Gavin Lyall - The Crocus List

"Another hundred." Maxim passed it over. "Keep moving, it won't look so bad."

"I am supposed to report what foreigners I take-"

"Let's hope they don't make me report, too, then." Beyond the S-Bahn tracks, the suburb thinned out to parks, cemeteries and sports stadiums. They weaved through them; there were few pedestrians and fewer parked vehicles. Another airliner rose out of the west, behind them now.

"Go right," Maxim ordered, "and right again." Something turned in behind them. Controlling his movement, Maxim looked casually back: a dark green van. The taxi shivered as Erich saw it. Maxim said: "Pull over and let them pass. "

The van slid past, its windows blanked with Venetian blinds. "Now follow," Maxim said.

"Followthat'? Do you see the number?"

"No…" Then Maxim did. The van had Russian military plates. Until that moment, such plates had been abstract, part of his training, but a part that had sunk in. He felt a shudder of fear.

But surely it had been a Volkswagen-or was it a UAZ452? He tried desperately to remember from his glimpse. Russian military colour and plates, and the Russians could easily have commandeered a Volkswagen and painted it up-but that was the safest cover for the Crocus List, too; the Volkspolizeiwould think twice about stopping a Russian military van.

Whatever it was, the van turned off down a road through a park full of trees shedding leaves in gusts down the wind. Erich didn't turn. Maxim laid his pistol alongside Erich's ear. "Stop. Back up."

The Ladawavered to a halt, then reversed jerkily and turned. The van was stopping halfway along the park, screened by trees from the houses a couple of hundred metres away on either side.

"Right up behind him."

Erich brought the Ladato a stop. "You are going to take us to prison for ever-"

"Wait."

Somebody stepped from the driving seat of the van; he wore a dark leather coat and a fur hat and the pause when he saw the taxi behind froze him into an arrogant military statue. Then he walked towards them. Erich jammed the Ladainto gear.

"Hold it!"

The man jerked open Erich's door. A second man, dressed the same way, was coming up on the other side. In accented German, the first man said: "Take this old thing away before-"

"Ja, ja,"Erich was in total agreement.

Maxim opened his own door. "Well, hello there, Mr Fluke. I don't know if you remember me from the Abbey-"

At that point, Erich and the Ladatook off. Maximtoppled on to the road, losing the gun and rolling to avoid Fluke's kick, then grabbing and twisting the foot so that Fluke cartwheeled over him and slammed on to the roadway. The second man was rushing at him, and Maxim sat up with the refound pistol and, with the slow motion that comes when you know you have just a fraction of a second on your side, shot him carefully in the leg.

In its way, it was a moment of victory. But Maxim couldn't think of anything clever to say, even if he had the breath to say it.

Fluke drove the van, wheezing and coughing from his own fall, and in the back Maxim bandaged the other man's leg. "It's going to hurt like hell until the medics get at it," he assured the man, "but it won't start bleeding again unless you begin dancing around, and I'm sure you don't plan to dance around. However, I'll take your passports, just in case."

With those, and their East German visas, in his hand, he had them nailed. They wouldn't last the night without identification. "So-I expect you've got some quiet place picked out where you can change the number plates back again? Fine, let's get there."

Fluke went no more than a mile, further north to where the houses petered out and there were whole blocks of allotment gardens, scruffy and deserted at that time of year. The Russian number plates came off in seconds and were dumped under a pile of compost. Then Maxim helped apply some colourful sticky-tape along the side of the van to soften its military look. That was the way they had brought it through the checkpoint, Fluke said, and Maxim accepted it. Nobody had anything to gain by getting held at the Wall.

Taking a last look around, he saw a small aircraft bend into a climbing turn a mile or so to the south-west, perhaps just over the Wall. Chubby fuselage, slender sharp wings, twin propeller engines… there could be two Jetstreams in Berlin that day, but it was a big coincidence in the timing: a glance at his watch showed just after three thirty. Ferrebee must have been stupidly trusting, or the Archbishop had overridden him or-The aircraft's shape blurred with smoke that streamed away behind it for a moment, then it pitched nose-up, rolled lazily on its back and dived in a smooth curve behind the skyline of houses and trees. A mushroom of black smoke bubbled up.

For a dazed moment Maxim was back in the desert watching Jenny die in the bomb-torn Sky van, wondering if that had really been a missile, then knowing it hadn't been, and neither had this.

"A bomb on board?" he demanded of Fluke, who was looking solemn. "A bomb? Was that your fallback? How was it fired?" He found he had the gun in his hand again.

"I was saying a prayer," Fluke said.

"For the Archbishop? I should keep it for yourself. "

"For Jim Ferrebee."

Since 1945 the British Army's Berlin HQ has been in the 1936 Olympic stadium offices, although they have only recently got around to renaming the entrance road Jesse Owens Avenue, after the black runner with whom Hitler refused to shake hands. It was late evening, and the table had that late evening look: a litter of coffee cups, beer cans, half-eaten sandwiches, ashtrays and papers. The General had gone and the Brigadier and some colonels and the man from the Foreign Office and the man who was supposed to be from the Foreign Office but was Intelligence… just Maxim, Gower, and a balding bespectacled Major from Int Corps.

"I thought," the Major said, "that you told the General to piss off and mind his own business very politely-"

"I didn't tell him that."

"Of course you didn't, dear boy, but that was the message you intended and certainly the one he got. Anyway, your life is going to be one mad round of generals in the next few days." He lifted a signal form off the table. "I am to deliver you to the door of a Riff-RAF Dominie coming specially into Gatow in-just about an hour. Your own private jet: somebody up there on the sixth floor likes you."

"I'm not counting on it. You got a free ride to Tyburn Tree in the good old days, too."

"I don't see what more you could have done. Stayed with the Archbishop? You'd just be spread around a crater in the Gesundbrunnenrailway yard as well-for the first time in your life, I dare say, indistinguishable from an Archbishop. Sorry: that wasn't in the best of taste. But you wouldn't have searched this Foreign Office chap'sbriefcase for a bomb, now would you? If you'd suspected him, you'd have done more than that…"

"Ishould have suspected him."

The Major cocked his head and looked at Maxim with a wry smile. "I really don't recommend a hair-shirt, old boy: not standard Army issue. Just remember that the Foreign Office in particular, and a lot of other government departments besides, have more to worry about right now than the future of one Army major. Particularly one who knows as much as you do."

Maxim nodded, numbly, and stood up. "Can I have a word with this man Fluke before I go?"

The Major slanted his eyebrows. "No rough stuff?"

"If I'd wanted to do that, I'd have done it before."

"I don't see why not, then…" He led the way. "We strip-searched him, as you suggested, and there's a guard in the room-I take your point about their predilection for suicide. D'you think you'll get anything useful?"

"Just one question."

"I can see why you'd like to take a little duty-free info back with you…" They walked across the lobby of the old Olympic offices, still with its full-frontal statue of some German runner where a military policeman positioned himself tactfully whenever an important woman visitor came calling. "You know, why don't you cross-badge to the Pansies? You seem to be doing our work for us already…"