They wouldn't know it was for Foster but that was where they'd send it, immediate attention. He was crossing over to the row of telephone kiosks now and one of his team was shifting obliquely to cover his p.o.v. I sipped my coffee.
Most of the time would be taken up in spelling the thing out and if it had been something I'd wanted to hurry I'd have written it in Russian but there was no hurry needed and I was damned if an ex-scholar of the Basingstoke Elementary was going to write a note to an Old Etonian in Slavonic hieroglyphs, the English are born snobs.
Analyse the data, make the decision, act.
He was coming out of the phone-box but he wasn't resuming station and the pattern had changed. I hadn't expected that. Absorb new data. He was a short man with a small head and a sloping walk and his shoes were quiet as he came and he came looking at no one, looking everywhere but at no one, not at me.
Panic tried getting in but I took a slow breath: the answer to panic is prana. Immediate construction: I'd misjudged the conditions. Foster had decided that I was leaving it too late — I'd said "this evening" — and that he'd settle for the info I'd collected since he'd let me run, without waiting for the rest. He was edgy about the H-hour for Sroda; they all were; they'd pulled in enough Czyn people to know that Sroda would begin at midnight plus one, eleven hours and thirty-one minutes from now. We have stockpiles strategically dispersed, sub-guns, grenades, land-mines, you name it. Wednesday morning, 0001 hours, the three main generating stations hit the sky. Will you be here? Don't be here Wednesday, pal. The station at Tamka wouldn't go up because they'd wiped out the unit there but in other places, other buildings, there'd be radio-controlled detonators still set up and the U.B. knew it. The U.B., the K.G.B. and Foster. His problem was simple and it was acute: he'd got to balance the risk that I was working against him with the hope that I was working for him, and as the time ran out he'd be driven to a compromise.
The man with the sloping walk looked at me now as he came. I heard the faint squeezed sound from his crepe-rubber soles. He stopped.
'Do you speak Russian?'
'Yes.'
He pulled a cheap plastic-covered notebook out of his black leather coat, finding the page. His breath smelt of czosnek.
'Listen please. "Good of you to get in touch but you're leaving it too late. We'll have to meet earlier than this evening. The orders are to immobilise you at four o'clock, so do what you can before then." ' His small head lifted. 'Do you understand?'
'Yes.'
'Do you wish to send a reply?'
'No.'
'Very well.'
I watched him go back to his station.
Seven minutes. Call it half that for the field-to-base transmission including his walk to the bookstall and from there to the telephone: it was good communication. On the move in a capital city with a travel pattern that could take me five or six miles from receiver-base I could hand in a signal to anyone, bookseller, road sweeper, barman, or just drop it on the ground, and within an average of three and a half minutes Foster would be reading it.
He was as close to me as that.
Time was 12:31 and I made it an overt movement, checking my watch with the station clock as I walked from the cafeteria to the ticket-gate area. Of course it was logicaclass="underline" blind instinct is a contradiction in terms. There was more chance of a break, of making a break, in a mainline station than in the streets; a fair percentage of the place-feel had reached the brain through the feet: this was one of the few extensive areas in the city where a running man wouldn't slip on snow. The rest had been visual and deductive: the sight of blind spots, obstacles, ticket-barriers, the awareness that patterns would change and provide opportunities as groups of people moved and the trains came in and went out. The trains particularly: in half a minute they'd throw a wall across the scene and in half a minute knock it down again; a street was static and its confines predictable.
Four of them had moved, pacing along the two flanks, turning when I turned, going back. The express for Rzeszbw was scheduled at № 5 ticket-gate: 12:45. People were moving up. Visual cover story for the tags was that I was here to meet someone and they'd be coming in from Bydgoszcz in the north-west.
It was important to show that I was here to meet a train and not to catch one and this was made easier because Foster had sent his reply in Russian, not English. He'd accept that any agent sent to this side of the Curtain would understand Russian and he'd used it for two reasons: to save time by using normal speech instead of having to spell out, and to let his operator commit the situation to memory as he wrote it down in his own language. The operator thus knew that I was to be immobilised in approximately three and a half hours and would assume I was agreeable to this:
'Good of you' and 'We'll have to meet' were phrases indicating a certain amount of accord between Foster and me. I therefore wouldn't be expected to leave Warsaw on a train with a first stop two hundred and fifty kilometres away. Also it had been seen that I hadn't bought a ticket, though there'd been plenty of time.
Paradox: the barrier was my best exit.
The first representatives of the Bonn Government began arriving in Warsaw this morning. Among them were the protocol secretariat and the personal aides of Herr Otto Reintz, the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs (who will be leading the delegation), and Herr Siegfried Meyer, the West German Co-ordinator for the Talks. They were greeted in English on their arrival at the Polish Foreign Ministry. In a brief formal discussion they confirmed that the recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier will be placed high on the agenda.
Wieslaw Waniolka, the young student of the College of Fine Arts who a fortnight ago forced the pilot of an L.O.T. Antonov 24B aircraft to alter course for Vienna, has been charged on three counts of extortion, restricting personal liberty and contravening the Austrian Firearms Law.
It has now been established that although avowed Rightist groups were responsible for inciting disorder in the city during the past month, demonstrations were mainly staged by students dissatisfied with educational conditions, which are now receiving attention with a view to revision. Calm has returned to the capital, thanks to the courageous efforts of all police departments.
I dropped it into the litter basket by the Orbis Information kiosk and turned back to the barrier. 'Will it be on time?'
'Perhaps a few minutes late. It's the local lines that suffer most. You have your ticket?'
'No, I'm meeting a friend from Bydgoszcz.'
'Ah. He'll have had a pleasant journey; the forests very beautiful under the snow.'
The gates were double, thin wrought iron and flat topped, head high, both locked back by ball-weighted tumbling levers. He was the only official guarding them, fifty to fifty-five, twelve stone, five nine, slow moving, the muscles unused to sudden demands.
I checked my watch and paced to the centre of the hall, trebling the distance and taking an interest in the schedules board. When I turned back I saw one of them at the barrier.
What did the foreigner say to you?
He asked if the train would be late.
Which train?
The train from Bydgoszcz. His friend is coming from there.
What friend?
He didn't say.
The visual cover story had now come alive and been put into the spoken word and it was important to establish meet as distinct from catch because it would keep them on this side of the barrier.