Yesterday's Spy (26 page)

The flashing police-lights made long reflections on the road, and the trucks slowed and followed the police cars into the heavy vehicle park of a service area. Our helicopter put us down gently just before the huge diesel trucks cut their engines, one by one.

‘Perfect,' said Schlegel. I'd never heard him use that word before.

The policemen got out of their Porsches, put on their white-topped caps and stretched their limbs. They had been providing us with a commentary for the last half hour. Now they saluted Schlegel and awaited instructions.

‘Ask them for their driving licences,' said Schlegel derisively. ‘Jesus Christ! Don't tell me a traffic cop can't find something wrong with everybody.'

They didn't smile, and neither did the men who climbed down from the cabs of the trucks.

‘Check the manifests, check the customs seals, check the brakes,' said Schlegel. He tapped my arm. ‘You and me are going to give them the once-over lightly, before we open them up.'

They were gigantic fifty-ton diesels: twelve forward speeds and two reverse. Cabs like glasshouses, ergonometrically designed seats, and behind them a rest bunk. There were racks for vacuum flasks of coffee, and cheap transistor radios were taped to the sunshields. A set of Michelin maps was duplicated for each of the five cabs, and there was a German phrase-book and a repair manual. They had been on the road for almost twenty-four hours. The cabs had become a smelly clutter of empty cigarette packets and butts, squashed paper cups and discarded newspapers.

‘We would see it,' Schlegel reminded me. ‘Champion was frightened that we would see it, smell it, or hear it. Otherwise there was no point in arranging that charade with those kooks.'

One of the traffic policemen brought the manifest to Schlegel. It was the same as the ones we'd got from the dock office in Marseille. It described the load as a general consignment of engine parts, construction materials, fabrics and chemicals. Schlegel handed it back. ‘Frisk all of them,' he told the policeman. ‘If you find as much as a pocket knife, it might be enough to hold them for inquiries. And I want the exterior of the trucks examined by someone who knows how many differentials a truck like this needs and where to find them.'

‘Yes, sir,' said the policeman.

There was a steel towing-cable padlocked to the underside of the chassis and, in special cradles behind the cabs, there were steel wheel-chocks. Schlegel rapped one of them. The metal was too heavy to get an echo out of it.

Schlegel looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

‘Why?' I said. ‘When you can put it inside so easily?'

‘I suppose you are right,' said Schlegel. ‘We're going to have to bust them open.' The vehicles were so large, and the wheels so big, that we were able to get right under the chassis without crouching very low. ‘Look at the suspension,' said Schlegel. ‘With one of these brutes you could schlepp Cologne cathedral away in the middle of the night, and still throw the opera house in the trunk.'

‘And it could take plenty more, too,' I remarked. We looked at the massive leaf springs. The upper one was still curved, and the lower, supplementary spring not yet tensioned.

‘That's got to be it!' said Schlegel, in great excitement. ‘You've hit it.'

‘The weight!'

‘Exactly. These trucks must be almost empty. Look at that! We should have noticed that from the way they were sitting on the road.'

‘And a customs man would have noticed. In fact they might have put them on a weighbridge while the manifest was stamped.'

‘Why? Why? Why?' said Schlegel. He punched the great rubber tyre.

‘So that we would be talking about fifty-ton diesel-truck suspension, somewhere on the banks of the lower Rhine, while Champion is earning a promotion from colonel of propaganda to general of god-knows-what.'

Schlegel grunted, and came out from under the truck. He waved to the policeman. ‘Forget it,' he called. ‘Let them go.'

‘They say they are going right the way down the Autobahn to Munich,' said the policeman.

‘Are the papers in order?'

‘They say they are going to get new papers in Bonn.'

‘Let them go,' said Schlegel. ‘They can keep going all the way to Vladivostok for all I care.' He smiled. ‘That's all, boys: go get yourselves some coffee.'

The policemen looked at Schlegel with that same inscrutable superiority with which they look up from your driving licence.

Schlegel turned back to me. ‘Munich,' he said with disgust. ‘And after that, Brindisi or Lisbon – it's a merry dance he's been leading us.'

‘There's something else,' I said.

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know – but he didn't send five empty trucks from Marseille docks to Bonn just to grab our attention.'

‘Why not?' said Schlegel. ‘He did it! And while we chased them, he got to where he wanted to go.'

‘You don't know Champion,' I said. ‘That's not fancy enough for him.'

Littered with old food wrappings, smelling of spilled fuel and warm fat, these coffee shops on the Autobahns are the most desolate places in Europe. An endless succession of strangers gobble mass-produced food and hurry on. The staff are glassy eyed and melancholy, trapped in a river of traffic, which swirls past so that the fumes, noise and vibration never cease.

‘And lousy coffee,' added Schlegel.

‘Do you know how much it costs to hold a chopper on the ground while you dunk that doughnut?'

‘You're a lot of fun to have around,' said Schlegel. ‘Did I ever tell you that?' He opened his shirt and scratched himself.

‘Not lately,' I admitted.

‘Hit me with one of your dust-packets, will you.'

I gave him one of my French cigarettes.

‘Why?' he said for the hundredth time. He lit the cigarette.

‘There's only one explanation,' I said.

He inhaled and then waved the match violently to put the flame out. ‘Give.'

‘He brought something off that boat.'

‘And unloaded it during the night,' finished Schlegel. ‘On the other hand, they've been making such a good average speed.'

‘It's all double-think,' I said.

‘Let's get back to Nice,' said Schlegel. He scratched himself again, but this time there seemed to be an element of self-punishment in it.

When Champion broke from the department, we set up this small office in Nice. The modest entrance bore the trademark of a well-known British travel company, and three of our staff gave their full-time attention to legitimate travel business.

Schlegel had taken an office on the top floor. He was standing in the window when I entered, looking across the square to Nice railway station. When Cimiez, in the northern part of Nice, had been chic, this section had also been fashionable. But now it was dirty and rundown. The tourists arrived at the airport, and they wanted hotels near the sea. I walked over to the window.

The railway station had hardly changed since the day I waited for Champion to arrive, and watched him being arrested. The tiled floor was a little more chipped, the mural of the Alps a little dirtier, but what else had stayed so much the same? Certainly not me.

Schlegel could always find himself a clean shirt, but his suit was creased and baggy, and the oil-stain on his knee was the one he'd got from the wheel of the big truck. His eyes were red, and he rubbed them. ‘They should tear this whole lousy district down. Put the bus depot and the railroad station in one complex, and stack twenty floors of office accommodation overhead.'

‘Is that why you sent down for me?' I said.

‘What are you doing downstairs?'

‘Trying to catch up on my sleep. First time since I got up on Sunday.'

‘You want to learn to cat-nap. No. I mean what are you working on down there?'

‘I sent out for some maps. I'm waiting for them,' I told him.

‘I know all about that,' said Schlegel. ‘When people in this office send out for things, I get a copy of the requisition. Your goddamn maps have arrived. I've got them here.'

‘I can see you have,' I said.

‘That's the way I work.'

‘Well, good luck, Colonel. I'll go back downstairs and try to get a little more sleep.' I got up and went to the door.

Schlegel suppressed a yawn. ‘OK, OK, OK. We're both tired. Now come over here and show me what you want the maps for.'

I went around to the other side of his desk and sorted through the survey maps of the country round Champion's house, and copies of the land registration, and some data about drainage and changes of ownership. I tipped everything – except the map that showed the whole region – into Schlegel's wastepaper basket. ‘That stuff was just to make it look like an ordinary lawyer's inquiry,' I said.

‘You want to tell me what's on your mind?' demanded Schlegel.

‘Those five empty trucks. Suppose they unloaded the contents at the Champion house.' I spread the map.

‘No, no, no,' said Schlegel. ‘I thought of that, but the gendarmerie patrol that area up there. They fixed a new lock on the back door. They go in there to look round.'

‘Let's suppose,' I said patiently.

‘That Champion is sitting in the dark up there, testing the spark plugs in some reconditioned dragster?'

‘Engine parts,' I said. ‘That might mean pumps, to get the old workings going again.'

‘The mine.' He snatched the map and unrolled it across his desk. He used the phone, a paperweight and his desk-set to hold the corners. He sucked his teeth as he looked at the full extent of the mine workings: the shafts, seams and the long haulage roads. ‘That was quite a layout.'

I rapped my knuckle against the telephone with enough effort to make the bell tinkle. ‘And just about here, remember – the artillery depot, Valmy.'

‘Jesus!' whispered Schlegel. ‘They've got atomic shells in that store.' For the first time Schlegel took the idea seriously.

‘Nuclear artillery shells – at Valmy! And you knew that all along?' I said.

‘It was need-to-know,' said Schlegel defensively.

‘And I didn't need to know?'

‘Keep your voice down, mister. You were going to sit in Champion's pocket. Telling you that there were nukes in Champion's back yard would have been stupid.'

I didn't reply.

‘It wasn't a matter of
trust,'
said Schlegel.

‘You're a stupid bastard,' I said.

‘And maybe you're right,' he admitted. He ran his thumb and index finger down his face, as if to wipe the wrinkles from his cheeks. It didn't work. ‘So what do we do about this?' He smacked the map with his fingers so that he made a tiny tear in the brittle paper.

‘We'd better tell Paris,' I said.

‘If we're wrong, they'll hate us. If we're right, they'll hate us even more.'

‘You'd better tell them,' I said.

‘You don't know those people like I do,' said Schlegel. ‘Champion was once one of ours – that's all they will need to blame us for everything.'

‘We've had these maps from the municipal authority – and that's on record – you've been told about the atomic shells – and that's on record, too. They will crucify us if we don't tell them immediately.'

Schlegel looked at his watch. ‘They will have packed up by now. I don't want to spend an hour explaining things to the night-duty officer.' He looked up at me. ‘And I know that you don't, either. Let's go out to the house and take another look at it. It might be just another false trail. If it's worth a damn, we'll tell Paris in the morning. What do you say?'

‘I don't like it,' I said.

‘Why not?'

‘I don't like it,' I said, ‘because when we get out there, you'll want to go inside. And then, you're going to want to find the entrance to the mine. And then you're going to want to go down there … and all the time, you're going to be holding me in front of you.'

‘How can you say that! Did I ever do that to you before?'

Before I could answer, Schlegel picked up the phone to get a car.

It was dark. I fidgeted enough to send the blood back through my dead arm, and looked round to where Schlegel was hiding, in the scrubland just a few feet away. The western horizon was still pale. But there was not enough light to see the Tix house, except through the night-scope that we'd set up on the rise behind it.

There was precious little moon, just a well-honed sickle, cutting its way out of the clouds every few minutes. But it was during such a flicker of light that the 'scope showed a movement at the back door. I held my breath: it was a man, tall enough to be Champion. He had a gun slung over his shoulder, and was wearing a helmet and some sort of boots or gaiters. I released the trigger on the night-scope so that the intensifying tube could build up a fresh charge. I used it again as the man started to walk across the yard, picking his way past the mud, and then climbing the wooden stairs to a vantage point on the platform outside the hayloft. It made a good sentry post; too good – if he turned this way he'd need no night-scope to see us moving.

Schlegel moved closer. ‘Champion's people,' he said. On the cold air his voice was dangerously loud. He rubbed his mouth, as if to punish it, and when he spoke again it was in a whisper. ‘Not real policemen; I checked the patrol times before we left.'

The dew had soaked my clothes and there was enough of a breeze to make me shiver. I nodded, lest the tone of my voice revealed the state of my morale.

We'd already seen another such man, standing at the place where the tracks divided for the house and the quarry. Equipped with a radio-phone it would be easy to warn of the approach of the gendarmes on their regular patrols.

Schlegel elbowed me aside, and took the eyepiece of the 'scope for a moment. There was a movement beyond the clump of half-dead olive trees that we were depending upon to screen us from the house. Lying full-length in the grass, I felt the vibrations of a man stamping his feet to keep warm. He was not more than forty metres away from us. Perhaps only the woollen scarf wrapped round his head, plus the numbness that comes from long spells of sentry duty, had prevented him from hearing Schlegel's voice.