by Adam Hall
'Yes.'
In a moment he said, 'You did this to me before, in Berlin.'
'Then you should be used to it.'
'True.'
He watched me steadily for a moment and then turned away, and I've seen that look before when the mission's running hot and there's no place for the shadow to go except into a red sector: they wonder if it's the last time they're going to see you. It used to worry me, but it doesn't any more.
'There's no other way,' I told him.
You couldn't stop anyone putting a bomb on a plane by relying on conventional security measures, with forty or fifty thousand commercial flights a day going through the airports worldwide. The high-tech plastic explosive, Semtex, was colourless and odourless and it could be moulded into any shape, a shoe or a hairbrush or a teddy bear, and at the moment there was no equipment in Europe that could detect it in a suitcase or a handbag. Cone knew that.
'The only way,' I told him, 'is to get inside the organisation that's planning to plant a bomb and wipe it out in time.'
He watched an Air France 727 nosing into the sky. 'Oh, I'm not arguing. So are you going to use any kind of base?'
'A car.'
'Where?
'I don't know until I know where the rendezvous is.'
He came and sat down again, facing me, his arms across his knees. 'You want somebody to watch the car?'
'No.'
It could be a night action and I wouldn't be able to identify him. Nemesis could find out that the car was mine and put a watch on it too.
'Are you going in wired?' Cone asked me.
'No.'
The idea was tempting, but if they found a mike on me it'd blow my cover, and my cover was all I'd have.
The cold was getting into me, into my bones.
'You don't carry weapons,' Cone said, 'that right?'
'No.'
A successful arms dealer is a businessman and he doesn't carry a gun, and even if I had one on me when I went close enough to Nemesis they'd look for it and find it and take it away.
'You carry a capsule?' Cone asked me.
'No.'
I wasn't infiltrating the regime of the host country and the only interest Nemesis would take in the Bureau was personal: they didn't want us to get in their way, that was all. If they put me under implemented interrogation and blew my cover and found I was operating against them they'd simply finish things off and get a body bag.
'You need a courier?'
'No.'
I was taking the ultimate risk and it wasn't likely that I could make contact with a courier without exposing him.
'What about a deadline?' Cone asked me.
'I can't give you one. I don't know where I'll be by 18:00 hours or midnight or 06:00 or noon. In any case you can't send in anyone to look for me. But for the board, if you like, call it noon tomorrow. If I haven't been able to make some kind of signal by then, you can tell them to send out a new shadow.'
Cone studied his dry scaly hands. 'There's not much,' he said, 'I can do, then, for the moment.'
'Not much, no. But if I can go in and get out you'll have a lot to do.' There'd be enough signals to light up the board in London, because if I could blow Nemesis from the centre there'd be a lot of fallout and we'd hand things over to the Bundeskriminalamt to hunt down the survivors and make arrests.
'Questions?' Cone asked me.
'No.' He'd had the London briefing and my own debriefing and he knew as much about the way the mission was running as I did. There was nothing I needed to ask him.
'Then you better get on with your homework.'
'Yes.'
He got up and stood at the window for a moment, watching a TWA jumbo go sloping into the sky.
'It must give you the willies,' he said as he turned round. 'All those people.'
'Yes.'
'You know where to find me,' he said, and I opened the door and watched him picking his way along the passage, his thin body angled forward a little against the blizzard in his soul.
14:00 hours.
The statistics relevant to the legitimate sale of AK47 assault rifles are as follows…
15:00 hours.
The US dollar is the standard currency in all arms deals of any importance…
16:00 hours.
And as the late winter sunshine changed from rose to purple across the roofs of the buildings opposite my window, and the planes moved through the twilight with the stealth of phantoms before their sound came in, I became prey to the feeling that the telephone standing on the lopsided bare wooden table was never, after all, going to ring, that Dieter Klaus wasn't here in Berlin or that Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him.
I couldn't assume that he'd be interested, in any case, in a tactical nuclear missile: his plans to put a bomb on board a Pan Am plane could be already advanced. He might not even have time for a meeting with a strange arms dealer with hew toys to sell: he might have all he needed.
Singapore and Israel both possess several high tech armaments that are not available anywhere else in the world…
At 17:00 hours I sat in the semi-darkness of the little room, with the recorder shut off and my mind ranging across the data that I'd been feeding into it since this morning. A big jet reached for altitude across the skyline with its strobes flashing and the thin line of its windows slanting through the dark.
So Dieter Klaus wasn't in Berlin or Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him or she knew about the ambush they'd set for me in the underground garage, knew my cover story was false, was that why the telephone hadn't rung?
I didn't think so. If Sorgenicht had recognised me in the cafeteria and phoned for support they would have gone for me in the car park while I was talking to Inge: they wouldn't have waited. It hadn't been Sorgenicht who'd got onto me; when they'd started the search for Krenz they must have intercepted some of the calls going out from the Mercedes to the SAAB and traced them and found the SAAB in the garage and set the trap, waiting for me to go back to it.
There was no connection between the unknown man who had taken over the Mercedes from Krenz and the man who had openly approached Inge Stoph in the car park.
She didn't know who I was, or if she knew, and telephoned with a rendezvous, it would be fatal to keep it.
But I wouldn't know.
I walked about, restless, up and down the narrow room, the floorboards creaking and the sound of the girls rising from the rooms below as they laughed for their money at the outset of the long night's parody of love.
A plane thundered into the dark.
And now the appalling idea came to me that I'd been wasting time, trusting the whole of the mission to a hypothetical rendezvous while all those people were busy packing their bags and saying goodbye to friends and filing through the departure gate for their exciting ride with the little teddy bear. I'd have to signal Cone and tell him there was a change of plan, I'd need to find another way in to Nemesis if it wasn't already too late, but the phone began ringing suddenly in the quiet room and I swung round and picked it up and Kleiber told me that Inge Stoph had called to say that if I wanted to talk to Dieter Klaus I must be at the north-west corner of Waldschulle Alice and Harbigstrasse at 5:15 this evening and that I must go there alone.
Chapter 13: KLAUS
And now Johan has the puck and he's leading with it all the way and he's going as if there just isn't anybody here to stop him. This is only his second time out since the injury he sustained at Frankfurt, but that's obviously old history by the way he's moving.
Floodlights roofed the night.
'Isn't he amazing?' Inge asked me.
I said yes, amazing.
'Would you like one?' Waving a bratwurst.
'Thank you.' I hadn't eaten since this morning.
But we didn't expect Tommy Warnke to get across there so fast and it looks as if Johan's going to have his work cut out unless he can pile on that extra turn of speed he's so famous for.
The stadium was pack
ed, the colours of the sweaters and scarves and woollen hats turning it into a vast flower bed.
'You like ice-hockey?' Inge asked me.
'Very much.'
I'd reached the north-west corner of Waldschulle Allee and Harbigstrasse at the precise hour for the rendezvous and paid off the taxi and the crimson Porsche 911 had pulled in to the kerb with a squeal of tyres.
'Hans!'
She waved from the car and I went across to it and got in.
'It's so nice to see you again!' Showgirl smile, the eyes ice-bright and observant. She took the Porsche away with a dash of expertise, her right hand caressing the gear-knob. She was wearing the same crimson calf-length boots, but tonight she sported a Russian fur hat with fur gloves to match.
A dark green Jaguar was trailing us: it had pulled up behind the Porsche and started off again, keeping close enough to make sure no one slipped in between. Later it overtook us and the woman at the wheel glanced across at Inge and away; then she held back and began trailing again. Inge knew the Jaguar was with us, but didn't say anything. She drove steadily, playing the lights and the traffic lanes without flash but with effectiveness.
'Dieter said he can only give you a few minutes,' she told me as we waited for a green. 'But even so, you're lucky.'
'So is he,' I said. 'I assume you told him what I've got for him?'
She looked at me. 'You don't understand. It's very difficult to get Dieter to see anyone at all.'
'It's very difficult,' I said, 'to keep me waiting so long for a meeting.'
The lights changed to green and she shifted the gear-lever. 'So? Then why did you decide to wait?'
I let my eyes move over her face. 'For one thing I find you charming.'
'Thank you.'
She wasn't impressed: she was a knockout and she knew it. But she flashed me the dazzling sharp-toothed feline smile, and I was fairly sure now that Dieter Klaus had instructed her to spring a Venus trap on me, and I was going to walk right into it because I knew how to pick up information that way. It would also be in keeping with my cover: an international arms dealer passing through Berlin wouldn't turn down the chance of a night with a girl like Inge Stoph.
'And for another thing?' she asked me.
'I confess to a certain admiration for Dieter Klaus.'
She said rather quickly – 'What do you know about him?'
'Not very much, but in my trade the word gets around that he's different from the kind of thugs you find, say, in the Rote Armee Faktion.'
'That's exactly the word,' Inge said. 'Dieter Klaus is very different.'
It was all she said, and she drove in silence until we reached the stadium.
I'd telephoned Cone before I left the hotel, and told him what time the rendezvous was, and where. He said he already knew: Kleiber had signalled him. I cancelled the car: it was a mobile rdv with no fixed address and I didn't know the area, didn't know where they could leave a car for me to reach if I needed one. Cone made a last try, asking me if I'd changed my mind about using support. I said I hadn't.
I don't think I've ever seen Braun so quick with the passes – I think the comeback Johan has made is inspiring him, and in fact the whole team.
I glanced sometimes at Dieter Klaus.
'He's over there,' Inge had told me when we'd sat down.
There were two men and four women around him: they were three rows down across the aisle in the best seats, the Ehrentribune. My view of him wasn't obstructed but it was at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees from behind, and I only saw his face when he turned to speak to the woman on his left. His head was bare; his hair was dressed in the Prussian style, brush-cut and blond. He wore a black overcoat with a dark sable collar, no gloves, a pair of designer sunglasses.
His entourage was fitted out with the same black padded track suit for each of them, except for the woman on his left. She wore a tourmaline mink coat and hat, a flash of gold at her ears, nothing on her wrists unless it was under a sleeve. She was young, olive-skinned, a Latin, and she was giving more of her attention to the game than to Dieter Klaus, even when he turned his head to say something.
Inge watched him with a lot more interest. She was sitting on my right, so that when she moved her head to look across at Klaus I couldn't see her eyes, but the angle of her head and its stillness told me a great deal, and when she turned to look at me for a moment to talk about him, the expression in her eyes was clear enough: Dieter Klaus was the subject of her adoration.
'He's here in Berlin tonight,' she told me, 'For a special reason. Normally he stays in Frankfurt -he flew in an hour ago.'
'Quite an aficionado.'
She looked surprised for an instant. 'Yes, but he didn't come to Berlin tonight to watch ice hockey.'
'It sounds interesting,' I said. 'Something, perhaps, I can help him with?'
She gave me a long look. 'No. Everything is arranged.'
Teddy bear.
And Lange takes the puck but he's not too well placed for a strike if he means to go for a goal at this distance and with those two quarterbacks moving in from the flank. But he's got the speed if he wants to take it closer before he strikes – just look at that!
Teddy bear in the sky.
He was fifty feet away from where I was sitting, Dieter Klaus, and the thought was running through my mind that if I could get close enough to him when we were leaving the stadium I might go for a quick direct kill and take it from there, keep the others off me if I could, use the confusion and the crowd for cover. They wouldn't use guns, even if they had any; it was illegal to carry arms in this city and the sound of shots would bring the police and security much faster than a brawl.
It was simply a thought, running through my head. I was not mad; I knew the risks; but the situation was so obviously attractive: the executive for Solitaire was within fifty feet of the target and if he could close that distance to within killing range he could complete the mission in a matter of seconds and two or three hundred people would board their flight and feel nothing worse than a touch of jet lag at the other end, attractive, such a very attractive situation.
With legs as long as that,' Inge was calling above the sudden roar of the crowd, 'I'm not surprised he can make that kind of speed!'
I said no, it wasn't surprising, something like that.
There was another thought in my mind, less attractive. Inge had been full of suspicion this morning at the airport when I'd told her we'd met at one of Willi's parties, and I couldn't tell how much I'd convinced her that it was true – that she simply didn't remember me. I might not have convinced her at all: she could have brought me here tonight to have me killed.
'Do you smoke?'
She had a packet of Players in her hand.
'I'm trying to quit.'
She flashed her smile and lit a cigarette, and the scent of marijuana came on the air.
To have me killed, because I didn't know what she'd said to Dieter Klaus when she'd phoned him in Frankfurt. I've just met an arms dealer who says he respects you and what you're doing. He supports people who try to bring down the capitalistic establishment, and he says he can sell you a nuclear missile. Are you interested?
That would be all right. That would be very nice. But she might have said something quite different. I've just met a man who says that he knows you and your organisation – he even knows its name. He says he knows that you have substantial backing from Colonel Gadhafi. He pretended he'd met me before, but I've never seen him in my life, and I think you should have him worked over to find out who he is. If you like, I can bring him to you.
That would not be all right. It would not be very nice at all. But that is what I thought she'd probably said to Klaus, and those were the terms of the critical risk I was taking. I hadn't walked in here with much hope of getting clear again if I wanted to, if I had to. I was committed now: if I got up and tried to walk out of here I wouldn't get farther than the car park if they didn't want me to, the people in the black track suits. I did
n't underestimate them because four of them were women: I've trained too many women myself at Norfolk in the lethal use of the hands. The men would only be there in case they were needed.
And as Johan gets through and shapes for the strike he's no more than two feet ahead of Lieberman and he'll need an awful lot of speed to bring this one off.
I was committed, and that had been my intent. From here I could only go in deeper, all the way to the centre, and I could only get out by destroying Nemesis first.
'She's one of his girls,' Inge said.
'Yes? What's her name?
'Dolores. I'm one of his girls too, one of his concubines. We share him. It's an honour.'
Her eyes were shimmering.
'How nice for him.'
She drew on the cigarette, deeply. 'We'd do anything for him.' She looked at me with her eyes narrowing. 'We would kill for him.'
I said, 'He must have quite a lot of enemies.'
'Of course. They are dealt with.'
One of the players made a goal and the crowd roared and I tried to think how to bring Maitland into the conversation, and Helen. This girl might know where Helen was, what had happened to her. There was an Englishman, I remember, killed in Berlin last week, May ford, was it, or Mason? Was he one of Dieter's enemies? But I couldn't risk it; there were too many reasons for murder in a big city, and there didn't have to be any connection with Nemesis.
'I must ask Dieter,' I said, 'why he flew in to Berlin tonight. You've got me interested.'
She looked at me. 'He might tell you. He might not.'
'I'm a salesman, Inge, and at the moment I'm selling something rather impressive. As I told you, he could take out an entire sports stadium like this one.'
She looked around her. That would be impressive, yes. That would be powerful.' Her eyes had darkened, the blue ice gathering shadows. 'I like power. That's why I'm with Dieter Klaus. He's the most powerful man in Europe. It'll be interesting to see what he thinks about you, Hans, but I must tell you something. I have a very good memory, and I've never been to one of Willi Hartman's parties in my life.'