The Contract (18 page)

' It's not cops and robbers, you know.'

'When we go for the autobahn, I'll want to carry a gun.'

' It'll never be agreed to, you know that. If anything happened . ..'

'Exactly right, if anything happened , . . if one idiot stands in the way. If one Schutzpolizei holds his hand up . . . What do you do? You won't be there to tell me. Not you, not Mawby.'

Because that was the crucible, and Carter wasn't travelling. He'd be at Helmstedt and waiting. Kicking his heels at Checkpoint Alpha and thinking of the restaurant they'd take over when Johnny came through.

Carter was the blunt end man. And Carter couldn't read this young man, young enough to be his son, young enough to have had the small front room of his home, young enough to have earned in Northern Ireland the mauve and green ribbon of active service, young enough to have killed there . . . How do you love a young man, offer yourself as parental substitute, when he's slaughtered a child, shown no public remorse?

And Carter didn't know him, could not search a path into the mind of the man they would send to Magdeburg. And he would only be waiting for him, waiting with a restaurant reservation.

'I'll see what I can do.'

'We wouldn't want a little thing to stymie us.'

Carter showed a beleaguered, tired sympathy. 'I'll argue the case for a gun with Mawby. Don't worry at it.'

He carried the bottle to Johnny. Something terrible in those watchful, clear lit eyes, something that frightened him,

that made him want to turn his back on the man who had shot a teenage girl and wept no tears.

'You're a cold bugger, Johnny.'

' I'm a contract man,' Johnny said, and his eyes blinked and the brightness had fled.

Ulf Becker jumped easily down from the lorry's tailboard. He didn't look back to see how Heini Schalke coped with the drop. He held his pack lightly with one hand, trailed his rifle in the other. Dirty, hot, bathed in his sweat he stopped in front of Company Orders, the board on which duty rosters were posted. Becker sniggered, pointed out the carbon typed sheet to those who followed him.

Battalion at Seggerde directed company at Weferlingen to provide two sections in the morning in support of company at Walbeck. An epidemic of measles was responsible. Much laughter, much ribaldry.

And welcome . . . Becker's name on the list of those to be sent the eight kilometres south from Weferlingen to Walbeck.

Anything for variety, anything to change the outlook of the sugar beet fields across the wire, and the farm houses, and the road junctions, and the viewing platforms where the British troops and the Bundesgrenzschutz and the Zoll Customs men came to peer across at them . . . and there was no hope of breaching the fence at Weferlingen, no justification there for writing a letter to a girl in Berlin.

Carter opened the door silently, and walked on his toes towards the bed.

Johnny sleeping and lit by the early morning sunshine. Carter intruding, as if creeping into the room of his daughter when she had been small.

And this one had a child's face too. Relaxed and easy breathing, a calm set mouth, the legs drawn up and silhouetted under the bedclothes. The defenceless, vulnerable posture of sleep. Carter carried a china mug of tea to the bedside table and grimaced at the street map of Magdeburg that had been left crudely folded beside the lamp. Bloody awful bedside reading. Switch yourself off from the day's work with a street map of a ghastly city of chimneys and furnaces in the German bloody Democratic Republic. Poor bastard. Everything so neat in the room. As if Johnny infiltrated himself between the furnishings and fittings, disturbed nothing, moved nothing. Clothes all in the wardrobe, or folded on the chair. Shoes together and slippers beside, as if for kit inspection. Means more than that, doesn't it? If his possessions aren't strewn on the floor, if he doesn't leave his mark in the nest, then he's a stranger here. He doesn't believe that he belongs. The return of the thought, the thought that came many times to Carter . . . They did not know this man.

'Johnny, Johnny.'

He started in the bed, tightness on the face, the peace gone and fled. A sharpness of movement, the fast clearing of the mind. Carter had thrown a pebble into still waters. The private face was gone, Carter would not recapture it.

'Johnny, I brought some tea for you.'

Johnny propped on one elbow. Johnny gazing at him and seeking a reason. Johnny who slept so tidily that the parting of his hair was still intact.

' I brought some tea.'

Brought some tea because that was a personal gesture, that was a bridge between pointman and planner, that was the way Carter hoped to span the chasm. Carter could not have said why he needed the relationship, nor where could be found its importance to DIPPER. He knew only that without it there would be an emptiness, that the mission would have no heart. And if there were catastrophe then Johnny would need the knowledge that he belonged and was a part of something greater that supported and upheld him. That was why Carter had gone down to Mrs Ferguson's kitchen and boiled the kettle and made the tea.

'Playing the housemaid?'

'I never sleep at weekends, I never just lie in. When I'm at home, when we haven't a show on, then I'd be out in the garden or walking the dog ...

I thought you'd like a mug of tea.'

'Thanks.'

'I always like one myself, early on.'

'You were right to wake me. I'm trying to marry the post- card snaps to the map. They're both ersatz, substitutes.' Johnny yawned, threw back his head, scratched at his chest. 'I was at it late last night, must have been at it a couple of hours after we went up.'

'You'll be all right, Johnny. We all think so, we're all very pleased with the way it's gone so far.'

'Thanks.'

'It's a special day today, Johnny, did you know that?' He was playing the parent figure, couldn't help himself.

'What day is it today?'

'It's the first of the month.'

'What happens on the first of the month?'

'It's the first of June, come on . . . it's the day Otto Guttmann goes to Magdeburg.'

'You brought me a cup of tea to remind me? Just for that?'

Carter flinched. 'Not like that, no. I just thought it was a bit of a landmark for us all. I'm sorry, I should have let you sleep . ..'

'Not to worry.' Johnny heaved himself out of bed, shook his head to achieve the effect of a bucket of cold water poured on his face.

' I spoke to Mawby again last night, after you'd gone up. He's off again to Germany, not coming here today. About the weapon, I worked on him a bit . . . he's not happy but he's agreed ... he took a bit of persuading . . .'

There was a pride in Carter's voice at his achievement against the habits of the Service. 'There'll be a drop-off point organised for you in Magdeburg . . . You know we're going outside normal practice on this one, it's irregular.'

'What are you giving me?'

'Probably the APS, the Stechkin. Nine millimetre, twenty round magazine. They'll get one with a tubular shoulder stock which'll bump the range up to a couple of hundred metres.'

'That would be right.'

'I suggested to Mawby that if you were to be armed we had better make it effective. In for a penny, and that nonsense. We can also make available up to 4 fragmentation grenades, we reckoned the RGD 5s. That makes the pay load all east bloc . . . might confuse them a bit.'

'Good for you.' Johnny had begun to dress, peeling off his striped pyjamas.

'It wasn't easy to get Mawby to agree.'

'I'm sure it wasn't.'

Carter fidgeted on his feet, wondered whether he should withdraw. If he did so then he would have aborted the whole journey up the stairs with the mug that still cooled on the bedside table, untouched.

'Not that the weaponry affects the main problem, the persuasion of old man Guttmann

Johnny's eyes lit up. 'Of course it bloody doesn't. Why do you think I go off each night and sit in this bloody hole? Why do you think I'm always first away in the evenings? .. . Because all the crap downstairs doesn't help me with the main issue. I'm not a bloody idiot you know.'

Carter stumbled for the door. Felt a pain, a desperate sadness and his mind was filled with the anger of Johnny's face, the anger that was the overcoat of fear.

As he went out of the room Johnny called to him.

'Thanks, thanks for bringing the tea. Give me five minutes and I'll be with you for breakfast.'

A small voice, a small brave voice.

Erica Guttmann tilted her window seat back, waved away the stewardess with the meal on the tray, and was content to sink and flow with the even motion of the aircraft. Non stop to Berlin-Schonefeld. High above the cloud layer, distanced from the turbulence. Her eyes were closed, her hands limp on the seat arms, a magazine lay unopened on her lap.

So tired from all that had gone before.

Otto Guttmann sat, as always, upright and serious, considering a technical journal, hissing between his teeth either in exasperation at what he read, or at the pleasure of new discovery. She wore the new skirt and blouse that she had bought for the holiday, she had made the effort to lift her morale. Her father was dressed in his perennial dark suit, scornful of concessions towards a vacation.

He had wearied her in these last weeks. First the task of confronting the lethargy that had seeped over him after the news of Willi. And when at last there was light and his cold grief had thawed imperceptibly there had been the sledge hammer set back of the firing range at Padolsk. The experience had left him flaccid and without enthusiasm for the breakaway from his laboratory and drawing board. Erica had to sort the clothes that he would take with him, Erica had to pack his suitcase, Erica had to write the letters to the friends in Magdeburg and give their arrival and departure dates. In his depression the old man had renewed his work on the guidance circuitry of the weapon, calling for greater effort from his technical team. Driving himself, pushing forward, moving beyond the perimeters of possibility for the health of an old man. Let the bastards do it themselves, she had told herself. He had earned his retirement, was owed a rest haven far from the badgering complaints of the generals from Defence . . . But it would not be granted. Their thanks would be confined to the few scientists and military officers who were detailed to walk behind his casket and stand in patronising quiet while the speeches were made over a worn down corpse.

Once she had pushed her hand against his and squeezed the hard, boned fingers and he had leaned towards her and his roughened lips had kissed behind her ear. The smartness of her new costume would have appealed to him. The perfume that an officer stationed at Padolsk had brought back from Romania and which she had dabbed against her skin would give him pleasure. Her long and carefully brushed fair hair would draw his pride.

From the cockpit came the pilot's information that they had entered the air space of the German Democratic Republic at Schwedt to the north of Berlin. They had received landing permission. The weather on the ground was clear and fine.

The drone of the aircraft engines switched in tone as the Tupolev sagged through its descent. She roused herself, straightened in her seat and looked at her father. Still trapped in his reading, still remorseless in his study. Pale cheeks. The small puff of cotton wool at his neck where he had slashed the skin while shaving in the hurry of the early morning at the flat. His hair, greying and unruly after the barest efforts of the comb before they had locked the front door of their home.

Absently she reached across his waist and buckled his seat belt.

'A few more minutes, then we land.'

His eyes, huge and blurred through the lenses of his spectacles, turned to her and he nodded. She thought, perhaps, it would have been better if she had held his head against her shoulder and let him weep with the fluency of an old man.

Better if he could have wept, better if he could have shared.

How could Willi have allowed himself to die? How could he have been so stupid ?

A courier from the Service brought to the house at Holmbury the buff envelope that contained the rail tickets and the voucher for the hotel.

The Dublin travel agency had enclosed a photostat of the relevant pages of the West German train timetable.

A second class seat had been booked for John Dawson on the Inter City from Frankfurt to Hannover. There he must change. At two in the morning he would connect with the train that crossed the frontier.

Obeisfeld in East Germany would be reached at 28 minutes past 3, Magdeburg at 25 minutes past 5.

'I'll be in a great state to take on the comrades,' remarked Johnny.

'It's better that you go at night and through a little used crossing, they won't be very bright,' said Carter soothing. 'You'll be able to sleep the rest of the day.'

'And not much after that.'

Time rushing past them. Time crushing and burdening the men on the DIPPER team.

They marched towards the company headquarters' operations room. Not inside, of course, not within sight of the most confidential wall maps of the Walbeck sector. Outside on the beaten down mud, lined up and at ease until the company commander was ready to come from his den and beard them. A blackboard was brought and a large scale map hung to it and a marker cane was produced. The two sections came to attention when the company commander emerged. Beside him Ulf Becker sensed the effort of Heini Schalke to get the contours of his fat arse and fat belly into dashing line.

Not a bad fellow, the company commander seemed at first sight. He wore the insignia of a major on his shoulder straps. An older man, one of the originals from the days far back when the National Volks Armee was formed and the Border Guard was raised as an integral part of the military forces of the state. Didn't seem flamboyant, nor pompous.