He said it was fourth series with first-digit dupes.
'All right, send off a couple of signals using the ignore key and tell them they're fully urgent and that they've got to send them while you're there. If they kick up rough because the tea's getting cold tell them it's on H.E.'s orders. Ask them to give you back your own originals and tell them you want their recorded originals and copies as well. If they let you have them, send another signal informing London they've done that and for Christ's sake leave out the ignore key this time. Watch their reactions at every stage and see if they fit your idea of people who've got nothing to hide.'
He said he understood. He also asked what he should put in the ignore signals: I suppose the poor little tick had never had to send one before.
'Tell them you've caught it in the zip again.'
The frightening thing was that it could be important: I wanted to know why they'd bottled me up in Warsaw but hadn't cut my line of communication through the Embassy. I didn't need to go there if I wanted to send anything out: within fifteen minutes of picking up the telephone in the Bar Kino the clerk in London could be decyphering. And they wouldn't want me to do that. Correction: they'd want me to do it but only if they could know what I was sending,
So I'd moved an untrained recruit into a highly sensitive area and it had felt like putting a match to a fuse because if Merrick exposed an opposition agent actually installed in the cypher room of the British Embassy it was going to make a nasty bang at a time when the East-West delegates were sending each other roses. Merrick would be all right but I'd get the chopper: I was out here to local control his mission and his mission was circumscribed and didn't provide for my pitching him into an area with this much potential for blast.
There'd been no choice. The Bureau doesn't like commandeering facilities in Her Majesty's embassies unless there's something big in progress and even if London sent me a ticket for the Warsaw cypher room I couldn't go in as young Merrick could, the image already established and the cover story dependent on it: I'd have to go, in as a stranger with inspectorate powers and if in fact the opposition had planted someone among the staff he'd scare so fast that the next morning his desk would be empty and so would the filing cabinets.
I had to know their minds, to know if they'd said: Let him run and we'll watch where he goes, let him signal and we'll read what he sends. The fifth series comes fairly high among the international unbreakables but a code only stays locked till someone finds the key.
Her glass was empty and she was watching me, the shock still dull in her stone blue eyes, their quickness blunted.
'Are we useful to you?'
She wanted to know why I’d gone to the trouble of getting her a new karta.
'Not really.'
'If we can be useful, tell us.'
'All right.'
She gave a little nod and was still again. I could have learned something from this woman, from her ability to sit like this, her calm containing her anguish, a brother for the camps and a friend for the grave and the known world falling away like a city going down.
I got the girl over and paid.
'You've got somewhere safe you can go?'
'Oh yes.' But she looked at me blankly because she hadn't thought of it yet: that there had to be somewhere safe she could go.
Perhaps there was nowhere now. The people who had rebuilt this capital from the ruins of the war were being smoked out of it like rats.
'Don't take any risks. Keep low for a few days.'
'Yes,' she said.
'Go to your parents. They in Warsaw?'
She answered in Polish because it was all she still remembered of them, the language they'd spoken together.
'There are friends you can go to?' She nodded and I said: 'I don't mean People in Czyn. Forget Wednesday, it's been called off. Forget the barricades, there won't be any. Just save yourself, Alinka.'
I got up and she lifted her head, watching me, as I sensed she'd go on watching me when I left here, until the door blotted me out and another bit of her known world broke away.
'You'll be all right now. You've got your papers.'
She nodded again. Standing over her I noticed her hand sliding towards the empty glass. the palm flat on the table and the fingers parting and covering the round glass base as if to hold it down so that no one could knock it away and send its fragments dropping among all the other fragments of once familiar things.
Papers weren't any use to her now. Even her name had been taken away for pulping in a destruction machine. Wanda Rek was no one, meant nothing.
I got a pencil. 'If you need me you can phone this number. Just leave the message they'll know who it's for.' Then I left her and went through the swing door and crossed the street. The wind blew from the north and the tall lamps swayed at the top of their stems, sending shadows on the move. I thought it would have been possible to keep on walking, then I had to find a doorway and shelter there, not from the wind, from the idea of going on. There weren't any people about: they didn't fancy being out in this killing cold. The windows of the state supermarkets were bright with cheap goods to impress the visitors with the wealth of Polish production; the lamps kept the dark sky hidden and made it look as if the city were still alive or at least had once contained life, but from here it seemed more like a fairground hit by plague, a lone tram running blindly on its tracks into the distance as if there hadn't been time to switch it off, the perspective of neon signs winking for no one, for nothing. What a bloody silly time, I'd told Merrick, to open talks here, but he'd said they were expected to last for a good six months, well into the summer.
Then the movement, quite a long way off, of the only living thing that seemed to be left. Coming out of the bar she put her gloved hands to her face as she felt the cut of the wind, at first moving away from me and then coming back, not sure where to go in a world she no longer knew.
From where I lay the window made a blank parallelogram, a screen where light came as a train went by, fading in the intervals to the background glow of the city. The glass had frosted over again, covering the clear patch I'd scraped with my nails, but it wasn't symbolic: I could see even farther now than I'd seen then. And I didn't like it.
There wasn't any light from the freight trucks, only their noise and the shake of the building; the light came from the passenger trains, though not from all of them because some had their blinds down, those for the east.
I didn't like it because most of what I could see was based on mission-feel and I couldn't discount it. Assumptions were unreliable: I assumed that there was an adverse party working the same field as Merrick and I and feeding the Polanski unit with doped info until its turn came to be wiped out and I assumed that the KG.B. had chosen to vet me and let me run and both these assumptions could be wrong. Mission-feel is never wrong: it's the specialised instinct you develop as you go forward into the dark like an old dog fox sniffing the wind and catching the scent of things it has smelled before and learned to distrust; and in the concealing darkness the forefoot is sensitive, poised and held still above the patch of unknown ground where in the next movement the trap can spring shut.
The feeling I had was close to that; but a man, being a more sophisticated beast, is caught with traps of greater complexity, and what I sensed was that behind all the logic I was trying to bring to the few facts available and all the attempts to make a pattern from random pieces, the opposition had a programme running, its engineering as smooth and massive as the iron wheels that rolled past here on their predestined rails; and that I was in its path.