The Striker Portfolio q-3

by Adam Hall

  'How much can you say?'

  The door was shut and her English was school-level and we had our own terms for things and if I spoke fast there wouldn't be any risk. I knew two things about Nitri: she was at this moment completely safe and if anyone ever told her that she could possess Franz exclusively by selling her soul to the devil she would become totally dangerous.

  'It's all right this end. It's just a question of bugs.'

  He was silent for a bit and I knew he was considering a rendezvous and the trouble was that we didn't have a safe-house in Hanover: there was no need for one because I was still too mobile and the mission had been running for only three days and every time we picked up some kind of direction the bastards blocked it. Lovett. Benedikt.

  He said at last: 'What happened?'

  'His code-name was Benedikt He'd started doubling so as to get across and he didn't have the stamina. You know how it goes. There's the odd patch of info missing but I can guarantee that a few hours before he found out who I was he had to save himself_ I He must have shown his hand and they didn't like him tagging me down to Linsdorf so he told them to come and get me. Then he broke up and went religious and tried to save me instead. Maybe he just confessed: it looked like that. They wiped him out. He knew they would.'

  'Was it effective or did you have to break your way out?'

  'It could have been effective. He drew them off me. But I was too interested. They did it in his room at the motel.'

  He didn't say anything for a minute because he was partly thinking and partly listening for bugs. I supposed he would have been hysterical if he'd known the girl was so close because he was a fanatic about security. There's a story at the Bureau, very shop-worn by now: 'I saw old Ferris having a cup of tea with his mother in Lyons today. He had her screened first, of course.'

  'And?'

  'They had a go at me afterwards.' He had enough on his plate already without my telling him I'd lost my memory and anyway it must have happened: I don't just drive clean off the bloody road, I've passed my test and everything. There was probably some 9-mm material stuck in the tyres if anyone wanted to look for it.

  'What happened to the cover?'

  'I had to make a search in his room to see if they'd missed anything. There'll be prints. Then I had to get out. As soon as they find him I'll be first suspect'

  'Oh, shit'

  Because that had been the third thing I'd had to tell him. Tomorrow there'd be a full-scale manhunt for Walter Martin throughout West Germany and although there was nothing to connect him with a non-existent government department in the U.K. it wasn't going to be easy for Ferris to fix me up with a new cover when the Identikit version of my face was plastered all over the papers.

  But it wasn't my fault. Even if there's been time to do the search according to the book I couldn't have gone into my own room to fetch gloves because I'd been pretty sure they were waiting for me there. And I couldn't have stayed in the motel because everyone's got a right to go on living.

  'Look,' I said, 'forget the cover.'

  Rather stiffly he said: 'If you want one you can have one.' He really was very upset.

  'Just get me some papers and if I'm stopped I'll play it by ear. Some papers and transport.'

  'Where do I pick up the old one?'

  'You don't have to. I wrote it off along the autobahn.'

  'Hurt yourself r There's a bit of a twinge in one tooth.'

  'Don't mess me about — what sort of condition are you in?'

  'Look, if I weren't capable of looking after myself I'd bloody well say so and if you get London to send in a shield I'll pull his balls off.' But I wasn't pleased about it and he knew that. I was protesting too much. It was a simple fact that if anyone broke in here at this moment my chances would be some degrees worse than fully normal because the right upper forearm was still in the healing stage and the left hand wanted stitches and the rib-cage and shoulders were bruised. But I had to be practical: if I had to start relying on a shield I'd take less care and that would be dangerous because even if they sent the best man in the Bureau he wouldn't be a hundred per cent reliable. No one is. It was no go.

  'When do you want it by?'

  He meant the papers and transport and I relaxed again. He wasn't going to press the shield thing. I said:

  'Soon.'

  After a bit he said: 'I'll put the keys in the mail-box and the papers will be in the car.'

  'Don't do that. Leave it halfway along the Marienwerderstrasse.'

  My left arm was aching because I was having to keep it raised. I thought of asking him to do something about shoes but it might hold things up and I was working on the premise that the Kriminalpolizei would be putting out a general alert from first light onwards. I watched the keyhole of the bedroom door all the time but there was never movement against it.

  'All right,' Ferris said. 'It's a dark-blue Ford 17M, Hanover-registered. You'll find everything inside but don't forget if you're stopped: you've borrowed it.'

  'As long as it's left-hand drive.'

  'What've you broken?'

  'I just like that kind. They don't attract attention.'

  There might have been an edge of annoyance in his voice but I couldn't be sure. The right ear is unused to telephones. 'Can you give me any kind of location?'

  They hate not knowing where you are and it's understandable because if you stop reporting they start getting the wind up and there's nothing they can do: you could be making progress somewhere inside an adverse area with no available communications or you could be at the bottom of the Mittellandkanal wrapped in a chain and London is pettish about sending a replacement unless the director in the field can practically produce a certificate, and this is reasonable too because a mission can get very sensitive in the final stages and there's a risk of rocking the boat. They'd thought Houseman was inside a burnt-out helicopter on Mont Blanc when the Lausanne thing was running and when they sent in a replacement the vibration was felt as far away as London and it nearly brought the Lowry off the wall.

  'I'm going to have a try at reaching X.'

  'All right,' he said.

  '2-11-14-11-9-14-4-7.' He didn't ask for a repeat and he didn't question the need for speech-code because there can always be bugs. The second thing I knew about Nitri made it advisable and in any case the idea of putting your next location into so many words on a telephone brings out a rash.

  The last thing he said was: 'Did you leave anything in the wreck?'

  'The odd bit of skin. What the hell do you think I am?'

  We were both a bit touchy: he'd got a week's work to do in half a day and I had to drive a hundred and fifty kilometres through a manhunt in daylight. I dropped the receiver with a bit of noise but the keyhole didn't change and there was no sound from the extension unit in the bedroom. This was no more than routine, like an actor checking his flies in the wings.

  When I went in she was wrapped in the sheepskin coat and gazing into the glass. The room smelt of pear-drops.

  'I've done some invisible mending.'

  It was a perfect fit. The milky glow of her body was hidden by the scarecrow folds and she was shapeless: but the metamorphosis had meaning. It was the gesture that fitted so precisely. She had wrapped the coat around herself without thinking: not for comfort or warmth but to invest herself with the magic powers of its owner, just as the fledgling warrior girds himself in the lion-skin of a warlord in the ritual of his initiation, drawing into his sinews the strength of the mighty. Nitri, half-disguised, had become Nitri naked: lost, afraid, vulnerable to the threat of a bell's ringing and to the far explosion she would hear a hundred times before she heard it once.

  'It looks new again,' I said.

  'Did you talk to Paul Dissen yesterday?'

  'Yes.'

  It was a peach-tinted glass and her amethyst eyes were darker, indigo.

  'Did you find out anything?5 'Quite a lot.'

  'He'll never do that.' She meant Franz would never bale out.r />
  'He'll never have to.'

  She let the coat fall away. 'You're finding things out all the time.'

  'We all are.' The crash-analysis engineers, the aviation psychologists, the people with the magic power to stop Franz getting killed.

  I didn't think much of my chances. The mission had only been running three days and we'd been blocked twice and all I'd managed to snatch out of the limbo was a name on a map. Neueburg.

  She helped get my left hand through the sleeve and made me a tourniquet out of a scarf. The top of the nail-varnish bottle had fallen and I picked it up and she stuck it back although the bottle was empty: there'd been five or six gashes in the sheepskin.

  'I want to see you again,' she said.

  'You'll see me again.'

  Chapter Eleven — THE HARE

  It was one of those buildings without a soul, a sorting-house for displaced persons, its design so modern that it set a trend that would never be followed: there is something already old-fashioned about black-and-teak matt mouldings and mushroom chairs. Glass is a precious material that can make a palace of a cave, playing with light and casting it into shadowed places, but there is no real point in constructing an entire building of it to prove that here we have open minds and hold no secrets.: the purpose is defeated by over-exposure and the result is that here we must shut our faces since we cannot shut our doors.

  People moved through the place as if through the cross-section of a termitarium under glass. But they were very efficient.

  The Frau Doktor i/c night-hours casualties was a big-boned lesbian with flat expressionless eyes and hands like a mechanical grab. She put in seven sutures and ordered anti-tetanus but that was as far as I would go with her: the capsules were livid-hued and presumably anti-bacterial and coagulation agents and I slipped them into my pocket when her head was turned and just drank the water which was refreshing. She obviously hadn't heard about indiscriminate sensitization and I didn't bother to tell her that I could produce enough antibodies to stop a mad horse given a fair chance.

  They wanted me to fill in forms before discharging me because I still looked like an accident case and the Polizeidirektion would expect details so I asked if I could sit down while I filled them in and then edged out to the street when they were busy rubbing antennae with some remote inmate via the automatic switchboard.

  It had cost me forty-five minutes but my hand would have been useless with the wound still open and the delay had to be written off as an investment. First light was an hour and a half away and even if they'd found Benedikt by now they probably wouldn't notice the remains of the N.S.U. until morning.

  I had told Ferris to leave his 17M in the Marienwerdestrasse because it was just round the block from the hospital and it saved me having to walk back to the Lister-Platz. I slipped the match from under the wiper and got in. The keys were in the ignition and the tank was full and it only took half a minute to find the envelope under the back carpet. It was a big one, quarto.

  Karl Ernst Rodl, Hamburg, Herrenhauserstrasse 15 geboren Hamburg 1924, Automechaniker.

  I hadn't had to tell Ferris I needed German-national papers: he knew they'd be looking for an Englishman. The rubber stamping bore faint segments and the photograph was sufficiently unlike my face to be natural but the Automechaniker bit was off key because my nails weren't normally split or ingrained. They slipped up sometimes in Credentials and Ferris would be on to that: a blast would already be working its way through his particular pipeline.

  There was also a folder inside the envelope. Chronological and Geographical Statistics Breakdown on Pattern-Crashes and Background Information on Dead Pilots. All neatly typed and typical Ferris: he'd never use 'Stats' or 'Info'. It was what I'd asked him for last night and I put it straight into a pocket because if I ever had to leave the 17M as fast as I'd left the N.S.U. there wouldn't be time to clean up inside for inspection and the Kriminalpolizei wouldn't expect Karl Ernst Rodl to interest himself in Striker-crash statistics in English.

  A pencilled note was at the foot of the folder. Did you see what happened to Field Marshal Stockener and Minister of Interior von Eckern? Watch this space!

  I got out and reached under the back of the car and scraped the nails of my right hand over the final-drive casing and got back in and wiped the worst off the finger-tips on the underside of the carpet. Then I started the engine.

  So the Feldmarschall hadn't just skidded and the Bundesminister hadn't just taken a boy into the cloakroom. Benedikt had known: 'They are toppling in high places.' And Ferris had known: This time it's a rather big show.' And of course Parkis had known. The only one who hadn't known was the ferret down the hole and now he was being told.

  I wondered why. It wasn't just a giggle behind the hand: Ferris would only tell you what he thought you needed to know. But he was running true to form and giving it to me in homeopathic doses and I wasn't going to think about it now: there were more pressing considerations and while the engine was warming I looked them over.

  Findings: (1) It must have been the two men at the motel, the hot operatives who had gone into neutralize Benedikt. They must have tagged me from there as far as the autobahn and then had a go on the long dark sectors where no one would hear any shots. They would certainly have stopped when they saw the N.S.U. smashing up and they would have tried to go down among the trees to finish me off if I were still breathing but I'd got away from the wreck so fast that they couldn't find me: it may well have been a matter of seconds. (There had been headlights across the higher branches so they had probably been going so fast that they'd had to turn back.) (2)A passing motorist might have seen me crash and stopped to see if he could help in which case he would have kept the adverse party away. If they hadn't been able to look inside the wreck they would now believe I was dead or so badly creased that I was out of the running. But this assumption had so little value as to be dangerous: a passing motorist would have telephoned the autobahn police patrols and they'd be called in anyway as soon as it was light enough for someone to notice the mess in the trees. The Bonn Telex would be putting out Mystery-Driver-Vanishes-from-Crashed-Car signals before noon today, nationwide. It was safer to assume the adverse party believed I was alive or would be informed at any time. They would continue to look for me and the police hunt would be thrown in as extra.

  (3)The ferret was still in fair shape but the hole was now virtually a cul-de-sac. I was blocked off from Hanover, Linsdorf and all communications with people who had accepted me up to now as, persona grata: Philpott of A.I.B., Dr Wagner, Rohmhild, Boldt, Dissen and the rest of the Striker pilots. (Add Nitri from the time she saw the noon editions. I didn't know if she would go to the police when she heard they wanted me but I didn't think so: she had a curious interest in me either because I was probably the only man ever to have turned down the chance of a novel experience or because she believed I could find the answer to the Striker problem before it killed Franz.) The engine was warm and I checked my few belongings. At the hospital they'd given me back the silk scarf that had been round my arm as a tourniquet: it was a vaguely Freudian design and very Nitri. It was already in my pocket and it could stay there because I didn't want the police to find anything that could lead them to her if I had to abandon the car. The good Frau Doktor had fixed my arm in a sling so that my stitched hand couldn't fidget about and I took the thing off and stowed it in the sheepskin coat because during an interrogation you can conceivably keep a bandaged hand out of sight and when they'd tallied the number of the N.S.U. with the number in the motel register they'd be looking for someone in poor condition and a sling would be a positive advertisement.

  At eighty-odd minutes before dawn in a wintry street I should have been prey to depression: mentally I was sound except for a patch of retrograde amnesia that couldn't be critical to the mission but physically I would have less chance than normal if anyone came for me close in and I didn't like that. Ferris had set me running and after three days I'd had to report that I'd blown my
cover and lost the contact and become first suspect in a murder hunt and I didn't like that either. The opposition had twice tried to smear me out and Parkis was so scared at the size of this show that he wanted to stick a shield on to me so if they tried a third time one of two things would happen: either it would be successful and too late for a shield or Parkis would panic and insist on my having one in which case I'd tell Ferris that if I couldn't work alone he could signal London for a replacement and pull me out. Then some snivelling bitch at the Bureau would slide her scummy teacup off the Progress Report and scrawl Mission Unconcluded against my name and I liked that least of all.

  But as I closed the driving window and shut myself in with the smell of ether and nail varnish and turned the car to face southwards I was elated instead of depressed. I had changed my cover and my nationality and I was on my own now with every man's hand against me throughout the whole country. From this time on I would follow the ways unknown to other men, digging my own dark tunnels as I went.

  There was more stuff along the autobahn, mostly trucks, but I was south of Gottingen before dawn. I went fast and the mirror was clear for a hundred kilometres except once when I thought there was a dark shape drifting in it but it must have been a trick of the light and I never saw it again. Some rain had fallen this side of the mountains and the trees stood wet with it, their branches interlaced with silver in the headlights. Once a hare ran obliquely across my path, its coat already winter-white and its shadow bounding ahead until it found a gap and leapt beautifully, ears' flat and feet together, vanishing. It was the only time I slowed, except when a rash of rearlights spread through the dark towards the Munden loop-road and I saw the police lamp swinging.