George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“Yes, I think so.” He passed his hand over his face. “The admiral’s reading over the typescript of our little agreement. He’s terribly cautious. I suppose it’s natural.” He looked down and away from Tarp. Tarp thought that he looked as he would for the next twenty years or so — handsome, slender, rather worn out by his service. Women would find him more attractive now, he thought, not less. “Will there never be an end to this, do you think? The leaks, the double agents. Men who sell out.”

“It’s human weakness.”

“Whatever happened to human strength?” He smiled wanly, as if embarrassed by that rather Victorian question.

“Tired, Johnnie?”

“Very. See here, I don’t want this one getting away, Tarp. I won’t have another bolt for Moscow!”

“I don’t think this one will do that. Anyway, we won’t give him the chance.”

“We’d damned well better not. I can’t afford to be a fool twice.”

Pope-Ginna came in then, and after him a male stenographer, who passed right through the room and out of the house, snapping the lid on a portable typewriter as he went. Pope-Ginna looked pleased with himself, although he showed the usual tic when he looked at Tarp. It seemed unfair that he should look relieved and Carrington should look burdened, but that was what had happened — the burden of knowledge had passed from one to the other.

Tarp cleared his throat. “I’d like to go through it once more, Admiral.”

“Certainly.”

“Each time you contacted Maxudov, you first called John Bull in London, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Did you think that John Bull then contacted Maxudov immediately?”

Pope-Ginna hesitated, and Carrington looked sharply at him. “I always thought there was contact. I’m not at all sure it was immediate. It seemed to me that…”

“Well?”

“You people are the experts at this sort of thing, but it seemed to me that Maxudov was in the sort of situation where he’d want as much confirmation as possible. So that my call to him in Moscow didn’t simply come out of the blue.”

“But you never said anything to John Bull about Maxudov?”

“Oh, no. I just did as I was told — made the telephone call-three, actually, the series of three. Then I waited two days and flew to Moscow. Always after two days. That was part of the system.”

Tarp looked at Carrington. “So John Bull didn’t flag Maxudov until after he got his own payoff, I suspect.”

“Yes, looks like.”

“Let’s do it, Johnnie.”

“I agree.”

“Ordinarily, you could go slow, but time’s very important to us. They’ll get scared soon. I’ve got to move.”

Carrington looked at his watch. “There’s still time today. Three hours between the first two calls, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Exactly three hours.”

“To a machine at the other end.”

“An answering device, yes.”

Carrington swung toward Tarp. “He can make the first call from here; we’ll be in England for the second one.”

Tarp touched Pope-Ginna’s arm, and the old man’s face twisted quickly in its tic. “Don’t screw us up, Admiral,” he said. “Do it exactly right, or else. If we don’t get our man — you’ve bought it.”

“I understand. Perfectly.” The old eyes, which Tarp had once thought merry but which now looked anxious, flicked from one to another. “I have to know what was playing at the Barbican Theatre last night. That was the identification signal.”

“We’ll find that out. Let’s go.”

“Good.”

Tarp breathed deeply. Action .

The third telephone call was placed from a kiosk on the Embankment, an arrangement insisted upon by John Bull so that he could make visual confirmation that it was Pope-Ginna calling. That meant that the quarry was there somewhere, in a taxi or walking a dog or watching through binoculars from a window. There were three MI-5 people near the telephone so that Pope-Ginna could not make a run for it if such a thing was in his head, while Tarp and Carrington waited well out of sight in a taxicab, an MI-5 car behind them with three more officers in it.

“Will he bolt, do you think?” Carrington said.

“John Bull? Why should he? It all looks right.”

“The admiral.”

“No, I doubt it. You’ve promised him everything but a knighthood.”

“I don’t care about him. Although he is a bit of a swine, I suppose. Lying about that ship, and so on.”

A bit of a swine . That seemed to sum it up — the dilution of moral outrage down to a faintly disapproving tolerance. In another generation , Hitler will be a bit of swine . Stalin , too . Beria .

“Here comes the admiral. He didn’t bolt, you see.”

Pope-Ginna passed them without acknowledgment and went on along the Embankment, crossed the street, and turned toward the city. They picked him up a block away.

“Problems?”

“None. Just like always.” He seemed very pleased with himself. It was often like that. After years of duplicity, the straightforward act became a cause for self-congratulation.

They drove southeast out of the metropolitan tangle and into rolling green countryside, where the late afternoon sun broke through and the clouds looked as if their tops had been gilded for the occasion. They passed the gate of a military installation, where a little village of tents had been put up where they could not be ignored by anyone driving on the main road or turning into the gate. As the car slowed for a turning vehicle, a line of women were forming across the road into the base. They wore raincoats and plastic rain bonnets, and they were carrying signs and other objects. Tarp saw the words No More Missiles .

“What’s that?” Tarp said.

Carrington was on the side nearest them. “A protest,” he said.

“Of what?” Pope-Ginna, on the far side, said. He seemed not to understand any of it.

Carrington put his hand above his eyes and looked out at the women with his face close to the glass. “Nuclear missiles,” he said.

“Whatever are they carrying?”

“Signs. Photographs.”

“Photographs! Of what?”

Again, he had to peer under his hand. They had passed now, and he had to turn to look.

“Children,” he said.

On the outskirts of Rochester, Pope-Ginna directed the driver through smaller streets until they reached a new business building, where he directed them down into its underground garage.

“The tube goes on the second steel rafter over there,” the admiral said. He pointed along the rows of steel girders that held up the ceiling. Already the garage was beginning to empty as businessmen headed home at the end of the day.

“He’ll be here soon,” Tarp said. “It’s a good time. Nobody would notice.” He turned to Carrington. “You’re sure he didn’t follow us?”

“My people saw no one. I had a third car several miles back. They’re to take the admiral with them now.”

“Okay. He must always come late enough that the admiral never gets a look at him.”

Tarp waited with Carrington while Pope-Ginna was taken to another unmarked car and driven away. Tarp saw his old face as a blur in the rear window as the car disappeared up the ramp of the garage. Only when it was gone did he walk toward the place where the tube was to be hidden and take the tube from an inner pocket. “I didn’t want him to see this,” he said to Carrington as he put it in place.

“Obviously he’s seen them before.”

“Yes. But he doesn’t know that I have.”

Carrington put a man in a car at each exit of the garage, and then Tarp and Carrington and another MI-5 man waited in a janitor’s closet that had only one window the size of a playing card.