waited patiently while the traffic ran steadily past him from west to east.
Some strange beggars came at night to Alpha, he would have thought.
They parked the car behind the Bundesgrenzschutz pass- port control and walked the last few yards to Carter. Pierce was spruced in a three piece cement grey suit, a closed rose bud at his buttonhole. Willi trailing but with an eagerness in his face and a bounce in his step. George was a pace behind the boy and dressed as if for winter, a roll neck sweater under the leather coat.
'The road was foul, that's why we're late. Have you spoken to Mawby?'
Pierce asked Carter.
Willi stood a little away from them. Clean in his new clothes, fresh with the air on his face, hair waving and falling.
' I tried to call him earlier. He wasn't on the HQ number… but that was some time ago… I've been stuck here waiting for you, I didn't want to go off to chase a phone in case they came through early.'
' I'd give a fair bit to know if they took off from Berlin on time.'
Willi motionless, Willi peering into the growing lights that edged forward from the far cluster of the Marienborn checkpoint across the shallow valley, across the line of the watch- towers and the wire and the whitewashed strip on the road that wheels had worn to a smudge.
'They could be here any time now,' Carter said.
'Did you leave a number where you could be reached?'
'Berlin Military know I'm at Alpha. Mawby will be beside the phone later, when I report the arrival.'
Willi with his hands clasped, his trousers pressed, shoes cleaned. Willi watching the cars approaching across no- man's land.
Pierce turned his wrist, looked down at his watch. 'Shouldn't they have been here by now?'
'They might have been, but they're not late yet.'
The door of the building flew open, spilling out light, bathing the faces of the men who waited, tensed faces, harassed tired faces. The Military Police corporal hesitated.
'Excuse me, gentlemen… is one of you a Mr Carter?'
'Yes, it's me.'
'You're wanted on thephone, sir. A Mr Smithson, in Berlin.'
Carter shrugged, went into the doorway, disappeared from Pierce's sight.
Willi saw him go… Willi with the stress at his mouth, the flicking wet tongue. Willi with the picture of his father bulging in his mind. Not knowing which car to watch for, restless, pacing.
'Where the hell have you been?' shouted Smithson, distant and furious, and in Berlin.
'I'm at Alpha…'
' I know you're at bloody Alpha now. Why didn't you call in?'
' I did and nobody knew where to find Mawby.'
The Military Police in the office turned their heads away from Carter as his face flushed and his forehead knitted in anger. In front of the electric fire their alsatian dog stirred, cocked its ears towards the raised voices.
'What a fucking shambles… not that it matters now, it's off..'
'What's off?'
'What do you bloody think? The run's off… Do you want it in one syllable words? It's off, there's no fucking car coming. They've knocked off the pick-up merchant coming through the border…'
'How?'
'About the least relevant question you could ask on an open line, Carter.
Just take it from me, no car has left Berlin, no car is gong to leave. It's finished, the whole thing.'
'What am I supposed to do, what does Mawby say?'
'Find yourself a fat frau and a bottle of whisky, that's my advice
…
Mawby's past answering questions like that.'
Carter put the telephone down. He thanked the Military Police corporal for coming to look for him.
Carter stepped back into the night wind, into the drone of the traffic, into the shadow of the high lights.
Willi was watching him. Willi would know. A bloody idiot could see the message, read it from the way he lurched across the concrete, from the way he winced his eyes, from his sunken shoulders, from the way he stumbled to Pierce's side. Willi staring, Willi absorbing.
'The car's not left…'
'Cutting it fine, aren't they?' Pierce had not looked at him, still peered up the road.
'… and it's not coming. Not now, not ever.'
'What?' Pierce had spun to face Carter. George scrambled towards them.
Willi alone, Willi abandoned, Willi within earshot.
' It's finished… DIPPER's called off. The pick-up maestro was arrested at the border checkpoint, he must have been driving into Berlin
'You're levelling, Henry?' Pierce in disbelief and his mouth sagging open.
'Smithson said so, and he called it a fucking shambles.'
'God… so what's going to happen to them, out there… when the chappie starts chattering…' Pierce cut himself short.
Willi was going. The stride into a trot. The trot into a run. The run into a sprint. 'Willi going past the shimmering white of the flag poles, along the central crash barrier. Willi going for the faded line that crossed the road.
Carter and Pierce rooted to the ground.
George struggling for speed, but heavy and flat footed. The white line looming, a car going east and slowing to avoid the boy who ran down the long hill, hugging the centre of the road. George losing ground. The voice drifted back to Carter, weak and carried on the breeze, the panic softened by distance.
'Come back, you little bugger. Willi, come back…'
Willi over the white line, Willi the victor of the race. The searchlight on the tower platform locked on him, circled and held him, followed him on down the road. Brightness all around and Willi ran with the beam that slowly traversed and accompanied his progress.
From where Carter and Pierce stood the cocking of the machine gun in the tower was sharp and unmistakable. The scraping of the metal spring, the crack as the mechanism locked the bullet in the breech. It would have been deafening to George, he could not be blamed for throwing the towel. The searchlight covering the boy, the machine gun covering George. Willi growing smaller, retreating into the bend of the wide road.
George was rock steady, standing on the white dividing line.
Carter thought he was about to be sick.
He saw a jeep stop beside the running boy, it was stationary for a few moments and then reversed towards Marienborn. When it was gone the road was empty.
'The car should have come, yes?'
Johnny could not see Otto Guttmann in the darkness, but the message was of deepening resignation, of tumbling faith.
'Yes,'Johnny said. He looked at the face of his watch, felt the bite of the insects in the grass.
The little jokes they had told to each other were finished. Father and daughter both cold, both flattened, and the fear settling on them.
'By now we should have been at Helmstedt?'
'Yes.'
'You promised us the car.'
' I promised it.'
'Why is the car not here?'
What a daft bloody question. 'I don't know, Doctor, there could be a hundred reasons… I don't know… perhaps there is a crash on the road, perhaps it's blown a tyre…'
'We have only your word that there was ever a car.'
'There is a car.' Johnny dug into the reserves of his patience. 'There is a car because the whole plan was
