The Contract

The man let the boy into the car first because that way he would be against the door which could not be opened from the inside. He waited while the boy slid across the back seat. Better safe. And the boy would be on the raw edge of his nerves and his strength and his control. They were all unreliable in the first few hours, those who had crossed the chasm, they were all unpredictable. Better safe, and this boy had been through more than most. The swim had exhausted him, the parting from the girl had bled him. He was docile enough at this moment, but his face was a mask suppressing his emotions. The man could only guess at the turmoil waging in the boy's mind, but he could guess well and his experience told him that the boy should be handled with care, with kid mittens. Whether they came from an out- station of Soviet intelligence or were junior interpreters attached to the permanent Moscow delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, they all carried the same hallmark. They differed little, the defectors who came over.

'George, this is Mr Guttmann, Mr Willi Guttmann.' Henry Carter eased himself into the car, and circumspectly pulled the door shut beside him. 'Willi, this is George, he'll be helping to look after you over the next three or four weeks while we sort things out, get things into order.'

A large fist snaked backwards from the front of the car and gripped Willi Guttmann's hand. The boy's eyes flickered upwards, but won no smile, no friendship.

'Pleased to meet you, Willi.' A watchful greeting.

'When we've been on the road a bit I'd like to make a phone call, George. When we're down by Cobham or Ripley, I'd like to ring the office.' Carter smoothed his hair into shape, pushed it back from his scalp.

'No problem, Mr Carter. They'll be pleased to hear from you.'

George's familiar bonhomie always annoyed Henry Carter, perpetually irritated him. But then George had been with the Service twenty years, on the payroll since a Cypriot gunman's bullet had put a stop to his Commando soldiering. He was part of the furniture, part of the trappings, part of the team that handled the 'runaways'.

The car pulled away, skirting the Terminal buildings, heading for the Underpass and the Staines Road. Beside him Henry Carter sensed Willi Guttmann's defiant stare through the window.

Four men had come down from the Residence on the hill above Lake Geneva and they stood in the dark on the shingle at the shore line, huddled together against the harsh spattering rain. With them was Geneva's Chief of Police.

Their shoes were soaked, their trousers below their coats were wet and wrapped to their shins. The wind squalls caught at their shoulders, bent their bodies, drilled at the skin on their cheeks. A bitter, clouded April night. Their voices carried to the man who stood apart from them and stared out, expressionless, at the activity on the grey dark water a hundred metres from the narrow beach.

Valeri Sharygin was described on the personnel lists as First Attache to the Secretary of the Soviet delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. It was not an arduous post and one designed to consume little of the time of the principal security officer at the Residence. As a senior KGB officer, as a man noted for the penetration of his intellect and the gimlet sharpness of his suspicion, he was almost always alone, often on the outside of the group. He was feared, he was avoided, he was respected. Through narrow-rimmed and thick-lensed spectacles, over a close-cut brush of a moustache he watched the bobbing endeavours of the rubber dinghies that circled the short and white-painted hull of the capsised yacht.