'Yes.'
In a moment he said, 'You did this to me before, in Berlin.'
'Then you should be used to it.'
'True.'
He watched me steadily for a moment and then turned away, and I've seen that look before when the mission's running hot and there's no place for the shadow to go except into a red sector: they wonder if it's the last time they're going to see you. It used to worry me, but it doesn't any more.
'There's no other way,' I told him.
You couldn't stop anyone putting a bomb on a plane by relying on conventional security measures, with forty or fifty thousand commercial flights a day going through the airports worldwide. The high-tech plastic explosive, Semtex, was colourless and odourless and it could be moulded into any shape, a shoe or a hairbrush or a teddy bear, and at the moment there was no equipment in Europe that could detect it in a suitcase or a handbag. Cone knew that.
'The only way,' I told him, 'is to get inside the organisation that's planning to plant a bomb and wipe it out in time.'
He watched an Air France 727 nosing into the sky. 'Oh, I'm not arguing. So are you going to use any kind of base?'
'A car.'
'Where?
'I don't know until I know where the rendezvous is.'
He came and sat down again, facing me, his arms across his knees. 'You want somebody to watch the car?'
'No.'
It could be a night action and I wouldn't be able to identify him. Nemesis could find out that the car was mine and put a watch on it too.
'Are you going in wired?' Cone asked me.
'No.'
The idea was tempting, but if they found a mike on me it'd blow my cover, and my cover was all I'd have.
The cold was getting into me, into my bones.
'You don't carry weapons,' Cone said, 'that right?'
'No.'
A successful arms dealer is a businessman and he doesn't carry a gun, and even if I had one on me when I went close enough to Nemesis they'd look for it and find it and take it away.
'You carry a capsule?' Cone asked me.
'No.'
I wasn't infiltrating the regime of the host country and the only interest Nemesis would take in the Bureau was personaclass="underline" they didn't want us to get in their way, that was all. If they put me under implemented interrogation and blew my cover and found I was operating against them they'd simply finish things off and get a body bag.
'You need a courier?'
'No.'
I was taking the ultimate risk and it wasn't likely that I could make contact with a courier without exposing him.
'What about a deadline?' Cone asked me.
'I can't give you one. I don't know where I'll be by 18:00 hours or midnight or 06:00 or noon. In any case you can't send in anyone to look for me. But for the board, if you like, call it noon tomorrow. If I haven't been able to make some kind of signal by then, you can tell them to send out a new shadow.'
Cone studied his dry scaly hands. 'There's not much,' he said, 'I can do, then, for the moment.'
'Not much, no. But if I can go in and get out you'll have a lot to do.' There'd be enough signals to light up the board in London, because if I could blow Nemesis from the centre there'd be a lot of fallout and we'd hand things over to the Bundeskriminalamt to hunt down the survivors and make arrests.
'Questions?' Cone asked me.
'No.' He'd had the London briefing and my own debriefing and he knew as much about the way the mission was running as I did. There was nothing I needed to ask him.
'Then you better get on with your homework.'
'Yes.'
He got up and stood at the window for a moment, watching a TWA jumbo go sloping into the sky.
'It must give you the willies,' he said as he turned round. 'All those people.'
'Yes.'
'You know where to find me,' he said, and I opened the door and watched him picking his way along the passage, his thin body angled forward a little against the blizzard in his soul.
14:00 hours.
The statistics relevant to the legitimate sale of AK47 assault rifles are as follows…
15:00 hours.
The US dollar is the standard currency in all arms deals of any importance…
16:00 hours.
And as the late winter sunshine changed from rose to purple across the roofs of the buildings opposite my window, and the planes moved through the twilight with the stealth of phantoms before their sound came in, I became prey to the feeling that the telephone standing on the lopsided bare wooden table was never, after all, going to ring, that Dieter Klaus wasn't here in Berlin or that Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him.
I couldn't assume that he'd be interested, in any case, in a tactical nuclear missile: his plans to put a bomb on board a Pan Am plane could be already advanced. He might not even have time for a meeting with a strange arms dealer with hew toys to selclass="underline" he might have all he needed.
Singapore and Israel both possess several high tech armaments that are not available anywhere else in the world…
At 17:00 hours I sat in the semi-darkness of the little room, with the recorder shut off and my mind ranging across the data that I'd been feeding into it since this morning. A big jet reached for altitude across the skyline with its strobes flashing and the thin line of its windows slanting through the dark.
So Dieter Klaus wasn't in Berlin or Inge Stoph hadn't been able to contact him or she knew about the ambush they'd set for me in the underground garage, knew my cover story was false, was that why the telephone hadn't rung?
I didn't think so. If Sorgenicht had recognised me in the cafeteria and phoned for support they would have gone for me in the car park while I was talking to Inge: they wouldn't have waited. It hadn't been Sorgenicht who'd got onto me; when they'd started the search for Krenz they must have intercepted some of the calls going out from the Mercedes to the SAAB and traced them and found the SAAB in the garage and set the trap, waiting for me to go back to it.
There was no connection between the unknown man who had taken over the Mercedes from Krenz and the man who had openly approached Inge Stoph in the car park.
She didn't know who I was, or if she knew, and telephoned with a rendezvous, it would be fatal to keep it.
But I wouldn't know.
I walked about, restless, up and down the narrow room, the floorboards creaking and the sound of the girls rising from the rooms below as they laughed for their money at the outset of the long night's parody of love.