slowed. Then the hilltop closed off my view of the horrible little cameo.
‘You were fantastic!’ said the kid in high excitement. ‘Un-bloody-believable! You got him.’
‘Yes, clever me. It was exactly what I was trying to avoid.’
‘Trying to avoid? What?’
‘They’ll not forgive us for that one,’ I said grimly. ‘And there’s a witness still alive. These are sure to be Moscow men, not Germans. You don’t know the lengths they’ll go to get even with us.’
‘You want to go back and kill him?’
I wet my lips. For a moment I was going to say yes. It was the logical, sensible thing to do, even if it was the kind of solution they glossed over at the training school. But at that moment I wasn’t sure I was up to killing him in cold blood. I was drained, and experience told me the kid wouldn’t be able to do it. ‘Keep going,’ I said.
We sped through the night like drunken bank-robbers, the kid taking the bends in narrow country roads at dangerous speeds. He was flushed and excited and driving beyond his abilities. Suddenly he said: ‘What say we give the Autobahn a try?’
It was tempting of course. We were close to the major route that ran from Berlin to the bright lights of freedom. On the Autobahn there would be lots of ‘Westies’, commercials and trucks trundling through what we used to call ‘the Soviet Zone’ on their normal route between the West Sector of Berlin and West Germany. But such a short cut was too tempting, too logical, too convenient to be safe. ‘No. That’s the first place they’ll block off.’
‘I have extra papers,’ said the kid. ‘In a little box welded to the underside of the car.’ He was Mr Ultra-efficient.
‘No,’ I said. ‘And slow down. That flea-bitten moggie of yours will be all right for a day without food. Forget the Autobahn. It’s not worth taking a chance. Even the traffic computer on the western end picks up drivers for five-year-old unpaid parking tickets in their home town.’
‘You’re right.’ He sobered a little.
‘Stick to the plan,’ I told him.
‘The plan is shot. VERDI is dead: one of the opposition is dead … maybe two of them. We don’t have any escaper needing false papers and transportation.’
‘Stick to the plan,’ I said. ‘Assume the dead man wasn’t VERDI; assume VERDI is on the run.’
‘You’re crazy. We’re sticking our necks out for nothing.’
‘Maybe I am crazy. You’ve never been out there where we all go crazy, or maybe you’d be crazy too.’ I remembered so many times when things had gone wrong for me. The field agent always desperately hopes that the operation can be salvaged. You hope like hell that the men assigned to meet you won’t just cut their losses and run. ‘We’ll go to the safe house and wait for an hour until the Stasi alert teams have done their preliminary checks. Driving in these rural parts in the small hours of the morning makes me feel very conspicuous. Any time now they’ll have a chopper overhead.’
‘It’s a village church about eight miles from here. The pastor is one of our people; an experienced man.’
‘Let’s do it,’ I said. ‘Let’s get off the road and come back on it when the commuter traffic starts. We’re too bloody visible out here in the sticks in the night.’
Before the war this village had been neat and prosperous, a dazzling prospect of whitewashed walls, flowers and well-kept farms with the church its cherished heart. Now it was a miserable little huddle of houses. Its ancient church had been destroyed, along with half the village, by a jettisoned RAF bomb-load in 1944. After the war ended the Red Army garrison commander had permitted the villagers to build a hut on the same site and continue to hold services. The postwar German communist politicians were more actively hostile to the Church than the Russian troops had been, and now that temporary structure – patched and propped – was still the villagers’ only place of worship.
We parked the Volvo alongside a rusty tractor in the barn and the kid found some keys hidden in the bowels of the tractor’s engine. Under the temporary hut the crypt of the old church had been restored to use. He took me down a flight of stone steps and when he switched on the lights the whole crypt, an extensive vaulted subterranean area, was revealed. One section had been divided off and made into a chapel with a permanent altar and a strange assortment of chairs that had probably been collected over the years, donated by the congregation. A large austere altar and a candelabra looked as if they had been salvaged from the wreckage of the razed church, repaired and restored to become the centre-piece of this improvised sanctuary.
The pastor arrived five minutes after we got there. Jumping out of bed fully alert in the middle of the night is a part of the job for a good pastor just as it is for a field agent, fireman or cop.
The old pastor seemed strangely familiar: weathered face with wrinkles and old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses. I remembered having seen him a couple of times in Berlin, at the houses of mutual acquaintances. Now he displayed unlimited energy as he strode about switching on lights and tidying up misplaced coffee cups and pamphlets, prayer books and dried flowers with that dedication that neurotics display when they need time to think. A woman in a sleeveless floral-pattern house-coat arrived and without a word brewed a jug of foul-smelling coffee for us, while the pastor kept up small-talk about his village and masterfully restrained any temptation to ask us questions.
‘We lost contact,’ the kid told him as we drank our coffee. ‘Our man is unlikely to have revealed – or even been told – that this was our first stop, but I wanted to go through the motions.’ He turned to include me in his speech, as if I might otherwise contradict him and tell the pastor that our man was dead on a blood-soaked sofa in Magdeburg. And that we were fugitives who’d murdered a government official, probably bringing retribution hard on our heels.
‘Poor devil,’ said the pastor with convincing concern. He turned around fully now, as if the time had come to give us his full attention. ‘If he’s out there with a general alarm ringing in his ears, I hope God is watching over him.’ I wondered how much the pastor had been told. Draped upon a chair I noticed a dark suit and outer clothes, smelling strongly of moth-repellent. If these were intended to disguise our missing escapee the pastor might have been told quite a lot, right down to VERDI’s shoe size.
The kid said: ‘Someone was killed – it might have been our contact who was killed … And we had trouble on the road. You should be prepared for house-to-house searches.’
‘It’s not often that things go according to plan,’ the pastor said, remaining almost unnaturally calm in the circumstances. The only sign of anxiety came in the way he took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one with that steady determination that is the mark of the addict. He blew smoke. ‘It’s in the nature of undercover work that the unexpected so often happens. You plan for three different eventualities but the fourth occurs.’ He grinned and reached for the coffee jug. ‘Moltke said it: he said it about war.’
‘No more coffee for me.’ I put my hand across the top of the china mug.
‘This is a war that is going on here,’ he said. ‘It’s no use denying it. Men are always at war. We are always at war because every man is at war with himself.’
‘Is that another of Moltke’s sayings?’ I asked him.
He’d been looking at me quizzically and now – jug in hand – he ventured: ‘We met. Remember? Some sort of celebration in a private house in Köpenick … No; wait: a hotel off the Ku-Damm and a fancy-dress party. I know your wife?’
It was framed as a question. ‘It’s possible,’ I said warily.
‘Yes, I worked with her. She is a great woman.’ He said it with a depth of reverence and awe that startled me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Perhaps my subdued response prompted him to tell me more: ‘She started