Shadow of the Wall - Ch1

He listened to the ringing tone and stared at his watch ticking away the seconds. Something was wrong. After thirty-two seconds the tone ceased.
"Silverback." he used the fall back code name.
"Twelve two, today," the phone answered.
"Affirmative." He cut the connection.
It had taken too long to answer the phone and they had not challenged his code name. On the other hand they knew the protocols for the call and how to set the meeting time. Perhaps it was a test of the system; maybe this visit to the office was to be no more than an exercise. The only way to find out was to be there at two twenty this afternoon as instructed, twenty minutes into the hour, two hours after the announced time.
The careful thing would be to get there early. He was always careful.
He dialled a taxi firm.
"Darlington Station for nine thirty, please. I'll be outside the Coronation Pub on Acklam Road," he said.
He began walking the short distance to the pub. As he went he switched off the phone, opened it, removed the sim card and dropped it in a drain. He put in a new card. He assumed they were tracking his phone; this would let him make calls which would not be traced for a short while.
A taxi drew up.
"Darlington Station, mate?"
He nodded, got into the car and settled down for half an hour's inconsequential chat about football, his destination - Amsterdam he told the driver, travelling light, nothing you might want that you couldn't get over there - and the driver's holiday preferences.
At Darlington he bought a ticket for Kings Cross, paying with his credit card. No need to hide the transaction, they were expecting him and it would not reveal his arrival time even if they could trace it within the time. Two and a half hours later he was in London.
By one o'clock he had walked to Victoria where he took up a position across the road from the newsagent's shop which hid the entrance to the office. Over the space of the next hour and ten minutes he had the place under surveillance. He saw no one he knew enter or leave.
He was under no illusions. It was a long sho that he might recognise more than a couple of people. He rarely came to the head office now. He had no reason to believe that the contacts he met around the country came here any more frequently than he did. He was really looking for a type, someone who looked out of place, probably German, maybe Russian. He saw nobody who fitted the bill. Everyone who went in came out again fairly soon. From time to time he cast his eyes over the windows at the first floor to see if there was anyone looking out over the street. There were blinds covering the windows and although he saw lights behind some of them he saw neither a shadow of a watcher nor any tell tale movement of the slats.
He crossed the road and entered the shop. He took time to browse the racks of books, magazines, newspapers, while sizing up the other customers. They appeared to rotate in and out as you would expect of the customers of such a shop. He heard low voiced conversations in a variety of languages, not all of which he recognised. He heard German spoken behind him but could not identify the speaker when he turned round to look. He thought about the accent. He would guess East German but that might be paranoia. He shifted position slightly but did not hear the speaker again.
He looked across to the counter. He knew that the jolly man laughing and joking with his customers was the proprietor, Augusto Celli. Augusto would recognise him as soon as he stepped towards the counter to ask to be allowed behind it and up the stairs to the first floor. His head half buried in a battered hat, hunched in a well worn mackintosh of some indeterminate brown shade, he hoped that Augusto had not identified him yet. He turned and walked to the counter, sweeping the hat from his head as he did so.
Augusto's face lit up. "Mr Wiggins; good to see you in London again."
It didn't seem that Augusto was aware of any changes in the office and he wasn't using the fall back protocols.
Wiggins smiled broadly and nodded to the door behind the counter.
"Go through, room 118."
"Thank you."
He was in the lobby at the foot of the staircase. A dark red carpet, well worn on the nosings of the stairs, rose before him then turned on itself at a half landing and rose further. He heard no sound from the upstairs offices. He began to climb quickly, hoping to reach the top before Augusto alerted them that he was on his way up.
At the half landing he turned.
"Careful as ever Silverback." There was a mocking tone in the voice that rumbled from the shadows at the head of the staircase. That was when he realised he had made a mistake. They knew who to expect before he came through that door. They had probably been watching him in the shop, through CCTV monitoring.
"Come up. I have you covered," the man continued.
He could barely make out the shape of the man who stood there, could not distinguish the features, but he knew that voice.
Then Wiggins knew that they had made a mistake too. He did not have to go up the stairs. He turned and leapt down them, two at a time. He wrenched open the door and ran through the shop and into the street.
He thrust his hat into the pocket of his coat. He shrugged off the coat and draped it over his arm. He dodged into the maze of side streets. keeping Victoria Street to his back or to his left. There were fewer people here, away from the main thoroughfare, a greater chance of being spotted by any pursuer but equally he had more chance of spotting his pursuers. He wondered what resources they could field, then he began to wonder what they were trying to achieve.
The voice at the top of the stairs belonged to the man he had known ten years ago as Polesden. They had worked together in Halle after the wall came down, meeting once or twice a month in workmen's cafes, dingy bars, once at the railway station. It had been Polesden's job to brief him on the activities of the German security service, to point him to areas in which they were showing an interest, to make him aware of areas in which they had lost interest. It had been Wiggins's job to use his network to verify the accuracy of Polesden's information and to find out what was truly of interest to the Germans.
More than once Wiggins suspected that Polesden fed the information he gave him straight to the Germans; how else to explain the random way in which they would pick up or drop their work. Wiggins did not believe in chance. That was what had kept him alive and active in East Germany from back before the wall came down. He did not believe that the work he was doing was any less dangerous than it had been in the GDR; he had not let unification blun his edge. The Germans would not take kindly to a spy on their territory, even one from an allied nation, and they would take less kindly to a spy whose job it was to monitor the links between their security service and the former GDR's security service, the Stasi, with its network of informers and agents embedded in the population of the East.
He began to wonder.
Was the old East German office being wound up at last? If that was so then why not a call to some cosy Whitehall office to discuss redundancy terms, pension rights, maybe even a medal?
Was the office being foreclosed by another branch of the intelligence service? There had been rumours of such activity before. While he was still in training there were stories of a Czechoslovakian office that had been taken over by an East European Bureau because its operatives were thought to be more Slovak than the Slovakians. Once he had heard of a unit that operated in the former Yugoslavia that was, as the phase went, "terminated with extreme prejudice," when it was found to be too close to the wrong side at a critical juncture during their war.
Had the office been taken out by the enemy, whoever they were? Some kind of Germans he supposed. People like him knew more than was good for them about the players in the murky world that swirled and eddied around the Berlin Wall while it was in place and the sometimes murkier world that underpinned the security of the united Germany.
He was confident no one was following him; what should he do next?
He took out his phone, dialled a number, let it ring three times, cut the connection, redialed, did the same again, then returned the phone to his pocket and walked briskly back to Victoria Street and to Westminster Bridge, seeking protection In the press of tourists and city workers crossing and recrossing the bridge. He was in the middle, staring up the river like any tourist when his phone rang. He pressed the "answer" key and spoke one word, "Gabriel."
"Dante." The counter word came with no hesitation. Wiggins explained that he needed a bed for the night.
"Can you travel?"
"By taxi, on foot. It would be best to avoid the main line stations."
"Go to Clapham Junction. Get a train to Coulsdon. Call again when you are there."
Wiggins stepped to the edge of the kerb and raised his arm. A black cab pulled up.
Wiggins did not notice the slim young man in a dull suit and a nondescript tie lean in behind him to hear what he said to the taxi driver.
"Clapham Junction."
The young man flagged down a taxi. and repeated the words, "Clapham Junction."
Settled in the taxi Wiggins pulled out his phone and dialled a number in Eastbourne.
"Hammill," a voice answered.
"John. It's good to hear your voice again. Chris," Wiggins said.
"Only because you want to draw on my fountain of knowledge. What can I do for you."
"Straight to the point, as ever."
"I don't have time for niceties any more John. I could be dead next week."
"Exactly what you told me in Leipzig twenty years ago."
"Leipzig. Why do I feel that there's a clue to what this call is about?"
"Intuition. Did you ever deal with Polesden?"
"Means nothing to me. Would I have known him under a different name?"
"Big man. Supposedly our liaison with the Germans when I was in Halle. I was never sure if he was one of them, either by birth or he'd been turned."
"Hmm. So was he feeding you duff gen or was he finding our what you knew and passing it on?"
"Does it matter?"
"Someone from the Federal Republic was definitely feeding us misinformation. The sort of stuff that if you queried it you'd have to say that it was a fair conclusion from the circumstances, just not the correct one."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Well very little, you know. We'd check the information, send our evaluation. That was what I'd act on, if I acted at all. Remember it was very different before the Wall came down."
"What was your contact like?"
"Big man. Not that that proves a lot, especially in Germany. Had a funny voice, I remember. Sort of high for the size of the man. That's all."
"Polesden," Wiggins said. "Thanks. I'll be in touch."

SYNOPSIS
Wiggins does not go to Coulsdon. His innate caution makes him leave his train at Purley where he finds his own accommodation. He is traced by the young man who followed his taxi from Westminster Bridge who says he is working for an arm of British Intelligence that is seeking to foil a plot by external forces to take over the East German office. Polesden has been put in as part of the plan to subvert this plot
Wiggins is taken back to London where he is questioned by intelligence to establish his knowledge and involvement in the plot. His innocence of the plot is established and an attempt to have him infiltrate the plot is initiated.
Polesden is suspicious of Wiggins's reappearance but assigns him to work aimed at uncovering the plot. Wiggins detects that there are mid-Eastern elements in the plot. He recalls intelligence gathered by his network had in the final days of the GDR pointing to Stasi nvolvement in the smuggling of heroin into the West. Continuing investigation of this after the Wall came down pointed at the involvement of the Security services of the GFR and suggested that rogue elements in German security were still involved in this traffic and collaborating with former Stasi and KGB operatives. His active investigation of this led to Wiggins being withdrawn from field work in Germany to work in analysis in the UK.
Wiggins resumes the investigation as part of his work under Polesden and concludes that heroin is still entering Britain through the same routes. His final report reveals that Polesden is a formers Stasi officer and paves the way to the close down of what is presented as an al Caeda operation across Europe and Afghanistan.