The Crocus List

by Gavin Lyall

  "We're talking about a bunchof Britons," Sir Nicholas said firmly. "Apparently intelligent men who went into this with their eyes open, acting in what they think is the best British interest. If Five wasn't allowed to catch them in this country when all they were doing was smearing Ettington and popping off guns in the Abbey, we can't expect Charlie to save our face when they go international."

  Sprague looked mildly hurt. "Well, then I suppose our hopes rest entirely on Major Maxim. Although hopes for what, I can't say."

  "And then," George said, "at least you'll be able to blame the Army as well. "

  West Berlin's prosperity stops well before the Wall itself, at roughly the point where the U-Bahn subway fills with Turkish immigrant workers and becomes known as the Orient Express. Beyond there, the buildings are old andshabby, the few modern ones standing aloof and uncomfortable, like guests at a wedding wondering what on earth sort of family their nephew is marrying into.

  Maxim sat in a rather scruffy bar just out of sight of Checkpoint Charlie, stretching a Pils and feeling time pass with the east wind outside. But the wind was steady; he, and they, should be in the right place.

  Sergeant Gower came in, wearing a uniform anorak and cypress-green beret. He ignored Maxim, went straight to a cigarette machine and bought a packet of Marlboros. The barman gave him a sour look as he went out again, turning right. Maxim waited two minutes, then followed.

  In the car, Gower said: "It's in place," and told him the address. "And if you want transport over there, there's a green Ladataxi that'll be hanging round the Friedrichstrassestation. You call the driver Erich-shall I give you the number?"

  Maxim repeated it carefully. "Thanks. I'll push on across, then. It's asking a bit, but if you could stick around here and be ready to grab the Volkswagen if it comes back-I'll try and be with it myself, but… I don't know if you've powers of arrest…"

  "In Berlin, we can always work out something."

  "Fine. And if I don't get back, could you signal George Harbinger at Mo D?"

  "You'll be back, Major." But it was the instinctive reassurance demanded on the eve of battle. Gower was torn-as Maxim could sense-between the common sense of letting him get on with his job and the feeling that nobody joined the Army to go into things alone. The Sergeant frowned through the windscreen and tapped his fingers quickly on the wheel. "I suppose I'm just the intellectual type, really… But there's something worries me. A Blowpipe's a good bit of kit, it did all right in the Falklands, I heard-but they shot off a lot more than they knocked down planes."

  "Taking off, any aeroplane's a sitting duck. And they've been practising as much as they could."

  "Civilians." The slow shake of Gower's head dismissed any civilian practice. "They've only got the one missile… it could have water on its brain or oil up its – Idon't know about missiles-but one on one isn't a sure way. Then what? What's their back-up plan?"

  "I don't know."

  "Me neither, Major… but killing the Archbishop, I mean it's quite a big idea. If they were going to do it at all, they might want to get it right."

  "They could be thinking of an assassination in London-only they don't stand a chance, now we're on to them."

  "Yes. I just thought, if he's not going to fly over that Blowpipe anyway, if you'd gone along to guard him instead…"

  "He's only half of it. If the Blowpipe brigade gets picked up-"

  "They must have thought up some sort of getaway. I mean, it would bugger their plan if they got caught…"

  "I don't want them to get away. I want to bring them back alive and talking."

  42

  The Wall that cuts Berlin in half, and makes West Berlin a landlocked island, brings a variety of emotions. It is nasty, but that is something you knew already. It is strange, a wall cutting across streets, at one place running down the centre of a street, pedantically following the boundaries of the prewar electoral districts-but just how strange only a Berliner could say, and increasingly only an older Berliner-although West Berlin is an old people's city. But perhaps strangest of all, it is old-fashioned: a Cold War attitude frozen in concrete, immortalising midnight deals in cigarettes, currency, people. It brings an exasperated demand: For God's sake, haven't things changed just a bit? The Wall is the answer, and the answer is No.

  What it certainly is not is impressive. Barely twelve feet high, it could be scaled in seconds by trained men or knocked flat by a tank: of course, the Russians may well have thought of that. On the Western side it is covered in aerosol graffiti and occasional plaques where people have died trying to cross from the East, but graffiti dominates. Its strength lies on the Eastern side, in the no-man's-land of minefields, watchtowers, alarm fences, ditches, automatic guns and vehicle obstacles.

  Yet even these are not very impressive as you walk past them at Checkpoint Charlie; or perhaps soldiers just getblaséabout such things. Maxim noted them instinctively, at first pretending not to look, then gawping obviously, as he assumed a tourist would do. The pathway narrowed through wire fences and he found himself standing with a little group of real tourists on the wooden verandah of the long control shed, a dirty corrugated plastic roof overhead and a wire mesh gate ahead, waiting for his visa. And waiting. And waiting.

  A single unarmed guard with a green-banded cap, chubby and pink-cheeked, strolled out among the cars on the widened roadway beside them, collecting and returning passports, lifting chain barriers to let a vehicle creep forward a few more yards to the next stage. From time to time he took a passport from a faceless window beyond the gate and held it up, open to show the photograph: a relieved tourist claimed it, was allowed through the gate to pay his five Deutschmarks, and vanished into the shed further along. The rest waited.

  It became the timeless, mindless hospital hallway where you wait stripped of personality, because the real you is a clutch of paperwork being leisurely diagnosed behind closed doors; where the best news can only be that things aren't as bad as you are sure they are. Or that you will reach East Berlin.

  It was a time for fears to grow. Absurdly, he began wondering if they had his photograph-Harry Maxim's photograph-on a file in that shed. They certainly had it on file somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, had had it from soon after he started work at Number 10, and he was a hundred miles behind the Curtain already. Or they were pulling the Winterbotham passport to pieces, spotting discrepancies and flaws he would never have suspected, that even Agnes… no, he didn't want to think of Agnes. She had nothing to do with Winterbotham. /am Alan James Winterbotham, aged thirty-seven, bom in London UK, hospital administrator… But there's a photograph of Harry Maxim-It was the guard holding up his passport.

  Blindly, he took it."Danke schön…"

  "Five Deutschmarks."

  He paid at the window, barely seeing the shadowed face beyond, walked the verandah, in through the door… There was a shelf scattered with small forms in different languages. He found an English one and filled out how much currency he was carrying, handed it to a middle-aged woman in uniform.

  "Have you any books, papers?"

  He half-pulled the unmarked map from his pocket; surely most tourists would carry that.

  "A map." She waved him past. "You must change twenty-five marks."

  He was ready for that. At the next desk he got twenty-five East German marks on a one-for-one exchange; the unofficial but real rate was four to one. And he was 'free' in East Berlin.

  The first stage of the route was easy: straight ahead down the wide Friedrichstrasse. Even after the deliberate desolation behind the Wall, the street took time to revive, with buildings perhaps eight storeys high standing among empty plots; one of the buildings itself was derelict. The wind blew a fine dust out of the emptiness, bringing a weird reminder of Washington… /am Alan James Winterbotham…

  At the broad Unter den Linden the new buildings began, stretching out in either direction. He waited for a green light; the traffic was far thinner than in the West, the cars smaller: Skodasand Lada
s, many old and asthmatic, with dulled paintwork. The crowd thickened on the far side, as he neared the Friedrichstrassestation; there were a lot of uniforms-all East German: the overt Russian presence in Berlin is very small-with the officers all carrying briefcases that were as much a badge of rank as their epaulets.

  He found thecaféeasily, just past the three-level station complex and the Metropole Theatre. It was small and genteelly modern, with waitresses in white-frilled black uniforms weaving among tiny plastic-topped tables. He drank a coffee, black, and it tasted much as any coffee did, but he was no connoisseur; had the time-warp of the Wall made him expect something made from toasted acorns?

  "Noch eins Kaffee, bitte."He could speak more fluent German than that, but Alan James Winterbotham couldn't. Most of the other customers were middle-aged ladies, seemingly well-dressed-he was no connoisseur there, either-chatting over an after-lunch coffee with perhaps a liqueur on the side. It was just… well, genteel.

  When the coffee came, he stood up and looked around for the… er… The waitress pointed the way, past therack of coats. He thanked her and moved off. Now he would find whether Sergeant Gower's visit had sparked any official interest. And if the middle-aged ladies suddenly turned into Volkspolizeiagents and leapt on him as he lifted the plastic-wrapped pistol from the lavatory cistern, they would find out how Harry Maxim reacted. Not Alan James Winterbotham.

  43

  With a pistol nearly nine inches long and weighing over two pounds jammed uncomfortably in his waistband (but thank God it was November and the weather for hiu thick car-coat) it was difficult to feel much like Alan James Winterbotham. In fact, it was pointless, since no passport could explain that away. In a Marxist state private property has to be tolerated, but a private weapon is a denial of the state itself.

  But _they_ don't know, he told himself, trying to lighten his step.

  It was nearly four miles through the streets to Pankow, so he walked back towards the station, looking for the green Ladataxi. It wasn't there, so he stood consulting the Berlin map-the agreed signal-until it cruised past, stopped and reversed: just a hungry taxi-driver looking for a tourist with West Deutschmarks.

  "Bist du Erich?"

  "Ja. Herein."

  He sat carefully on the uneven springs of the back seat."Nach dem Pankow S-Bahnof, bitte."

  The Ladajerked away, and after they had gone a couple of blocks Erich held his hand over his shoulder with a snap of his fingers. Maxim dealt him two hundred West Deutschmarks, as agreed.

  Erich wasn't entirely happy. "It is dangerous to drive you."

  "Then drive carefully so that the police will not stop you."

  "I have a wife, problems…"

  "I have no wife, she was killed by a terrorist bomb. We all have problems. " It was odd how crisply he could saythat, a plain statement of fact. God rest you, Jenny, but I am alone in East Berlin.

  Anyway, it shut Erich up. Maxim watched the streets settle down to a suburban evenness as they wriggled north, wondering for a while why the shops and office blocks seemed so drab, then realising it was simply the lack of advertising: neon signs and posters. Isthat the alternative to drabness? he wondered.

  The suburb of Pankow had been badly hit in the war, less by bombing than by the Russian drive from the northeast which had been bitterly opposed. But shells and small-arms fire don't knock down the solid Berlin apartment houses, just punch a few repairable holes and chip the elaborate carved stone around the windows from which boys hardly older than his Chris had sprayed Russian tanks with half-understood and wholly ineffective submachine-guns.

  Even the children who had lived would be in their fifties now, the trees-which had probably suffered worse casualties-had grown again along the pavements, and Pankow was back to being stolid middle class again, the undefeatable enemy of the class war no matter how much of its fancy stonework you shot away. "Drive me around," he told Erich. "Go left here." Ahead, the tubby shape of a Boeing 737 rose against the western sun, silent as it turned because the wind delayed its roar. They were almost on the right line. "I cannot just drive. It looks suspicious…"

  "Another hundred." Maxim passed it over. "Keep moving, it won't look so bad."

  "I am supposed to report what foreigners I take-"

  "Let's hope they don't make me report, too, then." Beyond the S-Bahn tracks, the suburb thinned out to parks, cemeteries and sports stadiums. They weaved through them; there were few pedestrians and fewer parked vehicles. Another airliner rose out of the west, behind them now.

  "Go right," Maxim ordered, "and right again." Something turned in behind them. Controlling his movement, Maxim looked casually back: a dark green van. The taxi shivered as Erich saw it. Maxim said: "Pull over and let them pass. "

  The van slid past, its windows blanked with Venetian blinds. "Now follow," Maxim said.

  "Followthat'? Do you see the number?"

  "No…" Then Maxim did. The van had Russian military plates. Until that moment, such plates had been abstract, part of his training, but a part that had sunk in. He felt a shudder of fear.

  But surely it had been a Volkswagen-or was it a UAZ452? He tried desperately to remember from his glimpse. Russian military colour and plates, and the Russians could easily have commandeered a Volkswagen and painted it up-but that was the safest cover for the Crocus List, too; the Volkspolizeiwould think twice about stopping a Russian military van.

  Whatever it was, the van turned off down a road through a park full of trees shedding leaves in gusts down the wind. Erich didn't turn. Maxim laid his pistol alongside Erich's ear. "Stop. Back up."

  The Ladawavered to a halt, then reversed jerkily and turned. The van was stopping halfway along the park, screened by trees from the houses a couple of hundred metres away on either side.

  "Right up behind him."

  Erich brought the Ladato a stop. "You are going to take us to prison for ever-"

  "Wait."

  Somebody stepped from the driving seat of the van; he wore a dark leather coat and a fur hat and the pause when he saw the taxi behind froze him into an arrogant military statue. Then he walked towards them. Erich jammed the Ladainto gear.

  "Hold it!"

  The man jerked open Erich's door. A second man, dressed the same way, was coming up on the other side. In accented German, the first man said: "Take this old thing away before-"

  "Ja, ja,"Erich was in total agreement.

  Maxim opened his own door. "Well, hello there, Mr Fluke. I don't know if you remember me from the Abbey-"

  At that point, Erich and the Ladatook off. Maximtoppled on to the road, losing the gun and rolling to avoid Fluke's kick, then grabbing and twisting the foot so that Fluke cartwheeled over him and slammed on to the roadway. The second man was rushing at him, and Maxim sat up with the refound pistol and, with the slow motion that comes when you know you have just a fraction of a second on your side, shot him carefully in the leg.

  In its way, it was a moment of victory. But Maxim couldn't think of anything clever to say, even if he had the breath to say it.

  Fluke drove the van, wheezing and coughing from his own fall, and in the back Maxim bandaged the other man's leg. "It's going to hurt like hell until the medics get at it," he assured the man, "but it won't start bleeding again unless you begin dancing around, and I'm sure you don't plan to dance around. However, I'll take your passports, just in case."

  With those, and their East German visas, in his hand, he had them nailed. They wouldn't last the night without identification. "So-I expect you've got some quiet place picked out where you can change the number plates back again? Fine, let's get there."

  Fluke went no more than a mile, further north to where the houses petered out and there were whole blocks of allotment gardens, scruffy and deserted at that time of year. The Russian number plates came off in seconds and were dumped under a pile of compost. Then Maxim helped apply some colourful sticky-tape along the side of the van to soften its military look. That was the way they had bro
ught it through the checkpoint, Fluke said, and Maxim accepted it. Nobody had anything to gain by getting held at the Wall.

  Taking a last look around, he saw a small aircraft bend into a climbing turn a mile or so to the south-west, perhaps just over the Wall. Chubby fuselage, slender sharp wings, twin propeller engines… there could be two Jetstreams in Berlin that day, but it was a big coincidence in the timing: a glance at his watch showed just after three thirty. Ferrebee must have been stupidly trusting, or the Archbishop had overridden him or-The aircraft's shape blurred with smoke that streamed away behind it for a moment, then it pitched nose-up, rolled lazily on its back and dived in a smooth curve behind the skyline of houses and trees. A mushroom of black smoke bubbled up.

  For a dazed moment Maxim was back in the desert watching Jenny die in the bomb-torn Sky van, wondering if that had really been a missile, then knowing it hadn't been, and neither had this.

  "A bomb on board?" he demanded of Fluke, who was looking solemn. "A bomb? Was that your fallback? How was it fired?" He found he had the gun in his hand again.

  "I was saying a prayer," Fluke said.

  "For the Archbishop? I should keep it for yourself. "

  "For Jim Ferrebee."

  44

  Since 1945 the British Army's Berlin HQ has been in the 1936 Olympic stadium offices, although they have only recently got around to renaming the entrance road Jesse Owens Avenue, after the black runner with whom Hitler refused to shake hands. It was late evening, and the table had that late evening look: a litter of coffee cups, beer cans, half-eaten sandwiches, ashtrays and papers. The General had gone and the Brigadier and some colonels and the man from the Foreign Office and the man who was supposed to be from the Foreign Office but was Intelligence… just Maxim, Gower, and a balding bespectacled Major from Int Corps.