Went over to the telephone.

'Just reporting in.'

Brief pause. 'What happened?' Cone.

His tone was wary, apprehensive, because, I suppose, of what he'd heard in my voice.

'I know where the target is.'

Volper.

Another pause. That had been telling him rather a lot. It had been telling him that we had a hope of completing the mission, of bringing Quickstep home. In a moment he asked, 'Can you reach him?'

'Yes.'

'I low long will it take?'

'Not long.'

'I'd feel more comfortable,' he said, 'in the end-phase, if you had some support. Not close. Just in the field.'

'It won't be necessary. He'll be alone.'

Another pause. 'All right. I've been in signals with London. They're prepared to let Trumpeter go ahead.'

'That should be interesting.'

'They also told me that the only danger to our protege is from the target. No one else.'

Not from Trumpeter.

'Do what I can,' I said. 'I'll report when I'm through.'

I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and drank a glass of water with its rank taste of chlorine; then I got my Lufthansa bag and went out of the room and down the stairs and across to the car.

07:04.

Over the past minutes the sky had been lightening.

I shifted on the seat, leaning my shoulder against the door, one hand hooked across the wheel rim.

There were no clouds, only a thin haze from the city softening the lights across the airport. I'd seen three planes come in since I'd got here, their landing lights coming on as they settled into final approach, directly in line with the street where I was waiting in the car.

The hotel was less than a hundred yards away. I'd chosen this location because it was near enough to see Volper clearly when he came out of the hotel and got into the car that was standing there, and far enough to give me a certain amount of cover. There were no lights in the hotel, and almost no windows: a wrecking gang had started demolition work on it a month ago, Dollinger had told me, and stopped again because of some bureaucratic holdup.

Dollinger.

His name still tolled like a death-knell in my mind.

But you had to do it. Give yourself a break.

No excuses.

It was that, or risking Gorbachev's life.

There should have been some other way.

It was for the mission.

Do that to a man, for a mission?

There's no quarter, in this trade. You know that.

Yes of course I've always known it and I've done a lot of things I couldn't live with and then lived with them but don't expect me to do them and then go whistling on my way, damn you.

Steady, lad.

07:42.

I didn't like this. I was beginning to worry.

I still didn't know where Volper had planned to intercept his target but it was obviously going to be soon after the General-Secretary had landed, at some time between his leaving the plane and leaving the airport, or just afterwards, soon after his leaving the airport; and that wasn't illogical because although the protection around him would be at its most concentrated, Volper was a man to strike where it'd be least expected.

He should be leaving his temporary base at any time now; the main route from the airport was eleven minutes from here, from the hotel: I'd timed the run at legal speed when I'd got here.

He would have to leave here, then, within seven minutes from now.

I could only wait. But he was running it close and it worried me.

Cone would be worried too. He hadn't expected me to get so close to the target so fast. I hadn't kept in touch, and he knew nothing about a bombed-out Mercedes burning in the streets, or about the man sagging in the chair buying his life with betrayal.

London knew nothing either, except for the last signal Cone had just sent in through Cheltenham for the board.

Executive has initiated end-phase, reports within reach of target.

Theirs not to do or die, theirs but to stand and wait, so forth. I didn't envy them. But Trumpeter was to go ahead, and that was a surprise. On whose decision? Not Shepley's. The Prime Minister's, possibly after consultation with the Chairman of the Praesidium on the private line.

Pollock would be delighted.

No. I'm just a kind of coordinator.

But it was your idea?

Yes.

The tape-recorder turning, Cone sitting there shrunk into his raincoat, Melnichenkov sweating hard, Schwarz saying nothing, the smoke thick in the cellar.

'How did it begin?'

'With Schwarz, actually. He and Bader used to come into the Club, and we got talking. A lot of it was political, like most of the talk in that place. There was a feeling in the air that Miki was coming to East Berlin to open the Wall, you know — an official ceremony and all that; but I knew he couldn't do it. They'd sling him out of power.'

Cone:

'That was your impression?'

'Most of us felt that way. With a man as charismatic as Gorbachev, there's always the risk of his opponents feeling jealous, and scared of his getting too powerful — look what happened to Khrushchev. Then it was something Schwarz said that put things together for me.'

'What did Schwarz say?'

Pollock looked across at him. 'I think this is your bit.'

The pilot got up and walked about, hands tucked into his belt. 'Listen, I am Jewish, like Hans.' Bader. 'And these people won't let us go over there to see our families. They gave us the high privilege of taking us into the bloody Airforce but won't trust us on the other side of the Wall for a couple of days. They — '

'But they'd be afraid you'd give away military information.'

'Others have been allowed across — people with classified information in their heads. So we hate the Wall, and more than most people. So one day I told Dickie — ' Pollock '- that it was getting to be an obsession with me, and with Hans. Every time we flew on training and exercise missions there was the Wall down there, and we were flying bombers…'

Cone leaned over to check the recorder, see that it was running. Everyone had gone very still.

'So I talked discreetly to someone else,' Pollock cut in again. 'Someone at the Soviet Embassy close to Talyzin, in the Kremlin.' Quick clean smile. 'From that point it all built up into Trumpeter.'

Walls of Jericho.

'It was Talyzin who took charge, then?'

'That's right.' He got out of his chair too. 'You see, he knows Miki very well; he's his right-hand man, behind the scenes. Of course in the Kremlin most things happen behind the scenes. Politically, it was felt that if Miki tried to get the Wall down officially it would cost him his career, but if someone could breach it for him, he could make the grand Marxist gesture of yielding to the will of the people and leaving it open — and in fact ordering a new street to be driven through it in the name of peace and the brotherhood of nations — you know the line.'

'My God,' Cone said. He was hunched forward now, squinting up at Pollock. 'You'll never get away with it.'

'Talyzin says we could.'

'You mean he's talked about this to Gorbachev?'

Pollock stopped pacing. 'Put it this way. Talyzin is a staunch ally of the General-Secretary's politically, and a close friend on a personal level. I don't think for a moment he could mastermind Trumpeter from the wings without sounding Gorbachev out first.'

Cone turned a glance on me and looked back at Pollock again. I didn't know what he meant. I think he was wondering if I could accept Trumpeter for what it was, for what it could do in Europe, with global repercussions.