Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

Maxim pushed Sims down onto the bunk beside Caswell and lifted the submachine gun at Eismark.

"Major?" Blagg called down. "Things is moving up here."

All it needed was a little pressure on the trigger, let the gun lift with the recoil and Eismark would tear open from crotch to neck. So easy – and that was the trouble. It would be almost as easy for Eismark.

"Colonel – I could kill you. Instead, I'm going to own you. I know something about you that you don't even know yourself. We'll make sure you know, and we'll make sure you believe it. And then you'll belong to us, and begin to love us. Every day you'll love us a little bit more because it'll be one more day we didn't destroy you. All the rest of your life, Colonel, every second of it, you'll never be lonely again because there'll always be us. And your little secret. That's the way it goes, isn't it, Dieter?" But Sims was silent, perhaps dying. "That's the way it goes."

He wasn't even sure that Eismark understood English, but was happy to know that he would understand in the end. Indeed, quite soon.

"Major!"

"On my way. And Colonel – don't tell the police who you are and we won't tell either. That would spoil our little secret. And we don't want that, do we?"

In what Blagg called 'a real docks', meaning something that needed his childhood expertise to break in and out of, they could well have been caught, at least momentarily. In Goole they waited while a thin swarm of dock police and real ones buzzed into the area asking each other where to go, because the source of shooting is always difficult to establish, and when there was a brief lull they just got into the Renault and drove away. Caswell had been right: it didn't look like a getaway car.

The police never set roadblocks on motorways, and they could join the MÓ2just over a mile to the west. Agnes found them back in the car park at the Woodhallservice area soon after three in the morning. She had somehow acquired a two-year-old Cortina.

He told her, briefly and efficiently, what had happened; she knew a lot of it already from Our Man with his local contacts, and probably a little eavesdropping on police radios.

Under her supervision – she knew where people left fingerprints better than they did – they wiped the inside of the Renault with petrol-soaked rags and then left it; the shotgun and submachine gun were at the bottom of the Aldam Dock but they hadn't had time to dump the last of the grenades from the Renault's boot. They risked taking those on the journey south.

Maxim drove – insisted on driving – since he was still too tense to sit and be driven.

"Mina 's safe with some of our people," Agnes said. "Once we've established a little agreement with East Berlin it'll be okay for her to go back to Ramsley."

"How are you explaining away tonight?"

"Oh, you were a group of East German dissidents, emigres, trying to stir up trouble and disrupt trade. We'd heard rumours and we're sorry we didn't warn the local Special Branch people, but we never thought it could happen in Goole. You know."

"Are they going to believe it? – the police?"

"Not one word in ten, I imagine, but nobody local got shot and they'll settle for a fuss between two sets of foreigners that was only technically on their patch. They won't lose their no-claims bonus for that. And whatever the captain and crewand the Colonel say, it won't be the truth either, we can count onthat. Are they going to identify Caswell?"

"Have you got a cover story for him, too?"

"A mercenary, hired by the emigres…"

"They won't identify him by any photograph. His fingerprints… he's still got those left, but I don't suppose they're on file any where. "

She looked into the back where Blagg, with his wound and the blessed talent of youth for unwinding fast, was already asleep.

"What should we do about her? – Caswell's wife?" Agnes asked.

"I'm going to talk to her now. As soon as I get there."

"What are you going to say?"

"I don't know yet."

"Look-our people can do that."

"I was in charge."

"There won't be any problem with an increased pension or whatever."

"How bloody right you are."

She let the silence between them run on for a long time, then said: "Why don't you come home with me?"

He let the silence run, too. "I've got to talk to Mrs Caswell. "

"Look, nothing has to happen, I just don't like to think of you going back to that crummy little flat of yours and… ohhell."

After a time, he said: "Loneliness isn't enough reason." Then he thought for a time, or perhaps just drove, and said: "Did I ever tell you about the first time I got posted to Germany? All the houses, the buildings at the small stations, they all seemed familiar. I'd never been there before. Then I realised: they were the big versions of the kits I'd had on my model railway when I was a boy – all the best kits are German – so now I think of them the other way round: the buildings you see from a train window are just oversized plastic fakes…"

She didn't see why he was saying all that, but she understood the ridiculous logic of it and couldn't help laughing.