Gerald Seymour - The Contract

He nodded the day's greeting to Comrade Honecker… he took the lift to the sixth floor.

There was a maid in the corridor with her trolley and bucket and brooms and stacked clean sheets. Johnny waited, admired a grim water colour of hills and lake shores until she had found a vacated room where she could work. He walked the length of the corridor looking for 626, and paused outside Otto Guttmann's door.

He looked once over his shoulder, heard the sounds of muffled radios in the rooms, the soft voice of the maid as she sang.. The corridor was empty. He bent and pushed the envelope under the door. He knocked.

There was a distant, indistinct grunt of acknowledgement.

'A letter for you, Dr Guttmann,'Johnny called softly.

'What…?'

'A letter for you under the door.'

'Who is it… what time is it…?'

Johnny heard no more. Away down the corridor, light- footed to the lift. The old man would not be quick to find his light switch, stumble to the door, turn the key. If he bothered to search for the carrier of the letter then he would find only a corridor frightening in its emptiness.

Johnny dropped into an armchair across the hallway from the restaurant. He made himself comfortable and waited for the breakfast service to begin.

'What should we do?'

Erica was by the window, a willow figure in a long cotton nightdress.

The letter was in her hand, the photographs were spread on the low table beside the easy chair. Erica was pale and her lips bit tight.

' I have to go to the bridge, as I am told.'

Otto Guttmann stood in the centre of his daughter's room. His dressing gown hung from his thin shoulders, his hair wisped and straggling, his eyes confused.

'What if it is a trick…?'

' It is Willi in the photograph.'

' It's horrible, evil… the people who have done this

'They know that I will follow, to find Willi.'

'Who would tell us that he is alive, who would tell us in this way?'

She gazed into her father's face and her hair that was not combed fell across her cheeks. Erica who was his leaning staff at Padolsk, on whom he depended. Erica as fearful as a child in a darkened house.

A smile broke the smoothness of the skin at his mouth. 'The pictures are taken in London… in the centre of a NATO capital. If they are not a fraud then Willi has gone to the military opponent of the Soviet Union.'

Her fingers crumpled the single sheet of paper, dropped it to the carpet.

'Then Willi is a traitor

'That is how he would be seen by many.'

'What will they want of you?'

' I don't know,' the old man said simply.

'They will want your mind.'

' I don't know.'

'What are you going to do?'

' I must go to the bridge.' Spoken with tenderness, spoken by a man who has seen the precipices of grief and does not believe he can be hurt any further.

'You can go to Renate's friend, to the Schutzpolizei…'

'Then I have disobeyed the instruction.'

' It is your duty to go to the police… to the Spitzer…'

'Then I do not see Willi.'

' If it is not reported, then we have joined the conspiracy, you see that?'

' I am too old to be afraid.'

'Willi is with our enemy…'

'In the photograph Willi is happy, as if he has found friends..

She came quickly to him. The slender arms circled his neck, the softness of her mouth nuzzled against his bristled chin.

' I will come with you to the bridge.'

They stood together a long time, drawing on each other's courage, and the photographs lay on the table, and Willi's smile was with them. They could hear his voice and see his face in laughter. Willi's presence was overwhelming. Their cheeks were damp when at last they broke apart to begin to prepare to face the day.

The Second Secretary, Commercial, slipped out of the British Embassy on Unter den Linden, and hurried towards the bridges over the Spree river. His briefcase weighed heavily in his hand. Twice he stopped and turned in one movement… surveillance of embassy personnel by the Staatssicherheitsdienst followed no regular pattern and he rated his chances of going without observation as best in the early morning.

Before eight and the tourists not yet on the streets.

He was the junior of the two SIS men attached to the embassy staff and working under the wing of diplomatic immunity. This was not the work that he enjoyed, playing the old delivery routines. He was an analyst, an interpreter of information.

The contact would be an older man, an East German national long employed by the British and with an account at a bank in Zurich. Not that he could use the money. But the day would come, the forged passport, the train through the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint. But the contact was not encouraged to think of that time, urged only to soldier on.

For five minutes the Second Secretary sat on a bench in a square across the river and under the Television Tower, then opened his briefcase and took out the package. It was wrapped as for a present. After another minute he left it on the seat, under a newspaper. When he walked back towards the bridge he did not try to watch the collection. Once over the river he stopped at the cafe beside the History Museum and ordered himself a coffee and a pork sandwich.

It was a vulgar scandal when a foreign intelligence service mounted an operation from Federal territory with neither the courtesy of liaison nor the consideration of the repercussions. Vulgar and arrogant.

Since the assault on the Lufthansa jet at Mogadishu, since the British had loaned two 'storm experts' and their equipment, since hostages had been freed and terrorists killed, the British had taken too much for granted. The congratulations and thanks offered by the Chancellor to their Prime Minister had left them with an illusion as to their rights.

Any connivance, official or otherwise, in the use of a commercial organisation to breach the frontier was potentially disastrous. Transit on the corridor autobahn between the Federal Republic and West Berlin was based on a fragile enough agreement, the Soviets had talked only eighteen months before of renouncing the arrangement if the Bonn government did not take acton to curb the escape groups.

The British were blundering onto thinly frozen water, and without authority.

Once in his office the man from BfV switched on his electric kettle, and selected two tea bags from the packet in the lower drawer of his desk. He phoned his clerk to provide him with the file on Hermann Lentzer, he ordered an immediate surveillance put on the man, he started the process of discovering the time schedule of the operation for which the British had employed him.

That done the temper that had lingered with him from the previous evening was improved. He would not have admitted that pique or spite fuelled the remorseless attention he now turned on Lentzer. He regarded himself as a good servant, committed simply to the welfare of his country.

On the table behind his desk the kettle spluttered and the lid bounced over an eruption of steam.

The Prime Minister sat shoulders back, erect and straight.

On the sofa, with his legs crossed and with the unhappi- ness of a man drawn into a dispute for which he has no stomach, was the Secretary to the Cabinet.

'Take a chair, please.' The Prime Minister was aloof.

'Thank you, Prime Minister,' the Deputy-Under-Secre- tary said firmly.

That was what he had learned over the years. The maxim of no surrender. Stare them out and don't whimper. Stand your ground. He looked at the Cabinet Secretary and smiled and received for his pains only a turned head. He would find no ally there; not in this room, not at this moment. Worthwhile to know.

'We had a discussion a few day ago over the areas of consultation that I required between your Service and Downing Street…' Measured words from the Prime Minister.