Untenable though this theory might be in the case of a stable personality, it was the most applicable among many others in the case of a woman long unbalanced by grave trauma in childhood (in the Fuhrerbunker).

  For reasons of caution I kept my beliefs to myself and proceeded as she would have expected, telephoning her doctor and asking him to come at once. (He would be a member of Phoenix and she would simply explain to him that his services were not in fact required, as nothing more than simulated torture had been undergone.) Note: the presence of blood on her legs (as evidence to me that the torture had been genuine) had been produced by the slight cutting of the flesh behind one ear-lobe. At our next meeting I looked for the scar left by the incision and remarked it; healing was not by that time complete.

  Before leaving the apartment I put my theory about her violent change of loyalties to the test, by writing a number on one of her Kleenex tissues and telling her that she could reach me there by phone if she wished. This number - that of a bar named the Brunnen - had been picked at random from the directory while I waited for the doctor to answer. The same night I checked the Brunnen Bar for observers or start-point tags and found none. It was to be expected that one or more would have been posted there if Lindt had given the number to her people. I felt it safe to assume that she had not given it, and her omission confirmed my theory: she was now allied with me.

  It was concluded, at about the same time, that Oktober had decided to change his tactics after my exhibition of syncope. The narcoanalyst (Fabian: see under Interrogation) had described to Oktober a technique used at Dachau, whereby information was successfully extracted from people believing themselves to be threatened with certain death. They would be ‘reprieved’ and offered the promise of sexual congress at the height of stimulation (return of life and positive forces granted by ‘reprieve’). These particular circumstances were in fact my own, not long before I had been expected to go to Lindt soon after believing that I had been ‘reprieved’ (Grunewald Bridge episode, q.v.). Oktober, in my view, had been so impressed with Fabian’s technique that when I passed out in the Lindt apartment he went in to her and told her to interrogate me herself on an implied promise of sexual congress. The prospect was the more hopeful since I was thought to be in a state of compassion for her, following the simulated torture session. (It was to increase my compassion that blood-drops were then taken from the ear-lobe and applied to the inside thighs, indicating to me that an attack had been made on the urethra, in line with classical method).

  She was too distressed mentally by her bewilderment and fear (see foregoing) to tell me that she had now, in truth, defected from Phoenix. It would not have been easy for her to explain her position, since she believed that at that time I assumed her to have defected a long time ago. She would have simply told Oktober that she would try out the new tactics, and let him leave the apartment. Her actual breakdown came at that precise moment, leading to the fit of sobbing once we were alone.

  From the time when I left her apartment that night there was a noticeable reduction in tagging and observation. Example: my meeting with Pol was unobserved and there had been no tag on my journey to the park. It was assumed the adverse party was giving me rope so that I should - being off-guard - try to visit Lindt again. She would then be expected to try their new tactics as ordered by Oktober. I did not go to see her. Their patience became exhausted and she was next ordered to contact me and ask me to see her at the apartment. I then went there and found the agent Helmut Braun. (Note: she had put on clothes of a vivid red. I had seen her only in black, before. I believed this to be an expression - not so much to me as to herself - of her radically-altered attitudes (red=life, black=death), and I accepted this as further confirmation of my theory that she was now allied with me and opposed to Phoenix. There follows the section on Helmut Braun.

  I could hear the water lapping at the legs of the bridge.

  Helmut Braun? It was difficult to think about him when I stood so close to her.

  “There’s no time, Quill, to talk. As long as you trust me.”

  I said: “I do.”

  She took my hand. Her eyes shone in the lamplight. She said: “Then I can come with you.” “Are you walking out on them?”

  “Running. I don’t know when you found out I was working for them, but you know when I stopped.”

  “It hasn’t been long.”

  “But it will be. They suspect me now - that’s why I had to give that exhibition in there. I’ll be safe if I go with you. Take me.”

  “I’m going to my Control. There might be time to stop Sprungbrett if there’s a last-minute hitch. And I’ve seen their faces, and I know their names. So I’ve got to send a signal.”

  “Take me with you. Wherever you go I’ll be safe. You’re my life, Quill.”

  I said: “It’s no go. There’s still a risk. They told me it’s too late but they know I’ll try to put a signal in to Control, in case there’s a last hope. And there’s a risk they’ll try to stop me.”

  Her face had gone bleak. “You won’t take me?”

  “I can’t. Not safe.”

  “It’s that you don’t trust me.” She took her hand from mine.

  I looked past her along the span of girders and then looked again at her face. “Listen to me. This is how much I trust you. There’s a risk of their shooting me down if I try to send that signal. If they do, it won’t ever reach my Control. Unless you’ll help me.”

  Her head came up. To reassure her I gave a smile. She said nothing.

  I told her: “Fix this number in your memory. 02.89.62. Berlin exchange. “I made her repeat it twice. “Oktober won’t get on your track for a time - you made a convincing show in there. You’re more free than I am, and safer. Phone that number. Give them the code-word: Foxtail. Tell them about Sprungbrett. All of it. Then ask them to pick you up. Once you’re with my people you’ll be safe.”

  “Then … I’ll see you again?”

  “If we both get through.”

  I kissed her mouth for the last time and turned away and walked quickly to the end of the bridge without looking back, but I knew I would always remember her as she was then, my lost little bunkerkinder, slim and erect and triumphant in her soldier’s coat with the light on her helmet of hair.

  It would take her five minutes to return to the house and report to her Reichsleiter, and five minutes for them to phone that number and find it was a fake. It would give me ten minutes’ start and a chance to live.

  21 : TRAP-SHOOT

  In trap-shooting the pigeon is released from the trap and then shot down.

  This was my situation now.

  I had stopped for a few minutes at the end of the bridge to survey the terrain; now I had reached a street in Zehlendorf, and stopped again.

  One of them was seventy-five yards distant, standing in shadow. Another was closer, waiting some fifty yards in the opposite direction. (It was the pincer trick, one tag rounding a block and keeping ahead. It is useful but can be done only when there are plenty of tags.) A third man was not far from the first and I couldn’t see him but I knew where he was because I’d seen him fade. The taxi had pulled up quietly at the intersection and no one got out.

  A clock struck eleven. I listened patiently to the strokes, calmed by their measured certainties. It was a half-hour since I had left the bridge and so far I’d seen five of them.

  There was no hurry. Some time before dawn I must get a signal through and do it without their knowledge. On the way from the bridge I had passed four phone-kiosks but couldn’t use them. If I went into a kiosk to call up Control in Rabinda-Tanath I would come out into a hail of fire. They would then go into the kiosk and call up their highest contact in one of the police departments, probably (and preferably) the Kriminal polizei because they could get a quicker reaction from the Berlin Exchange. The exchange would be told to find out what number had just been called from the kiosk and to find out the name and address of the subscriber. Phoenix would then send a party into Local Control Berlin to seize all papers and personnel.

  Phoenix was ready to launch a big-scale operation and they couldn’t do it before they were certain of how much my Control knew about it. It must be an operation whose success would depend on absolute secrecy and/or surprise. Pol had told me: “If you help us bring down Phoenix you’ll save a million lives and it will almost certainly cost you yours.” He had said: “We want information badly. We want to know where Phoenix has its base. They want information too, and as badly. They want to know how much we know of their intentions. Their most direct way of getting that information is through you.” He had said: “Your mission is to get near enough to see them and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage.”

  I had believed him at last and still did. They would be waiting now in the room on the ninth floor of the corner building at Unter den Eichen and Rhoner-allee with a full staff, waiting for me to signal. The line would be open to London. Phoenix was also waiting for me to signal, so that they could locate Local Berlin and wipe it out before my people could reach their base and wipe out Phoenix. It was my own situation in macrocosm: the kill and the overkill.

  There were no more doubts that Phoenix did in fact intend launching a big-scale operation: they were taking immense trouble with me, keeping me alive and hoping to crack me open by one method after another. I was the third operator to have been assigned to this one mission. They had let Charington get too close and had killed him off early. They had given Kenneth Lindsay Jones more rope - he’d been within rifle-shot of their base when they had killed him. Now they had let me right in and let me go again, matching my last single throw.

  I was now certain that KLJ had died because he’d been working with a contact. He had approached that contact within sight of the Phoenix base and Phoenix had panicked and shot them both. (It is not easy, even in Berlin, to dispose of a corpse. Probably they had managed to get a sinker round the contact, but KLJ was found floating.) He had got so close to base (and had possibly been let in and out again, as I had been) that the risk of his passing his information to Control was too high, and it was a double risk because of the contact.

  Now they were going the limit because their need to locate Local Berlin was fully urgent. Ergo, the time for the launching of their operation must be getting very short.

  It would have been Oktober who had triggered the present situation. He had lost patience when Inga had failed to report any success in interrogating me on the Dachau principle, which she had been ordered to do. He had decided to try me with the file on Sprungbrett. Helmut Braun had been sent in with it to convince me that he was a defector, as I was thought to believe Inga herself.

  The file trap had possibly been tried on KLJ, in which case I was surviving him only because I had no contact. It may have been simply that they didn’t have sufficient tags to cover him and his contact safely. Tonight they had five working on me, probably more.

  Sprungbrett didn’t look too bad on paper and they wouldn’t expect a field-operator to have much knowledge of military strategy. But there were some obvious flaws and it was then that I had decided on my single throw, gambling on the assumption that the file had been given freely into my hand in order to force me into action. I was to grab it and try to get it to my Control and make the touch-down before they tripped me.

  Their risk was slight: Sprungbrett was a faked file, got up specially for me, and if I managed to reach Control with it I’d have wasted my time. But it would give them a chance to locate my base by tagging me to whatever point of contact I made.

  I’d never seen Braun or a photograph of Braun. I was sure that Inga was still allied with me but too scared to make a move in front of Braun. I think she would have told me that the Sprungbrett file was a fake if it had been possible to talk. It wasn’t. First Braun, then the man in the lift, then Braun again in the taxi. He must have been worried when I said I was going into the Phoenix base. He had no orders to cover that one. So he stayed behind us in the apartment and either made a quick phone-call or tipped off one of the tags that were by that time thick in the area. The message had gone into the Phoenix base: Quiller is on his way.

  They were thrown off balance. They had covered the area with heavy tagging, given me the file, and sent me along the path to my base. Now I was heading for theirs.

  Braun left the taxi first and went straight in to see Oktober without my knowledge (he was a ‘defector’). He told him I had arrived outside. Decision: to carry on with the same game. I’d read the file and wanted confirmation. I would have it.

  Inga and I were kept waiting in the hall. In the operations room they set up the map-table for Mediterranean Area and positioned the markers: a ten-minute undertaking with a section leaf table of that kind where a dozen maps can be slipped in and out together with the magnetic strips.

  They brought me in.

  A defector is a creature as peculiar as the chameleon. He will tend to take on the colour of his environment. In the London Bureau we had a man who worked with us for five years and defected during a mission in Tangier. Two weeks and he was back with us and we knew what had happened but didn’t tell him. He was sent out again under cover that he didn’t suspect and three days later we sat listening to the tape: he had met the adverse party again and talked to him in a room where we had miked the ceiling-fan. He told the adverse party that he had defected: yet we knew by his actions that he was now back on his mission and doing a fine job for us. But we’d shut down on him and he found out and hanged himself on the iron grille of a shrine in the Iglesia San Augustino.

  Normally a true defector will get out and stay out unless great pressures (financial or political) add their influence to his already uncertain values. Then he will either double or bounce and they mostly bounce. Our man hanged himself because he’d lost direction and couldn’t find his way home because he no longer knew what home was.

  The most common instances are less spectacular: a man will defect, take one look at the terrain on the other side and make for home again, chastened and sobered. He is like a man who swears one day he’ll have himself a whore and gets to the top of the stairs and makes a bolt for it.

  The prevalent factors bearing on defection are moral, political, sometimes financial, religious and sexual (particularly homosexual).

  Inga was influenced by none of these pressures. She was character-motivated. She was not a true defector. She thought she was. She even put on red slacks to prove it. Then she lost direction and had to head for home - because she knew still where home was. A crystal of ashes.

  And when I had told her I was going into the Phoenix base she’d begun shivering, because when the crash came she was going to be there to watch it. She was going to be a part of it herself. She was going to re-establish herself with all the protestative violence of the true repentant, and shift the guilt on to a sacrificial victim. So she took the file and handed it over and said: “He’s read it. All of it.”

  Not that it mattered. She hadn’t known I was meant to read it. Braun would have been under orders not to tell her. She was already coming close to being suspect of defection and probably knew it. Oktober was wondering why she had made no attempt to contact me and interrogate me on the Dachau principle as instructed, and why she had drawn no scrap of information from me ever since the time of the crush-attempt when she was given the mission.

  Certainly she hadn’t been trusted to escort me alone to the Grunewald base: Braun had come with us and hadn’t left us until we were within earshot of new cover. She knew this and her fears increased, and her fit of fervour in the presence of the sacred ash was a desperate attempt to convince them of her unwavering faith.

  Here in the chill streets the night was sane again, with none of the mad overtones of that house with its swastika trappings and its vestiges of the Fuhrerbunker. Yet this whole city was mad, however much it was denied by mere acceptance. Not far from here the Russian war memorial stood inside the British boundary, so that it was agreed that barbed-wire should surround it. A Russian sentry guarded the memorial and a British sentry guarded the barbed-wire. To the north, in Spandau Prison, thirty men of four nations - British, French, American and Russian - guarded Hess, Speer and von Schirach: a hundred and twenty armed soldiers guarding three old men the world had long forgotten. Beside such monuments of absurdity, the renaissance of a Nazi group with illusions of making war seemed almost rational.

  Thoughts of Inga came again because after half an hour I could still feel the touch of her mouth. There was a question left in my mind and I had to clear it even though it couldn’t alter my position or immediate actions. Of three possible answers, one seemed most apt: she had followed me from the house to the bridge for her own purposes, not under orders. She knew that her organisation had suspected her of defecting. She hoped that by coming with me to their base, by handing them the file and by hailing the burned bones of their common god she had convinced them of her faith: but she couldn’t be sure.

  They needed urgently to locate my Control. If she could locate it herself and report her success to them she would no longer go in fear of them; they would accept her and honour her. Therefore she had made a final effort to persuade me that she was still a defector whose faith now rested solely in one. (“You’re my life, Quill,” she had said.) Perhaps she believed that because of what had happened between us on that innocent afternoon I could still be undermined. It might have been so. She had begged me to take her with me … and she knew where I was going: to my Control.