Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"Sunrise. Be a bit earlier up there. Call it first light around four."

"It'd take about three-quarters of an hour to berth her," Blagg said. "So whatever happens, it'll be between one and four – I mean if it's the right ship. Begging you pardon, Miss."

"And if it isn't," Agnes said cheerfully, "we'll all have had a nice drive in the country anyway. "

The abrupt silence startled her. Good God, theywant to go through with this charade! she realised. Even Harry… she snatched a glance at him; he was squinting ahead against the sunset with a fixed smile on his face and his shortish fair hair snapping in the breeze from the half-open window.

Harry is asilly name, she thought, and Harold is even worse. But I just don't want him getting hurt.

They came onto the start of the Mi at Brent Cross just on sundown. Agnes kept the speed down to let the traffic sort itself out, then moved up smoothly to seventy in the middlelane. The traffic was light, most of the London-loaded trucks had left hours before.

"I did get some of the stuff you wanted," she said. It was the first thing anybody had said for twenty minutes or forty miles and she had beenso determined that it wouldn't be she who spoke first. But they had retreated into a dreadful male/ military communion of silence where a fart would be criticised only for its length.

"Like what?"

Oh, theeloquence of the man, she thought, and pushed her airline bag towards him with her left foot. Inside were a folder of photographs of Sims and his two colleagues, and two Citizen's Band walkie-talkies.

Maxim passed the photographs to the back seat and fiddled with the radios. They weren't in a class with the Army's Clansman sets, with 840 channels to pick from, but they were handier in size and when switched on close together they produced nerve-scraping howls. He turned them off, satisfied.

"Good. We're in communication, then."

"Are we?" Agnes asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Skip it. Oh – and somebody at The Firm had another word with the one who dropped out of Sims's scheme. He said they've got hand-guns, and he believes there's a silenced submachine gun."

"What sort?" All three spoke together.

"He didn't know."

"It could be just a Patchett/Sterling. "

"I bet they've got hold of an Ingrams."

"Make a difference if it's a.32 or.45."

"You won't hear it any way…"

At least they're talking, she thought. Maxim took a packet of sandwiches from his own bag and passed them around. They were strictly non-drip, cheese, ham or corned beef without mayonnaise or pickles. He gave out individual cartons of orange juice.

"I've got a hip flask of Scotch," she offered.

"Thanks. We'll have an issue later."

The car thrummed on the stretch of concrete that begins atthe Bedfordshire border, the northern sky turned gold and dark blue and Maxim collected up the photographs, then said: "Ron, give me Sims himself."

"Five-ten, well-built, about forty, dark brown hair neatly cut, clean-shaven, smokes heavily, usually well-dressed…"

"That's him. Jim, give me one of the others. Don't bother with the name: they're all phonies. Call the older one 82, the younger 83. I want 83."

"Five-eight, late twenties, fair-haired with moustache…"

This game was part of Agnes's profession and she had routinely memorised the photographs and descriptions when she first got them. Now she could catch them out on an occasional detail and felt they respected rather than resented it. As the night closed around them they were becoming more of a unit, as she knew Maxim intended. She had never thought to see the day – or night – when Harry Maxim would be giving her orders and she'd be taking them.

On the straight stretches the wide road was a two-tone river of twinkling red and white lights, soothing and even hypnotic if you forgot it was two counter-flowing streams of metal at closing speeds of up to 140 mph. Or faster, for a brief period around Nottingham, when it was time for the local Jaguar owners to hurry home from an evening of scampi and Scotch.

Maxim was dozing, or pretending to doze, beside Agnes; in the back Blagg had gone fast asleep with his head on Caswell'sshoulder, which at least stopped him leaning forward every few minutes to breathe tobacco into her ear while he checked the dashboard instruments. But the car ran very smoothly, apart from a rhythmic rise and fall in the engine temperature: probably a sticky thermostat.

They had been on the motorway just two hours when Maxim woke up and called for a stop at the Woodhallservice area. That was still fifty miles short of Goole, but he didn't want to show their faces any closer; in a couple of hours their descriptions might be chart-toppers on police and all-night radio wavebands. Agnes made a phone call, Maxim paid for the petrol, everybody used the lavatories and they tested the radios across the width of the car park. In ten minutes they were on their way again, the sleepiness gone.

"His sister had been living in the Dales, you said?" Maxim asked.

"She's got a cottage there. It was her husband's."

"I don't think I knew she'd married."

"Out in Africa, twenty years ago. He was working in South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to have been one of the few who didn't make money at it, or else they spent it all. He got leukaemia and came home to die in his family village. She still lives there. She gives piano lessons."

She gives piano lessons. It was nothing to be despised, but what a leaden phrase it was for somebody who had toured the world.

"One of her hands is a bit of a mess, arthritis I think, " Agnes said.

"That can't help," Maxim said uselessly.

Caswell leaned forward again. "D'you mean, Miss, that somebody can just marry a Brit and walk in without your people knowing?"

"Just about, unless we were asking for tabs to be kept on her. She'd pick up her passport from a consul out there, and that's all there is. Six thousand people do it every year, we can't check on every one, and we never thought we'd be interested in Mina Linnarzagain until last week. "

"And we grab her back," Blagg said. "I mean, that's the idea, and that's all, is it?"

"More or less." It was a tricky question for Maxim. They were used – indeed, entitled – to clear orders. "I'll try and tell youjust what the score is at each step, but you're going to have to go by Sass rules. " The SAStraining at least meant that they were accustomed to making decisions for themselves.

"This Sims," Caswell said. "Is he good?"

Maxim hesitated, and Agnes chipped in: "You were with him in Germany; how did he come across?"

"He's a hard case. In his way, he's got a real grievance; everybody's been saying how important this Plainsong operation was, but leaving him to do all the work and take all the blame."

"That's our Guy Husband," Agnes said. "And swinging S-S besides. At our meeting they were using him like a glove puppet."

"Atmy meeting, Husband pissed all over him in front of me and he just had to take it. I think he's got a lot of loyalty to his people and he knows that if this caper doesn't come off, they're dead."

"Do you want them dead?" Caswell asked bluntly.

"It wouldn't hurt," Maxim said reluctantly. "I wouldn't give them the first shot." It was an important point, perhaps one that Agnes didn't quite notice being made, and it marked awhole world of difference between civil and military thinking. "One of those buggers can shoot," Blagg said. It made Maxim feel a little better to remember why Blagg knew, and that he owed him the same order Sims must have given his people: shoot first.

They slid off the motorway and down into the bright silent streets of Goole just after midnight. It gave no immediate impression of being a port: it was just a collection of low, mismatched shopfronts and then a level crossing in the middle of town. Agnes pulled into the station carpark, and a man got out of a dark car and walked over.