by Gavin Lyall
"Sit down, Major." Neale indicated just which chair. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"If it's going, sir," A silly answer since it was already waiting: plain white bone china pot, two cups, two colours of sugar. It belonged with the fresh paint outside, the precisely arranged little seascapes and brass ornaments around him now. A whisper of money, but money carefully spent. The Wing-Commander was divorced, and there would be a home in his constituency to keep up, and with no grace and favour directorships in the city, there might not be all that much to spend.
"What did Harbinger tell you?" Neale asked briskly.
"Just that you wanted to see me and that it was confidential," Neale grunted. "That's about all I said to him but I expect he dressed it up a bit. He comes of a good family, but I sometimes wonder if he takes his job seriously enough. Well…" he passed Maxim a cup; "… as you may know, one of my interests is tourism. I'm on the Authority board and I chair the House committee on tourism. A couple of years ago I was with a delegation to Prague, promoting Britain, you understand, and I met… a young lady." A slight hesitation, a careful choosing of words.
"She worked for Cedok, their tourist bureau," Neale went on. "Usually she was stationed in London, but she'd come back especially for our visit, partly as an interpreter."
"Yes," Maxim said, in a voice so flat and dull that Neale looked at him sharply.
"I'm not entirely a bloody fool, you know. Major. All Czechs abroad are working for their government, even if they're not actually members of the STB. I assumed that from the start."
Start of what? Oh God, has a British MP been leaping into bed with a Cezech agent, in Prague itself, with full sound and camera coverage, son et lumiиreas the professionals say?
"Her name is Zuzana Kindl." Neale folded his face into a cool smile. "And I was quite right: she was working for the STB itself. But now she wants to come over, to defect to us." He took a large mouthful of coffee and watched Maxim carefully.
There was something he hadn't said, yet. An ace up the sleeve.
"When did she get in touch with you?" Maxim asked.
"This morning. At about nine o'clock."
"Has she actually jumped off? Committed herself?"
"Yes, Major."
"Do you know where she is?" Then suddenly he realised. "She's here?"
"Yes."
Maxim sat back in the dainty little chair. "Well… thank you for telling us. I'll ring George and he'll pass it on to Security, and they'll-"
"No." A simple word of command. "One thing Miss Kindl told me was that the Soviets, not her people but the KGB itself, have got a line into our own security service. That was why I called you in." He looked satisfied; he had played his ace and won.
Maxim took his time thinking it out. Then: "Did you learn what sort of work she was doing for the Czechs?"
"Well, I don't think she was exactly a top-level agent. I'd say she worked mostly on research, background research."
No mention of any bed-and-breakfast work, setting up ex-military members of parliament for possible blackmail. But maybe this time a fairy godmother had got her spell right. Victim recruits agent. Love makes the world go backwards.
"Would you mind if I had a word with Miss Kindl before I ring Number 10?"
"I'll ask her to come down."
Zuzana Kindl was around thirty years old, on the short side and with a full cottage-loaf figure and a perky, pleasant face. There was something immediately sexy about her, but it was country sex, not city. Her dark hair was cut short and straight and she wore very simple clothes: a blouse with a shirt neck, full calf-length skirt, a single gold chain around her neck.
They shook hands formally. "I have heard of you," she said. "The major who goes to advise the Prime Minister. We wondered what it was about."
"If you ever find out, let me know as well, will you?"
She smiled briefly. Her face looked as if it should have more colour in it; her big dark eyes were restless and one hand plucked and twisted at the fold of her skirt.
They sat down, and Neale went to get more coffee.
Keeping his voice low in that tiny house, Maxim asked: "Will your service know you've gone by now?"
"Yes. Yes, they must believe it."
"When would they have known?"
"Oh… I think-" she looked at a large plain wrist watch; "-I think at perhaps nine-thirty."
About two hours ago. There would be a standard procedure for defections, but how much of it could swing into operation in two hours? For all that, the gallant Wing-Commander had given them those hours and denied them to his own side.
"Does your service know about Wing-Commander Neale?"
She blinked and hesitated, not looking at him.
"I have to know. You must tell me the truth."
"Yes. Yes, they know."
"And do you keep any tame baboons in this country?"
"What baboons?"
"Tough guys, thugs, hit men-"
"Oh yes. No. For such affairs they would bring in a team."
That was certainly standard procedure. Then if a baboon got caught with a dripping knife, there was no traceable connection with the resident service in this country.
"Will they bring them in?"
"I do not… they would not usually, but now – yes, I think." She shivered.
"Why this time?"
"Because they are worried about Mother Bear."
"About who? Ah, I see." The Czech secret service had long experience and a high reputation, but there were strings attached – and Moscow Centre held the far end of those strings.
"Is there any special reason why the bears should be angry about you?"
"I will tell you everything, everything I know!" she suddenly burst out. "But please, are you going to let me stay and be safe?"
"Stay where? Here?" Maxim was puzzled.
"In England."
"Good God, yes. Of course." It hadn't occurred to him that she might believe they could send her back, to a certain and imaginative death.
Hearing her raised voice, Neale came back and stood behind her chair, looking sternly at Maxim.
He got up. "Can I use your phone, sir?"
"The bloody woman could just be spreading alarm and despondency," George said viciously; "we've had phoney defections before. Or they might have told her they'd penetrated us specifically to dissuade her from Seeing The Light. Oh blast it. But we'll have to take her seriously, we don't have a choice. Can you get her away from there?"
"If she agrees to come. I rather think the Wing-Commander's idea is for her to stay on while I play watchdog."
"No bloody fear!" George erupted. "Get her out. And you'd better tell him to get away, too. He can go down to the House and spend a day thinking he's governing the country. Damn it all, if he Had His Way with her in Prague, his is the first place they'll come looking."
"What about the police?"
"I don't want them. They'll need to know why they can't turn her over to Box 500, and that'll leak and then we'll have a security scandal even if there isn't one. The Headmaster is not going to enjoy this. You just get her away, take her to an afternoon at the movies, a drive in the country, anything, while I whisper in a few well-bred ears."
"She's pretty frightened. She's expecting rough stuff."
"If they've only had two hours, I wouldn't expect anything too uncouth just yet. Their first reaction is usually to run around counting the spoons. By the by, did she bring any paperwork or photographs?"
"I haven't asked her."
"Well… are you armed?"
"It was you who said I wouldn't need it."
"Let's hope I was right."
"The Prime Minister is being told about Miss Kindl at this moment, sir. George is sure he'll be delighted with the way you've handled things." Maxim was choosing his words with the dishonest care of a man hand-picking his ammunition for a Bisley shoot. "But he does think she ought to be got to somewhere more secure. You did exactly the right thing in
calling me in, that's just why the Prime Minister appointed me, so now…"
I've mentioned the PM twice and you didn't call me in, George sent me. You pompous old nirk, anybody would think you were retired as an Air Marshal instead of just a… No, that's why you never made Air Marshal.
Mollified, Neale went to try and phone a taxi.
Maxim examined the mews from behind the nylon net curtains. It was narrow, too narrow to do a U-turn, and ended at a tall blank wall about a hundred yards to the left. The only way out was through an ornate arch onto the main road, a hundred yards up to the right. A single watcher beyond the arch could see everybody who went in and out of the mews, and if he were watching for Zuzana Kindl, he'd already know which house she'd gone to.
Anybody wanting to invent a better mousetrap could beat a path to this mews for a start.
Neale came back. "Sorry, there doesn't seem to be anybody answering at this time of day, but you should get a cab on the road."
"Do you have a gun in the house?"
The Wing-Commander looked startled. "No. No, not here."
"A knife, then. Anything serious, or just a kitchen knife."
A little worried, Neale showed him into the dolls'-house kitchen. Maxim selected a five-inch vegetable knife and plugged its tip with a champagne cork. There was an empty bottle standing on top of the refrigerator.
Zuzana was waiting for them in the hallway, now wearing a dark tartan coat with a wrap-over belt and furry collar. She carried a plastic airline bag without any insignia on it.
"Is that all you've got?" Maxim asked.
"I could not bring more. You know we have to share apartments, I have two other girls, so we can watch each other. If I had walked out with a suitcase… I would not have walked out, that is how it is."
"It'll all be different now." Neale said soothingly. Zuzana suddenly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him thoroughly. The Wing-Commander went pink. Maxim led the way out.
The mews was empty of anybody and everything except Dustbins. Not even a single illegally parked car. Maxim stayed on the girl's right, his hand holding the knife in his pocket. He was worried, and worried that he couldn't work out why he was worried. Perhaps he was just catching it off Zuzana, but perhaps there was a better reason…
The main road, lined with fat Victorian houses that were now mostly residential hotels, was wide but not wide enough for its rows of parked cars and the busy two-way traffic. There were perhaps fifty people in sight, and any one of them could be a watcher, and of course there were no empty taxies.
South or north? North, Maxim decided. He grabbed the girl's arm, and her muscles were locked solid as stone. She was scared, all right. Why?
They hurried, making themselves conspicuous but making anybody who was following conspicuous as well. Maxim kept looking back; he knew all about the theory of tailing and shaking tails in a city, but almost no real experience. Born a townee, as a soldier he was a professional countryman by now. But an unarmed soldier, except for that piddling little knife.
That cork, that champagne bottle. Had they been celebrating her defection at ten in the morning? Or at midnight? Oh God, she hadn't jumped off this morning, she'd got there last night, and the other side had had twelve hours to blow the baboon whistle, not just two, Then a sweet chariot, a taxi with its FOR HIRE light on, coming up behind them. Maxim waved it down, yanked open the door and pushed Zuzana in, turned to shout an address at the driver-It happened very fast. A blue car swerved in to block the taxi, somebody pulled Maxim aside and he saw a hand with a pistol reach at the taxi's open door. As he went down, he grabbed the arm that was pulling him, and the man came over with him, the gun banging into the air.
Maxim rolled free, kicked at the man's head and missed, then tore the knife from his pocket. As the gun hand came up towards him he just swiped at it. The knife skidded off bone and the hand loosened. The man grunted and Maxim snatched away the gun, left-handed.
On the far side of the taxi, another man was standing calmly pumping shots through the window, now opaque with cracks and starred holes. Zuzana was lying flat on the floor. A bullet ricocheted out past Maxim and clanged into a shop front.
He fired twice through the blind window, and couldn't tell if he'd hit anybody, but the shooting stopped. He dropped the knife and dragged Zuzana out, pushed her behind him, kneeling in wait for the next attack.
An engine yowled above the traffic noise and the blue car screeched away, trailing blue smoke. Maxim ducked to look under the taxi and there was no one on the other side.
"Did you get hit?" He turned to Zuzana and she was already ten yards up the street and accelerating. For a moment the good citizen and the soldier in Maxim clashed, then he was back on the streets of Belfast and moving, too. Let the police pick up the pieces.
If she'd been wounded, it wasn't anywhere vital. Despite her shoes and shape, Zuzana could run, the way only a trained sportswoman or dancer can run. She weaved between pedestrians who were trying not to know about gunshots and that side of life, except for one old lady who swung her umbrella at Maxim and screamed. He realised he still had the gun in his hand and the chase could be misconstrued. Just as he caught up with Zuzana, she swerved left into a one-way street, running against the flow of traffic. It was a quieter, residential street. Then she turned right; Maxim said nothing, just keeping up with her. Nobody seemed to be chasing them.
Around the next corner she slowed abruptly to a walk, gasping.
"Are you hurt?" Maxim asked.
"I do not think so," She rubbed her left shoulder. There was a long rip in her coat, but no blood on her fingers when she looked.
Maxim was still holding the pistol. He glanced at it – a Heckler amp; Koch such as West German police forces use – and shoved it into his ripped coat pocket. That cork hadn't done much good. He should never have let go of the knife to open the taxi door.
"Where are we going now?" he asked.
"I thought you were organising me."
"You might have told me you went to the Wing-Commander last night, not this morning."
She said nothing.
"All right," Maxim said. "I'm organising you." And at least he now had a gun.
10
Even on a dull, chill day there were still a number of resolute outdoor lunchers and duck-feeders sitting around St. James's Park lake. George and Agnes met at the Cake House, bought packets of sandwiches, and started to walk.
"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, the
y'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."