Slow Burner Read online

  Britain’s

  most closely guarded

  atomic secret

  is about to be turned over to the enemy. The unknown traitor could be any one of a number of top-ranking scientists. The only lead to discovering his identity: a lady of somewhat shady reputation . . .

  William Haggard

  spins out an ingenious game of spy-catch-spy in

  Slow Burner.

  It’s a suspense thriller that stars the adroit and very charming Colonel Charles Russell. It’s an espionage novel with the master Haggard touch. Wry. Worldly. Wonderfully menacing.

  “Elegance and wit dress up this thriller plot until you’d hardly recognize it as such, which is one of those literary tricks at which the English excel.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “William Haggard knows the special world of diplomats. . .a combination of urbanity and melodrama.” —NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  “The atmosphere of high-grade scientific, civil, and secret services is immensely convincing.”

  —LONDON OBSERVER

  Twenty-Seven

  Chatsworth Road

  “WHO lives there?”

  “A lady of easy virtue. A Mrs. Tarbat.”

  “You mean a tart?”

  Mortimer looked faintly shocked. “No, sir,” he said, “not a tart. A kept woman. Quite respectable, really.”

  When a leak in Britain’s most carefully kept nuclear secret is traced to a suburban house in Surrey, Colonel Charles Russell begins the unpleasant and dangerous task of trapping one of his own men. He tracks the traitor through a labyrinthine plot that includes an alcoholic Minister, a sincerely sexy lady, an impromptu cat-burgler, an insouciant genius . . . and he winds up outracing MURDER to a blast of a finish in the quiet English countryside. It’s pure Haggard—an understated treat of the suave and the sinister.

  COPYRIGHT © WILLIAM HAGGARD, 1958

  All rights reserved

  FIRST PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1965

  SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

  SIGNET BOOKS are published by

  The New American Library, Inc.

  1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Chapter 1

  William Nichol, entitled to more degrees than with modesty he could write after his name, Fellow of the Royal Society and not without recognition from his Sovereign, leant back in the comfortable Ministry car and wondered whether it would be in order to smoke a cigar. There was really no reason why he should not. He could afford it; he was well within his generous but not imprudent ration for the day; and finally and ordinarily this would have been decisive with William Nichol—finally he wanted to smoke. Nevertheless he hesitated, for he was aware that cigar smokers today, had to smoke with a certain discretion. Nothing had ever been said to him, and indeed he was too important for such a thing to be considered, but there was a negative, an oppressive tradition in the matter. Public men avoided the stigmata of any standard of comfort—cigars in particular. Cigars were a symbol, an army with banners marching. It wasn’t the fashion to give the impression of enjoying anything too greatly; perhaps not even very much; perhaps not at all. A Ministry car was not the place for cigars: that was established, though the reasoning was indefensible.

  William Nichol told himself that there was no reasoning at all.

  Nevertheless he still hesitated, for he was not of an age to take pleasure in deliberate indiscipline. He looked through the glass partition at the back of the driver’s neat green battle jacket, the forage cap slanted, but not too aggressively. Cigar smoke lingered abominably. She would not see him smoking, for she was too good a driver unexpectedly to turn her head. She would not see him, but she would smell him. She would talk in her canteen, perhaps . . . The Administrator General smokes cigars on urgent journeys to London in official transport.

  William Nichol decided that it was deplorable, but that it mattered. It mattered to the Ministry whose car this was, whose aura, tirelessly furbished by its Public Relations officers, might infinitesimally be risked by the smell of a cigar. He smiled a little impishly, deciding that he would stop the car and drink a cup of coffee instead. They could wait for him the extra quarter of an hour in part payment for that lost cigar. Life could hold only so much of material pleasure: that cigar which the Ministry had inhibited—the total had diminished by its loss. Very well then, he would take coffee instead. The driver might join him if he invited her. He reached for the voice tube but found only the marks where its supporting bracket had been removed. So this was Sir Jeremy’s own car. Just what he would do, of course. Voice tubes would be ostentatious, a symbol of personal authority; worse, they were positively a convenience. So away with them! This was certainly no hack from the Ministry’s pool but the Permanent Secretary’s official vehicle. Confound Sir Jeremy! Confound him for a high-principled prig. Confound his conventicle austerity.

  William Nichol lit his cigar and his mind returned to his problem. First things first, he thought. And the first thing was all too clearly going to be formidable trouble at the Ministry.

  That Sir Jeremy had sent his own car was significant. The Administrator General of Nuclear Development had an official car of his own, one neither less comfortable nor noticeably slower, and that the Permanent Secretary had sent his own forty miles to fetch him was something between a snub and a warning. Nichol had not liked it, but Sir Jeremy had been off the line before he could protest. He remembered that it had been very expertly done. It had taken his secretary at Colton a minute or two to get the Ministry on the security telephone, another few minutes to collect Sir Jeremy from one of his numberless committees. Sir Jeremy had listened without interruption; then done as Nichol had expected.

  ‘We cannot talk about this over the telephone,’ he had said. ‘I expect you will want an hour to get your papers together. I make it eleven o’clock exactly. There will be a car for you at Colton at a quarter past twelve.’

  He was gone.

  William Nichol smiled wryly. Sir Jeremy had done no more than he had expected in calling him to London, but ‘There will be a car for you at Colton at a quarter past twelve’—that had been calculated. Sir Jeremy had played that trick once before. The talk of papers, too: he would know there could be no papers. It had been neat, as smooth as oil. A professional himself, Nichol respected professional competence. Sir Jeremy had been putting him in what he considered to be his place. Not that Sir Jeremy was formally his superior—not in any sense that he could give him orders directly. They stood officially as equals in the hierarchy. Nevertheless he had been put neatly at a disadvantage. Of course he could still use his own car and arrive at the Ministry an hour earlier. In which case Sir Jeremy would take care not to be in his room when he arrived. He would be shown straight in without question, offered tea and treated with deference. And Sir Jeremy wouldn’t be so crude as to keep him waiting long; he would appear quite quickly, but he would not conceal his surprise.

  William Nichol, he would imply, was panicking.

  Or he could wait for the car which Sir Jeremy was sending and by implication accept an instruction.

  Nichol decided that it had been extremely expert, but that to give it serious thought would be to concede an avoidable advantage, even to admit a defeat. He was conscious that Sir Jeremy had never liked him; had resented him; had envied him even, if that sort of word was admissible in the thinking of a physicist who was also a Doctor of Philosophy.

  William Nichol’s smile changed again to one of genuine amusement. At least he would take very good care that this same car should drive him back to Colton in the e
vening. That was a legitimate riposte. If Sir Jeremy wanted his car again, then he had only himself to blame if he had to do without it. Besides, Nichol had taken a fancy to the driver. He had driven with her before in Ministry cars, though never in Sir Jeremy’s; he had noticed her. She was a handsome woman and a pleasant companion. He remembered that he had called her Madam, for it was evident that she had not spent a lifetime driving official motor cars. She hadn’t protested. She would be nearer thirty than forty, he had decided. A widow, perhaps—a war widow. In a mile or two he would stop the car and join her in front. He chuckled, reflecting that it wouldn’t have occurred to Sir Jeremy that his little snub mightn’t be without its compensations. He saw that the ash upon his cigar was lengthening and looked about him for an ash tray. They, like the voice tube, had been removed. He shrugged, tapping the ash upon the floor without a pang.

  The careful rusticity of the Thames Valley swam across the windows of the car. Sir Jeremy, Nichol reminded himself, was in this too. Indeed he was. William Nichol, Administrator General of Nuclear Development, was responsible without question for whatever happened at Colton and at the other Centres, but Sir Jeremy’s Ministry coordinated—Nichol suppressed a smile—coordinated Development generally. Whatever that might mean. The Permanent Secretary at the Ministry was responsible to his Minister whilst he himself answered to the Development Commission, partly scientific, partly political—a bit of everything. But Sir Jeremy was its chairman in his Minister’s absence, and that was almost always, for Gabriel Palliser wasn’t a man to interfere in principle with what he didn’t understand in detail. He was a very good Minister, and William Nichol would have preferred to go to him directly. As it was that was impossible: instead he was going to Sir Jeremy. He did not trouble, now, to suppress his smile. Palliser would have been incredulous, he concluded; Palliser would have stormed; he might even have been humanly frightened. Whereas Sir Jeremy would go on looking experienced, looking imperturbable, looking grey. You could not shake him from his stride, you could not visibly excite him. Not even when you told him that the latest, the most secret form of nuclear energy was shrieking to heaven in a suburban house in Surrey.

  The Ministry car pulled smoothly into the courtyard and stopped before a portico in public works baroque. It was fourteen minutes past twelve. William Nichol thanked the driver. ‘We must drive together again,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Nichol pulled a discreet grimace. It conveyed, and admirably, that he didn’t wish to be addressed as sir. ‘Should I wait?’ the driver inquired.

  ‘Please do. This is Sir Jeremy’s personal car, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s always kept in case he wants it.’

  ‘Is it indeed? Still, I should be grateful if you would wait. You will want a meal, though. I shall be an hour at least.’

  ‘Very good.’

  William Nichol took the private lift to Sir Jeremy’s room. He had decided that it was going to be a battle, but that there was no reason to anticipate a rout, and William Nichol enjoyed a battle—provided, that is, that the odds were not too uneven against him. There was no sense, in his opinion, no sense at all, in lost causes. He walked firmly into Sir Jeremy’s room and shook his hand as he rose from his desk. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said blandly. ‘It is good of you to give me the time.’

  Sir Jeremy let this pass. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘You know Russell, I think.’

  ‘But of course,’ Nichol was glad to see Charles Russell. The Head of the Security Executive was a man you could spend an evening with. He was in fact an old friend.

  Sir Jeremy Bates was silent, looking across the river. It wasn’t imaginable that he was capable of striking a pose, but the profile was undeniably effective. The turn of the head accented the lean jaw. Beautiful ears were set well back on the skull. Grey hair, still perfect, was as smooth as a boy’s. Sir Jeremy was very pale. A curial face, Nichol decided, the face of a saint of impeccable ancestry. It was difficult to believe that his father had been a drunken tobacconist.

  ‘I have told Russell what you told me this morning,’ Sir Jeremy said at length. ‘I do not think he entirely believes me.’

  ‘That is understandable.’ Nichol’s voice was entirely noncommittal.

  ‘Would it be best if we went over it again?’

  ‘By all means.’ William Nichol lit a cigarette, collecting his thoughts. It took him only an instant. ‘It starts with this Slow Burner itself,’ he began. ‘You know what it is, of course. It’s a form of nuclear energy which we managed to stumble on before anybody else. It’s tamed and it’s applicable—applicable to industry as a source of power. Literally it burns slow, and it could give us a twenty-year start on the rest of the world. It isn’t fully developed yet, but selected factories are trying it out. We have to keep the closest eye on what they are doing because, though I said Slow Burner was tamed, I should in fact have said that it was tameable. It yields up its energy evenly and without too elaborate an apparatus to tap it—that’s its great advantage—but it’s still extremely dangerous. Deadly in fact, if it isn’t properly handled. It has to be insulated just as carefully as does anything else nuclear, and in some ways more. For its emanations—epsilons we call them—can kill instantly.’ William Nichol paused. ‘And do,’ he added grimly. ‘Slow Burner hasn’t been won easily.’

  Sir Jeremy nodded. ‘I remember,’ he said briefly.

  ‘So that we have to watch these factories very carefully. We have men of our own in them, naturally, and we plot the emanations centrally. At Colton. If they go over a certain intensity on our instruments we know that insulation is somewhere breaking down and that there is increasing danger. We keep an emergency party standing by—a Crash Party. We man it day and night. It’s that serious—that dangerous.’

  Sir Jeremy nodded again. ‘Quite,’ he said.

  ‘But none of this arose because we got a reading on our instruments which went beyond the danger point. What we got was a reading from a place called Dipley.’

  Russell leant forward. ‘May I interrupt?’ he asked. ‘You spoke about a reading from Dipley.’

  ‘I stand corrected. I should have said a reading on the Dipley bearing. We’d never had a reading on that bearing before, and we didn’t know it came from Dipley until we had asked two of the other Centres to give us a fix from their own instruments.’

  ‘I see. And then?’

  ‘Then we knew that there wasn’t a factory trying out Slow Burner within thirty miles of where these readings were coming from. So we went to Dipley ourselves—with our gadgets, naturally. We pinpointed it. It was a house in a street of semi-detacheds. It was Number Twenty-Seven, Chatsworth Road.’ Sir Jeremy sighed softly. ‘So that somebody is stealing Slow Burner and cacheing it at Dipley,’ he said. ‘Somebody with sufficient knowledge to insulate it down to the level of safety. Somebody with sufficient knowledge to profit from the theft. That is ominous; that is very disturbing indeed. For it establishes that somebody rather intelligent is stealing Slow Burner.’

  ‘Not quite,’ William Nichol said quietly.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

  ‘No Slow Burner has been stolen.’

  ‘But can you be sure?’

  ‘Very nearly. We know to a fraction of a milligramme what has been manufactured; we know the rate at which it expends itself. We have been to the factories and we have made our calculations. Nothing seems unaccounted for.’

  Sir Jeremy considered this. Evidently he wasn’t entirely satisfied. ‘But even the smallest amount of Slow Burner would give these epsilon rays?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And mortal man is fallible—even scientists?’ Sir Jeremy’s tone was within distance of irony, but Nichol agreed at once. ‘He is indeed,’ he said.

  ‘So that theft does not seem to have been entirely excluded—not as a matter of complete certainty?’

  ‘It has,’ Nichol said. He glanced at his watch. ‘Or rather,’ he added, �
�and to be accurate, in an hour it will be.’

  ‘Again I’m afraid I do not follow.’

  ‘I said that we knew the rate at which Slow Burner expends itself. That is so. We know the rate and we know the limit. Slow Burner is effective for forty-eight hours. Occasionally a little more, but two days and two hours is the recorded maximum. After that it dies. It cannot be used as a source of power and it certainly doesn’t generate epsilon rays.’ William Nichol drew a deliberate breath. ‘We are now getting towards luncheon time on Friday,’ he went on. ‘That is important because at midday on Wednesday I gave instructions to stop the manufacture of Slow Burner at all the Centres. That was a little over the forty-eight hours ago, and if I receive a call from Colton within the next hour saying that readings are still being recorded, then any question of theft, even of continuing theft, has been eliminated.

  Sir Jeremy considered again. ‘Leaving us with what?’ he asked.

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘But I believe I do.’ Sir Jeremy’s reply was curt. ‘I believe that in a matter of what seems to be minutes some forty major factories will be demanding of this Ministry why they have been allowed to run to a standstill for lack of fresh Slow Burner.’ Sir Jeremy turned deliberately towards Nichol. ‘You had considered that?’ he inquired grimly.

  ‘I had.’

  Sir Jeremy stared again at the window. It was impossible to guess his thoughts. The handsome bracket clock on the table beside his desk composedly added another few minutes to the two hundred years it had already recorded. Sir Jeremy continued to think. Finally he turned again to Nichol. ‘I support your decision,’ he said.

  Thank you.’

  ‘It was,’ he added smoothly, ‘the only thing to do.’

  Sir Jeremy withdrew again into a formidable silence. When he broke it, it was to ask whether they were all agreed that the immediate problem was what to say to the factories. He swung his chair again towards Nichol. There was nothing of urbanity in his manner now. His voice was edged. ‘Perhaps you would speak first,’ he suggested. ‘You seem to have been making the decisions,’ he added.