ADAM HALL - The Warsaw Document

I had asked Merrick for them and he'd blocked me. Now I had asked Alinka. All I can.

Patrol car, and I went down the steps again into shadow. The steps were a hundred yards from the bridge and that was why I'd made the rendezvous here. There was no time now to phone and make another one. This was where time ran out.

There was no usable alternative project: this was already the alternative to the one that had been blown up when they'd doubled the guards on the Praga Commissariat. I could switch and go in alone and do damage but it wouldn't be enough and the risk was prohibitive: not only to me but to the Bureau. The risk to myself was acceptable because of professional vanity: we know that one day there'll be a mission we shan't complete and that the chances are that we shall go in ignominy, a slack shape spreadeagled below the window of an empty room, something afloat in a river, and that it will have been for nothing; and sometimes we think of how it could be otherwise, of how we might play the odds and go out winning and be remembered for it, be granted at least an epitaph: Hunter? He was Bucharest, '65. Went down with the ship but Christ, what an operation. We all remembered Hunter.

Discount considerations of stinking pride: there'd be a risk to the Bureau, to the Sacred Bull.

The chains crumped rhythmically through the snow and from the city centre came the moan of trams.

If it had been a deliberate alert-phrase meaning she was under duress I would have to go along there and do something about it, at least do that.

I expected him to go past but he stopped and stood with his back to me, to the steps, looking both ways, taking a pace and coming back, watching the traffic.

Decoy.

You get too sensitive. I was behind him before he heard me when I spoke he swung round with his hands whipping into the guard posture.

'Where are the other two?'

He relaxed.

'With the car.'

'Where?'

'Along there. We didn't want to — '

'Come on, we're late.'

The Hotel Cracow was busier than yesterday because there'd been a couple of flights in and the foyer was crowded: most of the atmosphere-coverage journalists were hemming in the dip. corps people, free vodkas, and I recognised Maitland of the Sunday Post, one of the brightest of the I-Was-There boys.

I showed my credentials at the desk and they said they hoped there was to be no trouble and I said none at all, I just wanted to visit one of their guests, and they gave me the number of the suite.

'Don't announce me.'

It was on the first floor and I pressed the buzzer. There were voices somewhere, speaking in English.

He was a short square man with his jacket pulled permanently out of shape by the holster. I told him my name and he came back in less than five seconds and opened the door wider for me.

This was the sitting-room and there were four people here.

With typical courtesy he left his armchair and came towards me. 'Hello, old boy, come along in.'

Foster went across to the trolley.

'I hope you'll have a drink?'

'There isn't time.'

'There's always time, old boy.' His laugh wasn't quite in key but he was doing pretty well because he must have been upset when they told him I'd slipped their surveillance: I was his personal responsibility.

'London wants a report.'

'Yes?’

'They'll be lucky to get it. Don't they know we've enough to do? Don't worry about the Czyn people I asked for.' There was a clinking sound: perhaps the woman washing a cup.

'I can try — '

'Won't you ever bloody well listen? I said don't worry about it. They were to give me support while I tried to break out of Warsaw but there's no need now.'

'I see.'

Foster turned round with a drink in his hand.

'Switch that thing off, there's a good chap.'

Merrick reached for the tape recorder and the voices stopped. He wouldn't look at me: he sat hunched in the armchair, just as he'd sat on the bench at the station. I felt sorry for him: he thought I was only just finding out that he'd used audio surveillance in the buffet while we'd sat with our bowls of soup.

That was all right: it was what I wanted them to think. 'You put a mike across me, did you?'

He didn't answer.

'You know how it is, old boy.' Foster tilted his glass and drank. 'We like to have things on record.'

He'd been much more than upset when they'd told him I'd slipped them. It wasn't coincidence that the tape had been playing when I got here: he must have run it a dozen times since he'd got the bad news from Warsaw Central, listening for clues as to what kind of op I'd got lined up, clues to where I'd gone.

'Well I hope it was worth listening to.'

'So-so.'

Most of the tape could be dangerous but it was too late to worry about that. It was safe — even valuable to me — from the point where Merrick had exposed himself, because from then onwards I'd suspected a mike and used it for my own purposes. It was the point where he'd given me the signal he said was from London.

In that instant he was blown.

There'd been three things wrong. (1) The code was fourth series with first-digit dupes. (2) P.K.L. was instructed to furnish a fully detailed interim report. (3) These instructions were sent during the final phase of the mission.

Fourth series was Merrick's code, not mine, and London would have used my own code or if for any reason they'd changed it to a different series they'd have put a prefix to indicate express intention and there wasn't a prefix.

They would have sent the signal to K.D. for Karl Dollinger and not to P.K.L. for P. K. Longstreet because Longstreet had ceased to exist when they'd given me the new cover.

They wouldn't have asked for a fully detailed report during the final phase of the mission because they know that at this stage of a mission you're lucky if you can hit the Telex or the short-wave, let alone draft a ten-page coverage with itemised refs and carbons. They knew I was in the final phase because Sroda was the deadline for all of us.

Merrick had been given the signal by Foster's group because they too knew the deadline was close and they wanted all available info from me before Sroda broke and the confusion gave me a chance of getting out of Warsaw. So the poor little tick had blown himself but my immediate decision was not to scare him by telling him I knew. Maybe I could have tried saving him, at that moment, by breathing on the bit of compassion he'd managed to find in me, giving it warmth: tell him to get out and hole up and pray. But I could use him now, and anyway I think he would have walked out of the buffet and across the platform and under the next train.

He'd been usable because of the mike. Foster knew I'd asked for three Czyn people because Merrick had told him, so I'd let Foster know why I wanted them, direct on the tape. I told him two important things: that they were to help me leave Warsaw, and that I no longer needed them.

These were things he could accept. The first gave him a plausible reason for my asking Czyn for support: to get me out of the city, not to mount an offensive operation. The second gave strength to what I knew I'd be telling him later, here in this room: that I no longer needed them because I'd been in direct touch with London and had orders to work with Foster and not against him and would therefore expect him to let me out of Warsaw as a temporary ally.

It wouldn't have mattered if there'd been no mike: the gist of it would have been passed on to Foster as routine info; but the tape gave it substance. I wasn't in fact sure there was a mike: it was just that Merrick had been sitting unnaturally still at the table and I'd put it down to chest pains, the asthma, until he gave me the duff signal. Then I knew it could be because he was trying not to fuzz up a mike with background noise, the friction of his clothes when he moved.