The Ipcress File by Len Deighton

Author:Len Deighton [Deighton, Len]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-11-29T11:43:19+00:00

* * *

*See Appendix: Joe One, p. 329.

*Approximately 2,500 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima explosion.

*For details see Appendix, p. 333.

Chapter 19

[Aquarius (Jan 20—Feb 19) People you work with seem to misunderstand your intentions, but don’t brood—look on the cheerful side.]

The heat rocketed back from the burning sand underfoot. The red painted framework of girders that made the shot tower blistered the careless hand. Wriggling away from the legs of the tower, black smooth cables and corrugated pipelines rested along each other like a Chinese apothecary’s box of snakes. Fifty yards away a twenty-foot-high electric fence, circumscribing the tower, was manned by white-helmeted police with panting Alsatian dogs on short leashes. A white amphibious jeep was parked near the only gate, its awning modified to permit the traverse of a half-inch-calibre machine-gun. The driver sat with hands clasped high on the steering-column, his chin resting on the back of his thumb. His helmet liner was painted in lateral black and yellow two-inch stripes to show he had a ‘Q’ permit. He looked like Danny Kaye.

Half a mile away across the flat sand I could see small shimmering black figures adjusting the automatic cameras which at this range could only be preserved by a freak of failure. With a welloiled sound a three-man lift dropped down the tower with the accuracy of a guillotine blade and bobbed gently on its spring cushion. My guide was a small lizard-like civilian with hard, horny hands and face, and the lightest blue eyes I ever saw. His white shirt had small darns such as only a loving wife can do, and only a tight salary bracket make necessary. Across the back of one hand was a faded tattoo, an anchor design from which a name had been erased. The plain gold signet-ring caught the sun through his copious white hair.

‘I’ve got a meter here with mercury in it.’ I tapped the old leather brief-case. ‘It had better not go near the cold box.’ I looked up to where the pipes got thicker and more numerous two or three platforms up. I pointed vaguely. ‘The refrigeration chamber might react.’ I looked up again, and he looked at my badge and read the words, ‘Vickers Armstrong Engineering’. He nodded without much emotion.

‘Don’t let anybody touch it.’ He nodded again as I opened the wire gate of the lift and stepped in. I pulled the little handle and we stood motionless, looking at each other as the motor whirled away its inertia. ‘Down in a minute,’ I said, rather than just stand there dumbly. He nodded his white head slowly and deliberately, as one would to a sub-intelligent child or foreigner, and the lift surged upward. The red girders cut the white hot sand into Mondrian-like shapes moving before me more quickly as the lift gained speed. The wire roof divided the dark-blue sky into a hundred rectangles as the oily steel lift cable passed me on its journey downward. No sooner did the platforms permit me to peek over them than they fell away beneath my feet.

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