by Adam Hall
The Muscovite elite is not afraid of the cold and I moved past them and down the slope to the drifts that in the last hour had covered the tarred pebbles. The rails made dark skeins through the snow. I came back.
'You have another hour here. Don't relax your vigilance. Pay particular attention when a train comes in.'
I paced away from them, slowly now, turning my head to demonstrate that the demands of efficient observation are unremitting: one must never be still, one must look here, look there, one's eyes must be everywhere. I stopped halfway to the barriers and stood sideways on, my head still turning, my gaze sweeping along the flank areas.
Thirst was increasing because the combat had dehydrated the system and there hadn't been time for more than a few gulps in the washroom. Blood from burst capillaries was filling the lacerated tissue along the forearms and the muscles were still half numbed. I didn't know if there was facial bruising because I hadn't looked at the mirror but I would need to check on that.
Movement left.
I looked along the platform and saw someone on this side of the barriers, a man in plain clothes, one of the Policia Ubespieczenia patrols I'd stared at just now when I'd gone down there. He stood facing towards me. He would want to know who I was or he believed I was Rashidov in the brown leather coat but wanted to know what I was doing here when recently I'd been in a different area, so I signalled him, a brief movement of my hand, yes I am Rashidov, and turned away without seeing if he acknowledged.
The pulse, quickening, made the throbbing worse in my head. Instant availability of adrenalin but I had no use for it, I couldn't run. In ten seconds I turned my back to him, finding something under. the sole of my shoe and fretting at it, chewing gum, rubbing my shoe across the edge of the platform to scrape it away, walking back towards the north end of the platform, deep breaths, deep regular breathing, prana the answer to most ills, the answer to panic.
The two M.O. patrols were watching me. They had been standing, the whole time, with their backs to the snow. They would have seen the man down there by the barriers. When I was within a dozen feet of them I turned again and saw he was still there, standing quite still, facing in this direction.
I signalled again, more emphatically, jabbing a finger towards one of the flank exits. He turned his head but could see nothing of interest, and looked back at me, not making any sign. I shrugged, he didn't understand, he was a fool.
They declined to look at me when I turned and walked slowly past them. They looked pointedly away from me, in detestation.
The. slope was gentle under my feet and I walked as far as the end, where the drifts had begun covering the tarred pebbles. The snow whirled from the open sky mesmerically, some of the flakes touching my face as I lifted it.
I would hear them if they moved and they hadn't moved.
Then I walked on through the deeper drifts, slowly at first and then making my way more quickly over the rough terrain when I knew that the screen had thickened behind me and I was obliterated. It was malowniczy, the snow in Warsaw, very picturesque, did I not find it so?
18: CRACOW
It smelt of mothballs.
From where I stood I could see the door and I didn't look away from it.
'When?'
'In an hour.'
'All right.'
'Do it by phone. I don't want you to go out.'
She said it might be dangerous to use the phone.
'Less dangerous than going into the streets.'
I felt surprised that it worried me so much but I suppose it was because the whole thing was entering its final stages and it'd be a shame if they caught her as late as this. Once they'd thrown her into a train she'd be lost for years among the camps but if she stayed in the city until after Sroda she'd have a chance: a general amnesty was certain because of the talks, as witness to the bountiful mercy of the Mother State.
It was black astrakhan, a hat to match and a cheap wristwatch, seventy zlotys plus the brown leather one plus the hat, the last of Piotr Rashidov hanging flat on a hook in the corner with the macs and duffle-jackets near the door where cooking smells came. Because when they found him they'd know who it was who'd walked out into the snow.
'Don't leave where you are. Give me your word.'
'Very well.'
'You can tell when a line's bugged?'
'Yes.'
'Then there's no risk.'
Before I hung up she asked if she were going to see me again and I said yes and this time it wasn't a lie.
The rendezvous was for 16:30 a hundred yards north of the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge along the west bank, three Czyn people, if possible trained in unarmed combat. This time I'd get them because this time I wasn't asking Merrick.
But they didn't turn up.
I waited thirty minutes and by that time my scalp was creeping because it had been bloody Merrick who'd exposed every one of my moves and I hadn't known it and now I knew it and he couldn't do it any more. Neither he nor Foster could possibly know the moves I was making now: every patrol of every branch of the civil and secret police was in the hunt and if they found me they'd slam me straight into a cell. There was no chance that Foster was giving me rope again, letting me run.
And the line hadn't been bugged: when you make an rdv in a city where there's a dragnet out you take damned good care of that.
At 17:15 I went into the bar at the corner of Mostowa and got through again.
'They weren't there.'
'Are you sure?'
I was listening to her voice, the tone of her voice, because I was right in the middle of a red sector and pushing my luck and it was just about as safe as taking the pin out and hoping it wouldn't go off.
'Quite sure.'
'I don't know what happened'
Her tone was quiet with worry.
'They got picked up.'
She said: 'It must be that.'
A black Moskwicz was pulling up outside, with big M.O. letters on it. I watched it through the window.
'Get me three more.'
The receiver was beginning to feel slippery. 'Yes.'
'Tell them to take care.'
The hours were running towards midnight and anyone could be picked up, they were busting whole units.
'I'll tell them.'
No one was getting out. There were four of them and they sat with their heads turned, watching the bar.
'In half an hour. The same place.'
I trusted her because it was logical. They would have caught me there, otherwise, at 16:30 on the west bank.
'All right.'
The Moskwicz was moving off and I remembered there were traffic lights at the corner. They'd stopped for the lights. I'd forgotten they were there. I mustn't forget things.
'Will it be long enough? Half an hour?'
The coffee machine roared and I lost what she said.
'What was that?'
'I will do all I can. Remember that, please.'
The thought came after I'd paid for the call. You grow sensitive at this stage of a mission. She'd said it with slow emphasis and it could have carried the undertone of a classic alert-phrase: all I can, am under duress. Stomach-think. Discount. This time they should be there.
They didn't come.
An hour ago the wind from the north had changed and it had stopped snowing. Beyond the balustrade the Vistula was a desert of white, untouched by the soot that would later darken it. Along the Wybrzeze Gdanskie the traffic was still running, its sound deadened by the new fall. Ashen light flowed from the lamps above my head, triplicating my shadow.
I had asked Merrick for them and he'd blocked me. Now I had asked Alinka. All I can.
Patrol car, and I went down the steps again into shadow. The steps were a hundred yards from the bridge and that was why I'd made the rendezvous here. There was no time now to phone and make another one. This was where time ran out.
There was no usable alternative project: this was already the alternative to the one that had b
een blown up when they'd doubled the guards on the Praga Commissariat. I could switch and go in alone and do damage but it wouldn't be enough and the risk was prohibitive: not only to me but to the Bureau. The risk to myself was acceptable because of professional vanity: we know that one day there'll be a mission we shan't complete and that the chances are that we shall go in ignominy, a slack shape spreadeagled below the window of an empty room, something afloat in a river, and that it will have been for nothing; and sometimes we think of how it could be otherwise, of how we might play the odds and go out winning and be remembered for it, be granted at least an epitaph: Hunter? He was Bucharest, '65. Went down with the ship but Christ, what an operation. We all remembered Hunter.
Discount considerations of stinking pride: there'd be a risk to the Bureau, to the Sacred Bull.
The chains crumped rhythmically through the snow and from the city centre came the moan of trams.
If it had been a deliberate alert-phrase meaning she was under duress I would have to go along there and do something about it, at least do that.
I expected him to go past but he stopped and stood with his back to me, to the steps, looking both ways, taking a pace and coming back, watching the traffic.
Decoy.
You get too sensitive. I was behind him before he heard me when I spoke he swung round with his hands whipping into the guard posture.
'Where are the other two?'
He relaxed.
'With the car.'
'Where?'
'Along there. We didn't want to — '
'Come on, we're late.'
The Hotel Cracow was busier than yesterday because there'd been a couple of flights in and the foyer was crowded: most of the atmosphere-coverage journalists were hemming in the dip. corps people, free vodkas, and I recognised Maitland of the Sunday Post, one of the brightest of the I-Was-There boys.
I showed my credentials at the desk and they said they hoped there was to be no trouble and I said none at all, I just wanted to visit one of their guests, and they gave me the number of the suite.
'Don't announce me.'
It was on the first floor and I pressed the buzzer. There were voices somewhere, speaking in English.
He was a short square man with his jacket pulled permanently out of shape by the holster. I told him my name and he came back in less than five seconds and opened the door wider for me.
This was the sitting-room and there were four people here.
With typical courtesy he left his armchair and came towards me. 'Hello, old boy, come along in.'
19: KICK
Foster went across to the trolley.
'I hope you'll have a drink?'
'There isn't time.'
'There's always time, old boy.' His laugh wasn't quite in key but he was doing pretty well because he must have been upset when they told him I'd slipped their surveillance: I was his personal responsibility.
'London wants a report.'
'Yes?’
'They'll be lucky to get it. Don't they know we've enough to do? Don't worry about the Czyn people I asked for.' There was a clinking sound: perhaps the woman washing a cup.
'I can try — '
'Won't you ever bloody well listen? I said don't worry about it. They were to give me support while I tried to break out of Warsaw but there's no need now.'
'I see.'
Foster turned round with a drink in his hand.
'Switch that thing off, there's a good chap.'
Merrick reached for the tape recorder and the voices stopped. He wouldn't look at me: he sat hunched in the armchair, just as he'd sat on the bench at the station. I felt sorry for him: he thought I was only just finding out that he'd used audio surveillance in the buffet while we'd sat with our bowls of soup.
That was all right: it was what I wanted them to think. 'You put a mike across me, did you?'
He didn't answer.
'You know how it is, old boy.' Foster tilted his glass and drank. 'We like to have things on record.'
He'd been much more than upset when they'd told him I'd slipped them. It wasn't coincidence that the tape had been playing when I got here: he must have run it a dozen times since he'd got the bad news from Warsaw Central, listening for clues as to what kind of op I'd got lined up, clues to where I'd gone.
'Well I hope it was worth listening to.'
'So-so.'
Most of the tape could be dangerous but it was too late to worry about that. It was safe — even valuable to me — from the point where Merrick had exposed himself, because from then onwards I'd suspected a mike and used it for my own purposes. It was the point where he'd given me the signal he said was from London.
In that instant he was blown.
There'd been three things wrong. (1) The code was fourth series with first-digit dupes. (2) P.K.L. was instructed to furnish a fully detailed interim report. (3) These instructions were sent during the final phase of the mission.
Fourth series was Merrick's code, not mine, and London would have used my own code or if for any reason they'd changed it to a different series they'd have put a prefix to indicate express intention and there wasn't a prefix.
They would have sent the signal to K.D. for Karl Dollinger and not to P.K.L. for P. K. Longstreet because Longstreet had ceased to exist when they'd given me the new cover.
They wouldn't have asked for a fully detailed report during the final phase of the mission because they know that at this stage of a mission you're lucky if you can hit the Telex or the short-wave, let alone draft a ten-page coverage with itemised refs and carbons. They knew I was in the final phase because Sroda was the deadline for all of us.
Merrick had been given the signal by Foster's group because they too knew the deadline was close and they wanted all available info from me before Sroda broke and the confusion gave me a chance of getting out of Warsaw. So the poor little tick had blown himself but my immediate decision was not to scare him by telling him I knew. Maybe I could have tried saving him, at that moment, by breathing on the bit of compassion he'd managed to find in me, giving it warmth: tell him to get out and hole up and pray. But I could use him now, and anyway I think he would have walked out of the buffet and across the platform and under the next train.
He'd been usable because of the mike. Foster knew I'd asked for three Czyn people because Merrick had told him, so I'd let Foster know why I wanted them, direct on the tape. I told him two important things: that they were to help me leave Warsaw, and that I no longer needed them.
These were things he could accept. The first gave him a plausible reason for my asking Czyn for support: to get me out of the city, not to mount an offensive operation. The second gave strength to what I knew I'd be telling him later, here in this room: that I no longer needed them because I'd been in direct touch with London and had orders to work with Foster and not against him and would therefore expect him to let me out of Warsaw as a temporary ally.
It wouldn't have mattered if there'd been no mike: the gist of it would have been passed on to Foster as routine info; but the tape gave it substance. I wasn't in fact sure there was a mike: it was just that Merrick had been sitting unnaturally still at the table and I'd put it down to chest pains, the asthma, until he gave me the duff signal. Then I knew it could be because he was trying not to fuzz up a mike with background noise, the friction of his clothes when he moved.
He could never do anything right, tripping on things and dropping things, cocking things up. Even when he used a mike on me it kicked back and he didn't know.
'I believe you've already met Voskarev.' The man in the other chair got up.
'Yes.'
He was the man with pale hands and thyroid eyes who'd directed my interrogation at the Ochota precinct after they'd ordered Merrick to have me pulled in. He lowered his head in a token bow but his eyes stayed on me, round and staring, the eyes of a fish. He didn't sit down again but turned slightly away and stood gazing into the middle distance as if listening for som
ething.
But I wasn't ready yet. I had to wait for Foster. I needed a cue from him and it had to be the right one because it depended on his next words whether I had to kill off the whole operation or kick it into gear.
'How's London?'
Kick it.
'I've just had my orders confirmed.'
London was the key. He believed what I'd told him on the phone, or believed some of it, enough of it to test me for slips. Otherwise he wouldn't have been replaying the tape, wouldn't have been interested, would have told the man at the door here to put me in a cell and make damned sure this time I didn't get out.
'That's good.' His tone was sleepy. 'Been on to them direct?'
'Yes'
'Not from the Hotel Kuznia.' His tone hadn't changed.
'There was too much delay.'
'Oh yes of course, they told me.' He took a sip of Scotch. 'So you're still on our side, that it?'
'What's it look like, Foster? You think I'd have come here under my own steam, otherwise?'
I had to work up some anger. The whole thing had to sound exactly right and a show of anger would do that.
'I suppose not. On the other hand you gave those chaps a lot of trouble, not very sporting. I mean if you're meant to be on our side — '
‘Christ, haven't you got the picture yet? I told you I'd got a lot to do before I could come here and hand you the full works and I couldn't do it with a bunch of thick-eared clods treading all over my heels the whole time. You put them there because you were shit-scared I'd go off on some lunatic suicide mission and do some damage, right? I don't expect you to trust me but I expect you to trust your own judgement and see the sense in what I was telling you on the phone. Does this man understand English? If not, I'll say it again in Russian because I want the whole of your outfit to know that if you start blocking me again you'll cost yourselves a good deal of valuable help and God knows you need it.' I looked at Voskarev but he was staring at the wall. 'Better still, tell him yourself, your Russian's a bit more fluent than mine, part of your contract.'
Foster was looking into his tumbler. In a moment he said idly: 'They found a man this afternoon. In a lavatory.' He looked at me and I saw that a certain shine had come to his eyes under their puffy lids. He didn't like what I'd said about his contract and he didn't like his people being found like that. My anger was counterfeit but his was the real thing and I was going to keep working on it because in anger the judgement suffers.