The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  She was smaller and dumpier than he'd expected – though he wasn't sure what he had expected – in a green tweed skirt, a short black leather coat cut like a double-breasted mac, and a headscarf knotted at the back of her neck.

  "What if I asked you to drive me into town to see the Gardai?"

  "I'd say it wasn't a bad idea."

  "Let's see your ID, Major Whosit." She'd been a Ministry of Defence wife for a dozen years. Maxim took out his card; she studied it, grunted, then slumped into the passenger seat. He walked round and got in the other side.

  "Do you want to go anywhere?"

  "Just drive around. I get cooped up in there.'"

  Maxim backed fast up the narrow lane. "Would you like some rather nasty processed cheese?"

  "Sure." She fumbled the box, spilled the cheeses, rescued one from between the seats and started picking it open. She was lightly and inoffensively drunk, and Maxim wondered how much of that had happened after he knocked on the door. A round, plump and rather flushed face, a piggy nose and at least a double chin. Put kindly, she was a bit short on royal blood. Perhaps the elocution lessons had been a touching attempt to become a proper Diplomatic Wife.

  "What's an infantry Major doing at Number Ten?"

  "I hope I'm the first to find out. I was attached there after your husband died. The Prime Minister was rather annoyed with the security service."

  "Oh, that's nice. Our masters are good at being right – after the event. Very well, Major, what's all this about?"

  "Why is the KGB looking for you?"

  "I put in a question and all I get back is a question. You're like one of those fruit-machines in pubs where all you get is tokens, never real money. And you said it was the Czechs, not the Russians."

  "They usually use the Czechs or Poles for their leg-work outside London. Their own people can't go more than thirty miles without giving notice and saying where and when – it's retaliation for the rules they slap on us in Moscow. The same thing works for Dublin. I thought you'd have known that."

  "I expect Jerry told me at some time. You can't remember everything."

  "And did you approach them, first?"

  "Who told you that?"

  "I did say there'd been a defector."

  She was quiet for a while. The rain kept coming down, and the tracks feeding into the road from the Arra Mountains on their right spread fans of mud and twigs across it.

  "This is a bloody cold car," she said at last.

  "The heater's on the blink."

  She gave a cackle of laughter. "More cuts in defence spending?" The elocution hadn't reached as far as her laugh; it was plain raw meat.

  "How did you get in touch with them? I wouldn't know where to start."

  She looked at him sideways. "Really? You should read more spy thrillers. What you do is, you write them a letter – on Mo D paper so they'll take some notice of it – and then you don't post it or deliver it yourself. You drop it in at the Aeroflot office in Piccadilly and hope they'll have the sense to see it gets to the right people."

  "And they did."

  "If they hadn't, I'd have tried some other way. I wasn't going to risk another little visit from bloody Security."

  He glanced at her; her mouth was clenched shut and her eyes fixed.

  "And then?"

  "Then… then they put a message in the Telegraph, a meaningless one I'd given them, to show they'd got my letter. So I sent them another."

  "Did you say who you were?"

  "Of course I did, man. I had to or they wouldn't have believed a thing."

  Maxim had a weird disembodied feeling, like going under an anaesthetic. At Ashford they'd told him about traitors who had to confess, but this was ridiculous.

  She had cheered up. "So then I told them they had to give me a telephone number which I could ring, and they did. They put it in the Telegraph in code: you added one to the first number, subtracted one from the second, that sort of thing, I'd told them how to do it, but I'm sure they'd be used to it anyway."

  "I'm sure," Maxim murmured.

  "So they never got to know where I was."

  Abruptly, the high wooded banks on either side of the road ended and they came out onto an open headland overlooking the Lough. On a whim, Maxim swung off onto the turf and parked facing the water that rippled like stretched grey silk in the wind.

  "Would you like a can of beer?"

  "Surely."

  He found the two cans on the back seat. She snapped hers open, took a quick drink, then started running the broken-off can ring up and down her finger until it just squeezed over the knuckle to touch the wide wedding band. She didn't know she was doing it.

  "Could you tell me why you began all this?" He wasn't at all sure it was the right question.

  She looked up, sharp and sly, and reached into her handbag. "I'm not breaking any law, Major, not a single bloody one. Because do you know what is the best book I've ever read in my life? It is this book, Major Harry of the British Army."

  She waggled an Irish passport in his face.

  "When I married I got dual nationality, but Ireland won't let you have but one passport so of course I had to have a British one. But now, now I'm back home again. And I'm not breaking one single Irish law, Mister Major Harry." She took a triumphant swig of beer.

  "That doesn't tell me why you approached them."

  "I don't have to tell you any reason at all."

  "No."

  She stared ahead through the windscreen at the misty hills on the far side of the Lough. "It is a gentle land. And now at last it is making some money. Have you been here long enough to see that?"

  Maxim nodded. Every little house he had passed seemed freshly painted and the cars on the road were new and shiny and plenty of them. It had impressed him.

  "He promised that when he retired," she went on, "we should buy a place here, in the old country. He had been very careful about his life insurance. But do you know what happens to life insurance when you are driven to suicide, Major Harry?"

  It was as simple as that. Agnes's Mob had robbed her of a husband and a second home and real security. Of course she hated them, and this was a beautiful two-pronged revenge because it could turn into money as well.

  "I'm sorry about that," he said lamely. "I hadn't thought…"

  "They could do it to you, too."

  "Not quite…" Maxim squeezed the steering-wheel very tight for a moment. "And… have they made you an offer yet? We know they want that letter badly."

  "What letter?"

  "The letter about Professor Tyler. If we aren't talking about that, then I'm sorry to have troubled you."

  He watched her as she carefully and rather drunkenly tried to work out whether it was in her interest to lie to him.

  "The funny thing," he went on, "is that Tyler says the thing must be a fake. He never even knew that chap in Canada, whats-his-name…"

  "Etheridge," she said automatically.

  "That's him." Maxim tried to keep his voice calm. "Tyler says publish and be damned. Anybody who does will just make fools of themselves."

  "You're a bloody liar," she growled.

  "I'm not," Maxim lied. "But Tyler could be, I suppose."

  "Somebody bloody is," she said, suddenly happy. "Or why would he be wanting to buy it off me as well?"

  Oh God, why hadn't he thought of that, of her offering it to Tyler as well? If she was trying to turn the letter into money then an auction was so obvious…

  "You're into a rather high-stakes game, Mrs Jackaman," he said thoughtfully, "trying to play off Professor Tyler against the KGB. They won't mind a bit of argy-bargy about money – they're quite used to that – and they don't have cash-flow problems. But had you thought how they'd feel if they believed they were going to lose, not going to get the letter? They've already been looking for you, ever since you contacted them."

  She glanced at him suspiciously.

  "Oh yes. All the letters and classified ads and telephone calls are
n't what they really want: they want to meet you. And a lonely houseboat is just where they'd choose. We knew you were in the Shannon area because the defector told us. After that, it took me just two and a half hours of phoning around until I found out just where-"

  "Who told you?"

  "It wasn't their fault; they didn't know you wanted it kept a secret. The point is that if I can do it, anybody can."

  She brooded on that for a moment. "I'm getting cold. Can we go back?"

  "Of course." The car skidded across the greasy grass as he turned around onto the road.

  He walked her to the gangplank and as she unlocked the door she said: "You'd better come in and get warm, Major."

  They went through a small cabin that was just for summertime, with big windows and wicker furniture that had once been gilded. Then down past a tiny kitchen – or galley? – into the main cabin. It was stuffed with furniture and as precisely tidied as a Victorian parlour. Everything that could be centred – the fruit bowl on the table – was centred, everything that could be polished was polished, and the books and magazines in the shelves stood as rigid as Guardsmen at a Trooping.

  From the corner, she said: "I'm having a small Jameson – will you join me?"

  "Yes, please." He moved carefully through the cabin and sat on an utterly un-seagoing chair at the table. None of the furniture was particularly good, or even matching, but it was clean. Probably she had nothing else to do, except drink. A warm paraffin smell crept up on him; she had turned up an unseen heater.

  "Well, Major Harry," she put a heavy glass down before him, on a small embroidered mat to save the table surface. "Well, and what do you really want me to do?"

  "Tell me what's happened to the letter."

  "Ah, now that would be telling." She smiled coyly.

  "Will you sell it to us? You know there are secret funds for this sort of thing."

  "Perhaps I've sold it already. I might have sold it to Professor Tyler, mightn't I?" She took a big sip of neat whisky. "Shall I tell you something about Professor Tyler, Major Harry? He gets people killed."

  "I don't think he had anything to do with your husband's death."

  "He put the Security people onto him."

  "I doubt he did, Mrs Jackaman. Your husband was making his objections to Tyler in the Whitehall circuit. Not in Tyler's world."

  "It's the same thing." She got up to refill her glass. He waited until she came back.

  "Has that letter really gone to the Russians?"

  "You're thinking like an Englishman, Major Harry."

  "If they ever come across the Elbe, Mrs Jackaman, do you think they're going to stop at Holyhead?"

  She sloshed the whisky around in her glass, looking moodily down at it. "Do you know what Gerald wrote before he died? Do you know that? No, of course you don't. You never saw it and nobody else did either. Except me. Now you're going to ask me why I didn't show it to the police. A bloody silly question, Major Harry Whatsit. Bloody silly." Quietly, she had gone over the top into real drunkenness. Maxim sat still and folded his hands around his glass.

  "I can translate it for you, Major Harry. I can remember it. He said that the Security Service had been planting money in our French account just to discredit him. He'd found they'd been doing that. Now what do you think ofthat, Major Harry?"

  Maxim took his time answering.

  "But it wasn't, Mrs Jackaman. It was you, putting in money without him knowing."

  She stared at him with watery red, deep-sunk eyes. "I should have had to get to the bank statements from the Compte Nationale before he did."

  "I think you did. You must have handled that side of the marriage anyway, or you wouldn't have risked it."

  "And where do you think I got that much money?"

  "Nobody said anything about how much money." There was a long silence while she frowned and tried to remember, then took a mouthful of whisky and shrugged. Maxim went on: "It was probably an inheritance or selling property in your own family, over here. It might be easier to move money out of Ireland to France. I don't think it's any more legal."

  Outside, the afternoon was beginning to darken, and a new wind made the water slap irregularly but monotonously against the metal hull. She eased out from the crowded table and went to the corner cupboard, then came back without having refilled her glass.

  "All right," she said wearily. "What do you want me to do?" She took a small orange from the bowl and began tearing the skin off; the sudden sharp smell cut through that of paraffin.

  Maxim was suddenly tired of the whole Tyler letter business, of Mrs Jackaman and her whisky breath. Next time. But he had to make sure there would be a next time.

  "The first thing," he said firmly, "is to get away from here. Forget the car, the boat, everything. Don't worry about the cost. I've said that others could find you just as easily as I did. You do see that?"

  She moved her head, half nod, half shake.

  "Is there anybody you can stay with?" Maxim asked. "A friend, not a relative, somewhere it would be difficult to trace you?"

  "I can think of one or two. If you haven't found a few friends by my age…"

  "I'll drive you wherever you want. An airport or main-line station. A hotel."

  "It's like that, is it?"

  "This is the first division, Mrs Jackaman. With the Cup Final coming up. Three people have been killed about that letter already."

  He'd over-done it. Her face was tight and suspicious. "Really? I'll pack my case."

  She went through into a cabin in the bows that must be a bedroom. Maxim tore a small orange apart for himself, dunking the segments in his whisky and chewing them angrily. The oblong aluminium-framed windows were misting over, but he could still see the gentle green lines of the far shore. How can anybody live in Ireland and not believe that people get killed for politics?

  She came back with her black coat on, carrying a heavy suitcase of battered fawn leather, held together with plenty of straps. Maxim took it. She turned off the hidden stove, gave one look around, then led the way out.

  He had stowed the case in the back of the Escort when she joined him, rattling the houseboat keys.

  "I'll take the car into Nenagh and leave it at the garage there. It's quite all right, Major," She had seen the look on his face. "I was sick when you weren't looking. I'm never sick when anybody is looking. I learnt that much from the Diplomatic. I can drive." She opened the Citroen. "You go ahead."

  He was parked about twenty yards in front. He had backed away perhaps another twenty when her car exploded.

  There was no sharp noise like a normal explosive. Just a heavy thud and flames surging out of every window as if there had never been any glass in them at all. Then it was a shapeless blistering bonfire, rolling black smoke into the air and reminding Maxim of something… He began running towards it, but mostly so that he could later say to himself that he'd done so.

  There was nothing he could do, not even get within ten feet of the furious blaze. Perhaps if she'd rolled out in the first two seconds, and without taking a breath… but she hadn't.

  He remembered now. A Land-Rover loaded with petrol cans that some idiot had managed to drive over a land-mine in the Yemen… He also remembered what had been left when the fire died out. It wasn't enough even to be horrible. He got into the Escort and drove away from the smoke signal.

  The letter wasn't in the suitcase, not even in the lining, though he hadn't really expected it to be anywhere. Perhaps somebody in London would complain about lost evidence; if so, he could tell them precisely where he dumped the case, weighed down with rocks, into the Lough.

  After that, he drove on up to Nenagh and turned back southwest on the main road to Limerick, bypassing Ballina and the Lough-side road. There probably wouldn't be any Gardai checkpoints set up yet, but it would be silly to get involved at all. An innocent man can be convicted, but not a man they don't even know exists, have never met.

  How had he got to thinking like that? He'd joined up
to be a simple soldier, hadn't he? The rain blattered down again, and he grinned sourly. That should wash out his tyre-marks in the lane, and the lane's mud from his tyres. How had he got to thinking like that?

  21

  In Limerick he found a telephone and rang the number that was probably some MI5 office or safe house. A man's voice, perhaps a different one, said: "Yes?"

  "H here. I'm afraid the project's been terminated. There was some prejudice, extreme prejudice."

  There was a silence at the other end. 'Terminate with extreme prejudice' was CIAese for 'bump off', or so Maxim had heard; he hoped the man had heard that, too.

  The line crackled. "I see. Yes?"

  "I don't think they'll even bother to send us a letter about it." He was proud of that sentence, though God alone knew how he'd explain it if anybody was listening in.

  "Right," the man said. "I'll ring the Automobile Association for you, as well." The phone clicked.

  Maxim stared blankly at it. The AA? What had they… Then he realised that they were Agnes Algar's initials, as well. So that was her office name, or one of them.

  He hurried back through the rain to the hotel and sank himself in another hot bath. For a commercial traveller, he was being remarkably clean. Then he listened to the six-thirty radio news, but there was no mention of the fire.

  The beef at dinner was over-cooked.

  The ten o'clock news had two sentences about a body in a burnt-out car near Ballina, County Tipperary, but nothing about what the Gardai thought of it. Maxim lay on his bed and tried to watch them work – assuming they went about it much the same way as in Belfast after a car bomb.

  First, put the fire out, if somebody else or the rain hadn't done it already. After one look inside, there then wouldn't be any hurry. Block off the road with plastic cones, seal off the area with white tapes tied from hedge to hedge, and maybe poke around a bit. In Belfast there wouldn't be any doubt about what had happened. Down in County Tipperary they would have less experience in jumping to the right conclusion.

  So they'd wait for the experts to arrive and the wreck to cool, which could be a fair old time after such a fire. Meanwhile, the job was identification. The car's number plates might still be readable, and they'd know it was a Citroлn GS, so all they'd have to do was call at the nearest farmhouse door. You might stay secret in the middle of a city, where nobody wants to know, but never in the countryside. He'd proved that by finding her so quickly. Come to think of it, so had somebody else.