Free The Partridge Kite by Michael Nicholson

listened to Tom’s taped message at midday. It had been rerouted to the Department through the automatic exchange by the combination of the six numbers Fry had given him to dial. Those six numbers had reversed the Malmö code, and Tom had given his ultimatum to a recording machine on a direct line to an annexe of Kellick’s Department in London, SW1.
    Kellick and Fry had been both pleased and displeased at Tom’s tone. Displeased that he had jumped ahead of their schedule, come to his correct conclusions quicker than they’d anticipated. Pleased because he had obviously taken the bait, had worked through much of the night, was anxious to get on with it.
    The excuses could wait. The most pressing thing now was where to guide Tom next.
    Both men read and re-read the mass of information around them. But the more they read the more convinced they were that the starter clue was to be found elsewhere.
    ‘Sanderson . . . It’s got to be Sanderson!’ Kellick got up and walked to the window and looked down at the tops of die red buses in Victoria Street.
    ‘We could spend weeks, months, looking for the tiniest mistake these people made last Friday and still get nowhere. The computers have already saturated us in data. Do you know, Fry, how many qualified helicopter pilots there are in this country? - assuming that the one who took that bomb to the Temax rig was British anyway.
    ‘And where do we begin to look for 126 gold bars? What part of London, what part of Britain, or Europe? We know we’ll get no help from informers. Except Sanderson himself.’
    For the next three and a half hours Kellick and Fry went over Sanderson’s interview word by word; sometimes playing back the tape, sometimes reading only the transcript. Sometimes, if passages were ambiguous, they would read them out aloud. Fry reading out Sanderson’s replies to Kellick’s repeated questions - both men acting the parts of inquisitor and inquisitioned.
    Somewhere in the forty-seven minutes of tape, somewhere in the nine thousand words of transcript, was the tip-off, deliberate or accidental, that would point the way. They were acting out the interview for the second time when Fry stopped.
    ‘Fascio di Combattimento!’
    ‘What of it?’ Kellick was standing by the window again.
    ‘Sanderson mentioned it. What does it mean?’
    Kellick thought back thirty years. Second class Honours, Politics, Philosophy, Economics. R. Palme Dutt’s Fascism and the Social Revolution, three questions on the same Finals paper.
    ‘It was the beginning of Italian Fascism proper; the new start for Mussolini after the First World War. Early 1919, a confused, chauvinistic, republican, revolutionary-sounding programme - understood by very few at the time including that idiot Mussolini himself. Why do you ask, Fry?’
    There was a mention of it in The Times . . . a letter; the computers dug it up.’
    He picked up a folder and pulled out three sheets of computer typing, two hundred and seventy-eight references to Fascism made in public during the past thirty months. He flipped through the papers, running his finger down the columns.
    ‘Here it is. . . Times, Monday, 5 January.’
    Kellick moved from the window and stood behind Fry who was sitting at the desk with the computer sheets now laid across it.
    ‘Let me read it to you. The first few paragraphs . . . the need to find industrial and social peace . . . permanent solution . . . all of one nation and so on . . . Here’s the bit we want!’
    He quoted: ‘We all appreciate that the future of this country can only be safeguarded by a strong popular government - whether it be this present one, the Opposition or a coalition of the best from all three parties. But we must have strong government soon, for there are men in this country who are at this very moment rejoicing in the disasters we are bringing on ourselves. Men whose strength grows from mass unemployment, strikes, our crippling borrowing and the exacerbation of race