The Cilla Rose Affair Read Free Page B

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 your 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