The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  "It wasn't that easy," Mrs Masson said reproachfully. "This is yesterday I'm talking about." She had done a slow frightening journey quite alone – more alone than she'd ever been before – and now, perhaps, she wanted to blunt the memory by doing it again in company.

  When she reached the airport, she realised she hadn't even any Austrian money for the taxi and had to overpay heavily in sterling. And then there wasn't a flight to Britain for another three hours. She began to worry.

  Rex might have let her go, but that didn't mean his new masters concurred. And there she'd be, sitting in the most obvious place, for three hours…

  She pulled herself together, changed the rest of her pounds into schillings and took a taxi back to the city, to the railway station. Which station? She hadn't realised there were two. Then where did she want to go? She didn't know that, either, but then remembered that Germany was to the west, away from the Iron Curtain. Then she must go to the Westbahnhof.

  "How were you going to manage for tickets and a passport?" Agnes asked.

  "Oh, I had my Diner's Club card, thank heavens. I'd only taken it out two years ago. And I actually had my real passport. You see, Rex hadn't told me not to bring it when he rang, I suppose that would have sounded odd, so I just naturally did. But he'd taken back the Margaret Franklin one."

  There was a stopping train to Munich, and as she watched the white countryside rumble by, the terrors began again. For over twenty. years of marriage she had been aware of the KGB as a giant enemy, but a distant, misty one. Now the giant was aware of her, knew she was scuttling around somewhere on the floor of Europe, would be leaning down to look closer.. At every stop, anybody getting on could be an agent, and most of them looked like it. She reached Munich almost in hysterics.

  She staved them off until Munich airport – and by then the snow had hit London, catching Heathrow with its boots off, as usual. Flights to London were backing up all over Europe, nobody knew when… at that, she hauled her case into the lavatory and sat down and burst into tears. Her whole life had fallen in on her, and she was still trapped in the rubble.

  At least German lavatories are clean enough for a good long cry. And after that, she remembered the duty-free bottle of Scotch in her airline bag, a rare and expensive brand that Rex had insisted on – and she now knew why. She didn't much like Scotch, especially neat, but a few cautious gulps made the giant seem smaller, and shorter-sighted. She took a taxi back to the station and bought a ticket to Frankfurt, remembering vaguely that the airport there had more flights than anywhere in Germany, and anyway, she wanted to keep moving.

  "You could have gone to the British consul," Agnes pointed out.

  "You mean just walk in and tell some little trade official that my husband's defected to Russia and I think the KGB's after me? Oh no thank you, Agnes. He'd've thought I was mad."

  "You could have rung us. You know the number."

  There was a tense silence. Maxim got up, switched on a lamp with an old parchment shade, then fumbled the curtains shut. The room took on a warm, firelight glow.

  "Perhaps," he said, "you didn't want to risk being the first to break the news."

  "I think perhaps that was it," Mrs Masson said gratefully. She swung her feet onto the floor and sat up, flexing her shoulders. "I suppose he might have changed his mind and come back. And anyway, would you have believed me, Agnes?"

  "It's our job to believe things like this," Agnes said tunelessly, watching Maxim.

  "And there," Mrs Masson said, "they did catch me."

  Probably they'd spotted her at the airport but not risked making a pass then. Now they found her alone in a corner of the concourse, searching for change in her handbag. One snatched the the bag, the other stepped in to block her from view, and she thought he had a gun in his hand. Then before she had time to decide whether to scream or not, the bag had been thrown back at her and they were gone, hurrying but not running, and lost in a crowd that looked quickly at her and quickly away, uninvolved.

  She was shaking so badly that she could hardly stand as she reached down for the bag to see what they had left her. And the answer was everything – except her little camera.

  "Was there a film in it?" Agnes asked.

  "Well there was, yes, I'd just put it in. I'd noticed there were only two shots left in it, so I used them taking a picture of the house – I don't suppose they'll come out, in that light – and bought a new film in Victoria."

  "What did you do with the old one?" Agnes asked, her voice very controlled.

  "It's somewhere in my airline bag. I was going to get it developed."

  "We'll do that for you."

  There was a distant thump as the police moved some heavy furniture. Mrs Masson shuddered. "It's like having the burglars in, grubbing through your clothes.. Oh, Agnes, just tell me who I married."

  Agnes had come down by train and Maxim offered to drop her at Redhill station. His own drive back to London was going to be murder in that weather, and she had the film to develop. Ferris watched, shivering, as he backed a cautious three-point turn among the parked police cars and vanished as they started down the rutted ice of the drive.

  "What happens now?" Maxim asked. "I mean to her: What does she live on?"

  "Tricky question. I suppose we might get his pension paid to her – somehow. We can do things with money that would have you jailed in more respectable departments. So she could be lucky that far."

  As they turned onto the wooded suburban road, the car slid broadside across the camber until it hit the piled snow on the verge. Maxim eased it out with very delicate use of the clutch. "D'you know what she told me, while you were getting your coat? That he made love to her, that last night in Vienna. It seems they hardly ever slept together any more. She thought it might be a sort of fresh start."

  "The bastard," Agnes said unemotionally.

  "So probably he guessed she wouldn't go with him."

  "Always leave them laughing."

  17

  It was past nine o'clock when he parked in the bright, wide empty stretch of Whitehall. The journey had been a crawling chaos, even though he was running against the commuter tide, but central London was spookily quiet in the snow. It could have been three in the morning.

  For once there were no tourists, just the policeman stamping his feet and punching his gloved hands together outside Number 10. Maxim went through to George's room, but there was only the duty clerk there.

  "They're in the Cabinet Room, Major. Would you go straight in?"

  Back down the corridor to the corner, where visitors to the Cabinet Room passed through the haughty marble gaze of Wellington – whom the French politely believed was Julius Caesar – and tapped on the door. George shouted: "Come!"

  He and Agnes were alone in the tall room, seated together at the near end of a vast boat-shaped table, with red-leather-padded dining chairs all around it. There was a scatter of glossy black-and-white prints on the brown baize tabletop.

  "D'you want a drink? I should think you must." George waved at a trolley of bottles and glasses by the fireplace. There wasn't any beer, so Maxim mixed himself a long whisky and water.

  "That's the film, is it?"

  "See what you make of that." George shoved a photograph into his hand.

  It was a negative print, white lettering on black. It seemed to be a straightforward typed document, with unfamiliar numbers and letters as references, then a heading.

  Gerald Jackaman

  Maxim sat down and began to read. The print was almost life size and only slightly blurred by the grain.

  When he'd finished he said: "We knew just about all this already. You could have worked this up from the files."

  "It gets better later," Agnes said. She seemed surprisingly cheerful.

  George pawed among the prints and thrust another one at Maxim. "Try that for size." Agnes's cheerfulness certainly wasn't infectious.

  This page began: Joint account in the names of Gerald and Mary Jackaman at Comp
te Nationale d'Escompte, Boulevard Heurteloup, Tours. The rest was a mixture of figures – mostly francs and dates – which Maxim might have been able to analyse if he had the time. But he felt he had to say something.

  "There's no classification," he said, inspired.

  "The Other Mob," Agnes said, "don't classify their documents. They regard every piece of paper they handle as above and beyond NATO Cosmic. I believe they file used loo paper under-"

  "Shut up" George said.

  "This was put together by MI6, then?"

  "In direct contradiction to a hands-off order distributed by the Headmaster. Then, in a rare fit of brotherly love, they showed it to Box 500-"

  "Massen probably asked for it," Agnes said.

  "With what excuse?"

  She shrugged. "Nobody believes excuses in our trade so you don't usually give them."

  "What a beautiful world."

  "If you want to send a gunboat instead, go right ahead and send a gunboat."

  Hoping he was peace-making, Maxim asked: "Has the Prime Minister seen this?"

  George glowered. "He's still at the House. There's the Defence debate on, remember?"

  "Yes. Sorry." Maxim realised that George, as the PM's defence adviser, would far rather have been down there playing nanny. "I'm not used to the idea that debates really happen except in the newspapers, and that people have to be there to make them happen."

  "You share that simple failing with most of the Honourable Members of Parliament. At one time, there were only seventeen, seventeen of them in the Chamber while the Defence Secretary was speaking. And this is about war and peace, the lot, everything."

  "Perhaps," Agnes said, "they've just come to realise that it's the civil service and the trade unions who run the country."

  "What?"

  "Just a quote from our latest traitor."

  George stared at her, then got heavily to his feet. "I need a drink."

  Agnes caught Maxim's eye and smiled gently. "We're waiting for a gentleman from Six to come round and explain his service's little antics. Don't stay if you can't stand the sight of blood."

  Maxim smiled back, sipped his drink and looked around. The room seemed cold, or perhaps it was just that it was so empty. He had been in here only once before, being 'shown around' by George. It was longer than the Private Secretaries' room next door, but built in exactly the same style except for two incongruous pairs of pillars holding up the ceiling at one end where a wall had been knocked down to add an extra few feet. The walls were painted oyster white and had only one picture, a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, over the fireplace. The writhing brass chandeliers had been put in by Sir Anthony Eden, he remembered George saying. He wondered if the cleaners had got around to thanking him yet.

  The man from the Intelligence Service said his name was Guy Husband, so perhaps it was. He was about forty, gangling and donnish, wearing an expensive tweed sportscoat that was rumpled and smeared with pipe ash. He had a high forehead, a breaking wave of wiry brown hair and a long nose. His teeth were rather yellow, and he tapped them constantly with his pen.

  "In fact," he said, "this shouldn't really have been circulated at all, even on a limited basis. One might say that it wasn't really developed."

  "That's what one might say, might one?" George asked coldly.

  "I only meant that our researches are far from complete. I think it was a mistake to pass it on to our sister service-" he smiled at Agnes; "-and indeed, we now know it was a mistake, bearing in mind the loyalties of the man on whose desk it landed." He smiled again.

  "Oh quite, " George agreed. "The Headmaster will be, one might say, interested to know that the only way he can find out what his Intelligence Service is up to is by routing through the house of a traitor."

  "Well, I don't really think-"

  "Particularly when it turns out that they're working on an operation that he has specifically forbidden."

  Husband smiled and gave a coquettish wriggle of you-and-I-know-what-prime-ministers-will-be-old-boy. "I do understand that it was Box 500 that was told to cease and desist."

  "It was distributed!" George snapped. He took a deep breath. "All right. This material-" he slapped a hand on the glossy prints; "-hasn't got a summary. Give me one."

  "I did say it was undeveloped."

  "When the Prime Minister gets back here I would like to have something to say to him other than suggest he gets your Director-General around to tell him personally. Just give me everything you've got, developed, undeveloped or still stuck in the mangle."

  "We-ell," Husband took a folded paper from an inside pocket. "What it boils down to is that Jackaman had a perfectly legal bank account in France. They owned a holiday cottage in the valley of Loire, and Exchange Control allows one to have funds over there to pay the plumber and window-cleaner and so on… A very nice part of the world."

  "I know the Loire valley. Get on with it."

  "Ah… then they sold the cottage a couple of years ago, and brought the money back into this country. Unless they were buying something else there, that's legally what they had to do. But the account was allowed to stay open: there would be lingering debts, legal fees and so on. Quite normal. But then the account started building up again. Now, I'm sure you appreciate that France isn't Switzerland-"

  "Dear God," George breathed; "although I was not born with football studs growing out of my feet like most people who read Geography, I do know the difference between France and Switzerland. Get on"

  Untroubled, Husband continued. "France has nothing like Switzerland's ideas of banking secrecy, nothing like even our own, which really aren't very impressive. They seem to be most amenable. As I say, in the last eighteen months the account has grown, not regularly, but fairly steadily, until it now stands at something a little over fifteen thousand pounds – at the current rate of exchange."

  "This would be a non-resident account?" Maxim asked. "Usually only fed with money from abroad?"

  "That's quite right. You would need French exchange control permission to put in francs."

  "But the account itself can be in francs? Safe from any devaluation of sterling?"

  "Oh yes."

  "How the hell do you know this, Harry?" George demanded.

  "I've spent more of my life abroad than you have, I expect."

  There was a short silence. Husband watched Maxim covertly, intrigued to find him in on a meeting at this level. Over at Six, they still weren't sure what to make of the Downing Street soldier.

  "And this was all clearly illegal?" George asked.

  "In British law, yes."

  Agnes said: "Clumsy, too."

  "I agree there are more subtle ways of secreting money abroad, but it probably wouldn't have come to light unless we – I'm sorry, I mean first your service – had started looking."

  "When was the last payment made?" George asked.

  "Last year, shortly before Jackaman died."

  "Is there any suggestion," Maxim asked, "that Jackaman was taking Moscow gold?"

  Husband and Agnes looked quickly at each other, then shook their heads. This at least was one thing they agreed on. She said: "No. The Centre would never let one of their people do anything so risky."

  "So the money now belongs to Mrs Jackaman?"

  "A nice point," Husband smiled. "As a true patriot, one really ought to tell the Inland Revenue that Jackaman's estate is some fifteen thousand pounds larger than they first thought. However, perhaps one doesn't want to drag the Jackaman name any further in the dust."

  "One doesn't," George said. "Not unless one wants one's Director-General around here on his hands and knees pleading for a job scrubbing out the loos."

  Husband's boyish smile became a little strained.

  Agnes asked: "Has probate been granted?"

  "Yes. He left quite a small estate, but very tidy. Most of the money was tied up in the English house. It's for sale now."

  "Where's Mrs Jackaman?" Maxim asked.

  Husband now h
ad no smile at all, and his voice was petulant. "You see, that was one of the reasons why we regarded this material as being undeveloped. Her pension is paid into the local bank, but she hasn't drawn any of it out, yet. Their only child lives in America now, and-"

  "You mean," Agnes said sweetly, "that you have no bloody idea at all."

  18

  "And that", Agnes said after Husband had gone, "is all that stands between us and the Red Peril."

  "There's me and my pistol as well," Maxim volunteered.

  George said: "He obviously isn't a field man."

  "He isn't even a field mouse."

  "They've got some good men over there. I tell you, you're just being old-fashioned." George poured them all another round of drinks and looked impatiently at his watch. "Why the hell don't they broadcast debates? At least they could do it on a land-line to here and the Cabinet Office and the Departments. All right, where are we now?"

  Maxim had been picking through the photographs – which Husband had made a feeble attempt to take with him, since they were his service's documents – and found that they spent half a page on Mrs Jackaman's background. Until then he'd known nothing about her except that Who's Who gave her family name as Brennan. He read it carefully.

  "We assume," Agnes said, "that Greyfriars' interest in Jackaman is because of their interest in Tyler. And that centres on the famous Tyler letter."

  "If it still exists," George said quickly.

  Maxim lifted his head. "It sounded from what Zuzana Kindl said that the KGB had only just heard about it. And they weren't working directly on Tyler at that time. So they either tripped over it or somebody…" he let the idea hang in the air like an unmentionable smell.

  "Could it have been your little chum Charles Farthing?" George asked hopefully.

  "No. He's a bit of a nutter, but a patriotic nutter. He didn't think Tyler was pure enough in heart for us."

  "You don't think Greyfriars actually have this letter?"

  Agnes said: "I doubt they'd be going through all this hoop-de-ha if they had it already." She looked at Maxim, who shrugged and went back to the blurred typescript in the photograph.