Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

The last lot had been tough on the ear-drums because when it was quiet again I could barely hear the engine. It was a three-cylinder Wartburg 1000, a home-product they described as a 'limousine' along the Unter den Linden though along Oxford Street it'd be a clapped-out minicab.

'Where did they call you from?'

She had a low and rather husky voice, the kind people wish they could keep once their cold has gone. It would have been attractive if every time she spoke I didn't expect her to tell the Prussian to pull up and get in the back with us and bring his garotting tools.

'Berlin.'

'When?'

Too late, as usual. No bloody co-ordination. I said in sudden frustration: 'You know the trouble with Die Zelle? It's over organized. Its left hand's so busy trying to find out what its right hand's doing that it can't even feel the way along the wall.' I looked for reaction but she just watched me, chin resting on the fleece collar of the jacket, saying nothing either with her eyes or her mouth. 'Look at the Hanover cell: they didn't get on to Benedikt till it was damned nearly too late. And who did the job on Stockener? They weren't too clever, getting him alone in his car before they shoved it off the road — made it twice as difficult and in the end it stank of foul play. What's one West German military driver among friends? Who went soft?'

I looked away from her and left it at that. A lot of it didn't add up but that was all right: I'd been called in late so I wouldn't be expected to know some of the answers. I just wanted to show I at least knew some of the questions.

It was a long time before she spoke. We passed one of the Soviet garrison barracks, a litter of two-storey hutments behind a picket fence with machine-gun towers. This side of the frontier there were twenty Russian divisions and they'd been here twenty years.

'Did you talk to Benedikt?'

'Of course I talked to him. Poor bastard, he was too good for this world, you know that?'

Lightning came again but this time there was quite an interval before the thunder followed. When the greenish glow brightened again on the facia-board I took another sighting on the speedo-trip. We'd gone twenty-seven kilometres from the frontier, due east most of the time, and it couldn't be far now because the fuel was below a quarter and there wouldn't be a filling-station open at night: we'd seen only two cars since we'd got on to the wider roads south of Mulhausen and there wasn't even an oil-streak along the nearside lane. In the Deutsche Demokratische Republik if you weren't military-or political you walked.

'Who was your controller in Hanover?'

'I never even saw him. They shot me straight in to locate Benedikt and stop the rot.' I'd rehearsed it so many times that it seemed to make sense. There were half a dozen other direct questions I'd rehearsed the answer to but now she threw one in that I couldn't hope to stop.

'Who was your controller in Berlin?'

Because you might get away with not knowing the people you've been sent in to assist but if you don't know the name of your own controller at your own base there's something just a fraction odd in the picture.

I hitched myself round and looked at her and waited until she turned her head and then I said; 'Look, I think you're old enough to know. I haven't been in East Germany since the night in 1945 when I was holed up for six hours in the undercarriage of a converted bomber that was due out of Leipzig with a cargo of anti-typhoid serum for Berlin. Maybe you know how long I've been working for Die Zelle on the other side of the frontier and if you don't it doesn't matter but I'll tell you this: you may be one of the hierarchy at HQ and I could trust you with my last wristwatch but the dreary fact of the matter is that until tonight I didn't know your face and I still don't know your name, Kamerad Oberst, so if it's all the same to you I'm going to play it a bit coy when you throw questions like that one. Because if you don't know who my controller is in Berlin I might be a fool to tell you.' There were gold flecks deep in the bronze but that was all, just the play of light on living colour. 'No offence, of course.'

When the eyes of two people meet and hold their gaze a silent conversation begins and when they are strangers there is a great deal, to be said because their lives are a blank to each other. But sometimes there is even more to be withheld and nothing of it must show and for some people it is difficult. For the woman sitting close to me in the Wartburg, her face sometimes shadowed and sometimes lit by the storm, it was easy. She had spent her life withholding things which spoken, even by the eyes, could betray her: she was a professional, the kind you occasionally meet in the bitter and grinding course of a mission and wish you could perhaps have met in some better place and at some better time when life held more promise of being longer. So that there was nothing in these honeyed tiger's eyes at all. And nothing, as I knew, in my own.

'We shall be there soon,' she said and looked away.

The moon was behind cloud and the land dark. From the distance the building made a honeycomb pattern of light as if a liner were moored there on still black water.

Three men at the gates checked us in. One carried a repeater rifle but wore no uniform: I knew his type, the blank face, the attitude half-slack, half-military, the air of unlimited power subordinate only to higher-ranking members of the same regime — the secret police.

'Kamerad Oberst.' The click of heels.

All I could see of the building was that it was modern, a slab of raw concrete with the silhouette of ship lamps jutting on the skyline. Most of the windows were barred and I heard dogs somewhere. The certainty was satisfying: the thread had held and now I had come all the way. This was the storm-centre: the Kommandantur of Die Zelle.

Two plain-clothes guards fell in as we climbed the steps but she dismissed them with a word and we went into the building alone. Two others met us and she sent for someone by name and we stood in a silent group until he appeared, a complex of hooded spotlights casting our shadows across the floor.

She didn't look at me: her head was turned away. Standing, she was a slight figure even in the flying-jacket though taller than I had imagined. She stood easily erect, gloved hands behind her.

'Kamerad Oberst?'

A big man, quiet on his feet, his eyes dulled by the long absence of any need to think.

Her neat head turned to look at him.

'This man crossed tonight. His name is Martin. Take him to Reception and search him. Strip him and search his body. Search the bandage particularly. Make certain there is no death-pill anywhere on him. Let him dress and then restrict his movements. If he should kill himself before the Heir Direkior can interrogate him I shall hold you responsible.'

She left us without looking back.

The passages were as wide as in any modern building in East Germany and there were no other guards within sight but the place had the atmosphere of a penitentiary.

'Is this a school?'

When they have dull eyes don't ask them what something is: they won't tell you. Give them a bone: the pleasure of correcting you.

'This is the Aschau Asylum for the Criminally Insane.'

The room where they took me seemed appropriate. The big man went in first and the other followed me. Iron bed, metal handbasin, spotlights in a low ceiling: there were a lot of these lights about the place, all the better to see you with. One window, adequately barred, a quarter-inch-steel door with a continental double-action lock and a sliding grille-panel where they could look in to see what you were doing.

The escort stayed in the doorway and the big man became a mechanical valet. She had said do this, do that, and now he did this, did that. The instructions had gone into his skull and the actions came out through his hands: he searched me and stripped me and searched my body and searched the bandage particularly and made sure there was no death-pill on me, then he let me dress and restricted my movements with a pair of military handcuffs, arms behind, because you can get through a vein with your nails if you work at it and she'd warned him that he was responsible for me. The other man stood near the door bouncing gently on his arches like a boxer fresh into the ring, the night-stick looped to his wrist with a leather thong.