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.
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 was
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."