The Conduct of Major Maxim

Chapter 9

Agnes Algar had dressed with particular care on Friday morning. She chose a slightly flared skirt of fawn flannel, plain white silk shirt with a demurely high neckline, a jacket in soft pastel-brown tweed with a standing collar, absolutely plain but very expensive Italian court shoes and a matching handbag that was small enough to be ladylike but not so small as to seem frivolous. Around her neck she put a thin early Victorian gold chain, on her right hand a fire opal she had recently had reset in a simple gold ring, on her left wrist the gold Baume amp;Mercierwatch.

Agnes thought of her clothes and jewellery in such terms, just as she thought of her car as a two-year-old 3-door Chevette ES in Regatta Blue with wing mirrors and two radio aerials. She lived in a world of detail and precision, of getting the names right and the appearances correct, and had done ever since she joined the Security Service straight from Oxford fourteen years before. She would have described herself quite objectively as aged 35 and looking neither older nor younger, height 5 feet 4 and usually just under nine stone with a figure that was well kept rather than dramatic. Her hair was light ginger and she had long ago given up trying to curl it; she had a snub nose and blue eyes in an oval face that was cheerful but perhaps forgettable. But being forgettable was part of her job; a jigsaw piece that fitted invisibly into any puzzle.

However, that morning Agnes intended to be neither forgettable nor invisible. Only a few hours earlier an unexpected Meeting Notice had been issued, the agenda being simply 'To consider the conduct of Major H. R. Maxim'. Since her job was to maintain liaison with Number 10, which made Maxim technically a colleague, she was to represent the Security Service at the meeting. She had no idea what that 'conduct' had been – a few early morning phone calls had produced more bad language than information – but she knew what 'to consider' meant in Whitehall, and frankly Harry had had it coming. Not that she had anything against him. She had no prejudice against any of the Army's trigger-happy desperadoes – not in the right place. Number10just wasn't that place, and she didn't mind who heard her say so.

But what concerned her even more was that the Notice had shown the meeting would includetwo members of the Secret Intelligence Service. That sounded bad. Long ago, the legend said, the security (or spy-catching) service and the espionage (or spy-hiring) service had been born next door to each other in rooms 5 and 6 of the corridor where Military Intelligence first nested in Whitehall. Nostalgically, the old door numbers still stuck among the mass of code and jargon names slapped on the services since then. Thus the Intelligence Service could be MI6, just Six, or The Firm, The Friends (said with a knowing, slightly twisted, smile) or, if you were one of Agnes's mob, the Other Mob.

That is, unless you happened to be about to meet them across a conference table. Then you reminded yourself that they were a bunch of gilded pederasts who spent what little time they could spare from betraying the country's secrets in stealing the Security Service's territory, influence and share of the Secret Funds. If it had ever existed, the cosy Whitehall corridor was long gone, though Agnes sometimes wondered what it would be like to concern herself with frustrating only other countries' spies. But she always dropped the thought as frivolous speculation.

"The room was swept just three days ago," the uniformed messenger said, and Sir Anthony Sladen thanked him automatically, although everybody knew the remark was meaningless. Listening devices didn't grow like bacteria: they had to be planted. The room might have been 'swept' three minutes or three months ago, but what mattered was what had happened since then. Three minutes is a lifetime to a good wire man.

The complete absence of windows gave the room a sense ofbeing right out of time and place, abetted by the bland neon lighting and acoustics which made everyone's voices sound flat and small. The walls were covered in oatmeal-covered sackcloth, and in the centre two heavy tables had been pushed together to form a single one that looked absurdly big for the eight tweed-covered office chairs around it.

"Lock the door when you go out," Sladen added. "And tell the coffee ladies that we'd like ours in, say, three-quarters of an hour?"

He looked around for support and everybody nodded, but the messenger became doubtful. "I expect they'll be here when they get here, sir."

Sladen sighed. "Far easier to change our entire defence policy than alter the timing of one coffee-trolley. Very well, then."

The messenger ambled out and for no good reason everybody stopped talking until they heard the lock click.

"How is the PM, do you hear?" Sladen asked George. "It's been almost a week, now. " He lowered himself very carefully into the chair at the head of the table. He was a stiff man by nature and now his back had seized up on him. The Assistant Secretary from the Cabinet Office, a motherly woman with very neat grey hair and fashionable spectacles, clucked around him, adjusting the embroidered cushion she had brought along.

"Quite chirpy on the phone," George said. "Probably the worst thing wrong with him is Frank Hardacre." Sir Frank, who had earned his knighthood by making house calls only at houses where there might be photographers waiting outside, had once told George he drank too much. "If he survives that he should be back in town next week."

"In the House? Taking Questions?" the Foreign Office asked. He got Mummy's Chair at the opposite end, the natural place for Sladen to look first when asking for comment.

George shrugged. "Tired Tim's quite happy playing Sorcerer's Apprentice. Why close a show that's taking money?" He had to settle for the seat at Sladen'sright hand, opposite the Assistant Secretary. Agnes came next to him and Major-General Sir Bruce Drewery next to her. Across thetable, the younger of the two men from Six had already torn up his place card and put it in his pocket as a gesture of security.

The Assistant Secretary gave Agnes an all-girls-together smile and flipped open her notebook.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologise for dragging you in here at such short notice, but as you will have guessed from the Meeting Notice the urgency…" Urgent or not, Sladen was experienced enough to give them thirty seconds of platitudes while they kicked their briefcases under the table, tugged at their waistcoats – both MI6 men wore them even on a hot June day – and shuffled their papers, although few of them were prepared to put much paperwork on view. One of two Second Permanent Secretaries to the Cabinet, Sladen's whole life was committees, conferences, meetings. He was a thin, thin-faced man and a bad back suited his dignity. His one concession to the heat was a grey suit in place of the usual Cabinet Office blue, with a Trinityist amp; 3rd tie.

"Chairman -" the first off the mark was Guy Husband from Six "-I'm sorry to be singing the school song so early, but the Meeting Notice was classified merely as 'Secret'. Could my service assume that any rrswould only be distributed as 'Top Secret'?"

Sladen glanced down the table. '". air," the Foreign Office said cheerfully. That was Scott-Scobie, a swinger from their harmlessly-named 'Research Department'; forty-fiveish, healthily plump, curly dark hair and wearing a rumpled linen suit.

George nodded. "Agreed. But does this mean that our friends from Dixieland -" the Intelligence Service lived south of the river "- are going to give us a hint of what they're up to these days?"

"We hope everybody will be giving hints of what they're up to," Husband said smoothly. His voice was pleasant but characterless, as if he were mostly concerned with avoiding mistakes; a provincial schooling or all the years in the spy business?

"Sir Bruce?"

"By all means. Classify it any way you prefer. " He was a big Scottish pussycat with a contented purr of a voice.

"Splendid." Then Sladen remembered Agnes; she gave him a happy smile. "Splendid, then. You'll make a note?" The Assistant Secretary already had. "Good. Now, I think we all know that the matter before us concerns Major Maxim, currently attached to the Private Office at Number 10. Guy, perhaps you'd like to…?"

"Yes, Chairman. But first…" Husband had the good looks of a schoolboy football star who had reached forty with one mighty bound: a strong nose, high forehead, brown hair set in tousled wiry waves. Even in a service which had a reputation for snappy dressing, he was an exquisite. His Italian suit was a little too shaped, too light in colour and probably too expensive. He adjusted his blue-tinted pilot-style glasses with a hand that wore a broad gold ring backed up by a gold cufflink in the shape of a reef-knot. Agnes disliked rings on men, although to be fair to Husband – which she had no intention of being – she had little trouble in finding something to dislike about everybody from Six.

"But first, " Husband said again, glancing quickly at Agnes; "may I ask why onr sister service is represented here?-no matter how pretw'i‹r'4 ask only because of the need-to-know principle."

You bastard, X¿'".ísthought. You peacock's prick. She waited for George to answer, but he sat hunched beside her, turning a gold pencil in his fingers. She realised she was on her own; George must be expecting a true Conflict Situation if he was already saving his last bullet for himself.

Our Harry has trodden on some Very Important Toes, she thought.

She became the bright helpful little girl, friendly but perhaps just a little out of her depth among all these clever men. "I only know that the Meeting Notice was sent out according to a list drawn up by the Prime Minister. "

"Deputy Prime Minister," Husband corrected.

"I really don't know. My Director-General asked me to come along because I usually handle the lower-level liaison with Number 10. But -"

"Lower-level,"Husband said quickly. "That, Chairman, is precisely my point, " although it hadn't been to start with.

Her voice stayed steady, despite feeling sick with anger and humiliation; " – but I imagine the Cabinet Office must have had some idea as to whether this is going to touch on security within this country."

Sladen cleared his throat. "I think we can take it that a representative of the Security Service was regarded as, ahh, fundamental."

"I was solely concerned with the need to know," Husband said with deep sincerity.

Nowthere I believe you, Agnes thought. There is something my service needs to know which you don't want us to.

"If there are no other objections," Sladen was carefully not looking for any, "then I think we can proceed with the meeting as it is currently constituted. Now could we -"

"If it comes to that," Sir Bruce rumbled, "I've no clear idea why I'm here myself. Nor," he added, "why that young man is." He smiled lazily across at the second man from Six, directly opposite.

Sladen sighed. "We hope, Sir Bruce, that you might keep a watching brief on behalf of Major Maxim, and indeed the Army as a whole… Mr Sims, also from the Intelligence Service, has specialised knowledge which could help us when we get into more detailed matters. "

Mr Sims, if that was his real name, dressed not so much snappily as very cleanly. His dark blue blazer looked as if it was brand new, as did the white shirt with a very faint grey stripe and the steel blue tie. He was in his middle thirties, his square tanned face set in a permanent appreciative smile, dark hair cut neat and fairly short. Although he chain-smoked menthol cigarettes, his hands – remarkably small hands – were unstained and well manicured.

"Now," Sladen pleaded, "could we please get on?"

Husband had been filling a curved briar from a silver pocket box. He struck a match and breathed a haze of bright blue smoke. "As you probably know, Major Maxim is attached to Number 10for duties that appear not to be precisely defined but touch on security matters. He works, as Sir Anthony said, directly to the Private Office. This whole matter began when my service becameaware of Major Maxim at the scene of asurveillance operation that had been mounted. "

"In London?" George asked.

"Yes, in London. Initially our agents had no idea of who he was, but as I'm sure you know it's standard procedure to take photographs, and as soon as we compared them and a description with our files, we were in no doubt as to who he was."

"So you stopped tailing him," Agnes suggested helpfully. George made a little annoyed grunt. She ignored it; I've been wounded already in this battle, brother. That makes a difference.

"No, not entirely. A full-scale round-the-clock watch obviously wasn't either necessary or appropriate, but we did something to monitor his movements."

Sir Bruce asked: "Did he notice what you were up to?"

Oh, I love thatnotice. Agnes smiled at the old warrior, and then at Husband: by now, her anger at him had distilled to the warming spirit of pure hatred.

"I believe he was lost from time to time, but that of course is inevitable in a down-market operation. We had no positive indication that he was aware of our interest until yesterday morning."

He paused to relight his pipe. Everybody waited patiently. The Assistant Secretary put a large floppy handbag on the table and took out a small handkerchief. Her security pass was clipped to the strap of the bag, like a paddock pass on a racecourse.

"Major Maxim lives alone. His life seems to have no particular routine apart from his work. That night we had two watchmen outside, just in case. He came out very early, as soon as it was light – about half past five – and drove off to Acton. Acton. You may or may not be familiar with Acton, one gets a glimpse of it from the train, but it largely consists of railway yards, goods depots, great piles of broken-up cars. All rather like a battlefield. "

Agnes felt Sir Bruce, stir beside her.

"With hindsight, we now see that our soldier friend was in fact leading our agents into his own sort of country. The two watchmen were in a van, radio-equipped of course, but unfortunately the particular area was under some overheadpower cables which badly affect radio for some distance around."

Sir Bruce nodded contentedly.

"In short, Major Maxim lured our watchers into this place and then ambushed them. The driver waspistol whipped, as I believe our Big Brothers call it, and left dazed and with the radio smashed -beyond repair. The other was kidnapped. He was held at gunpoint, handcuffed, blindfolded and forced into the boot of Major Maxim's car. I can understand soldiers being allowed to play with guns, but I would like to know where he got those handcuffs. "

Nobody could think where until Scott-Scobie said cheerily: "Buy 'em all over, gun shops and so on. Big item in the FD market."

"The what?" George asked.

"Female domination. Whips and bonds."

"Good God."

Scott-Scobie grinned. "Do geton, Guy."

"Yes… then he was driven for, he estimates, about half an hour. He was taken out, in some quiet place, out of doors, and questioned. Or rather, tortured. He was told to say just who he was working for, or he would have ammonia poured onto the blindfold. I assume you all know what raw ammonia does to the eyesight? Bank robbers used to use it quite freely, I believe. You can go blind."

The room was quiet except for a hidden fan that suddenly interrupted its humming with a series of squeaks like somebody rubbing his shoes together. Sladen bent carefully back in his chair and frowned at the ceiling.

"Our man could smell the ammonia," Husband said slowly. "He described quite graphically – to me personally – how he felt with it seeping through the blindfold and beginning to sting and then burn at his eyes so that he was finally forced to open them in order to blink. I do not want to hear anything like that again. Major Maxim then told him that there was no special hurry and that he was to take his time and make his statement complete. I understand that he made it complete."

He paused deliberately.

"As soon as we got him to a doctor-which took sometime – it was discovered that Major Maxim must have held the ammonia under our man's nose while pouring some odourless spirit – quite possibly strong vodka – onto the blindfold in order to produce the stinging sensation."

"At school," Sir Bruce said reminiscently, "they taught me you could go blind from masturbation, never mind ammonia."

"How fascinating. I hate to think what Major Maxim got taught in school-or would it have been the Army?"

"Couldn't say, dear boy, but we do encourage young officers to think creatively."

Husband sat back in his chair and began lighting his pipe for the third time. Sladen looked at George, who reluctantly sat up a bit straighter, and said: "Until your chap did talk, I imagine Major Maxim thought he was being followed by a bunch of Kremlin cowboys."

"I don't see why," Husband said. "Any man with access to sensitive information, such as Major Maxim, should expect to be put under surveillance purely as a matter of routine. By Special Branch, or by a positive vetting team from Defence, or even Miss Algar's own service could quite legitimately decide to check up on his private life. I'm sureshe wouldn't have taken the matter lightly if it had been her own colleagues who had been beaten up and tortured. Nor do I imagine that Number 10would have been overjoyed if it had been some young detective constable."

"I agree he acted hastily -"

"He acted very deliberately and to a plan. The ammonia proves it."

"Let's say that he should have come to me first," George said in a heavy, measured tone, "and let me sort the whole thing out. I assume that your service would immediately have acknowledged responsibility?"

"Of course."

Liar, Agnes thought. But George had to accept it.

"Very well. But what do you want now? – for me to send him round to say sorry?"

"We'd certainly like him sent round, but to say a little more than sorry."

"Such as what?"

"We would like to know what connection he has or had with the target of the original surveillance."

Sir Bruce leant forward so that he could see past Agnes to George, but didn't say anything.

George said: "Major Maxim is still working to the Private Office."

"If he was working for the Private Office in South London on the afternoon in question I should be very surprised indeed. '

"Whereabouts in South London?"

"Rotherhithe."

Sladen was looking from George to Husband and back again, twitching his head from side to side like a tennis umpire. There was a ball being knocked back and forth, all right, but only Husband and, Agnes now realised, George knew what it was.

"Who is your target?" George asked.

Husband paused, cocked his head slightly and peered at George as if he were assessing his artistic value. "Are you quite certain you don't know?"

The room tensed, but George shrugged and let it go past, perhaps admitting that was a ball he couldn't reach.

Sladen waited nervously for somebody to say something, then asked tentatively: "Well… if we aren't to discoverwho, is it possible to find out something aboutwhy T'

Why so nervous? Agnes wondered, then suddenly realised. As a number two to the Cabinet Secretary, who was the most powerful of all civil servants, Sladen's career was almost in orbit. One final boost and he would be up among the true stars, all guidance systems go for a seat in the House of Lords upon retirement. But final-stage rockets had misfired before, and at a time when people were whispering about a change of Prime Minister and the shake-out that would bring, the very last thing Sladen must want was to be caught up in a brawl between Number 10, the Foreign Office, Defence and the secret services. That way lay nothing but the chairmanship of a minor merchant bank.

"I think Guy might fill in some of the background," Scott-Scobie agreed.

But then there was a knock on the door, the messenger unlocked it and stuck his head in, asking: "Is it all right for coffee now, sir?"

Sladen nodded, maybe a little relieved. "Since it would be now or never, yes, it's all right now." The meeting collapsed into muttering groups. The coffee lady, in a green nylon uniform, pushed in her trolley and began handing out ready-filled cups. Agnes got hers with the pale coffee already slopped over into the two sugar lumps and two hard little biscuits in the saucer. Luckily, she took neither sugar nor biscuits.

"May I have mineblack, please?" Sladen called. Sims wanted his black, too. The coffee lady sighed loudly.

Sir Bruce sipped, made a face, and whispered to Agnes: "And, I thought we suffered at Mo D. Have you any idea of what we're talking about?"

"Not a thing. We've heard nothing about this."

He grunted. "Dothey often set up surveillance operations in this country?"

"I didn't think so. My own service was under the impression that it had thehuntin'and shootin' rights in this country. It didn't seem too much to expect, whenthey have all the rest of the world." She was wearing a brave but sad little smile. Outnumbered three to one – if you counted swinging S-S as One Of Them-she might need all the allies available.

Sir Bruce made another Highland noise. "I never could get on with those people; they appear entirely obsessed with sex. They will not get it into their heads that what the military wants ismilitary information, not the phone number of some general's girlfriend. I don't believe there's a one of them could tell the difference between a T-J2 and a kiddie's tricycle. "

Agnes nodded sympathetically. As the coffee lady trundled out, the messenger poked his head in. "Shall I lock up now, sir, or wait until she's collected the cups?"

"Oh Good God!" Sladen almost lost his temper. "It doesn'tmatter about the cups. She can get them when we've finished, if we ever have the chance. Just leave usalone."

Husband whacked out his pipe in a big glass ashtray, making a sound like a gong, then walked around the Assistant Secretary to mutter into Sladen's ear. Agnes flashed a smile at Sims and leant across after it.

"Look – the next time you want to set up a surveillance in London, do remember that we're here tohelp. We have an awful lot of experience in these things, and we can do you quite a big show at very short notice. "

Sims smiled back. His teeth were very even and, of course, very clean. "Thank you, but I think we can do all right." He had a faint German accent.

"I'm talking about a dozen sets of wheels, thirty or forty bods. Not just two old men in a van."

Sims stayed impeccably grateful. "You are very kind, but I do assure you we can manage."

"You really are getting that section organised," Agnes said admiringly.

Scott-Scobie suddenly woke up from behind his Financial Times and asked: "What was that? What did you say?"

Agnes smiled at him. "Just a little liaising at the lower levels."

S-S stared suspiciously at Sims, who lit another cigarette.

Husband came back, also distributing suspicious looks, and sat down. Sladen tapped his papers together into a squared-off pile, spread them out again, and said: "Miss Algar, gentlemen, can we get back down the mineshaft? I believe Mr Husband was going to…?"

Agnes interrupted. "Could I sort out one little problem first? I gather that the Rotherhithe operation was a full-scale affair, lots of wheels, thirty or forty personnel. Can I assume that it was cleared through the Cabinet Office? Obviously one can check, but…"

Sladen's eyes searched for comfort. A few doors down from his own room sat a Co-ordinator of Intelligence whose task it was to try and keep MI6, 5 and the true military organisations from duplicating each other's efforts and spitting in each other's beer. His main control was money, since he turned the taps of the Secret Funds, but that was rather long-term. When relations grew particularly bad he became the child go-between in a household of warring parents: "Ask your father if it would break his heart to change channels so I can watch the news." By the unwritten laws of an unadmitted game, Sixshould never have sent a war-party into Five's tribal land without at least telling the Co-ordinator.

"Or perhaps," Agnes added, "they went through the Yard?"

Everybody knew they hadn't. Nobody told Scotland Yard anything they would mind seeing as next day's headlines.

Husband wriggled himself comfortable and reached for his pipe. "Dieter?" he said to Sims.

"I arranged for the surveillance," Sims said evenly. "It was done from my section and I am afraid I did not ask for sufficient permission. I am sorry."

The can is carried here, Agnes thought.

"I think Dieter's been a bit naughty, " Husband puffed, "but it was a direct follow-up to an incident abroad, so you might say it came under the doctrine of'hot pursuit'."

"But if my Director-General asks what happened to the agreement that no operation of anything approaching this scale was to be mounted in this country without our knowledge…?"

"You don'tknow what scale it was, but you can tell him Dieter says he's sorry. " Husband waved his pipe, making brief smoke trails.

George muttered: "Drop it. Leave it lay. "

Agnes stared at him, amazed. This was just the sort of thing – a secret service playing God – that usually had George registering 9 on the Richter Scale. But then it came to her just how much of George's power flowed from the Prime Minister in person. Now that the PM was on his Scottish sickbed, George was a near-flat battery, hoarding his last sparks for really crucial issues. Scott-Scobie's strength was that of the Foreign Office, faceless but continuous while PM's came and went like lantern slides.

"I'm sorry for the interruption, Chairman," she said bleakly.

"You can also say," Husband added, "that the surveillance has been discontinued – hasn't it, Dieter?"

"Oh yes."

Sladen said: "Now we've got that settled, perhaps Mr Husband, you'd like to…"

"It's Dieter's section that's been handling this, so I'll let him fill in the background. "

Sims ground out his cigarette and began. "You will all be aware of the changes in the Politbureau in the GDR since the railway strike. Especially one of the new members of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, Gustav Eismark."

Sir Bruce wasn't sure he'd read that issue of The Economist.

"He is widely regarded in the West as the token liberal," Sims explained. "Just as there must be a token Jew and a woman. We believe he could be more than this. His background is with shipping, first in the yards at Rostock, then with the national shipping line. He stopped the seamen and dock workers joining the strike, but he did not take too hard a line. We prefer to see him as we think he sees himself: a pragmatist."

"The great thing to be in East Germany right now," Scott-Scobie announced. "It marks you as one of the technocrats – what a ghastly word – and they're the class that counts. The politicians may say Blah but the computers go on saying onoioo or whatever it is, and it's the people who can make senseof that who'll be in the top bunk when the dam breaks. Also Eismark's only sixty-odd and that's a mere youth in the GDR. Ulbricht died in office when he was gone eighty, didn't he?"

"That is so," Sims said, smiling – apparently grateful for S-S's help. 'Filling in the background', Agnes saw, didn't include delivering the punch lines. "We believe he may be, in the long term, a very important man. And we also know of his early life something more than the official biography, since, thirty years ago, his sister defected to here. She was a pianist, and used her mother's name, Linnarz. Wilhelmina Linnarz."

"I remember her, " Sladen pounced, thankful for something he recognised at last. "She used to play a lot of Schumann. I didn't always agree with her Chopin, and her Liszt was a disaster area, but I'd listen to her for a long time if it's Schumann. What happened to her? – is she dead?"

"We do not know. She left this country twenty years ago, and we have no trace. "

There was a moment while everybody thought about that, 84 probably for no good reason except that they didn't like to see twenty years go by without offering up a few seconds' respectful silence, then Sir Bruce asked: "So she didn't go back to the GDR?"

Husband said: "We're very inclined to doubt it. They'd have put her in the freak show, confessing how misled she was by capitalist gold. One defector that repenteth is better propaganda than nine-and-ninety loyal party workers, isn't that so, Dieter?"

But ofcourse, Agnes realised, Sims – or whoever he'd been born – must once have been on the far side of The Wall, too. She'd been slow to see that, and tried to make up for it by saying quickly: "Her jumping over can't have helped Eis-mark's career."

Sims nodded, thanking her. "That is so. But he was only young then, about thirty, and he did not have so far to fall. And also his background was very good. His father had been killed in the Rostock riots of 1931, and it seems that Gustavhimself had for certain been a Worker Youth. "

"In 1945," Husband said, "they were trading cigarettes -which were better than gold in those days – for Party cards and affidavits that they'd always been true Worker Youths -once they found themselves in the Russian Zone. There were – are still, I'm sure – plenty of overnight heroes of the Resistance with Hitler Youth uniforms buried in their cellars. "

"Yes, yes, yes," Scott-Scobie said with cheery impatience. "But we can accept that our Gustavwasn't one of those. Apart from anything else, he wasn't even in the Russian Zone to begin with. He actually went East soon after the war ended, if Guy's files mean anything. So his wicked sister's vanished and now he's big man on campus. Let's read on. "

"In the war," Sims said,"Gustavhad married. He had a son, that is now Manfred, who is a colonel in the SSD. But Gustav's wife was killed at the end of the war. His sister then helped to bring up the child while Gustav wasin Moscow for two years, at the university and taking the political indoctrination. He did not marry again until much later, when he was coming back to political life after the economic changes of 1962, which made the shipping more important. Politically, itis important to be married. It is normal, and the Democratic Republic is very modest."

"An absolute hotbed of puritanism, " Scott-Scobie cut in. "Rife with morality. When Frau Ulbricht was den mother she ran the Politbureau like a convent school. "

"So when Gustav Eismarkcame to the Secretariat," Sims went on, "naturally we looked in the files about him. There was not much; we do not have the money to research every politician in the Republic. But now, we said to our people, if anybody has something about Eismark that they had not the money to explore, now we can unlock the money."

"Standard operating procedure," Husband said, quickly smoothing over Sim's full-frontal use of the word 'money', even though there was nobody there from the Treasury to hear it.

"And one person said yes, she thought she had something. "

"Something interesting or something dirty?" Sir Bruce asked.

Scott-Scobie grinned at him. "Both, we hoped. It's the dirty bits that make the world go round, don't you find, General?"

"Please… " from Sladen.

"So we said to go on, to investigate. She reported that she was sure she would be able to prove something, but it needed just one operation, with more money. It was to be in a small town called Bad Schwärzendem."

"Do you know the place, George?" Scott-Scobie called.

"A spa witha Gradierwerkdown near Paderborn. I toddled through it when I was with Rhine Army. What happened then?"

Husband said: "It went wrong, badly wrong," then lit a match and Sims found he was holding the ball again.

"There was a shooting. Our agent was killed, so was the town registrar. If you read the German papers, it was in there. We lost the money, we did not get the proof. "

"Ohdear," Agnes said brightly.

Sim's smile stayed as bright and unchipped as his teeth. "But the identity of our agent was not discovered and the police seem to think it was a crime of passion without any third person involved. We do not expect any blowback."

"Ah, thatis lucky," Agnes helped. Husband glared at her.

Scott-Scobie also gave her a look, then past her at George. "I have to say that we in The Office put the highest, thevery highest priority on acquiring this proof- if it still exists."

George asked: "Knowledge of what? And in what form?"

"That," Husband said, "is what we would like your Major Maxim to toddle round and tell us. "