Running Blind / The Freedom Trap by Desmond Bagley Page A

to Kennikin and the best thing to do was to eliminate him. So I did it with a bomb.’ I swallowed. ‘I never even saw the man I killed—I just put a bomb in a car.’
    There was horror in Elin’s eyes. I said harshly, ‘We weren’t playing patty-cake out there.’
    ‘But someone you didn’t know—that you had never seen!’
    ‘It’s better that way,’ I said. ‘Ask any bomber pilot. But that’s not the point. The point is that I had trusted Slade and it turned out that the man I killed was a British agent—one of my own side.’
    Elin was looking at me as though I had just crawled out from under a stone. I said, ‘I contacted Slade and asked what the hell was going on. He said the man was a freelance agent whom neither side trusted—the trade is lousy with them. He recommended that I tell Kennikin what I’d done, so I did and my stock went up with Kennikin. Apparently he had been aware of a leak in his organization and there was enough evidence around to point to the man I had killed. So I became one of his blue-eyed boys—we got really chummy—and that was his mistake because we managed to wreck his network completely.’
    Elin let out her breath. ‘Is that all?’
    ‘By Christ, it’s not all!’ I said violently. I reached for the whisky bottle and found my hand was trembling. ‘When it was all over I went back to England. I was congratulated on doing a good job. The Scandinavian branch of the Department was in a state of euphoria and I was a minor hero, for God’s sake! Then I discovered that the man I had killed was no more a freelance agent than I was. His name—if it matters—was Birkby, and he had been a member of the Department, just as I was.’
    I slopped whisky into the glass. ‘Slade had been playing chess with us. Neither Birkby nor I were deep enough in Kennikin’s outfit to suit him so he sacrificed a pawn to put another in a better position. But he had broken the rules as far as I was concerned—it was as though a chess player had knocked off one of his own pieces to checkmate the king, and that’s not in the rules.’
    Elin said in a shaking voice, ‘Are there any rules in your dirty world?’
    ‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any rules. But I thought there were. I tried to raise a stink.’ I knocked back the undiluted whisky and felt it burn my throat. ‘Nobody would listen, of course—the job had been successful and was now being forgotten and the time had come to go on to bigger and better things. Slade had pulled it off and no one wanted to delve too deeply into how he’d done it.’ I laughed humourlessly. ‘In fact, he’d gone up a notch in the Department and any muck-raking would be tactless—a reflection on the superior who had promoted him. I was a nuisance and nuisances are unwanted and to be got rid of.’
    ‘So they got rid of you,’ she said flatly.
    ‘If Slade had his way I’d have been got rid of the hard way—permanently. In fact, he told me so not long ago. But he wasn’t too high in the organization in those days and he didn’t carry enough weight.’ I looked into the bottom of the glass. ‘What happened was that I had a nervous breakdown.’
    I raised my eyes to Elin. ‘Some of it was genuine—I’d say about fifty-fifty. I’d been living on my nerves for a long time and this was the last straw. Anyway, the Department runs a hospital with tame psychiatrists for cases like mine. Right now there’s a file stashed away somewhere full of stuff that would make Freud blush. If I step out of line there’ll be a psychiatrist ready to give evidence that I suffer everything from enuresis to paranoic delusions of grandeur. Who would disbelieve evidence coming from an eminent medical man?’
    Elin was outraged. ‘But that’s unethical! You’re as sane as I am.’
    ‘There are no rules—remember?’ I poured out another drink, more gently this time. ‘So I was allowed to retire. I was no use to the Department anyway; I had become that