Gerald Seymour - The Contract

'I quite understand…' Mawby doing his best to take the lecture in his stride, as no more than his due.

'Thirdly, the people that you want taken from the DDR will have an importance, or you as foreigners would not be interested by them. You are not involved with bringing to freedom your friend or your relation, you are bringing someone who is of political use to you. If the pigs there catch a driver then he will stay eight or ten years in the gaol, not happy years. But if there is the smell of political action, if he is working for a foreign power then they will make more of it, perhaps fifteen years. It is not a safe business, you know that, Charles?'

'I'm perfectly aware of that.' Mawby trying not to catch the eye of the nude.

'The price would be 25 thousand marks. Twenty-five thousand marks for each passenger that we bring through.'

Mawby stiffened, felt a sweat bead spring at his hairline. The calculations swarmed over him. Three marks eighty to the pound.

Thirteen thousand, one hundred and fifty sterling. 'That's bloody steep, Hermann, for a drive down the autobahn…'

The man was hunched in his chair, peering in surprise at Mawby. Adam Percy kept aloof.

'I did not suppose that this money would come from your own pocket, Charles.'

Mawby pulled for his rank. 'We have a certain influence in this country.'

Hermann laughed. A light, fine cackle. A small and diminutive noise from such a carcase of a man. 'Don't play with me, Charles. You have told me that an East German who is resident in Moscow will be in Magdeburg till the 15th of June, a man who interests a foreign agency.

How long would it take the Volkspolizei to identify the man you want carried? I think a few hours only. Don't make threats to me, Charles.'

Mawby rose from his chair. 'I'll have to refer the matter back.'

'But don't sit on it. And remember that it is not your money.'

'I will ring you in the evening with the answer.'

'If you accept then we should meet again tomorrow.' Hermann grinned, climbed from his chair and advanced on Mawby with a hand outstretched.

The farewells were brief. Mawby and Percy walked briskly out into the late afternoon air, the nude at Mawby's heel.

Smithson sat in his armchair with the street map on his knees, Johnny opposite him, after dinner coffee in his hands.

'Magdeburg had come through the war pretty well till January 16th in 1945, when the American air force came on the scene. Sixteen thousand people died that day and the inner city was obliterated, and I mean that.

They started again with a heap of rubble and ended up with rows of flats, functional little homes for the workers. There was pre-war industry there and that's been expanded, mostly engineering. It's a major rail centre for the south-west of the DDR. the honeypot that originally attracted the bombs. Now it's a provincial capital with all the trappings, big parks, a crop of theatres and concert halls along with new developments towards the north, Neue Neustadt, Nordwest and Olven- stedt. There's only one hotel that's offering rooms to foreigners, the International, where you'll be, which is highly convenient to us, the cat will be right on top of the mouse… Now we'll turn to the policing of the city. There will be a unit of SSD there. There is a headquarters of the Volkspolizei Bizirksbehorde, operating out of Halber- stadter Strasse 2, they're the provincial police. The town police, Volkspolizei Kreisamt, are little more than souped- up traffic men. Because of the proximity of the border there's a strong detachment of Schutzpolizei, they're security police and slightly down the ladder from SSD, also at Halberstadter Strasse. They keep their eyes open, their ears open. They look hard and they listen hard.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary had a suite of offices at Century House.

An outer room for meetings. A smaller room for his desk and easy chair.

An annexe where he had the use of a single bed if he had no wish to return to his Hampshire home or to spend the night at his club. They were light and comfortable quarters, but too recent for his taste and like many of his senior colleagues he still hankered for the old days of the Queen Anne's Gate building and its peeling glories. The evening had blanketed the London skyline below his windows, the lights eddied on the

Thames beneath. The House of Commons steeples and clock- face swam in their floodlighting. Columns of cars nudged forward on the miniaturised Embankment beneath him.

Mawby's telex still lay on the desk of his private office. A good man, Mawby, a tried and trusted man, a man with a future, who might one day inherit this upper office. The telex from Mawby requesting authorisation for the payment of 13,150 pounds sterling to a German national for the lift down the autobahn to Helmstedt. Eight months of the Deputy-Under-Secretary's salary, quite a handful for the wide embrace of 'miscellaneous'. But he had authorised it without question. If it was good enough for Mawby, it was…

The telephone warbled.

The green receiver with the scrambler distortion devices.

'Yes.'

'Fenton here.' Peter Fenton, Director of the Security Service. Rather a tiresome voice.

'What can I do for you, Peter?' The Deputy-Under-Secre- tary was guarded when in contact with his opposite number from Security.

Different men, different standards.

'Nothing that's very important… I just wondered if you felt the change of dates put out by FCO this afternoon for the DDR trade visit affected the business you were putting together.'

'You're ahead of me, Peter. I've been in one meeting after another, I haven't managed to get at my tray.'

'The visit of Oskar Frommholtz, FCO informed us because we have an escort commitment. It seems Comrade Frommholtz has asked for a change of dates. He was due here for the last week in June, that's been brought forward because he's a COMECON commitment on the original date.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary fished in his memory. 'We trying to turn the trade imbalance, they looking for a foreign protocol… Why should it affect anything we're doing?'

'The visit will coincide with the Guttmann dates. Frommholtz will be being wined and dined on Whitehall when the good scientist is nippin over the border.'

'It's a covert operation, nothing to link it with us.'

'Quite right… if it works, but it would be a pretty mess if your nursemaid were picked up… Are you still there?'

'Yes, Peter.'

'I think the PM should know. I think the PM should sanction it. That's my advice anyway…'

'I'll not give it up.'

'Nothing went into the minutes of JIC. If he's not told, and if the thing trips, they'd have our skins.'

'I'll not lose this to a politician with a weak stomach and a short future.'

'That's your decision then…'

'Thank you for calling,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary said. 'Good night, Peter.'

He replaced the receiver. Perhaps he would say something to Downing Street. Not at this time, but later, something that would not arouse curiosity. Of course there was risk, but without risk the Service died, dried on the branch. And when he produced Otto Guttmann that would rank as a rare moment of success. A success that he would not tolerate the faint-hearted to deny him. And Fenton had no right to talk of failure, damned old woman wringing his hands. The Deputy-Under-Secretary sat at his desk and read again the message from Mawby. He had authorised the payment, he had stood by his Assistant Secretary. Mawby was a good man, young and a little green, but sound for all that. Mawby believed in the plan, that should be enough for him, shouldn't it?

Security was always parsimonious in initiative, that was the difference between them and the Service. Mean, weren't they, when a bit of dash was required? The Deputy- Under-Secretary smiled. It was going to be a damned good show. He would not be balked.