The Scorpion Signal

2: TEMPELHOF

Blinding sleet and the runway lights floating up from the dark as the wheels hit and we bounced and they hit again and we bounced again with the airframe shuddering.

'Was, zum Teufel, macht der Pilot?'

A few uneasy laughs but at least we were down.

Bitte behalten Sie Ihren Sicherheitsgurtel an.'

A fat man sat leaning forward with his face white and his head down; I hoped he'd found the bag. Sleet washed past the windows in a bow wave.

'Mon Dieu, it est impossible meme de voir la tour d'observation!'

'Esperons que nous n'allons pas s'enfoncer contre elle!'

Reverse thrust and we sat feeling the drag.

'Are you all right, Audrey?' someone asked.

'Sort of.' A breathless giggle, then she lit a cigarette and blew out a noisy sigh. In the rear of the plane a child had started crying.

Tempelhof was packed.

'Excuse me, but do you know where the information desk is?'

'In the middle of that crowd over there,' I said, and she went hurrying off, trailing a flight bag with a broken strap. There were puddles everywhere, with people bringing slush in from the front of the building.

'Haben Sie etwas zu deklarieren?'

'Gar nichts.'

'Keine Rauchwaren, kein Alkohol?’

'Nein.'

He didn't bloody well believe me, went right through my bag.

'We were meant to land at Tegel,' a man with an astrakhan coat said to me, 'but there was too much stuff in the circuit.' I wondered if he'd got any other useless information.

In the main hall people were milling around looking for friends, children, baggage, a porter to help them out of the chaos. Three North Africans carrying skis edged their way through the crowd, clouting people every time they turned round to look for what they'd lost.

'Entschuldigen. Sie, Bind Sie Herr Wolsieffer?'

'Nein,' I told him.

A party of Chinese trotted past towards the main exit, their leader waving a little red flag to guide them.

'Pardon, monsieur. Vous etes de Paris?'

Non, mademoiselle, c'est le vol de Londres.'

She went across to the information desk. Pretty legs.

'Not a very nice evening.'

'Not very,' I said.

'What sort of flight?'

'Bloody awful.' We started walking, looking for somewhere we could talk. 'Been waiting long?'

'Half an hour,' he said.

'Did what I could. London was a mess.'

'Let's go over there,' Croder said.

'All right.' There was a lot of water on the floor below one of the big windows, which had sprung a leak, and we stood there with our backs to the dark glass watching the people near us. I didn't know whether he'd got here without any tags on him; as a rule the London directors aren't too good in the field. He stood with his hands in the pockets of the big military coat he was wearing, its buttons plain now and the marks still showing where the insignia had been taken off. It looked too big for him: he was a slight man, thin-boned and pallid, with a head like a skull and the hands of a skeleton and only the eyes alive, brooding in his face as if they were trapped there under the taut parched skin, their black luminescence shadowed by heavy lids. He hadn't looked at me yet.

'Good of you to come,' he said formally. 'I was surprised when they said you'd changed your mind.'

'So was I.'

He made a smile with his small teeth, like a rat nibbling.

'We nearly missed each other. They had to get back to me through Interpol.' It was a reprimand.

'Where's Shapiro?' I asked him.

He didn't answer for a moment. There was a lot of noise from a bunch of people over by the doors, and Croder gazed at them steadily. 'East Germans,' he said. 'They were going into Schoenefeld but an engine was out, so they came into Tempelhof instead.' His small teeth made a token smile. 'Half of them are demanding asylum. Wouldn't you? We don't know where Shapiro is,' he said without looking away from the group. 'His cover name is Schrenk. Forget Shapiro. Schrenk.' He spelt it for me. 'He was in Moscow for two months, working very well, then they uncovered him and put him through interrogation in Lubyanka. Then he escaped.'

For the first time he turned and looked at me with his black contemplative eyes and I thought, Christ Almighty, only Shapiro could have got out of Lubyanka by the midnight express. Only Schrenk. 'He got as far as West Germany,' Croder said, 'and we had him put straight into a clinic. I don't think he would have made it as far as London — he was in a pretty bad way.'

'Were you running him?'

I didn't think he'd answer that.

He looked back at the group of East Germans. 'It doesn't matter who was running him. He was in the clinic for nearly three months, and recovering steadily. They were going to discharge him before long, as soon as he was fit enough to stand up to debriefing. But the K got him again, and one report says he's back in Lubyanka.'

There was a chill coming into the air; I felt it against my skin: possibly the sweat was starting to creep, setting up refrigeration. I have never been inside Lubyanka, but I've talked to people who have. There aren't many of them at liberty. North had got back from there, the night he blew his brains out at Connie's place.

Croder was gazing across the hall in silence, and I asked him: 'What's our timing on this?'

'There's a flight for Hanover in forty minutes, and there's a seat booked for you.'

'In case I want one.'

He ignored that. 'Schrenk carried a capsule. It was part of the contract, on that particular mission. Obviously he didn't use it.' He turned away from the group of people and stood facing me, hunched into his big coat and saying with muted force: 'He would have saved us an immense amount of trouble if he had used it. An immense amount of trouble.' He waited for the message to sink in. 'Because what we have on our hands now is a potential disaster — unless we can somehow prevent it. Schrenk prided himself on his ability to survive the most gruelling interrogation by the use of practised and convincing disinformation; he had three or four different scenarios worked out and he rehearsed them every day of his life, in series. We know that. We had him tested at Norfolk, a year ago, and even hypnosis couldn't break him down, because he'd used autohypnosis himself, to move his scenarios down into the subconscious. That is the kind of man he is.' The heavy lids were lowered for a moment. 'But Norfolk isn't Lubyanka. We do not know, you see, how bad the position is, because we don't know how much he gave away.'

He withdrew into himself again, staring at nothing, or maybe at Schrenk's insubstantial image, lost somewhere in the wastes of Soviet Russia. The sleet outside was turning to water on the window, and the light from the tall gooseneck lamps threw its translucent delineations against his face, so that his skin crept with rivulets.

'What has he got,' I asked him, 'to give away?'

'I'm sorry?' He swung to look at me.

'You said you don't know how much he gave away. You mean something specific?'

His sharp teeth bit at the air again. 'Yes. The Leningrad cell.'

Mother of God.

This was why Norton had been showing his nerves today, and why Tilson had looked scared behind the eyes. The Leningrad cell had taken eleven years to build up, and once established and running it had given us the Sholokof Project and the submarine dispersal pattern and the tactical analysis for the buried-weapons system for transmission to NATO and the CIA, plus satellite scanning, plus laser progress in the military-application laboratories, plus the whole of the missile-testing programme including the ultra-classified global-range ICBMs from X-9 to the city-heat guidance Marathon 1000. That was the Leningrad cell.

'But he couldn't have known,' I said hopelessly, 'much about it:

'He worked there for two years, before he was seconded to the field-executive branch. He knows everything about it.'

I didn't understand. 'But who could have let him — '

'That is not your concern.' Spittle came against his lower lip, and in a moment he licked it away and said more slowly, 'For your information, it wasn't I.'

I let it go. Someone had blundered, and disastrously, because once you're with a cell you stay there till your time's up: you don't go anywhere else and you don't get seconded to the field-executive pool, because you know too much of value and they won't risk sending you into the field where the opposition can pick you up and drag you in and take your brain apart. But someone had done that with Schrenk.

'Your only concern,' Croder said with a lot of control, 'is to find him and pull him out — if indeed you're prepared to do that for us.' The need for control worried me, because this man was known for his cool and he'd lost it, and in front of the executive he was desperate to recruit. My nerves were jumping again. 'You would receive intensive support, I need hardly say.'

'In Moscow?'

'Right in the target area, wherever that may be. Cut-outs, back-ups, shields — '

'No shields — '

He shrugged. 'You may be glad — '

'I said no shields.' My own control wasn't too good and I waited and counted three. 'I make my own decisions and my own mistakes and I won't involve anyone else.' Shields were dangerous; they could get in your way, and when the crunch came they'd save themselves, not you. 'What about the director in the field? If the timing's that close you can't — '

'Bracken,' he said.

'Bracken's in Singapore.'

'We called him in.' He moved his eyes to the clock over the information desk. 'He is at present airborne with BAC, arriving Moscow at noon tomorrow, local time.' He waited.

'I've never worked with him.'

'He's first class, you know that. He directed Fenton in Cairo last year. He got Matthews out of Pekin. First class.'

There were thirty minutes left on the clock, and I thought of something else. 'When did you find out Schrenk was back in Moscow?'

'Early this morning.'

'Then you haven't had time to set it up. I'm not — '

'It was ready to run before I called base from Geneva. You have a director, a safe-house, contacts, sleepers, signal availability and Embassy liaison.' His thin mouth was contemptuous. 'What more do you want, for God's sake?'

'Access. I'm on their files and I'd never get through the airport.'

'You have access by road into East Germany.'

'Overt?'

'Of course not.'

'What are you talking about, a bloody farm cart or something?'

'A closed truck will take you across the frontier at Zellerfeld, in the Harz Mountains, with no questions asked.'

He was blocking me every time. I was his last hope, I knew that now. He'd tried half a dozen other people and drawn blank, because this was a suicide trip and he didn't pretend it was anything else.

'What about access into Moscow?'

'By commercial airline: Aeroflot. We have a seat for you on the morning flight from Leipzig, where the truck will drop you. It's perfectly straightforward.'

I took a slow breath. 'Cover?'

'Transit papers, East German national.'

It was beginning to sound like a trap and I stopped thinking about it for a minute, watching the people in the group by the main doors. A man was shouting his head off now and so was his wife: he wanted asylum but his wife said it would mean leaving her mother behind, and the secret police would take reprisals. A younger man, possibly their son, was trying to make them shut up. Two more policemen were marching towards them, unbuttoning their holsters to make an effect. A crowd was collecting.

Fluggaste fur Flug Nummer 903 fur Hannover kommen Sie bilge so fort Eingang Nummer 2.

I looked at the clock.

'Is that the flight you booked for me?' I asked Croder.

'Yes.'

'Then there's no time for briefing.'

'You'll be briefed on the access in Hanover, and fully briefed In Moscow.'

'By Bracken?'

'Yes.'

'Who's our man in Hanover?'

'He's an agent-in-place.'

'I want to know who he is.'

'All you want,' Croder said with his mouth tight, 'is just one good reason for getting the next plane back to London with what's left of your conscience, and the problem is that you won't find one because we've been hard at it setting the whole thing up, and it works, it really does. The odds, of course,' he said without looking away from my face, 'are not in your favour, and I'd quite understand it if you didn't feel up to the task. Your nerves, as you say, are still — '

'My nerves are my business.' A lot of heat came out and his black eyes flickered. 'You know bloody well you've got me hooked or I wouldn't be here in this stinking hole, would I?' Control, get control. 'It's just that I want — ' but the anger ran out and we stood facing each other without another word, while the shadows of the rain crept down his neon-grey face and his eyes looked into mine and waited to know whether I would do the job that had to be done or whether I was too old, at last, for this game, or too scared.

When I was ready I said: 'Who else did you ask?'

'I told you before. I went straight for you.'

His eyes went on waiting.

I only had one more question, and it was difficult, because I thought I knew what he'd say, what he'd have to say. 'What happens if I find him, but can't get him out?'

He didn't hesitate. 'That would make things easier for you. All we want is his silence.'