Quiller Solitaire

by Adam Hall

  I spoke quietly. I didn't think Helen was listening any more; she was watching the velvet curtains now, stroking her cheek against her collar. 'Willi,' I said, 'I'm afraid it's not all finished with now. Since George was murdered, "those people" mounted surveillance – put a watch on the house where our gentle friend here is living, and they put a watch on your flat, as you know, and when you left there tonight they had two men tracking you – at least two, possibly more. And you're now cut off from your home and your normal life and I have to tell you, Willi, that unless you earn my protection you may well follow your friend George Maitland in a matter of days, even a matter of hours. I would've thought this much would be clear to you, and I'm sorry to have to spell it out, but it could in fact save your life.'

  I sat back and drank some tonic; it was getting warm in this place, but that wasn't why there were drops of sweat forming on Willi's forehead. I glanced at Helen; she was still absorbed by the girls. One of them had noticed it, and was returning her gaze steadily, her long thin fingers playing with her cigarette holder.

  I looked back at Willi. 'It's getting late,' I said. 'I've come a long way to see you, and for your own sake I want it to be worth while.'

  'It is difficult,' he said, and crushed his cigarette out in the black onyx bowl and took another one from the packet, his hands moving with the speed of a conjuror's, the sweat giving his forehead a sheen below the blond thinning hair. 'Already I am being followed, and I have done very little. What will happen if I reveal things to you, and they find out?

  'They won't find out.'

  'But you cannot guarantee that.' Flicking his lighter, his pale face bright, suddenly, his eyes strained – They may capture you.'

  'I've never talked yet.'

  They are vicious,' he said urgently, those people. I know this.'

  'Of course. They're terrorists.' I leaned close to him again across the little table. 'You'll be much safer, Willi, if you trust me and let me help you, than if you walk out of here on your own tonight. Where can you go? I'm used to this kind of thing, Willi; It's my job, and I know how to handle it. For you it's very different. We're sitting here tonight talking about George Maitland. I don't want to be sitting with Helen somewhere in a couple of days' time talking about Willi Hartman.'

  Pulling on his black cigarette, his hands on the move the whole time, his eyes darting everywhere, seeing nothing. I was sorry for him. He'd taken up with a very good-looking girl and suddenly he'd found himself on the fringe of a very nasty set and before he could pull out they were on to him. If I hadn't felt sorry for him I would have given him the message a lot less gently than I had – either talk or get out and duck when you hear the shots, so forth.

  'The Faktion,' he said at last, 'has set up an operation, and they call it Nemesis.' He'd got the message all right, and I began listening carefully. 'The object of this operation is to place a bomb on board an international flight scheduled by one of the major US airlines. I do not know which airline, or which flight.'

  Oh my God. In a moment I asked him, 'Have they got a mule lined up?'

  'I don't know. There is never any problem with that; they will be using a Semtex bomb, obviously, and they can persuade almost any passenger to take it on board concealed in a suitcase or something like that; it's what they did with Pan Am Flight 103; they just got a girl to take it on board with her.' The sweat was bright on his forehead and he got out his handkerchief.

  'You know more than that, Willi.'

  His eyes widened. 'But I swear to you -'

  'What's their timing for this? Were they – was Inge talking about days, weeks, when you last spoke to her?'

  'She said nothing about -'

  'You must have got an idea, Willi. Did it sound as if they were getting near the deadline? Did Inge sound excited about it?'

  'Yes, yes, she did, but that was the way she always sounded when she talked about the Faktion. She -'

  'But I'll bet she was as high as a kite about this one, Willi, I mean she wasn't talking about just another financier in a Mercedes like Herrhausen or just another judge in a restaurant like Soderheim, she was talking about another Lockerbie, wasn't she, Willi, you'll find you can remember more than you think you do, so keep on trying.'

  If he was telling the truth and if Inge hadn't been selling him a line to make herself look big I was going to have to send a signal to London tonight that I didn't want to, that I very much didn't want to. The ghost of Lockerbie had started walking again.

  Willi was sitting with his eyes squeezed shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. 'I remember Inge said something about waiting for a passenger list, a certain passenger list.'

  'With important people on it?'

  'Yes, I think. She-'

  'Or just one important person?'

  'No.' He looked up at me. There was no name mentioned.'

  'Did she talk about a day operation, a night operation, the weather conditions -'

  'I don't remember -'

  'The plane's destination, the distance involved?'

  'I don't remember,' shaking his head all the time.

  'She talk about warning a particular airline, a particular nation?'

  'America. An American airline.'

  I gave it another ten minutes, another twenty or thirty questions, and got a little bit more but not much: this was Dieter Klaus' personal pride and joy, something he'd set his heart on, he had a lot of rage in him because they'd been making so many arrests within the Faktion, he needed a really important coup to re-establish the group as a major organisation, things like that.

  Willi got himself another schnapps and put it away in one go. 'I'm glad,' he said in a moment, I'm very glad you obliged me to tell you about this, about Nemesis, and what they want to do. Perhaps you can stop them. That would be good. Very good.'

  'There's a chance.'

  A girl came through the velvet curtains and dropped a short black whip onto one of the little tables and laughed to someone, another girl at the bar, her lipstick bright and her teeth flashing. The man hadn't followed her out, the man who'd gone in there with her.

  Then Helen said, 'I think I'd like a drink now, Willi.'

  'Of course.'

  'Cognac.' She pulled her coat closer as Willi looked round for the waitress. 'Did George know all this, about Nemesis? Did you tell him?'

  She'd been listening more than I'd thought.

  'Yes. I told him.' Tilting his head, 'If I had known…'

  'If we all knew the future, Willi. Don't have it on your mind.' She turned to look at me. 'Do you think you'll be able to do something to stop this awful thing from happening?'

  'It'll be a question of how much time we've got.'

  'And it's so very difficult,' Willi said. 'I telephoned all the major US airlines, do you know that? But they all said the same thing – thank you very much, we'll certainly take this seriously, but we get these threats every day, and we're operating with the best security we can.'

  'Was mochten Sie trinken, darling?'

  Willi looked at me, but I shook my head.

  'EinCognac.'

  When the girl had gone, Helen said, They had people watching my house, do you know that, Willi? It's not only you.'

  'Then you must be careful.'

  'Yes. And Victor's looking after me.'

  'He came from East Germany,' Willi said, I've just remembered. Dieter Klaus. He came across just after unification. He's a rabid communist, of course.'

  'Then he would have trained there.' It wasn't anything new. When the East German secret police had started to do their laundry it had brought a whole army of villains into the open and running for cover.

  'Cognac schwenker.'

  'Danke.'

  Helen cupped her hands round the balloon glass.

  'Do you think he killed George, this man Dieter Klaus? I mean personally?'

  'Does it make any difference?' Willi said. 'Maybe we shouldn't be morbid.'

  'It'd be interesting to know,' she said, 'th
at's all.' I think she shivered, under the thick coat.

  I gave her time to finish the cognac.

  'Willi,' I said, 'can I do this?'

  'No, thank you.' He got the girl over. 'We are going?'

  'Yes. And I need your address.' He hesitated, and I said, 'They know it already. You're not giving anything away. And where do I find Inge?'

  'She's moved. She's met someone else, and she lives with him. I don't know where.'

  I let it go. Perhaps he was trying to protect her, from a belated sense of chivalry. 'I'd find her anyway.

  'Willi, we're going to leave here first, Helen and I. Then you wait five minutes and go outside and get a taxi. You'll be perfectly safe. Go and buy a toothbrush at an all-night pharmacy and then book in at one of the big hotels, make it the Ambassador or the Kempinski, take a room on the top floor and use room-service for whatever you need.' I wrote a number for him on the back of his receipt. 'Call this number at ten tomorrow morning; be as punctual as you can. By that time I'll have arranged for you to go and take whatever you need from your flat. No one from the Rote Armee Faktion will see you there – no one, do you understand?'

  There was fear in his eyes but he said, 'Very well.'

  'Then do the other things I told you about, give the security guard a very good tip, then go and hole up somewhere quiet.'

  'For how long?'

  'I can't tell you. Phone the security guard every week, in case I've left a message for you. And watch the newspapers. Now wait here for five minutes, and trust me: there'll be no trouble.'

  The rain had almost stopped when Helen and I went out to the street, and the air was cool and fresh after the smoke we'd been breathing. We walked half a block and crossed the street and came back on the far side and I saw Willi come out of Die Zwanziger and flag a taxi down and there was no one behind him when it drove away. Then I found one for ourselves.

  'Hotel Steglitz.'

  'Jawohl.'

  She sat close to me again, Helen, huddled in her coat, the scent of the cognac on her breath. 'Poor Willi,' she said. 'I think he feels responsible for what happened to George.'

  We turned into Birkbuschstrasse. The wet streets shimmered under the lights. 'I think George was going to hell in his own handcart anyway, wasn't he?'

  'That could be. He wanted so desperately to make an impression, on himself more than other people.

  He was quite a short man, did you know? Almost as short as Willi, but not quite. I think that was partly why he liked him – in Willi's company he looked a little taller, or thought he did.' I felt her shiver against me. 'It's suddenly begun to hit me, all this. In England the shock was distanced for me, but now I'm back here it's come into sort of close focus. And there's this terrible thing about what they're planning to do, those people.'

  Along Sedan-strasse the leaves were spilled across the pavement from the park, yellow and red and gold in the lamplight. I didn't say anything. I didn't think she wanted me to. I had something to ask her but it could wait.

  'I have a friend,' she said, 'who lost her husband in the Lockerbie crash. I mean they loved each other; he wasn't just her husband. She cried for days. It was all that stuff in the papers, all the beastly details they love to put in, bodies strewn all over the place. She still doesn't read a paper; she cancelled it.' In a moment, 'Is there something you can do to stop those people?'

  She'd asked me that before. I said I could only try. And then I asked her, Who was the man in the night-club?'

  I was watching her reflection in the glass of the division. She looked at me and then away. 'What man?'

  'The one you recognised. The one who recognised you.'

  'Oh,' with a soft laugh. She hadn't hesitated, or at least not for very long. 'It was rather embarrassing. He was just someone I knew, a friend of George's at the embassy. I met him a few times at parties.'

  A BMW cut across our bows, swung in too soon, and our driver got the window down and shouted something, Schweinehundt, I think. 'What is his name?'

  Helen turned her head against my shoulder. 'Kurt He's -'

  'What's his surname?'

  'Oh. Muller, I think. I'm not sure. I mean it was embarrassing because neither of us expected to see the other one in a place like that.'

  I let it go. We'd come away absolutely clean from the night-club. The taxi turned east along Steglitzer Damm and I said, 'You'll be home by this time tomorrow, and you can leave Berlin behind.'

  In a moment she said, 'You still don't want me to see Gerda, or any of my friends?'

  'No. It'd be too dangerous.'

  She shivered again but I wasn't sorry I'd said it; she had to get the message: she was too exposed here, and I wanted to think of her safely back in Reigate taking Billy for long walks, kicking up the leaves.

  Things had moved very fast since I'd got here: only this morning Holmes had said there was no actual mission on the board and already we had Solitaire running and I'd got access to the opposition and there was something much bigger on my mind than making a private kill in the name of McCane. At some time tomorrow, unless we could stop it, tomorrow or the next day, any time at all, there'd be a flight taking off with three or four hundred people on board and it was going to make a sunburst in the sky.

  Chapter 7: SAMALA

  It was gone midnight when we got back to the hotel and I saw Helen up to her room.

  She was still shivering, and her face was haunted as she looked at me in the low light of the corridor, her thin hands holding the fleece collar of her coat pressed against her cheeks.

  'Do you want to come in for a little while?'

  I said, 'No. You need sleep.'

  'Just for a few minutes.' She leaned her head against me and I held her until the shivering stopped.

  'I've got to make some calls.'

  In a moment she said, 'I'm cold, and a bit frightened, that's all. I thought it would be all right to come back to Berlin, but it wasn't, because this is where that beastly thing happened.'

  The plastic key was clutched in her hand and I pulled it gently from between her fingers and put it into the slot and opened the door. 'Didn't you bring any gloves?'

  'I forgot them. I'm always forgetting them.'

  'Phone room service,' I said, 'for some hot milk, Horlicks if they've got it. Not alcohol, no more brandy.' I gave her a final hug. 'And call me if you really can't cope.'

  Going down in the lift I felt a touch of anger. We shouldn't have brought her to Berlin; she was so bloody young for all this, not so much in years but in her mind; she wasn't much more than a schoolgirl, got at by the men in her life, by her father, by George Maitland, perhaps by others, until the personality that had been trying to grow had been crushed and thrown away.

  Whatever you say.

  In my room I called London and found Matthews at the Signals board and asked him to get the tape running.

  'Are you debriefing?'

  'Yes.'

  Through the window the floodlit spire of St Johan's stood against the hazy dark; one or two pigeons were still awake, dipping from a parapet and circling and going back, their shadows flitting across the stone.

  'All right,' Matthews said at last, 'we're running.'

  I wondered what had taken him so long; all you've got to do is push a button on the console. He could have been helping out at one of the other boards, some kind of panic going on.

  'Executive debriefing,' I said, '00.12 hours, Berlin time, November 7. The subject has been questioned and this is the main content. The Red Army Faction is planning an operation code-named Nemesis, repeat Nemesis, under the direction of a former East German national, Dieter Klaus – will you run a dossier on him for me? You might be able to pick him up from what's left of the Stasi files, maybe get some help from Grenzschutzgruppe-9.' London would have to notify GSG- 9 in any case; they were the official German counter-terrorist organisation and if they hadn't got wind of Nemesis and the bomb threat we'd certainly have to brief them.

  'The object of th
e Klaus operation,' I said, 'is to put a bomb on board a US airliner.' I filled it in for them, told them everything that Willi Hartman had given me plus several assumptions, because he'd told me a lot more than he actually knew. It's always like that: you learn to fit bits and pieces of information into the overall picture, stuff that nobody tells us but we know must be there, the way the astronomers discover dark stars. 'I have a feeling,' I said, 'that Klaus might not actually be running the Red Army Faction as such, although that's what I was told. I think that Nemesis could be the code-name not for an operation but for a group he's formed, a separate cell, possibly taking some of the Faction people with him. I don't think he's the kind of man who'd take over a third generation outfit that hasn't done much lately. But this is just my feeling.'

  There was a police car down there, wailing through the streets; I could see its coloured lights reflected in the windows below.

  'End of debriefing,' I said into the phone. 'Questions?

  'You want this to go to Mr Shatner right away?'

  'To Mr Shatner, Chief of Signals and Bureau One. They may want to alert the major US airlines: they'll make a bigger impression than the subject over here. They'll also want to keep a close watch on passenger lists for a heavy contingent of VIPs or a single prominent diplomat or financier or army general, someone like that. What we've got to think about is how to protect every next flight of a US airliner taking off from Berlin.'

  Shatner would alert the US embassy in London in any case and trigger a CIA response in Berlin, long before daylight.

  'I've got that,' Matthews said. What else?

  'How soon can you get my DIF here?'

  'He's booked out on the noon plane, British Airways.'

  'Get him here sooner than that. Put him on the first plane in the morning, I don't care which airline. I've made contact with the opposition and I've got access and I need a director. I want him to see the Reigate subject out of Berlin as soon as possible, but she must not, repeat not take a US plane. When do I get my briefing on the arms dealer scene?'

  Shatner had told me he'd set it up for me, bring me up to date.