'What about the courier?' Elliott asked me. 'The woman?'
'You mean traces?'
'Yes.'
'I don't know. The whole line went to ground the minute the news got out. You'd have to check through their base.'
We started moving, following the BMW.
Elliott switched off the Sanyo and put it away, leaning forward and saying something to Chandler; all I caught was 'till they signal', or it sounded like that. Then he sat back again.
'Is that it?' I asked him.
'Oh,' he turned to me quickly, 'yes, many thanks. We just needed it on the record, confirming your report from Bombay.'
'So what am I doing in Berlin?'
'We did the debriefing — ' he looked at his nails ' — because it was convenient. We want you here to meet someone.' A quick smile. 'Won't take long.'
He was being too bloody reassuring, and I had the sudden feeling I was sitting here on my way to an execution. 'Who?'
I shouldn't have asked, but it was too late. Showing my nerves. It was six weeks since I'd got back from Singapore and I'd been standing by for a month and no one had remembered my existence until the phone call to the plane. The thing is, we come off the last time out with the blood still up and the nerves at the pitch where we've stopped being scared any more, and at that point they could send us straight out again and we wouldn't miss a beat; but then there's the debriefing and the medic exam and two weeks' paid leave with an air ticket to wherever we want to go or a stint at the spa in Norfolk with breakfast in bed and Swedish massage and saunas and the whole treatment; and then we're put on the list for standing by and the rot sets in — the nerves have come down and the blood's cooled off and we've had time to remember that it was only a bit of luck that got us back the last time, or at least a calculated risk that worked out according to the book. We shouldn't be here; we should have stayed stuck under that boat with the air-line still snarled or been pushed into a cell with the light still boring a hole in our head or found by the dustmen in the first grey light of the dawn with half the skull gone and the grin lopsided. So what do we want to go out again for, why push our luck?
The answer's another question. What else is there?
Elliott's voice came into my thoughts. 'Do you remember Yasolev? Viktor Yasolev?' Looking at his nails again.
'Yes.'
'Got on well with him, I believe.'
'As well as could be expected.'
He smiled indulgently. As well as could be expected, considering that Viktor Yasolev was a colonel in the KGB and had come extremely close to throwing me into Lubyanka.
'I mean,' Elliott said carefully, 'you found him, as an adversary, an honourable man?'
We turned left onto the Saaltwinkler Damm alongside the canal, with the windscreen wipers clearing the way through the drizzle and the rear lights of the BMW still ahead of us.
'Yes.' Viktor Yasolev: tough, dangerous, deadly in a corner, but yes, honourable. 'Why?'
'It is our hope,' Elliott said carefully, 'that you might agree to work with him.'
I swung my head and he gazed back at me steadily, his eyes expressionless.
In a moment I asked him, 'When did he defect?' 'He didn't. He's still in the KGB.'
2: ECHOES
'We'll get out here,' Chandler said, and turned off the engine, prodding his seat-belt release.
The BMW had parked in the next aisle and there were three other cars further away among the concrete pillars. Two men were standing further away still, near the entrance, where the ramp sloped down from the street. Pilot lamps burned in here above the parking-bay numbers, throwing a bleak light through the gloom.
We got out and stood doing nothing for a minute, breathing in the exhaust gas.
'Not Yasolev,' Elliott said quietly. 'We're not meeting Yasolev here, of course. It'll be Mr Shepley.'
I looked at him but he didn't turn his head. He was watching the BMW. I'd heard of Shepley but never met him before; not many of us had. He was the head of the Bureau. His status was approximately that of God.
Shepley in Berlin.
According to legend he never left London; never, some said, left the building in Whitehall with the false door behind the lift shaft and the mole's citadel of rooms above the street with no numbers to them, no names. Legend also had it that Shepley was a former colonel in the SAS and had taken a leading part in the raid on the Iranian Embassy in Princes' Gate; but then legends, with or without substance, are to be expected in a place like the Bureau, where we bury ourselves in deep cover as a matter of principle.
'Chilly,' I head Elliott say, 'for this time of year.' He gave me a faint smile, and it occurred to me that underneath his air of calm his own nerves were running close to the edge. It could have been because it doesn't give me the giggles to be in the presence of people very high in the echelon. They get my back up, and I suppose he didn't want it to happen now, with God here.
A police car went past the entrance very fast with its siren waking the night; then it was quiet again down here until a door of the BMW came open.
Elliott touched my arm. 'It would be quite a good thing,' he told me in an undertone, 'to listen, and not say much. The final decision must be yours, remember, so you've nothing to worry about.'
Nerves on his sleeve. It didn't help.
Two men got out of the BMW and came round to this side and then someone else got out of the back and stood with his hands buried in the pockets of his raincoat, and for a moment looked at no one as we walked over and stopped near him, the soft echoes of our footsteps dying away.
I could actually hear Elliott's breathing, it was so quiet here. Chandler hadn't said anything since we'd got out of the car; he was on my other side, opposite Elliott, and they were both standing a little way back from me.
'Who are they?' The man in the raincoat had his head turned towards the entrance to the garage. His voice was so soft that I'd barely heard him.
'NATO guard, sir, major's rank.' It was one of the men who'd just got out of the BMW.
Shepley's head moved again. 'What about those?'
He was looking at a dark grey Mercedes in the far corner, with two faces only just visible behind the windscreen.
'Police, sir. In case anyone tries disturbing us.'
Shepley turned his head again and looked at me. He was nondescript, in some ways: average height, average weight, thinning straw-coloured hair, a bank clerk or an insurance man — nondescript except for his eyes, a washed-out blue but with a steadiness that made me feel he was quietly taking every nerve synapse in my brain apart and checking it for wear. Nondescript, too, except for his voice, which was so soft that you had to focus in on it and ignore all other sounds, if you wanted to hear what he was saying.
'You're the executive?'
Chandler spoke from slightly behind us. 'Quiller, sir.'
The pale eyes went on looking at me without any reaction; then, when he was ready, he brought his right hand out of his pocket and offered it to me. 'Good of you to come. I'm Shepley.'
A cold hand, hardened by holding things that might have blown up if he hadn't been careful — 'this was how I thought of it.
'My privilege, sir.' To put poor old Elliott out of his misery. Shepley put his hand back into his raincoat and leaned against the car, his head turned a little to the right but his eyes watching me.
'You've been told we'd like you to work with the KGB on a certain assignment?'
'Yes.'
'How does it appeal?'
'I'll need more information.'
He looked away, at the guards by the entrance or beyond them: I think he'd stopped actually seeing the environment, and had slipped into alpha waves. I noticed pockmarks below his left ear, some kind of scarring left by an explosion, perhaps, a grenade. It would explain why he always turned his head to listen with his right ear.
'More information,' he said softly. 'Of course.' He looked back at me again. 'This man Yasolev. Would you trust him?'