Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy hp-6 Read online

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

  ( Harry Palmer - 6 )

  Len Deighton

  A Russian scientist defects, believing that in the West he will more easily realize his dream of contacting planets in outer space. But British Intelligence and the CIA have more worldly plans for him and move quickly, relentlessly, leaving behind a trail of blood which stretches from the Sahara desert to Manhattan, Paris, Dublin and halfway back across Africa.

  Len Deighton

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

  'I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.'

  Epitaph on grave of unknown astronomer

  Chapter One

  'Smell that air,' said Major Mann.

  I sniffed. 'I can't smell anything,' I said.

  'That's what I mean,' said Mann. He scratched himself and grinned. 'Great, isn't it?'

  There's not much to smell when you are one thousand miles into, the Algerian Sahara; not much to smell, not much to do, not much to eat.

  For those travellers who know the swimming-pools and air conditioning of the government hotels along the northern edge of the Sahara, Adrar comes as a shock. Here the hotel has no more than tightly drawn curtains to protect the tourist from the sun, and the staff have noisy arguments about who should siesta on the cold stone floor of the entrance hall. Only Europeans stayed awake all day, notably four bearded Austrians who, night and day, played cards in the shuttered dining-room. They were waiting for a replacement petrol pump for their truck. Between games they swigged sweet, warm cola drinks. There was no alcohol on sale, and smoking was frowned upon.

  Even on this winter's evening the stones and the sand radiated the heat of the desert day.

  There was no moon but the stars were so bright that we could easily see our vehicles piled high with stores and sextant and a sign that said 'Dempsey's Desert Tours'. They were parked on the huge main square of Adrar. Mann walked round the vehicles just to make sure the supplies had not been plundered. It was unlikely, for they were outside the police station.

  Mann stopped and leaned against the Landrover. He took out a packet of cheroots; there were only four left. 'Look at those stars,' he said.

  'The Milky Way — I've never seen it so clearly. A spaceship travelling at 100,000 miles per hour would take 670 million years to cross the Milky Way,' I said. 'There's a hundred thousand million stars there.'

  'How do you know?' said Mann. He put a cheroot in his mouth and chewed it.

  'I read it in the Reader's Digest Atlas.' Mann nodded. 'And do you know something else… the way they're going, in another few years there will be another millon stars there — enough spy satellites to put both of us out of business.'

  'Twinkle, twinkle, little spy,' I said.

  Mann looked at me to see if I was being insubordinate. 'Let's go back inside,' he said finally. He decided not to light the cheroot. He put it away again. 'I'll buy you a bottle of Algerian lemonade.' He laughed. Mann was like a small, neatly dressed gorilla: the same heavy brow, deep-set eyes and long arms — and the same sense of humour.

  The dining-room is large, and although the big fans no longer turned it was the coolest place for hundreds of miles. The walls are whitewashed light blue, and crudely woven striped rugs are tacked to floor and walls. Overhead, the wooden flooring rattled like jungle drums as someone moved. There was the sudden roar of the shower and the inevitable violent rapping of the ancient plumbing. We helped ourselves to soft drinks and left the money on the till.

  That Limey bastard takes a shower every five minutes.'

  'Yes, about every five minutes,' I agreed, Major Mickey Mann, U.S. Army Signal Corps, Retired, a C.I.A. expert on Russian electronics and temporarily my boss, had showed no sign of discomfort during the heat of day in spite of his tightly knotted tie and long trousers. He watched me carefully, as he always did when offering criticism of my fellow countrymen. "That particular Limey bastard,' I said quietly, 'is sixty-one years old, has a metal plate in his skull and a leg filled with German shrapnel.'

  'Stash the gypsy violin, feller — you want to make me weep?'

  'You treat old Dempsey as if he's simple-minded. I'm just reminding you that he did four years with the Long Range Desert Group. He's lived in Algeria for the best part of thirty years, he speaks Arabic with all the local dialects and if it comes to real trouble in the desert we'll need him to use that sextant.'

  Mann sat down at the table and began toying with the Swiss army penknife that he'd bought in the souvenir shop at Geneva airport. 'If the wind starts up again tonight…' he balanced the knife on its end, 'sand will make that road south impassable. And I don't need your pal Percy to tell me that.'

  'Even in the Landrover?'

  'Did you see that three-tonner down to the axles?' He let go of the knife and it stayed perfectly balanced. 'Sand that bogs down a three-ton six by six will bury a Land-rover.'

  'They were gunning the motor,' I said. 'You bury yourself that way.'

  'You've been reading the camping-in-the-desert section of the boy scout handbook,' said Mann. Again he banged the folding knife down on to the table, and again it balanced on its end. 'And in any case,' he added, 'how do we know the Russkie will be able to steal a four-wheel drive? He might be trying to get here in a Moskvich sedan for all we know.'

  'Is he stupid?'

  'Professor Bekuy's intellect is not universally admired,' said Mann. 'During the time he was with the Russian scientific mission at the U.N. he wrote two papers about little men in flying saucers, and earned his reputation as a crank.'

  'Defecting cranks don't get the department's O.K.,' I said.

  'Looking for messages from little men hi flying saucers probably motivated his work on masers,' said Mann. 'And Bekuv is one of the world's experts on masers.'

  'I'm not even sure I know what a maser is,' I said.

  'You read the Technical Brief.'

  'Twice,' I said. 'But not so as to understand it.'

  'Maser,' said Mann. 'It's an acronym — "m" for microwave, "a" for amplication, "s" for stimulated, "e" for emission, "r" for radiation.'

  'Do you mind if I take notes?'

  'Listen, dummy. It converts electromagnetic radiation — from a whole range of different frequencies — to a highly amplified, coherent microwave radiation.'

  'Is it anything to do with a laser?'

  'Well, a maser is a laser but a laser is not necessarily a maser.'

  'Is it anything to do with that guy looking in a mirror who says "Brothers and sisters have I none"?'

  'Now you're beginning to get the idea,' said Mann.

  'Well, somebody must be very interested in masers,' I said, 'or they wouldn't have sent us two down here to provide Bekuv with a red-carpet reception.'

  'Or interested in flying saucers,' said Mann.

  'If this Russian is such an idiot, what makes anyone believe that he's capable of escaping from that Russian compound, stealing a roadworthy vehicle and getting all the way up here to meet us?'

  'Don't get me wrong, pal. Bekuv is crazy like a fox. Maybe he is a flying-saucer freak, but when he was in New York with that U.N. scientific set-up he was reporting back to the K.G.B. He joined the 1924 Society — crackpots maybe, but they have some of the world's top scientists as members. Bekuv was only too keen to read them long papers about gabfests through the galactic plasma by Soviet scientists, but he was listening very carefully when they told him what kind of work they were doing with their radio telescopes and electromagnetic wave transmissions.' Major Mann ran his fingers back through his wispy hair that each day went greyer, now that he'd used up the last of his dark rinse. Almost without being conscious of what he was doing, he pushed hair
over the balding patch at the back of his head. 'Professor Bekuv was a spy. Don't ever forget that. No matter how you dress it up as being a free exchange of scientific know-how, Bekuv was skilfully digging out a whole lot more than rumours about flying saucers.'

  I looked at Mann. I'd seen plenty of such men all the world over from the Shetlands to Alaska, and all the way through Communist Algeria too: foot-loose Americans, their linen clean and their livers tormented, soft accents blunted by a lifetime of travelling. It would have been easy to believe that this wiry fifty-year-old was one of those condottieri of the oil fields — and that's what was written in his nice new passport.

  'Where did Bekuv go wrong?' I asked.

  'To be sent down to Mali, as part of Soviet aid to underdeveloped African countries.. deputy head of a six-man team of Soviet scientists?' Major Mann reached for his hip-flask. He looked round the room to be sure he was not observed before putting a shot of whisky into his sweet, fizzy Algerian cola. 'Nobody knows for sure. The latest guess is that Bekuv's flying saucers began to be an embarrassment for the Soviet Academy and they sent him down here for a spell to concentrate his mind on political realities.'

  'I thought the Soviet Academy were very enthusiastic about flying saucers,' I said. 'What about this big radio telescope they've built in the northern Caucasus — the RATAN-600?'

  'Now you reveal the depths of your ignorance,' said Mann. 'There's a whole lot of difference between the respectable scientific work of searching deep space for signals from extra-terrestrial intelligences, and the strictly infra dig. pastime of looking for unidentified flying objects, or what the sci-fi freaks call ufology.'

  'Now, I'm glad you told me that,' I said waving away Mann's offer of the flask. 'And so Bekuv was kicked downstairs into the foreign aid programme, and that's why he decided to defect. Well, that all fits together very neatly!

  Mann swallowed his drink and gave a grim smile to acknowledge that such a verdict was seldom intended as a compliment in the circles in which we moved. 'Right,' he said.

  'Last one in the shower is a cissy,' I said. As I got up from the table I noticed that his knife was not balanced there after all; he'd driven its short screwdriver right into the wood.

  Chapter Two

  The Trans-Sahara Highway is a track that goes south, through In-Salah and Tarn, to the Atlantic. But we were using another trans-Sahara highway; the lesser known route that runs parallel to it, and many miles to the west. This was the way to the least known parts of Africa. This was the way to Gao and to Bamako, the capital of landlocked Mali. This was the way to Timbuktu.

  It was four fifteen the next morning when we left the hotel in Adrar. Mann and Percy were in the Landrover. I followed in the VW bus with Johnny, an extra driver from 'Dempsey's Desert Tours'. We drove through the marketplace in the gloom of desert night. It was damned cold, and the drivers wore scarves and woolly hats. The big trucks that cross the desert in convoy, loaded with dried fish and oranges, were nearly ready to move off. One of the drivers waved us past. Desert travellers have survival in common; never knowing when you might need a friend.

  We turned south. I followed the rear lights of the Land-rover. The road was hard sand, and we maintained a good speed past the roughly painted signs that pointed to distant villages. In places, loose sand had drifted on to the track, and I braked each time the Landrover's rear lights bounced; but the drifts had not yet built up into the humps that tear an axle in half.

  The gun-metal sky lightened and glowed red along the horizon until, like a thermic lance, the sun tore a white-hot hole in it. This road skirted the edges of the Sahara's largest sand-seas. To the west the horizon rolled like a storm-racked ocean, but to the east the land was flat and featureless, as grey and as hard as concrete. Sometimes we passed herds of moth-eaten camels, scratching for a bite of thorn-bush or a mouthful of scrub. The route south was marked by small cairns of stones. Often there was a solitary Arab riding astride some wretched beast, so small and bowed that the rider's feet almost touched the ground.

  Once an Arab family were rearranging the burdens upon the saddles of their three camels. We saw no motor traffic.

  We were three hours out of Adrar by the time we reached the end of the track. Six dented oil-drums blocked the way, and a sun-bleached wooden sign indicated that we should follow the tyre tracks in a diversion from the marked route.

  The Landrover bumped off the hard verge with a flurry of sand as the wheels slipped into a soft patch. My smooth tyres took hold and then followed slowly along the pattern of tracks. I kept close behind the others, lining up our vehicles to simplify the problems of winching, for there was little doubt that I would be the one who got stuck. Their four-wheel drive would get them out of this kind of sand.

  The detour was marked each hundred metres or so by an old oil-drum. Some of them had been blown over, and rolled far away from their original positions. Two were almost buried in drifting sand. It was easier to watch the tyre tracks.

  After about eight kilometres the Landrover stopped. Mann got out and walked back to me. It was fully light now and even with sun-glasses I found myself squinting into the light reflecting from the sand. It was still early morning, but now that we'd stopped I felt the heat of the sun and smelt the warm rubber, evaporating fuel and Mann's after-shave lotion.

  "How far was that last drum?' asked Mann.

  'A couple of hundred metres.'

  'Right and I don't see another ahead. You stay here. Ill mosey around a little.'

  'What about these tyre tracks?' I asked.

  'Famous last words,' pronounced Mann. Tracks like those can lead you out there into that sand-sea, and finally you get to the place where they turn around and head back again.'

  'Then why tracks?'

  'An old disused camp for oil prospectors, or a dump for road gangs.' He kicked at one of the tyre marks.

  'These tracks look fresh,' I said.

  'Yeah,' said Mann. He kicked one of the ridges of impacted sand. It was as hard as concrete. 'So do the tank tracks you find in southern Libya — and they've been there since Rommel.'

  I looked at my watch.

  Mann said, 'I hope the diversion is well marked on the highway to the south of here, or that Russian cat will come wheeling past us while we're stuck out here in this egg-timer factory.'

  It was then that Percy Dempsey got out of the Land-rover and limped back to join us. He was a curious figure in his floppy hat, cardigan, long baggy shorts and gaiters.

  'Jesus!' said Mann. 'Here comes Miss Marple.'

  'I say — old chap,' said the old man. He had difficulty remembering our names. Perhaps that was because we changed them so often. 'Mr Antony, I mean. Are you wondering about the road ahead?'

  'Yes,' I said. My name was Antony; Frederick L. Antony, tourist.

  Dempsey blinked. His face was soft and babyish as old men's faces sometimes are. Now that he had taken off his sun-glasses, his blue eyes became watery.

  Mann said, 'Don't get nervous, Auntie. We'll dope it out.'

  The oil-drum markers continue along this track,' said the old man.

  'How do you know that?' said Mann.

  'I can see them,' said the old man.

  'Yeah!' said Mann. 'So how come I can't see them, and my buddy here can't see them?'

  'I used my binoculars,' said the old man apologetically.

  'Why the hell didn't you say you had binoculars?' said Mann.

  'I offered them to you just outside Oran. You said you weren't planning a trip to the opera.'

  'Let's go,' said Mann. 'I want to make camp before the sun gets high. And we have to find a place where the Russkie can spot us from the main road.'

  Dempsey's Desert Tours VW bus was equipped with two tent sides that expanded to provide a large area of shade. There was also a nylon sheet stretched across the roof, and held taut above it, which prevented the direct sunlight striking the top of the bus and so making it into the kind of oven that most metal car bodies became.

>   The bright orange panels could be seen for miles. The Russian spotted them easily. He had driven non-stop from some prospecting site along the river Niger east of Timbuktu. It was a gruelling journey over poor tracks and open country, and he'd ended it in the fierce heat of early afternoon.

  The Russian was a hatchet-faced man in his early forties.

  He was tall and slim with cropped black hair that showed no sign of greying. His dark suit was baggy and stained, its jacket slung over his brawny shoulder. His red check shirt was equally dirty, and the gold pencil clipped into its pocket was conspicuous because of that. Pale blue eyes were almost sealed by fine desert sand, and his face was lined and bore the curious bruise-like marks that come with exhaustion. His arms were muscular and his skin was tanned very dark.

  Major Mann opened the nylon flap and indicated the passenger seats of the VW bus and the table-top fixed between them. In spite of the tinted windows the plastic seat covering was hot to the touch. I sat opposite the Russian and watched him take off his sun-glasses, yawn and scratch the side of his nose with his car key.

  It was typical of Mann's cunning, and of his training, that he offered the Russian no chance to rest. Instead he pushed towards him a glass and a vacuum flask containing ice-cubes and water. There was a snap as Mann broke the cap on a half-bottle of whisky and poured a generous measure for our guest. The Russian looked at Mann and gave him a thin smile. He pushed the whisky aside and from the flask grabbed a handful of ice-cubes and rubbed them on his face.

  'You got I.D.?' Mann asked. As if to save face he poured whisky for himself and for me.

  'What are ID.?'

  'Identification. Passport, security pass or something.'

  The Russian took a wallet from his hip pocket From it he brought a dog-eared piece of brown cardboard with his photo attached. He passed it to Mann, who handed it to me. It was a pass into the military zone along the Mali frontier with Niger. It described the Russian's physical characteristics and named him as Professor Andrei Mikhail Bekuv. Significantly the card was printed in Russian and Chinese as well as Arabic. I gave it back to him.