He was fully conscious again and watching me. I told him to speak to his secretary on the inter-office line and give orders that he must on no account be disturbed for the next hour. As he pressed down the switch I said softly:

"The doors are locked. If you say the wrong thing I shall have a full minute before they break the doors down. I can do a lot to a man like you in sixty seconds. Be careful."

He spoke to his secretary and I was angry with him again because he was so helpless. I must remember the men of Brucknerwald. I must do what I came to do, even though he was helpless.

He closed the switch and I said: "Now you will tell me everything. Everything."

It was not quite ten o'clock when I left the office of the Bundeminister: the work had been quicker than expected. I had not taken a gun with me, nor any weapon at all; but we are not gentlemen, and we have our little ways. He had held out for close on twenty minutes and then broken, asking for mercy. Then he had told me everything.

On the way to the Unter den Eichen I phoned Captain Stettner at the Z Bureau. "I have someone for you." He didn't sound surprised when I told him the name. There was more than one Bundeminister on the Z Commission files. "I should go and pick him up straight away."

I knew he wouldn't be able to make a decent snatch because it was a job for the Selbstmord department, as it had been with Schrader, though in this case there hadn't been a gun. I just wanted it on record that I had last seen the Bundeminister alive.

Pol was still there when I went up to our place. He looked worried at seeing me so early: it was not yet half-past ten, and I had stipulated noon.

"What has gone wrong?"

"Nothing," I said. "Set up the tape."

They were all watching me obliquely and I kept my eyes down. I was bloody well fed up with them. When the tape was running I said

"Quiller. Report of interview with Bundeminister Ernst Lobst, true name Heinrich Zossen. General picture of imminent operation planned by Phoenix organisation is as follows."

The mechanism was simple enough and the pivotal factor was that the new German General Staff commanding the Bundeswehr in present-day West Germany had 5 00,000 fully-equipped troops under arms. In West Berlin the British, American and French troops totalled 12,000. The odds were thus worse than forty to one.

The operation was to be launched in two fast and successive phases: the creation of a cold-war crisis by an armed breach of the Berlin Wall and an attack by ground troops on the Allied garrisons in the west of the city. Air bombardment of East Berlin would provoke Russian counter-action at a time when Moscow and all Russian military bases would be suffering the outbreak of pneumonic plague.

The tape-spools turned silently.

"Reference Dr. Solomon Rothstein. Please see my report 34-A, following decipherment of Rothstein document. Now repeat: Rothstein was doubling with Phoenix. His own plan to start an epidemic of pneumonic plague in the Argentine was unknown to Phoenix. His second and concurrent plan was known to them: he was in fact working for them and under their orders. They asked him to prepare nine capsules of heavily-cultured pneumonic plague bacillus for special-messenger transit to Moscow and the eight major Russian military bases. These capsules were to be broken open in those nine centres and the bacillus introduced into foodstuffs four days prior to the air bombardment of East Berlin, so that the Russian forces counter-reacting in East Germany would be cut off from central directive and military supplies and reinforcements."

This was what I had come to think of as the Parallel Assumption. I knew that Solly Rothstein had been doubling with Phoenix. It thus seemed reasonable to assume that he was doing two jobs in parallel: preparing to wipe out San Caterina in the Argentine and preparing to wipe out the military centres of whatever country or countries Phoenix planned to attack. Solly would never have told me of his Argentine operation. He had wanted to tell me of the work he was doing for Phoenix. Later, had he lived, he would have informed both Russia and the Allied commands in Berlin, the moment Phoenix asked him to produce the nine capsules. The operation would then be imminent and although he might not be given the actual date of its launching he would have five days' warning: one day for transmission of the capsules, four days for the plague to incubate. Certain of this ample period of warning, he passed no information out to the Allied Commands or the Soviets, since his idea was to let Phoenix build up their large-scale preparations so that when he sprang the leak they would be caught at the height of their endeavours and would thus serve long sentences.

I said into the tape: "The Rothstein capsules would of course have contained a harmless culture. The instant Phoenix knew he was doubling they shot him and raided his laboratory to seize any papers that might incriminate them. At the same time they would have forced the laboratory assistants to indicate the most lethal of those bacilli then in culture, so that they could proceed with their plan to wipe out the nine Soviet centres, knowing that if Rothstein were doubling he could never have been expected to provide ‘live’ capsules. Every effort should clearly be made to trace any culture missing from the Rothstein laboratory and to grill both the assistants and the Phoenix agents who made the raid. The safe was broken open (see report by Captain Stettner, Z Commission) and it seems probable that an envelope addressed to the Russian Army Command and/or the Allied Commands would have been left there by Dr. Rothstein and subsequently removed and destroyed by Phoenix. The raid was carried out in haste, so that the metal container addressed to the Doctor's brother was overlooked, whereas almost no papers were left behind."

I cut the switch and sat for a minute, checking all mental hooks for material. It seemed about everything.

Pol asked: "Signal ends?"

"I don't know. Probably. There'll be a whole lot of details but there's no time now. Push it through if you want to."

Two of them linked up the tape to the London line for the play-back while Pol dialled on the other phone. In a minute he said: "General Stewart, please. Then find out where he is. This is LCB." He watched the men rigging the tape. "General Stewart? Our man is back ahead of schedule. You can go in when you're ready." He hung up.

The tape was running fast, reversed. Hengel spoke into the phone and asked for London. Pol sat on the edge of the desk and looked down at me.

"What happened to Zossen?"

I felt angry with him, and looked directly up at him so that the anger could drive out the other thing they'd all seen in my eyes. Pol was a pernickety man and he remembered everything. He remembered what I'd said to him in the box in the theatre when we'd been talking about Zossen. I had said: Give me a rope, and ask no questions.

"I don't know," I told him.

He said: "I mean do we have to put out smoke for you."

"No. He left a suicide note. I thought it was the best way."

Pol nodded and moved from the desk as London came on the line. They started the tape-recorder, and as the spools began turning I slid back on the chair and leaned my head on the wall and closed my eyes. My voice sounded verytired on the tape. I must be getting old, getting old.