LITMIR.BIZ

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almost any subject except the gastronomic merits of expensive restaurants.

      Billingsly, a bald-headed youngster from the Data Centre, tapped the palm of his hand with his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and said, ‘We seem to have lost more than one of them. That’s always a bad sign.’

      So even in the Data Centre they knew that. Things were looking up. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s always a bad sign.’

      Billingsly looked at me as if I’d slapped his face. Uncordial now, he said, ‘If you know anything else we can do …’

      ‘Have you put out a contact string?’ I asked.

      Billingsly seemed to be unsure what a contact string – a roll-call for survivors – was. But eventually Harry Strang, an elderly gorilla from Operations, stopped scratching his cheek with the eraser end of his brand-new yellow pencil for enough time to answer me. ‘Early yesterday morning.’

      ‘It’s too soon.’

      ‘That’s what I told the Deputy,’ said Dicky Cruyer, nodding deferentially to Sir Percy. Dicky was looking more tired and ill every minute. He usually came down with something totally incapacitating in this sort of situation. It was the thought of making a decision, and signing it for all to see, that affected him.

      ‘Mass,’ said Harry Strang.

      ‘They see each other at Sunday morning Mass,’ explained Dicky Cruyer.

      ‘No out-of-contact signals?’ I asked.

      ‘No,’ said Strang. ‘That’s what makes it worrying.’

      ‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘What else?’

      There was a moment’s silence. If I’d been paranoid I could easily have suspected that they wanted to keep me ignorant of the confirmation.

      ‘Odds and ends,’ said Billingsly.

      Strang said, ‘We have something from inside. Two men picked up for interrogation in the Frankfurt area.’

      ‘Berlin.’

      ‘Berlin? No Frankfurt,’ said Billingsly.

      I’d had enough of Billingsly by that time. They were all like him in the Data Centre: they thought we all needed a couple of megabytes of random access memory to get level with them.

      ‘Don’t act the bloody fool,’ I told Strang. ‘Is your information from Berlin or from Frankfurt?’

      ‘Berlin,’ said Strang. ‘Normannenstrasse.’ That was the big grey stone block in Berlin-Lichtenberg from which East Germany’s Stasi – State Security Service – intimidated their world and poked their fingers into ours.

      ‘Over a weekend,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t sound good. If Frankfurt Stasi put that on the teleprinter they must think they have something worthwhile.’

      ‘The question we’re discussing,’ said the Deputy with the gentle courtesy that barristers show when leading a nervous defendant into an irreversible admission of guilt, ‘is whether to follow up.’ He looked at me and tilted his head to one side as if seeing me better like that.

      I stared back at him. He was a funny bright-eyed plump little man with a shiny pink face and hair brushed close against his skull. Black jacket, a waistcoat full of ancient pens and pencils, pinstripe trousers and the tie of some obscure public school held in place by a jewelled pin. A lawyer. If you saw him on the street you’d have thought him a down-at-heel solicitor or a barrister’s clerk. In real life – which is to say outside this building – he ran one of the most successful law firms in London. Why he persevered with this unrewarding job I couldn’t fathom, but he was only one step away from running the whole Department. The D-G was, after all, on his last legs. I said, ‘You mean, should you put someone in to follow up?’

      ‘Precisely,’ said the Deputy. ‘I think we’d all like to hear your views, Samson.’

      I played for time. ‘From Berlin Field Unit?’ I said. ‘Or from somewhere else?’

      ‘I don’t think BFU should come into this,’ said Strang hastily. That was the voice of Operations.

      He was right of course. Sending someone from West Berlin into such a situation would be madness. In a region like that any kind of stranger is immediately scrutinized by every damned secret policeman on duty and a few that aren’t. ‘You’re probably right,’ I said as if conceding something.

      Strang said, ‘They’d have him in the slammer before the ink was dry on the hotel register.’

      ‘We have people nearer,’ said the Deputy.

      They were all looking at me now. This is why they’d waited for me to join them. They knew what the answer was going to be but they were going to make sure that it was me, an ex-Field Man, who would say it out loud. Then they could get on with their work, or their lunch, or doze off until the next crisis.

      ‘We can’t just leave them to it,’ I said.

      They all nodded. We had to agree the wrong answer first, that was the ethic of the Department.

      ‘We’ve had good stuff from them,’ Dicky said. ‘Nothing big of course, they are only foundry workers, but they’ve never let us down.’

      ‘I’d like to hear what Samson thinks,’ said the Deputy. He had a slim gold pencil in his hand. He was leaning back in his chair, arm extended to his notepad. He looked up from whatever he was writing, stared at me and smiled encouragement.

      ‘We’ll have to let it go,’ I said finally.

      ‘Speak up,’ said the Deputy in his housemaster voice.

      I cleared my throat. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ I said rather louder. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’

      They all turned to see the Deputy’s reaction. ‘I think that’s sound,’ he said at last. Dicky Cruyer smiled with relief at someone else making the decision. Especially a decision to do nothing. He wriggled about and ran his hand back through his curly hair, looking round the room and nodding. Then he looked over to where a clerk was keeping an account of what was said, to be sure he was writing it down.

      Well I’d earned my wages for the day. I’d told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Now nothing would happen for a day or so, apart from a group of Polish workers having their fingernails torn out under hygienic conditions with a shorthand writer in attendance.

      There was a knock at the door and a tray with tea and biscuits arrived. Billingsly, perhaps because he was the youngest and least arthritic of us, or because he wanted to impress the Deputy, distributed the cups and saucers and passed the milk and teapot along the polished table top.

      ‘Chocolate oatmeal!’ said Harry Strang. I looked up at him and he winked. Harry knew what it was all about. Harry had spent enough time at the sharp end to know what I was thinking.

      Harry poured tea for me. I took it and drank some. It turned to acid in my stomach. The Deputy was leaning towards Billingsly to ask him something about the excessive ‘down time’ the computers in the Yellow Submarine were suffering lately. Billingsly said that you had to expect some trouble with these ‘electronic toys’. The Deputy said not when you paid two million pounds for them you didn’t.

      ‘Biscuit?’ said Harry Strang.

      ‘No thanks.’

      ‘You used to like chocolate oatmeal as I remember,’ he said sardonically.

      I leaned over to see what the Deputy had written on his notepad but it was just a pattern: a hundred wobbly concentric circles with a big dot in the middle. No escape; no solution; no nothing. It was the answer he wanted to his question, I suppose, and I had given it to him. Ten marks out of ten, Samson. Advance to Go and collect two hundred pounds.

      It was only when the Deputy had finished his tea that protocol permitted even the busiest of us to take our leave. Just

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