ADAM HALL - The Warsaw Document

The courtyard was cobbled and the big saloon drifted a bit on the snow in spite of its chains.

Foster took the occasional seat and sat hanging on to the looped strap as we turned east towards Praga. He spoke more quickly than usual and his eyes were alert.

'You weren't actually sent from London to take any kind of action against Czyn?'

'I told you what had come up.'

'Yes, but keep on filling me in, will you?'

'There's nothing new except that my people have started panicking at the last minute because the F.O.'s putting pressure on them. First they told me to explore and report on the Czyn situation and then they began chucking fully urgent signals for me to assist and advise the U.B. and now I'm apparently expected to keep the lid on Warsaw single-handed, their usual bloody style. I opted to co-operate with you off my own bat, why should I skin my nose on the grindstone while you sit on your arse?'

He gave a brief smile but the nerves still showed through it. 'I've hardly been doing that. I think. We've quite a big problem here, and I don't expect you to understand its proportions. These urgent signals,' he said with polite interest, 'didn't reach you through the British Embassy, I suppose?'

'Oh Christ,' I said and we both laughed.

It was a private joke: we were two seasoned professionals and shared the understanding of our trade and our trade was deception so I knew what he was doing: he was testing his own agent, Merrick. 'Of course they didn't. He would have passed you the dupes.'

'I just wondered.!

'Give the little bastard his due: he did a first-class op. for you and if London hadn't sent me new orders it would have been chop-chop and no flowers, you know that. Surely that's worth at least a lance-corporalship in the Red Army?'

He laughed again but it didn't have quite the same sound because he knew I was guying his colonelcy.

I wiped the steam off the window and looked out at the people along the pavements. The reaction was starting to set in, the delayed shock of what had happened in the station buffet. One minute I was watching Merrick and feeling glad that he'd soon be back in London and safety and the next minute I was trying to absorb the realisation that his job in Warsaw had been to cut me down and trap me for the K.G.B.

I hadn't thought about it since it had happened because there hadn't been time: it had floated in my head like a nightmare you can't remember in detail but can remember having had. I was thinking of Egerton now, rather than Merrick. Egerton with his chilblains and his prim confidence in what he was doing: he's been fully screened, of course, I've no intention of saddling you with a potential risk.

If I had the luck to see London again I'd have Egerton out on his neck: the least we expect of Control is that they don't recruit an agent already recruited by Moscow and then tell us to hold his hand.

I couldn't do it by signals. My only communications were through Merrick and the Embassy because direct contact had been banned since Coleman had used a phone in Amsterdam and didn't hear the bugs.

The saloon gave a lurch and Foster hung on to his strap: a fire-service vehicle had been klaxoning for gangway and its amber rotating lamp went past as we tucked in to let it through. I think we hit the kerb with a rear wheel before we pulled straight again, the kerb or a drift of packed ice.

Foster was looking at me rather sharply.

'We'd have heard it,' I said, 'from this distance.'

'Are you sure?'

'The basement's crammed with the stuff.'

He looked away.

Nervous and physical courage don't always come in the same package. For twenty years this man had run the most sensitive type of operation known to the trade, watching his words and weighing them whenever he spoke, wherever he was, cold sober in his Whitehall office or half-drunk in a woman's flat, fabricating his lies and testing them, detecting flaws and repairing them and listening all the time for, a false note in the speech of others that would tell him of danger, carrying for twenty years a bomb that ticked in his pocket.

But he'd no stomach for the real thing, for trinitrotoluene.

'There are other places?'

'According to the Czyn people I spoke to.’

'Which places?'

'You're not thinking straight, Foster. If I knew which places I'd tell you. The only one I'm certain about is the Praga Commissariat and I told you as soon as I could. My orders are to help you keep the peace in this fair city, try getting it into your head.'

'The Records Office,' he said reflectively, 'would be another place.'

'I'd say so. What price an amnesty when you can blow up the evidence?' The Records Office stocked secret information on every single citizen. 'It's your own fault there's not much time left: you've wiped out most of Czyn and the die-hard survivors are going to make sure there's some action before they join the rest. Praga was rigged for midnight originally, the same as Tamka. You'd have had more time.'

He shut up for a bit. I think he was working out the odds: he was still a top-line professional and he had a big operation running and he could only save it by going into his base and pulling the documentation out in time. On the other hand, he didn't like thinking about his skin plastered all over what was left of the ceiling.

Voskarev hadn't spoken since we'd got into the car. I watched his reflection on the glass of the division between the dark shapes of the driver and escort.

In a moment Foster said: 'If they find the explosive and defuse it we'd better have Ludwiczak brought along to talk to us.'

'He'll talk to me. He won't talk to you.'

Gently: 'The same thing, surely, since your instructions are to help me prevent disorder?'

'I just mean don't scare him off.'

'We don't want to scare anybody, old boy. The thing is that we'll need to put some calls out as soon as we know which are the other places. Evacuate the night staffs and so on.'

'You're not worried about the night staffs. You don't want one and a half million dossiers to go up in smoke because you can't run a slave state without Big Brother.'

There was another lurch and he steadied himself on the tip-up seat. Through the clear patch he'd made on the window I could see the arc of lamps in the distance, the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge.

Then we began a nasty wobble and I could see the wheel jerking in the driver's hands. Foster held on to his strap. The wobble got worse and we slowed, pulling alongside the kerb.

'What's happening?'

'It looks like a flat.'

The car stopped and the driver got out and tapped at the window, calling something we couldn't hear. Voskarev opened the door, asking in Polish what the matter was.

'I regret that we have a puncture.'

'You must get us a taxi,' Foster told him quickly.

The driver pulled the door wide open and chopped for Voskarev's wrist to paralyse it in case there was a gun. Apparently there was, because the left hand went for the pocket of the coat, but the driver got there first so it was all right.

I told Foster: 'Don't do anything silly.' I didn't bother to look for a gun on him, he wasn't the type to carry one, the only thing you could say for the bloody man.

I told Voskarev I wanted his keys and his papers.

He stared around him as if looking for a street number through the clouded glass, as if lost in a place he'd thought familiar. I said

'I'll get them, otherwise. Don't embarrass yourself.' He opened his astrakhan coat, fumbling like an old man.

'Fast,' I said, 'very fast indeed.'

The driver said he'd get them for me and I told him to shut up. The driver wanted to kill him, I knew that.

Six, all cylinder-type, two on a separate ring, series numbers in sequence.