The secret servant, p.8
The Secret Servant, page 8
“I don’t know,” Agnes said, “whether I shouldn’t be seen with you or you shouldn’t be seen with me.”
“God knows,” George munched gloomily. “I just can’t tell where we go from here.”
“Do we know where they are?”
“We don’t even know if they’re alive.”
“Oh, come on, now.”
George gave her his sandwiches to hold while he fumbled in an inside pocket and found a crumpled piece of Press Association tape, torn from the machine just outside his room.
She read:
GUN BATTLE IN KENSINGTON
POLICE ARE SEARCHING FOR FOUR MEN AND A WOMAN, TWO OF WHOM MAY BE SERIOUSLY INJURED, AFTER SHOTS WERE FIRED IN STANFORD STREET, KENSINGTON, THIS MORNING. SCOTLAND YARD’S ANTI-TERRORIST SQUAD HAS BEEN ALERTED AND A HUNT HAS STARTED FOR A BLUE SALOON CAR BELIEVED TO BE A DATSUN. WITNESSES FROM AMONG THE SHOPPING CROWD SAID THAT AT LEAST TWO MEN EXCHANGED GUNSHOTS WHEN THE CAR FORCED A TAXI TO STOP. THE DRIVER OF THE TAXI IS BEING TREATED IN HOSPITAL FOR SHOCK BUT IS REPORTED TO BE UNINJURED.
“And that,” George said, “was less than a quarter of a mile from Wing-Commander Neale’s mews.”
“Well, it certainly sounds like our Harry.” Agnes sounded quite happy.
“He was unarmed. I told him he needn’t take a gun.”
“Oh.” She looked back at the tape. “They didn’t find any bodies.”
“They could have been kidnapped, dead or alive. I blame myself. I should have… I don’t know.”
Agnes took the lettuce from her sandwich and tossed it to a passing goose. “If this really was the cads and rotters, they’ve moved very fast and acted very blatantly. Usually they’d wait for months to set it up, then go for something like the cyanide gun or those-”
“I know all that. And it’s just the point: if they’re that desperate, then the girl must have something that really worries them. But now what can we do? We can’t tell the police to start looking for Harry, think where that would land us. And we can’t call your service in because of what the girl said. Not even if you’d got the resources. Get out of the bloody way.” He lunged his umbrella at a duck which was demanding a sandwich with menaces. It fluttered aside, quacking furiously.
“George, you know how compartmentalised we are. You aren’t suggesting all the service goes into neutral just because some little bint – who was a sworn enemy yesterday – says we’ve got one bad ‘un in our mob?”
“I don’t give directives to your service. That’s the Headmaster’s job.”
“Security,” Agnes said doggedly, “is perfection. It’s a picture that never gets finished. You keep putting on a dab of paint here, a dab of paint there and you know it’ll never be perfect but it’s the only picture you’re ever going to get to paint. That’s security work.”
“You’ve said that before,” George said rudely.
“I’ve said it to every bright young thing who joins us from Oxford and Cambridge and expects to make the world safe for democracy by tapping a couple of phones and getting screwed by some lovely big Russians. And none of them listens either.”
George grunted and they walked in silence for a while. Somebody had thrown a deck chair into the lake and a duck was perched on it, as on the topmast of a sunken ship. He pitched the last of his sandwiches at it. “We just have to wait until Harry rings in, if he’s still alive.”
“He’s not going to reach you in the middle of here.”
They turned back towards the modest towers and flagpoles of Whitehall, showing above the skeletal trees.
“One thing you might do,” Agnes said, “is get a police guard on the Wing-Commander. They could think she talked to him.”
“I’ll do that.”
Maxim rang in soon after two o’clock. “We’re in a pub just off the A41.”
“How did you get there?” George demanded.
“Hired a car.”
“Harry, you do know the police are looking for you?”
“I assumed they were. But I also assumed they’d think we’d steal a car rather than hire one. They haven’t got my name, have they?”
“Not from us. All they’ve put out so far is some vague descriptions.” Maxim knew that those things take time: he had spent hours carefully probing at witnesses, trying to work out who was exaggerating, who was really observant, and blending the results to get a likely picture of who had done what. And knowing that the who was using every minute of that time to advantage. Well, now it was his turn.
George said: “They must have a hit team already in this country to get onto you so fast.”
“Not necessarily.” Maxim told him about Zuzana jumping off the night before.
George swore luridly. “And we’re supposed to believe that little bitch when she says that Box 500’s been soured? Don’t stop the next one who tries to bump her off, it could be me.”
“I think she was trying to protect the Wing-Commander’s good name. I don’t imagine they spent the night playing chess.”
“Good name! What did that man do in the Riff-RAF? – command a latrine squadron? He rapes a Bloc agent in Prague, and then…” Maxim held the phone away from his ear while George wound down. A customer on his way to the lavatory gave an odd glance at him and the squawking receiver.
“Anyway, you just stay out of sight and keep in touch.” George finished. “And try and find out all she knows about Box 500. We’ve got our fingers firmly sub judice until then.”
They drove on north-westwards, going nowhere in particular. Maxim’s first instinct had been to head for the nearest London barracks, show his ID and demand sanctuary. There they’d certainly have been safe from any stray baboons, but the duty officer would have been risking his career if he hadn’t reported them to the police the moment there was any suspicion that they were wanted. The Army had to tread very delicately on the toes of the civil power.
For the moment, they really were on their own.
The hired Avenger didn’t have a radio, so he stopped and bought a cheap transistor. As nobody had been killed, they only made fifth place on the three o’clock hit parade, and that only because there had been gunfire. Police were still looking for four men and a woman, two of the men believed to be injured…
So I did hit that second bastard, Maxim thought happily. It had been an awkward shot, left-handed, since the Heckler amp; Koch comes with a thumb-rest for a right-handed shooter.
Oh blast. He should have locked himself in the pub lavatory and checked to see how many cartridges he’d got left.
“Did you recognise any of the baboons?” he asked.
“I did not properly see them.”
“D’you think they were yours or Mother Bear’s?”
“I do not know. Where are we going?”
“Just staying out of London. If I can find a motel, I thought we’d book in there. Is that all right?” He didn’t much like the idea, for more than one reason, but it was the only solution he could think of. They had to get off the road, and they had to start talking – privately.
Zuzana didn’t seem to mind, but: “We have no luggage.” In the scuffle, she’d lost even her airline bag.
“We’ll buy something.” George had suggested that he always carry a wad of cash – at least Ј50 – and now he was glad he’d taken the advice.
The evidence lay spread out across a scrubbed table in a blank back room decorated only with road safety posters. There was a row of little plastic sachets, each holding a single spent cartridge case or used bullet, and tagged to relate it to a point on the sketch maps and photographs of the ‘scene’. Then a larger sachet holding a five-inch kitchen ‘knife smeared with sticky blood. All these were waiting for the afternoon bagman to collect for the Lambeth laboratories.
There was also an airline bag with a shoulder strap, without any name or logo on it. Odd, that. The textured plastic fabric probably wouldn’t take much in the way of fingerprints, but the young detective constable still unzipped the bag very carefully. At the far end of the table, another d. c. waited to list whatever was inside.
“One packet woman’s tights, medium size, unopened. One woman’s night-dress, St. Michael’s brand, cream polyester…” he held it against himself to judge the length.
“It’s definitely you” the other said.
“Say knee length. Worn since washed. One pair green panties, clean, no maker’s label. One bra, size 36A, clean. One blouse, embroidered.” It was very much embroidered, obviously by hand, and looked old and valuable. “Is this silk? Oh, skip it, we’ll get one of the girls to do this stuff.” He felt carefully past the rest of the clothes. “One furry animal toy, not much fur on it now, looks as if the ears have been chewed off.”
“Should I write all that down?”
“And one file holder of typed papers.” He lifted it clear. “In… do you know what language this is?”
The other got up to look. Across the front of the file was stamped in red: TAJNY Then a heading written in ink: VEVERKA and the usual dates and initials that files accumulate.
“I dunno. I’d say Czech or Polish. But I’ll bet that red word means SECRET or something like it.”
Up till then, both of them had assumed that the shooting had been some Arab terrorist affair or a barney between two lots of villians. But now the compass needle had swung around to point in a totally unexpected direction. The file felt hot to the touch.
“This is for SB,” the first d. c. said.
That was pure routine, just as it was for Special Branch to send round for the file the moment they knew it existed. It was also pure routine for them, once they had decided the language was Czechoslovakian, to tell MI5 about it, and for Five to borrow it, since they had immediate translation facilities.
11
The motel had once been yet another famous old coaching inn; perhaps all coaching inns had once been famous. This one had had two rows of stables facing each other across a coach-yard at the back; now one row had become bedrooms, the other lock-up garages. Maxim and Zuzana sat each on a bed and looked at each other.
He felt nervous. It might be his puritan streak, or the memory of Jenny or just that it was a situation forced on him rather than chosen. He had a growing feeling that Zuzana would just as happily have taken a double-bedded room.
Towards the end of his Ј50 he had bought a half-bottle of Scotch and Zuzana seemed willing to share it. All the expenditure – suitcases, whisky, toothbrushes, nightgown – it was going to look Highly Irregular on his Form 1771, and he hoped to hell he’d find somebody prepared to sign it.
They clinked glasses. Maxim sipped, then asked casually: “Was there any particular reason why you chose today – last night – to come over?”
“I had become disgusted with a regime which represses its own citizens but does nothing to eliminate the abuse of power among its leaders.” The statement had a rehearsed ring to it, and it didn’t answer Maxim’s question, but Zuzana seemed to relax once she’d got it said, “Were you going to tell us something about the bears’ contact insecurity?”
“You are sure I will be safe?”
“If you keep telling the truth, yes. You know why they caught us back there?”
“I know, I know.” She flopped back flat on the bed, spilling some of her drink, and talked at the ceiling. “I will tell you about my work. Mostly I did research and keeping the files on your people. They were not so important people, but perhaps they would become important, you understand. They all had animal names: Lisбk, Lasicka, Krtek, Veverka.”
“A real animal farm.”
She didn’t get the joke. “Veverka means squirrel. But his real name was Professor John White Tyler.”
“I see.” Maxim made two long words of them.
She turned her head on the pillow and smiled at him mischievously. “You know him. You went to Warminster with him, but we did not find out why yet.”
“I see,” Maxim said again, feeling a twinge of discomfort. “And you kept the file on him?”
“Yes. I read his books, I cut all the pieces from the newspapers, I read the lectures – oh Mother, how I tried to understand about atomic wars and how they could happen in a thousand ways… And I knew all about the wives and the girls.”
She went back to staring at the rough-plastered ceiling. The whole room was like that, not a straight line or an even surface anywhere, and all painted white that looked grey as the light died outside. Maxim guessed that she felt safer in the gloom.
“He had the first wife when he was still in your Army, after the end of the war. It went only six years, when he went back to Cambridge to work for his doctor of philosophy degree, I think it was. It is in the file. She went to work at the Pye factory while he read his books, she typed his… his thesis. She did everything for him.”
“Did you talk to her?” It seemed very unlikely.
“No. no. For that we had this American boy, he was trying to be a journalist in London, one of our good friends in Italy was pretending to be a publisher, he asked the American to research your Tyler and two others for a book that will be published in Italy. And he was well paid, and of course, he does not read any Italian.”
“Of course,” Maxim agreed softly.
“The second wife, she was an American, she could have been his daughter.” Zuzana sounded rather disgusted. Mrs Tyler Mark II – the one Brock had remembered – had married him at Princeton. Tyler had originally gone over for a sabbatical year, then earned a research grant and stayed on. There he was caught up in that glorious crusade when the academics, led by Herman Kahn and the Rand Corporation, stormed the seedy bastille of nuclear war theory and transformed it into a Camelot of soaring intellectual complexity, all politicians and military men please use the back door only. Those two years changed Tyler’s life, but not his habits. That marriage lasted only five years.
And all the time, during, between and after the marriages, there had been the girls. Virtually as a reflex, the STB had tossed a few of its own sisters in his path, but whether he snapped them up or not hardly mattered. You could no more blackmail Tyler for his sex life than you could next door’s tomcat, because he was no more secretive about it. And as women don’t usually read military studies, you couldn’t even accuse him of seducing his own students, not that Cambridge would have cared anyway. Zuzana was distinctly shocked to learn that.
“So I had all that in the file. And then, then Mother Bear said to work harder on Veverka.”
“When was this?” Maxim offered her the whisky but she shook her head on the pillow.
“It was last year. Before Christmas.”
“Did they say why?”
She looked at him, eyes wide. Silly question: Mother Bear never says why.
“Sorry: but did you know if something had happened about Veverka?”
“He was to become chairman of the defence policy review committee.”
“And you knew this when? Can you remember?”
“It was… about the middle of November.”
That was well before any public announcement.
“And then…?”
“Then they said to work just on Veverka. Just him.”
“You in charge and others working for you?”
She couldn’t hide a quick proud smile.
“Your first real command?” Maxim asked. She didn’t answer, so he rambled on, provoking her to interrupt. “I remember my first command, out in Malaysia – it was still Malaya then. Just twenty-two of them, almost half the platoon was off sick or skiving, and every one of them hadn’t shaved or had got something wrong with his equipment, just to see how I’d take it. You’re told to rely on your sergeant, but-”
“So I worked on Veverka. I worked and worked. I read again all the books, The Gates of the Grave – have you read that? I tried to find the people who were in that, if they are still alive.” She suddenly sat up. “I will have a drink.”
Maxim poured it. They sat facing each other, knees almost touching. “Did you ever meet Tyler himself?”
“I heard him at a lecture in London one time. But they would never let me try to meet him.” She went quiet again, perhaps imagining – Maxim certainly was – the likeliest result of her meeting Tyler. A car’s brakes squeaked in the stableyard, and doors slammed. They listened in secret as new arrivals clumped in next door.
Maxim whispered: “And so you worked on Veverka.”
“It is funny. You say Veverka, I say Veverka, and all the time I know it is Tyler, but when I hear Tyler I think Veverka.”
“Codenames actually work. Sometimes. So…?”
“I tried to find the bears something, to find them anything.” For years Moscow had just dismissed Tyler – publicly – as a normal fascist warmonger. But now they really wanted to nail a handle on him, and Zuzana did her best to find one that would fit. She tried everything, even getting long and contradictory opinions from the best Czech psychiatrists about what made the English ‘Doctor X’ bed as many young girls as they did themselves. It didn’t help. Nothing did. The accounts grew longer but the sum at the bottom stayed a stubborn zero, while Mother Bear got more and more impatient.
“Then one of them, he sent for me and he told me. all the work I had done, I had done nothing. He said nothing. All that work, NOTHING!”
The noises in the next room stopped abruptly. Their secret cocoon shattered, Maxim and Zuzana listened to others listening to what had seemed an empty room.
After a time, somebody beyond the wall moved something cautiously. Life had to go on.
“When was this?” Maxim asked softly.
“It was two days before yesterday. He said they would control the Veverka file themselves now, I would just work for them, a waitress, a messenger, tah.”
“Did they say anything about why they could do better?”
“Oh, the bears know everything.”
“Fine, but did they know anything special?”
“They said there was a letter. An old letter about Veverka, and why had I not found it.”
“Have they got this letter?”
“No. But of course they will get it soon. Of course.” She clearly didn’t believe in the letter at all.
