by Adam Hall
‘There’s another flask.’
Bloody cocoa. All I wanted was Scarsdale at a table with a tape-recorder going, spilling it all out for me so that I could go into Berlin and get a fix on Hood and throw him to the KGB and come back home with a whole skin. Quickstep wasn’t precisely my idea of a shadow executive’s favourite mission; I’d be more like a rat out there running for its life.
At 02:34 the phone rang and Pauling took it and said ‘Roger’ and put it down again.
The warden’s satisfied. Any time now.’
But it was almost another hour before the Austin came round the corner and flashed its lights off and on again and pulled up and a door swung open and a man got out and began walking towards us, pale faced and hunched in a dark coat, crossing the road, walking right into the middle of the road as another car came blinding along from behind us and froze Scarsdale in its headlights and kept straight on and sent him spinning off the front end with his arms flung out and a scream coming and then cutting off as he curved through the air and dropped as the car reached the crossroads and turned with its tyres shrilling and leaving an echo in the night as the grey cat leapt for the top of a wall and vanished.
I heard Pauling say, ‘You’re going to have trouble with Hood. He’s a professional.’
Chapter 6
CONE
They’ve got concrete flower-boxes strung across Friedrichstrasse on the north side of Checkpoint Charlie because a couple of years ago Hans Joachim Pofahl rammed his fifteen-ton Skoda dump-truck through the three red-and-white barriers and the six-foot-high steel doors in front of fifty armed guards and made it to the West. That had been on a summer night with a clear sky but tonight it was November and close to freezing as a cold front came drifting through from the north.
There were only two guards on the west side and they checked me through and the third barrier swung up under the floodlights and I was into East Berlin, no one there to meet me, just the directions: turn right into Leipzigstrasse and go three short blocks. The hotel is on the left.
He was waiting for me in the car park, Cone, standing there with his feet together and his hands in his raincoat pockets and his collar turned up, didn’t signal, just waited for me to get out of the BMW and go across to him.
‘Maypole.’
‘Faerie Fey.’
Hand freezing cold, just touched, just a gesture and back in his pocket while he studied me through a pair of dark glasses, couldn’t see his eyes.
‘Any trouble coming through?’
‘No.’
A narrow head and narrow shoulders, a face with a mortuary pallor and a raw-skinned nose and a mouth like a recently-healed wound. His thin body was hunched, as if he’d been born in a bitter wind and never found shelter from it, never even looked for any, knowing there was none.
The director in the field for Quickstep.
His hand came out again. ‘Give me the keys of the car. Here’s your new set. It’s over there, the black Lancia. East Berlin number plates. ‘I’ll have yours sent back. When did you last eat?’
‘I don’t need anything.’
‘But when was it?’
‘A couple of hours ago.’
Well on the ball: if he heard I was in some kind of trouble at any stage of the mission - snatched, missing, gone to ground - he’d want to know how fit I was, what strength I had, how long I could last out. In Final Briefing they’d told me he’d worked on Nightlight and mounted his own personal manhunt for his executive after he’d been signalled as missing for two weeks, and pulled him out of a cave in the mountains still alive and covered in batshit. ‘Cone’s like Brighton rock,’ Pauling had told me, ‘lasts all the way through.’
‘All right,’ Cone said, ‘this is your base.’
I went with him into the hotel and he waited while I registered. In the lift he pressed for the third floor and took his dark glasses off but didn’t look at me; he had a slight squint or a glass eye, something not quite right.
‘Have you met Yasolev?’ I asked him.
‘Oh yes. We’re knocking on his door first. Protocol: he wants to show you into your room. The KGB are paying, so technically he’s your host. He’s in 308, you’re in 357, I’m two floors up in 525. Best we could do the place is crowded.’ He gave me a key. ‘This is for my room, a spare one, if for any reason you want to duck in there instead of your own. I’ll be available most of the time but if I’ve got to go out I’ll let you know.’ He spoke in a monotone as if he were reading aloud, and there was a dry harshness in his voice, maybe an echo of the wind he couldn’t escape.
Yasolev opened the door in his shirt-sleeves, hurrying. ‘Come in - you’re earlier than I expected.’ He looked at me hard with his nicotine-brown eyes, assessing me. A lot had happened since we’d last met. I’d turned the mission down and then changed my mind, and he’d have got the news about Scarsdale. ‘Have a drink, gentlemen.’ He gestured towards a side table and got a jacket out of the closet, shrugging into it. ‘Or a chocolate.’
Personal traits, it said in the dossier they’d given me in Clearance. He’s prone to sinusitis in the winter, hates homosexuals, is allergic to cats, has a collection of Samurai swords from his stint in Tokyo. Fond of sushi, oysters, chocolates.
‘I’ll show you your room.’ On our way out he stopped to give me another straight look. ‘My department appreciates your instructions that Major-general Solsky was to be released, and so, of course, do I. That was a bold move.’
‘It’s the only way we can play.’
‘I agree. But still a bold move.’ He took us along the corridor, leading the way, energetic, rebuttoning his black jacket because in his haste he’d done it up the wrong way. ‘You have the key?’
I gave it to him and he unlocked the door and pushed it open and stood aside. ‘I hope you will be comfortable.’
Not really. It was a modern hotel and this was the third floor with a sheer drop to the street, no fire-escape, guttering, drainpipes, creeper, no ledges below the window, just a view of the Wall with its floodlit wire and watchtowers and gunposts - they wouldn’t have that on the postcards they sold in the lobby.
Cone went straight over to the phone while I was looking round. ‘Binns, will you come up?’
Yasolev stood with his hands behind him for a moment, then went across to the bathroom and looked in, I suppose to see if the towels and things were there as they should be. Cone didn’t introduce Binns when the man came in; there wasn’t really time before he opened his black zippered bag and got out a transmitter detector and started sweeping the walls with it while Cone opened the closet and showed me the clothes he’d got for me; they would have been bought locally.
‘I’m not sure of the shoes - you’ve got a narrow foot. Better try them. When you’ve got out of the clothes you’re wearing, put them in that hag and I’ll deal with them.’
There was a tray with some beer and glasses on it, but no opener. ‘We’re out of vodka,’ I told Yasolev. ‘What about a beer?’
‘No. I have had enough vodka.’ He gestured with the flat of his hand up to his neck. ‘I was anxious, I might tell you. I might tell you, I was anxious.’
‘You didn’t think I’d come?’
‘Not after what happened.’
To Scarsdale. ‘It was a setback,’ I said, ‘that was all.’
‘But quite a big one. I understand he was in possession of valuable information on Horst Volper.’
‘So we’ll now have to get it ourselves.’
Binns was taking the lamps to pieces.
‘Then you have other leads?’
‘No,’ I said.
Nothing showed in Yasolev’s eyes but he tilted his head an inch, and I was beginning to read him. In this case it meant Jesus Christ. ‘You have no other leads?’
‘Not really. We’ve got to find a different way in.’
It was eerie. Yasolev was in effect my host, but we were having the guest room swept for bugs. He was a KGB officer but I was talking to h
im about the mission I was working, and he wasn’t sitting on the other side of a two-hundred-watt lamp with its shade cut in half, forcing the information out of me. Pauling had warned me about this in Final Briefing. ‘I’m sure you’ve considered it, but you’ll find things a bit odd over there. This is the first time London has ever liaised with the KGB and you’re the guinea-pig. But Yasolev’s going to find it odd too. We’re running you in a field where the KGB connection’s going to give you a window on their system, and you’ll be bringing back information it’d take an entire infiltration job to get hold of. And if anything goes wrong it’ll he his fault because it was his idea.’
The phone rang and Cone took it. Yasolev wasn’t interested. He was watching me with his head still on one side, waiting for me to tell him how I was going to find access to Volper. There was only one way but I couldn’t tell him that.
‘Everything is very nice,’ Cone said, and put the phone down. His German accent was a shade off, but I’d been briefed that his Russian was good enough to follow what Yasolev and I were saying.
“That’s it,’ Binns said. It was the first time he’d spoken. ‘We’re all clear.’ He shoved the transmitter detector in the black bag and went to the door. Cone thanked him and Yasolev gave an energetic nod.
‘I insisted,’ he told me. ‘I insisted. We wish you to be comfortable here.’
‘Civil of you.’
But no one was taken in, Binns included. He could sweep this room forever and pull the wallpaper off but he couldn’t tell if anyone were aiming microwave beams at the windows to catch voice vibrations on the glass, and without X-rays he wouldn’t know if some of the bricks had bugs or crystalline mikes put into them when the hotel was built, and he’d have to dismantle the walls to find non-metallic optic fibres hooked up to amplifiers in another room. Yasolev was simply making a diplomatic gesture to show his trust and we were meant to accept it.
‘Now I shall leave you to settle in. We’ll talk when you gentlemen are ready. My room number is by the telephone.’ He inclined his head and left us.
‘He’s nervous,’ Cone said, ‘but you don’t need me to tell you that.’
‘He’s not the only one.’
‘You’ll be all right. You’ve got massive support.’
And the thing I couldn’t tell him was that he was wrong. I would keep him as my director and go through the gestures but I was going to run Quickstep on my own. I’d never manage it with a horde of Bureau people and a horde of KGB agents tagging me through the streets wherever I went.
‘A few numbers for you,’ Cone said, and gave me a memo pad. ‘Karl Bruger is the HUA captain who’ll support your cover if needs be, and this is his office number. This one’s the direct-line number of the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy. You can call him if Yasolev isn’t available and you need official assistance, urgent or otherwise. If the military attaché isn’t available this is the direct-line number of the Soviet ambassador. The code-intro in both cases is Liaison. And this one’s the direct-line number of the cultural attaché at the British Embassy, Dickie Pollock. He’s been here for three years and he knows his way around, so he’ll be your most useful contact. And here are some mugshots of Horst Volper.’
‘When were they taken?’
‘During the last two years.’
I put them away.
‘All right,’ Cone said, ‘I’ll let you try some of these clothes on. Let me know about the shoes especially. Might need to break into a trot here or there.’ He said it deadpan. At the door he turned and levelled his squint at me and said, ‘Yasolev’s going to ask you how you’ll be planning your access to Volper. Will you tell him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know?’
‘Yes.’
He took his hand off the door-knob and came back into the room a little. ‘Are you prepared to tell me?’
‘You wouldn’t like it.’
He watched me steadily. ‘How much protection are you going to need?’
‘None.’
‘My job,’ he said, in his dry monotone, ‘is to get you through Quickstep with a whole skin. I’d rather you didn’t make it difficult for me.’
‘Look, it’s out of our hands. Put it this way: they went for Scarsdale and they got him. They thought it’d warn me off, but it didn’t, so now they’ll go for me. And that’s the only access we’ve got, and I’m going to use it. Don’t worry, they won’t be long.’
Chapter 7
AMNESIA
‘Are they tarts over there?’
A man in a black leather coat rocked our table as he squeezed through.
‘Verzeihen Sie.’
Place blue with smoke.
‘Tarts?’ Pollock said. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve never been propositioned, anyway.’ A clean white smile, his glasses reflecting the coloured lights over the miniature dancefloor. ‘I think they’re just here for a good time.’
‘Any swallows?’
‘What? I suppose they might be, some of them, anyway. We get a few KGB chaps in here from their embassy, though of course they call themselves attaches of some sort or another. In fact a lot of the people who come here are from the embassies - American, British, French, Soviet. It’s in walking distance for most of them. Are you sure you won’t have anything stronger?’
‘I’m too thirsty.’
‘This is my favourite haunt, actually. I mean, apart from the embassy connection it’s close to the Wall - that’s why it’s called Charlie’s. There’s always some kind of intrigue going on.’ Another clean smile. ‘People talking about getting across, especially now that the guards have stopped shooting to kill.’ He waved for the waiter. ‘But most of the talk’s political, and of course very pro-Gorbachev at the moment. They’re hoping he’s going to do something big for Germany.’
‘For the DDR.’
‘For both, actually. Dasselbe nochmals, Willi. Everybody’s seized on the idea of seeing one Germany again. You know something? A couple of months ago I had the chance of Rome - second cultural attaché - think of all that gorgeous art! But I turned it down. I’ve got a feeling something rather interesting’s going to happen here before long, and I don’t want to miss it. I mean, later I can always say, I was there.’ Quick smile.
One of the girls was watching me from a corner table, under the amber lamp.
‘You think he is going to do something big?’
‘Our Miki? Absolutely.’ The waiter banged another pitcher of Heineker onto the table and altered the tab. ‘Danke schon. Of course he’s taking a huge risk with his glasnost policy. I mean it’s all very nice to hear him talk about “more flexible” relations between Moscow and the satellites but it’s going to stir up the people in the streets. Once they get a whiff of freedom they’re liable to want the whole thing, and we could easily see an outbreak of rebellions like the one here in ‘53 and the ones later in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland. That’d put Gorbachev straight out of office and bring the tanks in again. But you probably know all this.’
‘Not all.’
‘Does it interest you, or would you rather -‘
‘It interests me very much.’
Not actually watching me, just passing her glance across me now and then. Blonde hair, blue eyes, the archetypal Aryan, bare-shouldered in a slip of a dress, smoking the whole time. She’d come in soon after we had.
‘Well, obviously,’ Pollock said, ‘the East Germans are fervently hoping for some kind of reunification, because so many of them have got relatives in the West and they’ve been cut off from them all this time by the Wall. On the other hand, some people are scared to death, because if Europe becomes denuclearised - which is the way things are heading - the US is going to withdraw most of its forces and that’ll leave West Germany without a security umbrella - and she’s liable to look for a new one in Moscow.’ He spread his hands flat on the table and looked at me steadily. ‘Can you imagine what the rest of Europe Would feel like with a reunited Germany as an ally, no
t a slave state, but an ally of Soviet Russia? That’s why lots of people are scared stiff.’ No quick smile this time.
‘Jesus.’
‘Didn’t mean to spoil your evening.’ He drank half his beer in one go and then looked at his watch. ‘But anyway, I think they’re wrong. I see a united capitalist Germany.’
‘And anyway it’d take time.’
‘Unless Gorbachev decides on a grand gesture. A symbolic gesture that would make its own statement and cut out half a dozen summit conferences.’
‘You’re thinking of something specific.’
‘I am, actually. I believe it’s on the cards, and that’s why I’m staying on here, in case our Mikhail takes a sledgehammer to the top of that wall and knocks the first brick off.’
‘You’re serious, are you?’
‘Absolutely. It’d be typical of him: he’s a brilliant public relations man and a gesture like that would rate more live coverage world-wide than the Olympic Games. Go down in history, wouldn’t he?’ He finished his beer. ‘Well, I’ve got to get some shut-eye. H.E. wants me up early for a meeting tomorrow. But I’d really like to leave you with something more interesting to drink.’
‘I’m fine. I shan’t be long myself.’
It was 11:13 when he paid the bill and told me to phone him if I needed anything and left me, pushing his way between the crowded tables and dodging a waiter’s tray.
She came over within a minute.
‘I didn’t want you to be lonely.’
‘I’m touched.’
‘This is the first time I’ve seen you in here.’
‘Yes?’
‘My name’s Hedda.’ She pulled another cigarette out of the pack. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Kurt.’
There was a lot of noise from the jazz trio and she leaned close to me over the table, her blonde hair hanging across her face. ‘He’s from the British embassy?’
‘Who?’
‘Your friend.’
‘Yes.’
‘I haven’t got any friends.’ Small, rather pointed teeth, a shred of tobacco on her lip, smoke curling as she spoke. ‘I talk all the time about getting across, and it bores them.’