The Contract

by Gerald Seymour

  With disaster closing around him the Prime Minister reverted to his most basic talent. He was a good fighter, they said in the party, and not too clean at close quarters. He would kick and hack and scratch, and he reckoned that as his sole possibility of defence.

  The Prime Minister poured coffee, added cream and milk, and beamed pleasantly at the cold, hostile face of the Trade Minister.

  ' I hope we can get whatever it is you wanted to say out of the way quickly. I've about 15 minutes .. . you'd like some coffee ... I have to go to church . . . what can I do for you?'

  ' I have been instructed by my First Secretary to deliver a Note of protest... a Note of the most serious protest. . .'

  The Prime Minister passed the cup of full coffee. 'They take it rather badly when I'm not at Morning Service, I read the second Lesson.'

  '.. . on a matter that gravely affects the relations between our two countries . . .'

  'You take sugar ... do go on, I'm listening.'

  ' I have been instructed to protest most vigorously at the criminal intrusion into the sovereign territory of the DDR by British espionage agents.'

  The Prime Minister waited sentence by sentence for the interpreter.

  ' I have been working particularly hard for the improvement of relations between our two peoples, not their deterioration.'

  'We regard it as an insult that at this moment when I am here on a mission of friendship that British saboteurs should be at work inside our frontiers.'

  ' I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. The fact that you are my guest here, at Chequers, should be an indication of the importance that we attach to your visit to our country. This nonsense about saboteurs . .. come to the point, please.'

  In front of the Trade Minister the coffee cup remained untouched. One of the old iron men, this one. The advocate of the erection of the Wall dividing Berlin. The opponent of the amnesty for political prisoners at the 30th anniversary of the State. The Prime Minister found himself fascinated by the peculiarity of the East German's hair, a pale powder grey and extraordinary how it stood upright with the firmness of a garden brush.

  'We have thorough proof provided by a boy named Willi Guttmann, who from his love of the socialist principle came across the Inner German Border last night, of British machinations against our people.

  Evidence of a criminal plot to kidnap this boy's father from our territory.'

  'Preposterous, Trade Minister . . . I've seen the name of that boy somewhere, I think I can recall that name,' the Prime Minister said easily. 'He defected to us in Geneva . . . A silly young chap, infatuated with an English secretary and wanted to build a love nest for her. Then she found she wasn't pregnant after all and threw him over. I hope that before you start bandying around these allegations you've better evidence than that.'

  'Within the next two days the television service of the DDR will broadcast these allegations. Willi Guttmann will be produced to tell his story so that the peoples of freedom loving nations may appreciate the criminal behaviour of your agents.'

  ' I've seldom heard such rubbish. What was he going to do with this scientist, sling him on his shoulder and jump that fence of yours? I find it most distressing that your government should stoop to such smears and untruths .. .' The Prime Minister turned to the interpreter. 'The strongest words you've got, Rodgers, I don't want any prissiness.'

  'Last night . . .' the Trade Minister snapped his reply to the interpreter.

  'Last night a spy who came to the city of Magdeburg under the name of John Dawson intended to kidnap Doctor Otto Guttmann, a most eminent scientist, and to smuggle him illegally beyond our borders.'

  'You should pass to the First Secretary my advice that he should be most careful of the weight he attaches to the gossip of this Guttmann boy

  . . .'

  'We have incontrovertible evidence.'

  'When you are my guest, Trade Minister, do me the goodness of hearing me out. It would be most unfortunate if the ramblings of a jilted youth were permitted to sour British and East German co-operation. I would not welcome anything that jeopardised the good relations between our countries, certainly not a concocted story like this. Where is this British agent, this saboteur?'

  ' In a few hours he will have been arrested.'

  'So the evidence is quite unsubstantiated?'

  'To us the evidence is satisfactory.'

  'To me it sounds ridiculous. I would like you to stress to the First Secretary my total commitment to the bettering of understanding between your country and ours. From the hospitality shown to you here you will have seen for yourself the value we have put on your visit. Are you forgetting that because of a youth's hysteria, I hardly think so .. .

  You haven't touched your coffee . . .'

  'Thank you ... I must return to London.'

  'You're due in the Midlands tomorrow, the Lucas and British Leyland factories.'

  ' If I have not been recalled to Berlin.'

  'That would be a very great disappointment to the people who have tried to make you feel most welcome here.'

  ' I must consult with the First Secretary.'

  'My advice is that he should not be precipitate in his actions. Assure him, please, that should he provide concrete evidence of the presence of a British agent in the German Democratic Republic, evidence incontrovertibly proved by his arrest, then a most far reaching enquiry will be instituted into the behaviour of our Services. The First Secretary has my word that I know nothing of this matter.'

  ' I have no doubts that such evidence will be produced.'

  'My warmest regards to the First Secretary.'

  'Thank you.'

  After the withdrawal of the Trade Minister and the interpreter, the Prime Minister reached for the coffee.

  He pondered to himself. He had come to the cul-de-sac after all and he was linked with the Service. All that he had feared and sought to avoid had happened, and he was hamstrung in the web that the Service wove.

  The same web that had caught Anthony Eden on the affair of Commander Crabbe. The same web that had dictated the bland denials from Harold Macmillan that Harold Adrian Russell Philby was a lifelong traitor. The head of government could not dissociate himself from his Intelligence establishment. He had bought himself a little time, and had not yet counted the cost of the purchase. The Trade Minister's scarcely civil departure had indicated that the message would be relayed to the First Secretary, it was possible the advice might be accepted.

  Now he must await a miracle. The freelancer that he had been told of, a man called Johnny Donoghue, must bring an elderly scientist and his daughter through this impenetrable border. A border that was sealed tight, the Deputy-Under- Secretary had told him, a border that was festooned with automatic guns and minefields. That alone could save him from the humiliation of involvement in the DIPPER failure.

  He drank his coffee. All a question of faith, he supposed. And in the matter of political miracles he regarded himself as an agnostic. Beyond possibility to believe the freelancer would offer salvation.

  His wife came into the room, two Prayer Books and a Bible in her hand.

  'We really must hurry, darling.'

  ' I suppose so,' said the Prime Minister. 'I'm not feeling terribly like church.'

  Carter came out of the communications wing at the Roadhaus. All despondency and gloom in London, all waiting for the Berlin team to come trooping back for the inquest of the afternoon. He was told that the name of John Dawson had been heard on the Magdeburg police radio.

  He'd be sitting on his hands and hoping that the dust would have settled before he, too, received his travel orders.

  He walked across the car park to the NAAFI bar. Yes, he was on duty.

  No, there was no harm in a couple of beers. Sunday lunchtime, wasn't it?

  'Morning, Mr Carter,' a big cheerful welcome. 'Christ, you look as. if it was a hard old night. Come for the hair of the dog, have you?'

  Charlie Davies of the British Frontie
r Service leaned easily against the bar.

  'Good morning, Mr Davies.'

  'Found myself short of fags, so I popped in for some. Cheapest ones you can get here, cheaper than duty free at the airport, that's what I told the wife.'

  'Yes, it was a bit of a rough night

  Charlie Davies called for two beers.

  'Going back soon, are you ?'

  ' I don't know ... I mean nobody's told me. They can run the shop well enough without the likes of me.' Carter smiled ruefully. ' If I was here six months they wouldn't notice back there.'

  The warm grin slipped from Davies's face. 'There's a fair old flap over the other side,' he said dropping his voice. ' I was talking to a BGS fellow

  . . . they're tearing the cars apart at the checkpoint, there's a mile's tail-back at Marienborn. Good job it's Sunday, be right chaos if the lorries were on

  the road as well. It's said the security on the autobahn is really fierce . . .'

  ' I know,' said Carter. As a seeming afterthought, he added, 'Would you care to take a breath of fresh air with me, Mr Davies?'

  The NAAFI manager had recently laid out a rough putting course beside the drive way. An RAF sergeant and his wife and small daughter were coaxing a ball down the green. Out of earshot of Carter's low and hesitant voice.

  'You'll forgive me for what's going to sound a pretty daft question, Mr Davies . . .' Carter stared down at the thick tufted grass. 'But what's the chances of a chap making it out right now?'

  'Depends who he is, what he knows.'

  'Resourceful, thirtyish, fit physically ... I don't know how much he knows.'

  Davies looked at his companion with a strand of sympathy. 'Your lad over there, is he? Is that what's stirring them up ?'

  'Could be,' said Carter.

  'He's about five foot ten . . . ?'

  Carter gazed into Davies's face.

  '.. . dark brown hair, a blood spot on the right side of his nose.'

  'Something like that.'

  'Calls himself Johnny, doesn't bother with the last name. Accent a bit north country.'

  'He was here?'

  'A week ago,' said Charlie Davies carefully. 'He had two days here . . .

  came out with us in daylight and kept us talking half the night.'

  Two missing days, Johnny wanted to brush up on his German. Clever, thoughtful Johnny. Come to the border to find the experts, the men who know. Slipped into place. Johnny buying his own insurance, Johnny taking his own precautions. Johnny disbelieving all the bromide that Mawby and Carter poured down his throat at Holmbury.

  ' It's Johnny that I'm waiting for,' said Carter. One turn round the course completed. The sergeant's daughter squealed with delight nearby.

  'What was the question again, Mr Carter?'

  'The chance of him making it...'

  'On his own, is he?'

  ' I don't know.'

  Davies considered. 'He spent the whole of his second morning in one sector, he seemed satisfied enough with what he saw. He's not a lad that talks much, is he?'

  ' If he was coming he would have started early this morning, but not in circumstances of his choosing, you know what I mean?'

  ' If he made it to the fence, when would he be over . . . that's what you're asking?'

  'Yes.'

  'We talked about that. I said to him that most of the people that get across have lain up for a full 24 hours in the immediate area, soaked up the patrol patterns, that sort of thing.'

  'And so . . .'

  ' If he followed that he wouldn't come tonight. It would be Monday night that he was giving it a go.'

  Carter sighed, breathed the air that now carried the faint moisture of hope. 'What was the sector that he looked at?'

  'He seemed to like a piece of what we call the Roteriede forest, just about opposite the village of Walbeck on their side . . . I'll run you out there tomorrow morning.'

  'Thank you.'

  'We all thought him a hell of a nice bloke. He came back to my place and had a meal with the family, got everybody laughing. He knows all there is that's important about the last few yards, but what you see from our side isn't the half of it. You know that, don't you .. . ?'

  'What time shall I come in the morning?'

  'Try about 10. I'll have cleared the post, we'll take a coffee and then run out there.'

  'You never answered my question,' Carter said in mild reproach. 'His chances?'

  'And you didn't answer mine, Mr Carter, whether he's on his own . . .

  I'll put it this way, if he hadn't been here this week then I'd say Sweet Fanny for his chances. He soaked everything we could give him on the border, and he'll need that and the rest. If he's passengers in tow, and they're not of the same quality .. . well, then it's obvious, isn't it?'

  Carter nodded morosely.

  ' I'm out of turn, Mr Carter, but it's a bit queer to me, the whole business. You in Helmstedt, Johnny over there, and you not knowing your lad was here this week casing the place . . . I'll tell you what he said.

  Nobody had spent five minutes working out how he was going to run for home if whatever he was up to slipped ... I knew he was going over, he said as much. He reckoned you'd left him bare arsed, that's why he came to see us.'

  'As you said, Mr Davies' out of turn . . . I'll see you in the morning.'

  Carter felt like an old man as he walked to the Stettiner Hof and the bed that he had missed last night. An irrelevance on the pavement as the procession marched by. He had no power of intervention, could do nothing to affect the fate of Johnny. Run fast, Dipper, run deep. He remembered the rifle that he had seen in the hands of the guard beside the river, the height of the wire and the automatic guns that had gleamed in the early morning light. And Charlie Davies said that wasn't the half of it.

  Willi Guttmann had been taken from Gunther Spitzer's office.

  He sat now in a hare walled ante-room with a man who watched him in silence, who wore thick lensed spectacles close to his face, and who had not removed his raincoat. Through the morning he had talked with many people, teams from SSD and Soviet Military Intelligence and KGB had come from the East German capital to interrogate him. His run from Checkpoint Alpha seemed not to impress them. When he asked about his father the questions were ignored. They were interested only in Holmbury, the men he had talked to there, and the limits on information of Padolsk that he had given to the British.

  If they had not reunited him with his father, if they had not told of Otto Guttmann's arrest, then that could mean one thing only. His father and Erica and Johnny were running, running blind and hard for safety.

  He ate his lunch from a steel tray, stringy meat and boiled cabbage. His father's survival from capture lay in the hands of Johnny. He remembered Johnny at Holmbury, quiet and reflective and sitting in a chair behind him as Carter questioned. Johnny who laughed rarely and distanced himself from the others. He remembered when he had looked down from his bedroom window high in the house, down on to the patio and watched the evening work-out, the strengthening of legs and shoulders and stomach. He heard again the pounding of the boots.

  And he had betrayed Johnny, he had spoken of him to the men from Berlin, and Johnny alone could take his father and Erica beyond the reach of their punishment.

  Willi pushed the tray with the half emptied plate away from him. The man who sat across the table said nothing and Willi dropped his head into his hands.

  Gunther Spitzer had been sent home for the night because men of greater seniority had taken over the organisation of the hunt for the scientist, his daughter and the agent of British Intelligence. A stranger had sat in the chair behind his desk and given orders to his staff, newcomers had handled his telephone. They came and went through his door without acknowledgement.

  When he reached his flat the tiredness and self-pity and frustration broke over Renate. She was the only target within reach.

  She lay on their bed and her moaning, whimpering, trebled in his ears as he stayed hunched i
n the chair across the room from her. The blood from the cut below her right eye seeped to the pillow covers. The bruises spread in technicolour at her throat.

  He had screamed at her with an anger she had never seen before.

  'You must have known . . . You told me nothing ... you were her friend.

  She would speak to you, you must have known . .. You made me pay for their dinner, you made me bow and scrape to him as if he were a great man, you must have known . . . Bitch, bitch, and you have destroyed me.

  . .'

  And through the accusations he had punched and pummelled her. She had not fought back, just cowered and used her arms to protect herself from the agonies inflicted by the gloved hand.

  'She didn't tell me anything ... I promise .. . she said nothing, Gunther.'

  A small, low, choking voice.

  During the day the trains to the West were searched with great thoroughness. All stopped at the Marienborn junction where the lines were enclosed by high wire. Border Guards with machine guns flanking the carriages, eight man teams climbing aboard with torches and rods for poking into the narrow recesses of the roof, with ladders and a painstaking commitment to the task. The delays grew, the trains ran late.

  The tracker dogs brought from Magdeburg found the place of crushed and trampled grass beside the approach road to the autobahn, but lost the scent on the roadway and sat sadly at the handlers' knees. New orders came for widening the hunt.

  It was seven hours between the time that the schoolmaster of Barleber reported the theft of his Trabant car to the Volkspolizei Kreisamt and the arrival of that information on the desks of the men who had come from Interior Ministry.

  And the trail grew cold.

  There were no grounds for panic amongst the men who directed the manhunt. No reason for anxiety. Let the Englishman and his followers run and blunder in the countryside. They must come to the border, they must flee in that direction. There they would be taken. Inevitable. They would be driven towards the frontier, the fence and the guards.