The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  "I was trying to get you an early night," he said abruptly. "Let's do that."

  "She was blackmailing me, Harry," Tyler said softly. So now he was 'Harry' again. "She was blackmailing the whole country. She was going to give that letter to Moscow-"

  "Or maybe not. I almost talked her out of it. At least she was coming away with me."

  "I couldn't know that."

  "You didn't try to know. You could have come to us and said you were being blackmailed, that you were vulnerable. You were risking the country's position. Back walking into the sand again and hoping for the best and somebody else got killed just to keep your reputation sweet! Now get to bed!"

  Quietly, Tyler stood up, turned, walked towards the hotel.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I understand you're the best weapon we've got, Professor. It's my job to protect you. That's all I'm doing."

  "When we first met, you said I – my book – was one of the reasons you joined the Army."

  "I don't regret joining the Army."

  32

  The Chвteau de Senningen lay just past the airport, down a steep lane off the main road and discreetly tucked away in a park of evergreen trees. Less discreetly, it was now surrounded by a mesh fence on concrete posts, with a barbed-wire topping, but the guard-house was still just a cottage with neat shutters beside the windows and potted geraniums behind them.

  Two soldiers with sub-machine guns waved them on through.

  "A remarkably consistent country," Quinton said. "Where else would you find a guard-house like that – or a supposedly secret conference centre like this?"

  At the end of the drive, this was a modestly large but thin country house, two storeys high plus little dormer windows with tiled witches' caps poking out from the steep roof. The windows were tall, with white shutters against the pinky-grey pebbledash walls, and the front door was just a set of french windows, held open by another soldier and a uniformed flunkey.

  They drank coffee in a reception room just off the hallway. Most of the people there had been at last night's buffet, but Maxim couldn't remember many names. He stayed on the fringe of the gently swirling crowd, watching.

  Quinton appeared beside him. "The old man's acting rather subdued this morning. Did he say anything last night?"

  Maxim gave a slight shrug. "We talked about the war, about soldiering…"

  "He's probably just tired. I wish you'd managed to get him into bed earlier, I must say."

  "We had this conversation last night." They had, too; Quinton's reaction then had been as if Maxim had borrowed his fifteen-year-old daughter for a tour of down-town Hamburg.

  "Well, it really is too bad."

  "I expect he'll get an early night tonight," Maxim said soothingly, or as soothingly as he felt like being with Quinton.

  At a signal Maxim didn't see, the delegates handed their cups to their juniors and began drifting back to the hallway and the stairs to the first floor, being elaborately polite about letting each other go first.

  The conference room was bright and cheerful. The back wall was a long blow-up of a mediaeval engraving of the old city, there were about fifteen Scandinavian swivel chairs around an oval table under modern chandeliers, wall-to-wall carpeting and curtains. The sort of place where chemical companies met to announce marketing strategies and pin merit badges on themselves for sales performance.

  "A modern chancellery of Europe," Tyler said in a heavy whisper. "I sometimes wish I had been in the business before 1914, when they were arguing about the two-power standard and the 15-inch gun was the ultimate weapon." He sat down and Mrs West slid a thin file of papers in front of him. "But I dare say that even then, somebody was complaining that this newfangled electric lighting made it look like a meeting of tradesmen"

  Quinton gave a little grunt of relief. Tyler seemed to be perking up.

  Their Luxembourg host said a few words in each of the three languages, then went tactfully away, so that there was nobody in the room who wasn't British, French or German. Maxim, like the other bit-part players, sat behind their leaders on armless non-swivelling chairs against the walls. He could spot two others carrying guns.

  There was a quick murmur of discussion before they agreed on what they had planned to agree on: that Tyler should speak first.

  He moved his papers carefully, waiting until the last noise had drained from the room. "/c Ahoffe, dass wir ьbereinstimmen und diese Konferenz auffranzцsisch halten."

  The German delegation made a friendly noise and Tyler began again.

  "On ne peut plus кtre sыr d'une contre-attaque massive Amйricaine…"Maxim tried to follow, but his French was too slow to get all the detail and nuance, although he suspected Tyler was deliberately spinning it out so that the Germans could keep up. He could still pick out the main points.

  "If Western Europe cannot any longer threaten the Soviet Union with damage of a quantity sufficient to deter an attack, then it must find a way of inflicting damage of quality… a short-range policy… as the Russian airspace became more and more closed to air strikes, even to missiles, so the Soviet Bloc countries become more and more tempting targets… Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria… all these are needed as jumping-off bases or lines of communication… and the ranges are short… from the Iron Curtain itself, less than 500 miles to Warsaw, 350 to Gdansk, 300 to Posnan, 150 to Budapest, around a hundred miles to Prague, Leipzig, Chemnitz – 1 apologise, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Dresden…"

  Maxim saw the German delegate wince, then become impassive and attentive again.

  "Moscow might well not believe we could destroy Russia, but Warsaw would certainly believe we could destroy Poland… Above all things, we are looking for a targetting policy that will be believed… then we have deterrence…"

  Tyler stopped as the captain from the Sыretй tiptoed into the room, pointing at Maxim and making telephone gestures at his own ear.

  "You'd better go, Major," Tyler grunted. He was 'Major' once more.

  Maxim had expected George; he got a slightly accented voice.

  "Major Maxim?"

  "Yes?"

  "I wonder if you would take a beer with me. When we last met, we did not seem to have the time."

  "Is that Mr Komoscsin?"

  "Of course." The voice sounded pleased. "There is a cafй at the bottom of the hill, the one on the right. A beer, yes?"

  "Yes."

  Maxim put down the phone and stepped back from the transparent space-helmet fixed to the wall.

  The captain, who had politely turned his back, swung around.

  "It is all right? I'm going down to the village," Maxim said, "to meet a Russian spy."

  The captain just looked at him.

  The beer was waiting for him. The cafй was a single dark room with a floor of tiny mosaic tiles, and its shelves and bar jammed with fancy beer-steins, green-stemmed glasses, calendars, a model of a Luxair Boeing 737 and fleshy rubber plants. At the back of the room a large lady was ironing blouses on one of the tables. At a closer one, a square grainy face with a widow's peak smiled up at Maxim. He sat down and took a sip.

  "There was no Guinness," Komocsin/Azarov said.

  "It isn't my favourite."

  "You looked me up, then."

  "The least I could do." Komocsin waited, perhaps to see if Maxim said anything about Azarov, but he didn't.

  "How is the meeting going?"

  "It marches. And how is your leg?"

  "Much better, thank you."

  Maxim almost said that he was glad or something just as daft.

  "This time," Komocsin/Azarov said, "you do not need a knife."

  He was looking at Maxim's left armpit – why did they call it a shoulder holster? – perhaps because of the way Maxim held his arm, or maybe the leather creaked, or most likely because Komocsin was part of the one per cent.

  "But you may need something. There are terrorists from Germany, your Germany, in Luxembourg."

  Maxi
m sipped and nodded. A big refrigerator in the corner began to hum loudly, and the woman left her ironing and slapped it a blow that would have left Maxim spinning. It went on humming, and she went back to her ironing.

  The blouses hung over the chair backs.

  "Do you have any idea who they are after?"

  "No. Your professor is the most famous. Him or the German."

  "Is that all?"

  "That, and the beer, yes, it was all."

  "Thank you. I'll buy it next time."

  "I hope so." The voice seemed suddenly tired.

  Maxim left his beer half finished and walked out, trying not to hurry.

  At the chвteau gate half a dozen demonstrators had gathered, holding placards with anti-nuclear symbols and mushroom clouds on them. They booed Maxim as he showed his pass at the gate and strode out along the curving drive.

  The session had broken up. The French delegation was already climbing into its black Citroens as he reached the little crowd in front of the building.

  He found the Sыretй captain at the edge of the crowd. "I've been told there are terrorists from Germany here-"

  "Is that what your Russian spy said?"

  "You said yourself that was the real risk."

  "How can you be sure he really is a Russian spy?"

  "Our intelligence people have got him on file…" He saw the captain wasn't believing anything he said. The French had gone, the Germans were gliding away, their own hired Mercedes were backing up to the little pavement.

  "It went like a dream," Quinton enthused. "You missed the best of it, of course. What was that all about? I really do think we may get an agreement. Our man was outstanding, quite first-class."

  Maxim was listening, but only to the distance. Nobody had done anything to the French, nobody anything to the Germans. And probably nobody would do anything to Professor Tyler.

  "Is there any other route we can take?" he asked the captain.

  "We have to go up to the big road. The village is a no-end." He looked at Maxim with bland eyes.

  "Harry-" Tyler called, and he slid into the back seat beside him, and the car purred away.

  "There's a terrorist threat," he said.

  "What can we do about it?" Tyler asked cheerfully. He was basking in the morning's glory.

  "I don't know, but…" From his seat beside the driver, the captain looked at him sourly. The car leant over as they swung out of the gateway and the crowd of demonstrators waved their placards and shouted something Maxim didn't understand.

  The lane led up through steep hairpin bends to the autoroute above, going through clumps of pines where a Boy Scout could have set an ambush. But if it came to that, a Boy Scout could have cut a hole anywhere in Senningen's mesh fence and thrown a grenade through the conference window. He might not have got out alive, but a terrorist who doesn't care about that – and there were plenty – is virtually unstoppable.

  Then he saw it.

  A small stream came trickling down the hillside so that, at some time, they had wrapped it up to pass quietly under the road instead of flooding it. A simple length of concrete drainage pipe, perhaps eighteen inches diameter. Quite standard.

  "Schnell!" he shouted. "Vite, vite! Go for Christ's sake GO-" and he dragged Tyler down off the seat as the startled driver rammed down his foot, the automatic gearbox thumped and then wailed and the car shot around the next bend.

  Behind them, the road blasted open. Something slammed into their backside, sending the Mercedes staggering across the road with the rear window crazed over. Then they were accelerating uphill, never mind anything coming down, and rocking crazily out into the hooting traffic on the main road.

  "That's it," Maxim said. "Slow down. Moins de vitesse." He helped Tyler back onto the seat. The car slowed but began to weave as the driver's shakes caught up with him.

  The captain said something sharp, and they straightened out.

  "What about the other car?" Tyler looked back at the blind rear window.

  "They can't have done worse than run into a hole. Keep going."

  "Major," the captain said respectfully, "how did you know?"

  "The culvert. Under the road. A standard place for terrorists. They've used it a dozen times in Ireland, and over here… Also, I could have been wrong."

  "I am glad, Harry, that you took that risk," Tyler said.

  By the time they reached the hotel, there was already a small and over-excited group of police around the doorway. Maxim and the captain hustled Tyler into the scrum of uniforms and they charged through the lobby to a waiting lift.

  Once inside, everybody seemed to let go a sigh of relief at the same time.

  "Who's got the key?" Maxim asked.

  Nobody had the key. Everybody thought that somebody else had it.

  "Christ!"

  "You wait," the captain said as they got out. "I will get it. If the terrorists were there, they will not be here."

  They stood around the lift doors as he rode down again. A man came round the far end of the corridor, and everybody turned to meet him, but he was elderly and shambling. In the dim light Maxim didn't recognise him until he said – "Professor Tyler?" then lifted a heavy pistol and fired twice.

  Tyler gasped and collapsed against Maxim, knocking him off balance as he snatched for his own gun.

  Charles Farthing said. "I will tell you just why-"

  Maxim shot him three times. Drawing his own pistol far too late, one of the police went forward and laid a hand against Farthing's neck. He looked back at Maxim with suspicious awe.

  "Bon groupement, monsieur."

  It was very good grouping. The three holes in Farthing's chest could have been covered by the palm of a small hand.

  Maxim handed over his revolver, automatically swinging out the cylinder and emptying the chambers so that it couldn't fire by accident.

  "Both dead on arrival at the hospital," George said heavily. "We rather forgot about Farthing. Farthing the grenade, Farthing the shotgun, we should have guessed at Farthing the pistol. I suppose he must have read the letter before sending it on to Jackaman."

  "He was carrying it around for a month or two," Agnes said. "And it doesn't sound as if he could afford much else to read. Perhaps after a time he started to blame Tyler for Etheridge's death. Fellow Yorkshireman and all that."

  George stood up, stretched, and walked slowly to the window. A military band was rehearsing on the Horse Guards and a thin strain of music worked its way in through the heavy glass. "Did you find out what had happened to Farthing in court?"

  "He got a fine for the grenade and a suspended sentence for the shotgun."

  "We should have had him shot," George snapped.

  "In the end, we did." She stood beside him staring blankly down to the trees at the bottom of Number 10's garden, now showing a faint dusting of new green. "And Tyler too. I suppose."

  "Harry kept him alive long enough. I think we've got an agreement with the French, they were the ones who mattered, of course, and now if anybody comes up with some silly story about Tyler having eaten somebody back in the war – that's just defaming the dead, who can't answer back. Typically crude Soviet propaganda. Not really too unhappy an ending."

  "And what about our Harry?" She said it without any trace of fake Cockney.

  "The embassy bailed him, and if Luxembourg brings any charges there is going to be one almighty coolness about their security standards. First the bomb and then… the only trouble seems to be some local cop claiming that Farthing had already surrendered when Harry shot him. Bloody fool."

  "I always said he'd kill somebody. I just didn't expect to be glad. Poor Harry."

  "You aren't getting sentimental about him in your old age, are you?" George asked politely.

  "Me? No, duckie, not me." She began to laugh quietly, to herself, and then in the middle of it, to cry.

  The morning session at Senningen had none of the cheerful babble of the day before. They sat down very quietly, all wearing black ar
mbands and the French delegation with identical black silk ties.

  "In honourable memory of our late colleague," the French delegate said, "I suggest that we speak English today." There was a murmur of agreement. It was also a tactful move, since Tyler's replacement – a middle-aged semi-scholar from the International Institute of Strategic Studies – spoke French rather badly.

  "Thank you," he said in a clogged voice, then coughed his throat clear. "I will speak from Professor Tyler's notes… He says – he believes that we can no longer rely upon an American Armageddon…"

  Sitting behind him, alongside the British First Secretary who was nominally his warder, Maxim began to pray silently. Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.

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