Quiller KGB

'No.'

'I see.' Cone straightened up and took a turn and came back to the man in the chair. 'The East German secret police snatched another of your people tonight. He didn't want to answer questions either. He's in an intensive care unit at the moment, and everything's being done for him, but he's not expected to live.'

I didn't know if it were true, but if Yasolev had ordered that snatch he would have done it through Karl Bruger. It is essential, he'd told me at our meeting in the woods, that the HUA is not informed that my department is operating in East Berlin on this particular case. Bruger alone had his trust.

'We need you to answer questions,' Cone was saying, 'just as we needed the other man to answer questions. If you won't do it for me, I'm not going to hand you over to the HUA. I'm going to put you into an interrogation room with an officer of the KGB.'

Got a flinch. Just a slight one. It's always like that over here: you can threaten a man with an intensive care unit and he won't necessarily break, but mention the KGB and you'll make an impression.

Understandable.

'So will you answer my questions,' Cone said, 'or his?'

He waited.

God it was cold in here.

'Yes or no?' Cone asked him.

'No.'

'I see.'

Cone went over to the phone, then turned to me before he picked it up. 'This might take a little time. Do you want running to the hotel right away?' Squinting steadily; I suppose I looked tired.

'No.' I might be able to help.

He picked up the phone and dialled.

I thought of going out to the car and getting into some clothes that didn't stink of fish but I didn't want to miss anything; I'd been to a lot of trouble getting Dietrich here and Cone might get just one clue out of him that could push Quickstep forward. Time was running out.

'Good evening,' Cone said in German; he didn't give the parole because Dietrich was listening. 'We've got one of Volper's people here and he doesn't want to say anything. I've told him you're ready to interrogate him, so I think you'd better come and pick him up. You know where we are.'

I was watching Dietrich. He must have known a bit of Russian because the blood was leaving his face. Cone wasn't messing about, I knew that. We needed answers.

The Bureau's ruling on interrogation is perfectly clear: no director or executive in the field is to force any opponent to talk, other than by verbal means. With Skidder it had been different, a case of dog eat dog. I've been inside Lubyanka, locked in an interrogation room with a major of the KGB, and it wasn't nice; but as I watched the man in the chair I didn't feel any compassion for him. He'd tried to get me killed tonight, and if you think I was taking things too personally I don't give a damn, it was my life on the line, not yours.

When we heard a car stopping outside, Cone went over to the man in the chair again. 'Before he comes in here, Dietrich, I'm going to tell you that he's a colonel in the KGB, highly experienced and effective as an interrogator, and with a reputation for being completely ruthless when people don't want to talk. I happen to be a different type myself and I'd like to save you a lot of misery, so if you want to answer questions now, I'm listening.'

For a second or two there was nothing but fear in the man's eyes; then they changed, as he got the better of it. 'I appreciate your offer, but this time he will not succeed.'

Cone gave a brief nod. 'It's your life,' he said, and went to unlock the door.

Yasolev came in alone, and took in the scene immediately, staring at the man in the chair for a moment and then giving us a nod. 'He still refuses to speak?'

'Yes.'

'You have searched him?'

'Yes.'

'There was no capsule?'

'Just a knife.'

'Where is the knife?'

Cone gave it to him.

'Thank you.' He looked at me and asked formally, 'Will you place your prisoner in my hands?'

'I will.'

'Then you may leave him with me. Stay if you wish, of course, but — ' he left it.

'I think we'll be off now,' Cone said, and we went out to the car, and as I heard Yasolev locking the door of the garage the shivering began, partly because man's inhumanity to man during the interrogation process always worries me and partly because of delayed shock after the car-park thing: I'd been expecting it.

'Are you all right?' Cone asked me.

'It's so bloody cold.'

'We'll get you into a nice hot bath.'

'There's no need to be personal.' Little joke, to take my mind off the garage.

'It's the fish,' he said, and started the engine. 'You fall in a rubbish dump or something?'

'You must be psychic.' Shivering like a leaf. 'Do you think he'll make that man tell him anything?'

'Cross our fingers.' He turned left towards Spittelmarkt. 'Meanwhile I took a call from Renata.'

Lena Pabst.

'When?'

'Just after three this afternoon. She asked for you and I said you weren't available and gave her the parole. She's been doing some work. There's some kind of operation being set up at Werneuchen Airforce Base with the code-name of Trumpeter. Three of the bomber crews are involved but she hasn't been able to identify them. The best thing she gave me was that the whole operation's on file, if we can only get to it. She — '

'Where?'

'It's in Room 60 in the new Airforce administration building in Bruderstrasse. She thinks the man behind Trumpeter works there as an administrator. Room 60's his office.'

'This is very good.'

'As far as it goes. She said she'd got some documents for us, but — '

'Did she ask for a rendezvous?'

'Yes, but our luck's run out, I'm afraid. She's been found shot dead.'

16: ROCK

'That's bullshit. I don't lay down some kind of kinky funk-jazz hybrid like Billy Kid — I blow free, see, I give it a rush, a lot of pressure along the vertical and a lot of thrust on the level, you know what I mean? And I let them solo if they want to, guitar, sax, drums, whatever they want to do, you know? Musically I'm democratic.'

Thin, small-faced, made up like a cat with the corners of her eyes drawn out across the skin, a white leather coat thrown open, tiny hands on tiny hips, a silver sweater and skirt, the skirt a thin tube stopping short just above the knees, the knees bare, alabaster, knobbly, the feet in silver boots, a thick belt made of her own plaited hair — Cone's briefing — caught by a silver snake's-head buckle, the hair on her head exploding like a mane, the colour of ocean surf. Cat Baxter.

The reporter was making notes but stopped when she turned away

'Wiz, get out of here will you, you're stoned' — and turned back. 'Drummers… I work with hieroglyphs, see, and that's where the song takes me, wherever it wants me to go. It's free-wheeling, ethereal, a kind of unstructured take-off into the heights I haven't flown before, and this happens every time, it's not just sentimentality and it's got nothing to do with the Protestant Work Ethic — that really makes my boil bleed. No, change that — it really offends my sense of the political, it's so bourgeois, I mean, you can't have a message in everything, talk shout the Sound of Mucus.'

Pollock came over. 'Well, well. Come here to get her autograph?' Quick white smile.

'Something I've been meaning to ask you,' I said. 'Isn't it a coincidence that Gorbachev is flying in here at the same time that Miss Baxter's giving her concert?'

'Goodness. It never struck me. But we only knew he was coming the day before yesterday. I started fixing up her concert last month.' Cone walked in and looked around the room and came across.