by Adam Hall
‘I implied nothing. Have Cone come to the telephone again, will you?’
I passed it to him and tuned out what he was saying. It wasn’t totally unlikely that Bureau One would order him to pull me out of the mission for mishandling the Skidder thing and letting it affect my morale.
‘Something for us to work on,’ Cone said, when he’d put the phone down. ‘One of our sleepers out here got his wavelengths crossed with someone’s transmitter and picked up Werneuchen Airforce Base as the site of a clandestine operation. Mr. Shepley suggests you do some work on it.’
I opened my eyes. ‘Volper’s operation?’
‘They don’t know.’
‘Werneuchen,’ I said, ‘is a bomber base.’
‘See what you can find out. But I need your report before we do anything else. Feel up to it?’
I said yes and he got the recorder and put it on the edge of the bed and pulled his chair closer and switched the thing on and said, ‘Report on terminal incident, DIF Cone, executive Quiller.’ He gave the time and the date and sat back.
‘The loss was unintended,’ I said into the recorder. ‘I had to judge how far to go with the subject, and how fast. This was difficult because there was very limited time and we were both feeling the onset of hypothermia.’
His blunt, heavy face bobbing at the surface of the water, his eyes not looking at me, though we were face to face.
‘There was no personal element involved. It’s my feeling that if I hadn’t pressed him he would have lost consciousness before I got anything out of him at all. Or he would have gone on blocking.’
The weight of his body under my hands as we swayed together in that freezing river, both of us near death, thrown together like flotsam on the tide of circumstance and performing our little danse macabre to the tune of sirens in the night.
‘I have no compunction. I feel no remorse.’
But I’m depressed, I tell you, I’m bloody depressed.
The compunction and remorse bit’s always asked for in these reports because some of us can take a man’s life like swatting a fly but others find it affecting their work, the mission, and they’re often pulled out.
‘The subject had been trying hard to kill me and that had been his intention; the trap had been set specifically to accomplish that. Hence no remorse. I regard it as having been in the day’s work, but I admit to a feeling of depression and this is normal for me after a terminal incident.’
Words, words, oh my God words, it does matter when you cut down a human life and the fact that he was trying to wipe me out had got nothing to do with it. There was that awful sound, the gurgling, and that had got everything to do with it, the sound of someone drowning like a dog while I went on pushing him under and blocking the force of my natural instinct to save him.
‘I contend that I got as much information as was possible in the circumstances, and that I didn’t hasten the loss by poor judgement.’
Bullshit, but they wouldn’t know that. All those snivelling bloody clerks want is what they call a clear picture, just give us a clear picture, told boy, can you, so they can peck it all down on their neat little keyboards and go home to their steak and kidney pudding and watch the telly, damn their eyes, do they really think you can give them a clear picture when you were up to your neck in a river and freezing to death and trying to decide just how much to put the fear of Christ in a man to make him squeal? They don’t ‘Anything else?’
‘What?’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’ A killing, nicely wrapped up. Oh my God how I hate bureaucrats.
‘Did you look for any identification on him?’
‘No. There wasn’t time - the Vopos were coming.’
In a moment: ‘How do you feel now?’ But I noticed he switched the thing off before he said that.
‘Bloody awful.’
Rather vague, yes. This man was my director in the field and it was his job to support, nurse and succour his executive, test him out at every major phase of the mission and decide whether he was still operational, still competent to go ahead, unaffected by fear, guilt, remorse or emotion of any kind. And if he thought fit, to warn London to pull him out.
‘What sort of bloody awful?’ Squinting at his nails.
It’d need time. I got off the bed and moved around, checking things out - pain in the shoulder but only when I moved it; other areas, left thigh, left shin, rib cage, where I’d been flung around on the back of the Mercedes; but nothing wrong with the feet or ankles: I could still run flat out if I had to and that’s the first thing you worry about when you’ve come through the wrong end of the mangle - whether you can still run fast enough if you’ve got to.
‘For one thing,’ I said, ‘I’m pissed off. Was that your Audi?’
‘Which one?’
‘Look, when I went to meet Pollock at Charlie’s Club I checked the area very carefully and it was clean. So how did you know I’d gone into the river?’
‘We don’t use an Audi, as far as I know.’
‘It was a blind?’
‘It could have been.’
‘So you did put a tag on me?’
‘Yes.’
Gott straffe the bastard.
When the traffic conditions are too light for comfort in a vehicle-tag operation you can slip a third car in the middle with instructions to stay there until some innocent vehicle gets in between, and then peel off and come back when it’s needed again. The object is to make sure there’s always something between the tag and the target and that could’ve been why the Audi had gone down a sidestreet when the Fiat had come up, but it was academic now: Cone had said yes, he’d ordered someone in.
‘When did the tag get onto me?’
‘When you left here.’
‘Shit.’
I’d checked for tags when I’d got to the Club but not when I’d left, because I’d been too busy watching the girl and keeping her in sight. ‘Why did you have me tagged?’
‘You told me you were expecting Volper to have a go.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You wouldn’t have liked it -‘ looking up from his nails ‘- would you?’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, let’s get some tea sent in.’ Whatever they’d given me to pull me out of the hypothermia thing had left me as dry as a wooden god. ‘If I’d wanted someone in support I’d have asked for it.
‘It’s not like that,’ he said, ‘this time,’ and picked up the phone.
‘It’s so bloody dangerous.’
When your own cell puts some kind of support in the field without telling you it can lead to a whole lot of trouble: three years ago in Mexico City I’d spent half the night coming round full circle on a tag and when I’d got him on the floor of a hotel boiler-room with a near-lethal lock on his throat and started asking questions he’d turned out to be an extra-curricular peep tacked onto me by an over-anxious local director and it’d set the mission back by two weeks because I’d lost track of the objective.
‘It’s a calculated risk,’ Cone said, and switched to German and asked for some Earl Grey, putting the phone down and getting out of his chair and standing with his shoulders forward, leaning into that bitter wind of his. ‘My instructions are to protect you whenever I think it’s necessary.’
‘I can look after myself. You know my record.’
‘You’ve survived very well, so far. But you’ve been lucky.’
His eyes came to rest on mine, which was unusual. He’d won a major point and I think he was watching me for my reaction.
‘We all need luck when a wheel comes off but that doesn’t change anything.’
‘It does, this time. This time, it’s Mr. Shepley.’
‘He’s a soldier, and they can only think of making a move with a mass of troops in the field.’
It looked something like a smile; the skin tightened on his face and his eyes lost their look of unbreakable concentration just for a second. ‘I wouldn’t call that m
an a soldier, not the way he works. What you’ve got to realise is that this time we’re expecting you to cooperate with us. I know that doesn’t come easy, but this time we’re trying to protect one of the two most powerful men on the planet. It’d be nice if you could get perspective on that.’
I gave it some thought: I had to. It was no good asking what the KGB was doing if their top kick needed protection because I knew what they were doing: they’d sent Yasolev in to ask us for liaison. Volper was a British national and the Bureau was digging up enough ground in London to bring the place down before they could find his tracks. What Cone meant was that I still hadn’t got a grip on the size of this thing and he could be right, but there was only one way I could work and they’d known that when they’d called me in.
‘All right, try this. Whenever you put someone in the field with me I want to know about it. I want to know who they are and where they’re deployed and what their instructions are.’
‘That’s a tall order.’ There was a knock on the door and he loped across and opened it and we didn’t say anything before the boy had left the tray on the round plastic-topped table and gone out again.
‘No, I mean in the field with me actively. I know the place must be full of lamplighters.’
‘You wouldn’t believe how many. You want it straight up?’
‘Yes. Actively - all right?’
He brought my tea over and I went halfway to meet him and wondered if he caught the symbolism.
‘All right, you’ll be told. There’s got to be trust, hasn’t there, like with Yasolev. Got to meet each other halfway.’ The skin tightened again and a spark came into his eyes and I had the impression that this man Cone was deeper than I’d thought, quicker, harder, more implacable, and with the power, perhaps, given only to people in the very top echelon: the power to break me in an instant and throw me to the dogs if he thought I looked like endangering the mission. It occurred to me that the KGB connection wasn’t the only thing that could cost me sleep: I was expected to ‘cooperate’ right across the board, and I could believe they’d given me a director in the field who’d wipe me out if I didn’t. This time, yes, things were different.
He held his cup in both hands, stooping over it, though it wasn’t cold in here. ‘And that works both ways, doesn’t it? If you make any kind of move where you think you’re going to need some luck, I want you to tell me.’
‘I don’t have to. They’ll come for me again, whether I make a move or not.’
‘That’s how you see yourself? A sitting duck?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Squinting down at his tea. ‘That’s unavoidable. And you’re prepared to draw their fire?’
‘It’s the only way in. I’ve done it before.’ Moscow, West Berlin, Prague. ‘It’s a classic, you know that. It’s the fastest way in.’
‘They’ll want,’ he said, ‘to make sure, next time.’
‘The greatest risk is that one of your people gets in my way. The whole thing’s very hair-trigger and I could lose him by a knee-jerk reaction before he’d got time to identify himself. I wish you’d see that.’
He put down his tea by the phone and got his briefcase and found an envelope and ripped it open.
‘I’ve got five men on standby. Here are their faces.’ He gave me some photographs. ‘I don’t use them all at once. There was only one of them behind you when you left that club. Keep these somewhere safe.’
‘What are their code names?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that. They won’t ever come out of the background unless something happens, and then you won’t be interested in their names.’
I put the prints away. ‘All right, that’s a help. D’you think Yasolev’s got people out there too?’
‘He gave you his word. I don’t know how much it’s worth.’
I let it go. ‘What about the police?’
‘We haven’t asked them to look after you. He might have.’
I got myself some more tea. ‘What are they doing about the Spree thing?’
‘Yasolev asked them to put out smoke. They did. You won’t be questioned.’
‘But it’s woken them up, hasn’t it? He wiped out at least two of their cars and finished up on a slab.’
‘We can’t help that.’ The phone was ringing. ‘We’ve got to leave the HUA to Yasolev.’ He picked up the receiver.
I was getting gooseflesh, the more I thought about it. Cone had got five men in support and the Spree thing had shaken Yasolev badly and lie could easily decide to bring in some KGB support of his own and on top of that the East German police could just as easily decide to take an interest in me after what had happened, despite Yasolev’s request to leave me alone: this was their pitch we were playing on. But the only way we’d got of reaching Horst Volper was by letting him come for me again and he wouldn’t do that if it meant taking on an army: he’d realise I was bogged down and no longer a danger.
I’d known I’d have to find a safe-house and go to ground and work Quickstep solo, but I didn’t know I’d have to do it so soon.
‘He wants to see us.’ Cone was putting the phone down.
‘Yasolev?’
‘Yes. Sounds worried.’ He loped across and took the lid off the big brass teapot to see how much there was left.
‘What did he say?’
‘Just wants to talk.’ He went to the door and opened it and left it that, a small gesture of courtesy. ‘He’s on his way.’ The chrome art deco clock on the wall was at 11:05. An hour earlier Yasolev had phoned us and said he was turning in.
‘He must have had some kind of signal.’
‘That’s conceivable.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Before he comes, there’s been another instruction from London. We’re to check on Cat Baxter. She’s coming out here.’
‘The rock star?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do we have to check on her?’
‘Now that’s a very good question.’ He took his cup into the bathroom and rinsed it out and dried it on a towel and came back, and then Yasolev was suddenly in the open doorway in a worn red dressing-gown, his thin hair untidy as he looked first at Cone, then at me.
‘I have just received information that General-Secretary Gorbachev -‘
‘Door,’ Cone said, and jerked a hand.
I went past Yasolev and shut it and came back.
‘Thank you - that General-Secretary Gorbachev will make an informal visit to East Berlin.’
‘When?’ Cone asked him.
‘He arrives on the 17th of this month.’
In a week from now.
‘There’s some tea,’ Cone said, ‘if you’d like some.’
Chapter 10
LIBIDO
‘They shot him.’
Closer, now, the Wall.
‘They shot him in the back.’
Looming against the south sky, the Wall.
‘What made him do it?’
It was all you could see through the window here: the Wall, floodlit, towering, though it’s not all that high, fourteen feet, but towering because of what it is, what it means. And because of the barbed wire, the watchtowers, the machine gun posts.
‘I suppose he wanted freedom,’ I said.
He took another gulp of schnapps, puckering his mouth over it, squeezing his eyes shut, a drop of clear mucus gleaming at the end of his nose under the bleak white light. You could even see the reflection, in the glass of the china cabinet opposite the window, the reflection of the Wall. It shut us in, squeezing us into the small overheated room between its floodlit expanse against the window and its reflection on the cabinet. It was all they talked about in these rooms, these buildings, along these streets: the Wall. Twenty-seven years ago it had leapt like a tidal wave and frozen solid, cutting a city in half.
Gunter Blum, sixty, cab-driver: ‘It’s not so bad here.’
‘No
‘We’re better off here than what they are in Poland or Czechoslovakia. ‘Th
ere’s industry here, goods, stuff in the shops. You can earn a decent living.’ He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘So why did he do it?’
‘Those things aren’t freedom,’ I said. ‘Perhaps that was what he wanted. How old was he?’
‘Thirty-two. Still a young man.’
This place was near Spittelmarkt, and we were on the second floor. The other apartment was next to this one, next to his. He just had the two.
‘When did it happen?’
‘Three years ago. Three years and seventeen days.’ He rubbed at a blister on his hand. ‘She tried to kill herself.’
‘Your wife?’
‘His mother. More his mother than my wife, you know? He was everything to her.’ Small jerk of his head. ‘It’s the way it is, sometimes, mothers and sons.’
This was the fourth place I’d seen. I hadn’t looked at the small ads in the local papers because I wanted somewhere close to the hotel, close to the embassies. I’d spent two hours getting rid of a tag, not one of Cone’s people because his face didn’t match any of the photographs, possibly one of Yasolev’s if he’d decided to break faith, possibly one of Horst Volper’s. Then I’d gone on foot, looking for the Zimmer zu Vermieten cards in the windows.
‘Where is she now?’
There was no sign of a woman here.
‘She’s living with her sister in Strausberg. She - we couldn’t get on, after that.’ Jerk of his head. ‘She shouldn’t have tried to do such a terrible thing. I didn’t, and he was my son too, wasn’t he? She still had me, didn’t she?’
The cheap schoolroom chair creaked as he tossed back the last of his drink; he was a big man, his arms tattooed, his fists resting on the table, bunched, angry, his eyes glancing up at the window every so often as if he were keeping watch on an enemy.
‘I read about it,’ I told him.
‘A lot of people did. It caught attention.’ He reached for the bottle of schnapps and then changed his mind, looking at the tin-framed clock on the shelf over the sink.
The story had caught attention because of its irony. Paul Blum had almost made it to the West: he’d been poised on the top of the Wall when they’d shot him, and it was only his body that had dropped to freedom on the other side.