Time was difficult to estimate in the darkness of the cell, and Red had no watch. Certainly two hours, and maybe as many as three, had passed before he heard the bolts being moved. He hauled himself stiffly off the concrete floor, knowing he was defenceless, but feeling marginally less so on his feet.
The light that streaked in from the guardroom was painful to his eyes. He was aware of a figure outlined in the doorway, then of something tossed in towards him, landing at his feet.
‘Put on your clothes.’
‘Why?’ he asked in amazement. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’
‘Just do what you’re told. Quickly.’
He didn’t argue. The cell had been like an ice-box.
The clothes were the ones he had arrived in – Cal’s tracksuit and trainers – no longer of interest, apparently, to the Russian guards. Even the cap was there. He put them on gratefully, at a loss to understand what could have prompted such clemency.
The guard watched him from the doorway. ‘Now put your hands on your head and step out here.’
He obeyed. Two guards moved close with their sub-machine guns levelled.
The same granite-featured Russian NCO was standing by the desk. He looked Red up and down as if it were a uniform-inspection. ‘Are these the clothes you were wearing when you entered the prison illegally?’
Red gave a nod. ‘Are you going to release me?’
There was a gleam of malice in the grey eyes, but no response.
‘You want to question me?’
Still nothing.
So Red waited in silence, wary of antagonizing his captors with further questions. After about two minutes, the NCO picked up the phone, dialled a number and spoke in Russian. His eyes didn’t leave Red. He put down the receiver. ‘You will come this way now.’
Red followed him across the red-tiled floor to a different door from the one he had come in by, leading, if his sense of direction could still be relied on, to the courtyard that separated the buildings at the entrance from the main cell-block. He was at a loss to understand why. This was exactly the way he would have taken if he had been able to bluff his way past the guards. He would have crossed the yard to the building where Cal worked, and Rudolf Hess was held.
And now they were allowing him to go there. One of the guards had opened the door. The open courtyard lay ahead. Across it, some forty yards away, the lighted windows of the main cell-block. The NCO stepped aside and gestured his prisoner through. It couldn’t have been from politeness.
Only then was Red seized with the suspicion that he was about to take a death-walk. Some words came back to him, the orders so precisely recited by the NCO: A guard will fire his weapon against persons who have gained entrance into the courtyards by force or other illegal method. The Russians, meticulous in their observance of the regulations, were about to carry out his execution. They had given him back the clothes he had arrived in because they meant to shoot him. A corpse in false clothes riddled with bullets would convince the other powers that he was an impostor, shot in the act of penetrating the security system.
He had seen diagrams of the yard. He didn’t have a chance. The sides were walled. He would be picked out by the searchlights and shot.
But not without a fight. As he reached the doorway, he wheeled round, reached for the top of the door-frame, gripping it with his fingers, and kicked with both feet at the chest of the guard behind him. The man staggered back. Red hurled himself forward to grab the sub-machine gun.
There was never much chance that he would succeed. As he fell on the guard, another gun crunched into his ribs and something smashed across his shoulders. He was pinned facedown on the floor with army-boots pressing on his arms and legs.
‘Shoot me now, you bastards!’ he yelled through the pain.
But no gun was placed to his head. There was just a bedlam of shouting in Russian, and it didn’t seem to be directed at him. Recriminations, threats, fresh orders – Red didn’t care. He waited angrily for the beating that would now precede his execution.
It didn’t occur. Instead, he was lifted up by his arms and dragged backwards through the door and into the yard. Fully expecting to be dumped in the centre and left for the snipers on the watchtowers to pick off, he made no resistance, trying to conserve what strength he had left for a dash to one of the darker corners.
Again, he had miscalculated. The guards didn’t leave him. They frogmarched him right across the yard to the main cell-block, up some steps to a door that he heard being unbolted, and straight inside. Then he was hauled up an iron spiral staircase, his heels scraping against the steps. Each of his trainers came off, but someone collected them and, with a mystifying show of consideration, slipped them back onto his feet at the top of the staircase. There, he was faced towards the front and led across the landing to a door marked in Russian, French and English, ‘PRISON DIRECTOR’.
A meeting with the man in charge. Why?
The NCO came up the stairs last and looked Red up and down again, walking right around him and stopping once to rub some dustmarks off his shoulder. He said in a low voice, ‘Colonel Klim, the prison director, has indicated that he wishes to interview you.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me over there, for God’s sake?’ Red asked. ‘It would have saved some hassle all round, wouldn’t it?’
The Russian went on as if Red hadn’t spoken, ‘Whatever he decides to do with you, he will require me to execute the order. I would like to make something clear to you before we go in. Any injuries you have sustained, any rough handling you have been given, was of your own making. You had to be restrained. The Colonel will not wish to hear about it. Do you understand me?’
‘Transparently,’ answered Red.
‘Then we will go in.’ He knocked and opened the door.
Colonel Klim, small, sallow, distinctly oriental in feature, was standing by the arched window trying to operate the blind. He was wearing a Soviet army raincoat over bottle-green pyjamas. He must have come specially from his quarters. His neat toes peeped out of leather sandals. He seemed to have been caught unprepared. Giving up his struggle with the blind, he glided behind the director’s desk, a teak and metal status-symbol, massive enough to serve as a screen for a man of his size. He gave an order in Russian to the two guards who had entered the room with Red. They saluted and withdrew, leaving only the NCO in attendance.
Another order, and a chair was placed in the centre of the room for Red, a couple of yards back from the desk. All that was now visible of Colonel Klim was his face, framed by his hands so that even the collar of the pyjamas was obscured.
Formality restored, he said in correct English that sounded like lesson one of a language laboratory course, ‘Good morning. My name is Colonel Klim. What is yours?’
‘Calvin Moody,’ answered Red, knowing it would not be believed, but with no alternative to offer.
Colonel Klim tilted his eyebrows and said with gentle sarcasm, ‘How strange! We have a warder here with the same name, but he is nothing like you.’
Red made it clear with a sideward glance that he wasn’t interested in a verbal chess game.
The Russian continued, ‘To avoid misunderstanding, I will tell you that my position here is permanent. I have been the Soviet director of the prison since April 1982. I know the warders personally. Moody has a narrower face than yours. His hair is darker and certainly shorter. Feature for feature he is quite unlike you. What is your name?’
‘Calvin Moody.’
Colonel Klim scowled. ‘This is very unwise, young man. My sleep has been disturbed by this breach of prison regulations. My patience has a short limit. However, let us try another avenue of conversation. How did you enter the prison?’
‘Through the front gate.’
The NCO interposed something rapidly and earnestly in Russian that Red guessed was a first attempt to paper over the breach of security.
Colonel Klim barked back a few syllables and then resumed to Red, ‘It seems that the normal procedure at the gate was not observed. There should have been a warder on duty there. We were a man short tonight.’
‘I know.’
‘A telephone message was received that Moody was coming in late. Was that part of your scheme to enter the prison illegally?’
‘That’s a leading question,’ commented Red.
‘But you had better answer it,’ Klim insisted.
‘I didn’t make a phone call.’
There was another exchange in Russian.
‘It was a woman who called,’ Klim informed Red. ‘She spoke to the duty warder. He passed the message to the guardroom. That is why you were admitted. I presume that this woman is in league with you.’
And how! Red thought. It’s the super-league if I ever get out of this place alive.
Colonel Klim asked, ‘Is that assumption correct?’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ Red answered with a baffled expression.
‘Very well. Let’s turn to something we can both agree on.’ Klim picked Cal’s pass off the desk and held it up by one corner. ‘This appears to be genuine. It has Moody’s photograph, not yours, and his signature, not the poor imitation you scribbled in the guardroom book. How did it come into your possession?’
Red was tempted to answer with the truth, just to see whether the fact of Cal’s murder would make any impression on the Buddha-like repose of the face across the desk. But the truth was his defence, not to be surrendered. So long as he remained of interest to the Russians, kept them puzzled about his identity and his reason for being there, he stood a chance of survival.
When it was obvious that no answer was forthcoming, Klim said with a harder edge to his words, ‘You stole it. You stole his clothes as well. You had better tell me the reason now. You tricked your way in here. Why? Are you politically motivated? Making some form of demonstration?’
‘Like saving the whales?’ Red flippantly suggested.
Colonel Klim snapped out some sentences in Russian and the NCO came from behind Red, grabbed his arms and strapped them together at the elbows and hard against the vertical struts of the chair-back. The pain was bearable, but not for long.
‘How about the electrodes?’ Red muttered. ‘I thought you people had all the latest gear.’
‘We are not torturers,’ said Klim with a show of umbrage. ‘This is a necessary safeguard while I speak to you in private.’
‘Yes?’ said Red sceptically. Then he heard the door close as the NCO withdrew. ‘So what is there to say?’ He braced his arms, and one of the struts snapped, bringing him some relief.
Colonel Klim got up and moved around the desk, tugging his raincoat across his chest. He stood facing Red, studying him, making up his mind. ‘I will be frank with you. I know that Moody is dead. The information reached me earlier this evening.’
Aware that he was under the closest scrutiny, Red made no attempt to fake a reaction. He wanted to know where this was leading.
Klim continued like a judge summing up, ‘You were able to trick your way in here because the prison staff have not yet been informed about Moody. But it was a crude attempt at impersonation which the guards detected easily. Occasionally, we have to deal with crazy people and publicity-seekers who make trouble at the prison gate. I would treat you as such a minor nuisance if you could persuade me that there is not some more sinister motive governing your actions.’
Red didn’t respond. His tired brain was wrestling with the implications of what he had just learned. Klim had been informed about Cal’s killing. Earlier this evening, he had said, implying that he had heard the news early enough to have put the guards on alert if he had chosen. So it could only have come from Cal’s murderer, Valentin, or his employer, the KGB. Colonel Klim was either a KGB agent himself, or he was acting on their orders.
The realisation led to a significant shift in Red’s tactics. His entry into Spandau had started so disastrously that up to now he had scarcely given a thought to anything but survival. He had fully expected to be shot. Now other possibilities were emerging. The Colonel knew things. He probably knew the reason why Edda Zenk and Cal had been murdered. It might be possible to draw it out of him by trading information.
‘I knew Cal,’ he volunteered. ‘He was no villain. He didn’t deserve to be shot in the head.’
Klim’s brown eyes gleamed with satisfaction. ‘Yes, it will come as a shock to everyone in Spandau. So you have been to his apartment?’
‘I broke in,’ admitted Red.
‘And found him dead? Then, for some reason, you dressed up in his clothes and tried to enter Spandau. Why?’
‘To get some answers.’
‘From whom?’
‘Anyone who knew anything.’
Klim looked disbelieving. ‘I think you could be more precise than that.’
‘How?’ asked Red.
‘I think you had ideas of meeting the man we call Number 7.’
‘Rudolf Hess?’
Klim nodded. ‘You believe he can tell you why Moody had to be shot.’
‘Had to be?’
‘But I doubt whether he would have helped you in the least, even if you had miraculously arrived in his cell. Number 7 is singularly uncommunicative. He would be suspicious of your motives. Do you deny that you intended to make contact with him?’
‘Of course I deny it,’ Red affirmed. And now he would stonewall again, because he had got as much from Colonel Klim as he was likely to give: the admission that Cal’s killing had been carried out because it ‘had to be’; and the strong suggestion that Hess would know the reason why, even if he refused to talk.
More questions followed and, as Red reverted to short answers, Klim showed increasing signs of annoyance. The questions began to be replaced by thinly-veiled threats. ‘If you persist in this way, I shall have to bring in people who are experienced in questioning suspicious persons.’
‘The police?’
‘Not the police. They have no jurisdiction here.’
‘The military police?’
The phone on Klim’s desk bleeped. He picked it up and spoke his name. Then something was said that made the blood run from his face. He had been standing with one sandalled foot turned downwards, resting on the tip. He brought the heel down sharply and practically stood to attention. He clutched at the collar of his raincoat and drew it across his chest. His contributions to the conversation were minimal.
As soon as he was able to replace the phone, he picked it up again and dialled a two-digit number, presumably internal. This time he was doing most of the talking, evidently passing on urgent information. Red tried to understand some of it. The only certain thing he gleaned was a name, spoken and repeated with great emphasis, as if to make sure there were no misunderstanding: General Vanin.
Colonel Klim cradled the phone again, staring at Red as if he had no inkling how he had arrived there, and went across to the door and opened it. He shouted something to the NCO outside.
The guards came in and loosened Red’s arms. They hustled him outside, past Klim, who stood distractedly at his door, rubbing his face with his hand. He said nothing.
They took Red down the stairs, this time allowing him to use his own feet. Down one level, they steered him into a once-whitewashed, now yellow-grimed and flaking corridor that stretched the length of the block, almost a hundred yards. Dim lights under old-fashioned conical shades showed open cell-doors from end to end on each side. If ventilation had been the intention, it was not a success. The place smelt musty and unused.
The NCO ordered a halt while he looked into a couple of cells. He selected the second on the right.
‘You want me to go in there?’ asked Red, as if there were any choice.
Nobody bothered to answer. As he went in, he asked, ‘Who is General Vanin?’
The door slammed shut.