The Crocus List - Lyall Gavin - Страница 49

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And if you were somebody else you'd flash a gun and end up in thesameplace: it was a common terrorist tactic to take a family hostage and do their killing from that temporary base. They knew better than to look obvious sitting in parked cars, and probably Moscow knew as much, too. The street still looked empty, and very menacing.

He heard Clare Hall coming downstairs, was aware of Agnes hurriedly stuffing paper into her bag and sliding the bureau drawer gently shut. He beckoned Clare over.

"There's a pickup truck, parked round the side of that house nearly opposite. Do you recognise it? Don't touch the curtain."

Agnes was suddenly at his other shoulder. Clare said: "That's the Gleissner house, they maybe have the decorators in."

"It's parked facing out," Agnes whispered. "Most people drive straight in: we backed in for a fast getaway. Give them a call, please."

Clare Hall punched a number on the telephone and listened. "They don't answer."

"Try once more, just in case it was a wrong number."

There was still no answer. Agnes said: "I think it would be best if you called the police and said there was something suspicious going on."

"Send some poor deputy up against Moscow Centre?"

Agnes and Maxim glanced at each other. They certainly didn't want a dead policeman to explain away. "I could talk to him before he came over," Agnes said thoughtfully, "tell him what's going on.,."

"You'regoing on," Clare Hall said. "You brought them here-now you get me out of this."

"In a way, it was your father who brought them here. Harry: what d'you think they're going to do?"

Maxim shrugged. "I assume they'd rather catch us on some lonely road, but do they think that truck can outrun your car?"

"Yes," Agnes said. "Those trucks have damn big engines, and with no load in the back… Yes, they'dthink they could catch my Snailsprint Special. They could, too." Instinctively, Agnes had chosen an innocuous low-powered model at Chicago airport. She was regretting it now.

"We can just wait here for them, then," Maxim said.

"They could walkin here," Clare Hall said.

"I wouldn't mind them trying to get close."

"Harry, could we try and settle something without a shoot-out for once? We'll be here for ever explaining why we're here. And God knows what the embassy…"

Maxim looked impassive. Clare Hall said: "My car's faster than yours. We can get through to the garage without them seeing, then unlatch the doors and crash out while-"

"No," Agnes said firmly.

"My God," Clare Hall said, "we can just walk out the back door and keep this house between us and the Gleissner house until-"

"No. D'you think Moscow hasn't heard of back doors? It's routine to cover back and front, and they're great ones for routine. "

Clare Hall glanced fearfully towards the back of the house. Her jitters were showing; no matter who her father was, the Moscow Bravoes were still something that happened on late-night TV, not in Matson, Illinois.

She rounded on Maxim: "So you're the tough guy, why don'tyou do something?"

"You say there must be somebody at the back?" Maxim said to Agnes. "They've split their force. If I neutralise him or them, then the back way could be open."

Agnes had never been in such a situation before: she had been on the outside, among the watchers of a house, moving two steps back on the rare occasions when the police or people like Maxim had been unleashed to go in, and shrugging sadly that things could not have been settled in a more civilised way. Now she was on the inside, and there was no civilised way out that she could see from there.

What they could see was the watcher himself, around the corner on the cross-street and about a hundred metres on a direct line across the lawn, at the only place where hehad a clear view between the shrubs and full-grown trees. He was bending over the open engine of a parked car.

"He wasn't there when we circled the block," Agnes said. "But a hundred to one that motor's in perfect nick."

Maxim was calculating the cover given by the trees and shrubs. "If I can slip out of a side window…"

"Are you sure?"

"This is my end of the business."

"All right-but, Harry: try not to neutralise him too hard."

Agnes planted Clare Hall in the kitchen to cover the back while she herself scurried to and from the front, checking on the Gleissner house.

Standing behind Clare for a few moments, Agnes said quietly: "With the effort Moscow's put into this, at short rime and long distance, your father seems to get more and more alive."

Clare gave a vague snort.

"Living in England?" Agnes suggested.

"If that's what you want me to say."

"If they do catch you," Agnes went on calmly, "it would be nice if I could warn him that they'll be after him as soon as you're through talking to them. Given their methods, you won't last long. "

"Iknow about their methods."

"Really?"

"I worked at Langley in, you'd call it the 'registry', until Dad resigned."

Yet another little something Mo Magill didn't tell me, Agnes thought, hurrying back for a look from the parlour window. All secret services recruit from families-not for nepotism, but just a pious hope that trustworthiness, whatever that was, was genetic.

When she got back, Clare Hall said irritably; "Yourfriend's taking his time."

"I hope so. That way, he's likely to get it right. Why didn't you ring up your old friends at Langley and tell them what's going on here? They'd get something organised pretty quickly."

"It was a long time ago."

"Youknow what your father's doing with that Crocus List, and you just don't want to wreck his little games."

Clare Hall looked at her coldly, downwards, since she was some inches taller. "Get mad at me and I'll paste you one, little girl."

"You and a freshly broken arm."

A watcher merely pretending to fiddle with his car's wiring has to turn his head away at times; the pretence demands it. When he turned back, there was a slim man in a new-looking fawn windcheater shambling across the quiet street and glancing from a paper in his hand to the houses around, obviously seeking an address. The watcher bowed his head into the engine again; he didn't want to be asked.

He wasn't. Maxim said softly: "Do you see where this gun's pointed?"

The watcher straightened slowly, looking down. The automatic was aimed at his crotch from about eighteen inches.

Maxim reached and took the humming CB radio, half-hidden by oily rags, from the engine compartment. "Now shut the bonnet-the hood," he remembered the American word. "And into the car, please."

Later, the watcher would think of all the other moves he might have made-if he had been prepared. He would also remember being taught about those paralysing first seconds after meeting an unexpected and horrible threat. At least he'd be able to say the teaching had been true.

At the front window, Agnes hadn't seen them get into the car. What she heard was the muffled roar of an engine, close, then the garage doors banged open and a silver compact swerved around her own car and hit the road in a squealing turn. She knew Clare Hall must be in the car, but had no idea of what to do about it.

The men in the Gleissner house had no doubts. Two of them were in the truck and it had jumped off by the time she looked back at it. Agnes looked around for her handbag, car keys-it was too late.

The compact had swung round the corner, roaring uppast the watcher's car; the truck didn't bother. It charged across the road, bounced up the sidewalk and across the lawn-no hedges or fences-weaving between the bushes and trees.

At first, Maxim didn't know where the silver car had come from, but the style of driving didn't belong on those quiet streets. Then he saw the truck bucketing through the bushes he had crawled among so slowly and started cranking down the window, but the truck was long out of range. And then Agnes came sprinting across the lawn.

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