Assault on England (8 page)

"Oh dear," Heather said, looking down at the flaming wreck. Then she turned and looked across to where the S.O.C.E.M.A. lay upside-down in the field on the other side of the road. It was a mess.

"Sorry about that," I said.

"Oh, well," she sighed. "It never shifted down very well, anyway."

I grinned at her. "That Ferodo clutch must have needed adjusting»

"Rather Are you hurt?"

"Just my ego I wanted Novosty alive Now he can't tell us anything."

She gave me a small, smug smile. "Marsh talked before he died I promised him a doctor, poor chap. It seems these lads had nothing to do with the assassination. They planned to steal guided missile blueprints as they were transferred from the Defence Ministry to military headquarters."

"I'll be damned," I said. So, I had been right about Novosty all along. But if the Russians weren't behind the assassination plot then who was?

Brutus was seated behind his desk, fingering the photograph of Fergus' commando unit. In front of him was a stack full of official Army records, each containing information on the men in the unit.

"We've managed to track all of them down," Brutus said. "Twelve of them are dead, either killed in the war or died at home. This one," he pointed at a man wearing a lieutenant's insignia, "is a very interesting one. Lieutenant John Elmore. He had part of his skull crushed in a commando raid. Had a steel plate put in his head. After he left the service, he put his commando training to work for him. He became the most successful paid assassin in England. Mostly underworld assignments. The man was a genius at killing."

I arched my eyebrows. Here, at last, was something, Brutus shot my hopes down immediately. "He was killed years ago in a fight with Scotland Yard in a suburb of London."

"Are you sure it was him?"

"Certain! Scotland Yard got a tip from one of its informers that Elmore was hiding in a service station. When they got there, he started shooting. One of the Yard men got a good look at him through the telescopic sights of a sniper's rifle. The fight lasted 10 minutes, then the whole place went up in flames. One of the bullets must have hit a petrol pump. When it was all over they found Elmore's body burned to a crisp. But there is no doubt that it was him."

"So that leaves us with a killer still running loose."

Brutus didn't think so. "It's twenty-four hours past the fortnight deadline," Brutus was saying, walking back and forth before his massive desk, pulling on a heavy briar pipe clenched tightly between his teeth. "Which could mean your man Marsh was deliberately misled by Novosty so as not to give away the real purpose of the mission. In that case, my lad, the assassin died in that flaming car. And with the others dead or in custody, the plot has been frustrated."

"But Koval has verified Marsh's story," Heather pointed out.

"But wouldn't he do just that?" Brutus argued. "If you were Koval, would you rather be tried for stealing some documents or for murder?"

"A good point," I said. "I can't help thinking, though, that our killer is still out there somewhere."

"The handwriting is bothering you, isn't it?" Brutus said, sucking at his pipe.

"Yes, sir. And the way the killings were done. When you've been at this work for a while, you get a feeling about a man you're after, whether you've ever met him or not. My idea of the killer just doesn't match up with Novosty."

"Well, I hope you're wrong, Nick," Brutus said heavily. "Because if you're right, all we can do at this point is double our guard on all our high officials and wait."

"I know," I said gloomily.

Brutus suddenly stuck his big jaw out and grinned. "All right, my lad. Don't look so down. You and Heather here go on about your work and check with me often."

"We're off, then," Heather said. "We'll divide up the work. I'll take the Home Secretary and the Lord Privy Seal and Nick can start off with the Foreign Secretary. We'll give you a ring tonight, Brutus."

I walked down the wide corridor slowly. At first glance, the office building seemed to be humming in the ordinary way of a day's work, the secretaries hurrying from one room to another, typewriters clacking behind closed doors. But if you knew what to look for, you saw the undercurrent of tension beneath the surface.

Those same secretaries avoided dark corridors and unused rooms. There were government agents and plainclothes Yard men everywhere. They stopped me every couple of minutes and made me flash the I.D. Brutus had given me. I wondered how difficult it might be to forge an SOE or MI5 I.D. card, probably not too hard for a knowledgeable operator.

I climbed the stairs to the next floor and headed toward the Foreign Secretary's offices. There were a lot of people in the corridor here, including a small contingent of uniformed soldiers at the wide doors leading to the main work areas.

Across the corridor was a smaller unguarded door to a suite of lesser offices of the Ministry. As I moved past this, a man came out. He was wearing a janitor's uniform and carrying a mop and bucket, and he seemed to be in a great hurry — he almost knocked me down.

He gave me a quick, hard look and then he was moving quickly down the corridor, almost running. He was a tall man with dark hair and a mustache. I was trying to decide whether or not the mustache was phony, about to take off after him, when I heard the scream.

It came from the offices the janitor had just left. A man in a dark suit and tie got in my way. I shoved him aside and opened the door.

As I moved into the office, leaving the door wide open behind me, a girl standing near the doorway leading to the next room looked at me wide-eyed and screamed. Papers she must have been holding lay scattered at her feet. I moved past her into a small private office as footsteps pounded down the corridor behind me. Inside the inner office, a dark-haired woman stood over the body of the Foreign Secretary, her mouth opening and closing in shock.

I saw the horror in her face and looked at the reason for it. The Secretary had been killed with a garrotte, the kind used by the commandos in the war. He had been almost decapitated and blood was spattered everywhere.

The woman looked at me and tried to speak but I moved her to a chair and sat her in it, then I looked around the room. There was a note propped on a desk nearby, but I ignored it for the moment.

I thought about looking for that janitor but decided against it. He'd be long gone by now. I tried to fix in my mind how he'd looked, what had made me think the mustache might be phony, and that's when I remembered something. Not just the mustache but the hair must have been phony — a wig — because I was sure I'd seen a fringe of blond hair at the back of the neck.

Two men stormed into the office now.

"Here, what's going on here?" one asked.

"Bloody hell!" the other said, spotting the dead man.

"And who are you?" The first man looked at me suspiciously.

I flashed my I.D. card as more people came running into the room. "I think I got a look at the killer," I said, "He's dressed like a janitor. Ran that way down the corridor."

One of the men hurried from the room. The others eyed me warily, as the room filled with horrified Ministry personnel. I went to the desk and looked at the note. It read:

"Better late than never. The amount owed and payable has now risen to fourteen million pounds. Put it aboard a private plane and fly it to Geneva. You will receive further instructions as to what bank to contact for deposit, Don't fail — you're running out of time."

"Here, what have you got there?" a plainclothes policeman said beside me. "I'll just take that" He reached for the note stiffly and I let him have it. It had looked like the same handwriting to me but of course the handwriting expert would have to confirm it.

I moved from the desk to get another look at the body. There were reporters in the outer room now, trying unsuccessfully to get past the military guards there.

As I walked around the desk closer to the body, I spotted a scrap of paper on the floor just about where the killer might have been standing when he took the note out of his pocket and placed it on the desk. I picked it up; it appeared to be torn from a piece of stationery, just a corner of the sheet. There was a phone number written on it, in pencil. A part of a printed emblem remained on the tear-line.

Studying the scrawled digits, it seemed to me that they might have been written by the same hand that wrote the assassination notes. It was a long shot, certainly, but we needed one right now.

A burly man moved toward me and I slipped the paper into my pocket.

"You there — who are you?"

"SOE," I said, showing the I.D. again. He hadn't seen me hide the paper.

"Oh. Right. Just keep out of the way, my lad."

"I'll make every effort to." I said, straight-faced. I moved over to the body for a last look at the mess that had been the Secretary.

It was another unnecessarily bloody killing. The garrotte, composed in this case of two metal handles with a length of piano wire running between them, was a familiar weapon to military men. The attacker merely looped the wire over the victim's head and pulled. The wire cut through flesh, muscle, tendon and bone until it separated head from body. At least it was a fast way to go. I remembered, suddenly, that Augie Fergus had served in the commandos. Was that how he came to know the assassin? If, in fact, he
had
known him. Now I was playing a guessing game and there was no time for that, I turned and quickly left the room.

I found Heather at the Home Secretary's office nearby; she hadn't heard about the latest slaying. "I just ran into Elmo Jupiter," she said lightly. "He insisted that I call him. Are you jealous, love?"

"I wish I had the time," I said. 'The Foreign Secretary has just been assassinated."

Her lovely blue eyes widened in shock.

"Does Brutus know?" she asked.

"I called him on the way here. He was in quite a state."

"It's bloody awful, isn't it?" she said.

"If we don't improve on our batting average soon," I told her, "the British government will cease to exist as a viable institution. There was total panic at the Ministry."

"Does Brutus have any ideas?" she asked.

"Not really. We're pretty much on our own now. The Prime Minister has already been notified, I hear, and wants to deliver the ransom immediately."

"He is probably afraid he may be next."

"He's a logical target," I said. 'The killer left another note, demanding payment. And I found this at the scene." I handed her the scrap of paper.

"It's the telephone number of the Ministry," she said, puzzled. "Do you think the assassin wrote it?"

"It seems unlikely that an employee at the Ministry would need to write the number down," I said. "And the scrawl seems similar to the handwriting in the assassination notes. What do you make of the emblem?"

"There isn't quite enough of it showing," she said. "But somehow I think I've seen it before. Let's go up to my flat and have a closer look."

Heather leased a small apartment on London's West End. It was a three-flight walk up but once inside it was quite a charming place. She made us a cup of English tea and we sat at a small table by the window sipping it. I pulled the scrap of paper from my pocket again.

"Whoever this fellow is, he likes to play rough," I said, turning the paper over in my hand. I had given Heather the details of the killing. "Rougher than Novosty. And he's probably more dangerous because he enjoys killing and because he's probably not rational."

I held the paper to the light from the window. "Hey, what's this? There's the impression of some writing on here, under the digits."

Heather got up and looked over my shoulder. "What does it say, Nick?"

"I can't make it out. It looks like a capital «R» to start, and then…"

"An 'O' and a 'Y'," Heather said excitedly.

"And then — 'A' and maybe 'L. Royal. And there's something else."

"It might be 'Ho, " she said, "and part of a TV There is a Royal Hotel, you know, at Russell Square."

"Of course," I said. "Royal Hotel. But is this hotel stationery?"

"I don't think so," Heather said. "I told you that I've seen that emblem before, but I don't associate it with a hotel. We'll check it out though."

"If it isn't hotel paper," I said, "we have a double clue. Royal Hotel and the organization or idea represented by the symbol."

"Exactly," Heather agreed, excitement showing in her face. "Maybe this is our break, Nick."

"
If
the paper belonged to the killer," I reminded her.

After tea we took a taxi to the Royal Hotel and spoke to the assistant manager at the desk. He looked at the scrap of paper and denied that it belong to the hotel. He took out a sheet of hotel stationery and showed it to us for comparison.

"Of course, it might have belonged to a guest," the man said. "Or to one of the many conventioneers who meet here."

"Yes," I said heavily. "Well, thanks just the same."

Outside, Heather said, "I think we'd better bring Brutus up to date."

"All right," I said. "Maybe he can offer some ideas on our emblem." We hailed a cab and went directly to Brutus's office.

When we got there, after marching briskly through the long corridor with the uniformed security guards, we found Brutus poring over old police records. He thought there might still be some chance that the assassin was a convicted felon with a grudge against the Establishment. I showed him the scrap of paper, but he shook his head.

"I can't make anything of it," he said. "I can make copies though and show it around the department. Maybe somebody will recognize it."

"That might be worthwhile, sir," I said.

"We've checked out this janitor chap you saw leaving the Secretary's office," Brutus told me. "Nobody can identify a person of that description working in the building."