Quiller KGB

Cone said nothing, sat watching him.

'We've done our best,' Pollock told Cone. 'This has been a very thorough debriefing. I think you owe us consideration.'

'I'll give you five minutes,' Cone said, and looked at his watch. 'It might take a bit — '

'This is a Soviet enterprise.' Melnichenko was standing over Cone, his pink hands flat with the fingers spread, orchestrating what he was saying. 'The Soviets alone are responsible for the consequences.' Thumping his chest — 'I am responsible for the consequences, not Pollock, not you, not your government. The action will take place on East German soil, the soil of a country under Soviet protection. Our intention is to advance General-Secretary Gorbachev's efforts to bring the USSR into the open, into the world community; our intention is not to harm him, and we have made that plain enough. You say your mission is to protect him. So, indirectly, is ours.' Spreading his hands, holding the crescendo — 'Now, come, let each of us get on with our own business.'

Cone sat thinking. Pollock lit another cigarette. I finished the tea in the pot; it was cold by now, and bitter, just what I wanted, an astringent for the tongue.

'If this is a Soviet operation,' Cone said at last, 'who's running it?'

The pink brow wrinkled in surprise. 'We are.'

'Look,' Cone said, 'if you want my help, don't give me any bullshit. It's late and I'm tired. I want the name of the man in Moscow who's holding the reins.'

Melnichenko glanced at Pollock.

'We've got to,' Pollock said.

'Very well. His name is Gregor Talyzin. He is a deputy chairman of the Politburo.'

'Well well,' Cone said, and looked at me. 'And a close friend of Gorbachev's.' He looked back to the Russian. 'Give me his phone number — his direct private line.'

Melnichenko brought out a card and Cone took his finger off the pause button and noted the number and shut the machine off and got up and gave the card back and went over to the telephone and dialled, waiting.

'If your operation,' he told Pollock, 'weren't such a whizz-bang, I'd probably leave you to it. But there's going to be an awful lot of fallout, and I don't want to be in it.' Into the phone: 'Viktor, you can take these people now. Yes. Did he? Yes, a van would do nicely.' He told Yasolev how to get here and put the phone down.

Melnichenko said without much conviction, 'But you have no authority.'

'I know. You'll be the guests of the KGB.'

Cone stood in the car park watching the van turning onto the street, arms folded across his chest against the cold.

'If they can do it,' he said, 'it's going to shake a lot of things up.'

'If the KGB lets them.'

'It won't be up to them. Ask me, Thatcher's going to get on the phone to Gorbachev just as soon as Mr Shepley's told her the score. It'll be decided at that level.'

'You think they'll let Trumpeter go ahead?'

'God, how do I know? I'm just half-hoping they will and half-hoping they won't.' He got the keys of the car. 'It scares me to think how close we are to making history. I prefer a good game of darts, actually, down at the Whistle.'

We got in and he fished in the glove pocket and gave me a hotel envelope and I opened it.

'Just in from London. The one marked B is the latest, taken three months ago.'

Two photographs, 10 x 8, of Horst Volper, one without any grain at all, or at least not much. From this one alone I could recognize him, or perhaps it was because I'd looked at the others so often that his face had become familiar.

'These'll help,' I said, and put them away.

'Good show.' He didn't start the engine.

'All I can do,' I told him, 'is whatever I can.'

'I know.'

The conversation was Pinteresque, loaded with all the things that couldn't be said. He'd been worrying the whole time we'd been down there in the cellar.

The clock on the dashboard showed 3:57.

'Four hours,' I said, 'is quite a long time.'

'It is?'

Mikhail Gorbachev's Tupolev was due in at 8:05. 'It won't take me any time to start things.'

'No?'

Just letting me talk.

'They'll start themselves. It's a fast-burn fuse.'

'What makes you think,' he said, 'you're going to have any better luck this time?'

'It won't be a question of luck. Volper knows he's only got four hours, too, and he's going to throw the whole thing at me. He's got to, or I'll get in his way.'

The windscreen was starting to mist over because of our breath. The engine ticked sometimes, cooling down. Cone still had the keys in his hand, as if when he started the engine he was going to blow something up. I sat with my hands inside the chest-pockets of my padded jacket, not wanting to move.

'And there's nothing you need from me?'

'No,' I said. He meant support. 'Nothing.'

'How big,' he asked in a moment, 'is the risk?'

Shepley had asked me the same thing, in the underground garage in West Berlin, and now I gave Cone much the same answer. 'If I measured the risks, I'd never take them. Go back and sleep. But sleep by the phone.'

He started the engine then, and drove out of the car park. 'Where d'you want to go?'

'Find a cab station, will you? I'll need this car.'

'All right. She's three-quarters full.'

I'd already checked the gauge. 'I don't suppose I'll be going far.'

'I got you a BMW,' he said. 'It's at the hotel. You said you wanted something fast.'

'This'll do me.'

There were three taxis outside the S-Bahn on Unter den Linden and Cone pulled up and left the engine running and got out and I shifted behind the wheel. He leaned in at the window.

'What shall I say, exactly?'

I thought about it, not wanting to give a false impression.

In a moment I said, 'Tell them the odds are fair.'

'They'll want something more precise than that.'

I gave it some more thought. 'Tell them to keep the board clear. If Shepley can be there for the next few hours, I think it'd be wise, in case you need to flash anything that could help us. I'm in active condition, good morale, ready to go.'

'No actual plan?'

'I'm going to try doing a switch.'

He was looking at the ground, or maybe the door-handle or whatever, I mean he was looking down, not at me. 'All right,' he said. 'That's what I'll tell them.' Then he looked up quickly before he turned away. 'See you.'

24: TRUCKS

The car was quiet. I'd watched his cab into the distance, and turned off the engine, and since then I hadn't moved.

It was like being frozen in glass, in a heavy glass paper-weight, the way they do it with coins and things. It was as if the billionfold nerve impulses investing the system had reached the synapses and couldn't make the leap and had shut down, leaving the organism in a state of suspended animation.

I just needed a minute, that was all, perhaps a few minutes. It was a form of meditation, of seeking the self within the self and consulting with levels of wisdom beyond the norm. It was necessary because when I started the engine again, a minute from now, or perhaps a few minutes from now, I would be breaking through into the end-phase for Quickstep and nothing could stop it until they put one of two things on the signals board, mission accomplished or shadow down.

They were busy now, in London, burning the midnight oil.

'I really can't say, sir. He sounded, I don't know, depressed.'

'That's not like Cone.'

Shepley, his washed-out eyes looking quietly into infinity while his brain went through a hundred scenarios, a thousand, trying to take an intuitive leap and find the best thing to do, the best way of guiding Quickstep through the end-phase with a shadow executive who had requested him to stand by the board 'for the next few hours', who had reported that 'the odds were fair', whose morale was good and so on but who had no actual plan in mind to bring the mission home between now and eight o'clock, Berlin time.