Quiller KGB

by Adam Hall

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Getting across.’ She leaned closer, spoke louder. ‘I’m completely fed up, you know? They call this a workers’ and peasants’ state but it’s a two-class system - you’ve got West German currency or you haven’t. The roof of the Metropole’s full of Lancias and BMWs and all most people can afford is a Volkswagen. You’re not here looking for somebody?’

  ‘No.’ I wasn’t certain she meant a girl.

  ‘I thought you might be.’

  ‘What would you like to drink?’

  ‘I’ve had too much. You can’t tell?’

  ‘It doesn’t show.’ If not a girl, then who?

  ‘You know what I think? I think Moscow ordered a boycott of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles because they knew the DDR would beat them hands down.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Are you frightened of AIDS?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That means you’re either married or careful.’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘Isn’t it terrible, though? Everyone’s too scared even to fuck.’

  ‘Why did you think I was here looking for someone?’

  ‘I thought - I was mistaken, that’s all.’

  Her eyes didn’t make any connection with mine; she looked as if she were speaking on the telephone. She could be stoned. I tried a long shot.

  ‘When did you start working for the KGB?’

  ‘For what?’ Smoke curling out of her mouth, her eyes meeting mine but without any expression.

  ‘The KGB.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ But they still didn’t change; she was like talking doll. ‘I saw a Soviet military truck make an illegal U-turn today across Unter den Linden, and one of our Vopos stopped him – but he didn’t get a ticket. I hate those people; it’s like they rape us every day. You’re not looking for Volper?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Horst Volper.’ Her eyes blank, indifferent.

  I said, ‘No.’

  She pulled another cigarette out. ‘You want one?’

  ‘I quit.’

  ‘I don’t know how I’d live without them.’

  I was losing a word now and then because of the noise. ‘Have you got relatives over there?’ Across the Wall.

  ‘Yes.’ A flicker of emotion came into the ice-blue eyes. ‘My father. I’ve only seen him three times since I was five. Don’t you think that’s terrible?’

  ‘He came through to see you?’

  ‘Yes. God, it’s like I’m in gaol, isn’t it? But then I suppose I am. You know the worst thing? To me, the BDR is Deutschland. West Germany isn’t a foreign country; it’s German, and so am I. It only feels foreign because I can’t go there. Don’t you feel that?’

  ‘I’ve got used to it. And we shan’t have the Wall forever. Who knows, Gorbachev might pull it down one day.’

  ‘I can’t see that happening,’ she said, ‘in my lifetime.’

  It was another hour before she said goodnight and left the club and I waited three minutes and went up the steps to ground level and saw her getting into a dark-coloured VW with a front wing smashed in and covered with adhesive plastic with the headlamp poking through. Five minutes later I was fifty yards behind her along Franzosischestrasse with a taxi between us and nothing in my mirror, the streets quiet and access to the target for Quickstep depending on the thin thread leading me through the night as the twin rearlights moved ahead of me and I sped up or held back, keeping them in sight.

  Northeast along Werderstrasse with the same taxi and a small pick-up truck between us, a black Audi in the mirror: it had come up behind me from a sidestreet and I discounted it because we’d gone two miles from the club and it was the first I’d seen of it.

  Turning right onto Spandauerstrasse with the clock on the dashboard moving through 12:35, into the early hours, and the Audi closing up a little: it had turned right as we had but I still couldn’t take it seriously because it was too close. It couldn’t be one of Yasolev’s people because they’d have tagged me to Charlie’s Club and I’d checked when I got there, taking a lot of care. Cone wouldn’t have put anyone on to me unless I’d asked for support or unless he’d thought I was going to need it.

  Left onto Grunerstrasse with the taxi peeling off and moving down a sidestreet, leaving the pick-up ahead of me and the rear lights of the Volkswagen showing whenever I veered far enough in the traffic-lane to make a check. There was almost no traffic at this hour and the only police car I’d seen was stationary, three blocks behind.

  Eyes watering a little from the thick cigarette smoke at the club, the smell of it on my coat, 12:41 and the thought persisting that I’d handled things correctly, holding off when she’d mentioned Volper, giving her nothing.

  I mustn’t lose her.

  Right onto Karl Marx Allee, 12:45 and the streets almost deserted; another police car cruising north, passing us on the far side. The Audi was still with us but it peeled off a block later, leaving the mirror blank.

  12:49.

  ‘98.3.’

  It can’t be ninety-eight point three. That isn’t any kind of time at all.

  ‘Pulse normal.’

  The smell of cigarette smoke on my coat, and of something else. ‘Blood-pressure 125 over 83.’

  Antiseptics. Smell of antiseptics. Terror.

  ‘All right, you can take him off the drip.’ The terror of disorientation, of not knowing. ‘Lights,’ I said. ‘Can you turn off the lights?’

  Blinding me. I was enveloped in some kind of passive restraint. Blankets.

  ‘Did he say something?’ Cone’s voice.

  ‘Yes , he’s conscious now.’

  Conscious? Jesus Christ, of course I’m conscious.

  Said, ‘Of course I’m conscious.’

  It had gone almost dark now, just one lamp burning, like a moon in haze.

  ‘Feel all right?’ Cone’s face with its eyes squinting and its gash of a mouth, hovering over mine.

  ‘God knows what I feel.’ I tried to sit up but the girl in the white linen coat put her hand on my shoulder and I wasn’t strong enough to resist.

  ‘You can’t get up yet,’ a man said in German. Also in a white coat.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Someone else standing there looking down.

  Yasolev.

  Said, ‘Is this a hospital?’

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor said.

  Some kind of amnesia, then.

  ‘Am I functional?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Functional, for God’s sake. What injuries?’

  ‘Take it slow,’ Cone said. ‘You’re all right. There’s nothing broken.’

  Furious now. Panicking. ‘Tell me what condition I’m in.’

  The sharpest fear of the executive: to become unfit and lose the mission.

  ‘You’ve come out of hypothermia,’ Cone said, ‘and there was some concussion and various bruises and some skin ripped off. There’s nothing serious.’

  ‘Hypothermia. Cone, fill me in, will you?’ Excessively polite, monumentally patient, because my head was full of bells ringing and lights flashing and fireworks going off - the nerves, in other words, had been rubbed raw and the brain was screaming out for information so that I could find my place again in reality. So I had to keep the lid on things, strictly essential.

  ‘You were nearly drowned,’ Cone said. ‘The police pulled you out of the Spree. The other man was already dead.’

  Sensation of black water rising against my face, filling my mouth, blocking my throat - Oh Christ ‘Nurse.’

  ‘Yes, doctor - ‘

  ‘Take it slow,’ Cone said, and the nurse held me by the shoulders, some sort of paroxysm, choking fit, hadn’t expected it. ‘You swallowed the wrong way, that’s all.’

  It was a minute before I could speak. ‘Out of the Spree? What was I doing there?’

  ‘We’re hoping you can tell us.’

  There was a sense of
oblivion coming into me, of a void. It was enough to chill the blood and I stayed with it alone for as long as I could before I asked for help.

  ‘Doc,’ in German, ‘I had concussion, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Mild concussion.’

  ‘Any shock?’

  ‘Shock too, yes, because of the hypothermia and because of the other trauma.’

  ‘I see. Well I - listen, what about retrogressive amnesia?’

  ‘You’re having difficulty in remembering?’

  I didn’t answer right away. When it’s necessary to fight panic off you can’t think of anything else. It came at me in waves, freezing the blood, stilling the mind, blocking the breath. After a long time, I said, ‘Cone.’

  He leaned closer.

  ‘The last thing I can remember was looking at the clock on dashboard, at 12:49.’

  He watched me for a moment. ‘That was twelve hours ago.’

  Mother of God.

  ‘What is being said?’ In Russian.

  Cone turned to Yasolev. ‘He’s got a memory lapse.’

  The doctor glanced at them, not understanding, and I remembered ,I hadn’t answered his question. ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I’m having difficulty recalling what happened between 12:49 this morning and when I came to a few minutes ago.’

  He opened his hands, fingers spread. ‘It sometimes happens after an accident. The mind protects itself from unpleasant memories. I wouldn’t worry. Perhaps nothing very important happened.’

  But, Jesus Christ, I’d been tagging someone who’d connected me with Horst Volper and she could have led me straight into access to the target and it would have swung the mission from phase one into a totally new situation with a chance of going in and reaching Volper and completing Quickstep in a matter of days, hours. Nothing very important?

  ‘Cone. You said “the other man.” What other man?’

  ‘We don’t know who he is.’

  It was for me. For me to know.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the mortuary.’

  ‘Aren’t you trying to find out who he is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What time did they find us in the river?’

  ‘It’s down on the incident report as 01:15.’

  Twenty-six minutes. That was the gap.

  ‘Where was the car?’

  ‘Your car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Two blocks away, in a side street off Karl Marx Allee.’

  ‘But that’s - what d’you mean, my car? Was there another one?’

  ‘You must allow him to rest now, please. He - ‘

  ‘You mean I walked as far as the river? But that’s over -‘

  ‘There was a car in the river, where you were found.’

  ‘In the - I got into someone else’s car?’

  ‘We think so. A Mercedes.’

  ‘So why did it go into the river?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘But for Christ’s sake, were the tyres shot off, was it hit by another -‘

  ‘That is enough.’ The doctor stepped between Cone and the bed and signalled the nurse. ‘Gentlemen, you have to leave now. My patient needs to rest.’

  Yasolev said something about getting a tape recorder but Cone interrupted him.

  ‘Doc, this is very important. We need…’

  ‘Nothing is as important to me as the welfare of my patient. Please understand that.’

  ‘Give me thirty seconds more,’ I told him, and he looked down at me.

  ‘Very well. But don’t get excited, please.’

  ‘Cone,’ I said, ‘call the doctor at the Embassy and ask him if he’s ever used hypnosis. If he can do it for me, I’m ready. I’d ask this man, but it’s got to be in my own language. It’s the only chance.’

  ‘Pretty long shot.’

  ‘Look, it’s all in here, inside my head, and all we’ve got to do is get it out. Nothing’s lost.’

  Cone looked at Yasolev and said in Russian, ‘Hypnosis. What do you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ nodding emphatically. ‘Yes, yes.’

  Cone picked up the telephone and asked the operator for an outside line.

  ‘Can you take yourself down to the alpha level?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You’ve been hypnotised before?’

  ‘Couple of times.’

  His name was Cosgreave, been at the embassy six months or so. ‘Won’t have me in the West, I’m too Commie for their liking.’ Not a smile in him anywhere, very intent, dark, still smouldering from some kind of conflagration in his past. What were they thinking of, for God’s sake, keeping a leftist at the embassy this side of the Curtain? I suppose he’d been to Cambridge, one of us, you know.

  ‘Have you any ideas on induction?’ he asked me.

  ‘I use the image of a brass pendulum.’

  ‘Never fails. Big, slow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, are you comfortable?’

  ‘Let’s hit those lights.’

  He signalled the nurse. ‘You want her to stay?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  The main lights went off and I felt the eye muscles relaxing. I was still smothered in blankets but not too hot anymore; a sense of overlying comfort with a tendency to break through it and worry, worry like hell because this might not work and if it didn’t God knew what we were going to miss but it’d be something vital: who was the man in the Mercedes and what had he said to me?

  Cosgreave pulled up a chair. ‘When you reach alpha, just lift a finger.’

  I closed my eyes and relaxed, went limp, listening to the settling of the pillow as the neck muscles lost tension and the head grew heavy and the brainwaves slowed and the ticking of a watch came in and I eased it away to silence, silence and the deepening dark as the mind drifted, floated, drifting, floating as I lifted a finger and let it fall again, floating, drifting … as his voice came in quietly …

  ‘So you’re watching the big brass pendulum … swinging … swinging to and fro … to … and fro … with the light catching it as it swings … the light flashing softly … flashing softly as it swings… to and fro … to … and fro …’

  My head settling lower on the pillow, lower, as I drifted in the darkness, drifting, floating, his voice still soft but clearer now, my mind opening gently, intent, attentive.

  ‘What is the last thing you remember, then? It really doesn’t matter if you can’t think of it; we can always try again later.’

  ‘A street. Karl Marx Allee.’

  ‘You’re walking along the street? You’re -‘

  ‘Driving. Driving along Karl Marx Allee. I’m following another car, with a woman driving it.’

  ‘What do things look like? Feel like? It really doesn’t matter if you can’t remember.’

  ‘There are just the street lights, and sometimes the reflection of my own lights in a shop window at the intersections, the sound of the engine and the smell of cigarette smoke, that’s about all. We’d turned onto the Allee a few blocks ago, and the time on the dashboard clock was 12:45. Not much in the streets, not much traffic. Police car cruising the other way. There was another car behind me, a black Audi, but it peeled off after a while and left a Fiat in the mirror. When I looked at the clock again it was 12:49.’

  Silence.

  12:49.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me anything more?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s really not important. Just go on talking, if you want to. Just go on talking.’

  12:49.

  ‘If you like, but I’m not sure -‘

  ‘Just go on talking.’

  ‘We were driving along the street, that was all. I’d fallen behind quite a bit now because the taxi had peeled off earlier and I didn’t want her to see me close enough to identify the front-end profile. Then I looked at the clock again because I wanted to keep a check.’

  ‘What time was it?’

  ‘12:49. No, 12:50.’

  �
�Good, Go on.’

  ‘I was just keeping station. It was a routine tag. Then. she began slowing, soon after Strausbergerplatz, and turned right onto a sidestreet, Andreasstrasse. I sped up and swung onto the same street and saw her tail-lights ahead of me as she turned left into a car-park.

  This was tricky because I wasn’t certain she was going to park there but I took a chance and put the nearside wheels of the Lancia onto the pavement and switched off and got out and began walking, listening as I went, and heard the engine of the VW throttle up and then cut off.

  Slam of a door and then she was within sight and I held back and used a rubbish bin as cover. She was walking away from the car, not hurrying, not looking around her, and I closed the distance to something like a hundred feet before she picked her way across a patch of waste-ground and turned into an alleyway with one street-light at this end. I was fifty feet behind her and using cover as I went - doorways, rubbish-bins, a section of fallen fence - because if she turned she’d see me. There were brick walls on each side now, high ones, with almost no cover, and I held back, taking the risk of losing her if she went into one of the doorways further down. It couldn’t be helped and in any case it made no difference because the sound of an engine exploded in the silence and I spun round as a flood of blinding light leapt in a wave against me.

  Chapter 8

  SKIDDER

  There wasn’t a chance because the width of the car was filling the alleyway and there was no door I could reach and the walls were too high and there was nothing to climb so I waited until the headlights were close enough and then jumped and hit the bonnet with the flat of my hands and pulled my legs up and got thrown against the top of the windscreen and over the roof, hitting the CB antenna in the centre of the boot and feeling it flex and break but the base held and I got one foot against it and used it for leverage and smashed the rear window with a heel-palm and got a grip on the frame and held on while the car accelerated through the alley like a bullet down a gun barrel and burst into the street and began weaving from side to side with the tyres shrilling and the suspension taking the shock and the bodywork heaving and recoiling and heaving and throwing me from side to side as my foot lost its hold against the base of the antenna and I clung on with one hand, side to side, weaving and bucking as he sped up and zig-zagged from kerb to kerb.