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.Perhaps the woman’s complaint to the police had been passed on and the Opel couple told they were too noticeable there.Perhaps the men had detected the woman watching and decided they’d switch.Or.or.Mount did wonder if they’d just had the order to withdraw, withdraw permanently.Why, though? He knew this might be hope rather than a wise guess.A trap? Was it an inducement to go out again, and perhaps lead to somewhere more significant than the gorgeous Steglitz town hall - such as, for instance, the British embassy?He had waited in the apartment for another couple of hours yesterday.Neither of the cars reappeared, and he’d seen nobody on foot patrol.He felt increasingly baffled that the watch might have been lifted.If the original pair had followed him here from Lichtenberg it must mean, mustn’t it, that they suspected a shady bond between a Foreign Ministry official, full of important secrets, and this stranger - supposing, that is, they hadn’t identified the stranger? How had they connected him with Toulmin on Monday night? They clearly had, hadn’t they, and seeing Toulmin leave the building on Tuesday morning would have confirmed the connection for them.Yet they, or their chiefs, had closed the operation.Madness? Impossible?Mount tabulated recollections: (5) BRITISH EMBASSY.He’d made himself a soup and cheese meal, then had yet another look down at the street: still nothing and nobody hanging about.He went from the apartment and, very watchful, set out for the embassy.For the present, he shelved his worry about the chairs.He did some unnecessary changes on the U-Bahn to check for gumshoes, classic anti-tail drills.No.He’d been sure he had no tail.He’d become sure that, if he did have a tail, he would have located it, them.Yes, he’d learned something permanently useful: Mount, stay awake and aware.At the embassy in Wilhelmstrasse, Bernard Kale-Walker, Head of Passport Control, Germany, as it were, had helped him draft then encode the telegram to SB.It would be decrypted and on his desk at the Section by the end of the day.‘High-grade material,’ he’d said about the dispatch.‘High-grade and alarming.What comes next?’Well, I’ll give things a day and a half in case of developments, and then, if there aren’t any, tomorrow night I must get to the Toledo club and warn two commercial girls there that they might have recently qualified for a state police dossier.I’ll have to concoct some non-espionage tale as to why this should be.Perhaps I’ll take one or both back to the apartment so I can give the yarn in privacy.Mount had thought this, but didn’t say it.It would have involved telling Kale-Walker he’d unknowingly, stupidly, allowed himself to be tailed from Lichtenberg to Steglitz on Monday night, and that Inge and Olga visited the apartment now and then for a bit of an orgy.These topics Mount preferred to keep quiet about.It might also suggest he was putting an operation at risk for inanely big-hearted reasons.‘I’ll lie low for a day or so, see if there are any developments,’ he said.‘What sort of developments?’ Kale-Walker had asked.‘Occasionally it can be wise to do nothing.’‘“Masterly inactivity.” Who said that?’‘Me, if I’d thought of it.’Perhaps the German security people had become keen on masterly inactivity, too, and so the Olympia had been called home yesterday afternoon.For a reason Mount could not see, did they want for now to avoid a public espionage fracas in Berlin? Politics? Would they allow the link between him and Toulmin to continue? Mount had decided not to make it a priority to warn Toulmin.Another journey to Lichtenberg would be needed, or a wait around the Foreign Ministry once more, or an attempt at a booth phone call.And he couldn’t tell what results any of these might have.Even if he did get a warning to him, what could Toulmin do? Would either he or Mount be allowed to flee Germany? That was very different from being tolerated inside the country as a clever tactic of some sort, possibly supervised at a distance - at liberty, it seemed, but on a long lead.After all, Toulmin would rate as a traitor, and Mount was a spy.Could Germany possibly let them do a flit? Quite a question, that, and the answer depressing.Possible exits might be arranged, though: a small plane lands at night on a remote, improvised airstrip; a submarine surfaces to meet a rubber dinghy off some secluded beach? Possibly, it would come to something like that.But either would take a deal of setting up, with Kale-Walker most probably in charge, as Service chief in Germany.For now, Mount shelved the notions.Kale-Walker - square built, blunt faced, hard voiced, grey-eyed - had been messing about with passports, or not, in Berlin for five or six years: an exceptionally long spell in such a sensitive post.SB admired what he called his ‘management abilities, rough-house aura, and polished instincts’, though Mount didn’t know how Kale-Walker had applied the qualities in those five or six years.At Mount’s Oxford college, Kale-Walker had been a scholar with two rugby Blues as a scrum-half, and then a don.But he’d moved over to this other trade a few years before Mount arrived as an undergraduate.‘Your Russian stuff from the agent - I think it fits with what I’ve been picking up,’ Kale-Walker had said.‘On which front?’‘Czecho.’‘Munich won’t stop him from going in when it suits?’‘Munich means nothing, as you must know.I’m not sure our people understand the full, mystic dimensions of the problem.Hitler believes he has a mission, a destiny.He thinks he’s the greatest German ever and that, therefore, Germans in what’s been Czechoslovakia since 1919 expect him to free them.He accepts they are entitled to.As he sees it, he has no option.Noblesse oblige.Only he can do it.He’s a saviour picked by Fate.Same with Austria
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