met with some good natured abuse as he forced his way through, but a moment later he was inside the gate. He moved through the crowd, glancing quickly through the window of the gatehouse on his left, noting the three uniformed security guards at the table, coffee and sandwiches spread before them, an Alsatian squatting in the corner.
The workers were still moving towards the gate in a steady stream and Chavasse passed through them quickly, crossed the yard to the main block and entered the basement garage. He had spent the previous night poring over the plans S2 had provided until the layout of the building was so impressed on his mind that he was able to move with perfect confidence.
There were still one or two mechanics about, but he ignored them, mounted the ramp, walked behind the line of waiting vehicles parked in the loading bay and pressed the button for the service lift. A moment later he was on his way to the third floor.
It was strangely quiet when he stepped out and he paused, listening, before moving along the corridor. The door to the wages office was on the third from the end and marked Private. He glanced at it briefly in passing, turned the corner and opened a door which carried the sign Fire Exit. Concrete stairs dropped into a dark well beneath him and on the wall to his left he found what he was looking for – a battery of fuse boxes.
Each box was numbered neatly in white paint. He pushed the handle on number ten into the off position and returned to the corridor.
He knocked on the door of the wages office and waited. This was the crucial moment. According to his information, the staff went to lunch between noon and one o’clock leaving only the chief cashier on duty, but nothing was certain in this life – he had learned that if nothing else in seven years of working for the Bureau and there were bound to be days when someone or other decided to have sandwiches instead of going out. Two he could handle – any more than that and he was in trouble. Not that it mattered – it all came down to the same thing in the end and he smiled wryly. On the other hand it might be amusing to see just how far he could go.
A spyhole flicked open in front of him and he caught the glint of an eye.
‘Mr Crabtree?’ Chavasse said. ‘I’m from Maintenance. There’s been a partial power failure on this floor and I’m checking each office to find the cause. Is everything all right here, sir?’
‘Just a moment.’ The cover of the spyhole dropped into place. A moment later there was the rattle of a chain, the door opened and a small white haired man peered out. ‘The lights don’t seem to be working at all. You’d better come in.’
Chavasse stepped inside, noting in that first quick moment that they were alone and Crabtree busied himself in locking and chaining the door again. He was perhaps sixty and wore neat gold-rimmed spectacles. When he turned and found the muzzle of a .38 automatic staring him in the face, his eyes widened in horror, his shoulders sagging so that he seemed to shrink and become visibly smaller.
Chavasse stifled a pang of remorse and tapped him gently on the cheek with the barrel of the automatic. ‘Do as you’re told and you’ll come out of this in one piece – understand?’ Crabtree nodded dumbly and Chavasse produced a pair of handcuffs from a pocket in his overalls and gestured to a chair. ‘Sit down and put your hands behind you.’
He handcuffed Crabtree quickly, secured his ankles with a length of cord and squatted in front of him. ‘Comfortable?’
The cashier seemed to have made a remarkable recovery and smiled thinly. ‘Relatively.’
Chavasse warmed to him. ‘Your wage bill here runs you between forty and fifty thousand pounds depending on the amount of overtime worked. What’s the figure this week?’
‘Forty-five thousand,’ Crabtree replied without the slightest hesitation. ‘Or to put it another way, just over half a ton dead weight. Somehow I don’t think you’re going to get very far.’
Chavasse grinned. ‘We’ll see, shall we?’
There was money everywhere, some of it stacked in neat bundles as it had come from the bank, a large amount already made up into wage packets in wooden trays. The strongroom door stood open and inside he found a trolley with canvas sides containing several large money bags which, from their weight, held silver and copper. He removed the bags quickly, wheeled the trolley into the office and pushed it along the line of desks, sweeping in bundles of banknotes and wage packets together. Crabtree was right – it added up to quite a load yet it took him no more than three minutes to clear the lot.
He pushed the trolley to the door and Crabtree said, ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but we do a great deal of work for the RAF here so our security system’s rather special.’
‘I got in, didn’t I?’
‘But not while you were pushing half a ton of banknotes in front of you and it’s impossible for any vehicle to get through that gate until it’s been thoroughly checked. Something of a problem, I should have thought.’
‘Sorry I haven’t time to discuss it now,’ Chavasse said. ‘But don’t fail to buy an evening paper. They’ve promised to print the solution for me.’
He produced a large piece of sticking plaster and pasted it over the cashier’s mouth before he could reply. ‘Can you breathe all right?’ Crabtree nodded, something strangely like regret in his eyes, and Chavasse grinned. ‘It’s been fun. Somehow I don’t think you’ll be on your own for long.’
The door closed behind him with a click and Crabtree sat there in the silence, waiting, feeling more alone than at any other time in his life. It seemed an age before he heard heavy feet pounding along the corridor and the anxious knocking started on the door.
The previous Wednesday when it all started, was a morning of bright sunshine and Chavasse had chosen to walk through the park on his way to Bureau headquarters. Life, for an intelligence agent, is a strange and rather haphazard existence compounded of short, often violent, periods of service in the field followed by months of comparative inactivity, often spent in routine anti-espionage investigations or administration.
For almost half a year Chavasse had clocked in each morning as ordered, to sit behind a desk in a converted attic in the old house in St John’s Wood to spend the day sifting through reports from field sections in all parts of the globe – demanding, highly important work that had to be done thoroughly or not at all – and so damned boring.
But the sun was out, the sky was blue, the dresses were shorter than he’d ever known them, so that for once he took his time and strolled across the grass between the trees smoking a cigarette, discovering and not for the first time in his life, that after all, a man didn’t need a great deal to be utterly and completely happy – for the moment, at any rate. Somewhere a clock struck eleven. He glanced at his watch, swore softly and hurried towards the main road.
It was almost half past the hour when he went up the steps of the house in St John’s Wood and pressed the bell beside the brass plate that carried the legend Brown & Co – Importers and Exporters.
After a few moments, the door was opened by a tall greying man in a blue serge uniform and Chavasse hurried past him. ‘I’m late this morning, George.’
George looked worried. ‘Mr Mallory was asking for you. Miss Frazer’s been phoning down every five minutes for the past hour.’
Chavasse was already half-way up the curving Regency staircase, a slight flicker of excitement moving inside him. If Mallory wanted him urgently, then it had to be for something
