Chapter Nineteen

As the last of the campers were leaving the cafeteria for their tents and the shutters of the bar came down, Johnny rose from the table, tapped at his watch, motioned to Otto Guttmann and his daughter that it was time.

The path was dim lit and they walked close to each other and twice the old man bumped into Johnny's back.

I don't know why they're coming, thought Johnny.

The contact had been too slight, too transitory for him to make the judgement. Damned if he knew why they were coming. Too old, too settled to be purchased by the trinket attractions of the West. Too cynical to be bought by the elusive breezes of freedom across the fence. Too weary to be lifted only by the promise of a lost son at Checkpoint Alpha.

Perhaps he would one day comprehend, if at a future moment he met and talked with Otto Guttmann. He had expected more fight from the girl, more hostility.

All questions, Johnny, and questions are wasted breath.

They kept to the centre of the gravel path that widened when it left the trees. It was flanked now by low slung holiday tents and there were the lights of portable gas lamps, and the glow of cookers, and radios played the interminable orchestra music of the East's airwaves. A couple were in dispute, another kissed in the privacy of shadow. A child urinated noisily behind a flapping canvas screen. There was the dull, constant drone of the traffic on the autobahn. Johnny leading, Otto Guttmann and Erica following. Where are you taking them, Johnny, to what salvation, into which Shangri-la land? Another question…

No questions, no answers, not until the rear lights blazed away onto the autobahn, not until the train pulled out of Obeisfelde and straddled the Aller Bridge.

They turned out of the gateway of the Barleber See site, and went along the road that Johnny had walked on the first morning. Seemed a century ago. In front of them the autobahn bridge towered and the racing lights of the cars were suspended, carried on puppet strings above them.

A hundred yards from the bridge Johnny stopped and he took Otto Guttmann's hand and whispered to him that Erica and he should stay, that he would be gone for only a minute. Johnny hurried forward. The fast, trained reconnaissance. He was clear in his mind what he was looking for. On the open road that passed under the autobahn a waiting police car could not be hidden.

Johnny came back to them. He reached out in the darkness and his fingers touched the hem of Erica's coat, and she started as if in shock and her hand clutched his wrist. Poor bitch, frightened half to death.

Gently he pulled his arm clear of her and they started to walk again towards the approach road. Only the autobahn lights to guide him. He would want to see Erica again, Johnny thought, when it was over.

They came to the approach road that snaked up to the traffic lanes.

Johnny held one of Otto Guttmann's hands, Erica the other. As if at a signal they scurried forward, bent low. Their feet stampeded on the tarmac and then they were buried in the undergrowth. The branches whipped at their faces, low roots caught at their feet, the grass sank and heaved under their shoes. Johnny knelt and they followed him down.

Near to the autobahn and the cars and lorries hammered towards Helmstedt above them. The sweet and sticky smell of green leaves and green grass was around them. The damp of the evening clung to their clothes. Johnny moved and wriggled in the bushes before he found the view that he wanted, the road down from the autobahn on which the car would come. He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes, perhaps a little more or less. He felt Erica against him and the softness of close-clinging summer clothes, and he heard the breathing of her father as if the short run to their hiding place had winded him.

'Well done,'Johnny whispered. 'Strange carry-on, isn't it? But this is the way it happens. For all the cleverness we end up with grass stains on our knees. Silly.'

'How long to wait?'

'Fifteen minutes, Doctor Guttmann. Around midnight, The pick-up has to be open-ended, you can't be exact as to how long it will take the driver from Berlin. They should have practised it, but we still have to wait for them.'

'What will happen?' Erica's voice pitched high and nervous.

Johnny playing the expert. Making believe that most weeks of his working year he slogged his way into the German Democratic Republic and lifted the best of the Warsaw Pact scientists… 'The car will come off the autobahn at this turn off. When he's turning he will flash his lights once, at the top of the incline. About where we are you'll have seen the

"Give Way" sign, he stops level with that. The driver will get out and look at his tyres, one by one, the passenger will open the door behind him, the near side. You have to move fast, Erica first, Dr Guttmann, you follow. The car spins and it's back to the autobahn. I wave and find a beer.'

'You don't come with us?' Erica shrill and close.

' I have my own way out.' The smile wiped from Johnny's face.

'Who will be in the car?'

'Germans, who work for us. They have the paperwork for you to have been travelling with them from West Berlin. You are from Frankfurt.. you have been to see an aunt in Berlin, what you like. It's very straightforward.'

'Why don't you come with us?'

'He does not come with us,' Otto Guttmann said quietly, 'because if it is not straightforward he does not wish the involvement of being in our company…'

'That's nonsense… four is enough in the car, and a foreigner would only complicate.'

Johnny edged a little way from them. Not the time for a debate on the plan, he should separate himself. His gaze was on the gap between the bushes and the upper curve of the approach road. Waiting for the car, for the transport. He checked his watch. He was very tense and his legs were cold and numb. Staring into the darkness for flashing head- lights. He was half aware of the low pitched conversation behind him, what they would do the next morning. Warm baths and newspapers, and talking to Willi and whether there might be a church service they could attend, and with Erica gone what would happen to the cat at the laboratory at Padolsk. How Erica would need new clothes and Otto Guttmann would need money.

Bloody innocents, Johnny thought, like a couple of kids from the provinces going to London for the weekend.

Again he looked at the luminous face of his watch. Come on you bastards you're not going to be bloody late, are you? Not tonight. Please God, not late tonight.

It was easy for them in the approaching car to see Carter.

The floodlights on the tall stanchions at either side of the road highlighted him as he stood in front of the two storey building, and beneath the sign. 'Allied Check Point'. The rooms were bright behind him and a Military Policeman sometimes came to the window and wondered at the presence of the bald and elderly Englishman who waited patiently while the traffic ran steadily past him from west to east.

Some strange beggars came at night to Alpha, he would have thought.

They parked the car behind the Bundesgrenzschutz pass- port control and walked the last few yards to Carter. Pierce was spruced in a three piece cement grey suit, a closed rose bud at his buttonhole. Willi trailing but with an eagerness in his face and a bounce in his step. George was a pace behind the boy and dressed as if for winter, a roll neck sweater under the leather coat.

'The road was foul, that's why we're late. Have you spoken to Mawby?'

Pierce asked Carter.

Willi stood a little away from them. Clean in his new clothes, fresh with the air on his face, hair waving and falling.

' I tried to call him earlier. He wasn't on the HQ number… but that was some time ago… I've been stuck here waiting for you, I didn't want to go off to chase a phone in case they came through early.'

' I'd give a fair bit to know if they took off from Berlin on time.'

Willi motionless, Willi peering into the growing lights that edged forward from the far cluster of the Marienborn checkpoint across the shallow valley, across the line of the watch- towers and the wire and the whitewashed strip on the road that wheels had worn to a smudge.

'They could be here any time now,' Carter said.

'Did you leave a number where you could be reached?'

'Berlin Military know I'm at Alpha. Mawby will be beside the phone later, when I report the arrival.'

Willi with his hands clasped, his trousers pressed, shoes cleaned. Willi watching the cars approaching across no- man's land.

Pierce turned his wrist, looked down at his watch. 'Shouldn't they have been here by now?'

'They might have been, but they're not late yet.'

The door of the building flew open, spilling out light, bathing the faces of the men who waited, tensed faces, harassed tired faces. The Military Police corporal hesitated.

'Excuse me, gentlemen… is one of you a Mr Carter?'

'Yes, it's me.'

'You're wanted on thephone, sir. A Mr Smithson, in Berlin.'

Carter shrugged, went into the doorway, disappeared from Pierce's sight.

Willi saw him go… Willi with the stress at his mouth, the flicking wet tongue. Willi with the picture of his father bulging in his mind. Not knowing which car to watch for, restless, pacing.

'Where the hell have you been?' shouted Smithson, distant and furious, and in Berlin.

'I'm at Alpha…'

' I know you're at bloody Alpha now. Why didn't you call in?'

' I did and nobody knew where to find Mawby.'

The Military Police in the office turned their heads away from Carter as his face flushed and his forehead knitted in anger. In front of the electric fire their alsatian dog stirred, cocked its ears towards the raised voices.

'What a fucking shambles… not that it matters now, it's off..'

'What's off?'

'What do you bloody think? The run's off… Do you want it in one syllable words? It's off, there's no fucking car coming. They've knocked off the pick-up merchant coming through the border…'

'How?'

'About the least relevant question you could ask on an open line, Carter.

Just take it from me, no car has left Berlin, no car is gong to leave. It's finished, the whole thing.'

'What am I supposed to do, what does Mawby say?'

'Find yourself a fat frau and a bottle of whisky, that's my advice

Mawby's past answering questions like that.'

Carter put the telephone down. He thanked the Military Police corporal for coming to look for him.

Carter stepped back into the night wind, into the drone of the traffic, into the shadow of the high lights.

Willi was watching him. Willi would know. A bloody idiot could see the message, read it from the way he lurched across the concrete, from the way he winced his eyes, from his sunken shoulders, from the way he stumbled to Pierce's side. Willi staring, Willi absorbing.

'The car's not left…'

'Cutting it fine, aren't they?' Pierce had not looked at him, still peered up the road.

"… and it's not coming. Not now, not ever.'

'What?' Pierce had spun to face Carter. George scrambled towards them.

Willi alone, Willi abandoned, Willi within earshot.

' It's finished… DIPPER's called off. The pick-up maestro was arrested at the border checkpoint, he must have been driving into Berlin

'You're levelling, Henry?' Pierce in disbelief and his mouth sagging open.

'Smithson said so, and he called it a fucking shambles.'

'God… so what's going to happen to them, out there… when the chappie starts chattering…' Pierce cut himself short.

Willi was going. The stride into a trot. The trot into a run. The run into a sprint. 'Willi going past the shimmering white of the flag poles, along the central crash barrier. Willi going for the faded line that crossed the road.

Carter and Pierce rooted to the ground.

George struggling for speed, but heavy and flat footed. The white line looming, a car going east and slowing to avoid the boy who ran down the long hill, hugging the centre of the road. George losing ground. The voice drifted back to Carter, weak and carried on the breeze, the panic softened by distance.

'Come back, you little bugger. Willi, come back…'

Willi over the white line, Willi the victor of the race. The searchlight on the tower platform locked on him, circled and held him, followed him on down the road. Brightness all around and Willi ran with the beam that slowly traversed and accompanied his progress.

From where Carter and Pierce stood the cocking of the machine gun in the tower was sharp and unmistakable. The scraping of the metal spring, the crack as the mechanism locked the bullet in the breech. It would have been deafening to George, he could not be blamed for throwing the towel. The searchlight covering the boy, the machine gun covering George. Willi growing smaller, retreating into the bend of the wide road.

George was rock steady, standing on the white dividing line.

Carter thought he was about to be sick.

He saw a jeep stop beside the running boy, it was stationary for a few moments and then reversed towards Marienborn. When it was gone the road was empty.

'The car should have come, yes?'

Johnny could not see Otto Guttmann in the darkness, but the message was of deepening resignation, of tumbling faith.

'Yes,'Johnny said. He looked at the face of his watch, felt the bite of the insects in the grass.

The little jokes they had told to each other were finished. Father and daughter both cold, both flattened, and the fear settling on them.

'By now we should have been at Helmstedt?'

'Yes.'

'You promised us the car.'

' I promised it.'

'Why is the car not here?'

What a daft bloody question. 'I don't know, Doctor, there could be a hundred reasons… I don't know… perhaps there is a crash on the road, perhaps it's blown a tyre…'

'We have only your word that there was ever a car.'

'There is a car.' Johnny dug into the reserves of his patience. 'There is a car because the whole plan was based on that. Without a car there is no plan.'

'What do we do, Johnny?' Erica asked.

'We have to wait… just that.'

The anorak hung close to Johnny, the weight of the Stechkin and the shoulder stock and the magazines and the grenades in his pockets pulled it round him. Sometimes his hand slipped to the pistol, and from the hard steel of the barrel he took a fragile reassurance.

'We're not at a bloody funeral, you know. You'll wonder why you fussed when it comes,'Johnny said, and he was glad there was no light to show his face. 'It'll be here in a few minutes.'

They alternated between fists to the body, cold water from a bucket over his head, and the lit cigarette of friendship placed between his swollen lips. There were three men working on Hermann Lentzer who was strapped with leather thongs to the wooden chair, and Gunther Spitzer who leaned against the tiled wall of the cell. In staccato repetition the questions came.

Why was he making the journey to West Berlin?

Who was the subject of his escape attempt?

Where was it planned that the pick-up should be made?

Who were the people in the BDR that had hired him?

Of course he would talk before dawn came, if he had a face left to speak through, but in the intervening hours there was entertainment to be had for Gunther Spitzer. There was an obstinacy about the Nazi. He said nothing and spat back the mucus and blood and the chipped tooth fragments, and sometimes his eyes were molten in hatred behind the bruising. They would break him before morning. He would scream for them to stop, and then the discs that held the tapes would slowly circle on the recording machine. He would beg and howl for their mercy. Gunther Spitzer's hands were crossed in front of his stomach, the pleasure was fiery and intense but it should not be seen by the man who punched, the man who tipped the water bucket, the man who held the cigarette packet and breathed the words of kindness. He thought of Renate's body, thought of her whimpering in the blend of excitement and pain as he rose over her, thought of her white skin and the clear curves and the dark hair, thought of his plunging mastery over her..

A junior officer entered the cell.

There had been a strange affair at Marienborn, a boy was being brought to Magdeburg, when he arrived he would be sent to the Schutzpolizeipresident's office.

From Marienborn Willi Guttmann had been put in a jeep and driven to Halberstadter Strasse. The major on duty at the checkpoint had heard the explanation of the boy for his dash from west to east and made what he thought to be the sensible decision, pass the parcel on. The Schutzpolizei detachment in Magdeburg took responsibility for the area between the town and the border. They should be the ones to extract some shape from an extraordinary story.

In the office of Doctor Gunther Spitzer Willi was given a cup of freshly warmed tea, sat down in front of a gas tire.

The message of his arrival passed down corridors and stairs, came to rest in the building's basement.

The boy warmed himself. Now he was no longer a cypher, he thought, he was a person of importance who would be listened to. And now he would save his father, he would absolve him from blame and they would be reunited, and everything that he had done would be forgiven him. Willi who had run from Checkpoint Alpha had demonstrated his loyalty, and would be permitted to speak in the defence of his father. He felt confident when the Schutzpolizei- president came into the room followed by a senior officer in uniform, confident because he had come to protect his father from arrest and accusation. He would denounce the conspiracy of the British.

The Schutzpolizeipresident sat at his desk, his eyes bored at Willi.

The officer took a pencil and notebook firom his pocket.

'My name is Spitzer, what is yours?'

' I am Willi Guttmann.'

'You are a citizen of the Federal Republic?'

'My father was born in Magdeburg, is now resident in Moscow.'

The puzzlement clung to Spitzer's face. He was tired and the stump of his arm ached, and distracted too because his attention was with the bloodied mouth of Hermann Lentzer in the cell block below. 'Your father is Doctor Otto Guttmann?'

'Yes.'

'And your sister is…?'

'Erica Guttmann, that is my sister.'

'But Otto Guttmann's son was drowned on the Lake of Geneva…'

So, Willi talked and Spitzer listened. He talked of Geneva and the yacht on the lake, and the policeman thought of a dinner with the father of the friend of his mistress. He talked of England and the house in the hills, and the policeman thought of a message despatched the previous day to KGB Headquarters. He talked of Carter and Smithson and Pierce and George, and the policeman closed his eyes and swore softly and felt the chill and the trembling. He talked of a flight to Berlin and a train journey on the line that ran through Magdeburg, and the policeman's eyes were glazed in the fear for self-survival. He talked of a man that he knew only as Johnny who had been in this town for four days. It was a long story and it took many minutes in the telling. Often Willi repeated himself, and then he apologised and tried again to pick up the threads.

He talked of Checkpoint Alpha and the abandonment of the autobahn run.

'Where is your father now?' Spitzer broke his silence.

'He should be at the autobahn, with the man called Johnny Spitzer shuddered, then scribbled on a sheet of paper, fast, frantic. He thrust the paper at the officer, watched as the man snapped his notebook shut and hurried from the room.

'Why have you come to tell us this?'

'So that no blame shall attach to him, to speak in his defence. My father is not a traitor.'

'That is not for me to decide,' said Spitzer mildly.

'Anything he did he would have done only for the love of me. They have tortured him these last days. He is only an old man, not a criminal.'

'Willi, answer me this.' Spitzer chose his words with care. 'Your father you believe has gone tonight to the autobahn, but the collection has not taken place. What was to stop your father returning to his hotel, taking the aircraft tomorrow to Moscow? Who then would have known of the affair?'

'You would have known… this morning you arrested the man who has organised the car, that is what the British said. When he is questioned he will implicate my father, there will be no-one to speak for my father

Spitzer laughed, without sound, without mirth. The cold had come to the room, blanketed the flames of the gas fire.

'You should be proud of yourself, Willi,' Spitzer said. 'You have done your duty most adequately.' And the text of his report to Moscow pealed in his mind.

Faintly at first, in the distance, Johnny heard the choral song of the sirens, hurrying from the south, from Magdeburg. The fox that is aware of the baying of hounds, and he reacted, rising to his knee, seeming to sniff around him for confirmation of danger.

A swelling of noise and closing. He groped in the darkness and took the arm of Otto Guttmann. He felt the dragging at his anorak as Erica clawed with her fingers to find him. The fear of the hunted was shared.

No argument, no discussion. Father and daughter clung, one to each of Johnny's arms as they came from their hiding place and began to run back towards the camp of Barleber See. They swung off the road and onto the track and Otto Guttmann heaved and gasped for air, and Erica in her shoes tripped on the rough chipped stones, and Johnny looked back.

The cluster of blue lamps was nearer, the wail of the sirens grew. The Stechkin banged against his hip, the grenades danced in his pocket.

Johnny pulled them off the track, onto the grass and away behind the line of tents. He would set a cruel race and as he ran his mind was tugged to the alternatives open to him. Precious few, Johnny.

Where are you going, Johnny? Going west, west is the way to Cherry Road, west is the way back.

West is where the bloody minefields are, and the fences and the machine guns, right, Johnny? Right, darling, bullseye first time.

Are you going to ask the Doctor and his daughter if they fancy the glory ride with Johnny? Not now, later. Enough on the rubbish heap, without sifting for detail.

Perhaps they don't want to go, thought of that, Johnny? Thought of it and ducked it, they'll come… with the sirens blasting in their ears, they'll come.

They're going to slow you down, they'll be lead on your back, and the order for difficulties was quit and run, remember that, Johnny? But a promise was made, that's the end of it. A bloody promise was made.

The old man tried to keep with them, heavy going and he wheezed and coughed. Johnny on one elbow, Erica on the other. The three of them careering through the trees, and all the time the sirens in the wind.

A wasp's nest disturbed by the gardener, that was the head- quarters, of the Schutzpolizei on Halberstadter Strasse at past two in the morning.

Lights erupting in the upper windows, desks manned, telephones busy.

There was no reason for Gunther Spitzer to doubt the scale of the catastrophe that had befallen him.

From the International Hotel he was told that the bed of Otto Guttmann was undisturbed, so was that of Erica Guttmann, so was that of a British tourist travelling under the name of John Dawson. His men were at the hotel now, swarming through the rooms, hectoring the staff.

Right under his eyes they had been, right under the nose of Gunther Spitzer who had entertained the Doctor and his daughter to dinner. And the report he had transmitted to KGB would take pride of place in the ammunition aimed at the Schutzpolizeipresident.

The telexes went variously to the Ministry of State Security in Berlin, to the offices of SSD, to the duty desk clerk for the Red Army's military intelligence section at Zossen- Wunsdorf, to the home of the First Secretary of the Party at the privileged village of Wandlitz seven miles from the Berlin city boundaries, Fury, recrimination, abuse, burst like a monsoon over the second floor office of Gunther Spitzer. And in the eye of the storm would be the arrival of the men from Berlin, and what he had done to retrieve the disaster would be analysed and criticised because a head must be found for the block.

In a high whining scream he demanded greater efforts of his subordinates.

From his bed in the guest wing at Chequers, the Trade Minister of the German Democratic Republic was roused by the telephone. On the line was his country's ambassador to

Britain. A matter had arisen of great sensitivity and delicacy involving relations between the two countries, a matter that could not be communicated on an open line. The Minister should know that the ambassador was about to leave the Residence for the Embassy where the text was expected soon of a message from the First Secretary to the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The ambassador anticipated that he would be at Chequers before dawn.

The conversation had been monitored by the Duty Officer in the Chequers' switchboard. It was debated whether the Prime Minister should be woken.

'Frankly, if he's to be in the firing line in the morning and you'd seen him just before he turned in, you'd leave him in bed,' advised a civil service aide. 'He was well maggoted, and beauty sleep's going to be like gold dust for him.'

The interpreter at Chequers for the visit of the East German delegation had translated the tape recording of the telephone conversation. The Prime Minister was permitted to sleep on.

In Berlin Brigade a scrambler call had been patched through for Mawby to talk from the offices of Military Intelligence to Century House and the Deputy-Under-Secretary. They talked curtly, unemotionally of the night's events. Both men at that moment lived in a house of glass, neither would hurl rocks. Later it would be different, later the bitter inquest would begin. Mawby had said that there was no further business for him in Berlin, he would be returning to London in the morning. After the call he walked back across the floodlit parade area.

The Brigadier was waiting up for him. There was a champagne bottle in a silver bucket on the sideboard, a linen napkin draped across the neck. The Brigadier looked at Mawby's face, at the shamed eyes, at the pale cheeks. From the cupboard in the sideboard he took a decanter of whisky, poured two fingers, no water, no ice, handed a tumbler to Mawby.

'Was it that bad, Charles?'

'Worse than bad, it was bloody awful.'

'A fiasco?'

Mawby drained the glass, spluttered. A wisp of mischief crossed him.

'I'll tell you how bad it was. Ten years ago if this had happened it would have been a resignation job.'

'And now…?' The Brigadier refilled the glass.

' I can't afford to bloody resign. I'll just be kicked side- ways, I'll never have responsibility again. You asked if it was a fiasco… It is and it can get worse. It's all blown now, it's wide as the open sky, and we have a man in there. A train left 15 minutes ago from Magdeburg to Wolfsburg, if he's not on the train then he's locked inside. That's his only chance.

They're reporting in Signals down on the border that the whole bloody place is awake, there's heavy traffic on their police net. He's our man, and if picked up then… then… it's just a bloody disaster.'

They went to their bedrooms. In the morning the champagne bottle would be returned to the kitchen refrigerator, and Mawby would retrieve two green backed passports of the Federal Republic of Germany from the corner of his room where he had hurled them.

Johnny's flight took him through the camp site and the woods around it, and to Barleber See station.

A primitive place for vacationers and few else. There were no lights nor life nor activity. Five hundred yards away was the autobahn and racing cars and twice Johnny saw that signature of the police, the inanimate and travelling blue lamp.

In front of him was the fragmented pattern of the street lights of Barleber, more than a mile away. When the moon came he could see the far, flat horizon spread beyond the village. No trees, no cover, and he remembered how he had seen it when he had come back on the train on the first day. There were open fields between the railway and the village.

'We have to go on,'Johnny whispered.

'He can't, you can see that,' Erica hissed in his ear.

' If he has to be carried, so be it. We have to go on.'

'How far?'

' I don't know.'

'Where to?'

'Any bloody place but here.'

He could not see her face and did not know with what grace she came.

It was a track, built to carry farm vehicles and trailers, holed and ridged.

Erica and Johnny linked their hands and made a seat for Otto Guttmann and his arms rested around their necks. Weighed enough, and awkward enough, for a bloody bag of bones, Johnny thought. It took a long time to reach the outside of the village, to come within sight of the first set of buildings. Beyond the crop fields they came to a place where the grass had been scythed for a farmer's winter cattle fodder, near to a hedge and a barn where a dog barked. Time to rest and time to think, Johnny. They eased Otto Guttmann to the ground and he sank back and his daughter cradled his head. Time to think, but time was a bloody luxury.

The bastards, Johnny swore silently. The bastards who had not sent the car.

Johnny knelt over Otto Guttmann. He was very close to Erica, could feel her breath on his face, could smell the scent that she had worn for the journey.

'Doctor Guttmann, we have to talk now, but quickly. We have to make a decision and then we have to accept that it is irreversible.. '

'You promised that the car would come. You promised that there was no danger, no risk. What right have you to share a decision with me?'

'And I promised that I would take you to Willi, and I will do that…'

'You are incompetents, you have shown that. There was no car, there was only a trap.'

' I don't have time for debate, Doctor Guttmann. If you come with me I will take you across the frontier.' You're killing yourself, Johnny.

Without him you have a small chance… ' I will take you across the frontier, Doctor Guttmann.'

'And why should I not go back to my hotel, and this afternoon take the train to Berlin, and fly to Moscow tonight? Why not?'

' It's too late to go back. You are hunted now, you must think about that. You cannot explain where you have been. You will never be trusted again, the office at Padolsk will be taken from you and the flat in Moscow, if you are not in prison you will rot the rest of your life under surveillance. That's the future…'

'Again the threat,' Erica said.

' It's the truth… They asked me before I came to take the chance of talking to you, finding anything about your work that I could carry back if the autobahn failed, if I went back on my own. I haven't done that. I asked for nothing. I asked for no drawings, nothing. That's the promise, I'm taking you over the frontier.'

The old man was very still, a prone figure communing with himself.

His head rested easily in the crook of Erica's arm. Johnny looked at his watch… not long till the organisation would have been mustered, till the road blocks were in position, till the trap would snap shut. Perhaps a few more minutes. The sirens told him that there had been panic in Magdeburg, that the sending of the cars had been the first reaction.

Cooler heads would take control within an hour, a plan would be formed.

In the dark Otto Guttmann's hand grabbed at Johnny's. He squeezed, tight and painful, and the bones of his fingers dug at Johnny's skin.

'How do we go to the border?'

' I think we should start by borrowing a car,' Johnny said.

For the moment the tension spilled from them. There was quiet laughter. Johnny and Erica pulled the old man to his feet. They began to walk towards the village.

Ulf Becker and Jutte Hamburg took the stowed tent and the rolled sleeping bags back to the caretaker of the Camp- ingplatz 'Alte Schmiede' at first light. It would be on foot from here he had told her, they would move only in the woods, only in the depths of the Landschaftschutzgebiet that stretched from the town of Haldensleben behind them to the outskirts of Walbeck village. They would cut through a nature zone, crossed by few roads, with few villages.

They went out of the Campingplatz hand in hand. Two products of the regime, two machine-tooled children of the Party. Her blonde hair was whipped back on her shoulders by the wind. Their stride was bold and long. Two young people on whom the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands had lavished care

'How long will it take?' she asked, and the leafy light played at the tan of her cheeks.

' If we go hard we shall be close by tonight. We rest for a few hours and we watch. Tomorrow, early in the morning, we go over.'

So sure, so confident, he seemed to her. She kissed him quickly behind the ear, and did not see the quaver at his lips. In a few minutes they were hidden by tall trees, walking a carpet of fallen autumn leaves, alone together in the territory of wild pigs and fallow deer and foxes. Jutte dreamed of Hamburg and of the car of her uncle and of the house in which he lived. Ulf thought of the automatic guns and the wire and the watchtowers, and of Heini Schalke and an MPiKM high velocity rifle.

Carter stayed by the barrier at the station of Wolfsburg until all the passengers had left the train. Not many of them on the early train of the day out of Magdeburg. And never really a chance that Johnny would have been with them. Straightforward enough at Holmbury. Johnny to see the Guttmanns into the pick-up car, then back to Magdeburg for the station, and nobody had drawn a blueprint for the plan if the autobahn ran off schedule. A wasted journey for Carter and he'd known it before he started. Johnny wouldn't quit, not before it was hopeless, he would have stayed at the autobahn intersection. Stayed till the train was lost to him.

What would Johnny have done with the Doctor and Erica Guttmann? Carter couldn't know, doubted that he knew his man well enough to make the judgement. The order was quit and run… it would be a hell of a thing for his man to do, but that was the order.

He had heard from Pierce the report from the Signals monitoring unit, that police activity across the border had risen sharply from the small hours of the night. The codenames for prearranged road blocks had been called, reinforcement detachments had been summoned, search parties were co-ordinated. Johnny would have stood a chance on the first train of the day. Not after that. They'll tear the bloody carriages apart till they find him.

Back to Helmstedt, back to sweat it through. Mawby and Smithson were returning in a few hours to London, Percy would fly to Bonn.

Pierce and George had been told to take the first aircraft to Heathrow.

Carter was to be left to gather up any information that might seep through. Of course it would be Carter who was left behind, because Carter was too junior to field the blame that would be ambushing the senior men of DIPPER. Better off where, he was. He would hear of Johnny soon, that was certain. He would hear of an Englishman arrested in Magdeburg.

God knows we conned you, Johnny. Conned you rotten.

He drove back from Wolfsburg on the secondary road to Helmstedt.

Through small villages that were timbered and attractive. Through fields that were tended and flourishing. Along the line of the frontier. The border was perpetually with him, as a ribbon of wire and torn earth.

Beyond it were distant and faded hills and protective woods that his eyes could not penetrate.

The border drew him, as a cliff edge will a man who suffers vertigo.

He turned off left and drove into the sleeping, Sunday morning of Saalsdorf. The wire was in front of him, away across a field. He walked from the car and threaded his footsteps between the lines of young barley. Trying to share something, wasn't he? Trying to share something with Johnny, and the only way that he knew was to go to the fence and stare across at the closed country beyond.

The River Aller, not wide, only a dozen feet or so and deep banked.

Carter stood beside the cement post painted in red, white and black that carried the embossed symbol of the German Democratic Republic.

There was a spike set in the angled top of the post and he remembered the laughter of the men he had met in the Roadhaus when they had told him that all the posts had spikes because that way the birds couldn't perch on them and defecate and smear the sign. Thorough bastards you're up against, Johnny. Fifty feet from him a dozen troops were working on the steel gate that fell to the river bed… at this bloody time in the morning. It was the first time Carter had seen the wire close up.

Formidable, chilling, high. From the fence posts where the soldiers worked beside the river, wires trailed to the ground and Carter followed them till he saw the white painted boxes, the automatic guns disconnected for the day. None of the men working on the gate looked at him, none caught his gaze.

There was the click of a camera shutter. Carter swung round. Two soldiers lay in the thick grass between him and the work party. One with a camera fitted with a telephoto lens, one with the MPiKM. The ones who guarded the guards. Bastards.

We should never have asked it of you, Johnny.

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