Bluebolt One Read Free Page B

dead. Shaw grinned to himself as he swung his long legs out of bed and stood up in carpet-slippers. Clarice Larkin, in early middle age, had just one driving passion in her asexual life and that was her devotion to Latymer. All other men were treated exactly alike—with dampening coldness. The devotion was in a sense misplaced for Latymer was something of a misogynist, as well as being a diehard bachelor; but he completely filled a void in Miss Larkin’s otherwise meagre life—and when she said ‘we’ in her royal way she spoke for Latymer just as much as if the Old Man had been on the line personally, talking himself in that quiet, authoritative voice of his, the voice in which the quality of steel was never very far away. Shaw stopped grinning when he thought of Latymer.
    He shaved and dressed quickly and had a scratch breakfast. He’d certainly overslept more than somewhat... and he decided that the juxtaposition of an urgent summons to the Chief, and the events of last night, was just a little too much to be due to coincidence.
    It wouldn’t be long before he found out.

    Slowly Shaw climbed the broad staircase of the old Admiralty building on the Horse Guards, feeling, as he always felt just before an assignment got under way properly, that cold nagging pain at the pit of his stomach, the legacy of the ulcer which had cut short his seagoing career as a very junior officer years before and had projected him into the atmosphere of intrigue and danger that surrounded the big jobs carried out by the Special Services agents of the Naval Intelligence Division.
    Walking into the secretary’s room he met the impersonal stare of Miss Larkin.
    She said, “Oh—Commander Shaw. Mr Latymer wanted to see you the moment you arrived. He’s been here for some hours himself.” There was a slight stress on the word “moment,” and she glanced at the green Connemara marble clock, her expression and the very way she held her stiff figure as she twisted round to look at it managing somehow to convey disapproval. She pressed a switch on the intercom box, spoke briefly and crisply, and then Latymer’s voice said; “Send him in, Miss Larkin.”
    Shaw moved over to the door.
    That door was marked simply: Mr G. E. D. Latymer . Shaw, who had been a party to the close secrets of state after a certain bomb had gone off years ago in Eaton Square and left ‘Mr Latymer’ scarred for life, often thought that a lesser man than the Chief would never have for so long survived the gall of having to pretend to civilian status in the Admiralty. The night of the bomb, a high-ranking officer of the Admiralty Staff had been blown up and left for dead by agents of the other side to whom he had become too dangerous to live. He had, in fact, been within a fraction of an inch of death when Shaw had found him; and it had been thought expedient, prudent in the circumstances of the time, to allow these men to believe that they had in fact made the kill. This had been done with the aid of sheer cunning and the Official Secrets Act under which, when the officer was out of danger, a certain plastic surgeon had worked his miracles of physical transformation... and Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Charteris, K.C.B., D.S.O. and two bars, D.S.C., youngest officer ever to attain that rank, had become ‘Mr Latymer.’ The fact that he had no family whatever living had made the thing, to that extent, easy. Only a handful of men apart from Shaw—men who had since all retired from the Service or politics—knew that Sir Henry Charteris lived on and had, under his pseudonym, returned, after months of illness and recuperation, to the Naval Intelligence Division, taking over again in due course his old job as Chief of Special Services—a job which few people even knew still existed at all.
    Shaw knocked, and entered the sumptuous room, his feet sinking deeply into the thick pile of a fitted carpet. A bar of sunlight came through the big window, turned the old shagreen surface