The Contract (2 page)

'A bit choked up about the girl not coming on the second leg. He's quiet and sullen most of the time, sort of bottling it.'

'That's damned stupid, not much point in going through with this charade and then having his girlfriend disappear on the same night. The boy has to see that.'

'I think it's the girl. Flood of tears at the parting, quite a scene really.'

'You're going soft in your dotage, Henry.'

'He said they'd kept it very secret, plugged the keyhole I suppose.'

'Chatter him through the Geneva end for a couple of days, then I'll send an armour king down to you.'

'Right, Mr Mawby. We'll be on our way again.'

'Good . . . oh, and Henry, it's been very well done. Very smooth.'

'Thank you very much, Mr Mawby.'

For a man of his build, Henry Carter had quite a sharp step as he returned to the car. At his position in the Service with a lowly plateau of advancement reached and little to look forward to bar the cut glass decanter and the hand- shakes and the good riddance and the bored smiles of the retirement party, praise was welcome. It was his talent that he sold himself short, that was what his wife said anyway, and he usually told her she was right.

Lying on the carpet in his small study, wearing the Guernsey knit sweater that provided him with a boyish sense of the outdoors, puffing at a cigarette that dropped from a monogrammed holder, Charles Mawby studied the mole hills of paperwork that he had dispersed across the floor. His wife never disturbed him while he was working, left his coffee and tea outside the door before going at tip-toe back to the living room of their Knightsbridge flat, and the consolation of the portable television.

Sometimes he wished that she would intrude so that she could flavour the concentrations of files and maps and photographs with their 'Secret'

and 'Restricted' stamps, but the door stood as a barricade between his professional life and what private existence the Service permitted him. If she had come in then Charles Augustus Mawby, of good pedigree, good school, good Cambridge College, would have assumed irritation and made a show of covering typescripts and said something about 'Not really good for you to see this sort of stuff, darling', and wallowed secretly in a sort of pride. An Assistant Secretary nominally working at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mawby was a career officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, climbing high and well. A bright future at every compass point in the offing.

The paper mounds represented the briefings he had received during the previous week. They concerned a success that was not spectacular but might be significant. A mite of triumph in the unending struggle for information and the placing of pieces in the jigsaw that had no horizon.

Two years back Mawby and select colleagues had taken a private room at the Garrick Club and over champagne and lobster, and afterwards port and Stilton had celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the Service.

They had toasted their Elizabethan founder, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had created the principle that knowledge is never too dear, that no price could be set on intelligence material. For Mawby that evening had set the seal on his determination that within the confines of his influence the Service would remain a virile and lively agency. He munched at the sandwich he had retrieved from the doorway, scattered crumbs on the papers left by the Ministry of Defence (Intelligence) and the Service's Russian Desk/Military.

If the Service were to remain the vital agency that he con- jured in his mind, stay free from the constraints of the 'parsi monious politicians' that the Deputy-Under-Secretary was for ever complaining of, then it must be alert to chance, responsive to good fortune. In the case of Willi Guttmann they had much with which to be satisfied.

An English girl of good county stock, employed by the World Health Organisation, leaning towards middle age and fear of the shelf, had plucked up the courage to jump from her virginal pedestal and launch herself into an affair with a junior Soviet diplomat. And managed to get herself pregnant for her pains.

A nice girl from a nice home and father doing well in the Inner Temple, and so, of course, the thought of termination was unthinkable.

And Willi Guttmann, naive and infatuated and far from home, had been persuaded that a baby needs a father, and wet little blighter that he was had agreed that Lizzie Forsyth should trip round to the British Consul in Geneva who would know what to do, what arrangements could be made.

The Consul had been quick and his telex had finished up on Charles Mawby's desk.

The German name and the Soviet background had nagged at Mawby, caused him to take the lift to the Library in Century House, caused him to smile sweetly at the wide- hipped ladies who could drop their hands on cross references, caused him an agreeable sting of pleasure when they reported back that the junior interpreter was the son of Doctor Otto Guttmann. Mawby had glanced once at the files the ladies showed him and with rare excitement hurried to telephone the Consul.

He brushed the crumbs from the biography sheet, wondered why his wife needed the television's volume so high and glanced again at the typed detail.

Lizzie Forsyth's little indiscretion, her failure to get herself kitted up, had landed in their laps the son of the Director of Russian anti-tank missile research. There would be some pieces for the jigsaw out of that, could hardly be otherwise.

Sweet, wasn't it? And the Deputy-Under-Secretary had already offered his congratulations, and there would be something to go to the market place with, barter for the friends across the water, and you needed something strong to wring material in exchange out of Washington.

That evening Charles Mawby immersed himself in the technology of weapons code named Snapper, Swatter and Sagger that could destroy a NATO Main Battle Tank at a range of two thousand metres,and read the evaluations of the potential of its untried successor. He buried his mind in blueprint studies that showed skeleton mechanisms with appended titles for Hollow Charge Warhead, and Gyroscopic Controller, and Guidance Wire Spool. He assimilated a paper on the theory of the tactics that the Warsaw Pact would employ with infantry operated anti-tank-war- heads to halt a NATO armoured counter-thrust. He browsed in a Central Intelligence Agency report that detailed the career of a young German scientist attached to rocketry in the Second World War who had not run fast enough to escape the advancing Russian invasion, who had been carried back to the Motherland as a spoil of war and put to work, who had married a local girl and risen through proven ability and intellect to the position of director (Technical Research) at Padolsk, fifty miles south of Moscow.

And Henry Carter was taking Otto Wilhelm Guttmann's son deep into the Surrey countryside, and they were going to start in the morning, gently to prize open the can that held the boy's knowledge of his father's work.

She'd done them well, very well, little Lizzie Forsyth. They'd probably have given her a medal if anyone could think up the wording of the citation.

No talking in the car. George following his headlights and concentrating because they had now left the main roads and were into the rabbit warren of lanes that threaded the Surrey hills. Carter resting and far into his seat and with his eyes closed and his breathing even. Willi Guttmann peered through the dirty glass of the side window and out into the night's blackness.

Willi thought of a girl called Lizzie. He thought of a bar called the Pickwick where the decor was English and where she sat at a stool and bought him drinks that were warm and unfamiliar and that burned his throat, and where her friends gathered and the talk was noisy and happy.

He thought of visits to the cinema after Conference had finished in the afternoon and where moist fingers were held before the rush to be back inside the Residence doors before the last sitting for supper. He thought of the night after the girl who shared a one-bedroomed box of a flat with Lizzie had flown back to England for a job interview and he had been invited back for a toasted cheese sandwich and coffee. He thought of loving Lizzie through the snow carpeted months of February and March in a Swiss city where the idyll had lasted until the meeting when he had seen the strained eyes and the pale cheeks that warned of her day's weeping. He thought of her telling him she was late, had never been late before, and was he going to walk out on her, was he flying back to Moscow at the end of the month. He could not fight a girl in anguish, could not pull the wings off a fallen butterfly. And his father should not know. His father who was an old man and who had caused him no pain should hear only of an accident. Grief was less lasting than the shame of having reared a traitor. There was no retribution that they could bring against the father of a drowned son, no loss of privileges.

He thought of Lizzie with the soft, warm mouth. Lizzie with her arms around his neck in the sitting room of the home of the British Consul.

Lizzie in tears as the Englishman had said that she could follow in three weeks or four to England. Gentle, darling, sweet Lizzie.

The car swung off the tarmac lane and the lights caught at high iron gates that had been opened and a squat lodge house, and the wheels ground on shallow gravel, and high trees dwarfed them, and thickset bushes spilled over the edge of the driveway. He saw the house, its pale stone bright in the lights, before George swung the wheel and braked viciously so that the man beside him started and grunted and was awake.

Before Willi could feel for the handle, George was out and opening the door and after he had stood for a moment and tried to see about him there was a hand on his elbow and he was guided towards a porch where a dull lamp shone.

'Mrs Ferguson said she'd leave some cold cuts out, Mr Carter,' George said as he ferreted in his pocket for the front door key.

'You go along with George, Willi. There's something to eat for you, and he'll show you where you're sleeping. I expect you'll want a good hot bath too . . .'

The boy walked across the polished floor of the hall, past the painting of a stag at bay, past a wide table on which was set a vase of bright daffodils, past an oak staircase and a panelled wall. Behind him he heard a door close and when he turned he could no longer see Carter. George pushed him forward towards another door. He had lost something, felt bereft, because the last link with Geneva had been taken from him.

George sat him down at a table with a blue plastic cloth over it and took the metal cover off a plate displaying a yellowish piece of chicken and three curled slices of ham.

'I expect Mrs Ferguson didn't think we'd be so late,' George said.

Willi felt the tang of the lake water in his mouth, behind his teeth. He was very tired, his eyes hurt and his knees trembled, and a kaleidoscope of memories from far back and far away burned in his mind.

The house, close to the village of Holmbury St Mary, was set in a wooded valley west of the Surrey county town of Guildford. It was used by the Secret Intelligence Service, and not infrequently, for the reception of east bloc defectors. Eight bedrooms, two bathrooms, six acres of grounds, a gargantuan annual heating bill, a formidable schedule of roof repairs. A defector with knowledge of the internal machinery of Defence, Foreign Affairs, the Politburo or Security in Moscow might expect to spend months here hidden from the scattered community that lived beyond the high fence and the thick encircling hedgerow. The accommodation and the matters of catering and cleaning were in the hands of Mrs Ferguson, an unobtrusive housekeeper who kept a myopic, shuttered mind on the events and personalities around her.

It was a warm, close evening, unseasonably so, but Carter had worn his raincoat and a woollen scarf for a walk around (he lawn with Charles Mawby. The big man was down from London, and he'd been expected.

Inevitable that he'd come himself after the low-key material that had been sent to the capital in transcript each evening. Mawby down from Century House to play the dragon and breathe some fire into the question and answer sessions of the debrief of Willi Guttmann.

'Putting it indelicately, Henry, he knows bugger all.'

'Barely worth the airfare, Mr Mawby,' Carter said mildly. He was aware that some of those in the Service who carried his own grading felt able to address the Assistant Secretary on first name terms. Sometimes it rankled that he had never received an invitation to do so.

'If we're lucky we get one of them a year. Either damned good or bloody useless.'

'I suppose we always hope for the platinum seam, what we're digging into here is barely fool's gold.' Carter often carried in his coat pocket a dried out crust taken surreptitiously from the kitchen. He ground a piece of bread to crumbs in his pocket and threw them discreetly in the direction of a pair of chaffinches, and saw with pleasure how their greed surpassed their caution.

'I'm supposed to report to Joint Intelligence Committee in the morning.'

'You'll not have much to tell them, Mr Mawby. I suppose his Foreign Ministry material is marginally interesting.'

'It's boring, uninformed and not new.'

'We were very thorough, the fellow you sent down here and me, the fellow with armour and missiles and warheads sprouting from eyes, ears, God knows where else. Very thorough, but the boy just stone-walled us.

"My father doesn't talk about his work", that's the hub of it, and the boy's sticking to it.'

'I'm going to put the rod across his back, Henry.'

Carter sighed. It was against all the precepts of a debrief that you hurry. 'If that's what you think right, Mr Mawby.'