"Your lady friend," the watcher said, "does not have a strong stomach."
The pistol rammed him forward in his seat. "And you don't have a strong neck. I won't kill you in here, but we can take a walk in a cornfield. "
After a moment, Agnes slid the car into Drive. "Thank you, Harry. Andyou: you helped, too." She wound up to a fast but safe speed. "What are we going to do with the excess baggage here?"
"D'you want to stop and ask him a few questions?"
"You are kidnapping me," the watcher started, remembering his innocence again.
"I doubt he knows anything we don't already. He's just a pawn."
"The name's Gulev, and he lives in Chicago." Maxim had the contents of Gulev's pockets-which had included a revolver-spread on the back seat.
"Bulgar?" Agnes asked the watcher.
"I am an American citizen. You are committing-"
"I dare say." She drove silently for a few more minutes, then stopped. "All right, Gulev; this is as far as you go."
Maxim saw a sudden dampness on the watcher's forehead.
"Give him back everything," Agnes said, "except the gun and one thing-his driving licence, say. Now listen, Gulev: that licence is proof that we had you and could have killed you-when I show it to your bosses in Washington or London, and I know them better than you do. So you just tell them we didn't bury you in some cornfield in return for them not trying to kill Major Maxim in the future? Have you got that? Good. Have a nice rest of the day."
Maxim got out first and watched Gulev on his first hundred yards back towards Maison, just in case. When he got back in, he asked: "D'you think it'll work?"
"No, frankly."
Maxim smiled. "From the first day I joined the Army, I assumed the Russians wanted to kill me. "
"I had to try," Agnes said between clenched teeth.
After a time, Maxim said. "Yes. Thank you."
The Illinois farm country isn't truly flat, as film directors show it (Maxim blamed his disappointment on them) by choosing the few stretches where you could roll a bowling ball fromhorizonto horizon without losing sight of it. Slow rises and dips unnoticeable to a car's engine pull the skyline closer, and clumps of trees around the still-frequent farmhouses pull it closer still. But it certainly didn't need a map; he put that away.
"Did you find anything useful in her papers? I noticed you pinched a photo of Tatham. "
"I got her last batch of telephone bills."
He was unimpressed. "Nothing more?"
Agnes gave him a superior glance. "You don't know American phone bills: they actually tell you something, like what numbers you dialled long-distance. To Britain, for instance."
"Ah. Did she?"
"I think so, but I haven't had time to look carefully. They may not tell us much, she could have been smartenough to let her father call her. You didn't know she was CIA as well, for a time? Just a filing job, I think, but she may have learnt something… Not enough to charge out and try to beat the Bravoes at that game… damn it, I didnot know she was going to do that."
"Of course you didn't. But d'you think she was escaping from us or Them?"
After a time, Agnes said: "You're a reassuring person, Harry, but any way you look at it, we got her killed."
"Nothing to do with her father, the CIA, the Crocus List, Moscow? -just us?"
"I know we only reacted-but here we are driving a car hijacked from some Bravo across the Midwest, breaking God-knows-what laws and with two or three people burnt to death back there… Is it enough to say we didn't start it all?"
He knew Agnes was going to fear sleep for the next few nights, would be trying to bypass her dreams with drink and pills, and he longed to see her through those nights. But he also knew today's events would tear them apart. If he could say anything, it had to be now.
"Reacting is our job; we aren't supposed to start anything. But if they fire the first shot-"
"That's the Army way, Harry."
"No, the Army way would be to fire back the next thousand and anything else we could lay our hands on. By that standard, I think we've behaved quite politely. But not reacting at all won't make the secret war go away. I think we were stuck with it the moment the world got The Bomb. It didn't stop nations wanting to get their own way, it just made them scared of using their armies. So they shifted to surrogate armies: guerrillas, terrorists, agents they could disown-all well away from The Button. So-here we are."
Agnes slowed the car and looked across at him curiously. "You've been doing some thinking."
"No, mostly just listening to Miss Tuckey." Then he nodded. "Yes, some I thought of for myself. Trying to think about what I'm doing, and why."
"And it may be crooked, but it's the only game in town."
"Oh no. Somewhere across the Elbe there's a Major Ivan Maximovitch who's put as much of his life into his army as I have into mine. And some days-you can't help it-we'd like to know how it would work out. Nothing to do with politics or human rights, just to know which one of us is the best. We'd need a supporting cast of a few hundred thousand, but they're mostly in place already… We'd make quite a chapter in history, between us. Andthat's the other game. But"-he lifted the pistol from his lap-"I think I'm safer with just this."
"Put that bloody thing away, we'll be in Springfield in a couple of minutes." If he had done anything towards consoling her, her tone didn't show it.
33
"I didn't identify all of them," Annette told George before he had even had time to order a drink; inevitably, they had met in one of his clubs. "Four are dead anyway, and there's five others I'm not certain about. One of them could be either of two people with the same name, but I've got twenty-two who are alive now unless they've died in the last year or so. How's that?"
"Brilliant. What are you drinking?"
"Anything." Then, remembering that such a careless attitude to alcohol offended George: '.'Gin and tonic, lemon, no ice. Can I go on?"
"May I see?" George read the St Louis list through carefully, feeling guilty that it took such a neat and thorough piece of paperwork to remind him of how competent a woman he had married. And he could guess at the amount of work it represented: it had been no simple skimming of Who's Who, since few businessmen enter those pearly gates without the visa of a knighthood, or at very least, a CBE or CMC. Only four had achieved such distinctions.
Somewhere on that list is Person Y, he thought, glaring at it as if he could make the name shuffle its feet with guilt. But at least there was a pattern: a Church connection (where it showed), a tendency to independence and running their own businesses, although not all were businessmen: one was a university lecturer, another a solicitor. But no Person Y.
Blast.
"What did you say?" Annette was suddenly anxious.
"Nothing, you've done a marvellous job… perhaps I can narrow it a bit further." Taking the ages, he thinnedthe list down to twelve men who were now around the fifty-year mark.
Their drinks arrived and George gobbled more or less silently for a while. Then he said carefully: "I have an American banker from the Midwest sending a signed photograph to an Englishwoman who was involved in the French Resistance. A picture of himself and some Briton, just the two. It's the Brit I want, and he's somewhere on that list. Where's the connection?"
"The American had an affair with the Englishwoman in the war."
"Typically feminine; you've all got pornographic minds. No, he spent the war in the Pacific."
"Then they had an affair after the war. If he's a banker he could afford a European holiday, I should think."