Circus by Alistair MacLean

knee, when a couple of stewards appeared and rescued him from his misery. To the accompaniment of much tongue-clucking they assisted him sympathetically to his stateroom and lowered him tenderly to his settee.
    â€˜Just you hang on a minute, guv’nor,’ one of them said. He had a powerful Cockney accent. ‘I’ll have Dr Berenson here in a jiffy.’
    It hadn’t occurred to Bruno – as it apparently hadn’t occurred to Harper – that the Carpentaria would be carrying its own doctor, which was an elementary oversight on both their parts: over and above a certain passenger capacity international law made the carrying of a ship’s doctor mandatory. He said quickly: ‘Could I have our own doctor, please – the circus doctor? His name is Dr Harper.’
    â€˜I know his cabin, next deck down. At once, sir.’
    Harper must have been waiting in his cabin, medical bag in hand, for he arrived in Bruno’s cabin, tongue-clucking and looking suitably concerned, inside thirty seconds. He locked the stateroom door after the stewards’ departure, then set to work on Bruno’s ankle with some extremely pungent salve and about a yard of elasticized bandage.
    He said: ‘Mr Carter was on schedule?’
    â€˜If Mr Carter is the purser – he didn’t introduce himself – yes.’
    Harper paused in his ministrations and looked around. ‘Clean?’
    â€˜Did you expect anything else?’
    â€˜Not really.’ Harper inspected his completed handiwork: both the visual and olfactory aspects were suitably impressive.
    Harper brought over a low table, reached into an inside pocket, brought out and smoothed two detailed plans and set some photographs down beside them. He tapped one of the plans.
    â€˜This one first. The plan outline of the Lubylan Advanced Research Centre. Know it?’
    Bruno eyed Harper without enthusiasm. ‘I hope that’s the last stupidly unnecessary question you ask this evening.’ Harper assumed the look of a man trying not to look hurt. ‘Before the CIA recruited me for this job – ’
    â€˜How do you know it’s the CIA?’
    Bruno rolled his eyes upwards then clearly opted for restraint. ‘Before the Boy Scouts recruited me for this job they’d have checked every step I’ve taken from the cradle. To your certain knowledge you know I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Crau. How should I not know Lubylan?’
    â€˜Yes. Well. Oddly enough, they do carry out advanced research in Lubylan, most of it, regrettably, associated with chemical warfare, nerve gas and the like.’
    â€˜Regrettably? The United States doesn’t engage in similar research?’
    Harper looked pained. ‘That’s not my province.’
    Bruno said patiently: ‘Look, Doctor, if you can’t trust me how can you expect me to repose implicit trust in you? It is your province and you damned well know it. Remember the Armed Forces courier service at Orly Airport? All the top-secret classified communications between the Pentagon and the American Army in Europe were channelled through there. Remember?’
    â€˜I remember.’
    â€˜Remember a certain Sergeant Johnson? Fellow with the splendidly patriotic Christian names of Robert Lee? Russia’s most successfully planted spy in a generation, passed every US-Europe top military secret to the KGB for God knows how long. Remember?’
    Harper nodded unhappily. ‘I remember.’ Bruno’s briefing was not going exactly as he’d planned it.
    â€˜Then you won’t have forgotten that the Russians published photocopies of one of the top-secret directives that Johnson had stolen. It was the ultimate US contingency plan if the Soviet Union should ever overrun Western Europe. It suggested that in that event the United States intended to devastate the Continent by waging bacteriological, chemical and nuclear warfare: the fact