The Contract

Carter stayed by the barrier at the station of Wolfsburg until all the passengers had left the train. Not many of them on the early train of the day out of Magdeburg. And never really a chance that Johnny would have been with them. Straightforward enough at Holmbury. Johnny to see the Guttmanns into the pick-up car, then back to Magdeburg for the station, and nobody had drawn a blueprint for the plan if the autobahn ran off schedule. A wasted journey for Carter and he'd known it before he started. Johnny wouldn't quit, not before it was hopeless, he would have stayed at the autobahn intersection. Stayed till the train was lost to him.

What would Johnny have done with the Doctor and Erica Guttmann? Carter couldn't know, doubted that he knew his man well enough to make the judgement. The order was quit and run… it would be a hell of a thing for his man to do, but that was the order.

He had heard from Pierce the report from the Signals monitoring unit, that police activity across the border had risen sharply from the small hours of the night. The codenames for prearranged road blocks had been called, reinforcement detachments had been summoned, search parties were co-ordinated. Johnny would have stood a chance on the first train of the day. Not after that. They'll tear the bloody carriages apart till they find him.

Back to Helmstedt, back to sweat it through. Mawby and Smithson were returning in a few hours to London, Percy would fly to Bonn.

Pierce and George had been told to take the first aircraft to Heathrow.

Carter was to be left to gather up any information that might seep through. Of course it would be Carter who was left behind, because Carter was too junior to field the blame that would be ambushing the senior men of DIPPER. Better off where, he was. He would hear of Johnny soon, that was certain. He would hear of an Englishman arrested in Magdeburg.

God knows we conned you, Johnny. Conned you rotten.

He drove back from Wolfsburg on the secondary road to Helmstedt.

Through small villages that were timbered and attractive. Through fields that were tended and flourishing. Along the line of the frontier. The border was perpetually with him, as a ribbon of wire and torn earth.

Beyond it were distant and faded hills and protective woods that his eyes could not penetrate.

The border drew him, as a cliff edge will a man who suffers vertigo.

He turned off left and drove into the sleeping, Sunday morning of Saalsdorf. The wire was in front of him, away across a field. He walked from the car and threaded his footsteps between the lines of young barley. Trying to share something, wasn't he? Trying to share something with Johnny, and the only way that he knew was to go to the fence and stare across at the closed country beyond.

The River Aller, not wide, only a dozen feet or so and deep banked.

Carter stood beside the cement post painted in red, white and black that carried the embossed symbol of the German Democratic Republic.

There was a spike set in the angled top of the post and he remembered the laughter of the men he had met in the Roadhaus when they had told him that all the posts had spikes because that way the birds couldn't perch on them and defecate and smear the sign. Thorough bastards you're up against, Johnny. Fifty feet from him a dozen troops were working on the steel gate that fell to the river bed… at this bloody time in the morning. It was the first time Carter had seen the wire close up.

Formidable, chilling, high. From the fence posts where the soldiers worked beside the river, wires trailed to the ground and Carter followed them till he saw the white painted boxes, the automatic guns disconnected for the day. None of the men working on the gate looked at him, none caught his gaze.

There was the click of a camera shutter. Carter swung round. Two soldiers lay in the thick grass between him and the work party. One with a camera fitted with a telephoto lens, one with the MPiKM. The ones who guarded the guards. Bastards.

We should never have asked it of you, Johnny.

Chapter Twenty

An insipid little car it seemed to Johnny. An impoverished creature with an underpowered engine, a slipping clutch and mushy steering. His foot was hard down on the accelerator, and the needle on the dial in front of him flickered optimistically towards the figure of 90. Kilometres, Johnny, 50 miles an hour that's the maximum you'll beat out of her, and she's straining like a donkey. A pathetic bloody car, and the two doors that were loosely fastened rattled on the poor road surface. Check the dial with the engine temperature, Johnny, check the fuel gauge, and check the forward mirror. Always back to the mirror. And it's left hand driving, Johnny, and it's four years since you've done that. Check, check, check, Johnny, and pray God the road stays clear behind.