by Adam Hall
Cold. By Christ it was cold standing here at this bloody telephone, the air coming in waves from the freezing river. But that wasn’t the worst of it; the worst was the chill of horror creeping through the nerves. Not horror, quite - revulsion, a feeling not coming from the brain stem but the neocortex, philosophical, sophisticated; an awareness of the difference between driving myself to the brink of extinction on my own responsibility and being driven there by someone else, Yasolev, as a matter of cold-blooded expedience.
‘You’ve got a point,’ I said, ‘but if that’s what Yasolev is doing he should have put it to me first and asked for my approval instead of breaking our contract. Tell him that. Tell him my life’s on the line and not his. And tell him that if he wants to use me as a pawn across the board he’s got the wrong man and he’ll have to get another one for Quickstep - if he can.’
Silence for a while, except for scratchy background on the line. The tag on the other side of the intersection wasn’t alone anymore.
‘Understood,’ Cone said at last. ‘But I’ve got a question. What are you going to do now?’
‘Keep going. I’ve got them in the zone and there’s still a chance of bringing one of them down.’
‘Keep in touch,’ he said, and rang off.
It was past ten o’clock when they tried again.
Earlier, I was hungry, and had some potato soup in a place in Baum-Schulenweg further down the river. Earlier, I was cold and afraid, and went into a library for warmth, to experience the feeling of air that didn’t paralyse the face, and to experience the atmosphere of the social norm, wherein ordinary people sat reading books or the papers, instead of seeing a movie, or instead of walking the streets from shadow to shadow, cold and afraid.
By ten o’clock I’d gone from Treptower Park to Konigsheide and north again to Baum-Schulenweg, waiting for twenty minutes in a U-bahnhof and checking my watch, making it seem that I was so desperate for the rendezvous that I was taking risks, making three phone calls and speaking the correct lines from the scenario because an efficiently-trained tag is taught to lip-read.
I still can’t throw them off, so forth, I’ll make contact when I can.
And now I was in a crowd outside a bowling-alley, huddling among the people for warmth and company and the chance of a close encounter that could give me what I wanted: information.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think there’s room for fifty but they’re short of bowls.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised. They’re always short of something.’ A man in a leather jacket ripped at the shoulder, his hands dug into his pockets to keep them warm.
‘They should either let us in or tell us how long we’ve got to wait.’ A thin girl half-buried in her boyfriend’s arms, her nose raw from rubbing with a handkerchief.
Another bus stopped and people got off, some of them joining us, blowing into their hands, jogging up and down on the cold pavement.
‘Can’t get in?’
‘They said they’re short of equipment.’
‘Then why don’t they - ‘
I didn’t hear any more because someone had moved against me and I brought an elbow down on that side and paralysed his wrist but the knife had already gone in and I could feel the warmth oozing under my clothes. Minimal pain because the shock had brought the endorphins flooding to the site.
I hadn’t expected a knife in a crowd because it’d be difficult for anyone to get clear but he’d taken the chance and we were still close together - he was in a half-crouch because of the pain in the smashed wrist-bone and the knife was on the ground. He came up at me and I’d been waiting for it and I dropped him with a jab to the carotid nerve and he sank down again with his knees folding and I began easing my way out because there was no chance of getting him away for questioning - the others would be too close.
‘What are you -‘
‘Pickpocket - he’s a - ‘
‘Is it a heart attack?’
‘Tried to pick my pocket!’
‘I think he’s ill - ‘
‘I’ll get an ambulance - ‘
‘Look, there’s a knife - ‘
Everyone fussing and it kept them busy and I got to the edge of the crowd and kept walking, pain creeping into the nerves on my right side he’d gone for the liver and it could have been penetrated for all I could tell because the effects wouldn’t be immediate, just a feeling of violation for the moment, dark physical mischief: I never see action with a blade of any kind without thinking of Macbeth and his mad frenzied thrusts in the lamplit chamber because a knife is so very personal, so very intimate, a feeling of violation, then, as I walked to the corner and turned, keeping to shadow, a hand pressed to my right side, how sordid, if this were going to be the last of this lone ferret, a knife-wound received in a crowd outside a bowling-alley on a dirty winter night, felled by a chance hit and not even ready for it, shadow down, and how ignobly, but what do you expect in this trade, for Christ’s make, a volley of grapeshot as you stand with breast bared beneath the tattered banner at the barricades with time for the utterance of your famous last words?
In this game you get what you pay for and life’s cheap.
Not oozing any more, or I wasn’t aware of it, was perhaps getting used to it, the slow letting of blood. It was venous, not arterial, otherwise I’d have been soaked by now and weakening. I tried to walk as upright as I could because they might not have been near enough, the others, to know what had happened, but they’d catch on soon enough if I looked winged and then they’d make a rush to finish me off while I couldn’t defend myself, though they’d be wrong there, my good friend, you will kindly refrain from composing my bloody epitaph while I’m still on my feet, and if you’ve ever tried chewing on a turkey’s gizzard you’ll know what I mean.
Narrower streets, these, running off Treptower Park, with the Wall half a mile away, less than that, a floodlit concrete dam strong in the night, strong enough to hold back the flow of humanity that would otherwise surge to meet its kind. If only someone would blast a hole in that bloody thing and let the world get on with its business, no one behind me when I turned a corner and looked back, no one, and that was a worry because there was no reason for them to leave my tracks; even if I’d gone for the throat instead of the carotid and dropped him to a quick death they wouldn’t have gone near him: casualties were to be expected on this busy night.
A patch of waste-ground with a big rubbish bin against a rotting fence, and I moved into its shadow and sat on the frosty dirt and made a wad of my handkerchief and opened my coat and pulled up my sweater and put the wad over the wound in my side and held it there until it stuck to the blood; I wouldn’t see much if I tried to look: a wound is a wound and if it looked big enough to need medical attention it’d have to wait in any case until this night’s work was done.
I still couldn’t see them anywhere near; in the sour light from the street lamps here I would have picked out movement but there wasn’t any. I was alone.
I was alone and one of two things must have happened: either I’d put too much power behind the half-fist when I’d gone for that man’s carotid nerve and he’d never got up again and they’d decided that two dead in the field was enough, or Yasolev had ordered another of them snatched and they’d been called off, which was exactly what I’d warned Cone could happen, Gott strafe them, this was a solo operation and I didn’t want any interference.
It was half-past ten and I moved from the shadow of the rubbish bin and crossed the street and found cover at the corner of Richterstrasse and checked the environment and it was blank, still blank. But the light was tricky because at some time or other there’d been a spate of escape attempts in this area and I was within a couple of hundred yards of the Wall and the searchlight they’d installed there was sweeping the ground and flickering across the buildings and the gaps between them with the intermittent effect of a strobe.
There was a parking area with twenty or thirty vehicles in it, all of the same type sta
nding in rows, the nearest one with a crest on it, City of Berlin, street maintenance department. I moved between them and then stopped and checked the environment for the last time to make certain.
Flying glass and I dropped flat.
Chapter 14
RUN
Headlamp.
The spotlight swept the ground, the vehicles. I didn’t move, lay flat. I was in shadow.
The shot had gone into a headlamp close to where I’d been moving and there was blood on my face from the flying glass.
A rifle, nothing smaller; a long-distance shot that hadn’t made any noise. He was using a silencer.
The tags had been called off and this was why. For the whole of the long afternoon they’d kept me in sight and waited for the right time and the right place, which was here, which was now. The two attempts to kill me had been made on impulse, a chance taken on the wing in the hope of an easy kill and the kudos it would bring. But this had been the predetermined operation and now it had begun.
The smell of oil as I lay with my face close to the ground over a patch of crankcase droppings. Very little sound; no traffic; there was no checkpoint here, nothing between Oberbaumbrucke to the north and Sonnen Allee to the south. A wash of reflected light came from the concrete sweep of the Wall itself but the rotating beam was infinitely more intense and the shadows between the vehicles in the parking area were black in contrast.
It wouldn’t have been a single attempt. He would run through a whole ammunition-belt if he had to. He wouldn’t have to; it would be a question of time, of number, the number of shots required.
He’d be in no hurry; he had from now until dawn. But he wouldn’t of course be alone; there’d be others in the environment, stationed strategically so that I couldn’t make a headlong run for it and with luck survive. I couldn’t see them from where I lay. All I could see were wheels to the right of this position, dark rounded blobs below the vehicle that sheltered me. On my left there were the others in orderly rows, parked for the night. More of them were ahead of me, and beyond them the lights of a street. Behind me there was another street but I was cut off from that; the sniper was in that direction, posted on a height of some sort, in the window of a building or on a fire-escape. He would be comfortable; he would take his time.
And I would take mine.
The air was perfectly still and very cold. Sounds would carry clearly when they came. There’d be no change in the light value unless traffic passed along the street behind me or the street on the far side; the glow of the Wall was constant and so was the intensity of the rotating beam. I suppose it was cheaper than putting up a whole battery of spotlights; and there was a sinister aspect to this constantly moving finger that brought everything it touched into fierce relief. Its purpose was to deter.
Cone:
Yasolev’s going to ask you how you’ll be planning your access to Volper. Will you tell him?
No.
Do you know?
Yes.
Are you prepared to tell me?
You wouldn’t like it.
How much protection are you going to need?
None.
My job is to get you through Quickstep with a whole skin. I’d rather you didn’t make it difficult for me.
Look, it’s out of our hands. Put it this way: they went for Scarsdale and they got him. They thought it’d warn me off but it didn’t, so now they’ll go for me. And that’s the only access we’ve got, and I’m going to use it. Don’t worry, they won’t be long.
That had been four days ago, and this night would be the last.
Impact and I jerked my head and listened to the ricochet as the shell ripped through the metalwork of the vehicle in front of me and skated across the ground under dying momentum. It was a heavy projectile, I would say from a carbine or magnum with anything up to twelve shots in the magazine and fitted with a high-magnification night scope and silencer. It wouldn’t be expected to drive a hole in a human skull; it would blow it apart.
There was no smell of the gun. It could be a quarter of a mile away. I closed my eyes and let the scene come in as it would look from the sniper’s position: a rectangular area of flat tarmacadam dotted with dominoes, regularly spaced, with the shadows of the swinging light shifting constantly at precise intervals. And within this circumscribed pattern, a man.
A man for the moment motionless. To lie here until dawn was a temptation, to lie here and use the dark hours to review my life so as to leave it with a feeling of something accomplished, not a lot but something. But I would also have to review the mistakes I’d made, the instances of gross incompetence incurred by pride or too much faith in the self’s abilities, and the unwitting betrayals, the lapses in manners, in loyalty, in the concession to mercy when its need cried out. And that, my good friend, could not be countenanced; it would not look well in the reckoning. Besides which, I wasn’t going to give up after the first two shots, or after the first two hundred if he’d got that many. One must be true to one’s principles, so forth, but the terror was on me and I could smell it as the cold sweat broke out: it’s not the thought of death that makes us afraid, you know, it’s the thought of dying, of reaching the point of no return, of being too late; everything in life has always been reversible, hasn’t it, or tolerable, manageable - there’s always been time left in which to put one’s house in order, to clean up the worst of the mess and say you’re sorry; and then suddenly we’re caught in the headlights, frozen in mid-stride, and there’s nowhere to go any more except there, into the unknown.
Finis.
Exactly, my good friend.
Impact and the breath came out of my body as if the shell had blown it out. But it hadn’t; it had crashed into the side window of the vehicle where I was sheltering, and the fragments fluted through the air in a dying chorus of notes as the vehicle moved on its springs by a degree and was still again.
Amusing himself.
The rotating light swung, sending the shadows of the vehicles’ shifting from left to right in a circling crossword puzzle. He was amusing himself: I hadn’t moved and he knew where I was but he couldn’t reach this side of the vehicle unless he changed his position and he didn’t want to do that; he was too comfortable, too well-placed. So he’d fired another shot to keep his eye in, to keep his eye in and to put the fear of Christ in me because the impact of a shell that size in the silence of the night is enough to shatter the nerves.
I lay flat, relaxing, trying to shift into alpha waves if only for a few seconds because the sound of the bullet was still reverberating through the system. It hadn’t been loud but it had been sudden, and had expressed appalling power, enough power to fell an ox on the hoof. Relax, and let the body sink against the cold tarmac, the cheek resting on the back of the hand, the nose filling with the crude, heavy reek of engine oil. In a moment I would have to move; all through the night I would have to move and go on moving if I could, if one of those shells - the fifth or the tenth or the fifteenth - didn’t blow apart the delicate array of intelligence inside the skull.
Alpha, and the sense of letting go, of the slackening of the nerves to the point of ephemeral euphoria, until confidence came back like a lost friend and touched my hand; and then I moved, crawling over the ground and underneath the vehicle, finding the crankcase and wiping my hands across the underside and smearing the blackened oil on my face and the back of my hands, doing it carefully, attending to the eyelids and the lobes of the ears. I couldn’t tell if it were going to be enough and I wouldn’t be taking it for granted: I’d use more oil from the next vehicle if I ever reached it.
My suit and sweater were dark and my shoes black, but I took off my watch and pushed it into a pocket. Then I began crawling again, pulling my body forward across the ground, flat as a lizard, until I was lying in front of the vehicle on the blind side to the sniper’s eye.
And waited.
I couldn’t try to go back to the street behind me because it’d mean moving straight into his line of fire. T
here were buildings on each side of the car-park and they offered no shelter because they were fully exposed. The only place I could try to reach was the street in front of me, more than a hundred yards away, and the only hope I had of doing It was by moving from the shelter of one vehicle to the next and using their moving shadows for visual cover as the rotating light swept the area. It amounted to a suicide run but there was no choice.
I began counting.
The first move was going to be the most difficult to make; not difficult In terms of timing and distance because the vehicles were in orderly rows and equally spaced, but difficult in terms of willpower. Later there’d be the factor of familiarity as an aid, on the principle that the more you do something the easier it gets, but as I lay waiting I couldn’t be certain that I wouldn’t get halfway to the next vehicle and lose faith and stumble and go down and offer a motionless target that he’d see the moment the light swung across my prone body.
Three, four.
Counting.
The light swung, spreading the black-and-white crossword in front of me.
The only sound was of traffic to the northeast along Treptower Park. To the west there was the deep silence of the Wall, where nothing moved but the guards, who made no sound.
Five, six.
It had taken the light six seconds to sweep from this vehicle to the next and that was the amount of time I had available to make the crossing and it would have to be done at a fast run so I pulled my shoes off, reverting to the primitive animal in order to deal with this primitive situation: the need to survive. Without shoes I could run faster and although they were black they were polished leather and could pick up light, barely a glimmer but possibly all he’d need, the sniper, to pick me out of the dark.
Waiting.
The next vehicle wasn’t immediately in front; there was one each side of the gap between them and I chose the one to the left because the right leg is stronger in the right-handed and it would give me extra thrust as I pushed off, by however small a degree.
