Borshin nodded.
“I wish he would stay the hell out of the way,” Cockburn said bitterly. The comment was unfounded and he knew it. He was just frustrated that the Russian had beaten him to it twice in a row.
Tansey-Williams looked up sharply, but the KGB man waved him back.
“If it’s any consolation, Quayle told him the same thing,” Borshin chuckled out loud.
“Perhaps some background here?” Tansey-Williams said. Clipping the end off a cigar and taking a taper from the mantle, he dipped it into the fire and held the flame up to the cigar, puffing strongly. Finally satisfied, he looked at Chloe and Cockburn. “General Borshin inherited a small team of people on a file they called Long Knives. We had Teddy Morton working on the same project without realising it. One day, the team is dead and the file is gone. Directorate Four put a man in as a defector. A top flight agent we had at the Midhurst House. He tempts us with a little titbit and ends up dead, the first in a string – and our files are gone too. Both teams at a dead end, except for Adrian Black’s enquiry. General Borshin puts a new man in to try and watch our progress. He thinks, maybe, we’ll stumble on something at our end…”
Cockburn interrupted, “Sorry, Sir Gordon, we are sure we’re after the same thing?”
“Little doubt of that,” Borshin said firmly.
“Then you’ve lost me. What has this to do with me?”
“Titus Quayle – who we inadvertently dragged back into this – is being hunted by the same group that we’re after. But Titus is Titus, and now he’s turning the tables on them. He came across three of them in Ireland and took out two more last night in Frankfurt. For the first time, there’s someone getting close and staying alive.”
Cockburn looked at Chloe with a raised eyebrow. “Kurt Eicheman,” she mimed.
He nodded and she rolled her eyes to the ceiling as Tansey-Williams kept on speaking.
“So you’re back here to fully understand the gravity of the situation. General Borshin is here with the approval, and on the suggestion of, Premier Gorbov – and was talking on the telephone this evening with Number 10. You are to team up with Alexi Kirov, the KGB man who found Quayle in Dublin, and work this one together. Find Quayle. See it finished as one.”
“Resources?” Cockburn asked.
“Just what you’ve got for now. You will understand why later.”
“I want a chap out of the BND, if you can swing it?”
“Reasons valid?”
“Very.”
“Who?” Tansey-Williams asked
“Kurt Eicheman. He’s Station Chief Frankfurt.”
Tansey-Williams harrumphed a bit. He hadn’t missed the significance of the city. “Keep it lean until you need muscle – then shout and I’ll get you the Royal Marines if you want ‘em...”
Borshin interrupted there with a dry smile, “I’ll go one better. I’ll get you a Spetznatz unit.”
Tansey-Williams glared at him with hooded eyes for a second and then continued, “Get straight out again. Stay away from any mainstream contact. Come straight through to me. Quicker that way.”
“Alexi Kirov is in Germany. Following your Mr Quayle,” Borshin said. “He’s waiting for you there.”
“One last question,” Cockburn said, leaning forward. “What the hell are we up against here?”
So Borshin began to speak.
*
“Move up three. Left, left on the roundabout…”
Up ahead, Quayle could see a motorcycle’s rear lights in the rain. The car, number three, would be coming up to take over from the bike who had shadowed now for six or seven kilometres. So far, so good. They were now on a much smaller provincial road – still two lanes each side, but with a preponderance of farm vehicles, trucks with produce heading into the towns and cities. Quayle thought they must be somewhere near Kitzingen or Ansbach but was unsure, so kept his eyes peeled for a road sign. He was now confident that his motley old team could tag the target all the way. They hadn’t put a foot wrong since the airport in Frankfurt two hours ago.
Up ahead, something was happening. The driver touched the brakes and, as he did so, the radio crackled into life. “Right turn right turn after the petrol station bottom of the hill. I’m overshooting…” As he said it, the car crossed the brow and began to descend.
Quayle looked across at the driver. “That must be a small access road.”
“Ja.”
“Right, let’s move up. Take over.”
The man’s foot hit the accelerator. Quayle looked into the back seat, where the taxi sign and wiring sat. They had pulled over for a minute, thirty kilometres back, and ripped the frame off the roof. Now, they were using a second configuration of lights – so that, from the front at night, it would look like a fresh car. He groped for and found the map, pulling it onto his lap.
“Where are we?” Quayle asked the driver.
“Mittelfranken. Ansbach is maybe six or seven kilometres that way,” he replied, jerking a thumb to the left.
The car began to slow. Up on the right, the petrol station lights appeared.
They took the bend fast.
“Don’t lose him,” Quayle warned as he looked back down at the map. He hated not knowing where they were.
Thirty seconds later, the driver cut his lights and brought the car to a halt on the road side in the dark.
“What?”
“There. Ahead. The turning with the sign. They went in there…”
Quayle threw the map on the floor, all thoughts geographical gone in an instant.
“Wait here. Lift the bonnet and mess around in the engine in case we’re being watched. Tell the others to wait up by the road. Don’t bunch up. I’ll be ten minutes. If I’m not back then take off. Leave someone at the petrol station to bring me back.”
“Ja.”
Quayle slid out of his door and doubled over, dropping into the deep ditch at the roadside. From here he began moving back up the road to find somewhere to cross, somewhere where he hoped whatever cameras were hidden out there would have a blind spot.
He waited two minutes for a passing truck to rattle by and, in its wake, darted across the road and into the trees. There he stopped. Taking his overcoat off and dropping it over a stump, he began to move down toward the gate, dressed only in a blue tracksuit and woolly hat. This was the bit he had always liked because here he was good, better than anyone he had ever seen. He moved fast and lightly on his feet like a forest animal.
Four minutes later, he was at the gate. Up in the trees he could see a small platform with three mounted cameras, one overlooking the gate and the other two aimed at the ten foot hurricane fencing that headed off in both directions. Crawling a few feet closer, he stopped below the big signboard and looked up. There was a company name he didn’t recognise, but down the bottom there was one he did. The small black letters said the company was part of the Munchen Dag AG Groupen.
Retracing his steps for forty yards, he moved back into the darkness of the trees, searching for a place to cross the fence. From its structure it didn’t look electrified – but there was enough trace wiring to suggest touch alarms. He was watching one sector when something moved in the trees above him and he saw the familiar shape of a squirrel scrabbling noisily in the branches. He smiled. If there was one, there were more – and that meant the alarms were constantly being set off.
He crossed a grassy strip, very close to the limit of what he thought was the cameras’ focus distance – and, praying that whoever manned the security monitors was asleep, he quickly but carefully climbed the fence and dropped onto the inside. Then he moved straight into the trees to meet the road a few hundred yards in.
The complex sat half a kilometre back from the main road. In the security lights it looked like a converted farm, with some newer prefabricated structures off to one side. As he watched, a four-wheel-drive with three men arrived at what was once the main house. From his hiding, Quayle saw them walk within, every last one of them dresse
d in the uniforms of security officers, with high peaked caps, side arms in holsters and big torches in their hands.
He moved closer.
There it was: the thing he’d come here for.
Alongside the main building, standing stark against the darkness, was the cream coloured Mercedes.
CHAPTER TEN
Quayle pulled the front of the balaclava down over his face and, still lying on the cold ground, began to shuffle forward on his elbows towards the side of the building. Muted strains of laughter carried across the gravel parking area from one of the low buildings and a bright shaft of light swept a short rectangular beam from an opened door. He paused, waiting for a set of crunching footsteps to pass on, and moved forward to the wall. Above him was a window. As he slid his left hand up, he could feel the dampness of the old bricks and the moss in the cracks.
Standing up slowly, he looked through the dirt streaked window.
Inside, a figure was walking down a hallway of some kind, carrying a huge tray on which sat covered dishes and bottles of beer. Quayle tried the window. It was locked. Moving backward, he looked toward the upper floor and the roof eaves above. There, a little further along, one of the windows was hanging open.
Like a burglar, he moved towards a drainpipe and began to climb. This was too good an opportunity to miss. The window opened into what had once been a bedroom, but was now being used to store boxes. After hauling himself through the window, he threaded his way to the door and stood listening for a full minute. The floor seemed quiet enough. Walking back toward the window, he undid the screws around the lock before closing it and then moving back toward the door.
Outside was a passage narrower than the hall below, the stairs at its far end. He slipped the small pack from his back and delved into it, producing a coil of what looked, on first impression, to be black rubber hose. Stretching it out, he lay it on the floor. It was a modified fibre optical device normally used for obstetric examinations by doctors, but intelligence operators had long ago discovered that it had other uses. Coupled to a re-chargeable battery pack, it threw full colour pictures onto a tiny two inch monitor. He connected the battery pack and plugged in both the endoscope and the listening device he had used in the apartment complex in Frankfurt, then moved back toward the door. Here he settled on his knees, the microphone on the floor, to listen to whatever was taking place below.
It was quiet, so he picked up the gear and moved carefully out into the corridor, the thick carpet soft beneath his feet. Bypassing the first door, holding the microphone out towards the second and hearing only silence in return, he slipped through the door of an office. Inside, a newish desk dominated the centre of the room and, against one wall, there was a second work station with a computer screen.
Quayle didn’t know much about computers – but he knew this was part of a bigger system. Somewhere on the complex was the hardware. What could they need a machine like this for? he wondered. Scooping up a sheaf of papers from the desk, and walking to the window to get the best out of the carpark lights below, he held them up. All that he saw were rows of figures and some business German about pork prices. Commodity by the kilo. Maybe this place really did produce pigs.
But pigs weren’t guarded by uniformed armed security.
Dropping the papers back where he had found them, he crossed to the wall, where the floor was bare, and once again went on his knees to listen. This time he heard voices. Pressing the record button, he put the system down and crossed to the door with the endoscope, pushing the fine head under the door so that he could see the comings and goings in the passage. When things went quiet, he would move downstairs.
He looked at his watch. It was just after 1am. He thought momentarily about his team of watchers waiting at the petrol station. For what he was paying them, they could wait. Settling back behind the desk, the headphones on his head, he listened carefully, occasionally adjusting the enhancer dial, his eyes narrowing as he tried to focus on what was being said.
It was just after three when he moved, cat like, down the short steep staircase and into the main room. He now knew what he was looking for.
By 4.30, he was back at the petrol station. As the taxi tag car pulled away for the return run into Frankfurt, a delivery truck pulled into the station and threw several bundles of newspapers towards the office door. Across the bottom of the front page, below the stories of East German policy changes – ‘Panzer Perestroika’ as one column called it – coal miner strikes in the Ukraine, and the resignation of the Bulgarian Party Chief, was a story about an armed assault and kidnap at a millionaire’s hide-away villa in Mallorca.
*
Kurt Eicheman was at his desk early that morning, sitting back reading the reports of a surveillance exercise on a small group of extreme left-wingers. This group was of interest because two of them were suspected of having links with the old Bader Meinhof group. Yet, try as he might, his mind was not on the file, and when the phone rang he snatched it up.
“Ja?”
“Kurt?” The voice was English.
“Who is this?” he asked. Very few people had his private number.
“Hugh Cockburn.”
Eicheman sat forward, putting the report down and creasing his brow. “Hugh! I have been expecting your call.”
“We need to meet.”
“I know. As a matter of fact, I had a call this morning…”
“I’m at the Hilton. Room 617.”
“I’ll be twenty minutes.”
The call had come at 4am, from Helmut Blucher himself. At the mention of his name, Kurt was wide awake in milliseconds. Blucher was Head of the BND, a measured stern old man, and often took his orders direct from the Chancellor’s office. He, in turn, ordered Kurt to hand over Frankfurt Station to his assistant until further notice, and lend all possible aid to the MI6 people without – repeat, without – involving unapproved BND resources. He was to consider himself on secondment.
Picking up his coat, Eicheman moved toward the door, looking at his watch. Quayle was due to contact the Bremen conduit between 8 and 9pm, so he had another hour at least. Things must have gone well because there were no reports coming through from the civilian police that could be linked. Two people dead after a domestic quarrel and a body in a foundry pond was the sum total of the night’s police activity, and as yet there had been no calls for a clean-up crew. But things could get tricky now, he thought. With Hugh here, there’s every chance it’s Titus he’s after.
He stopped in the lobby of the hotel, bought a paper and walked straight to the lifts, ignoring the front desk.
Hugh Cockburn answered the door.
“Hello, Kurt. Come in.” He pointed across the room to a stocky black girl sitting on one of the chairs by the television. “This is Chloe. She works for me.”
On the table beside her was what the services called a bug-alarm. It was a box of sophisticated electronics the size of a small portable Walkman that would sound an alarm if there was an audio bug within one hundred feet. They were extremely sensitive and the little red operational light shone reassuringly.
“Hello,” he said to Chloe. Then he turned back to Cockburn. “I believe you have something for me?”
“I do.” Cockburn handed over a sealed envelope. Eicheman slipped it open, quickly scanned the contents, and then slid it into his breast pocket. They were the confirmation of his orders. “Do you know why you’re here?” Cockburn asked.
Eicheman shook his head. “Not really.”
“Kurt, I have to find Titus Quayle, and find him fast. Now, I think you know where he is or how we can contact him…”
“What makes you think that?”
“Everything. You’re good friends. He would have contacted you, and you couldn’t possibly have said no.”
They looked at each other for a few seconds, each knowing better than to lie to the other.
“Look,” Kurt said, “just leave him to finish it. These people have had their own way long enough. They ju
st tried it on the wrong man this time.”
“Do you know who these people are?”
“That’s the problem,” Kurt replied. “No-one does.”
“Except Titus.”
“Not yet,” Kurt said firmly, “but he’s getting close.”
“Can you contact him?”
“Can’t you leave it alone, Hugh? Let him take these bastards. They’ve tried to kill him and his woman. Enough is enough.”
“They got her,” Cockburn said. “Here, look at this.”
He threw a paper across to Kurt – who began to read the story. Once he was finished, he dropped the paper Hugh had given him and took up the one he had bought in the lobby. The same story was there but on page two.
“We mean him no harm. You have my word of honour on that. Quite the contrary. I need his skills. I want these people as well, Kurt. That’s the job. Find Titus, get him back on service and take this organisation down.”
Kurt walked to the window and looked out over the grey damp city, shrouded in rain. It was quiet for a full minute before he spoke, his mind in a turmoil. For years he had protected sources: his cells, both guilty and innocent. Never. in all his time as an intelligence agent. had he ever betrayed a confidence.
But now the time had come.
“He’s here,” he said sadly. “In Germany.”
“Great!” Cockburn stepped forward eagerly. “Where? Can we contact him?”
Kurt turned and looked him in the eye. “He uses a conduit. All I can do is ask him to see you. The choice is his… and the way he’s been treated, I don’t like your chances.”
“How soon can we get word to him?”
“He’s due to phone in any minute.”
Cockburn brooded, inwardly. “Tell him there’s been a problem. In Mallorca. Tell him we’re on his side. Tell him... tell him to get a newspaper.”
Kurt bent and picked up the paper he had bought in the lobby, re-reading the story again. “She better be alright. Bastards,” he said bitterly. “I hope he kills the lot of them.”
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