Bloody Passage. Jack Higgins
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in front of him.
Stavrou put a hand on it. ‘Oliver Berkley Grant. In detail.’
‘What, warts and all?’ I said.
‘I must know it by heart by now.’ He pushed it away ostentatiously and closed his eyes. ‘Father, colonel in the Marine Corps, killed in action in Korea in 1951. Mother English. You were educated at an English public school, Winchester. That was to please her, then West Point. You first went to war the year your father was killed. By the end of the Korean conflict you had collected a D.S.C. and Silver Star and a wound which put you in hospital for nine months. It was the last time you fought in any conventional sense as a soldier.’
Most of this had been delivered in a rather flat monotone at some speed and now, he opened his eyes. ‘How am I doing?’
‘Now I know where I’ve seen you before,’ I said. ‘Gypsy Rose. You had a tent two summers ago on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.’
He was not provoked in the slightest. ‘For the next seven years, Special Services Executive, Major Grant. Military Intelligence. You became especially expert at getting people out of places. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco the Cubans got their hands on an American colonel named Hurwitz. They intended to stage a show trial that would expose America to the world and then on the night of …’ He hesitated. ‘The 31st October, am I right? You landed with half a dozen special service troops and spirited Hurwitz away from an apparently impregnable fortress.’
I was shaken now, rocked straight back on my heel, because what he was giving out was classified information at the highest level.
‘You must be on good terms with the President.’
‘A brilliant operation which made you famous in the Pentagon, at least in a discreet way and one you repeated seven or eight times over the ensu-ing years. Cuba once again. Cambodia, twice in Vietnam and then Albania. An American U2 pilot named Murphy was to be put on trial as a spy. You got him out of the top state security prison in Tirana.’
‘It’s just a knack,’ I said. ‘Something my old grannie taught me when I was in short pants.’
‘And now we come to August, 1966,’ he said. ‘Sylvia Gray, a seventeen-year-old student from Boston, daughter of a friend of your grandfather. An impulsive young lady who went to Prague with a group of other students during the Czechoslovakian revolt and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a Russian soldier. She shot him in the back three times.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He was trying to rape a fourteen-year-old girl at the time.’
‘You went to your superiors and asked permission to get the girl out and they refused.’
Strange that I could feel the same impotent rage so many years later.
‘So you went anyway, entered Czechoslovakia illegally and with the help of an underground organization broke the girl out of jail and got her safely home after a rather public gun fight on the Austria–Czech border.’
‘You seem to know it all.’
‘But I do. Everything. A General Court Martial, all highly secret, but just as nasty. They stripped you bare and dumped you in disgrace, well and truly on your ass, if you’ll excuse such an uncouth expression.’
And now I was worried because he really had got too close for comfort and I waited for the axe to fall.
‘Which left you in one hell of a fix because you had responsibilities. The year your father was killed, your mother died in childbirth leaving a little girl, your sister, Hannah. Twenty years your junior. A grave responsibility. Your maternal grandmother raised her in London. You provided for both of them. More than essential in view of the fact that your sister is totally blind, but then, her musical gifts make up for that to some extent. She studies piano at the Royal College of Music, I understand.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s been fun, really it has, only let’s get to the point.’
‘You tried writing thrillers, which brought you only a modest return, and then you were approached in London by an ex-British Intelligence officer who knew something of your background. There was a man in prison in Birmingham, one of a number who had robbed a train of several million pounds, most of which had never been recovered. With only a thirty-year sentence to look forward to, he was happy to pay fifty thousand pounds into a Swiss bank account to anyone who could get him out and you couldn’t resist the challenge, could you, Major Grant?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me that,’ I said. ‘Under the circumstances it’s almost obscene.’
‘After that, you never looked back. A reasonably constant demand for the services of someone with your very special talents. When you retired last year you had over four hundred thousand pounds in your Geneva account. Would you like the number, by the way?’
There was a longish pause as if he actually expected an answer. I glanced at Langley who smiled beautifully. ‘You’re really quite a card, aren’t you, old stick?’
‘So there you were,’ Stavrou said, ‘with all the money in the world, or so it seemed, so that when someone approached you three months ago and offered you one hundred thousand dollars to get a young American named Stephen Wyatt out of a penal colony in Libya where he was recently sentenced to life imprisonment, you refused.’
There was a long pause and then the whole thing suddenly clicked into place. ‘You?’ I said.
‘Stephen Wyatt is my stepson, Major Grant,’ he told me softly. ‘My dead wife’s son. A stupid, misguided boy who dropped out of Yale after war service with the Paratroops in Vietnam, came out to the Mediterranean and got mixed up with some counter revolutionary organization in Libya aimed at overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi.’
‘And they gave him life?’ I said.
‘Exactly. I want him out.’
My anger was like a fuse slow-burning. I said, ‘Are you telling me this whole thing was a set-up from the beginning? The guy in the marsh at Cape de Gata with his Lee Enfield, for instance?’
‘Now he did get a little over enthusiastic,’ Stavrou said. ‘All he was supposed to do was rattle you. Leave you a little worried, but he went too far.’
‘And bit off more than he could chew.’
‘An impressive performance, major, I must say. He was actually supposed to be resting, isn’t that the term theatricals use? A young man who’d had a considerable success as a sniper in Ulster with the Provisional IRA.’
‘And everything since? The Hole, for example?’
‘You’re surely familiar with brainwashing techniques, particularly as practiced by the Chinese? Pavlovian in concept. First of all it is necessary to bring about the complete alienation of the individual, destroy his confidence in any kind of order or pattern to his life. Degrade him if at all possible.’
Langley said, with a grin, ‘We certainly did a good job of that, old stick, credit where credit’s due.’
I gave him some old-fashioned Anglo Saxon, tried to reach him and tripped over my chains. Stavrou said, ‘I wished to show you that I hold you in the hollow of my hand, my friend. That was the sole purpose of the exercise. There is nowhere you can run. Nowhere you can be certain of safety. No single person you can trust.’
‘You go to hell,’ I said.
He smiled patiently. ‘I’ll prove it to you. The final and ultimate truth.’ He reached for a small handbell and rang it.
A moment later, Simone Delmas came through a gate in the wall and stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, her face calm, untroubled. She wore a silk mini dress in olive green open at the throat.
‘Is she not lovely, Major Grant?’
She leaned down to kiss him, he slipped a hand under the edge of the skirt, stroking her