Quiller KGB

2: ECHOES

'We'll get out here,' Chandler said, and turned off the engine, prodding his seat-belt release.

The BMW had parked in the next aisle and there were three other cars further away among the concrete pillars. Two men were standing further away still, near the entrance, where the ramp sloped down from the street. Pilot lamps burned in here above the parking-bay numbers, throwing a bleak light through the gloom.

We got out and stood doing nothing for a minute, breathing in the exhaust gas.

'Not Yasolev,' Elliott said quietly. 'We're not meeting Yasolev here, of course. It'll be Mr Shepley.'

I looked at him but he didn't turn his head. He was watching the BMW. I'd heard of Shepley but never met him before; not many of us had. He was the head of the Bureau. His status was approximately that of God.

Shepley in Berlin.

According to legend he never left London; never, some said, left the building in Whitehall with the false door behind the lift shaft and the mole's citadel of rooms above the street with no numbers to them, no names. Legend also had it that Shepley was a former colonel in the SAS and had taken a leading part in the raid on the Iranian Embassy in Princes' Gate; but then legends, with or without substance, are to be expected in a place like the Bureau, where we bury ourselves in deep cover as a matter of principle.

'Chilly,' I head Elliott say, 'for this time of year.' He gave me a faint smile, and it occurred to me that underneath his air of calm his own nerves were running close to the edge. It could have been because it doesn't give me the giggles to be in the presence of people very high in the echelon. They get my back up, and I suppose he didn't want it to happen now, with God here.

A police car went past the entrance very fast with its siren waking the night; then it was quiet again down here until a door of the BMW came open.

Elliott touched my arm. 'It would be quite a good thing,' he told me in an undertone, 'to listen, and not say much. The final decision must be yours, remember, so you've nothing to worry about.'

Nerves on his sleeve. It didn't help.

Two men got out of the BMW and came round to this side and then someone else got out of the back and stood with his hands buried in the pockets of his raincoat, and for a moment looked at no one as we walked over and stopped near him, the soft echoes of our footsteps dying away.

I could actually hear Elliott's breathing, it was so quiet here. Chandler hadn't said anything since we'd got out of the car; he was on my other side, opposite Elliott, and they were both standing a little way back from me.

'Who are they?' The man in the raincoat had his head turned towards the entrance to the garage. His voice was so soft that I'd barely heard him.

'NATO guard, sir, major's rank.' It was one of the men who'd just got out of the BMW.

Shepley's head moved again. 'What about those?'

He was looking at a dark grey Mercedes in the far corner, with two faces only just visible behind the windscreen.

'Police, sir. In case anyone tries disturbing us.'

Shepley turned his head again and looked at me. He was nondescript, in some ways: average height, average weight, thinning straw-coloured hair, a bank clerk or an insurance man — nondescript except for his eyes, a washed-out blue but with a steadiness that made me feel he was quietly taking every nerve synapse in my brain apart and checking it for wear. Nondescript, too, except for his voice, which was so soft that you had to focus in on it and ignore all other sounds, if you wanted to hear what he was saying.

'You're the executive?'

Chandler spoke from slightly behind us. 'Quiller, sir.'

The pale eyes went on looking at me without any reaction; then, when he was ready, he brought his right hand out of his pocket and offered it to me. 'Good of you to come. I'm Shepley.'

A cold hand, hardened by holding things that might have blown up if he hadn't been careful — 'this was how I thought of it.

'My privilege, sir.' To put poor old Elliott out of his misery. Shepley put his hand back into his raincoat and leaned against the car, his head turned a little to the right but his eyes watching me.

'You've been told we'd like you to work with the KGB on a certain assignment?'

'Yes.'

'How does it appeal?'

'I'll need more information.'

He looked away, at the guards by the entrance or beyond them: I think he'd stopped actually seeing the environment, and had slipped into alpha waves. I noticed pockmarks below his left ear, some kind of scarring left by an explosion, perhaps, a grenade. It would explain why he always turned his head to listen with his right ear.

'More information,' he said softly. 'Of course.' He looked back at me again. 'This man Yasolev. Would you trust him?'

'What with?'

'Your life.'

I thought about it, then said, 'I'd trust him to keep his word to me. If he said, for instance, that whatever the orders from Moscow he wouldn't cut me down, I'd accept that.'

'Would you.'

It wasn't a question. I didn't add anything; he was giving me the information I needed by asking me things and listening, so that he'd know what his next question should be. That sounds complicated but it isn't really; it's the classic technique for limiting the information to what the other man needs to know, so that the least amount of information possible is given. I wished him a lot of luck in this case because I was going to want a lot of data before I'd consider working with the KGB, and he knew that.

'Would you be prepared to work inside the German Democratic Republic?'

'Under what kind of cover?'

'Whatever you felt comfortable with, plus the option of going clandestine at any given time.'

He meant I could bolt for a burrow if things got hot.

'I'd want a guarantee,' I told him, 'that you'd pull me out of there if I made the request.'

It didn't sound a lot to ask but he knew what I was saying. It could mean having to send a chopper across the frontier under the radar and locate me and get me out of whatever hole I was in, and do it in a rainstorm or in the dark with not much time left before the opposition closed right in on me or I lost too much blood or couldn't signal or give my position or lift a finger for that matter. Or it could mean calling a whole covey of sleeper agents and contacts and couriers out of the ground and sending them in to find me if they could, and that meant that Shepley could reach the point where he'd have to balance the value of this single shadow executive against the risk of exposing half the resident moles and sleepers and agents-in-place in the whole of East Berlin or the whole of East Germany, and if the scales didn't tip in my direction he'd have to go back on whatever guarantee he'd given me and throw me to the dogs.

He was watching me steadily.

'We can't do that,' he said, 'as you know.'

I'd just been trying to find out if he was ready to promise me the impossible in order to tempt me into the mission. So far he was playing straight.

'All right.' I shifted my stance, feeling the need for movement. Standing as close as this to Shepley was like standing under a high-voltage power line. Maybe he didn't always pack this amount of tension but he was doing it now. He hadn't, after all, come to Berlin to try the apfelstrudel. 'All right, then I'd want your guarantee that you wouldn't cut me down, whatever the pressure on you.'

He looked at his shoes.

I think someone made a movement beside me, Elliott, on my left, a more vulnerable man than Chandler, more easily embarrassed; or he knew — where perhaps Chandler didn't — that two missions ago London had put a bomb under me because I'd become suddenly and critically expendable, and I'd only got back because I'd found it and pulled out the flint. I didn't want them to do it again.

'That would be difficult,' Shepley said, and looked up at me with his pale mother-of-pearl eyes and began sorting out my synapses again to see what I was thinking.

'Yes, but that's what I'd need from you. From you personally.'

'That would be an irrevocable condition, if you agreed to work on this assignment?'

'Yes.'

It was warm in here, in this waste of cold concrete on an October night in latitude 52, the sweat creeping on my face, on my hands. I hadn't been ready for this when they'd told me to land in Berlin. With the head of the Bureau out here and with the timing so tight that they'd had to switch my flights without warning and shove me into an underground garage face to face with the stark proposal that I should work in liaison with the KGB, I was feeling the heat. God knew what the background was to this thing but it was obviously ultra-high-level and I suppose there was a degree of paranoia creeping in — I felt these people were pulling me into a vortex before I had a chance of getting clear; otherwise I'd never try making conditions like this without even knowing what they wanted me to do.

'By "cut you down",' Shepley's soft voice came, 'you mean order your death. Is that correct?'

I liked him for that. We're all so fond of euphemisms like eliminate, terminate, cut down, so forth, but this man said what he meant.

'Yes,' I told him.

He didn't look away. 'You mean you'd put your life higher than the success of the mission? Of a mission as important as you must realise this one is?'

I turned and took a step, looking at the oil-stained concrete, kicking a broken chip of it with the toe of my shoe, watching it skitter and come to a stop against a pillar.

'No,' I told him. It was the only answer. It's what we settle for when we sign up, and when we sign again at yearly intervals to confirm our commitment. It's on this one that most of the new recruits back out, and I don't blame them. I'd signed because this was the life I wanted, and I was ready to accept the death they might one day want of me.

At the Bureau we don't have a licence to kill; we have a licence to die. 'No, I wouldn't put my life higher than the success of the mission. But look — ' I turned back and met his eyes again '- all I'm asking is that you'll let me do it for myself, that's all. If — '

'There might not be time to ask you.'

'But you wouldn't have to. I'd know if — '

'Not necessarily.'

'Look, I'm seasoned, you know that. I've — '

'You're being impractical.'

'With my life on the line, surely I — '

'We can't let you tie our hands.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, I'd have a capsule on me, so what are we talking about? I just don't want to be stabbed in the — ' but I stopped right there because I could hear the tone in my voice, pitching a degree higher, showing my nerves, no better than bloody Elliott.

The sound of an engine came suddenly and headlights swung into the entrance, dipping as the car reached the ramp, and by this time we'd all turned and were standing with our backs to the light, our faces hidden, our shadows standing against the wall like a group photograph in silhouette, none of us moving as we stood listening to the whimper of tyres as the brakes came on, a man's voice — one of the NATO guards — then another voice, fainter, from inside the car, the engine idling and then speeding up, the sound of the transmission in reverse, the group of silhouettes against the wall shifting to one side as the headlights swung away and the gloom came down again and we turned like puppets, taking up our positions again.

'You have a reputation,' Shepley's soft voice came, 'of showing resistance when offered a new mission. I'll suffer you not to waste my time.'

'This thing,' I said at once, 'was thrown at me cold.'

'I take your point. But time is of the essence. We need to hurry.'

'All right, but I need to know more, a lot more.'

'Of course. You'll be fully briefed. For the moment — ' he began pacing suddenly and I joined him, glad of the chance of movement '- for the moment I simply want you to agree to a meeting with Yasolev. It would take place in East Berlin; he wouldn't come to you, but you would go to him. This was a concession on my part during the initial approach. For your protection — or for the protection, shall I say, of the executive undertaking the assignment — I pushed the KGB very hard for a hostage for us to hold in London, and they finally agreed to send a major-general of the Red Army.' We reached a wall and turned back, our footsteps raising small echoes. 'I also demanded four of our agents — SIS, not Bureau — to be freed from captivity in Moscow and returned to London, together with three Americans. I therefore offered the token concession of our meeting Yasolev on his home ground.'

'Alone?'

'Yes. Again, you'll be fully briefed. You should also know at this point that the mission is to be strictly confined to the intelligence community in London, with not the slightest involvement with the Foreign Office or overseas embassies — unless the circumstances of the mission call for it. But if you accepted the assignment you would have the full resources of the Bureau at your command, under my personal and constant supervision.'

He stopped short of where the other men stood waiting, and faced me with his head turned slightly to the right, his eyes trapping light from a pilot lamp overhead. 'This, I think, is as much as you need to know at this stage, but I'm prepared to answer any question, providing it's of the most vital consequence.'

He wouldn't give me long. He'd told me all he was going to tell me, because if I refused the mission he didn't want a critical mass of information loose in my head: any agent at any time can be got at and picked clean, even between assignments, if someone suspects he's loaded with some kind of product. Until I accepted this one I'd be told nothing more.

There was only one question I could ask Shepley that would give me an idea how big this assignment was, and whether I should even look at it. 'It wasn't Yasolev,' I said, 'who made the approach off his own bat. He's not big enough. So who was it?'

'General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.'