by Adam Hall
‘How far d’you think things’ll go?’
He spread his hands in appeal. ‘We’ve done all we can, as you know, to weed out the rowdy elements. If those remaining decide to make a nuisance of themselves then we’ll just have to keep order. Surely that’s reasonable? We had to do it in Prague.’
Page 9 paragraph 3: The proven guilt of the accused will not only make it clear that incitement to disturbance was wholly motivated by foreign capitalist powers, but also that similar motivation led to similar events in Czechoslovakia, a fact that hitherto other nations have shown the most obdurate reluctance to accept.
‘It was different there. In Prague there weren’t any talks set up. It’ll make you think twice this time.’
‘Actually no.’ His eyes had gone sleepy again. ‘In Prague we lacked evidence of foreign conspiracy. Any necessity to keep order in Warsaw tomorrow will be seen to be fully justified. As a matter of fact - unofficially of course - we’ll be rather in your debt.’
The Hotel Alzacki was in a side street of the station district and a commissar-style saloon would attract attention there but we couldn’t get out and walk the last hundred yards because the M.O. patrols were stopping everyone and checking papers and we could be past the deadline by now: they might be looking for Foster as well as for me.
‘Take it east of the river and leave it in the dark and make your way back separately.’
I got Foster across the pavement and inside.
He recognised me, the man with the Bismarck head and the weathered face. He said they were upstairs.
It was a billiard-room on the first floor and the guns came out when they heard us and I hold them to put the bloody things away. Strain was setting in and I tended to sweat too easily and resented it because there wasn’t time for the nerves to start playing up.
Voskarev was on the floor with his back to a leg of the billiard-table. A thin boy with a torn coat and a shocked face was huddled in a leather armchair and Alinka was crouched near him, rubbing his blue hands to warm them. The three Czyn people stayed near the door after we’d come in: one of them was the driver who’d brought Voskarev here. Voskarev looked numbed, his face waxy in the flat hard light from the lamps over the table. He was clutching his handkerchief in a stained ball.
‘Who hit him?’
‘I did.’
Medium weight, gymnastic type, the small eyes close together, the head lowered a fraction as he came across to me, typical boxer’s pose for the local sports page. His hands came up much too late and he spun once and smashed into the rack of cues and sent a chair over and hit the wall and slid down it and didn’t move any more.
The other two looked at him.
‘I told you to leave that man alone. The same thing goes for this one. God help you if you forget again. Throw some water on him.’
A lot of noise came and the shaded lamps began swinging. Through-train.
Alinka moved across to me, stopping halfway, her feet together. her dark eyes quiet. She looked younger. From behind her Jan Ludwiczak watched me, not sure of me, not sure of anyone after the bright lights and the rubber coshes and the blind-windowed train to the east.
‘Why was he brought back?’ she asked me.
‘He was the only one with a name I knew.’
I went over and looked at the man on the floor in case it was anything serious but there was only a scalp lesion: the cues had taken the initial impact.
‘Come on, where’s that water? And put Voskarev in a chair, get him a drink; ask the patron for some vodka up here.’ They had to help him and I went across. ‘Did they take the insulin away?’
‘No.’
‘Can you do it yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll need food afterwards.’
He stared up at me.
‘I wish to speak with Colonel Foster.’
‘I can’t allow that.’
Typical police thinking: show them a shred of humanity and they think you’re a bloody fool.
There was a tap running. I had to know the meaning of all sounds. This one was all right: a Pole had gone into the next room for water. I told the other to watch the briefcases and see that Voskarev and Foster didn’t talk. Then I went downstairs to the reception desk.
He asked straight away where I was.
I listened for bugs and said: ‘I’m still with Foster and Voskarev and everything’s under control. Is the guard there?’
‘Yes.’
His tone was bleak. This was the first time he’d spoken to me since he’d said he was sorry.
‘Tell him we want you to meet us at the Praga Commissariat immediately. Is that clear?’
‘Yes. But what -‘
‘The bomb has been located and it’s all right now. Listen carefully. Tell the guard you’re going to the Commissariat, but go to the British Embassy instead. To the Chancery, not the Residence. Get the cypher-room staff back on duty as soon as you arrive. Tell the Embassy guard to expect me in half an hour: my papers are in the name of Karl Dollinger and I’ll speak to him in German. I shall ask to see you. Have you got that?’
For a moment he didn’t answer and I knew why. He was being crucified. Then his voice came faintly: ‘Yes, but I can’t -‘
‘Listen, Merrick. Stay in the Embassy and don’t contact anyone except for the signals crew. You’ll be safe there.’
The silence drew out again.
‘No, I won’t. They’ll only -‘ but he couldn’t finish. In those words I heard all human desolation.
‘They can’t do anything more to you now. I’ve got the photographs.’
Silence.
‘Merrick. Did you hear what I said?’ In a moment:
‘Yes’
He began sobbing and I rang off.
Chapter 21
ASHES
At 23:06 hours I crossed into British territory.
It had seemed a long way from the hotel to the Embassy though it was only a couple of miles. I’d brought the Mercedes 220, the car they’d used to switch Voskarev from the Commissariat saloon. It had seemed a long way because the coordinated police divisions had been searching the city for me since I’d made my break from Warsaw Central and by now the hunt would have become intensified: I hadn’t asked Merrick if he’d tried to contact Foster at the Commissariat but he. would have done that when Ludwiczak was taken over at the Hotel Cracow. It would have worried him.
Dangerous not to assume that both Foster and Voskarev were now reported missing, last seen in company of Dollinger.
I left the Mercedes in the yard, parked broadside-on to the main entrance, as a point of routine. The plates would have been noted by the police observation-post in the street outside but might not have gone on record. No one else could see them now unless they came right into the yard.
Only two of the windows showed light.
Merrick was in a small room on the first floor.
There was a change in him. He looked much the same but the tension was gone. He reminded me of a man I’d seen just pulling out of a killing trip on one of the amphetamines: physically weak, deathly pale, the hand-movements uncertain but the eyes calm, perfectly calm.
He said
‘This is Webster.’
‘Signals?’
‘Yes.’
Small alert cheerful man, knitted tie and Rotarian badge, breast-pocket stuffed with pens. ‘He’s okay now.’ He looked at Merrick again. ‘Okay now?’
‘Yes.’
I asked what had happened.
‘Eh? He saw someone run over. Turns you up.’
Merrick went and stood at the window, his back to us.
‘Is that the cypher-room?’ An inner door was ajar.
‘That’s right.’ With his pert gaze he tried to see who I was, what I was, a red-eyed man with stubble and a German name and no trace of accent, something urgent to send.
‘Open up transmission.’
‘Okay.’ He’d put a pad ready for me on the desk. ‘You got a p
en?’
‘I’m giving it to you direct.’
‘I’ll have to have it written. It’s rules.’
‘Just open it up, d’you mind?’
I dumped the briefcases on to a chair and got one open and took out the envelope and dropped it flat on the desk so Merrick could hear it. ‘They’re yours.’
I pulled the door open. Webster had half closed it behind him: a cypher-room is sacred ground.
‘You can’t come in here.’
I heard Merrick in the other room, opening the envelope.,
‘Do they ever jam you?’ I sat on the nearest stool. ‘I mean by accident on purpose?’
‘Not often.’
‘Get Crowborough’s acknowledgement on a word-count for each sending. What code’ve you got?’
‘Standard.’ He just meant bugger off.
‘Don’t send standard.’ The cowled lamps threw a lot of back-glare and I could feel needles in my eyes. It wasn’t exactly fatigue: the organism that started panicking because some of the brain-think had filtered through and it was squealing to know what I intended to do about its survival and there wasn’t an answer. ‘Send priority.’ It didn’t want to stay trapped in this dark winter city where people would try to kill it.
Webster wasn’t touching the knobs. I’d been vouched for by a second secretary but it wasn’t enough.
‘I’ll want some kind of authority.’
By approximate reckoning it’d take five minutes to give it in fifth series and another five minutes for him to re-encode. It wouldn’t matter if anyone was tuned in: I was destroying their operation and they couldn’t stop me. They could only stop me if I gave them enough time,
‘These are to BL-565 Extension 9. No copies and no repeats. You ready for me? First: K.G.B. operation mounted to stage rigged show-trial as proof that -‘
‘Hold on a minute.’ He’d found BL-565 E-9 on his list. For the Curtain embassies it approximates to the hot-line and I suppose he’d never had to use it before. He threw a couple of switches and dialled for pips and got them and said: ‘Okay.’
‘K.G.B. operation mounted to stage rigged show-trial as evidence of -‘
‘Evidence or proof?’
‘Proof.’ I let my eyes close against the glare. ‘Proof of Western conspiracy to incite Polish uprising.’ He was on automatic encode but I didn’t want to rush this so I gave him time. ‘Justification thus established in event of subjugation by Warsaw Pact forces. Primary aim protection of imminent East-West talks.’ I heard him making an interval reception-check. ‘This operation now defused since candidate for trial no longer available but suggest all Western agencies Warsaw receive immediate warning to retrench in case of ‘effort made to provide substitute.’
My foot slipped off the rung of the stool and I sat up and opened my eyes. Bloody little organism trying to flake out and forget its problems.
‘Relevant documents by Q.M. next run. Dollinger.’
I found him in a room at the end of the passage, putting the lid back on the cast-iron stove. Even though he knew I’d come in he stood for a minute listening to the dying away of the flames. Then he looked at me. I know exactly how he saw me, exactly what I represented to him: I’d become a composite creature, the object of his hate for my having seen the photographs, gratitude for having vouchsafed him their destruction, guilt for what he had done to me and fear for what I might now do to him.
‘How did you find them?’
‘I knew where to look.’
He went to the door and shut it: the building was quiet and Webster was still in the cypher-room waiting for an answer to my second signal.
‘There won’t be any others, will there?’
‘No.’
The negs had been the middle ten in a roll of thirty-six and the rest were blank: automatic exposure with a dummy run and timed cut-off, the prints tallying.
He stood uncertainly, his raw hands hanging from his sleeves and his feet neither together nor astride. The calm that had come to his eyes was also in his voice: he could speak abstractly about things that had been for him, so recently, a crucifixion.
‘It was horrible of them, to do that.’
‘Just routine. They do it to anyone they can get hold of, embassy staffs, businessmen, didn’t you know? It’s the classic hello-dearie.’ I didn’t want to ask but I had to because someone else might be glad to know he was off the hook. ‘Who was the boy-friend?’
His eyes squeezed shut behind the spectacles and he couldn’t say anything for a second or two, then it was over.
‘Someone I met in a bar. I didn’t see him again.’
‘Because if it was anyone here in the Embassy we’d have to fix things’
‘No.’
The door clicked open: there was a draught somewhere and the catch hadn’t quite sprung home when he’d shut it. He could never do anything properly. He pressed it harder this time.
‘They told you they’d send those to your father?’
‘Yes. And to a Sunday paper.’
Sir Walford Merrick, K.C.M.G., O.B.E., Equerry to the Queen’s Household. An initialled spoon beside the silver eggcup, the paper-knife arranged beside the mail and in the mail a letter with a Polish stamp and in the newspaper the headline.
‘First thing you did was to throw yourself under that tram?’
‘Yes.’
Never anything properly.
I hooked a chair from the desk and sat on it and the organism woke up and squealed that we’d got no shelter here because there wasn’t any diplomatic immunity, British territory or not, and no hope of a plane and no frontier that didn’t border a Russian-controlled state, but there were some things I needed to know and only Merrick could tell me.
‘They asked you to give them information on Czyn. What else?’
Suddenly he said: ‘Why did they choose me?’
‘You were in Prague in August ‘68 so they were going to pin that one on you too. You’d already got friends in Czyn so you could develop your access to information on their programme. You’ve got personal tendencies so they could take pictures to entrap you. Your father’s position was their guarantee that you’d obey orders and it also gave you great value as an exchange-monkey if there was no uprising and therefore no invasion and therefore no trial.’
He was only taking some of it in: the first time he’d known he was being groomed as a star turn in the Moscow circus was a few minutes ago when he’d heard my signal through the open doorway of the cypher-room, and he was having to look back over the recent past and see it in this new light.
I was thinking suddenly of Egerton again, sitting up there rubbing the bloody ointment in while both Merrick and I were headed for perdition. It was a case of murderous incompetence and I’d have him roasted for it. The worst hazard of them all is a mission formulated on false concepts and in this case it was his belief that Merrick was just another second secretary willing to do a little bit on the side for the U.K. secret services. He’s been fully screened, of course.
I had to stop thinking about it. Egerton was done for anyway: the document included references to Merrick’s recruitment by the K.G.B. prior to his sick-leave in London.
‘What are you going to do with me?’
His eyes watched me, vulnerable, submissive.
‘Send you home.’
He nodded. ‘How - how long will they give me?’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘For what I’ve done.’
‘You think you’ve done anything that matters?’
‘I worked for them. For Moscow.’
‘Don’t get any illusions of grandeur. You made a mess and I’ve cleared it up, that’s all.’ The poor little bastard was trying to get rid of some of the guilt by picturing a stretch in the Scrubs. ‘You’ll be declared persona non grata for having engaged in inadmissible activities and put on a plane. They might try fixing you up with a bad smash on the way to the airport because you’ve been witness to their operation but I’
m going to stop that one.’ Then suddenly I saw what he meant. ‘Listen, Merrick. Once you’re in London the whole thing’s over for you. In a case like this there won’t be any muck-raking because it won’t suit anyone’s book: we’ve bust their project wide open and the press handouts are going to be strictly propagandist. Even the F.O. won’t know the full story and it won’t ask any questions because they’ll be too busy putting the flags out. You’ll leave the Diplomatic Service and go into some other ministry with first-class recommendations and that’ll be that, so if you’re thinking of trying another trick with a tram you can forget it.’ Slowly I said: ‘Your father will know absolutely nothing. Nothing about the photographs, nothing about your involvement with the K.G.B. Nothing.’
His face was perfectly blank. I couldn’t tell if it had got through to him. Then I knew it had.
‘I’m just going to be let off.’
‘Christ, haven’t you paid enough? Stop thinking about crime and bloody punishment, will you, it’s old hat. You got caught in the works, you’re not the only one. And you’ve been lucky, so settle for that.’ I was fed up with his chocolate-box morality, with his inability to know that in the Intelligence services you’ve got to wrench your sense of values round till they face the other way. ‘Look, I want to know some things: what were they after, specifically, when they told you to volunteer for a U.K. espionage job while you were on sick-leave in London?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite -‘
‘Oh come on Merrick.’ He was still lost in his dreams of atonement. ‘The K.G.B. recruited you and you tried to kill yourself and it didn’t come off so you went on leave and while you were in London they told you to fish around for a job in one of the hush services and I’m asking you why they did it.’
Because I couldn’t make it fit. They’d picked him for the show trial, not for infiltrating the opposition.
‘It wasn’t their idea.’
My head seemed to freeze and thought went cold. After a bit I said
‘Whose was it?’
‘Mine.’
‘You’d better tell me.’
Then he had to get the bloody thing out and pump it. ‘Excuse me.’
‘Get a chair.’
