by Gavin Lyall
Agnes stopped a block away, watching, then turned to Maxim. He shook his head. "It's over already. Either they got out fast or they didn't get out at all." He had seen burnt-out vehicles, and their occupants, before.
Agnes moved off slowly, keeping north towards the edge of the town. Maxim asked: "What about your car?"
"I'd like it, but it could be a mistake to go back now. Better keep moving."
"Won't they trace you from a hired car?"
"Yes, in time. But they've got a lot to think about already."
After a few minutes and one zigzag they were out on a straight if not wide road between the cornfields strewn with rotting stalks. Agnes speeded up, then abruptly slowed to a stop. She sat there, her head bowed and her shoulders shivering; when she lifted her hands off the wheel, they shook "God, Harry, I'm sorry…"
"Take your time."
"Just… you're speaking to somebody, and a minute later she could be…"
"I know. And you don't get used to it. Not unless you're the wrong sort of person to start with."
"Your lady friend," the watcher said, "does not have a strong stomach."
The pistol rammed him forward in his seat. "And you don't have a strong neck. I won't kill you in here, but we can take a walk in a cornfield. "
After a moment, Agnes slid the car into Drive. "Thank you, Harry. Andyou: you helped, too." She wound up to a fast but safe speed. "What are we going to do with the excess baggage here?"
"D'you want to stop and ask him a few questions?"
"You are kidnapping me," the watcher started, remembering his innocence again.
"I doubt he knows anything we don't already. He's just a pawn."
"The name's Gulev, and he lives in Chicago." Maxim had the contents of Gulev's pockets-which had included a revolver-spread on the back seat.
"Bulgar?" Agnes asked the watcher.
"I am an American citizen. You are committing-"
"I dare say." She drove silently for a few more minutes, then stopped. "All right, Gulev; this is as far as you go."
Maxim saw a sudden dampness on the watcher's forehead.
"Give him back everything," Agnes said, "except the gun and one thing-his driving licence, say. Now listen, Gulev: that licence is proof that we had you and could have killed you-when I show it to your bosses in Washington or London, and I know them better than you do. So you just tell them we didn't bury you in some cornfield in return for them not trying to kill Major Maxim in the future? Have you got that? Good. Have a nice rest of the day."
Maxim got out first and watched Gulev on his first hundred yards back towards Maison, just in case. When he got back in, he asked: "D'you think it'll work?"
"No, frankly."
Maxim smiled. "From the first day I joined the Army, I assumed the Russians wanted to kill me. "
"I had to try," Agnes said between clenched teeth.
After a time, Maxim said. "Yes. Thank you."
The Illinois farm country isn't truly flat, as film directors show it (Maxim blamed his disappointment on them) by choosing the few stretches where you could roll a bowling ball fromhorizonto horizon without losing sight of it. Slow rises and dips unnoticeable to a car's engine pull the skyline closer, and clumps of trees around the still-frequent farmhouses pull it closer still. But it certainly didn't need a map; he put that away.
"Did you find anything useful in her papers? I noticed you pinched a photo of Tatham. "
"I got her last batch of telephone bills."
He was unimpressed. "Nothing more?"
Agnes gave him a superior glance. "You don't know American phone bills: they actually tell you something, like what numbers you dialled long-distance. To Britain, for instance."
"Ah. Did she?"
"I think so, but I haven't had time to look carefully. They may not tell us much, she could have been smartenough to let her father call her. You didn't know she was CIA as well, for a time? Just a filing job, I think, but she may have learnt something… Not enough to charge out and try to beat the Bravoes at that game… damn it, I didnot know she was going to do that."
"Of course you didn't. But d'you think she was escaping from us or Them?"
After a time, Agnes said: "You're a reassuring person, Harry, but any way you look at it, we got her killed."
"Nothing to do with her father, the CIA, the Crocus List, Moscow? -just us?"
"I know we only reacted-but here we are driving a car hijacked from some Bravo across the Midwest, breaking God-knows-what laws and with two or three people burnt to death back there… Is it enough to say we didn't start it all?"
He knew Agnes was going to fear sleep for the next few nights, would be trying to bypass her dreams with drink and pills, and he longed to see her through those nights. But he also knew today's events would tear them apart. If he could say anything, it had to be now.
"Reacting is our job; we aren't supposed to start anything. But if they fire the first shot-"
"That's the Army way, Harry."
"No, the Army way would be to fire back the next thousand and anything else we could lay our hands on. By that standard, I think we've behaved quite politely. But not reacting at all won't make the secret war go away. I think we were stuck with it the moment the world got The Bomb. It didn't stop nations wanting to get their own way, it just made them scared of using their armies. So they shifted to surrogate armies: guerrillas, terrorists, agents they could disown-all well away from The Button. So-here we are."
Agnes slowed the car and looked across at him curiously. "You've been doing some thinking."
"No, mostly just listening to Miss Tuckey." Then he nodded. "Yes, some I thought of for myself. Trying to think about what I'm doing, and why."
"And it may be crooked, but it's the only game in town."
"Oh no. Somewhere across the Elbe there's a Major Ivan Maximovitch who's put as much of his life into his army as I have into mine. And some days-you can't help it-we'd like to know how it would work out. Nothing to do with politics or human rights, just to know which one of us is the best. We'd need a supporting cast of a few hundred thousand, but they're mostly in place already… We'd make quite a chapter in history, between us. Andthat's the other game. But"-he lifted the pistol from his lap-"I think I'm safer with just this."
"Put that bloody thing away, we'll be in Springfield in a couple of minutes." If he had done anything towards consoling her, her tone didn't show it.
33
"I didn't identify all of them," Annette told George before he had even had time to order a drink; inevitably, they had met in one of his clubs. "Four are dead anyway, and there's five others I'm not certain about. One of them could be either of two people with the same name, but I've got twenty-two who are alive now unless they've died in the last year or so. How's that?"
"Brilliant. What are you drinking?"
"Anything." Then, remembering that such a careless attitude to alcohol offended George: '.'Gin and tonic, lemon, no ice. Can I go on?"
"May I see?" George read the St Louis list through carefully, feeling guilty that it took such a neat and thorough piece of paperwork to remind him of how competent a woman he had married. And he could guess at the amount of work it represented: it had been no simple skimming of Who's Who, since few businessmen enter those pearly gates without the visa of a knighthood, or at very least, a CBE or CMC. Only four had achieved such distinctions.
Somewhere on that list is Person Y, he thought, glaring at it as if he could make the name shuffle its feet with guilt. But at least there was a pattern: a Church connection (where it showed), a tendency to independence and running their own businesses, although not all were businessmen: one was a university lecturer, another a solicitor. But no Person Y.
Blast.
"What did you say?" Annette was suddenly anxious.
"Nothing, you've done a marvellous job… perhaps I can narrow it a bit further." Taking the ages, he thinnedthe list down to twelve men who were now around the fifty-year
mark.
Their drinks arrived and George gobbled more or less silently for a while. Then he said carefully: "I have an American banker from the Midwest sending a signed photograph to an Englishwoman who was involved in the French Resistance. A picture of himself and some Briton, just the two. It's the Brit I want, and he's somewhere on that list. Where's the connection?"
"The American had an affair with the Englishwoman in the war."
"Typically feminine; you've all got pornographic minds. No, he spent the war in the Pacific."
"Then they had an affair after the war. If he's a banker he could afford a European holiday, I should think."
"That still doesn't tell us who the Brit is-and before you start, he's too old to be their love-child. Cleanse your thoughts and start again."
"What else do you know about your American?"
"Nothing much… he wrote a couple of books."
"What sort of books?"
"One was a polemic on banking practice, by the title, and the other was about the Red Menace. "
"What does your Englishwoman do-since the war?"
With a shiver at talking of Miss Tuckey in the present tense, George said: "Oh… gives lectures, writes books-"
"Writes books."
' "Everybody writes books, these days… " George let his voice trail away. Keyserlinghad been anti-Communist: Dorothy Tuckey's work on Resistance techniques-seen as a future need-were anti-Communist. So perhaps the photograph was one writer paying homage to another whom he admired? "It still doesn't tell us who the Brit was."
"Another banker? Or another author-no, there isn't one on the list… Or a publisher? There's one of them. Could that be the missing link?"
"Most publishers look like missing links… But no jumping to conclusions. First we have to know who published Miss… Library."
One advantage of London clubs is that at least the older ones maintain good libraries that stay open after the public ones are closed. Miss Tuckey's works had been rather specialised, however, so it was only in the third of George's haunts that they found a couple of her books. The earlier had been published by the Parados Press and printed by Arthur Fluke amp; Son, Worcester.
"By God," George whispered-the particular library had that leather-bound and unread atmosphere-"I do think we've found him."
According to Annette's notes, Julian Fluke from the CCOAC list had spent a couple of years with a London publisher before joining the family printing firm in Worcester, where he had soon started a small imprint of his own. The books had been marketed through a bigger publisher: that, George knew already, was not rare and even today needed relatively little capital-particularly when you owned a printing works already.
"Isn't Parados some sort of fort?" Annette murmured.
"It's a bit of a fort, the wall you build to stop yourself getting shot in the back. Ha!" Such a name was no coincidence. Parados had specialised in Resistance memoirs and some crusading religious works. But it had published no books since 1970. Shortly afterwards, Julian Fluke had left the family firm and gone to. work for HMSO Press, the government printing works in Edinburgh. The latest Whitaker's Almanack showed that he was now Deputy Controller, Classified Printing.
George shook his head in slow admiration. After the CCOAC conference there had been two years spent winding down Parados Press-which could have made Fluke too overtly an activist figure-then the retreat to Edinburgh and the gradual penetration of the government institution he would understand best. Now, just about every secret government paper that needed printing would pass under his nose. A true position of trust-and in one way, Fluke's loyalty ran deeper than anybody had guessed.
34
They left Gulev's car at a shopping mall on the outskirts of St Louis and got a cab out to the airport. They were back at the Washington embassy around dinner time, but the messages had got there sooner. Those were stacked in order of time and mounting hysteria on Agnes's desk. She flicked wearily through them, then reached for the phone. "They certainly traced my car… Hello?"
Maxim could hear the operator's anguished squawk.
"Never mind that," Agnes said firmly. "I'm not at home to anybody except London, but you can tell Colonel Lomax and Mr Giles that I'm back." She put the phone down. "Giles does the same job for the Other Mob, Six. You probably haven't met him."
She took the cover off a portable typewriter and began to type in expert bursts; Maxim remembered her undercover two years as a secretary. He lit a cigarette and slumped in a corner chair. Without looking up, she said: "You're getting the habit again fast. "
Maxim looked at the cigarette in his hand. "Funny. I thought I'd be fireproof after eight years."
"You'll fail your next Combat Fitness Test and then what?"
"Not quite the most pressing of my problems."
"No… light me one, would you?"
He put it in her mouth. "Report?"
"I seem already to have reported to Moscow," she said sourly. "It's about time London got a few words as well."
They could identify Lomax's urgent Rifle Brigade stride in the corridor well before he slammed through the door. "Good God, Agnes, what did you-and you!" He suddenly saw Maxim. "I told you specificallynot to-have you been in Illinois as well? I should have guessed. You canhave no idea of what we-By God, you'll stir up a rerun of the War of 1812 any moment now."
"Jerry," Agnes said wearily, "turn down the heat and come off the boil. I'll have something for you in a minute."
Lomax gave her a vicious glare and subsided in another corner. Just as Agnes finished, Giles came in, tall and aristocratic in evening dress, having been called away from some function. He had almost no hair and a permanently amused expression.
"My dear Agnes, youhave been enjoying yourself -except for your poor eye. What happened there? You've even got Charlie's Indians speaking to me again, although I won't pass on what they're saying. It seems they'd arranged in Matson to be tipped off if Arnold Tatham's daughter did anything newsworthy, and I suppose getting burnt to death counts as news even in these days. And would this gentleman be Major Maxim? Yes, I've heard of you. Delighted. Edwin Giles." They shook hands.
Agnes handed over her report. "Once encyphered, I shall send that Flash to Snuffbox, recommending a very limited initial distribution."
Giles disentangled a pair of gold-rimmed half-eyes from the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and perched on the corner of her desk to read it through. Lomax bounced up to try and peer over his shoulder; Giles simply handed him each sheet as he finished it, and at the end waited with his indecipherable smile unchanged.
Lomax said: "This appears to be the work of a diseased mind."
"Two diseased minds, actually," Giles pointed out. "Assuming that Major Maxim endorses it. You do? Thank you."
"We can't let this be signalled," Lomax said.
"I doubt we can stop it. Not short of eliminating Agnes and the Major and burying them under the magnolias. And given their advantage in years, and the tendency to activism revealed in that document, I'm not sure I'd choose to join you in that. We could, however, send our own telegrams expressing our own views."
"My own view is quite clear: fantasy."
"Not all of it, Jerry: by no means all. Taking just today's events, there seems to have been more going on in Matson, Illinois, than even our two young friends here could have achieved unaided. An elderly couple held up in their own house, bullet holes in Mrs Hall's car, a silenced machine-gun in the burnt-out truck beside its burnt-out passenger… How do we explain those away? Charlie's Indians seem to accept a Moscow factor, and while they can't officially act in their own country, the FBI isn't going to be caught not seeing Red when Charlie does."
"That's not my business-"
"Exactly…"
"-but now I've read this, I have to send something. "
"Then why not send Major Maxim? Put him on the first available seat to London, tonight if possible. I have no doubt that the Ambassador will authorise whatever it costs.
Most willingly. "
"Damn it, I probably should send him back to Illinois…"
"But Illinois hasn't asked for him. Only for our Agnes, who has diplomatic immunity, unless the Ambassador chooses to waive it. I've seen nothing public nor private to suggest they know she had a male accomplice (forgive me) let alone who he is. Is your name on record out there, Major?"
"No, but a lot of people saw my face."
"All the more reason to get that face back to London prompter."
Agnes stood up, clenching her jaw to stop her face sliding off its moorings from tiredness and strain. "I want to get this down to the communicators."
"Something you might add," Giles said, "from a private source: that Mrs Hall had her passport with her. In her handbag; it didn't get too badly burnt."
Agnes nodded slowly. "So she was going further than just across a state line. Thank you, Edwin. Would you like a copy of this when I'm through?"
Giles smiled resignedly. "Yes, dear, I suppose I'd better have."
"The more the merrier. " She went out.
"And, indeed, the safer," Giles added.
"Do you two usually swap reports?" Lomax asked.
"We represent the same national interest, the spirit of inter-service co-operation… The answer is No, we don't, it's most unusual, but so is this situation. Let me advise you, Major, that should you ever come into possession of exclusive information, always share it before reporting back, in the hope that others will report it at the same time. Otherwise, the Top Floor will say: 'If we're only getting this from Major Maxim, it means he's been on the booze and invented it to cover his expenses.' Don't you agree, Jerry?"
"The Army doesn't work quite like that," Lomax said tightly.
"All Top Floors work like that. Innumeroveritas: in numbers, no matter how contrived, there is truth. In a solo report there is onlyvino. Which is why dear Agnes wanted me to have a copy."
"Are you going to send a report yourself?"