by Adam Hall
I took a minute to think and then said, ‘You’ve got the wrong word.’
He’d used ‘krot’. ‘You don’t mean he’s a mole, Yasolev; you mean he’s an operator.’ Rabotnik. ‘So let me straighten it out a bit: you’re talking about a British operator buried in East Berlin and preparing some kind of a strike, and he’s being paid to do it, possibly by someone inside the Kremlin. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s his target, then?’
‘Comrade General-Secretary Gorbachev.’
Oh my God.
British.
Of course. They couldn’t risk using a Soviet.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ He was watching me steadily now, with the eyes of a man who had just thrown down four aces. ‘So you see, we felt that your department might agree that it would be in the best interests of the British government for you to help us.’
I didn’t show anything. In a moment I said, ‘No wonder you’re nervous, Yasolev.’
‘No more than you.’
‘I haven’t accepted the mission.’
He shrugged, kicking up the fibrous earth with the toe of his creased black shoe. ‘I hope you will.’
Hope on, then, comrade. Two heads on the block, Thatcher’s and Gorbachev’s, if that operator pulled off his assignment: Gorbachev’s because he was the target and Thatcher’s because if a British national hit the Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet her government wouldn’t last the night.
Not quite my cup of tea, but I suppose it was a compliment that Shepley had called me in and I’d been sent to this rendezvous to listen to Yasolev and check out the job, so I’d better do that.
‘What makes you think I can do what the HUA and the KGB combined can’t do?’
‘This man is British, and you have resources in London that we can’t tap. You might -‘ a hand shrugging ‘- how shall I say? You might pick up his trail from there.’
‘How much time have we got?’
‘Think of it as a short fuse, already burning.’
‘All right, so I could make a start over there and with a bit of luck pick up his trail and then move into Berlin for the kill, but what about you, Yasolev? Where would you be?’
‘In close support.’
‘You mean you’d be running me?’
‘We would be supporting you, as a free agent under our protection.’
‘We? The whole of the KGB?’
‘No.’ He took a step closer. ‘Just my immediate cell, inside the department.’
‘Your immediate cell?’
Quietly he said, ‘You must understand that inside the Kremlin there are factions opposed to the Comrade General-Secretary’s policy of perestroika. That is why he dismissed Yeltsin, the head of the Party, a week ago. Inside the KGB there are certain factions similarly opposed. ‘ Drily, ‘Internecine warfare along the corridors of power is not the exclusive prerogative of democratic governments.’
‘Jesus Christ, Yasolev, I wonder you can ever sleep at night. Is there any more tea in that thing?’
He got the thermos flask and poured me some. My feet were froze and the chill was creeping all the way up my spine because the more I heard about this thing the more it looked like a massive iceberg somewhere out there on the night-black sea, drifting towards us.
‘I will give you some time to think,’ Yasolev said. ‘Excuse me.’
He went across to pee against a tree while I stood there doing a lot of very fast thinking, holding the plastic cup of tea and taking small sips of it, burning my mouth, taking in its raw black essences with certain relish now because there was absolutely no question of letting myself get sucked into this kind of operation - it was strictly a five-star spectacular and I wasn’t qualified to take it on and if Shepley wanted that operator blown out of his basement he’d have to come over here and do it himself.
‘It’s not on,’ I told Yasolev when he came back. ‘But I’ve left some tea for you.’
He stood very still with his small brown eyes watching me from the shadows of his brow as if he’d suddenly found me holding a gun on him.
‘Tea?’
‘There’s some left. But I can’t take this thing on. It’s not my style.’
‘Style?’
It was only then that I knew he’d thought I was a certainty; that Shepley had told him I wouldn’t refuse. Or maybe he was just thinking like a KGB man and believed I had to obey orders, as he did.
‘Look,’ I told him, ‘it’s far too political, far too important. There’s too much in the running: if you don’t manage to put the skids under this operator, you’re going to lose your General-Secretary and we’re going to lose Thatcher and let those snivelling socialists back in to screw up the economy again. Listen, do you mean they’re planning an actual kill? Are we talking about attempted assassination?’
In a moment: ‘We don’t know.’
‘All right, even if this operation is aimed simply at getting Gorbachev out of office, then you’ve not only lost him as a leader but in my opinion we’ve all lost the biggest chance of genuine world peace we’ve had for the last fifty years, if the Americans can find a president like Nixon who can really get down to brass tacks at a summit meeting. So this is something I’m not even qualified to touch. Sorry.’
I thought he’d never answer.
‘It frightens you.’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Your Mr. Shepili believes you are the best agent for this.’
‘He’s not infallible.’
‘You’d say that, to his face?’
KGB thinking, yes.
‘Of course. But it’s not only the size of this thing, Yasolev. You want me to work with your people in close support. I couldn’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’d hamper my movements. It’d mean tagging, and not always in good light. I wouldn’t necessarily know who the tags were - yours or the opposition’s. That’s dangerous, could be fatal.’
I finished my tea and put the cup down onto the rough linen cloth and looked at my watch.
‘But of course we would have to put tags on you -‘ suddenly animated, his thick square hands coming out of his coat pockets and chopping at the air ‘- how else could we possibly work? We -‘
‘I work alone, unless I call people in. You’re -‘
‘Mr. Shepili would allow that?’
‘Of course. He -‘
‘But you would be working with us, the KGB.’
‘I know that.’
‘Perhaps -‘ on a sudden thought ‘- it’s this that frightens you?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Without reason.’ Hands chopping the air again.
‘Possibly.’
‘Then I do not understand you.’
‘And that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘We can’t even agree on basic principles, so what d’you think would happen if we tried to get through an entire mission together? Christ, it’d be like a dog fight.’
He didn’t leave it at that; I didn’t expect him to. We started walking, to keep our feet warm, in and out of the trees and down the slope and up again while Yasolev made his pitch and I countered when I had to, not wanting to leave him with nothing in his hands, because they’d made the approach, the KGB, or his department of the KGB, and we didn’t have any reason to turn them down without grace, without respect.
The normal trappings of a mission on foreign soil weren’t applicable: there’d be no need for courier lines or contacts or drops or a safe-house because Yasolev’s network would contain all those things; I’d be noted by the East German police and secret services as an agent to be left alone but given assistance if I asked for it, and that would be totally acceptable; but it would mean working the mission under the concerted scrutiny of those same organisations, a fly in a spotlight, and that was enough to chill the nerves of any agent even before the action got under way.
If I took this thing on I’d be one small alien
cog enmeshed in the machinery of the most powerful and most ruthless intelligence organisation in the world, and it could reverse its direction at any given stage of the mission and grind me into pulp if it suited its purposes. Let’s face it: that shot we’d heard earlier, deep in the trees, had triggered the image of a man going down because the last time I’d been fired on it had been by this man’s agents, less than a year ago.
It was two hours before he saw I meant it, and then he walked off along the top of the slope to isolate himself and do some thinking, and when he came back his face was expressionless and he just said: ‘Very well.’
Not quite that, exactly - the words he’d used were Horocho … Tak e buit. With a more fatalistic tone: So be it.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It could’ve been a whole lot of fun.’
I screwed the top back on the thermos flask and he pulled out his radio and told them he was escorting me to the checkpoint and we left the remains of our little picnic on the tree-stump and went down the slope to the road, and in the car I said, ‘But listen, Yasolev, you’ll have to find someone to do this for you. No one in their senses wants anything to happen to your man Gorbachev. It’s just that I can’t work like that, you understand?’
He ignored that, and sank into a brooding silence all the way to the checkpoint. His car had followed us up and he got out of mine and told the border guards the score and then leaned in to look at me with his eyes sunk deep under his brows and his hands still in his coat pockets and said with a tight mouth: ‘You undervalue your talent, you know, and that is very disappointing for us. For all of us.’
He slammed the door shut and stood away and we got rolling and when we were back in the West I leaned forward.
‘British Embassy, on Unter den Linden.’
By the time we got there I was starting to sweat and I showed my identity in the hall and took the stairs two at a time and went into the signals room without knocking and asked the man at the desk to put me on the scrambler to London through the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham. Time hadn’t meant anything when I’d been talking to Yasolev in the woods but I was in a hurry now because I’d had a chance to do some thinking on the drive to the checkpoint and the whole thing had come spinning round full-circle in my mind and I knew what I had to do.
‘Anyone specific, sir?’
‘What? No, main signals board. No, cancel that. Ask for Bureau One. Are you already on the scrambler?’
‘Yes. I’m trying them now.’
He pressed three more keys and I stood waiting with a cold skin and the heart-rate elevated: I could feel it under the rib cage. The thing was, the whole thing was that I’d been looking at this project as if it were just another mission and it wasn’t, it was not, and I suppose it had taken a bit of time to sink in. Either that or the subconscious had already made up its mind that we should keep well clear, and it had steered my conscious decision-making. Put it in English: I’d been shit-scared. All right, it was indeed the size of the thing that had rocked me back and it was certainly the idea of working with the KGB that had sent the nerves running for cover but I’d overlooked the obvious, the absolute.
I didn’t have any choice.
‘Main board, sir.’
‘Can’t you get Bureau One?’
‘I’ll ask them. Just telling you we’ve got through.’
Photos all over the wall of hang-gliders, I suppose that was his thing, picture of Diana, sign of the times, she was nudging the crown for wall-space in all the government offices I’d been in lately, you couldn’t wonder. For Christ’s sake hurry.
‘You’re on, sir. Bureau One.’ I took the phone from him
‘Ash.’
‘Oh, yes.’
His voice was just as quiet at the console.
‘I’ve just left him. I told him I couldn’t take it on, but I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want this one. I want it badly.’
‘Anyone would.’
‘Yes.’
Everything closing in.
‘How long ago did you leave him?’
‘Say fifteen minutes.’
‘Did he have a phone in his car?’
‘I don’t know. He came as far as Charlie in mine.’
I heard him turn away to speak to someone else, something about fully urgent. He’d have to contact Yasolev now, see if we still had a chance. The KGB wouldn’t necessarily want to work with someone who’d shown cold feet. I’d left Yasolev in a rage.
Everything closing in, the walls crowding me. I still didn’t know whether the Bureau was setting me up, using me for what I was worth, selling me the pitch that even a top shadow executive could go into a mission this big and bring it home. And I didn’t know whether the KGB was trying to use me too, Yasolev for the furtherance of his own career or the whole of his organisation for their own cryptic purposes. All I knew was that the temptation for me to go into this, the challenge, was enough to bring me in here and have me lay my neck on the block in the name of blind ambition.
But the blood was running cold.
‘What reason,’ Shepley came back, ‘did you give him?’
‘Too big, too political. And having to work by their rules.’
”That’s understandable.’
‘He didn’t think so. I left him furious.’
‘That’s understandable too. But I need this from you. Are you prepared to undertake the mission on their terms, if we can’t talk them down?’
Now is the chance, my friend, the last chance, if you want to say no and save yourself.
‘Yes. On whatever terms.’
Blood running cold.
‘Very well. I want you here on the first plane. There isn’t too much time.’
I gave the phone back to the man and stood doing nothing for a moment, letting the psyche centre if it could, while at the brink of consciousness I caught glimpses of the pretty coloured hang-gliders and the man watching me and then another face, Yasolev’s, and the faceless, nameless people in London who were prodding the new mission into life on their computers, getting the facts in order, November 3, 09:54 hours, signal from the Embassy, Berlin: the executive accepts the mission.
Running cold.
Chapter 4
DAISY
I can’t do that.
‘Why not?’
They know where I am.
Slater glanced up, looking for Croder, but couldn’t see him. He looked down again, leaning forward over the desk of the console, thinking. Slater was new at the signals boards. We always feel vulnerable, with someone new.
‘You mean you can’t get clear?’
No way.
The voice on the radio was steady enough, but I caught a tone of false nonchalance; probably the others did too. I’d spoken like that myself in the earlier missions; when you’re certain you can’t get clear and all you can do is let them come for you or pop the capsule, your voice sounds like this at the signals board in London, because your greatest fear of them all is of sounding scared.
‘Look,’ Slater said, ‘if we can do anything, we will. But - hold it a minute.’
Croder had come in and Slater told him the problem. Croder took over the microphone, his mechanical hand resting on the desk like a steel skeleton. ‘Stay precisely where you are and wait for dark. At some time before midnight you’ll get a signal from the embassy. If they can reach you, they will. If they can’t -‘ he broke off and there was dead silence in the signals room and I noticed Holmes swallowing ‘- then I shall trust in your own discretion.’
The Bureau can’t actually tell you to use the capsule; all they can do is to issue you one in Clearance when you go out. But if you’ve really got your back to the wall and there’s any major information inside your head the opposition could get out of you, then your ‘discretion’ is expected.
We didn’t find the contact. Instructions?
Different voice, different board. There were three in here. Slater’s had
Pineapple chalked at the top of the black Formica console; this one had Quarry. No one had told me what the code name for my own mission would be, but at this stage they were going from P to Q
‘Get hold of your director in the field. It’s his job. Ask for a new rendezvous. Weston’s ETA is 11:06 hours and you’ll have to be at the airport by then.’
Roger.
There was some morse beeping somewhere; we wouldn’t have anyone using it; it was just part of the slush. I saw Holmes turning away and pouring himself some more coffee, worried sick about the executive for Pineapple. He always worries, being more human, I suppose, than the rest of us.
Not that I was all that cool. I’d got on the first plane, according to instructions, and they’d shoved me into a police car at Heathrow and dumped me outside the building ten minutes ago and if I never hear another siren again I won’t complain: it’s not the most reassuring of noises.
She’s just a bloody whore.
Malone’s voice, you couldn’t mistake it. Costain, sitting at Peashooter, said briefly, ‘Explain.’
That word from a signaller means a bit more than it says. It means shut up and mind your language and give exact details, because one of the top Controls is in the room.
C-Charlie told me the silly bitch was a Venus trap for the militia but he was dead wrong. She’s just a tart. One thousand pesos and not even a good fuck.
It was no use telling Malone what the word ‘explain’ meant. He was furious; he hates wasting time in the field.
‘Tell C-Charlie to report. Where is he now?’
At field base. Now listen, I want new instructions.
The lights dimmed, flickered and came back on, less bright now. ‘Power cut,’ someone said. ‘It’s the storm.’
Most of the high-ceilinged room was almost dark; the consoles stood out like ships in harbour at night, lit overall. There were no windows here; this was the basement.
Two people were talking on the other side of Quarry, one of them Stapely, back from Sri Lanka with no injuries and mission completed in the record books. I didn’t know the other one. The auxiliary generators had started humming and Costain was talking to his ferret and Holmes was standing near Pineapple, brooding, when the door opened and Shepley came in and the atmosphere changed at once. Even Croder hadn’t got this kind of presence in the signals room. I’d never seen him here before, never known him control a mission personally.
