The Aphrodite Cargo

By Alexander Fullerton

What price for the treasures of the Aphrodite Cargo?

Tom Clinker, a former wartime member of the Special Boat Squadron, is in intensive care after a savage beating.

With the hospital being surveyed constantly, the watcher's interest is transferred to Mike Clinker – who from his dying father's ravings has picked up fragments of a story about a cargo of Nazi loot, lost off the Greek island of Aphos forty years previously.

Knowledge of the Aphrodite cargo could leave Mike Clinker fabulously rich – or end his life…

A pulsating piece of classic action storytelling, The Aphrodite Cargo is perfect for fans of Dan Brown, Clive Cussler and Chris Kuzneski.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788631945

Alexander Fullerton

Alexander Fullerton was a bestselling author of British naval fiction, whose writing career spanned over fifty years. He served with distinction as gunnery and torpedo officer of HM Submarine Seadog during World War Two. He was a fluent Russian speaker, and after the war served in Germany as the Royal Navy liaison with the Red Army. His first novel, Surface!, was written on the backs of old cargo manifests. It sold over 500,000 copies and needed five reprints in six weeks. Fullerton is perhaps best known though for his nine-volume Nicholas Everard series, which was translated into many languages, winning him fans all round the world. His fiftieth novel, Submariner, was published in 2008, the year of his death.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The siren’s racket started abruptly out of nowhere – night-splitting, startling. A homebound cab-driver slammed his brakes on and a cyclist swerved to the kerb: there was no other traffic in sight at this hour. The blur of the ambulance came hurtling out of Sydney Street – tyres screeching, two of them almost lifting from the wet roadway: then it was in the Fulham Road, westbound, lights and noise and some poor bastard’s life or death, the cabbie muttering, ‘Bloody ’ell!’ – meaning, even if he wasn’t aware of it, There but for the grace of God… Getting his cab moving again as, nearly half a mile ahead, the ambulance swerved into the entrance of St Stephen’s Hospital.

Pushing into Casualty, one of the stretcher-men told a nurse, ‘Hit and run. He’s a gonner, love. More blood on the road than’s in him now.’

Plenty on him. Blood all over a considerable length of ageing male. Long, bony shanks, no belly, wide shoulders, scrawny throat, face all blood and bruises, blood matting short grey hair. His clothing was already being cut off him. The basic essential – heartbeat, the existence of life as of this moment – had been confirmed, secondary factors were now being assessed.

A clock on the wall showed the time as 0420. A dark, wet night out there, and most of Britain’s capital still asleep.

The Casualty officer had ordered a blood transfusion and Intensive Care to be alerted. He murmured, with a frown on his youthful, blunt-featured face, ‘Hit and run, be damned…’ A nurse glanced at him questioningly: he shook his head, and told her, ‘He’s been beaten. I’d guess with fists, boots and some heavy instrument. See this imprint?’ His hand moved, pointing at areas of recently and deliberately inflicted damage. ‘And this one here… See this?’

---

‘Gray. Telephone. Are you deaf? Will you answer the goddam ’phone – Gray?’

‘What? Huh?’

A truck or some other heavy vehicle passing rattled the windows. The woman in the bed shouted, pushing at him, ‘Telephone!’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Roiling over, fumbling at it: it was on the table at his side. A heavily-built man, floundering like a whale. ‘My God, what time is it… Yeah. Hello. Hello, who is—’

Silence, except for his harsh breathing, swishing rumble of cars down on the street and a tinny voice over the line.

‘No. No, he is not. He’s in Toledo. He lives in Toledo. But his mother’s here. You wanna talk with her?’

‘For God’s sake who, this time of—’

‘Say, lady, what time do you have there in London?’

His wife squawked, ‘London, England?’

‘Oh. Six o’clock. Here’s my wife now.’ He passed her the receiver, as far as its cord would reach. ‘For you. Some hospital in England wanting Mike.’

‘Hell it does…’ Her husband had found the light-switch and she was blinded, covering her eyes. She was a thickset woman, middle-aged. A quartz radio-alarm on the bedside table showed the time as 0105… ‘This is Alice Magnusson, Mike’s mother… Sure, Mike Clinker, that was my first husband’s—’

Quiet, listening. Then: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Very sorry. Tell him, will you? Tell him I’m sorry, I hope he makes a real quick—’

‘Sure. But he’s in Toledo, that’s fifty miles from here. He’s on The Blade… Right, the Toledo Blade, that’s a newspaper, a great newspaper, he’s one of the top men there and I doubt, I really doubt he’d be able to just take off and—’

‘Yeah. Hold on, please.’ Her hand covered the mouthpiece. ‘Mike’s number, Gray. In the little book.’ To the caller: ‘I’m getting it for you now. But London – well, my God, he has his living to earn, his career, I do very much doubt—’

‘Here.’

‘Now, here you are.’ She read the number slowly, enunciating carefully. ‘You got that, now? And you’ll tell Tom I’m sorry, that I hope he’ll soon – well, look, how serious is this, I mean is he going to be all—’

She gasped, and took the receiver from her ear. ‘How d’ya like that?’ She told her husband, ‘Bitch hung up on me!’

---

The group in the centre of the hospital’s Intensive Therapy Unit consisted of two doctors, a female social worker and a plainclothes policeman. A male nurse was on the fringe of it, while other nurses, girls, were at work all around the unit and moving in and out of the curtained cubicles. The social worker put down her coffee mug and nodded. She said, ‘But the inspector had better tell you himself.’

‘Well.’ The detective was a hard-faced man of about thirty. He hadn’t been home since yesterday and he was in need of both a shave and some sleep. He told them, addressing the senior of the two doctors, ‘Clinker was discharged from prison less than a week ago. He’s done more time inside that out, since 1947. All for robberies, mostly banks. Never with violence, incidentally.’ He gestured towards one of the cubicles. ‘Makes this seem a bit unfair, doesn’t it. And yes, there’s a son, according to the record.’ He asked the social worker, ‘Have you contacted him yet?’

‘They’re doing it now. Or trying to. He’s in America, though – Detroit – and of course it’s the middle of the night there.’ They’d all glanced towards the clock: close to six-thirty now. The younger doctor cleared his throat. ‘Son’s name being Mike, I gather. The patient’s asked for him – in fact he was becoming distinctly worked-up about it, so—’

‘Is he conscious now?’

‘No.’ He frowned. ‘I was saying – to forestall any suggestion of allowing him to be questioned, inspector – we have him lightly sedated, for the time being.’

‘And longer term? What’s the prognosis?’

The older one shrugged, while the houseman yawned. ‘Logically, he ought to be dead. There’s extensive damage to several organs.’ He shook his head – a healer still baffled, on occasions such as this, by man’s inhumanity to man. The policeman put it baldly: ‘So he’s going to die?’

The gesture was one of helplessness and, therefore, assent. The social worker began, ‘So when we talk to the son—’

‘Say as little as possible. Just the truth – that he’s in a very bad state and has asked for him urgently.’ The doctor added, ‘Remembering that urgency, I’d say it’s on the cards he’s only hanging on in the hope of seeing him.’

The inspector put down his cup. ‘May I take a gander?’

A shrug: grudging… ‘But no attempts to question—’

‘Don’t worry.’

The younger doctor parted the curtains, and the nurse who was on duty in there looked round at them over her shoulder. Ebony hair, brown eyes, golden skin: Asian, or part-Asian. She had a chair beside the bed and her eyes returned now to the patient’s face, glancing up to scan the array of machines registering blood-pressure, heartbeat, temperature and other vital functions. Wires were taped to the patient’s body here and there, a tube bulged one nostril and a clear plastic bag on a stand leaked drip by drip into a vein in his rigidly-secured left arm.

Clinker’s eyes were closed. The policeman’s face expressionless as he took in detail: the colours of bruising and of antiseptic stain, dressings plastered to damaged areas, heavy bandaging around the head… The young doctor asked, ‘D’you have any clues who did it, or what for?’

A glance sideways: a flicker of irritation quickly controlled. Every profession had to put up with certain kinds of silly question – as the doctor who’d asked that would know as well as anyone. The detective said, ‘Interesting point in your own Casualty officer’s report – he stank of whisky, but not a drop of alcohol in his blood.’

The social worker murmured, ‘Excuse me.’ She told the older doctor, ‘I’ll see if that call’s got through to America.’

‘Doctor – spare a minute?’

A nurse, beckoning the houseman to another patient. The policeman stooped, looking closely into the haggard face on the pillow, perhaps trying to see it as it might have been before the beating-up. All you could be sure of was that Thomas Clinker had a strong-boned, wide-jawed face, with deepset eyes and a breadth of forehead that suggested intelligence.

His eyelids had flickered. The nurse glanced round, and the doctor crouched. Clinker’s lips moved hesitantly, as if they were learning how to. He whispered, ‘Got on to my boy yet, have they?’

‘Yes. They’re telephoning. Don’t worry. You just rest, old fellow. He’ll come all right.’

Tom Clinker’s view, as his eyelids moved by just a fraction, was of a vaguely-defined head and shoulders black against blinding light. A shiver in it, like water rippling, and sound over – the steady rhythmic pulsing of the heart machine, its volume growing in his ears – or brain, imagination, memory – to match the hardening of the light and warmth, building into a pounding rhythm of marching feet. Forty years and two thousand miles away.

---

In oven-like heat, a shuffling double file of prisoners marching more or less in step. Slouching, more than marching. British soldiers, in defeat. Despondent, dispirited and dirty under a dazzlingly blue sky and a blaze of sun burning down on them and beating back up at them from the stony track. A hundred yards in front, on a level, open plateau with a sheer wall of rock as protection against attack from inland, is the enemy headquarters to which they’re being herded.

Tom Clinker leads them. It’s the same face as the one on the bed, except that here it’s only twenty-three years old. He’s an exceptionally tall and unusually thin man, with that hard-eyed, bony face and a captain’s three stars on each shoulder of his sweat-stained khaki shirt.

On his right, in the leading file, is his own ‘mucker’, Corporal Clark. Stocky, square-jawed, a Yorkshire farmer’s son. And in the file immediately behind him lurches Nick Parthenios, a sergeant in the Sacred Squadron and a member of Clinker’s own four-man patrol. This Greek is wiry, dark as a Turk and, when faced with Germans, lethal as a cobra.

Nine British, one Greek – except that to some people Clinker could pass for an Australian – and they’re being herded by two Germans armed with machine-pistols and very obviously alert, sharp-witted and ready to react to any escape attempt. Not that empty-handed men could do much against those guns, unless half of them had been prepared for sudden death. An observer might well have doubted whether these people would be capable of any such attempt in any case; their obvious lack of spirit matches what looks clearly like physical exhaustion.

Except for Tom Clinker’s eyes. Clinker’s eyes, deepset and sharply blue, are extremely busy, not in the least defeated. The observer would have needed to be very close to have noticed this, because like the others Clinker is marching with his chin down near his breastbone.

To the left of the track, the hillside rises to a ridge crowned with the dark spires of cypress. Below it and to the right, olive groves permit occasional glimpses of blue sea. While right in front, and of most immediate importance, a gate in the camp’s wired perimeter is being opened. One of the two marching guards bawls in loud, triumphant German, ‘Ten prisoners! Nine British, one Greek!’

The ones inside the wire have been waiting for them. A German patrol they ran into several miles back sent a runner to this camp.

Clinker is trying to turn his eyes into telescopes, to see into the camp before he gets to it. One patrol – or rather, the three survivors of it – is already locked up, somewhere in there. A balls-up of considerable magnitude, by SBS standards. Night before last, Clinker led an attack by four patrols, sixteen men, on the airfield – his own patrol and one other having arrived by caïque, island-hopping via Nisos Aphros and Skyros to this much bigger island, Evvia – or Euboea or Evvoia, as alternative spellings, for those who give a damn… The other two patrols came in by submarine. The attack went according to plan, in so far as every aircraft on the field, mostly Ju87s and Ju88s, was ornamented with explosives and destroyed, an ammo dump similarly attended to and a number of sentries rendered permanently hors de combat, but it went adrift later when Ronnie Herbert’s patrol allowed itself to be cut off on one beach while its canoes were on another. Clinker heard the action down in that cove and guessed they were trapped, and later a shepherd came in with the news: one killed, three taken prisoner.

It isn’t anything like good enough. Particularly as the camp to which those three have been taken – according to local informants – is the headquarters of a major by the name of Traubmann, who has a particularly unpleasant reputation.

They’re close enough now to see the farmhouse, which is likely to be Traubmann’s own billet. Beyond it, Clinker sees several stone barns. One of them, he guesses, must house the prisoners. He can’t see much in that direction now, however, because of the mob that’s collecting, off-duty German soldiers thronging to welcome their new guests with jeers and catcalls.

Passing in through the gap in the wire the two guards, still holding their guns on the prisoners, find the gathering crowd potentially inhibiting. The senior of the pair shouts angrily at his comrades to stand back, clear the line of fire. None of them take much notice – until another, higher-pitched order cuts through the noise and has far more effect: the loungers fall back instantly, and as they do so Clinker sees Traubmann for the first time.

He’s coming from the farmhouse. It was he who shouted.

The senior of the two escorts yells ‘Halt!’

It’s not a smart, parade-ground halt, more a shuffle to a standstill by a crowd who look as if they’d as soon lie down as stand there.

The two Germans face them with guns levelled, fingers on the triggers. The surrounding audience is in a rough circle several files deep at about a dozen yards’ radius from the huddle of prisoners, and Major Traubmann is swaggering slowly towards the centre.

He’s stopped now. Immaculately turned-out, hands on hips, he looks as if he really loves himself. A Sonderführer who’s been trailing him also halts, hovers deferentially a few yards in the rear. The major has been looking them all over with evident disdain, but now he’s noticed the insignia on Clinker’s shoulders and has selected him for particularly close attention. Clinker, meanwhile, has seen three faces at a barred window in the nearer of the stone-built barns.

There’s a smirk on the major’s lips. He raises his voice, and points.

‘So was haben wir hier?’

Laughter rolls across the compound. Traubmann raises a hand to still it, then playfully suggests an answer to his own question…

‘Ein Britischer offizier?’

The heavily sarcastic tone wins guffaws of applause. What he’s implying is, can this filthy-looking object be an officer? He’s glanced round and beckoned to the Sonderführer. There are grins of anticipation among his audience: there’ll be some real jokes coming soon. Traubmann is a notoriously playful character: he’s notorious in particular among the islanders of Nisos Aphros. And Thomas Clinker, captain, Special Boat Squadron, decides the joke has gone far enough: he lifts his head, shouts ‘Go!’

They’ve been waiting for it. The two German guards drop flat and the two ranks of prisoners turn back to back. They aren’t tired any more and they certainly aren’t dispirited. Schmeisser machine-pistols, until now hidden in their shirts or baggy shorts, stutter and flame. It’s a massacre. There’s only one prisoner to be taken: Major Ernst Traubmann is flat on his face with the barrel-end of Clinker’s gun nudging the back of his cleanly-barbered neck.

---

The doctor rested his palm lightly against the bandaged forehead, using the ball of the thumb to roll up one eyelid. He could see the dream-process, the tiny flickering triggered by whatever show was running on the patient’s private, closed-circuit screen. He took his hand away. ‘He’ll wake when the spirit moves him. Or, as the case may be, he may not.’ He glanced at the nurse: ‘All right, meanwhile?’ She had a sweet smile: and it was a crime, he thought, to make a girl with such marvellous blue-black hair hide it under a nurse’s cap. He took the detective by the elbow, edged him out of the curtained enclosure.

‘Is there anything else we can do for you?’

‘Well, obviously, I want to talk to him.’

‘That may never be possible. We’ll see. Anything else?’

‘I’d like to hear when the son’s been contacted, whether or not he’s coming over.’

‘See Miss Tewks about that. Her office is just before you come to the secretary’s suite. Through the foyer, right on past X-ray, and turn left.’

‘The other thing is, anyone who enquires about him, either in person or by telephone – could their names and addresses be taken?’

‘They can be asked for.’ The doctor pointed. ‘Telephone calls would normally be put through from the exchange to that ’phone there. You’d better make your requirement known to the staff nurse on duty, and ask her to pass it on. If I were you I’d also have a word with the people on the exchange and at the reception desk near the main entrance. Then you’re belt and braces – eh?’

---

Tom Clinker hadn’t opened his eyes, but he was half awake, remembering now, consciously reliving the incident that had followed on the heels of that brief and bloody action. Because it led – was to lead, eventually – to the thing he was going to have to tell his son Mike about, if and when the boy did come. But he’d be summoning all his strength then, to fight off this thing that was like drowning, being dragged down; he would need to stay up and conscious, alive, operational and remembering, remembering as he did now the sight of Major Ernst Traubmann with his wrists tied behind his back and all the superciliousness drained out of him, and not one of his men left alive.

Memory leading into daydream: like an old video rerunning…

---

The survivors of Ronnie Herbert’s patrol have been let out of the barn, and are unhurt. It was Herbert himself who got killed – one through the head – in that first exchange of shots. They were pinned down in the cove and finally ran out of ammo and there was nothing to do except surrender.

It’s too bad, to have lost old Ronnie. The aim is zero casualties and it’s frequently achieved.

Clinker tells Traubmann, ‘We’ll be moving out now. Suit me best to shoot you here, be done with it, but you’re wanted – alive – on Aphros. Little matter of mass murder – some women and kids, was it?’

His own voice, ringing dully in his eardrums under the outer layer of temporary deafness caused by the recent and close roar of weaponry, is as Australian as a bloody kangaroo. But Traubmann’s got the message, all right: he’s shaking.

‘Captain, I beg you—’

‘Beg your bloody head off, chum, I don’t give a tinker’s fart for—’

‘Captain – on my honour—’

‘Honour, shit!’

‘I can make you rich!’

At this stage, he hasn’t attached the slightest importance to it, hasn’t felt even a spark of interest. He’s concerned with the detail of various arrangements he has to make – like despatching three patrols to the prearranged submarine pick-up and taking a smaller party of his own choosing for the return by caïque via Nisos Aphros. There’s some interest, of a detached kind, although a better word for it might be abhorrence, in seeing tears running down Traubmann’s cheeks: real, salt tears, outward and visible signs of inner, soul-crippling terror, Traubmann’s anticipation of the treatment he’s likely to get from the Greeks on Nisos Aphros.

The last word – ‘rich’ – hangs in the air still, enunciated in the German’s shaky but – in comparison with Clinker’s – almost unaccented English. A few heads turn, in that mild show of interest, but Clinker’s own reaction is limited to a mutter of, ‘Yeah, pull the other one.’ Then he glances at Nick Parthenios. ‘You’re the best man to keep an eye on him, sergeant.’

The Sacred Squadron man shows neither pleasure nor displeasure at landing this chore. He simply looks at Traubmann with all the hatred of a thousand murdered compatriots in his dark eyes. Traubmann can’t face him: he turns after Clinker’s retreating back instead.

‘Captain – please – may I speak with you?’

‘Christ, you still nattering?’

‘I do not lie to you, I swear this!’

Incredibly, he’s on his knees. ‘Listen – please – I beg… Take me as your prisoner, of the British Army? If you do this, I—I am in position to make you more rich than you could dream! Captain, I swear this!’

Clinker looks round. ‘Menke!’

One of the Germans who acted as guards in that game of charades comes at the double, and salutes. They’re SIG – Special Interrogation Group – ‘tame’ Germans, anti-Nazis who’ve been taken out of POW cages and vetted by Intelligence, a few of them drafted to work with the Special Boat Squadron as interpreters, interrogators and so on. Clinker tells this one, ‘Find out what this shit’s trying to put over on me.’

A few minutes later, when he’s busy elsewhere, Menke comes to report that according to Traubmann there’s a ship – a type of Ems-barge but a larger, modified version – en route from the Black Sea via the Dardanelles, bound for the Greek mainland port of Lavrion with a cargo of treasure looted by the Germans from museums and State collections in south Russia. Mostly jewels but also gold and ikons: a small ship’s hold packed with priceless objects and recently sneaked out of Odessa under the snouts of the advancing Red Army, on the personal order of Reichsmarschal Herman Göring.

‘D’you believe him?’

Menke confirms that in his view it sounds like the truth. The ship – barge – is due to call at Nisos Aphros in a few days’ time for fuel; Traubmann has been told to be there with a squad of soldiers to meet it and to travel to Lavrion in it. At Lavrion he’s to deliver the cargo into the custody of a certain colonel of the SS.

It could be true. The island of Aphros is certainly on that direct route. And would Traubmann, with good reason to fear the people of that island, have invented a yarn which as likely as not will lead to his being taken there now?

Maybe he didn’t think of this. Maybe the story just poured out in the flood of his panic. He’s off his knees now, but sagging in the weakness of the same intensity of fear. Clinker walks over to him, disdain on his face.

‘You’re a fool, Traubmann. You’ve spilt it – so now we know it and I can still hand you over – where you belong, by rights… Fact, what I’m bloody going to do—’

‘Please – for the love of God—’

‘Use words like that, I’ll hang you here and now, you bastard!’

‘I – don’t understand, I—’

‘So listen to me… Handing you over to them is what I should do. But if you’d agree to give us a hand – with this barge, when she gets there…’

---

‘Oh, you’re with us again… No, don’t exert yourself, don’t try to—’

The patient’s lips moved, trying to frame words. She leant closer, putting her ear down to him, and caught the husky whisper: ‘My son… Coming?’

‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll come!’

‘Is Mike – my son Mike – coming?’

She assured him, ‘They ought to have got through to him by now. He’ll be on his way soon enough, you can bet. Soon as they know for sure, they’ll tell us.’ She smiled: a motherly smile from a nurse young enough to be his granddaughter. ‘Just be patient a little while longer, dear?’

But he was straining again. She stooped, and heard ‘Is my – my son – coming?’

As if she hadn’t answered, as if he hadn’t just asked it twice in the last minute. But polite as anything. They weren’t always polite, when they were in this limbo state, quite often you had to put up with a stream of filth… The doctor – the young houseman – touched her shoulder lightly as he leant down: ‘Hello there, Mr Clinker… Hey, be all right if I call you Tom?’ But the eyes weren’t focussing: and he might not have heard. The nurse straightened up, and murmured, ‘He was asking it again – is his son coming. He doesn’t seem to hear the answers, just repeats it over and over.’

The doctor said, with his mouth close to the patient’s ear, ‘The answer is yes, old chap, you son is coming… You relax now, take it easy so you’ll be rested when he gets here.’

The eyes had closed.

‘Look.’ He told the nurse, just outside the curtain, ‘Tell him what he wants to hear. It doesn’t make any difference. Even if the son’s on his way, it’s only a matter of hours.’

He glanced over at the clock. Ten past seven.

---

Stumbling out of the elevator, Mike Clinker thought he heard a telephone ringing. He stopped to listen, and confirmed it: it would be either his own or the one in the next-door apartment. He’d got his key out: fumbling it into the lock he wondered who in hell would be calling at this hour of the morning.

Well, the cops might. Or doctors, or drunks, or some fellow journalist. Or one of a number of women, including Dolores – if she’d tied one on, gone maudlin again.

It was his ’phone. He snapped a light on, crossed the room and picked it up.

‘Yeah?’

‘If that’s Mr Michael Clinker, I have a call for you from London, England. They’ve been trying for the past hour or more. Are you Michael Clinker?’

Confirming his identity, he checked the time. Quarter after two…

‘Michael Clinker?’

‘Right. Who’s calling?’

The man said, ‘My name’s Hargreaves, and I’m speaking from St Stephen’s Hospital in London. I’m very sorry to tell you that your father, Thomas Clinker, is in this hospital, in Intensive Care, following a very serious accident. He’s been asking for you. He’s not conscious all the time, but whenever he comes-to he repeats this wish to see you. I’m bound to tell you that his condition is extremely grave: what the position would be by the time you could get here, I can’t say. That is the doctors’ view… But is there any possibility of your coming over?’

‘To London?’

He’d sunk into the chair beside the telephone table. Getting his wits together. It had been quite a night, one way and another. Now this shock, like a brick between the eyes.

‘Well, yeah. I suppose…’

‘You’ll come? May we tell him so?’

‘What kind of accident?’

‘He was found unconscious in the road. Very badly knocked about. Multiple injuries, internal as well as external. I don’t think it’s been established yet with certainty just what did happen to him.’

‘Do you know I never saw him in my life? Well, I did, I guess, when I was about six months old, but—’

Hargreaves shouted, in his funny accent, ‘This is a very bad line, Mr Clinker. May I tell your father you’re coming?’

Good question. Holding the receiver, staring at it. Decision forming itself, out of shock… He put it back to his ear, heard the man ask more quietly, ‘Mr Clinker, you there?’

‘Yeah. Listen. Tell him – tell my father I’ll be on the first flight I can get.’

He hung up: stood up, too. He was at a loss, bewildered. He spread his arms, muttered, ‘I can’t believe it. The old man, asking…’ He peeled off the cord jacket he’d been wearing, dropped it on the chair, then fumbled in a desk drawer and pulled out a frayed, fat envelope. Shaking its contents on the desk…

There. He picked it out of the heap: a small black-and-white head and shoulders shot that might have been intended for some kind of identity document, a military pass maybe.

It was like looking at a photo of himself. Except that when this had been taken, Captain Tom Clinker had been in his early twenties, whereas Mike Clinker, studying it now, was thirty-seven. In a way, this seemed to reverse the father-son relationship: that was how it felt. But apart from the age difference, the two faces were so alike that it wasn’t far off a mirror image.

The mirror confirmed it. Except there was a lipstick-smear on his neck. Wiping it off, he checked the time again. Two twenty-five. Then he was staring at the telephone, thinking that for busting up people’s rest that was the most fiendish weapon ever. But hell, why not… He went back to the chair and flopped into it, reached for the ’phone and punched out a number. Listening to the ringing tone, he held the receiver there with his shoulder while he lit a cigarette.

His stepfather, Gray Magnusson, rattled the thing around, breathed hard into it and then growled unpleasantly, ‘Yeah, what is it?’

‘Mike. Sorry to disturb you.’

‘I’m getting used to it. Hold on, damn it.’

Breathing smoke…

‘Mike?’ His mother asked, ‘Did they come through to you from London?’

‘Oh, you know about it.’

‘They called us here, and I gave them your number. Then I tried to call you myself, but—’

‘I just got in… Look, I’m going over there. First flight I can get on. Thought I ought to let you know I’ll be away.’

‘But honey, your job!’

‘I have vacation due to me – plenty. They won’t object too much.’

‘You want me to tell Dolores?’

‘Not particularly. But if you want to, go ahead.’

He was divorced from Dolores. She received a monthly payment from him, but he couldn’t see how his movements were any of her business. Women enjoyed telling each other things, of course: also his mother would like an excuse to call her, to find out what she was doing. His mother asked, ‘You really sure The Blade