A lone motor-cruiser rumbled upstream, tidily cluttered, steered by an elderly man with a blacklabradorsitting on the cockpit seat behind him. He waved and Marriage lifted his cup slowly in return.
"One of yours?" George asked politely.
"Private. Did you think this was a poor country? Hah. Just go and count the private boats up and down the river. Most of 'em don't get used more than a few hours in the year. A poor country. "
The boat left a wake that rocked the long drifts of dead leaves on the water and slapped against the quay below them. Marriage finished his drink and put the cup down very obviously.
My God, George thought, cringing, he wants me to kill offmoreofthatfossilised brain. And I'm going to do it, so that he might, just might, tell me something useful. Have I been sending people out to do this? Mind, he excused himself quickly, this is exceptional, quite exceptional. And difficult. Even a trained interrogator would have a problem here…
Thus excused, he poured the drinks. "Did Miss Tuckey have anything to do with that? Help them recruit or…?"
"But then she'd have their lists, wouldn't she? And they wouldn't want that, any more than they wanted the Firmto have them. Once you've got a list, you can drag in the whole network. That's what I'm worried about: if your people are… working along those lines again, and Dot's been helping out, somebody might think she'd gotyour lists. An old lady living alone in the country, you do see…"
George did, and yearned to tell him the Army had thought of it, that Maxim had mentioned how they worked under codenames, then wondered if the Army should tell Moscow that, too-and realised that he was after a list, as well.
Marriage misinterpreted his hesitation and said querulously: "Dot really didn't tell me a thing, nothing. I was just guessing. I don't want you to-"
"Of course not," George soothed him. "I appreciate your concern." And that at least is true, he thought, because if I were a crippled old man living on an early pension filtered through the Secret Vote-and thus controllable-I wouldn't want any whisper of indiscretion getting back to the Service. And probably you're in hock to the Service's banking friends (the Service always had banking friends) for this boatyard, too. They'll never foreclose, because they want you to die in debt. Controllable.
"Getting back to Winter Garden," George said confidently, no longer needing to invoke Miss Tuckey, "you might say it's up my street. What sort of training did they get?"
"Radio, cyphers, handling explosives, the sort of thing we got at Wanborough in the old days."
"Weapons?"
"I doubt most of them would need it; everybody did national service in those days, some would have been in the war."
"They didn't issue any weapons?"
Marriage looked at him oddly, wilting George's confidence. "Our people made it pretty clear there were enough guns still floating loose from the war and getting into the wrong hands. We did make them promise No Guns."
"D'you think they stuck to it?"
"You know, I rather think they did. Probably not forthe right reasons. A Resistance group should use enemy weapons, or stuff that can take enemy ammo-and the Company just didn't have enough Russian gear then, in the early Fifties. Now they could do you a boatload right off the shelf, nothing down and nothing to pay if you shoot 'em in the right direction."
"Would there have been any training indéstabilisation?"George had thought carefully about risking that word. But one thing he was sure he had learnt was that Marriage was no part of any conspiracy, had indeed no useful friends left. That was why he was reduced to talking to George Harbinger.
"Déstabilisation? God, no. You can't destabilise an occupying army, you've got to blow the buggers up. All that came later, when the Company reached the big time. "
"Sorry. And you think Winter Garden's all withered away now."
"Just think about it. They wouldn't have been recruiting schoolboys: they'd want mature people, organisers, types with a sense of responsibility and a bit of gloom, kids and a mortgage. You need to be pretty gloomy to think of Resistance in peacetime, don't you? So they'd have been picking people in their thirties then, now they'd be in their sixties. Past it, except for running safe houses. Dead of heart attacks, crippled old men like me. It's long past, now.
"As much as anything, it was the Company that changed," he mused into his cup, beginning to slobber the whisky now. "They got more confident-more money, too, of course. Not just giving radio sets to bank clerks, they were giving bank accounts to politicians. They didn't want to wait and react, they wanted the Other Side to react to them. That's when they began thedéstabilisationthing… but Winter Garden, no that's long past."
22
George could have cabled Maxim, but that would have meant a cypher clerk at each end reading the material, and a letter by diplomatic bag would have taken at least thirty-six hours. So he settled for a secure telephone call, indifferent to what that would do to Maxim's reputation among the Defence Staff at the embassy. Until then they had treated him with a mixture of sympathy as a man caught up, by line of duty, in a political imbroglio, and suspicion at what he might do to make things worse. A long secret call from a Ministry of Defence civilian locked the pendulum on the side of suspicion.
Colonel Lomax contrived to bump into him as he left the booth. "Harry, I don't know what that was all about, and I'm not asking, but can I beg one thing of you? Unless you've got a clear order through the proper channels, please don'tdo anything over here. I don't think London realises just how touchy things were even before the shooting at the Abbey. With the Peace Crusade and the Berlin business, we've got so many fences to mend already that we just can't afford another broken strand. So be a good chap and just look at the sights, do a little shopping, try to get to a football game…"
"And of course, I do feel bad about it," Maxim confessed to Agnes a few minutes later. "They must have a rough time of it at the moment…"
"Let 'em sweat a bit; Washington's a key career posting for most of them, it can't all be cherry blossom and cocktails. So what did George have to say?"
Maxim told her. She ended up shaking her head in slow disbelief. "It's too facile an explanation: blame everything on the CIA. And it still isn't their scale of operation; they'd do it big or not at all."
"All right, but… these people have got connections with somebody. The training-"
"Out of books."
"Not a Russian rifle, grenade and typewriter, not out of books. It's just the sort of kit Charlie would have been supplying. Who else could do it?"
Agnes stood up slowly, stretched her back, lit a cigarette and sat down again, frowning thoughtfully. "Winter Garden was before my time, but I did hear about it in my training. And there was a move to set it up again in the late Sixties, but that got sat on. Do you know about the UKUSA agreement? That was when they first created Central Intelligence over here. It's all classified, but what it amounts to is that we won't play the Great Game over here and they won't play it in the UK. So we invoked that agreement, and Charlie said Winter Garden had set a precedent and we said No it hadn't, it had just been a Cold War expedient and those days were over. My own mob was right at the front of the fuss: we didn't want any more secret organisations on our patch."