The Cilla Rose Affair Read online

  Colonel Mobambo, in his heat-wrinkled fatigues, had leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingertips together, assessing his prisoner. On his desk lay Ian’s passport—American, false—and all of his identification…a camera, minus its film…and a hastily prepared document—a confession—badly typed.

  Ian had glanced at this sheet of paper, reading it upside down. There were a number of charges, many involving laws which had been invoked in the wake of the military uprising.

  “Not guilty,” he said.

  Mobambo grinned, displaying a mouthful of large, perfectly white teeth that gleamed against his black skin. “You may be what you claim—a journalist from Los Angeles. But you must understand my dilemma: if I release you, I am answerable to General Pinkerton, who is absolutely convinced you must be a foreign agent, and sends communications to me daily, demanding your immediate execution.”

  Ian waited. Above the desk, the ceiling fan swirled, slowly, stirring nothing but the flies who ventured too close to its smooth wooden blades.

  “If I hold you,” Mobambo continued, leaning back, so that his chair gave off a small wooden squeak of protest, “a trial would not be likely to take place in our courts for another two years.” He gave the piece of paper a push with an immaculately-manicured finger. “It might be better—for you—to confess.”

  Still, Ian waited.

  “You wish to think about it?”

  “Yes,” Ian said. “I do.”

  “Then we will talk again soon.”

  Mobambo had snapped his fingers, and two guards had stepped forward to escort him back to his cell.

  It was a given truth in this business that the extraction of information necessarily involved a degree of unpleasantness. Colonel Mobambo’s soldiers had been singularly unpleasant to Ian since his interview in the office. While the so-called civilized nations of the world tended to rely on psychology and pharmaceuticals to accomplish their ends, that level of sophistication hadn’t yet dawned on this dark little corner of the continent. Mobambo’s methods were crude, to say the least.

  They covered situations like this in your training sessions. The steps you could follow: parting with a few details to keep your captors guessing—not enough to cause harm to others in your organization and certainly not enough to jeopardize the overall success of your particular mission; denying your guilt—it was expected of you, all part of the game; trying to find out how much your interrogators actually knew—arguing with them, falling back on reason, pleading, swearing, getting angry. And then, there was the oldest trick in the book: giving them the impression you were breaking, the theory being, the more they beat you, the less they knew.

  If that was true, Ian thought, then Mobambo’s men were singularly unenlightened. The rope marks on his wrists and ankles—the cuts and bruises on selected regions of his body, and the pain that accompanied them—all attested to that.

  He could, of course, always sign the confession. The rules of that part of the game were pretty simple: scribble your signature on the piece of paper, hope the beatings stopped, put your faith in the knowledge that one day, your release would be negotiated as part of a high-level spy swap.

  Ian let his breath out. That was another of the theories they liked to trot out in the training sessions. It presumed the existence of strategically valuable spies on the other side. It also presupposed that the penalty for spying was not immediate execution in front of a firing squad.

  He’d already witnessed two poor sods meeting a ragged end in front of a bullet-riddled wall in the far corner of the compound.

  If he signed that confession, he’d be signing his death warrant.

  Evan collected his mail from the locked slot on the ground floor, and trudged up the three flights of stairs to his Knightsbridge apartment. He let himself in. In the sitting room, he could see his answering machine, winking on and off with red-flash urgency.

  Slipping off his shoes, he made himself comfortable on the couch, leaned back, and addressed his messages.

  Agent on the other side of the Atlantic. Did he want to play an insidious murderer in a made-for-TV thriller about an award statuette possessed by an unspeakable evil?

  “No one’ll suspect you, Evan—that’s the beauty of it: you’ve got that sort of face. Trusting. Kind. Fatherly. Let me know before Tuesday.”

  Evan made a note to call Richard in New York and turned his attention to the TV and VCR in the corner of the room. A tape was already in place; he aimed the remote control in the general vicinity of the cabinet, satisfied himself that all of the little red lights, green level indicators and blue digital readouts were appropriately primed, and settled back to watch himself Do Chat.

  There was Wally Green, the host of the programme, decked out with Union Jack patriotism in a blue suit and a red and white striped shirt—grinning hugely, a slightly astonished look about the eyes as he ambled across the set and pretended to be amazed by the tumultuous applause from his Shepherd’s Bush audience.

  And here was his first guest, who’d carved out a career for himself playing Jarrod Spencer 25 years ago in America, up to plenty of other things nowadays, of course, and here he is to tell us all about his most recent project, won’t you all please give a very warm welcome to Mr. Evan Harris.

  Up swelling applause, cheers from the diehards in the back, and The Star appeared from the curtains, shook his esteemed host’s hand and got comfortable in the celebrity swivel chair.

  Pleasant individual, Evan thought, offering up a quick assessment of himself. Interesting sort of face…Very kind, it was true. Very fatherly. Hair the right length, a few lines showing, yes—but only in mirth and then, only about the eyes. Not bad for sixty-something. He could still pass for fifty.

  “Welcome to the program, Evan. You played Jarrod Spencer, of course, in that enormously successful secret agent series in the 1960s. How long did it run?”

  “Three years, 1967 to 1970.” Expertly, he changed the subject. “I’m about to begin a new series this fall actually, about a man, he’s a gardener, a freelance gardener who hires himself out to various households and somehow manages to put himself in the way of whatever family plots happen to be hatching when he gets there.”

  “No James Bond gadgets in this one, I suppose, no secret telephones hidden in soles of shoes, cones of silence or Mrs. Peel karate chops across the old back of the neck—”

  “The odd creeping ivy,” Evan conceded, to scattered laughter.

  “And what’s it called, this intriguing new series of yours?”

  “Bill and Ben. It’s a joke, really: Bill and Ben’s the name of this fellow’s gardening firm, as in Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men—”

  “And we all remember the lovely, demure Miss Weed, don’t we, children? Wee-eee-d.”

  “Wee-eee-d,” squeaked several members of the audience, in unison, and their embarrassed attempts dissolved into islands of self-conscious laughter.

  “—and there is only Ben, you see, as Bill’s fictitious.”

  “A sort of silent partner.”

  “You might say that, yes.”

  “And you’re Ben.”

  “As well as Bill, when Bill’s presence is required. It’s rather confusing.”

  “But funny.”

  “Outrageously funny, yes, hilarious, often muddy.”

  “Let’s talk about something you’re more often remembered for, Evan, and that’s that delightfully witty, often scathingly silly, television series, Spy Squad, in which you played the title role of Jarrod Spencer.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “I gather you still have quite a following.”

  “Somewhere,” Evan said, checking cautiously beneath his seat cushions, while there was outrageous laughter from the same manic few who earlier had been screaming “Wee-eee-d” like a chorus of fingernails scratching on slate.

  “Even after all these years. That’s admirable, isn’t it? Do they pursue you as they did in the old days, Evan, shrieking, tearing off yo
ur clothes, pulling out your hair—?”

  “Funny you should mention that, Wally. I was at Heathrow the day before yesterday seeing someone off and this woman came rushing up to me all out of breath. ‘Oooh,’ she said, ‘ooh—I know who you are—you’re that fella on the telly, aren’t you?’ and I said yes I was and she said, ‘Oooh, just wait til I tell my son, he’ll be thrilled to bits I’ve just rubbed shoulders with Captain Kirk.’”

  “It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?”

  “I didn’t think I looked anything like Captain Kirk, and when she realized she’d got it wrong she came rushing back. ‘I’m so dreadfully embarrassed,’ she said, ‘it’s not Captain Kirk, is it—you’re that other one—with the ears.’”

  Wally Green was beside himself.

  “Let’s talk about Spy Squad again, Evan. It was a very physical program, wasn’t it?”

  “Very physical, yes, but fun, it was great fun. And the odd flowerpot still comes crashing down on me in Bill and Ben but there’s not a lot of physical stuff in this new series, it’s more cerebral, more a comedy of errors, a nice old fellow with a fictitious partner trying to make a living pulling weeds and pruning yews.”

  “And occasionally stumbling into a den of intrigue, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Domestic intrigue, though, Wally—nothing MI6 would be much interested in.”

  “I’ll still expect to see half a dozen nasty men in black come hurtling across my screen brandishing armed bowler hats in hot pursuit of poor old Jarrod Spencer. Any hint of a revival, a TV movie, you know—an updated version of the old Mandy, Huff and Jarrod team—?”

  “It would be interesting, wouldn’t it?”

  “And I’m sure we’d love to see whatever became of those characters we were so fond of—” Wally here stood up and led the audience in an enthusiastic round of applause.

  “I’d like to, yes,” Evan lied, when the clapping had died down and the host was in his chair again, “but I suspect I’d be the only interested party. The fellow who played Huff—Barry Ryder—he’s directing these days, I think he’s booked up well into the millenium, and Lesley Towne, she was Mandy, we’re not absolutely certain where she’s disappeared to—”

  “Dropped off the face of the earth, has she?”

  “Lesley, if you’re out there, call Wally. Reverse the charges.”

  “Thank you very much. We’ve been chatting with Evan Harris, ladies and gentlemen, late of Spy Squad, now a resident of London while he films Bill and Ben for British TV. We’ll be back in a moment.”

  Evan stopped the tape as the telephone in the corner began to ring. He reached across the chesterfield to answer it.

  “Nicholas,” he said. “Have you managed to locate my son for me?”

  Chapter Three

  Sunday, 18 August 1991

  Ian rolled off the bed as the keys clanked in the lock. A shaft of light blazed into the cell. There were five men, and they were wearing the makeshift uniforms of General Pinkerton’s conscripted foot soldiers.

  “You—up—now!” The one doing the barking reinforced his orders with a wave of his AK-47.

  Warily, Ian got to his feet. “Where are we going?”

  “No questions, stinking CIA pig dog. You move now!”

  They pushed him outside, and in the sudden glare of the sun, Ian saw what he had dreaded: the limp body of Colonel Mobambo, surrounded by the bodies of his loyal guards, among them the two Africans and the Australian mercenary.

  “Why do this?” he said, hurling the question over his shoulder as he was marched across the sandy courtyard. “I’m more valuable to you alive. Use me—negotiate—”

  “Less trouble to shoot you,” one of the soldiers replied, jabbing him with the gun, driving him into the far corner of the yard and standing him with his back to the wall.

  No blindfold. No last words. Just his hands cuffed behind his back, and Pinkerton’s army, consolidating their power, eliminating witnesses. Ian fought hard against the feeling of unreality that was rapidly dropping down over him, the sense of utter disbelief—this can’t be happening to me—psychic denial, it was called by the professionals: the protective mental response that removed you from the abrupt shock of the truth. He needed to be alert, to be aware of an opportunity to escape—any chance he could grab. Hanging onto his thumb, he squeezed it, forcing his mind into furious reconnaissance.

  A command was issued. Ian’s eyes flew around the compound.

  Faintly, behind him and in the distance, he heard the wind-beating chop of a helicopter. Military manoeuvres. Land-sea surveillance.

  There was a second command, and Ian got ready to run, his adrenalin surging.

  The third command was rendered inaudible by a great roar and a hurricane of sand and wind. It was a Sea King, amphibious and military green, carrying no identification, its decals, flags and numbers spray-painted over in camouflage brown.

  It was coming in.

  There was chaos in the compound. Clouds of dust stormed through the yard. The guards dropped their rifles, breaking rank, scattering. Ian hit the ground.

  The blizzard pitted grit into his eyes and clogged his nose and mouth with sand. The thunder of the engines deafened him. There were other noises, over his head, indistinct—the blurt of automatic gunfire—

  A hand grappled Ian’s shoulder and he fought back instinctively, twisting over and kicking his assailant away. The hand responded with a swift, tight-fisted clout to the side of his head, stunning him. He was hauled to his feet and dragged across the yard to the open door of the Sea King and pitched inside, roughly. And when at last he was fully conscious again, the helicopter was soaring skyward. The soldiers were shooting at him from the ground, but they were rapidly dropping out of range.

  Sprawled on his stomach on the pitching floor, his head hurting severely, his hands still chained behind his back, Ian tried to focus on the feet of the man who had struck him and dragged him through the whirlwind chaos, to safety.

  The zippered brown suede boots were incongruous, somehow, with the hard-edged precision of the military skylift.

  “Your sense of timing,” he said, digging his chin into the floor, “as usual…is impeccable.”

  “Who do you think rang up General Pinkerton and told him you were a spy?”

  Ian was incredulous. “I was very nearly shot!”

  “Sorry, old son, I need you back in London. Had to get you outside one way or another.”

  Skilled fingers were attempting to unlock the manacles around his wrists.

  “Been knocking you about a bit, have they?”

  “Knocking’s not the word for it. Where’d you get the Sea King?”

  “Stole it.”

  Ian closed his eyes.

  “Well, thanks for the lift, anyway.”

  “Not at all,” his father replied, humorously.

  In London, hours later, Ian Fleming Harris twisted the taps off and sank down into the warm bathwater, until only his nose was poking out, like the periscope of a submarine, and he could hear his heart thudding in his ears. Action, glamour and intrigue—that was the image Hollywood liked to project, the idea the scriptwriters inked contracts over.

  The intrigue existed, but in much smaller servings than were generally advertised, and the action tended to be coupled—as he had so recently experienced—with a clear element of sheer unadulterated terror. And as for the glamour…

  He surfaced, and explored the little wicker basket full of soaps and shampoos that had been left on the counter next to the sink. His in-tray at work in Vancouver was a permanent study in bureaucratic clutter: unclassified manuals and notebooks, boxes of floppy disks for his PC, brochures for scuba holidays in the Caribbean. Unread bulletins. Forms he should have filled out months earlier, but hadn’t: One I.A.P.—Injured, Absent, Paid. One AS9096: Claim for Lost Personal Equipment. One SP123: Field Items Expended. One SA43: Transportation Allowance, please include copies of all airline tickets, car rental vouchers, etc. One SQ98: Work
Related Expenses, fill out in triplicate, return one copy to Accounting for reimbursement, retain second and third copies on file, file third copy with Department Head when reimbursement received. He could hardly wait for the next installment, due upon his return from London.

  Unwrapping a hotel-sized bar of designer soap, he aimed the paper over the side of the bath and into a plastic bin beside the toilet.

  He hated London. London smelled. The smell got into your hair. It wrapped itself around you like a grimy gauze bandage and it turned a perfectly decent English summer into a warm, brown, humid stench.

  London smelled, and London was not beautiful—as Vancouver was, with its backdrop of mountains and its seascapes and its dusky, Toni Onley sunsets. London was magnificent only on clear summer nights, and even then, you had to be standing at a particular point on the curve of the river, and the floodlights had to be on.

  He stopped, and raised his head. What was that?

  A noise in the hallway outside—a tiny tapping on his door.

  Chambermaid?

  No…it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

  Far too late to be making beds and certainly too early to be turning them down.

  And he hadn’t ordered room service.

  Silently, he slipped out of the tub, flipped a towel off the heated rack and, dripping wet, padded out to investigate.

  The deadbolt was totally turned, the door was partway open, and the resourceful individual on the other side was having a go at the inside chain. Incredulously, Ian watched. He was being burglarized. Some fool was actually trying to break into his room.

  He considered calling the front desk and letting the hotel’s own security people look after it. And then, he had a thought.

  “Is that you?” he inquired.

  “No,” said his father.

  Ian went back to his bath.

  Some minutes later, having successfully challenged both lock and chain, Evan ambled past the open bathroom door, juggling cardboard containers of carry-out Chinese with plastic shopping bags from Marks and Spencer and Selfridges and a small, portable VCR.