Gavin Lyall - The Secret Servant

The only real error the two baboons made was not to think that in the darkness she might have a gun in her hand.

The younger and smaller of them grabbed her from behind as she came through the lych-gate; the bigger reached for her from in front. She fired before the pistol was level, and the bullet smacked into his thigh bone. The second shot missed as the gun kicked higher, and the third went through his throat.

The other let go with one hand to reach for his own gun and she swung away, firing and missing as she turned. His shot hit her ribs with a punch that had no immediate pain, and then they were shooting into each other, barely three feet apart, until both fell down. Compared with that noise, the big baboon made almost no sound as he drowned in his own blood.

Maxim was first there, dodging from shadow to shadow across the churchyard until he could see the three bodies. He kicked the guns away; Zuzana and the younger one weren't dead, not yet.

"Did I kill them?" she muttered.

"I think so."

"I had wanted to do it… and be alive, but… Not" He had tried to lift her head out of the blood. But half her right eye socket was shot away. He laid her down very gently.

"They killed… the Wing-Commander…" After that she lapsed into a murmur of Czechoslovakian until she shuddered and died.

A small timid crowd had formed outside the gate. A burly man with a raincoat on over his shirt and carrying a torch, pushed through and shone it around. What had looked like black oil suddenly turned into a pond of blood.

"Great Jesus!" He swayed and put a hand on the gate for support, then turned the torch on Maxim. "I'm a policeman-"

"I'll get an ambulance," Maxim said. "You get onto Special Branch."

"At a rough guess, I would say that he broke just about every rule in the book and quite a few that aren't. Of course," Agnes added, "that's merely one person's opinion."

"He had an impossible job," George said defensively. "He couldn't know the girl was going to turn into Calamity Jane."

"It was the girl started it. Adam never knew what a long-running excuse he'd thought up." They were sitting shivering in the front of George's Rover, parked on the Horse Guards Parade behind Number 10.

"If we'd had her," Agnes went on, "she wouldn't have been left alone for a second, let alone get near a telephone or – Dear God, I still don't believe it-a gun."

"It was all understandable the way Harry explained it. And she wouldn't have come to your people anyway."

"She'd have done what she was told. Where else would she go? – back to the embassy and say sorry?"

"She could have gone to Grosvenor Square. The Ivy League can always use another defector to polish their image with Congress."

One of the attendants, whose job was to keep the Horse Guards exclusive, drifted up and glanced in through the misted windows. But there was the correct sticker on the windscreen and he wandered off down the ranks of exceptionally clean and neatly-parked vehicles. There should be a new class in the Honours List, George thought, with Her Majesty sticking a parking permit on your lapel while wife and eldest beamed tearfully in the background. It would certainly rank above a C, but perhaps not quite a K.

"Have you any idea," Agnes persisted, "how much work the Branch had to do to keep Mr and Mrs Maxim's names out of it? God knows what they threatened or promised that motel. Half of Fleet Street booked in there that night. There's nowhere else to stay."

"Police get paid overtime. I do not."

"That's not what I mean. It's all being written down on tablets of stone and one day the Branch is going to need a favour from Number 10. Then you'll have early carol singers in Downing Street. And what was our Harold up to in that motel with Miss Kindl?"

"You write down your guess and I'll write down mine and we'll open each other's envelopes on New Year's eve. What does it matter?"

"It was in another county and besides, the wench is dead."

"When did Box 500 take up sexual prudery? Is there any news from the hospital?"

"Only that he's still critical. Fifty-fifty. It could be the uncertainty that's keeping the other side quiet."

The second baboon hadn't died, not quite, not yet. Meanwhile, stories about Gun Battle In Lonely Churchyard With Girl Defector flashed around the world, and the mystery about the two men guaranteed they would flash for days yet. The police had announced that the dead man had false German papers, but said nothing about the other. He might live to stand trial, and his papers would be evidence.

The Czech embassy had put out a statement saying just that they were sure Miss Kindl wasn't defecting, and they certainly didn't know the sort of people who carried false papers.

"Were they from sunny Russia?" George asked.

"Never in your life. The Centre wouldn't do anything so crude. That was the STB, they panicked and called in the Al Capones to try and sort out the defection before Moscow ever heard of it. Somebody really must love Professor John White Tyler – but then, I believe he loves quite a lot of people, one at a time."

George ignored that. "And have you found out who in your mob might be a traitor and comes to work on the Gatwick line every morning?"

Agnes took a couple of calming breaths. "Your dashboard clock isn't working."

"Dashboard clocks aren't supposed to work. Well?"

"George – how do you expect us to go about that?"

"Rather fast." He rubbed a clear patch on the misted windscreen. "You know – when the up-state vote comes in, we may find we're actually in the black. We did get a defector-"

"For about five minutes."

"Long enough to learn that Greyfriars has a steer on the Tyler letter, if it still exists. And a line into a bad apple in your barrel. They've also lost two trained cads-"

"Those come ten to the koruna."

"Never mind. Now everybody knows who sent them even if it can't be printed. So the STB comes out of it with a reputation not just for dirty work but incompetent dirty work. Moscow won't be mining any medals for that. And if Wing-Commander Neale gets tied in – and some bright reporter might do it – then Greyfriars have killed an MP on top of it. They might be ten a penny as well, but it does look bad on paper. With possibly a big show trial in six months."

"You surely don't want one?"

"Of course we don't. You never know what witnesses will say. But Greyfriars wants one even less. No, I see a distinct possibility of an increased dividend. Who do we talk to in the STB here?"

Agnes shook her head slowly. Whatever Moscow Centre and Prague were feeling, George obviously wasn't suffering, which meant that Number 10 wasn't. She'd expected a raging gloom about a scandal far worse than Jackaman having been avoided by – she believed – sheer luck.

"Josef Janza seems to be their open end right now," she said thoughtfully. "You could have met him at their National Day party. Fortyish, about five-ten, balding, very cheerful, gold teeth-"

"Yes, yes, I think I did. Right, then-" George turned suddenly brisk, snapping out orders as if he were still a Dragoons subaltern. "You meet this Janza and tell him more or less what I've said. Take a tough line. If his people even hint that anybody on our side is involved – and I mean anybody, not just Harry or Number 10 – then he can start building himself an ark and not to waste time waiting for the animals. Any questions?"

"Is this the Headmaster speaking?"

"No comment. None of this is avowable, of course. All your own work."

"I know." In the patch of windscreen George had wiped clear, snowflakes hardly bigger than dust swirled around as if too timid to risk a landing. Agnes shivered and reached for the door handle.

"And one other thing," George said. "See if you can chase up that STB file on Tyler. I believe your people had it to translate. It's more or less academic interest by now, but we'd like to know…"