by Adam Hall
The data was limited enough but it would have to do.
She was watching me in the mirror. My face wasn’t too bad now that I’d rinsed off the earth. I’d obviously fallen somewhere or gone down the bank from the autobahn face first.
There’s a doctor in this block.’ She was impatient, annoyed at r her own sense of helplessness. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you.’ I said: ‘I need a phone.’
Code-intro for the mission was sapphire needle and we cleared on it and didn’t bother with anything else because it was fool-proof: if one of us were under duress we’d slip in the alarm-phrase and take it from there. The only danger was from bugging but he was very good on security and no one could have known I’d show up here.
‘I’ve blown my cover.’
‘All right.’ There was sleep still in his voice but he’d said it straight away and I knew there’d been no need for any kind of code-intro because only Ferris would say ‘all right’ without hesitation when you phoned him three hours before dawn to tell him a thing like that. It wasn’t the work involved that would upset him - all I wanted were some new papers and something to drive in - but the background inference: you don’t blow your own cover unless you’ve got into a very dodgy position. ‘How soon can you fix me up ?’
‘It depends where you’re going.’
‘Nowhere special.’
She had gone into the bedroom and shut the door but she could listen through it if she wanted to and I thought she probably would because the normal thing to do when you’ve had an accident is to call round at the nearest hospital for bandages and I’d shown up here and fallen all over the floor.
‘What happened,’ he asked. The sleep had gone from his voice. I didn’t answer right away and he said: ‘We’re all clear.’
The throbbing across the shoulders and chest had set in again because I was standing up. The international-standard belt is designed to take 30g’s and the one in the N.S.U. must have absorbed nearly that amount of load and it was a wonder the slack hadn’t whiplashed the buckle free. The only thing it hadn’t done was to keep my head off the body-shell above the windscreen and the only reason there wasn’t any blood was because the visor was padded.
‘They got at the contact’
‘I see.’
I felt vaguely sorry for him. He’d told me that London wanted to know fully urgent who made contact with Lovett. For a moment I expected him to order a rendezvous. He’d have to do an awful lot of chasing about in the next few hours trying to help London deal with the blown cover thing and he’d probably go down to Linsdorf himself to stop any flap inside the A.I.B., but when half a mission hangs on a stable cover and the other half on getting a contact across and the cover’s blown and the contact’s dead it’s reasonable for the director to ask for a meeting person-to-person if only so that he can tread on his agent’s face.
I waited till he said something else. Five minutes ago he’d been asleep and now he was having to do a lot of thinking. And there was the third thing I had to tell him and I didn’t want to do it until he’d had a chance to stop reeling.
‘Where are you?’
‘Where I was last night.’
On the other hand there is always a risk in meetings. The agent is usually infectious: there are tags at his back or trying to trace him or set up a trap and if he’s seen making a contact it exposes the director. They are not two members of a team: they are strictly departmentalized. The agent is a bit of clockwork on the floor and when it hits something or turns over the director’s hand comes down and sets it going again on a straight course unless it’s broken in which case he throws it away and sends for another one. An agent can go through a mission and be set running again through another one and if he’s lucky they can use him half a dozen times before they have to plug him with platinum tubing and bone-rivets or reach for the next-of-kin form. But the director is a career man, a white-collar manipulator who keeps his nails clean, stacking up mission after mission till they pension him off to prune roses.
‘How much can you say?’
The door was shut and her English was school-level and we had our own terms for things and if I spoke fast there wouldn’t be any risk. I knew two things about Nitri: she was at this moment completely safe and if anyone ever told her that she could possess Franz exclusively by selling her soul to the devil she would become totally dangerous.
‘It’s all right this end. It’s just a question of bugs.’
He was silent for a bit and I knew he was considering a rendezvous and the trouble was that we didn’t have a safe-house in Hanover: there was no need for one because I was still too mobile and the mission had been running for only three days and every time we picked up some kind of direction the bastards blocked it. Lovett. Benedikt.
He said at last: ‘What happened?’
‘His code-name was Benedikt He’d started doubling so as to get across and he didn’t have the stamina. You know how it goes. There’s the odd patch of info missing but I can guarantee that a few hours before he found out who I was he had to save himself_ I He must have shown his hand and they didn’t like him tagging me down to Linsdorf so he told them to come and get me. Then he broke up and went religious and tried to save me instead. Maybe he just confessed: it looked like that. They wiped him out. He knew they would.’
‘Was it effective or did you have to break your way out?’
‘It could have been effective. He drew them off me. But I was too interested. They did it in his room at the motel.’
He didn’t say anything for a minute because he was partly thinking and partly listening for bugs. I supposed he would have been hysterical if he’d known the girl was so close because he was a fanatic about security. There’s a story at the Bureau, very shop-worn by now: ‘I saw old Ferris having a cup of tea with his mother in Lyons today. He had her screened first, of course.’
‘And?’
‘They had a go at me afterwards.’ He had enough on his plate already without my telling him I’d lost my memory and anyway it must have happened: I don’t just drive clean off the bloody road, I’ve passed my test and everything. There was probably some 9-mm material stuck in the tyres if anyone wanted to look for it.
‘What happened to the cover?’
‘I had to make a search in his room to see if they’d missed anything. There’ll be prints. Then I had to get out. As soon as they find him I’ll be first suspect’
‘Oh, shit’
Because that had been the third thing I’d had to tell him. Tomorrow there’d be a full-scale manhunt for Walter Martin throughout West Germany and although there was nothing to connect him with a non-existent government department in the U.K. it wasn’t going to be easy for Ferris to fix me up with a new cover when the Identikit version of my face was plastered all over the papers.
But it wasn’t my fault. Even if there’s been time to do the search according to the book I couldn’t have gone into my own room to fetch gloves because I’d been pretty sure they were waiting for me there. And I couldn’t have stayed in the motel because everyone’s got a right to go on living.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘forget the cover.’
Rather stiffly he said: ‘If you want one you can have one.’ He really was very upset.
‘Just get me some papers and if I’m stopped I’ll play it by ear. Some papers and transport.’
‘Where do I pick up the old one?’
‘You don’t have to. I wrote it off along the autobahn.’
‘Hurt yourself?’
‘There’s a bit of a twinge in one tooth.’
‘Don’t mess me about - what sort of condition are you in?’
‘Look, if I weren’t capable of looking after myself I’d bloody well say so and if you get London to send in a shield I’ll pull his balls off.’ But I wasn’t pleased about it and he knew that. I was protesting too much. It was a simple fact that if anyone broke in here at this moment my chances would be some degrees worse than fully normal because
the right upper forearm was still in the healing stage and the left hand wanted stitches and the rib-cage and shoulders were bruised. But I had to be practical: if I had to start relying on a shield I’d take less care and that would be dangerous because even if they sent the best man in the Bureau he wouldn’t be a hundred per cent reliable. No one is. It was no go.
‘When do you want it by?’
He meant the papers and transport and I relaxed again. He wasn’t going to press the shield thing. I said:
‘Soon.’
After a bit he said: ‘I’ll put the keys in the mail-box and the papers will be in the car.’
‘Don’t do that. Leave it halfway along the Marienwerderstrasse.’
My left arm was aching because I was having to keep it raised. I thought of asking him to do something about shoes but it might hold things up and I was working on the premise that the Kriminalpolizei would be putting out a general alert from first light onwards. I watched the keyhole of the bedroom door all the time but there was never movement against it.
‘All right,’ Ferris said. ‘It’s a dark-blue Ford 17M, Hanover-registered. You’ll find everything inside but don’t forget if you’re stopped: you’ve borrowed it.’
‘As long as it’s left-hand drive.’
‘What’ve you broken?’
‘I just like that kind. They don’t attract attention.’
There might have been an edge of annoyance in his voice but I couldn’t be sure. The right ear is unused to telephones. ‘Can you give me any kind of location?’
They hate not knowing where you are and it’s understandable because if you stop reporting they start getting the wind up and there’s nothing they can do: you could be making progress somewhere inside an adverse area with no available communications or you could be at the bottom of the Mittellandkanal wrapped in a chain and London is pettish about sending a replacement unless the director in the field can practically produce a certificate, and this is reasonable too because a mission can get very sensitive in the final stages and there’s a risk of rocking the boat. They’d thought Houseman was inside a burnt-out helicopter on Mont Blanc when the Lausanne thing was running and when they sent in a replacement the vibration was felt as far away as London and it nearly brought the Lowry off the wall.
‘I’m going to have a try at reaching X.’
‘All right,’ he said.
‘2-11-14-11-9-14-4-7.’ He didn’t ask for a repeat and he didn’t question the need for speech-code because there can always be bugs. The second thing I knew about Nitri made it advisable and in any case the idea of putting your next location into so many words on a telephone brings out a rash.
The last thing he said was: ‘Did you leave anything in the wreck?’
‘The odd bit of skin. What the hell do you think I am?’
We were both a bit touchy: he’d got a week’s work to do in half a day and I had to drive a hundred and fifty kilometres through a manhunt in daylight. I dropped the receiver with a bit of noise but the keyhole didn’t change and there was no sound from the extension unit in the bedroom. This was no more than routine, like an actor checking his flies in the wings.
When I went in she was wrapped in the sheepskin coat and gazing into the glass. The room smelt of pear-drops.
‘I’ve done some invisible mending.’
It was a perfect fit. The milky glow of her body was hidden by the scarecrow folds and she was shapeless: but the metamorphosis had meaning. It was the gesture that fitted so precisely. She had wrapped the coat around herself without thinking: not for comfort or warmth but to invest herself with the magic powers of its owner, just as the fledgling warrior girds himself in the lion-skin of a warlord in the ritual of his initiation, drawing into his sinews the strength of the mighty. Nitri, half-disguised, had become Nitri naked: lost, afraid, vulnerable to the threat of a bell’s ringing and to the far explosion she would hear a hundred times before she heard it once.
‘It looks new again,’ I said.
‘Did you talk to Paul Dissen yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
It was a peach-tinted glass and her amethyst eyes were darker, indigo.
‘Did you find out anything?’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘He’ll never do that.’ She meant Franz would never bale out.
‘He’ll never have to.’
She let the coat fall away. ‘You’re finding things out all the time.’
‘We all are.’ The crash-analysis engineers, the aviation psychologists, the people with the magic power to stop Franz getting killed.
I didn’t think much of my chances. The mission had only been running three days and we’d been blocked twice and all I’d managed to snatch out of the limbo was a name on a map. Neueburg.
She helped get my left hand through the sleeve and made me a tourniquet out of a scarf. The top of the nail-varnish bottle had fallen and I picked it up and she stuck it back although the bottle was empty: there’d been five or six gashes in the sheepskin.
‘I want to see you again,’ she said.
‘You’ll see me again.’
Chapter Eleven
THE HARE
It was one of those buildings without a soul, a sorting-house for displaced persons, its design so modern that it set a trend that would never be followed: there is something already old-fashioned about black-and-teak matt mouldings and mushroom chairs. Glass is a precious material that can make a palace of a cave, playing with light and casting it into shadowed places, but there is no real point in constructing an entire building of it to prove that here we have open minds and hold no secrets.: the purpose is defeated by over-exposure and the result is that here we must shut our faces since we cannot shut our doors.
People moved through the place as if through the cross-section of a termitarium under glass. But they were very efficient.
The Frau Doktor i/c night-hours casualties was a big-boned lesbian with flat expressionless eyes and hands like a mechanical grab. She put in seven sutures and ordered anti-tetanus but that was as far as I would go with her: the capsules were livid-hued and presumably anti-bacterial and coagulation agents and I slipped them into my pocket when her head was turned and just drank the water which was refreshing. She obviously hadn’t heard about indiscriminate sensitization and I didn’t bother to tell her that I could produce enough antibodies to stop a mad horse given a fair chance.
They wanted me to fill in forms before discharging me because I still looked like an accident case and the Polizeidirektion would expect details so I asked if I could sit down while I filled them in and then edged out to the street when they were busy rubbing antennae with some remote inmate via the automatic switchboard.
It had cost me forty-five minutes but my hand would have been useless with the wound still open and the delay had to be written off as an investment. First light was an hour and a half away and even if they’d found Benedikt by now they probably wouldn’t notice the remains of the N.S.U. until morning.
I had told Ferris to leave his 17M in the Marienwerdestrasse because it was just round the block from the hospital and it saved me having to walk back to the Lister-Platz. I slipped the match from under the wiper and got in. The keys were in the ignition and the tank was full and it only took half a minute to find the envelope under the back carpet. It was a big one, quarto.
Karl Ernst Rodl, Hamburg, Herrenhauserstrasse 15 Geboren Hamburg 1924, Automechaniker.
I hadn’t had to tell Ferris I needed German-national papers: he knew they’d be looking for an Englishman. The rubber stamping bore faint segments and the photograph was sufficiently unlike my face to be natural but the Automechaniker bit was off key because my nails weren’t normally split or ingrained. They slipped up sometimes in Credentials and Ferris would be on to that: a blast would already be working its way through his particular pipeline.
There was also a folder inside the envelope. Chronological and Geographical Statistics Breakdown on Pattern-Crashes and Ba
ckground Information on Dead Pilots. All neatly typed and typical Ferris: he’d never use ‘Stats’ or ‘Info’. It was what I’d asked him for last night and I put it straight into a pocket because if I ever had to leave the 17M as fast as I’d left the N.S.U. there wouldn’t be time to clean up inside for inspection and the Kriminalpolizei wouldn’t expect Karl Ernst Rodl to interest himself in Striker-crash statistics in English.
A pencilled note was at the foot of the folder. Did you see what happened to Field Marshal Stockener and Minister of Interior von Eckern? Watch this space!
I got out and reached under the back of the car and scraped the nails of my right hand over the final-drive casing and got back in and wiped the worst off the finger-tips on the underside of the carpet. Then I started the engine.
So the Feldmarschall hadn’t just skidded and the Bundesminister hadn’t just taken a boy into the cloakroom. Benedikt had known: ‘They are toppling in high places.’ And Ferris had known: This time it’s a rather big show.’ And of course Parkis had known. The only one who hadn’t known was the ferret down the hole and now he was being told.
I wondered why. It wasn’t just a giggle behind the hand: Ferris would only tell you what he thought you needed to know. But he was running true to form and giving it to me in homeopathic doses and I wasn’t going to think about it now: there were more pressing considerations and while the engine was warming I looked them over.
Findings:
(1) It must have been the two men at the motel, the hot operatives who had gone into neutralize Benedikt. They must have tagged me from there as far as the autobahn and then had a go on the long dark sectors where no one would hear any shots. They would certainly have stopped when they saw the N.S.U. smashing up and they would have tried to go down among the trees to finish me off if I were still breathing but I’d got away from the wreck so fast that they couldn’t find me: it may well have been a matter of seconds. (There had been headlights across the higher branches so they had probably been going so fast that they’d had to turn back.)