The Partridge Kite Read online

  ‘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 as well write off half the General Secretaries in the British Trade Union Movement.’

  ‘But Leggett was a man, Prime Minister, whose own union’s support was not only constant; he was a man whose individual power within the Movement was rapidly rising. You can’t have forgotten. Prime Minister, your own litany at his funeral, that he might one day have become General Secretary of the TUC. Most thought he most certainly would have been; also, as it happens, the first Communist General Secretary of the TUC.

 
‘Given that threat, any psychopathic Right-Winger had his motive, and it’s not hard, I’m reliably told, Prime Minister, to infuse an air clot before or during an operation if your assassin is one of the theatre team. Ten CCs, I’m told, is all that’s necessary.’

  ‘And Professor Berg?’ The Prime Minister continued to look straight at Kellick.

  ‘Berg, Prime Minister, as you are well aware, right up until the time of his death was the most active member of your own Economic Advisory Committee.’

  ‘You’re talking about Berg’s draft for our Bill on Industrial . . .?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But I’m responsible for that Bill: so is Cabinet: its direct author is the Industry Secretary and it was voted law by every member of my Parliamentary Party. Are they going to kill the lot of us? Why Berg?’

  Kellick flushed slightly. ‘Because of the violent public hostility to it. Berg was publicly acknowledged as its author proper. Hostile fingers could be pointed at one man - a foreign Jew at that - and fingers were pointed. Berg had countless threats to his life, he received a letter bomb. . . you must remember. Prime Minister!’

  The Prime Minister nodded but said nothing. He remembered it all too well. Berg had been the prime mover of the most drastic takeover of British industry and investment ever presented to Parliament. Yes, he had had many enemies.

  ‘Run the tape again, Kellick,’ he said aloud. ‘Let me hear how this man became involved. . . why he ran away. . . why he. . . defected.’

  The acidness had left his voice and he cupped his hands over his eyes, elbows resting on his desk, the light from the table picking out the thick purple veins on the back of his hands. The freckles were fading into khaki blotches, the fingers spread white, purple fingernails - the hand of an old man.

  Kellick ran the tape on to the point where Sanderson’s voice began again.

  ‘When I joined CORDON just over six and a half years ago, I was totally committed. A great deal of the work in organising the cell structure of our membership then was done by me, supervising and vetting. At that time, starting almost from scratch, we had to be sensitive in who we approached and how we dealt with people who made the initiative to us. We relied much on our intuition and a probationary period for suspect newcomers. We protected ourselves then by merely promoting an image of ourselves as some kind of crank offshoot of the Empire Loyalists, dead and gone.

  The present success of CORDON is a direct result of the care we took in those days in admitting the right people and rejecting the suspect. We were guided then not by any new ideology: there were no pep talks or conditioning programmes. We were not trying to change people.

  ‘When people came to us it was because they shared our convictions, people who were witness to and sickened by Britain’s steady slide into ruin: sickened by the total bankruptcy of political talent in government at all levels; angry at the awful power of the Trade Unions and of particular men in that Movement with whom certain Government Ministers were beginning to share the responsibility of government in a practical daily way.

  The “collapse of democracy” was the subject in those days. The unify of CORDON, its raison d’être, was how to

  reverse the slide. Patriotism was not a word that had disappeared from the vocabulary of the people who joined us, a love of one’s country! But what we were really talking about was already history. It took a little time for us to appreciate how archaic we were.

  ‘We found we were talking about a countryside that existed only in back copies of Country Life. The good looks and civilities of the British way of life were more obsolete than we’d imagined. We’d lost our currency, our weights and measures, our pint, our mile. And when we realised we had become caricatures of ourselves, our attitudes hardened.

  ‘I suppose I represented what you might call the centre- cut of British society - those who had so little but felt they had so much to lose. Like so many of those around me at that time I felt the need to belong to something because I felt I was no longer part of anything. CORDON put fire into me and into those around me who joined then. It hit me in the way National Socialism must have hit those millions of Germans in the twenties and thirties. It was a force: something hard, something new, something actual in a lazy, careless, nondescript society. It was the only definite thing I’d ever known. Maybe if I had been born fifty years earlier I should have followed Keir Hardie with the same enthusiasm.’

  Across the darkened room lit only by the single brass lamp with the green shade, across from the disembodied taped voice, there was only the slightest stir in the Prime Minister’s chair. Kellick took it as a cue to stop the machine.

  ‘Sanderson goes on for some time like this, Prime Minister,’ he said.

  There was no answer from the chair, only a new breeze of sickeningly sweet pipe smoke unfolding through the lampshade.

  ‘I’ll move another ten minutes into the tape. Prime Minister, to where he begins to explain the structure of CORDON.’

  ‘CORDON. . .’ - Sanderson went on - ‘has a cell structure but nowhere for a very sensible security reason will you find a membership file. The country is divided into fifty-two regions and each has its CORDON leader or Director. Their names are known only to six men - six anonymous men who make up the Board of CORDON, five Directors and the Chairman. The Chairman makes the decisions.’

  ‘How are members recruited?’ . . . Kellick’s taped voice again.

  ‘Are you a Mason, Mr Kellick?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But you know something of how the first approaches are made before an invitation to join a Lodge is offered.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we owe much to that system. We owe much to the Lodges: some of our best members were recruited from them. That wouldn’t be surprising, though, would it?’

  Kellick said nothing.

  ‘Well, much the same kind of approach was made by us to prospective members. Usually it was left to the Area Director. K a man’s views were known to be close to those of CORDON, and consistent, then a first approach was made. The Director would engineer a casual meeting. . . the familiar places, the golf club. Rotary, trade associations, the man’s business. If the Director was convinced of the man’s availability he would sponsor the candidate to CORDON’S HQ staff.

  ‘To my knowledge over the past two and a half years the system has failed us so infrequently that it has never posed any real threat, certainly nothing to embarrass us. On only very few occasions in those thirty months did CORDON have to issue an execution order on people who had the authority to damage us because a mistake was made in our first approaches to them. Of course, this kind of vetting was only necessary in a fraction of the considerable number of our members - only among those we would call opinion leaders, men who would be privy to information that we could never afford to become public. The vast mass of our support, the fodder that provided the strength and money, the hundreds of thousands who will rally on the day, were recruited more casually because they did not know, will not know, until after the event exactly what it is they have pledged their support to. Our disguise to them was simple enough and we used many titles.’

  ‘Why have you defected, Mr Sanderson?’ Kellick’s voice cut in hard. ‘And why are you telling us all this?’

  ‘Because I am afraid. Not for myself: I consider myself dead anyway in my own mind. You really cannot expect police protection against CORDON. They’ll come and take me. They have marked me dead.

  ‘I am afraid for my country, for the friends I have, for the family I once had. CORDON is a monster, Mr Kellick. I’ve seen enough of its workings to be afraid. I’ve seen it grow out of its ideals, which were to me once fine and worthwhile, to become totally evil. All those like me who have sworn loyalty to it are caught up in its filth.

  ‘CORDON is preparing us for a society that would shock Orwell. Shall I tell you that 1984 is forbidden r
eading in CORDON - and can you guess why? I have seen the spectre of a Britain under CORDON. It is the end of a Nation and the rebirth I had dreamed of. We are to be governed by the Board. It will have powers no King of England and Empire could ever have dreamt of. We are to be employees of a monopolistic greyness, a corporation governed by computers programmed by the Chairman. CORDON’S control will be total. The word “individual” will be scratched from our language.

  ‘I am dead, Mr Kellick. I died the moment I saw that vision. I am a renegade “Brownshirt” - and I am giving your employers, the political bankrupts I once despised, enough currency now to destroy CORDON and the organisation within Britain they now control. Kill them, Mr Kellick, before they destroy a thousand years of democracy!’

  The cassette tape continued turning a few moments more before it stopped. Even then the slight hum from the machine was the only sound in the room. Gradually they became aware of the muffled noise of traffic in Whitehall seeping under the door and the sharp hiss beyond the curtains as the wind and rain hit the window.

  The three, in the brown and green room overlooking grey and wet London, said nothing. Kellick made no attempt to switch off the machine but stared across the room to a borrowed Turner original of Melham Cove on the wall opposite. The PPS Knightley was staring at the green lampshade that hid the face of the Prime Minister from him.

  The Prime Minister was emerging from the semi-sleep that Sanderson’s story had lulled him into. Both Kellick and Knightley know the form, he thought. They’ll keep their mouths closed. And then we sit it out. We are paid for our waiting time, the art of inactivity, the sharpest weapon in government. But all the same . . . his mind was already moving ahead of him, manoeuvring and side-stepping, placing him in the most protected position . . . all the same, we must chase them, sort out whatever it is they stand for. Must have, at least in the beginning, some elementary kind of intelligence report. Then move.