Free The Alamut Ambush by Anthony Price

already – and the middle against each end, too. And. God only knew what Audley and Llewelyn and Stocker were really up to.
    ‘Talking of contacts, Squadron Leader Roskill, I think you’ve one exceedingly useful one of which you may not be aware,’ said Cox. ‘The Ryle Foundation.’
    The Ryle – ‘ A moment earlier Roskill had been halfway to telling himself that at least there could hardly be any more unpleasant surprises ahead, but evidently there was no limit to them.
    ‘The Ryle Foundation?’ He heard his own voice echo Cox uncertainly.
    ‘I believe you know Lady Ryle quite well,’ said Cox. ‘And Sir John Ryle.’
    ‘I know the Ryles, yes.’ The voice sounded more like his own this time, no matter how he felt inside. ‘But I’ve never had anything to do with the Foundation – and I don’t think the Ryles have either.’ But obviously they did; or one of them did. He couldn’t even remember whether it was relief or education or both, for the life of him. ‘But Lady Ryle does a lot of charity committee work,’ he concluded cautiously.
    ‘She’s an honorary life vice-president, as a matter of fact. And she’s on the educational grants sub-committee.’ Cox sounded as though he had expected Roskill to know much better what Lady Ryle did or did not do.
    Education rang a bell. Old man Ryle – or was it the grandfather? – had robbed the Persian Gulf blind in the days when anything within range of a British gunboat was fair game for British mercantile enterprise. And then in a fit of conscience had divided his loot in half, one to buy the family into respectability and one to bring the blessings of education to the Arab world.
    It was coming back now, a word here and a sentence there. Grandfather Ryle had been in on the ground floor in oil. But when he’d sold out he’d wrapped the share he gave back to the Arabs so tight there’d never been a breath of either scandal or do-gooding inefficiency about his Foundation; it had been constructed to show solid annual profits in terms of S.R.N.s and agricultural diplomas. No bloody arts and crafts for granddad – the words had been John’s. He remembered them quite clearly now.
    ‘You’re not going to tell me that there’s anything subversive about the Foundation, for God’s sake?’ Roskill came out of his nose-dive and climbed to counter-attack. ‘It’s as solid as UNESCO – probably a damn sight solider in terms of secure finance.’
    ‘You do know something about the Ryle Foundation then?’
    Roskill gestured vaguely. ‘Second-hand stuff – I remember the Ryles talking about it now. They said – ‘
    The penny dropped. Butler had said as much the night before: They know you got Jenkins in … and Audley likes you … but I think there’s something else behind that too … His connection with the Ryles had been the clincher: what they knew about that – the thought that they knew anything – made his flesh creep. But that wouldn’t be what interested them now: there must be something very wrong with the Foundation, whatever its appearance of respectability might be.
    ‘What did they say?’ Cox prompted.
    Jenkins and Audley and the Ryles, thought Roskill bitterly: no wonder they’d changed their own rules to recruit him! What would have trebly disqualified him under normal circumstances made him the ideal candidate with time pressing them so hard. No time to plant a professional carefully and painstakingly in the Foundation; they needed someone with a ready-made introduction to it. And in him they had the one with the other – the sinking feeling in his stomach told him they knew it, too …
    ‘What’s wrong with the Ryle Foundation?’ he asked harshly.
    Cox looked to Llewelyn.
    ‘I know some of your Arab specialists think the Foundation’s clean,’ he began.
    ‘Elliott Wilkinson swears it is, and he works for them,’ said Llewelyn.
    Audley snorted derisively.
    ‘Well, I don’t agree with them,’ said Cox bluntly. ‘If