The Quiller Memorandum

17 : FERRET

We were alone in the silent park. The winter daylight fell on us as we faced each other. He stood still, letting me remember his features. A round face with mud-brown eyes unmagnified by the plain lenses of his schoolboy-type glasses. A black velour hat, that I hadn't seen on him the first time.

I was satisfied.

"All I wanted was the report," I told him. "They could have sent anyone. Hengel or someone."

"They sent me to talk to you. I would have contacted you two days ago but you didn't tell us you'd moved to the Zentral." I remembered the Rhinish accent. He asked "Why aren't they tagging you?"

He had taken note that no other car but his own had dogged me from the hotel just now.

"I'm on ice."

"No observation at all?"

"They've got a man at the bar opposite, or they did have, yesterday." I had been puzzled, myself, at the absence of a tag when I'd driven from the hotel this morning. I never liked being given too much rope, for the classic reason.

"We are getting worried about you," he said.

He meant worried about my being made to talk. "They won't break me," I told him.

"They've tried."

I wondered how much he knew. Control always knew more about an operator than he thought. I know when I'm being followed but I don't always know when I'm being observed, and they might have posted Hengel or Brand or any of their scouts to watch the Hotel Prinz Johan. As soon as they had received my signal requesting the KLJ report they might have posted a man on the Zentral.

The idea annoyed me and I tested him. "July, August, September."

The light flickered across his glasses as he nodded. "Yes, we know about Oktober."

"For how long have you known?"

"Seven months."

Before my time, and even before Kenneth Lindsay Jones's. Charington had been operating on this mission, seven months ago. It was probably Oktober who had killed him. It was probably Oktober who had killed Jones. Now Control was worried about me.

Our breath steamed on the air. I said:

"All I wanted was the report."

"I've brought it."

"Don't give it to me now."

"Of course not."

The park looked deserted, a ring of trees phantom-grey in the winter air. We could both be wrong: there might have been a tag following both our cars from the Zentral. He might be among those trees. If Pol were seen to pass anything to me they would be after it very fast.

He said in his modulated tone: "I was sent to bring you the report and to brief you. We know less than you do about Oktober and Phoenix but we know more about the general background than you. The overall picture."

"Control doesn't have to tell me any more than it thinks I have to know -"

"Don't misunderstand me. I was briefed to give you the whole background the first time I contacted you, but you weren't ready to be convinced, so I didn't persist. You didn't think the German General Staff might be prepared to launch any kind of armed operation, given the means and the chance."

"I still don't."

"Then what do you think your mission is?"

"I'm just an operator sent into the opposite warren like a ferret. That's all right, it's what I'm for, it's what I like doing. But if I finally pick off Zossen and Oktober and the top echelon of the whole Phoenix organisation I don't think I shall have done any more than blow down a pack of cards. I don't think the German General Staff knows anything about Phoenix, or is interested, any more than the British War Office is interested in mods and rockers."

He was a man of peculiar patience. He would have made a good schoolteacher. He waited for a few seconds so that I had time to replay the echoes of my own voice, and he got results: I was right, I was a ferret in a warren, but I was also wrong: a ferret can't expect to know anything at all about the German General Staff or what it was doing or what it was thinking. Control knew more than I. It always does. That's why we kick up rough, perhaps, when we can't see the sense of its policy.

When he had given me my few seconds to think, he said quietly: "If you help us to bring down Phoenix you'll save a million lives and it will almost certainly cost you yours. We know this. We know this." His mud-brown eyes stared at me without blinking. "If you underestimate what you are doing you won't do it well. We want the best from you, the very best, while you have the time left to give it."

The air was clammy against my face. The ring of trees was cemetery-quiet.

"That is why we are worried about you," his calm voice said. "We want you to take this mission seriously. If you let yourself imagine we have sent you into this particular search-area on a routine mission to get information and nothing more, you won't work at your best. We do want information, badly. We want to know where Phoenix has its base. They want information, too, and as badly. They want to know how much we know of their intentions. Their most direct way of getting information is through you."

I decided to let him go on talking. He was perfectly correct about this. Oktober was handling me as no adverse party had ever tried to handle me before. His two attempts to break me – by narcoanalysis and then torture at one remove – followed a normal pattern; but he was giving me rope by the mile at every other stage. I had run right across their line of fire when Solly was killed; they had walked out on me after the scene at Inga's flat; they had let me go to see Captain Stettner yesterday. A dozen times, at the Prinz Johan and at the Zentral and in the open at a dozen places they could have hauled me in and broken me up physically at their leisure in the hope of getting information on how much Control knew of Phoenix. But the more rope I took, the more they gave me.

Probably they hadn't got enough out of Charington so they killed him off before he got too much out of them. The same with KLJ. They were giving me a longer run, concentrating on me instead of relying on their own agents to crack open Control itself.

"We are worried," Pol said, "that you don't understand your position. It is this. There are two opposing armies drawn up on the field, each ready to launch the big attack. But there is a heavy fog and they can't sight each other. You are in the gap between them. You can see us but so far you can't see them. Your mission is to get near enough, to see them, and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage. That is where you are, Quiller. In the gap."

He waited again so that I could consider.

All he hadn't said was that once I got near enough to Phoenix to give that signal, my part would be played and I would become expendable, would have to be expendable, because the chances of surviving were slight.

Well, I would get near to them, and I would send the signal, and I would bloody well survive.

But the ring of trees was so quiet, a ring of tombstones.

I said: "All I want is the report. Then stop getting in my way."

I walked back to the BMW and sat inside. He leaned through the window so that his body covered it, and dropped the envelope on to the seat beside me. His face was dark in the gloom of the interior.

"Never forget," he said, "that the whole of our organisation is behind you, at every minute."

"Just keep it clear of me."

I read the last testament. The writing was thin and hurried.

Dec. 3. Tags now a nuisance, time wasted in flushing. But have got a line on base, will confirm soon. Things very tricky now, request no contacts any account. May not receive Bourse. May not signal for a time. KLJ.

The restaurant was full and I sat working on the report, fiddling with an underdone lump of schweinefleisch.

So he had reached much the same stage as I had reached now, and had told them – as I had told Pol an hour ago – keep clear of me. Then he had gone in, right the way in, and couldn't be allowed to live.

A line on base. What line? It didn't matter. He had followed it and they had killed him off because he was too close. So here was the address of the Phoenix base. I had been there myself without being allowed to know where it was. Now I knew where it was.

I put the slip of paper back into the envelope, which was already addressed to Eurosound. The man brought my bill and I paid it, going to the lavatory and using a penknife to ease out the Rothstein document. There was a postbox at the intersection not far from the restaurant and I sent off the report as promised. One quick turn round the block showed there was no foot-tag, but I had been followed to the restaurant by the small grey NSU, because I had called at the Zentral after leaving Pol and they'd picked me up from there. It was parked five cars behind my BMW. I didn't want to waste time flushing him and I didn't want to risk being snatched with the document on me. There was a polizei officer on duty at the intersection so I crossed over and showed him the Z-Commission ausweis that Captain Stettner had given me: it was no more than a laisser passer into the Z-Bureau back-room departments but it would probably do.

I said: "I've reason to believe that there's a man in a stolen car across the road. The NSU number BN.LM.11 outside the friseur. You may care to check it."

We walked together to the other side and I hung back as we passed my BMW. He didn't miss me because he was sizing-up the NSU as he approached it, and as I drove away I saw him in the mirror, checking the driver's papers.

It took half an hour to change the BMW at the Hertz office but it would have taken longer than that to flush the tag and I had now altered the image. I couldn't risk being picked up by sheer chance from now on, because I had the document on me and because, as KLJ had put it, things were very tricky now.

A million lives, Pol had said. And mine. A million and one. Because I was going to survive. The man in London wasn't going to light another cigarette and send for a replacement.

I had never whistled in the dark before and the tune came thinly.

The new image was a very fast 230SL pagoda-top Mercedes with fuel-injection, the last thing they would look for, and I took it right out west to the edge of the Havel and parked on the Schildhorn peninsula. Mist shrouded the waterscape and the light was grey. The monument poked its sandstone finger at the sky and I didn't look at it more than once because everything reminded me of cemeteries.

Treble-combination frequencies in English and German ING-ENT-SCH-EUN. Check and assume, recheck. No go.

Two hours by the black-and-gold clock on the facia, cramp in the legs.

Reverse and read backwards, add prefix and suffix nulls LKAOEI – JUQOP – AJSHGFRWEQT. Pick a new set and stay clear of the multisyllabics, obviously Latin for bugs.

Four hours and the circulation seizing-up.

A walk by the beautiful waterside, dead land and dead water, a mezzotint laced with the sombre dark of the pines, a place for lost souls and ferrets, with the sirensong crying softly across the mirrored sky. AJSHGFRWEQT! they sang, OQUISTRI!

The only living thing I saw the whole afternoon was a dog that came from the mist and pissed at the foot of the monument and vanished as it had come.

Patience.

Possible key: U=S, B=M, O=A, eight others. Pick a long one for pride's sake: VASOSFGWOBU. Gave OTNANGILAMS. Reverse and add prefix and suffix nulls. Gave SMALIGNANTO.

Nearly missed it because it sounded Spanish.

Drop prefix and suffix nulls. MALIGNANT.

Check another. Thought we had Sprit, German for Alcohol, yesterday. But hope has a grasshopper leap. RCIMEDIPEF. Drop nulls and reverse: EPIDEMIC. Come in, Solly, come in…