A narrow head and narrow shoulders, a face with a mortuary pallor and a raw-skinned nose and a mouth like a recently-healed wound. His thin body was hunched, as if he'd been born in a bitter wind and never found shelter from it, never even looked for any, knowing there was none.
The director in the field for Quickstep.
His hand came out again. 'Give me the keys of the car. Here's your new set. It's over there, the black Lancia. East Berlin number plates. 'I'll have yours sent back. When did you last eat?'
'I don't need anything.'
'But when was it?'
'A couple of hours ago.'
Well on the balclass="underline" if he heard I was in some kind of trouble at any stage of the mission — snatched, missing, gone to ground — he'd want to know how fit I was, what strength I had, how long I could last out. In Final Briefing they'd told me he'd worked on Nightlight and mounted his own personal manhunt for his executive after he'd been signalled as missing for two weeks, and pulled him out of a cave in the mountains still alive and covered in batshit. 'Cone's like Brighton rock,' Pauling had told me, 'lasts all the way through.'
'All right,' Cone said, 'this is your base.'
I went with him into the hotel and he waited while I registered. In the lift he pressed for the third floor and took his dark glasses off but didn't look at me; he had a slight squint or a glass eye, something not quite right.
'Have you met Yasolev?' I asked him.
'Oh yes. We're knocking on his door first. Protococlass="underline" he wants to show you into your room. The KGB are paying, so technically he's your host. He’s in 308, you're in 357, I'm two floors up in 525. Best we could do the place is crowded.' He gave me a key. 'This is for my room, a spare one, if for any reason you want to duck in there instead of your own. I'll be available most of the time but if I've got to go out I'll let you know.' He spoke in a monotone as if he were reading aloud, and there was a dry harshness in his voice, maybe an echo of the wind he couldn't escape.
Yasolev opened the door in his shirt-sleeves, hurrying. 'Come in — you're earlier than I expected.' He looked at me hard with his nicotine-brown eyes, assessing me. A lot had happened since we'd last met. I'd turned the mission down and then changed my mind, and he'd have got the news about Scarsdale. 'Have a drink, gentlemen.' He gestured towards a side table and got a jacket out of the closet, shrugging into it. 'Or a chocolate.'
Personal traits, it said in the dossier they'd given me in Clearance. He's prone to sinusitis in the winter, hates homosexuals, is allergic to cats, has a collection of Samurai swords from his stint in Tokyo. Fond of sushi, oysters, chocolates.
'I'll show you your room.' On our way out he stopped to give me another straight look. 'My department appreciates your instructions that Major-general Solsky was to be released, and so, of course, do I. That was a bold move.'
'It's the only way we can play.'
'I agree. But still a bold move.' He took us along the corridor, leading the way, energetic, rebuttoning his black jacket because in his haste he'd done it up the wrong way. 'You have the key?'
I gave it to him and he unlocked the door and pushed it open and stood aside. 'I hope you will be comfortable.'
Not really. It was a modern hotel and this was the third floor with a sheer drop to the street, no fire-escape, guttering, drainpipes, creeper, no ledges below the window, just a view of the Wall with its floodlit wire and watchtowers and gunposts — they wouldn't have that on the postcards they sold in the lobby.
Cone went straight over to the phone while I was looking round. 'Binns, will you come up?'
Yasolev stood with his hands behind him for a moment, then went across to the bathroom and looked in, I suppose to see if the towels and things were there as they should be. Cone didn't introduce Binns when the man came in; there wasn't really time before he opened his black zippered bag and got out a transmitter detector and started sweeping the walls with it while Cone opened the closet and showed me the clothes he'd got for me; they would have been bought locally.
'I'm not sure of the shoes — you've got a narrow foot. Better try them. When you've got out of the clothes you're wearing, put them in that hag and I'll deal with them.'
There was a tray with some beer and glasses on it, but no opener. 'We're out of vodka,' I told Yasolev. 'What about a beer?'
'No. I have had enough vodka.' He gestured with the flat of his hand up to his neck. 'I was anxious, I might tell you. I might tell you, I was anxious.'
'You didn't think I'd come?'
'Not after what happened.'
To Scarsdale. 'It was a setback,' I said, 'that was all.'
'But quite a big one. I understand he was in possession of valuable information on Horst Volper.'
'So we'll now have to get it ourselves.'
Binns was taking the lamps to pieces.
'Then you have other leads?'
'No,' I said.
Nothing showed in Yasolev's eyes but he tilted his head an inch, and I was beginning to read him. In this case it meant Jesus Christ. 'You have no other leads?'
'Not really. We've got to find a different way in.'
It was eerie. Yasolev was in effect my host, but we were having the guest room swept for bugs. He was a KGB officer but I was talking to him about the mission I was working, and he wasn't sitting on the other side of a two-hundred-watt lamp with its shade cut in half, forcing the information out of me. Pauling had warned me about this in Final Briefing. 'I'm sure you've considered it, but you'll find things a bit odd over there. This is the first time London has ever liaised with the KGB and you're the guinea-pig. But Yasolev's going to find it odd too. We're running you in a field where the KGB connection's going to give you a window on their system, and you'll be bringing back information it'd take an entire infiltration job to get hold of. And if anything goes wrong it'll he his fault because it was his idea.'
The phone rang and Cone took it. Yasolev wasn't interested. He was watching me with his head still on one side, waiting for me to tell him how I was going to find access to Volper. There was only one way but I couldn't tell him that.
'Everything is very nice,' Cone said, and put the phone down. His German accent was a shade off, but I'd been briefed that his Russian was good enough to follow what Yasolev and I were saying.
"That's it,' Binns said. It was the first time he'd spoken. 'We're all clear.' He shoved the transmitter detector in the black bag and went to the door. Cone thanked him and Yasolev gave an energetic nod.
'I insisted,' he told me. 'I insisted. We wish you to be comfortable here.'
'Civil of you.'
But no one was taken in, Binns included. He could sweep this room forever and pull the wallpaper off but he couldn't tell if anyone were aiming microwave beams at the windows to catch voice vibrations on the glass, and without X-rays he wouldn't know if some of the bricks had bugs or crystalline mikes put into them when the hotel was built, and he'd have to dismantle the walls to find non-metallic optic fibres hooked up to amplifiers in another room. Yasolev was simply making a diplomatic gesture to show his trust and we were meant to accept it.
'Now I shall leave you to settle in. We'll talk when you gentlemen are ready. My room number is by the telephone.' He inclined his head and left us.
'He's nervous,' Cone said, 'but you don't need me to tell you that.'
'He's not the only one.'
'You'll be all right. You've got massive support.'
And the thing I couldn't tell him was that he was wrong. I would keep him as my director and go through the gestures but I was going to run Quickstep on my own. I'd never manage it with a horde of Bureau people and a horde of KGB agents tagging me through the streets wherever I went.