The Berlin Crossing (16 page)

He blinked his eyes open, became aware of the cell-like room, and the horror of the night came back to him. The black man
down in the station entrance, blood seeping on the tiled floor from behind his ear. ‘He’s dead,’ Ingham had said but he wouldn’t
be surprised if the bastard was lying.

He took in the thin yellow curtains on the tall windows, the functional furniture – washstand with white jug and basin, chest
of drawers, single wardrobe, a chair pushed under a small table up against the window. A cell for a student or a monk. Or
a prisoner.

At least they’d left him his personal stuff. Ingham had placed the plastic bag from the police station on the chair beside
the bed before advising him to get some sleep, that tomorrow everything would seem clearer. Roland hadn’t bothered to check
the door after Ingham: he’d heard the lock click as Ingham turned the key outside.

So tomorrow was here and not much, if anything, seemed clearer. Terry was somewhere else, he was sure of that. He could only
hope that Ingham kept his word about getting him home safely.

MI5 or MI6 or some kind of secret service shenanigans, it had to be something like that. Ingham wanted him to do something
in Germany, or maybe Austria, he could figure that much out,
especially with all the newspaper headlines about Berlin.

It’s more legal than what your brother did to that black in High Street Ken
.

Slippery bastard, that Ingham. Well-mannered and beautifully spoken in at least two languages, the kind of customer his father
would drool over if he set foot in the jewellery shop back home.

Roland looked at his watch. Handmade by his father.
House of Feldmann
it said, in tiny letters on the face. And engraved on the back by his father’s hand to mark the twenty-first birthday of
his eldest son, his heir apparent, Roland Feldmann, now detained in a cell-like room in an unidentified house somewhere in
the south of England.

After ten, his handmade watch said. Just a few hours’ sleep, then, after he’d been shepherded out of the van and into the
big, silent house. Silent, but he’d sensed watching eyes as Ingham led him up the sweeping staircase and along the lino-floored
corridor to the bedrooms. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, he felt, not after such a strange night, but he’d fallen asleep in
his underwear as soon as his head hit the hard pillow.

Gazing out over the ragged lawns he was able to admit to a deeper malaise that had been troubling him for years, standing
behind the gleaming counter in his father’s jewellery shop.
Smile and display, smile and clinch the sale
. Was his place behind the gleaming counter the purpose of school, of university, even of all the hours on the rugby field?

Roland was not given to bouts of fanciful introspection yet now, virtually imprisoned by a cynical manipulator who called
himself Ingham, he wondered if perhaps this locked room – and what lay beyond – might not, somehow, be the destination towards
which, unknowingly, he had been journeying all his life.

He looked at himself in the hinged mirror on the washstand and smiled ruefully.
You were destined for this, were you
?

Bullshit. But at the same time, who knows
?

He padded to the window across the linoleum. More green stuff. Somebody in the British security service must have found a
job lot at a knockdown price. Or maybe somebody in the service had a brother-in-law who produced it. Dealing with eager sales
reps at Feldmann, Watchmakers and Jewellers, had made him just a little bit cynical.

The window overlooked extensive lawns which needed cutting. The surrounding hedges were also in need of a trim. Herr Feldmann,
proprietor of the jeweller’s which bore his name, would not approve of the unkempt appearance of such extensive premises.
Roland found himself thinking that he didn’t approve either.

Beyond the lawns and hedges he could see the black slated roofs and upper walls of a more modern building and, beyond it,
a high wall which he took to be the boundary wall of the house. He could remember the van halting last night, the sound of
voices, the hoarse noise of gates being opened and locked again behind them as they drove through. Ingham’s organization didn’t
seem as well-versed in alarm systems as his jeweller father: even at this distance Roland could see the smashed bottle glass
cemented into the top of the high perimeter wall. Maybe Ingham wanted his advice on how to secure a perimeter wall. Or how
to breach one.

Hunger and the need to piss suddenly assailed him. He turned from the window and began to hammer on the door.

‘And what exactly is it that you plan to do with this German-speaking Irishman?’ Yearling’s small head shook on the thin neck
above the corpulent body. ‘Or perhaps it’s too much to expect that I should be kept fully informed of my organization’s operations?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Jonathan.’ Fitch-Bellingham’s drawl was more mellifluous than ever. ‘You know perfectly well that I wouldn’t
dream of mounting an operation without your approval.’

They both knew that there was a grain of truth in Fitch-Bellingham’s words. Both of them also knew that Fitch-Bellingham considered
it politic to keep his own left hand in ignorance of most of what the right hand was doing, or planned on doing. Yearling,
although the Director of the Service, would be told as little as possible by Fitch-Bellingham. Both of them also knew that,
despite Yearling’s protests, this was the way the Director liked it; later, if developments proved unsatisfactory, or even
disastrous (as sometimes happened), Yearling could truthfully say he had been kept in the dark by maverick subordinates.

They were sitting in the so-called boardroom of Highfield: a high-ceilinged, once-elegant room which now housed a long dining-room
table and an assortment of non-matching chairs which, to Yearling’s eye, looked as if they had escaped from some unruly NCO’s
mess. His distaste was not lessened by the remains
of Fitch-Bellingham’s lunch on the flower-decorated tray beside him.

‘I had to hurry through a perfectly good lunch to get here,’ he said, pushing away the remains of fatty chicken bones and
congealed gravy. ‘Couldn’t they at least remove the evidence?’

‘You know perfectly well, Jonathan, that there is no “they”. There’s just an ageing housekeeper who is visiting her equally
ageing sister, and Adams, who was kind enough to prepare lunch for me and should be having a bite himself just now.’

‘Ah, yes, Adams, your trusty batman of the Balkans – whatever should we do without the fellow?’ Yearling made no attempt to
hide his contempt.

Fitch-Bellingham let it go: Yearling’s desk-bound war was an itch best left unscratched.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘this house would probably fall down without him. We
do
need more staff, you know we can’t go on like this.’

Yearling shifted his huge weight uncomfortably on the leather seat.

‘You know how it is, F-B.’ The use of the initials was an intimation of collegiality. ‘Budgets and ministerial cutbacks –
I’ve protested, of course, but security is a dirty word, it seems, when it comes to spending money.’

When it comes to spending money on
us
, you mean, Fitch-Bellingham thought. MI5 and MI6 and Special Branch managed to prise funds out of Whitehall but then they
had credible masters to plead their case to the politicians. Whereas we have Yearling, he thought, the kind of fellow who
should be running an obscure prep school in Somerset or further afield.

‘We’re going to need funds to handle this operation,’ he said.

‘Which is exactly what? Now that we’ve got back to the reason for my rushing through lunch.’

‘We’ve got to find out what happened to Imhof,’ Fitch-Bellingham said. ‘And maybe we can still get our hands on those maps.’

Something like a groan came from Yearling’s small mouth.

‘Imhof,’ he said, ‘is a disaster that does not need revisiting.’

‘You mean we should forget that he’s dead and that possibly the others are as well?’

‘You know I don’t mean that,’ Yearling protested.

Losing Imhof had been a catastrophe, they both knew that. And not just for poor, murdered Imhof himself but for the organization
too. Up-to-date maps of the entire East German terrain had been promised, together with contingency battle plans for the Warsaw
Pact armies. The Minister was startled, then delighted by the prospect; the Prime Minister himself was chuffed; the Joint
Intelligence Committee were agog; finally the Americans were advised of the treasures that were being spirited out of Berlin.

And then Rudi Imhof’s body was washed up (or dumped) on the bank below the Adenauerstrasse bridge, with an unseemly amount
of identity information in the pockets of the corpse’s ill-fitting suit to make clear to the finders just who had had his
neck broken before being delivered (without maps) to the watchers in West Berlin.

Cue horror in Whitehall. Fingers pointing, throats clearing, budgets under scrutiny. The JIC separately and collectively washed
their hands of the whole mess. The Americans recorded it as another typical cock-up by the Brits.

The Prime Minister’s personal displeasure was conveyed to Yearling. Folding up the organization’s tent for good was mooted.
Yearling had taken Fitch-Bellingham with him as support to a gathering of the Special Committee on Security Affairs, convened
in a third-floor office in an anonymous block off the Haymarket.

Yearling and Fitch-Bellingham exited the meeting with their organization still intact. Whether the reprieve was temporary
or absolute was by no means clear – but what else could you expect from politicians?

What was clear was that, in Fitch-Bellingham’s words, the organization was ‘in a parlous condition’. Within the month since
Rudi Imhof’s murder and consequent failure to deliver the Warsaw Pact battle plans, the organization had had a number of older
agents permanently pensioned off. And the crew of army personnel – cooks, drivers, fitness instructors who serviced the organization
– were abruptly detailed to return to their respective barracks. Fitch-Bellingham’s sometime batman, Ivor Adams, together
with a skeleton crew, were left to oversee the accelerating demise of Highfield. Money for the organization’s operations had
always been tight; now it seemed to have disappeared.

‘We’re falling apart,’ Fitch-Bellingham said at last. ‘Not just here,’ his outstretched hand took in the shabby dining room
and the unkempt lawns beyond the window, ‘but in the field too. God knows if we have a single useful agent left in East Germany.
We both know that every signal we’ve received since Imhof’s murder has been worthless, nothing more than the kind of information
you could pick up from
Time
or
Newsweek
, and that’s not saying much, is it? It could be Ulbricht himself tapping out the stuff, for all we know.’

Both of them were silent awhile, imagining Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the Socialist Unity Party, at the Morse key in East
Berlin.

‘Or even Honecker,’ Yearling said at last.

‘It doesn’t bear thinking about it,’ Fitch-Bellingham said. ‘I just hope Rudi didn’t suffer at the hands of that bastard.’
Erich Honecker, head of the Stasi, was, if anything, even more ruthless than Ulbricht.

‘And you think,’ Yearling said, ‘that you can establish the truth of the matter by using this Feldmann fellow?’

‘Perhaps even better than that.’ This was the nub of the matter and Fitch-Bellingham leaned closer, spoke more softly to his
Director. ‘It may well be that our network is still intact – we simply don’t know. If Rudi was held for any length of time
in the “submarine”, then of course he gave up everything.’ Yearling nodded: in the end everybody gave everything up after
a few days in the old Hohenschönhausen underground cells. ‘But we don’t know that. Maybe he bought it quickly – we just don’t
know. Maybe he was lucky to die without ever having to see the inside of the “submarine”. I hope so, for the poor bastard’s
own sake.’

‘And Feldmann?’ Yearling’s interruption was curt: old F-B did have an unfortunate overly sentimental attachment to long-term
operatives who dated back to his time in occupied Berlin. ‘What can an ignorant, untrained fellow from Ireland do about all
this?’

‘He might be untrained but he’s not ignorant. He speaks impeccable German and he’s a university graduate.’

‘Of some
Irish
institution.’ Yearling smiled his thin smile. ‘Not exactly Cambridge, is it, or even Oxford?’

Something like exasperation shadowed Fitch-Bellingham’s features. Hardly surprising the organization was a shambles when the
Director was forever pining for the company of Maclean and Philby and the other nancy boys over at M15.

‘The boy is clever.’ Fitch-Bellingham began to tick off on his fingers. ‘He’s resourceful. He’s a fighter. He’s got guts.
And, as I said, he speaks German like someone who grew up in Berlin.’

‘Very well, F-B, very well.’ Yearling stole a glance at his watch: best to get this business over with and get back to Marjorie
and his guests. ‘You have a plan?’

‘I plan to insert Feldmann into East Berlin, kitted out with the best possible ID, and take it from there.’

‘Take it from there?’ Disbelief was evident on Yearling’s face. ‘That’s all?
Take it from there
?’

‘Jonathan, you know perfectly well that it’s sometimes inadvisable for you to be involved in the minutiae of operations—’

‘Minutiae, F-B, are one thing, but I’ve got to have some sort of broad outline if I’m to obtain ministerial approval for this
undertaking.’

‘It might be best, Jonathan,’ Fitch-Bellingham said smoothly, ‘not to seek ministerial approval on this occasion. After all,
we are discussing a very low-level operation here.’

‘
Low level
? Inserting an agent into East Berlin?’

‘Consider, Jonathan, please consider.’ Fitch-Bellingham spoke slowly, once more itemizing on his long fingers. ‘One, this
boy is not an agent, just a youngster doing us a favour. Two, nobody, absolutely nobody, knows he is here at Highfield. Three,
if things go awry, we can have him in and out of East Berlin in a single day, just like any other tourist with his knapsack.
And, four,’ Fitch-Bellingham paused, ‘Imhof is dead, and we have no idea how he intended to obtain those plans or how he might
have conveyed them to us but we have another possibility.’