01 The Quiller Memorandum, page 15
“We are getting worried about you,” he said.
He meant worried about my being made to talk. “They won’t break me,” I told him.
“They’ve tried.”
I wondered how much he knew. Control always knew more about an operator than he thought. I know when I’m being followed but I don’t always know when I’m being observed, and they might have posted Hengel or Brand or any of their scouts to watch the Hotel Prinz Johan. As soon as they had received my signal requesting the KLJ report they might have posted a man on the Zentral.
The idea annoyed me and I tested him. “July, August, September.”
The light flickered across his glasses as he nodded. “Yes, we know about Oktober.”
“For how long have you known?”
“Seven months.”
Before my time, and even before Kenneth Lindsay Jones’s. Charington had been operating on this mission, seven months ago. It was probably Oktober who had killed him. It was probably Oktober who had killed Jones. Now Control was worried about me.
Our breath steamed on the air. I said:
“All I wanted was the report.”
“I’ve brought it.”
“Don’t give it to me now.”
“Of course not.”
The park looked deserted, a ring of trees phantom-grey in the winter air. We could both be wrong: there might have been a tag following both our cars from the Zentral. He might be among those trees. If Pol were seen to pass anything to me they would be after it very fast.
He said in his modulated tone: “I was sent to bring you the report and to brief you. We know less than you do about Oktober and Phoenix but we know more about the general background than you. The overall picture.”
“Control doesn’t have to tell me any more than it thinks I have to know -“
“Don’t misunderstand me. I was briefed to give you the whole background the first time I contacted you, but you weren’t ready to be convinced, so I didn’t persist. You didn’t think the German General Staff might be prepared to launch any kind of armed operation, given the means and the chance.”
“I still don’t.”
“Then what do you think your mission is?”
“I’m just an operator sent into the opposite warren like a ferret. That’s all right, it’s what I’m for, it’s what I like doing. But if I finally pick off Zossen and Oktober and the top echelon of the whole Phoenix organisation I don’t think I shall have done any more than blow down a pack of cards. I don’t think the German General Staff knows anything about Phoenix, or is interested, any more than the British War Office is interested in mods and rockers.”
He was a man of peculiar patience. He would have made a good schoolteacher. He waited for a few seconds so that I had time to replay the echoes of my own voice, and he got results: I was right, I was a ferret in a warren, but I was also wrong: a ferret can’t expect to know anything at all about the German General Staff or what it was doing or what it was thinking. Control knew more than I. It always does. That’s why we kick up rough, perhaps, when we can’t see the sense of its policy.
When he had given me my few seconds to think, he said quietly: “If you help us to bring down Phoenix you’ll save a million lives and it will almost certainly cost you yours. We know this. We know this.” His mud-brown eyes stared at me without blinking. “If you underestimate what you are doing you won’t do it well. We want the best from you, the very best, while you have the time left to give it.”
The air was clammy against my face. The ring of trees was cemetery-quiet.
“That is why we are worried about you,” his calm voice said. “We want you to take this mission seriously. If you let yourself imagine we have sent you into this particular search-area on a routine mission to get information and nothing more, you won’t work at your best. We do 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 information is through you.”
I decided to let him go on talking. He was perfectly correct about this. Oktober was handling me as no adverse party had ever tried to handle me before. His two attempts to break me - by narcoanalysis and then torture at one remove - followed a normal pattern; but he was giving me rope by the mile at every other stage. I had run right across their line of fire when Solly was killed; they had walked out on me after the scene at Inga’s flat; they had let me go to see Captain Stettner yesterday. A dozen times, at the Prinz Johan and at the Zentral and in the open at a dozen places they could have hauled me in and broken me up physically at their leisure in the hope of getting information on how much Control knew of Phoenix. But the more rope I took, the more they gave me.
Probably they hadn’t got enough out of Charington so they killed him off before he got too much out of them. The same with KLJ. They were giving me a longer run, concentrating on me instead of relying on their own agents to crack open Control itself.
“We are worried,” Pol said, “that you don’t understand your position. It is this. There are two opposing armies drawn up on the field, each ready to launch the big attack. But there is a heavy fog and they can’t sight each other. You are in the gap between them. You can see us but so far you can’t see them. Your mission is to get near enough, to see them, and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage. That is where you are, Quiller. In the gap.”
He waited again so that I could consider.
All he hadn’t said was that once I got near enough to Phoenix to give that signal, my part would be played and I would become expendable, would have to be expendable, because the chances of surviving were slight.
Well, I would get near to them, and I would send the signal, and I would bloody well survive.
But the ring of trees was so quiet, a ring of tombstones.
I said: “All I want is the report. Then stop getting in my way.”
I walked back to the BMW and sat inside. He leaned through the window so that his body covered it, and dropped the envelope on to the seat beside me. His face was dark in the gloom of the interior.
“Never forget,” he said, “that the whole of our organisation is behind you, at every minute.”
“Just keep it clear of me.”
I read the last testament. The writing was thin and hurried.
Dec. 3. Tags now a nuisance, time wasted in flushing. But have got a line on base, will confirm soon. Things very tricky now, request no contacts any account. May not receive Bourse. May not signal for a time. KLJ.
The restaurant was full and I sat working on the report, fiddling with an underdone lump of schweinefleisch.
So he had reached much the same stage as I had reached now, and had told them - as I had told Pol an hour ago - keep clear of me. Then he had gone in, right the way in, and couldn’t be allowed to live.
A line on base. What line? It didn’t matter. He had followed it and they had killed him off because he was too close. So here was the address of the Phoenix base. I had been there myself without being allowed to know where it was. Now I knew where it was.
I put the slip of paper back into the envelope, which was already addressed to Eurosound. The man brought my bill and I paid it, going to the lavatory and using a penknife to ease out the Rothstein document. There was a postbox at the intersection not far from the restaurant and I sent off the report as promised. One quick turn round the block showed there was no foot-tag, but I had been followed to the restaurant by the small grey NSU, because I had called at the Zentral after leaving Pol and they’d picked me up from there. It was parked five cars behind my BMW. I didn’t want to waste time flushing him and I didn’t want to risk being snatched with the document on me. There was a polizei officer on duty at the intersection so I crossed over and showed him the Z-Commission ausweis that Captain Stettner had given me: it was no more than a laisser passer into the Z-Bureau back-room departments but it would probably do.
I said: “I’ve reason to believe that there’s a man in a stolen car across the road. The NSU number BN.LM.11 outside the friseur. You may care to check it.”
We walked together to the other side and I hung back as we passed my BMW. He didn’t miss me because he was sizing-up the NSU as he approached it, and as I drove away I saw him in the mirror, checking the driver’s papers.
It took half an hour to change the BMW at the Hertz office but it would have taken longer than that to flush the tag and I had now altered the image. I couldn’t risk being picked up by sheer chance from now on, because I had the document on me and because, as KLJ had put it, things were very tricky now.
A million lives, Pol had said. And mine. A million and one. Because I was going to survive. The man in London wasn’t going to light another cigarette and send for a replacement.
I had never whistled in the dark before and the tune came thinly.
The new image was a very fast 230SL pagoda-top Mercedes with fuel-injection, the last thing they would look for, and I took it right out west to the edge of the Havel and parked on the Schildhorn peninsula. Mist shrouded the waterscape and the light was grey. The monument poked its sandstone finger at the sky and I didn’t look at it more than once because everything reminded me of cemeteries.
Treble-combination frequencies in English and German ING-ENT-SCH-EUN. Check and assume, recheck. No go.
Two hours by the black-and-gold clock on the facia, cramp in the legs.
Reverse and read backwards, add prefix and suffix nulls LKAOEI – JUQOP - AJSHGFRWEQT. Pick a new set and stay clear of the multisyllabics, obviously Latin for bugs.
Four hours and the circulation seizing-up.
A walk by the beautiful waterside, dead land and dead water, a mezzotint laced with the sombre dark of the pines, a place for lost souls and ferrets, with the sirensong crying softly across the mirrored sky. AJSHGFRWEQT ! they sang, OQUISTRI !
The only living thing I saw the whole afternoon was a dog that came from the mist and pissed at the foot of the monument and vanished as it had come.
Patience.
Possible key: U=S, B=M, O=A, eight others. Pick a long one for pride’s sake: VASOSFGWOBU. Gave OTNANGILAMS. Reverse and add prefix and suffix nulls. Gave SMALIGNANTO.
Nearly missed it because it sounded Spanish.
Drop prefix and suffix nulls. MALIGNANT.
Check another. Thought we had Sprit, German for Alcohol, yesterday. But hope has a grasshopper leap. RCIMEDIPEF. Drop nulls and reverse: EPIDEMIC. Come in, Solly, come in …
18 : OBJECT 73
The hands of Captain Stettner had begun shaking.
I sat facing him, trying to think, but gave it up. The room was so filled with his horror that detached thought was impossible. He picked up a telephone long before he had finished reading my deciphered version of the Rothstein document.
“Fifteen,” he said to the switchboard.
That would be their forensic laboratory, the safest place for keeping a glass phial whose contents might be dangerous.
“Captain Stettner,” he said, his voice only just under control. “You have an object numbered 73 in your keeping. Have you received any orders to open it?” He went on staring at me, and I remembered his uneasiness when the bogus doctor from Phoenix had come to this office to inject him. “Then if you receive any such order, refer to me first, immediately. I have information that the contents are highly dangerous. Please take all steps to ensure that it remains sealed and locked away. Accidental breakage could cause a whole-scale disaster.”
He went on a bit more about this, and there was a mist of sweat on the receiver when he put it down. Then I had to wait while he finished reading the decipherment. The single sheet of paper went on quivering in his hands.
“I don’t know,” he said at last, “anything about these matters. Anything about this bacillus. Do you?” He was like a child pleading to be comforted, to be told that it wasn’t really dark, only night-time.
“Not much,” I said.
He was running the back of his hand round his face. “I mean,” he asked without hope, “is it possible that Dr. Rothstein was deranged in some way?”
“In a world as mad as this, how do we define derangement?”
No comfort in that. He tried again. “This - this talk of a plague . Could one small phial cause such a thing?”
I wished he’d straighten up so that I could sound him on the general background of Solly’s operations. Perhaps it would be quicker in the long run to tell him the worst and then put a few questions of the kind that interested me more.
“Yes, a phial that size could do it. At this moment, America, Russia, England, France, Japan and China - there are probably others - are researching on botulinus toxin, culturing it and killing it to provide the basis for an antidote. Eight ounces of it could wipe out the world population. We all need the antidote, just as we all need the best anti-missile missile, to make sure we can go on living in brotherly love. It may be that Rothstein was also working on that toxin, but it isn’t what he put into the phial. That’s just one of the plague-group.”
A telephone began ringing and he cut the switch, so I carried on. “There are three forms of plague. The classic bubonic type causes the superficial lymph-glands to swell and suppurate into dark abcesses. Type two, the septicaemic, poisons the blood. Type three affects the lung. It’s even more infectious than the bubonic, which killed off a quarter of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century - the English called it the Black Death. This third type is the pneumonic. Dr. Rothstein gives it the more correct name in that document: pastorella pestis. It’s a rod-shaped bacillus that can be grown in a laboratory on suitable culture medium. Once it gets loose, infection is by exhaled droplets and the incubation period is a short one three or four days. Three times quicker than smallpox.”
He didn’t look comforted. He said dully: “A quarter of the population of Europe. Did you say that?”
“At that time, twenty-five million people.” My thoughts ran on aloud, just as they had at the Nurnberg Trial when I had spoken of Heinrich Zossen. “A heavy toll of human life, mein Hauptmann, I agree. Even the Nazi plague of our own century wiped out only half that number in the death camps.”
It didn’t register. He was thinking of Argentina, and object number 73. I tied the ends for him: “Natural resistance to the pneumonic plague in South America is fairly low at present because there hasn’t been an epidemic there for a long time, though it’s endemic in Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. So I would say that if Dr. Rothstein’s brother in the Argentine had opened that phial and tipped the contents from the balcony of a packed cinema, as instructed, the seventy thousand Germans and ex-Nazis in San Caterina would be dead within a week.”
He said nothing for a full fifteen seconds.
“Herr Quiller … Why did he want to do this?”
“Because they killed his wife.”
“But I do not understand. It is one of your little jokes, again.”
“I hope you’ll never understand. You’re too young to understand. You must ask your elders. They know about these things. They killed twelve million people in five years. Half were Jews. And you can hear their reason for killing six million Judenfrei when you listen to them pleading their innocence at the courts. They say they killed them because they were ‘only Jews’. Nothing personal, you see. No hate, or thoughts of vengeance, or even fear. Just the Yellow Star, the selection-camp, and the gas-chamber. Difficult to understand. I understand Dr. Rothstein’s reason better. He was committed to personal vengeance and it was measured solely by the depths of his love for one woman and by the desolation of her loss to him. And a thousand shall fall.”
He got up and stood over me, a thin young man still trying to get to grips with the world he’d been born in.
“But the others ! The plague wouldn’t have stopped at any frontier. The whole of San Caterina - and then the whole of the Argentine -“
“And beyond, until they got the diagnosis correct and put the sulpha drugs to work. Rough justice is like that it takes the innocent as well. He knew that. He knew there are half a million of his own race in the Argentine but even that didn’t stop him preparing that phial and writing this bequest to his brother. Dr. Rothstein meant to avenge his wife before he died, and if that wasn’t possible he meant his death to bring it about.”
Stettner looked down at me with his clear blue unimaginative eyes and I was impatient with him because I’d asked two of my questions about Solly’s operational background and he didn’t even catch on. Either that, or he didn’t know anything more about Solly than I knew.
The day had gone badly for me and frustration was setting in. After two days’ grinding work on the cipher I had produced nothing that would take me any nearer to Phoenix. This document could have nothing to do with what Solly had wanted to tell me. He wouldn’t have any reason to tell me that his living obsession was to wipe out a South American town, because I couldn’t be expected to champion the idea. Either his obsession had followed a normal course, pushing him across the edge of reason so that he was self-blinded to the risk of annihilating a whole continent, or he had made elaborate plans for his brother to organise an underground inoculation scheme to save the innocent before the plague was set on the march. It made no difference to me or to my mission. If Isaac Rothstein were a sane man he would have put the phial straight into an incinerator, realising his brother’s state of mind.
Solly would never have told me of this. Then what had he been so desperate to tell me? There was no clue in the document, which was simply a detailed form of instruction to his brother: how the bacillus was to be disseminated, how to avoid infection during the act of dissemination, steps to be taken during the four-day incubation period, so forth.
There was of course an obvious parallel to be assumed, and it would have to be thought about later when I had left the aura of Captain Stettner’s pathological horror of disease.
