by Adam Hall
‘The Kino,’ she said. Then Jo began lolling his head from side to side and we sat him up. It was no good telling them to get out of here with me because there wasn’t anywhere they could go: wherever they went they’d risk exposure. Jan Ludwiczak hadn’t been told where this safehouse was located or they’d have smashed the mirror by now, but every time one of them left here the rest were at risk. It would be the same anywhere else.
Polanski stood looking down at Jo. Viktor hadn’t moved; the gun was still across his knees. He seemed lost in some other time and some other place, maybe the barricades of Sroda.
‘All right, Jo?’ Polanski said.
‘I don’t know why it happens.’
‘It happens because you keep going to the clinic. From now onwards you’ll keep away.’
I began moving to the door. Halfway across the room I heard the slight clink of a sling-buckle as Viktor swung the gun but I went on moving because this side of a verbal warning I thought I was probably safe. I didn’t know how stable he was but I’d seen they had to handle him with patience.
‘Stoj.’
I turned around.
In German Polanski said quietly: ‘All we want to know is who you are.’
Jo was trying to get off the settee but Alinka stopped him: it looked as if you didn’t go too near Viktor when he had his finger inside the guard. But she was angry, brittle of speech.
‘Vikki. You know what he did for me.’
Polanski said to me: ‘We don’t want to make any conditions.’ He wet his lips, compressing them. ‘You’d be free to go, if…’ he moved a loose hand, the one nearer to Viktor. ‘We trust you, but we want to feel safe here, and you knew how to find us. Who told you? That’s really what worries us. We know the British are on our side to the point of actual diplomatic backing and we know what you’ve done for us personally, so it must seem we’re being mean with our thanks. But if you’ll just give us -‘
‘Vikki,’ Jo said with his eyes squeezed into bright slits, ‘you’ve got ten seconds to put that damn’ thing down and then I’m coming to get it.’
Alinka murmured something to him. Polanski watched me with worried eyes. I didn’t know how much logic Viktor was capable of following but it had to be tried.
‘One of you led me here.’
I looked away from Polanski and down the length of the room at the ravaged untrusting face above the snout of the Typolt.
‘That’s how I knew. Nobody told me. You exposed your safehouse because you’re amateurs: you don’t know when you’re being followed or when the police are moving in to pick you up, and when one of you gets pulled in you don’t know where he is till somebody tells you and then you go in with bombs instead of a blueprint so you never get near enough to spring him. You’ve no source of counterfeit papers so the minute you’re on the wanted list you’ve got to get off the streets and where do you go? To a refuge with only one exit and not even a Judas-hole and my name for that is a trap. The day I arrived in this city I didn’t know you existed: I’d only been told. But my job was to locate you and within forty-eight hours I’d done that. I’m a professional and for me it was routine but for you it could have been fatal: none of you would be here now if my interests didn’t coincide with yours. But it happens that they do, so let’s put that thing back in the toy-cupboard and go through our twice-times again. You’ve struck some luck when you need it most: I’ve been useful to you and I can be useful again. But not on your terms. On mine.’
Viktor hadn’t moved. I met the fixed black stare of his eye but learned nothing from it; there was courage in this face, and suffering, but no sign that it could recognise an appeal to reason.
I said: ‘I’m going now. If you shoot, remember you’ll be shooting away one of your own barricades.’
As I turned my back on him I heard someone move behind me but it was too late to do anything except keep on going and it wasn’t until I was through the sound-lock and shutting the outer door that I saw her lean black figure standing across his line of fire.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to check and recheck for surveillance because of the light-conditions and wall-angles and the lack of effective cover. They’d only raided one side of the building and they could have posted some people m the area to observe later movements. The damned place was a trap.
Then I was filtering through the network of narrow streets where the snow was thick and the lamps few and the night quiet, encoding in my mind a fully urgent signal to Egerton telling him that tonight the whole pattern had shifted and that something was wrong, hellishly wrong.
Chapter 9
RENDEZVOUS
Steam burst across the red lamp and left its bloodied plumes blowing in the dark, and wheels rolled, iron on iron. No one was there, it had gone, and he crouched in front of the ammo-boxes, rubbing his cobbled fingers, and steel rang, dull as a cracked bell.
See him and pull him out it was getting too close, they wouldn’t like that, but he was no better off than I was. He couldn’t even take care of himself: they’d only got to bust open one of the Czyn places while he was there doing his homework like a good boy and they’d clink the poor little sod for aiding and abetting dissident factions clandestinely engaged in activities against the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, so forth. Make His Excellency the British Ambassador look a right lemon.
Soot clouded between the massive spokes and he blew his whistle, his black bright eye watching me above the drum of the Typolt, no go I said, not even a Judas-hole. They ran right to the horizon, leaning together till their tips touched in a point, one of them was coming.
It was small at first because of the distance, and you wouldn’t notice it if you hadn’t spent years ferreting in the back streets of the political hinterlands, then you’d see it sticking out a mile. There’d been a definite pattern and it had shifted suddenly as if his finger had tapped a kaleidoscope: we know the British are on our side to the point of actual diplomatic backing.
Oh are they really well that’s very interesting.
It came fast and grew gigantic, a black mountain on the move towards me, and she lay there with her lean body stretched under the lamp, her shadowed ivory breast tipped with blue in the deathly light and a dark curl creeping in the wing of her arm, then the sky was blotted out and it was on me with a shriek and I was down, too many friends, next time they’ll make sure his head’s under the wheel.
The long sound of it drew out, thinning to silence, and a signal clattered. The ceiling was dark again. Polyphasic sleep had left me surfaced and I leaned across her, a dream fragment persisting, and checked the time: 00:15. The 00:15 to Krakow via Lodz and Czestochowa, a black brute loosed southwards across the snows.
I’d seen one this morning, with weak sunlight throwing clear reflections on the windows because all the blinds were down. It had drawn away slowly eastwards towards the Russian frontier.
Third series with fifth-digit duplications and recurring blanks, normal contractions: Can you confirm any degree of U.K. diplomatic backing of potential revolution here.
But I wouldn’t send it. Somewhere on the crest of a sleep-curve a thought had come: Egerton knew. And he expected me to know, to have found out. All he wanted was for me to do something about it. He was waiting for some raw intelligence to give his analysts, not for a signal saying look my drawers are all wet how did that happen.
There wasn’t a lot of time. Merrick might get me some stuff on this but we were both moving into the red sector by now and I’d have to pull him out before long: behind the official preparations for the reception of the Western delegates there was a much bigger operation running. And the trains were rolling east.
The thing was that Czyn was being fed with doped sugar. The U.S.S.R wasn’t alone in hoping for the total, success of the talks: the U.S.A., Britain, France and the Benelux states had been grooming their spokesmen since last August and the message was perfectly clear. The cold war had been devalued from the moment it was seen that short of global annih
ilation a hot war couldn’t be won. Detente was back in fashion and when the Bonn delegation arrived in Warsaw there’d be quite a few bricks of the Berlin Wall lying on the ground. If the talk succeeded they wouldn’t be the last: they’d open the way. And the U.K. would give diplomatic backing to a full-scale revolution in Poland as promptly as it would put the whole of its sterling reserves on a three-legged hundred-to-one outsider with its arse to the tapes at the off.
They’d know this, if their minds weren’t inflamed with their dreams of manning the barricades in the holy name of the motherland.
The smell of the soot came now: it always took a few minutes. The building was old and decade after decade the trains had shaken it, loosening tiles on the roof and the cement round the doors and windows and making cracks in the brickwork so now it was like a sponge, absorbing the smell of soot and diesel gas and exuding the smell of bigos and karp po polsku from the kitchen below.
Assumption: the doped sugar was being fed to Czyn by an agency purporting to be British and spuriously offering diplomatic backing in exchange for information. This agency served a state considered alien to resurgent Poland or it wouldn’t have to assume British identity. Rule out the West: the C.I.A. and the Deuxieme Bureau and the Gehlen Organisation and the little mail-order firm in Geneva that sent all its bills in plain envelopes to NATO.
What information? Information on the activities of Czyn. We were getting that without any offers of backing. Egerton had meant what he said to Merrick: ‘Nor must you lead them to feel that the United Kingdom is in any way prepared to assist them in whatever projects they have in mind, morally, physically, officially or unofficially. You must not even let them infer that such is the case, from anything you say; and if you think that despite your caution they have so inferred, then you must negate it. Is that perfectly understood? He’d been so specific that he’d clearly known, at that time, what I’d learned only last night: that someone was soft-footing it round the Warsaw cellars with a borrowed Union Jack poking out of his breast pocket. And Merrick would follow that explicit order to the letter: his anxiety to make a good showing in his first mission was half killing him. From behind me, his numbed face reflected against the dark trees of the park, he’d said with fledgling courage: ‘I won’t let you down.’ That was his one fear.
Recheck and rule out the hairline possibility that it was M.I.6, and not a foreign agency. The Bureau doesn’t exist, publicly or officially, simply because it’s empowered to do things that could never be admitted, publicly or officially, to have been done; and built into its anatomy is a self-destruction unit triggered to go off in the instant when any one of its operations runs wild enough to risk exposing it. We all know that. Each of the shadow executives in the overseas missions echelon has the suffix-9 after his code name to indicate his proven reliability under torture, and among the facilities available to agents in clearance is the death-pill. Because one single operative, nosing his way through the warrens of a sensitive area in Manchuria or Paraguay, can hit a counter-intelligence tripwire and blow up London Control. That was why there’d been a death-house chill over the Bureau last week when a wheel had come off in Gaza: they didn’t know where it would roll. And that was why Merrick, for all his tail-wagging eagerness to bring us the right bone, would have to work through half a dozen missions of increasing complexity before his director would brief him anywhere but in a taxi.
The situation that ruled out M.I.6 was that despite its official non-existence the Bureau was responsible to the same Minister and therefore subject to the same policy. Syllogism: the Minister dictated policy to both agencies. The Bureau had orders to negate any inference that the U.K. might assist Polish insurgents. The same orders would have been received by M.I.6 Ergo, M.I.6 could be ruled out. Q.E.D.
It wasn’t the U.S.S.R. For one thing the set-up was untypical of Russian thinking and for another thing they’d rather tuck a broken stink-bomb into their breast pocket than a flag of the decadent capitalists even for the indirect purpose of hurrying their ruin. If Moscow wanted information on Czyn it didn’t have to get it by subterfuge: the trainloads quietly leaving the city for the frontier at Briest would be passed through the interrogation centres before their dispersal to the camps. The snowball effect was already in operation: one member of Czyn, efficiently grilled in the detention cells, would buy an east-bound ticket for at least two of his fellow crusaders.
So there was no one. No one with any reason to use the U.K. as a cover for extracting information from Czyn. Yet it was being done.
The room was too small, shutting me in. The window was opaque, coated with ice, and I couldn’t see beyond it. I got off the bed and pulled my coat round my shoulders, standing by the window to scrape at the ice with my nails. A ragged hole grew against the glass and I went on scraping until I could see a lamp below in the station, and then other lamps beyond, and finally the soft blue haze of the city thrown by the sodium lights and deflected upwards from the snow against the faces of the buildings. And the farther my eyes could reach the farther my mind could range, and I knew with sudden tingling clarity that tonight I’d arrived at the edge of the area that Control wanted me to explore, and that once inside it I must tread with infinite care.
‘The Bar Roxana.’
He didn’t know where it was.
‘On Jerozolimskie.’
The line wasn’t bugged. I’d got the picture on the Embassy before leaving London and part of it was that three weeks ago the clicks and echoes had become so bad that they’d interfered with the actual conversation so they’d fired a diplomatic rocket at the Polish Foreign Ministry suggesting they took a look at Clause 19(a) Para. II of the Instrument of Convention, reference facilities granted to foreign missions: and that such telephonic installations shall at all ‘times be free of technical modification. Everyone does it, of course: there’s a jukebox in a cupboard within sight of the Cenotaph where you can enjoy a do-it-yourself Linguaphone course right round the clock, but now and then a rocket goes in and for a few weeks His Excellency can date his Bunnies without it actually getting into Hansard.
When did I want him to be at the rendezvous?
‘Say half an hour.’
He sounded worried because it was the first specific rdv we’d made and he was wondering why I couldn’t just pick him up in the street as I’d done before. He didn’t say anything about this: he just said that he’d start out for the Roxana straight away.
Before he could ring off I said: ‘Use a taxi. Get it to drop you off somewhere neutral like a post office and then do the last few blocks on foot. They put a tag on you from the Residence to the Chancellery this morning, so make sure you’re clean.’
I’d used a phone-box midway between the hotel and the bar so that I’d be certain to get there first. There was a bus-queue opposite and I stood there for nearly thirty minutes in the cutting wind before he came; then I gave it five minutes and it was all right so I followed him inside and ordered vodka grogs.
‘It took you long enough.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He looked like death.
‘How many were there?’
‘Only one, I think.’
‘You think?’
‘Only one.’ He couldn’t look away from the door.
‘Don’t worry, I checked.’
He looked away now, his eyes red from the wind that had cut behind his glasses, his glasses magnifying them, magnifying the fright in them.
‘Did you?’ Then he got the thing out and pumped it. ‘Excuse me.’
‘I’m having you pulled out of Warsaw.’
He looked as if I’d hit him:
‘What have I done wrong?’
‘Nothing. This isn’t your game, that’s all.’
It was the first time he’d had to flush a tag and if it had left him shot to shreds like this then how in God’s name was he ever going to survive until it became just a natural act like blowing your nose?
‘I haven’t been at it very long.’
&nbs
p; ‘The best time to pull out.’
But the thing was that I couldn’t do it to him and I knew that. Check his reports, keep him out of trouble, those were my orders, and I could signal London till the Telex seized up and, it wouldn’t do any good because they wanted him out here and they didn’t care if it killed him and they didn’t care if I had to stick here and watch them do it.
‘I’ll get better,’ he said, ‘as I go along.’ He couldn’t get his breathing right and I knew by the way he hung on to his mug of grog that he was fighting the urge to fetch out the atomiser again and shame himself with it. ‘Don’t send me back.’
I looked away. ‘It’s not in my hands. I just wish to Christ it was. Have you got anything for me?’
It wasn’t much, a couple of sheets. Certain changes of plan in spearhead deployment, reduction of present radio contact to minimise risk, increasing importance of person-to-person liaison (he meant cutouts), so forth. Nothing about what I was looking for.
‘Which unit was this? The one they wiped out yesterday?’
‘The one in Tamka.’
‘Where the power station is.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where they’d fixed up radio-controlled detonators?’
‘Yes.’
His tone was numb and he sat hunched in desolation and I was fed up with it.
‘Well they won’t go off now, will they? Let there be light next Wednesday, and there will indeed be light. It’s a bloody shame, isn’t it, Merrick? It’d be nice to think we were looking at a report on something that’s going to make history, a glorious revolution wresting the independence of an oppressed people from its despotic overlords and precipitating the collapse of Russian dominance in the whole of Eastern Europe. But what we’re looking at is the autopsy on a dead duck.’
I think he hated me then. His head jerked and his eyes opened very wide and he stared into my face, wishing me dead.
‘That’s what you - ‘ and a spasm took him and he sat with it and I waited and finally he managed to get his breath without using the spray and I liked him for that, he’d got pride. ‘That’s what you want. Isn’t it?’