Dead Secret Page 27

  Hanak drew up on the opposite side from it and stopped, but did not switch off the engine. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. Hawn leant forward. ‘So we wait here?’

  Hanak answered with a nod towards the hut across the road ‘HO — Handelsorganization. State Trading Company.’

  ‘All right if we get out and stretch our legs?’ Hawn said. ‘I need some fresh air.’ He had already opened the door before Hanak replied: ‘Don’t go too far. Stay where I can see you.’

  Hawn got out, and Anna followed, wrapping her French raincoat tightly round her. The air had a dank chill, full of the stifling odour of pine and rotting vegetation. Anna shivered. ‘God, what a place! And Hanak’s behaving so funnily. Not at all like last night. What do you think’s happening?’

  ‘That’s what we’ve come to find out. You don’t think they’re going to make it easy for us, do you? Last night was just softening us up.’

  ‘Well, they did a good job.’

  Hawn led the way across to the hut. A pudding-faced woman in a black shawl sat behind a counter lined with metal bowls containing what looked like lard. On a shelf behind her was a row of soft drinks. She looked at Hawn and Anna as though they did not exist.

  Behind them, the car’s engine died. There was the distant cawing of a bird. Otherwise silence — total, unnatural. It was bitterly cold, and they returned to the car.

  Hawn sank back into the rear seat. ‘Lovely spot, Sam. What happens around here?’

  ‘I believe it’s a popular holiday resort in the summer. In winter there’s hunting and fishing. The whole area is full of lakes. But it’s usually empty round now, till the weekend.’

  ‘How long do we have to wait?’

  ‘Not long, I hope.’ Not once did Hanak turn his head while he spoke.

  Hawn sat forward, speaking close to the man’s ear. ‘Listen, Sam. We were pretty patient and easy-going last night — perhaps it was the booze, plus the friendly fists and boots of the People’s Police. I didn’t press you too hard. This morning I feel different. There are one or two more things I want to know. About you, for instance. You’re not German, are you?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, if I met an Eskimo or a Papuan Indian, I’d say they weren’t German either, I think you’re English. London, born and bred.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘Come on, Sam. I’m not pleasing myself, nor are you. I thought you might be an English Communist who likes to play free and easy in East Germany. But the authorities in these countries tend not to trust English Communists — not enough, at any rate, to have them practically pulling rank on a full Colonel of Security. I think you’re here on a very special mission, with a very special status. Are you anything to do with ABCO?’

  Hanak laughed. ‘No, I am not.’ This time he turned in his seat. ‘Look, Tom, you got yourself into this thing. You went in with your eyes open — both of you. You’ve had plenty of opportunity to get out, but you carried right on. OK, that’s your decision. But look at it from my point of view. This is a big game, and I’m one of the players. There is also a damn big pot in the middle of the table. And now, just as the final hand is about to be played, you ask to see my cards.’ His soft lips smiled, but his eyes remained grave. ‘Sorry, Hawn — I’m not showing you my cards.’

  In the far distance, down the straight road, a dark blob had appeared. Hawn stiffened. Hanak and Anna had seen it too. It grew larger: an olive-green jeep with a canvas hood and two Vopos in the front.

  It stopped exactly opposite them, in front of the hut. The Vopo in the passenger seat got out. He stared at the Skoda, then walked round to the back of the jeep. A second man appeared. He was tall, in a long black overcoat. He stood quite still for several seconds, then walked past the Vopo towards the Skoda, with a crooked loping movement. He was a hunchback.

  The Vopo followed a few paces behind, opened the rear door of the Skoda. The man climbed awkwardly in, folding his legs up as though they were shanks of badly articulated machinery. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles which magnified his eyes out: of all proportion. His hair was a shock of grey, with no parting, and his ears had a translucent look, mauve with the cold.

  Hanak turned and said, ‘I would like you to meet Doktor Reiss.’

  Hawn looked the man in the eye and said, ‘Shouldn’t it be Alan Rice?’

  The hunchback showed his teeth, long and yellow like well-polished wooden pegs. ‘I haven’t been called that in nearly thirty years!’ His accent was clearly English, but slightly offkey: like one of those long-retired Englishmen who have lived for years in exile on some sunny slope.

  Hanak said: ‘Doktor Reiss knows why we are here.’

  Reiss’s bloodless lips stretched back again across his gums. ‘I thought they’d have forgotten about it by now. Who dug it up?’

  ‘Mr Hawn is an English journalist. Miss Admiral is a professional researcher.’

  The hunchback nodded. ‘I offer you both my congratulations. You must have both been very lucky and very tenacious. You must also have won the trust and co-operation of certain people who are not much given to friendly confidences.’ He smiled again, at each of them; his breath had a sour bitter smell. Hawn wondered if he had been drinking.

  Outside, the Vopo had got back into the jeep, and a moment later it started up. Hanak watched it until it was well past them, then turned again towards the back seat:

  ‘Doktor Reiss, we still have to recover the documents — the full minutes and memoranda of every meeting concerned with “Operation Bettina”.’

  Rice drew his lips back even further; he looked like a man who had been dead for days. ‘Why are you so sure that I know?’

  Hanak spoke quietly, without once looking at Hawn and Anna: ‘Because you were leading co-ordinating officer of the whole operation. You ran the Istanbul end, and later the Caribbean. And von have been interrogated by the authorities here and have told them where the documents were hidden. We know that it is somewhere in this area.’

  Hawn interrupted: ‘I’d like to ask Doctor Rice a question. Who was in charge of this operation on the other side — our side?’

  Rice seemed not to have heard. He had taken out a handkerchief and soundlessly blew his nose. Hawn persisted: ‘Was somebody called Shanklin involved? Major Toby Shanklin?’

  Rice’s reaction was swift and spiteful. ‘What do you know about it all? It was too long ago — you were too young, you and this Jew here.’

  Hawn said: ‘I know that Shanklin was in Mexico and Venezuela with you. He was also with you one night when you killed a man in your car. I don’t know who was driving, but the dead man was a Consular official called de Vere Frisby. He’d been in Istanbul earlier, and so had Shanklin.’

  Rice made a whistling noise through his nostrils. ‘I may have been driving — I can’t remember now. Frisby was careless, stepped out under the wheels. He was also a nuisance. He’d started asking too many questions. In Mexico he got talking to one of the tanker masters, then he somehow got hold of some papers — top secret, German, from the German Embassy in Mexico City. I tell you, he was a nuisance.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘The car did.’

  ‘Did you murder him?’

  ‘Murder? He was knocked down by a car. Read the official reports.’

  ‘I have. At least one of them is missing from the files.’

  ‘That’s not my fault.’

  ‘What about Shanklin? How much was he involved?’

  ‘I was giving him a lift. His car had broken down.’

  ‘I mean, how much was Shanklin involved in “Operation Bettina”?’

  Another pause. ‘He was suspicious. He’d become suspicious in Istanbul. He’d got himself posted to the Caribbean to try and find out more. Frisby could have told him — only he was killed first. Shanklin, I mean,’ and he sniggered, as though he remembered something that amused him.

  Hawn said, ‘And what do you think’s g
oing to happen to you, Doctor Rice, when all this comes out?’

  ‘Comes out?’

  ‘Is published all over the world — at least, in the free press?’

  ‘The free press!’ Rice had again turned his skull-like features to Hawn and bared his dreadful teeth. ‘My dear sir, I am a professional scientist. I am one of the three greatest scientists in the German Democratic Republic. Nothing will happen to me. I shall merely continue my work.’

  ‘Let’s get going,’ Hanak said, with a note of impatience.

  The road began to twist, the trees grew closer, darker, until it became twilight. Then it cleared. Ahead was a wide flat wasteland fringed with distant pines: an untidy pattern of lake and marshland, with road following the edge of the water for a few hundred yards, until it reached a wooden pier that ran out to a little island. At the end of this was a small cafe, shuttered and desolate, its terrace empty of tables, its yellow paint blistered and blotched with damp. On the roof was a red star with one of its points bent inwards like a rusty claw.

  Doctor Rice told Hanak to stop at the end of the pier. For a moment none of the party moved, as though each were waiting for one of the others to lead the way. Hanak got out first. He opened Rice’s door and held it back, while the hunchback climbed out and stood gaunt and lopsided against the dark wall of trees.

  Hawn and Anna followed him. It was very still, very cold — a dank, bone-chilling cold that carried with it the corrupt whiff of stagnant water and dead waterlogged vegetation.

  Hawn looked around: ‘This another happy playground for the workers?’

  Rice said, ‘In the summer they sometimes have banquets in that cafe.’

  Hanak turned. ‘All right, Herr Doktor, show us the way.’

  Rice pointed a long finger at the pier. ‘That wasn’t there before, you understand. Nor was the cafe. Just the island.’

  ‘Lead the way.’

  Rice loped on to the pier. Hanak let Hawn and Anna follow him, before taking up the rear, his big steel-tipped boots clomping on the spongy boards.

  The pier was about fifty yards long. The water below was black and freezing; crusts of ice had collected round the wooden piles. The cafe stood at the near end of the island, which was perhaps a hundred yards long and thirty wide, tapering to a point.

  They crossed the abandoned concrete terrace and began to follow a muddy path towards a clump of pines. At the far end two rocks jutted out of the water. Rice stopped and stood peering down between them, at a crevice half clogged with moss. He raised his crooked shoulders and turned to Hanak. ‘Down there,’ he said, with a vague gesture towards the rocks.

  ‘Get it.’

  ‘It weighs at least fifty kilos! It’ll take all three of us to get it up. It’s made of lead.’

  Hawn said, ‘So you weren’t just dumping die stuff? You were preserving it for posterity?’

  ‘You know what the Germans are like,’ Rice said: ‘They love documents. They never destroy anything, if they can help it. As for this stuff, we never knew when it might come in useful.’

  Hanak had stepped forward and stood examining the crevice. Hawn and Anna joined him. It took them several seconds to make it out: about three feet down, a stout piton, filthy with rust, had been driven into the rock at a steep angle. Hanging from it was a chain, its links at least half an inch thick, disappearing between the moss into the black water.

  Anna said, ‘You’re going to need some sort of lever.’ She glanced quickly round — at the silent water, the row of trees, the abandoned cafe behind them.

  Hanak flopped down on his belly and poised himself forward until he was hanging over the mouth of the crevice. ‘Just let’s see how much slack there is.’ He reached down, groped for the end of the chain and pulled. It came up slack — several feet of it. He then stood up and gave it a hard wrench, stumbled and sat down in front of Hawn. The icy chain was trailing limp and slimy between his fingers. They all stared at the severed link, dangling at the end of about four feet. It was crusted with algae and weeds, as well as rust, but by rubbing it in die mud they saw that it was a clean cut.

  Hanak spoke first. ‘A chain like that doesn’t break. Somebody’s been here before us.’

  ‘The question is, just how long ago,’ said Hawn. ‘And it wasn’t any casual picnicker playing around these rocks. It would take a heavy saw, even oxyacetylene, to cut through that chain.’ He stood staring at the black frozen links lying coiled in the mud like the skeleton of a large snake. In the icy silence the only sound was the chatter of Rice’s teeth.

  Hawn looked at him; then at Anna and at Sam Hanak, and at the derelict cafe and at the path leading up to the pier, and at the trees across the still water. He sensed a numb anti-climax, a feeling of futility as though he were the victim of some obscure and protracted practical joke. Yet he was also puzzled. Hanak seemed puzzled too, as well as barely concealing his annoyance. Anna was looking at him for an explanation, but received none.

  The only one who showed no emotion at all was Dr Alan Rice — except for feeling the cold. He looked like a man who had thin blood. Hawn turned to him: ‘You knew somebody had been here before us, didn’t you?’

  ‘I knew nothing,’ Rice replied, with chilling composure. ‘I haven’t been back to this place for over thirty years.’

  ‘How can you be sure it’s the same place?’

  ‘The same place?’

  Hawn said patiently, ‘There are dozens of little lakes round here. This place has changed — you said so yourself. The cafe hadn’t even been built when you were last here.’ He took a step forward and his foot squelched in the mud; a twig snapped under his shoe. He was standing opposite Rice, facing out across the water.

  Rice shrugged his misshapen shoulders. ‘You saw the chain, didn’t you?’

  ‘I saw a bit of broken chain hanging on a nail. I bet half the islands and jetties round here have got chains or ropes at the end of them for mooring small craft in the summer.’ He took another step forward, until he could smell the hunchback’s breath. ‘Whose orders are you acting on, Rice?’ — but as he spoke there came a crack across the water. It sounded like branch splitting in the stillness, followed by a series of sharp echoes like whiplashes dying slowly round them. He glanced out at the bank on their left, at the wall of trees where the noise seemed to have come from — but saw nothing.

  In the same instant he felt Rice’s sloping shoulder lurch against him and the weight of the man’s body collapse like a folding table. Hawn was just in time to grab him round the waist; then he looked into the man’s face. The jawbone and most of one cheek had gone, leaving his eye hanging naked, glaring unseeing into Hawn’s.

  Hank had yelled, ‘Down!’ He had already flung Anna flat in the mud.

  Hawn was down on his knee, still supporting the inert body of Rice, as though it would be indecent to let it drop. It was Rice, dead, who had saved him.

  Hawn now twisted round, holding the body in front and slightly above him, when he felt the impact of a second bullet drill between the man’s shoulder blades, straight into the hump-back, and exit through the collarbone, brushing Hawn’s sleeve with a draught of air, before spending itself against one of the small pines behind them where it sliced a scar in the bark.

  Hawn, flat on the ground now, was edging towards Hanak and Anna under cover of the trees. He felt sick rather than frightened. The ground was spattered with slivers of bone and gristle, several teeth; and there was a great deal of blood about, soaked black into the mud.

  He was near enough to touch Anna’s hand, when he heard the third crack. This time the whine carried above the echoes. He knew it had been close, but he didn’t know how close. You never did know. He had been shot at many times during his career, in jungle, desert, in cars, planes, helicopters. But it had always been an impersonal sensation: part of the random ritual of war.

  This was different. There was a man, or perhaps men, out in those trees, and they weren’t firing on vague orders from above: weren’t firing t
o preserve some loose map reference or hold that edge of the lake. These were marksmen, shooting at him and Anna and Sam Hanak: and they were shooting single rounds with at least one high-velocity rifle, accurately, to kill.

  Hawn realized again Rice’s body remained his sole protection. He glanced quickly, desperately round. Whoever had set this up had done so with expertise. The paltry pines on the island could offer only the most temporary protection: enough for the enemy to adjust their sights, ‘shoot their guns in’.

  The path back to the cafe was open ground. One of them might make it, zigzagging, flat-out — then hole up in the cafe. But for how long, unarmed? The pier beyond, and the short stretch of road back to Hanak’s car, would be death-traps. They might as well walk it, hands in their pockets, holding their heads up like clay pigeons.

  The question was, how many of them were there? And who were they?

  This was alien territory — beyond even the rules of Pol’s game, with his clandestine bank accounts and band of mercenaries. True, Pol had arranged the meeting with the bumptious Dr Wohl — but then Wohl was merely a double-faced go-between, a privileged Party hireling.

  Hawn was thinking fast, still lying flat, moving like a reptile towards the trees, wondering if he would feel the bullet, whether it would hurt him, or whether it would be just a blank nothing. Instead, he felt only the slimy chill of the mud. Time became concertinaed, meaningless. How many seconds now since the first shot? They had picked off Rice, and now were just firing at leisure. But who? And why?

  The most plausible candidates, of course, were always ABCO; but Hawn doubted that even their arm could reach this far. For this was the other side, the enemy side, home of the spiritual and commercial adversaries of everything that ABCO represented, where the only writ was that of the Workers’ State which operated on a very short lead from the Kremlin. Besides, ABCO had had plenty of opportunities to strike. Why should they choose this eleventh hour to risk a clumsy shoot-out in this distant, hostile domain?