The Alamut Ambush Read Online Free PDF Page B

crawling about like this. It was no use telling himself that he was a country boy, born and bred, for over recent years he had become half-naturalised into a townsman. Not that this little bit of heath, field and woodland was true countryside; anything close to London as this was little better than the enclosures at Regent’s Park Zoo, open space preserved to give the human animals the illusion of a natural setting.
    He shook his head. If there was nothing left to show that the wires had been deliberately brought down, should he invent evidence to keep Audley happy? It had been what he had originally intended, after all, before the possible truth of it had dawned on him. Yet Audley had taken little convincing; it was almost as though he’d welcomed the idea, despite his previous intransigence. Perhaps deep down he knew that he wasn’t quite big enough to turn Llewelyn away.
    Or perhaps it was simply that the logic of Roskill’s solution made such crude proof unnecessary. It was there in the events themselves: every step of the car theft and booby-trapping had been marked by the same contradictory cleverness and stupidity. But the cleverness and the stupidity had both been carefully calculated to lead directly to the removal of the fatal bug by an expert – and by one expert in particular.
    The Jenkins Gambit, Audley had called it: the best way to kill a food taster is by poisoning his master’s dish — it looks like an occupational hazard !
    And it had so very nearly worked, too. With someone as important as Llewelyn menaced, Jenkins was almost certain to be overlooked. The assassins could not reasonably have expected anyone like Roskill, with a personal commitment to sharpen his perception, to appear on the scene – and even he had only stumbled on the more likely truth by accident.
    The only real flaw in their planning was the telephone wire: the coincidence that had alerted Roskill. They should have waited until Jenkins came on duty by normal routine — unless for some reason they were unable to wait, in which case it was not a flaw, but a calculated risk…
    At least finding the place had been easy enough. Although the repair men had worked on the other side of the hedge their vehicles had chewed up the roadside verge, deeply rutting the debris of the previous summer. He had had no difficulty spotting it on his early morning reconnaissance drive along the road, in the half-light.
    The tree itself, contrary to Butler’s report, had not come down – it merely leaned drunkenly away from the road, ten degrees out of true. The damage had been done by a huge dead limb which appeared to have snapped off two-thirds of the way up. Falling in the field it had brought down Maitland’s wires and conveniently left the main cable intact.
    Roskill squelched his way over the ruined verge. The elm had grown up on the far side of a deep roadside ditch; with its one-sided root system – he could see the stumps of roots which had been severed when the ditch had last been cleaned out – it was hardly surprising that it had started to fall away from the road. Elms, he remembered, were notoriously unstable at the best of times.
    He peered up at the new scar high up on the trunk where the limb had been ripped away. There were no signs of saw marks, nor any tell-tale sawdust scattering at the base either. It looked depressingly like a natural break, the result of the extra pressure when the tree canted over.
    Not for the first time he felt a touch of doubt chilling his beautiful theory. It would be damned embarrassing if he was forced to double-cross Audley into making a fool of Llewelyn. Worse, if Jenkins wasn’t the target it was Audley who would be made to look the fool, and Audley would be a nasty enemy to make in the department.
    He launched himself clumsily across the ditch, throwing his weight forward and embracing the elm as the soft earth crumbled under him.
    The grass on the other side of the hedge was also torn and