The Contract

The boy recoiled. The same picture that was in an album at home. Four men in a line together with their arms around each other's shoulders; one was taller than his companions and had a face wrapped in privacy, not wearing the bold grin of the others. 'Lubeck, January 1945. Your father making warheads for the Nazis. Otto Wilhelm Guttmann. Born in Magdeburg in 1912. Expert in short range missiles. Taken to the Soviet Union in 1945. Married Valentina Efremov Guttmann, killed in a car accident in 1968…' Mawby reeled off the information, referred to no notes… 'One daughter, Erica. One son, Willi. Technical Director of Research at Padolsk for the last seven years. Expert now in MCLOS, that's Manual Controlled Line of Sight. Developing the successor to the AAICV, we call it Sagger over here. That's what we brought you here for,

Guttmann. That's what we've got to be talking about if you're to find yourself between Lizzie Forsyth's thighs again.'

'Bastard.'

'Good boy, Willi. Now you're understanding me,' Mawby chuckled with satisfaction.

For four hours, with Mawby wielding the pickaxe and Carter handling the scalpel, they kept at him, dogs in a pit with a dying bear. Willi shouting and Willi whimpering, alternating courage and submission. A bright light in his face, the rattle of the questions from behind its beam, and never the answer that they sought.

'My father didn't bring work home to the flat.'

'At home he hardly ever talked of Padolsk.'

'If he had to work then he had a room in the flat where he would go.

Right from the time I was a child I was never invited into that room.'

'When I disturbed him and he was working, then he was angry. I didn't do it.'

'He never spoke of difficulties and solutions.'

'Maybe he talked with my sister. Erica is at Padolsk with him, she is his secretary there. He never talked with me.'

'I hardly saw him after I went to the Foreign Ministry. Before that I was at the University of Kiev. I have a room at home, but I was working or at night classes for languages.'

'When we went to Magdeburg, when he went home for his holiday in the summer, then we were close. Two weeks in the year, and then we did not speak of this AAICV that you talk of.'

'I don't know… I don't know about his work… believe me, I don't know.'

Mawby looked at his watch, rapped his fingers on the table. Willi heard the door open. He stood up and saw George standing inside the room. A pitiless, cold face, and there was the nod for him to follow.

Surely now they would believe him? Surely they would realise the truth of his ignorance. He tried to remember Lizzie's face and could not, tried to feel her hands on his skin and could not, tried to lhear her words from the pillow and could not.

In his room after he had fallen onto the bed Willi heard the key turn softly in the lock and the diminishing footsteps of George. The tears welled in his eyes and dribbled on his cheeks. He was their prisoner and their pawn and he buried his head in the blankets.

The exalted company would have deterred a less confident man than Charles Mawby.

He stood at the end of the mahogany table in the third floor room of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that overlooked Horseguards, and from his handwritten reminders told the story of the flight of Willi Guttmann and of the sparse information that the defection had provided.

He was listened to patiently by the Deputy-Under-Secretary who headed the Service, by the Major General who commanded the Directorate of Service Intelligence and who took copious pencilled notes, by the Permanent-Under-Secretary who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee and lit a chain of matches to fire his pipe, by the Director of the Security Service who gazed out of the window.

The Joint Intelligence Committee met every fortnight and it had been the opinion of the Deputy-Under-Secretary that the success in bringing over the Russian boy was a matter for moderate congratulation. As he heard Mawby out, he increasingly regretted his decision to offer Guttmann for the agenda.

'… so from our point of view it's been an interesting but frustrating start, the debrief. The boy is obviously extremely fond of his father, and says it's reciprocated. He may in his answers be trying to protect him in the same way that he sought to spare him from punishment through the planning of the escape. After personally questioning him last night I tend to regard his lack of knowledge as genuine. I think that's it, gentlemen.'

Mawby sat down.

'But we are hoping there will be more to come,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary countered the tepid response to the Service's efforts. 'We're getting into a very sensitive area, close to a sensitive man.'

'Close to, but not up alongside,' murmured the

Per- manent-Under-Secretary.