The Crocus List

by Gavin Lyall

  "Couple of small things. How secure is this line?"

  A momentary pause, then: "Hold on," and humming silence. He could have been warning his receptionist off the line or switching off- or on-a recording device. She didn't care either way.

  "All secure. Shoot."

  "I've been thinking, Mo. I'd still like the name of the front for the Crocus List."

  "Long gone, I told you."

  "I'd still like it. If you can't remember it, look it up and give me a call in Washington this evening. You've got my number?"

  ' "You sound kind of imperative, sweetie. Could there be any reason for this?" The old crocodile was smelling hook, not bait.

  "We were peeped, Mo."

  "No. No way at all."

  "Mo, I'll tell you something, now. Your Company -my Service, too-got itself into video and pin lenses andultra-violet light, all wires and electricity. I never could understand electricity: it bites you. So I just staggered along with good old photography. I found this sweet little man who fixed up a non-reflex 35 for me, slowed down the motor wind so it wouldn't make a sound, fixed in a timer to take a shot every thirty seconds. Oh yes, and a filter to make it like the cap of my handcream tube looking out of my handbag and on the dressing-table. It's a lovely dressing-table, that, Mo. I want you to know how much I appreciate your dressing-table."

  She turned to smile benevolently at the scurrying passengers behind her. There was a rare pleasure in blackmailing somebody, privately, from so public a place.

  "You're in those pictures, too."

  "That's right, Mo. They wouldn't do me any good with my Service, I grant you that."

  "Attempt to blackmail an ex-Company man."

  "You're so right. The whole thing could catch fire, all over the front pages, Crocus List and all. But I'm on a crusade-" As professionals, they were cutting a lot of corners. He hadn't suggested the film might not come out, although she couldn't have had time to develop it yet, and she wasn't working through a 'friend' sent round to sympathise with him, deplore the whole thing and assure him it could be stopped if he'd only tell that terrible woman one little thing…"-And since I'm not married or anything, I thought I'd stick to the personal angle. I assume even your second wife would be used to this sort of thing by now, but I looked you up: you've got a boy and a girl, both around college age, and-"

  "You lousy little whore!" Then she knew she'd won.

  When he'd calmed down, she said: "If whores don't get no respect, they should at least get paid the rate for the job."

  "Jesus. Okay, then, call me in-make it fifteen minutes."

  But it was a long and lonely quarter of an hour. Was there any way he could have traced her call, or picked up background noise and was now rushing downtown in a wild attempt to snatch the film from her? She stayed at the back of a shop until it was time to come out cautiously and find an unoccupied phone again.

  Magill was still at his desk. "A limited liability company called Anglam Gateway."

  "Registered office?"

  "Taplin, Green and Keeley, solicitors at Lincoln's Inn."

  "Did they provide the directors?"

  "A Mr Wainwright and a Mr Nightingale."

  "Great. Thank you, Mo. And the other thing-now I think about it, don't call Clare Hall in Matson. In fact, don't call anybody, don't do anything. Just work on Mrs Wertenheimer's problems with her landlord."

  "Am I going to get that film, undeveloped?"

  "Mo, you're too respectable to look at such things. As long as nothing happens, nothing will happen-okay? The good old British way. Be seeing you. Or not."

  It was too late to ring Defence-early evening in London by now-but Maxim had given her the number of one of George's military clubs and she left the name of Anglam Gateway and its solicitors with the secretary there. There was a certain reassurance in hearing the calm voice three thousand miles away scrawl the message down and ask politely: "May I say who -? Miss Algar. A-L-G-A-R. Thank you, Madam, I'll make sure he is informed…"

  Then she rang Information, asking for the number of Clare Hall in Matson, Illinois, just to establish that it was real. After that, she practised her cheery-little-girl act to allay any of Maxim's suspicions, which of coutse he wouldn't have anyway. When he arrived, he was doing much the same thing, since he wasn't asnaïveabout the values of the secret world as she assumed: assuring himself there was nothing to suspect and being careful not to find any signs of it. Anyway, there was soon the train to look at.

  He liked trains. An airliner is an airliner, anywhere in the world, but a train is part of the landscape. Sadly, the Metroliner had lost confidence in being a train and wanted to be an airliner instead: the coaches were rounded like a fuselage, there were airliner seats with fold-down tables from theseatback infront, even a company magazine at each place. Maxim found himself reaching for the nonexistent seatbelt.

  First class meant Amclub: everything on Amtrak was Am: Amcoach, Amcafé, aneffect slightly undermined if you recalled Batman and his Batmobile, Batcopterand even Batrope. Maxim wondered if they would serve Amsandwiches.

  The air-conditioning roared softly and they got their first drinks as they came out of the tunnel and on to the New Jersey marshes, where gulls circled the refuse dumps among a forest of concrete stilts carrying the highways south. Any big city has a dirty hem to its outskirts.

  Agnes told him what she had learnt. Condensed, it sounded very little for an afternoon's talking, but simultaneously it was a surprising amount from a man who had started the day denying everything. Both ways sounded bad to Agnes herself.

  "D'you think this is the real info?" Maxim asked.

  "1 don't think he's trying to kid us," Agnes said, rather more grimly than she had intended. "I think he feels guilty about his old buddy Tatham and doesn't want to interrupt his posthumous triumph, the Crocus List. At the same time, he knows a lot of this is going to get known by the people who matter and he doesn't want to be the man who hindered the investigation. He wants us to get there, but too late. A lawyer's solution."

  "Crocus List." Maxim tasted the phrase. It was good to put a name-totally meaningless though it was-to two faces he had seen so briefly. "Ten, you said."

  "Less, by now, I should think. After fifteen years, some may have emigrated, died… would all of them spring to the colours when called?"

  Maxim brooded for a time. "We should have the CCOAC list tomorrow."

  "Yes… but don't expect too much from that. Tatham wouldn't have recruited the whole Crocus List from that. One or two, maybe, and I'm damned if I see how we'll identify them in a hurry, but…"

  "I'll cable it straight to George and see what he can make of it. If we can just identify Person Y… I'd rather like to get home and talk to him myself."

  "Harry, sticking a bucket over some citizen's head and beating it with a broomstick is not going to advance your career."

  "Seeing imaginary policemen at moments of stress isn't doing it much good, either."

  Agnes pondered for a while. "Matson can't be too far from St Louis. Illinois is just across the river and turn left…"

  "I could stay overnight and drop in on her." They had planned his St Louis trip as a one-day event.

  "I wish I could go myself, but if she complains and London hears about it, they'll put a stop on me doing anything. She may not say a word, but-it's another base to be touched."

  "AUright."

  "If you're away for a night… I'd better start building you an alibi around Washington. Would you mind if it leaked out that we were having an affair?"

  After a moment, Maxim said: "No, not at all."

  "Just ateensy bit quicker next time, Harry. A certain enthusiasm lends conviction in these matters." But her own light-heartedness made her feel tawdry. She badly needed another drink, but Maxim hadn't finished his first, yet. She lit a cigarette instead. "I could check us into a motel out of town, you give the number to the Liaison Office, I'll give it to my office, and hope their nasty little minds think that's al
l that's going on."

  They were both quiet for a long time, both thinking much the same thing: was such a pretence a way of beginning, or would it destroy the might-have-been? And both concluded, with an inner shrug, that it was the right thing for the job in hand; anything else could wait.

  The train ambled out of the flat New Jersey landscape where the towns had a shapeless, unrooted look like a child's model village that must be cleared away by supper-time. Beyond Philadelphia, the farmland became vaguely English in the fading light, with neat fields and little clumps of trees at the corners. A claret-jacketed waiter served them a warmed-up airline meal with little bottles of wine.

  "One thing you won't have out there," Agnes said, "is a credit card for Winterbotham. That makes you a very third-rate citizen indeed, but that's how they think of Canadians anyway. The snag is, it means you can't rent acar: they insist on a credit card for that nowadays, so you're going to see America by bus."

  A man in a dark suit across the aisle had been working on business papers since New York. At Philadelphia he had been joined by two others in what was obviously a preplanned meeting, since the moment dinner was cleared away and a new round of gin and diet tonics ordered, they began a miniature board meeting. Apart from learning something about front-end loaded deals and arbitrageurs, Maxim found it restored his faith in American trains. They might try to look like aeroplanes, but at least there were still smart waiters serving drinks to tycoons as they shuffled papers where the noughts ran off the edge of the page, building a case to be argued to some Washington agency the next day.

  He murmured some of this to Agnes.

  "Poor security," she said unromantically. "The government could save itself billions by hiring a few wide-eared gents to ride these trains and find out what newrip-ofísare being planned. Probably a violation of umpteen civil rights, but…

  "Actually," she went on quietly, "there's a point in there. People let their guard slip when they're travelling; they'll tell you things they wouldn't say to a neighbour they've known for years. Probably something to do with it being a finite relationship, but… Sorry, you probably learnt all that on the Ashford course. "

  "It was a long time ago."

  "Just whatdid they teach you there?"

  "Oh, techniques of surveillance, when you're sitting alone in a car you move into the passenger seat, make it look as if you're waiting for the driver to come back… the trouble is, I never got a posting where I had to use it."

  "If you're going on to Matson, you might find a bit of it useful. One person alone can't do much, but perhaps… Would you like an hour or so's refresher course when we get back to town?"

  "Fine."

  "All right. I'd better go to the embassy to check if anything's actually happened today. There's a bar on the north side of MStreet, just before…"

  27

  Maxim made sure he got there well ahead of Agnes. ("Qive yourself time to reconnoitre the Subject's area and known haunts.") It was a sprawling split-level place where you could take on board anything from a glass of beer to a four-course dinner plus the right wines at each course, and with about as much choice about where to sit: at tables in the middle, at booths and alcoves at the sides, on the bar stools, on other stools up against long shelves. It had a friendly dark-panelled atmosphere with brisk service, and most of the diners and winers were around Maxim's age. Well, so was Agnes; it was probably her local, being only a few blocks from her Georgetown address.

  Maxim took one quick drink at the bar, went on back to the toilets ("Establish whether there are any other exits") and then chose a stool against the wall with a beer and the Washington Post. ("Generally, choose a position towards the back of a bar or pub. Make sure you have something to read; a single person doing nothing but drink and smoke looks suspicious.")

  He spotted the Subject the moment she came in. She had changed her clothes-as he had himself, in a sprint through his hotel-to a pale coffee-cream skirt and russet blouse under a hip-length waterproof jacket. ("Study the Subject's clothing to anticipate how it could be changed quickly: a reversible coat, a hat that could be stuffed into a handbag or pocket.") The jacket could be reversible, a different pattern on the inside, but there was no hat and the bag she carried was tiny, by Agnes'sstandards.

  If she saw him, he didn't see that she saw him. And from the way the staff greeted her, she was obviously a regular there; she had to chat to several before taking aglass of wine to a booth towards the front, out of Maxim's sight. So probably she had spotted him.

  But he was still covering the door and to move his seat apparently just for the sake of moving would seem suspicious-and it occurred to him that Washington DC would be full of people who knew the surveillance trade, that tonight a lot of people would be running genuine surveillances. Perhaps in here.

  The lively Georgetown faces suddenly looked like masks.

  There was one lone man at the back of the bar, forty-fivish, reading a newspaper-but a real surveillance should be done by at least three people, the A-B-C method, although not all would come into a bar, perhaps only one… He shook himself out of a spiral of suspicion and isolation. ("It is normal to feel self-conscious and conspicuous on your first few times in the field; do not let this distract you from the Subject.") And the Subject was moving.

  He took his glass back to the bar, glancing at his wrist-watch as a reason for not buying another, said good-night and ambled towards the street. At the door, Agnes suddenly turned round and came back.

  Maxim was sure his amble had become a rigid march, but he kept going. ("If forced to come face to face with the Subject, avoid catching the Subject's eye.") He went on out.

  When Agnes had retrieved the paperback book she had 'forgotten* in her booth and reached the street, Maxim was standing a few yards away, studying the map in a pocket guide of Washington. She waited for a gap in the traffic and scurried across the road. Maxim began strolling on the original side, perhaps fifteen metres back.

  He was surprised at how light and lively MStreet still was in the middle of the evening. Not just bars and restaurants-and there were plenty of those-but most of the shops were still open: you could still buy a winter outfit, birthday card, book or a pressure cooker, and lots of people were doing so. The crowd gave him cover, but gave it to Agnes, too.

  She was varying her pace, moving briskly, then strolling ("Find an average pace between the Subject's twoextremes")and carrying her light-coloured jacket over her arm. The slope down to Rock Creek began to steepen and the shops thinned out as they moved away from the centre. Agnes dived into one of the last, a pharmacist's with tall free-standing shelves.

  Maxim kept going. ("Follow the Subject into a big department store, but never into a small shop.") In daylight, he could have used a shop window as a mirror to watch the pharmacist's across the road, but lit windows were no use, and who stands staring into dark ones? When he reached an angle where he could watch the shop-front without being seen from inside it, he stopped and consulted his guide book again.

  Time passed, in very low gear. Georgetown conversation swirled around him: "I'm telling you, that was a great party, really great…"

  "I'm talking about the 700 series…"

  "I'll take you to some place quieter…"

  Maxim noted that he should start any remark in Georgetown with the pronoun T. Meanwhile, people went in and out of the pharmacy, but only two women of conceivably Agnes's age: one very tall and striding in a long ethnic-of-somewhere skirt, the other short and waddling, flat-heeled, long blonde hair, dark jacket and beret and a huge shoulder bag.

  Compelled to move at last, he crossed over and glanced casually into the pharmacist's as he passed. No Subject in view. He studied a restaurant menu a few doors along, feeling confused, and angry at his confusion.

  ("If the Subject appears to have been lost by accident, continue in the direction the Subject was proceeding.") But this Subject hadn't lost him by accident: she had brushed him off within minutes, in less than a
quarter-mile of straight well-lit street. He was going to be a star turn out West, by himself.

  Then he knew where she was-or would be, moments after he committed himself in one direction: behind him. By trade she was a hunter.

  His one hope was to head for the small area of streets and alleys he had explored around the bar-restaurant before going inside ("… reconnoitre the Subject'sarea…"). His own trade included the quick memorising of landscape and cityscape, and at one corner there was an L-shaped alley that cut off the building on the corner itself, giving an alternative route to making a left turn on the streets.

  He lengthened rather than quickened his pace-difficult to detect from behind-stepped into the alley and sprinted as hard as he could. It was hardly wider than a car, and somebody had parked a van halfway along. He brushed past it and ran stooping round the corner of the L, where the only light was fixed high up on a wall. He kept running up to the cross-street, turned right back towards M, slowing but glancing at his watch to excuse a half-jog- Right again on M, completing the four sides of a small square, and right into the first leg of the alley again. It would be too much to hope to sneak up on Agnes peering around the corner under the alley light, but-but a man was doing just that.

  Ducking to put the van between them, Maxim ran crouching, his soft-soled shoes making the barest patter on the rough but, thank God, dry paving. As he slipped past the van, the man disappeared round the corner.

  Maxim caught him three strides up the second alley.

  The man heard or sensed him at the last moment and turned with his hands coming up to a fighting stance, but Maxim feinted through them and hit him low in the stomach. The man collapsed against the wall and slid down it, making gurgling noises. Up ahead, cars and people moved undisturbed on the bright street at the top of the alley; Maxim had time to search the man's pockets-and then suddenly he hadn't.

  A clatter of steps and another man swung under the alley light, pistol in hand and coming to the aim. Maxim ducked behind the first man, who was hauling back his breath in short gasps. For a moment there was deadlock, then Maxim remembered his dark sunglasses case and took it out, aiming like a gun. The second man ducked back around the corner and Maxim backed off, crouching and aiming, until he was within a few metres of the cross-street.