Adam Hall - Quiller Solitaire

Cone studied his dry scaly hands. 'There's not much,' he said, 'I can do, then, for the moment.'

'Not much, no. But if I can go in and get out you'll have a lot to do.' There'd be enough signals to light up the board in London, because if I could blow Nemesis from the centre there'd be a lot of fallout and we'd hand things over to the Bundeskriminalamt to hunt down the survivors and make arrests.

'Questions?' Cone asked me.

'No.' He'd had the London briefing and my own debriefing and he knew as much about the way the mission was running as I did. There was nothing I needed to ask him.

'Then you better get on with your homework.'

'Yes.'

He got up and stood at the window for a moment, watching a TWA jumbo go sloping into the sky.

'It must give you the willies,' he said as he turned round. 'All those people.'

'Yes.'

'You know where to find me,' he said, and I opened the door and watched him picking his way along the passage, his thin body angled forward a little against the blizzard in his soul.

14:00 hours.

The statistics relevant to the legitimate sale of AK47 assault rifles are as follows…

15:00 hours.

The US dollar is the standard currency in all arms deals of any importance…

16:00 hours.

And as the late winter sunshine changed from rose to purple across the roofs of the buildings opposite my window, and the planes moved through the twilight with the stealth of phantoms before their sound came in, I became prey to the feeling that the telephone standing on the lopsided bare wooden table was never, after all, going to ring, that Dieter Klaus wasn't here in Berlin or that Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him.

I couldn't assume that he'd be interested, in any case, in a tactical nuclear missile: his plans to put a bomb on board a Pan Am plane could be already advanced. He might not even have time for a meeting with a strange arms dealer with hew toys to sell: he might have all he needed.

Singapore and Israel both possess several high tech armaments that are not available anywhere else in the world…

At 17:00 hours I sat in the semi-darkness of the little room, with the recorder shut off and my mind ranging across the data that I'd been feeding into it since this morning. A big jet reached for altitude across the skyline with its strobes flashing and the thin line of its windows slanting through the dark.

So Dieter Klaus wasn't in Berlin or Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him or she knew about the ambush they'd set for me in the underground garage, knew my cover story was false , was that why the telephone hadn't rung?

I didn't think so. If Sorgenicht had recognised me in the cafeteria and phoned for support they would have gone for me in the car park while I was talking to Inge: they wouldn't have waited. It hadn't been Sorgenicht who'd got onto me; when they'd started the search for Krenz they must have intercepted some of the calls going out from the Mercedes to the SAAB and traced them and found the SAAB in the garage and set the trap, waiting for me to go back to it.

There was no connection between the unknown man who had taken over the Mercedes from Krenz and the man who had openly approached Inge Stoph in the car park.

She didn't know who I was, or if she knew, and telephoned with a rendezvous, it would be fatal to keep it.

But I wouldn't know.

I walked about, restless, up and down the narrow room, the floorboards creaking and the sound of the girls rising from the rooms below as they laughed for their money at the outset of the long night's parody of love.

A plane thundered into the dark.

And now the appalling idea came to me that I'd been wasting time, trusting the whole of the mission to a hypothetical rendezvous while all those people were busy packing their bags and saying goodbye to friends and filing through the departure gate for their exciting ride with the little teddy bear. I'd have to signal Cone and tell him there was a change of plan, I'd need to find another way in to Nemesis if it wasn't already too late, but the phone began ringing suddenly in the quiet room and I swung round and picked it up and Kleiber told me that Inge Stoph had called to say that if I wanted to talk to Dieter Klaus I must be at the north-west corner of Waldschulle Alice and Harbigstrasse at 5:15 this evening and that I must go there alone.

And now Johan has the puck and he's leading with it all the way and he's going as if there just isn't anybody here to stop him. This is only his second time out since the injury he sustained at Frankfurt, but that's obviously old history by the way he's moving.

Floodlights roofed the night.

'Isn't he amazing?' Inge asked me.

I said yes, amazing.

'Would you like one?' Waving a bratwurst.

'Thank you.' I hadn't eaten since this morning.

But we didn't expect Tommy Warnke to get across there so fast and it looks as if Johan's going to have his work cut out unless he can pile on that extra turn of speed he's so famous for.

The stadium was packed, the colours of the sweaters and scarves and woollen hats turning it into a vast flower bed.

'You like ice-hockey?' Inge asked me.

'Very much.'

I'd reached the north-west corner of Waldschulle Allee and Harbigstrasse at the precise hour for the rendezvous and paid off the taxi and the crimson Porsche 911 had pulled in to the kerb with a squeal of tyres.

'Hans!'

She waved from the car and I went across to it and got in.

'It's so nice to see you again!' Showgirl smile, the eyes ice-bright and observant. She took the Porsche away with a dash of expertise, her right hand caressing the gear-knob. She was wearing the same crimson calf-length boots, but tonight she sported a Russian fur hat with fur gloves to match.

A dark green Jaguar was trailing us: it had pulled up behind the Porsche and started off again, keeping close enough to make sure no one slipped in between. Later it overtook us and the woman at the wheel glanced across at Inge and away; then she held back and began trailing again. Inge knew the Jaguar was with us, but didn't say anything. She drove steadily, playing the lights and the traffic lanes without flash but with effectiveness.

'Dieter said he can only give you a few minutes,' she told me as we waited for a green. 'But even so, you're lucky.'

'So is he,' I said. 'I assume you told him what I've got for him?'

She looked at me. 'You don't understand. It's very difficult to get Dieter to see anyone at all.'

'It's very difficult,' I said, 'to keep me waiting so long for a meeting.'

The lights changed to green and she shifted the gear-lever. 'So? Then why did you decide to wait?'

I let my eyes move over her face. 'For one thing I find you charming.'

'Thank you.'

She wasn't impressed: she was a knockout and she knew it. But she flashed me the dazzling sharp-toothed feline smile, and I was fairly sure now that Dieter Klaus had instructed her to spring a Venus trap on me, and I was going to walk right into it because I knew how to pick up information that way. It would also be in keeping with my cover: an international arms dealer passing through Berlin wouldn't turn down the chance of a night with a girl like Inge Stoph.

'And for another thing?' she asked me.

'I confess to a certain admiration for Dieter Klaus.'

She said rather quickly – 'What do you know about him?'

'Not very much, but in my trade the word gets around that he's different from the kind of thugs you find, say, in the Rote Armee Faktion.'

'That's exactly the word,' Inge said. 'Dieter Klaus is very different.'

It was all she said, and she drove in silence until we reached the stadium.