The Contract

'I'm grateful for your help, Peter.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary sat on the side of the bed in his usual room at the Travellers' Club. There was the faint drone of a vacuum cleaner on a faraway landing, the clink in the corridor of the tea cups and saucers being brought to the early risers. The garish ceiling bulb hovered over his head, accentuating the pits of his eyes, the concave bowls of his cheeks. The telephone rested on the sheets beside him.

'Don't think about it, it's nothing. If we can't help each other what can we do?'

It was a sharp barb. Fenton had long been the advocate of inter-departmental liaison, was a founder member of the 'bigger is best' brigade, had written a paper two years back on the desirability of merging Intelligence and Security, and had faced for his pains waspish opposition from SIS and its parent Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

He was wide awake, in control and confident, but then Security never enjoyed the dinner round that was the privilege of the Service. Peter Fenton would warrant a fraction of the hospitality that was available to the Deputy-Under- Secretary.

' I'm advised that this matter cannot be mounted unless Guttmann is co-operative.'

'More to the point, if a breath of this drops out of the bucket then there'll be half a dozen heavies from GRU or KGB on father Guttmann's shoulder crowding his vacation, yes? That is in the unlikely event they let him travel to Magdeburg.'

'There was no option, I suppose, but to bring in the police?'

'Had to be done. You want the boy and you want him fast. For that you need a manhunt. We don't have the necessary numbers and neither do you.'

'I hate to say it about ourselves, but it has been a pretty poor effort by our people down there…'

The rare candour cut at the toughness of the Director. 'Take my advice, leave the inquests till we have the boy back.

Keep the court martial till we know the scope of the damage

'There'll be damage, but it's good advice.' There was the whiff of desperation. 'I'm not going to lose this thing, Peter.'

'We'll keep in touch through the morning.'

The Deputy-Under-Secretary began to dress, and he rang for the porter and asked if a cup of tea could be brought to him.

At first he had run hard.

Panting for air. Crashing through the undergrowth. Cannoning from the trees that loomed around him in the darkness. Sprinting where there were no paths. Around him were only the devastating sounds of his own movements and the thunder in the high leaves of disturbed pigeons.

Running, crashing, panting, sprinting. But the boy's shoulder hurt him now, hurt far down in the muscles and wounded him in the hidden nerves by his collar bone and rib cage. The shoulder that had cracked into the low stone wall as he had pitched forward in the shallow, camouflaged ditch. The pain came often, surged and subsided. The intensity billowed with the exhaustion in his legs and the ache in his chest as he gulped for breath. He had no map, had followed no plan. He could only run. He ran with the darkness of the woods and trees closing on his flight as he passed, cloaking his trail. He knew that sometimes he had turned back on his path, that often he had sacrificed distance for the needs of concealment and so as to skirt the scattered homes beyond the trees. He could not calculate how far he had gone in the hours since he had climbed onto the rusted, rainwater pipe. Many hours, enough to waste his strength and exacerbate the throb in his forehead.

The wetness of the morning's dew gathered at his shoes and at the ankles of his socks. Water flaked to his arms and legs from the previous evening's rain on the leaves.

So where was Willi Guttmann running? What was his goal? Only a vision for company. Willi running to his Lizzie. The pigs had lied to him, the pigs had told untruths, had separated him from his Lizzie. Going to Lizzie.

In his tiredness he did not think of aeroplanes and travel documents and money and fresh clothes. Lizzie was outside the house, Lizzie was across the fence. Lizzie was out there, out beyond the darkness, and he was no longer in their cage. He had achieved a kind of freedom.

And they were going to kill his father. That was as clear as the lies they had told about Lizzie. They were going to kill him in Magdeburg – from a car – with a silenced pistol, by a knife thrust. Why else did they ask where his father would go in Magdeburg, who he would meet, whether he would be guarded? They had taken him from Lizzie, now they sought to take the life of an old man.