Authors: Eric Ambler
‘Very sensible, Mr Halliday. The buck has passed. What Nato does is Nato’s business. Let’s concern ourselves with ours. I’ll prophesy this. If Mukhabarat Zentrum’s people don’t kill me today, they will not kill me at all, nor any of my family. There! What do you think?’
‘I’ve heard cheerier forecasts.’
‘Listen, Mr Halliday. If they fail with me today they will have to wait and start thinking again. When they find that I and my family have totally disappeared and no longer exist except as memories, they will claim responsibility. Who will there be to dispute their claim? You? Herr Schelm? General Newell? I don’t think so.’
‘Talking of me, patron, what’s your reading of my chances?’
‘If they fail to kill you today, they will find it convenient to forget you. No one could ever hear of that failure and hold it against them. And, the moment your interview receives publicity, here or anywhere else, you would be, if still alive, doubly safe. Simone is right about that. They don’t like accepting those contracts that are obviously motivated by someone’s desire for personal reprisal, even from clients who can afford to pay top rates. When the policeman can see a motive he will go to the client with awkward questions that the client may feel he has to answer. Mukhabarat Zentrum considers that class of business as beneath it. In that area, at least, I can be reassuring. A calm mind helps, though I
have
heard it said that one can be too
calm for safety. Have you ever found that?’
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’
‘Quite right. It’s today that matters. So, let us be serious. What do you now see behind us?’
I looked and saw, as expected, the Ortofilm van. ‘The same scene. Nothing’s changed.’
‘Look again, carefully.’
‘Guido’s driving the van now. Is that what you mean? I don’t see Jean-Pierre.’
‘He got out when we stopped for the road repair block at Neumarkt. He’s quick for his age. I doubt if anyone noticed.’
‘I gather that there’s been a change of plan.’
‘Not an immediate change, Mr Halliday, and please don’t think that I am ungrateful for the arrangements you made for our safety. They have been a great help in enabling
us
to choose where we will stand and fight instead of the enemy. What we will have is not a total change of plan, but certain modifications. Jean-Pierre knows my mind. Before you left the Gasthaus this morning he made some contingency arrangements that he thought I might like to have available. It was a natural thing for him to do. We have worked together for many years remember.’
‘Yes. What’s the first modification?’
‘I want us to make the stop where you will hand over package number one of the film to ORF’s Mr Rainer before we get to Arnoldstein. Just after Villach there is a bridge over the railroad. We will make the handover two hundred metres beyond the bridge. Do you have a stop signal arranged?’
‘Three quick flashes with the headlights. But why there? What for? We could get ten kilometres closer to the Italian frontier than that,
and
still keep the ORF escort.’
He made one of his giggly jokes. ‘We shall have the Mukhabarat Zentrum escort instead.’ When Simone sighed loudly, he said: ‘Don’t worry, Mr Halliday. They won’t dare to move against us just there.’
‘That means, I take it, that the real problem is going to be
blasting our way through a roadblock on the way down to Tarvisio.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to have to do that.’ He sounded quite shocked by the idea. ‘We would have two enemy teams to contend with then, one behind and one in front. No, no! Let us first worry about the Autobahn to Villach.’
‘What about our rifles and ammunition?’ asked Simone. ‘The rifles are clean, but should we not have one loaded and ready to fire?’
‘Leave all that to me. I will have a rifle and one magazine where I can reach them quickly. But if there is an incident, if they try to play games with us on the Autobahn and the police become involved we must not be seen to be armed. Now, we are coming to St Veit. When we stop for a traffic light, Mr Halliday, you and I will change places. But very quick, please, when I give the word.’
‘Okay.’
‘And it would be a good idea for Jasmin to give you both parcels of film now,’ he went on. ‘You should hide parcel number two before we get to the Autobahn.’ He spoke in their private language to Jasmin who at once handed me the packages.
Ripping the lining of an inside pocket while you are wearing the coat of which it is a part proved to be difficult. In the end, Mokhtar lent me a murderous-looking flick knife so that I could cut the seam. ‘I don’t see why I have to treat a good suit like this,’ I complained.
‘You’ll see,’ Zander replied. ‘And you had better give me the other parcel, the one for ORF. It will be safer in the glove compartment. We don’t want you dropping it when we change places. Are you carrying your passport on your person or is it in your briefcase?’
‘It’s in my other inside pocket.’
‘Keep it there. What about your money, your credit cards?’
‘They’re making an uncomfortable bulge in the same place. Why?’
‘You will need them on your person.’
I rarely respond well to being treated like a backward infant, but on that occasion I meekly handed over the ORF package and checked to see that my passport, travellers’ cheques and credit cards were where I had said they were. Zander could be maddening, but he had a way of commanding obedience that was hard to resist. No doubt the General would have been able to tell me why.
We went through St Veit without hitting a single red light and Zander began to get fidgety over the delay in our changing places. We were in the outskirts of Klagenfurt and only two kilometres short of the turn-off for the Villach Autobahn before we had to stop for a big crane transporter backing out of a building site. Almost before we had started to slow down Zander had his door eased open and was telling me to do the same. In fact the whole change-around took less than ten seconds. The manœuvrings of the crane transporter held us up for a full two minutes.
Zander spent them extracting one of the rifles, which were rolled up in what a customs man making a cursory inspection of the baggage would have taken for a piece of camping equipment, and in re-arranging the boxes of ammunition. My knowledge of small arms is pretty well limited to those used in the wars I have covered as a reporter. I
think
the rifles they had that day were Armalite AR 15’s, the kind that fire smallish bullets with high muzzle velocities. Marksmen don’t like them because they aren’t very accurate and you can’t really aim them at anything over two hundred yards away. At any range up to six hundred, however, those small bullets can do terrible damage to a human body. Not even the entry wound is a clean hole. The Colt magazines they had each held twenty-five rounds. That I know because the information was plainly stencilled on the boxes they were in.
The Klagenfurt–Villach Autobahn is mostly four lanes with steel dividers. It goes to six lanes for short distances where the on and off ramps join it, but on the westbound
lanes that we were using, Rainer’s plan for dealing with any attempts to interfere with the Ortofilm vehicles proved to be simple. As soon as we got on to the Autobahn, the ORF camera-car, its roof-light still flashing, moved out into the fast lane, and stayed there without increasing its speed. I looked back and saw that the ORF truck had done the same thing. The furious horn blasts which now pursued us were not from the Rasmuk Citroën but, quite evidently, from regular Autobahn users. Five-thirty was the beginning of the evening rush hour, and workers from Klagenfurt factories and offices with suburban homes in the Wörther See area were in a hurry. Clearly, the Rasmuk team had long ago realized that ORF, for strange reasons of its own, was providing Ortofilm with an escort. A radio check with whoever was controlling the Rasmuk operation had probably elicited orders to maintain contact and report progress towards the frontier.
Zander was impressed by the way ORF was using its muscle. ‘This Rainer of yours,’ he said, ‘must be an amusing fellow.’
‘Not particularly amusing, but very determined. He means to have that film and he’ll stay with us until he gets it. All the way to the frontier if you want.’
He ignored my last remark. ‘Well, he’s given Bourger and his team an anxious time. That is helpful. An anxious opponent is always more liable to make mistakes. Is there anything in this briefcase of yours that you particularly want to keep?’
‘There’s a thick address book there that I’d rather not lose.’
‘Jasmin can take that in her handbag. All right?’
‘Okay. If you say so. I gather you mean to ditch this thing we’re riding in.’
‘I am making sure that if we leave it to be destroyed we take what we need with us. You have also here the Nechayev memoir.’
‘You were going to tell me about that some day.’
‘I bought the original manuscript several years ago from a dealer in Basel. He did not put a high value on it. It was among what he called his political ephemera – old letters and other documents of passing interest to specialists. He suspected it of being a forged pastiche done ten years or so after Nechayev’s death. One of Pacioli’s so-called experts had the same idea. I believe it, though, to be genuine. I was almost ashamed to use it as bait in that way.’
‘What makes you think it’s genuine?’
‘Nechayev has always interested me. Are you one of those who believe that soldiers and men of affairs are incapable of serious thought?’
‘What I was really asking, perhaps, is why you picked on Nechayev as a subject for serious thought. Why not Kropotkin or Malatesta? Nechayev was just a wild man.’
‘Simone would agree with you, but Professor Arnold Toynbee didn’t think so. Have you read his correspondence with Daisaku Ikeda?’
‘I’ve never even heard of it.’
‘And you a man of letters! Ah well. Toynbee compares Nechayev with Robespierre and Lenin. All made the ethical and intellectual mistakes of believing that violence is a justifiable means when the end you have is the ultimate welfare of mankind. Robespierre and Lenin lived long enough to see, but not to admit, that the earthly paradises they had created were merely two different kinds of terror. If Nechayev also had lived, he too might have been on that famous train that arrived in Petersburg in nineteen-seventeen. But he would have been there
instead
of Lenin. Don’t worry about the memoir, not this copy. I will send you another, better-translated. Now, we are getting to Villach and must be alert. There is a loop road, eh Simone?’
‘We are on it now. The Autobahn stops here. We have about three kilometres to go.’
As she spoke, the Autobahn divider ended and we were on
a two-way road with traffic going in both directions and a common centre lane for passing. The ORF camera-car at once moved over into the position dead ahead of us that it occupied before the Autobahn. The big truck that had been running interference alongside our van dropped back into line. A swarm of angry small-car drivers at once seized the opportunity to snarl by, but there was no sign of the Citroën. Zander had the telescope out though and, after a moment or two, reported that the Citroën was tucked in behind the ORF truck.
‘Bourger is in no hurry,’ he remarked. ‘He awaits developments.’
We were in a fringe area of small factories and lumber yards on the outskirts of Villach. I noticed that the signposts were becoming more frequent and beginning to point towards Arnoldstein, the frontiers and a special customs clearance depot for big commercial vehicles.
‘Slowly, Simone. Slowly and steadily,’ Zander warned. ‘We don’t want them to think that we don’t know where we are exactly.’
‘You’re getting excited for no reason, patron,’ she said. ‘
I
know exactly where we are. We’re just coming to the railroad bridge. We can’t just stop anywhere here, no matter what the map says. The road’s too narrow.’
Beyond the bridge there was a street with old apartment blocks and small stores on either side of it; then came two gas stations, then there was a truckers’ café with a big parking lot in front of it.
‘There,’ said Zander.
She flashed the headlights three times and pulled off the road. I saw Rainer turn his head quickly as his driver stopped and began to back up towards us. When they stopped again, Rainer said something and the driver switched off the roof-light.
‘So far so good,’ said Zander. ‘Now, Mr Halliday, he’s
your
friend. Go give him the film he wants and thank him for
his very efficient help. Tell him we can look after ourselves now.’
‘Can we look after ourselves? Nothing’s changed so far that I can see. We still have a Rasmuk hit team sitting on our tail. Your memories of Raoul Bourger as a teenage killer don’t make him sound like the kind who mellows over the years. Has the fact that you once knew him made you change your mind? Does it look now as if, after all, you may be able to do a deal and
buy
yourself off the hook?’
He still disliked my disrespectful habit of asking him direct questions. ‘Mukhabarat Zentrum has no use for hit teams of mellow personalities, Mr Halliday,’ he said. ‘You leave my job to me. Yours is to get rid of your television friend there smoothly and without fuss. I wish to part company with him here. Right? Take your time. No hurry. But get rid of him.’
‘Whatever you say, patron.’
I took the package of film from the glove compartment and climbed out. Even from a distance of eight or ten yards, I could see that Rainer was deeply suspicious of me and the unexpected stop we had made. That very morning I had asked him for an escort all the way to the frontier at Thöl. Now I was stopping when I was nearly there. To fill up with gas? No. I’d just passed a couple of gas stations. Was I stopping for coffee? A last cup of the real Austrian-style brew with cream? Absurd. No, I had to be trying in some cunning way and for some disreputable reason of my own to renege on our deal. Or maybe I’d just failed to get a foot of film and had been postponing the embarrassing moment when I would have to admit it. Well, whatever the bad news was, he wasn’t about to make it easy for me to break.