Quiller KGB

24: TRUCKS

The car was quiet. I'd watched his cab into the distance, and turned off the engine, and since then I hadn't moved.

It was like being frozen in glass, in a heavy glass paper-weight, the way they do it with coins and things. It was as if the billionfold nerve impulses investing the system had reached the synapses and couldn't make the leap and had shut down, leaving the organism in a state of suspended animation.

I just needed a minute, that was all, perhaps a few minutes. It was a form of meditation, of seeking the self within the self and consulting with levels of wisdom beyond the norm. It was necessary because when I started the engine again, a minute from now, or perhaps a few minutes from now, I would be breaking through into the end-phase for Quickstep and nothing could stop it until they put one of two things on the signals board, mission accomplished or shadow down.

They were busy now, in London, burning the midnight oil.

'I really can't say, sir. He sounded, I don't know, depressed.'

'That's not like Cone.'

Shepley, his washed-out eyes looking quietly into infinity while his brain went through a hundred scenarios, a thousand, trying to take an intuitive leap and find the best thing to do, the best way of guiding Quickstep through the end-phase with a shadow executive who had requested him to stand by the board 'for the next few hours', who had reported that 'the odds were fair', whose morale was good and so on but who had no actual plan in mind to bring the mission home between now and eight o'clock, Berlin time.

'Cone has plenty of support for him?'

'Yes, sir. He said he didn't need any.'

Holmes, going to get himself another cup of coffee and then not drink it, let it get cold.

The other voices at other boards, quiet under the focused glow of the lamps, with people drifting in to take a look at the one for Quickstep, because the Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet was involved.

And finally one of them would take the bit of chalk and scrape it across the board. Executive at point of initiating end-phase, no details.

Executive, actually, sitting in a black and rather dirty 230 SE — it's very difficult to get a car washed this side of the Wall — and looking along a deserted stretch of Unter den Linden with three-quarters of a tankful of petrol and his nerves shut down because he was staring at the brink; and even though he'd seen it before it still had the power to make him afraid, afraid to go forward.

Is that really what's happening?

Probably.

You're not just trying to get your nerve back?

Well yes, that too. Give me a break, for Christ's sake.

Not often you ask for charity. You -

Shuddup and leave me alone.

I could actually feel everything shutting down again and giving me a kind of peace as the brainwaves slowed into alpha, touched theta perhaps, lulling the mind into the green and gentle domain of not knowing, not-fearing, until with brilliant clarity I understood the process and my desperate need for it, for these few minutes of oblivion and surrender before I let consciousness take over again and calculate the needs of the moment and tell me to switch on the engine.

Awareness, as if at a great distance, of the hum of the digital clock on the dashboard, of the creak of the upholstery as the muscles went into deep relaxation, of a man's voice from the taxi-rank behind me, of a jet lifting from Tegel on the far side of the Wall, awareness of all three things and then, by infinite degrees, the surfacing of consciousness and the return to the beta rhythm and the sharpness of what we are conditioned to believe is reality, with the harsh and angular perspective of the street under its garish lights and the hard plastic and glass and metal surfaces of the interior of the car and the small black-covered Ignition key jutting from the lock.

Switch on and go.

4:07.

I drove to the British embassy, two miles distant. This had to be the initial step: to make contact.

He would be arriving, the General Secretary of the USSR, in almost exactly four hours from now, direct from Moscow. I didn't know how long Horst Volper would need — had apportioned — for the final stage of his project to remove the General-Secretary from the world scene, but the incident might be scheduled for any time from his arrival on German soil, and I would assume that the assault would be made at the earliest moment, from the moment when the target came down the steps from his plane.

West along Unter den Linden, past the Palace of the Republic.

But I didn't believe that Volper would attempt the kind of shot that had succeeded in Dallas; it was too chancy. Oswald had had luck, at that distance and with that rifle. Volper would use a superior weapon if he had it in mind to use one at all; but the visitor would be arriving under very close protection and no one would even get near any building where a sniper could set up his post.

The Hotel Unter den Linden on the right, with lights burning in the foyer.

There was the chance that if I gave it enough thought, and if I could put myself in Volper's position with effective enough verisimilitude, I could find out the exact method he would use. I would try to do that, in the next four hours, if there were time; but the possibilities were countless, from a close shot into the motorcade to a black olive laced with cyanide at this evening's reception.

Crossing Friedrich-strasse with the red just flicking to green.

The moon was at three-quarters and I noted it as a matter of routine. We would be working within the close confines of the city, where there would be bright artificial light; but even if this weren't so, I couldn't predict at this stage whether moonlight would help me find my way or render me fatally discernible as I crawled from cover to cover. Nothing, in these few imminent hours, was predictable.

Grand Hotel on the left.

I felt quite good, now, quite contained. The brief period of meditation had calmed the nerves, and besides, I was in control of the moment as I took my foot off the throttle and moved it to the brake. I was to precipitate the action, and that gave me the advantage. Later, things would be different, but it didn't come into the reckoning as I slowed the car and stopped outside the furrier's next door to the British Embassy.

Above the street lights the sky was black, its stars lost in the city's albedo. There was no movement in the street: these were the dead hours before the dawn.

There were reflections in the windows of the shops on each side, the street's facade repeating itself in mirror images. In the show window of the embassy, photographs of Stratford-upon-Avon, Kenneth Branagh as Henry V, Anthony Sher as Richard III. Beyond it, a clothing store, and in the distance the massive Soviet embassy and the Brandenburg Gate, with a taxi crossing the intersection at Otto Grotewohlstrasse. The French Cultural Centre was dark, and so were the headquarters of the Party Youth Movement opposite the British Embassy, but there was a car standing on the far side of Neustadtische Glinkastrasse, a dark-coloured Audi.

At that distance I couldn't be sure whether there were anyone sitting in it or not, but I believed there would be. In my driving-mirror there was another car, a Mercedes 280 SE, standing not far from the Komische Oper building. It was closer, and there was a man sitting at the wheel.

I didn't turn my head to look at the car directly; that would have been hamming it, and Brannagh would have been appalled. Scenario: I'd come here to visit the embassy or leave something there, but I'd noticed the two cars and decided not to get out of my own. I wasn't to regard it as a trap; I had simply moved into a surveillance operation that I hadn't expected, and the only thing to do was get out if I could.

04:15. Executive has made contact with opposition surveillance and is moving away.

It would have been interesting for them to make periodic changes to the board during these last hours of the night, if I could have signalled progress to Cone. Perhaps, an hour from now, two hours, I would in fact be able to call him from some phone box or other, to tell him I'd got a fix on Volper or had dealt with him and in time or was trapped and totally unable to get clear, my apologies to Bureau One, so forth, as the blood pooled at my feet or they came for me at a run or their headlights swung suddenly and caught me in the glare and the first shots centred in the ribcage and Cone flinched, hearing them over the phone.

But one mustn't be anxious; one must not, my good friend, anticipate the worst; let it come, if it should, unheralded, like a thief in the night, to pluck away dear life.

I got into gear and drove as far as the second intersection at Otto Grotewohlstrasse and turned north, and after half a block I'd got the Audi in the mirror. At the next street I'd got the Mercedes and a Fiat within view, taking up stations at a distance and moving at my own pace. I had expected this much attention from the moment I'd entered the surveillance area, because at this stage Volper would have given orders to make a certain kill. There would be other cars standing on other streets in the hope of seeing me, especially near the hotel: they hadn't specifically expected me to visit the embassy; it was simply a place where I might appear at any time and they'd staked it out as a routine.

Now that I'd been sighted and was under permanent observation they wouldn't waste any time and it was going to be very difficult to do what I wanted to do: make a switch. But it was all that was left to me and I now had the material I needed to work with.

A switch is an operation easy to describe and in many cases impossible to bring off. When followed, one has to vanish and then follow one of the opposition to his base. I have only done it twice, in Istanbul and Prague, and in each case it had taken me half a day; tonight I had less than four hours, and if I chose the wrong man I might not be led to his base, to Volper, but to any one of a dozen stations in the network. But when there is nothing else to do, the impossible seems less difficult.

Two blocks, three, going northwest and crossing Spandauerstrasse and Karl Marx Allee with two more cars making strategic loops as the others kept mobile watch and we began meeting the first of the trucks coming in with produce for the markets and police cars became more in evidence as early traffic started moving from the suburbs into the city's centre.

Then they began making rushes, first the Audi and then the Mercedes, one of them bumping the rear end and swinging me against the kerb, the other coming from in front and cutting across and forcing me into a swerve because its headlights were on full beam and I was blinded. A truck loomed at a cross-street and the Fiat behind me made impact and pushed me forward against the brakes with the wheels locked and the tyres shrilling over the surface and the truck grazing across the front end and taking away a headlamp, the driver shouting and his voice snatched away as his vehicle thundered on.

I don't think they were hoping to smash me up in the car because it's not that easy if the driver knows what he's doing; I think they were trying to get me out of the car and on the run and that was when they would close right in and get me into the centre of a concerted rush and make the kill with their guns or their hands or however they chose, once having me trapped.

I hadn't thought it would be easy to make the switch. I had thought it would be like this, and I settled down to the business of keeping them off and staying alive and trying to manoeuvre the Merc I was driving into a last-ditch crash that could give me room to run before they were ready, and by now the pace was so fast that a lot of the driving had become instinctive as the images flashed across the retinae and clamoured for attention, the streets merging into a lurching continuum, a brick and concrete channel cut through the city between earth and sky and flowing past and behind me in a dizzying stream of lights, vehicles, intersections and trucks — always the huge and monolithic shapes of the trucks with their horns blaring as someone cut across their path, one of them lurching past me with its wheel wrenched over and ripping away the doors, while the mind began shifting focus under the stress of the constant demands on the intellect to base its judgement on the torrential rush of feedback coming in from the environment.

I no longer knew which streets we were running through or which direction I was going but the object of the operation was to let them hound me until I could leave the car and get to cover and vanish and hope to sight them, one of them or more than one, and wait until they believed I was clear and went back to their base.

A long shot, oh yes indeed it was a very long shot and for the first time I wondered if this had been the only way to shift Quickstep into the end-phase and get to the target in time, but the left brain was almost shut down by now and my hands moved the wheel of their own accord as the eyes sighted and the brain interpreted and instinct triggered the motor nerves and we hit a wall and bounced and ran on with torn metal screaming against a tyre while headlights swung in and blinded me time after time and I drove unseeing, with memory trapping the last image and the brain taking me through an opening and getting me to the far side where vision came in again and the kaleidoscope of the street's perspective was broken into a semblance of order and I hit the throttle and braked and swung the wheel and used the kerb to kick me straight and the corners to get me clear until the police sirens began and the flashing of lights coloured the night.

Then they came for me and I wasn't ready for it but there was nothing I could have done as a Mercedes came up very fast in the mirror and swung out and drew alongside and I felt the impact of something against my leg and heard it thud to the floor and knew what it was and hit the brakes and wrenched at the wheel to roll the car over and use its underside for a shield as the explosion came and its force blew glass and metal in a hot wind across the street and I was pitched headlong across the pavement as the fuel tank went up in a burst of orange light and the heat came against my back like a blowtorch and I got up and tripped and pitched down and got to my feet again and ran, ran anywhere, just away from the inferno in the street behind me with the sirens coming in, wailing and dying as the first patrol car slammed on its brakes and backed off as the black smoke billowed between the buildings.

A truck halted at the intersection as the driver saw the blaze and I dropped and slid underneath it and reached the other side and clambered onto whatever I could find that gave a hand grip and lay flat across the top of the huge fuel tank as the truck backed, bumping with its twin rear wheels across the kerb and then moving forward again, swinging full circle away from the heat, so that I had to drop and crawl underneath again to the other side because there'd be Volper's people in the area watching for me: if they were professionals they wouldn't assume the grenade had finished me before the Merc rolled over.

A Fiat went past the truck on the other side and I saw its reflection in a store window as it reached the street where the Merc was burning and hit the brakes and slewed sideways as a Vopo patrol waved it back.

They'd be moving in, all of them, the whole of the opposition hit team, and they'd be looking for me. Nothing could have survived in that inferno and there was no question of the police or fire crews trying to pull a body out, dead or alive, and none of the hit team could get close enough to find out if I were still inside the Merc or not.

Black Audi going very fast towards the blaze, underestimating its closeness and braking hard and slamming against a sandbin and bouncing off and spinning and getting control and coming back past the other side of the truck. I twisted on top of the fuel tank until I was lying with my back to the street, a black polythene and fabric bundle in the half-dark as the truck lumbered through its forced detour and another came up alongside, one of the drivers shouting something to the other.

A police car neared from the intersection with its lights splashing against the buildings and I waited until the truck was moving close to a wall and pulling up and then I dropped and rolled underneath, reaching for a handhold on the cruciform chassis beams, heaving myself up and hanging on as a wash of light flowed across the road surface And the wheels of a private car rolled past at a walking pace and then halted and turned as one of the Vopos shouted.

I shifted over as the big propeller-shaft of the truck began brushing my arm but the handhold was too smooth and I had to cling on to a brake cable, swinging with both feet lodged against a cross-member. The truck slowed again and turned between two rows of wooden platforms, coming to a halt as a man dropped from the cab; all I could see were his legs. The wheels of another truck were rolling to a halt behind us and I hung there taking slow shallow breaths as the diesel gas clouded from the exhausts.

Dropped, crawled under the platform and lay there among a litter of crates, pulling the nearest ones around me for cover.

Take stock. I was in a freight-yard and the trucks were coming in to unload for the markets that would open for shopkeepers, probably at first light. There would be Volper's people moving through the area, checking everywhere before they assumed one of two things: either the grenade had finished me or I'd managed to get clear. Then they would leave, moving in larger circles with the truck depot as their centre.

There was still a chance of making the switch: of keeping one of them in sight and waiting until he moved away and moving after him and staying on his track until led me to base, to the objective for Quickstep, to Horst Volper.

Must've been a drunk!

Or a stolen car, going that speed!

Truckers calling to each other they came alongside and began work on the ropes and the tarpaulins, big men in big coats, in from the country, mud on their boots.

Makes you sick, with him still in the car.

A woman, maybe.

Worse, then. Hans! Gimme a hand with this rope, the knot’s frozen!

I began checking the environment. There must be ten or fifteen platforms in the yard, a hundred feet long, with twenty or thirty trucks crawling between them and pulling up, the rattle of their diesels dying one after another and leaving only the shouts of the men and the banging of their boots as they moved about, stowing the tarpaulins and pulling the crates on their backs, the crates, baskets, sacks and bundles, dropping them onto the platforms.

What's he coming here for?

Give us a talk about bloody Lenin, what else?

He's all right, Otto, he's shaking things up over there!

Pity he doesn't knock the Wall down, now that'd be something!

Below the platforms, a backdrop of red brick walls and store fronts, doors, windows, sandbins, street lamps, two cars standing within fifty yards of where I was lying in cover, a man moving away from a BMW and coming into the depot, looking at no one, talking to no one, hands shoved into the vertical chest-pockets of his black anorak, his head turning left, turning right. I wasn't in hazard: this was good cover among the debris of broken crates and cardboard boxes, with the light factor so low as to be shadowless. I could lie easy, letting the body go through its healing processes and the nerves relax — I'd skinned a hand when I'd hit the door of the Merc open and pitched out, and my back had twisted as I'd started my run, falling and getting up and falling again and finding my feet and lurching towards cover; I didn't know what I looked like from the back, whether the rush of flame had actually seared the plastic jacket, how much attention I'd attract when I finally walked out of here. There was a lingering degree of shock from the instant when I'd known what they must have thrown into the car, worse than when the thing had blown up because I'd been expecting that. Relax, then, relax and observe.

The scents of damp earth and greenstuff came on the air, sweet after the man-made reek of exhaust gas, the smell of the country drifting in to the stone and steel and concrete mileu of the man-made city. The smell of black tobacco as the truckers lit up again as they worked.

Within the next ten minutes I counted four men moving about in the area, the one from the BMW and three coming in from the street that ran at right-angles, their figures silhouetted against the last of the blaze as the fire crews worked with their hoses and extinguishers. Black smoke drifted as thick as black water from the mouth of the street, coloured by the lights of the police cars and the fire-trucks, and one of the men coming across here was coughing the whole time, probably because he'd stayed close to the burning car, trying to see if the driver were still inside.

A rat ran close to my face as I lay perfectly still, a huge rat, a city rat here for the feasting, and another followed, scampering across my leg and stopping, its feet splayed as it sniffed; and I moved slightly and felt it leap in alarm and heard it scuttle away; it had felt flesh underfoot and suspected I was carrion. Feast, my good friend, but not on me.

Ten minutes more and two of the men had passed along the row of trucks behind me: I could watch both rows by turning my head at intervals. It may have been a subconscious concession to social convention that stopped them going through the debris under the platforms; the truckers would hardly notice them as they walked past, but they would have attracted attention if they'd started scavenging. And they were looking for a man on foot, the silhouette or the shadow of a man loping in the distance from cover to cover, someone they could give chase to and run down and kill. If this yard had been deserted, I think they might have made a thorough search, taking their time, taking an hour, two hours, before they were satisfied.

Get it, Heiner!

Don't move!

Clang of a metal bar, maybe a tyre-iron, as one of the rats leapt and vanished in the half-dark.

Another ten minutes and a truck started up at the front of the row and moved off, the sound of its diesel drumming within the walls of the yard, the gas from its exhaust creeping across the ground.

There was only one man now, the one from the BMW that stood fifty feet away near a fire hydrant. He was moving towards the area where I was lying, checking the trucks for the second time. He would be my last chance for making the switch, and it worried me.

There was no other vehicle in sight and even if there had been it would have been locked and although I could smash a window and get in, the key would almost certainly not be there and I wouldn't have time to hot-wire the ignition and take up station behind the BMW.

The BMW was the only car I could use, and if this man were the last of the hit-team left in the area I wouldn't have to follow him anyway. I would have to take him with me.

He was coming along the nearest row between the trucks and the platform and was within thirty feet of me. I got a glimpse of him now and then between the slats but his face was strange; he wasn't one of the tags who'd been with me through the streets the day before. A blunt face with short black hair, worn leather jacket, not a big man but strong, wide-shouldered, thick at the wrist. He was ducking to look under the trucks now, then turning and looking under the platform.

There was deep shadow here, the flat white light of the street lamps blanked off by the trucks, but he would see me if he looked under the platform and was close enough.

If I couldn't do the switch there was only one option left to me. It was something I have never done before in any mission, on principle and because the Bureau disallows it, but I believed as I lay there among the mess of broken crates and beer cans that I would have to do it now.

Not now, later. But prepare it now.

Paul, canyou shift up a couple of metres?

What for?

I've got to let the tailboard down.

Half a jiff.

Another truck was moving off at the end of the row behind me and a crate dropped off the platform and split open, spilling green apples. Paul's truck started up, and the huge twin wheels rolled as the man, the man with the blunt face, stood back. Small flat-beds and vans had started coming in from the street as the shopkeepers arrived to load up. Engines were running everywhere in the crowded yard, and the air was thick with carbon monoxide.

All right, that'll do it!

A tailboard slammed down against the rubber stops. The man was close now, two or three metres away.

Heinrich! Where's Veidt?

Haven't seen him.

I've got his quota!

The door of a cab clanged shut and boots hit the ground. The section of platform above my head took the weight of potato sacks as they were swung from the truck. The man ducked and looked under the platform, closer still now, but didn't see me among the debris.

Veidt's not coming!

Why not?

He's off sick.

Shit!

The engines rumbled. The big wheels rolled. The truckers shouted. Then the man looked under the platform again and saw me.