The Contract (38 page)

'Was it that bad, Charles?'

'Worse than bad, it was bloody awful.'

'A fiasco?'

Mawby drained the glass, spluttered. A wisp of mischief crossed him.

'I'll tell you how bad it was. Ten years ago if this had happened it would have been a resignation job.'

'And now . .. ?' The Brigadier refilled the glass.

' I can't afford to bloody resign. I'll just be kicked side- ways, I'll never have responsibility again. You asked if it was a fiasco ... It is and it can get worse. It's all blown now, it's wide as the open sky, and we have a man in there. A train left 15 minutes ago from Magdeburg to Wolfsburg, if he's not on the train then he's locked inside. That's his only chance.

They're reporting in Signals down on the border that the whole bloody place is awake, there's heavy traffic on their police net. He's our man, and if picked up then .. . then .. . it's just a bloody disaster.'

They went to their bedrooms. In the morning the champagne bottle would be returned to the kitchen refrigerator, and Mawby would retrieve two green backed passports of the Federal Republic of Germany from the corner of his room where he had hurled them.

Johnny's flight took him through the camp site and the woods around it, and to Barleber See station.

A primitive place for vacationers and few else. There were no lights nor life nor activity. Five hundred yards away was the autobahn and racing cars and twice Johnny saw that signature of the police, the inanimate and travelling blue lamp.

In front of him was the fragmented pattern of the street lights of Barleber, more than a mile away. When the moon came he could see the far, flat horizon spread beyond the village. No trees, no cover, and he remembered how he had seen it when he had come back on the train on the first day. There were open fields between the railway and the village.

'We have to go on,'Johnny whispered.

'He can't, you can see that,' Erica hissed in his ear.

' If he has to be carried, so be it. We have to go on.'

'How far?'

' I don't know.'

'Where to?'

'Any bloody place but here.'

He could not see her face and did not know with what grace she came.

It was a track, built to carry farm vehicles and trailers, holed and ridged.

Erica and Johnny linked their hands and made a seat for Otto Guttmann and his arms rested around their necks. Weighed enough, and awkward enough, for a bloody bag of bones, Johnny thought. It took a long time to reach the outside of the village, to come within sight of the first set of buildings. Beyond the crop fields they came to a place where the grass had been scythed for a farmer's winter cattle fodder, near to a hedge and a barn where a dog barked. Time to rest and time to think, Johnny. They eased Otto Guttmann to the ground and he sank back and his daughter cradled his head. Time to think, but time was a bloody luxury.

The bastards, Johnny swore silently. The bastards who had not sent the car.

Johnny knelt over Otto Guttmann. He was very close to Erica, could feel her breath on his face, could smell the scent that she had worn for the journey.

'Doctor Guttmann, we have to talk now, but quickly. We have to make a decision and then we have to accept that it is irreversible. . .'

'You promised that the car would come. You promised that there was no danger, no risk. What right have you to share a decision with me?'

'And I promised that I would take you to Willi, and I will do that. . .'

'You are incompetents, you have shown that. There was no car, there was only a trap.'

' I don't have time for debate, Doctor Guttmann. If you come with me I will take you across the frontier.' You're killing yourself, Johnny.

Without him you have a small chance ... ' I will take you across the frontier, Doctor Guttmann.'

'And why should I not go back to my hotel, and this afternoon take the train to Berlin, and fly to Moscow tonight? Why not?'

' It's too late to go back. You are hunted now, you must think about that. You cannot explain where you have been. You will never be trusted again, the office at Padolsk will be taken from you and the flat in Moscow, if you are not in prison you will rot the rest of your life under surveillance. That's the future . . .'

'Again the threat,' Erica said.

' It's the truth . .. They asked me before I came to take the chance of talking to you, finding anything about your work that I could carry back if the autobahn failed, if I went back on my own. I haven't done that. I asked for nothing. I asked for no drawings, nothing. That's the promise, I'm taking you over the frontier.'

The old man was very still, a prone figure communing with himself.

His head rested easily in the crook of Erica's arm. Johnny looked at his watch . . . not long till the organisation would have been mustered, till the road blocks were in position, till the trap would snap shut. Perhaps a few more minutes. The sirens told him that there had been panic in Magdeburg, that the sending of the cars had been the first reaction.

Cooler heads would take control within an hour, a plan would be formed.

In the dark Otto Guttmann's hand grabbed at Johnny's. He squeezed, tight and painful, and the bones of his fingers dug at Johnny's skin.

'How do we go to the border?'

' I think we should start by borrowing a car,' Johnny said.

For the moment the tension spilled from them. There was quiet laughter. Johnny and Erica pulled the old man to his feet. They began to walk towards the village.

Ulf Becker and Jutte Hamburg took the stowed tent and the rolled sleeping bags back to the caretaker of the Camp- ingplatz 'Alte Schmiede' at first light. It would be on foot from here he had told her, they would move only in the woods, only in the depths of the Landschaftschutzgebiet that stretched from the town of Haldensleben behind them to the outskirts of Walbeck village. They would cut through a nature zone, crossed by few roads, with few villages.

They went out of the Campingplatz hand in hand. Two products of the regime, two machine-tooled children of the Party. Her blonde hair was whipped back on her shoulders by the wind. Their stride was bold and long. Two young people on whom the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands had lavished care

'How long will it take?' she asked, and the leafy light played at the tan of her cheeks.

' If we go hard we shall be close by tonight. We rest for a few hours and we watch. Tomorrow, early in the morning, we go over.'

So sure, so confident, he seemed to her. She kissed him quickly behind the ear, and did not see the quaver at his lips. In a few minutes they were hidden by tall trees, walking a carpet of fallen autumn leaves, alone together in the territory of wild pigs and fallow deer and foxes. Jutte dreamed of Hamburg and of the car of her uncle and of the house in which he lived. Ulf thought of the automatic guns and the wire and the watchtowers, and of Heini Schalke and an MPiKM high velocity rifle.

Carter stayed by the barrier at the station of Wolfsburg until all the passengers had left the train. Not many of them on the early train of the day out of Magdeburg. And never really a chance that Johnny would have been with them. Straightforward enough at Holmbury. Johnny to see the Guttmanns into the pick-up car, then back to Magdeburg for the station, and nobody had drawn a blueprint for the plan if the autobahn ran off schedule. A wasted journey for Carter and he'd known it before he started. Johnny wouldn't quit, not before it was hopeless, he would have stayed at the autobahn intersection. Stayed till the train was lost to him.

What would Johnny have done with the Doctor and Erica Guttmann ? Carter couldn't know, doubted that he knew his man well enough to make the judgement. The order was quit and run ... it would be a hell of a thing for his man to do, but that was the order.

He had heard from Pierce the report from the Signals monitoring unit, that police activity across the border had risen sharply from the small hours of the night. The codenames for prearranged road blocks had been called, reinforcement detachments had been summoned, search parties were co-ordinated. Johnny would have stood a chance on the first train of the day. Not after that. They'll tear the bloody carriages apart till they find him.

Back to Helmstedt, back to sweat it through. Mawby and Smithson were returning in a few hours to London, Percy would fly to Bonn.

Pierce and George had been told to take the first aircraft to Heathrow.

Carter was to be left to gather up any information that might seep through. Of course it would be Carter who was left behind, because Carter was too junior to field the blame that would be ambushing the senior men of DIPPER. Better off where, he was. He would hear of Johnny soon, that was certain. He would hear of an Englishman arrested in Magdeburg.

God knows we conned you, Johnny. Conned you rotten.

He drove back from Wolfsburg on the secondary road to Helmstedt.

Through small villages that were timbered and attractive. Through fields that were tended and flourishing. Along the line of the frontier. The border was perpetually with him, as a ribbon of wire and torn earth.

Beyond it were distant and faded hills and protective woods that his eyes could not penetrate.

The border drew him, as a cliff edge will a man who suffers vertigo.

He turned off left and drove into the sleeping, Sunday morning of Saalsdorf. The wire was in front of him, away across a field. He walked from the car and threaded his footsteps between the lines of young barley. Trying to share something, wasn't he? Trying to share something with Johnny, and the only way that he knew was to go to the fence and stare across at the closed country beyond.

The River Aller, not wide, only a dozen feet or so and deep banked.

Carter stood beside the cement post painted in red, white and black that carried the embossed symbol of the German Democratic Republic.

There was a spike set in the angled top of the post and he remembered the laughter of the men he had met in the Roadhaus when they had told him that all the posts had spikes because that way the birds couldn't perch on them and defecate and smear the sign. Thorough bastards you're up against, Johnny. Fifty feet from him a dozen troops were working on the steel gate that fell to the river bed ... at this bloody time in the morning. It was the first time Carter had seen the wire close up.

Formidable, chilling, high. From the fence posts where the soldiers worked beside the river, wires trailed to the ground and Carter followed them till he saw the white painted boxes, the automatic guns disconnected for the day. None of the men working on the gate looked at him, none caught his gaze.

There was the click of a camera shutter. Carter swung round. Two soldiers lay in the thick grass between him and the work party. One with a camera fitted with a telephoto lens, one with the MPiKM. The ones who guarded the guards. Bastards.

We should never have asked it of you, Johnny.

An insipid little car it seemed to Johnny. An impoverished creature with an underpowered engine, a slipping clutch and mushy steering. His foot was hard down on the accelerator, and the needle on the dial in front of him flickered optimistically towards the figure of 90. Kilometres, Johnny, 50 miles an hour that's the maximum you'll beat out of her, and she's straining like a donkey. A pathetic bloody car, and the two doors that were loosely fastened rattled on the poor road surface. Check the dial with the engine temperature, Johnny, check the fuel gauge, and check the forward mirror. Always back to the mirror. And it's left hand driving, Johnny, and it's four years since you've done that. Check, check, check, Johnny, and pray God the road stays clear behind.

Difficult to see the Trabant saloon as the supreme success symbol of a citizen of Barleber village. Would have been the star of his life, and perhaps that was why it was parked outside the front door of the house and not garaged behind the back fence where it would have been unseen.

A bloody good thing that it had been at the front, because that was where Johnny had found it. Not a car you'd drive down Cherry Road for a boast.

Don't knock it, Johnny, it's taking you clear of Magdeburg.

Erica's hair pin had opened the door for Johnny. From under the drawn curtains and upper windows of the house he had silently pushed the car a hundred yards away down the road. Then the pin again, inserted into the slot of the ignition and the engine had spluttered long-sufferingly. Otto Guttmann had been given the back seat and been told to lie down as best he could across it so that only two occupants would show. Erica beside Johnny and holding through the open window a white handkerchief.

That was the justification for haste at this early hour. A medical emergency. A young man driving a young girl, and any who saw the speed- ing car would think only of a person in pain, a person in need of help.

They might have had time, Johnny believed, to block the main roads, but not the secondary routes. The red ribbons on his map he avoided, and also the yellow marked roads where possible until he was forced into the town of Haldens- leben. Small and deserted on a Sunday morning.

Comrade Honecker leered from the hoarding outside the FDGB

building. Once Johnny chuckled grimly to himself as a racing green and white car of the polizei hurtled by him heading towards Magdeburg.

Calling reinforcements to the city. So far so good, Johnny.

It was a pretty road out of Haldensleben, winding through woods and curling on slight hills.

There was no talk in the car, no attempt at conversation, because the Stechkin rested on the seat under Johnny's thigh. He had taken the gun from his waist as he had first driven away, tried it on his lap and it had slipped, decided against asking Erica to hold it. The gun maimed his passengers' confidence, slipped them into silence. And if Johnny knew it, then so could Erica and her father realise that each time they swept round a blind corner then that might be the place where the block was in position.