Chapter 58: Hospital Visit

Harry sat on the hillside munching on a ham roll. To anyone passing by we looked like a couple of back packers out for a hike. Harry put down his food and picked up the binoculars. The grounds of the hospital lay almost directly below us, clearly visible through a gap in the pine trees. He seemed remarkably relaxed given the strength of the telephone call he'd had with Elly. At one point he'd been holding the phone a foot from his ear. In the end though she'd been content to let Harry get on with it.

"She's done this stuff," Harry had said. "She knows you can't cover every base although she did suggest that we might have guessed something was wrong from the debacle at Marchmont Hall, which is fair enough."

"How's Freddie," I said. "He didn't seem himself when we all got together last week."

"Bogged down in admin and irrelevancies as he calls it. He's got some problems with one of the other businesses which he can't hand off. They've kept him out of touch with our stuff and he doesn't like it. Talking to Elly, he'd much rather be out on operations or running a few accounts."

Harry swept the binoculars across the view before bringing them back to the hospital. "Yepp, he'd much rather be here. That," he said, "is what I'm interested in." He passed the binoculars to me and gestured to a small outbuilding about 50 metres from the main hospital block.

I looked myself. There didn't seem to be anything to distinguish it from any of the other half dozen or so buildings around the complex. "I'm not sure what I'm looking for," I said handing the binoculars back.

"It's in the right place," said Harry taking them and peering down again. "The lads have scoped it out and its definitely being used for something illegitimate. It's what we'd use but we need a better indication than ... Hang on." He sat up still looking through the binoculars. I could see a figure moving across the yard between the hospital and the outbuilding. The figure was a woman, I could tell that much from where I was. All in white, presumably one of the nurses. She looked as if she was carrying something. She stopped at the door and after a short pause went in. "That's good enough for me," said Harry. "That's where we'll find her ladyship."

"Harry," I said, "I'm happy to bow to your judgement but I imagine there plenty of nurses going backwards and forwards between the hospital and the other buildings."

"You didn't see it, did you? Before she went in?"

"I saw she stopped but that's about it. You're the one with the binoculars."

"Well, it was a nurse all right. Carrying a tray with a meal on it."

"It's lunch time, Harry."

"Sure, but why do you suppose she stopped to put her mask on before she went into the building?" I saw what he meant.

The worst possible thing if you are running an operation like the Hospital, or the Prep Centre come to that, is to get locked in to too much of a routine. But I guess with the Swiss, clockwork is what you'd expect. Every two hours a nurse would come across to the outbuilding and put on her mask and go through the door. A few minutes later another one would leave. They were on turn and turn about. Nobody else seemed ot be taking much interest. It didn't take too much thought to work out how we were going to get in.

There was Harry, two heavies and me. We waited until dusk. One of the heavies, grabbed the nurse as she opened the door. The other was through the door ready to deal with the nurse that was already inside. By the time I'd followed Harry through the door. One nurse was struggling in the arms of the first heavy, trying to breath with one of his arms locked around her chest and one hand across her mouth. The other, sitting beside her captive's bed, still wearing her medical mask, was staring at the barrel of our other heavy's pistol.

Angela Marchmont was on the bed, swathed from head to foot in bandages like an Egyptian mummy she couldn't move but she was able to see what was happening and put up a spirited mmmphing of welcome from behind the strapping that covered her mouth. Harry walked across to her. "We'll soon have you out of here, your Ladyship," he said. You could see the relief in her eyes. It was a shame that her rescue wasn't going to turn out quite like she was expecting.

We tied the two nurses up, gagged them, and dumped them on the bed. That's the great thing about hospitals, plenty of bandages and sticky tape around the place. They were wriggling and squealing quite a bit but I guess that was as much because of what their paymasters would be saying to them later when they found that her Ladyship was missing. We lifted Lady M onto a wheeled trolley and got her out of the building. Her captors might have been efficient at collecting her but security around the hospital was rotten. Two others of our team drove an ambulance in and around to where we were. We loaded her up and were on our way in moments. Nobody seemed bothered. Lady M seemed to think we should be letting her out of her bandages. We weren't convinced that was of any value. She started struggling around where she was laid out on the bench of the ambulance. Harry slipped a hypodermic needle into her arm and gave her a shot of sedative. It calmed her down quite quickly. Now we just had to get her back to the UK.

We got as far as the airport. We had a DH104 Dove waiting for us, one of the old Flying Doctor aircraft, ancient but robust. Harry drove the ambulance into the hangar. As he and I got out, pistol shots rang out, flattening the ambulance's tyres. Four heavies emerged from behind the Dove. They seemed to be encouraging us to surrender our cargo. I could see that Harry was sizing up the options. I'm no professional but none of them looked good to me.

Then I heard Freddie's voice ring out. "I'm not sure that you have this situation quite as much under control as you think, Constanza."

A dark haired woman emerged from the Dove, clutching one of Harry's operatives against her as a shield and holding a gun to her head.

"I think we both need to sit down and have a talk." I followed the sound of Freddie's voice. He was standing on a gantry at the end of the hangar with three of our heavies all armed with machine pistols and another woman held at gunpoint. "It's really not a great idea if we let off firearms with all this aviation fuel around and I think we both might end up losing more than we gain."

"Can I trust you, Clegg?" the woman from the plane called.