The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  But even if he had been spotted as Maxim, the Bloc embassies hadn't got the manpower to ring every hotel in the Home Counties.

  He spread out the food, expecting Zuzana to pounce. But she just began decorously spreading a little pвtй on a biscuit.

  "Drink?" he suggested. The whisky was running low: she'd taken a snort while he was out. She took another now.

  He saw the radio and tuned it to a programme of classical music – not loud, but continuous.

  "We're very happy to learn about Veverka, but is there anything you can say about the bears and our security? You do see how important that is."

  She nodded with her mouth full, swallowed, took a gulp at her whisky. "It was when your minister sent home so many of the bears, do you remember? It was two years ago. The bears kept bringing in so many joes, your security could not afford to watch them all. It was, what you call it, like saturation bombing. Then for one time your minister did the right thing."

  Maxim remembered: a great slaughter of the guilty when over a hundred Russian embassy and trade officials had been declared personne non gratae. Aeroflot had even sent a special plane to collect them. It had made headlines everywhere. Except Moscow, probably.

  "So then, the bears went crazy. Suddenly they had nobody to make the drops, they thought all their sources would forget them, they would have nothing left. So they had to use us, of course. And some of the Poles and Hungarians, but…" the but and a little shrug relegated the Polish and Hungarian services to the fourth division. "Of course, they did not tell us who we were posting messages for. But it was the usual ways, the dead drops, always Moscow Centre chose them. I did not believe it before, but it is true. They could say in Moscow for me to post a message in the springs of the bed near the window of number 6 bedroom in this motel. They do not trust their own people here even to decide things like that."

  Maxim had heard the same thing and hadn't really believed it, either.

  "So, I tell you, it was a crazy time." They were back sitting facing each other, not touching. "We were running all over to the places Moscow said was a good drop. It was mad." And in the panic, there had been an unguarded discussion about which of two missions was more important, and Zuzana had heard enough to know she was acting as a cut-out for a source within British security itself.

  "It was a moving drop, you understand. In a train, it came into Victoria just about ten o'clock each morning. I must go down to Gatwick first, then get on it there and post the message up under the towels basket in the lavatory at the back of the third first-class carriage. Then I stayed and went again just before the end to pick it up if it had not been collected, so the cleaners would not find it."

  Maxim's experience was that British Rail cleaners might just be getting around to finding messages posted in the Boer War, but he smiled and nodded encouragingly.

  "It was a good drop," she conceded. "It was simple, we used it often Of course, there must have been a crash contact for the emergencies, but I would not be in that."

  The radio concert ended with a burst of applause; it turned out to have been Schubert. Zuzana stood up, glanced at her watch, then prowled the room restlessly, but still with an animal grace. In an odd way, she reminded Maxim of the cat who sat on his papers.

  "So I thought," she said, "why do I not find out who is this source?"

  "And did you?"

  Somebody next door flushed a cistern and in the silence after the music, it seemed to startle her. "I want to walk a bit. We can go down the back way."

  It was quite dark by now, the sky sharp with stars. The stable-yard rambled downhill into a small vegetable garden and then a field where they must once have grazed the horses. In a few seconds, Maxim's thin town shoes were soaked in freezing dew. Zuzana had on strong, well-polished ankle boots. They walked hand in hand.

  Once they were clear of the buildings, she said: "It was not easy to find out, you understand. I could not wait in the corridor – those carriages were never so crowded – to go into the lavatory after each one to see if the message was gone. And the real man would have known me before I knew him. So I had to take some time. I would go in early to see if the message had gone, like that I knew he came on before East Croydon…" Gradually she had eliminated the other regulars, bringing it down to one man.

  And that man must be the man; a spymaster can use cut-outs, messengers who are no great loss when pinched, but a traitor can trust nobody. He has to collect his own post.

  "Did you find out his name?" Maxim asked incautiously. But she wasn't to be hurried. They had reached the bottom of the field, where an overgrown stream glinted slow and sullen in the starlight. Zuzana shivered, folded her arms as if to cradle her breasts, and rocked gently against the quiet cold, sniffing at the sky.

  "It will snow," she said suddenly. "Here you almost never have snow. It will be beautiful, like at home… He was I think fifty years old, or some more, about 185 centimetres in height, he is bald in the middle with grey hair…" the description rambled on, but it was by a trained observer and it added up to a complete man.

  But what man?

  "You didn't get his name?"

  "Did you want me to ask him?"

  "Once you'd spotted him, you could have followed him from Victoria, to see where he worked."

  "He was in the trade. He was in both our trades, he would have noticed me. And… they took me off that drop. I think they had some new joes in by then, and he was too important…" Her voice was flat and mumbly.

  Maxim asked: "Have your people got a photograph of me yet?"

  "Oh yes, of course."

  "So you must have photos of everybody you know in British security?"

  She didn't say anything.

  "And you've had nearly two years to look through them, haven't you?"

  "It was not easy, you must have a reason-"

  "In two years you couldn't think of a reason? Who was the man you described just now? – your favourite uncle? You never worked out which man was the contact, did you?"

  "I had to have something!" she shouted. "I had to bring something over! I had brought the Veverka file. I had it in my bag, but…"

  Like a voice over his shoulder, Maxim could hear the Ashford instructor saying. "They all do it, they all build themselves up to make themselves more of a catch. If one says he's a KGB major, you can bet he's just a captain. If he tells you he can name six illegals, don't count on getting more than three. Just accept that you're going to be lied to, don't lose your cool, and at least you'll get all that there is to get."

  I did brilliantly, Maxim thought bitterly. My first defector and the only cool thing about me is my feet.

  He put his arms around her, awkwardly, since he wasn't used to her height and she was as stiff and unhelpful as a lamp-post. "I'm sorry. It's all right. You've given us quite enough to find him anyway. And the file, the baboons won't have got it. The police probably picked it up, so that's all right."

  She relaxed and leant against him. "The police, of course. Yes. But what will they do to it?"

  "I'll ring in and make sure we get hold of it. Come on." He put an arm round her shoulders and they started back up the field.

  After a while, she said carefully: "There is something I can do for you, something else. I cannot say what, but soon."

  "Fine." Maxim wasn't really listening. "Do you want to wait in the room?"

  "I will wait. Can I have the gun again?"

  He gave it to her along with the key, and this time waited until he heard the door lock before going up the yard.

  He walked briskly out to the telephone box, since he wasn't going to trust the motel switchboard. But telephone boxes, taxis and parking spaces are never empty when you need them. He waited, almost dancing with the pain in his feet, while two girls made a long giggly call, and then another.

  At last they rushed out in a flurry of long coats and laughter, not even noticing him.

  Number 10 came on as a matronly voice saying: "You should have told us w
here you are, Major. We've had more than one-"

  "I'm not anywhere," Maxim said. "Just find me George Harbinger."

  He told George about the motel, then about Zuzana's work as a cut-out and her little white lies. George took it better than he'd expected, just muttering. "Bloody woman." But he would have had far more experience of defectors' habits, if only indirectly.

  Then Maxim told him about Veverka and the file. "That must have been what the wild bunch were after. There doesn't seem any reason why they should think she's even heard of the contact in security."

  George grunted dubiously. "Has she said anything about why she's Seen The Light?"

  "Just that she's tired of a repressive regime repressing its citizens, or something."

  "Bullshit. She tried to identify that contact just so that she'd have something in the bank if she ever decided to come over. Every agent pinches some little secret, just in case. I suppose when you start in that work, you soon realise there may be only one safe place for you: the other side."

  "Actually why she came," Maxim said, "is that they just took away her first command. She just grabbed the file, out of spite, and ran. Or that's my guess."

  "She doesn't sound all that bright… What's that noise? Have you got the Brigade in there with you?"

  Maxim realised he'd been stamping his almost numb feet on the floor of the box. "Sorry. She's no master-spy, but at least we know the Tyler letter's probably still around."

  "I'm not at all sure I like that. We'll go into a huddle about it when you get back."

  "When's that going to be?"

  "Ring me in an hour or so. Oh – there's one other thing, Harry, and I don't think you should mention it to her. Wing-Commander Neale's dead. I asked the fuzz to put a guard on him but I was too late, blast it. Some of your roughnecks seem to have got in and worked on him a little. I believe it was his heart that gave out, so they probably didn't mean to kill him."

  "They certainly meant to kill her."

  "Yes, well,.. Keep in touch."

  "Is the news about Neale on the radio?"

  "I imagine so…"

  Suddenly it wasn't just Maxim's feet that were cold. He ran all the way back to the motel, slowing down just for respectability as he entered the arch into the stableyard. The bedroom was dark, and there was no answer to his gentle knock and whisper. He tried the handle and the door opened. He knew then that she'd gone; a few seconds later, he knew the gun had gone with her.

  The receptionist hadn't seen her go. "To tell the truth, I haven't seen her at all, have I? She's a foreign lady, your wife, isn't she?"

  "Yes." Maxim was turning away when he realised what that meant. "She made a telephone call from the room, then?"

  She could hardly deny it, but wasn't going to admit she'd tried to listen in. She must have been around fifty, with the thin bedraggled look of a bird with a broken wing. "She did make a call to London, yes."

  "Just now?"

  "Oh no. Nearly an hour ago, I should say."

  "Can you give me the number, please?"

  She was looking it up when the first shot sounded. It hardly registered on her; to Maxim it was a bomb.

  Zuzana was certainly no master spy. She had rung her office as soon as the radio had told her of Neale's death: an almost purely emotional reaction, seeking revenge. But she remembered enough of her training to pretend that she had heard nothing and offered to discuss her own return to the fold provided nobody went near the Wing-Commander. They had promised that straight off, so she knew that when they came to meet her it would be in bad faith but perhaps without too much suspicion. But she had no time to scout the meeting-place she suggested: the porch of the church glimpsed as she and Maxim drove in. And her worst mistake was not to get there first: she had overestimated the time they would take.

  The only real error the two baboons made was not to think that in the darkness she might have a gun in her hand.

  The younger and smaller of them grabbed her from behind as she came through the lych-gate; the bigger reached for her from in front. She fired before the pistol was level, and the bullet smacked into his thigh bone. The second shot missed as the gun kicked higher, and the third went through his throat.

  The other let go with one hand to reach for his own gun and she swung away, firing and missing as she turned. His shot hit her ribs with a punch that had no immediate pain, and then they were shooting into each other, barely three feet apart, until both fell down. Compared with that noise, the big baboon made almost no sound as he drowned in his own blood.

  Maxim was first there, dodging from shadow to shadow across the churchyard until he could see the three bodies. He kicked the guns away; Zuzana and the younger one weren't dead, not yet.

  "Did I kill them?" she muttered.

  "I think so."

  "I had wanted to do it… and be alive, but… Not" He had tried to lift her head out of the blood. But half her right eye socket was shot away. He laid her down very gently.

  "They killed… the Wing-Commander…" After that she lapsed into a murmur of Czechoslovakian until she shuddered and died.

  A small timid crowd had formed outside the gate. A burly man with a raincoat on over his shirt and carrying a torch, pushed through and shone it around. What had looked like black oil suddenly turned into a pond of blood.

  "Great Jesus!" He swayed and put a hand on the gate for support, then turned the torch on Maxim. "I'm a policeman-"

  "I'll get an ambulance," Maxim said. "You get onto Special Branch."

  13

  "At a rough guess, I would say that he broke just about every rule in the book and quite a few that aren't. Of course," Agnes added, "that's merely one person's opinion."

  "He had an impossible job," George said defensively. "He couldn't know the girl was going to turn into Calamity Jane."

  "It was the girl started it. Adam never knew what a long-running excuse he'd thought up." They were sitting shivering in the front of George's Rover, parked on the Horse Guards Parade behind Number 10.

  "If we'd had her," Agnes went on, "she wouldn't have been left alone for a second, let alone get near a telephone or – Dear God, I still don't believe it-a gun."

  "It was all understandable the way Harry explained it. And she wouldn't have come to your people anyway."

  "She'd have done what she was told. Where else would she go? – back to the embassy and say sorry?"

  "She could have gone to Grosvenor Square. The Ivy League can always use another defector to polish their image with Congress."

  One of the attendants, whose job was to keep the Horse Guards exclusive, drifted up and glanced in through the misted windows. But there was the correct sticker on the windscreen and he wandered off down the ranks of exceptionally clean and neatly-parked vehicles. There should be a new class in the Honours List, George thought, with Her Majesty sticking a parking permit on your lapel while wife and eldest beamed tearfully in the background. It would certainly rank above a C, but perhaps not quite a K.

  "Have you any idea," Agnes persisted, "how much work the Branch had to do to keep Mr and Mrs Maxim's names out of it? God knows what they threatened or promised that motel. Half of Fleet Street booked in there that night. There's nowhere else to stay."

  "Police get paid overtime. I do not."

  "That's not what I mean. It's all being written down on tablets of stone and one day the Branch is going to need a favour from Number 10. Then you'll have early carol singers in Downing Street. And what was our Harold up to in that motel with Miss Kindl?"

  "You write down your guess and I'll write down mine and we'll open each other's envelopes on New Year's eve. What does it matter?"

  "It was in another county and besides, the wench is dead."

  "When did Box 500 take up sexual prudery? Is there any news from the hospital?"

  "Only that he's still critical. Fifty-fifty. It could be the uncertainty that's keeping the other side quiet."

  The second baboon hadn't died, not quite,
not yet. Meanwhile, stories about Gun Battle In Lonely Churchyard With Girl Defector flashed around the world, and the mystery about the two men guaranteed they would flash for days yet. The police had announced that the dead man had false German papers, but said nothing about the other. He might live to stand trial, and his papers would be evidence.

  The Czech embassy had put out a statement saying just that they were sure Miss Kindl wasn't defecting, and they certainly didn't know the sort of people who carried false papers.

  "Were they from sunny Russia?" George asked.

  "Never in your life. The Centre wouldn't do anything so crude. That was the STB, they panicked and called in the Al Capones to try and sort out the defection before Moscow ever heard of it. Somebody really must love Professor John White Tyler – but then, I believe he loves quite a lot of people, one at a time."

  George ignored that. "And have you found out who in your mob might be a traitor and comes to work on the Gatwick line every morning?"

  Agnes took a couple of calming breaths. "Your dashboard clock isn't working."

  "Dashboard clocks aren't supposed to work. Well?"

  "George – how do you expect us to go about that?"

  "Rather fast." He rubbed a clear patch on the misted windscreen. "You know – when the up-state vote comes in, we may find we're actually in the black. We did get a defector-"

  "For about five minutes."

  "Long enough to learn that Greyfriars has a steer on the Tyler letter, if it still exists. And a line into a bad apple in your barrel. They've also lost two trained cads-"

  "Those come ten to the koruna."

  "Never mind. Now everybody knows who sent them even if it can't be printed. So the STB comes out of it with a reputation not just for dirty work but incompetent dirty work. Moscow won't be mining any medals for that. And if Wing-Commander Neale gets tied in – and some bright reporter might do it – then Greyfriars have killed an MP on top of it. They might be ten a penny as well, but it does look bad on paper. With possibly a big show trial in six months."