The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  "You surely don't want one?"

  "Of course we don't. You never know what witnesses will say. But Greyfriars wants one even less. No, I see a distinct possibility of an increased dividend. Who do we talk to in the STB here?"

  Agnes shook her head slowly. Whatever Moscow Centre and Prague were feeling, George obviously wasn't suffering, which meant that Number 10 wasn't. She'd expected a raging gloom about a scandal far worse than Jackaman having been avoided by – she believed – sheer luck.

  "Josef Janza seems to be their open end right now," she said thoughtfully. "You could have met him at their National Day party. Fortyish, about five-ten, balding, very cheerful, gold teeth-"

  "Yes, yes, I think I did. Right, then-" George turned suddenly brisk, snapping out orders as if he were still a Dragoons subaltern. "You meet this Janza and tell him more or less what I've said. Take a tough line. If his people even hint that anybody on our side is involved – and I mean anybody, not just Harry or Number 10 – then he can start building himself an ark and not to waste time waiting for the animals. Any questions?"

  "Is this the Headmaster speaking?"

  "No comment. None of this is avowable, of course. All your own work."

  "I know." In the patch of windscreen George had wiped clear, snowflakes hardly bigger than dust swirled around as if too timid to risk a landing. Agnes shivered and reached for the door handle.

  "And one other thing," George said. "See if you can chase up that STB file on Tyler. I believe your people had it to translate. It's more or less academic interest by now, but we'd like to know…"

  "Will try. By the way, what's happened to our favourite fighting man?"

  "We gave him a couple of days off to re-group."

  "Ah yes. Well, at least you can't say this time that nobody's got killed."

  "Not by Harry."

  "And not for lack of trying. Give him time, give him time." She opened the door and skipped out. George glowered after her, then turned on the car radio. He'd wait a couple of minutes for her to get clear. Outside, the snowflakes suddenly thickened, gained confidence and started to settle.

  Later that day, the second baboon suddenly died, leaving everybody else feeling much better, thank you. Now all the vote was in and could be counted. There would be no public trial with unpredictable witnesses, just a well-orchestrated inquest and – a rare treat – no relatives of the decreased around. Josef Janza quickly accepted Agnes's invitation to lunch at one of the old high-ceilinged railway hotels with wide-spaced tables. Only George, who mistrusted happy endings, seemed to have doubts.

  He stayed late at Number 10, working on the draught of the PM's speech in the defence debate and worrying. Certainly the baboon had had every excuse for dying: one lung collapsed by a bullet and with pneumonia, diagnosed too late, in the other. And there was no chance that any cad or rotter could have reached his bedside, where Special Branch men and friends of Agnes far outnumbered the doctors and nurses. But quis custodiet ipsos custodes"! And how do you phrase such a delicate – or indelicate – question?

  He was still wondering when Agnes rang to ask if the PM was home and if so, could she bring her Director-General over to see him. Urgent. George established that the PM was already on his way back from the House and told Agnes to come on round.

  George shook hands with the D-G, a rather sombre, lean man in thick spectacles, and showed him straight into the Cabinet Room where the Prime Minister was waiting quite alone. Then he took Agnes next door, to the Principal Private Secretary's room, away from the young ears of the duty clerk.

  She wore a sexless old sheepskin jacket and an oddly blank expression. George offered her a drink and she shook her head, "The Tyler file. I'm afraid it's gone."

  "Gone? Gone where?"

  "Home, I imagine." Her voice was blank, too; deliberately drained of expression. "It had been about half translated when Rex Masson – I don't know if you've met him, he's been deputy head of our vetting section the last couple of years – he asked to borrow it. He rang in later last night to say he thought he was going down with flu. Nobody got around to asking any questions until late today, then… he's gone, his wife's gone, the file's gone."

  George walked a slow quiet circuit of the nearest desk. "Where did Massen live?"

  "Just outside Reigate. He caught a Victoria train at Redhill every morning, so it sounds as if that girl was telling the truth. The Branch is pulling his house apart by now."

  "This is what your D-G's telling the Headmaster?"

  "Yes."

  George walked another circuit. "The vetting section… that would be how they knew about Tylers appointment. He would have had his vetting topped up as soon as he was chosen… Did this Masson of yours have anything to do with the hounding of Jackaman?"

  "I don't know." She wasn't even looking at him, just staring blindly at the wall.

  "Well," George said, "at least now we know. You win one, you lose one. I can't say how the Headmaster'll take it, but I don't suppose that file would have told us very much. And they had to blow a prime asset to get it back. It must have been the only copy – funny, that."

  "You know how they are about copying machines." Then she suddenly burst out: "What is it about Tyler? I know he's a great military theorist, but anybody would think he was the Pope…"

  George looked mildly surprised but ignored the question. Agnes looked as if she might be going to cry; George couldn't have stood that. "It isn't your fault. These things just happen. All you can do is keep on carrying the banner with strange device through snow and ice… peculiarly apposite, on this evening." He had left one of the curtains open so that he could see the snowflakes spiralling down outside. It was a rare and restful sight.

  "Oh bollocks." Agnes turned her back and blew her nose vigorously. "You just think that it's something that only happens to the Other Mob. Then when it's somebody in your own service… they'll be serving free champagne in Century House tonight." Agnes's view of the Intelligence Service was that the best of them were merely alcoholic transvestites. George had heard her on the subject often.

  "That's out of date. Now have a drink."

  She glanced at the tall double doors into the Cabinet Room. "All right. Make it a strong one."

  George poured them both stiff whiskies. "Enough ice outside, I imagine. Confusion to the enemy." They both drank. "And what now?"

  "We spend the night going through every file that Masson could have known about. And the next night…"

  They chatted vaguely until the doors opened and the D-G came out. He looked pale: after Jackaman and now this, his job and reputation were teetering on the high wire. No, George thought, his reputation's already hit the sawdust. The job's all he's got left.

  "Would you like a drink, Director-General?"

  "No thank you, George. Agnes and 1 will be running along. The Prime Minister said he'd call you in a few minutes."

  Politely, George saw them to the front door, then went back to work on the speech. The war in Europe ended on the river Elbe… Our front line is still there… no island has been an island since 1940… Europe's defences are in Europe's hands, not in a begging bowl… Apart from that last phrase, it was still crude and certainly too hawkish. But the strange device on their banner had to be Europe. Not NATO, but Europe, Europe, Europe.

  Outside, the snow lay smooth and certain. London would be chaos tomorrow. And he hadn't mentioned that second baboon to Agnes. Now he never would.

  14

  Professor Tyler dined with the Master of his college that night. Just the two of them, alone in the big warm twinkling room, huddled at one end of the long triple-pillar table, backs to a crackling log fire. A silent maid came in and out, offering second helpings of everything, which they always refused.

  "I imagine you would have to be very rich," the Master said, "to live privately in the style we decree for ourselves." Tyler made an agreeing noise, knowing that the Master had married quite enough money to live in any style he chose, private
or public.

  "Was it still snowing when you came in?" the Master went on. "So I suppose that tomorrow there won't be any trains or aeroplanes or buses, just because we live in a country which lies on the same line of latitude as Minsk and Hudson Bay." He gave a whimpering laugh. "But I like snow. I didn't see enough of it in London. How is London these days?"

  "Cold," said Tyler. "That was nearly a week ago."

  "Oh yes, your committee. When do you expect to report? – or is that Top Secret?"

  Tyler smiled politely. "The final report won't be much more than a public relations exercise, Master. It's what we can persuade the joint chiefs and politicians about before then that will really matter."

  The Master's bleary baggy eyes lit up suddenly. He had decayed to a fat blotched grub of a man who moved in slow motion and occasionally missed his mouth with a forkful of food, but he remembered thirty glorious years of academic and political intrigue as one of Whitehall's top scientific advisors. A whiff of conspiracy was like cannon smoke to an old war-horse.

  "But do you believe you can achieve anything significant, I mean really significant, without the imprimatur of our Big Brothers in Washington?"

  "I think," Tyler said carefully, "that it isn't so much a question of whether we can, but that we're going to have to."

  "They've come to thinking that, have they? De Gaulle really must be grinning in his grave. So you think the Americans are going to retreat from Europe? – or let their forces come down below – what do you call it?"

  "The hostage level."

  "Ah yes. Do you believe that?"

  "Let me put it this way. Master. Ten years ago it would have been unbelievable. But the last ten years of American policy, in the White House particularly, have been unbelievable. Now nobody's sure about what can be believed any more."

  After a time, the Master said vaguely: "Yes, I suppose it has come to that. But you're going to need the French, John. Of course, you get on well with them. They don't respect anybody who doesn't speak their language properly. And who isn't a bit of a gangster besides." He shook with wet, almost silent, laughter. "I suppose you'll be looking for a common nuclear targetting policy. Do you have anything to offer Paris on that?"

  Tyler's smile was quick, almost defensive. How, in this great collapsing grub of a man could there still be a small bright worm of intelligence gnawing its way to the heart of every question?

  He put his knife and fork down very precisely. "I think it matters less what we can offer than that we can get them to accept the principle of joint targetting. We can always change the targets later."

  "Do you think they're ready for it?"

  "I think they may be. They haven't had a really coherent nuclear policy since de Gaulle, and some of their Force de Dissuasion is getting a little tired by now – it was never very long-ranged anyway. Their Murage IV's are all of fifteen years old, you know."

  "Ummm." The Master rang a small handbell, then got up very slowly and carefully, tiptoeing along the edge of pain. "We'll have coffee by the fire, shall we? Will you take port? The Mad Doctor says I mustn't touch it any more. And a cigar?"

  He gave orders over his shoulder to the expressionless maid, who collected the dishes and went out. Tyler stared after her, trying – for no good reason – to guess at her age.

  "Don't seduce this one, will you, John?" the Master called from the fireplace. "It's so difficult to find a maid who's even half way competent, no matter what you pay them." He lowered himself into a stiff wing chair. "Have you met them yet?"

  "No, but we're trying to arrange a little get-together. With somebody from Bonn as well."

  "In the hope that they'll pay for it all."

  "That's perhaps too much to hope for, Master. But West Germany has to accept that she is really a nuclear power already, with those thousands of tactical warheads stored on her soil and sheltering behind the American atomic sword ever since NATO began."

  "You aren't proposing that the Germans get their own nuclear weapons, are you?"

  "No, Master. Not this year."

  The Master made a long reflective humming noise. The maid came back with a coffee tray, a decanter of port and a box of Jamaican cigars. They had been Havanas when the Master still smoked. She poured coffee for them both, then the Master waved her away with a hand that went on nodding like a forgotten metronome.

  "You'll help yourself to anything you want, John? And you know where to find the whisky." He sipped plain black coffee. "It isn't being forbidden things that's really so bothersome, it's discovering that you don't want them any more. I'm not sure what would be a vice, at my age. I suppose if I were still a believer I'd have the consolations of blasphemy… Are you going to propose anything specific to our Parisian targeteers?"

  "I have one or two ideas that we've been discussing in committee and with the chiefs of staff. Nothing I've published, but I've been thinking along these lines for some time now…" Tyler selected a cigar, the end was already cut. "The problem is to find something that the Russians will believe in. I don't think they're going to believe that we can inflict damage of quantity on them. We have to find a way to inflict damage of quality."

  "Ce n'est pas la quantitй qui compte, mais la qualitй… It translates well." He hummed tunelessly for a time. "But you're getting into muddy waters, John."

  "We're small fish now, Master. It's the pike who likes a clear stream."

  The Master said nothing more, so Tyler went and poured himself a glass of port. Before he sat down again, he lifted one of the heavy green velvet curtains at the window. The sky had cleared to a hard star-sparkled black, as clear as the desert night in the old days… Below, the small court was filled with rich deep snow under the blue lamplight. Just a single track of footprints went diagonally across it, and he felt a shiver of fear, but then decided it must be some young don exercising his new rights to get his feet wet across the lawn. He let the curtain fall again.

  "It's going to be a cold night, Master."

  "I'm sure you're right. And none of this has gone before the Cabinet, I assume?"

  "I don't think targetting policy has ever been a Cabinet affair. But it's been raised at the Cabinet committee on defence, so I understand."

  "Where you don't get any missionaries from Education or Social Services." He put his coffee cup down very carefully. "And you say it's fifteen years."

  "What was, Master?"

  "Since the French formed their first nuclear strike force."

  "More than that."

  "Nothing happens and yet it all goes by so quickly. When I was up as an undergraduate, in a single term you could fall in and out of love, discover a new poet and change your political views completely… all in eight weeks… John, I suppose you want me to keep this to myself?"

  "We'd prefer the meeting not to be mentioned, but if we do get a targetting policy, we'll have to let it get out for it to have any deterrent effect."

  "So I'm just a leaky old pump that you're priming." The great body quivered with his own joke. "Take some more coffee, John. What do they say is behind this business of that Czech girl defector?"

  On the south coast, the snow lay thinner and patchier, but the wind came off the grey sea like a frozen scythe. Maxim and Chris tramped the pebble bank at the top of the beach, their feet shifting and sliding, stopping to pick up the smoothest stones and fling them into the waves. Hunger, sex and throwing stones into water were the three primitive drives that had made the human race what it is, Maxim decided.

  At ten years old, Chris had grown sideways as much as upwards: he was now a miniature Welsh fly-half. Indeed, there was something of the original Celts about his long dark hair and his pale skin – but the eyes, when he turned a sudden direct stare on you, were the golden-dark of Jenny's.

  And he mustn't know, Maxim thought. I must see only him in his own eyes, nobody else.

  "Daddy," Chris asked, "when are you going back to London?"

  "When somebody rings up. When they want me."


  "Is it very secret, what you're doing?"

  "Not very, no," Maxim said glibly. "I'm there to answer military questions – if I can. And all military things are at least partly secret."

  "Do you see the Prime Minister all the time?"

  "Not to speak to. He's around, but I usually work to one of his private secretaries, George Harbinger. I don't think you'd better mention his name around school, by the way."

  "Of course I won't." Chris hunched his shoulders~ in the inevitable plastic rally jacket – and trudged on, frowning over what he would say next. "Daddy – what sort of aeroplane was Mummy in when she crashed?"

  "A Short Skyvan. Very square-shaped, twin engines, twin tails, high wing, fixed undercarriage… don't you know it?"

  Chris nodded; he could identify most modern aircraft from the swamp of books and magazines in his bedroom. "I thought it was a Skyvan."

  "Why did you ask, then?"

  "Some of the boys at school… they said they didn't believe Mummy was really dead, that she'd just gone away and left us. I thought if I could be sure what aeroplane it was, they'd believe me."

  I will kill those boys, Maxim thought. One by one I will pick them up and beat their little heads to a pulp and then it won't matter what they believed…

  He realised how fast he was walking, crunching ahead of Chris at a Rifle pace. He slowed. It isn't cruelty, he thought, it's just that a broken marriage is something all these kids know about, and death is something that only happens on TV. Particularly in a blown-up aeroplane. He stopped and threw three stones, trying to cut them through the crests of the breaking waves.

  "I saw the aeroplane crash," he said in a flat voice.

  "Yes, Daddy," Chris said. "So you're quite sure she won't comeback?"

  If they were here I would kill them, for giving Chris such a terribly false hope.

  "No," he said. "No chance. It's just you and me."