Cone:
'That was your impression?'
'Most of us felt that way. With a man as charismatic as Gorbachev, there's always the risk of his opponents feeling jealous, and scared of his getting too powerful — look what happened to Khrushchev. Then it was something Schwarz said that put things together for me.'
'What did Schwarz say?'
Pollock looked across at him. 'I think this is your bit.'
The pilot got up and walked about, hands tucked into his belt. 'Listen, I am Jewish, like Hans.' Bader. 'And these people won't let us go over there to see our families. They gave us the high privilege of taking us into the bloody Airforce but won't trust us on the other side of the Wall for a couple of days. They — '
'But they'd be afraid you'd give away military information.'
'Others have been allowed across — people with classified information in their heads. So we hate the Wall, and more than most people. So one day I told Dickie — ' Pollock '- that it was getting to be an obsession with me, and with Hans. Every time we flew on training and exercise missions there was the Wall down there, and we were flying bombers…'
Cone leaned over to check the recorder, see that it was running. Everyone had gone very still.
'So I talked discreetly to someone else,' Pollock cut in again. 'Someone at the Soviet Embassy close to Talyzin, in the Kremlin.' Quick clean smile. 'From that point it all built up into Trumpeter.'
Walls of Jericho.
'It was Talyzin who took charge, then?'
'That's right.' He got out of his chair too. 'You see, he knows Miki very well; he's his right-hand man, behind the scenes. Of course in the Kremlin most things happen behind the scenes. Politically, it was felt that if Miki tried to get the Wall down officially it would cost him his career, but if someone could breach it for him, he could make the grand Marxist gesture of yielding to the will of the people and leaving it open — and in fact ordering a new street to be driven through it in the name of peace and the brotherhood of nations — you know the line.'
'My God,' Cone said. He was hunched forward now, squinting up at Pollock. 'You'll never get away with it.'
'Talyzin says we could.'
'You mean he's talked about this to Gorbachev?'
Pollock stopped pacing. 'Put it this way. Talyzin is a staunch ally of the General-Secretary's politically, and a close friend on a personal level. I don't think for a moment he could mastermind Trumpeter from the wings without sounding Gorbachev out first.'
Cone turned a glance on me and looked back at Pollock again. I didn't know what he meant. I think he was wondering if I could accept Trumpeter for what it was, for what it could do in Europe, with global repercussions.
'Look,' Pollock said, 'Miki's brilliant at PR work and he's a showman. He's also got a great deal of savvy and a great deal of courage. I think he might have told Talyzin to go ahead.'
'Whose idea was Cat Baxter?'
'That was mine.' Pollock looked rather pleased. 'Just making a gap in the Wall wouldn't do it. We had to get world-wide attention and we needed a symbol, in a big way. Like ten thousand East German rock fans climbing over the rubble and crowding through the Wall and dancing in the streets with the West Berliners. They — '
'Not escaping,' Cone said.
'Oh no — that wasn't the thing at all. Germany reunited — that was going to be the message. Cat Baxter jumped at it, as you can imagine. What a role to play… Joan of Arc at the barricades with banners waving, leading the faithful through. Talk about promotion…'
Mr Ash, she'd said to me, will you be at the concert?
I hope so.
Try and make it. It'll blow your mind.
Cone glanced at me again. He thought Pollock was mad. So did I. But I remembered Einstein. No new idea will ever succeed unless at first it sounds crazy.
'You'd be forewarning the media?'
'I'm ready to send the same message,' Pollock said, 'to every major TV news network and every newspaper and magazine world-wide: warn your camera crews and reporters in East Berlin to stand by for a major story. There'd be instant replay.'
'What about the police? Casualties?'
'The HUA would be willing to turn their backs on the scene when Cat goes through the Wall, with a request direct from Moscow. They — '
'From Talyzin.'
'Yes. They want a united Germany themselves. They'd be asked to evacuate the area around the projected breach on the excuse that toxic chemicals are escaping from a crashed truck. A warning would go to West Berlin, with the same story. I don't have to tell you the planning that's been necessary.' A shrug, and no bright smile. 'You've got to tell London? Now that you know the project?'
'They'd have my head,' Cone said, 'if I tried to keep this dark.'
Another shrug. 'Then I can only hope I'm right in thinking that Talyzin has sounded Gorbachev out. Then if Thatcher calls him, it won't change his mind.'
He lit another cigarette, and I remember thinking it looked like a slow fuse burning.
'If we can't nail Horst Volper,' Cone had said, 'there won't be any point in bombing the Wall.'
He'd shut the recorder down and got onto his feet.
Leaden light was seeping over the sky from the east, casting a metallic sheen across the landscape and the distant buildings. There was no sound in the area, no traffic; Dollinger had told me that a redevelopment scheme had been started and then become stalled, leaving two or three square miles of no-man's-land.
07:49.
Twice I thought I heard a sound from the derelict hotel, but it had been without identity — not the closing of a door or footsteps or a voice. It could have come from the airport.
He will be there alone.
Then he'd waited, forcing me to use more pressure, to drain the blood from his face and bring sweat springing.
But where will he attack the target?
Waited again, forcing me to induce a degree of pain that I had to share with him, to identify with, so that my own face was bloodless as I brought the nerve to breaking point.
I don't know. I don't know.
07:50.
Nothing moved inside the hotel. The car still stood there, half-concealed. There was no sound in the immediate area.
A spark came into the sky to the north and gradually broke into two as the landing lights of the plane grew brighter and it lowered towards the runway, passing directly overhead and landing within half a minute, reversing thrust as the brakes came on.
And then I knew that Volper was not going to leave the hotel at all and that I'd left it too late.
26: TUPOLEV
Smell of death.
I climbed to the next floor. The elevators were not working. The electric power had been cut off months ago. On the next floor I waited again, listening.
The smell of the death that this building was going to die when the men came again with their demolition tools, the smell of damp plaster, mildew, decay along the corridors and on the stairs. The glass had gone from most of the windows, and some of the balconies were sagging. This was the sixth floor, below the roof-garden I'd seen from the car, with its collapsed trelliswork and dead plants and the remains of a flag shredded by the wind.
I had seen tracks on some of the floors below, but they might not be his; workers had been here, disturbing the thick patina of dust and grime along the passages. Some of the doors had been left wide open, and the strengthening light of the morning came into the windowless rooms, pooling along the corridors, innocent, shadowless.