Quiller KGB

by Adam Hall

  But she looked shaken, deep inside all the mascara.

  ‘I’ll put it this way,’ I said. ‘Although I’ve no right to ask you any questions, the government feels that you’d want to avoid doing anything against your own country. Unwittingly.’

  ‘I do a great deal for my country, thanks. I’m quite a valuable British export, and wherever I take my group I get a lot of reaction. In Israel a month ago the fans broke through the police cordon and nearly overturned the limo. I might add that I donated twenty-five per cent of the proceeds to the survivors of the Holocaust. That’s bad for Britain?’

  ‘I’m sure we’re all very pleased.’

  ‘So what’s the gripe, Mr. Ash?’

  The phone rang but she didn’t move.

  ‘I believe you were a cultural exchange student in Moscow about three years ago, or am I wrong?’

  ‘Christ, I do wish you’d stick to the point.’

  The phone went on ringing.

  ‘The point is that if you have any Communist leanings we don’t want them to lead a very talented, charming and popular international artiste into any kind of deep water.’

  ‘Communist? Me? ‘

  ‘What do you think, for instance, of Mr. Gorbachev?’

  ‘I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a coincidence that you’ll be performing here during his visit?’

  ‘Maybe he planned it like that.’

  ‘Let’s try it the other way round,’ I said, ‘shall we?’

  The phone stopped ringing.

  ‘Look, I didn’t plan anything. I was invited here.’

  ‘By the City of East Berlin?’

  ‘Not straight off.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down too?’

  ‘I’m fine like I am.’

  And angry, and beginning to be scared.

  ‘Where did the invitation come from, then, initially?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly an invitation. I got a letter from the British embassy saying that if it’d interest me to bring The Cats here, they’d ask the authorities.’

  ‘The authorities in East Berlin?’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  ‘I just want to be sure I understand you. And who was it at the British Embassy who wrote to you?’

  ‘Mr. Pollock.’

  ‘Of course. He’s the cultural attaché, that’s right.’ I got up, and one of the stitches pulled. ‘That’s all I wanted to ask you, Miss Baxter.’

  ‘What have I said?’

  Very scared now.

  ‘You’ve been very cooperative, and you’ve set my mind at rest.’

  ‘You people are so bloody smooth, aren’t you?’

  I thought if I offered my hand she might have spat in it. ‘Let me wish you a very successful concert. The East Berliners are lucky to have you here.’ I went to the door, and she followed, step, step, step in that tiny silver skirt, her eyes bright.

  ‘Okay, Mr. Ash, I’m taking a risk, out here. But it’s going to be worth it.’

  I’d leave that one to Cone.

  ‘Then look after yourself. I mean that.’ I opened the door and found the KGB bodyguard outside.

  ‘Mr. Ash.’

  I looked back at her.

  ‘Will you be at the concert?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Try and make it.’ Eyes shining. ‘It’ll blow your mind.’

  ‘He knew very little.’ Yasolev’s eyes were sunk deep under the brows and he was pouring himself another shot of vodka.

  ‘He knew very little, or only said very little?’ I wasn’t on vodka but it wouldn’t have needed much for me to blow up in his face. It’d taken me close to ten hours to snatch whatever I could off the streets and it had been that man Dietrich and I’d handed him over to a KGB colonel with a reputation for squeezing blood out of a stone in an interrogation cell and all he’d come up with was close to zero.

  ‘He said very little, but I believe he would have said more if he had known it.’

  Bloody assumption, that was all.

  ‘What about the other man you snatched, the one on the bridge?’ Those nicotine-stained eyes of his had never looked at me with this much animosity before and I was warned. I’d come out here to run Quickstep for the KGB and Shepley would quite rightly blast me into Christendom if I provoked Yasolev into calling the whole thing off.

  ‘We had no better fortune.’

  A tone of icy control.

  ‘Interrogation,’ Cone said, looking at no one, ‘doesn’t carry a guarantee.’

  Pouring oil, so forth, perfectly right. Bureau One would blast him into Christendom too if we lost control.

  ‘Point taken.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  I liked his manners. ‘All right, Viktor, give us what you got.’

  I t was the first time I’d used his Christian name, waving a flag of truce.

  ‘Mr. Cone has sent it for analysis to London, and I have of course sent it to Moscow.’ I think some of the edge had come off his voice. ‘For what it’s worth.’ He knocked back the shot and absorbed its force. ‘He obliged me to use pressure. There was no time for sophisticated procedures.’ Hooding, love-hate, psychiatry.

  ‘The General-Secretary,’ Cone said, ‘arrives here in forty-eight hours, yes.’

  ‘Would you care for some vodka?’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll stick to tea.’

  A tilt of his head. ‘It was also clear that Dietrich didn’t have the confidence of Horst Volper. He said that he had only ever spoken to his master on the telephone, and that he spoke German with an English accent. Dietrich has no English. He was no more than a minion, like the man you questioned that night in the river, with as little success.’

  Touché.

  Cone stepped in. ‘How long did it take, with Dietrich?’

  ‘I think perhaps half an hour.’

  Mystery of dead man discovered in garage. Signs he may have been tortured.

  ‘The rest of what I have to tell you,’ Yasolev said, ‘is patched together from the scraps of information Dietrich was willing to part with. My feeling was that the little he gave me was true, that he has never met Horst Volper nor. heard of Trumpeter, and that Volper’s operation is aimed at the General-Secretary - as we already knew.’

  Cone put his tea-cup back on the tray. ‘You think he was talking about assassination?’

  ‘Whether he was talking about assassination or not, I am assuming an attempt will be made. From the information you have given me, it is Volper’s specialty. But you can imagine how I feel. I have reported to my department on the inherent risk to Comrade Gorbachev, and that would normally evoke immediate and urgent concern.’ A bitter shrug. ‘But the visit is not to be cancelled. The General-Secretary’s meeting with President Honecker is apparently considered vital. What more can I do?’

  ‘But they’ll strengthen the guard.’

  His eyes flicked to mine. ‘But of course. And we shall request the HUA to do the same. But this is Gorbachev. We must not lose him. He is … precious.’

  It was extraordinary how much charisma this new man of theirs possessed. People had gone crazy about him in London and Washington and here was a KGB man getting emotional. Of course he was right: no one could afford to lose this totally different breed of Soviet leader.

  ‘We’ll have to do what we can,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think -‘ he took a step nearer ‘- do you think that the man Volper has any chance of succeeding?’

  Oh God what a question. The answer was even worse. ‘Yes.’

  ‘A chance,’ Cone said. ‘Let’s not put it at much more than that.’

  ‘You are not optimistic.’ Yasolev looked as if we’d thrust a knife in him.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘We know that Horst Volper specialises in assassination and we know that he’s here in Berlin and we know who the target is. He hasn’t got a reputation for failing. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t rely on doubling the guard round the General-S
ecretary. We’ve got to pick up someone much closer to Volper than these minions. They’ve been given the job of wiping me out because he thinks I’m a risk and he’s damned right - but they don’t know anything. We still need information.’

  ‘How do we get it?’

  ‘Tonight,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to have a look round Room 60 in the Airforce Administration building.’ I turned to Cone. ‘You filled him in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will give you support,’ Yasolev said, and I swung on him.

  ‘Viktor, if I see one of your people in the field again I’m going to pack my bags - now is that clear?’

  ‘I gave no instructions to have you followed last night. My agents were following only the tags, in the hope of seizing one. Which we did. We -‘

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, I really don’t know how to convince you.’ In English: ‘Cone, I’m going to leave you to work on him. I do not want the field cluttered tonight and he’s got to understand that.’

  ‘Do what I can.’

  ‘All right. And listen -‘ I switched back to Russian ‘- I’d put someone reliable on Cat Baxter, if I were you, in fact two or three people. Talk to her yourself if she’ll see you.’

  ‘What did you get out of her?’

  I checked the time. ‘I’ll have to report on it later because I’ve got to get into the Airforce building before they close the doors at five. But in brief I think she’s playing with fire and it could be some kind of demonstration she’s thinking of putting on because Gorbachev’s going to be here. We’re sitting on dynamite and we can do without some little jumped-up Joan of Arc throwing matches around.’

  This was at 4:13 in the afternoon and at 4:46 I walked into the Airforce administration building in Bruderstrasse and showed my police card to the man at the desk and went across to the elevators and started work.

  Chapter 17

  ROOM 60

  He was watching me.

  The ideal scenario when you go into a building to search one of the offices is that everyone leaves by five o’clock and the doors are shut and there’s only the janitor in the basement and you come out of the cleaners’ cupboard and start work, but on this particular night there were still some people in the building at six o’clock and it occurred to me that since this was a military administration headquarters they might run a night shift.

  Or at least he seemed to be watching me - it wasn’t easy to tell. The whole place was a honeycomb of glass and brushed aluminum panels and wherever you looked there were reflections.

  I didn’t move.

  I was sitting in Room 60 and the name of the man who worked here was on the plate outside the door: A. V. Melnichenko, Soviet Adviser to the Directorate. I didn’t know what he looked like. If he looked anything like me at a distance of fifty feet through a series of windows and their angled reflections it might go well: here was Comrade Melnichenko, Soviet Adviser to the Directorate, still sitting at his desk and catching up on his work. But if he didn’t look like me, and I started moving about and opening drawers and going through the filing cabinets it wouldn’t go well at all: that man at the desk in the office across the corner would be in here to ask who I was and what I was doing, and a captain of the HUA had no right in this place because the military took precedence, and even if I said I was here on some kind of liaison work I’d have to name the officer in the Airforce administration who’d allowed me in here.

  In addition to which, this was the office of the Soviet Adviser, and he would be no lightweight: he would be a member of the GRU.

  The man across the corridor wasn’t in uniform; nor were the others I could see in the more distant offices. My camouflage was thus in order: I’d put on a dark suit and tie, and this at least gave me a chance. And he was on the telephone, the man who seemed to be watching me, and when we’re on the telephone we tend to stare at things without really seeing them. On the other hand he might have noticed me after he’d started talking, and might have decided to wait until he’d finished before he came across the corridor to find out who I was.

  I suppose it sounds like a harmless intellectual exercise but if that’s what you think then you’re dead wrong. I’d only been in here five minutes when that man had walked out of the elevator and gone into his office and switched the lights on and sat down at his desk; and when he’d looked up he’d seen me through the glass panels and there hadn’t been time for me to drop out of sight and in any case that might have been a mistake because once out of sight I couldn’t suddenly appear from nowhere.

  The thing is that if anyone came in here and asked who I was it wouldn’t be easy, because the military don’t get on with the civilian intelligence departments or the secret police and the least they’d do would be to ask me to show my identity card and they’d check on it by phone and find it was false.

  Yasolev: The HUA are on no account to know that you are liaising with the KGB.

  Someone came out of an office halfway along the corridor and went into the one where the man was at the phone and he looked up and shielded the mouthpiece and this was when he would ask his visitor to go across and check on that man sitting at Comrade Melnichenko’s desk, if he were interested.

  I waited.

  The only man I could call on in the HUA was Captain Karl Bruger, if I had to get out of a sticky situation, and he might not be available or he might have had instructions to deny knowledge of me and I couldn’t even call the Soviet ambassador because that would expose the KGB connection and if I blew Yasolev I could blow Quickstep.

  Waited.

  It wasn’t cold in here but I felt the chill. I could possibly get away from the police escort if they tried to take me along for interrogation but they’d know my face again and there’d be an all-points bulletin put out immediately and I’d have to go to ground and stay there, and I had a very definite intuition that even if Yasolev panicked his chief directorate into sending the KGB into East Berlin en masse to escort General-Secretary Gorbachev when he arrived in less than forty-eight hours they wouldn’t be able to protect him.

  Horst Volper was a professional and he was a specialist and he was believed to be here in this city with the single intention of assassinating Gorbachev and he would expect his target to be heavily escorted and protected, as at all times on foreign soil, and he would make his plans accordingly. The only way to protect the General-Secretary was by finding Volper and incapacitating him.

  Incapacitating, Jesus, I was as bad as those snotty-nosed scribes stuck up there in their stuffy little offices in London - killing, yes, we have to kill Volper, get him out of society’s way.

  ‘The man at the telephone was still talking to the other one who’d gone into his office and his hand was still blocking the mouthpiece and I still didn’t move and it had started to be a test of the nerves, and the sweat was making my scalp itch and I couldn’t scratch it, the immobility of my right leg was bringing on cramp and I couldn’t move it, well either tell him to come and see who I am or don’t.

  It was as if he’d heard. He nodded and took his hand away from the mouthpiece and started talking into the telephone again and the other man went out of the office and shut the door and came along the passage with two of his ghostlike reflections moving together across the windows and merging as he got to the corner and turned in this direction, looking down at something in his hand, looking up again and not stopping, not going into any of the other rooms, coming straight on and turning his head to look at me through the glass until he reached the door and opened it.

  ‘Where’s Melnichenko?’

  ‘He said he’d be back shortly.’

  Looked at the folder in his hand. ‘I’d like a word with him.’

  ‘I’ll tell him that.’

  A nod, turning to go, turning back. ‘Have I seen you before?’

  ‘Not unless you’ve ever visited the Commandant at GRU Headquarters in Moscow.’

  Head went back an inch and he opened his mouth but didn’t seem to know quit
e what to say, went out.

  I’d spoken German with a Russian accent to make the whole thing plausible but it had been very close and if anyone else came in here they might not be so impressed.

  Sitting here like a fish in a bowl and I hadn’t expected it, wasn’t ready for it. Question of choice at this stage: get out of here and don’t stop moving until I hit the street, or stay where I am and ransack this room and risk exposure at any minute. Question of urgency, too: Lena Pabst had said there was a file on Trumpeter in this room, so I was infinitely closer than I’d ever been to finding Volper or blowing his operation. Urgent, then, that I should stay here and take the risk of blowing Quickstep first.

  There was also the temptation of picking up the phone and calling Cone.

  I’m in a red sector and if I can’t get out of it you should be informed that the man who works in Room 60 is A. V. Melnichenko, Soviet Adviser to the Directorate, presumably GRU.

  It would then be up to Cone to work out why the file on Trumpeter was in the safekeeping of an officer of the GRU. Two possibilities: the GRU was simply watching the operation and waiting to blow it up, or Trumpeter had nothing to do with Horst Volper.

  I opened the top left drawer while the last thought went through the processing stage; then it came back very fast indeed. Play it again:

  ‘Trumpeter had nothing to do with Horst Volper.

  Nothing to do with the assassination.

  Then what was it to do with? Something of major importance, because soon after Lena Pabst had started infiltrating it she’d been found shot dead.

  No question now: pick up the phone.

  While I waited for the, ringing tone I watched one of the reflections of the man in the office over there; he wasn’t interested in me: he’d put the phone down and was writing.

  Five rings.

  Eight.

  Someone came into reflection from the direction of the elevator and his images merged and then split apart again. I watched him.

  At the tenth ring I pressed the contact down and waited and let it up again. Dialling tone.

  He was coming in this direction and I closed the top left drawer.