Gunter was watching me now, his mouth open a little, his eyes naked and appalled under the fierce glare of the lamp.
I'd called him in here.
'I want you to take him somewhere and leave him, and phone for an ambulance, tell them where to find him.'
I was very tired. This business had drained me, and I hadn't expected it to be so bad. But if I had expected it, I would still have had to do it.
Against your principles.
Indeed yes, against my principles, against the tenets of human conduct that alone can keep some sort of brotherhood alive in this angry world. These I had transgressed, and this is not, my good friend — my friend, I am sure, no longer — this is not to purge myself in an outpouring of spurious confession. I shall remember the name of Dollinger. I shall remember it.
Gunter: 'Take him where?'
'What? Anywhere. In a doorway, where you won't be seen.' It occurred to me, either because I was finding it difficult to regain my focus on reality or because he looked so stunned, Gunter, so removed from ordinary understanding — it occurred to me that I should spell it out for him, for his own sake. 'That's the important thing, of course, that no one sees you. Then phone for an ambulance, without giving your name.'
I began taking off my gloves, the thin nylon driving-gloves they'd told Cone I preferred, when they'd briefed him as my director in the field. I'd put them on in a grotesque attempt to distance myself, my hands, from the other man's body while I worked on it, on its nervous system, its most sensitive sites of pain. They'd been meant to anaesthetise my hands, to separate them from what they were doing. Don't you think that's the most appalling part of it?
'Is he still alive?'
'Of course.' Said with anger, the first murmuring of self-rage, like distant thunder. 'But he needs hospitalising. For God's sake switch off the light.'
He seemed not to know where the switch was, though our apartments were identical. Then he found it and the glare was cut off, to leave the reflected glow of that bloody Wall in the room.
He came towards the man in the chair, tied to the chair with torn cloth, towelling, I forget what I'd used. 'What do I do if he dies, while I'm taking him there?'
'You'll leave him there just the same, you clod, and call an ambulance, for Christ's sake, now is that clear?'
He said it was, and got Dollinger across his shoulder and went out with him and I soaked a towel in the bathroom and held it against my face and stood there a long time with the nerve-light spangling the dark behind my lids and my heart's beat hammering. The worst of it, with things like this, as you know, is that you can't have your time over again, and not do whatever you've done, and I can't think of two other words in the whole of the language that carry the weight of such infinite despair as these: too late.
Went over to the telephone.
'Just reporting in.'
Brief pause. 'What happened?' Cone.
His tone was wary, apprehensive, because, I suppose, of what he'd heard in my voice.
'I know where the target is.'
Volper.
Another pause. That had been telling him rather a lot. It had been telling him that we had a hope of completing the mission, of bringing Quickstep home. In a moment he asked, 'Can you reach him?'
'Yes.'
'I low long will it take?'
'Not long.'
'I'd feel more comfortable,' he said, 'in the end-phase, if you had some support. Not close. Just in the field.'
'It won't be necessary. He'll be alone.'
Another pause. 'All right. I've been in signals with London. They're prepared to let Trumpeter go ahead.'
'That should be interesting.'
'They also told me that the only danger to our protege is from the target. No one else.'
Not from Trumpeter.
'Do what I can,' I said. 'I'll report when I'm through.'
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and drank a glass of water with its rank taste of chlorine; then I got my Lufthansa bag and went out of the room and down the stairs and across to the car.
07:04.
Over the past minutes the sky had been lightening.
I shifted on the seat, leaning my shoulder against the door, one hand hooked across the wheel rim.
There were no clouds, only a thin haze from the city softening the lights across the airport. I'd seen three planes come in since I'd got here, their landing lights coming on as they settled into final approach, directly in line with the street where I was waiting in the car.
The hotel was less than a hundred yards away. I'd chosen this location because it was near enough to see Volper clearly when he came out of the hotel and got into the car that was standing there, and far enough to give me a certain amount of cover. There were no lights in the hotel, and almost no windows: a wrecking gang had started demolition work on it a month ago, Dollinger had told me, and stopped again because of some bureaucratic holdup.
Dollinger.
His name still tolled like a death-knell in my mind.
But you had to do it. Give yourself a break.
No excuses.
It was that, or risking Gorbachev's life.
There should have been some other way.
It was for the mission.
Do that to a man, for a mission?
There's no quarter, in this trade. You know that.
Yes of course I've always known it and I've done a lot of things I couldn't live with and then lived with them but don't expect me to do them and then go whistling on my way, damn you.
Steady, lad.
07:42.
I didn't like this. I was beginning to worry.
I still didn't know where Volper had planned to intercept his target but it was obviously going to be soon after the General-Secretary had landed, at some time between his leaving the plane and leaving the airport, or just afterwards, soon after his leaving the airport; and that wasn't illogical because although the protection around him would be at its most concentrated, Volper was a man to strike where it'd be least expected.
He should be leaving his temporary base at any time now; the main route from the airport was eleven minutes from here, from the hoteclass="underline" I'd timed the run at legal speed when I'd got here.
He would have to leave here, then, within seven minutes from now.
I could only wait. But he was running it close and it worried me.
Cone would be worried too. He hadn't expected me to get so close to the target so fast. I hadn't kept in touch, and he knew nothing about a bombed-out Mercedes burning in the streets, or about the man sagging in the chair buying his life with betrayal.
London knew nothing either, except for the last signal Cone had just sent in through Cheltenham for the board.
Executive has initiated end-phase, reports within reach of target.
Theirs not to do or die, theirs but to stand and wait, so forth. I didn't envy them. But Trumpeter was to go ahead, and that was a surprise. On whose decision? Not Shepley's. The Prime Minister's, possibly after consultation with the Chairman of the Praesidium on the private line.
Pollock would be delighted.
No. I'm just a kind of coordinator.
But it was your idea?
Yes.
The tape-recorder turning, Cone sitting there shrunk into his raincoat, Melnichenkov sweating hard, Schwarz saying nothing, the smoke thick in the cellar.
'How did it begin?'
'With Schwarz, actually. He and Bader used to come into the Club, and we got talking. A lot of it was political, like most of the talk in that place. There was a feeling in the air that Miki was coming to East Berlin to open the Wall, you know — an official ceremony and all that; but I knew he couldn't do it. They'd sling him out of power.'