The Striker Portfolio

'You did pretty well,' I said.

'No. We — '

'I mean it's not everyone who can fix up a secret-police cover and live too long.' I didn't want her to explain how pretty well she hadn't done. It can happen to the best of them: they've nowhere to go once their base is blown and the best of them just go on operating in the hope that somehow they can bring it off alone. But they can't do that if they come down to the broken reeds among their number. People like Benedikt.

'We were cut off,' she said and there was a sag in her voice because she was only now recognizing the defeat that she'd refused to face before.

'It can happen to anyone. But why send a man like him to a place like Hanover when you had at least two other people right inside London?'

She looked at me and away again. I was knowing too much. That wasn't awkward: it was just embarrassing. She said in a moment: 'I couldn't trust them.'

That fitted. Benedikt had broken but he hadn't sold out. He'd left them safe.

'But you didn't drop the idea. I mean of calling on London.'

It wasn't the first time a group had signalled for help. A lot of them were the nuclei of resistance cells and refugee organizations and even though times had changed and the hot war had gone cold they were still of the generation that once had nothing to sustain them in the twilight of the attics and the cellars and the boarded-up cupboards but the voice among the static prefaced by the four notes of the V-sign: This is London. But it was the first time my own Bureau had mounted a mission and sent out an agent within hours of a contact. We get a lot of contacts and most of them are duff but just as soon as Lovett tipped us off about an imminent Striker crash I was lying on my back on top of a chalk quarry with that very aeroplane performing overhead. And there'd been nothing to go on. Lovett himself hadn't known who the contact was.

I suppose people loathe Parkis because he's always so bloody right She said: 'If London couldn't do anything, you'd tell me now, wouldn't you?'

'Yes.'

We were running through flat country: a few hedgerows and then nothing but the far horizon. The car slewed sometimes across frost' but she held it well enough.

'It wasn't bad organization,' she said and I knew she was worried about it. 'They must have gone to have another look at you soon after you'd left. I was counting on at least one hour before that happened. We couldn't — '

'Look, I'm here and I'm not thirsty any more. Well for God's sake.'

'All right.'

'Did you send Benedikt across on a specific mission or was he just meant to check on the Hanover cell?'

'He was to take over the Striker operation.'

Of course. So he'd known when the next one would crash. And had told Lovett. I said: 'Can you fill me in on Kohn?'

The roads were narrower here and the tarmac was broken in places. The terrain was taking on the wasteland look of the Frontier Zone.

'Distinguished flying record, the Iron Cross as a lieutenant, 1944. He was cut off after a crash-landing near Poznan a year later and taken prisoner by the Soviet troops in that area. He never saw his family again and he didn't know at the tune that his wife was killed in the bombing of Cologne. When they released him he began working for privileges as a pro-communist — '

'Why didn't he go back before 1961? He could have. There was a child, wasn't there?'

She said reflectively: 'I think it may have been his pride, or — '

'Oh I see, yes.' At that time his face would have been still in the healing stages and frightening to a small boy.

We began slowing and she switched to low-beam. The dark mass of pines loomed on our left and at its fringe were the trees I had memorized as markers on our way across.

Time was so short.

I said: 'You're going straight back?'

'As soon as I know you're through safely.' She slowed to a crawl and drove on sidelights between hedges of thorn. 'They'll have widened the search by now and I'll join them.'

I didn't ask what the risk was: she would have been absent for two hours. I said: 'Who are the people we have to deal with? The ones at the top with Kohn?'

'There are others. Gross, Langmann and Schott. Langmann is based in East Berlin. The others are at Aschau.'

'Langmann — what's his cover?'

'Secretary of Trade Agreements in the S.E.D.' They're the all-highest? Those four?'

'If they were brought down,' she said, 'the whole of Die Zelle would collapse.'

She turned off the side-lights before the thorn gave way to scrubland and we went forward at a walking-pace through the faint light from the sky. She said:

'Kohn, Gross and Schott go by road to Berlin once every month for conference with the political re-education secretariat. They are normally escorted by one military vehicle.'

'Oh really.'

'I tried,' she said.

'Of course.'

There are only three of us and there's so little we can do. Aschau is a network of microphones and every second man is an informer.'

'You've done well enough to survive.' Aschau was a Chinese Box: within an asylum for the criminally insane was the legitimate but undercover political re-education complex. Within that, Die Zelle. Within that, Helda's group, a potential detonator.

'Survival isn't enough.'

'It's kept open the way in. You know that.'

She cut the engines and we coasted, bumping over rough ground where the track ended. Then we stopped.

I said: 'If my people decide to have a go they'll want to look over Aschau. I mean as well as fix the convoy on the Berlin run. There might be some confusion when it all hots up so we'll have to arrange a code-intro.'

We couldn't see much of each other now because the facia lamp was out. We spoke more quietly.

'Might you be there?' she asked.

'No. It's not in my field.'

In a moment she said: 'What is your name?'

'Quiller.'

Slowly she said: 'Quiller. Tell them we shall use that'

'All right.'

'We shall use the English pronunciation.'

'Yes.' There were a few German words that would sound similar if the 'u' were spoken as V.

We were accommodating visually to the dim light and I could see the dark shape of her mouth and the glow of her eyes. I could feel her warmth. I said:

'You'll have been absent for two hours. How big is the risk?'

'It's calculated.'

Kohn would give the orders and they would arrange it discreetly and the glow and the warmth would be gone.

'Come across with me now. You'd be given immediate asylum.'

She moved her head, looking through the wind-screen at the distant posts where the wire ran. 'No. It would mean letting them down. My friends. And if your people decide to go over there I shall try to have material available. Documents, rosters, everything they'll have come for.' She looked at me again. 'I tried to get your papers back, and the key-plan of the mines. It wasn't possible.'

'I took bearings.' The chill air flowed in as I opened my door. 'Go straight back.'

'I shall wait until I know.'

Sharply I said: 'There's no point. If I make a mistake there'll be nothing you can do. Go straight back.'

'Very well.'

Looking in at her I said: 'We met late, didn't we?'

'Yes.'

I shut the door and began walking.

I was more than halfway across before the tension got so bad that I had to rest. The danger was in the need to concentrate: there comes a time when the mind refuses further discipline and argues that luck will get you through. Marksmen at the range find that their aim deteriorates after a certain point and they put it down to fatigue but it isn't the whole answer.