The Warsaw Document

by Adam Hall

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘When I was on leave I told Mr. Frazer about -‘

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Head of Personnel at the Foreign Office. We all like him, because he takes a lot of real interest in us and -‘

  ‘All right, Dutch uncle, well?’

  ‘I told him about the photographs, and asked him what I could do. He was very worried -‘

  ‘Oh my, God.’

  The whole picture began coming up: the one I hadn’t been able to see when I’d stood at the window scratching the ice away with my nails. At that time I didn’t have the facts. I had one now.

  Egerton had known.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘He was worried. What did he do?’

  ‘He said he’d get someone’s advice.’

  Frazer could have gone to someone he knew in M.I.6 or the O.I.B. or the Security Service but it had happened to be Egerton. Frazer was in a bad spot because the press wouldn’t have any mercy on him if it came out that yet another homosexual had been posted to a Curtain embassy, a high security risk because of his susceptibility to being compromised. Since the Vassall case the public had lost patience and this time there were added dangers: the person of Sir Walford Merrick increased the menace of the photographs and at the same time brought the risk of explosive scandal close to the Throne.

  ‘He didn’t say who’s advice he was going to get?’

  ‘No. He just said it was someone who knew about things like that.’

  ‘Then the bastards did a deal.’

  ‘I’m not sure -‘

  ‘Never mind.’

  Cosily, over a glass of sherry. Well what d’you expect me to do about it? I don’t know, but I’d be grateful for any advice. Think he’d be willing to do a bit of work for us? I’d imagine so - he’s in a pretty awful state about those damned snapshots. All right then, send him along and we’ll find a little job for him, then you can both stop worrying.

  The time had been right. Things looked like getting rough in the Polish Republic and the U.K. was interested in what the chances were of revolt and subsequent invasion and what the effect would be on the East-West talks. Merrick could keep his ear to the ground and at the same time pass back info on the K.G.B.: their orders to him would be analysed in London to provide an insight into the way Moscow was thinking.

  A bargain’s a bargain, however foul: a word in the ear of Sir Walford across the coffee-table or in the caldarium or on the eighteenth green: if he should hear anything, or receive any kind of evidence, to the detriment of his son, he should discount it totally, since certain duties of high value to his country might expose him to false accusations.

  It was horrible of them, to do that.

  And those bastards in London no better.

  ‘I suppose you told them you doubted your capabilities, no experience in hush operations, so forth?’

  He watched me from above his hands. His hands were cupped against his face, as if he were trying to hide. He’d get over that, given time. given peace.

  ‘Yes I did. But they said I’d be among friends at the Embassy, and they’d send someone out here to look after me.’

  ‘Who directed you?’

  He’d only met Egerton once, and I’d been there.

  ‘I never knew his name.’

  There was a question he wanted to ask but he knew it might sound naive and make him look silly. He’d had enough humiliation. I did it for him: ‘He said I wasn’t to be told you’d been entrapped by the K.G.B. I wasn’t to know.’

  He nodded, his hands sliding away from his face.

  Because Egerton had seen the risk: that Merrick was doubling for Moscow and his cover-story was the photographs and his job was to infiltrate the Bureau. And he’d wanted me to find out.

  If a Control director knows his executive in the field, knows his style and potential, he can do things with him that would otherwise be impossible. The director-executive relationship is peculiar to the trade and has immense value for both parties but especially for Control. Egerton had selected me for a mission that I didn’t even know was being given me - a little trip abroad, only a few days - and he’d sent me in blind, knowing that if I worked to form I’d find the target for myself, sniffing out the directions and scratching away at the earth like a good little ferret until I reached what he knew must be there, somewhere east of the Oder, and made my kill.

  He had known, essentially, that most of us would have refused to take on a job as diffuse as this with no local control, no communications except through the Embassy and no positive leading-in data to work on; and he’d selected me because he knew I’d want to go in deeper the minute I sensed the field, simply because I like being left alone when I’ve found something to play with. It had been the only way to rope me in.

  The mission had been to make contact with the K.G.B., discover their project and inactivate it. Define, infiltrate and destroy. That was now accomplished. This operation now defused:

  The risk hadn’t been high: he’d known I wouldn’t go nearer Merrick than I’d go to a rabid dog until I’d got the scent of the field and located its hazards.

  And if I tripped a snare he’d expect me to cut loose.

  ‘You were told not to expose me to the K.G.B., that right?’

  His hands went to his face again and he didn’t answer and I got up and kicked the chair clear and said, ‘For Christ’s sake give yourself a break, will you? London knew there was the risk but I don’t blame them and I don’t blame you - I’m still here aren’t I and I’m in bloody sight better shape than you are so stop picking your nits about it. All I’m after is plain information. Exposed me by accident did you?’

  He nodded into his hands.

  ‘Well I’m not surprised. When you’re doubling there comes a point when you don’t know which way you’re facing. That was on Friday, was it? Come on I’m pushed for time.’

  ‘Yes.’ He got up and tried to face me and couldn’t and just stood there with his head down and I turned away and looked at the picture on the wall, donkeys in Clovelly, far cry from here.

  Friday. The bar. The rendezvous at the Roxana. That’s why he’d been worse than usual, ill with nerves: he knew he’d blown me. There’d been no tags or I’d have seen them or sensed them: they’d wanted to pull me in without my suspecting Merrick, or I’d never contact him again. So they’d used window surveillance in relay and passed me from street to street till I was more than a mile from the Roxana and then they’d rigged the pickup with ordinary patrols just asking for papers, for dokumenty. Then they’d sent for Foster.

  Have a look at me and let me go, see where I’d run. That was when they did the switch and started preparing me for the tribunal instead of Merrick.

  ‘I tried not to give you away. I did try.’

  ‘Civil of you.’

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ But he’d had no chance. Driven by both sides till he broke. ‘Didn’t you trust their word, in London?’

  ‘At first.’ He knew what I meant: he was straight on to it because for weeks he’d lived in terror. ‘Then when I was out here again they began reminding me, asking me again for my father’s correct address, you know what they’re -‘

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So that’s all I kept thinking about. My father actually looking at them, even though he’d been told not to take any notice.’ I heard him using the thing and then he said: ‘I wanted to warn you, but I thought you might leave Warsaw if I did, and then they’d have known they couldn’t trust me anymore, so they’d have sent the -‘

  ‘Get it out of your mind.’ I turned back to him and it was all right now, he wasn’t looking so bloody abject. There was only one more thing I wanted to know. ‘Our last rendezvous in the station buffet. Did you know they were going to come for me there?’

  ‘Yes.’ I only just heard it.

  ‘Then what made them tell you to pass on that fake signal? What did
they want a full interim report for, when I was booked for grilling?’

  His face went loose and he lost contact completely because these things had stopped meaning anything to him.

  I said: ‘It’s important, Merrick.’

  He nodded and made an effort and I waited.

  ‘I was meant to give it to you earlier. But I forgot.’

  I think he saved himself, then, from any grudge I might ever have held against him.

  Webster was getting something through when I went along to the cypher room.

  There was a phone in the annexe and I picked it up. He came through the doorway while I was trying the buttons.

  ‘How does this thing work?’

  ‘Want an outside line?’

  He pressed the one with the worn Sellotape tag and I dialled for the Hotel Cracow.

  We looked up.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sounds like a chopper.’

  He’d put the signal-slip on the desk in front of me. Hamilton. Quay 4. End crane

  ‘Did you do a word-count check?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He was trying to clip another pen into his breast pocket but there wasn’t room.

  ‘Hotel Krakow?

  ‘Tak jest.’

  I asked for Maitland.

  The helicopter was still nosing about and a flush of light passed across the window.

  ‘Anything to send?’ asked Webster.

  ‘No.’

  He went to shut down the console.

  ‘Maitland?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Listen. Tomorrow morning there’s a second secretary leaving the Embassy for London and the U.B. might arrange an accident on the route to the airport, so why don’t you turn up and follow the Embassy car? Let everyone know you’re the press, take plenty of Rollies, you get the drift.’

  ‘Well well.’

  ‘You’ll need some kind of excuse.’

  ‘Human angle: while the pin-stripe elite of the dip. set come flocking into the flashlights here goes one unassuming second sec. on his lone way home so let’s give him a cheer lads. A natural for the mums.’

  ‘Don’t leave him till he gets on the plane.’

  ‘Roger. Thing is, I can beat the Street with a nice faked smash that’ll only happen if I’m not there to cover it. What d’you do in the coffee break, make up crosswords?’

  The light flooded the rooftops again, slanting off the snow.

  I asked him if he could hear a chopper.

  ‘What? Yes. They’re getting fidgety. Midnight curfew for all Polish nationals, leave cancelled for the police and the army, foreign residents prone to a slight loosening of the bowels, what shall I do with my poor Fido, they won’t let him on a plane and I’m not going to leave him behind. Who are you anyway, the Ambassador?’

  ‘Word in your ear: you never had this call.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘We’re being bugged, didn’t you hear the click?’

  ‘I thought it was your teeth.’

  He rang off smartly. There was nothing they could do: if they wanted to fake a trump they’d have to do it in front of a Western camera.

  Someone was talking in Russian, then a lot of splurge came. I went into the cypher room.

  ‘What station’s that?’

  ‘Voice of America.’ Webster cut the treble and the whole range sank into the porridge.

  ‘They often jam it?’

  ‘They’ve not done it since Prague.’ He changed the wavelength and there was more porridge. ‘Radio Free Europe.’ Then he flicked the band and got a girl in slow emphatic Polish. ‘One of the Warsaw stations hidden up somewhere.’

  … been to the point if Minister Podhal had explained the presence tonight of more than five hundred medium tanks and one quarter million motorised troops standing by along Motor-route E8 within twelve kilometres of the capital. If we are to conclude that these forces are -

  ‘More?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Think they’ll come in?’

  ‘No.’

  Because they’d lost their license to occupy the city: the document in the other room.

  ‘Well I can’t see who’s going to stop them.’

  ‘Do some things for me, will you?’ He followed me through the doorway. ‘Put those two briefcases into the dip. bag and seal it’.

  ‘I can’t do that -‘

  ‘Can Merrick?’

  ‘Not officially, till the morning.’

  I shut my eyes again because of the light, because of having to think of small important details, because of the worry about what I had to do next, the bloody little organism snivelling for what it knew we couldn’t get: a quick plane home.

  ‘Look, phone H.E., get him along here and give him the pitch.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Oh Christ, the picture. Ask Merrick. He knows. He’s got to leave Warsaw by the next plane, waive all formalities, he’s not safe here. And that bag’s got to reach London, highest priority: tell the Queen’s Messenger what’s on, you’ve got a rough idea.’

  Very far away an emergency klaxon sounded and then the buildings muted it. I bent over the briefcases to check the zips and a muscular spasm gripped my chest and I had to wait till it passed. ‘Listen, I want you to stay with Merrick. Don’t take him to the Residence: keep him here.’

  ‘Okay. Fetch the Doc along shall I?’

  ‘Can do. And don’t let him go near windows, watch him for aspirins, he’s depressed.’

  ‘You okay yourself, are you?’

  ‘Yes. Just look after him for me.’

  ‘I savvy. Book that call, did you?’

  ‘Call?,

  ‘The local. Rules, see, they’re red hot on expenses. I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.’ He unclipped one of his pens.

  I went along the passage and past the room with the cast-iron stove and its red curling ashes, then down the stairs and into the bitter night air.

  It was a clear run back to the Hotel Alzacki. The streets were deserted: the curfew was for thirty minutes from now and people didn’t want to be caught out because their watch had stopped. A few taxis: they’d be journalists covering the scene.

  The hotel was halfway along the street and they came in from the far end while I was switching the engine off, a dark-coloured mobile patrol slowing on sidelights, and a couple of seconds later my mirror went bright. I knew the Mercedes was all right so it was the hotel itself they were closing on. I threw the door shut and crossed the brittle snow on the pavement and went inside.

  Chapter 22

  SRODA

  The staircase. curved and I caught at the banister rail, pulling myself up. One of them was guarding the door and I told him to get inside.

  A tin tray on the billiard-table, dirty bowls and spoons and the smell of czosnek, the Ludwiczak boy asleep, nothing else different.

  ‘Alinka.’

  It couldn’t be said in front of Foster because there was a last chance: he might not see the vulnerable point that could finish me.

  As she came quickly the slamming of metal doors sounded from below and in the half-lit passage her eyes glittered.

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Listen, I’m taking the Englishman and not coming back. Get control of them if you can, tell them Voskarev’s no good as a hostage if they kill him, make them see sense for your own sakes.’

  The door below came open and we heard their boots. She turned her head to listen, contempt on her shadowed mouth, then looked, up at me.

  ‘Thank you for my brother.’

  They watched me as I went back through the doorway and Foster was standing up and on his face I saw fear and knew it was for Voskarev.

  A man tried to get past me with his rifle and I pushed him back. ‘Stay here and keep quiet. Foster, I want you,’

  He looked once at the Russian and may have said something to him. Then he followed me out and I shut the door. Through the banisters I could see the cap of, the man guarding th
e main entrance while the search spread through the ground floor.

  ‘They’ll kill him,’ I said, ‘you know that.’

  He looked at me without enmity, his mind too disciplined for abstraction. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘that I can do it.’

  We went down the stairs together. A lieutenant was at the desk throwing questions at the patron and swung round when he saw us. Foster showed him his credentials and I heard him trying to get authority into his tone: what were they doing here?

  The Commissar saloon had been reported as having been seen outside this hotel.

  Yes, it had brought us here. What was the trouble?

  The Comrade Colonel and the Deputy Chief Controller were said to be missing.

  ‘Some fool,’ Foster told him with a flash of impatience, ‘is spreading confusion. Comrade Deputy Chief Voskarev has gone to the Najwyzsza Izba Kontroli. Now get your men out of here.’

  I turned to the patron and apologised formally for the disturbance as the orders were shouted along the passage. The tramp of boots gathered at the entrance and an engine started up outside. The lieutenant’s salute to Foster was perfunctory: the Polish M.O. branch was at present under control of the Coordinated Information Services Foreign Division and the position was one of sufferance.

  Foster was standing perfectly still. I think he was waiting for the sound of a shot from the billiard-room: in hostage situations the death rate is highest when a search comes close.

  The rhythm of snow-chains passed the building and then it was quiet.

  ‘All right.’ I took his arm because he was turning towards the stairs.

  The street smelt of exhaust gas.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The ignition and oil-pressure lights dimmed out and I turned by gunning up and bouncing the rear off the kerb because there wasn’t room for the lock. I didn’t answer him. He sat without a word until we were into Zawisza Square and it occurred to me that he knew what I was going to do with him.

  Sidelights came into the mirror and I noted them. The Square was heavily patrolled and the white beam of a lamp swung from somewhere above us, a rooftop command post. A long way off I heard the chopping of rotors again. Then there was firing of some kind, nearer to us, and I checked my watch. It was midnight minus one: a minute to Sroda.