She smoothed away a wisp of hair from her eyes. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her. Instead he took her hand as it completed its movement and they sat in silence for a minute or two, as they had at their first meeting. She interlocked her fingers with his, and it was at this moment, rather than later in the bedroom, or later still when they talked of themselves with greater freedom, that Leonard felt irrevocably bound to her. Their hands fitted well, the grip was intricate, unbreakable, there were so many points of contact. In this poor light, and without his gla.s.ses, he could not see which fingers were his own. Sitting in the darkening, chilly room in his raincoat, holding on to her hand, he felt he was throwing away his life. The abandonment was delicious. Something was pouring out of him, through his palm and into hers; something was spreading back up his arm, across his chest, constricting his throat. His only thought was a repet.i.tion: so this is it, it's like this, so this is it ...

Finally she pulled her hand away and folded her arms and looked at him expectantly. For no good reason other than the seriousness of her look, he began to explain himself. "I should have come sooner," he said, "but I've been working all hours of the day and night. And actually, I didn't know if you'd want to see me, or if you'd even recognize me."

"Do you have another friend in Berlin?"

"Oh no, nothing like that." He did not question her right to ask this question.

"And did you have many girlfriends in England?"

"Not many, no."

"How many?"

He hesitated before making a lunge at the truth. "Well, actually, none."

"You've never had one?"

"No."

Maria leaned forward. "You mean, you've never-"

He could not bear to hear whatever term she was about to use. "No, I never have."

She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a yelp of laughter. It was not so extraordinary a thing in 1955 for a man of Leonard's background and temperament to have had no s.e.xual experience by the end of his twenty-fifth year. But it was a remarkable thing for a man to confess. He regretted it immediately. She had the laughter under control, but now she was blushing. It was the interlocking fingers that had made him think he could get away with speaking without pretense. In this bare little room with its pile of a.s.sorted shoes belonging to a woman who lived alone and did not fuss with milk jugs or doilies on tea trays, it should have been possible to deal in unadorned truths.

And in fact it was. Maria's blushes were brought on by shame at the laughter she knew Leonard would misunderstand. For hers was the laughter of nervous relief. She had been suddenly absolved from the pressures and rituals of seduction. She would not have to adopt a conventional role and be judged in it, and she would not be measured against other women. Her fear of being physically abused had receded. She would not be obliged to do anything she did not want. She was free, they both were free, to invent their own terms. They could be partners in invention. And she really had discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze and the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him all to herself. These thoughts she formulated later in solitude. At the time they erupted in the single hoot of relief and hilarity which she had suppressed to a yelp.

Leonard took a long pull of his tea, set down the mug and said ah ah in a hearty, unconvincing way. He put his gla.s.ses on and stood up. After the handclasp, nothing seemed bleaker than setting off back down Adalbertstra.s.se, descending into the U-Bahn and arriving at his apartment in the early evening darkness to find the breakfast coffee cup and the drafts of his foolish letter all over the floor. He saw it all before him as he adjusted the belt of his coat, but he knew that with his confession he had made a humiliating tactical error and he had to go. That Maria should blush for him made her all the sweeter, and hinted at the scale of his blunder. in a hearty, unconvincing way. He put his gla.s.ses on and stood up. After the handclasp, nothing seemed bleaker than setting off back down Adalbertstra.s.se, descending into the U-Bahn and arriving at his apartment in the early evening darkness to find the breakfast coffee cup and the drafts of his foolish letter all over the floor. He saw it all before him as he adjusted the belt of his coat, but he knew that with his confession he had made a humiliating tactical error and he had to go. That Maria should blush for him made her all the sweeter, and hinted at the scale of his blunder.

She had stood too and was blocking his path to the door.

"I really ought to be getting back now," Leonard explained, "what with work and everything." The worse he felt, the lighter his tone became. He was stepping around her as he said, "You make a terrific cup of tea."

Maria said, "I want you to stay longer."

It was all he wanted to hear, but by now he was too low to enact a change of heart, too drawn to his own defeat. He was on his way to the door. "I have to meet someone at six." The lie was a hopeless commitment to his anguish. Even as it was happening, he was amazed by himself. He wanted to stay, she wanted him to stay, and here he was, insisting on leaving. It was the behavior of a stranger, and he could do nothing, he could not steer himself in the direction of his own interests. Self-pity had obliterated his habitual and meticulous good sense, he was in a tunnel whose only end was his own fascinating annihilation.

He was fumbling with the unfamiliar lock and Maria was right at his back. Though it still surprised her, she was to some extent familiar with the delicacy of masculine pride. Despite a surface a.s.surance, men were easily offended. Their moods could swing wildly. Caught in the turbulence of unacknowledged emotions, they tended to mask their uncertainty with aggression. She was thirty; her experience was not vast, and she was thinking mostly of her husband and one or two violent soldiers she had known. The man scrabbling to leave by her front door was less like the men she had known and more like herself. She knew just how it felt. When you felt sorry for yourself, you wanted to make things worse. She was touching his back lightly, but he was not aware of it through his coat. He thought he had made his plausible excuses and was free to depart with his misery. To Maria, who had the liberation of Berlin and her marriage to Otto Eckdorf behind her, a display of vulnerability of any kind in a man suggested an approachable personality.

He opened the door at last and turned to say his goodbyes. Did he really believe that she was fooled by his politeness and the invented appointment, or that his desperation was invisible? He was telling her he was sorry he had to dash off, and expressing grat.i.tude for the tea again, and offering his hand-a handshake!-when she reached up and lifted his gla.s.ses clear of his face and strode back into her living room with them. Before he had even started to follow her, she had slipped them under a chair cushion.

"Look here," he said, and, letting the door close behind him, took one step, then another, into the apartment. And that was it; he was back in. He had wanted to stay; now he had to. "I really do have to be going." He stood in the center of the tiny room, irresolute, still attempting to fake his hesitant English form of outrage.

She stood close so he could see her clearly. How wonderful it was, not to be frightened of a man. It gave her a chance to like him, to have desires that were not simply reactions to his. She took his hands in hers. "But I haven't finished looking at your eyes." Then, with the Berlin girl's forthrightness that Russell had praised, she added, "Du Dummer! Wenn es fur dich das erste Mal ist, bin ich sehr glucklich "Du Dummer! Wenn es fur dich das erste Mal ist, bin ich sehr glucklich. If this is your first time, then I am a very lucky girl."

It was her "this" that held Leonard. He was back with "this." What they were doing here was all part of "this," his first time. He looked down at her face, that disk, tipped way back to accommodate the seven-inch difference in their heights. From the top third of the neat oval, the baby hair fell back in loose curls and straggles. She was not the first young woman he had kissed, but she was the first who seemed to like it. Encouraged, he pushed his tongue into her mouth, the way, he had gathered, one was supposed to.

She drew her face back an inch or so. She said, "Langsam "Langsam. Plenty of time." So they kissed with a teasing lightness. The very tips of their tongues just touched, and it was a greater pleasure. Then Maria stepped round him and pulled out from among the heap of shoes an electric heater. "There is time," she repeated. "We can pa.s.s a week with our arms just so." She embraced herself to show him.

"That's right," he said. "We could do that." His voice sounded high-pitched. He followed her into the bedroom.

It was larger than the room they had left. There was a double mattress on the floor-another novelty. One wall was taken up with a gloomy wardrobe of polished wood. By the window was a painted chest of drawers and a linen chest. He sat on the linen chest and watched her plug in the heater.

"It is too cold to be undressed. We go in like this." It was true, you could see the vapor on your breath. She kicked off her slippers; he untied his laces and took off his coat. They got under the eiderdown and lay with their arms round each other in the way she had prescribed, and kissed again.

It was not a week but several hours, just after midnight, before Leonard was able to define himself in strictest terms as an initiate, a truly mature adult at last. However, the line that divided innocence from knowledge was vague, and rapturously so. As the bed, and to a far lesser extent the room, warmed up, they set about helping each other undress. As the pile on the floor grew-sweaters, thick shirts, woolen underwear and football socks-so the bed, and time itself, grew more s.p.a.cious. Maria, luxuriating in the possibility of shaping the event to her needs, said this was just the right moment for her to be kissed and licked all over, from the toes upward. This was how Leonard, halfway through a characteristically meticulous job, came to enter her first with his tongue. That surely was the dividing line in his life. But so too was the moment half an hour later when she took him into her mouth and licked and sucked and did something with her teeth. In terms of mere physical sensation, this was the high point of the six hours, and perhaps of his life.

There was a long interlude when they lay still, and in answer to her questions he told her about his school, his parents and his lonely three years at Birmingham University. She talked more reticently about her work, the cycling club and the amorous treasurer, and her ex-husband, Otto, who had been a sergeant in the army and was now a drunk. Two months before he had appeared after a year's absence and had hit her around the head twice with an open hand and demanded money. This was not the first time he had intimidated her, but the local police would do nothing. Sometimes they even bought him drinks. Otto had persuaded them he was a war hero.

This story temporarily erased desire. Gallantly, Leonard got dressed and went down to Oranienstra.s.se to buy a bottle of wine. People and traffic circulated, oblivious of the great changes. When he returned she was standing at the stove in a man's dressing gown and her football socks, cooking a potato and mushroom omelette. They ate it in bed with black bread. The Mosel was sugary and rough. They drank it in the tea mugs and insisted it was good. Whenever he put a piece of bread in his mouth, he smelled her on his fingers. She had brought in the candle in the bottle, and now she lit it. The cosy squalor of clothes and greasy plates receded into the shadows. The sulfur smell of the match hung in the air and mixed with the smell on his fingers. He tried to recall and recount in an amusing way a sermon he had once heard at school about the devil and temptation and a woman's body. But Maria misunderstood, or saw no reason why he should be telling her this or finding it funny, and she became cross and silent. They lay propped on their elbows in the gloom, sipping from their mugs. After a while he touched the back of her hand and said, "Sorry. A stupid story." She forgave him by turning her hand and squeezing his fingers.

She curled up on his arm and slept for half an hour. During that time he lay back, feeling proud. He studied her face-how scant her eyebrows were, how her lower lip swelled in sleep-and he thought what it would be to have a child, a daughter who might sleep on him like this. When she woke up she was fresh. She wanted him to lie on her. He cuddled up and sucked her nipples. They kissed, and it was acceptable this time when he was free with his tongue. They poured out the rest of the wine and she c.h.i.n.ked his mug.

Of what followed he remembered only two things. The first was that it was rather like going to see a film that everybody else had been talking about: difficult to imagine in advance, but once there, installed, partly recognition, partly surprises. The encompa.s.sing slippery smoothness, for example, was much as he had hoped-even better, in fact-while nothing in his extensive reading had prepared him for the crinkly sensation of having another's pubic hair pressed against his own. The second was awkward. He had read all about premature e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n and wondered if he would suffer, and now it seemed he might. It was not movement that threatened to bring him on. It was when he looked at her face. She was lying on her back, for they were what she had taught him to call auf Altdeutsch auf Altdeutsch. Sweat had restyled her hair into snaky coils and her arms were thrown up behind her head, with the palms spread, like a comic-book representation of surrender. At the same time she was looking up at him in a knowing, kindly way. It was just this combination of abandonment and loving attention that was too good to be looked at, too perfect for him, and he had to avert his eyes, or close them, and think of ... of, yes, a circuit diagram, a particularly intricate and lovely one he had committed to memory during the fitting of signal activation units to the Ampex machines.

Seven.

It took four weeks to test all the tape recorders and fit the signal activation units. Leonard was content working in his windowless room. The very repet.i.tiveness of his routine absorbed him. When another ten machines were ready, a young serviceman came and loaded them onto a rubber-wheeled cart and took them along the corridor to the recording room. Already more people were working in there, some of them from England. But Leonard had not been introduced, and he avoided them. In his spare moments he liked to doze, and in the canteen he always took an empty table. Gla.s.s came by once or twice a week, always in a hurry. Like all the other Americans he chewed gum, but with a frenzy that was all his own. This and the livid semicircles under his eyes gave him the appearance of an anxious nocturnal rodent. There were no gray hairs in his beard, but it looked less black. It was dried out and shapeless.

His manner, though, was unchanged. "We're running on schedule, Leonard," he would say from the doorway, too busy to step in. "We're almost to the far side of the Schonefelder Chaussee. We got new people arriving every day. The place is humming!" And he would be gone before Leonard had time to put down his soldering iron.

It was true-after mid-February it became harder to find an unoccupied table in the canteen. In the noise of voices around him he could make out English accents. When he asked for his steak now, he was automatically handed a cup of tea into which three or four spoonfuls of sugar had already been stirred. For the benefit of the Vopos with their binoculars, many of the Englishmen wore American Army uniforms bearing the insignia of the Army Signal Corps. The vertical diggers had arrived, the specialists who knew how to tunnel upward to the telephone cables through soft earth without bringing the roof down on their heads. So too had men from the Royal Signals, who were to install the amplifiers near the head of the tunnel. There were faces Leonard recognized from Dolus Hill. A couple of these fellows nodded in his direction, but did not approach. It was possible they were being scrupulous about security, but it was more likely they considered a technical a.s.sistant beneath them. They had never spoken to him in London.

And security in the canteen was not tight. As the numbers eating there rose, so did the din of conversation. Gla.s.s would have been outraged. Small groups from all over the building talked shop in closed huddles. Leonard, eating alone, enfolded with his thoughts of Maria, still amazed at the changes that had come over his life, was sometimes drawn against his will into a story at a nearby table. His world had contracted to a windowless room and the bed he shared with Maria. Elsewhere in her apartment it was simply too cold. He had made himself an outsider here, and now he was becoming a reluctant eavesdropper, a spy.

He heard two vertical diggers at the next table reminisce with suppressed hilarity in front of their American colleagues. It appeared that the tunnel had a predecessor in Vienna. It had been dug in 1949 by MI6 and ran from a private house in the Schwechat suburb seventy feet out under a road, where it picked up the cables linking the headquarters of the Soviet occupation forces in the Imperial Hotel with the Soviet command in Moscow. "They needed a cover, see," one of the diggers said. A companion laid a hand on his arm, and the first man continued quietly, so that Leonard had to concentrate. "They needed a cover for all the coming and going while they installed the tap. So they opened up a Harris tweed import shop. They reckoned no one in Vienna would be too interested in that kind of thing. And what happened? The locals couldn't get enough Harris tweed. They were queuing up for it, and the first shipment was sold out in days. So there were these poor b.u.g.g.e.rs filling out order forms all day and answering the phone instead of getting on with their business. They had to turn customers away and close the place down."

"And then," the American said when the laughter had died away, "our guy walked right into your act."

"That's right," the Englishman said. "That was Nelson, Nelson ..." And it was this name, which Leonard was to hear again, that brought the group to the full awareness of its transgression. The conversation turned to sport.

Another time, a different group of tunnelers, vertical as well as horizontal, were comparing notes. The purpose of nearly all the stories Leonard heard was to entertain. The Americans recounted how they had had to shovel their way through the runoff of their own cesspit. Again there was loud laughter, and an English voice said to more laughter, "Digging through your own s.h.i.t, that just about sums this business up." Then one of the American sergeants told how the sixteen of them, all hand-picked for the job, had been made to dig a practice tunnel in New Mexico before they started in Berlin. "Same kind of soil, was the idea. They wanted to figure out the optimum depth and check out if there was going to be any kind of slump on the surface, so we dug-" "And dug, and dug ...," his friends joined in. "After fifty feet they had all they needed for the best depth, and there was no slump. But would they let us stop? You want a picture of futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long. Four hundred and fifty feet!"

One conversation the diners had frequently concerned how long it would take the Russians or the East Germans to smash through into the tap chamber, and what would happen when they did. Would the operators have time to get clear, would the Vopos shoot, would there be time to close the steel doors? There had once been a plan to install incendiary devices to destroy cla.s.sified equipment, but the fire risks were thought too great. On one matter everybody was agreed, and Gla.s.s confirmed this too. There had even been a CIA study. If the Russians ever did break in, they would have to keep quiet about it. The embarra.s.sment of having their top military lines tapped would be too great. "There are silences and silences," Gla.s.s had told Leonard. "But there's nothing like the great Russian silence."

There was another story Leonard heard several times. Its form changed only slightly with the retelling, and it worked best on newcomers, on people who were not yet acquainted with George. So in mid-February it was often heard in the canteen. Leonard first heard it while he was waiting in the queue. Bill Harvey, the head of the Berlin CIA base, a remote and powerful figure whom Leonard had never even glimpsed, occasionally visited the tunnel to check on progress. Because Harvey was conspicuous around Berlin, he came only at night. On one occasion he sat in the backseat of his car and overheard his driver and the GI beside him complain about their social life.

"I'm getting nowhere, and boy, am I ready for it," said one.

"Me too," said his friend. "But George is out there every afternoon, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g by the fence."

"Lucky George."

The men at the warehouse were supposed to be kept in relative isolation. There was no telling what they might divulge to a fraulein in a moment of weakness. The extent of Harvey's anger when he arrived that night depended on the storyteller. In some versions he simply asked to see the duty officer; in others he stormed into the building in an alcohol-driven rage and the duty officer quivered before him. "Find this a.s.shole George and get him out of here!" Inquiries were made. George was in fact a dog, a local mongrel adopted as the warehouse mascot. In further elaborations, Harvey was supposed to have responded with face-saving calmness. "I don't care what he thinks he is. He's making my men unhappy. Get rid of him."

At the end of four weeks Leonard's great task was over. The last four tape recorders to be fitted with signal activation were packed into two specially constructed cases with snap locks and canvas straps for extra security. The machines were to be used for monitoring purposes at the head of the tunnel. The cases were loaded onto the cart and taken down into the bas.e.m.e.nt. Leonard locked his room and wandered down the corridor to the recording room. It was lit by hooded fluorescent lamps and was large, but not quite large enough to accommodate comfortably the 150 machines and all the men who were working around them. The recorders were stacked three high on metal shelves and arranged in five rows. Down the aisles there were people on their hands and knees tracing power cables and other circuits, and stepping over and around them were others with spools of tape, in and out trays, numbered signs and gummed paper. Two fitters were drilling into the wall with power tools, preparing to secure a twenty-foot-long set of pigeonholes to the wall. Someone else was already gluing pieces of card with code numbers under each compartment. By the door was a head-high pile of stationery and spare recording tape in plain white boxes. On the other side of the door, right in the corner, was a hole in the floor through which cables dropped down into the bas.e.m.e.nt, down the shaft and along the tunnel to where the amplifiers were about to be installed.

Leonard was at the warehouse for almost a year before he understood the operating system in the recording room. The vertical diggers were sc.r.a.ping their way upward to a ditch on the far side of the Schonefelder Chaussee in which three cables lay buried. Each one contained 172 circuits carrying at least 18 channels. The twenty-four-hour babble of the Soviet command network consisted of telephone conversations and encoded telegraph messages. In the recording room only two or three circuits were monitored. The movements of the Vopos and the East German telephone repair crews were matters of immediate interest. If ever the tunnel was about to be discovered-if the beast, as Gla.s.s sometimes called the other side, was ready to break in and threaten the lives of our people-the earliest warnings would come over these lines. As for the rest, the taped telephone conversations were flown to London and the telegraph messages to Washington for decoding, all in military planes, under armed guard. Scores of workers, many of them Russian emigres, toiled in small rooms in Whitehall and in the temporary huts that littered the way between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

Standing by the entrance to the recording room on the day he finished, Leonard was concerned only to find himself a new job. He teamed up with an older German, one of Gehlen's men, whom he had seen on his first day driving a forklift. Germans were no longer ex-n.a.z.is, they were Maria's compatriots. So he and Fritz, who had once trained as an electrician and whose real name was Rudi, stripped wires and made connections at junction boxes, and fitted protective covers over power lines and secured them to the floor so that no one would trip on them. After an initial exchange of first names, they worked in comradely silence, pa.s.sing the wire-strippers between them and making encouraging grunts whenever one small job was complete. Leonard took it as a sign of his new maturity that he could work contentedly alongside the man Gla.s.s had described as a real horror. Rudi's big fingers with splayed ends were swift and precise. The afternoon lights came on, coffee was brought. While the Englishman sat on the floor with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette, Rudi kept at it and refused refreshment.

In the late afternoon people began drifting away. By six Leonard and Rudi had the room to themselves, and they worked faster to complete a final set of connections. At last Leonard stood up and stretched. Now he could allow himself to think again of Kreuzberg and Maria. He could be there in less than an hour.

He was fetching his jacket from the back of a chair when he heard his name being spoken from the door. A man too thin for his double-breasted suit was coming toward him with his hand extended. Rudi, who was on his way out, stepped aside and called "Gute Nacht" "Gute Nacht" to Leonard over the stranger's shoulder. Leonard had his jacket half on and was returning the goodnight as he shook the man's hand. During this little flurry, Leonard was making the automatic, barely conscious appraisal of manner, appearance and voice by means of which one Englishman decodes another's status. to Leonard over the stranger's shoulder. Leonard had his jacket half on and was returning the goodnight as he shook the man's hand. During this little flurry, Leonard was making the automatic, barely conscious appraisal of manner, appearance and voice by means of which one Englishman decodes another's status.

"John MacNamee. We've got someone fallen sick and I'll be needing another pair of hands at the tunnel head next week. It's all clear with Gla.s.s. I've got half an hour now if you want me to show you around." MacNamee had buck teeth, and very few of them-little pegs set far apart, and rather brown. Hence the slight lisp in a delivery from which the c.o.c.kney had not been fully expunged. The voice was almost chummy. A refusal was not expected. MacNamee was already leading the way out of the recording room, but his authority was lightly worn.

Leonard guessed that this was a senior government scientist. A couple of them had been his teachers at Birmingham, and there were one or two in and around the G.P.O. research laboratory at Dollis Hill. Theirs was a special generation of unpretentious, gifted men, brought into prominent government service in the forties by the necessities of modern scientific warfare. Leonard respected the ones he had met. They did not make him feel clumsy and short of the right word the way the public-school boys did-the ones who would not speak to him in the canteen and who were all set to rise through the hierarchies of command by dint of a reasonable grasp of Latin and ancient Greek.

Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt they had to stand and wait by the shaft. Someone in front of them was having difficulty finding his pa.s.s for the guard. Near where they stood, the earth piled to the ceiling exuded its cold stench. MacNamee stamped his feet on the muddy concrete and clasped his bony white hands. On the way Leonard had taken from his room a greatcoat Gla.s.s had found for him, but MacNamee had only his gray suit.

"It'll be warm enough down there when we get those amplifiers running. It could even be a problem," he said. "Enjoying the work?"

"It's a very interesting project."

"You fitted out all the recorders. That must have got boring."

Leonard knew it was unwise to complain to a superior, even when prompted. MacNamee was showing his pa.s.s and signing for his guest. "It wasn't so bad, really."

He followed the older man down the ladder, into the pit. By the mouth of the tunnel MacNamee supported his foot against a railway line and bent to retie his lace. His voice was m.u.f.fled, and Leonard had to stoop to hear. "What's your clearance, Marnham?" The guard at the edge of the shaft was looking down at them. Could he possibly believe, like the sentries on the gate, that he was guarding a warehouse, or even a radar station?

Leonard waited until MacNamee had straightened and they had stepped into the tunnel. The fluorescent striplights barely dispersed the blackness. The acoustic was dead. Leonard's voice sounded flat in his ears. "Actually, it's level three."

MacNamee was walking ahead of him, his hands deep in his trouser pockets for warmth. "Well, I suppose we might have to bring you into four. I'll see about that tomorrow."

They were making a shallow descent as they walked between the rails. There were puddles underfoot, and on the walls, where the steel plates had been bolted together to make a continuous tube, condensation glistened. There was a constant hum of a groundwater pump. On both sides of the tunnel sandbags were piled to shoulder height to support cables and pipes. A number of bags had split and were spilling their contents. Earth and water were pressing in on all sides, waiting to reclaim the s.p.a.ce.

They arrived at a place where tight coils of barbed wire were stacked by a pile of sandbags. MacNamee waited for Leonard to draw level. "We're stepping into the Russian sector now. When they break in on us, which is bound to happen one of these days, we're meant to spread the wire across as we retreat. Make them respect the border." He smiled at his little irony, revealing his pitiful teeth. They teetered at all angles, like old gravestones. He caught Leonard's gaze. He tapped his mouth with his forefinger and spoke right into the younger man's embarra.s.sment. "Milk teeth. The other lot never came through. I think perhaps I never wanted to grow up."

They continued along level ground. A hundred yards ahead a group of men stepped through a steel door and came toward them. They appeared deep in conversation, but as they came closer, Leonard realized they were making no sound. They jostled in and out of single file. When they were thirty feet away Leonard caught the sibilants of their whispers. Those ceased too as the two groups squeezed by each other with wary nods.

"The general rule is no noise, especially once you've crossed the border." MacNamee was speaking in a voice fractionally above a whisper. "As you know, low frequencies, men's voices, penetrate very easily."

Leonard whispered "Yes," but his reply was lost to the sound of the pumps.

Running along the tops of the twin banks of sandbags were power lines, the air-conditioning conduit and the lines from the recording room, encased in a lead sheath. Along the way there were telephones mounted on the wall, and fire extinguishers, fuseboxes, emergency power switches. At intervals there were green and red warning lights, like miniature traffic signals. It was a toytown, packed with boyish invention. Leonard remembered the secret camps, the tunnels through the undergrowth he used to make with friends in a sc.r.a.p of woodland near his house. And the gigantic train set in Hamleys, the toy store-the safe world of its motionless sheep and cows cropping the sudden green hills that were no more than pretexts for tunnels. Tunnels were stealth and safety; boys and trains crept through them, lost to sight and care, and then emerged unscathed.

MacNamee murmured in his ear again. "I tell you what I like about this project. The att.i.tude. Once the Americans decide to do a thing, they do it well, and hang the cost. I've had everything I wanted, never a murmur. None of this can-you-get-by-with-half-a-ball-of-string nonsense."

Leonard was flattered to be confided in. He tried to be humorous in agreement. "Look at all the trouble they take with the food. I love the way they do their chips."

MacNamee looked away. It seemed this puerile observation drifted with them down the tunnel until they reached the steel door.

Beyond it was air-conditioning equipment banked up on both sides to make a narrow corridor of the railway lines. They edged past an American technician who was working there and opened a second door.

"Now," MacNamee said as he closed it behind him. "What do you think?"

They had entered a brightly lit section of the tunnel that was clean and well ordered. The walls were lined with plywood that had been painted white. The railway lines had disappeared under a concrete floor, which was covered with linoleum. From overhead came the rumble of traffic on the Schonefelder Chaussee. Wedged between racks of electronics were tidy works.p.a.ces, plywood surfaces with headsets and the monitoring tape recorders. Neatly stowed on the floor were the cases Leonard had sent down that day. He was not being asked to admire the amplifier. He knew the model from Dollis Hill. It was powerful, compact and weighed less than forty pounds. It was about the most expensive item in the lab where he had worked. It was not the machine, it was the sheer quant.i.ty of them, and the switching gear, all down one side of the tunnel, stretching ninety feet perhaps, stacked head high, like the interior of a telephone exchange. It was the quant.i.ty MacNamee was proud of, the handling capacity, the amplifying power and the feat of circuitry it implied. By the door, the lead-sheathed cables broke into multicolored strands, fanning out to junction points from which they emerged in smaller cl.u.s.ters held by rubber clips. Three men of the Royal Signals were at work. They nodded at MacNamee and ignored Leonard. The two men pa.s.sed along the array at a stately pace, as though reviewing a guard of honor. MacNamee said, "Near on a quarter of a million pounds' worth. We're drawing off a tiniest fraction of the Russian signals, so we need the best there is."

Since his remark about the chips, Leonard was confining his appreciation to nods and sighs. He was thinking about an intelligent question he might put, and only half listened while MacNamee described the technicalities of the circuitry. Close attention was not necessary. MacNamee's pride in the bright white amplification room was impersonal. He liked to see the achievement afresh through the eyes of a newcomer, and any eyes would do.

Leonard was still working on his question as they approached a second steel door. MacNamee stopped by it. "This one is a double door. We're going to keep the tap room pressurized to stop the nitrogen leak." Leonard nodded again. The Russian cables would have nitrogen sealed within them to keep moisture out and to help monitor breaks. Pressurizing the air around the cables would make it possible to cut into them undetected.

MacNamee pushed open the doors, and Leonard followed him in. It was as though they had stepped inside a drum being beaten by a wild man. Road noise was filling the vertical tunnel and reverberating in the tap chamber. MacNamee stepped over empty sacks of sound insulation piled on the floor and took a torch from a table. They stood at the base of the access tunnel. Right up in its roof, picked out by the narrow beam, were the three cables, each four or five inches thick and caked in mud. MacNamee was about to speak, but the pounding intensified to a frenzy and they had to wait. When it subsided he said, "Horse and cart. They're the worst. When we're ready, we'll use a hydraulic jack to pull the cables down. Then we'll need a day and a half to cement the roof for support. We won't make the cut until all the backup is in shape. We'll bridge the circuits first and then break in and lead off. There's likely to be more than a hundred and fifty circuits in each cable. There'll be an MI6 technician laying the actual tap, and three standing by in case something goes wrong. We've one man off sick, so you might have to be in the support group."

While he was speaking, MacNamee rested his hand on Leonard's shoulder. They came away from the shaft to be out of the worst of the noise.

"Well I have got a question," Leonard said, "but you might not want to answer it."

The government scientist shrugged. Leonard found that he wanted his approval. "Surely all the important military traffic will be encoded and telegraphed. How are we going to read it? These modern codes are meant to be virtually unbreakable."

MacNamee took a pipe from his jacket pocket and bit on its stem. Smoking, of course, was out of the question.

"This is what I wanted to speak to you about. You haven't been talking to anyone?"

"No."

"Have you heard of a man called Nelson, Carl Nelson? Worked for the CIA's Office of Communications?"

"No."

MacNamee was leading the way back through the double doors. He bolted them before they walked on. "This is level four now. We were going to let you in, I think. You're about to join an exclusive club." They had stopped again, this time by the first rack of amplifying equipment. At the far end the three men worked on in silence, well out of earshot. As MacNamee spoke he ran his finger along the front of an amplifier, perhaps to give the impression that he was discussing it. "I'll give you the simple version. It's been discovered that when you electrically encode a message and send it down the line, there's a faint electronic echo, a shadow of the original, of the clear text, that travels with it. It's so faint that it fades out after twenty miles or so. But with the right equipment, and if you can tap into the line within the twenty miles, you can have a readable message coming straight onto the teleprinter, no matter how well the material has been encoded. This is the basis for the whole operation here. We wouldn't be building something on this scale just to listen to low-priority telephone chat. It was Nelson's discovery, and the equipment was his invention. He was walking about in Vienna looking for a good place to try it out on the Russian lines when he walked right into a tunnel we had built to tap those same lines. So, very generously, we let the Americans into our tunnel, gave them facilities, let them make use of our taps. And you know what? They didn't even tell us about Nelson's invention. They were taking the stuff back to Washington and reading the clear text while we were knocking our brains trying to, break the codes. And these are our allies. b.l.o.o.d.y incredible, don't you think?" He paused for confirmation. "Now that we're sharing this project, they've let us in on the secret. But only the outline, mark you, not the details. That's why I can only give you the simplest account."

Two of the Royal Signals people were walking toward them. MacNamee steered Leonard back in the direction of the tap chamber. "On the need-to-know basis, you shouldn't be getting any of this. You're probably wondering what I'm up to. Well, they've promised to share whatever they come up with. And we have to take that on trust. But we're not prepared to live off the crumbs from their table. That's not our understanding of this relationship. We're developing our own version of Nelson's technique, and we've found some marvelous potential sites. We're not talking to the Americans about them. Speed is important because sooner or later the Russians are going to make the same discovery, and then they'll modify their machines. There's a Dollis Hill team working on it, but it would be useful to have someone here keeping his ears and eyes open. We think there might be one or two Americans here who know about Nelson's equipment. We need someone with a technical background, and not too highly placed. As soon as they see me, these people run a mile. It's the details we're after, odds and ends of electronics gossip, anything that might help things along. You know how careless the Yanks can be. They talk; things are left lying around."

They had stopped by the double steel doors. "So. What do you think?" It almost sounded like "fink."

"They're all very chatty in the canteen," Leonard said. "Even our own chaps."

"You'll do it, then? Good. We'll talk more later. Let's go up and have some tea. I'm freezing to death."

They went back along the tunnel, into the American sector, up the incline. It was hard not to feel proud of the tunnel. Leonard remembered before the war when his father built a small brick extension onto the kitchen. Leonard lent a child's token a.s.sistance, fetching a trowel, taking a list to the hardware shop and so on. When it was all finished, and before the breakfast table and chairs were moved in, he stood in the new s.p.a.ce with its plaster walls, electrical fittings and homemade window, and he felt quite delirious with his own achievement.

Back in the warehouse, Leonard excused himself from tea in the canteen. Now that he had MacNamee's approval, his grat.i.tude even, he felt confident and free. On his way out of the building he looked in at his room. The absence of tape recorders on the shelves was itself a small triumph. He locked the door and took the key to the duty officer's room. He crossed the compound, pa.s.sed the sentry at the gate and set off for Rudow. The road was dark, but he knew every step of the way now. His greatcoat gave poor protection against the cold. He could feel the hairs in his nostrils stiffening. When he breathed through his mouth, the air stung his chest. He could sense the frozen flat fields around him. He pa.s.sed the shacks where refugees from the Russian sector had set up home. There were kids playing in the dark, and as his steps rang out on the cold road, they shushed each other and waited until he had pa.s.sed. Every yard away from the warehouse was a yard toward Maria. He had spoken to no one about her at work, and he could not talk to her about what he did. He was not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void traveling between two points. Only on arrival, at this end or that, would he a.s.sume or be a.s.signed a purpose, and then he would be himself, or one of his selves, again. What he did know for sure was that these speculations would begin to fade as his train approached his Kreuzberg stop, and that as he hurried across the courtyard and took the five flights of stairs two or even three at a time, they would have vanished.

Eight.