Quiller KGB

'You're having difficulty in remembering?'

I didn't answer right away. When it's necessary to fight panic off you can't think of anything else. It came at me in waves, freezing the blood, stilling the mind, blocking the breath. After a long time, I said, 'Cone.'

He leaned closer.

'The last thing I can remember was looking at the clock on dashboard, at 12:49.'

He watched me for a moment. 'That was twelve hours ago.'

Mother of God.

'What is being said?' In Russian.

Cone turned to Yasolev. 'He's got a memory lapse.'

The doctor glanced at them, not understanding, and I remembered,I hadn't answered his question. 'Yes,' I told him, 'I'm having difficulty recalling what happened between 12:49 this morning and when I came to a few minutes ago.'

He opened his hands, fingers spread. 'It sometimes happens after an accident. The mind protects itself from unpleasant memories. I wouldn't worry. Perhaps nothing very important happened.'

But, Jesus Christ, I'd been tagging someone who'd connected me with Horst Volper and she could have led me straight into access to the target and it would have swung the mission from phase one into a totally new situation with a chance of going in and reaching Volper and completing Quickstep in a matter of days, hours. Nothing very important?

'Cone. You said "the other man". What other man?'

'We don't know who he is.'

It was for me. For me to know.

'Where is he?'

'In the mortuary.'

'Aren't you trying to find out who he is?'

'Yes.'

'What time did they find us in the river?'

'It's down on the incident report as 01:15.'

Twenty-six minutes. That was the gap.

'Where was the car?'

'Your car?'

'Yes.'

'Two blocks away, in a side street off Karl Marx Allee.'

'But that's — what d'you mean, my car? Was there another one?'

'You must allow him to rest now, please. He — '

'You mean I walked as far as the river? But that's over — '

'There was a car in the river, where you were found.'

'In the — I got into someone else's car?'

'We think so. A Mercedes.'

'So why did it go into the river?'

'We don't know.'

'But for Christ's sake, were the tyres shot off, was it hit by another — '

'That is enough.' The doctor stepped between Cone and the bed and signalled the nurse. 'Gentlemen, you have to leave now. My patient needs to rest.'

Yasolev said something about getting a tape recorder but Cone interrupted him.

'I)oc, this is very important. We need — '

'Nothing is as important to me as the welfare of my patient. Please understand that.'

'Give me thirty seconds more,' I told him, and he looked down at me.

'Very well. But don't get excited, please.'

'Cone,' I said, 'call the doctor at the Embassy and ask him if he's ever used hypnosis. If he can do it for me, I'm ready. I'd ask this man, but it's got to be in my own language. It's the only chance.'

'Pretty long shot.'

'Look, it's all in here, inside my head, and all we've got to do is get it out. Nothing's lost.'

Cone looked at Yasolev and said in Russian, 'Hypnosis. What do you think?'

'Yes,' nodding emphatically. 'Yes, yes.'

Cone picked up the telephone and asked the operator for an outside line.

'Can you take yourself down to the alpha level?'

'Yes.'

'Good. You've been hypnotised before?'

'Couple of times.'

His name was Cosgreave, been at the embassy six months or so. 'Won't have me in the West, I'm too Commie for their liking.' Not a smile in him anywhere, very intent, dark, still smouldering from some kind of conflagration in his past. What were they thinking of, for God's sake, keeping a leftist at the embassy this side of the Curtain? I suppose he'd been to Cambridge, one of us, you know.

'Have you any ideas on induction?' he asked me.

'I use the image of a brass pendulum.'

'Never fails. Big, slow?'

'Yes.'

'All right, are you comfortable?'

'Let's hit those lights.'

He signalled the nurse. 'You want her to stay?'

'I don't mind.'

The main lights went off and I felt the eye muscles relaxing. I was still smothered in blankets but not too hot any more; a sense of overlying comfort with a tendency to break through it and worry, worry like hell because this might not work and if it didn't God knew what we were going to miss but it'd be something vitaclass="underline" who was the man in the Mercedes and what had he said to me?

Cosgreave pulled up a chair. 'When you reach alpha, just lift a finger.'

I closed my eyes and relaxed, went limp, listening to the settling of the pillow as the neck muscles lost tension and the head grew heavy and the brainwaves slowed and the ticking of a watch came in and I eased it away to silence, silence and the deepening dark as the mind drifted, floated, drifting, floating as I lifted a finger and let it fall again, floating, drifting… as his voice came in quietly…

'So you're watching the big brass pendulum… swinging… swinging to and fro… to… and fro… with the light catching it as it swings… the light flashing softly… flashing softly as it swings… to and fro… to… and fro…'

My head settling lower on the pillow, lower, as I drifted in the darkness, drifting, floating, his voice still soft but clearer now, my mind opening gently, intent, attentive.

'What is the last thing you remember, then? It really doesn't matter if you can't think of it; we can always try again later.'

'A street. Karl Marx Allee.'

'You're walking along the street? You're — '

'Driving. Driving along Karl Marx Allee. I'm following another car, with a woman driving it.'

'What do things look like? Feel like? It really doesn't matter if you can't remember.'

'There are just the street lights, and sometimes the reflection of my own lights in a shop window at the intersections, the sound of the engine and the smell of cigarette smoke, that's about all. We'd turned onto the Allee a few blocks ago, and the time on the dashboard clock was 12:45. Not much in the streets, not much traffic. Police car cruising the other way. There was another car behind me, a black Audi, but it peeled off after a while and left a Fiat in the mirror. When I looked at the clock again it was 12:49.'

Silence.

12:49.

'Aren't you going to ask me anything more?'

'I don't think so. It's really not important. Just go on talking, if you want to. Just go on talking.'

12:49.

'If you like, but I'm not sure — '

'Just go on talking.'

'We were driving along the street, that was all. I'd fallen behind quite a bit now because the taxi had peeled off earlier and I didn't want her to see me close enough to identify the front-end profile. Then I looked at the clock again because I wanted to keep a check.'

'What time was it?'

'12:49. No, 12:50.'

'Good, Go on.'

'I was just keeping station. It was a routine tag. Then. she began slowing, soon after Strausbergerplatz, and turned right onto a side-street, Andreasstrasse. I sped up and swung onto the same street and saw her tail-lights ahead of me as she turned left into a car-park.

This was tricky because I wasn't certain she was going to park there but I took a chance and put the nearside wheels of the Lancia onto the pavement and switched off and got out and began walking, listening as I went, and heard the engine of the VW throttle up and then cut off.

Slam of a door and then she was within sight and I held back and used a rubbish bin as cover. She was walking away from the car, not hurrying, not looking around her, and I closed the distance to something like a hundred feet before she picked her way across a patch of waste-ground and turned into an alleyway with one street-light at this end. I was fifty feet behind her and using cover as I went — doorways, rubbish-bins, a section of fallen fence — because if she turned she'd see me. There were brick walls on each side now, high ones, with almost no cover, and I held back, taking the risk of losing her if she went into one of the doorways further down. It couldn't be helped and in any case it made no difference because the sound of an engine exploded in the silence and I spun round as a flood of blinding light leapt in a wave against me.