The Warsaw Document q-4

by Adam Hall

  Purpose-tremor was setting up in the muscles, normal but hazardous: my feet felt light and I breathed as if I'd been running. Check and decide and in deciding remember that the whole of the mission hangs on this and that he's up there rubbing his bloody chilblains waiting for the phone to ring so for Christ's sake don't go and muck it just because the nerves are overtuned.

  Two at each main entrance, two splitting up and bracketing the cafeteria blind spot, two going down to the ticket barriers at three and nine o'clock from centre, all minor exits covered. This wasn't a box. It was a net. These were elite Muscovites, trained till they ticked like a clock; they may have been in force to this extent round the Hotel Kuznia or held back in reserve until the movement report had gone in. The thing was that within ten paces of the entrance where I'd come in they'd deprived me of visual cover. Their specialised field overlapping a neighbouring discipline: the observation of V.I.Ps. in public places; the two jobs had various factors in common and the chief of these was geometry: they moved to their stations as if instructed by the computed findings of compass and protractor; they knew the distance I'd have to go before the island cafeteria obscured me from points A and B, the angle subtended by the view of C and D, the sector through which I could move under observation from E. F and G before the A and B zones picked me up again.

  They didn't see the cafeteria or the bookstall or the ticket-gates: they saw vectors, diagonals, tangents. It amounted to this: if each man were a spotlight I would have no shadow.

  All I needed to do was get where just for ten seconds they couldn't see me and they knew it and they weren't going to let me so I crossed to the bookstall and bought a noon edition of Zycie Warsawy and gave the woman the leaflet I'd folded in four.

  'Would you be kind enough to keep this for a moment? A friend of mine will ask you for it.'

  I offered ten zlotys but she shook her head, putting the message in the inside pocket of her lambswool coat. 'Will he give his name?'

  'No, but he's a Russian gentleman; you'll know him by his accent.'

  I didn't look back until I'd reached the cafeteria towards the far side of the hall. One of them was already there at the bookstall.

  'Kawa, prosze.'

  The girl pulled a waxed-paper cup from the column. They hadn't necessarily seen me pass it but they'd seen me talking to the woman and a station bookstall is one of the classic letter-drops.

  I estimated that he'd get it within ten minutes.

  Two birds: my movements were surveyed and mustn't be aimless and this was what I could have come here for; and it would keep him happy for a few more hours.

  'Dziekuje.'

  I stirred it.

  All going well. You'll be glad you co-operated. I shall see you this evening either at the Praga Commissariat or the Hotel Cracow, in time for you to take all necessary action.

  They wouldn't know it was for Foster but that was where they'd send it, immediate attention. He was crossing over to the row of telephone kiosks now and one of his team was shifting obliquely to cover his p.o.v. I sipped my coffee.

  Most of the time would be taken up in spelling the thing out and if it had been something I'd wanted to hurry I'd have written it in Russian but there was no hurry needed and I was damned if an ex-scholar of the Basingstoke Elementary was going to write a note to an Old Etonian in Slavonic hieroglyphs, the English are born snobs.

  Analyse the data, make the decision, act.

  He was coming out of the phone-box but he wasn't resuming station and the pattern had changed. I hadn't expected that. Absorb new data. He was a short man with a small head and a sloping walk and his shoes were quiet as he came and he came looking at no one, looking everywhere but at no one, not at me.

  Panic tried getting in but I took a slow breath: the answer to panic is prana. Immediate construction: I'd misjudged the conditions. Foster had decided that I was leaving it too late — I'd said "this evening" — and that he'd settle for the info I'd collected since he'd let me run, without waiting for the rest. He was edgy about the H-hour for Sroda; they all were; they'd pulled in enough Czyn people to know that Sroda would begin at midnight plus one, eleven hours and thirty-one minutes from now. We have stockpiles strategically dispersed, sub-guns, grenades, land-mines, you name it. Wednesday morning, 0001 hours, the three main generating stations hit the sky. Will you be here? Don't be here Wednesday, pal. The station at Tamka wouldn't go up because they'd wiped out the unit there but in other places, other buildings, there'd be radio-controlled detonators still set up and the U.B. knew it. The U.B., the K.G.B. and Foster. His problem was simple and it was acute: he'd got to balance the risk that I was working against him with the hope that I was working for him, and as the time ran out he'd be driven to a compromise.

  The man with the sloping walk looked at me now as he came. I heard the faint squeezed sound from his crepe-rubber soles. He stopped.

  'Do you speak Russian?'

  'Yes.'

  He pulled a cheap plastic-covered notebook out of his black leather coat, finding the page. His breath smelt of czosnek.

  'Listen please. "Good of you to get in touch but you're leaving it too late. We'll have to meet earlier than this evening. The orders are to immobilise you at four o'clock, so do what you can before then." ' His small head lifted. 'Do you understand?'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you wish to send a reply?'

  'No.'

  'Very well.'

  I watched him go back to his station.

  Seven minutes. Call it half that for the field-to-base transmission including his walk to the bookstall and from there to the telephone: it was good communication. On the move in a capital city with a travel pattern that could take me five or six miles from receiver-base I could hand in a signal to anyone, bookseller, road sweeper, barman, or just drop it on the ground, and within an average of three and a half minutes Foster would be reading it.

  He was as close to me as that.

  Time was 12:31 and I made it an overt movement, checking my watch with the station clock as I walked from the cafeteria to the ticket-gate area. Of course it was logical: blind instinct is a contradiction in terms. There was more chance of a break, of making a break, in a mainline station than in the streets; a fair percentage of the place-feel had reached the brain through the feet: this was one of the few extensive areas in the city where a running man wouldn't slip on snow. The rest had been visual and deductive: the sight of blind spots, obstacles, ticket-barriers, the awareness that patterns would change and provide opportunities as groups of people moved and the trains came in and went out. The trains particularly: in half a minute they'd throw a wall across the scene and in half a minute knock it down again; a street was static and its confines predictable.

  Four of them had moved, pacing along the two flanks, turning when I turned, going back. The express for Rzeszbw was scheduled at № 5 ticket-gate: 12:45. People were moving up. Visual cover story for the tags was that I was here to meet someone and they'd be coming in from Bydgoszcz in the north-west.

  It was important to show that I was here to meet a train and not to catch one and this was made easier because Foster had sent his reply in Russian, not English. He'd accept that any agent sent to this side of the Curtain would understand Russian and he'd used it for two reasons: to save time by using normal speech instead of having to spell out, and to let his operator commit the situation to memory as he wrote it down in his own language. The operator thus knew that I was to be immobilised in approximately three and a half hours and would assume I was agreeable to this:

  'Good of you' and 'We'll have to meet' were phrases indicating a certain amount of accord between Foster and me. I therefore wouldn't be expected to leave Warsaw on a train with a first stop two hundred and fifty kilometres away. Also it had been seen that I hadn't bought a ticket, though there'd been plenty of time.

  Paradox: the barrier was my best exit.

  The first representatives of the Bonn Government began arriving in Warsaw th
is morning. Among them were the protocol secretariat and the personal aides of Herr Otto Reintz, the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs (who will be leading the delegation), and Herr Siegfried Meyer, the West German Co-ordinator for the Talks. They were greeted in English on their arrival at the Polish Foreign Ministry. In a brief formal discussion they confirmed that the recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier will be placed high on the agenda.

  12:35.

  Wieslaw Waniolka, the young student of the College of Fine Arts who a fortnight ago forced the pilot of an L.O.T. Antonov 24B aircraft to alter course for Vienna, has been charged on three counts of extortion, restricting personal liberty and contravening the Austrian Firearms Law.

  12:36.

  It has now been established that although avowed Rightist groups were responsible for inciting disorder in the city during the past month, demonstrations were mainly staged by students dissatisfied with educational conditions, which are now receiving attention with a view to revision. Calm has returned to the capital, thanks to the courageous efforts of all police departments.

  12:37.

  I dropped it into the litter basket by the Orbis Information kiosk and turned back to the barrier. 'Will it be on time?'

  'Perhaps a few minutes late. It's the local lines that suffer most. You have your ticket?'

  'No, I'm meeting a friend from Bydgoszcz.'

  'Ah. He'll have had a pleasant journey; the forests very beautiful under the snow.'

  The gates were double, thin wrought iron and flat topped, head high, both locked back by ball-weighted tumbling levers. He was the only official guarding them, fifty to fifty-five, twelve stone, five nine, slow moving, the muscles unused to sudden demands.

  I checked my watch and paced to the centre of the hall, trebling the distance and taking an interest in the schedules board. When I turned back I saw one of them at the barrier.

  What did the foreigner say to you?

  He asked if the train would be late.

  Which train?

  The train from Bydgoszcz. His friend is coming from there.

  What friend?

  He didn't say.

  The visual cover story had now come alive and been put into the spoken word and it was important to establish meet as distinct from catch because it would keep them on this side of the barrier.

  He crossed to the man with the small head and spoke to him and resumed station. None of the others moved: there'd been no signal to move, because they believed in meet.

  12:43.

  'A few minutes late: say three, four. But he could be wrong: an official was moving some people away from the edge of Platform № 3 and in the far distance a whistle sounded, its thin note drifting on the wind and funneling into the arched mouth of the station. Fifteen seconds or so later I saw signal wires jerk on their pulleys.

  12:44 but chronometric time was no longer useful: a train was now on its run in and it was probably the express. It was now a matter of sighting it and adapting my movements to its approach so that I would be nearing the barrier as it drew in, nearing the barrier without changing my pace. It would be perfectly normal to turn sooner, hearing the train, or to quicken my steps a little, impatient to meet my friend; but I preferred to keep the pattern unchanged because I'd now made them familiar with it.

  Similarly any train would do for my purposes since what I needed were the attendant confusion. and the erection of the sliding wall: it didn't have to be the express; but the pattern had been established to focus on № 3 barrier and I didn't want to use a new one, a different one, because even the most experienced tags are human and therefore fallible, mentally predicting the actions of the target and basing their own on his. The consequent lulling effect produces a subsequent shock when the actions become inconsistent with their prediction: in the Hocherl reaction test the electro-encephalograph will shift critically when the conditioned subject sees the pointer change its motion after a mere twenty-five beats, and this is always confirmed in verbal questioning: 'I thought it moved to the left again and I saw a kind of phantom image for a fraction of a second.'

  The pattern was going to be changed on the other side of the barrier and the visual + psychological shock would produce a time gain of much more than a fraction of a second. I might never need it but that kind of reasoning is sloppy and can be fatal: preparation for any important action has got to be one hundred per cent and the instructtors at Norfolk have a phrase for it 'A bull at a gate's never yet got out of the field.'

  From here the snow looked grey, a mottled and slanting veil covering the mouth of the station, and through it came the outline, its size increasing, dark grey on light. Other people were moving towards the barrier, their voices rising, and I made a final turn and came back, noting the group's disposition, the narrow gap between the two men on the left and the people in the middle, the wider gap towards right centre. Distance now closing, obstacles registered: big suitcase near the women on the right, unattended baggage trolley halfway between the two men and the gates, ticket collector's stool close against barriers, all.

  Train slowing, coasting to a crawl, conrods lazy, snow caked on the front of the locomotive and thick along the carriage roofs — someone moved at the edge of the vision field and I looked back at the clock and down again, porter, not one of them, not one of Foster's men. Three more paces and I stopped, filling the gap, the wider gap towards right centre, the one I would use.

  Of course they might have put someone into the platform area and it was a risk but a calculated risk so discount. Discount and wait.

  And don't muck it.

  Wait for the first door, the first one, not till then. When it swung open I moved.

  16: FOXHOLE

  He shouted at me but that was anticipated and there was nothing he could do because he couldn't leave his post at the barrier and within the first ten seconds I was behind reliable cover as the passengers began filling the platform between the train and the ticket-gate area and then I heard him again but the nearest official was two carriages away on the forward end and by now I was walking, taking my time, keeping to cover but nearing the mid-section carriage where most of the passengers had got out.

  'She'll be here. She said she would meet us.'

  A woman wept, a fat woman buried in her thick coat, the tears bright on her face, no, she won't be here, it said in the paper, you saw the paper.

  'I tell you she couldn't telephone because the lines were down at Inowroclaw and besides they don't arrest the students, they know there's no harm in them.' Snow on the wet platform where boots had dislodged it from the footboard. I climbed and turned left, away from the head of the train, edging along the corridor with my back to the windows, then a clear run for the length of half carriage, then people again, and baggage.

  'But it was in the brown one, I remember putting it in here.'

  'I haven't got the brown one.'

  'Then you've left it in the compartment.'

  'We'll have to go back.'

  They were so slow, so slow, they moved slowly, they had arrived, but I was just starting. Somewhere behind me a guard was using his whistle. Assumption: there were ten of them and they'd deploy in open formation with the flank men covering Platforms 2 and 4 and the centre group concentrating on 3 and working the narrow area limited by the train's length and the two adjacent lines. Estimation: I had another ninety seconds and there were two more carriage lengths to go. I would need to hurry now.

  'Mind what you're — '

  'Sorry, I've left something — '

  'There's no need — '

  Oh yes there was need.

  Sweating badly, the limits so very fine, calculated but hazardously fine, the centre group through the barrier by now and working their way along. One or more would check underneath the train and that would slow them a bit but it wasn't a bonus, it was allowed for, part of the ninety seconds, eighty, seventy.

  Baggage stacked in the coupling bay, climb over it, not so many here now, one more carriage
, stifling, the heat full on and the windows misted, watch for the orange-colour poster through the misted glass, get a bearing on that.

  Bloody well think.

  Back the way I'd come, five seconds, the top bag from the stack in the coupling bay, a big one with retaining straps, two seconds, forward again with a total loss of twelve seconds but with the advantage of an altered image-component. Orange glow on the window. Fur kepi tilted to the back of the head, coat unbuttoned and hanging open, swing the bag down first on to the platform, the breathing heavy and the gait shortened to a fat man's waddle, look directly towards the barrier, nowhere else.

  From the main hall the acute-angle perspective had given something like a ten-yard error and although I'd allowed for it I now found that the entrance to the subway was well beyond the orange poster but there was nothing I could do about it. The last of the passengers from this end of the train were giving their tickets in and going down the steps and I waddled after them, puffing a lot, stopping halfway to drop the bag and change it to the other hand, coat flapping open, picking up the bag and going on. Impression of people near, some would be passengers moving up the platform to this end of the train, destination Rzeszow, one or more would be Foster's men but discount proximity, whole thing depended on the altered image.

  It was a single gate, concertina trellis and half open but with enough room to go through at a run. I wasn't going to run.

  'I have come from Bydgoszcz. I have no ticket.' Heavy Berlin accent. The bag made a thump as I put it down, getting my breath.

  'Didn't you have enough time?'

  'Please?'

  'Were you late for the train?'