"One packet woman's tights, medium size, unopened. One woman's night-dress, St. Michael's brand, cream polyester…" he held it against himself to judge the length.
"It's definitely you" the other said.
"Say knee length. Worn since washed. One pair green panties, clean, no maker's label. One bra, size 36A, clean. One blouse, embroidered." It was very much embroidered, obviously by hand, and looked old and valuable. "Is this silk? Oh, skip it, we'll get one of the girls to do this stuff." He felt carefully past the rest of the clothes. "One furry animal toy, not much fur on it now, looks as if the ears have been chewed off."
"Should I write all that down?"
"And one file holder of typed papers." He lifted it clear. "In… do you know what language this is?"
The other got up to look. Across the front of the file was stamped in red: TAJNY Then a heading written in ink: VEVERKA and the usual dates and initials that files accumulate.
"I dunno. I'd say Czech or Polish. But I'll bet that red word means SECRET or something like it."
Up till then, both of them had assumed that the shooting had been some Arab terrorist affair or a barney between two lots of villians. But now the compass needle had swung around to point in a totally unexpected direction. The file felt hot to the touch.
"This is for SB," the first d. c. said.
That was pure routine, just as it was for Special Branch to send round for the file the moment they knew it existed. It was also pure routine for them, once they had decided the language was Czechoslovakian, to tell MI5 about it, and for Five to borrow it, since they had immediate translation facilities.
11
The motel had once been yet another famous old coaching inn; perhaps all coaching inns had once been famous. This one had had two rows of stables facing each other across a coach-yard at the back; now one row had become bedrooms, the other lock-up garages. Maxim and Zuzana sat each on a bed and looked at each other.
He felt nervous. It might be his puritan streak, or the memory of Jenny or just that it was a situation forced on him rather than chosen. He had a growing feeling that Zuzana would just as happily have taken a double-bedded room.
Towards the end of his Ј50 he had bought a half-bottle of Scotch and Zuzana seemed willing to share it. All the expenditure – suitcases, whisky, toothbrushes, nightgown – it was going to look Highly Irregular on his Form 1771, and he hoped to hell he'd find somebody prepared to sign it.
They clinked glasses. Maxim sipped, then asked casually: "Was there any particular reason why you chose today – last night – to come over?"
"I had become disgusted with a regime which represses its own citizens but does nothing to eliminate the abuse of power among its leaders." The statement had a rehearsed ring to it, and it didn't answer Maxim's question, but Zuzana seemed to relax once she'd got it said, "Were you going to tell us something about the bears' contact insecurity?"
"You are sure I will be safe?"
"If you keep telling the truth, yes. You know why they caught us back there?"
"I know, I know." She flopped back flat on the bed, spilling some of her drink, and talked at the ceiling. "I will tell you about my work. Mostly I did research and keeping the files on your people. They were not so important people, but perhaps they would become important, you understand. They all had animal names: Lisбk, Lasicka, Krtek, Veverka."
"A real animal farm."
She didn't get the joke. "Veverka means squirrel. But his real name was Professor John White Tyler."
"I see." Maxim made two long words of them.
She turned her head on the pillow and smiled at him mischievously. "You know him. You went to Warminster with him, but we did not find out why yet."
"I see," Maxim said again, feeling a twinge of discomfort. "And you kept the file on him?"
"Yes. I read his books, I cut all the pieces from the newspapers, I read the lectures – oh Mother, how I tried to understand about atomic wars and how they could happen in a thousand ways… And I knew all about the wives and the girls."
She went back to staring at the rough-plastered ceiling. The whole room was like that, not a straight line or an even surface anywhere, and all painted white that looked grey as the light died outside. Maxim guessed that she felt safer in the gloom.
"He had the first wife when he was still in your Army, after the end of the war. It went only six years, when he went back to Cambridge to work for his doctor of philosophy degree, I think it was. It is in the file. She went to work at the Pye factory while he read his books, she typed his… his thesis. She did everything for him."
"Did you talk to her?" It seemed very unlikely.
"No. no. For that we had this American boy, he was trying to be a journalist in London, one of our good friends in Italy was pretending to be a publisher, he asked the American to research your Tyler and two others for a book that will be published in Italy. And he was well paid, and of course, he does not read any Italian."
"Of course," Maxim agreed softly.
"The second wife, she was an American, she could have been his daughter." Zuzana sounded rather disgusted. Mrs Tyler Mark II – the one Brock had remembered – had married him at Princeton. Tyler had originally gone over for a sabbatical year, then earned a research grant and stayed on. There he was caught up in that glorious crusade when the academics, led by Herman Kahn and the Rand Corporation, stormed the seedy bastille of nuclear war theory and transformed it into a Camelot of soaring intellectual complexity, all politicians and military men please use the back door only. Those two years changed Tyler's life, but not his habits. That marriage lasted only five years.
And all the time, during, between and after the marriages, there had been the girls. Virtually as a reflex, the STB had tossed a few of its own sisters in his path, but whether he snapped them up or not hardly mattered. You could no more blackmail Tyler for his sex life than you could next door's tomcat, because he was no more secretive about it. And as women don't usually read military studies, you couldn't even accuse him of seducing his own students, not that Cambridge would have cared anyway. Zuzana was distinctly shocked to learn that.
"So I had all that in the file. And then, then Mother Bear said to work harder on Veverka."
"When was this?" Maxim offered her the whisky but she shook her head on the pillow.
"It was last year. Before Christmas."
"Did they say why?"
She looked at him, eyes wide. Silly question: Mother Bear never says why.
"Sorry: but did you know if something had happened about Veverka?"
"He was to become chairman of the defence policy review committee."
"And you knew this when? Can you remember?"
"It was… about the middle of November."
That was well before any public announcement.
"And then…?"
"Then they said to work just on Veverka. Just him."
"You in charge and others working for you?"
She couldn't hide a quick proud smile.
"Your first real command?" Maxim asked. She didn't answer, so he rambled on, provoking her to interrupt. "I remember my first command, out in Malaysia – it was still Malaya then. Just twenty-two of them, almost half the platoon was off sick or skiving, and every one of them hadn't shaved or had got something wrong with his equipment, just to see how I'd take it. You're told to rely on your sergeant, but-"
"So I worked on Veverka. I worked and worked. I read again all the books, The Gates of the Grave – have you read that? I tried to find the people who were in that, if they are still alive." She suddenly sat up. "I will have a drink."