Colin Forbes - The Janus Man

Tweed sat facing Diana in a booth inside his favourite restaurant near Walton Street, South Ken. The service was discreet and efficient, the atmosphere intimate, the food among the best in London.

Tweed had once heard the proprietor remark in his upper crust voice, 'I set out to found a place where discriminating customers would appreciate good food at modest prices.. A bit poncey, but he'd achieved his object.

`Who are these people we are going to visit?' Diana asked. `And this pheasant is delicious.'

`They do it rather well here. Who are we going to visit? Four different men, one of whom may be involved in a serious kidnapping case. I've explained the type of insurance General and Cumbria specialize in.'

'But why do you want me with you?'

`Because I have faith in feminine intuition. I know these people well. You'll look at them with a fresh eye. I want your impressions of them.'

`Sounds rather exciting…'

`We'll have to be careful,' Tweed warned.

I'll be frightfully careful. I suppose I do know a bit about men by now,' she said reflectively and sipped her Chablis. `Who am I supposed to be?'

A shrewd question, Tweed thought. 'I was just coming to that,' he said. 'You are an old friend of mine, over here on a visit from New York. Can you fake that? None of the four concerned have been to the States. They spend most of their business hours in Europe.'

`I have been to New York once, as I told you at Travemunde, but it was a long time ago. Can I fake it? I know I can. I'll just babble on, speaking a lot and really saying nothing. Haven't you noticed? Most people do that. It's rather like a game – I think I'm going to enjoy this. Who do we meet first?'

`Tomorrow we travel down into the country to meet Harry Masterson.' He looked up from his pheasant as he spoke the name to see her reaction. She stared back at him over the rim of her glass, her pale blue eyes steady behind her long lashes. 'He lives in Sussex in a typical old thatched cottage.'

`He's married?' she enquired.

`Divorced. He likes women and is very lively. Says the most outrageous things to see how you react..

`Sounds fun. I'll play up to him a bit. Maybe he'll talk to me about himself. That type often does. Their favourite subject.'

`You're a cynic,' he teased.

`Just a realist. I'll tell you afterwards what I think of him. Doesn't sound like a villain.'

`This villain is dangerous because he's so clever at concealing his real character.'

`I'll get under his skin,' she said confidently. 'It will be lovely travelling round with you, Tweed. That crowd back at the marina can be such a crashing bore.' She raised her glass again. `Here's to my spotting the odd man out…'

Tweed escorted Diana back to Newman's flat, refused her invitation to join her in a nightcap, used the waiting cab to take him on to Park Crescent. Monica was waiting for him when he entered his office.

`I kept on phoning Peter Toll at Pullach as you suggested,' she informed him. 'Three times at spaced-out intervals to keep up the pressure. He's still away.'

`I don't like it.' Tweed walked across to the wall-map he had put up earlier in the day, a map showing the whole of Northern Europe, including West and East Germany, the Baltic and Scandinavia.

`Harry Butler is still at Heathrow with that German, Walther Prohl, the BND man who looks like Bob Newman,' she reminded him. 'Harry has reported in. First he starved Prohl, who was famished. Gave him only strong black coffee to drink, which made PrOhl edgy. No new data from him. Then Harry had a meal sent in and Prohl devoured everything, mopping up the gravy with his bread. That should have softened him up. Still nothing fresh. Harry says it looks as though he doesn't know anything more. What do you think Toll is up to?'

`Well, he's up to something.' Tweed turned away from studying the border between West Germany and The Zone. 'He sends a man who looks like Newman to Heathrow – which means what he is involved in concerns Newman. Prohl has a return ticket to Hamburg and waits at the airport for the next flight back. Toll, therefore, was trying to convince someone Newman had left the Federal Republic. That someone, I'm pretty sure, is Markus Wolf, who probably has a man inside Hamburg Airport – someone who can check the passenger manifests.'

`I also called Samuel Portman, Paula Grey's private detective. You have an appointment with him tomorrow. His office at ten in the morning. He thinks you're a potential client. Is there something funny about Paula checking on her husband?'

`That,' Tweed told her, 'is what I'm going to find out. Lord, it must be late…'

`Nearly midnight,' Monica replied, glancing at her watch.

There was no wind, no sound, no light. The silence, the black fir forest, the dark sky were oppressive. Only seconds earlier the frontier zone ahead of Newman and Toll had been a blaze of lights from the distant watchtowers, beams of light moving slowly, like sinister eyes probing the forbidden area, searchlights from each individual tower. Toll had handed Newman night-glasses which he had raised to his eyes, focusing them on the watchtower immediately in front of them, seen through an avenue of grass and shrubs cut through the forest.

The watchtower was a concrete vertical column supporting a round cabin at the summit, a cabin with large windows and a shallow roof. The lenses brought the top of the tower so close Newman felt he could reach out and put a hand inside the open window.

Three men inside. One standing by a swivel-mounted machine-gun. A second operating his searchlight. The third fiddling with something which looked like a console equipped with switches. A beam swept slowly along the thirty-foot high wire fence which rose up about ten yards back from where they stood. At this point a gate was let into the fence.

`You go through the gate,' Toll whispered.

`I know.'

Newman, his hands clammy round the binoculars, studied the lie of the land beyond the gate. Tufts of grass. Stunted shrubs of gorse. Not cleared in the same ruthless way he had seen at other parts of the seven hundred-mile Iron Curtain stretching from the Baltic to Hungary, far to the south.

He heard a metallic clink. Toll had extracted his bunch of skeleton keys from his coat pocket. God knew how long it would take him to unlock that gate. Five minutes was the expected duration of the blackout to be organized by the crew in the tower he was gazing at, a blackout caused by deliberate shorting of the electricity.

`Best night for a month for crossing,' Toll hissed. 'No moon. Heavy overcast forecast. No wind. You'd hear trouble a kilometre off.'

`You said it before,' Newman whispered back.

And he had. Toll was repeating himself Sign of nerves. He had good reason. God knew how many regulations he was breaking – a senior BND officer coming right up to the frontier.

Newman felt he should be grateful. All he could think of was the route he had to follow beyond that gate. When the lights went out. With luck the bloody lights wouldn't go out. That would abort the operation.

`Feeling nervous?' Toll asked.

`Just concentrating on the job.'

Newman handed back the glasses and his voice was ice-cold. That worried Toll. If they felt nervous they would have maximum alertness. Overconfident, they always took risks. Something he could do nothing about. Toll quenched his last-minute doubts.

Newman began to feel the cold seeping into him. They were standing behind a copse of trees, peering round the thick trunk of one giant fir sheering above them. No sign of mist. That was one thing to be thankful for. No mist, please. Not until I'm across – over the dummy minefield. If it was still a dummy. Markus Wolf had a habit of changing the defences without warning.