The Crocus List - Lyall Gavin (книги онлайн бесплатно без регистрации полностью .txt) 📗

She can run, he noticed. Not just hurry with her bottom sloshing from side to side, butmove.

"Swing around," he ordered. The watcher was in the driving seat, Maxim behind him.

The watcher took his time, fumbling the key, mistaking the gear. He had recovered from his fright. The car reached the far kerb as Agnes arrived. She-and a tap from the gun-moved the watcher to the passenger seat.

There was a distant bang.

Agnes drove off. "Where did they go?"

"Left at the corner." He tapped the watcher again. "Put your seatbelt on, friend. It could save your life."

"I don't know what in hell all this is about-" the watcher began. He had, to Maxim's un American ear, a fairly standard American voice.

"Something to do with what I found in your pocket. Now shut up."

Agnes swung the corner smoothly and accelerated, not wasting a second or an inch, and in a strange car. Then she braked. Ahead and to the right, a puff of black smoke was rolling up above the houses and trees.

"Oh God." She drove on slowly.

The fire was at an intersection, a pyramid of flame and smoke boiling above the interlocked pickup truck and silver car. Already there was a circle of people forming around it, swaying back as the wind toppled the flames towards them. One man was hopefully spraying an extinguisher on the edge of the flame pool; a police siren whooped from the town centre.

Agnes stopped a block away, watching, then turned to Maxim. He shook his head. "It's over already. Either they got out fast or they didn't get out at all." He had seen burnt-out vehicles, and their occupants, before.

Agnes moved off slowly, keeping north towards the edge of the town. Maxim asked: "What about your car?"

"I'd like it, but it could be a mistake to go back now. Better keep moving."

"Won't they trace you from a hired car?"

"Yes, in time. But they've got a lot to think about already."

After a few minutes and one zigzag they were out on a straight if not wide road between the cornfields strewn with rotting stalks. Agnes speeded up, then abruptly slowed to a stop. She sat there, her head bowed and her shoulders shivering; when she lifted her hands off the wheel, they shook "God, Harry, I'm sorry…"

"Take your time."

"Just… you're speaking to somebody, and a minute later she could be…"

"I know. And you don't get used to it. Not unless you're the wrong sort of person to start with."

"Your lady friend," the watcher said, "does not have a strong stomach."

The pistol rammed him forward in his seat. "And you don't have a strong neck. I won't kill you in here, but we can take a walk in a cornfield. "

After a moment, Agnes slid the car into Drive. "Thank you, Harry. Andyou: you helped, too." She wound up to a fast but safe speed. "What are we going to do with the excess baggage here?"

"D'you want to stop and ask him a few questions?"

"You are kidnapping me," the watcher started, remembering his innocence again.

"I doubt he knows anything we don't already. He's just a pawn."

"The name's Gulev, and he lives in Chicago." Maxim had the contents of Gulev's pockets-which had included a revolver-spread on the back seat.

"Bulgar?" Agnes asked the watcher.

"I am an American citizen. You are committing-"

"I dare say." She drove silently for a few more minutes, then stopped. "All right, Gulev; this is as far as you go."

Maxim saw a sudden dampness on the watcher's forehead.

"Give him back everything," Agnes said, "except the gun and one thing-his driving licence, say. Now listen, Gulev: that licence is proof that we had you and could have killed you-when I show it to your bosses in Washington or London, and I know them better than you do. So you just tell them we didn't bury you in some cornfield in return for them not trying to kill Major Maxim in the future? Have you got that? Good. Have a nice rest of the day."

Maxim got out first and watched Gulev on his first hundred yards back towards Maison, just in case. When he got back in, he asked: "D'you think it'll work?"

"No, frankly."

Maxim smiled. "From the first day I joined the Army, I assumed the Russians wanted to kill me. "

"I had to try," Agnes said between clenched teeth.

After a time, Maxim said. "Yes. Thank you."

The Illinois farm country isn't truly flat, as film directors show it (Maxim blamed his disappointment on them) by choosing the few stretches where you could roll a bowling ball fromhorizonto horizon without losing sight of it. Slow rises and dips unnoticeable to a car's engine pull the skyline closer, and clumps of trees around the still-frequent farmhouses pull it closer still. But it certainly didn't need a map; he put that away.

"Did you find anything useful in her papers? I noticed you pinched a photo of Tatham. "

"I got her last batch of telephone bills."

He was unimpressed. "Nothing more?"

Agnes gave him a superior glance. "You don't know American phone bills: they actually tell you something, like what numbers you dialled long-distance. To Britain, for instance."

"Ah. Did she?"

"I think so, but I haven't had time to look carefully. They may not tell us much, she could have been smartenough to let her father call her. You didn't know she was CIA as well, for a time? Just a filing job, I think, but she may have learnt something… Not enough to charge out and try to beat the Bravoes at that game… damn it, I didnot know she was going to do that."

"Of course you didn't. But d'you think she was escaping from us or Them?"

After a time, Agnes said: "You're a reassuring person, Harry, but any way you look at it, we got her killed."

"Nothing to do with her father, the CIA, the Crocus List, Moscow? -just us?"

"I know we only reacted-but here we are driving a car hijacked from some Bravo across the Midwest, breaking God-knows-what laws and with two or three people burnt to death back there… Is it enough to say we didn't start it all?"

He knew Agnes was going to fear sleep for the next few nights, would be trying to bypass her dreams with drink and pills, and he longed to see her through those nights. But he also knew today's events would tear them apart. If he could say anything, it had to be now.

"Reacting is our job; we aren't supposed to start anything. But if they fire the first shot-"

"That's the Army way, Harry."

"No, the Army way would be to fire back the next thousand and anything else we could lay our hands on. By that standard, I think we've behaved quite politely. But not reacting at all won't make the secret war go away. I think we were stuck with it the moment the world got The Bomb. It didn't stop nations wanting to get their own way, it just made them scared of using their armies. So they shifted to surrogate armies: guerrillas, terrorists, agents they could disown-all well away from The Button. So-here we are."

Agnes slowed the car and looked across at him curiously. "You've been doing some thinking."

"No, mostly just listening to Miss Tuckey." Then he nodded. "Yes, some I thought of for myself. Trying to think about what I'm doing, and why."

"And it may be crooked, but it's the only game in town."

"Oh no. Somewhere across the Elbe there's a Major Ivan Maximovitch who's put as much of his life into his army as I have into mine. And some days-you can't help it-we'd like to know how it would work out. Nothing to do with politics or human rights, just to know which one of us is the best. We'd need a supporting cast of a few hundred thousand, but they're mostly in place already… We'd make quite a chapter in history, between us. Andthat's the other game. But"-he lifted the pistol from his lap-"I think I'm safer with just this."

"Put that bloody thing away, we'll be in Springfield in a couple of minutes." If he had done anything towards consoling her, her tone didn't show it.