The Contract

The train eased along the track. Nothing particular about the engine that was huge, oozing power, and that carried the initials of the Deutsche Bahn, the railway of West Germany. The main line from West Berlin to Helmstedt. He had not come to the bridge to see the engine, it was the carriages that he would observe. Ordinary and nondescript until his eyes caught the brilliance of the red and white and blue. The bloody old Union Jack, the flag attached to the carriage walls. The British military train on its daily run. A restaurant car and men with grey hair and trimmed moustaches tucking into their toast and scrambled eggs. The windows of the kitchen section were wide open to expel the grill fumes and the Army Catering Corps chef was taking time off from his frying pan and looking out. He would have seen the lone ligure on the bridge above. There was a corporal in camouflage dress who had positioned himself by a window in a carriage farther back. The train moved slowly, negotiating the junction of points. Time enough for Johnny to view the sight and scenes.

He wanted to shout, wanted to wave and communicate. The old Union Jack slipping through Magdeburg each day, a journey of impertinence, the maximum of effrontery. The historic legacy of the transit right of the Allied powers to West Berlin. And it was gone from him. He hadn't seen the East German troops who rode escort in the forward and rear carriages; complacent and on their arses they'd be, smoking and reading the day's Neues Deutschland. Right on time the train had come, mark that down as a bonus, Johnny.

A long walk now. And this was not tourist country and Johnny must forge on as if there was a purpose in his direction, as if he had the reason and the right to tramp past the factory entrances and the power stations on the Aug-Bebal- Damm. Guards of the National Volks Armee, with MPiKMs and magazines attached, watched the side roads leading to the city's heavy industry complex. Not a place to linger. Few houses here, just machinery and decay and old brickwork and heaving chimney smoke. On your way, Johnny. But better to walk, because then your eyes are brought into play. You see nothing from a train, nothing from a trolley bus, nor from a tram. You have to walk because that way you remember what you have seen. It was Wednesday morning and there was much that he must remember before Saturday evening and there would be no opportunity to retrace his steps. See it now, remember it now. Wide, flat, colourless country, pimpled with squat factory sheds and high rise chimneys.

Like a dividing ribbon the autobahn lay ahead.

Down the autobahn the car would come for the rendezvous and the pick-up of Otto Guttmann. Jumping the fences early, Johnny, light years till then. Not true, three and a half days. Not even worth thinking about. .. God, they'd kept that in short supply, they'd hoarded and they'd played the miser with Johnny's available time. But that was the plan, to press forward and sweep the target up in a rush, above all and above everything deny him the opportunity for reflection and consideration.

Sounded good at Holmbury, but stretched and creaking beside the Magdeburg intersection of the autobahn.

The autobahn bridge of grey, weathered cement straddled the road.

There was a steady surge of traffic above him. Mercedes and Opels and Audis and VWs and the throbbing articulated lorries plying the isthmus strip between West Germany and West Berlin, drivers with documents and permit for transit through the DDR. Johnny looked quickly over his shoulder. And that was wrong, out of character for his cover. Suppress it, Johnny, shut it down. He walked under the bridge and saw the sharply curving slipway to the autobahn down which a car coming from Berlin would travel and beside it the bushes that were leafy and would offer concealment. There were no houses on the far side of the city to the autobahn, no factories, only a gravel works more than 300 metres farther beyond the bridge. An unseen place, a covert place, and here the car would come and take its load and spin its wheels and be away again within seconds back onto the racing circuit of the autobahn. A deviation of less than half a minute… That's the plan, Johnny. That's what Charles Mawby and his dark suit and his club tie have been sweating on.

Not Johnny's problem, not his concern how fast a car swivels and how quickly the driver guns an engine back onto the autobahn. Johnny's concern was the bringing of an old man and his daughter to this seedy patch of undergrowth where the cover was draped with old newspapers and the ground littered with beer bottles and household rubbish. Christ, that was enough, wasn't it?

Johnny walked on. Putting the briefings of Smithson into pictures.