The Westminster Disaster by Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle

Author:Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle [Hoyle, Fred & Hoyle, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF Thriller
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1980-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

London, 8 a.m,

Sunion Webb was in a bright, energetic mood. Having made his contact successfully with Hermann Kapp on the previous evening, he was determined to make a successful showing of the rest of the operation. He took breakfast at 7.30 a.m. in the hotel dining room, at which hour there were quite a few tourists around, but fortunately not the kind of people who might recognize him. Then he checked out. paying his bill at the cashier’s grille. Carrying the same bag he had used in Moscow, he walked the short distance to the Marble Arch station and took the underground to Gloucester Road. By 8.25 a.m. he was at 17A Courtlane Mews to find the elderly couple with their bags packed. The couple left shortly after his arrival, and Sunion Webb saw them off at the door, expressing his hope that the weather would be fine for their holiday. All very smoothly done, he thought. Then he went through into the kitchen quarters to check that the house was amply provisioned. There was a good store of bread and cakes, tea and coffee, eggs and milk, but he could find no meat. This had seemed a nuisance until he remembered seeing a freezer in the workshop. So he went down to the basement, stumbling about a little until he found the electric light switches. To his satisfaction there was a more-than-ample supply of meat in the freezer, and also to his satisfaction he noticed the second briefcase which the grey-haired caretaker had brought from King’s Cross on the previous day. He opened up the briefcase, finding there a flat, yellow-packaged, heavy object similar to the one in the briefcase which he himself had brought from the Libyan Embassy. Sunion Webb felt he had come a long way since his meeting only a few days earlier with Igor Markov in Babushkin, indeed a long way since his contact with Hermann Kapp on the boat in Amsterdam.

Sitting beside the briefcase he also found an unstamped typed letter addressed to himself. He read the contents, which were quite extensive, with great interest. As he returned upstairs he found himself a little overwhelmed at the subtlety of it all. This last detail was a real gem which no ponderous bourgeois society could possibly have imagined. Webb found himself even in some awe at this further indication of the profound intellectual quality of those who were standing behind him in this enterprise. It gave him an added surge of confidence.

Hermann Kapp, Al Simmonds, Abu l’Weifa, and Anna Morgue checked separately and at different times out of the Cumberland Hotel, and they made their way separately to 17A Courtlane Mews. Although they moved separately, their thoughts as they walked the last quarter of a mile to the house were the same. The whole district was thronged with a motley and polyglot crowd of people amongst whom they themselves must look very nondescript.

Anna Morgue was the last to arrive, for the good reason that she

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