It took nearly fifteen minutes to check and recheck for surveillance because of the light-conditions and wall-angles and the lack of effective cover. They'd only raided one side of the building and they could have posted some people m the area to observe later movements. The damned place was a trap.
Then I was filtering through the network of narrow streets where the snow was thick and the lamps few and the night quiet, encoding in my mind a fully urgent signal to Egerton telling him that tonight the whole pattern had shifted and that something was wrong, hellishly wrong.
9: RENDEZVOUS
Steam burst across the red lamp and left its bloodied plumes blowing in the dark, and wheels rolled, iron on iron. No one was there, it had gone, and he crouched in front of the ammo-boxes, rubbing his cobbled fingers, and steel rang, dull as a cracked bell.
See him and pull him out it was getting too close, they wouldn't like that, but he was no better off than I was. He couldn't even take care of himself: they'd only got to bust open one of the Czyn places while he was there doing his homework like a good boy and they'd clink the poor little sod for aiding and abetting dissident factions clandestinely engaged in activities against the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, so forth. Make His Excellency the British Ambassador look a right lemon.
Soot clouded between the massive spokes and he blew his whistle, his black bright eye watching me above the drum of the Typolt, no go I said, not even a Judas-hole. They ran right to the horizon, leaning together till their tips touched in a point, one of them was coming.
It was small at first because of the distance, and you wouldn't notice it if you hadn't spent years ferreting in the back streets of the political hinterlands, then you'd see it sticking out a mile. There’d been a definite pattern and it had shifted suddenly as if his finger had tapped a kaleidoscope: we know the British are on our side to the point of actual diplomatic backing.
Oh are they really well that's very interesting.
It came fast and grew gigantic, a black mountain on the move towards me, and she lay there with her lean body stretched under the lamp, her shadowed ivory breast tipped with blue in the deathly light and a dark curl creeping in the wing of her arm, then the sky was blotted out and it was on me with a shriek and I was down, too many friends, next time they'll make sure his head's under the wheel.
The long sound of it drew out, thinning to silence, and a signal clattered. The ceiling was dark again. Polyphasic sleep had left me surfaced and I leaned across her, a dream fragment persisting, and checked the time: 00:15. The 00:15 to Krakow via Lodz and Czestochowa, a black brute loosed southwards across the snows.
Fqb fqqi lub ddqb gjuu hhr ixxn gls eedf nlqq jri srrw hqw oouh yoxx wqk huuh.
I'd seen one this morning, with weak sunlight throwing clear reflections on the windows because all the blinds were down. It had drawn away slowly eastwards towards the Russian frontier.
Third series with fifth-digit duplications and recurring blanks, normal contractions: Can you confirm any degree of U.K. diplomatic backing of potential revolution here.
But I wouldn't send it. Somewhere on the crest of a sleep-curve a thought had come: Egerton knew. And he expected me to know, to have found out. All he wanted was for me to do something about it. He was waiting for some raw intelligence to give his analysts, not for a signal saying look my drawers are all wet how did that happen.
There wasn't a lot of time. Merrick might get me some stuff on this but we were both moving into the red sector by now and I'd have to pull him out before long: behind the official preparations for the reception of the Western delegates there was a much bigger operation running. And the trains were rolling east.
The thing was that Czyn was being fed with doped sugar. The U.S.S.R wasn't alone in hoping for the total, success of the talks: the U.S.A., Britain, France and the Benelux states had been grooming their spokesmen since last August and the message was perfectly clear. The cold war had been devalued from the moment it was seen that short of global annihilation a hot war couldn't be won. Detente was back in fashion and when the Bonn delegation arrived in Warsaw there'd be quite a few bricks of the Berlin Wall lying on the ground. If the talk succeeded they wouldn't be the last: they'd open the way. And the U.K. would give diplomatic backing to a full-scale revolution in Poland as promptly as it would put the whole of its sterling reserves on a three-legged hundred-to-one outsider with its arse to the tapes at the off.
They'd know this, if their minds weren't inflamed with their dreams of manning the barricades in the holy name of the motherland.
The smell of the soot came now: it always took a few minutes. The building was old and decade after decade the trains had shaken it, loosening tiles on the roof and the cement round the doors and windows and making cracks in the brickwork so now it was like a sponge, absorbing the smell of soot and diesel gas and exuding the smell of bigos and karp po polsku from the kitchen below.
Assumption: the doped sugar was being fed to Czyn by an agency purporting to be British and spuriously offering diplomatic backing in exchange for information. This agency served a state considered alien to resurgent Poland or it wouldn't have to assume British identity. Rule out the West: the C.I.A. and the Deuxieme Bureau and the Gehlen Organisation and the little mail-order firm in Geneva that sent all its bills in plain envelopes to NATO.
What information? Information on the activities of Czyn. We were getting that without any offers of backing. Egerton had meant what he said to Merrick: 'Nor must you lead them to feel that the United Kingdom is in any way prepared to assist them in whatever projects they have in mind, morally, physically, officially or unofficially. You must not even let them infer that such is the case, from anything you say; and if you think that despite your caution they have so inferred, then you must negate it. Is that perfectly understood? He'd been so specific that he'd clearly known, at that time, what I'd learned only last night: that someone was soft-footing it round the Warsaw cellars with a borrowed Union Jack poking out of his breast pocket. And Merrick would follow that explicit order to the letter: his anxiety to make a good showing in his first mission was half killing him. From behind me, his numbed face reflected against the dark trees of the park, he'd said with fledgling courage: 'I won't let you down.' That was his one fear.
Recheck and rule out the hairline possibility that it was M.I.6, and not a foreign agency. The Bureau doesn't exist, publicly or officially, simply because it's empowered to do things that could never be admitted, publicly or officially, to have been done; and built into its anatomy is a self-destruction unit triggered to go off in the instant when any one of its operations runs wild enough to risk exposing it. We all know that. Each of the shadow executives in the overseas missions echelon has the suffix-9 after his code name to indicate his proven reliability under torture, and among the facilities available to agents in clearance is the death-pill. Because one single operative, nosing his way through the warrens of a sensitive area in Manchuria or Paraguay, can hit a counter-intelligence tripwire and blow up London Control. That was why there'd been a death-house chill over the Bureau last week when a wheel had come off in Gaza: they didn't know where it would roll. And that was why Merrick, for all his tail-wagging eagerness to bring us the right bone, would have to work through half a dozen missions of increasing complexity before his director would brief him anywhere but in a taxi.