Reading upside down is a fraction easier than mirror-reading because you don't have to dissociate from the familiar and the brain recognises that if you turn through a hundred and eighty degrees you'll be out of the wood, whereas mirror-writing remains gibberish until you've done a mental switch. All I could see was that his name wasn't among the thirty or so on the one and a half filled pages of the register unless of course he was now A. Voshyov or K. Voskarev, the two possibles among the several Russian entries. He was on one of these open pages if he'd booked in officially because they went back to January 14 and he'd been flown in to vet me on a night flight of the 15th.
'On the third floor, sir, overlooking the court.' He added without any expression: 'It will be quieter there.'
It wasn't important: I hadn't come to look at the register; it’s just that the eye of a seasoned ferret notes the lie of every grassroot on its way through the warren. Voshyov or Voskarev could be the agent and Foster's base somewhere else. The important thing was to expose as much data as possible in the short time left and my real concern was the obscene-looking Moskwicz outside: the courtyard was the area we could possibly work in, facts needed collecting.
He hit the bell but I told him I didn't want to see the rooms now: I would return and confirm.
The pivotal fact was that when the Moskwicz dropped its passengers at the Commissariat and at this hotel the driver and escort remained on board. They were there when I walked down the steps, backed up to the wall between the end window and one of the griffons, the engine shut off and the louvres closed and their faces watching me from behind the reflected light on the windscreen.
On the way back to the Hotel Kuznia I stopped the taxi at a telephone kiosk and spoke to Merrick.
By nightfall I'd gone over the whole thing again and it looked all right: risky but all right. Most of it stood up so well that the one critically weak point seemed less of a hazard. It was to do with the guard. There was a single police guard on the Commissariat but today was Niedziela, Sunday. and it could be that on weekdays when every department was functioning and there were more visitors it carried the normal double guard I'd seen on other official buildings. If tomorrow they doubled the guard it'd be no go.
13: SIGNAL
Poniedzialek. Monday.
They doubled the guard.
It was getting too close to the limit now to do anything except hack out a last-ditch alternative operation and it took till midday to do it and when I'd done it I knew it would only work if the opposition movement patterns remained constant. And if it worked at all the main objective would be gained: but nothing more. I would blow up their programme by springing the trap but there'd be no hope of survival.
I don't like suicide missions. They're for the angels.
Rethink.
Findings: the only other thing to do was to let the time run out to Sroda and get a plane when the heat came off and take Merrick back to London where he'd be safe and let them put it in the mission report at the Bureau: objective unaccomplished.
So out of sheer stinking pride I set the thing running.
One hour's wait. A lot of the major planning overlapped instead of throwing out the whole of the original operation I'd lopped the dead limbs and done some grafting.
When the hour was up I telephoned Merrick and made an immediate rendezvous and then went down to the street where the taxi was parked. I'd paid him a day in advance and he was filling the Wolga with cheap Russian tobacco smoke.
'When they come back keep an eye open and follow them when they leave again, find out where they go. Does that gauge work?'
'Sometimes.' He tapped it.
'Fill up the first chance you get. You can lose people that way.'
I walked on towards Wilenska against a low wind; the sky was blue-black in the north and they said there was heavy snow falling across the forestland and that the city would get it before morning.
He was late of course.
Trucks banged and the echoes rang under the great sooty roof. A mail van was parked on the slip-road that ran parallel with this platform and they were slinging the bags in; on the far side a short-haul tender was butting at a line of freight. A dozen people waiting, their backs turned to the M.O. patrol. No one else.
After twenty minutes he came in from the street and began looking for me among the group of people because the poor little bastard had only had two weeks' training and he didn't know that when you make a protected rdv you don't use cover: it wastes time. When he finally saw me he started a half-run towards me and the M.O. patrol turned their heads so I called out to him in Polish: 'It's all right, it hasn't come in yet. They say there's snow on the line.'
I waited till he got his breath.
'I'm sorry,' he said. He was always having to say that.
I took him into the buffet. Three men, four women, a kid with a red plastic guitar, his fur hat over his eyes. Steaming urns, a door to the street, telephone. I asked for czosneksoup.
'What happened?'
He sat opposite me at the table, pulling his gloves off and blowing into his hands. 'Someone tried to get asylum, just when I was leaving the Embassy.' His eyes were in a stare behind the glasses, still bright with shock. 'They followed him up the steps and tried to drag him away but he got free and came inside. There wasn't anything I could do; none of us could help him. But he didn't seem to believe it. We just had to — to kick him out.' He fished the thing from his pocket and covered it as best he could with his cold long-fingered hands. 'Excuse me.'
I gave him a minute because he wouldn't even know what I was saying.
'Listen, Merrick. They didn't turn up.'
When I'd phoned him last evening on the way back from the Hotel Cracow it was to ask for three men, part of the original plan and still part of the new one. I still had to have them.
'They didn't?' He frightened so easily.
'I waited for another hour.'
'They were properly briefed. I told them — '
'They've been picked up. That was the risk we took.'
'I'll recruit another three. The Ochota unit's still — '
'No. There isn't the time.'
Looking down at his hands he said numbly: 'I did my best — '
'It wasn't your fault.' Because he was doing it again, with his numbed words and his raw schoolboy hands and his pathetic eagerness to please and his utter inability ever to manage it, uncovering something again that I thought had been long ago buried in me: a sense of compassion.
He looked up with a slow blink and stared at me as if I'd surprised him and maybe I had; I suppose it was the first civil thing I'd ever said to him.
'What about the cypher-room staff, you got any leads?'
'Not yet, but I — '
'Anything positive, anything negative? Come on.'
He drew back on his chair, tender as a sea-anemone. 'I haven't been given much time, and they're making it very difficult. I think they've taken offence.'
Christ, the world was full of them.
Then he was pulling something else, out of his coat and I knew instinctively that he'd forgotten it until now and was hoping I wouldn't realise.
'This is from London.'
I didn't open it straight away. 'You told London to give you a hand?'
'Well yes, you said I must.'
'They given you any leads?'
'Not yet.'
'Because I've got to send signals and if you think the cypher-room's monitoring your stuff then I'll have to risk a direct line.'
Carefully he said 'There's nothing positive. That's all I can tell you.'
I ripped the envelope.