by Adam Hall
'Not often.'
'Get Crowborough's acknowledgement on a word-count for each sending. What code've you got?'
'Standard.' He just meant bugger off.
'Don't send standard.' The cowled lamps threw a lot of back-glare and I could feel needles in my eyes. It wasn't exactly fatigue: the organism that started panicking because some of the brain-think had filtered through and it was squealing to know what I intended to do about its survival and there wasn't an answer. 'Send priority.' It didn't want to stay trapped in this dark winter city where people would try to kill it.
Webster wasn't touching the knobs. I'd been vouched for by a second secretary but it wasn't enough.
'I'll want some kind of authority.'
By approximate reckoning it'd take five minutes to give it in fifth series and another five minutes for him to re-encode. It wouldn't matter if anyone was tuned in: I was destroying their operation and they couldn't stop me. They could only stop me if I gave them enough time,
'These are to BL-565 Extension 9. No copies and no repeats. You ready for me? First: K.G.B. operation mounted to stage rigged show-trial as proof that-'
'Hold on a minute.' He'd found BL-565 E-9 on his list. For the Curtain embassies it approximates to the hot-line and I suppose he'd never had to use it before. He threw a couple of switches and dialled for pips and got them and said: 'Okay.'
'K.G.B. operation mounted to stage rigged show-trial as evidence of — '
'Evidence or proof?'
'Proof.' I let my eyes close against the glare. 'Proof of Western conspiracy to incite Polish uprising.' He was on automatic encode but I didn't want to rush this so I gave him time. 'Justification thus established in event of subjugation by Warsaw Pact forces. Primary aim protection of imminent East-West talks.' I heard him making an interval reception-check. 'This operation now defused since candidate for trial no longer available but suggest all Western agencies Warsaw receive immediate warning to retrench in case of 'effort made to provide substitute.'
My foot slipped off the rung of the stool and I sat up and opened my eyes. Bloody little organism trying to flake out and forget its problems.
'Relevant documents by Q.M. next run. Dollinger.'
I found him in a room at the end of the passage, putting the lid back on the cast-iron stove. Even though he knew I'd come in he stood for a minute listening to the dying away of the flames. Then he looked at me. I know exactly how he saw me, exactly what I represented to him: I'd become a composite creature, the object of his hate for my having seen the photographs, gratitude for having vouchsafed him their destruction, guilt for what he had done to me and fear for what I might now do to him.
'How did you find them?'
'I knew where to look.'
He went to the door and shut it: the building was quiet and Webster was still in the cypher-room waiting for an answer to my second signal.
'There won't be any others, will there?'
'No.'
The negs had been the middle ten in a roll of thirty-six and the rest were blank: automatic exposure with a dummy run and timed cut-off, the prints tallying.
He stood uncertainly, his raw hands hanging from his sleeves and his feet neither together nor astride. The calm that had come to his eyes was also in his voice: he could speak abstractly about things that had been for him, so recently, a crucifixion.
'It was horrible of them, to do that.'
'Just routine. They do it to anyone they can get hold of, embassy staffs, businessmen, didn't you know? It's the classic hello-dearie.' I didn't want to ask but I had to because someone else might be glad to know he was off the hook. 'Who was the boy-friend?'
His eyes squeezed shut behind the spectacles and he couldn't say anything for a second or two, then it was over.
'Someone I met in a bar. I didn't see him again.'
'Because if it was anyone here in the Embassy we'd have to fix things'
'No.'
The door clicked open: there was a draught somewhere and the catch hadn't quite sprung home when he'd shut it. He could never do anything properly. He pressed it harder this time.
'They told you they'd send those to your father?'
'Yes. And to a Sunday paper.'
Sir Walford Merrick, K.C.M.G., O.B.E., Equerry to the Queen's Household. An initialled spoon beside the silver eggcup, the paper-knife arranged beside the mail and in the mail a letter with a Polish stamp and in the newspaper the headline.
'First thing you did was to throw yourself under that tram?'
'Yes.'
Never anything properly.
I hooked a chair from the desk and sat on it and the organism woke up and squealed that we'd got no shelter here because there wasn't any diplomatic immunity, British territory or not, and no hope of a plane and no frontier that didn't border a Russian-controlled state, but there were some things I needed to know and only Merrick could tell me.
'They asked you to give them information on Czyn. What else?'
Suddenly he said: 'Why did they choose me?'
'You were in Prague in August '68 so they were going to pin that one on you too. You'd already got friends in Czyn so you could develop your access to information on their programme. You've got personal tendencies so they could take pictures to entrap you. Your father's position was their guarantee that you'd obey orders and it also gave you great value as an exchange-monkey if there was no uprising and therefore no invasion and therefore no trial.'
He was only taking some of it in: the first time he'd known he was being groomed as a star turn in the Moscow circus was a few minutes ago when he'd heard my signal through the open doorway of the cypher-room, and he was having to look back over the recent past and see it in this new light.
I was thinking suddenly of Egerton again, sitting up there rubbing the bloody ointment in while both Merrick and I were headed for perdition. It was a case of murderous incompetence and I'd have him roasted for it. The worst hazard of them all is a mission formulated on false concepts and in this case it was his belief that Merrick was just another second secretary willing to do a little bit on the side for the U.K. secret services. He's been fully screened, of course.
I had to stop thinking about it. Egerton was done for anyway: the document included references to Merrick's recruitment by the K.G.B. prior to his sick-leave in London.
'What are you going to do with me?'
His eyes watched me, vulnerable, submissive.
'Send you home.'
He nodded. 'How — how long will they give me?'
'What's that mean?'
'For what I've done.'
'You think you've done anything that matters?'
'I worked for them. For Moscow.'
'Don't get any illusions of grandeur. You made a mess and I've cleared it up, that's all.' The poor little bastard was trying to get rid of some of the guilt by picturing a stretch in the Scrubs. 'You'll be declared persona non grata for having engaged in inadmissible activities and put on a plane. They might try fixing you up with a bad smash on the way to the airport because you've been witness to their operation but I'm going to stop that one.' Then suddenly I saw what he meant. 'Listen, Merrick. Once you're in London the whole thing's over for you. In a case like this there won't be any muck-raking because it won't suit anyone's book: we've bust their project wide open and the press handouts are going to be strictly propagandist. Even the F.O. won't know the full story and it won't ask any questions because they'll be too busy putting the flags out. You'll leave the Diplomatic Service and go into some other ministry with first-class recommendations and that'll be that, so if you're thinking of trying another trick with a tram you can forget it.' Slowly I said: 'Your father will know absolutely nothing. Nothing about the photographs, nothing about your involvement with the K.G.B. Nothing.'
His face was perfectly blank. I couldn't tell if it had got through to him. Then I knew it had.
'I'm just going to be let off.'
'Christ, haven't y
ou paid enough? Stop thinking about crime and bloody punishment, will you, it's old hat. You got caught in the works, you're not the only one. And you've been lucky, so settle for that.' I was fed up with his chocolate-box morality, with his inability to know that in the Intelligence services you've got to wrench your sense of values round till they face the other way. 'Look, I want to know some things: what were they after, specifically, when they told you to volunteer for a U.K. espionage job while you were on sick-leave in London?'
'I'm sorry, I don't quite — '
'Oh come on Merrick.' He was still lost in his dreams of atonement. 'The K.G.B. recruited you and you tried to kill yourself and it didn't come off so you went on leave and while you were in London they told you to fish around for a job in one of the hush services and I'm asking you why they did it.'
Because I couldn't make it fit. They'd picked him for the show trial, not for infiltrating the opposition.
'It wasn't their idea.'
My head seemed to freeze and thought went cold. After a bit I said
'Whose was it?'
'Mine.'
'You'd better tell me.'
Then he had to get the bloody thing out and pump it. 'Excuse me.'
'Get a chair.'
'Yes.'
'Right.'
'When I was on leave I told Mr Frazer about — '
'Who's he?'
'Head of Personnel at the Foreign Office. We all like him, because he takes a lot of real interest in us and — '
'All right, Dutch uncle, well?'
'I told him about the photographs, and asked him what I could do. He was very worried — '
'Oh my, God.'
The whole picture began coming up: the one I hadn't been able to see when I'd stood at the window scratching the ice away with my nails. At that time I didn't have the facts. I had one now.
Egerton had known.
'What's the matter?'
'He was worried. What did he do?'
'He said he'd get someone's advice.'
Frazer could have gone to someone he knew in M.I.6 or the O.I.B. or the Security Service but it had happened to be Egerton. Frazer was in a bad spot because the press wouldn't have any mercy on him if it came out that yet another homosexual had been posted to a Curtain embassy, a high security risk because of his susceptiblity to being compromised. Since the Vassall case the public had lost patience and this time there were added dangers: the person of Sir Walford Merrick increased the menace of the photographs and at the same time brought the risk of explosive scandal close to the Throne.
'He didn't say who's advice he was going to get?'
'No. He just said it was someone who knew about things like that.'
'Then the bastards did a deal.'
'I'm not sure — '
'Never mind.'
Cosily, over a glass of sherry. Well what d'you expect me to do about it? I don't know, but I'd be grateful for any advice. Think he'd be willing to do a bit of work for us? I'd imagine so — he's in a pretty awful state about those damned snapshots. All right then, send him along and we'll find a little job for him, then you can both stop worrying.
The time had been right. Things looked like getting rough in the Polish Republic and the U.K. was interested in what the chances were of revolt and subsequent invasion and what the effect would be on the East-West talks. Merrick could keep his ear to the ground and at the same time pass back info on the K.G.B.: their orders to him would be analysed in London to provide an insight into the way Moscow was thinking.
A bargain's a bargain, however foul: a word in the ear of Sir Walford across the coffee-table or in the calidarium or on the eighteenth green: if he should hear anything, or receive any kind of evidence, to the detriment of his son, he should discount it totally, since certain duties of high value to his country might expose him to false accusations.
It was horrible of them, to do that.
And those bastards in London no better.
'I suppose you told them you doubted your capabilities, no experience in hush operations, so forth?'
He watched me from above his hands. His hands were cupped against his face, as if he were trying to hide. He'd get over that, given time. given peace.
'Yes I did. But they said I'd be among friends at the Embassy, and they'd send someone out here to look after me.'
'Who directed you?'
He'd only met Egerton once, and I'd been there.
'I never knew his name.'
There was a question he wanted to ask but he knew it might sound naive and make him look silly. He'd had enough humiliation. I did it for him: 'He said I wasn't to be told you'd been entrapped by the K.G.B. I wasn't to know.'
He nodded, his hands sliding away from his face.
Because Egerton had seen the risk: that Merrick was doubling for Moscow and his cover-story was the photographs and his job was to infiltrate the Bureau. And he'd wanted me to find out.
If a Control director knows his executive in the field, knows his style and potential, he can do things with him that would otherwise be impossible. The director-executive relationship is peculiar to the trade and has immense value for both parties but especially for Control. Egerton had selected me for a mission that I didn't even know was being given me — a little trip abroad, only a few days — and he'd sent me in blind, knowing that if I worked to form I'd find the target for myself, sniffing out the directions and scratching away at the earth like a good little ferret until I reached what he knew must be there, somewhere east of the Oder, and made my kill.
He had known, essentially, that most of us would have refused to take on a job as diffuse as this with no local control, no communications except through the Embassy and no positive leading-in data to work on; and he'd selected me because he knew I'd want to go in deeper the minute I sensed the field, simply because I like being left alone when I've found something to play with. It had been the only way to rope me in.
The mission had been to make contact with the K.G.B., discover their project and inactivate it. Define, infiltrate and destroy. That was now accomplished. This operation now defused:
The risk hadn't been high: he'd known I wouldn't go nearer Merrick than I'd go to a rabid dog until I'd got the scent of the field and located its hazards.
And if I tripped a snare he'd expect me to cut loose.
'You were told not to expose me to the K.G.B., that right?'
His hands went to his face again and he didn't answer and I got up and kicked the chair clear and said, 'For Christ's sake give yourself a break, will you? London knew there was the risk but I don't blame them and I don't blame you — I'm still here aren't I and I'm in bloody sight better shape than you are so stop picking your nits about it. All I'm after is plain information. Exposed me by accident did you?'
He nodded into his hands.
'Well I'm not surprised. When you're doubling there comes a point when you don't know which way you're facing. That was on Friday, was it? Come on I'm pushed for time.’
'Yes.' He got up and tried to face me and couldn't and just stood there with his head down and I turned away and looked at the picture on the wall, donkeys in Clovelly, far cry from here.
Friday. The bar. The rendezvous at the Roxana. That's why he'd been worse than usual, ill with nerves: he knew he'd blown me. There'd been no tags or I'd have seen them or sensed them: they'd wanted to pull me in without my suspecting Merrick, or I'd never contact him again. So they'd used window surveillance in relay and passed me from street to street till I was more than a mile from the Roxana and then they'd rigged the pickup with ordinary patrols just asking for papers, for dokumenty. Then they'd sent for Foster.
Have a look at me and let me go, see where I'd run. That was when they did the switch and started preparing me for the tribunal instead of Merrick.
'I tried not to give you away. I did try.'
'Civil of you.'
'You don't believe that.'
'Oh yes.' But he'd had no chance. Drive
n by both sides till he broke. 'Didn't you trust their word, in London?'
'At first.' He knew what I meant: he was straight on to it because for weeks he'd lived in terror. 'Then when I was out here again they began reminding me, asking me again for my father's correct address, you know what they're — '
'Yes.'
'So that's all I kept thinking about. My father actually looking at them, even though he'd been told not to take any notice.' I heard him using the thing and then he said: 'I wanted to warn you, but I thought you might leave Warsaw if I did, and then they'd have known they couldn't trust me any more, so they'd have sent the — '
'Get it out of your mind.' I turned back to him and it was all right now, he wasn't looking so bloody abject. There was only one more thing I wanted to know. 'Our last rendezvous in the station buffet. Did you know they were going to come for me there?'
'Yes.' I only just heard it.
'Then what made them tell you to pass on that fake signal? What did they want a full interim report for, when I was booked for grilling?'
His face went loose and he lost contact completely because these things had stopped meaning anything to him.
I said: 'It's important, Merrick.'
He nodded and made an effort and I waited.
'I was meant to give it to you earlier. But I forgot.'
I think he saved himself, then, from any grudge I might ever have held against him.
Webster was getting something through when I went along to the cypher room.
There was a phone in the annexe and I picked it up. He came through the doorway while I was trying the buttons.
'How does this thing work?'
'Want an outside line?'
He pressed the one with the worn Sellotape tag and I dialled for the Hotel Cracow.
We looked up.
'What's that?'
'Sounds like a chopper.'
He'd put the signal-slip on the desk in front of me. Hamilton. Quay 4. End crane
'Did you do a word-count check?'
'That's right.' He was trying to clip another pen into his breast pocket but there wasn't room.
'Hotel Krakow?
'Tak jest.'
I asked for Maitland.