The Warsaw Document

'Listen, Foster.' I turned away and moved about so that I could keep them all in sight: it wasn't the time for anyone to do something silly. 'I told you there are one or two Czyn units still intact and I had to go and talk to them and I didn't intend exposing them to your people so that you could give orders to have them wiped out. They trust me and that might be a new idea to a man like you but it's a fact of life. If you've any more stupid bloody questions I don't want to hear them now because Warsaw's going to blow up if we don't do something to stop it and we haven't got long.'

I went over to the trolley and found some soda and hit the tit and drank a glassful. It was very quiet in the room.

'You'd better be more specific.'

'Now you're talking.' I turned back to him. 'Did you bring in Ludwiczak for me?'

'He's on his way.'

'But I told you to fly him in and that was thirty hours ago!'

'It's not really the problem of transport. There are always formalities.'

'How long's he going to be kept hanging around while they're filling in forms? He's our key man and we can't do much without him. Can't you phone someone?’

He spoke to Voskarev in Russian and he stopped staring at the wall and picked up the telephone. Merrick had left his chair and stood with his back to us and I heard the atomiser pumping. The guard was still by the door.

I had to do it now and the sweat was coming out because if it didn't work first time it wouldn't ever work at all and I watched Voskarev at the phone as if it was important that Ludwiczak was here.

He spoke to Foster, not to me.

'They are bringing him through the airport.'

Foster nodded and looked at me to see if I understood.

'We can't wait for him,' I said. 'You'd better leave orders that he's to be brought here and kept under close guard till we get back.'

The pain in my head was starting again and the bruises along my arms felt like muscular fever.

'We're not,' Foster said gently, 'going anywhere.' I shrugged, looking at my watch.

'Do it your way, I'm easy, but the Praga Commissariat's due to go up in an hour from now. I make it 21:05 hours, that about right?'

'To go up?'

His tone was extra sleepy and that was all right: he was absorbing reaction.

'It's detonated for 22:00 hours.'

He glanced at the gilt sunburst clock. 'Oh is it?'

I saw Voskarev transferring his stare to Foster. He understood English all right.

Foster drained his tumbler and took it across to the trolley, his steps short and with a slight spring to them. He nodded as Voskarev went to the telephone, then turned back to me.

'What sort of detonators are they?'

'Ludwiczak could tell us that. I'd imagine they're radio-controlled like the ones at the Tamka power-station. I suppose the police found that stuff there, did they?'

'They did, yes.'

He watched me attentively, no smile now, the eyes less sleepy.

'Fair enough. Tamka was for midnight.'

He nodded. 'Yes, they told us. Nobody told us about the Commissariat.'

'Then you're lucky.'

Voskarev was speaking in Polish, quite fast and with a lot of authority. When he'd put the phone down he got his coat and the heavy black briefcase that had been resting against the chair.

Foster hesitated and I knew why. The Praga Commissariat was his base and he'd got to get in there and out again while the walls were still standing.

Then he got his coat.

'I want you to come with us. I want to talk to you on the way.'

'I thought maybe you would.'

The courtyard was cobbled and the big saloon drifted a bit on the snow in spite of its chains.

Foster took the occasional seat and sat hanging on to the looped strap as we turned east towards Praga. He spoke more quickly than usual and his eyes were alert.

'You weren't actually sent from London to take any kind of action against Czyn?'

'I told you what had come up.'

'Yes, but keep on filling me in, will you?'

'There's nothing new except that my people have started panicking at the last minute because the F.O.'s putting pressure on them. First they told me to explore and report on the Czyn situation and then they began chucking fully urgent signals for me to assist and advise the U.B. and now I'm apparently expected to keep the lid on Warsaw single-handed, their usual bloody style. I opted to co-operate with you off my own bat, why should I skin my nose on the grindstone while you sit on your arse?'

He gave a brief smile but the nerves still showed through it. 'I've hardly been doing that. I think. We've quite a big problem here, and I don't expect you to understand its proportions. These urgent signals,' he said with polite interest, 'didn't reach you through the British Embassy, I suppose?'

'Oh Christ,' I said and we both laughed.

It was a private joke: we were two seasoned professionals and shared the understanding of our trade and our trade was deception so I knew what he was doing: he was testing his own agent, Merrick. 'Of course they didn't. He would have passed you the dupes.'

'I just wondered.!

'Give the little bastard his due: he did a first-class op. for you and if London hadn't sent me new orders it would have been chop-chop and no flowers, you know that. Surely that's worth at least a lance-corporalship in the Red Army?'

He laughed again but it didn't have quite the same sound because he knew I was guying his colonelcy.

I wiped the steam off the window and looked out at the people along the pavements. The reaction was starting to set in, the delayed shock of what had happened in the station buffet. One minute I was watching Merrick and feeling glad that he'd soon be back in London and safety and the next minute I was trying to absorb the realisation that his job in Warsaw had been to cut me down and trap me for the K.G.B.

I hadn't thought about it since it had happened because there hadn't been time: it had floated in my head like a nightmare you can't remember in detail but can remember having had. I was thinking of Egerton now, rather than Merrick. Egerton with his chilblains and his prim confidence in what he was doing: he's been fully screened, of course, I've no intention of saddling you with a potential risk.

If I had the luck to see London again I'd have Egerton out on his neck: the least we expect of Control is that they don't recruit an agent already recruited by Moscow and then tell us to hold his hand.

I couldn't do it by signals. My only communications were through Merrick and the Embassy because direct contact had been banned since Coleman had used a phone in Amsterdam and didn't hear the bugs.

The saloon gave a lurch and Foster hung on to his strap: a fire-service vehicle had been klaxoning for gangway and its amber rotating lamp went past as we tucked in to let it through. I think we hit the kerb with a rear wheel before we pulled straight again, the kerb or a drift of packed ice.

Foster was looking at me rather sharply.

'We'd have heard it,' I said, 'from this distance.'

'Are you sure?'

'The basement's crammed with the stuff.'

He looked away.

Nervous and physical courage don't always come in the same package. For twenty years this man had run the most sensitive type of operation known to the trade, watching his words and weighing them whenever he spoke, wherever he was, cold sober in his Whitehall office or half-drunk in a woman's flat, fabricating his lies and testing them, detecting flaws and repairing them and listening all the time for, a false note in the speech of others that would tell him of danger, carrying for twenty years a bomb that ticked in his pocket.