The Partridge Kite

Somerset

Friday, 10 December

The explosion was timed for 6.45 p.m., one hour after the bank manager, his assistant and the three security guards had locked up and gone. The seven crates of bullion were safely stacked in the strongroom, twenty feet underground.

The blast blew away the entire wall of the building in Threadneedle Street in the City of London. Five people at the bus stop some yards down at the Bishopsgate junction were killed instantly, and another eleven taken to hospital, mutilated by the shrapnel of glass and masonry. In the chaos the seven crates of bullion were trollied into an ambulance and driven the half-mile to Gardners Corner, Whitechapel, where the East End meets the City. Men in the uniform of the London Ambulance Service pushed the trolleys towards other men in helmets, visors and security guard uniforms, who, keeping the momentum of the trolleys, wheeled them up light steel ramps into the recognisable armoured security tracks. At three minutes past seven - eighteen minutes after the four hundred pounds of gelignite C4 was detonated — the ambulance and the security trucks moved off in different directions. And four and a quarter million pounds in gold bullion was on its way to new owners.

One hundred and ninety miles away, just north of Flamborough on the Yorkshire coast an Alouette helicopter lifted off from the helipad of Temax International Oil, red navigation lights spinning at its tail and glass dome.

Temax ‘Bravo Lima’ was a familiar sight and sound at any time of the day or night, ferrying oil executives and engineers fifty miles out into the North Sea to the three Temax drilling rigs stationed in the ZB38 licence area. But tonight ‘Bravo Lima’ was making an unscheduled flight. As the sound of the rotors disappeared into the drizzle, the pilot and ground crew were already dialling 999 from telephones in the crew hut and the nearby taxi rank.

‘Bravo Lima’s’ new pilot had already swung the machine on to a heading of 036 degrees mag. which, with a constant airspeed, would bring him to his target in less than twenty minutes. By the time the second man aboard had unpacked, retaped and primed the bomb, the yellow glare of the Temax ‘Virginia’ rig was already clearly visible to the right, less than three hundred yards away and two hundred feet down.

The aim was perfect. Given the fifteen-second time fuse, ‘Bravo Lima’ was six hundred feet away from the shrapnel area before the explosion ripped away part of the steel platform close to the generator housing. It set off a series of smaller explosions, spilling hundreds of gallons of diesel oil until the entire platform, half the size of a football pitch, was on fire. ‘Bravo Lima’s’ pilot set his course again, keeping the machine below the five hundred feet radar surveillance height. The bomber next to him carefully rolled up a small screwdriver and a pair of chrome pincers into a white handkerchief and looked back over his shoulder. To see men jumping into the sea, on fire.

Reginald Scammill had no need to wear such a heavy overcoat: he was sweating and uncomfortable. There was a slight drizzle but there was no breeze. He tugged at his collar to loosen his tie and heard the collar-button snap. He found himself hurrying, pushing past the late London evening crowds. But as he entered Leicester Square tube station he remembered he was on his way home and he relaxed a little. He shuffled along in the queue for his ticket and paid his eighty pence to get home to Buckhurst Hill, to the sanctuary of his semi in suburban Essex. He opened his hands, podgy pink hands, fingers yellowed, and saw how his nails had dug into his palms. His hands had been clenched most of the time since he’d left Brussels three hours ago. But within an hour he’d be having his evening cocoa and sandwich in the kitchen with his wife.

The trip had been successful - so successful he still couldn’t believe it. Nor had his Executive. But he’d left them a few minutes ago dotting the i’s of the Press Release and fighting for who’d be spokesman on the radio and television news bulletins tomorrow. Full backing from the Belgians, Dutch, French and Italians - only the Germans had refused. But they didn’t matter now anyway, with such support from the others. He’d won, despite the backtracking from his own members, despite the vicious Press attacks, despite the warnings from his treasurer that they’d only got enough money for five weeks. It had come off and he was set for the big once-and-for-all showdown. And he would win! He barged his way through the automatic ticket barrier, cursing as his squat round body became jammed in it. He held a small plastic holdall high in one hand and began dragging his briefcase through the rubber doors. He paused at the top of the escalator, fumbling with his baggage, pushing his spectacles and the ticket into his top left-hand coat pocket, a routine that did away with the frenzy at the ticket gate the other end. He was a man who flustered easily.

The tall man stood less than a yard away from Scammill, carrying an umbrella. Leicester Square underground station has the longest, steepest escalator in the entire London Underground system, which makes it the longest, steepest escalator in the world. Reginald Scammill stepped on to the first moving steel step, felt a sharp push from behind as the umbrella dug into his spine and glimpsed very briefly but vividly an advertisement for body stockings as he hurtled towards the concrete floor below. He bounced and broke his neck violently at the first impact twenty feet down, his body turning several times.

The push had been hard and he accelerated downwards, unchecked by any contact with travellers standing on the right. But forty feet down the body, with the heavy overcoat billowing, struck an Iranian gesticulating to a French au pair he’d picked up at the ticket queue a minute before. The body carried the Iranian, his eyes staring, his mouth open, downwards at over fifty miles an hour. The au pair went screaming after them, grabbing blindly at the rubber handrail as she fell. The three bodies landed one hundred and sixty-one feet down, a second apart, sprawled across each other like some perverted act caught on Polaroid. Scammill’s briefcase, office papers and the dirty underwear from his overnight bag scattered beneath and around them. The minute hand on the clock above, advertising Dutch cigars, moved a fraction to ten minutes past twelve.

The death of Reginald Scammill, militant Marxist General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, just made the last run of the London editions, sharing the headlines the following morning with the two other stories: the five deaths of the bullion raid bystanders and the bombing of Temax ‘Virginia’ with casualties ten times higher. Whereas all other newspapers gave each of the three stories equal prominence on their front pages, the Sun filling its front page with three massive headlines, only the Morning Star considered Scammill’s death merited a sole banner headline. Their story read: ‘A spokesman for the NUR confirmed this morning that Mr Scammill’s tragic accident had made it necessary for the proposed international rail strike to be postponed indefinitely pending his funeral and the opening of new talks between the Executive and the Rail Board. It follows a new initiative during the night by the Prime Minister. The Rail Unions of other Continental countries who had pledged their support will not now be called upon to engage together in what would have been the first ever internationally co-ordinated strike.’

The man in the first-class carriage read each newspaper report in turn from the neat pile on his right. He stretched. The waiter in the corridor called the first sitting for breakfast as the train passed Derby on its way north. The man laid his umbrella across his window seat and followed the waiter down the corridor to the restaurant car.

Saturday, 11 December

The Prime Minister turned his back and listened involuntarily.

‘It confirms all he told us,’ Knightley said, ‘all he warned us of three days ago. He said there’d be a bank raid. He said there’d be a bombing - something where we’d recognise the symbolism immediately - and a political murder. It’s all there in Kellick’s report.’

Kenneth Knightley, Personal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, watched his employer’s profile on the first floor of Number 10 Downing Street, the dull, cramped, unimpressive house tucked away in a dead-end off Whitehall.

Knightley’s needling, carping voice had annoyed the Prime Minister, reminding him of the previous night’s events in a way that suggested that he, Knightley alone, cared about the awful loss of life.

The Prime Minister was hunched in his chair, staring out of his side window on to Horse Guards Parade and across to the lake in St James’s Park. He could see the fountain through the leafless plane trees and the figures of the five stone soldiers in their stone tunics on the Guards Memorial.

It was drizzling. It always seemed to, he thought, at times like this. He’d had a long experience of disasters, sometimes personal, sometimes political, usually the interaction of both. Always, it seemed, he was at their centre, it was always he who had to engineer a solution. Or, if there wasn’t the manoeuvrability, ensure that someone else was left dangling. He had always believed that prime ministers were not expendable.

Today was Saturday, it was raining and Knightley was carping. The Prime Minister remembered Kellick’s report. Richard Kellick was Department Head of Special State Operations, a relatively new Department within the British Secret Service which dealt exclusively with threats to the British Government and vital British institutions which could not normally be handled by MI6 or any of the three military services.

Special State Operations was not the Prime Minister’s brainchild but it had come into being under his Premiership. There had not been another Premier for some years.

The Prime Minister reached across his wide mahogany desk for the manilla envelope, opened it and laid Kellick’s report on his lap. The report had been sealed ‘for his eyes only’ and according to Kellick only three other men knew of it - Kellick himself, another agent in his Department who’d typed it, and Knightley, who would need to know of it anyway sooner or later. The Prime Minister spoke for the first time in ten minutes.

‘Knightley,’ he said, turning in his chair away from London and the rain, ‘ring Kellick. Have him here straight away. I want him to read this report to me slowly, so that I can understand every bloody little word.’

Knightley left, and as he turned to close the door he saw the Prime Minister, still hunched, hands resting on the pages of the report, now facing the window again, staring at the rain. Knightley paused, and saw the dandruff flaked across the Prime Minister’s shoulders. Tiny particles of dead skin shone like snow on the dark grey material of his suit.

Nice to have some snow, Knightley said to himself as he closed the door - first time in four years. Could take the children tobogganing in Richmond Park.

How convenient, thought the Prime Minister, that Scammill should trip like this so close to his bloody international rail strike. It would have crippled this country. Worse, it would have led to a confrontation that almost certainly would have forced him to resign. You can’t survive without a little bit of luck, he thought, and this was certainly the best he’d had for a very long time. He almost smiled but his eyes dropped to the pages resting on his knees and he suddenly felt cold.

He felt a familiar feeling in his chest - the feeling that had begun over sixty years ago when he’d heard his father’s footsteps on the stairs leading to the tiny bedroom. The tight feeling of fear of the Sam Browne belt, punishment for some little childish crime committed so innocently, so long ago.

The title on the folder read CORDON.

‘The interview, Prime Minister, was conducted last Wednesday evening at 9.30 p.m. in my office. It was recorded on tape and there are only four written copies.’ Kellick knew the Prime Minister had always found it hard to listen, so he had perfected the shortest, most direct sentences when in his presence.

The Prime Minister was not put off by Kellick’s eagerness to please.

‘Kellick!’ - he used the high grating nasal voice normally reserved for Opposition Front-benchers. ‘I do not want all the farts and hesitations you’ve recorded on your tape machine. You will tell me, as clearly as you can, what it means - what it adds up to, what this bloody man is threatening us with.’

Kellick looked up. ‘The man gives his name as Sanderson, Christian name Francis. We have no way of checking this. When he entered Cannon Row police station on Wednesday he was carrying no documents, no driving licence, no letters, not even a tailor’s tag on his suit. All his clothes, even his underwear, were brand new, most of them bought at Marks and Spencer the previous day. Forensic tests on his shoes and socks show he could only have been wearing them for a few hours and that he had only been wearing them in the London area. We’ve no prints on him, by the way, or voice tapes. We might of course be permitted to find a way of helping him volunteer more?’

The Prime Minister looked up and right through Kellick as if Kellick’s head was transparent and he was examining the wall beyond. How he loathed the business Kellick represented! How he loathed them, especially at times like this, with their sinister innuendos and their talk of ‘persuasion’.

He remembered a late-night drunken conversation some years ago with the then Home Secretary, who had said that the only torture techniques the Prime Minister knew about were what were referred to in the trade as the ‘soft options’.

‘When your stomach’s as hard as your heart,’ the Home Secretary had told him, ‘get Mr Bloody Kellick to describe what they do to the obstinate sods!’

Kellick went on, ‘You’ll see from your report. Prime Minister, that Sanderson walked into Cannon Row police station last Wednesday, 8 December. He insisted on seeing a senior officer privately. He spoke eventually to a superintendent and as soon as Sanderson mentioned our Department he phoned us immediately. In his report the super says that he was impressed by the man, that he was well-spoken - whatever’s meant by that - well-dressed and was obviously not a drunk or drugged or a crank.

‘Sanderson was brought to my Department at 1915 hours and I was brought into the interview at eight o’clock. I asked him to repeat everything he had said at Cannon Row and to the agent who’d brought him over.

‘He began by saying there was no way we could crosscheck what he was to tell me, nor was there any way of preventing the events he would warn me of; events, he said, that had already been set into motion. Three things would happen: a bank raid of some proportions, a bombing of some symbolic importance, and a political murder. He said it would not be a murder of a politician but of political significance. He referred directly to you. Prime Minister, in his next sentence, implying that the victim might be an enemy of yours or an opponent.

‘In the event he was wrong, if of course Scammill was the man they intended to kill. Most of the newspapers I see today have used the agency photos taken at this year’s Party Conference with you and Scammill arm in arm singing Auld Lang Syne.’

‘Go on, Kellick. Don’t bloody well ramble!’ The Prime Minister hardly moved and the round grey head seemed to sink lower into the shoulders. In his right hand he held a gold ballpoint pen, the retractable type. He began digging the tip on to the open desk diary, irritatingly monotonous.

Kellick continued. ‘Now, no amount of interrogation by me that evening managed to get an ounce more out of Sanderson concerning these threats of violence. He acknowledged that he had placed himself on record as being an accomplice before the event. We promised him he’d be prosecuted and would certainly never see the outside of a prison again. He didn’t seem at all put out by this. All he said was that by coming to us he had virtually signed his own death warrant anyway. In the eyes of his former employers he had committed high treason and they would find their own way to carry out his execution long before he went into court. The second part of the interview was about this organisation’s structure. The third confined to why he had defected.’

‘Defected has political overtones. Did you mean to use it?’

‘Of course, Prime Minister.’

Knightley shuffled papers on his desk.

‘Prime Minister,’ Kellick said, ‘I’ll read verbatim, with your permission, the remaining part. It’s short and to the point.’

‘Play it to me. Let me hear his voice.’

The Prime Minister reached backwards and with both hands outstretched pulled the heavy curtains together to hide the wet evening.

The effort flushed him. Blood rose to his cheeks, but unevenly, as if he had been daubed clumsily with rouge. His head fell back against the swivel armchair and he stared at the ceiling.

Kellick pulled a small Sony tape cassette recorder from his briefcase. He pushed the forward play button, watching the numbers counter-spin until the number coincided with the number at the left-hand column on the open page of the report on his lap. He pressed the play button.

Sanderson’s voice was low, steady and precise.

‘The Organisation I’ve left means to take control of this country by force. It means to take over this government and create a government of National Unity, in a one-party state. It will control the means of production. Much of the early planning for the takeover of industry and commerce has been based very much on Italian Fascism, the Fascio di Combattimento of the twenties, and the Organisation is confident of support from influential people in vital areas of the armed services. It has canvassed support carefully but indirectly over the past eight years, and directly as an Organisation proper for the past thirty months.

‘It is not a political organisation as such, that is it has no political dogma. It is not revolutionary and the people at the top would not like to be called reactionary. They might call themselves Right-Wing if that didn’t mean so many different things to so many people. It might be easier for you to understand it better if you thought less in political definitives and more in nationalist terms.’

‘You mean the National Front,’ Kellick’s voice interrupted.

‘I’ve just said,’ Sanderson went on, ‘you’re not to be bound by political titles. The Organisation is made up of thousands of ordinary British people - and by British I mean non-immigrant. Obviously British is the best way I can describe them. Membership is unofficial and unrecorded as far as I know. But all members are bound by the same sentiment. They are people sickened by the state of the nation, and the men who supposedly govern it. They are people who have agreed, implicit in their membership, to be led by a group of men who are prepared to take over the duties of government. Hundreds of thousands of people, committed in a way that would surprise and shock you!’

‘And what are they committed to?’ asked the voice of Kellick from the slowly turning tape.

‘The-Greatness-of-a-Nation. A Britain made new again by strong, certain government: a government made strong by the certainty of the support from the mass of the British people - support made certain by the sincerity of government and governed, desperate to see their island nation strong and integral again.’ The words rolled off his tongue, campaign words, repeated like the Holy Mary.

‘The name of this Organisation is CORDON. It signifies the unbroken circle.’

‘Sanderson!’ Kellick’s taped voice interrupted, ‘You told me a few minutes ago not to be bound by political titles, yet you’re talking nothing but third-rate political Fascist propaganda. It’s not the first time we’ve heard that kind of rubbish in this office. You have not convinced me yet that your Organisation means a tinker’s cuss. Where does its finance come from? How will they achieve the Organisation’s aim?’

There was a long pause, long enough for Knightley to look to Kellick, wondering if the tape had jammed. The Prime Minister made no movement. He might have been asleep except for the haze above the table lamp to his right as the pipe smoke rose up into the green shade, resting like a low cloud above the table. Kellick caught Knightley’s eye, held a finger to his lips and pointed to the tape machine.

Kellick smoothed his short greying hair, palms on each side of his temples, and began slowly moving them across his head until the fingers met at the nape of his neck . . . a very precise symmetrical movement, one he did often.

He was a handsome man - looked every part an invention of Buchan. It would have pleased him to have been told so: Hannay and Crawford were his childhood heroes. He looked exactly what the Head of Special State Operations should look like which was perhaps why, despite his exalted position and twenty-eight years in the Civil Service, he had remained relatively anonymous; he looked so much the part that no one could ever take seriously the rumours about him that were revived periodically.

A good thirty seconds passed until Sanderson’s voice began again.

‘They rob banks to get money. They murder to make a point. The annual budget of the Organisation is now running at a hundred and twenty-five million pounds - that’s nearly two and a half million pounds every week!

‘A great deal of this comes in the form of discreet contributions from all kinds of people and institutions, but that does not meet the budget. The balance is made up in a number of other ways. Enforced contributions from a number of banks is just one way. In the past twelve months alone the Organisation has taken upwards of thirty-five million pounds from banks in London, Zurich, Basle, Lyon, Zagreb, Stockholm, Prague and a dozen other cities. Much of this money is being reinvested by very well-known brokers in Europe and America: some of the British brokers, as it happens, are also very committed members of the Organisation. They manage to channel money to other brokers who are not, and who know nothing of the money’s origin or eventual purpose. A simple exercise and something the Mafia has managed to do for a long time now. The Organisation’s assets would surprise you. I would estimate that half of the Organisation’s budget is paid for just out of the interest on loan capital. That’s what CORDON has to do with banks!’

‘And murder?’

‘In the eight years the Organisation has been active, it has been responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven people - people considered to be enemies of the New Britain and therefore enemies of CORDON. I can write down all their names for you if you wish but if I mention just a few of the more celebrated you may begin to understand. Professor Jan Berg of the Institute of Economic Studies, Dr Richard Lemmings of the Roldorf Foundation, Arthur Leggett of the AEU and General Sir William Tendale . . .’

The Prime Minister began speaking loudly over Sanderson’s voice:

‘How did these men die, Kellick? Surely Leggett had a heart attack, there’s never been any doubt of that; and General Tendale scalded himself to death in his bath.’

Kellick had already stopped the tape recorder and was flipping through the pages of the folder, checking the number on the machine’s counter indicator again, and he began reading from pencilled notes he’d made in the margin.

‘Dr Lemmings,’ he answered, ‘died skiing in Aviemore, Scotland, hit a tree and broke his neck. Local coroner reported death as instantaneous, no suspicion of foul play. Berg drowned off Constantine Bay in North Cornwall - a well-known hazard spot. It seems that he’d ignored all the warnings on the beach. Washed up three days later at Newquay, barely recognisable. His dog drowned with him.

‘Leggett in fact died of a clot, a pulmonary embolism, not strictly speaking a thrombosis, during an emergency operation for appendicitis. There was never any mention in any reports, official or otherwise, of hospital negligence. General Tendale was found dead on the twelfth of January last, in his bath. Apparently scalded himself. What wasn’t released for public knowledge, I remember, was the embarrassing 210 mls. of alcohol in his bloodstream at the time. Thankfully, no one outside my Department and his own people in CIGS HQ knew of his newfound addiction to neat gin.’

‘You put all this to . . . Sanderson?’ The Prime Minister spoke the surname for the first time, reluctantly.

‘Yes, sir, I suggested that he was merely using a number of unfortunate but totally explicable deaths to fit his story!’

‘And?’

He wouldn’t expand. He would only say that he hadn’t the desire or the proof but that we could convince ourselves merely by examining who these men were and what they represented. Having done that, he said, we might begin to understand the reasons for their assassinations.

‘And have you examined them, Kellick?’

‘Yes!’

‘And are you convinced?’

‘Yes, Prime Minister, I am convinced - at least in part convinced. If we are to take this man’s allegations seriously - and after last night I don’t see that we have any choice - there is every reason why this Organisation of Sanderson’s, with all that it stands for, should want to see these men dead. Leggett, the Marxist militant, for example, managed to keep half the British motor industry closed down for most of the working year before he died.’

‘Christ! Kellick’ - the Prime Minister was almost shouting - ‘if you start arguing that way you might just