The Quiller Memorandum

by Adam Hall

  I signalled Control before reaching the Z-Bureau, using a letter-card. REQUEST EARLY SIGHT OF LAST KLJ REPORT IN ORIGINAL FORM. HOTEL ZENTRAL MARIENDORF.

  Captain Stettner was alone in his office and greeted me with slight embarrassment. He was a man typical of his stock, with a strong face and clear unimaginative eyes. Let him follow a saint and he would do saintly things; put him to work with a devil and he would out-foul Satan. They are born to obey, these men, born to be led, and it's luck that elects their leader. Stettner was young, perhaps thirty, and so he was working for a liberal chancellor; it was his duty to bring in the henchmen of a long-dead maniac and to hand them to justice. Had he been fifteen years older he would have graduated from the Hitler Youth in 1939 to command an SS company pledged to genocide in the glorious name of the Fuhrer.

  He said to me: "You are not sleeping well, Herr Quiller."

  "I haven't the time." It wasn't lack of sleep that was showing in my face, but the strain of Oktober's succession of treatments. It irked me that it showed. "You said you were trying to contact me?"

  "Yes. I'm sorry you didn't feel it necessary to give me your change of address."

  "I didn't know you'd need my help."

  His embarrassed air increased. "I assume our relationship to be one of mutual assistance."

  No answer. I studied the clearness of his skin and the freshness of his eyes and wished I were thirty, so that whatever I went through it didn't show in my face.

  "I believe you knew Dr. Solomon Rothstein well?" he asked me suddenly.

  "I knew him a long time ago."

  "In the war?"

  "Yes."

  "Would you tell me what kind of work he was doing, in the war?"

  I said: "In what precise way can I mutually assist you, Herr Stettner?"

  "Of course you are not obliged to answer my questions, Herr Quiller -"

  "That's right. You talk and I'll listen."

  He considered this and I could see the brightly-polished cogs going round inside his transparent plastic skull. He worked for the Federal Government. I worked for an intelligence service of an Occupying Power, and was therefore of a technically higher status. Therefore I called the tune. When he got it set out correctly he followed procedure and said unemotionally:

  "We have been trying to break a cipher and we have so far failed. I hoped you might succeed, since you once worked with Dr. Rothstein and might remember any cipher systems he used."

  I knew what had happened.

  "We can't trace his brother in Argentina – Isaac Rothstein. We have now opened the canister that was found in the laboratory on the Potsdamer-strasse, after checking it for explosive with magnetic sounding. It contains a glass phial and a sheet of paper covered with cipher."

  It was some time since I'd had a piece of luck. I had expected a lot of trouble in persuading them to open the container and even more trouble in persuading them to show me what was inside.

  I said: "I'll have a go."

  He tried not to look relieved. "We are keeping the original, and will give you an exact copy. It's unnecessary to warn you that it must not be let out of your close possession."

  "I thought of offering the publication rights to Der Spiegel."

  He span in his chair. "But that would be unthinkable, Herr Quiller! Surely you must realise that the very highest possible secrecy has to be… maintained…" and the wind went out of him slowly while I watched him. A wan smile came to his face. "Of course… a little joke. Of course."

  He took time to recover. I asked him: "Are you thinking of opening the glass phial?"

  "My superiors believe it might be very dangerous to do that. Dr. Rothstein's main work was carried out in a special laboratory behind the one that was raided, and it is sealed off with decontamination air-locks. One of his staff has been interrogated and has warned us that Dr. Rothstein was researching on certain strains of bacteria highly dangerous to man. Unless the ciphered material specifies any good reason for our opening the glass phial it will probably be put into a furnace, still sealed. "He gave me a plain grey envelope. "This is your copy, Herr Quiller. May I wish you success."

  On the way to Mariendorf a small grey NSU became lodged in the driving-mirror and I led it to within a kilometre of the Hotel Zentral. I wasn't going there but I went in that direction to give the impression that I was, so that the flush would be easier: anticipating my destination, though wrongly, the tag would be unprepared for a sudden change of route. I lost him in a turning off the Rixdorfstrasse and got clear, heading for the park and running the BMW into a gap between two other cars that stood empty outside the lodge.

  The decipherment might take several days. If I sat like a duck at the Zentral Hotel working on it they could come for me whenever they liked, and I didn't want to see Oktober again until I was ready. He wouldn't wait long. I knew why he'd left Inga's flat, and it wasn't because he thought he could never get me to talk. He would go on trying until one of the higher executives gave the order to kill me off as useless. Since leaving the flat last night I had been under constant observation and they'd now be worried about the two flushes of today.

  If they came for me at the hotel and caught me with the Rothstein document they'd haul me in and keep me held until they'd tried to break the cipher, and if they failed they would try to break me. The Hotel Zentral was a permanent red sector now.

  The park was deserted. Sleet hit the windows of the car and slid down in rivulets. The engine was still warm so I turned on the heater-fan and worked up a fug.

  The single sheet was copied in typed capitals. I took a letter-card and drew the skeleton-boxing. The pale afternoon light threw water-patterns from the windows across the paper, and it seemed to be melting as I studied it.

  First considerations: was this code, cipher, or an unfamiliar language? Three or four of the words indicated a cipher; two of them comprised solely the letter N and there was more than one instance of a word comprising double A. This wouldn't happen with a code, and it was unlikely that even a lost language of Asia or South America would have a double vowel as a complete word. There was a thousand-to-one risk of my spending days on this task without realising I was trying to decipher the indecipherable: a purely unknown language.

  Darmha valthala-mah im jhuma, for example, is pure Rabinda-Tanath and means ‘fire-cart kills very quick’. I had put this into speech for Fabian the narcoanalyst and he imagined it to be gibberish or a foreign tongue. In writing it would still look like gibberish, or like a foreign language, or like a cipher. To propose an absurd case anyone who had never heard or seen French might take the word arbre for cipher, and if he assumed A=M, R=O, B=T, E=R, he would finish up with the word motor. Obviously he wouldn't get far because he would soon find that most of the other words were turned into gibberish by applying the same assumption. (Barre would give tmoor, which is meaningless.) But he could waste hours of time trying different assumptions (A=B, C, D, etc.) before he realised he was dealing with the indecipherable: a foreign language.

  But the N and the double A ruled out the chance that Solly had written this document in a little-known tongue with which his brother was familiar.

  Assumption: cipher. Stettner's cryptographers agreed with this.

  All ciphers are broken by applying three tools: mathematics, the laws of frequency, and trial-and-error. The most experienced cryptographer uses these three tools and plies them with patience, the prime mover.

  I was not experienced. Two months at the training school and the infrequent sight of cryptograms during a mission was all I knew of the business, and normally I would shoot this document straight over to Control for their own team of specialists to break. But there might be something in Captain Stettner's idea: my knowledge of Solly Rothstein could provide a key. (In the same terms, the original report sent in by KLJ could give me clues to his death and its circumstances, where the edited and depersonalised information could not.)

  The sheet on my knees carried twenty-five lines averaging
ten words to the line. First checks on frequency gave the use of the letter K one hundred and thirty times. Possible E. The number of L'S was ninety-seven. Possible T. The x's numbered sixty-one. Possible A. So on.

  Check a cipher word, XELK. Gave A-TE. ANTE was the only possibility. No go. Anti would have given more hope, since it was a suffix used in most sciences, biology included (antibiotic), but even then it wouldn't stand alone. I went on to double letters in terms of frequency LL, EE, SS, so on, thinking in English and German. Tried combinations: TH, HE, AN, so on. Treble-combination frequencies: THE, ING, AND, ION, ENT, so on. Back-checked and amalgamated with singles, doubles, trebles, English and German.

  One interesting point was that there was no equal grouping to avoid a single letter standing alone. This is often done to avoid leaving blatant clues: a single letter standing alone is almost certain to be A or I. Two letters standing alone would be IN, ON, AN, so on. Therefore I SHALL SEND IN A REPORT would be grouped in batches of five, using one `null' at the end of the final group as a filler: ISHAL LSEND INARE PORTW. The ciphering would follow. But the groups here were unequal, with words comprising single, double and treble letters. These could be themselves ‘nulls’ peppered at random to confuse the pattern.

  Five words were composed of fifteen letters or more, but this was to be expected: they were probably the Latin names of bacilli. I left them out of my present reckoning.

  Trial and error. Apply singles, doubles, trebles, try the same again: reverse and read backwards, add prefix and suffix nulls, assume all singles and doubles to be nulls…

  The sleet hit the windows softly.

  Solly, what is it you want so urgently to tell your brother?

  ELFTE-PSKLIO-JZFDX-LWO… No go, no go.

  The afternoon light was fading. Steam was thick inside the windows and I turned off the heater.

  Solly, what did you put in your little glass phial? For good or for evil, and for whom?

  SLK. FPQC. OS. SPRIT. Sprit! German. Alcohol. Alcohol used in biological research. Check it. ASSwz. No go… a false alarm. (But there's nothing like it to spur you on, an occasional promise of success, however false.)

  When it was too dark to see the words without putting a light on I got out of the car and locked it, walking for an hour through the raw half-dark of the streets to circulate the blood and take on oxygen; then I did a further four-and-a-half hours' stint without moving the BMW, and finished where I had begun, with not one single word deciphered. But the groundwork was almost over. The document was written in one of sixteen thousand two hundred and twenty ciphers, and I still had to find out which; but it couldn't be found by going through the lot (a task of approximately twenty-one months, working eight hours per day and six days per week with no vacations) and there were ways in that must be found and taken.

  At ten o'clock a schnitzel and some Moselvein and the thought of home and bed. Unattractive. Home was the place where they might come for me at any minute, but if I left the Hotel Zentral it would worry Oktober. It must be shown that I was ready to hold myself available, placing my trust in the situation of his own devising. For another day – but no longer than that – he could be allowed to think that his present plan would work. After that, I would have to change it and pursue my own.

  I had chosen a restaurant of cheap aspect, where the lavatory could be expected to have a certain amount of warped woodwork somewhere instead of elegant tiling throughout. If the choice was wrong it would mean finishing the evening at a bar with an Apollinaris; as it was, there was a partition of flimsy timber here at the restaurant and the document was folded thrice and slipped between the joists where it would be safe for the night. Then I went home to the Zentral.

  The BMW was run into the lock-up and the key taken upstairs. A five-minute check assured me that my room had neither been searched nor rigged with booby-traps or a mike. Half a minute to reach a brain-think decision to override the stomach-think wish to telephone the Brunnen Bar, the number of which I had written on the Kleenex for Inga. Sleep, with a swarm of typed capitals plaguing my dreams.

  It was noon next day when I took out the car and checked the tag in the mirror within a kilometre of the hotel. It was different again: a metalescent Taunus 12M that dogged me through two ambers before closing up and flicking its lights on and off. I chose the same park where I had worked all through the afternoon and evening of yesterday, and stopped the car near the lodge. The Taunus pulled up behind and I got out before he did, just in case, and stood waiting for him.

  17 : FERRET

  We were alone in the silent park. The winter daylight fell on us as we faced each other. He stood still, letting me remember his features. A round face with mud-brown eyes unmagnified by the plain lenses of his schoolboy-type glasses. A black velour hat, that I hadn't seen on him the first time.

  I was satisfied.

  "All I wanted was the report," I told him. "They could have sent anyone. Hengel or someone."

  "They sent me to talk to you. I would have contacted you two days ago but you didn't tell us you'd moved to the Zentral." I remembered the Rhinish accent. He asked "Why aren't they tagging you?"

  He had taken note that no other car but his own had dogged me from the hotel just now.

  "I'm on ice."

  "No observation at all?"

  "They've got a man at the bar opposite, or they did have, yesterday." I had been puzzled, myself, at the absence of a tag when I'd driven from the hotel this morning. I never liked being given too much rope, for the classic reason.

  "We are getting worried about you," he said.

  He meant worried about my being made to talk. "They won't break me," I told him.

  "They've tried."

  I wondered how much he knew. Control always knew more about an operator than he thought. I know when I'm being followed but I don't always know when I'm being observed, and they might have posted Hengel or Brand or any of their scouts to watch the Hotel Prinz Johan. As soon as they had received my signal requesting the KLJ report they might have posted a man on the Zentral.

  The idea annoyed me and I tested him. "July, August, September."

  The light flickered across his glasses as he nodded. "Yes, we know about Oktober."

  "For how long have you known?"

  "Seven months."

  Before my time, and even before Kenneth Lindsay Jones's. Charington had been operating on this mission, seven months ago. It was probably Oktober who had killed him. It was probably Oktober who had killed Jones. Now Control was worried about me.

  Our breath steamed on the air. I said:

  "All I wanted was the report."

  "I've brought it."

  "Don't give it to me now."

  "Of course not."

  The park looked deserted, a ring of trees phantom-grey in the winter air. We could both be wrong: there might have been a tag following both our cars from the Zentral. He might be among those trees. If Pol were seen to pass anything to me they would be after it very fast.

  He said in his modulated tone: "I was sent to bring you the report and to brief you. We know less than you do about Oktober and Phoenix but we know more about the general background than you. The overall picture."

  "Control doesn't have to tell me any more than it thinks I have to know -"

  "Don't misunderstand me. I was briefed to give you the whole background the first time I contacted you, but you weren't ready to be convinced, so I didn't persist. You didn't think the German General Staff might be prepared to launch any kind of armed operation, given the means and the chance."

  "I still don't."

  "Then what do you think your mission is?"

  "I'm just an operator sent into the opposite warren like a ferret. That's all right, it's what I'm for, it's what I like doing. But if I finally pick off Zossen and Oktober and the top echelon of the whole Phoenix organisation I don't think I shall have done any more than blow down a pack of cards. I don't think the German General Staff knows anything about Phoenix, or
is interested, any more than the British War Office is interested in mods and rockers."

  He was a man of peculiar patience. He would have made a good schoolteacher. He waited for a few seconds so that I had time to replay the echoes of my own voice, and he got results: I was right, I was a ferret in a warren, but I was also wrong: a ferret can't expect to know anything at all about the German General Staff or what it was doing or what it was thinking. Control knew more than I. It always does. That's why we kick up rough, perhaps, when we can't see the sense of its policy.

  When he had given me my few seconds to think, he said quietly: "If you help us to bring down Phoenix you'll save a million lives and it will almost certainly cost you yours. We know this. We know this." His mud-brown eyes stared at me without blinking. "If you underestimate what you are doing you won't do it well. We want the best from you, the very best, while you have the time left to give it."

  The air was clammy against my face. The ring of trees was cemetery-quiet.

  "That is why we are worried about you," his calm voice said. "We want you to take this mission seriously. If you let yourself imagine we have sent you into this particular search-area on a routine mission to get information and nothing more, you won't work at your best. We do want information, badly. We want to know where Phoenix has its base. They want information, too, and as badly. They want to know how much we know of their intentions. Their most direct way of getting information is through you."

  I decided to let him go on talking. He was perfectly correct about this. Oktober was handling me as no adverse party had ever tried to handle me before. His two attempts to break me – by narcoanalysis and then torture at one remove – followed a normal pattern; but he was giving me rope by the mile at every other stage. I had run right across their line of fire when Solly was killed; they had walked out on me after the scene at Inga's flat; they had let me go to see Captain Stettner yesterday. A dozen times, at the Prinz Johan and at the Zentral and in the open at a dozen places they could have hauled me in and broken me up physically at their leisure in the hope of getting information on how much Control knew of Phoenix. But the more rope I took, the more they gave me.