Here in the chill streets the night was sane again, with none of the mad overtones of that house with its swastika trappings and its vestiges of the Fuhrerbunker. Yet this whole city was mad, however much it was denied by mere acceptance. Not far from here the Russian war memorial stood inside the British boundary, so that it was agreed that barbed-wire should surround it. A Russian sentry guarded the memorial and a British sentry guarded the barbed-wire. To the north, in Spandau Prison, thirty men of four nations – British, French, American and Russian – guarded Hess, Speer and von Schirach: a hundred and twenty armed soldiers guarding three old men the world had long forgotten. Beside such monuments of absurdity, the renaissance of a Nazi group with illusions of making war seemed almost rational.
Thoughts of Inga came again because after half an hour I could still feel the touch of her mouth. There was a question left in my mind and I had to clear it even though it couldn't alter my position or immediate actions. Of three possible answers, one seemed most apt: she had followed me from the house to the bridge for her own purposes, not under orders. She knew that her organisation had suspected her of defecting. She hoped that by coming with me to their base, by handing them the file and by hailing the burned bones of their common god she had convinced them of her faith: but she couldn't be sure.
They needed urgently to locate my Control. If she could locate it herself and report her success to them she would no longer go in fear of them; they would accept her and honour her. Therefore she had made a final effort to persuade me that she was still a defector whose faith now rested solely in one. ("You're my life, Quill," she had said.) Perhaps she believed that because of what had happened between us on that innocent afternoon I could still be undermined. It might have been so. She had begged me to take her with me… and she knew where I was going: to my Control.
I had played it her way because it eight conceivably be useful to me. If Phoenix went on thinking that they'd convinced me that Operation Sprungbrett wasgenuine they would continue their present tactics. Dangerous though these tactics were to myself, they were known to me and I could take whatever opposing action thought fit. If they changed these tactics I would no longer be in control of the situation.
Inga would have reported that I was indeed convinced about Sprungbrett. The number I had given her was nothing to do with Local Berlin. It was an impromptu jumble of figures. If such a number existed they could get a reply, but still find it belonged to some unknown subscriber. But they wouldn't be sure: they would check with the Exchange and send a couple of men to that address to make certain it wasn't Local Berlin playing hard to get. They would finally consider the possibility that Inga had made a mistake with the number I gave her, since it was verbal.
The chances, then, of their pursuing their present tactics were if anything increased.
Small comfort: these men meant my death.
I had been safer in that house than here in the open city. I had known that since they were forcing me to signal Control they must let me leave there alive and try sending that signal more urgently than ever, now that I knew where their base was and that it possessed a full-scale operations room.
Going into that house I had not looked for death. I looked for it now.
There was a sixth man, a new one in a light-coloured coat. I watched him and he watched me. He would be one of the decoys. Out of a total of maybe twenty tags, only one or two would be briefed to make the kill. This was straight Oktober-thinking and I felt comfortable about it. I had been released from the pigeon trap and they had to tag me; they knew I would spot their tags because the hour was late and the streets were emptying; therefore they went the whole hog and plastered the place. Soon they would begin calling them off, one by one, letting me flush half a dozen to keep me happy… until, some time between now and dawn, I would believe I was alone, and would make a bid to signal Control. Then they'd be there, the last of them, and I wouldn't see them coming.
If I made my signal and they saw me do it they would shoot me within the next sixty seconds. If I delayed too long they would start worrying, as they did with Charington and KLJ, and would shoot me and switch off the risk. I didn't think they'd tag me beyond dawn, so I assumed that to be my deadline.
Meanwhile, Local Berlin and London would be waiting for me to signal. So would Phoenix.
I knew now why they had sent Pol to bring me the KLJ report. They had to convince me, on field-executive level, of my position. And Pol had described for me the precise situation that existed now. He had said: "We are worried that you don't understand your position. It is this. There are two opposing armies drawn up on the field, and you are in the gap between them. That is where you are, Quiller. In the gap."
22 : CORNER
By four o'clock in the morning I knew I was beaten.
We had done the whole city. In five hours we must have gone thirty or forty kilometres on foot and in a dozen taxis from north to south, Hermsdorf to Lichtenrade, from east to west, Neukolln to Spandau, and through seventeen hotels and three stations, to finish where we'd started in Zehlendorf.
The eyes gave in first: I saw dark specks on light surfaces. The eyes and the nerves. I had flushed ten of them before three o'clock and one of these ten had tried so hard to stick that I knew he couldn't be a decoy. In two of the hotels I had gone as far as asking the night porter to deliver a message for me but the message was never written because I sensed they were on to me.
My coat was torn and one knee was swelling: there'd been ice between the lines at the Hauptbahnhof freight yard and I'd slipped between a truck and a loading jig full of unplaned timber. One glove was missing and a button was gone from the coat: I'd tried topping a pair of iron gates at the Kaulsdahl cemetery but it had been no go. Some time about midnight we had started a scare at Checkpoint Charlie because I'd given a taxi-driver fifty marks to keep his foot down and he'd got blocked at the east end of the Friedrichstrasse and simply did a U-turn under the nose of the guards.
I was never alone in the open street. Whenever I got a taxi there was another one tagging it, sometimes two or three. There was no point in asking a driver to get a message through to Controclass="underline" every time I left a taxi they moved in on the driver and questioned him with their gun-hands lumpy in their pockets. Every car had radio and the temptation was very great, but it would be fatal to send out a call to the fleet switchboard because every time they took a car to follow mine they'd order their driver to call his base and request monitoring. No go.
The only time I had come near to flushing the whole team was when I had got a fifty-yard start in the open and headed for the nearest cover – the ruins of the Reichstag; then I'd stepped on broken glass and two guards came over from near the Russian memorial and began using their lamps. Now we were back in Zehlendorf and in two hours it would be dawn. Three of them were still with me and they would be the full-backs, briefed to kill. My night was drawing short.
Once daylight came they wouldn't let me run them arty farther because there was the risk of losing me in the rush-hour traffic and they knew that the minute I'd flushed them I would send my signal, and the Grunewald base would be raided straight away and with no chance of an overkill. I had two hours left before Oktober sent them the order to put me in the cross-hairs and switch off the risk.