I asked: "Are you feeling better?" There had been blood on her thighs.
"I am better now."
"They gave me your message -"
"Yes. You must come to see me."
"Too dangerous, Inga. It could start all over again."
"There is no danger. You must come as soon as you can. I have something important for you. Believe me." There was a choice of two reactions: to follow her view of the situation, or to follow mine. I said:
"I'll be with you in fifteen minutes."
My view of the situation might not be right but it was riskable. But I left the car in the lock-up, walking to the post-box and sending the signal before I got a taxi. I wanted the very fast 230SL to stay unseen in case there was trouble and I had to drive myself out of it.
There was no apparent observation on the entrance to the block of apartments. The hall, lift and top-floor passage were deserted. I pressed the bell.
She was in a tunic and slacks of a red so vivid that it glowed on my hand as I touched her and burned in her eyes as she watched me. It was the first time I had seen her in colour.
She said: "This is Helmut Braun."
He was a small soft-eyed man with slightly hooded lids and a short kittenish nose. He never put his hands anywhere but let them hang by his sides, and he was as confident as she was nervous. She glanced twice at the ebony table within the first half-minute.
"I am officially working for them," he said to me with a shy smile.
I was on the wrong foot and the thought was unpleasant. We always try to estimate whatever situation we go into, beforehand-even a few seconds beforehand. It was twenty minutes since I had telephoned her and I was still unprepared for three things: the vivid red of her clothes, the presence of the man Braun, and the object lying on the table. It was a black-covered file of papers.
It would have to be played by ear, and we never like that.
"For them?" I asked him. He might be anyone, Z Commission, a doubler, one of her lovers. He wasn't in my group: there hadn't been a single ‘c’ in his first sentence.
"Phoenix," he smiled.
We were obviously here for business because he picked up the file and offered it to me with a pert bow. "This is for you, Herr Quiller."
Inga sat on the black Skai settee, a flame on charcoal. I looked at her once before I opened the file but she was staring at her hands. The file was thin quarto and there was one word on the first sheet: Sprungbrett. Springboard.
I asked: "Do you want me to look at it right away?"
"We think you should." His accent was Bavarian.
They both watched my face as I turned the sheets. The second sheet carried a list of names, all of them high-ranking officers of the German General Staff. Next was a list of armed units in readiness. There followed the main outline of the operation, detailing preliminaries, major attack-sectors and spearheads. The operation was to be launched by carefully-integrated land, sea and air contingents immediately following a false announcement by five international news-services that a bomb-test in the Sahara had misfired and was spreading fallout across the Mediterranean. Under cover of alarm conditions the immediate assaults would be directed against Gibraltar, Algeria, Libya, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Sicily. Franco in the west, Nasser in the east, and Mafia battalions taking hold in southern Italy. A fait accompli before the major powers could put out the fire. And this only the springboard of a non-nuclear war in a nuclear age, with neither Russia nor the United States mutually threatened.
It took me fifteen minutes to read the file, during which time no one spoke. I dropped it back on to the table and said
"There's no date. No D-Day, no H-Hour."
Helmut Braun looked pained. "I hadn't noticed that. It would be very difficult for me to find out the date of the operation. It was highly dangerous for me in any case to get this file."
Inga had been watching me but now she looked at her hands again. I could tell nothing from her expression except that she was nervous about the whole thing. Braun was still looking hurt.
"There's a testing-team set up in the Sahara," I said reflectively, "at the moment. No one's been told when they intend to fire their bomb."
"We can assume it's a matter of days, Herr Quiller."
I stood close to him and asked: "Why did you make it your business to get hold of this file and what decided you to let me see it?"
His hands hung at his sides. He looked at me straight in the eyes. "I am a friend of Inga's. She knows I am working against Phoenix. She told me about you. I wanted to do something active
Then Inga moved and hissed out a breath and he swung his eyes to her and then to the door. In silence he went across the room and bent at the door, listening.
Sixty seconds is a long time. The silence went on for longer than that and he stood crouched like a cat at the door. She was beside me but I didn't look at her. Knowing that if there came another sound he would hear it, I left the situation in his hands and used the time for thinking.
It sometimes comes to people like us that we are faced with the terrible temptation of risking all on a single throw. This happened to me now. But we never throw blind. There have to be certainties in support of the decision to take a risk that size. In my case there were these:
I knew why the Brunnen Bar hadn't been put under observation on the night when Oktober had been here. I knew why Solly had been killed. I knew why Inga, tonight, was wearing red. And I knew why the briefing draft of Operation Springboard had been given freely into my hands.
But certainties can lodge in the mind as a partial result of stomach-thinking, which is always dangerous. Sometimes the facts in our possession interlock so elegantly that we reject the few pieces that spoil the edge of the picture. Therefore a risk is always present when the all-or-nothing type of throw is made; but the risk is calculated.
Braun moved, coming away from the door.
"I am an easily-frightened man," he said. "I wish I weren't like that. My operations would then be less passive, less ineffectual." He had spoken in a whisper.
I looked down at the file. "You're not doing badly." It seemed to cheer him up and he asked: "You'll take it to your people?"
"Yes. As soon as I've got confirmation on it. My people like us to vet this kind of thing at source, to save wasting time. And time looks short, with this one."
"How will you get confirmation?"
"I'll go to the source. The Phoenix base. I know where it is. The house by the Grunewald Bridge."
At the edge of my field of vision I saw Inga begin shivering.
19 : THE SEPULCHRE
He said: "You would never get out alive."
Inga was still shivering.
I picked up the file and he lifted his hand at once, saying, "I beg you not to go. But if you go, I beg you not to take the file with you."
"Don't worry, I won't say where I got it."
"You don't understand my position, Herr Quiller. They'll start an immediate inquiry at the highest level to find out who stole the file. They'll examine it for fingerprints, and mine are on it – so are Inga's." He held his hands limply. "Please," he said.
"All right." The file hit the table with a slap. "But you'll make it available to me when I get back?"