Gavin Lyall - The Secret Servant

Maxim straightened up. "It's all right, that doesn't give you away, her death was in the papers. But you pretended you didn't know about Bob Etheridge dying, and his letter. She'd been trying to sell it to you, she told me that. And I saw her car blow: it wasn't explosive, just petrol. In a funny way, de Carette told me how you did it: the way you booby-trapped the Volkswagen before the village, with the spark-plug in a petrol tin."

Suddenly tired, he sat down across the little table from Tyler, just two men in the whole empty square, where in daytime, in better weather, perhaps men argued about the fate of nations, about life and death.

"You were the only person with a motive for killing her," he said wearily. "Moscow had no reason, whether or not they'd got the letter. They probably think it was me, and I'm not sure George doesn't, either, since I burnt down her houseboat afterwards. Yes, that was me. But she told me she'd turned you down; probably she just wanted you to suffer for her husband's death. So you killed her. "

"I would have had to be in Ireland."

"I was in Ireland, the KGB was in Ireland, you can walk in and out of Ireland as free as the wind. The Army wishes you couldn't, but you can. And she'd been in touch with you, so she'd most likely managed to give away where she lived. She was just clever enough to be really stupid. The whole idea of playing footsie with the KGB was stupid."

At the corner of the square a car crept in and stopped, without lights. It was a long way off, too far for a revolver with a five-inch sight radius. Maxim felt awkwardly exposed; the entire situation was one of those dreams of being on the street in your pyjamas.

"I was trying to get you an early night," he said abruptly. "Let's do that."

"She was blackmailing me, Harry," Tyler said softly. So now he was 'Harry' again. "She was blackmailing the whole country. She was going to give that letter to Moscow-"

"Or maybe not. I almost talked her out of it. At least she was coming away with me."

"I couldn't know that."

"You didn't try to know. You could have come to us and said you were being blackmailed, that you were vulnerable. You were risking the country's position. Back walking into the sand again and hoping for the best and somebody else got killed just to keep your reputation sweet! Now get to bed!"

Quietly, Tyler stood up, turned, walked towards the hotel.

"What are you going to do?"

"I understand you're the best weapon we've got, Professor. It's my job to protect you. That's all I'm doing."

"When we first met, you said I – my book – was one of the reasons you joined the Army."

"I don't regret joining the Army."

The Chвteau de Senningen lay just past the airport, down a steep lane off the main road and discreetly tucked away in a park of evergreen trees. Less discreetly, it was now surrounded by a mesh fence on concrete posts, with a barbed-wire topping, but the guard-house was still just a cottage with neat shutters beside the windows and potted geraniums behind them.

Two soldiers with sub-machine guns waved them on through.

"A remarkably consistent country," Quinton said. "Where else would you find a guard-house like that – or a supposedly secret conference centre like this?"

At the end of the drive, this was a modestly large but thin country house, two storeys high plus little dormer windows with tiled witches' caps poking out from the steep roof. The windows were tall, with white shutters against the pinky-grey pebbledash walls, and the front door was just a set of french windows, held open by another soldier and a uniformed flunkey.

They drank coffee in a reception room just off the hallway. Most of the people there had been at last night's buffet, but Maxim couldn't remember many names. He stayed on the fringe of the gently swirling crowd, watching.

Quinton appeared beside him. "The old man's acting rather subdued this morning. Did he say anything last night?"

Maxim gave a slight shrug. "We talked about the war, about soldiering…"

"He's probably just tired. I wish you'd managed to get him into bed earlier, I must say."

"We had this conversation last night." They had, too; Quinton's reaction then had been as if Maxim had borrowed his fifteen-year-old daughter for a tour of down-town Hamburg.

"Well, it really is too bad."

"I expect he'll get an early night tonight," Maxim said soothingly, or as soothingly as he felt like being with Quinton.

At a signal Maxim didn't see, the delegates handed their cups to their juniors and began drifting back to the hallway and the stairs to the first floor, being elaborately polite about letting each other go first.

The conference room was bright and cheerful. The back wall was a long blow-up of a mediaeval engraving of the old city, there were about fifteen Scandinavian swivel chairs around an oval table under modern chandeliers, wall-to-wall carpeting and curtains. The sort of place where chemical companies met to announce marketing strategies and pin merit badges on themselves for sales performance.

"A modern chancellery of Europe," Tyler said in a heavy whisper. "I sometimes wish I had been in the business before 1914, when they were arguing about the two-power standard and the 15-inch gun was the ultimate weapon." He sat down and Mrs West slid a thin file of papers in front of him. "But I dare say that even then, somebody was complaining that this newfangled electric lighting made it look like a meeting of tradesmen"

Quinton gave a little grunt of relief. Tyler seemed to be perking up.

Their Luxembourg host said a few words in each of the three languages, then went tactfully away, so that there was nobody in the room who wasn't British, French or German. Maxim, like the other bit-part players, sat behind their leaders on armless non-swivelling chairs against the walls. He could spot two others carrying guns.

There was a quick murmur of discussion before they agreed on what they had planned to agree on: that Tyler should speak first.

He moved his papers carefully, waiting until the last noise had drained from the room. "/c Ahoffe, dass wir ьbereinstimmen und diese Konferenz auffranzцsisch halten."

The German delegation made a friendly noise and Tyler began again.

"On ne peut plus кtre sыr d'une contre-attaque massive Amйricaine…"Maxim tried to follow, but his French was too slow to get all the detail and nuance, although he suspected Tyler was deliberately spinning it out so that the Germans could keep up. He could still pick out the main points.

"If Western Europe cannot any longer threaten the Soviet Union with damage of a quantity sufficient to deter an attack, then it must find a way of inflicting damage of quality… a short-range policy… as the Russian airspace became more and more closed to air strikes, even to missiles, so the Soviet Bloc countries become more and more tempting targets… Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria… all these are needed as jumping-off bases or lines of communication… and the ranges are short… from the Iron Curtain itself, less than 500 miles to Warsaw, 350 to Gdansk, 300 to Posnan, 150 to Budapest, around a hundred miles to Prague, Leipzig, Chemnitz – 1 apologise, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Dresden…"

Maxim saw the German delegate wince, then become impassive and attentive again.

"Moscow might well not believe we could destroy Russia, but Warsaw would certainly believe we could destroy Poland… Above all things, we are looking for a targetting policy that will be believed… then we have deterrence…"

Tyler stopped as the captain from the Sыretй tiptoed into the room, pointing at Maxim and making telephone gestures at his own ear.

"You'd better go, Major," Tyler grunted. He was 'Major' once more.