by Adam Hall
I began taking off my gloves, the thin nylon driving-gloves they'd told Cone I preferred, when they'd briefed him as my director in the field. I'd put them on in a grotesque attempt to distance myself, my hands, from the other man's body while I worked on it, on its nervous system, its most sensitive sites of pain. They'd been meant to anaesthetise my hands, to separate them from what they were doing. Don't you think that's the most appalling part of it?
'Is he still alive?'
'Of course.' Said with anger, the first murmuring of self-rage, like distant thunder. 'But he needs hospitalising. For God's sake switch off the light.'
He seemed not to know where the switch was, though our apartments were identical. Then he found it and the glare was cut off, to leave the reflected glow of that bloody Wall in the room.
He came towards the man in the chair, tied to the chair with torn cloth, towelling, I forget what I'd used. 'What do I do if he dies, while I'm taking him there?'
'You'll leave him there just the same, you clod, and call an ambulance, for Christ's sake, now is that clear?'
He said it was, and got Dollinger across his shoulder and went out with him and I soaked a towel in the bathroom and held it against my face and stood there a long time with the nerve-light spangling the dark behind my lids and my heart's beat hammering. The worst of it, with things like this, as you know, is that you can't have your time over again, and not do whatever you've done, and I can't think of two other words in the whole of the language that carry the weight of such infinite despair as these: too late.
Went over to the telephone.
'Just reporting in.'
Brief pause. 'What happened?' Cone.
His tone was wary, apprehensive, because, I suppose, of what he'd heard in my voice.
'I know where the target is.'
Volper.
Another pause. That had been telling him rather a lot. It had been telling him that we had a hope of completing the mission, of bringing Quickstep home. In a moment he asked, 'Can you reach him?'
'Yes.'
'I low long will it take?'
'Not long.'
'I'd feel more comfortable,' he said, 'in the end-phase, if you had some support. Not close. Just in the field.'
'It won't be necessary. He'll be alone.'
Another pause. 'All right. I've been in signals with London. They're prepared to let Trumpeter go ahead.'
'That should be interesting.'
'They also told me that the only danger to our protege is from the target. No one else.'
Not from Trumpeter.
'Do what I can,' I said. 'I'll report when I'm through.'
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and drank a glass of water with its rank taste of chlorine; then I got my Lufthansa bag and went out of the room and down the stairs and across to the car.
07:04.
Over the past minutes the sky had been lightening.
I shifted on the seat, leaning my shoulder against the door, one hand hooked across the wheel rim.
There were no clouds, only a thin haze from the city softening the lights across the airport. I'd seen three planes come in since I'd got here, their landing lights coming on as they settled into final approach, directly in line with the street where I was waiting in the car.
The hotel was less than a hundred yards away. I'd chosen this location because it was near enough to see Volper clearly when he came out of the hotel and got into the car that was standing there, and far enough to give me a certain amount of cover. There were no lights in the hotel, and almost no windows: a wrecking gang had started demolition work on it a month ago, Dollinger had told me, and stopped again because of some bureaucratic holdup.
Dollinger.
His name still tolled like a death-knell in my mind.
But you had to do it. Give yourself a break.
No excuses.
It was that, or risking Gorbachev's life.
There should have been some other way.
It was for the mission.
Do that to a man, for a mission?
There's no quarter, in this trade. You know that.
Yes of course I've always known it and I've done a lot of things I couldn't live with and then lived with them but don't expect me to do them and then go whistling on my way, damn you.
Steady, lad.
07:42.
I didn't like this. I was beginning to worry.
I still didn't know where Volper had planned to intercept his target but it was obviously going to be soon after the General-Secretary had landed, at some time between his leaving the plane and leaving the airport, or just afterwards, soon after his leaving the airport; and that wasn't illogical because although the protection around him would be at its most concentrated, Volper was a man to strike where it'd be least expected.
He should be leaving his temporary base at any time now; the main route from the airport was eleven minutes from here, from the hotel: I'd timed the run at legal speed when I'd got here.
He would have to leave here, then, within seven minutes from now.
I could only wait. But he was running it close and it worried me.
Cone would be worried too. He hadn't expected me to get so close to the target so fast. I hadn't kept in touch, and he knew nothing about a bombed-out Mercedes burning in the streets, or about the man sagging in the chair buying his life with betrayal.
London knew nothing either, except for the last signal Cone had just sent in through Cheltenham for the board.
Executive has initiated end-phase, reports within reach of target.
Theirs not to do or die, theirs but to stand and wait, so forth. I didn't envy them. But Trumpeter was to go ahead, and that was a surprise. On whose decision? Not Shepley's. The Prime Minister's, possibly after consultation with the Chairman of the Praesidium on the private line.
Pollock would be delighted.
No. I'm just a kind of coordinator.
But it was your idea?
Yes.
The tape-recorder turning, Cone sitting there shrunk into his raincoat, Melnichenkov sweating hard, Schwarz saying nothing, the smoke thick in the cellar.
'How did it begin?'
'With Schwarz, actually. He and Bader used to come into the Club, and we got talking. A lot of it was political, like most of the talk in that place. There was a feeling in the air that Miki was coming to East Berlin to open the Wall, you know — an official ceremony and all that; but I knew he couldn't do it. They'd sling him out of power.'
Cone:
'That was your impression?'
'Most of us felt that way. With a man as charismatic as Gorbachev, there's always the risk of his opponents feeling jealous, and scared of his getting too powerful — look what happened to Khrushchev. Then it was something Schwarz said that put things together for me.'
'What did Schwarz say?'
Pollock looked across at him. 'I think this is your bit.'
The pilot got up and walked about, hands tucked into his belt. 'Listen, I am Jewish, like Hans.' Bader. 'And these people won't let us go over there to see our families. They gave us the high privilege of taking us into the bloody Airforce but won't trust us on the other side of the Wall for a couple of days. They — '
'But they'd be afraid you'd give away military information.'
'Others have been allowed across — people with classified information in their heads. So we hate the Wall, and more than most people. So one day I told Dickie — ' Pollock '- that it was getting to be an obsession with me, and with Hans. Every time we flew on training and exercise missions there was the Wall down there, and we were flying bombers…'
Cone leaned over to check the recorder, see that it was running. Everyone had gone very still.
'So I talked discreetly to someone else,' Pollock cut in again. 'Someone at the Soviet Embassy close to Talyzin, in the Kremlin.' Quick clean smile. 'From that point it all built up into Trumpeter.'
Walls of Jericho.
> 'It was Talyzin who took charge, then?'
'That's right.' He got out of his chair too. 'You see, he knows Miki very well; he's his right-hand man, behind the scenes. Of course in the Kremlin most things happen behind the scenes. Politically, it was felt that if Miki tried to get the Wall down officially it would cost him his career, but if someone could breach it for him, he could make the grand Marxist gesture of yielding to the will of the people and leaving it open — and in fact ordering a new street to be driven through it in the name of peace and the brotherhood of nations — you know the line.'
'My God,' Cone said. He was hunched forward now, squinting up at Pollock. 'You'll never get away with it.'
'Talyzin says we could.'
'You mean he's talked about this to Gorbachev?'
Pollock stopped pacing. 'Put it this way. Talyzin is a staunch ally of the General-Secretary's politically, and a close friend on a personal level. I don't think for a moment he could mastermind Trumpeter from the wings without sounding Gorbachev out first.'
Cone turned a glance on me and looked back at Pollock again. I didn't know what he meant. I think he was wondering if I could accept Trumpeter for what it was, for what it could do in Europe, with global repercussions.
'Look,' Pollock said, 'Miki's brilliant at PR work and he's a showman. He's also got a great deal of savvy and a great deal of courage. I think he might have told Talyzin to go ahead.'
'Whose idea was Cat Baxter?'
'That was mine.' Pollock looked rather pleased. 'Just making a gap in the Wall wouldn't do it. We had to get world-wide attention and we needed a symbol, in a big way. Like ten thousand East German rock fans climbing over the rubble and crowding through the Wall and dancing in the streets with the West Berliners. They — '
'Not escaping,' Cone said.
'Oh no — that wasn't the thing at all. Germany reunited — that was going to be the message. Cat Baxter jumped at it, as you can imagine. What a role to play… Joan of Arc at the barricades with banners waving, leading the faithful through. Talk about promotion…'
Mr Ash, she'd said to me, will you be at the concert?
I hope so.
Try and make it. It'll blow your mind.
Cone glanced at me again. He thought Pollock was mad. So did I. But I remembered Einstein. No new idea will ever succeed unless at first it sounds crazy.
'You'd be forewarning the media?'
'I'm ready to send the same message,' Pollock said, 'to every major TV news network and every newspaper and magazine world-wide: warn your camera crews and reporters in East Berlin to stand by for a major story. There'd be instant replay.'
'What about the police? Casualties?'
'The HUA would be willing to turn their backs on the scene when Cat goes through the Wall, with a request direct from Moscow. They — '
'From Talyzin.'
'Yes. They want a united Germany themselves. They'd be asked to evacuate the area around the projected breach on the excuse that toxic chemicals are escaping from a crashed truck. A warning would go to West Berlin, with the same story. I don't have to tell you the planning that's been necessary.' A shrug, and no bright smile. 'You've got to tell London? Now that you know the project?'
'They'd have my head,' Cone said, 'if I tried to keep this dark.'
Another shrug. 'Then I can only hope I'm right in thinking that Talyzin has sounded Gorbachev out. Then if Thatcher calls him, it won't change his mind.'
He lit another cigarette, and I remember thinking it looked like a slow fuse burning.
'If we can't nail Horst Volper,' Cone had said, 'there won't be any point in bombing the Wall.'
He'd shut the recorder down and got onto his feet.
Leaden light was seeping over the sky from the east, casting a metallic sheen across the landscape and the distant buildings. There was no sound in the area, no traffic; Dollinger had told me that a redevelopment scheme had been started and then become stalled, leaving two or three square miles of no-man's-land.
07:49.
Twice I thought I heard a sound from the derelict hotel, but it had been without identity — not the closing of a door or footsteps or a voice. It could have come from the airport.
He will be there alone.
Then he'd waited, forcing me to use more pressure, to drain the blood from his face and bring sweat springing.
But where will he attack the target?
Waited again, forcing me to induce a degree of pain that I had to share with him, to identify with, so that my own face was bloodless as I brought the nerve to breaking point.
I don't know. I don't know.
07:50.
Nothing moved inside the hotel. The car still stood there, half-concealed. There was no sound in the immediate area.
A spark came into the sky to the north and gradually broke into two as the landing lights of the plane grew brighter and it lowered towards the runway, passing directly overhead and landing within half a minute, reversing thrust as the brakes came on.
And then I knew that Volper was not going to leave the hotel at all and that I'd left it too late.
26: TUPOLEV
Smell of death.
I climbed to the next floor. The elevators were not working. The electric power had been cut off months ago. On the next floor I waited again, listening.
The smell of the death that this building was going to die when the men came again with their demolition tools, the smell of damp plaster, mildew, decay along the corridors and on the stairs. The glass had gone from most of the windows, and some of the balconies were sagging. This was the sixth floor, below the roof-garden I'd seen from the car, with its collapsed trelliswork and dead plants and the remains of a flag shredded by the wind.
I had seen tracks on some of the floors below, but they might not be his; workers had been here, disturbing the thick patina of dust and grime along the passages. Some of the doors had been left wide open, and the strengthening light of the morning came into the windowless rooms, pooling along the corridors, innocent, shadowless.
I stood perfectly still, breathing tidally, projecting my sense of hearing across the environment, desperate now to pick up any sound that would give him away.
Silence.
I moved again, crossing the corridor and going into an open room, keeping clear of the window until I'd studied the components of the view: three windows in the other wing of the building and a section of the rubble-strewn courtyard below. Then I moved nearer, keeping to the side, looking across and down. I had made this survey on each floor from the second level upwards, and I suppose the angle of reflection in the broken pane of glass on the opposite wall hadn't been right, as it was now, because I hadn't seen movement before.
It was very slight: the broken pane was only a few inches across and it was dirty; but the movement was there, and I watched it, stilling the breath and listening to the blood coursing past the tympanic membranes. It still wasn't definable; it was still no more than movement, except that it didn't seem to be made by a rat or a bird, because there was a glint to it, like a watch would make on a moving wrist.
At this angle the source of the reflection must be on the floor below, the fifth floor, and from the room next along from where I was standing. I could hear sounds now, small ones, some of them identifiable as metallic or hard wood, hard plastic, an object or objects not moved about by rats or birds.
When I looked at my watch it showed four minutes to eight o'clock and when I looked down at the balcony below and to the left I judged it to be five feet to the side and nine feet down, a total distance of ten feet. The balcony was sagging, like most of them, with the railings broken away. The one outside the room where I stood was in much the same state, with the railing on the left end rusted and buckled.
He was, then, ten or twelve feet away from me.
Volper.
07:57.
Yes indeed, when I'd been waiting in the car below and suddenly realised the truth, I could have driven as fast as p
ossible to the nearest telephone and called the airport and told them to warn the General-Secretary's plane and divert it to an alternate but there would have been no point in it — divert his plane, who is speaking — this is Colonel Heidecker of the HUA and I tell you it is imperative that you warn the pilot that — Wait a minute, please, where are you speaking from — so forth, and yes I could have driven as far as the airport itself but time would have been dangerously shorter and I would have met with the same suspicion because a hoax is a hoax and I was wearing a ripped coat and there was stubble on my face and after the bomb thing and the nightmare with Dollinger I didn't look like your standard respectable policeman so that was the choice I'd been faced with and this was the one I'd made because I'd known by the way Dollinger had given his information that he hadn't been lying and this was where Horst Volper had to be, a floor below in a room with a rotting balcony and a sixty-foot drop into the courtyard if I got it wrong.
Sound in the sky, the sound of the Tupolev.
The French doors were open, one of them hanging on a single hinge, and I stepped through the gap with my shoes clear of the littered glass and went to the end of the balcony and ignored the risk that he might notice movement in one of the broken window-panes down there as I had done, ignored it because I was moving as quickly as I could and there was no question as to whether the sixty-foot drop should be allowed to affect my thinking, only the question of working out the angle and distance and the force needed to take me over the buckled railing and through five feet of space and then the drop.
A thin, loudening scream from the jets of the Tupolev.
Surprise was the only thing in my favour and it would have to be enough and I dragged on the railing to test its strength and thought it was sound enough and swung over it and felt the air-rush of the drop against my face and hit the balcony below on all fours and used the railing supports for leverage and pitched into the room.
He had the flat, featureless face that I'd studied so many times in the photographs, the eyes rather far apart and the nose running almost straight to the brow. The mouth was open a little at this particular moment and his expression wasn't one of surprise but of non-understanding, as if his known version of reality had slipped like a time-warp and left him suddenly a stranger in his own world, and untutored to meet the demands on him.
