Gerald Seymour: The Contract

'You've the sort of chaps on your books who could trek over there and proposition him, haven't you Deputy-Under- Secretary?' The Director beamed.

The Deputy-Under-Secretary held his head hidden in his hands, his voice was muffled through his fingers. 'Would it have to go to the politicians?'

The Permanent Under Secretary seemed pained. 'They're so dreadfully squeamish these days, aren't they? You'll bear that in mind when you judge the issue.'

They were on their way. Quick steps down the corridors and stairs and through the front door and towards the waiting cars. The lunch period had been eaten into and unless they scampered would be lost.

'Dig into the files, would you, Charles, for a suitable fellow. See if you can come up with a name for me by tomorrow evening,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary said over his shoulder.

Carter spoke from the dining room door. 'Willi, there's something they want to clarify in London. What are your father's holiday dates

… in Magdeburg this summer?'

God Almighty, what were they thinking about in their ivory towers?

What bloody scheme were they hatching up above the cloud level? They weren't going to try to bring the old man out, not through the minefields, not through the bloody fences. Remember the maxim of the Service, Henry; it exists for the gathering of information and how it is acquired is irrelevant. And it's what the old Service would have done. He curbed himself, doused the thought. They wouldn't be so bloody mad.

'From the first of June to the fifteenth…'

'Thanks, Willi.' Carter glanced at his watch face, read the date. A month till Otto Guttmann went on holiday. Six weeks till he left, that was more positive. What on earth were they playing at in London?

'Why do you need to know, Mr Carter?'

'Don't ask me, lad. Don't expect me to be told anything.'

They had been in the earth bunker at the edge of the Spellersieck wood for eight hours and the relief lorry to collect Ulf Becker and Heini Schalke was late.

The 0400–1200 duty, the killer time. The duty that started as the first birds broke the night silence and that ended at noon with the head pounding in pain, the legs stiffened, the eyes red rimmed from staring out in concentration over the cleared ground to the border fence.

There was no friendship between these two boys as they squatted in the half dark. Becker from Berlin, Schalke from Leipzig. No basis for mutual understanding or trust. The orders of the company commander insisted that sentries should talk together only on matters that affected their operational readiness. And if one spoke in the earth bunker or the watch tower or the patrol jeep then he must know first that his colleagues would not denounce him, and it was the skill of the officers and the NCOs and their rosters that the conscripts never knew with whom they were safe. The boys watched each other with lonely, hawk suspicion.

Becker was close to the end of his eighteen month service in the Border Guard of the National Volks Armee of the German Democratic Republic, Schalke was new and raw and barely introduced to the barracks back in the farming village of Weferl- ingen.

The cold seeped inside the walls of the bunker, edged through their mudstained denims, caught at their ears and cheeks, and the hands that gripped their MPiKM automatic rifles. They must always be close to their rifles because the earth bunker had been dug one hundred and fifty metres from the border fence and this was the shooting zone where challenge was unnecessary. If there is a civilian close to the wire, shoot.

That was the order given to the boys in the company at Weferlingen.

Shoot to kill. Do not challenge and offer the fugitive the opportunity to run for the wire and try to climb. Shoot to prevent the fence being breached. For that duty they were armed with the MPiKM automatic rifle and two magazines of ammunition. Each time he lay in the bunker or climbed the watchtower or rode in the jeep, Becker posed for himself the same question. Why was it necessary more than thirty years after the founding of the state to maintain a wall of wire, to lay a field of mines, to build a line of watchtowers, why were there still young people prepared to challenge the barricade and the excellence of its defences. Schalke would have no answer, not this lout from the factories at Leipzig who never in his life had doubted the religion of the Party.

Becker had never spoken of the erosion of his faith.

From the far distance, muffled by the trees of Spellersieck came the drone of the lorry.

Becker grinned at the fatty, pallid face of Schalke. He had much to look forward to. From the lorry to Weferlingen. A shower to wash away the night dirt and a change into his best uniform. Transport to Haldensleben, a train to Magdeburg and a connection to Berlin. A 48 hour pass. There would be an obligatory visit to his parents' flat in the Pankow sector of the capital and then he would be away with the Freie Deutsche Jugend group to the camp site at Schwielowsee, 30 kilometres from the city; and in the party would be Jutte. For two days Heini Schalke could crawl into his bunker, or mount his watchtower, or freeze his arse, or learn his manual without Ulf Becker for company. It would be his last weekend pass before demobilisation in June. The lorry braked in front of the bunker.

They came out together, emerged into the daylight.

An officer jumped down from the driver's cab onto the patrol track, two guards from the back tailboard.

'Anything to report?'

'Nothing to report,' Becker said to the officer. He did not salute: such mannerisms were not required in the National Volks Armee. He nodded without affection at the men who would replace him in the bunker and occupy the position till eight in the evening.

He was well built and finely muscled and he climbed easily onto the back of the lorry, Schalke, overweight, struggled to lever himself upwards with his pack and rifle and night-sight binoculars. He was offered no help.

On the pavement outside Century House the two men who had come from Charles Mawby's office reckoned themselves lucky to have flagged down a taxi. At that time, late in the afternoon, it could take more than half an hour to get from the north end of Westminster Bridge to Euston Station. Adrian Pierce checked the rail vouchers, first class return to Lancaster, and settled to the evening paper. Harry Smithson gazed sightlessly at the passing metropolis, his thoughts brooding on the file of a man called Johnny Donoghue.

The clouds pushed hard down over the honeycomb of small streets between Willow Lane and the railway line and the River Lune. The slate roofs shone with a dull polish, the first fires of the day had been lit and thrust thin grey spirals into the early day. The brickwork of the houses, terraced and semi-detached in haphazard pattern, was weathered red, and solid. This was Lancaster, a county town rich with history, its castle a monument to the work of five centuries before, its prospects in decline, its usefulness outgrown. Not that there was such history in Cherry Road, but the houses had a steadfast, enduring appearance.

In the terraced homes the layout was uniform and identical for all.

A narrow hallway with a front sitting room leading off and behind it a parlour where the chairs were comfortable and the television stood in glossy splendour permitting the sitting room to be left for best. At the end of the hall and beyond the bent staircase was the kitchen with a back door into a stone flagged yard. Upstairs was one large front bedroom and then space only for one smaller bedroom, and the bathroom. Not a large house, but sufficient for the needs of Johnny Donoghue and his mother.

When he had first come home to live here, a year and a half ago, he had tried to freshen and brighten the old house, to warm its walls with colour, and for months he had busied himself with his paintbrush and his electric drill and the ladder he stored in the yard.