The Contract

For a man of his build, Henry Carter had quite a sharp step as he returned to the car. At his position in the Service with a lowly plateau of advancement reached and little to look forward to bar the cut glass decanter and the hand- shakes and the good riddance and the bored smiles of the retirement party, praise was welcome. It was his talent that he sold himself short, that was what his wife said anyway, and he usually told her she was right.

Lying on the carpet in his small study, wearing the Guernsey knit sweater that provided him with a boyish sense of the outdoors, puffing at a cigarette that dropped from a monogrammed holder, Charles Mawby studied the mole hills of paperwork that he had dispersed across the floor. His wife never disturbed him while he was working, left his coffee and tea outside the door before going at tip-toe back to the living room of their Knightsbridge flat, and the consolation of the portable television.

Sometimes he wished that she would intrude so that she could flavour the concentrations of files and maps and photographs with their 'Secret' and 'Restricted' stamps, but the door stood as a barricade between his professional life and what private existence the Service permitted him. If she had come in then Charles Augustus Mawby, of good pedigree, good school, good Cambridge College, would have assumed irritation and made a show of covering typescripts and said something about 'Not really good for you to see this sort of stuff, darling', and wallowed secretly in a sort of pride. An Assistant Secretary nominally working at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mawby was a career officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, climbing high and well. A bright future at every compass point in the offing.

The paper mounds represented the briefings he had received during the previous week. They concerned a success that was not spectacular but might be significant. A mite of triumph in the unending struggle for information and the placing of pieces in the jigsaw that had no horizon.

Two years back Mawby and select colleagues had taken a private room at the Garrick Club and over champagne and lobster, and afterwards port and Stilton had celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the Service.

They had toasted their Elizabethan founder, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had created the principle that knowledge is never too dear, that no price could be set on intelligence material. For Mawby that evening had set the seal on his determination that within the confines of his influence the Service would remain a virile and lively agency. He munched at the sandwich he had retrieved from the doorway, scattered crumbs on the papers left by the Ministry of Defence (Intelligence) and the Service's Russian Desk/Military.

If the Service were to remain the vital agency that he con- jured in his mind, stay free from the constraints of the 'parsi monious politicians' that the Deputy-Under-Secretary was for ever complaining of, then it must be alert to chance, responsive to good fortune. In the case of Willi Guttmann they had much with which to be satisfied.

An English girl of good county stock, employed by the World Health Organisation, leaning towards middle age and fear of the shelf, had plucked up the courage to jump from her virginal pedestal and launch herself into an affair with a junior Soviet diplomat. And managed to get herself pregnant for her pains.

A nice girl from a nice home and father doing well in the Inner Temple, and so, of course, the thought of termination was unthinkable.

And Willi Guttmann, naive and infatuated and far from home, had been persuaded that a baby needs a father, and wet little blighter that he was had agreed that Lizzie Forsyth should trip round to the British Consul in Geneva who would know what to do, what arrangements could be made.

The Consul had been quick and his telex had finished up on Charles Mawby's desk.

The German name and the Soviet background had nagged at Mawby, caused him to take the lift to the Library in Century House, caused him to smile sweetly at the wide- hipped ladies who could drop their hands on cross references, caused him an agreeable sting of pleasure when they reported back that the junior interpreter was the son of Doctor Otto Guttmann. Mawby had glanced once at the files the ladies showed him and with rare excitement hurried to telephone the Consul.

He brushed the crumbs from the biography sheet, wondered why his wife needed the television's volume so high and glanced again at the typed detail.

Lizzie Forsyth's little indiscretion, her failure to get herself kitted up, had landed in their laps the son of the Director of Russian anti-tank missile research. There would be some pieces for the jigsaw out of that, could hardly be otherwise.