The Striker Portfolio

Ferris saw me looking at the papers.

'How's your German?'

'West Hartlepool accent.' I said to show him I was still narked at not being told anything.

'You shouldn't need much cover.'

Perhaps that was why it looked a bit thin.

'Where do I start?'

The thing is, there are two ways of going at the Striker problem.

You can analyse the bodies and the wrecks to find how the planes or the pilots are being got at. That's what everyone's already doing at Linsdorf and other places and they've not turned anything up. Or you can jump the queue and try to find who's getting at them and why.'

'You've said that.'

'Now I know you were listening.'

In half an hour the pressure came off our haunches and we began the run in to Amsterdam.

It was blowing a half-gale and as we came broadside on I could feel the mainplane lifting on the starboard side. Dust from the freight area stung our faces and a hat took off and a man ran after it. We had to hang about for an hour before they called us for the Hanover flight and Ferris wasn't hungry and I'd just had a meal and neither of us talked because he wasn't going to and I wasn't going to try to make him. He wandered round and round the souvenir stall peering through the glass at the varnished clogs and packets of Clan, his thin straw-coloured hair blowing to and fro as he moved.

I'd stopped sulking now. Ferris was all right I'd done two missions with him and he hadn't let me down. Now we were at it again: he was here to guide me, show me the way in and set me running like a ferret down a hole. Later he'd support me, feed me information and get my reports to London through the protected communications net; he'd pull me out of trouble if I was worth it or he'd abandon me and throw me to the dogs if I got in too deep and couldn't get out and looked like being a danger to them; then he'd call in a replacement and there'd be someone else eating his Peach Melbas for him while he told them as much as he thought they needed to know. It wouldn't be Waring. If I stopped anything nasty they'd never get Waring into the same area.

'Why do they have to varnish the bloody things?'

'To make them shiny.'

'But they don't look nice, shiny.'

'They don't know that.'

It was after midnight when we touched down in Hanover.

The normal routine would be to take separate taxis to different hotels and he still didn't say anything until we were through Customs and I thought he was leaving it very late this time.

'Start by seeing Lovett.'

'Where?'

'The Carlsberg.'

'All right'

Outside at the taxi-rank he said: 'Did you pick anything up in Firearms?' 'Only the pox.'

Chapter Three — SELBSTMORD

There was no wind in Hanover. It was cold.

From the outside the hotel looked like a cinema organ designed by Steinberg. Inside it was an ornate cave full of lamps and shadows. It was quiet even for one in the morning, though people were about.

'But of course it isn't your fault'

There were some piles of baggage near the main doors and more people were coming out of the lift, hardly any of them talking.

I said I didn't want to see the room. Number 14. Lovett was 31 in the register.

'It's just that my wife is sensitive about things like that' The American was consoling the manager and then consoling his wife, looking around secretively as if for a bar where he could console himself.

'If you will follow the page, Herr Martin.'

The other people were coming silently across from the lift.

'We don't have to stay, honey, but that doesn't mean it's their fault now, does it? We have to be fair.'

When my bag was in Room 14 and the page had gone I went up two floors and walked along the passage. It didn't seem worth waking Lovett if he'd already gone to bed. There was a light from under his door but there were voices from inside so I went down again because we would have to talk alone.

A piece of grit had got lodged under my top lid when we were crossing from the plane at Amsterdam and I spent some time poking about with the corner of my handkerchief and thinking about Lovett.

It was a name from the past and I hadn't seen him for more than a year. He used to be with the Liaison Group and I'd worked three times under his direction, then they sent him to Rome on the Carosio thing and one of the adverse party found him alone and left him for dead. It finished him for operations and the Bureau put him into their political section to sit in on summits and report any rot. He could still move about without crutches or things like that but he was full of platinum tubing and bone-rivets and his face was attractively lopsided so he never went short of a bed.

There was a NATO conference going on in Hanover this month and I suppose the Bureau had sent him to sit in on it.

It was a bit of metal, which explained why it had got lodged in so efficiently. The room looked watery now.

That sort of job must be irksome for a man like Lovett because he'd been very active before and spent most of his leaves in the Box of Squibs showing people how to break a door down without any noise and things like that: the Box is the house in Norfolk where we're sent at intervals for refresher training. But Lovett was good in subtler ways and perhaps he now passed the time trying to get two frames of micro under one full-stop without any tweezers.

I had to blank my mind consciously before I could get to sleep because I was still narked with Ferris for not telling me anything. Lovett would have to make up for that in the morning.

'He can't be!'

She laughed at first, like some people do, but her eyes were beginning to go bright and she went on staring at me with the laugh still on her face.

It seemed genuine.

I said: 'He threw himself out of a window on the fourth floor. Last night, about eleven o'clock.'

It was genuine all right. I got to her before she could hit her head on anything. She didn't go right under. When I helped her into the chair she stayed there without moving, like a dress thrown across it, but her eyes opened and she began staring again and I said:

'Have you got any brandy?'

After a minute she asked me: 'How do you know?'

They told me at the hotel. I was going to talk to him this morning and that's what they said happened.'

There wasn't anything but beer and a dreg or two of vodka in the bottom of a bottle so I gave her that, but she didn't drink it. Her colour was coming back and she sounded almost normal when she spoke again.

'So that was Bill.'

She wasn't dismissing him. She just didn't feel like consoling herself with the usual deceptions: but there must be a mistake, I was only talking to him yesterday, so forth. She was the kind of woman who would appeal to Lovett. His wife would have approved.

'It's the official version,' I said, 'anyway.'

'So you know him well.'

'He wasn't the type.'

'No. What's this?'

'Drink it.'

'What do you think I am?'

It was a small room with a bunk bed and there were two dressing-gowns behind the door. I didn't know who the other girl was. They'd given me this one's name at the hotel. She was on the translating staff for the conference. I'd asked them who came to see him most at the Carlsberg and she'd been the only woman on the list and I thought she'd probably know him better than the others.

Ferris hadn't actually told me to start enquiring. It was the only thing to do.

He'd sounded upset. 'Well, they were on to it bloody early.'

'Did they see us coming through?'

'No. They don't know us.'

I listened to his breathing on the line. He was trying to think what to do now. He'd have to tell me a bit more, because Lovett couldn't.