by Adam Hall
The taxi was keeping in the slow lane, rounding towards Lancaster Gate. Egerton’s hands were folded on his lap, the ointment leaving dark patches on his gloves, and Merrick watched him steadily, a little disturbed at not being able to see his eyes.
‘You should also bear it well in mind that there must be no exchange of confidence between yourself and the people you’ll be dealing with. Confidence will be entirely on their side. Nor must you lead them to feel that the United Kingdom is in any way prepared to assist them in whatever projects they have in mind, morally, physically, officially or unofficially. You must not even let them infer that such is the case, from anything you say; and if you think that despite your caution they have so inferred, then you must negate it.’ He studied Merrick in silence for a bit. ‘Is that perfectly understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
We went down towards the Serpentine and got snarled up twice in a pack of traffic while I listened to Egerton briefing him: paramount importance of security, limited and circumspect use of protected communications, attitude if apprehended, so forth.
‘Their methods of interrogation, as you know, are less charitable than in the West. You must therefore avoid any risk of their taking you into custody, as far as is possible. You will have Mr. Longstreet in support, of course, but don’t allow your benefit of his greater experience to minimise, in your mind, the real hazards you’ll be exposed to.’
Merrick was quite good, sitting to attention on the tip-up and never looking away from the dark glasses even when the taxi gave a lurch. He’d heard all this from the instructors and Egerton knew that but he wanted to tell the boy himself, frighten him with the soft-gloved phrases that would bring his imagination into play instead of blunting it with over-explicitness. The slightly magnified blue eyes held steady as he listened.
Northwards from Hyde Park Corner we found a clear run and got up speed for fifty yards before a double-decker blocked us off again. Baronet - with the Tip that Filters Everything but the Flavour.
‘No after effects?’ Egerton was asking.
‘No, sir.’
I spoke for the first time. ‘What was it, exactly?’
Merrick looked at me and then quickly away. ‘I slipped on the snow, and a tram nearly got me.’
‘Warsaw?’
‘Yes.’
‘You weren’t; I said, ‘pushed or anything?’
‘Oh no. I slipped.’
Egerton didn’t turn his head. ‘Why did you ask him that?’
‘I don’t know how deep he’s got into things out there. He could have found out a bit too much,’
Merrick said prissily: ‘Those people are my friends.’
‘Don’t trust them. Don’t walk too near the kerb. And the next time you keep a rendezvous with me make sure you’re clean, is that a lot to ask?’
Gratuitous of course, telling him in front of his director, but I was suddenly fed up with his harping on people being his friends. One fine day he’d trust a friend too many and next time they’d make sure his head went right under the wheel.
Egerton asked: ‘When did this happen?’
‘This morning. We had to jump on a bus.’
Merrick was leaning forward. ‘You mean we were being followed?’
‘Just watch it, in Warsaw.’,
Egerton said: ‘You’re quite certain, Longstreet?’
‘Am I what?’ He folded his gloved hands, accepting the rebuke. I said, ‘The F.O.‘s lousy with tags, always has been, they hang about like tarts.’
‘Yes. Never mind, Merrick, you’re only just out of training, after all.’
The bus in front got moving again and at Marble Arch we dropped him off, Egerton just saying he’d be kept informed. The poor little tick started looking behind him as soon as he’d got out.
‘You mustn’t expect too much, at this stage.’
‘I don’t expect anything. Now that you’ve seen him d’you still want me to take him out there?’
‘They didn’t have time to give him more than a token training, as I’m sure you -‘
‘It’s not only that. He’s the worst agent material I’ve ever set eyes on: idealistic, unstable and a bag of nerves. I suppose you know he’s got asthma, do you?’
‘It’s in his report,’ he said rather tartly. ‘But there’s no pollen out there in the winter months.’
‘There’s none in this clammy hole: the origin’s nervous, anyone can see that.’ We were into the faster lane now and getting a move on: he’d told the driver to make for the Cenotaph. ‘How much does he know about the Bureau?’
‘Nothing, of course. He’s never been there; he was trained by Special Branch instructors, not by us. He’s seen me only once and without any chance of recognition, as you note . All he knows about you - apart from anything you’ve him - are your features and your cover name. I’ve no intention of saddling you with a potential risk, Quiller.’
‘Accident, was it?’
He took off his smoked glasses and shifted into the corner, facing me obliquely. ‘You accepted this little chore,’ said patiently, ‘and I’m most grateful. It’s only for a few days and you’re not going into a sensitive area, so -‘
‘Apart from an imminent revolution, or is that just a tic fancy of his?’
He looked past me through the window. ‘I doubt if there’ll be a revolution; we don’t think Moscow will let it get that far.’ By ‘we’ he meant the Bureau’s pet department: political analysts. Meeting my eyes again he got a measure of coy reassurance into his tone: ‘But the situation there could well become interesting, and while it’s not your cup of tea we thought we might just give it a stir see if it’s sugared.’
Merrick’s clearance didn’t amount to more than an air ticket, which he got from the Foreign Office anyway. A second secretary was resuming his post at the British Embassy in Warsaw following sick leave and that was all; he didn’t need a cover because he was already established and in place.
The Bureau doesn’t normally use hired labour but it was clear enough that he was going out on a special situation mission and if he survived it I didn’t expect to see him again. Egerton hadn’t told me this and I hadn’t asked. Merrick’s long-term future was one part of the overall background picture that I wasn’t going to be shown; my job was to check and confirm the information he’d be sending in to London and try to keep him out of trouble while he was getting it. The one thing I’d have liked to know was the extent of his value to the Bureau. At first glance it didn’t look too high: he spoke a bit of Polish and had established organisational cover and unofficial access to the underground cell of an East bloc republic simmering with dissension. But someone in the Bureau had recruited him and appointed Egerton to direct him despite the fact that they knew he’d need looking after from the minute he left the U.K. According to the rules it shouldn’t have worried me but the rules don’t mean a thing.
‘That one do you?’
I looked at it. Third series, fifth-digit duplications with recurring blanks, normal contractions and all numerals reversed. The alert-key was general, not integrated: you just put a contraction in full.
‘Can they recode this for radio?’ It looked as if I’d be sending my stuff through the Embassy, diplomatic telegram.
‘We’ve made sure,’ he said.
‘Oh really?’
Codes and Cyphers don’t normally go into little points like that: they just select one that nobody’s using and try it on for size. This was Egerton, steering me through clearance as smoothly as if he were at my elbow. The same thing had happened in Firearms: they know I never use anything but they usually try a bit of persuasion so they can feel they’re still in business, but today they’d just said nothing for you, that right? Nil under Weapons Drawn. Egerton again, taking care of me, hunched in front of the little fire up there in the other building, with his every thought devoted to my welfare. I could have done without that. I didn’t like being taken care of so smoothly by a man who’d done his best to pass
this thing off as a ‘little chore’, ‘only for a few days’, ‘not really our cup of tea’. Maybe it was just because he was most grateful, most grateful. I didn’t think so.
Accounts. Travel. Field briefing. Credentials.
She opened the folder. ‘Is this all you need?’
I hadn’t asked for deep cover and Egerton hadn’t insisted because this wasn’t a full-scale mission. It was only light stuff: passport with two-year-old border guard frankings at Danzig and Krzeszow, visa background, C.P.S. membership card and a few letters carrying fairly recent dates; a nice touch was that although their subject matter was in obvious sequence the latest one was headed January 2 of the previous year, a thing a lot of people do from force of habit.
‘Are any of these present-day?’
‘The two top ones are,’ she said. ‘We had enough time.’
To M. Stasiak, 17 Chalubinskiego, Warsaw. December 20.
Oh you bastard, I thought, you bastard.
On Tuesday there was an L.O.T. flight via East Berlin and I’d told them to book me on that. Egerton must have known but he didn’t question it.
There wasn’t anything about Jan Ludwiczak in the paper the stewardess gave me but I didn’t expect there would be: they always throw a blackout after the first run. It didn’t matter because. I’d seen the story in a copy of Zycie Warsawy I’d picked up on the off-chance at the shop near Cambridge Circus. Jan Ludwiczak, 21 - there was no address - had been arrested for subversive acts against the Republic, chiefly the operation of a clandestine printing press with three other men and a woman - none of whom were named - for the publication and distribution of violently seditious material among the bourgeois elements of the universities. The arrest of Ludwiczak’s confederates was said to be imminent.
I hadn’t been looking for this particular story when I’d bought the copy of Zycie Warsawy but it was the kind of information I needed. As a by-product it told me quite a lot about the situation out there because in the paper the stewardess had given me there wasn’t a hint of subversive acts or even mild unrest. This wasn’t so much an example of typical Russian split-mindedness as a pointer to indecision on the part of the authorities: first they’d tried to ‘soften up the workers by leniency’ - according to Merrick - and then they’d gone on to ‘the other tack’, and they obviously still weren’t sure whether to clean up dissident factions by secret arrests or scream their misdeeds from the housetops as a deterrent. On a personal level Jan Ludwiczak was of course cooked and the arrest of his friends was indeed ‘imminent’: under the glare the rubber truncheons would work through the routine and their names would come out one by one.
The sky was brilliant and below us lay an ocean of sludge. After East Berlin I put my watch forward an hour and thought: you bastard. He’d known I wouldn’t ask for deep cover because the pitch he’d decided to sell me on was the ‘only for a few days’ ploy. So he’d told Credentials to fix me up with these few letters ostensibly exchanged between me and the people in Warsaw, arranging to meet. That was all right. The meetings weren’t important ones: a meal somewhere, a little business, the sort of thing I could cancel or postpone or leave in the blue if it suited my plans. The letters were typed and the ones from P. K. Longstreet were signed in a perfect imitation of my own handwriting so that nothing would look odd if some bright spark thought of checking with the signatures on my passport and visa. That was all right too. But the first letter had gone off on December 20. So ‘everyone else’ hadn’t refused. They’d never been asked. He hadn’t roped me in at the last minute: he’d lined me up for this job nearly three weeks ago.
He wasn’t a bastard for doing that. He was Control, not Bureau, and a director puts his ferret to work in the way he chooses, shows him the hole and shoves him down it and stands back and crosses his fingers. No, he was a bastard for knowing I’d pick up the date on that letter when I was going through clearance and was therefore committed, too late to change my mind without actually getting slung out.
‘Will you please fasten your seat belt?’
If I must but I’d rather put it round Egerton’s neck.
We started a long slow dip towards the sludge.
Query: why had he wanted me? There were several who wouldn’t have refused a short trip like this to keep out of Norfolk between missions or break up the dreary round of the girls who were always in bed with someone else when you needed them most because once a job came up there wouldn’t be time for anything except getting in and getting out alive. Waring was in London now and he’d have done it like a shot just to get into their good books after cocking up the Copenhagen lark but they hadn’t asked Waring. They’d wanted a particular type of agent to work with Merrick and the one they’d selected with great care was the one who’d proved time and again that he always worked best alone.
They weren’t fools. It’d be dangerous to settle for that.
The windows went grey.
But I’d done it on their doorstep too. I’d keep to the bargain and look after their new recruit for them but I’d do it in my own way, working alone. Egerton would have known I’d asked them for the Tuesday flight but he hadn’t questioned it. Merrick was due out tomorrow, B.E.A. direct.
The tension had gone out of the airframe and we’d lost weight. Plastic fittings creaked. The 134 was floating at a slant through the muck.
Query: is it even worse than you think? Have they palmed you off with the worst job of all? That one?
I thought about it again because if I didn’t I wouldn’t sleep tonight. The kid had said no, they hadn’t told him to deliver anything to anyone. He’d seemed surprised when I’d asked that. Two weeks in training, how would he know? But I’d believed him and it should have consoled me: it’d be all right so long as they hadn’t given him any kind of document to carry, to deliver. But it wasn’t easy to get rid of the chill. Because this whole thing made a pattern and it was the only one that could accommodate all the facts. They don’t do it often and no one talks about it afterwards. Correction: Heppinstall talked about it, once, to me. It’s not that they’re squeamish: you can’t fight a full sized cold war without someone sometimes getting pushed off his perch; it’s just that there’s not often the need to do it because the other ways round are more efficient. But now and then it’s the only setup that’ll fill the bill and that’s when they sign up a new recruit and make a pretence of training him and give him the bait. The bait’s not for him - he’s already hooked - it’s for the opposition, usually a file or a brief breakdown on a spurious operation, some form of written intelligence either encyphered or straight and specifically designed to fox the opposition and send them at a tangent while the real party goes in. In military terms it’s the feint attack and the principle’s the same.
The mechanics vary. The technique doesn’t. You send your man in and he delivers the goods by letter-drop and he’s caught doing it because he’s meant to be caught doing it, that’s what he’s for. After that it’s just dull routine: he’s beaten up till he breaks and tells them all he knows but all he knows isn’t much, oh, a few tidbits here and there to give them something to chew on, the odd bit of info they’ve had on their books since God told Moses to spy out the land of Canaan, it looks quite good, they know he’s telling the truth. And while they’re busy dashing off in all directions on the strength of the stuff they caught him with, the real operative goes in. Sometimes he’s not told what the setup is: he’s simply sent as far as the edge of the area and ordered to wait for a signal. He might not know what the mission is or even that he’s got one, then they throw him the works and tell him the field’s clear: get in there.
Or sometimes they send him out with the new recruit and ask him to hold his hand.
‘I’ve done mine,’ I said and she smiled and passed on. Customs Declaration Form to be completed by passengers prior to landing. I hadn’t actually done it myself, of course: it’s delivered with the visa and the Bureau takes pride in relieving its valued servants of these annoying little d
etails. It’s the things it doesn’t do for you that sometimes chills your nerves. The things you’ve got to do yourself.
Heppinstall had been drunk that night and I hustled him round to my place before he could break into Control and knock Loman for six. Loman was his director at the time. ‘I didn’t have a clue, of boy, not a single rotten stinkin’ bloody clue … an’ you know - you know what? There was nothing for me, in the end. No mission … nothing. It was for someone else, you get it?’ A white face and the tumbler shaking in his fingers, his voice thinned with rage. ‘Some other bastard went in … got it all lined up, you see, an’ all - all I did was come on home like goo’ - good little boy. An’ Christ, they shot that poor little squirt, know that, eh? Put him - put him against a wall. Keep me ‘way from Lo’ - Loman, will you? Oh, God, ‘gainst a wall…’
Normally they don’t talk about it afterwards but Heppinstall had got deliberately drunk. Also he was unlucky because the U.K. had just sent Sharawi Hassan down for the maximum stretch of fourteen years for the missile programme filch and the United Arab Republic was smarting a bit and a decoy’s no good as exchange material so they’d shot him.
No Smoking.
The murk thinned off and I saw lights below and the twisting course of the Vistula, which looked frozen over. The runway beacons tilted across the glass as we lined up.
Was that the one they’d palmed off on me? That one?
Bounce.
Chapter 4
SNOW
An Aeroflot Tupolev T.U. 104 had just come in from Moscow and the building was crowded. The people from the T.U. were waving their papers, eager to show how uplifted they were by complying with the regulations drawn up by their all-wise comrades to protect the rights of the workers. It always speeds up the formalities though because there’s no time wasted arguing: tell them to shit and they’ll shit.
