I had believed him at last and still did. They would be waiting now in the room on the ninth floor of the corner building at Unter den Eichen and Rhoner-allee with a full staff, waiting for me to signal. The line would be open to London. Phoenix was also waiting for me to signal, so that they could locate Local Berlin and wipe it out before my people could reach their base and wipe out Phoenix. It was my own situation in macrocosm: the kill and the overkill.
There were no more doubts that Phoenix did in fact intend launching a big-scale operation: they were taking immense trouble with me, keeping me alive and hoping to crack me open by one method after another. I was the third operator to have been assigned to this one mission. They had let Charington get too close and had killed him off early. They had given Kenneth Lindsay Jones more rope – he'd been within rifle-shot of their base when they had killed him. Now they had let me right in and let me go again, matching my last single throw.
I was now certain that KLJ had died because he'd been working with a contact. He had approached that contact within sight of the Phoenix base and Phoenix had panicked and shot them both. (It is not easy, even in Berlin, to dispose of a corpse. Probably they had managed to get a sinker round the contact, but KLJ was found floating.) He had got so close to base (and had possibly been let in and out again, as I had been) that the risk of his passing his information to Control was too high, and it was a double risk because of the contact.
Now they were going the limit because their need to locate Local Berlin was fully urgent. Ergo, the time for the launching of their operation must be getting very short.
It would have been Oktober who had triggered the present situation. He had lost patience when Inga had failed to report any success in interrogating me on the Dachau principle, which she had been ordered to do. He had decided to try me with the file on Sprungbrett. Helmut Braun had been sent in with it to convince me that he was a defector, as I was thought to believe Inga herself.
The file trap had possibly been tried on KLJ, in which case I was surviving him only because I had no contact. It may have been simply that they didn't have sufficient tags to cover him and his contact safely. Tonight they had five working on me, probably more.
Sprungbrett didn't look too bad on paper and they wouldn't expect a field-operator to have much knowledge of military strategy. But there were some obvious flaws and it was then that I had decided on my single throw, gambling on the assumption that the file had been given freely into my hand in order to force me into action. I was to grab it and try to get it to my Control and make the touch-down before they tripped me.
Their risk was slight: Sprungbrett was a faked file, got up specially for me, and if I managed to reach Control with it I'd have wasted my time. But it would give them a chance to locate my base by tagging me to whatever point of contact I made.
I'd never seen Braun or a photograph of Braun. I was sure that Inga was still allied with me but too scared to make a move in front of Braun. I think she would have told me that the Sprungbrett file was a fake if it had been possible to talk. It wasn't. First Braun, then the man in the lift, then Braun again in the taxi. He must have been worried when I said I was going into the Phoenix base. He had no orders to cover that one. So he stayed behind us in the apartment and either made a quick phone-call or tipped off one of the tags that were by that time thick in the area. The message had gone into the Phoenix base: Quiller is on his way.
They were thrown off balance. They had covered the area with heavy tagging, given me the file, and sent me along the path to my base. Now I was heading for theirs.
Braun left the taxi first and went straight in to see Oktober without my knowledge (he was a ‘defector’). He told him I had arrived outside. Decision: to carry on with the same game. I'd read the file and wanted confirmation. I would have it.
Inga and I were kept waiting in the hall. In the operations room they set up the map-table for Mediterranean Area and positioned the markers: a ten-minute undertaking with a section leaf table of that kind where a dozen maps can be slipped in and out together with the magnetic strips.
They brought me in.
A defector is a creature as peculiar as the chameleon. He will tend to take on the colour of his environment. In the London Bureau we had a man who worked with us for five years and defected during a mission in Tangier. Two weeks and he was back with us and we knew what had happened but didn't tell him. He was sent out again under cover that he didn't suspect and three days later we sat listening to the tape: he had met the adverse party again and talked to him in a room where we had miked the ceiling-fan. He told the adverse party that he had defected: yet we knew by his actions that he was now back on his mission and doing a fine job for us. But we'd shut down on him and he found out and hanged himself on the iron grille of a shrine in the Iglesia San Augustino.
Normally a true defector will get out and stay out unless great pressures (financial or political) add their influence to his already uncertain values. Then he will either double or bounce and they mostly bounce. Our man hanged himself because he'd lost direction and couldn't find his way home because he no longer knew what home was.
The most common instances are less spectacular: a man will defect, take one look at the terrain on the other side and make for home again, chastened and sobered. He is like a man who swears one day he'll have himself a whore and gets to the top of the stairs and makes a bolt for it.
The prevalent factors bearing on defection are moral, political, sometimes financial, religious and sexual (particularly homosexual).
Inga was influenced by none of these pressures. She was character-motivated. She was not a true defector. She thought she was. She even put on red slacks to prove it. Then she lost direction and had to head for home – because she knew still where home was. A crystal of ashes.
And when I had told her I was going into the Phoenix base she'd begun shivering, because when the crash came she was going to be there to watch it. She was going to be a part of it herself. She was going to re-establish herself with all the protestative violence of the true repentant, and shift the guilt on to a sacrificial victim. So she took the file and handed it over and said: "He's read it. All of it."
Not that it mattered. She hadn't known I was meant to read it. Braun would have been under orders not to tell her. She was already coming close to being suspect of defection and probably knew it. Oktober was wondering why she had made no attempt to contact me and interrogate me on the Dachau principle as instructed, and why she had drawn no scrap of information from me ever since the time of the crush-attempt when she was given the mission.
Certainly she hadn't been trusted to escort me alone to the Grunewald base: Braun had come with us and hadn't left us until we were within earshot of new cover. She knew this and her fears increased, and her fit of fervour in the presence of the sacred ash was a desperate attempt to convince them of her unwavering faith.