by Gavin Lyall
He was twenty fast metres along it when a cockney voice said: " 'Ullo, sailor, watcher doin' ternight?"
It was the waddling blonde in the beret from the pharmacist's, and under that, Agnes. He grabbed her arm and started towards the lights of the corner. "Did you know there were two blokes behind us?"
"No, I…" She shut up and matched his pace. Nobody came out of the alley. They crossed MStreet and kept going, and in a doorway she snatched off the wig and beret and rammed them into the shoulder bag that had been expanded from the purse she had been carrying before. "Damn, and I was being so clever fooling you, I never looked behind. What happened?"
"I thumped one of them, then another turned up with a gun. I left."
"Did you kill him?"
"Of course not."
"Sorry, I never know with you."
"At least we know they've caught up with me."
"The Bravoes? It could be, doesn't have to be. Your chums in the Treasury, the Secret Service, they could be behind you. They were interested in whether you were going to start investigating anything over here… let's cross." She hustled him to the far side of the street.
"With a gun?"
"For God's sake, the Secret Service carries guns like credit cards, every enforcement agency does."
"Where are we going?" They were getting away from the busyness and bright lights.
"Just my car."
They drove slowly around the streets of old houses, now cramped by lines of parked cars. "But it could be Them," Agnes conceded. "If they're after you, all it needs is a telephone call to your parents: 'A question about your son's camera insurance, could you put me in touch?'
'Sorry, he'll be back from America in a few days' -bingo. Washington's the place to start, and the embassy only uses two hotels here. See how easy my job can be?"
"Frankly, no."
"Okay. I pulled a dirty trick on you in the pharmacy. Itook too many risks, putting on the wig and beret and changing my shoes. You did fine up until then. I screwed it up by not noticing somebody behindme. They probably thought you'd added me as a convoy."
("When it appears that the Suspect has somebody following them to detect any followers, ignore the Suspect and follow the follower instead.")
"But," Agnes decided, "even if it was the Secret Service, we don't want them knowing you're off to St Louis and points West any more than we want the Bravoes… Can you travel with what you've got?"
"Yees." Maxim trusted neither his passport-now two passports-nor any money to the hotel room or safe. "I'd need to buy a toothbrush and a shirt-"
"So buy 'em. I'll pack a bag at my place and we can make that motel alibi real."
28
Agnes made no pretence of escaping any following car by 'accident'. Being a skilled driver, particularly in towns, was part of her job, but the only skill she displayed that evening was in not actually hitting anything. After making unsignalled turns and abrupt lane changes through Chevy Chase and Bethesda, she blasted to a highly illegal speed south on the Beltway, ducked off it, rejoined a few miles along and finally came down to a leisurely cruise through the Virginia countryside.
Maxim knew her driving well enough to be relaxed about it, and spent his time folding and refolding a road map. Finally Agnes said: "Dostop it, Harry. / know where we are. Just trust me."
"It isn't that. I just hate not being able to put my finger on a map and say, 'I'm there.' "
"Oh Lord. I suppose that's the soldier in you."
"Be thankful I'm not a Gunner: I'd've brought my theodolite along and surveyed us down to the inch every five minutes."
"A small mercy, I suppose. Where we are, however, is south-west of Alexandria. From here it's a pretty direct route back to National Airport tomorrow. Happy now?"
"Yes." But she noticed he didn't put the map away until he'd located himself precisely.
They registered as Mr and Mrs Alan J. Winterbotham, although the motel clerk was more interested in the car's licence plate.
"That's America for you, " Agnes said, shaking out her hastily packed clothes. "If you aren't on wheels, you must be on the skids. Some states even issue a non-driver's licence: it actually says This Is Not A Driver's Licence, because you need something for identification. I thought you handled that well, Mr Winterbotham. Anybody would think you'd spent your life checking unmarried ladies into motels."
Maxim looked back expressionless, knowing she was babbling from nervousness, knowing his own stolid attitude was nervousness, too. The motel was made up of separate cabins, wide-spaced and private among trees-but more to the point, the cabin had its own phone extension and twin beds.
"I'm going to have a bath," Agnes announced. "You'd better ring your hotel and leave this number there. If Jerry Lomax or anybody tries to get hold of you… I'll ring my office in the morning. "
She spent a long time in the bathroom. When she came back in her long nightdress, Maxim was in the bed by the window, bare-shouldered and riffling through a handful of motel pamphlets.
She hopped into her own bed. "Are you reading?"
"This stuff?"
She snapped off the light between the beds and lay listening to the night. It was quiet except for the murmur of the highway a mile off. After a time, she said: "You did all right, back there… followed the rules."
"I didn't follow you very far."
"I told you: I took a risk. Sorry. I just wanted to make the point that the rules aren't everything… it's an attitude. If you're going to be Winterbotham out there, think about him. Not just job, address, past history-get into the habit of thinking Why am I Aere? Where have I come from? Where am I going next? Have a reasonable answer ready at every point, but don't be too quick to explain yourself. Sorry, I'm lecturing." She fumbled for her cigarettes and lit one. In the brief flare of the lighter she saw he was lying back, hands clasped under his head, staring at the ceiling.
"Go ahead."
"I may as well… Forget anything you've heard or read about 'living the part'. It can't be done, and if it could, it wouldn't be any use. If you play innocent and unnoticing too well, you won't attract suspicion, but you won'tnotice anything, either. Act the part and know you're acting it-and thatthey don't know.
"That's really the key. You've got to love that idea, really love it: they don't know. Relish it, wallow in it. Let it give an extra colour, spice, dimension, to everything you do. At the bad moments, don't look back and think, Well, at least I'm a major in the British Army. And don't look forward to a time when you can tell somebodyal! about it. You've got to live in the moment, and the way to do that is to thinkthey don't know and really enjoy it. The only way. Believe me."
Halfway through, her voice had become an echo, disorientating Maxim until his memory came to rest in a stone-walled lecture room with the Scottish wind rattling the windows. "Did somebody tell you that, once?"
"A Miss Dorothy Tuckey, on my first training course. A long time ago."
"I didn't know you'd met her."
"She taught me how to react and not to react. The least I could do when you told me… An unknown grave, I suppose. She might have thought that was appropriate."
After a time, Maxim asked: "Did you ever live that sort of life?-for any length of time?"
Agnes took her own time deciding to answer. The glow of her cigarette briefly outlined her snub-nosed profile against the dark wall. "Yes… right at the beginning, before my face got known. I got myself a job as typist and general dogsbody on a small magazine we thought was being financed from Moscow. We didn't care about the magazine, we just wanted to trace back the gold chain, see who handled it. After a time they used me as a courier: everybody else on the staff thought they were being watched. They were quite right, too, by then."
"How long did it last?"
"Eighteen months, about. Living and working with those people, eating and drinking with them, and the only taste I learnt to like wasthey don't know." The taste, relearnt that afternoon in New York, was still in her m
outh.
"What happened in the end?"
"Nothing special. It just got too obvious that nobody bought the magazine so Moscow hauled in the chain. Orperhaps I made a mistake: you can see which I'd rather believe. The magazine folded and we all got drunk on Bulgarian wine and I made a speech about going out to penetrate the government and cut the arteries of the police state right at its heart-you need Bulgarian wine to say things like that, it makes me faint to think of it now. And the next day-well, nearly-the Service put me on the list as an Administration Trainee.
"I suppose we got a few more names on a few more files, learnt a bit about Moscow's accountancy procedures. And I learnt a lot-mostly about myself… about giving everything but keeping something back because you'll have to start giving again tomorrow. Is there some secret You inside that rather activist exterior?"
"I don't know… I don't think there was; you live a very open life in the Army, the secrets aren't personal ones… I suppose I used to think the worst that could happen was that I got killed. Just Lights Out and somebody else's problem from then on. Now… it's getting a lot more complicated. The Army can teach you to handle anything-except loneliness."
She breathed the last gasp of smoke towards the ceiling and stubbed out her cigarette. "Do you want to come into my bed, Harry?"
"Yes."
"Promise me one thing: don't say you love me."
From then on, everything went dreadfully and completely wrong. Perhaps it was too small a bed, because it had to hold the ghosts of Mo Magill and Jenny, Maxim's dead wife, as well. And perhaps they were hoping for an innocence that was long past both of them… It went wrong.
Sitting weeping in the bathroom, Agnes demanded of herself how she could have been so responsive to every whim of Magill's mood, and so dull but demanding and clumsy with Maxim… When she went back he was asleep, or pretending to be, in his own bed.
In the dawn, grey with sea mist, she drove him to the airport.
29
Meanwhile, back at the Ministry of Defence, George was not back at the Ministry. Something sudden had come up concerning the family fortunes, and he had to consult his solicitors: it was the one excuse that his seniors, being closer to retirement and thus deeply concerned with land values and capital transfer taxes, accepted with sympathy.
George actually did spend the morning with solicitors, although not his own. Taplin, Green and Keeley-or their ghosts, since none of those names now survived in the list of partners-had offices on the south side of New Square, a corridor with an uneven floor under the carpeting and doorways that had subsided to odd angles. Mr Nightingale's room was the third along to the right.
"I rather think," Mr Nightingale said, "that I was at school with your uncle, C. A. Harbinger. Would that be right?"
"Really? Uncle Charles? Yes, indeed." George had chosen to ask for Mr Nightingale because he had already established that connection.
"First-class cricketer. I'm sorry he missed his Blue, but Oxford was very strong in those years… How's he keeping?" When last heard of, Uncle Charles had been keeping a Malaysian girl less than half his age in a Vancouver penthouse, but George managed to recall some less interesting small-talk, and like winged seeds the conversation spiralled delicately down to business.
"We don't actually act for you, do we?" Mr Nightingale asked politely.
"I'm sorry to say you don't, one feels bound by tradition… This is quite unofficial, but"-hoping that would be interpreted as 'almost official'-"it does concern my work at the Ministry, security and intelligence on thepolside…" Mr Nightingale had been a wartime soldier in a fairly respectable regiment (George's opinion, as an ex-cavalryman) and while he had filled out to a pink-and-white chubbiness, he still wore a small military moustache that had stayed loyally ginger as a reminder of the Desert campaign.
George continued with deliberate diffidence: "It's all rather confidential, I know of course you'll respect that; the problem is rather whether you feel you can disclose anything from your side without an official request from Security, and I'm sure you'll understand why we'd rather avoid that at this stage…"
"If it concerns one of my clients, you must appreciate my position is quite clear."
"I really don't know whether it does or not… May I simply go ahead and ask?"
"By all means."
"I believe you were once a director of a small company called Anglam Gateway Ltd?"
"Oh yes, that… we wound that up ten years ago, at least."
"Can you tell me anything about it?"
Mr Nightingale considered. "There was nothing confidential about it: it was a bright idea some Americans had for setting up training courses-that sort of thing-for their businessmen and other people coming over to Britain for the first time. You spent a week in the countryside being lectured on British business practices, company law, how to address a Duke… all sorts of things like that. It did quite well, for a time."
"What happened eventually?"
"I think the American end decided to, ah, quit while they were ahead. There was a trend for the multi-national corporations to set up their own courses, on a European rather than purely British basis… We were totally dependent on the American end to send us the, ah, trainees. It was essential to recruit them over there, before they arrived; if they found it was getting too expensive to advertise and recruit, well, that was that."
"And you were a nominee shareholder and director."
"Yees, I think you could certainly assume that. Theproblems of American citizens being directors of British companies…"
So Anglam had been, effectively, entirely in American hands: they sent the trainees, probably nominated the lecturers, and when the time came could quietly pull out, pleading changes in the American scene which the British directors couldn't challenge. George veered away from the obvious next question, which he was sure Mr Nightingale wouldn't answer.
"Did the company itself own any property?"
"Oh yes. It rented an office in Knightsbridge for a while, and actually bought a house in Tunbridge Wells. We sold that when we picked up another house down near Eastbourne. A more secluded place, very pleasant. I actually gave a few lectures there myself, on company law. Always had a most pleasant time."
"And that was sold when the company was wound up?"
"Certainly."
"Do you happen to know who bought the properties? Turnbridge Wells and Eastbourne?"
A slight frown crinkled just above Mr Nightingale's gold-rimmed spectacles. The Uncle Charles connection was wearing thin. "I imagine we still have the conveyancing documents down among the cobwebs somewhere…"
George said: "Well, I dare say I could find out from the Land Registry."
Mr Nightingale beamed with gentle superiority. "I'm afraid you couldn't, you know. You need the permission of the owner to go in for a title search, so you'd have to know the owner first. You mentioned security: I can assure you that one of the most secure things in British life is who owns what property. It's been said, although I wouldn't say it for myself, that the lack of pressure for change stems from the Royal Family's landholdings. A remarkable amount of it is alleged to be held through nominees. If the true title to land were fully disclosed, it might prove that Her Majesty really was the richest lady in the world, which would be, I'm sure you agree"-he Smiled at George over his spectacles-"rather vulgar."
George smouldered quietly.
"Of course," Mr Nightingale added, "you could always go and park a caravan on the grounds. The true owner or owners would have to reveal themselves by going to court to have it removed. A lengthy process, and perhaps you don't have a caravan…" Mr Nightingale was enjoying himself.
"The Americans themselves"-George opted to risk it-"for whom you were acting… can you…?"
"I'm afraid not. Not without a very good reason. You said something about a security aspect…"
"Yes. It's quite possible that Anglam was a front organisation." George decided to plunge; he had already given aw
ay too much if Mr Nightingale himself was one of the List, but George didn't think he was, simply because he had been too easy to find.
"A front? For what?" Mr Nightingale was no longer amused.
"We came on the name through a retired CIA man in America; let me put it that way."
"There is a very serious allegation inherent in that."
"Yes," George said carefully. "Hence my quite unofficial approach. Let me say that I would imagine the courses were genuine for most of the time, but on occasional weekends, perhaps, they taught something rather different."
There was a long silence, apart from the creaking of Mr Nightingale's chair as he swung a few degrees either way, frowning down at his desk top. At last he said: "You have no proof of this?"
"And we're unlikely to get any. If it was a front, it was designed precisely to block any such proof, with nominees and cut-outs unto the seventh generation. But I'm not really concerned with your Americans of ten years ago. They're water under the bridge, and if it was murky water…"He shrugged. "I'm only interested if any aspect of Anglam still lives on."
"It was totally wound up."
"Yes… but the properties still, presumably, stand. It's just conceivable that one or other of those houses was passed on to another organisation… A long shot, but the only lead I seem to have. "
"Are you implying that something is still, ah, going on?"
"Something is certainly going on. Whe*e it's going on…"
Mr Nightingale considered. "The reputation of my firm, no matter how innocent our connection… Tell me, Mr Harbinger, how do you envisage this, ah, matter being concluded?"
"Very quietly," George said firmly. "The very last thing my Department wants is any overt scandal with a CIA connection."