Quiller Solitaire

Chapter 12: CONE

It is contended legally that Voest-Alpine of Vienna licensed Gerald Bull's howitzer technology about 1979, some time before he dismantled his American operation and went to work with Poudriere Reunie Belge, who wanted to produce and market howitzer shells together with Austrian gun sales.

Crumbs dropped from the meat pie as I took bites at it, and I held it over the greaseproof paper. A jet took off, leaving echoes among the buildings.

It was just gone 10:00 hours.

By eleven I had got through the whole cassette, made notes, turned them face down, making up questions, answering them, some of them right, not all of them, not enough.

Terpil and Korkala were convicted in absentia for conspiring to sell 10,000 machine guns and 10 million rounds of ammunition to a small unit of New York under-cover police officers posing as South American revolutionaries. Several private people and agencies are now looking for these two in Lebanon, but their hideout is quite difficult to locate.

It was cold in here, in this small oblong room at the top of the building; there was an electric heater but it didn't do much more than warm the air within a few inches of it, where I had my feet. The cold was coming from inside me, some of it. I hoped Cone would get into Berlin before I needed him, before Inge Stoph telephoned, if she were going to telephone, if Klaus had told her he'd see me.

A woman laughed, lower in the building, one of the tarts, I suppose. I didn't think the top floor rooms were used, or at least not by the girls: when || I'd been shown along the passage most of the doors had been open, with nothing in the rooms except for tin trunks, mattresses, a portable bidet, some newspapers, no beds or furniture. But the room was all right because it was on the third floor and the one window wasn't Overlooked and there was a metal fire escape and a courtyard with six-foot walls on three sides. When the woman with the huge mole on her neck had left me I'd stood outside on the fire escape and checked on the roof; there wasn't easy access but it could be done if it didn't snow. It surprised me that a man like Thrower had chosen a place like this; it should have offended his sensibilities; perhaps he'd just signalled Kleiber's support group and asked them where he should book me in.

The biggest dealer across the globe is Sarkis Soghanalian, born a Turkish-Armenian Christian and naturalised as a Lebanese. He lives most of the time in the USA. The weaponry he has sold has been used in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Angola, Ghana, Biafra, you name it, even against Britain in the Falklands mini-war, though Soghanalian claims he is friendly to the US and her allies in the West.

He spoke quietly, Ahmad Samala, leaving silences for note-taking; sometimes I could hear his smile when he talked about new weapons, the latest and shiniest of his toys… Terpil was after that particular model but I beat him to it, and he was most upset…

There was a telephone in here; they'd led an extension cable from the next room, but there was a big enough gap under my door for it to shut. I would be glad when the thing rang: I didn't know the timing for the day. Inge could call Kleiber and make a rendezvous an hour from now and it could take me an hour to reach there. I would also be glad when Cone rang to say he was in Berlin; the executive would have a director in the field and Solitaire could start running again and those bloody people controlling the board in London could settle down and try and get things right in future: Shatner must have been out of his mind to pick someone like Thrower to handle me.

My head was still throbbing, I think because I was feeling under pressure with so much information to take in against the clock.

He deals in everything from Brazilian tanks to helicopters and army uniforms, sometimes legally but not always. There are widespread thefts that go on at military bases all the time.

Twelve noon.

He's rather touchy when people tell him he's a merchant of death. He asks them how the big chemical manufacturers feel, selling the stuff they do – if they don't feel guilty, why should he?

13:00 hours.

He couldn't have been in Europe, then, Cone, when Signals had called him in.

They don't have allegiance to any flag or organisation, remember, and they need wars in order to prosper. It makes them different.

I wanted to phone Kleiber and ask him if he'd had instructions from London to mount a search for Helen Maitland, but it would tie up the line and I had to stay open for Cone, for Kleiber.

A TWA jumbo dropped through the sky on its approach path, trailing a skein of exhaust gas through the winter sunshine.

We must remember 'that because arms dealers meet so many people in government and military circles, they pick up some very sensitive information, and there are those who trade that information for as high a price as they can get, and that is often very high indeed. They -

The phone began ringing and the nerve-light flashed behind my right eye, the side where I'd banged my head. I picked up the receiver.

'Bitte?'

'Mr Jones?

'Yes.'

Cone.

'Your place or mine?'

I asked him: 'Does Kleiber know you're here?

'I phoned him from the plane.'

'You'd better come to my place,' I told him. It was Kleiber's number I'd given to Inge, and this was where he'd call me.

'Bring anything?' Cone asked.

'No.'

I shut down and switched on the tape again.

There was another incident in Kansas, USA, during a propellent transfer for a recycling operation. A pipe broke loose from the missile in the silo and there was a release of nitrogen tetroxide.

Samala was talking about the availability of nerve gas from legitimate sources when Cone arrived, his footsteps picking their way across the bare boards of the corridor with deliberation. I opened the door and he came in and took a quick look around.

'Economy class.'

'It's good in terms of security.'

'Oh yes.' He would have noticed the fire escape and the fact that the room was at the other end of the building from the stairs, so that you could hear people coming.

'Sit down,' I said, and he looked carefully at the iron bedstead and the two art deco chairs and sat down in one of them and pulled a manila envelope out of his coat and gave it to me.

'Stuff on the Miniver missile. You wanted it, didn't you?'

'Yes.'

'They gave it to me in London. It's also been faxed to Thrower's hotel, and I'll have it picked up there. Its nothing classified, just the specifications, mostly from Jane's. Bit of action was there?'

I suppose my eyes were still a bit nervy.

'Yes. Nothing serious. Bump on the head.'

'Doesn't show. Anything else?'

'Bruised shoulder.'

'Still use it?

'Yes.' I showed him.

'How d'you feel?'

'First class.'

He nodded and stopped talking. He'd been like this in Moscow, fussing about injuries, part of his job. One of the responsibilities of the director in the field is to make sure his executive doesn't go into any kind of action unless he's fit. He sat watching me with his bright attentive eyes, the window throwing light across his raw peeled-looking face, the cheekbones sharp under the skin, the ear nearer the window so thin that it was translucent. Cone, wherever he is, even in summer, looks as if he's walking against a blizzard, and more than that, as if he created it for himself, perhaps as a penance.

'Did you get any briefing in London?' I asked him.

'The lot.'

'From Shatner?'

'Yes.'

'How was he?'

'Pissed off.'

'He could've got me killed, giving me that clown. What about debriefing on this side?'

'I was an hour with said clown at the airport – London set it up. He was told to wait for me to come in before he booked out.'

I would have expected London to do that, to have Thrower go through the whole of the debriefing he'd given me so that I wouldn't have to do it all over again for Cone.

'Let's hope it was accurate,' I said.

'It sounded all right. He's got a good memory. What about timing, then?'

'I'm waiting for a call from Inge Stoph through Kleiber. Whatever time she suggests, I'll have to be there.'

'So tell me what's got to be done before you leave.'

'As soon as you can, tell Kleiber to send someone along to the taxi-rank outside the Steglitz Hotel. Ask them if Helen Maitland got into one of their cabs and if so, where she was taken. The doorman offered to get her one but she said she felt like a walk.'

'Description?'

I gave it to him.

'All right. You trust her, don't you?

'We can't. She's naive and she's totally subservient to men. If anyone told her to walk into a trap, that's what she'd do.'

'And that's what you think she's done.'

'Possibly.'

'And if anyone asked her the wrong questions?'

'That's why Thrower moved me out of the Steglitz right away.'

Cone got out of the chair, moving around. 'Better not phone Kleiber yet.'

'Not until he phones us. You can tell him then.'

'Right.'

I was going through the documents in the envelope; they were a breakdown on the Miniver, specifications, capability, technical drawings, disposition of all known models, mostly in the USA, some in the UK, some in Germany.

'That what you wanted?' Cone asked me.

'It's perfect.'

'Thank goodness something's perfect, then.'

I dropped the documents onto the bed. 'I hope you're not worried,' I said.

He leaned one shoulder against the window frame, looking down at me, sometimes turning his head as a plane moved through the pale sunshine outside. Thrower said you're going to try getting into Nemesis on your own and with no support, and you'll be relying on your cover and nothing else, is that right?'

'Yes.'

In a moment he said, 'You did this to me before, in Berlin.'

'Then you should be used to it.'

'True.'

He watched me steadily for a moment and then turned away, and I've seen that look before when the mission's running hot and there's no place for the shadow to go except into a red sector: they wonder if it's the last time they're going to see you. It used to worry me, but it doesn't any more.

'There's no other way,' I told him.

You couldn't stop anyone putting a bomb on a plane by relying on conventional security measures, with forty or fifty thousand commercial flights a day going through the airports worldwide. The high-tech plastic explosive, Semtex, was colourless and odourless and it could be moulded into any shape, a shoe or a hairbrush or a teddy bear, and at the moment there was no equipment in Europe that could detect it in a suitcase or a handbag. Cone knew that.

'The only way,' I told him, 'is to get inside the organisation that's planning to plant a bomb and wipe it out in time.'

He watched an Air France 727 nosing into the sky. 'Oh, I'm not arguing. So are you going to use any kind of base?'

'A car.'

'Where?

'I don't know until I know where the rendezvous is.'

He came and sat down again, facing me, his arms across his knees. 'You want somebody to watch the car?'

'No.'

It could be a night action and I wouldn't be able to identify him. Nemesis could find out that the car was mine and put a watch on it too.

'Are you going in wired?' Cone asked me.

'No.'

The idea was tempting, but if they found a mike on me it'd blow my cover, and my cover was all I'd have.

The cold was getting into me, into my bones.

'You don't carry weapons,' Cone said, 'that right?'

'No.'

A successful arms dealer is a businessman and he doesn't carry a gun, and even if I had one on me when I went close enough to Nemesis they'd look for it and find it and take it away.

'You carry a capsule?' Cone asked me.

'No.'

I wasn't infiltrating the regime of the host country and the only interest Nemesis would take in the Bureau was personal: they didn't want us to get in their way, that was all. If they put me under implemented interrogation and blew my cover and found I was operating against them they'd simply finish things off and get a body bag.

'You need a courier?'

'No.'

I was taking the ultimate risk and it wasn't likely that I could make contact with a courier without exposing him.

'What about a deadline?' Cone asked me.

'I can't give you one. I don't know where I'll be by 18:00 hours or midnight or 06:00 or noon. In any case you can't send in anyone to look for me. But for the board, if you like, call it noon tomorrow. If I haven't been able to make some kind of signal by then, you can tell them to send out a new shadow.'

Cone studied his dry scaly hands. 'There's not much,' he said, 'I can do, then, for the moment.'

'Not much, no. But if I can go in and get out you'll have a lot to do.' There'd be enough signals to light up the board in London, because if I could blow Nemesis from the centre there'd be a lot of fallout and we'd hand things over to the Bundeskriminalamt to hunt down the survivors and make arrests.

'Questions?' Cone asked me.

'No.' He'd had the London briefing and my own debriefing and he knew as much about the way the mission was running as I did. There was nothing I needed to ask him.

'Then you better get on with your homework.'

'Yes.'

He got up and stood at the window for a moment, watching a TWA jumbo go sloping into the sky.

'It must give you the willies,' he said as he turned round. 'All those people.'

'Yes.'

'You know where to find me,' he said, and I opened the door and watched him picking his way along the passage, his thin body angled forward a little against the blizzard in his soul.

14:00 hours.

The statistics relevant to the legitimate sale of AK47 assault rifles are as follows…

15:00 hours.

The US dollar is the standard currency in all arms deals of any importance…

16:00 hours.

And as the late winter sunshine changed from rose to purple across the roofs of the buildings opposite my window, and the planes moved through the twilight with the stealth of phantoms before their sound came in, I became prey to the feeling that the telephone standing on the lopsided bare wooden table was never, after all, going to ring, that Dieter Klaus wasn't here in Berlin or that Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him.

I couldn't assume that he'd be interested, in any case, in a tactical nuclear missile: his plans to put a bomb on board a Pan Am plane could be already advanced. He might not even have time for a meeting with a strange arms dealer with hew toys to sell: he might have all he needed.

Singapore and Israel both possess several high tech armaments that are not available anywhere else in the world…

At 17:00 hours I sat in the semi-darkness of the little room, with the recorder shut off and my mind ranging across the data that I'd been feeding into it since this morning. A big jet reached for altitude across the skyline with its strobes flashing and the thin line of its windows slanting through the dark.

So Dieter Klaus wasn't in Berlin or Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him or she knew about the ambush they'd set for me in the underground garage, knew my cover story was false, was that why the telephone hadn't rung?

I didn't think so. If Sorgenicht had recognised me in the cafeteria and phoned for support they would have gone for me in the car park while I was talking to Inge: they wouldn't have waited. It hadn't been Sorgenicht who'd got onto me; when they'd started the search for Krenz they must have intercepted some of the calls going out from the Mercedes to the SAAB and traced them and found the SAAB in the garage and set the trap, waiting for me to go back to it.

There was no connection between the unknown man who had taken over the Mercedes from Krenz and the man who had openly approached Inge Stoph in the car park.

She didn't know who I was, or if she knew, and telephoned with a rendezvous, it would be fatal to keep it.

But I wouldn't know.

I walked about, restless, up and down the narrow room, the floorboards creaking and the sound of the girls rising from the rooms below as they laughed for their money at the outset of the long night's parody of love.

A plane thundered into the dark.

And now the appalling idea came to me that I'd been wasting time, trusting the whole of the mission to a hypothetical rendezvous while all those people were busy packing their bags and saying goodbye to friends and filing through the departure gate for their exciting ride with the little teddy bear. I'd have to signal Cone and tell him there was a change of plan, I'd need to find another way in to Nemesis if it wasn't already too late, but the phone began ringing suddenly in the quiet room and I swung round and picked it up and Kleiber told me that Inge Stoph had called to say that if I wanted to talk to Dieter Klaus I must be at the north-west corner of Waldschulle Alice and Harbigstrasse at 5:15 this evening and that I must go there alone.