The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  "No Cabinet Office Christmas card for you, this year," Agnes told Maxim.

  George got up slowly, turned on three lights in big simple shades, and pulled the long drapes closed. In the golden light, the room looked a little younger, but not much.

  "He's a pompous old fart," George said, "but in this instance…" He looked at his watch; it wasn't yet five o'clock. "Does anyone feel like a real drink?" he asked wistfully.

  They shook their heads. George hesitated, then went across to a break-front chiffonier in the corner by the fireplace and took out a bottle of The Famous Grouse, a tumbler and a bottle of Malvern water.

  "I don't know much about this," Maxim said, "but I don't see who would publish the letter. It can't be proveable unless de Carette admits it, and he's already lied to us about it. So wouldn't they just set a new record for libel damages?"

  "Try sueing Pravda in Moscow," Agnes suggested.

  "Try sueing Der Spiegel in Hamburg, for that matter." George ambled back with his drink and a little coaster to protect the table. "No – but there are underground magazines all over Europe who'd use it, and you can't sue them because they just fade away like smoke and start up again as something else. But that isn't the real question. If Moscow can persuade the French that this might be published about the Brit they're negotiating with, then they wouldn't touch Tyler with a ten-foot gaffe. They've got voters to think of, as well."

  "There is one other little danger." Agnes said quietly. "Publishing this letter would be firing off all your ammunition in one broadside, and Moscow doesn't work like that, not usually. If I were them, I'd use it to put the screws on Tyler. I'd whisper to him, first. So if the letter just might exist and Moscow just might have it, how do we know Tyler isn't already their joe?"

  The idea hung over them, like a thunderstorm reluctant to break.

  George slumped down, clenching his glass with both hands. "That does it. Luxembourg is off. It has to be."

  Maxim waited for Agnes, but she was staring blindly at a picture over the fireplace, a very detailed view of a dead hare and several flowers. He said pleasantly: "You're surrendering rather quickly, aren't you?"

  "Harry, in politics, it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost."

  "Then Moscow wins without firing a shot. Probably without even knowing they've won, since they most likely haven't got the letter, and won't understand why you've pulled out of the Luxembourg talks."

  "You're in deep waters, Harry," Agnes said, without looking at him.

  "I'll try and remember to hold my breath." Maxim went on watching George, his face expressionless and his eyes cold. "You're making sure the French would believe anything – anything – Moscow says about Tyler, whether they've got the letter or just dreamed something up on the spot. They could say he was gay and Paris would have to believe it, because we've dropped him from the first team."

  Agnes opened her mouth, then shut it again. George grunted, staring at the backs of his hands and finding no encouragement there in the wrinkles and blotches. Some things were irreversible. Life was irreversible. He wished he were Maxim's age.

  "Harry – I don't take these decisions-"

  "You're giving the advice."

  "It's for the Headmaster to decide."

  "So what can we lose that we aren't throwing away now?"

  "Harry, this is a matter of national defence."

  "What in the hell do you think Army officers are for?"

  "Show-jumping," Agnes said, and as Maxim snapped out of his chair she knew he was going to hit her and possibly kill her. Her training was no use against his training.

  Then he stopped, just as abruptly as he'd started.

  "I'm sorry, Harry," she mumbled breathlessly. "It was a bloody stupid thing to say. I'm sorry."

  George gave a long, long sigh that ended as a groan. "You weren't called in to advise at these levels, Harry."

  Maxim nodded, looking down at his shoes and blinking quickly. "Then as a voter and a taxpayer… You must know what Tyler's going to propose at Luxembourg, and he obviously won't go there alone. If Moscow's pulling his strings and he proposes something different, you'll know straight away. And as far as a scandal goes, you have to balance that against the value of an agreement with the French. I dare say it's a risk. But if you don't fight any battles, you won't win any wars."

  "That doesn't sound much like the viewpoint of the average taxpayer." He looked up at Agnes. "Since it appears to be the open season, would Little Miss Muffet care to take a shot?"

  She frowned and said slowly: "You always have to work with flawed material. There may still be a few saints around – I like to believe there are – but they don't go into politics or nuclear strategy."

  For a long time, George turned the heavy cut-glass tumbler in his chubby hands. Then he said simply: "Those are honest points of view. I'll put them to the Headmaster along with whatever else I give him."

  29

  George often wondered what the PM would have decided. As it was, two days later, Moscow decided for him.

  Professor John White Tyler hadn't slept in college that night. Even so, he would normally have been back in his rooms with plenty of time to make coffee, skim through the morning papers and perhaps hear the radio news headlines before his ten o'clock lecture. But the girl he had woken up with was doing a thesis on Hindu literature, and their farewell was a long and complicated act that Tyler thought he had once seen carved in full frontal colour on a Katmandu temple. He was delighted with a girl of such dedication, but it did mean that he only had time to change his shirt, find the file for that lecture, and hurry out again. He had shaved the evening before. He always did.

  "The most carefully conceived and most believable nuclear targetting policy carries with it no guarantee that any government or leader will actually implement it at the moment of decision. You may build the most perfect rifle for hunting dangerous game, precisely fitted to your customer's arm length and the weight of trigger pull he prefers – but you cannot build in any device that will make him aim straight and squeeze the trigger at the moment the tiger charges."

  He laid his hands flat on the side of the lectern and glanced up at the undergraduates stacked in front of him. There were more of them than usual, gazing blankly down from behind their curved stalls made of cheap wood the vivid orange colour of unfried fishcakes. Perhaps somebody else had been recommending this lecture to his own students.

  "Nor should you be able to," he said clearly.

  "At that point, the hunter has at least four options. He can stand there and be torn apart. He can shoot the tiger. He can fire wild to scare the tiger away – making it back down from a confrontation. Or he can back down himself, metaphorically, by climbing the nearest tree in somewhat of a hurry."

  A ripple of laughter went through most of his audience, but not all. There was a pale, unamused group sitting slightly apart from the rest, with a few girls among it, which was odd for a military studies lecture.

  "Only two of these four options owe anything to the gunsmith's art, and I think we might agree that it is not his job to decide whether the world would be a better place with or without the tiger concerned. He simply provides his customer with options. The customer decides which one to opt for. In terms of war, which has not yet been downgraded to the status of a sport, where the only objective is to win-"

  "Fascist bastard," said one of the girls, but rather quickly and tentatively.

  Tyler ignored her. "War remains what it has always been: a continuation of politics by other means. So every option has to be seen as a political one, no matter whether it is offered up by the military, the commercial world, or even the academics – taken together, the gunsmiths."

  "Fascist bastard," the girl said again, with more conviction.

  "Nazi," one of boys added.

  "Could you make up your minds?" Tyler asked in a polite deep voice. "Either I was in an Italian nationalist movement started in the 1920's or in the National Soc
ialist party in Germany led by Adolf Hitler. I don't think they allowed you to belong to both."

  That got a sympathetic laugh from his usual audience. The girl muttered: "Sod you."

  At the top of the central aisle, there were double swing doors with big glass port-holes in them – scuttles, as the Navy would call them, smugly confusing the landsman – and he had seen faces peeping quickly in. Usually that only happened at the end of the hour, when a new class was gathering for a different lecture.

  "But the decision itself remains in the hands of the political leaders, and once a country has a nuclear arsenal, any decision that touches on the possibility of war becomes a nuclear decision. The decision not to use nuclear weapons is a nuclear decision-"

  "Why don't you take a nuclear decision then?" somebody called.

  "I'd like to very much, but you're rather too close to me." As he said it, Tyler knew it was a mistake. It got a laugh from his usual audience, but it gave the others just the provocation they had been waiting for.

  "Tyler out!" one of them shouted. "Tyler out, out, out!" They got to their feet, moving into the aisle and taking up the chant: "Tyler out, Tyler out…"

  One of the other undergraduates stood up from across the aisle and was pushed down again. The little crowd moved down on Tyler, and he was suddenly and surprisingly afraid. He wasn't a young soldier any more.

  The doors at the top slammed open and a slim figure in a short raincoat danced down the steps and crashed into the crowd. One of the girls flopped aside, sprawled over the top of one of the stalls, one of the men turned to meet the newcomer and then folded suddenly out of sight. The man in the raincoat reached the front and Tyler recognised him.

  The spearhead of the crowd was a pale boy with very black curly hair and a black leather jacket. He marched towards Tyler with his right forefinger stabbing at eye-level in time with his chant. "Tyler out, Tyler out…"

  As Maxim came past he slashed sideways with the edge of his left hand, a blow that moved no more than nine inches. But the pecking arm flopped, and the boy gasped. So did Tyler: he could imagine what such a whack on the biceps felt like. Then Maxim was hustling him off the platform and through the side door.

  They waited in the corridor that was supposed to be for faculty only, until George burst through the door behind them, looking rather blown and dishevelled.

  "I had to thump somebody," he said, examining his hand. "Haven't hit anybody in years. I'm getting soft. There should be a car…"

  Inside the lecture room, a full-scale brawl was brewing up as the two groups of undergraduates tangled.

  "I should have poked him with my umbrella," George puffed as they scuttled down the corridor. "No, that would have been a gesture of class warfare. Where is the bloody woman?"

  Dead on cue, Agnes rolled the big anonymous blue Vauxhall up to the outside door. George grunted; they all climbed in.

  She drove fast for a quarter of a mile, then relaxed as they blurred into the complication of Cambridge's one-way and no-go systems.

  "George," Tyler said, "can you tell me what this is all about?"

  "Where have you been all the night? No, you needn't answer that. But we've been ringing you since six this morning, and I'm sure Fleet Street began soon after midnight. Haven't you read any papers today?"

  "I haven't had the time, yet."

  "Well, Luxembourg's leaked. Leaked? – the dam's broken. Moscow must have put out its own release. It came out in the first edition of the Morning Star: Britain's leading advocate of nuclear warfare going to a secret meeting in Luxembourg with equivalents from France and Western Germany, are they planning a secret nuclear strike force? Provocative behaviour by the old imperialist powers just at a time when America seems to be seeing the light, de-da-de-da-de-da. The real papers had to pick it up, just to cover themselves. Communist sources claim that a secret meeting in Luxembourg… and so on. So the cat's in the fire, the bat's in the belfry and the Headmaster would like you to go incommunicado until Luxembourg itself. Can you get a bag packed? We can collect more of your stuff later."

  "Where are we going?"

  "The FO's lending us one of their hospitality places near Maidenhead. Can we turn right here?"

  "No. Take the second left…" Tyler leaned forward and gave crisp directions to Agnes. Maxim had never been driven by her before; she was very good, handling what was probably a strange car – it certainly wasn't hers – with a flowing, farsighted confidence.

  "There isn't any question of cancelling Luxembourg?" Tyler asked.

  George sighed. "No-o. In fact, it rather means it has to go ahead, unless one of the others drops out, but that's their affair. Moscow's deliberately challenged us to back down. If we do that, our little Froggie friends aren't going to listen to anything we say for a long time."

  "It might even have a unifying effect," Tyler said, mostly to himself.

  What nobody said was what they had been discussing on the way down: that this proved Moscow hadn't got the letter and now didn't expect to. "If they're going public in this way," Agnes had pointed out, "it shows they haven't anything more subtle up their balalaikas."

  Maxim checked out Tyler's rooms for him, then the three of them paced the court while he packed a bag and ignored the telephone. The snow had melted, but the invading east wind still sprang out of every archway.

  "Of course," George said, suddenly moved to look on the gloomy side, "if they're challenging us not to go to Luxembourg, they probably know they're making sure we do go. Perhaps that's what they want."

  "We were going anyway," Agnes said.

  "That wasn't by any means certain, not after we knew what was in the letter…"

  "But Moscow didn't know we were having doubts," Agnes said, rather exasperated.

  "True, true," George said reluctantly. "At least, I suppose it is."

  "You need a drink."

  "It is not yet eleven in the morning," George said with dignity.

  At that time, in that weather, the big court was almost empty. A porter walked briskly along the far side, a stray out-of-season tourist was peering into the dead fountain, and the lodge cat was showing off its privilege by squatting on the forbidden, and very damp, grass by the gateway. It was the first time Maxim had been inside a Cambridge college. It lacked grandeur, but the uncaring mixture of styles, from the Tudor gateway to the Victorian library, had a comfortable homely look of a dotty professor in odd socks who has never thought about anything as small as grandeur in his life.

  He felt a slight twinge of envy at the sort of life that could be lived behind those calm walls, and wondered if Chris would ever get a chance at it.

  "What do you think might happen in Luxembourg – now?" he asked.

  George glanced the question on to Agnes.

  "I don't expect the Centre to do anything sudden," she said. "Now they've taken the initiative in publicising the talks as western warmongering, they'll get the blame if somebody bumps him off. They don't want that; they want a live fascist beast to point at."

  "There'll be more of this morning's little rumpusculation." George said.

  "I expect so. But Luxembourg's handled top-security meetings before."

  "Yes." George paced silently for a while, then said abruptly: "Harry, you'll go too."

  "Why Harry?" Agnes asked.

  "I want somebody of ours there – just in case – and he'd better know what was in the letter. Either we tell somebody new, or…"

  Agnes nodded.

  "Have you ever been to Luxembourg?" George asked Maxim.

  "No."

  "Odd-looking place. It gives me vertigo. And be careful not to say the British won the war. They've got General George S. Patton buried there and they're still trying to work out why he didn't rise again on the third day."

  30

  In the next three days the weather changed completely and they flew out of Northolt on a hazy blue spring morning, the little twin-jet Dominie rocking and humming in the new west wind. It was too early
to be the real spring, but it was a hint, perhaps a promise.

  Tyler spent the flight sipping RAF coffee poured from a vacuum flask and letting papers stack up in his lap. He would take one, glance at it, then his gaze would drift back to the little window and the misty patchwork of Belgium, 25, 000 feet below.

  "That's where it happened," he said in his deep slow voice, "where it's always happened. The Sambre, Ramillies, Mons, Ypres, Liиge, the Ardennes… Belgium's dark and bloody ground. From Caesar to General Patton in about five minutes flying time…"

  He turned and caught Maxim's eye and smiled across the narrow aisle between the fat VIP seats. He had been talking mostly to himself, but Maxim was the one who would understand.

  Tyler added: "I was with Monty's TAC HQ back near St. Trond then. It was quite an interesting Christmas."

  "It must have been." That was when Patton had disengaged three divisions from action – tricky enough in itself – then swung them and his whole army with its hundred thousand vehicles through ninety degrees and rammed them north across seventy-five miles of icebound roads straight into the new Battle of the Bulge. All in four short-lit December days. That was what professional soldiers remembered about Patton, not the circus trappings of the two pistols and the bragging.

  The Dominie's engine note wound down and they began a gentle slide down the hill of air. Mrs West, the solid quiet-eyed secretary borrowed from Defence, handed Tyler another paper and watched impassively as he let it join the stack in his lap. He was wearing, Maxim noticed, the scarlet thread of the Lйgion d'honneur in the lapel of his usual hairy dark suit.

  The RAF steward came back, stooping in the low cabin, and asked cheerfully: "Would anybody like another cup of coffee? We'll be landing in Luxembourg in approximately fifteen minutes."