by Adam Hall
I said: "It's no go. There's still a risk. They told me it's too late but they know I'll try to put a signal in to Control, in case there's a last hope. And there's a risk they'll try to stop me."
Her face had gone bleak. "You won't take me?"
"I can't. Not safe."
"It's that you don't trust me." She took her hand from mine.
I looked past her along the span of girders and then looked again at her face. "Listen to me. This is how much I trust you. There's a risk of their shooting me down if I try to send that signal. If they do, it won't ever reach my Control. Unless you'll help me."
Her head came up. To reassure her I gave a smile. She said nothing.
I told her: "Fix this number in your memory. 02.89.62. Berlin exchange. "I made her repeat it twice. "Oktober won't get on your track for a time – you made a convincing show in there. You're more free than I am, and safer. Phone that number. Give them the code-word: Foxtail. Tell them about Sprungbrett. All of it. Then ask them to pick you up. Once you're with my people you'll be safe."
"Then… I'll see you again?"
"If we both get through."
I kissed her mouth for the last time and turned away and walked quickly to the end of the bridge without looking back, but I knew I would always remember her as she was then, my lost little bunkerkinder, slimand erect and triumphant in her soldier's coat with the light on her helmet of hair.
It would take her five minutes to return to the house and report to her Reichsleiter, and five minutes for them to phone that number and find it was a fake. It would give me ten minutes' start and a chance to live.
21 : TRAP-SHOOT
In trap-shooting the pigeon is released from the trap and then shot down.
This was my situation now.
I had stopped for a few minutes at the end of the bridge to survey the terrain; now I had reached a street in Zehlendorf, and stopped again.
One of them was seventy-five yards distant, standing in shadow. Another was closer, waiting some fifty yards in the opposite direction. (It was the pincer trick, one tag rounding a block and keeping ahead. It is useful but can be done only when there are plenty of tags.) A third man was not far from the first and I couldn't see him but I knew where he was because I'd seen him fade. The taxi had pulled up quietly at the intersection and no one got out.
A clock struck eleven. I listened patiently to the strokes, calmed by their measured certainties. It was a half-hour since I had left the bridge and so far I'd seen five of them.
There was no hurry. Some time before dawn I must get a signal through and do it without their knowledge. On the way from the bridge I had passed four phone-kiosks but couldn't use them. If I went into a kiosk to call up Control in Rabinda-Tanath I would come out into a hail of fire. They would then go into the kiosk and call up their highest contact in one of the police departments, probably (and preferably) the Kriminal polizei because they could get a quicker reaction from the Berlin Exchange. The exchange would be told to find out what number had just been called from the kiosk and to find out the name and address of the subscriber. Phoenix would then send a party into Local Control Berlin to seize all papers and personnel.
Phoenix was ready to launch a big-scale operation and they couldn't do it before they were certain of how much my Control knew about it. It must be an operation whose success would depend on absolute secrecy and/or surprise. Pol had told me: "If you help us bring down Phoenix you'll save a million lives and it will almost certainly cost you yours." He had said: "We 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 that information is through you." He had said: "Your mission is to get near enough to see them and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage."
I had believed him at last and still did. They would be waiting now in the room on the ninth floor of the corner building at Unter den Eichen and Rhoner-allee with a full staff, waiting for me to signal. The line would be open to London. Phoenix was also waiting for me to signal, so that they could locate Local Berlin and wipe it out before my people could reach their base and wipe out Phoenix. It was my own situation in macrocosm: the kill and the overkill.
There were no more doubts that Phoenix did in fact intend launching a big-scale operation: they were taking immense trouble with me, keeping me alive and hoping to crack me open by one method after another. I was the third operator to have been assigned to this one mission. They had let Charington get too close and had killed him off early. They had given Kenneth Lindsay Jones more rope – he'd been within rifle-shot of their base when they had killed him. Now they had let me right in and let me go again, matching my last single throw.
I was now certain that KLJ had died because he'd been working with a contact. He had approached that contact within sight of the Phoenix base and Phoenix had panicked and shot them both. (It is not easy, even in Berlin, to dispose of a corpse. Probably they had managed to get a sinker round the contact, but KLJ was found floating.) He had got so close to base (and had possibly been let in and out again, as I had been) that the risk of his passing his information to Control was too high, and it was a double risk because of the contact.
Now they were going the limit because their need to locate Local Berlin was fully urgent. Ergo, the time for the launching of their operation must be getting very short.
It would have been Oktober who had triggered the present situation. He had lost patience when Inga had failed to report any success in interrogating me on the Dachau principle, which she had been ordered to do. He had decided to try me with the file on Sprungbrett. Helmut Braun had been sent in with it to convince me that he was a defector, as I was thought to believe Inga herself.
The file trap had possibly been tried on KLJ, in which case I was surviving him only because I had no contact. It may have been simply that they didn't have sufficient tags to cover him and his contact safely. Tonight they had five working on me, probably more.
Sprungbrett didn't look too bad on paper and they wouldn't expect a field-operator to have much knowledge of military strategy. But there were some obvious flaws and it was then that I had decided on my single throw, gambling on the assumption that the file had been given freely into my hand in order to force me into action. I was to grab it and try to get it to my Control and make the touch-down before they tripped me.
Their risk was slight: Sprungbrett was a faked file, got up specially for me, and if I managed to reach Control with it I'd have wasted my time. But it would give them a chance to locate my base by tagging me to whatever point of contact I made.
I'd never seen Braun or a photograph of Braun. I was sure that Inga was still allied with me but too scared to make a move in front of Braun. I think she would have told me that the Sprungbrett file was a fake if it had been possible to talk. It wasn't. First Braun, then the man in the lift, then Braun again in the taxi. He must have been worried when I said I was going into the Phoenix base. He had no orders to cover that one. So he stayed behind us in the apartment and either made a quick phone-call or tipped off one of the tags that were by that time thick in the area. The message had gone into the Phoenix base: Quiller is on his way.
They were thrown off balance. They had covered the area with heavy tagging, given me the file, and sent me along the path to my base. Now I was heading for theirs.
Braun left the taxi first and went straight in to see Oktober without my knowledge (he was a ‘defector’). He told him I had arrived outside. Decision: to carry on with the same game. I'd read the file and wanted confirmation. I would have it.
Inga and I were kept waiting in the hall. In the operations room they set up the map-table for Mediterranean Area and positioned the markers: a ten-minute undertaking with a section leaf table of that kind where a dozen maps can be slipped in and out together with the magnetic strips.
They brought me in.
A defector is
a creature as peculiar as the chameleon. He will tend to take on the colour of his environment. In the London Bureau we had a man who worked with us for five years and defected during a mission in Tangier. Two weeks and he was back with us and we knew what had happened but didn't tell him. He was sent out again under cover that he didn't suspect and three days later we sat listening to the tape: he had met the adverse party again and talked to him in a room where we had miked the ceiling-fan. He told the adverse party that he had defected: yet we knew by his actions that he was now back on his mission and doing a fine job for us. But we'd shut down on him and he found out and hanged himself on the iron grille of a shrine in the Iglesia San Augustino.
Normally a true defector will get out and stay out unless great pressures (financial or political) add their influence to his already uncertain values. Then he will either double or bounce and they mostly bounce. Our man hanged himself because he'd lost direction and couldn't find his way home because he no longer knew what home was.
The most common instances are less spectacular: a man will defect, take one look at the terrain on the other side and make for home again, chastened and sobered. He is like a man who swears one day he'll have himself a whore and gets to the top of the stairs and makes a bolt for it.
The prevalent factors bearing on defection are moral, political, sometimes financial, religious and sexual (particularly homosexual).
Inga was influenced by none of these pressures. She was character-motivated. She was not a true defector. She thought she was. She even put on red slacks to prove it. Then she lost direction and had to head for home – because she knew still where home was. A crystal of ashes.
And when I had told her I was going into the Phoenix base she'd begun shivering, because when the crash came she was going to be there to watch it. She was going to be a part of it herself. She was going to re-establish herself with all the protestative violence of the true repentant, and shift the guilt on to a sacrificial victim. So she took the file and handed it over and said: "He's read it. All of it."
Not that it mattered. She hadn't known I was meant to read it. Braun would have been under orders not to tell her. She was already coming close to being suspect of defection and probably knew it. Oktober was wondering why she had made no attempt to contact me and interrogate me on the Dachau principle as instructed, and why she had drawn no scrap of information from me ever since the time of the crush-attempt when she was given the mission.
Certainly she hadn't been trusted to escort me alone to the Grunewald base: Braun had come with us and hadn't left us until we were within earshot of new cover. She knew this and her fears increased, and her fit of fervour in the presence of the sacred ash was a desperate attempt to convince them of her unwavering faith.
Here in the chill streets the night was sane again, with none of the mad overtones of that house with its swastika trappings and its vestiges of the Fuhrerbunker. Yet this whole city was mad, however much it was denied by mere acceptance. Not far from here the Russian war memorial stood inside the British boundary, so that it was agreed that barbed-wire should surround it. A Russian sentry guarded the memorial and a British sentry guarded the barbed-wire. To the north, in Spandau Prison, thirty men of four nations – British, French, American and Russian – guarded Hess, Speer and von Schirach: a hundred and twenty armed soldiers guarding three old men the world had long forgotten. Beside such monuments of absurdity, the renaissance of a Nazi group with illusions of making war seemed almost rational.
Thoughts of Inga came again because after half an hour I could still feel the touch of her mouth. There was a question left in my mind and I had to clear it even though it couldn't alter my position or immediate actions. Of three possible answers, one seemed most apt: she had followed me from the house to the bridge for her own purposes, not under orders. She knew that her organisation had suspected her of defecting. She hoped that by coming with me to their base, by handing them the file and by hailing the burned bones of their common god she had convinced them of her faith: but she couldn't be sure.
They needed urgently to locate my Control. If she could locate it herself and report her success to them she would no longer go in fear of them; they would accept her and honour her. Therefore she had made a final effort to persuade me that she was still a defector whose faith now rested solely in one. ("You're my life, Quill," she had said.) Perhaps she believed that because of what had happened between us on that innocent afternoon I could still be undermined. It might have been so. She had begged me to take her with me… and she knew where I was going: to my Control.
I had played it her way because it eight conceivably be useful to me. If Phoenix went on thinking that they'd convinced me that Operation Sprungbrett wasgenuine they would continue their present tactics. Dangerous though these tactics were to myself, they were known to me and I could take whatever opposing action thought fit. If they changed these tactics I would no longer be in control of the situation.
Inga would have reported that I was indeed convinced about Sprungbrett. The number I had given her was nothing to do with Local Berlin. It was an impromptu jumble of figures. If such a number existed they could get a reply, but still find it belonged to some unknown subscriber. But they wouldn't be sure: they would check with the Exchange and send a couple of men to that address to make certain it wasn't Local Berlin playing hard to get. They would finally consider the possibility that Inga had made a mistake with the number I gave her, since it was verbal.
The chances, then, of their pursuing their present tactics were if anything increased.
Small comfort: these men meant my death.
I had been safer in that house than here in the open city. I had known that since they were forcing me to signal Control they must let me leave there alive and try sending that signal more urgently than ever, now that I knew where their base was and that it possessed a full-scale operations room.
Going into that house I had not looked for death. I looked for it now.
There was a sixth man, a new one in a light-coloured coat. I watched him and he watched me. He would be one of the decoys. Out of a total of maybe twenty tags, only one or two would be briefed to make the kill. This was straight Oktober-thinking and I felt comfortable about it. I had been released from the pigeon trap and they had to tag me; they knew I would spot their tags because the hour was late and the streets were emptying; therefore they went the whole hog and plastered the place. Soon they would begin calling them off, one by one, letting me flush half a dozen to keep me happy… until, some time between now and dawn, I would believe I was alone, and would make a bid to signal Control. Then they'd be there, the last of them, and I wouldn't see them coming.
If I made my signal and they saw me do it they would shoot me within the next sixty seconds. If I delayed too long they would start worrying, as they did with Charington and KLJ, and would shoot me and switch off the risk. I didn't think they'd tag me beyond dawn, so I assumed that to be my deadline.
Meanwhile, Local Berlin and London would be waiting for me to signal. So would Phoenix.
I knew now why they had sent Pol to bring me the KLJ report. They had to convince me, on field-executive level, of my position. And Pol had described for me the precise situation that existed now. He had said: "We are worried that you don't understand your position. It is this. There are two opposing armies drawn up on the field, and you are in the gap between them. That is where you are, Quiller. In the gap."
22 : CORNER
By four o'clock in the morning I knew I was beaten.
We had done the whole city. In five hours we must have gone thirty or forty kilometres on foot and in a dozen taxis from north to south, Hermsdorf to Lichtenrade, from east to west, Neukolln to Spandau, and through seventeen hotels and three stations, to finish where we'd started in Zehlendorf.
The eyes gave in first: I saw dark specks on light surfaces. The eyes and the nerves. I had flushed ten of them before three o'clock and one of these ten had tr
ied so hard to stick that I knew he couldn't be a decoy. In two of the hotels I had gone as far as asking the night porter to deliver a message for me but the message was never written because I sensed they were on to me.
My coat was torn and one knee was swelling: there'd been ice between the lines at the Hauptbahnhof freight yard and I'd slipped between a truck and a loading jig full of unplaned timber. One glove was missing and a button was gone from the coat: I'd tried topping a pair of iron gates at the Kaulsdahl cemetery but it had been no go. Some time about midnight we had started a scare at Checkpoint Charlie because I'd given a taxi-driver fifty marks to keep his foot down and he'd got blocked at the east end of the Friedrichstrasse and simply did a U-turn under the nose of the guards.
I was never alone in the open street. Whenever I got a taxi there was another one tagging it, sometimes two or three. There was no point in asking a driver to get a message through to Control: every time I left a taxi they moved in on the driver and questioned him with their gun-hands lumpy in their pockets. Every car had radio and the temptation was very great, but it would be fatal to send out a call to the fleet switchboard because every time they took a car to follow mine they'd order their driver to call his base and request monitoring. No go.
The only time I had come near to flushing the whole team was when I had got a fifty-yard start in the open and headed for the nearest cover – the ruins of the Reichstag; then I'd stepped on broken glass and two guards came over from near the Russian memorial and began using their lamps. Now we were back in Zehlendorf and in two hours it would be dawn. Three of them were still with me and they would be the full-backs, briefed to kill. My night was drawing short.
Once daylight came they wouldn't let me run them arty farther because there was the risk of losing me in the rush-hour traffic and they knew that the minute I'd flushed them I would send my signal, and the Grunewald base would be raided straight away and with no chance of an overkill. I had two hours left before Oktober sent them the order to put me in the cross-hairs and switch off the risk.