Symmes and Burchwood talked. I don’t remember what they said, but it seemed like nonsense at the time. I produced my last cigarette and tapped Padillo on the shoulder. He turned around and smiled, accepting it. “They’re still behind us,” he said.
“I know,” Max said. “We should turn at the next block.”
“How’s the time?” Padillo asked.
“We have a three- or four-minute leeway.”
“Go up three blocks and then turn. If they still follow, you’re going to have to try to lose them.”
Max continued to drive at a steady forty kilometers an hour. He made two green lights. I counted blocks. On the third one he signaled for a right turn. He pulled over to the right-hand lane and turned the steering wheel carefully, shifted down into second, and watched the police Trabant in the rearview mirror. He sighed. “They kept on going,” he said.
I exhaled noisily. I discovered that I had been holding my breath. Padillo glanced at his watch. “We should be right on time,” he said. Max circled the block and drove back the way we had come. He turned left on a side street and parked the car. It was twilight.
“Everybody out,” Padillo ordered.
I showed Symmes and Burchwood my gun before I put it into my raincoat pocket. “It’ll shoot right through it,” I said.
Padillo was out first and around the car to open the door for the pair. I crawled out after them.
“I go first,” Padillo said. “Then Symmes and Burchwood. You’re last, Mac.”
We headed down a narrow passageway between two buildings. I let my left hand drag on the brick wall. My right hand was in my coat pocket, wrapped around the revolver. It was not dark, and I could easily see the three figures outlined before me. Padillo turned right around a corner. I followed after Symmes and Burchwood into the recess of a doorway. The door itself had been bricked up. Directly in front of us was the wall, built of meter-square concrete slabs and topped off with crudely laid concrete blocks. Three or four strands of barbed wire ran across the top. I could also catch the faint glint of broken bottles stuck into dabs of cement on top of cement blocks.
Symmes and Burchwood huddled together in a corner of the recess. Padillo kept his eyes fixed on a seven-story apartment building in West Berlin that lay directly in front of us.
“The third floor from the top,” he whispered. “The fourth window from the left. See it?”
“Yes.”
“When that Venetian blind goes up we get ready. When it goes down we set the outdoor record for the sixty- foot dash—straight ahead. The wire’s been cut between here and the wall. Just push it open. You’ll go first this time. Then Symmes and Burchwood.” He turned to them. “You understand?” They whispered yes. We waited fifteen seconds. Nothing happened. The blind didn’t move. Two Vopos passed in front of us, fifty feet away from our doorway, ten feet from the wall. We waited another five seconds.
To our right there were three sharp explosions. They were followed by bright flashes of light. “That’s the diversion on the right,” Padillo said. “Now on the left.” Two seconds later there were three more blasts followed again by the light. “They’re a hundred and fifty yards to our right and left. Molotov cocktails. They should draw the Vopos. Their machine pistols are good for only a hundred and ten yards. Watch the blind.”
I watched the building that was 150 feet away. It could have been 150 miles. We could hear the police shouting orders to the left and right, their voices distant but penetrating. Somewhere a siren began. The blind that we had been watching began to rise slowly. It seemed to inch its way to the top of the window, it paused, and then suddenly it dropped.
“Now!” Padillo barked.
Searchlights began to play fitfully on the wall but lost their effectiveness in the dusk. I took my gun from my pocket and ran. A machine pistol chattered from my left. I kept running, scanning the top of the wall. I could hear Burchwood and Symmes panting and scrambling behind me. We pushed through the wire and were at the wall. “Where’s the goddam ladder?” I whispered to Padillo. He stared up the rough gray blocks.
Suddenly a blond head poked over the wall. “Be right with you chaps. I had to snip the wire,” the head said; “now just let me get the pallet over the glass.” A thick brown pallet made of two blankets sewn together, thickly stuffed and padded, was flopped over the top. Then the head reappeared with a reassuring grin. “Just a moment,” it said. “Have to straddle the thing to get the ladder up.”
He was young, not more than twenty. He got one leg over the wall and sat astride the stuffed pallet. “Embarrassing if any of that glass worked through,” he said calmly. “Here comes the ladder.” It started up over the wall. “My name’s Peter,” the blond kid said. “What’s yours?”
He had it balanced on the wall when the shout came. It couldn’t have been from more than forty feet away. Then the faint, not quite yellow light settled on the kid. His mouth opened to say something more, something casual perhaps, but the bullets slammed into him. He teetered for a moment on the wall as if trying to make up his mind which way to fall. But he was past caring. The ladder balanced crazily for a moment and then tilted up slowly and slid out of sight on the other side. The kid fell forward on the pallet, rolled to his left, and followed the ladder.
Padillo turned and fired three shots at the light, which was still focused at the top of the wall. I got off three more in the same direction. The light went out and there was a yell. More shouts of command were coming from both our right and our left. There was another burst of machine-pistol fire. “Back to the car,” Padillo ordered.
“I can’t move,” Symmes said.
“Are you hit?”
“No—I just can’t move.”
Padillo slapped him sharply across the face. “You’ll move or I’ll kill you.” Symmes nodded and Padillo shoved me ahead. “You first.” I ran back to the building and down the passageway to the street. Max’s face, a white blob of pure fear, was peering out of the window. I jerked open the back door and held it for Symmes and Burchwood, who threw themselves in. Padillo paused at the entrance to the passageway and fired three shots. A machine pistol answered him. He darted around the front of the car and lunged for the door as Max raced the engine. Before he had the door closed the Wartburg was at its peak in low gear and Max was noisily wrestling it into second.
