Quiller KGB

1: BERLIN

My arm was getting numb but I didn't move. I wanted her to go on sleeping for as long as she could, dreaming of God knew what. The worst wasn't over yet, I knew that.

The next time she woke up she began shaking all over and I held her more tightly, telling her it was all right, though of course it wasn't. Then the sobbing came and she tried to stop it, burying her face against me while her whole body shook and the tears began falling onto my hand.

'Let it come,' I said, 'don't hold it in.'

It helped, I think; she was making more noise now. A stewardess came over with a box of Kleenex and I pulled out a handful.

'Is there anything she needs?'

I shook my head, and held the tissues against Corrine's hand so she could feel them.

'Oh, Christ,' she kept moaning.

We'd reached our ceiling and levelled off; the jets were quieter now. One of the people across the aisle was looking back, glancing across us with his eyes deliberately blank, wasn't even seeing us, just looking at the view. No one else was taking any notice; London had booked us first class for the sake of more privacy; decent of someone, or perhaps it had to do with guilt.

'All I want to know…' Corrine was saying now, a lot of it muffled, 'All I want to know is whether he'd been sleeping with her…'

I tried to understand why it mattered.

'No,' I told her at once, lying, or probably lying. 'She was just someone in his courier line, that was all.'

That was all, but sex too, probably; he'd been moving in to the end-phase and it was going to be dangerous. 'He didn't,' Holmes had told me over the phone yesterday, 'fancy his chances.' And when we don't fancy our chances, my friend, we look for the good graces of a woman, any woman, to help take the edge off and allow us to go in relaxed, less tense, less vulnerable. But no, that's a lie too — lies come easily to us in this trade. The truth is that we want it on the principle of just-one-more-time, if that's all there's going to be.

'I suppose it doesn't make any sense,' Corrine was saying, her head off my shoulder now as she messed about with the tissues.

I moved my arm at last and felt the tingling as the circulation got going again.

'I mean, he won't ever be able to — ' But that thought broke her up again, expectedly.

When she'd calmed down I said, 'It doesn't matter why it's important to you. The thing is, she was just a courier, and that was all.'

We're trained to lie in our teeth but this time it wasn't to get me out of a death trap or anything; it was for personal reasons. I'd got the idea now: she couldn't let herself go, couldn't cry over the coffin and things like that, if she thought he'd gone out doing it with someone else. I suppose there was a certain raw logic in that.

'How do you know?' she asked me.

'Because I knew him.' A bit of false anger: 'Do you think we ever have time, for Christ's sake, when we're pushing a mission at that pace?'

After a while she said, so softly that I only just caught it, 'I so much want to believe you.'

'Then you can.'

I had to protect him, too.

They were sending him back on a freight plane in the morning, the coffin, anyway, though God knew what they could have found to put in it. The opposition had set up an ambush and blown the car apart, both of them in it, the girl too, the courier, bits of her in the same coffin with him, unavoidably, and if that wasn't the ultimate act of intimacy, what was it, what did the sex thing matter?

But Corrine was his wife — widow, yes — not just a girl-friend, so she'd expected some kind of fidelity from him, not knowing much about the job we do, the kind of stress we work under. The shadow executives don't often marry; there are no promises we stand much chance of keeping.

One of the flight crew, three rings, put his head through the doorway and spoke to a stewardess and went back onto the deck.

'He was good,' Corrine said, 'wasn't he?'

'One of the best.'

'They told me he helped someone get through, once.'

'Yes.' But there hadn't been much point because Thompson had spent the rest of his life — three weeks — in a hospital linked up with tubes and monitors until he'd got someone to smuggle a capsule in to his room.

'Not many people do that,' Corrine said.

Save lives. 'Very few.'

I suppose this was the way her grief was taking her: she had to create the idol she could later venerate, a hero, faithful to the last.

She uncrossed her legs and half-turned to look at me, her eyes puffy from crying. 'If you knew him like you say, this isn't much of a fun trip for you either, is it?'

'Not really.'

'Excuse me, sir.' The stewardess was leaning over me. 'You're Mr Stephen Ash?'

'Yes.' Cover-name for the assignment.

'They've got a call for you on the radio. May I show the captain some kind of identity?'

I gave her my Barclaycard and she went forward and tapped on the flight-deck door, three long, three short. Someone in London was panicking: we were due in at Rome in twenty minutes and they could have paged me there.

'Is something up?' Corrine asked. Her tone was like a robot's, with no feeling in it; the world was going on for everyone else and she was forcing herself to take an interest.

'Could be,' I said. They wouldn't call me in flight just to get my debriefing on Hubbard. They'd sent me to Bombay to see if we needed any smoke out after they'd got him, and to bring Corrine back, look after her. I couldn't see there was any rush to debrief me: I'd sent them a clear-field signal from Santa Cruz Airport.

'Is everything all right?' Corrine had turned to look at me again.

'Perfectly. He left a clear field. Don't worry.' She worked in Codes and Ciphers and knew some of the routine when an agent blew it. She wanted to feel sure Hubbard hadn't messed things up. 'Feel like another drink?'

She thought about it and then said, 'No. I've got no excuse to get smashed.' I'd given her two brandies, one before take-off and one an hour ago.

'Mr Ash?'

The stewardess gave me back my card and led me to the flight deck and the skipper introduced himself.

'This phone here. George, can you shift over a bit?'

The flight engineer twisted out of his seat and passed me the phone.

'Ash.'

'Parole and countersign.' Tinsley's voice, from the signals room: I could hear the background.

'Fanfare.'

'North 5. We want you to change flights in Rome for West Berlin. There's a Lufthansa leaving at 19:07 hours for Tegel airport direct, which gives you twenty-two minutes to switch. That's ample. Have you got any baggage?'

'No.' But I didn't understand. 'Is this for debriefing?'

Just the slightest hesitation — I only just caught it. 'Yes.'

'In Berlin?'

'What we want you to do,' Tinsley said carefully, 'is to put down at Tegel and go to the Hertz counter and wait there. You'll be met by two of our people and the parole is for October. Have you got that?'

'Yes.'

All I could think of was that Hubbard's ambush had started making waves and either there was a West German connection or my debriefer was going to fly with me to London and go through it on the way. It was no good asking Tinsley anything: he'd just told me to shut up. I looked past the battery of circuit-breakers on the engineer's panel at the lights of Rome glowing in the windscreen. Maybe he hadn't left a clear field after all, Hubbard, and in London they were waiting for some kind of shit to hit the fan.

'What about his wife?' I asked Tinsley.

'We've sent someone to meet your flight in Rome and take over the escort. A woman, name of Baker, October parole. How's Corinne doing?'

'All right. Look,' I said, 'I've told her he didn't mess anything up. If he has, don't let anyone tell her.'

'I am not,' Tinsley said evenly, 'a total idiot. And how are you feeling?'

'I'm used to it, and I'm not his wife.' The floor of the deck shuddered slightly as the undercarriage went down and locked in.

'How are you feeling in general?'

This time I didn't let him get away with it. 'I've no information for you if you've none for me.'

'Over a telephone?'

With Tinsley you can't win. 'I'm feeling normal,' I told him, 'whatever that means.' I waited for another question, one that might give me a clue. I was picking up some nasty vibrations in the background and they were reaching the nerves, because they'd been left exposed by the Hubbard thing: I'd known him for five years and worked with him twice and when someone gets blown apart there's always the thought in our minds: it could have been me.

'The two people,' Tinsley said, 'who are going to meet you at Tegel Airport are rather high in the echelon, and they'll handle you extremely well. Total reliance. Is that understood?'

'Roger.' I knew one thing now: Hubbard couldn't have left a clear field, and if high-echelon people were moving in to debrief me I didn't want to think what kind of mess he'd made out there. I also knew another thing: they weren't going to send me back there to clear it up. When I got back to my seat I found Corinne staring up at me with her eyes haunted. 'What went wrong?' she asked me.

'Nothing went wrong.' She was shivering, and I rubbed her hands. 'They want me to switch flights, that's all.'

She almost flinched. 'You're going back to Bombay?'

'I am not going back to Bombay. I'm wanted in Berlin.' We began lowering into the approach path.

She wouldn't let it go at that. 'What are you going to tell them, when you're debriefed?'

'I'm going to tell them he left no traces, nobody involved, nothing that's ever going to blow up in anyone's face.' I could have bitten my tongue because there were better ways of putting it than that. 'Look,' I told her, 'he was doing his best and he bought it. Did you love him?'

'Yes.'

'Then settle for that. What else matters, for God's sake?'

They were standing near the Hertz desk in West Berlin, hands tucked behind their backs. I'd never seen them before; they could have been twins, both a bit overweight, pink-faced and recently-shaved, formal blue suits and bright polished shoes — I thought of Loman — and with an air of being totally in charge, not a thing for me to worry about, just leave it all to them, so forth.

Parole and countersign for October but they also asked for my card, the heavy one with the Queen's coat-of-arms embossed on it, kept in the lining, not in my wallet.

'Splendid,' one of them said, 'then we'll be on our way. No baggage, is that correct?'

They could almost be Foreign Office, not Bureau; except for one or two people like Loman we look like down-at-heel Fleet Street stringers out of a job, part of the cover — but then Tinsley had said these two were 'very high in the echelon', and that explained it: they spent their days in the rarified atmosphere of Administration, high under the roof of the building in Whitehall, with nothing much more to worry about than how to get the pigeon-shit off the windowsills. That's not actually true; it's just that we don't like the bastards — at any given hour they can hit their computers and bring up a man's name and put him down for a mission and send him headlong into God knows what kind of mayhem, ours not to reason why, so forth.

'I'm Chandler, and this is Elliott,' one of them said — the shorter one with the trimmed military moustache — and pushed open a swing door and got us into the Customs and Immigration hall. 'We shan't be delayed very long, just a formality.'

They guided me right past the end booth and told me to wait on the cleared side while Elliott spoke to a plainclothes immigration officer and flashed his identity and signed something and came back and joined us.

'Terribly cooperative chaps,' he said briskly, by which I suppose he meant we were sailing through the formalities under the NATO flag.

Just to debrief me on Hubbard?

'Car outside,' Chandler said. He spoke like a very quiet machine gun. 'Shan't be long now.'

'You're wasting your time,' I told him.

They both gave me a half-glance and Chandler coughed discreetly and no one spoke again until we'd got into the black 420 SEL outside and driven to the corner of the east car park and stopped and waited with the engine off but the side-lights still burning.

A cold drizzle blew around the overhead lamps and frosted the bonnet of the car.

'Wasting our time?' Chandler.

'Whatever kind of mess Hubbard left out there in Bombay, you'll have to get someone else to wipe it up.'

They've done that too often — pushed me into one red sector or another with a checkpoint blown apart or a body in the street with dangerous papers on it or a courier line scattered and one of them sitting under a bright light with his brains being picked. Not this time. Not again.

'We've got a few minutes,' Elliott said, and pulled out a mini-Sanyo and slipped a cassette into it and snapped the cover shut. 'Let's just do a little debriefing on that one, shall we?' Smoother than Chandler, not a machine gun at all, more like a soft shoe shuffle, almost apologetic.

He pressed the record button and held the thing closer to me and I'd got nothing to lose this far so I gave it to them again: they obviously hadn't recorded my signal earlier from Bombay. 'From what I could get out of the local sleepers, Hubbard got in the way of the security people at the Soviet consulate without knowing it and one of their.station staff put a man on him and reached a contact and took him inside and grilled him — a Pakistani, not one of ours. When they'd got enough on Hubbard they must have thought it was safer to push him right of the picture and warn us off, so they did that.'

'You don't feel he could have told them anything useful first?' Elliott.

'Whether I do or not, they didn't, which is what matters. I don't know enough about his operation to give a valid opinion.'

Chandler, sitting at the wheel, kept his head turned to watch the nearest entrance to the car park.

'What about the woman?' Elliott asked me.

'She was the final link in the courier line and the instructions from the director in the field were for her to go with Hubbard as far as the rendezvous with the Afghan contact and the leave him and stand by in case she was needed.'

Elliott leaned with his arm on the bac of the seat, holding the Sanyo at an angle between us. 'As regards timing, how long were Hubbard and the woman in the car before he started off and met with the ambush?'

'Three hours. They had to wait for the Afghans to make a signal.'

'Three hours.' Elliott pressed the pause button while he did some thinking.

All I want to know is whether he'd been sleeping with her. Corinne, her eyes puffy with crying, brandy on her breath. How the hell did I know, but what are you going to do to pass the time for three hours closed up in a car with a young woman when you don't have the slightest idea whether or not the rendezvous could have been compromised and you could be lying on the floor of a detention cell by this time tomorrow with nothing ahead of you but ten or twenty years in a forced-labour camp in the Gulag without a woman in sight?

No, she was just someone in his courier line, that was all. With one of her blackened finger-bones or the charred remnant of an ear lying inside the coffin by mistake, to be prayed over in ignorance by his grieving widow — how complicated life can be, my friend, how very poetic.

'What traces might he have left?' Elliott was asking me.

'None at his safe-house: I went in there. All his signals were verbal, the last three to London by phone at a courier's flat. His code book would have been on him in the car.'

The beam of some headlights swung across the windscreen as a BMW came into the car park and went past us, accelerating. Chandler started the engine.

'What about the courier?' Elliott asked me. 'The woman?'

'You mean traces?'

'Yes.'

'I don't know. The whole line went to ground the minute the news got out. You'd have to check through their base.'

We started moving, following the BMW.

Elliott switched off the Sanyo and put it away, leaning forward and saying something to Chandler; all I caught was 'till they signal', or it sounded like that. Then he sat back again.

'Is that it?' I asked him.

'Oh,' he turned to me quickly, 'yes, many thanks. We just needed it on the record, confirming your report from Bombay.'

'So what am I doing in Berlin?'

'We did the debriefing — ' he looked at his nails ' — because it was convenient. We want you here to meet someone.' A quick smile. 'Won't take long.'

He was being too bloody reassuring, and I had the sudden feeling I was sitting here on my way to an execution. 'Who?'

I shouldn't have asked, but it was too late. Showing my nerves. It was six weeks since I'd got back from Singapore and I'd been standing by for a month and no one had remembered my existence until the phone call to the plane. The thing is, we come off the last time out with the blood still up and the nerves at the pitch where we've stopped being scared any more, and at that point they could send us straight out again and we wouldn't miss a beat; but then there's the debriefing and the medic exam and two weeks' paid leave with an air ticket to wherever we want to go or a stint at the spa in Norfolk with breakfast in bed and Swedish massage and saunas and the whole treatment; and then we're put on the list for standing by and the rot sets in — the nerves have come down and the blood's cooled off and we've had time to remember that it was only a bit of luck that got us back the last time, or at least a calculated risk that worked out according to the book. We shouldn't be here; we should have stayed stuck under that boat with the air-line still snarled or been pushed into a cell with the light still boring a hole in our head or found by the dustmen in the first grey light of the dawn with half the skull gone and the grin lopsided. So what do we want to go out again for, why push our luck?

The answer's another question. What else is there?

Elliott's voice came into my thoughts. 'Do you remember Yasolev? Viktor Yasolev?' Looking at his nails again.

'Yes.'

'Got on well with him, I believe.'

'As well as could be expected.'

He smiled indulgently. As well as could be expected, considering that Viktor Yasolev was a colonel in the KGB and had come extremely close to throwing me into Lubyanka.

'I mean,' Elliott said carefully, 'you found him, as an adversary, an honourable man?'

We turned left onto the Saaltwinkler Damm alongside the canal, with the windscreen wipers clearing the way through the drizzle and the rear lights of the BMW still ahead of us.

'Yes.' Viktor Yasolev: tough, dangerous, deadly in a corner, but yes, honourable. 'Why?'

'It is our hope,' Elliott said carefully, 'that you might agree to work with him.'

I swung my head and he gazed back at me steadily, his eyes expressionless.

In a moment I asked him, 'When did he defect?' 'He didn't. He's still in the KGB.'