The Contract

by Gerald Seymour

  'He's no money, the little bastard.'

  'So George says.'

  'He's no papers, no passport.'

  'That's certain.'

  'Where'll he go, Johnny?'

  'He won't have thought of that. Just getting into the distance game, getting shot of us, that's all he'll be wanting.'

  'He won't find any transport round here . . . there's pre- cious few buses in day time, none at night.'

  'He can take a car . . .'

  Carter broke his pacing, swung round on Johnny. 'Don't pile it, lad.'

  'It's a fact,' Johnny said quietly. 'He's five hours' start on you.'

  'After what we've done for him.' The pacing resumed. 'Bloody well nursemaided the creep.'

  'We've done nothing for him,' Johnny spoke to himself, as if alone.

  'We brought him over here, offered him a new life

  'We've done nothing for him. We've crippled him, chopped his foot off at the ankle ... he won't be thinking well ... at best he's an outcast for the rest of his natural, at worst he's a traitor.'

  'We owed him nothing.'

  'There's no basis for his loyalty . . . but he won't have a car.'

  'I'll hang him by his bloody thumbs when I get him back.' Carter spat his anger across the room.

  'You need manpower out there.'

  'There'll be bloody hell to pay.'

  'You have to call for help,' said Johnny. 'Anyone who can get your feet on the ground, and soon.'

  'Rather it was any other bugger than me . . .' Carter walked without enthusiasm towards the mahogany desk on which the telephone rested.

  'Johnny, it's not my field, tell me, where's he going to be ?'

  'Out there.' Johnny waved towards the hazed distance beyond the window glass. 'Not far and scared half to death, blundering off the trees.

  He'll be in the woods crying his bloody heart out. He won't be calm and he won't be rational. He won't have an idea of what he should be doing, where he should be going. He's not that sort of kid.'

  'Hope to God that you're right.' Carter began to dial. 'I can just see Mawby's bloody face .. .'

  The Night Duty desk at Leconfield House in London's West End, home of the Security Service, received and duly logged the telephoned advice from Henry Carter.

  The clerk called the home of the Director. There had been a lengthy pause on the line and then a rattle of instructions, as if Security as well was involved in SIS's loss of their precious property.

  Scotland Yard's Special Branch police were alerted, the description of Willi Guttmann telexed to their night operations room, the request was made for intensive surveillance of airports and harbours. A team of detectives would be hustled together and sent to Holmbury. Special Branch would undertake liaison with Surrey Constabulary and their headquarters on the hill above Guildford, ten miles from the scene of the disappearance of the boy. Surrey Constabulary would inform their outlying stations of a Missing Persons call and would add the rider that the matter was covered by Official Secrets.

  More calls for the clerk.

  The naval officer who had retired from the service with the rank of Vice-Admiral and who had been given the job of directing the country's D notice procedures was next on the list. The clerk explained word by word what he had been told to communicate by his Director. It was requested that advice of a D notice be served on all newspapers and broadcasting outlets urging them neither to publish nor communicate any material relating to the defection, arrival in Britain, and subsequent flight of Willi Guttmann. The clerk knew the wording well - Paragraph 4

  Section a, 'You are requested to publish nothing about . . . the secret activities of the British Intelligence, or Counter Intelligence Services, undertaken inside or outside the United Kingdom for the purpose of national security.'

  That was the necessary precaution. Once the civilian police were brought in the matter would be leaky as a sieve. Chatter among the wives, chatter in the saloon bar with most favoured journalists. Bring the civilian police onto the scene and security was at terminal risk.

  The clerk's work done his imagination could wander and he sensed as a sharp smell the atmosphere on Night Desk at Century House across the city. For a long time the grin remained on his face.

  The submission of his catastrophe to the Security Service had provided Carter with the required adrenalin to wake the Deputy-Under-Secretary.

  Should have done it hours before, shouldn't he? Should have done it when the men were still out hunting through the grounds. Should have, but he hadn't. Carter hadn't spoken to the Deputy-Under-Secretary for three years, could be more. Johnny watching, silent and sympathising.

  Mrs Ferguson slipped into the room. Still in her dressing gown, still in her slippers, still with the pink curlers embedded in her hair. More coffee, steaming and augmented with a plate of biscuits. Both men might have kissed her.

  When she was gone Johnny poured.

  'I'm grateful for your help, Peter.'

  The Deputy-Under-Secretary sat on the side of the bed in his usual room at the Travellers' Club. There was the faint drone of a vacuum cleaner on a faraway landing, the clink in the corridor of the tea cups and saucers being brought to the early risers. The garish ceiling bulb hovered over his head, accentuating the pits of his eyes, the concave bowls of his cheeks. The telephone rested on the sheets beside him.

  'Don't think about it, it's nothing. If we can't help each other what can we do ?'

  It was a sharp barb. Fenton had long been the advocate of inter-departmental liaison, was a founder member of the 'bigger is best'

  brigade, had written a paper two years back on the desirability of merging Intelligence and Security, and had faced for his pains waspish opposition from SIS and its parent Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

  He was wide awake, in control and confident, but then Security never enjoyed the dinner round that was the privilege of the Service. Peter Fenton would warrant a fraction of the hospitality that was available to the Deputy-Under- Secretary.

  ' I'm advised that this matter cannot be mounted unless Guttmann is co-operative.'

  'More to the point, if a breath of this drops out of the bucket then there'll be half a dozen heavies from GRU or KGB on father Guttmann's shoulder crowding his vacation, yes? That is in the unlikely event they let him travel to Magdeburg.'

  'There was no option, I suppose, but to bring in the police?'

  'Had to be done. You want the boy and you want him fast. For that you need a manhunt. We don't have the necessary numbers and neither do you.'

  'I hate to say it about ourselves, but it has been a pretty poor effort by our people down there . . .'

  The rare candour cut at the toughness of the Director. 'Take my advice, leave the inquests till we have the boy back.

  Keep the court martial till we know the scope of the damage

  'There'll be damage, but it's good advice.' There was the whiff of desperation. 'I'm not going to lose this thing, Peter.'

  'We'll keep in touch through the morning.'

  The Deputy-Under-Secretary began to dress, and he rang for the porter and asked if a cup of tea could be brought to him.

  At first he had run hard.

  Panting for air. Crashing through the undergrowth. Cannoning from the trees that loomed around him in the darkness. Sprinting where there were no paths. Around him were only the devastating sounds of his own movements and the thunder in the high leaves of disturbed pigeons.

  Running, crashing, panting, sprinting. But the boy's shoulder hurt him now, hurt far down in the muscles and wounded him in the hidden nerves by his collar bone and rib cage. The shoulder that had cracked into the low stone wall as he had pitched forward in the shallow, camouflaged ditch. The pain came often, surged and subsided. The intensity billowed with the exhaustion in his legs and the ache in his chest as he gulped for breath. He had no map, had followed no plan. He could only run. He ran with the darkness of the woods and trees closing on his flight as he passed, cloaking his trai
l. He knew that sometimes he had turned back on his path, that often he had sacrificed distance for the needs of concealment and so as to skirt the scattered homes beyond the trees. He could not calculate how far he had gone in the hours since he had climbed onto the rusted, rainwater pipe. Many hours, enough to waste his strength and exacerbate the throb in his forehead.

  The wetness of the morning's dew gathered at his shoes and at the ankles of his socks. Water flaked to his arms and legs from the previous evening's rain on the leaves.

  So where was Willi Guttmann running? What was his goal ? Only a vision for company. Willi running to his Lizzie. The pigs had lied to him, the pigs had told untruths, had separated him from his Lizzie. Going to Lizzie.

  In his tiredness he did not think of aeroplanes and travel documents and money and fresh clothes. Lizzie was outside the house, Lizzie was across the fence. Lizzie was out there, out beyond the darkness, and he was no longer in their cage. He had achieved a kind of freedom.

  And they were going to kill his father. That was as clear as the lies they had told about Lizzie. They were going to kill him in Magdeburg - from a car - with a silenced pistol, by a knife thrust. Why else did they ask where his father would go in Magdeburg, who he would meet, whether he would be guarded? They had taken him from Lizzie, now they sought to take the life of an old man.

  The day came with a hint of rain and the taste of the low, hill-hugging clouds. There was a wind, too, that caught the moisture on his clothes, tugged at them. The stamina for running had deserted the boy. The strength remained only to walk, to plod forward. There was nothing in his room that he could have taken that would have helped him. The bastards had left him nothing. Not even a bar of chocolate, not even a packet of sweet biscuits. Bastards, and he spat the phlegm from the dried soreness of his throat. He was walking and the trees now were sharp to his eyes, and the hedges clear and the pain of his shoulder concentrated his mind.

  Time for the boy to think, and with the thoughts that came to his tired mind there welled a horrible loneliness, a hopelessness that was the friend of desperation . . . He should break from the thinking, because thinking would hurt, would always bring to mind Lizzie and his father.

  And thinking would also be of George and his quiet shoes, and Mr Carter and his smile and the questions, and the one called Johnny who sat and listened and said nothing and who would be the man that killed his father. He had the eyes of a man who could kill, the one called Johnny, eyes that were never still . . . Against a thorn hedge the boy flopped down. The brush of the wind could not reach him. He sprawled on his side and closed his eyes. So tired. Legs and arms draped haphazard on the soft grass. He must find someone to tell of the danger to his father. He must find someone to speak with of Lizzie and of the lies that had been told him. He would find someone ... He pushed himself up, tried to rise trom the ground, but his energy was sapped, his will weakened.

  He would find someone, but later.

  From the towns of Guildford and Dorking and Horsham police units were moved into the area of the hills around Holmbury.

  A photograph had been issued, plus height and weight, and a note of the clothes that the boy was believed to be wearing. There had been more than a buzz of interest at the police station briefings as the Superintendents had rolled their eyes and given the half wink and let it be known that this was a matter falling into the realm of national security.

  Two car loads of Special Branch had travelled from London with the paraphernalia of fingerprint and photographic equipment believing they were visiting a sc ene of crime, and the argument had been loud and vicious when George, heavy in aggression, had refused them permission to enter the grounds of the house without the prior authorisation of Henry Carter.

  A party had come from Leconfield House, stern-faced, brush-moustached, unmistakably military men in civilian order.

  They had gone with Carter to the sitting room and talked for more than an hour in an attempt to explore the mind of Willi Guttmann and gauge his intentions.

  Johnny went to bed. Not his problem, not for him to hold Henry Carter's hand.

  When the bank close to the Music Academy on Koblenzer- strasse opened, Charles Mawby and Adam Percy were there and waiting by the front door. This was where the SIS 'out station' in Bonn kept their funds for operational use. Percy wrote a cheque for 25,000 marks, Mawby scribbled the receipt that would go through Percy's paperwork. They were the first to be served, receiving a stack of 100 mark notes. Mawby counted them, Percy slid the money into a plain buff envelope, and then they were out onto the street and striding to the car.

  The advance payment would be made, and the morning would be spent in the discussion of detail, the establishment of a liaison link, the understanding of the plan. With luck Mawby would be on the late afternoon flight to Heathrow. Percy had picked him up early from the Steigenberger Hotel, had not called at his office on the way and so the coded telex from Century House addressed to Charles Mawby lay unread.

  They drove in heavy traffic out onto the Bad Gotesburg road. The money burned in Mawby's inside pocket.

  'It's not the way I'd have wanted it, Adam. I'd have preferred our own people doing the driving. We can't contemplate it.'

  'You have to allow for failure, and if the worst comes to the worst then you absolutely cannot afford any connection.'

  'It's the reliability of this man . . .'

  'We can guarantee nothing. But he's as good as you'll find, that's what I'm told.'

  'They wouldn't play with us ?'

  'BND ? The masters would, but not the man I talk to.'

  It was a hell of a way to work, reflected Mawby. To take a matter so delicate and rich and pass it to this thick-fisted pig for delivery. But those were the rules.

  'I don't know how you stick it here, Adam.'

  Adam Percy looked with a trace of surprise at his passenger. 'I don't fret much, Mr Mawby. That way it's just about tolerable.'

  The woman normally took her dog for a walk in mid- morning if it were not raining. Not far, not more than a mile from the farm gateway in which she could park her car. Enough to let the labrador run and stretch in the fields and sniff around and cock his leg. There were no sheep here off the Ewhurst to Forest Green road, only cattle and the dog would not disturb them and could be allowed to run and ferret for himself far ahead of his mistress. She had thought twice about going out that morning, but eventually had risked it, armed with raincoat and head scarf. She stayed at the edge of the field and looked up at the tree line and beyond it to the squashed-down peaks of Pitch Hill and Holmbury Hill and Leith Hill.

  Even on a threatening day, with the mist low and muzzling the beauty of the trees, it was an exhilarating outing. She was well bedded in her thoughts when the barking of the dog alerted her. Hackles up, shoulders flexed, back legs tensed and ready to spring, furious at a centre of attention that was hidden from her view by the hedge. He wasn't going to set up a fox . . .

  'Rufus, Rufus, heel. ..' She ran forward.

  He never came back to the call if it were a fox.

  The boy lay on the ground. His knees were drawn up to cover his stomach, his hands across his face for protection.

  She stared down at him, then reached for the dog's collar and heaved the animal back and hooked the leash in the collar ring and took the strain as it rose on its back legs and pawed at the air.

  The boy was soaked, his clothes drenched through, his hair streaked and tangled. Face white, eyes cowering. She would have run for her car if the dog had not been with her, but the animal gave her courage.

  'What are you doing here?' Her voice shrill.

  The boy did not reply, did not look at her, and his eyes were held by the slobbering, teeth-filled mouth of the dog.

  'Don't you know you're trespassing? This is Mr Daniel's land. . .'

  Now the boy gazed up at her. In her life she had never seen such terror.

  There was not the look of a gypsy, an itinerant, about him. Too well dressed for that, a
nd by his face he was not someone used to sleeping in the rough.

  'This is private property. You have to have permission

  'Will you help me? Please help me, please.'

  She recoiled, and the croak of the voice renewed the demand of the dog to be at the boy, and he wormed away.

  'You'll try no tricks ... or the dog will have you.'

  'Please help me, madam. You have to help me.'

  'Stand up, and don't you dare to try anything.'

  A silly thing to say and she saw her idiocy from the moment that the boy, stiffly, awkwardly, began to rise to his feet. A helpless creature.

  His eyes pleaded, his shoulders hung limp. He stood in front of her.

  'I was running from them,' he said.

  'From whom?'

  'They are going to kill my father. When he takes his holiday they are going to murder him . . . Please, help me.'

  'I'm sure they're not.' Her reserve was tumbling, her curiosity winning.

  'I have been a prisoner for two weeks now . .. they are going to murder him.'

  The dog's barking had subsided and he sat now at his mistress's feet and his tongue lolled at his mouth.

  'Where have you been a prisoner?'

  The boy waved towards the dark mass of the woods, gestured behind him. 'There is a house there .. .'

  The woman and the boy and the dog alone in the field, rain spitting on their faces.

  'The one with the high fence round it - at the end of Maltby Lane?' She knew the place. Everybody in the villages close to Holmbury St Mary knew of the house. A fence of that height could not be erected around 6

  acres of grounds without talk, talk that multiplied when it became known that 'government' was paying. She had seen the closed gates, and in winter had noticed the far flicker of brickwork between the bared trees. 'You'd better come home and have something warm and then I'll ring Mr Potterton, and he'll help you.'