Gavin Lyall - The Crocus List

Then she rang Information, asking for the number of Clare Hall in Matson, Illinois, just to establish that it was real. After that, she practised her cheery-little-girl act to allay any of Maxim's suspicions, which of coutse he wouldn't have anyway. When he arrived, he was doing much the same thing, since he wasn't asnaïveabout the values of the secret world as she assumed: assuring himself there was nothing to suspect and being careful not to find any signs of it. Anyway, there was soon the train to look at.

He liked trains. An airliner is an airliner, anywhere in the world, but a train is part of the landscape. Sadly, the Metroliner had lost confidence in being a train and wanted to be an airliner instead: the coaches were rounded like a fuselage, there were airliner seats with fold-down tables from theseatback infront, even a company magazine at each place. Maxim found himself reaching for the nonexistent seatbelt.

First class meant Amclub: everything on Amtrak was Am: Amcoach, Amcafé, aneffect slightly undermined if you recalled Batman and his Batmobile, Batcopterand even Batrope. Maxim wondered if they would serve Amsandwiches.

The air-conditioning roared softly and they got their first drinks as they came out of the tunnel and on to the New Jersey marshes, where gulls circled the refuse dumps among a forest of concrete stilts carrying the highways south. Any big city has a dirty hem to its outskirts.

Agnes told him what she had learnt. Condensed, it sounded very little for an afternoon's talking, but simultaneously it was a surprising amount from a man who had started the day denying everything. Both ways sounded bad to Agnes herself.

"D'you think this is the real info?" Maxim asked.

"1 don't think he's trying to kid us," Agnes said, rather more grimly than she had intended. "I think he feels guilty about his old buddy Tatham and doesn't want to interrupt his posthumous triumph, the Crocus List. At the same time, he knows a lot of this is going to get known by the people who matter and he doesn't want to be the man who hindered the investigation. He wants us to get there, but too late. A lawyer's solution."

"Crocus List." Maxim tasted the phrase. It was good to put a name-totally meaningless though it was-to two faces he had seen so briefly. "Ten, you said."

"Less, by now, I should think. After fifteen years, some may have emigrated, died… would all of them spring to the colours when called?"

Maxim brooded for a time. "We should have the CCOAC list tomorrow."

"Yes… but don't expect too much from that. Tatham wouldn't have recruited the whole Crocus List from that. One or two, maybe, and I'm damned if I see how we'll identify them in a hurry, but…"

"I'll cable it straight to George and see what he can make of it. If we can just identify Person Y… I'd rather like to get home and talk to him myself."

"Harry, sticking a bucket over some citizen's head and beating it with a broomstick is not going to advance your career."

"Seeing imaginary policemen at moments of stress isn't doing it much good, either."

Agnes pondered for a while. "Matson can't be too far from St Louis. Illinois is just across the river and turn left…"

"I could stay overnight and drop in on her." They had planned his St Louis trip as a one-day event.

"I wish I could go myself, but if she complains and London hears about it, they'll put a stop on me doing anything. She may not say a word, but-it's another base to be touched."

"AUright."

"If you're away for a night… I'd better start building you an alibi around Washington. Would you mind if it leaked out that we were having an affair?"

After a moment, Maxim said: "No, not at all."

"Just ateensy bit quicker next time, Harry. A certain enthusiasm lends conviction in these matters." But her own light-heartedness made her feel tawdry. She badly needed another drink, but Maxim hadn't finished his first, yet. She lit a cigarette instead. "I could check us into a motel out of town, you give the number to the Liaison Office, I'll give it to my office, and hope their nasty little minds think that's all that's going on."

They were both quiet for a long time, both thinking much the same thing: was such a pretence a way of beginning, or would it destroy the might-have-been? And both concluded, with an inner shrug, that it was the right thing for the job in hand; anything else could wait.

The train ambled out of the flat New Jersey landscape where the towns had a shapeless, unrooted look like a child's model village that must be cleared away by supper-time. Beyond Philadelphia, the farmland became vaguely English in the fading light, with neat fields and little clumps of trees at the corners. A claret-jacketed waiter served them a warmed-up airline meal with little bottles of wine.

"One thing you won't have out there," Agnes said, "is a credit card for Winterbotham. That makes you a very third-rate citizen indeed, but that's how they think of Canadians anyway. The snag is, it means you can't rent acar: they insist on a credit card for that nowadays, so you're going to see America by bus."

A man in a dark suit across the aisle had been working on business papers since New York. At Philadelphia he had been joined by two others in what was obviously a preplanned meeting, since the moment dinner was cleared away and a new round of gin and diet tonics ordered, they began a miniature board meeting. Apart from learning something about front-end loaded deals and arbitrageurs, Maxim found it restored his faith in American trains. They might try to look like aeroplanes, but at least there were still smart waiters serving drinks to tycoons as they shuffled papers where the noughts ran off the edge of the page, building a case to be argued to some Washington agency the next day.

He murmured some of this to Agnes.

"Poor security," she said unromantically. "The government could save itself billions by hiring a few wide-eared gents to ride these trains and find out what newrip-ofísare being planned. Probably a violation of umpteen civil rights, but…

"Actually," she went on quietly, "there's a point in there. People let their guard slip when they're travelling; they'll tell you things they wouldn't say to a neighbour they've known for years. Probably something to do with it being a finite relationship, but… Sorry, you probably learnt all that on the Ashford course. "

"It was a long time ago."

"Just whatdid they teach you there?"

"Oh, techniques of surveillance, when you're sitting alone in a car you move into the passenger seat, make it look as if you're waiting for the driver to come back… the trouble is, I never got a posting where I had to use it."

"If you're going on to Matson, you might find a bit of it useful. One person alone can't do much, but perhaps… Would you like an hour or so's refresher course when we get back to town?"

"Fine."

"All right. I'd better go to the embassy to check if anything's actually happened today. There's a bar on the north side of MStreet, just before…"

Maxim made sure he got there well ahead of Agnes. ("Qive yourself time to reconnoitre the Subject's area and known haunts.") It was a sprawling split-level place where you could take on board anything from a glass of beer to a four-course dinner plus the right wines at each course, and with about as much choice about where to sit: at tables in the middle, at booths and alcoves at the sides, on the bar stools, on other stools up against long shelves. It had a friendly dark-panelled atmosphere with brisk service, and most of the diners and winers were around Maxim's age. Well, so was Agnes; it was probably her local, being only a few blocks from her Georgetown address.

Maxim took one quick drink at the bar, went on back to the toilets ("Establish whether there are any other exits") and then chose a stool against the wall with a beer and the Washington Post. ("Generally, choose a position towards the back of a bar or pub. Make sure you have something to read; a single person doing nothing but drink and smoke looks suspicious.")