The Contract

Ulf Becker would never run on that open ground, not with Heini Schalke high and unimpeded above him in the tower. Not with Heini Schalke pulling the hard stock of the MPiKM against his shoulder and squinting with his pig eyes down the foresight.

Not here… an impossibility here.

Cold in the shadow of the tower. Cold in the night air. Gone was the heat and the touch of Jutte. Find me that place, she had said. Find me that place, she had shouted from the platform at Schoneweide. But there was no place on the ground west of Weferlingen. If he were to come on foot to the south of the village, use the Siedlung Hagholz woods for concealment and cross the road that leads to the lime works, and stay beyond the old brick buildings of the railway yards… Then there was the tower and the night- sight binoculars, then there were the lights, then there were the fences, then there were the spring guns, and still there was Heini Schalke and a hundred more in the company.

A chill eddied in the tower, carried on the wind, bitter and penetrating because the windows must be open so as not to delay them if they must shoot and because the binoculars were less effective through glass.

Jutte, it is not possible here.

Find me that place.

Away to his left he saw the lights of the approaching jeep. The border, lethal to those who intruded on its ground, was alive only with armed and watchful men.

There was a pleasing peace in the house. Close to midnight. Smithson and Pierce away to their beds. Carter back into his book. The slow hours of the late evening. The best time of the day for Johnny, when the quiet took command.

'You know, Johnny, we haven't a name for this caper, and we're under a month.' Carter looked up. 'We have to have a name for you.'

'Not a bloody Greek god, don't give me one of them.'

'Of course, lad. I've found it here, just the number.'

Johnny was amused. Johnny wondered whether Carter's hands ever sweated, whether he shouted at his wife, threw his temper at his children, whether he panicked, whether he screamed. He had seen a rough side with the boy, but that was tactical, that showed neither strength nor weakness. Carter would be escorting Johnny to Hannover, working on the fine detail of the pick-up. He'd want to have faith in this man, Johnny would want to trust him, to the full. The one who ironed the creased details of organisation… and who was filching ideas from a guide to European birds.

'What are you going to call me?'

Carter looked over the top of his reading spectacles. 'The Latin is cinclus cinclus. There are many names, different in parts of the country – water blackbird, water crow, water pyet. These are the characteristics…

"straight, fast flight. Can swim both on the surface and under water, enters water by either wading in or diving, habitually walks submerged on the stream bed." That's what we want of our lad, creeping along the floor of the river while the Volkspolizei sit on the banks in blissful ignorance. I reckon that's rather apt. They call it most often the Dipper.

I'm going to put it to Mawby. You'll be the Dipper man, Johnny. I think it's rather good…'

Johnny had not replied. There were feet drumming down the staircase.

The crash of doors being wrenched open. George's voice angry and raised and cursing.

Carter snapped his book shut, drove his glasses into his breast pocket, started up from his chair.

The door of the living room arched towards them. George was in silhouette, the hall lights blazing behind him. Half dressed, hair dishevelled, eyes wide with anger.

'He's gone… Guttmann. I can't find the bugger anywhere.'

It was Johnny who discovered the imprint of shoes in the soft earth of the flower bed beside the rainwater pipe beneath the boy's window.

Chapter Eight

A slow May dawn, arriving at its own deliberate pace, maddening for the men at the house. They had searched the grounds as best they could with torches, had stumbled over the flower beds and through the rhododendron bushes and between the trees. They had arced their lights in the outbuildings, seeking the cover that a fugitive might use. They had seen nothing, they had heard nothing. Smithson and Pierce in separate cars had gone to drive through the lanes that skirted Holmbury Hill and its woods, roaring away down the drive in the early hours, and neither back yet. George, distraught and malevolent, still paced the grounds of the house as if believing that with the daylight a great truth might yet be found inside the perimeter fence. The nestling had taken to its wings, and George who had been given responsibility for the close supervision of Willi Guttmann had been found wanting. Perhaps that was why he lingered outside, avoiding the reproach of those who waited inside. Later he would find the boy's route over the wire, but it would be of token importance.