by Adam Hall
Three minutes. The light was strengthening on the far spire and the matt uniformity of the sky was curdling into cloud.
If nothing happened in another ten minutes I'd have to go and take a look because they'd start moving in on the same principle and I couldn't afford to -
Three phases now operating. Percussion – the ground shook and the wall shuddered at my back. Audible blast – a crash of wild music as the roof went up and the glass over the courtyard shattered and fell away in a drift to the ground. Air shock-wave – the hot wind of it fanned past my face, stinking of sodium-chlorate.
I stayed where I was until the yard was ringed with people standing agape in the light of the flames, then I edged my way behind them. Another fuel-tank went up and the first fire-bells began sounding from the distance. Then the clock in the spire chimed six.
The taxi put me down in the Unter den Eichen and I went into the passage next to the hat shop, using the double-edged key. We had a notice on the service lift saying it was out of order, to discourage people. The ninth-floor button operated the lift and also switched on a red winking lamp in both rooms.
Five people were there including Hengel. They looked pasty and red-eyed because they'd been up all night waiting for me to signal. There was a tray of cups so I said: "Have you got some coffee?"
Hengel was already using the direct-line telephone, asking for Pol.
They kept looking me up and down and I remembered I was still wearing the white chef's coat. There would have been a whole bunch of tags in the crowd watching the fire and I'd had to get clear unrecognised.
I took off the coat and dropped it over a chair. We all talked a bit and in ten minutes Pol came, while I was holding my second cup of coffee in both hands to warm them. A chef's coat isn't much for a winter morning.
Pol had just gone to bed after the night-shift and Hengel had got him out again. The room had gone very quiet. A hot operator doesn't just show up at Control and ask for coffee.
I gave Pol the report I'd written during the early hours at the hotel and they all watched him reading it. He said:
"This will do for a start."
"It's all you'll get for the moment."
He told someone to get on to London and while we waited he said: "We'll have to go in, you know." He was speaking in English and I thought again of England and how much I needed her.
I said: "Give me till noon. Then you can go in."
"Why noon?" His featureless face was blanker than ever without the glasses.
"I need the time."
He dropped the report on to a desk and asked for copies.
"It depends on London," he told me.
I was feeling tired so I said: "Just for a few hours, London depends on me."
The call came through and they gave me the phone. I talked for a minute and finally had to persuade him. "You can send them in if you have to, sir, but we shall go off at half cock unless you can give me till noon. Once you raid their base they'll try to put calls out and they might succeed. Give me till noon and I'll give you the whole set-up."
He said I was putting a gun at their heads. Bloody fool. We had guns at all our heads. He asked if I couldn't make it earlier than noon.
"I'll try, sir. It should work out well before that, but it's just a reasonable deadline for me to aim at."
He still went on nagging and I had one of my regrettable impulses: "Things got very tricky, sir. I even had to blow up a garage and seven cars, all private property." I listened for a minute to give myself the pleasure and then handed the phone to Pol.
While Pol was trying to smooth things over I drank some more coffee and asked someone to get me the Public Prosecutor on the other phone.
"Which one?"
"Ebert."
I could hear the phone ringing for a long time and then the Generalstaatsanwalt came on. His voice was perfectly alert, though it was still only a quarter to seven. I asked if I could see him.
"It must be very urgent, Herr Quiller."
"Yes."
He said he was at my disposal and rang off.
Pol had finished with London.
"They don't like it," he said.
"Do them good."
"I don't like it either."
So they were all going to nag. I drank the coffee as fast as I could without burning my tongue. I would need the caffeine because I would be feeling the fatigue as the work of the morning went on. I was going to do something for the first time in my life and it would be very unpleasant.
"You'll be all right," I told Poll.
"We shall be here until noon, of course." He almost said ‘at our posts.’ I knew he would keep the rest of them here too, to help him sweat it out. All the time I was on the loose there was the danger of being picked up and made to talk. They had lived with this over their heads ever since Pol had given me the Q memorandum, but now it was worse for them because time was running short. They didn't want to be sitting here like so many ducks when Phoenix sent a party up here in the lift, or opened fire from the windows across the street with a battery of submachine-guns. They didn't want to be picked off one by one as they left the passage by the hat shop, dropping cold on to the pavement before they could warn the next man out.
It wasn't easy for them and they had my sympathy. I always get on better with a Local Control, wherever it is, than those bloody people in London.
I told Pol: "You won't see any adverse action. There's no risk. They think I'm dead. They're still watching the flames. They won't look for me again. So don't worry."
The London line began ringing. He answered the call and did a lot of listening, then hung up. He told me
"They've signalled British Military H.Q. Berlin. At twelve noon today the Commandant is sending four armoured cars to the Grunewald base with fifty troops."
"London always did get the fidgets when there's a flap on." I looked down from one of the windows. The street was filling with traffic. "Will you please phone me a taxi? And has anyone got an overcoat my size?" It looked cold down there, and my own coat was hanging on a peg in the kitchens of the Hotel Zentral.
Sleet was falling again as I crossed the pavement and got into the taxi, right in the middle of the Zeiss close-focus square-15's they had up there. But there would be no tags. I was dead.
Ebert opened the door himself as a gesture of courtesy and invited me to take breakfast with him.
"You have an important client for me, Herr Quiller?"
He was more jovial at the breakfast-table than in his office. I said: "Several, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt. We shall be notifying you later in the day." He gave me a long look from under his pink-and-blond eyebrows, then took another slice of pumpernickel. Iremembered he didn't really know who I was. "But I came to ask you a favour," I said. "There is a man I would like to talk to, and you could probably arrange the introduction. He is Bundeminister Lobst."
Ebert ruminated, saw no connection, gave it up and said "Certainly I shall arrange it."
"At his office, as early as possible. I imagine he gets there about nine, being a busy man. Don't give my name."
"As you wish."
The territories of Ebert and Lobst abutted, and they would know each other well in their official capacities. This was why I had come to Ebert, whom I trusted and who trusted me.
He made two telephone calls and said that I would be shown in to the Bundeminister's office on arrival at any time after nine o'clock. The Generalstaatsanwalt would be glad if I would convey to the Bundeminister his personal greetings.
There were forty-five minutes to go so I found an early barber and had a shave, manicure and neck-trim to take the fatigue away. It was nine o'clock precisely when I was shown into the Bundeminister's office. He was speaking on a telephone and his secretary had quietly gone away before he finished the call and turned in his chair and looked at me, but I had been prepared for the secretary still to be here so it would have been all right anyway.
He just sat there without moving or rea
ching for a drawer so I took my time crossing to his desk. He started to get up and I moved round the desk and brought my right hand flattened and palm-down and very fast against the side of the neck, taking off some of the force at the last inch so that he wouldn't be under for too long.
Then I left him and locked both doors and came back and sat on his desk.
"Zossen," I said, "I want to know everything."
It made me angry: he just sat there with his eyes turned up a little, trying to focus on my face; but he was a man like that, who never lowered himself to physical action. He gave the orders and signed the papers and left it to his henchmen to do the work.
His eyes were getting their focus now and he said loosely "It was reported that you were dead." I studied his face. It was worse than cruel: it was greedy. It was an eater's face, a devourer's, the eyes watchful for prey, the mouth long and thin and set between pouches, like a stretched H. It wasn't his face I had recognised in the Grunewald operations room, but his walk when he had moved from the desk to the map-table. Then I had looked at the face again and seen the ice-blue of Zossen's eyes set in the blubber of twenty years of greed.
This face had a third identity and it was public: I had seen it on the front pages of newspapers when Bundeminister Ernst Lobst had made a speech or greeted a visiting diplomat at Tempelhof. Thus I had known where to find him.
I had come here in case he had got wind of the raid at noon today and went to ground. I had come here to make him tell me everything, in case the raid misfired. And I had come here in the name of three hundred nameless men to whom he had once said: "I am due back in Brucknerwald in one hour, for luncheon."
He was fully conscious again and watching me. I told him to speak to his secretary on the inter-office line and give orders that he must on no account be disturbed for the next hour. As he pressed down the switch I said softly:
"The doors are locked. If you say the wrong thing I shall have a full minute before they break the doors down. I can do a lot to a man like you in sixty seconds. Be careful."
He spoke to his secretary and I was angry with him again because he was so helpless. I must remember the men of Brucknerwald. I must do what I came to do, even though he was helpless.
He closed the switch and I said: "Now you will tell me everything. Everything."
It was not quite ten o'clock when I left the office of the Bundeminister: the work had been quicker than expected. I had not taken a gun with me, nor any weapon at all; but we are not gentlemen, and we have our little ways. He had held out for close on twenty minutes and then broken, asking for mercy. Then he had told me everything.
On the way to the Unter den Eichen I phoned Captain Stettner at the Z Bureau. "I have someone for you." He didn't sound surprised when I told him the name. There was more than one Bundeminister on the Z Commission files. "I should go and pick him up straight away."
I knew he wouldn't be able to make a decent snatch because it was a job for the Selbstmord department, as it had been with Schrader, though in this case there hadn't been a gun. I just wanted it on record that I had last seen the Bundeminister alive.
Pol was still there when I went up to our place. He looked worried at seeing me so early: it was not yet half-past ten, and I had stipulated noon.
"What has gone wrong?"
"Nothing," I said. "Set up the tape."
They were all watching me obliquely and I kept my eyes down. I was bloody well fed up with them. When the tape was running I said
"Quiller. Report of interview with Bundeminister Ernst Lobst, true name Heinrich Zossen. General picture of imminent operation planned by Phoenix organisation is as follows."
The mechanism was simple enough and the pivotal factor was that the new German General Staff commanding the Bundeswehr in present-day West Germany had 5 00,000 fully-equipped troops under arms. In West Berlin the British, American and French troops totalled 12,000. The odds were thus worse than forty to one.
The operation was to be launched in two fast and successive phases: the creation of a cold-war crisis by an armed breach of the Berlin Wall and an attack by ground troops on the Allied garrisons in the west of the city. Air bombardment of East Berlin would provoke Russian counter-action at a time when Moscow and all Russian military bases would be suffering the outbreak of pneumonic plague.
The tape-spools turned silently.
"Reference Dr. Solomon Rothstein. Please see my report 34-A, following decipherment of Rothstein document. Now repeat: Rothstein was doubling with Phoenix. His own plan to start an epidemic of pneumonic plague in the Argentine was unknown to Phoenix. His second and concurrent plan was known to them: he was in fact working for them and under their orders. They asked him to prepare nine capsules of heavily-cultured pneumonic plague bacillus for special-messenger transit to Moscow and the eight major Russian military bases. These capsules were to be broken open in those nine centres and the bacillus introduced into foodstuffs four days prior to the air bombardment of East Berlin, so that the Russian forces counter-reacting in East Germany would be cut off from central directive and military supplies and reinforcements."
This was what I had come to think of as the Parallel Assumption. I knew that Solly Rothstein had been doubling with Phoenix. It thus seemed reasonable to assume that he was doing two jobs in parallel: preparing to wipe out San Caterina in the Argentine and preparing to wipe out the military centres of whatever country or countries Phoenix planned to attack. Solly would never have told me of his Argentine operation. He had wanted to tell me of the work he was doing for Phoenix. Later, had he lived, he would have informed both Russia and the Allied commands in Berlin, the moment Phoenix asked him to produce the nine capsules. The operation would then be imminent and although he might not be given the actual date of its launching he would have five days' warning: one day for transmission of the capsules, four days for the plague to incubate. Certain of this ample period of warning, he passed no information out to the Allied Commands or the Soviets, since his idea was to let Phoenix build up their large-scale preparations so that when he sprang the leak they would be caught at the height of their endeavours and would thus serve long sentences.
I said into the tape: "The Rothstein capsules would of course have contained a harmless culture. The instant Phoenix knew he was doubling they shot him and raided his laboratory to seize any papers that might incriminate them. At the same time they would have forced the laboratory assistants to indicate the most lethal of those bacilli then in culture, so that they could proceed with their plan to wipe out the nine Soviet centres, knowing that if Rothstein were doubling he could never have been expected to provide ‘live’ capsules. Every effort should clearly be made to trace any culture missing from the Rothstein laboratory and to grill both the assistants and the Phoenix agents who made the raid. The safe was broken open (see report by Captain Stettner, Z Commission) and it seems probable that an envelope addressed to the Russian Army Command and/or the Allied Commands would have been left there by Dr. Rothstein and subsequently removed and destroyed by Phoenix. The raid was carried out in haste, so that the metal container addressed to the Doctor's brother was overlooked, whereas almost no papers were left behind."
I cut the switch and sat for a minute, checking all mental hooks for material. It seemed about everything.
Pol asked: "Signal ends?"
"I don't know. Probably. There'll be a whole lot of details but there's no time now. Push it through if you want to."
Two of them linked up the tape to the London line for the play-back while Pol dialled on the other phone. In a minute he said: "General Stewart, please. Then find out where he is. This is LCB." He watched the men rigging the tape. "General Stewart? Our man is back ahead of schedule. You can go in when you're ready." He hung up.
The tape was running fast, reversed. Hengel spoke into the phone and asked for London. Pol sat on the edge of the desk and looked down at me.
"What happened to Zossen?"
I felt angry with hi
m, and looked directly up at him so that the anger could drive out the other thing they'd all seen in my eyes. Pol was a pernickety man and he remembered everything. He remembered what I'd said to him in the box in the theatre when we'd been talking about Zossen. I had said: Give me a rope, and ask no questions.
"I don't know," I told him.
He said: "I mean do we have to put out smoke for you."
"No. He left a suicide note. I thought it was the best way."
Pol nodded and moved from the desk as London came on the line. They started the tape-recorder, and as the spools began turning I slid back on the chair and leaned my head on the wall and closed my eyes. My voice sounded verytired on the tape. I must be getting old, getting old.
Elleston Trevor
***
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