by Adam Hall
Cone tried his first question. 'How soon do we have to do it?'
'As soon as we can.'
'I'll check with Samala.'
'Do that. Tell him we're only contracted for the nuclear warhead, not the whole NK-9 missile. Same price.'
'Warhead only.'
'Yes.'
He'd be hunched over the telephone, Cone, his back to the blizzard he lived in, had probably lived in since childhood, when he'd been abandoned or orphaned or in one of a hundred ways cast out, hunched over the telephone now in a small Berlin hotel wondering what London would do with this, wondering as I was what London would do. They could wreck Solitaire if they didn't get this thing absolutely right.
The figures on the dashboard clock flicked to 10:14. It would be a few minutes before we rang off and Cone hit the mast at Cheltenham and his voice came over the speaker at the Signals board and Carey or Matthews picked up the bit of chalk. Executive DIF 22:10 Berlin time reporting either as captive or surveilled, believed to have reached Nemesis centre, requests delivery of Miniver NK-9 warhead, see printout of DIF's briefing.
Croder would move in on a signal like this one or if he wasn't in the room then they'd page him and get him there, find him wherever he was. Croder had the soul of a piranha but he could think well, and there'd be a chance of keeping the mission alive until I could work as a free agent again and signal Cone and brief him. There'd be a chance but it was thin, terribly thin, because London might go for the obvious and decide to call in GSG- 9 in Frankfurt and the counter-espionage service in Algiers and stake out the delivery point and risk exposure and blow the whole thing.
'It could take a little time,' Cone said.
I used the chance. 'You'll have to cut corners, Charlie. I'm talking about – wait a minute, our client's here with me.' I turned to Klaus and I didn't put my hand over the mouthpiece. 'He says it can take a little time, so give me your deadline.'
He checked his watch. '19:15 hours tomorrow.'
'That's tight.'
'You offered me the missile.' His eyes were black now in the glow from the dashboard lights. 'If you can deliver it in that time, the deal is on. Not otherwise. Twenty-one hours.'
It suited me, because every minute I spent at the centre of Nemesis would be extending the risk of exposure; but I'd told him the deadline was tight because God knew how long it would take to persuade Army Ordnance to part with even an unarmed Miniver warhead casing. I was having to play the breaks as they came and make what choices I'd got: the longer I stayed with Nemesis the greater the risk, yes, but I was prepared to face that if the alternative was not to have delivery of the warhead made at all. I had to get it for Klaus if I could; I had to get closer to the deadline he'd been working on before I'd moved in; I had to know what he was planning to do before I could stop him.
'Charlie,' I said, 'the whole deal depends on the time of delivery, and that's our deadline: twenty-one fifteen hours, 19:15.'
'In Algiers.'
'In Algiers. So you'll have to cut corners, as I said. Do we want to lose a deal like this?
'No, if you put it that way.'
Cone's German was fluent and he'd heard Klaus making the deadline but he couldn't tell whether I needed delivery as fast as that for my own sake or whether I was forced to let Klaus pressure me like this because he could be sitting beside me holding a gun at my head.
In the cold night air I was beginning to sweat because all I wanted was the chance of sixty seconds on the phone with Cone in private, thirty seconds, Tell Control he's got to make the deadline with a dummy nuke and tell him that if he alerts GSG-9 or the Algerian counter-terrorist service he'll risk exposing me and blowing the mission, tell him that 2nd for God's sake make him understand.
It was all I wanted, thirty seconds, fifteen, enough time to protect the delivery scene and make it worth my while to stay inside Nemesis and talk to these people and get it right, watching every word, every gesture, every reaction, every expression, so that they wouldn't sense a trembling on the web.
'How long,' I asked Cone, 'will it take you to make the delivery?'
'I can't say. It -'
'You've got twenty-one hours, Charlie.'
'I can only do my best.'
'Then it's got to be good enough. You want to work with me again, you'll have to meet the deadline.'
'It's very short notice -'
'Charlie, are you listening to me? Get that item delivered on time or it's the last deal we do together, are you listening?'
There was no speech-code involved but I was giving him private information. I'd started to threaten him and he'd picked up on it and started raising doubts to see what I'd do, and I'd pressured him and given him an ultimatum and the message was clear enough now: I wanted him to make the delivery for my own reasons, because if Klaus had had a gun at my head I would have started raising doubts of my own, pointing out the difficulties to him and pleading for more time.
It had been all I could do to spell things out.
'I'll get moving on it, then,' Cone said. 'Where is the point of delivery?'
I looked at Klaus. 'Where do we deliver?'
'At Dar-el-Beida.'
The airport for Algiers.
'Who will receive the goods?
'Five men will be waiting in a black Mercedes 560 SEL at the north-east corner of No. 5 Maintenance Hangar at the airport at exactly 19:15 hours tomorrow.' He checked his watch again. 'I'm giving your partner an extra two minutes, which should please him.'
'Could make all the difference,' I said.
He gave a short laugh. 'We shall get on well together. I like your sense of humour.'
'We need a name,' I told him.
'When your people approach at that time, one of I the men in the car will get out and meet them. His name is Muhammad Ibrahimi. The parole for exchange will be… would you like to suggest something?'
The parole for exchange. That was the vernacular of the intelligence field. He'd been in Stasi intelligence, then, perhaps under the control of the KGB in former East Germany.
'Mushroom,' I said.
'I like that!' The short laugh. 'Mushroom, yes. The freight will be put into the boot of the car and the cash will be handed over immediately afterwards.'
'What currency?'
'You asked for US dollars.'
'Yes.'
'Then you shall have US dollars.'
There wasn't anything else so I talked to Cone again and went over the whole thing twice and he said he'd got it. It's just a simple exchange, Charlie,' I told him. 'Nothing we haven't done a hundred times before.'
'Give it all I've got. Call you back at the same number?'
I checked with Klaus and he nodded.
'Yes,'I told Cone.
'Anything else?'
'No,' I said, 'there's nothing else,' and he rang off and I put the telephone back and Klaus snapped the driving-door open.
'So! We will go back into the house. Schwartz?'
The man's feet grated over the gravel. 'Sit in the car here and when the telephone rings call me on my pager.'
Headlights flooded the driveway as we left the Volvo, and the gates began swinging open.
'Who is that?' Klaus called out.
'His name is Khatami, mein Fuhrer. He gave the password.'
A black Porsche came into the drive and cut its lights and the gates were swung back as a man got out and came across to the house. Klaus didn't break his stride but shook the man's hand and told him to go on ahead. 'I'll be there in a moment, Bijan. The others are waiting.'
He led me into the panelled hallway and touched my arm – 'Everything looks very fine, my friend. I'm sure your associate realises that delivery has to be made on time. I could have given you a more comfortable deadline if it weren't for the fact that my operation is running to a precise schedule, and I can't afford delays.' His black eyes watched me steadily. 'The next twenty-four hours, you see, constitute a count-down.' A man was stationed near the wide carpeted staircase
and Klaus called him over. 'Fogel! Show Herr Mittag to his room.' He turned away and said over his shoulder, 'You'll find everything there – toilet necessities, a choice of pyjamas, a small bar – turning round for a moment – 'Inge will entertain you if you wish – just mention it to Fogel here. We shall meet again to receive the call from your associate. I am very pleased, you know, that you have offered me this particular item at such a convenient time – I am delighted.'
His footsteps faded out along the corridor. Fogel showed me to a bedroom suite on the floor above and left me there, and I began thinking about the man who'd just arrived in the Porsche, Khatami. He hadn't been in uniform this time but I'd recognised him: he was the Iranian pilot I'd seen talking to Inge Stoph at the airport cafeteria.
Cone telephoned just after three in the morning and we went down to the Volvo.
'We can meet the deadline.'
He was in a public phone box. He'd got out of his hotel and into another one but he couldn't phone me from there and he couldn't give me his new number because he knew I wouldn't be alone. He also knew that I couldn't call him back, wouldn't know where he was, couldn't hope to reach him again.
'Good for you, Charlie,' I said, and put the phone down and watched the severed lifeline go snaking away in the dark.
Chapter 16: SIROCCO
The sun was a pale disc in the haze, still low above the horizon. Its light glinted on metal and glass surfaces, on the mascot of the Mercedes limousine as it swung in a half-circle by the VFW-Fokker and halted. Klaus got out first and we followed.
There were two other cars already here, with people standing near them in a group, waiting for Dieter Klaus, watching him. His bodyguards – four women and two men – closed in around him as he walked towards the plane with that implacable energy of his. There was a small dog among the people who stood waiting. The pilot came down the ramp and saluted Klaus, standing aside and waiting for him to board the company jet. Klaus spoke to him and got an answer; I didn't hear any actual words but I suppose he was asking the pilot about the weather forecast: the haze was thick towards the horizon.
I joined the group, one of the male guards walking a little way behind me: I'd been under what amounted to close escort since we'd left the house, and I didn't expect that to change. Geissler, the man who'd interrogated me in the garage, had come with us in the limousine, and went aboard the plane soon after Klaus. The rest of us were following now, and the woman in the camelhair coat gave me a flashing smile and said in English – 'Hello, I'm Helen Maitland, and this is George, my husband.'
'Hans Mittag. Delighted.'
I'd caught sight of her earlier this morning, getting into one of the cars at the house.
'Dieter told us about you,' Maitland said. 'Most interesting.' Then he hurried up the ramp, a short man, quick in his movements and with the same nervous tension in him that Klaus had.
The focus of this operation – Shatner, in London briefing – is on a man named Maitland. Or rather, on his death. A week ago he was murdered, and his body taken away. His flat was broken into with some violence, and the police found evidence of massive blood loss. There were marks on the floor indicating that his body had been dragged out of the flat to the lift. The telephone was hanging by its cable – he'd been talking to a woman friend, who came forward, when the flat was entered. She reported sounds of the door being smashed in, an outbreak of voices and finally a cry.
Helen kept close to me as we went up the ramp, and I thought I heard her whisper, 'I'm sorry…'
Maitland had sat down with Klaus in one of the forward seats behind the flight deck. The pilot had taken his place next to the navigator, and a stewardess was greeting us as we came aboard. Her smile, I thought, was over-bright, as Helen's had been just now when she'd greeted me. No one was talking much; they seemed to be taking their cue from Dieter Klaus, from their fuhrer, and this morning he was totally changed from last night: in the limousine there'd been none of his brief outbursts of laughter. I took as long a look at Maitland as I could when I went past his seat: later I might need the ability to recognise some of the people here, perhaps quickly and at a distance.
Maitland, Willi Hartman had told me in the night-club, had been interested in the Red Army Faction. He began asking me questions about them. Then later I realised he was – how will we put it? – playing a kind of game with himself. He had a master plan, he told me once, about how to assassinate Moammar Gadhafi.
A counter-terrorist game, then? He fancied himself as an armchair counter-terrorist?
I think, yes. George was a very unusual man. Very intense.
The twin jets began moaning.
He was neurotic, Willi had said with sudden force. May I say that?
Helen hadn't objected. Oh, of course. Terribly so, terribly neurotic, yes. He fascinated me.
The olive-skinned girl in the mink coat was the last to board; she'd been sitting next to Klaus at the ice-hockey game, and Inge had said her name was Dolores. She was last to board, I think, because her little dog had been giving trouble, scared by the noise of the jets, and as she pulled it through the doorway by the leash I saw Dieter Klaus swing his head – 'I told you I didn't want that thing on the plane!' – and in the next second he was on his feet and the kick caught the dog in the flank and it went spinning through the doorway onto the tarmac with the leash whipping after it. 'Now shut that door!'
The stewardess stood frozen for a moment with her mouth in an O as she stared out at the dog; then she reached for the security lever and pulled the door shut and made it fast and came quickly along the aisle looking at no one, her face white. The dog wasn't yelping out there; from my window I could see that its neck was broken.
Would you please fasten your seat-belts, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to roll. Thank you.
No one was looking at anyone else. Helen sat with her head lowered, picking at her nails; the lacquer was already chipped. It couldn't, I thought, have been an easy decision to join George Maitland again when she found out he was still alive.
We listened to the exchange between the flight deck and the tower through the doorway as the wheels began rolling; then the stewardess came back and slid the door shut and sat down on the single rearward-facing seat with her head turned to the window, her eyes glistening. On the other side of the aisle I could see Khatami, the Iranian pilot, in a black bomber jacket and flying boots. He was sitting alone. His was the only face I'd seen when we'd come aboard that hadn't looked tight, nervous. On the contrary, he'd looked in a strange way exalted.
We got the green from the tower and the full thrust of the twin jets came on and the runway lights began flicking past the windows.
Blood from a butcher's shop, I suppose, or they'd cut a dog's throat to give the scene realism. But why had they gone to so much trouble: couldn't he have just disappeared?
Picking at her nails.
Terribly neurotic, yes. He fascinated me.
That alone could have been why she'd gone back to him, had stayed with him even though she'd seen what it would have to mean – being absorbed into Nemesis, living among people like these. Perhaps she was easily fascinated by people like George Maitland with his neurotic intensity, by the girls in the night-club, by anything or anyone illicit, by whatever dared to take its fill of the forbidden. It would be consistent with her character as far as I knew it, with her schoolgirl naivete.
When we'd reached our ceiling and the power levelled off I asked her quietly, 'Was it Kurt Muller?'
She turned her pale face to me. 'What did you say?'
'Was it Kurt Muller who told Klaus you were in Berlin?' He'd been the man who'd recognised her in the night-club, the one I'd asked her about in the taxi when we'd left there. She hadn't hesitated, or not for long. Oh, he was just someone I knew, a friend of George's at the embassy.
'I'm not sure,' she said. 'It could have been. I didn't ask.'
Muller must have been one of the few people who'd known that George Maitland was still alive,
and he'd phoned him that night, told him that he'd seen his wife, that she was here in Berlin.
'He didn't have to do that,' she said.
'Who?
'Dieter.'
Didn't have to kill the dog.
I said, 'You're running with the wrong set.'
How many hotels had Klaus phoned before he'd found her? He would have started with the big ones, so it wouldn't have taken him long. It must have put her into shock, a voice from the dead, his voice. But she'd gone to him, left her things behind, just walked out of the hotel and down the street and found a taxi once she was out of sight.
He fascinated me. Well yes, he must have, and still did. But there was something else she'd said. I've only just realised how much I hated him. But then hate is as close to love as laughter is to tears.
Five rows in front of us I could see Maitland and Klaus talking intently, their heads close. But I wasn't ready to believe that a neurotic embassy attache with a feverish sense of adventure had mounted a one-man counter-espionage crusade against an organisation the size of Nemesis and persuaded a former Stasi colonel to put his trust in him.
I hadn't been able to do it myself, not completely, I knew that now.
'Aren't you running,' Helen said in a moment, 'a terrible risk?
'It depends on what you tell them.'
She turned her head quickly to look at me. 'I won't tell them anything, of course.'
'Then the risk I'm running isn't all that high.'
Not absolutely true. Klaus had got the whole thing worked out and I hadn't been able to stop him because I'd had to stick with my cover and go with him to Algeria, to Dar-el-Beida. It was possible that he believed in me, but it didn't make any difference one way or the other. We believe in what we want the truth to be, ignoring the evidence that would raise doubts, deceiving ourselves, and Dieter Klaus desperately wanted the truth to be that I was a bona fide arms dealer and could provide him with a Miniver NK-9 nuclear warhead. But he was a seasoned Stasi officer and he'd covered himself: if I made the rendezvous in Algiers and the NK-9 was delivered he'd be as happy as a kid at a Christmas tree – I am very pleased, you know, that you have offered me this particular item at such a convenient time – I am delighted! – but if there was no delivery he wouldn't be taking any risk: he'd still go ahead with his operation and he wouldn't let me walk away with all the information I had on him now. He would simply have me silenced.