by Gavin Lyall
"Okay. Let's see, now. I spent that Sunday at Little-Hampton; on the Monday I dined at one of George's clubs-"
"Bugger you, Harry Maxim. I want to know what you've done."
He nodded placidly. Anger didn't suit her friendly snub face, making her seem out of place in that aloofly cut suit -and he realised he was mentally taking it off her. He nodded once more and tried to remember that this was, dammit, the British embassy.
"I told the D-G of your Service what I thought, once. At the Steering Committee."
"That old fart."
"May I quote you?"
A snap glance of fury, then a tired little laugh. "Yes, it has come to that, I suppose. So you're out on a limb. And I bet you're further out than anybody realises. I know you, chum. And George, too. But what do I tell my Service?" She took time to think about that, then lifted the telephone. "Algar. I'm off now, going downtown. I'll check in-okay?" She looked back at Maxim. "You heard me. Off-duty. Let's have that drink."
"No," Maxim persisted. "You either tell your Service or you don't."
She stood up, reaching for the desk lamp. "You like your orders cut and dried. Well, I don't blame you, after… All right: from here on you're totally off the record. Do you believe me?"
"Yes."
"Or one day… I wouldn't want you for an enemy, Harry. You take loyalty seriously. God help me, I hope I still do"-she clicked off the light-"where I can still find it. I'm beginning to need that drink."
They sat in thick wickerwork chairs on an open balcony atop one of the older hotels, close to the floodlit shaft of the Washington Monument. Beyond it, the mild night sky was busy with lights arrowing down into National airport and jinking up away from it, following the curls of the river so that if one fell, it would fall into that. Agnes had brought him there for the view, but it was impossible not to watch just the aircraft lights, perhaps macabrely hoping one would lose its grip. They reminded him of what the city was really about, more so than the near-deserted streets below, dominated by monuments and government buildings that themselves became monuments after dark.
Agnes listened carefully and without interruption except to clarify a name or time. They were halfway through their second round of drinks when he finished; she leaned away so that-sitting beside him-she could peer back at him through the dimness. "Golly, you do live, don't you? Those you run into may not, but you soldier on. Literally."
"Do you believe all this?"
She gave that only a moment's thought. "A lot of it's still guesswork by you and George, but the rest, yes. If something like that were going to happen, now would be the time. And you say my Service doesn't believe it?"
"George didn't want to put the business at the cottage to them, you can see why, and it's pretty clear they don't want to believe in a conspiracy anyway, even when they knew about the Reznichenko Memorandum. "
"That smelled bad even from here, but now you say they had proof it was phoney and didn't tell the Home Sec? That means they didn't even tell the D-G. My God, it's come to that pitch already. This is the sortofthingmy mob is supposed to be ironing out and they daren't admit they've even been involved-except by whispering to people like Sprague. Sprague. "
"You know him?"
"Met him." She snatched a gulp of her drink and banged the glass on her teeth. "And the Bravoes seem to believe it… They shouldn'thave a team like that in Britain, acting so openly. It shows how safe they feel; six months ago they wouldn't have dared… And I believe you when you say you killed one of them. I might not have believed it if you'd said you hadn't."
"The world is full of people I haven't killed."
"So far. And you had George along with you on that? Poor man. His blood pressure must be stratospheric. But the Bravoes aren't going to like that, you know. There'sno rules in our business, but there's more or less a convention that we don't kill each other. Once that gets started, you don't know where it could end."
"They must have been planning to kill Miss Tuckey."
"Oh yes, they've killed people in Britain before. Usually their own defectors and so on… but outsiders, not professionals. I know it sounds crazy to you, but that's the convention. At the moment. Now you've broken it… well, let's hope they count Miss Tuckey as a pro and call it quits. If not, you could be a target."
"Just me?"
"Just you. You're thinking of your boy? No. That's more or less another convention-and they don't want to send you berserk, doing God-knows-what more damage. It'll be you personally, but nothing personal, if you see what I mean. Just getting across the message that 'Oi, there's a convention about these things, remember? Now we've squared it up, we can start again from scratch.' I should keep your back to the wall."
"I'll try and remember."
Looking at his face, calm in the faint glow of the awning lights, Agnes felt a flush of exasperation at failing to get her message across. In fact, Maxim had listened and believed: she knew far more of that world than he did. But his own world had stretched to the hinterland of the Gulf states, where a mixture of religion, politics and blood feuds made death a beginning rather than an end. There were families and organisations out there which had sworn to kill him far less cleanly than the KGB would, and he had learned to live with that. Not exactly with courage, which is a wasting asset, but with a soldier's fatalism that if it happens, it will be tomorrow and not today.
"All right," Agnes said resignedly, "so what it boils down to is that, despite your assurances to the White House Protective Detail, you're sneaking off to do a little sleuthing on your own?"
"If we can identify this Person Y… it seems the only thing to do."
"Sure. But you'd better do it carefully. Grow a long-lost cousin in Missouri, or something. Have you booked anything? Then don't until I've done a little looking up.
I'm supposed to be just liaison, and the climate isn't good for that. But a list like that can't be anything secret… Did George suggest you got me mixed up in all this?"
Maxim smiled and shrugged. "He suggested I contact you. But I would have done anyway."
"However, not just for my big blue eyes and tiny morals? And what's he going to be doing meanwhile?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary, I hope."
21
Asit turned out, George had not had to stir up the matter of Miss Tuckey himself. It arrived at his desk, as he had privately hoped, simply because he was the long-stop for security/intelligence matters that nobody else wanted to field. It had not been the Army which first noticed her disappearance, but an old Resistance colleague. Forty years after the event, the survivors were a sociable group with their own small London club and a way of closing ranks that, in wartime, had needed to be desperately widespread. The file brought with it a twinge of now-familiar guilt and a covering note from Army Intelligence: Will you please try and persuade the creepy-crawlies that we have neither the facilities nor any reason to investigate this lady's apparent disappearance. Even if she fails to turn up for her next set of lectures there is nothing we can do but not pay her. Sir Bruce had a low opinion of civilian intelligence officers.
The usual 'open end' at MI6 was a small bird of a man whose telephone voice sounded permanently pained. "My dear George, we haven't any interest in the woman, missing or not. If the Army doesn't care what happens to its lecturers then that's no skin offour nose. As you know perfectly well, and I'm sure they do, too, we can't mount any active investigation in this country"-just as if six had never done such a thing."We only got involved because we're being badgered by one of our ex's, an old friend of hers, I believe. They were in the Resistance together, that sort of thing. We took him on after the war, when we were a bit short-handed. He retired some time ago; had a stroke, I understand." The sentence ended on a high, uninterested note.
"What's he worried about?" George asked.
There was a pause; there almost always was when you asked a question of the Secret Intelligence Service. After twenty years, George still couldn't decide whether they s
pent the time thinking or it was just to show they needn't really answer anything.
"You've got our note? That's really all we know. She vanished, it was reported to the police, they couldn't find anything criminally suspicious. We at least went to the trouble of asking them."
"Is he going to make a fuss?"
Pause. Then the voice said distantly: "He certainly should know better. But he was rather… wartime."
"If he had any idea of what she was doing for us, Mo D doesn't want it spread around. Would it help if I go and lend him a sympathetic ear?"
This time, the voice after the pause might, by MI6 standards, have been described as faintly eager. "If you really feel like doing that, George, by all means. I've got his address around here somewhere. It could be the best thing, might even do some good. "
Clenching his teeth, George had to remind himself that he had now got just the endorsement he wanted.
Edward Marriage, Secret Intelligence Service (retired) managed a small boat-hire yard on the Thames below Oxford. There were five boats moored to the shored-up bank, all with names beginning Duke, hung with bright blue fenders that hadn't saved them from long scratches and stains. Behind, in a tilting wooden boathouse, a youth with cropped hair was tinkering with a partly stripped engine. The place smelt of oil, paint, damp and slow failure, and Marriage himself sat with his back to it in the cold sunshine, looking across to the willows and alders of the far bank and the fields beyond. It was very still, with the landscape painted in shades of smoke.
They drank tea out of mugs labelled Captain and Bosun brought by his wife, who was small, bright-eyed and determinedly busy. The stroke had left Marriage hunched and rigid; he turned his head slowly and his smile had become a lopsided leer. His legs were wrapped in a tartan rug and he was fortressed by small tables, stools, a frameto help lever himself upright. George had an old kitchen chair brought from the boatshed.
"We never met," Marriage said carefully. "1 got my Little Problem before you became involved in our side. You were at Number 10? But you aren't there now?" However carefully he spoke, he still released a litjtle dribble from the stiff side of his mouth and wiped it away with a routine gesture of his left hand. His right hand was permanently supported by a strap around his neck.
"No, I'm back at Mo D, security and intelligence, on thepolside. That was why Miss Tuckey's file came across my desk."
"Yes… are you allowed to tell me anything about her?"
"I was rather hoping you could tell me. I'm afraid she's just a name to me."
Marriage took a moment to assemble his thoughts. "I don't get out much, just sit here pecking out letters to old friends"-there was a portable typewriter on one of the tables-"and she was coming to tea last Monday. Liz had it all ready-but she didn't show up. That's not like Dot, I felt if she'd been called away she'd have got word to me somehow so… so that's why I rang the Firm. Of course, I hardly know anybody there, not now…"
The file had shown that Miss Tuckey had had no official connection with the Intelligence Service since turning down a backroom job there in 1946, the year Marriage himself had joined them. After losing most of its wartime recruits back to the universities and the law, the Service was determined to maintain its new influence, in Whitehall if not the world. The gap was filled with people who had learnt something about intelligence and too much (in the Service's view) about weaponry in the Resistance schools of the Special Operations Executive. But they remained second-class citizens as the Service restocked itself with young men of the right background from Oxford and Cambridge. After all, with the sunset of Empire and most departmental requests becoming for economic intelligence, you need trained minds who understood international banking, surely George could seethat? So the Resistance-trained amateurs were gradually shuntedto filing jobs or forgotten overseas stations where they needed do nothing but show an invisible flag and curl a lip at the way the CIA did the real work.
George asked: "Did she say anything about her job?"
"Oh no. Dot never would. But I knew she was giving a series of lectures somewhere, and they weren't being reported, and there's only one thing you'd ask Dot to lecture on, so…" The mouth did its best to become a wry smile. "I just guessed you were getting interested in the old Winter Garden stuff…"
"Winter Garden?"
Marriage's smile became slightly superior. "Before your time, of course. And that was the Americans." He called them Amurricanes, in a heavy stage accent that came over as an envious sneer.
"An American Resistance movement?"
Mrs Marriage came up tentatively along the line of boats, making sure she caught her husband's good eye before she moved into their circle of secrecy. She wore a faded anorak over her long cardigan. "I'm just popping into town to pick up a parcel from the station. It could be the parts John was wanting. Can I make you some more tea before I go?"
"No. We're both swimming in tea, we're both sinking in tea." Marriage's tone became abrupt and petulant.
She just smiled. "All right, dear. And shall I see when the garage can take in the car? The clutch really does need-"
"There's nothing wrong with the clutch. It's the way you drive it."
"It's snatching. I really think it's getting dangerous."
"It's the way you drive it."
"I'll see what the garage says. Don't get cold out here. Get Mr Harbinger to help you if- "
"Mr Harbinger's got better things to do than help an old cripple around. I'm not getting cold."
"Very well, dear." She smiled at George and walked briskly away.
"I don't know why I'm so bloody to her," Marriage grumbled, "except that shetolerates me. God knows I got enoughofthat inthe Service." They heard the car start atthe third try and roar jerkily up the track behind the boathouse, leaving a faint cloud of blue smoke drifting around the corner.
"I should have asked you if you wanted more tea," Marriage said, suddenly remorseful. "But perhaps you wouldn't mind something a bit stronger? There's a bottle of vodka in the cupboard over the desk in there. It's all I can offer, but if you felt like pouring us a couple, then topping it up with water… Liz doesn't like me having a snort before sundown."
For once in his life, George would have been ready to forego a drink. But there was a gentle desperation in Marriage's crooked face, and his hand crawled on the rug like a dying spider. "Don't worry about me," he said. "Half my brain cells are dead tissue anyway, so a few more won't make much odds. She can't countthem."
Did one more matter? The man was already living beyond sundown, George told himself. "Actually, I happen to have a flask of Scotch on me, just in case I broke down on the road…" He tried to force the joviality that was usually so easy. Marriage watched as George filled two of his silver cups, refusing water with it.
"It's good to taste the real thing for once; that vodka's mostly water by now." He poured the neat whisky into the corner of his mouth and wriggled with slow, painful relief. George's drink tasted of shame, but he needed it too, by now.
"The American Resistance movement," George prompted delicately. "Was that Winter Garden?"
"In the early Fifties, we all started setting up Resistance networks again, all over Europe, when it looked as if the Soviets were going to come west on the next train. The Air Force was particularly interested: escape routes for aircrew and so on. The Americans took it very seriously; of course, it was the Company by then." If Marriage knew the current jargon for the CIA, he didn't bother with it. "And they'd learnt a fair bit in the war, with their OSS -Office of Strategic Services, same as our SOE. I know they were collecting recordings of all the national songs, so they could set up a Radio Free Norway or Denmark or Italy somewhere, after…"
"And a Radio Free Britain?"
"Oh yes. The trouble was, we could believe in the Continent being overrun again, but we couldn't face up to it happening here. So the Amunicanes wanted to do it, and we let them."
"An American network in Britain."
"Probably qu
ite a good one, too. My Service wanted me to try and penetrate it, just on general grounds, but I told them: the whole point is not to have their name's on our files, all ready for the Soviets to take over. But I spent a few bob buying drinks for a couple of old OSS types who'd turned up in their London station and they took pity on me and let drop the codename: Winter Garden. And flower names for the different groups. At least that's what they told me, it could be sheer bull. But it was before they went in for all the cryptonyms and digraphs and five-letter codes because that's what computers like…"
A lone motor-cruiser rumbled upstream, tidily cluttered, steered by an elderly man with a blacklabradorsitting on the cockpit seat behind him. He waved and Marriage lifted his cup slowly in return.
"One of yours?" George asked politely.
"Private. Did you think this was a poor country? Hah. Just go and count the private boats up and down the river. Most of 'em don't get used more than a few hours in the year. A poor country. "
The boat left a wake that rocked the long drifts of dead leaves on the water and slapped against the quay below them. Marriage finished his drink and put the cup down very obviously.
My God, George thought, cringing, he wants me to kill offmoreofthatfossilised brain. And I'm going to do it, so that he might, just might, tell me something useful. Have I been sending people out to do this? Mind, he excused himself quickly, this is exceptional, quite exceptional. And difficult. Even a trained interrogator would have a problem here…
Thus excused, he poured the drinks. "Did Miss Tuckey have anything to do with that? Help them recruit or…?"
"But then she'd have their lists, wouldn't she? And they wouldn't want that, any more than they wanted the Firmto have them. Once you've got a list, you can drag in the whole network. That's what I'm worried about: if your people are… working along those lines again, and Dot's been helping out, somebody might think she'd gotyour lists. An old lady living alone in the country, you do see…"
George did, and yearned to tell him the Army had thought of it, that Maxim had mentioned how they worked under codenames, then wondered if the Army should tell Moscow that, too-and realised that he was after a list, as well.