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THE JUDAS CODE
Derek Lambert
COPYRIGHT
Collins Crime Club
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1983
Copyright © Derek Lambert 1983
Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008268442
Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008268435
Version: 2017-12-20
DEDICATION
For Len and Dorothy Wellfare
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Encoding
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Four
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Five
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part Six
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Decoding
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It should not be forgotten that this is a novel. But nor should it be forgotten that it concerns an established and bewildering fact: that, despite all the evidence, Joseph Stalin refused to believe that Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. If he had heeded the warnings – and there were many – two tyrannies might have remained relatively unscathed and the world today might have been a very different place. With such a momentous fact as the pivot of a novel it soon becomes easy to believe that the accompanying material is also true. Who knows, perhaps it is.
And what of Stalin? How was he reacting to the fact that almost the entire German army was on his doorstep? Incredibly, he appeared to ignore it. Was he the victim of some kind of hysteria that deprived him of the ability to act? Or were there other powerful reasons for not acting – reasons known only to him? – Russia Besieged by Nicholas Bethell and the editors of Time-Life Books
Despite all the indications that war with Germany was approaching neither the Soviet people nor the Red Army were expecting the German attack when it came … History of World War II, editor-in-chief A.J.P. Taylor
Never had a state been better informed than Russia about the aggressive intent of another … But never had an army been so ill-prepared to meet the initial onslaught of its enemy than the Red Army on June 22, 1941. The History of World War II, by Lt. Col. E. Bauer
It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty and hard-headed, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not realise right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force which would almost destroy their nation. – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer
ENCODING
My advertisement in the personal columns of The Times read: ‘Would anyone with the key to the Judas Code please contact me.’ The response was prompt: at nine a.m. on the day of publication a man called at my London home and threatened to kill me.
The threat wasn’t immediate but as soon as I saw him on the doorstep smiling and tapping a copy of the newspaper with one finger I sensed menace.
He was in his sixties with wings of silver hair just touching his ears and what looked like the scar from a bullet wound on his right cheek; he wore a light navy blue topcoat with a velvet collar and carried a furled umbrella; the elegance and the legacy of violence combined to give the impression of a commando who had retired to the City.
‘Your request interested me’, he said. ‘May I come in?’
Wishing that I hadn’t unlocked the ground-floor door by remote control and allowed him to reach my apartment on the top floor of the old block near Broadcasting House, I said: ‘It is rather early. Perhaps—’
‘Nine o’clock? You look pretty wide awake, Mr. Lamont, and I won’t take up much of your time.’ He took a step forward.
‘Before we go any further, Mr. …’
‘Chambers.’
‘Do you mind telling me how you found out where I live? I only gave a telephone number …’
‘It’s not so difficult to obtain an address from a telephone number. If you know how to go about it, that is.’
‘And my name?’
‘The same source. Now if you would be good enough …’
‘To step aside? I don’t think I would, Mr. Chambers. Perhaps you would be good enough to telephone me to make an appointment.’
‘Aren’t you being a little formal for someone as obviously enterprising as yourself?’ He tucked The Times beneath his arm on his umbrella side.
‘I’ve always been a stickler for protocol.’
‘Really? You surprise me. I had heard quite the opposite.’ His voice frosted. ‘Let me in, Mr. Lamont.’
‘Get stuffed,’ I said, terminating my brief relationship with protocol.
He, too, abandoned niceties. He levelled a Browning 9mm automatic at my chest and said: ‘Don’t try slamming the door. It’s only in Hollywood that wood panels stop bullets. Now turn round and go inside.’ The door clicked snugly behind me. ‘That’s better,’ he said as we entered the living-room. ‘Now sit down in that easy chair beside the fireplace.’
I sat down, feeling slightly absurd in my red silk dressing gown, rumpled blue pyjamas and leather slippers savaged by a friend’s dog, and waited. Chambers sat opposite me and appraised the room – the books scattered across the worn carpet, bottle of Black Label and its partner, an empty glass, punished leather sofa, windows looking across the rooftops to the pale green trees of Regent’s Park. In short, fading elegance; in fact, the workshop of an author who commuted to a house in Surrey where his wife and children lived.
Having completed his inventory, Chambers waved the gun and said: ‘Do I really have to go on pointing this at you? I know I’m much older than you. Forty-five aren’t you?’ – I was forty-four – ‘But I think I’d get the better of you in physical combat, and I’m not just being conceited.’
He could well have been right. Anyway I told him to put down his gun and tell me what he wanted. There was always the possibility that I might be able to surprise him later.
He stood up and slipped off the topcoat. Underneath he wore a charcoal grey pin-stripe with a waistcoat and a gold watch-chain with a seal fob looped across it. He slipped the Browning inside the jacket without spoiling its shape and sat down again. ‘And now,’ he said pleasantly, ‘tell me why you want to know about the Judas Code,’ one finger straying to his cheek; the bullet must have taken a lot of bone with it because the scar was almost a furrow.
‘You must have guessed that – I’m writing a book.’
‘The Judas Code … a good title. Why did you choose it?’
‘I didn’t: it was unavoidable. Kept cropping up while I was researching a book about the last war. I wanted to know why Stalin ignored all the warnings that Germany intended to invade Russia in 1941.’
‘That’s simple. The warnings came from Churchill and Roosevelt and other interested parties and he interpreted them as mischief-making. Most accounts of World War II have made that quite clear.’
‘But it doesn’t wash, does it? He also ignored warnings from his own spies. Richard Sorge in Tokyo, for instance. And the evidence before his own generals’ eyes – the build-up of the German army on his borders.’
‘And why are you, a novelist, so anxious to put the record straight?’
‘Three reasons. One, because I abhor flawed logic. Any history student who suggested in an exam that Uncle Joe misread Hitler’s intentions just because he thought the Allies were deceiving him would deserve to get C minus.
‘Two, because if Stalin had got it right then you’d have to re-draw today’s maps of the world. If, for instance, Germany and Russia had persevered with their unholy alliance, if their armies hadn’t bled each other for more than three years, then Britain might be a Nazi or a Soviet satellite.’
Chambers took a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket, on the other side from the Browning. He didn’t offer it to me – perhaps he even knew I’d given up smoking – and selected a cigarette. He lit it with a gold Dunhill lighter and inhaled with pleasure. A true smoker, not a chain-smoker. ‘And the third?’
‘Because it’s my guess that the real reasons behind Stalin’s apparent stupidity will make a better story than any novel I’ve written.’
‘I see.’ He blew a jet of smoke into a shaft of dusty sunlight. ‘Yes, I can see that.’ His voice had assumed an introspective quality and I wondered if I could jump him. I had never been an athlete, let alone a fighter, but I was big enough and fairly fit. He said crisply: ‘Don’t try it,’ followed by: ‘But you haven’t explained about the Judas Code.’
‘Why don’t you explain it? It seems to have worried the hell out of you.’
‘Because I have the gun,’ slipping his hand inside his jacket. I told him.
To try and plug the gap in appraisals of World War II caused by Stalin’s apparent aberration I had travelled all over Europe winkling out people who might once have had access to secret information that could explain it. Spies in other words; among them former members of Britain’s XX Committee, various branches of America’s OSS, Germany’s RSHA VI (foreign intelligence) and Abwehr and the Soviet Union’s two European espionage organisations known as the Red Orchestra and the Lucy Ring.
Predictably, most of the agents denied that they had ever been spies. Who wants to admit to a furtive past if he is currently a burgormaster or the chairman of a bank? But a few, mostly the very old whose cloaks of secrecy were now in tatters, did agree that the history books should be rewritten. Watching their reactions to my questions was like peering into coffins and seeing corpses momentarily resuscitated. From each coffin came a dusty whisper: ‘The Judas Code.’ No more. Ageing reflexes belatedly recognised indiscretion, coffin lids snapped back into place.
Chambers seemed to relax, relieved, I guessed, that I appeared to know nothing more. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I should forget all about it.’ He crossed his legs, revealing black silk socks.
‘Why? It was important enough to bring you round here like a dog after a bitch on heat.’
‘There are some secrets that are best left undisturbed. For everyone’s sake.’
‘You would have to be more explicit than that to convince me.’
He was about to reply when the phone on the coffee table between us rang, as intrusive as a fire alarm. I reached for the receiver but Chambers beat me to it.
He gave the telephone number, paused and said: ‘Yes, I inserted the advertisement. Can you help me?’
As I tried to snatch the receiver Chambers backed away and, with a pickpocket’s agility, plucked the Browning from his pocket and aimed the barrel between my eyes.
‘… Yes, my name is Lamont. Can we meet somewhere? … Very well, midday … Yes, I’ll explain then … Thank you for calling …’
‘So where are we meeting?’ I asked as he sat down again.
‘You are not meeting anyone.’
‘Are you in the habit of impersonating people?’
‘Not recently. In the past, well yes, it has been known.’ He handled the gun with love, then asked: ‘Do you have a price?’
‘They say everyone does.’
‘What’s yours?’
‘A niche at the top of the best-seller list.’
‘Alas the one bribe I can’t offer you because if The Judas Code achieved that distinction it would negate everything I have set out to achieve.’
‘Which is?’
‘To persuade you to abandon your inquiries.’
‘And why would you want to do that?’
‘I can’t tell you that. Would £10,000 persuade you that I had good reasons?’
I shook my head.
‘Twenty thousand?’
‘I’m going to write the book.’
He stubbed out his cigarette fastidiously, making sure he didn’t soil his fingers with tar, and stared at me without speaking. In the hall the grandfather clock chimed 9. 30; a pigeon on the windowsill pecked at the glass; I became aware of the hum of the traffic far below.
Finally he said: ‘If you continue to follow this up I shall kill you.’
He took a gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it as though shortly he had another appointment to threaten someone with death.
‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said.
‘Please do so,’ he said. ‘But have the courtesy to wait till I’ve gone.’ He stood up, walked to the window and gazed at the dignified streets below. ‘You have a wife and three children, I believe?’
‘You keep them out of this!’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t touch them. But they’re very fond of you, aren’t they? Would it be fair to deprive your wife of a husband, your children of a father? Because, please believe me, Mr Lamont, I mean what I say. Try and crack the Judas Code and you’re a dead man.’
Throat pulsing, the pigeon backed away along the windowsill.
Perhaps I should have said: ‘I don’t scare that easily,’ but it wouldn’t have been the truth. Instead I said: ‘All right, you’ve had your say, now get out.’
He shrugged, buttoned his overcoat, walked to the door, said: ‘Please be sensible,’ and was gone.
I considered calling the police but even if they traced my visitor - I doubted whether his name was Chambers but he couldn’t escape the scar – he would merely deny everything.
As I was making a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen the phone rang again.
A man’s voice: ‘If you want to meet Judas go to the lion house at the Zoo at eleven this morning. Be carrying a copy of—’
‘The Times?’
‘The Telegraph. And appear to be making some notes.’ Click as he cut the connection.
So I had more than an hour. I shaved and dressed in a blue lightweight and took the antiquated lift to the ground floor where the porter, Mr. Atkins – I had never known his first name – had stood guard ever since I had come to the musty old block ten years ago. He was as permanent as the stone horsemen on the portals and just as worn.
‘Good morning, Mr. Atkins.’
‘Good morning, Mr. Lamont. Fair to middling this morning.’
I don’t think he ever left the hallway because the weather was ‘fair to middling’ even if a blizzard was raging outside.
I walked up Portland Place towards Regent’s Park. An April shower had washed the street, the sun was warm, pretty girls had blossomed overnight. A chic woman in grey waited patiently while her poodle watered a lamp-post; a man in a bowler-hat carrying a briefcase danced down a flight of steps; a nun smiled shyly from beneath her halo; an airliner chalked a white line across the blue sky.
Faced by all this, Chambers’ lingering menace dissolved; the gun probably hadn’t been loaded anyway.
I crossed Marylebone Road and the Outer Circle, Nash terraces behind me benign in the sunlight, and walked down the Broad Walk between the chestnut trees.
Nursemaids were abroad with prams and for a moment I imagined them steering them towards clandestine meetings with red-coated soldiers.
And that scar—he had probably fallen on to the railings at school.
Inside the lion house my mood changed. The big cats hopelessly padding up and down their cages, their prison smelling like sour beer. I displayed the Telegraph, took out a notebook and began to make notes. Lions watching the spectators brought there for their delectation …
The young man in the fawn raincoat said: ‘I’m afraid you won’t meet Judas here.’ His voice and dress were irrefutably English but there was a Slavonic cast to his features; he had grey, questing eyes and was, I guessed, in his late twenties. ‘You see you’ve been followed.’
My earlier optimism was routed. A lion bared yellow teeth behind its bars; captivity tightened around me.
‘Who are you?’
‘That doesn’t matter. Just an intermediary. We had to do it this way otherwise …’ He shrugged. ‘… you would never have got your story.’
‘How did you know I wanted a story?’
Without answering, he took my arm. ‘Let’s get out of here, I can’t stand jails. But before you go take a look at the man in the sports jacket with the patched elbows looking at the tigers.’
Casually I glanced towards the tiger cage. The man in question seemed absorbed with the occupant; he was squat, balding, powerfully built, about the same age as Chambers.
We left the cats dreaming about wide open spaces and returned to the sunlight.
‘And now,’ he said as we walked past a polar bear sunning itself beside its pool, ‘I have another assignation for you. But first you’ll have to shake off your tail and make sure that he hasn’t got a back-up.’
I stopped and gazed at the bear, glancing at the same time to my right. The man in the sports jacket was standing about seventy-five yards away consulting a hardbook.
We walked on. ‘One more word of advice,’ he said, ‘don’t use your telephone on Judas business – it’s bound to be bugged. That wasn’t you who answered the phone the first time, was it?’
‘It was a man who says his name is Chambers.’
‘We thought as much. It was he who hired the private detective who’s following us.’
‘Do you mind telling me what this is all about?’
‘I can’t; Judas can.’
‘And when am I going to meet Judas?’
‘Soon. But, first of all, do you mind telling me just how you intend to use any information you might get hold of?’
‘Write a book. You seemed to know that.’
‘We’ve known about you for a long time, Mr. Lamont. Ever since you started making inquiries. We’ve checked you out and you seem to be an author of integrity …’
‘Don’t forget I write novels. In my particular field it pays to be sensational.’
‘At least you’re being honest. That’s what I want to establish – before you meet Judas – that your book will be honest.’
‘I can give you this assurance: I want to write a book that puts the record straight about the second world war. Our civilisation is shaky enough without being saddled with false premises. There was, for instance, no way Britain could have stood alone in 1940–41 unless something occurred behind the scenes that we know nothing about. The Battle of Britain was a famous victory but it wasn’t sufficient to deter Hitler from calling off the invasion. There was something more behind that decision, just as there was something more behind Stalin’s refusal to believe that Germany was going to attack Russia. Stalin, after all, was a very wily Georgian …’
‘And you’ll stick to the truth? If, that is, you believe what you’re told?’
‘As I said, I’m a novelist. I may use the fictional form to mould the facts into a digestible composition. But, yes, I’ll stick to what I learn. If and when I learn it.’
A flock of schoolchildren shepherded by a harassed woman in brogues passed by, watched from aloft by a giraffe. I turned, ostensibly to watch the children, and spotted the man in the sports jacket.
The young man seemed to accept my assurance. He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘I wonder,’ he said, slowing down as though he was about to break away, ‘if you realise just what you’re getting into.’
‘When you’re forced into your own flat at gunpoint you get the general idea.’
‘He wasn’t play-acting, you know.’
‘The gun didn’t look like a prop.’
‘Well, so long as you understand …’
I said impatiently: ‘Where can I meet Judas, for God’s sake?’
‘It’s 11.30 now. At Madame Tussaud’s in one hour.’
‘Where at Madame Tussaud’s?’
‘Beside the figure of Winston Churchill.’ Where else? his tone seemed to say. ‘Good luck, I’ll take care of our friend. But it will only be a temporary measure, so take care.’
He turned abruptly and hurried away – straight into the man in the sports jacket. The man fell. I raced past a line of cages and, while the two men untangled themselves, took refuge in Lord Snowdon’s aviary, watched incuriously by a blue and red parrot. There was no sign of the man in the sports jacket.
I emerged cautiously from the aviary and, leaving the jungle squawks behind, made my way to the zoo’s exit. At Camden Town I took an underground train to King’s Cross on the Northern Line and changed on to the Circle Line, alighting at Baker Street.
At 12.25 I entered Madame Tussaud’s Waxwork Exhibition and made my way into the Grand Hall on the ground floor. Churchill, hands clasping the lapels of his suit, chin thrust out belligerently above his bow tie, seemed about to speak. To offer, perhaps, nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’.
It was exactly 12.30. The voice behind me said: ‘He could tell the story much better than I can. But I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me.’
I turned and came face to face with Judas.
