A bargain's a bargain, however fouclass="underline" a word in the ear of Sir Walford across the coffee-table or in the calidarium or on the eighteenth green: if he should hear anything, or receive any kind of evidence, to the detriment of his son, he should discount it totally, since certain duties of high value to his country might expose him to false accusations.
It was horrible of them, to do that.
And those bastards in London no better.
'I suppose you told them you doubted your capabilities, no experience in hush operations, so forth?'
He watched me from above his hands. His hands were cupped against his face, as if he were trying to hide. He'd get over that, given time. given peace.
'Yes I did. But they said I'd be among friends at the Embassy, and they'd send someone out here to look after me.'
'Who directed you?'
He'd only met Egerton once, and I'd been there.
'I never knew his name.'
There was a question he wanted to ask but he knew it might sound naive and make him look silly. He'd had enough humiliation. I did it for him: 'He said I wasn't to be told you'd been entrapped by the K.G.B. I wasn't to know.'
He nodded, his hands sliding away from his face.
Because Egerton had seen the risk: that Merrick was doubling for Moscow and his cover-story was the photographs and his job was to infiltrate the Bureau. And he'd wanted me to find out.
If a Control director knows his executive in the field, knows his style and potential, he can do things with him that would otherwise be impossible. The director-executive relationship is peculiar to the trade and has immense value for both parties but especially for Control. Egerton had selected me for a mission that I didn't even know was being given me — a little trip abroad, only a few days — and he'd sent me in blind, knowing that if I worked to form I'd find the target for myself, sniffing out the directions and scratching away at the earth like a good little ferret until I reached what he knew must be there, somewhere east of the Oder, and made my kill.
He had known, essentially, that most of us would have refused to take on a job as diffuse as this with no local control, no communications except through the Embassy and no positive leading-in data to work on; and he'd selected me because he knew I'd want to go in deeper the minute I sensed the field, simply because I like being left alone when I've found something to play with. It had been the only way to rope me in.
The mission had been to make contact with the K.G.B., discover their project and inactivate it. Define, infiltrate and destroy. That was now accomplished. This operation now defused:
The risk hadn't been high: he'd known I wouldn't go nearer Merrick than I'd go to a rabid dog until I'd got the scent of the field and located its hazards.
And if I tripped a snare he'd expect me to cut loose.
'You were told not to expose me to the K.G.B., that right?'
His hands went to his face again and he didn't answer and I got up and kicked the chair clear and said, 'For Christ's sake give yourself a break, will you? London knew there was the risk but I don't blame them and I don't blame you — I'm still here aren't I and I'm in bloody sight better shape than you are so stop picking your nits about it. All I'm after is plain information. Exposed me by accident did you?'
He nodded into his hands.
'Well I'm not surprised. When you're doubling there comes a point when you don't know which way you're facing. That was on Friday, was it? Come on I'm pushed for time.’
'Yes.' He got up and tried to face me and couldn't and just stood there with his head down and I turned away and looked at the picture on the wall, donkeys in Clovelly, far cry from here.
Friday. The bar. The rendezvous at the Roxana. That's why he'd been worse than usual, ill with nerves: he knew he'd blown me. There'd been no tags or I'd have seen them or sensed them: they'd wanted to pull me in without my suspecting Merrick, or I'd never contact him again. So they'd used window surveillance in relay and passed me from street to street till I was more than a mile from the Roxana and then they'd rigged the pickup with ordinary patrols just asking for papers, for dokumenty. Then they'd sent for Foster.
Have a look at me and let me go, see where I'd run. That was when they did the switch and started preparing me for the tribunal instead of Merrick.
'I tried not to give you away. I did try.'
'Civil of you.'
'You don't believe that.'
'Oh yes.' But he'd had no chance. Driven by both sides till he broke. 'Didn't you trust their word, in London?'
'At first.' He knew what I meant: he was straight on to it because for weeks he'd lived in terror. 'Then when I was out here again they began reminding me, asking me again for my father's correct address, you know what they're — '
'Yes.'
'So that's all I kept thinking about. My father actually looking at them, even though he'd been told not to take any notice.' I heard him using the thing and then he said: 'I wanted to warn you, but I thought you might leave Warsaw if I did, and then they'd have known they couldn't trust me any more, so they'd have sent the — '
'Get it out of your mind.' I turned back to him and it was all right now, he wasn't looking so bloody abject. There was only one more thing I wanted to know. 'Our last rendezvous in the station buffet. Did you know they were going to come for me there?'
'Yes.' I only just heard it.
'Then what made them tell you to pass on that fake signal? What did they want a full interim report for, when I was booked for grilling?'
His face went loose and he lost contact completely because these things had stopped meaning anything to him.
I said: 'It's important, Merrick.'
He nodded and made an effort and I waited.
'I was meant to give it to you earlier. But I forgot.'
I think he saved himself, then, from any grudge I might ever have held against him.
Webster was getting something through when I went along to the cypher room.
There was a phone in the annexe and I picked it up. He came through the doorway while I was trying the buttons.
'How does this thing work?'
'Want an outside line?'
He pressed the one with the worn Sellotape tag and I dialled for the Hotel Cracow.
We looked up.
'What's that?'
'Sounds like a chopper.'
He'd put the signal-slip on the desk in front of me. Hamilton. Quay 4. End crane
'Did you do a word-count check?'
'That's right.' He was trying to clip another pen into his breast pocket but there wasn't room.
'Hotel Krakow?
'Tak jest.'
I asked for Maitland.
The helicopter was still nosing about and a flush of light passed across the window.
'Anything to send?' asked Webster.
'No.'
He went to shut down the console.
'Maitland?'
'Who's that?'
'Listen. Tomorrow morning there's a second secretary leaving the Embassy for London and the U.B. might arrange an accident on the route to the airport, so why don't you turn up and follow the Embassy car? Let everyone know you're the press, take plenty of Rollies, you get the drift.'
'Well well.'
'You'll need some kind of excuse.'
'Human angle: while the pin-stripe elite of the dip. set come flocking into the flashlights here goes one unassuming second sec. on his lone way home so let's give him a cheer lads. A natural for the mums.'
'Don't leave him till he gets on the plane.'
'Roger. Thing is, I can beat the Street with a nice faked smash that'll only happen if I'm not there to cover it. What d'you do in the coffee break, make up crosswords?'
The light flooded the rooftops again, slanting off the snow.