Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

The early hunger of the day had passed off during the afternoon. It would return before midnight and I was tempted to pick up something to conserve but I didn't want to show my face anywhere. It would have to wait: in any case a light stomach would be an advantage if things got rough at the clockmaker's.

I didn't know. Benedikt hadn't told me whether the place were a safe-house for Die Zelle, a contact point of his own or a Zelle address where he was still accepted as loyal.

It was near the end of the main street. I assumed there was only one clockmaker's in Neueburg, otherwise Benedikt would have been more precise.

It backed on to a chapel so there wouldn't be a door at the rear. It made a corner of a T-section and if there were a second entrance it would be the door at the side, the first one along. I took the 17M past at normal speed and turned at the end of the village and came back, coasting to a stop just within observation-view of the front entrance and the door at the side. It was only ten minutes to five but the winter dark had already come down. The street-lamps were all right and I spent some time with the x6 Zeiss after wiping the grime off the lenses.

In the next half an hour two people went in and came out. There was nothing about them to suggest they weren't fetching their alarm-clocks. I was in no hurry.

There are a few simple rules about visiting an indicated address and they add up to the one general idea of vetting the place carefully before going in. That was why I'd thought the Zeiss would be useful. After the first half an hour I had some data collected, mostly about the best way of getting out of the building if I found myself on the second or third floors and didn't want to use the front entrance. There were at least two people there because a light had gone on upstairs about fifteen seconds after someone had entered: there wasn't a lot of time to reach the third floor and the clockmaker would probably be talking to him in the shop itself.

Apart from general rules there were specific considerations. I might be recognised the instant I went in, either because they were in close touch with the Zelle unit in Hanover or because my face was probably now in the papers. There could be a dozen people in there — contacts, couriers, operators, radio-signallers — and I could walk straight into a spring-trap especially if Benedikt had talked before he died: if they knew he'd given me this address they'd expect me here.

General rules, specific considerations, instinct. The precise formula for doing the right thing in a given situation. But mostly instinct. The antennae weaving sensitively around and touching on hair-fine contacts, correcting and recorrecting the plan of approach, the conscious and sub-conscious gathering and relating of random data, computing, presenting, counselling telling me whether to cross over there and walk in now or wait another ten minutes or another sixty, whether to give the clockmaker Benedikt's name and assess his reaction or try one of a dozen other gambits that would leave us both with a way out if there were people there and it was dangerous.

Because I had to start with an assumption, a likelihood, as a blueprint. And I assumed that he was aware (1) that Benedikt had tried to defect and (2) that I knew it.

Normal data was coming in all the time and it could be vital or useless: seven cars driven through the village in half an hour, four of them Hanover-registered, two Frankfurt and one Stuttgart. A light-coloured Porsche had pulled up fifty yards ahead of the 17M and a man had gone into the shop and driven off again after five minutes. Thirteen people had passed me on foot and ten had gone by the clockmaker's, four of them looking in, one of them giving a wave of his hand. Two had gone in and come out again.

An Opel Kapitan stopped a short way down the side-street and a man got out and went into the first doorway along. I'd had the Zeiss on him and so I was certain. I supposed he had come south as I had, perhaps going to ground as I had, and for the same reason: to wait for the police traps to be withdrawn. The manager of the motel would have described him to the Kriminalpolizei and he would know that. In the ordinary way it might not worry him: a verbal description isn't much to go on. So I assumed it had been important for him to reach Neueburg and the doorway over there in complete security. The death of Benedikt could have sent the entire network quivering and its controllers would be jumpy.

He had left the Kapitan a few yards from the door and had walked along to it lightly on the balls of his feet, his shoulders forward. I didn't need to go across and put my head inside the car to confirm what I already knew would be there: a faint smell of almonds.

He was in the house for an hour and during that time I twice decided to make a move and follow him through the side door and take it from there on an ad hoc basis and twice revoked the decision and tried to sell myself the idea that it wasn't because my left hand didn't want to get hurt any more.

There were in fact practical reasons why I should avoid immediate risks. Up to an hour ago I'd had only one fine thread to follow: the name of a village where there was a clockmaker. If that information had turned out to be duff or if I'd made a mistake at the autobahn police trap my personal part in the mission would have been totally written off. Without this one fine thread there would have been no future: I was isolated now, cut off from Linsdorf and the ability to root around there under the A.I.B. cover. And there was nowhere else to go. It would have been the first time I had ever failed to report back to the Bureau without at least some bits and pieces for them to. look at.

But now I had something for Ferris: the location of a Zelle safe-house, confirmed. If I went in there the chances of learning a lot more were high but the chances of bringing the information away with me were not. If I stayed where I was I'd be sitting pretty and I didn't want to jog the barber's arm.

One factor made the final decision. It was a factor that often influences an operation at any given critical stage and it is surprising because it is banal: it is the weather. Tonight over Neueburg the sky was still clear, with the storm-clouds piled and concentrated in the Harz range to the north. A haze was spreading eastwards from the centre but the third-phase moon was still at nine-tenths luminosity and its light would last until the storm broke. Without it I would have had to go in there and do what I could because there would have been no alternative.

He came out alone and went straight to the Kapitan without checking the street and if Ferris ever saw one of us do a thing like that he'd have us underneath the Lowry for filthy rotten security. Perhaps that's why the Bureau had lasted so long.

I gave him fifty seconds and started up and tagged him out of the village at long range, settling down at something like a hundred yards through the hedgerows south. I didn't expect it to be easy but it was worse than I'd let myself believe. Across flatter terrain the going would have been comfortable because his rear-lamps and the light thrown by his heads would have provided a continuous beacon for me but in this area the rise and fall of the road blotted him out at intervals and I had to use the moon alone. After the first few kilometres I could feel the ciliary muscles contracting and relaxing as my eyes adjusted to the changing light-conditions. That was all right: they could go on doing it and the exercise was good for them but the roads were narrow and there was often a temptation to flick the heads on for half a second to make sure I wasn't going to hit anything. Even the sidelamps would have been a help but from the moment I switched them on he'd pick me up in the mirror and start watching me and wait for me to turn them off somewhere and I wasn't going to do that.