Quiller KGB
Page 19
Life had become refined and narrowed down, with the trivia of earlier ambitions stripped away and leaving the stark immediacy of the present. The world had shrunk to a few square inches of concrete where I stood, where this organism stood with its feet at the precise angle at which they could best sustain life, with its splayed fingers touching the mass of concrete behind its body for the purpose of tactile orientation but with the knowledge that any slight pressure on the wall would begin the mechanical process that would eventually extinguish life, as the body was tilted forward and poised at an angle above the void, an angle from which it could not now return, but from which it must tilt progressively forward until the feet lost the security of the ledge beneath them and followed the body as it began curving over with the weight of the head turning it in the air as it gathered speed and plunged directly to the earth below as the mind played out the drama of the occasion, first experiencing the swift onset of terror as the windrush moved through the hair and pressed against the eyes, the terror of annihilation, of obliteration as the details of the street grew larger and more defined as if seen through the zoom lens of a camera, and then, following the terror, the experience of rage, of rage against the gods, against the fates, bringing to the organism a semblance of identity after its loss in the helplessness of the terror, and then, following the rage, euphoria, easing all travail away and leaving in its place the onset of spiritual peace, of acceptance, of an understanding that would know nothing of the body’s gross concerns of physical death as the head hit the ground and the brains were smashed from the skull and the arms were flung out and the stillness came, the inertness, the mutation from creature to object, to chemicals, while Gust of wind Oh God Stay … stay … hold still …
Hold still, and fix the eyes on the window there, on the window across the street, so as to keep stillness in the mind through the eyes’ reference, hold still and wait it out, with the feet braced and pressing forward by infinite degrees until the shoulders feel the presence of the wall and all movement ceases and the wind’s sudden tugging dies away, dies away.
Cold sweat drenching the skin beneath the clothes, the eyes fixed on the building opposite, the ears picking up sound in the environment, a voice.
Somewhere below.
Below in the street. Look down.
A group of people on the pavement, one of them pointing upwards as others came, lifting their heads to stare.
One of them shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words. I looked upwards again, because they were so small, so far away, so far below.
Move, move again, we have to reach safety.
The feet shuffling, angled on the narrow ledge - we must make haste before they upset everything I’ve got to do, the people down there, they’ll call - yes, they have already called, I can hear the siren voicing in the night.
There’s a man trying to commit suicide.
Not really.
All patrols vicinity Bruderstrasse, man reported on ledge, seventh floor, the Airforce administration building.
But this is not convenient, good citizens.
I have plans, you see, and I don’t need help with them, so why don’t you mind your own bloody business and let me Steady.
There’s nothing you can do about it now, so But I wouldn’t have fallen, for Christ’s sake Possibly not. By no means certainly not, but possibly not.
Move, keep moving Not terribly wise, to hurry. You get another wind gust like the last one and Move, get going, there’s still time to find a safe place before they Actually no.
A fire engine, immense, with its sirens and bull-horns cutting out as it came to a halt below. That was all I saw because the movement and the colour was disturbing the visual equilibrium and that was dangerous. I heard men running and the moan of a winch-engine.
What were you doing on the ledge?
I was contemplating suicide, so forth, because there was nothing else I could say.
What’s your department, captain?
Not known, not known there.
Interrogation.
Finis.
I went on moving because I wasn’t far now from the corner of the building and there was a million-to-one chance of reaching the next wall if I could manage the right-angle turn, of reaching it and finding some kind of escape, a roof below where I could drop and break the fall and run, a million-to-one.
Oh, bullshit, you haven’t got a chance in hell.
Perfectly right.
Movement at the edge of the vision-field and I looked down as far as the next window below me on the building opposite and saw the reflection of the ladder.
The whole street was filled with noise by now and I suppose there was a crowd down there. The police radios would be busy: I could hear a chorus of three sirens loudening from the distance.
In a workers’ state, captain, attempted suicide is seen as anti-social and irresponsible. We All right, I’ll take over. He’s not known in that department. There’s more to this than attempted suicide. I’m taking him in for questioning.
Window behind me: I’d got almost as far as the corner, Gott straffe their bloody workers’ state and social expectations.
Wind gust and I braced against it, the nerves shocked again and the sweat coming chill on the skin, don’t move, hold still, you are not safe yet, you are not in safety.
I took in what I could without disturbing the equilibrium: the top of the ladder was still rising and from the reflections in the windows opposite I could see that a fireman had started climbing as the winch-motor moaned below. The sirens had neared and died short, cut off as the vehicles reached the scene; voices floated upwards as the crowd grew bigger. This was better than television, better even than the Western stations, though not so colourful of course; one man on a wall could hardly qualify for casting in Lives of the Rich and Famous, nothing so fancy.
No, sir, we’re taking him along for questioning; for one thing his police papers are false, so there’s a great deal we want to know. He was also found on the Airforce administration building.
The winch crew on the fire engine were very good: the top of the ladder was now leaning on the wall beside me and the fireman was only a few rungs below.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, but at last I’d got leverage and I grabbed the top rung and arched my spine and lowered my head and smashed my way backwards through the window behind me and pitched into the room.
Chapter 19
CHECKPOINT
Three rings.
Cone: ‘Yes?’
‘Liaison. I think I can get clear of the red sector, but I’m not sure. I’m phoning you to confirm Soviet Adviser A. V. Melnichenko’s involvement in Trumpeter. Listen carefully: he will be at Werneuchen Airforce Base when the target arrives. That clear?’
‘Yes. Where -‘
‘Yasolev will obviously recommend the target lands at Schonefeldt instead. I think we should treat Melnichenko as highly suspect and get London to put his name into the computer for background. Clear?’
‘Clear. Where are you now?’
Police car.
‘In the streets.’ I did not want support.
‘Then you’ll have to be careful. I had a call from Karl Bruger an hour ago and it looks as if Volper or someone else has blown you to the HUA.’
I think I flinched. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Bruger told me there’s an all-points bulletin out for your arrest for questioning, and they’ve got a photograph.’
It was probably one of the police cars that had been protecting the scene below the Airforce building. I watched it cross the intersection, heading away from the phone box.
‘How did they get the photograph?’
I have never felt so cold.
‘It could have been taken at any time with a telescopic lens. When you arrived in Berlin, or when you left the club at lunch time yesterday. Bruger says there’s hardly any grain and the light was sharp.’
‘I see.’
I was sorry for him, for Cone. The director in the field is meant to keep the executive in signals with London and to observe his progress through the mission and report on it and monitor feedback from the Bureau and pass on what he feels to be necessary; to love, cherish and act as nursemaid if the executive is beyond the ability to help himself, and to respond to an emergency by calling in whatever help he can from sleepers, agents-in-place and in extreme cases the intelligence chief-of-station at the British embassy.
The director in the field is not expected to inform the executive that he has been exposed to the host-country’s police forces and intelligence services, but that is what Cone had just had to do and I felt sorry for him.
The streets had been dangerous for me since I’d arrived in Berlin but only because of the opposition’s limited surveillance and hit teams. The streets were now the more dangerous to an infinite degree: the whole city had become a red sector.
Mr. Shepley?
Speaking.
We’ve just had to revise the signals board. The DIF reports the executive has become the subject of an APB and the Berlin police have been ordered to arrest him on sight for questioning.
On the board it would be expressed more briefly than that, with a red-and-white striped line underneath my name and the time the information came in. For an executive behind the Curtain it’s not uncommon to be the subject of an arrest-on-sight order during the last phases of a mission. It is not uncommon, but it is nonetheless hazardous in the extreme.
‘Is there anything,’ Cone asked me, ‘I can do?’
‘Yes. I’d feel easier if you could man that phone constantly until I can stabilise things.’
‘I’ll have my food sent in.’
‘If you’ve got to leave the phone, get Yasolev in. But he can’t signal London and we might need to do that, any time now. I don’t - ‘
‘I’ll be standing by without a break. Is there anything else?’
‘No. I’m going to ground and I’ll phone you when I’m there.’
Another police car, cruising slowly. I turned my back to the street.
‘I’d like,’ Cone said quietly, ‘to send you some support. I’ve got six men.’
‘Offer them my respects.’
I rang off and waited until the police car had crossed the intersection and then I walked into the alley and reached the next street and got into the BMW and for a moment sat doing nothing, thinking of nothing, letting the muscles go limp and feeling the mood deepening towards the alpha state, and the benison of not caring, not knowing, not being afraid.
Then after a little time I began thinking again, going over things carefully, assessing the damage, trying to plan the future. I didn’t know how many people there’d been in the Airforce building when I’d gone through the window. I’d heard shouting on the seventh floor and that had probably been Melnichenko and the other two as I ran for the emergency stairs and hit the walls at the corners on the way down and went through the door on the sixth floor and pressed the elevator button to delay pursuit and took the stairs again to the ground floor.
There were police code lights flashing outside the front entrance and some people in the lobby and I went back into the stairwell and opened the door to the street and found it clear. There was a window and I twisted round and took a look at my back; the leather coat had been slashed by the breaking glass up there but there was no blood and in East Berlin you can get by on the streets with worn clothing and not attract attention. I could feel some blood that had started from cuts on the nape of the neck but it was already clotting and I left it alone and pulled up the collar and started looking for a phone box on the way back to the car.
I’d left the BMW the prescribed distance from the work-scene - the Luftwaffe Building - three or four blocks. It’s dangerous to leave a car closer than that because if you think there’s going to be any problem about getting clear you’re going to do it on foot because the sound of a vehicle starting up will bring them running and if you leave the car near the scene without using it you won’t get back to it that easily: the police will normally set up a watch in the area and check any vehicle standing unattended.
The street was clear and I switched on the parking lights and got out and checked them front and rear. It wasn’t far to the safe-house but I could be stopped anywhere along the way by police for a dead bulb and that could be fatal.
The lights were all right and I got back in and started up and moved off and stopped again at the intersection until the signals went green but there was a police car standing in the middle of the road with its lights flashing when I tried to turn right, so I kept straight on and tried the next street but there was a barricade with an officer manning it and I kept on again and tried the next left and got through until the next intersection. Two Vopos and another barricade to the right and straight ahead, the officers waving their batons to show me the way I had to go.
By now the BMW was one of a dozen vehicles working through a maze - Bruderstrasse, Unterwasserstrasse, Spittelmarkt, Gertrstrasse - with the Airforce building as its centre.
The centre of the trap.
The night had been quiet; now it was loud with the sound of running engines and the shouts of the Vopos as they directed the swell of traffic into the net. I checked two alleys as I passed them but they both had a guard; the whole area was being sealed off and I stayed where I was, rolling the BMW forward a yard at a time between halts as the police PA system started up.
You will switch off your engines. Switch off your engines, please, and stay inside your vehicles.
I’d come full-circle and the Luftwaffe Building was directly ahead at the next intersection. Lights were flashing in front and behind me and green-uniformed police were taking up positions wherever there wits an exit from the street.
Switch off your engines, please.
Yes indeed, comrades, petrol is expensive at 20 marks a gallon and we don’t want to sit here in a cloud of asphyxiating bloody exhaust gas until you’re ready to check our papers and flash a torch in our face, do we, this is a trap, we don’t want to sit here choking on carbon-bloody-monoxide while you take your time turning over all the little minnows the net to find the one you want, do we, this is a trap I know.
We can’t get out.
I know.
You can’t show your papers Shuddup. Leave me alone.
Panicky little bastard, the rotten little harbinger of doom, won’t let you alone, this is a trap, I know it’s a trap so shuddup.
Stay where you are. Do not leave your vehicle.
I wouldn’t dream of it. Get out of this car and take one step and there’ll be a Vopo closing in, two or three of them closing in like sharks that’ve seen something in the water: I’m going to stay exactly where I am, comrades, sitting in my sweat.
Coloured lights flashing wherever you looked, lights reflected in the windscreens and the windows and the metalwork of the 280 SE in front of me, in the driving-mirror and the chrome strips along the dashboard, lights wherever you looked, but no sound now except for the movement of boots as the police deployed themselves and the trap was finally shut.
‘What are they doing?’
Girl with light hair and green eyeshadow and a red mouth, a cigarette in her small white fingers as she leaned out of the window of her Lancia alongside the BMW. I couldn’t see who was at the wheel.
‘It’s a police block.’
A look of surprise, ‘Well, yes, but I mean -‘
It’s a trap.
Shuddup.
Fireman.
A door opened somewhere behind me and a man got out and a Vopo moved in from the building. ‘You will stay in your vehicle, didn’t you hear?’
‘But what are you stopping us for?’
‘You are to stay in your vehicle.’
And you’d better get the message, Fritz my good friend, where the hell are you from, West Berlin or somewhere? You don’t question the police on this side of the Wall: they question you.
&n
bsp; Fireman, yes. This was an identity parade and every one of us would have to be cleared by the fireman somewhere up there at the end of the street, the only man who knew my face.
This is the one?
I think so.
Take a good look. Make sure.
Staring at me from the top of a ladder one minute, seventy feet in the air, staring at me in the street the next minute, in the middle of a horde of police. Life is a game, my friend, life is a cabaret.
And this is the man with no papers?
Yes, captain.
Then bring him along, two of you.
Thirty minutes, at an approximate estimation. Thirty minutes from now.
You will now leave your vehicles and form a single line. Please leave your vehicles.
Doors opening and slamming shut like a fusillade of shots along the street, the echoes bouncing from the buildings. The lights still flashing in the eerie silence that came down now, except for the shuffling of feet.
‘Are they searching them?’
A small man beside me suddenly, keeping his voice low; he was on his toes, trying to see the front of the line.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why not leave it in the car?’
He flicked a look at me. ‘If they’re searching us, they’ll search the cars too.’
Not the first time he’d been caught in a drug bust. But that wasn’t what it was.
It’s a trap.
I don’t need telling.
It had probably been Melnichenko who had started this. As a high-level member of the GRU he’d carry a lot of clout and he’d use it. He would have put two and two together when he’d found the window still open an inch and seen the fuss in the street: the man he’d seen later, running for the stairs, might have been in his office earlier and been surprised there. He would think immediately of the Trumpeter file and pick up a telephone very fast indeed. The file would still be there - he’d check on that - but he would want to know who’d been in his office and what they were looking for.