The Alamut Ambush by Anthony Price

to put it on again.
    She looked at him, reading his thoughts. ‘All right, Hugh – Lady Ryle for you both. But don’t think you can pull the wool over Archie’s eyes too easily – he’s good at seeing through phonies.’
    This echoed what Howe had said, Roskill warned himself – and it was substantially his own first impression. Havergal might be full of years and whisky, but he was still as tough as old boots and sharp as the bootmaker’s awl. It would be as well to stay on his good side.
    But the prospect of that dimmed the moment the old man entered the room. Either the check-up had proved unprofitable or it had occasioned second thoughts, for the eye that settled on him was distinctly jaundiced – what it saw it didn’t like. Before such an eye a generation of red-necked British subalterns and raw Arab levies had undoubtedly quailed.
    ‘Good evening again, Colonel Havergal,’ said Roskill carefully. If it was to be war he wasn’t going to fire the first shot.
    Havergal glanced over his shoulder, making sure that Isobel wasn’t behind him – presumably her armour required a moment’s fitting.
    ‘Roskill,’ the Colonel finally acknowledged him, ‘I’ve been talking to Fred Clinton about you.’
    In other circumstances Roskill might have whistled: Havergal had certainly gone straight to the top. Indeed, since Sir Frederick was never available for casual queries, this was an old boys’ network operating at an exalted level. It was disquieting, that.
    ‘Despite your bull-in-a-chinashop tactics, he vouches for you,’ Havergal continued. ‘I took you for a beginner, but it seems you aren’t. It seems I must rely on you.’
    The soft answer died on Roskill’s lips. The only thing that Havergal would ever do with a doormat would be to wipe his feet on it.
    ‘We’re rather in the same boat then,’ he said casually. ‘He said much the same about you. We shall both have to make the best of it — in the national interest.’
    ‘My dear Roskill, that rather depends on how you define the national interest – if there is one in this instance. There was a time when interest and responsibility and honour coincided. Now they don’t often seem to do that.’ Havergal stared at Roskill unwaveringly. ‘In any case, my concern at the moment is with the Foundation — I don’t care to involve myself beyond that.’
    ‘And what exactly is it about the Foundation that disturbs you at the moment, Colonel Havergal?’
    Havergal shook his head. ‘You tell me, Roskill.’
    Roskill considered the Colonel in silence. This was where the man’s full file would have been a godsend – it would have given him some clue as to where leverage might be applied. He hadn’t asked Howe enough questions, not expecting this hostility.
    To Havergal Roskill had signified something he’d been afraid of for a long time …
    … Havergal, who’d retired and been forced to watch his work erased as his country withdrew from the lands it had dominated in his youth. The fact that he liked the Arabs, admiring the uncomplicated simplicity of Islam as so many Englishmen before him had done, only made it worse: the Red Navy ships anchored off Basra and Aden and Alexandria, and the M.I.G.S lined up on the old R.A.F. strips in Egypt, Iraq and now even at Khormaksar, signified that they’d only changed one master for another, and a worse one at that.
    But then he’d encountered the Foundation – something; useful and above board that fitted his personal inclination and his specialist knowledge … something worth living and fighting for.
    Isobel came into the room bearing a coffee tray. Typically, her coffee was not in delicate bone china but in enormous N.A.A.F.I.-style mugs on which Kitchener’s portrait and the legend ‘Your Country Needs You’ was superimposed on a large Union Jack. – ‘I know you’d both rather have Scotch,’ she said in her Lady Ryle voice, ‘but with the way Wadsworth pours drinks I think you’ve both had