ADAM HALL: The Scorpion Signal

'Why so early?'

'I didn't know you wanted to see Steinberg first.'

'Couldn't you signal him?'

'Look,' he said, 'we're all doing our best, OK?' He got on to the autobahn at Hanover-Flughafen and drove east, moving into the eighties before turning south at the cloverleaf with the Hildesheim sign coming up. 'Your stuff's in the glove pocket if you want to start looking it over.'

I found the thick envelope. It had the single word Scorpion written in pencil at the top left corner. 'Where else did they take him,' I asked Floderus as I pulled out the papers, 'apart from Lubyanka?'

'We think he was at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, and the mental hospital in Chernyakhovsk. London's still checking with our people in Moscow and you'll be briefed when you get there.'

'Is that all you know?'

'I'm just contact and relay, sorry.'

I checked the stuff over: transit cover in the name of Hans Matthofer, East German representative for Plastichen Farben; visa and travel permit, Moscow only; record of previous visits; stated purpose of present visit; advanced hotel booking and proposed itinerary (including a visit to the Bolshoi Theatre on the evening of February 23rd, unaccompanied); currency vouchers; a batch of sheets in a file with photographs of plastic moulding and three letters of introduction, one of them to the Ministry of Labour. My photograph was recognizable, with fur hat.

'Have you got any clothes for me?'

'In the back. Coat, hat, furlined boats and gloves; it's twenty below in Moskers, rather you than me.'

We drove for two hours, through Hildesheim and over roads covered with snow when we reached the mountains, while I thought of Croder and Schrenk and Steinberg and tried to think why Schrenk should feel 'bitter' about what they'd done to him. It didn't fit in with the pattern and I kept on worrying it because these are the little things that can take you off course if you're not watching. I'd done two missions with Schrenk and in two missions you learn a lot about a man; Schrenk knew the score, all the way along the line, and he wouldn't bear a grudge against the KGB any more than he'd bear a grudge against a snake that had bitten him, because there's nothing personal about these things.

Floderus was slowing, and I tore off the top left corner of the envelope and put the papers back.

'Where are we?'

'The other side of Zellerfeld. I made a loop.' He drove slowly for another half mile and pulled up on a snow-covered patch alongside the road, dousing the headlamps. The moonlight brightened gradually.

'Is this the place?'

'Yes.'

'Where is he?'

'He should be here.'

'What's the landmark?'

'That sign over there.' Einbeck.

I began worrying. 'How far is it to the checkpoint?'

'Four kilometres.' He began blowing into his hands and I reached over to the back seat and rummaged about and found the gloves and dropped them on to his lap.

'For Christ's sake put these on.'

'You'll need them when — '

'Put them on till then.' A slight break in the tone, inadmissible in the pre-jump phase but my nerves were only just under the surface and small things were picking at them because this is the phase when you're stone cold and your mind is clear and you know you're putting your life on the line and you know you've done it before and got away with it but this time it's different and you're scared again, and swallowing, and alert to the signs and portents that are suddenly in every sound and every shadow, till you can't stand a man blowing into his hands because the repetition drives you up the wall.

Not good. Not at all propitious. Better to get to a telephone and pull Tilson out of bed and tell him to find Croder: Tell him I was right, I'm not ready, he'll have to get someone else.

'… Gunther.'

'What?'

'His name's Gunther,' said Floderus again. 'The man with the truck.'

I wound the window down and listened. The air was perfectly still and the snow had brought its own peculiar silence; a jet was moving at altitude, lost in the brightness of the moon, its thin whine threading the night. I could hear other sounds, distant and muffled by the terrain.

'Dogs?'

'What? Yes. At the checkpoint.'

'Where else?'

'Nowhere else, in this area.'

I don't like dogs.

'You want a gun?'

'What for?'

He looked at me in the pale light, sniffing a drop off his nose. 'For the mission.'

'No. Is this meant to be clearance?'

'Sort of.'

I wanted to laugh. Clearance and briefing normally takes hours and you see a dozen people and sign a dozen forms and make half a dozen declarations because that's all that's going to be left of you if you muck it up out there: a record of what you were. It makes you feel you're important to somebody, if only to the computer clerks. But this trip I was being kicked across the frontier by a junior a-i-p with a drip on his nose and only just enough control over himself to keep him from telling me I shouldn't have got him out of bed in the first place.

'You'd better sign this.' He sniffed again and got out a crumpled handkerchief, taking off one of my gloves to use it. 'Is that your own code?'

I looked at the form. 'My own what?'

' "Five hundred roses for Moira." '

I didn't want to talk about that so I got a pen and signed the form, no next-of-kin, no dependants, nothing saved up to leave to anyone, just enough for the roses. What was she doing now? When did she last think of me?

'Where the hell is that man Gunther?'

Floderus looked at his watch in the moonlight. 'He'll be here.' He put the glove back on.

'How big's the truck?'

'It's a ten-tonner.'

'What's it carrying?'

'You.'

'Come on for Christ's sake I want briefing!' He jerked back and stared at me. 'I want to know what else that truck's carrying and where it's going and why he's got a free run across the frontier. I want information, is that too much to ask?'

He pulled himself round on his seat and said a bit shakily: 'Look, I haven't been told all that much. You're being briefed in Moscow, they said. All I'm here for is — '

'Information, don't you know what it means? About the truck.'

'Oh. Well,' he gave a long riffling sniff, 'it's taking luxury goods across for the black market in Leipzig, a regular run. Scotch and perfume and American goods, jazz records and cassettes and stuff like — '

'Who runs this?'

'The Party, if you want to go right to the top. It's for them and their wives, the same thing that goes on in Moscow. They — '

'How often does this truck go across?'

'About every month. It varies.'

'Just the driver, no one with him?'

'No. He — '

'Is he Russian? East German? West German?'

'He's from Hamburg.'

'Has he ever been turned back?'

'Only once. He — '

'Only once?'

He caught his breath and said in a moment, 'There was a new guard commander, and he wasn't tipped off. He was changed again.'

I didn't want to know any more. This was Russian roulette they'd got me playing: either we'd get across the frontier or we wouldn't. Either I'd find Schrenk or I wouldn't. All I could do was to stop thinking and let the strain off and leave it to Croder and try to believe he knew what he was doing.

I shut my eyes for a while, until I heard the faint clinking of snow chains and the throb of a diesel engine. There was light flushing across the road behind us.

'Is this Gunther?'

'Yes. He said he'd — '

'How do you know it's not someone else?'

'There shouldn't be anyone else up here, this time of night.'

'Shouldn't? Jesus Christ.' I wished Ferris were here, or someone who didn't leave everything to chance.