Gerald Seymour - The Contract

They had come under the arch of the castle gatehouse, they had paused to find the coins for the admission charge, they had stepped into the strong light of the battlements adorned with cannon. He had no recollection of the man who had come in stealth behind him, could remember nothing of his face or features. He could recall only a slouched and disappearing back and the feel of the thin paper of the envelope in his fingers. If the palm of his hand had not been able to find the clear edges of the photographs in his pocket he would have known he had dreamed, imagined, that the mind of an old man could be harsh and vindictive.

He made an excuse to his daughter. He must find a lavatory. He would only be a few minutes. He left her to gaze down from the high walls across the panorama of the houses set in trees in the slope of the valley, and beyond to the rising woodlands and the Brocken mountain.

Behind a bolted door, cramped and closeted, he took the photographs from his pocket. The pictures admitted no possibility of doubt, nor of deception. Even in the meagre light he could see there was nothing fraudulent, no super- imposition, no trick… Willi in the centre of London… He felt his knees weaken and reached for the whitewashed walls for support. The tears flowed and he wept without inhibition.

Willi, his son. Willi, walking and alive and breathing the good air. He found his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and snivelled into its folds.

Why had the man come with such subterfuge? Why had he not stayed to offer explanation? Why did he torture him with such cruelty? When Otto Guttmann joined his daughter on the battlements she quizzed him sharply as to whether he felt faint, and he said that he was well.

This year, as every year, they set off to tour the state- rooms of the Feudalmuseum.

Too early for lunch, too early for the train back to Magdeburg, Johnny meandered along a wood path away from the cemetery. To his right, half hidden from him by trees was the road winding to the horizon of the hills. That would be the road to the Brocken, the summit at 1140 metres above sea level, the highest peak in the Hartz. Pierce had spoken of the Brocken, of the antennae of the Soviet technicians, of the principal Warsaw Pact listening post in the DDR. Triple towers rising into the skyline that could monitor NATO radio transmissions across West Germany. Less than 10 miles away and the most sensitive installation in the country and close to the frontier. And down the road he'd be drifting into the

Schutzzone that Smithson had warned of. He retraced his steps, turned his back on the far hill and its pylons.

The sign of the forking of the paths directed him to the Wildpark Christianental.

There were deer and pigs here that gazed sorrowfully from inside their wire lined compounds. A fox in a cement floored cage stared back at him and having no escape curled itself again into a fur ball. A wild cat scurried for its artificial cave. They were not the creatures that caught at Johnny's eye. It was the birds of the mountain that drew him. The buzzard and the sparrow hawk, the harrier and the peregrine, the merlin and the kestrel. Each with his stumpy wooden perch, each with his own chain for denying flight. What the bloody place is all about, a great sodding empire of clipped wings and restricted movement.

And Johnny would cut Otto Guttmann free. He would have loved to take a wire cutter to the birds, loved to watch them climb and soar again in the upper currents of the wind.

Suppose Otto Guttmann won't come, rejects it, won't entertain the drive down the autobahn… what then, Johnny? Cut the wires on those birds and they'll rise. Guttmann is the same, or he's a bloody lunatic.

It had taken Johnny half an hour to walk through the Wildpark. In front of him was the main road into Wernigerode.

Nothing more for him to do in this town. The dart had been thrust into the mind of Otto Guttmann. Its poison should be given time to run.

He would catch the early afternoon train to Magdeburg.

A pleasant sunshine in West Berlin. Crowds out on the Kaiser-Damm and the Bismarck Strasse. The people of this frenetic, isolated city around which 11 Divisions of the Red Army were stationed bobbed in and out of the department stores, crowded the pavements, jostled for seats in the cafes.

With the Brigadier's wife as his guide, Charles Mawby was shopping.

He had bought a cut glass vase for Joyce, now looked for something for the children. And he was frittering time, eating at the hours that stood before the launch- ing of DIPPER's run. He was poor company for the Briga- dier's wife, little that was amusing in his conversation, and the shopping expedition did nothing but aggravate the cutting edge of his impatience. The obsession that he could not share trampled on him. He carried full responsibility yet he would not be in Magdeburg when Johnny Donoghue met Otto Guttmann. He would not be on the autobahn for the pick-up. He would not be at Marienborn when the documents and passports were produced. He had taken responsibility but when the Dipper bird soared he could not influence its flight.

In three days the mission would be done with, finished. Either way, success or failure, it would be completed. In his working life he thought that he had never felt such choking awareness of the stakes for which he played.

On a scheduled Interflug flight the Trade Minister of the German Democratic Republic and his advisory team arrived at Heathrow.

The group was taken by car from the apron to the Queen's Building suite where was waiting for them a welcoming party formed of a junior minister, two senior civil servants from the Department of Trade and Industry and the East German ambassador to London. There was much smiling as the interpreters grappled with the introductions, many firmly clasped handshakes, an impression of lasting friendship. The Trade Minister was an important figure in the regime and the Party, a member of the Politburo, one of the 'old guard', a colleague of the founders of the

'other' Germany, a friend of Ulbricht and Stoph and Grotewohl and Pieck. A hardline man whose political career had been at its peak when Stalin sat in the Kremlin, an advocate of the march of the Red Army into Czechoslovakia.

The pleasure shown by Dr Oskar Frommholtz at his reception was a patchy mask, as if the guard over his face sometimes slipped to allow suspicion to flourish, the glimmer of caution to cloud his warm words.

There were short speeches, polite applause and then the Trade Minister was led to a News Conference.

It was not an auspicious start to the visit.

When a senior functionary of another country, whether from the socialist or capitalist camp, came to the German Democratic Republic a room full of journalists was guaranteed. All the trappings of serious scribblers hanging on the words of the visitor, and arc lights and microphones and turning cameras.

To hear Dr Frommholtz there had gathered only the Press Association, the airport news agency of Brenards, the BBC world service, and the representative of the communist Morning Star. Interest had been muted, the questions sparse until the proceedings were brought to a sharp close.

The request by the PA reporter for information on the release date of a young East German writer named by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience and charged with espionage ended the conference. The chairs had been snappily vacated, while the visitors sulked and the hosts twitched in embarrassment.

Facing the first Censure motion that the Opposition had tabled since he had assumed office, the Prime Minister had reacted with annoyance to the charges of incompetence and maladministration thrown across the Despatch Box of the House of Commons. In the morning he had been tetchy with his colleagues in Cabinet and Overseas Planning and Defence. In the afternoon he had given no quarter when fielding his twice weekly Questions. Uneasily his supporters on the benches behind him had cheered as he steam-rollered his opponents on the far side of the Chamber.