by Adam Hall
'On the Pabst matter?'
'Yes. It's unsettling — she was highly respected and devoted to the Party. Does anyone feel a draught?'
'Draught?'
'Yes, this window's not quite shut.'
A bus halted at the lights.
The window was shut now; the latch had clicked home.
Traffic was slowing behind the bus: two or three cars and a taxi.
I could still hear voices but they weren't intelligible now that the window was shut.
Cold. It was very cold here.
The lights went to green and the traffic moved off, the bus leaving a cloud of diesel smoke drifting across the street. I couldn't smell it from here.
The ledge was less than a foot wide. I had to angle my feet.
He would be Melnichenko, the man who said he was going over to Werneuchen. He was the only one with a Russian accent, and the others wouldn't be interested in whether Lena Pabst was devoted to the Party or not. So it would have been strictly no go if I'd stayed in the room — Melnichenko's own office. But this might not be any better: I was seventy feet above the street and I could only shuffle sideways and if I put any pressure at all against the concrete behind me I would lose my balance, finis.
The windows of Room 60 had plastic blinds but they weren't totally opaque so I'd crabbed my way along the ledge until there was a wall behind me. I suppose if I felt the onset of fatigue or vertigo I could shuffle back to the windows and knock on them and think up an acceptable reason for being out here and look for a chance of getting clear while the military police were taking me along for questioning, but I didn't like throwing in the towel without trying to find a better way out — an unfortunate metaphor, yes — if you threw a towel from here it would go floating and curling and dipping lower and lower until it met the street. A body would go straight down.
So Melnichenko was reported to have a file on Trumpeter in Room 60 and Lena Pabst had been got out of the way because she'd been infiltrating Trumpeter and Melnichenko himself would be at Werneuchen making enquiries. I was glad I'd phoned Yasolev. If I came unstuck from the side of this building at least I'd reported on Melnichenko and it might give them a clue, even provide a breakthrough.
Bitterly cold. I didn't put my gloves on because I wanted to feel things with my fingertips: the rough concrete and the next window-frame when I worked my way along there. The only chance I'd got was to keep moving and hope to find a handhold somewhere before the tension brought on fatigue and I tipped forward. That could happen at any time, minutes from now, an hour from now.
Nothing below me but the street: no balconies, canopies, guttering, nothing to break a fall. This was a new building with a flat modern facade and only a single ledge jutting at each storey.
The cold alone could finish me, inducing torpor. In still-air conditions it would have been more tolerable, but there was a wind that came in sharp gusts, tugging at my coat.
Move, keep moving. And don't look down. I could hear the traffic and that was all; the wind was taking the exhaust gas away before it reached this height, and bringing in the river smell from the west.
There's a difference between a tight-rope and a ledge along a wall: on the rope you can swing from one side to the other to keep your balance; on a ledge you can only keep still, and even though this one was wider than a rope the wall itself was the danger because when you feel yourself losing your footing you instantly reach out for support but if I let my hand touch the concrete with more than the slightest pressure it'd pitch me into the void.
I don't like heights. I'd seen a man go down, once, from the twenty-first floor of a construction site. They say you scream but you don't. They call it going down the hole, the construction workers, and when one of them does it the rest of them are told to go home for the day because it's unnerving and therefore dangerous.
One foot, then the other. The ankles had started aching and I wanted to angle the feet the other way but it would mean shifting the body's equilibrium and the nerves were already under stress; I was beginning to feel that the wall had started leaning towards the street, and the ledge tilting. This was normal: fear begets illusion; but it would have to be dealt with, combatted.
Like a crab. Moving like a crab along the wall. A dull ache had started at the top of the spine. I was keeping my head to one side, to the left, the way I was moving, because when I turned it to the right the building across the street swung across the vision field and affected the sense of balance.
A captain of the HUA?
I was now certain that it would have been safer to stay in the room and face it out.
What department are you, Captain?
It would have been dangerous to let them put me under interrogation but less dangerous than this dizzying height in this killing cold.
This is Commandant Melnichenko, Adviser to the Airforce Directorate. I have a Captain Kurt Heidecker here, with the HUA, service number D/435-05. Is he known in your department?
A gust of wind came and my shoulders met the wall and I froze and contracted the leg muscles and waited, for a moment sickened. If the wind got stronger in the night there wouldn't be a hope in hell: it'd blow me off the building.
He's not known in your department?
And there would have been no explanation he would have accepted when he asked what I was doing in his office; compared with a commandant of Soviet Military Intelligence a captain of the HUA had no authority.
But there would have at least been a chance, even in the hands of the GRU. I couldn't have given them Yasolev's name because Yasolev was using me to infiltrate Trumpeter and Melnichenko had a file on that operation in his office and he would have had me shot, just as someone had had Lena Pabst shot. The situation here in East Berlin forty-eight hours before the arrival of the General-Secretary of the USSR was ultra-sensitive. Yasolev was here on a secret assignment known only to his immediate cell within his department; he'd made it a condition of our liaison that I didn't expose either him or his assignment to East German Intelligence; and the GRU had an adviser buried in the Airforce's HQ with a file on Trumpeter in his care.
In addition there was the London connection, and if I ever got close to blowing my own cover the Bureau would expect me to use the capsule and I would do that.
Window.
I'd been watching it for minutes now, trying to see if there were any chance of using it. When I'd got out of Room 60 I'd left the window open an inch so that I could have climbed back inside after they'd gone, and it was conceivable that another window somewhere had been left open by mistake and I could — watch it, you're losing rationality. It was not conceivable that any window of this building had been left open in winter conditions with the heating system going full blast.
Glass. Perfectly smooth glass and a frame less than an inch proud of the wall, drawing blank so move on, keep moving. Given a wider ledge, wider by only a few inches, I might have jabbed an elbow against the glass and smashed it and gone through. On this ledge there wasn't enough room for leverage.
Wind gust and it tugged at me and I froze and waited and longed to shut my eyes but without a visual reference the balance would have gone. The gust had rocked me sideways a little before I'd had a chance to contract the muscles, and the buildings opposite tilted back and that was when the vertigo began, the real thing, and for the first time I realised there wasn't necessarily a chance of reaching the corner and making the turn and finding some kind of purchase on the next face of the building.
Keep still.
The street steadied and held and then shifted again, and all I could do was try to keep still, but vertigo is not just a sensation, not just a fear of heights: it's the primitive fear of falling, of dying, of taking time to die, of being cut off from the safety we have known since we crawled across that solid floor and began to know on the subconscious level that it would always be like this; there would always be the safety of solidity beneath us, the arms of the Earth Mother.
Keep still.
>
But it was here to stay, now, the vertigo, and I was keeping still because I couldn't move any more, unless I could deal with the enemy within the gates, within the mind.
Breathe deeply, slowly, call upon prana.
The consciousness of known values was diminishing, slipping away, and soon there was no mission to be accomplished, no action to be accounted for; London was the shred of a thought, a name for a place where a man called Shepley lived, had once lived, in the past. Another man, with the name of Melnichenko, floated through my mind as a figment, a ghost seen moving through a hall of mirrors, of reflections, as reality seeped away and took with it the demands of normal life, that I should somehow make my way along this ledge and find a place where I could be safe, and pick up a telephone and say, I am safe now, I am safe.
Life had become refined and narrowed down, with the trivia of earlier ambitions stripped away and leaving the stark immediacy of the present. The world had shrunk to a few square inches of concrete where I stood, where this organism stood with its feet at the precise angle at which they could best sustain life, with its splayed fingers touching the mass of concrete behind its body for the purpose of tactile orientation but with the knowledge that any slight pressure on the wall would begin the mechanical process that would eventually extinguish life, as the body was tilted forward and poised at an angle above the void, an angle from which it could not now return, but from which it must tilt progressively forward until the feet lost the security of the ledge beneath them and followed the body as it began curving over with the weight of the head turning it in the air as it gathered speed and plunged directly to the earth below as the mind played out the drama of the occasion, first experiencing the swift onset of terror as the windrush moved through the hair and pressed against the eyes, the terror of annihilation, of obliteration as the details of the street grew larger and more defined as if seen through the zoom lens of a camera, and then, following the terror, the experience of rage, of rage against the gods, against the fates, bringing to the organism a semblance of identity after its loss in the helplessness of the terror, and then, following the rage, euphoria, easing all travail away and leaving in its place the onset of spiritual peace, of acceptance, of an understanding that would know nothing of the body's gross concerns of physical death as the head hit the ground and the brains were smashed from the skull and the arms were flung out and the stillness came, the inertness, the mutation from creature to object, to chemicals, while -
Gust of wind -
Oh God -
Stay… stay… hold still…
Hold still, and fix the eyes on the window there, on the window across the street, so as to keep stillness in the mind through the eyes' reference, hold still and wait it out, with the feet braced and pressing forward by infinite degrees until the shoulders feel the presence of the wall and all movement ceases and the wind's sudden tugging dies away, dies away.
Cold sweat drenching the skin beneath the clothes, the eyes fixed on the building opposite, the ears picking up sound in the environment, a voice.
Somewhere below.
Below in the street. Look down.
A group of people on the pavement, one of them pointing upwards as others came, lifting their heads to stare.
One of them shouting, but I couldn't make out the words. I looked upwards again, because they were so small, so far away, so far below.
Move, move again, we have to reach safety.
The feet shuffling, angled on the narrow ledge — we must make haste before they upset everything I've got to do, the people down there, they'll call — yes, they have already called, I can hear the siren voicing in the night.
There's a man trying to commit suicide.
Not really.
All patrols vicinity Bruderstrasse, man reported on ledge, seventh floor, the Airforce administration building.
But this is not convenient, good citizens.
I have plans, you see, and I don't need help with them, so why don't you mind your own bloody business and let me -
Steady.
There's nothing you can do about it now, so -
But I wouldn't have fallen, for Christ's sake -
Possibly not. By no means certainly not, but possibly not.
Move, keep moving -
Not terribly wise, to hurry. You get another wind gust like the last one and -
Move, get going, there's still time to find a safe place before they -
Actually no.
A fire engine, immense, with its sirens and bull-horns cutting out as it came to a halt below. That was all I saw because the movement and the colour was disturbing the visual equilibrium and that was dangerous. I heard men running and the moan of a winch-engine.
What were you doing on the ledge?
I was contemplating suicide, so forth, because there was nothing else I could say.
What's your department, captain?
Not known, not known there.
Interrogation.
Finis.
I went on moving because I wasn't far now from the corner of the building and there was a million-to-one chance of reaching the next wall if I could manage the right-angle turn, of reaching it and finding some kind of escape, a roof below where I could drop and break the fall and run, a million-to-one.
Oh, bullshit, you haven't got a chance in hell.
Perfectly right.
Movement at the edge of the vision-field and I looked down as far as the next window below me on the building opposite and saw the reflection of the ladder.
The whole street was filled with noise by now and I suppose there was a crowd down there. The police radios would be busy: I could hear a chorus of three sirens loudening from the distance.
In a workers' state, captain, attempted suicide is seen as anti-social and irresponsible. We -
All right, I'll take over. He's not known in that department. There's more to this than attempted suicide. I'm taking him in for questioning.
Window behind me: I'd got almost as far as the corner, Gott straffe their bloody workers' state and social expectations.
Wind gust and I braced against it, the nerves shocked again and the sweat coming chill on the skin, don't move, hold still, you are not safe yet, you are not in safety.
I took in what I could without disturbing the equilibrium: the top of the ladder was still rising and from the reflections in the windows opposite I could see that a fireman had started climbing as the winch-motor moaned below. The sirens had neared and died short, cut off as the vehicles reached the scene; voices floated upwards as the crowd grew bigger. This was better than television, better even than the Western stations, though not so colourful of course; one man on a wall could hardly qualify for casting in Lives of the Rich and Famous, nothing so fancy.
No, sir, we're taking him along for questioning; for one thing his police papers are false, so there's a great deal we want to know. He was also found on the Airforce administration building.
The winch crew on the fire engine were very good: the top of the ladder was now leaning on the wall beside me and the fireman was only a few rungs below.
'You all right?'
'Yes,' I said, but at last I'd got leverage and I grabbed the top rung and arched my spine and lowered my head and smashed my way backwards through the window behind me and pitched into the room.
19: CHECKPOINT
Three rings.
Cone: 'Yes?'
'Liaison. I think I can get clear of the red sector, but I'm not sure. I'm phoning you to confirm Soviet Adviser A. V. Melnichenko's involvement in Trumpeter. Listen carefully: he will be at Werneuchen Airforce Base when the target arrives. That clear?'
'Yes. Where — '
'Yasolev will obviously recommend the target lands at Schonefeldt instead. I think we should treat Melnichenko as highly suspect and get London to put his name into the computer for background. Clear?'
'Clear. Where are you now?'
Police car.
'In
the streets.' I did not want support.
'Then you'll have to be careful. I had a call from Karl Bruger an hour ago and it looks as if Volper or someone else has blown you to the HUA.'
I think I flinched. 'I'm listening.'
'Bruger told me there's an all-points bulletin out for your arrest for questioning, and they've got a photograph.'
It was probably one of the police cars that had been protecting the scene below the Airforce building. I watched it cross the intersection, heading away from the phone box.
'How did they get the photograph?'
I have never felt so cold.
'It could have been taken at any time with a telescopic lens. When you arrived in Berlin, or when you left the club at lunch time yesterday. Bruger says there's hardly any grain and the light was sharp.'
'I see.'
I was sorry for him, for Cone. The director in the field is meant to keep the executive in signals with London and to observe his progress through the mission and report on it and monitor feedback from the Bureau and pass on what he feels to be necessary; to love, cherish and act as nursemaid if the executive is beyond the ability to help himself, and to respond to an emergency by calling in whatever help he can from sleepers, agents-in-place and in extreme cases the intelligence chief-of-station at the British embassy.
The director in the field is not expected to inform the executive that he has been exposed to the host-country's police forces and intelligence services, but that is what Cone had just had to do and I felt sorry for him.
The streets had been dangerous for me since I'd arrived in Berlin but only because of the opposition's limited surveillance and hit teams. The streets were now the more dangerous to an infinite degree: the whole city had become a red sector.
Mr Shepley?
Speaking.
We've just had to revise the signals board. The DIF reports the executive has become the subject of an APB and the Berlin police have been ordered to arrest him on sight for questioning.
On the board it would be expressed more briefly than that, with a red-and-white striped line underneath my name and the time the information came in. For an executive behind the Curtain it's not uncommon to be the subject of an arrest-on-sight order during the last phases of a mission. It is not uncommon, but it is nonetheless hazardous in the extreme.
