by Adam Hall
Probably they hadn't got enough out of Charington so they killed him off before he got too much out of them. The same with KLJ. They were giving me a longer run, concentrating on me instead of relying on their own agents to crack open Control itself.
"We are worried," Pol said, "that you don't understand your position. It is this. There are two opposing armies drawn up on the field, each ready to launch the big attack. But there is a heavy fog and they can't sight each other. You are in the gap between them. You can see us but so far you can't see them. Your mission is to get near enough, to see them, and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage. That is where you are, Quiller. In the gap."
He waited again so that I could consider.
All he hadn't said was that once I got near enough to Phoenix to give that signal, my part would be played and I would become expendable, would have to be expendable, because the chances of surviving were slight.
Well, I would get near to them, and I would send the signal, and I would bloody well survive.
But the ring of trees was so quiet, a ring of tombstones.
I said: "All I want is the report. Then stop getting in my way."
I walked back to the BMW and sat inside. He leaned through the window so that his body covered it, and dropped the envelope on to the seat beside me. His face was dark in the gloom of the interior.
"Never forget," he said, "that the whole of our organisation is behind you, at every minute."
"Just keep it clear of me."
I read the last testament. The writing was thin and hurried.
Dec. 3. Tags now a nuisance, time wasted in flushing. But have got a line on base, will confirm soon. Things very tricky now, request no contacts any account. May not receive Bourse. May not signal for a time. KLJ.
The restaurant was full and I sat working on the report, fiddling with an underdone lump of schweinefleisch.
So he had reached much the same stage as I had reached now, and had told them – as I had told Pol an hour ago – keep clear of me. Then he had gone in, right the way in, and couldn't be allowed to live.
A line on base. What line? It didn't matter. He had followed it and they had killed him off because he was too close. So here was the address of the Phoenix base. I had been there myself without being allowed to know where it was. Now I knew where it was.
I put the slip of paper back into the envelope, which was already addressed to Eurosound. The man brought my bill and I paid it, going to the lavatory and using a penknife to ease out the Rothstein document. There was a postbox at the intersection not far from the restaurant and I sent off the report as promised. One quick turn round the block showed there was no foot-tag, but I had been followed to the restaurant by the small grey NSU, because I had called at the Zentral after leaving Pol and they'd picked me up from there. It was parked five cars behind my BMW. I didn't want to waste time flushing him and I didn't want to risk being snatched with the document on me. There was a polizei officer on duty at the intersection so I crossed over and showed him the Z-Commission ausweis that Captain Stettner had given me: it was no more than a laisser passer into the Z-Bureau back-room departments but it would probably do.
I said: "I've reason to believe that there's a man in a stolen car across the road. The NSU number BN.LM.11 outside the friseur. You may care to check it."
We walked together to the other side and I hung back as we passed my BMW. He didn't miss me because he was sizing-up the NSU as he approached it, and as I drove away I saw him in the mirror, checking the driver's papers.
It took half an hour to change the BMW at the Hertz office but it would have taken longer than that to flush the tag and I had now altered the image. I couldn't risk being picked up by sheer chance from now on, because I had the document on me and because, as KLJ had put it, things were very tricky now.
A million lives, Pol had said. And mine. A million and one. Because I was going to survive. The man in London wasn't going to light another cigarette and send for a replacement.
I had never whistled in the dark before and the tune came thinly.
The new image was a very fast 230SL pagoda-top Mercedes with fuel-injection, the last thing they would look for, and I took it right out west to the edge of the Havel and parked on the Schildhorn peninsula. Mist shrouded the waterscape and the light was grey. The monument poked its sandstone finger at the sky and I didn't look at it more than once because everything reminded me of cemeteries.
Treble-combination frequencies in English and German ING-ENT-SCH-EUN. Check and assume, recheck. No go.
Two hours by the black-and-gold clock on the facia, cramp in the legs.
Reverse and read backwards, add prefix and suffix nulls LKAOEI – JUQOP – AJSHGFRWEQT. Pick a new set and stay clear of the multisyllabics, obviously Latin for bugs.
Four hours and the circulation seizing-up.
A walk by the beautiful waterside, dead land and dead water, a mezzotint laced with the sombre dark of the pines, a place for lost souls and ferrets, with the sirensong crying softly across the mirrored sky. AJSHGFRWEQT! they sang, OQUISTRI!
The only living thing I saw the whole afternoon was a dog that came from the mist and pissed at the foot of the monument and vanished as it had come.
Patience.
Possible key: U=S, B=M, O=A, eight others. Pick a long one for pride's sake: VASOSFGWOBU. Gave OTNANGILAMS. Reverse and add prefix and suffix nulls. Gave SMALIGNANTO.
Nearly missed it because it sounded Spanish.
Drop prefix and suffix nulls. MALIGNANT.
Check another. Thought we had Sprit, German for Alcohol, yesterday. But hope has a grasshopper leap. RCIMEDIPEF. Drop nulls and reverse: EPIDEMIC. Come in, Solly, come in…
18 : OBJECT 73
The hands of Captain Stettner had begun shaking.
I sat facing him, trying to think, but gave it up. The room was so filled with his horror that detached thought was impossible. He picked up a telephone long before he had finished reading my deciphered version of the Rothstein document.
"Fifteen," he said to the switchboard.
That would be their forensic laboratory, the safest place for keeping a glass phial whose contents might be dangerous.
"Captain Stettner," he said, his voice only just under control. "You have an object numbered 73 in your keeping. Have you received any orders to open it?" He went on staring at me, and I remembered his uneasiness when the bogus doctor from Phoenix had come to this office to inject him. "Then if you receive any such order, refer to me first, immediately. I have information that the contents are highly dangerous. Please take all steps to ensure that it remains sealed and locked away. Accidental breakage could cause a whole-scale disaster."
He went on a bit more about this, and there was a mist of sweat on the receiver when he put it down. Then I had to wait while he finished reading the decipherment. The single sheet of paper went on quivering in his hands.
"I don't know," he said at last, "anything about these matters. Anything about this bacillus. Do you?" He was like a child pleading to be comforted, to be told that it wasn't really dark, only night-time.
"Not much," I said.
He was running the back of his hand round his face. "I mean," he asked without hope, "is it possible that Dr. Rothstein was deranged in some way?"
"In a world as mad as this, how do we define derangement?"
No comfort in that. He tried again. "This – this talk of a plague. Could one small phial cause such a thing?"
I wished he'd straighten up so that I could sound him on the general background of Solly's operations. Perhaps it would be quicker in the long run to tell him the worst and then put a few questions of the kind that interested me more.
"Yes, a phial that size could do it. At this moment, America, Russia, England, France, Japan and China – there are probably others – are researching on botulinus toxin, culturing it and killing it to provide the basis for an antidote. Eight ounces of it could wipe out the world
population. We all need the antidote, just as we all need the best anti-missile missile, to make sure we can go on living in brotherly love. It may be that Rothstein was also working on that toxin, but it isn't what he put into the phial. That's just one of the plague-group."
A telephone began ringing and he cut the switch, so I carried on. "There are three forms of plague. The classic bubonic type causes the superficial lymph-glands to swell and suppurate into dark abcesses. Type two, the septicaemic, poisons the blood. Type three affects the lung. It's even more infectious than the bubonic, which killed off a quarter of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century – the English called it the Black Death. This third type is the pneumonic. Dr. Rothstein gives it the more correct name in that document: pastorella pestis. It's a rod-shaped bacillus that can be grown in a laboratory on suitable culture medium. Once it gets loose, infection is by exhaled droplets and the incubation period is a short one three or four days. Three times quicker than smallpox."
He didn't look comforted. He said dully: "A quarter of the population of Europe. Did you say that?"
"At that time, twenty-five million people." My thoughts ran on aloud, just as they had at the Nurnberg Trial when I had spoken of Heinrich Zossen. "A heavy toll of human life, mein Hauptmann, Iagree. Even the Nazi plague of our own century wiped out only half that number in the death camps."
It didn't register. He was thinking of Argentina, and object number 73. I tied the ends for him: "Natural resistance to the pneumonic plague in South America is fairly low at present because there hasn't been an epidemic there for a long time, though it's endemic in Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. So I would say that if Dr. Rothstein's brother in the Argentine had opened that phial and tipped the contents from the balcony of a packed cinema, as instructed, the seventy thousand Germans and ex-Nazis in San Caterina would be dead within a week."
He said nothing for a full fifteen seconds.
"Herr Quiller… Why did he want to do this?"
"Because they killed his wife."
"But I do not understand. It is one of your little jokes, again."
"I hope you'll never understand. You're too young to understand. You must ask your elders. They know about these things. They killed twelve million people in five years. Half were Jews. And you can hear their reason for killing six million Judenfrei when you listen to them pleading their innocence at the courts. They say they killed them because they were ‘only Jews’. Nothing personal, you see. No hate, or thoughts of vengeance, or even fear. Just the Yellow Star, the selection-camp, and the gas-chamber. Difficult to understand. I understand Dr. Rothstein's reason better. He was committed to personal vengeance and it was measured solely by the depths of his love for one woman and by the desolation of her loss to him. And a thousand shall fall."
He got up and stood over me, a thin young man still trying to get to grips with the world he'd been born in.
"But the others! The plague wouldn't have stopped at any frontier. The whole of San Caterina – and then the whole of the Argentine -"
"And beyond, until they got the diagnosis correct and put the sulpha drugs to work. Rough justice is like that it takes the innocent as well. He knew that. He knew there are half a million of his own race in the Argentine but even that didn't stop him preparing that phial and writing this bequest to his brother. Dr. Rothstein meant to avenge his wife before he died, and if that wasn't possible he meant his death to bring it about."
Stettner looked down at me with his clear blue unimaginative eyes and I was impatient with him because I'd asked two of my questions about Solly's operational background and he didn't even catch on. Either that, or he didn't know anything more about Solly than I knew.
The day had gone badly for me and frustration was setting in. After two days' grinding work on the cipher I had produced nothing that would take me any nearer to Phoenix. This document could have nothing to do with what Solly had wanted to tell me. He wouldn't have any reason to tell me that his living obsession was to wipe out a South American town, because I couldn't be expected to champion the idea. Either his obsession had followed a normal course, pushing him across the edge of reason so that he was self-blinded to the risk of annihilating a whole continent, or he had made elaborate plans for his brother to organise an underground inoculation scheme to save the innocent before the plague was set on the march. It made no difference to me or to my mission. If Isaac Rothstein were a sane man he would have put the phial straight into an incinerator, realising his brother's state of mind.
Solly would never have told me of this. Then what had he been so desperate to tell me? There was no clue in the document, which was simply a detailed form of instruction to his brother: how the bacillus was to be disseminated, how to avoid infection during the act of dissemination, steps to be taken during the four-day incubation period, so forth.
There was of course an obvious parallel to be assumed, and it would have to be thought about later when I had left the aura of Captain Stettner's pathological horror of disease.
Because I knew that Solly had been doubling.
"I am grateful to you, Herr Quiller," Stettner was saying. "I shall of course take this decipherment straight to my superiors."
Before I went I asked him: "Did you find anything else in that laboratory, anything significant, anything you decided not to tell me about?"
He seemed surprised. "Nothing."
"I've done you a service, Herr Hauptmann, and you would be the first to reciprocrate. So I'll take your word that the canister was all you found."
"You have my word. Apart, of course, from the various papers we allowed you to see at the time. There was nothing else."
He wasn't lying. I wished he had been. It would have been something to bite on.
I left him and found the 230SL where I had parked it, half a kilometre from the Z Bureau. It was a model they'd never expect to find me driving, but once they'd got on to it they'd tag me at a distance because it was so distinctive, and distance-tagging was difficult to sense. They knew I might visit the Z Bureau at any time, so the car had been parked well clear. But I was expecting a tag to show up and there wasn't one. The half-kilometre was a dead clear run and I got into the car with a sense of foreboding. The rope they were giving me was getting longer, and I feared it.
Going over to the offensive was more difficult than I'd thought. Two days wasted on the Rothstein document, with still no clue to the way in.
There was only one feature of the day's work that eased my frustration: I now believed in Pol and in his briefing. The German General Staff did have – or might have – the means of triggering a non-nuclear war. Because of the parallel assumption.
Night was down and the streets shone with the aftermath of the sleet. There was a chance of getting the Mercedes into the Hotel Zentral lock-up without being recognised. If they still had a man posted in the bar at the corner he would be watching for the BMW.
I waited on the far side of the traffic-lights until a line of cars had built up, then followed the two who peeled off and took my street, keeping close behind them on the principle that one of three cars is less noticeable than if it travels alone. The windows of the bar were steamed-up but there was a black area low down in one corner and I turned my head away as I passed the place, swinging into the glass-roofed courtyard of the hotel with the riding-lights switched off.
The courtyard was oblong and the glass roof ran from the hotel building to the row of lock-ups. Observation could be kept on it only from the windows of the hotel itself and from a single house on the other side of the street, whose windows faced the open gates of the court. Three of these were lit and the fourth heavily-curtained. The lower windows of the hotel were of frosted glass and the five upper ones were all lit. I hadn't been seen putting the new image into the lock-up, though I might have been seen driving it into the court.
Findings: the 230SL was probably a good bet if I had to get away in a hurry.
Routine checks made on entering my room ind
icated no interference. They were keeping their distance, paying out the rope.
One hour's thought cleared up a lot of unanswered questions and posed some new ones. The Rothstein parallel assumption was given a thorough examination and still stood up. The frustration was eased a little and I even had the grace to send in a brief report to Control:
Correction to Signal 5. Container found at Rothstein lab. didn't carry microfilm but a phial charged with heavy culture of pneumonic plague bacillus and ciphered message to R's brother in Argentine detailing method of starting epidemic in San Caterina. Contact Captain Stettner Z Bureau if want details.
Ten minutes with the feet above head-level, the eyes closed. Review mental hooks for the day. One left: telephone the Brunnen Bar.
The line was clear of tapping. There was indeed a message for Herr Quiller: would I please ring Wilmersdorf 38.39.01 before midnight?
She answered after the second ring. There was no tapping at her end either.
I asked: "Are you feeling better?" There had been blood on her thighs.
"I am better now."
"They gave me your message -"
"Yes. You must come to see me."
"Too dangerous, Inga. It could start all over again."
"There is no danger. You must come as soon as you can. I have something important for you. Believe me." There was a choice of two reactions: to follow her view of the situation, or to follow mine. I said:
"I'll be with you in fifteen minutes."
My view of the situation might not be right but it was riskable. But I left the car in the lock-up, walking to the post-box and sending the signal before I got a taxi. I wanted the very fast 230SL to stay unseen in case there was trouble and I had to drive myself out of it.
There was no apparent observation on the entrance to the block of apartments. The hall, lift and top-floor passage were deserted. I pressed the bell.