by Adam Hall
'That was your own fault — I told you not to let them get in my way. You're slipping, you know that? What are you by this time, a bottle-a-day man? They all go like that once they're blown.' I went close to him and he didn't look away. 'The trouble with you Slavs is that you can't stand back far enough to get a world view. The Bonn proposals have opened up the chance of an East-West detente that could wipe out a lot of the mutual fear that's keeping both camps with one hand on the hot-line telephone and the other on the nuclear trigger and all you can worry about is a thug found dead in a lavatory.'
I could hear movement behind me. Voskarev, getting restless. It was a fair bet he understood English and didn't like what he heard because Comrade Colonel Foster was their blue-eyed boy and I didn't sound too impressed.
They can't stand heresy.
Foster was perfect. Give him that. He took a sip of whisky and savoured it and said mildly: 'All I mean is, old boy, that you must have been rather keen to go off on your own, which makes it difficult for us to believe you've nothing to hide from us. Why did you have to — '
'Listen, Foster.' I turned away and moved about so that I could keep them all in sight: it wasn't the time for anyone to do something silly. 'I told you there are one or two Czyn units still intact and I had to go and talk to them and I didn't intend exposing them to your people so that you could give orders to have them wiped out. They trust me and that might be a new idea to a man like you but it's a fact of life. If you've any more stupid bloody questions I don't want to hear them now because Warsaw's going to blow up if we don't do something to stop it and we haven't got long.'
I went over to the trolley and found some soda and hit the tit and drank a glassful. It was very quiet in the room.
'You'd better be more specific.'
'Now you're talking.' I turned back to him. 'Did you bring in Ludwiczak for me?'
'He's on his way.'
'But I told you to fly him in and that was thirty hours ago!'
'It's not really the problem of transport. There are always formalities.'
'How long's he going to be kept hanging around while they're filling in forms? He's our key man and we can't do much without him. Can't you phone someone?’
He spoke to Voskarev in Russian and he stopped staring at the wall and picked up the telephone. Merrick had left his chair and stood with his back to us and I heard the atomiser pumping. The guard was still by the door.
I had to do it now and the sweat was coming out because if it didn't work first time it wouldn't ever work at all and I watched Voskarev at the phone as if it was important that Ludwiczak was here.
He spoke to Foster, not to me.
'They are bringing him through the airport.'
Foster nodded and looked at me to see if I understood.
'We can't wait for him,' I said. 'You'd better leave orders that he's to be brought here and kept under close guard till we get back.'
The pain in my head was starting again and the bruises along my arms felt like muscular fever.
'We're not,' Foster said gently, 'going anywhere.' I shrugged, looking at my watch.
'Do it your way, I'm easy, but the Praga Commissariat's due to go up in an hour from now. I make it 21:05 hours, that about right?'
'To go up?'
His tone was extra sleepy and that was all right: he was absorbing reaction.
'It's detonated for 22:00 hours.'
He glanced at the gilt sunburst clock. 'Oh is it?'
I saw Voskarev transferring his stare to Foster. He understood English all right.
Foster drained his tumbler and took it across to the trolley, his steps short and with a slight spring to them. He nodded as Voskarev went to the telephone, then turned back to me.
'What sort of detonators are they?'
'Ludwiczak could tell us that. I'd imagine they're radio-controlled like the ones at the Tamka power-station. I suppose the police found that stuff there, did they?'
'They did, yes.'
He watched me attentively, no smile now, the eyes less sleepy.
'Fair enough. Tamka was for midnight.'
He nodded. 'Yes, they told us. Nobody told us about the Commissariat.'
'Then you're lucky.'
Voskarev was speaking in Polish, quite fast and with a lot of authority. When he'd put the phone down he got his coat and the heavy black briefcase that had been resting against the chair.
Foster hesitated and I knew why. The Praga Commissariat was his base and he'd got to get in there and out again while the walls were still standing.
Then he got his coat.
'I want you to come with us. I want to talk to you on the way.'
'I thought maybe you would.'
The courtyard was cobbled and the big saloon drifted a bit on the snow in spite of its chains.
Foster took the occasional seat and sat hanging on to the looped strap as we turned east towards Praga. He spoke more quickly than usual and his eyes were alert.
'You weren't actually sent from London to take any kind of action against Czyn?'
'I told you what had come up.'
'Yes, but keep on filling me in, will you?'
'There's nothing new except that my people have started panicking at the last minute because the F.O.'s putting pressure on them. First they told me to explore and report on the Czyn situation and then they began chucking fully urgent signals for me to assist and advise the U.B. and now I'm apparently expected to keep the lid on Warsaw single-handed, their usual bloody style. I opted to co-operate with you off my own bat, why should I skin my nose on the grindstone while you sit on your arse?'
He gave a brief smile but the nerves still showed through it. 'I've hardly been doing that. I think. We've quite a big problem here, and I don't expect you to understand its proportions. These urgent signals,' he said with polite interest, 'didn't reach you through the British Embassy, I suppose?'
'Oh Christ,' I said and we both laughed.
It was a private joke: we were two seasoned professionals and shared the understanding of our trade and our trade was deception so I knew what he was doing: he was testing his own agent, Merrick. 'Of course they didn't. He would have passed you the dupes.'
'I just wondered.!
'Give the little bastard his due: he did a first-class op. for you and if London hadn't sent me new orders it would have been chop-chop and no flowers, you know that. Surely that's worth at least a lance-corporalship in the Red Army?'
He laughed again but it didn't have quite the same sound because he knew I was guying his colonelcy.
I wiped the steam off the window and looked out at the people along the pavements. The reaction was starting to set in, the delayed shock of what had happened in the station buffet. One minute I was watching Merrick and feeling glad that he'd soon be back in London and safety and the next minute I was trying to absorb the realisation that his job in Warsaw had been to cut me down and trap me for the K.G.B.
I hadn't thought about it since it had happened because there hadn't been time: it had floated in my head like a nightmare you can't remember in detail but can remember having had. I was thinking of Egerton now, rather than Merrick. Egerton with his chilblains and his prim confidence in what he was doing: he's been fully screened, of course, I've no intention of saddling you with a potential risk.
If I had the luck to see London again I'd have Egerton out on his neck: the least we expect of Control is that they don't recruit an agent already recruited by Moscow and then tell us to hold his hand.
I couldn't do it by signals. My only communications were through Merrick and the Embassy because direct contact had been banned since Coleman had used a phone in Amsterdam and didn't hear the bugs.
The saloon gave a lurch and Foster hung on to his strap: a fire-service vehicle had been klaxoning for gangway and its amber rotating lamp went past as we tucked in to let it through. I think we hit the kerb with a rear wheel before we pulled straight again, the kerb or a drift of packed ice.
Foster was looking at me rather sharply.
'We'd have heard it,' I said, 'from this distance.'
'Are you sure?'
'The basement's crammed with the stuff.'
He looked away.
Nervous and physical courage don't always come in the same package. For twenty years this man had run the most sensitive type of operation known to the trade, watching his words and weighing them whenever he spoke, wherever he was, cold sober in his Whitehall office or half-drunk in a woman's flat, fabricating his lies and testing them, detecting flaws and repairing them and listening all the time for, a false note in the speech of others that would tell him of danger, carrying for twenty years a bomb that ticked in his pocket.
But he'd no stomach for the real thing, for trinitrotoluene.
'There are other places?'
'According to the Czyn people I spoke to.’
'Which places?'
'You're not thinking straight, Foster. If I knew which places I'd tell you. The only one I'm certain about is the Praga Commissariat and I told you as soon as I could. My orders are to help you keep the peace in this fair city, try getting it into your head.'
'The Records Office,' he said reflectively, 'would be another place.'
'I'd say so. What price an amnesty when you can blow up the evidence?' The Records Office stocked secret information on every single citizen. 'It's your own fault there's not much time left: you've wiped out most of Czyn and the die-hard survivors are going to make sure there's some action before they join the rest. Praga was rigged for midnight originally, the same as Tamka. You'd have had more time.'
He shut up for a bit. I think he was working out the odds: he was still a top-line professional and he had a big operation running and he could only save it by going into his base and pulling the documentation out in time. On the other hand, he didn't like thinking about his skin plastered all over what was left of the ceiling.
Voskarev hadn't spoken since we'd got into the car. I watched his reflection on the glass of the division between the dark shapes of the driver and escort.
In a moment Foster said: 'If they find the explosive and defuse it we'd better have Ludwiczak brought along to talk to us.'
'He'll talk to me. He won't talk to you.'
Gently: 'The same thing, surely, since your instructions are to help me prevent disorder?'
'I just mean don't scare him off.'
'We don't want to scare anybody, old boy. The thing is that we'll need to put some calls out as soon as we know which are the other places. Evacuate the night staffs and so on.'
'You're not worried about the night staffs. You don't want one and a half million dossiers to go up in smoke because you can't run a slave state without Big Brother.'
There was another lurch and he steadied himself on the tip-up seat. Through the clear patch he'd made on the window I could see the arc of lamps in the distance, the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge.
Then we began a nasty wobble and I could see the wheel jerking in the driver's hands. Foster held on to his strap. The wobble got worse and we slowed, pulling alongside the kerb.
'What's happening?'
'It looks like a flat.'
The car stopped and the driver got out and tapped at the window, calling something we couldn't hear. Voskarev opened the door, asking in Polish what the matter was.
'I regret that we have a puncture.'
'You must get us a taxi,' Foster told him quickly.
The driver pulled the door wide open and chopped for Voskarev's wrist to paralyse it in case there was a gun. Apparently there was, because the left hand went for the pocket of the coat, but the driver got there first so it was all right.
I told Foster: 'Don't do anything silly.' I didn't bother to look for a gun on him, he wasn't the type to carry one, the only thing you could say for the bloody man.
20: DOCUMENT
I told Voskarev I wanted his keys and his papers.
He stared around him as if looking for a street number through the clouded glass, as if lost in a place he'd thought familiar. I said
'I'll get them, otherwise. Don't embarrass yourself.' He opened his astrakhan coat, fumbling like an old man.
'Fast,' I said, 'very fast indeed.'
The driver said he'd get them for me and I told him to shut up. The driver wanted to kill him, I knew that.
Six, all cylinder-type, two on a separate ring, series numbers in sequence.
'Papers.'
The engine was still running. Exhaust gas came through the open door. Yellow light flooded the snow and went out.
'Oh come on,' I said.
Sweat was on his white face, glazing it like a toffee-apple.
Foster spoke to him quietly in Russian telling him not to worry, he would retrieve the situation. Such a windy phrase, that.
N. K. N. Voskarev, Deputy Chief Controller, Co-ordinated Information Services Foreign Division, seals and frankings U.B. liaison, all facilities requested up to ministerial privilege level.
Big fish.
I kept the passport and gave the identity card to the driver. 'There's a man under escort arriving at the Cracow within the next half an hour. Show this to his guards and tell them you're taking him over, Voskarev's orders. Get him to base.'
'Understood.'
A red card had dropped out of the folder and I picked it up and looked at it.
'Where's your insulin?'
'Here.' Voskarev tapped his case.
'Get it.'
The air came in, freezing against our legs. The driver stood impatiently, his breath clouding. The escort had shifted behind the wheel in case we had to take off suddenly.
'Look, you want that insulin? Give you five seconds.'
Stuff was flashing us, no parking here, only wanted a patrol. Red, very red sector. I looked at the driver.
'Right'
The briefcase was still open and Voskarev was trying to zip it. He clutched the hypodermic kit in one hand.
'The case stays here.'
He tried to take it with him and the driver did the wrist thing and papers hit the floor. Then he was pulled out.
'Bloody well calm down will you? He can keep the insulin and use it when he wants to, he's no good to us in a coma. You beat him up and I'll have you kicked into the camps, I can do that, now get moving.'
I dragged the door shut.
The man at the wheel got into gear and I slapped the division and told him to wait.
'It doesn't,' Foster said, 'look too well organised.’
'Best you can do with hired labour.'
I wound the division down. The handle was loose and took a bit more off the veneered panel.
Foster sat with his hand still in the looped strap. His eyes were almost closed, two slits glinting in the baggy flesh.
'You're making it worse for yourself,' he said.
Police klaxons were piping a see-saw note somewhere on the far side of the river.
Doors slammed much closer, behind us.
'Don't do that.'
I had to kick upwards before he could reach the handle. He'd seen it done on the telly or somewhere: this wasn't his type of field at all; he was political-intellectual, the big moves over a glass of bubbly.
Then a man came past from the other car and got into the front and shut the door and I said hurry but don't crash.
Foster showed his expertise, the top off one-handed, still strap hanging.
'Calm the nerves?'
Trick after trick down the drain: he should have smashed it into my face. Not his field. I said
'Information: they're Poles and proud of it and Voskarev's been responsible for filling the trains with their own brothers and they know that. I'm going to phone them in fifteen minutes, failing which they're going to kill him. They're hoping I won't be able to phone. Don't make it easy for them, will you?'
I got the loose papers and stuffed them into the briefcase and zipped it and sat back and watched Foster. He screwed the top on a
nd put it away.
'If you think about it,' he said earnestly, 'you really haven't the ghost of a chance, right in the middle of Warsaw. I do wish you'd try to be reasonable.'
I didn't feel like answering: I was fed up because he was probably right.
The two in front were talking but we couldn't hear much, something about Sroda. They sounded pleased with themselves, thought we'd captured the city between us.
'What happened to the other chaps?' Foster asked me.
'What other chaps?' I was trying to think ahead, about the photographs and things.
'My driver and his mate.'
'Were they Russian or Polish?’
'Russian, I think. I didn't really know them.'
'Then you're too late now.'
They were no use as hostages and I hadn't given any specific instructions about what should be done with them afterwards, happened in the courtyard, you've got a flat tyre, and they'd got out to look. A night for flats but we were still running all right, making good time.
'I can get you a reduced sentence, you know. I've quite a lot of influence.'
'Oh balls.'
The bridge was clear, stuff crawling in both directions, a hole in the balustrade where the Mercedes had spun, the gravel making dirty brown streaks on the late snow. Foster said something, ought to be sure what I was doing, something like that, but I wasn't listening because there was so much to think about and I didn't want to make a mistake although with a set-up this sensitive a mistake was almost guaranteed and it wouldn't have to be a big one, just a slip and she'd blow.
There were some police cars when we reached the Commissariat and the steps were cordoned off. Just before we pulled up I said:
'Don't forget the situation, will you?' He didn't answer but sat there squinting at me and I got a bit worried that he'd do something awkward simply because this wasn't his kind of terrain; for instance you can't stop a charging bull by pointing a gun at it because it doesn't know what the thing is. 'You've got to look after Voskarev and the only way you can do it is to look after me.'