The Striker Portfolio q-3

by Adam Hall

  The dark came down soon afterwards, sweeping from west to east across the land as the clouds reached and drew beneath the moon. I should have made him push on faster through the mines instead of wet-nursing him: the rendezvous could be a kilometre from here and if I missed it the one fine thread would break. Or I should have let him take me further than those five paces but the trouble was that I couldn't stand his company.

  A long flash broke, a chain-discharge that went rippling across the dark mass of the trees and dusted them with grey-green light. I froze and waited, uneasy now because this was a patch of open ground where there was nothing higher than a clod of earth and anyone could pick me off with the other hand behind their back. The thunder arrived within a few seconds: at ground level the air was calm but a high wind-layer was shifting the storm-clouds at increasing speed. Then light flashed once and I wasn't ready for it because it didn't come from the sky. It could have been the nerves:

  I was stumbling blind across furrows and the spine was taking some of the shocks. The trunk of the first pine loomed and I began crossing the gap to the next one.

  I had overshot quite a bit and had to turn back and to the left before I saw it. There was still ploughed earth underfoot so they must have brought it right to the dead-end of the track.

  I got in and said: 'You'd better get away quite fast because I kicked up some noise coming across.' The dash-lamp threw a weird greenish glow on the driver's face. He had his neck screwed round to look at me and I stared back at him. 'What the hell did you have to flash your light for?' I said. 'Did you think I couldn't find you or something?' He didn't move but his eyes switched twelve inches to my left.

  She asked from beside me: 'Where is he?'

  'Guhl? Crossing tomorrow night. You'll have to meet him.' Her one question had been clipped and authoritative so I said: 'Just tell him to shove off, will you? There's two of them out there looking for the noise I made.'

  She told him: 'Wait for the next thunder.'

  'Kamerad Oberst.' He faced the front.

  'What happened to Guhl?'

  Lightning flared and I was looking into bronze eyes, their brilliance heightened by the flash: then it was over but I had seen her face, hard, proud, altered by the storm and my strangeness.

  'I was ordered across first.' The thunder shook the night and the engine started up and we were on the move before the echoes died away. 'You want an intelligent report, don't you? You think he knows what the hell's going on? He's a clod, you know that.'

  The track gave on to a metalled road within a hundred metres and we stopped bumping around.

  'How did you injure yourself?'

  She didn't miss much: he hadn't switched the heads on yet and there was no back-glare. She'd taken me all in, just in the one flash.

  'The nail-file slipped.' We got into higher gear and now he switched them on so I hunched myself round a bit more to face her. Night-black hair, close-cropped but not masculine, pale lipstick, if any, a lean hard jaw-line, the nose by Michelangelo. 'What do you imagine things are like in Hanover with the Benedikt thing just blown up? I was lucky to get off with a stray one in the hand.' It was the sort of face you'd expect to see at a night-rendezvous in the East German Frontier Zone if you expected to see a woman there at all. 'Anyway,' I-said wearily, 'we've stopped the leak, that's the main thing.'

  She kept her hands inside her battered flying-jacket. Perhaps she had a gun but I didn't think so: one sharp word to the Prussian-headed type at the wheel and he'd swing one on me without even swerving. He'd called her Oberst: Colonel. She asked:

  'How far had it gone?'

  'What?'

  'The leak.'

  'Christ, don't you know anything? Didn't Neueburg keep you informed?'

  She didn't answer but I wasn't worried. You don't set up a contact point thirty kilometres from a frontier without putting radio in. I let the silence go on for a bit and then said: 'I'll tell you how far it had gone. He'd made contact — twice. We got the one in Hanover and he went and did it again: he knew how to try, I'll give him that much.' The scene was lit up around us and I had to shout against the din. 'It was Guhl who was sent in to fix him the second time, at Linsdorf. I thought they were your orders through Hanover. If they weren't yours then whose were they for God's sake?'

  She might have answered me, given me a name, a hand-hold, but there was a flash so bright that it looked as if the whole sky had fused: the headlights seemed to go out and the entire landscape went lichen-green and the thunder rolled between the hills with one long-drawn-out bowling-alley clatter. It was appropriate enough: I was on my way to what London called the 'storm-centre' and bloody Parkis was right again.

  The last lot had been tough on the ear-drums because when it was quiet again I could barely hear the engine. It was a three-cylinder Wartburg 1000, a home-product they described as a 'limousine' along the Unter den Linden though along Oxford Street it'd be a clapped-out minicab.

  'Where did they call you from?'

  She had a low and rather husky voice, the kind people wish they could keep once their cold has gone. It would have been attractive if every time she spoke I didn't expect her to tell the Prussian to pull up and get in the back with us and bring his garotting tools.

  'Berlin.'

  'When?'

  Too late, as usual. No bloody co-ordination. I said in sudden frustration: 'You know the trouble with Die Zelle? It's over organized. Its left hand's so busy trying to find out what its right hand's doing that it can't even feel the way along the wall.' I looked for reaction but she just watched me, chin resting on the fleece collar of the jacket, saying nothing either with her eyes or her mouth. 'Look at the Hanover cell: they didn't get on to Benedikt till it was damned nearly too late. And who did the job on Stockener? They weren't too clever, getting him alone in his car before they shoved it off the road — made it twice as difficult and in the end it stank of foul play. What's one West German military driver among friends? Who went soft?'

  I looked away from her and left it at that. A lot of it didn't add up but that was all right: I'd been called in late so I wouldn't be expected to know some of the answers. I just wanted to show I at least knew some of the questions.

  It was a long time before she spoke. We passed one of the Soviet garrison barracks, a litter of two-storey hutments behind a picket fence with machine-gun towers. This side of the frontier there were twenty Russian divisions and they'd been here twenty years.

  'Did you talk to Benedikt?'

  'Of course I talked to him. Poor bastard, he was too good for this world, you know that?'

  Lightning came again but this time there was quite an interval before the thunder followed. When the greenish glow brightened again on the facia-board I took another sighting on the speedo-trip. We'd gone twenty-seven kilometres from the frontier, due east most of the time, and it couldn't be far now because the fuel was below a quarter and there wouldn't be a filling-station open at night: we'd seen only two cars since we'd got on to the wider roads south of Mulhausen and there wasn't even an oil-streak along the nearside lane. In the Deutsche Demokratische Republik if you weren't military-or political you walked.

  'Who was your controller in Hanover?'

  'I never even saw him. They shot me straight in to locate Benedikt and stop the rot.' I'd rehearsed it so many times that it seemed to make sense. There were half a dozen other direct questions I'd rehearsed the answer to but now she threw one in that I couldn't hope to stop.

  'Who was your controller in Berlin?'

  Because you might get away with not knowing the people you've been sent in to assist but if you don't know the name of your own controller at your own base there's something just a fraction odd in the picture.

  I hitched myself round and looked at her and waited until she turned her head and then I said; 'Look, I think you're old enough to know. I haven't been in East Germany since the night in 1945 when I was holed up for six hours in the undercarriage of a converted bomber that was due o
ut of Leipzig with a cargo of anti-typhoid serum for Berlin. Maybe you know how long I've been working for Die Zelle on the other side of the frontier and if you don't it doesn't matter but I'll tell you this: you may be one of the hierarchy at HQ and I could trust you with my last wristwatch but the dreary fact of the matter is that until tonight I didn't know your face and I still don't know your name, Kamerad Oberst, so if it's all the same to you I'm going to play it a bit coy when you throw questions like that one. Because if you don't know who my controller is in Berlin I might be a fool to tell you.' There were gold flecks deep in the bronze but that was all, just the play of light on living colour. 'No offence, of course.'

  When the eyes of two people meet and hold their gaze a silent conversation begins and when they are strangers there is a great deal, to be said because their lives are a blank to each other. But sometimes there is even more to be withheld and nothing of it must show and for some people it is difficult. For the woman sitting close to me in the Wartburg, her face sometimes shadowed and sometimes lit by the storm, it was easy. She had spent her life withholding things which spoken, even by the eyes, could betray her: she was a professional, the kind you occasionally meet in the bitter and grinding course of a mission and wish you could perhaps have met in some better place and at some better time when life held more promise of being longer. So that there was nothing in these honeyed tiger's eyes at all. And nothing, as I knew, in my own.

  'We shall be there soon,' she said and looked away.

  The moon was behind cloud and the land dark. From the distance the building made a honeycomb pattern of light as if a liner were moored there on still black water.

  Three men at the gates checked us in. One carried a repeater rifle but wore no uniform: I knew his type, the blank face, the attitude half-slack, half-military, the air of unlimited power subordinate only to higher-ranking members of the same regime — the secret police.

  'Kamerad Oberst.' The click of heels.

  All I could see of the building was that it was modern, a slab of raw concrete with the silhouette of ship lamps jutting on the skyline. Most of the windows were barred and I heard dogs somewhere. The certainty was satisfying: the thread had held and now I had come all the way. This was the storm-centre: the Kommandantur of Die Zelle.

  Two plain-clothes guards fell in as we climbed the steps but she dismissed them with a word and we went into the building alone. Two others met us and she sent for someone by name and we stood in a silent group until he appeared, a complex of hooded spotlights casting our shadows across the floor.

  She didn't look at me: her head was turned away. Standing, she was a slight figure even in the flying-jacket though taller than I had imagined. She stood easily erect, gloved hands behind her.

  'Kamerad Oberst?'

  A big man, quiet on his feet, his eyes dulled by the long absence of any need to think.

  Her neat head turned to look at him.

  'This man crossed tonight. His name is Martin. Take him to Reception and search him. Strip him and search his body. Search the bandage particularly. Make certain there is no death-pill anywhere on him. Let him dress and then restrict his movements. If he should kill himself before the Heir Direkior can interrogate him I shall hold you responsible.'

  She left us without looking back.

  Chapter Fifteen — KOHN

  The passages were as wide as in any modern building in East Germany and there were no other guards within sight but the place had the atmosphere of a penitentiary.

  'Is this a school?'

  When they have dull eyes don't ask them what something is: they won't tell you. Give them a bone: the pleasure of correcting you.

  'This is the Aschau Asylum for the Criminally Insane.'

  The room where they took me seemed appropriate. The big man went in first and the other followed me. Iron bed, metal handbasin, spotlights in a low ceiling: there were a lot of these lights about the place, all the better to see you with. One window, adequately barred, a quarter-inch-steel door with a continental double-action lock and a sliding grille-panel where they could look in to see what you were doing.

  The escort stayed in the doorway and the big man became a mechanical valet. She had said do this, do that, and now he did this, did that. The instructions had gone into his skull and the actions came out through his hands: he searched me and stripped me and searched my body and searched the bandage particularly and made sure there was no death-pill on me, then he let me dress and restricted my movements with a pair of military handcuffs, arms behind, because you can get through a vein with your nails if you work at it and she'd warned him that he was responsible for me. The other man stood near the door bouncing gently on his arches like a boxer fresh into the ring, the night-stick looped to his wrist with a leather thong.

  The bandage was difficult because some of the stitches had pulled — probably when I'd tugged the edge of the wing clear of the tyre — and the blood had congealed, but we managed it in the end. The other one, right fore-arm, was perfectly clean. His dull eyes wandered over me and he kept turning me round and lifting my arms, a Simian frown of puzzlement forming slowly across his brow. It would take time for someone like this to catch up with progress and I assumed he was wondering why there weren't any bits of Elastoplast here and there because in the old days it used to be all the rage: you could pack a 1000-x microfilm and a flat-mould cyanide dose under quite a small strip and still leave room for the handbook.

  They went away. They took the obvious things with them: sheepskin coat, papers for Waiter Martin, papers for Karl Rodl, Striker statistics folder, crossword puzzle. I was worried about that: even in the moonlight it had looked very like a plan Of the minefield layout Guhl had kept on him in case he wanted to check his bearings. They had taken the coat because it was so thick — you could secrete photostat copies in triplicate of the entire Early Warning System from Mexico to Nova Scotia in a coat like that — and because Nitri had patched it so neatly and they wanted to know why. They had taken the arm-sling I'd been given at the hospital because it would be possible for me to hang myself with it but they had left Nitri's scarf because it wouldn't.

  I had only just finished checking the door-lock and the window-bars when they fetched me out and took me along to a small surgical ward where a doctor redressed my hand. He was a civilized man and asked if there were anything I wanted so I said food. They took me back to 'Reception' and after fifteen minutes a heavy-breasted girl in brogues brought a tray and left it with me. The big man unlocked the handcuffs and took them away with him. It must have been on orders: he would never have worked it out for himself that no one can eat with his hands behind his back.

  No knife, no fork, nothing for surprise attack or self-infliction I hadn't expected to be given them. I hadn't expected to be given caviar either but there was a fair-sized paper picnic plate full of the stuff, spread for me on strips of buttered toast as neatly as you'd spread rat-poison. Beer in a soft plastic cup.

  It had to be a brain-think all the way because my last meal had been with Benedikt the night before and I was already salivating. (1) If they wanted to kill me they could do it more cheaply than this way. (2) If they wanted me unconscious the same applied. (3) I hadn't been interrogated yet and they wouldn't learn much if I had to be carried to the grilling-room insensible or dead. (4) There was no effective drug in the oral-administration group that would force me to reveal what I didn't want to reveal.

  Provided the foregoing were acceptable the fifth consideration was decisive: this stuff was high in protein, fats and carbohydrates. No value in the salt content but enough sugar in the beer to feed the muscles for a limited period.

  I ate slowly.

  They had taken away my watch to have it probed but by estimation it was an hour later when they came for me again.

  That would make it approximately midnight. I had been keeping a conscious check on the passage of time since the watch was taken: it wouldn't be important for a while but I didn't know ho
w things would go here and it might later be useful, even vital, to judge the coming of daylight.

  They were the same two and they took me down to the main hall. It seemed busy, so late, but some of the spotlights were out and people talked quietly. Three men were passing through the hall, dark-suited and preoccupied, the members of a consultant body convening to discuss a recent autopsy. It was what they looked like but they might have been anyone: anyone important. My escort stopped them and spoke to the one with the rebuilt face and he glanced at me and nodded and went on with his colleagues.

  'We will wait,' the big man said. He looked as if he'd waited all his life at some bus-stop where the road was closed. Other people went through, some of them women with patient faces that looked at nobody else: Vidauban is very good at this, with his interiors grey-toned and peopled with dream figures that however crowded appear uninvolved with each other.

  From somewhere higher in the building a sound reached us and I didn't want to think it was a human voice because a human voice ought not to sound like that.

  Quick footsteps and an interchange of words. The big man said tonelessly: 'We will go to the office of the Herr Direktor now.'

  It was a long room with a low acoustic ceiling and an internal-communications complex on a desk. Black chairs with the East German equivalent of PVC upholstery and chrome legs, an ebonite console on one wall with some of the panels illuminated. From here they could probably diagnose a schizophrenic crisis in Patient 99, Cell 104, South Block, and prescribe shock-treatment.

  They were the same three men but two of them said nothing and did nothing all the time I was there. The one who spoke to me was the one with the rebuilt face.

  'Sit down, Herr Martin.'

  There was a spare chair but no one else came. He sat behind the desk. Above him on the wall was the expected portrait of Walter Adolphovich Ulbricht, First Secretary of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.