by Adam Hall
Get it, Heiner!
Don’t move!
Clang of a metal bar, maybe a tyre-iron, as one of the rats leapt and vanished in the half-dark.
Another ten minutes and a truck started up at the front of the row and moved off, the sound of its diesel drumming within the walls of the yard, the gas from its exhaust creeping across the ground.
There was only one man now, the one from the BMW that stood fifty feet away near a fire hydrant. He was moving towards the area where I was lying, checking the trucks for the second time. He would be my last chance for making the switch, and it worried me.
There was no other vehicle in sight and even if there had been it would have been locked and although I could smash a window and get in, the key would almost certainly not be there and I wouldn’t have time to hot-wire the ignition and take up station behind the BMW.
The BMW was the only car I could use, and if this man were the last of the hit-team left in the area I wouldn’t have to follow him anyway. I would have to take him with me.
He was coming along the nearest row between the trucks and the platform and was within thirty feet of me. I got a glimpse of him now and then between the slats but his face was strange; he wasn’t one of the tags who’d been with me through the streets the day before. A blunt face with short black hair, worn leather jacket, not a big man but strong, wide-shouldered, thick at the wrist. He was ducking to look under the trucks now, then turning and looking under the platform.
There was deep shadow here, the flat white light of the street lamps blanked off by the trucks, but he would see me if he looked under the platform and was close enough.
If I couldn’t do the switch there was only one option left to me. It was something I have never done before in any mission, on principle and because the Bureau disallows it, but I believed as I lay there among the mess of broken crates and beer cans that I would have to do it now.
Not now, later. But prepare it now.
Paul, can you shift up a couple of metres?
What for?
I’ve got to let the tailboard down.
Half a jiff.
Another truck was moving off at the end of the row behind me and a crate dropped off the platform and split open, spilling green apples. Paul’s truck started up, and the huge twin wheels rolled as the man, the man with the blunt face, stood back. Small flat-beds and vans had started coming in from the street as the shopkeepers arrived to load up. Engines were running everywhere in the crowded yard, and the air was thick with carbon monoxide.
All right, that’ll do it!
A tailboard slammed down against the rubber stops. The man was close now, two or three metres away.
Heinrich! Where’s Veidt?
Haven’t seen him.
I’ve got his quota!
The door of a cab clanged shut and boots hit the ground. The section of platform above my head took the weight of potato sacks as they were swung from the truck. The man ducked and looked under the platform, closer still now, but didn’t see me among the debris.
Veidt’s not coming!
Why not?
He’s off sick.
Shit!
The engines rumbled. The big wheels rolled. The truckers shouted. Then the man looked under the platform again and saw me.
Chapter 25
END-PHASE
It was a long way.
A minute ago a police car had gone past the entrance to the freight yard with its lights flashing. I suppose it was one of the patrols which had gone to the scene of the bombed-out Mercedes. I didn’t want any police near me.
A long way, maybe fifty metres, dragging him behind me through the litter, through the mess.
It had been an easy enough strike because he hadn’t been ready for it and couldn’t reach his gun. He’d given a shout as I’d pulled him down but there were shouts going on all over the place and no one took any notice. It was a 9mm Mauser and I’d emptied the magazine and scattered the bullets and wrapped the gun in some newspaper and dropped it into a crate. They’re dangerous, and can hurt people.
I’d put the keys in my pocket.
He must have caught his leg on something, one of the platform supports or a splintered crate, when I’d brought him under here with me, because sometimes when I looked back I caught the glint of blood across the ground. So I turned him over and went on dragging him to the end of the row.
He was valuable. I prized him. He was the custodian of my enterprise, Quickstep. I didn’t at this time dwell on the future, and what I would have to do.
Against your precious principles.
Yes.
It’s nothing to do with principles. It frightens you.
If you say so.
You know it’s true.
Shuddup.
I was dragging him by the wrists and it wasn’t easy because I was having to move in a crouch below the platform and it was a strain on the lumbar muscles. But to get him from here to the end of the row wouldn’t be the worst of it.
I felt his wrists jerk suddenly as he came to and tried to get free. I dropped him and did some minor work on the left side of the neck and then started pulling him along again.
A wrecking truck went past the gates, its lights dappling the dark with colour. They would haul the burnt-out Mercedes away, like a dead elephant. It had been a nice motorcar: I like that particular model.
And then we reached the end of the platform and I stopped work and rested a little, lying flat on my back, keeping one of his wrists in my hand so that I’d know if he tried to do anything.
Just gone five, 05:03 to be exact. Less than three hours, then, to the deadline. It wasn’t long. It depended on how things went, how effective I could prove, and what kind of man he was, how strong, how weak. Three hours wouldn’t be long, because I also had to locate Horst Volper and deal with him, and in time.
‘Back off there! Get in the next line!’
Green uniform. Green uniform and a holstered revolver and polished hoots, peaked cap. He was directing the trucks.
Until he moved I couldn’t bring my prisoner into the open. It was going to be bad enough with the other people around.
‘Get in behind that one - come on!’
An engine gunning up.
I watched his boots. I watched them for ten minutes, fifteen, and listened to him shouting, telling them where to bring their vans and their pickups and flat-beds. Then a bit of trouble started in the next row, a scraping of metal, and a lot more shouting than usual. I think one of them had buckled another’s wing and they were arguing the toss. The policeman went over there.
I got the man’s wrists again and dragged him clear of the platform and began walking him to the gates with his arm round my shoulders and my own round his waist but his feet were dragging and it would have been easier to give him a fireman’s lift but I couldn’t do that because it would have looked very odd, something serious.
Headlights sweeping across the yard as the shopkeepers kept coming in. If they saw me they wouldn’t do anything; this was a narrow time-gap for them - they had to get the produce through the checkers and into their shops and on display before they opened.
‘What’s the trouble, then?’
‘He fell and banged his head.’
One of the truckers, sweating in the chill morning, his breath steaming as he stood fishing for his pack of cigarettes.
‘Tell the cop, he’ll get an ambulance.’
‘He’s not that bad,’ dragging him faster, swinging him along. ‘I’m getting him to the car -‘
‘You ought to tell the -‘
‘He’s a friend of mine, had too much to drink - I don’t want to get him in trouble.’
‘That’s different,’ grunt of a laugh as he lit up and clicked his lighter shut, turning away.
Swinging him along, a dead weight, one of his feet getting in the way of my own, sweat on the back of my neck as I felt the cop’s eyes on us - you there, what’s the trouble? - don’t let him turn,
don’t let him see us, swinging the bastard along, he would’ve shot me between the eyes if I hadn’t been so fast, those were his instructions, his instructions from Horst Volper, come on you bastard lift your bloody feet up, come on.
‘Had a skinful?’
‘How did you guess?’
Face in a window of the van going by, laughing.
Crossing the street and I got the keys and let him slump against the BMW while I opened the passenger door and pushed him in, his eyes coming open but with no understanding in them. Coloured light flashing as a police patrol crawled past, pulling in to the kerb as the wrecking truck turned in from the next street, hauling the blackened shell of the Mercedes.
05:37 on the dashboard clock, the fuel gauge at half. I started up and waited until the wrecker had gone by and the police car swung in a U-turn and followed it and then I took the opposite direction, turning left at the intersection to keep clear of the police crew throwing sand on the road where the fire had been.
Heard his breath coming in a jerk as he recovered enough to realise the situation and instinctively tried to do something, lifting his foot and bringing it down as I used the edge of my hand on the knee-cap - I suppose he was trying to break the gear-lever or smash my ankle and hit the brake-pedal, something like that.
His breath was hissing now and he was holding his knee.
‘Give me your name.’
Didn’t answer.
Later would do, but the name is important, the key to the psyche. Our name is the most personal thing about us, a cypher for all that we are, our claim to identity. It is the first thing you do, when you begin the matter: you get their name, so that you can turn it as a weapon against them.
I drove circumspectly, slowing in good time for the lights when they changed to amber, keeping five kph below the speed limit, driving west and south and reaching the safe-house at 05:52.
Before we got out of the car I said: ‘You are in my hands, as you realise, but you have a choice.’
I told him what it was.
Gunter Blum, looking down, his face white.
‘Don’t stand there,’ I said. ‘Don’t just stand there like that.’
I wanted to be angry with him, for showing me what I had done, for holding up a mirror to me, to the picture of Dorian Gray. That was how it felt, how I thought of it.
‘What happened?’ he asked me.
I didn’t answer. The light was still very bright: I’d taken the shade off and put some aluminum foil round it to intensify the glare. That too is important, another tool of this most hideous of all trades. There were smells in the room, too, none of them strong but none of them pleasant. There was no sound, except for his breathing. Dollinger’s, Helmut Dollinger’s breathing. It was all, one might say, that he had left: the ability to breathe.
Gunter was watching me now, his mouth open a little, his eyes naked and appalled under the fierce glare of the lamp.
I’d called him in here.
‘I want you to take him somewhere and leave him, and phone for an ambulance, tell them where to find him.’
I was very tired. This business had drained me, and I hadn’t expected it to be so bad. But if I had expected it, I would still have had to do it.
Against your principles.
Indeed yes, against my principles, against the tenets of human conduct that alone can keep some sort of brotherhood alive in this angry world. These I had transgressed, and this is not, my good friend - my friend, I am sure, no longer - this is not to purge myself in an outpouring of spurious confession. I shall remember the name of Dollinger. I shall remember it.
Gunter: ‘Take him where?’
‘What? Anywhere. In a doorway, where you won’t be seen.’ It occurred to me, either because I was finding it difficult to regain my focus on reality or because he looked so stunned, Gunter, so removed from ordinary understanding - it occurred to me that I should spell it out for him, for his own sake. ‘That’s the important thing, of course, that no one sees you. Then phone for an ambulance, without giving your name.’
I began taking off my gloves, the thin nylon driving-gloves they’d told Cone I preferred, when they’d briefed him as my director in the field. I’d put them on in a grotesque attempt to distance myself, my hands, from the other man’s body while I worked on it, on its nervous system, its most sensitive sites of pain. They’d been meant to anaesthetise my hands, to separate them from what they were doing. Don’t you think that’s the most appalling part of it?
‘Is he still alive?’
‘Of course.’ Said with anger, the first murmuring of self-rage, like distant thunder. ‘But he needs hospitalising. For God’s sake switch off the light.’
He seemed not to know where the switch was, though our apartments were identical. Then he found it and the glare was cut off, to leave the reflected glow of that bloody Wall in the room.
He came towards the man in the chair, tied to the chair with torn cloth, towelling, I forget what I’d used. ‘What do I do if he dies, while I’m taking him there?’
‘You’ll leave him there just the same, you clod, and call an ambulance, for Christ’s sake, now is that clear?’
He said it was, and got Dollinger across his shoulder and went out with him and I soaked a towel in the bathroom and held it against my face and stood there a long time with the nerve-light spangling the dark behind my lids and my heart’s beat hammering. The worst of it, with things like this, as you know, is that you can’t have your time over again, and not do whatever you’ve done, and I can’t think of two other words in the whole of the language that carry the weight of such infinite despair as these: too late.
Went over to the telephone.
‘Just reporting in.’
Brief pause. ‘What happened?’ Cone.
His tone was wary, apprehensive, because, I suppose, of what he’d heard in my voice.
‘I know where the target is.’
Volper.
Another pause. That had been telling him rather a lot. It had been telling him that we had a hope of completing the mission, of bringing Quickstep home. In a moment he asked, ‘Can you reach him?’
‘Yes.’
‘I low long will it take?’
‘Not long.’
‘I’d feel more comfortable,’ he said, ‘in the end-phase, if you had some support. Not close. Just in the field.’
‘It won’t be necessary. He’ll be alone.’
Another pause. ‘All right. I’ve been in signals with London. They’re prepared to let Trumpeter go ahead.’
‘That should be interesting.’
‘They also told me that the only danger to our protégé is from the target. No one else.’
Not from Trumpeter.
‘Do what I can,’ I said. ‘I’ll report when I’m through.’
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and drank a glass of water with its rank taste of chlorine; then I got my Lufthansa bag and went out of the room and down the stairs and across to the car.
07:04.
Over the past minutes the sky had been lightening.
I shifted on the seat, leaning my shoulder against the door, one hand hooked across the wheel rim.
There were no clouds, only a thin haze from the city softening the lights across the airport. I’d seen three planes come in since I’d got here, their landing lights coming on as they settled into final approach, directly in line with the street where I was waiting in the car.
The hotel was less than a hundred yards away. I’d chosen this location because it was near enough to see Volper clearly when he came out of the hotel and got into the car that was standing there, and far enough to give me a certain amount of cover. There were no lights in the hotel, and almost no windows: a wrecking gang had started demolition work on it a month ago, Dollinger had told me, and stopped again because of some bureaucratic holdup.
Dollinger.
His name still tolled like a death-knell in my mind.
Bu
t you had to do it. Give yourself a break.
No excuses.
It was that, or risking Gorbachev’s life.
There should have been some other way.
It was for the mission.
Do that to a man, for a mission?
There’s no quarter, in this trade. You know that.
Yes of course I’ve always known it and I’ve done a lot of things I couldn’t live with and then lived with them but don’t expect me to do them and then go whistling on my way, damn you.
Steady, lad.
07:42.
I didn’t like this. I was beginning to worry.
I still didn’t know where Volper had planned to intercept his target but it was obviously going to be soon after the General-Secretary had landed, at some time between his leaving the plane and leaving the airport, or just afterwards, soon after his leaving the airport; and that wasn’t illogical because although the protection around him would be at its most concentrated, Volper was a man to strike where it’d be least expected.
He should be leaving his temporary base at any time now; the main route from the airport was eleven minutes from here, from the hotel: I’d timed the run at legal speed when I’d got here.
He would have to leave here, then, within seven minutes from now.
I could only wait. But he was running it close and it worried me.
Cone would be worried too. He hadn’t expected me to get so close to the target so fast. I hadn’t kept in touch, and he knew nothing about a bombed-out Mercedes burning in the streets, or about the man sagging in the chair buying his life with betrayal.
