Hengel hadn't only lost me within five minutes but had picked me up by sheer chance, and he knew it. If I told him that I knew it too he'd draw blood from his lip. If I told him he'd missed by ninety minutes an attempt on the life he was so eager to safeguard he'd bust a gut.
So I had just finished my beer and left him.
Back at the hotel I had some food and went up to tune-in to Eurosound. The Bourse was being read now. My signal was just coming up.
Quota Freight Tenders: 878¼. Plus 2½.
RhoneElectric: 626
1 switched off.
The ‘Communication Post and Bourse’ system is limited but foolproof. One of our cipher staff dreamed it up himself. It is relatively safe to entrust a signal to the ordinary postal services, and in the Federal Republic as safe as anywhere in the world. The agent doesn't stamp his letters because it might not be easy at any given moment (when leaving a theatre, for instance) to find a stamp. More important, an unstamped letter is virtually registered, since it must be handed personally to the addressee by the postman in order to collect the fee and tax. Thus, even if an agent is carrying a vital document and suspects he is being followed by an adverse party who might intend capturing the document at gun-point at the first chance, he can get rid of it readily at the nearest postbox and ensure its safety. We have a man at Eurosound to collect. Radio Eurosound is a perfectly genuine broadcasting station operating under the combined auspices of NATO and the Benelux Industrial Commune, and carries light music, U.S., British and French newscasts, and commercial programmes.
The Bureau has facilities not known publicly to exist for inserting into the twice-daily Bourse price announcements the name and movement of a fictitious stock, in my case Quota Freight Tenders. (At the time of the Zossen operation, ‘Quota’ was simply the call-sign (the memorandum being Q) and it could be varied five ways: Quota Freight Tenders in full, Quota Freight, Quota Tenders, Quota alone, and Q.F.T.) Each variation is in itself the key-word to one of four code-systems, and the agent normally uses the book, because the permutations of a single ‘price’ and ‘movement’ (878¼. Plus 2½
The Eurosound programmes are legitimately aimed at an audience demanding light music for housewives, up-to-the-minute news flashes and entertainment sponsored by the top Continental industrial concerns. That kind of audience does not want market news, and it would have been discontinued after the first probes by listener research, but the sponsors insisted on two daily readings of the Bourse because their stock was listed and it gave them free publicity especially when prices rose. The fact remains that since the inception of the Communication Post and Bourse system no listener has ever telephoned Eurosound to ask who the hell Quota Freight Tenders is and where the stock can be bought.
The reply-system has two advantages, especially when an operator must not carry radio. A letter mailed to him in reply to his would take longer and could be intercepted even if unstamped. A letter delivered to me at the Prinz Johan Hotel would have its tax paid by the desk and would be lying in a pigeonhole for as long as I was absent – sometimes a matter of days. Not safe. Nor is it convenient to pick up mail post restante; post offices are scarcer than beer-houses and an agent would in any case have to carry the letter until he could burn it and could be forced to give it up at gun-point if an adverse party meant to have it. The second advantage of the P and B system is that it can reach an agent anywhere in Europe at a precise time when he can arrange to be alone to take the signal. Also the signal goes direct into his mind without trace. He can, if he must, receive a signal while standing in a public bar with an adverse party at his elbow, and receive it in total secrecy.
But it's a slow system and is never used in emergency. Emergency justifies risk, and the risk in any country is that the Bureau may, for many reasons, be working against the interests of that country's police services. In my case a telephone call to Local Berlin Control would assume a risk and therefore be made only in emergency, because I was working against the interests of certain members of the Federal police services, the unknown ex- and neo-Nazis riddling the department from the highest echelons (people like Ewald Peters, just arrested) down to the constabulary. Any member of the police, seeing me leaving a telephone, could use his credentials and ask the hotel clerk, the barman or the operator what number I had called, and could find the address. Also, the line could be tapped.
Against this risk we have two safeguards. There is a simple code system whereby "I'm dining with Davis tonight " means "I'm going to ground " and so on. If the signal is more complicated and a great deal of vital information has to be phoned in during an emergency, we speak in Rabinda-Tanath, the dialect of the Lahsritsa hill-tribes of East Pakistan, which is even more basic than original Malay and has the advantage of being instantly adaptable. (Oddly, there is no word for ‘bullet’, and we would use ‘kill-ball’. ‘Motor-car’ would be ‘fire-cart’.) A Lahsritsa is stationed permanently in Local Berlin Control, happily studying for a degree in Literature in between emergency calls.
There had been no urgency in getting confirmation of Pol's identity and function, so that I had posted his photograph and set the system going. A photograph is always carried by an agent ordered to make contact with someone who has never met him before. Its receipt at the Bureau, without any message alongside, is taken to mean one thing:
Who is he?
He was 878¼. Plus 2½. TRUE NAME GIVEN. TOTALLY RELIABLE. LIAISON LONDON.
That was why I'd never heard of him before. I'd been out of London for two years: Egypt, Cuba, now Germany. He was one of the new links normally liaising direct with London. I would never have seen him at all if KLJ hadn't bought it and thus created an emergency. Willi Pol (his Christian name had been in the memorandum) had been flown out to make contact and hand me the baby. Where was he now? Flying back. Lucky bastard.
Something about the darkened radio dial afflicted me, on the very edge of consciousnesss, and I worried it until the answer came. KLJ Petroleum had been knocked out of the market, and wouldn't be quoted again.