. Every bend and shine belonged to its wearer and to no one else, nor would ever.

      Dalby said, ‘ONI.^fn2 Both of them. US Embassy car; probably there to do what we did. Serve the nosy—right. They should tell us what they are doing.’ He caught my glance at Raven. ‘Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s way out.’

      I remembered the US Navy’s white S2F-3 ‘Tracker’ at Rome, and another at Beirut that was the same one.

       7

      I saw Dalby butting his head back, his long fair hair flashing in the hot sunshine. He shouted something I couldn’t hear, and disappeared behind one of the gigantic smooth-sided Corinthian columns. In scale with him the ruins of Baalbek’s temple were vast against the clear desert sky. I jumped down the broken steps and a couple of lizards twinkled out of sight. Dalby had caught the sun this morning and I could feel the tightening of my skin across my nose and forehead. A little scatter of sand blew across my feet as a draught of wind flicked a finger along the valley floor. As Dalby came nearer I saw that he’d found a piece of tile that had cleverly eluded two millennia of tourists. On the far side of the site beyond the little round temple of Venus a group of American girls in red blazers were standing in a semicircle listening to an old white-bearded Arab. I could tell that he’d got to the bit about the sex orgies and the Rites of the God Moloch even though the wind carried his voice away. Dalby had caught up to me now.

      ‘OK for lunch?’ he asked, and in his proprietorial manner led the way towards it without waiting for a reply.

      We had all slept late that morning in the rather grand villa out there on the Baalbek road. Simon was a Lt-Col in the RAMC and some sort of specialist. He had never been involved in a stunt like last night’s before. I felt a little guilty at my unspoken criticism. He was back there now, keeping an eye on the man who had held centre stage last night. The villa was discreetly situated and under the quiet control of an elderly Armenian couple who accepted our arrival last night without surprise. The house stood in the middle of a vast acreage of terraced garden. Azaleas, cyclamen and olive trees all but hid the building which was ‘U’ shaped in plan. Behind the house across the open end, an irregular-shaped pool was cut into the natural rock. Under the clear blue water at one end a Roman statue was transfixed in athletic pose, and there were no changing-rooms, beach-chairs, parasols or diving-boards to mar the pool’s natural appearance. The walls of the house facing inwards were glass from floor to ceiling, with bright plain curtains which moved on electrically propelled runners. At night when the lights were on throughout the house and the curtains fully open, and when the coloured lights illuminated the Roman statue, the paved central loggia made a perfect helicopter landing space, while the double-glazed windows kept the worst of the sound out.

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