"Bullshit. She tried to identify that contact just so that she'd have something in the bank if she ever decided to come over. Every agent pinches some little secret, just in case. I suppose when you start in that work, you soon realise there may be only one safe place for you: the other side."
"Actually why she came," Maxim said, "is that they just took away her first command. She just grabbed the file, out of spite, and ran. Or that's my guess."
"She doesn't sound all that bright… What's that noise? Have you got the Brigade in there with you?"
Maxim realised he'd been stamping his almost numb feet on the floor of the box. "Sorry. She's no master-spy, but at least we know the Tyler letter's probably still around."
"I'm not at all sure I like that. We'll go into a huddle about it when you get back."
"When's that going to be?"
"Ring me in an hour or so. Oh – there's one other thing, Harry, and I don't think you should mention it to her. Wing-Commander Neale's dead. I asked the fuzz to put a guard on him but I was too late, blast it. Some of your roughnecks seem to have got in and worked on him a little. I believe it was his heart that gave out, so they probably didn't mean to kill him."
"They certainly meant to kill her."
"Yes, well,.. Keep in touch."
"Is the news about Neale on the radio?"
"I imagine so…"
Suddenly it wasn't just Maxim's feet that were cold. He ran all the way back to the motel, slowing down just for respectability as he entered the arch into the stableyard. The bedroom was dark, and there was no answer to his gentle knock and whisper. He tried the handle and the door opened. He knew then that she'd gone; a few seconds later, he knew the gun had gone with her.
The receptionist hadn't seen her go. "To tell the truth, I haven't seen her at all, have I? She's a foreign lady, your wife, isn't she?"
"Yes." Maxim was turning away when he realised what that meant. "She made a telephone call from the room, then?"
She could hardly deny it, but wasn't going to admit she'd tried to listen in. She must have been around fifty, with the thin bedraggled look of a bird with a broken wing. "She did make a call to London, yes."
"Just now?"
"Oh no. Nearly an hour ago, I should say."
"Can you give me the number, please?"
She was looking it up when the first shot sounded. It hardly registered on her; to Maxim it was a bomb.
Zuzana was certainly no master spy. She had rung her office as soon as the radio had told her of Neale's death: an almost purely emotional reaction, seeking revenge. But she remembered enough of her training to pretend that she had heard nothing and offered to discuss her own return to the fold provided nobody went near the Wing-Commander. They had promised that straight off, so she knew that when they came to meet her it would be in bad faith but perhaps without too much suspicion. But she had no time to scout the meeting-place she suggested: the porch of the church glimpsed as she and Maxim drove in. And her worst mistake was not to get there first: she had overestimated the time they would take.
The only real error the two baboons made was not to think that in the darkness she might have a gun in her hand.
The younger and smaller of them grabbed her from behind as she came through the lych-gate; the bigger reached for her from in front. She fired before the pistol was level, and the bullet smacked into his thigh bone. The second shot missed as the gun kicked higher, and the third went through his throat.
The other let go with one hand to reach for his own gun and she swung away, firing and missing as she turned. His shot hit her ribs with a punch that had no immediate pain, and then they were shooting into each other, barely three feet apart, until both fell down. Compared with that noise, the big baboon made almost no sound as he drowned in his own blood.
Maxim was first there, dodging from shadow to shadow across the churchyard until he could see the three bodies. He kicked the guns away; Zuzana and the younger one weren't dead, not yet.
"Did I kill them?" she muttered.
"I think so."
"I had wanted to do it… and be alive, but… Not" He had tried to lift her head out of the blood. But half her right eye socket was shot away. He laid her down very gently.
"They killed… the Wing-Commander…" After that she lapsed into a murmur of Czechoslovakian until she shuddered and died.
A small timid crowd had formed outside the gate. A burly man with a raincoat on over his shirt and carrying a torch, pushed through and shone it around. What had looked like black oil suddenly turned into a pond of blood.
"Great Jesus!" He swayed and put a hand on the gate for support, then turned the torch on Maxim. "I'm a policeman-"
"I'll get an ambulance," Maxim said. "You get onto Special Branch."
13
"At a rough guess, I would say that he broke just about every rule in the book and quite a few that aren't. Of course," Agnes added, "that's merely one person's opinion."
"He had an impossible job," George said defensively. "He couldn't know the girl was going to turn into Calamity Jane."
"It was the girl started it. Adam never knew what a long-running excuse he'd thought up." They were sitting shivering in the front of George's Rover, parked on the Horse Guards Parade behind Number 10.
"If we'd had her," Agnes went on, "she wouldn't have been left alone for a second, let alone get near a telephone or – Dear God, I still don't believe it-a gun."
"It was all understandable the way Harry explained it. And she wouldn't have come to your people anyway."
"She'd have done what she was told. Where else would she go? – back to the embassy and say sorry?"
"She could have gone to Grosvenor Square. The Ivy League can always use another defector to polish their image with Congress."
One of the attendants, whose job was to keep the Horse Guards exclusive, drifted up and glanced in through the misted windows. But there was the correct sticker on the windscreen and he wandered off down the ranks of exceptionally clean and neatly-parked vehicles. There should be a new class in the Honours List, George thought, with Her Majesty sticking a parking permit on your lapel while wife and eldest beamed tearfully in the background. It would certainly rank above a C, but perhaps not quite a K.
"Have you any idea," Agnes persisted, "how much work the Branch had to do to keep Mr and Mrs Maxim's names out of it? God knows what they threatened or promised that motel. Half of Fleet Street booked in there that night. There's nowhere else to stay."
"Police get paid overtime. I do not."
"That's not what I mean. It's all being written down on tablets of stone and one day the Branch is going to need a favour from Number 10. Then you'll have early carol singers in Downing Street. And what was our Harold up to in that motel with Miss Kindl?"
"You write down your guess and I'll write down mine and we'll open each other's envelopes on New Year's eve. What does it matter?"
"It was in another county and besides, the wench is dead."
"When did Box 500 take up sexual prudery? Is there any news from the hospital?"
"Only that he's still critical. Fifty-fifty. It could be the uncertainty that's keeping the other side quiet."
The second baboon hadn't died, not quite, not yet. Meanwhile, stories about Gun Battle In Lonely Churchyard With Girl Defector flashed around the world, and the mystery about the two men guaranteed they would flash for days yet. The police had announced that the dead man had false German papers, but said nothing about the other. He might live to stand trial, and his papers would be evidence.
The Czech embassy had put out a statement saying just that they were sure Miss Kindl wasn't defecting, and they certainly didn't know the sort of people who carried false papers.