They drove very slowly. Leamas sat with his hands on his knees, looking straight in front of him. He didn’t want to see Berlin that night. This was his last chance, he knew that. The way he was sitting now he could drive the side of his right hand into Peters’ throat, smashing the promontory of the thorax. He could get out and run, weaving to avoid the bullets from the car behind. He would be free–there were people in Berlin who would take care of him–he could get away.
He did nothing.
It was so easy crossing the sector border. Leamas had never expected it to be quite that easy. For about ten minutes they dawdled, and Leamas guessed that they had to cross at a prearranged time. As they approached the West German checkpoint, the DKW pulled out and overtook them with the ostentatious roar of a labored engine, and stopped at the police hut. The Mercedes waited thirty yards behind. Two minutes later the red and white pole lifted to let through the DKW and as it did so both cars drove over together, the Mercedes engine screaming in second gear, the driver pressing himself back against his seat, holding the wheel at arm’s length.
As they crossed the fifty yards which separated the two checkpoints, Leamas was dimly aware of the new fortification on the eastern side of the wall–dragons’ teeth, observation towers and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had tightened up.
The Mercedes didn’t stop at the second checkpoint; the booms were already lifted and they drove straight through, the Vopos just watching them through binoculars. The DKW had disappeared, and when Leamas sighted it ten minutes later it was behind them again. They were driving fast now–Leamas had thought they would stop in East Berlin, change cars perhaps, and congratulate one another on a successful operation, but they drove on eastward through the city.
“Where are we going?” he asked Peters.
“We are there. The German Democratic Republic. They have arranged accommodation for you.”
“I thought we’d be going further east.”
“We are. We are spending a day or two here first. We thought the Germans ought to have a talk with you.’,
“I see.”
“After all, most of your work has been on the German side. I sent them details from your statement.”
“And they asked to see me?”
“They’ve never had anything quite like you, nothing quite so . . . near the source. My people agreed that they should have the chance to meet you.”
“And from there? Where do we go from Germany?”
“East again.”
“Who will I see on the German side?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not particularly. I know most of the Abteilung people by name, that’s all. I just wondered.”
“Who would you expect to meet?”
“Fiedler,” Leamas replied promptly, “deputy head of security. Mundt’s man. He does all the big interrogations. He’s a bastard.”
“Why?”
“A savage little bastard. I’ve heard about him. He caught an agent of Peter Guillam’s and bloody nearly killed him.”
“Espionage is not a cricket game,” Peters observed sourly, and after that they sat in silence. So it is Fiedler, Leamas thought.
Leamas knew Fiedler, all right. He knew him from the photographs on the ifie and the accounts of his former subordinates. A slim, neat man, quite young, smooth-faced. Dark hair, bright brown eyes; intelligent and savage, as Leamas had said. A lithe, quick body containing a patient, retentive mind; a man seemingly without ambition for himself but remorseless in the destruction of others. Fiedler was a rarity in the Abteilung—-he took no part in its intrigues, seemed content to live in Mundt’s shadow without prospect of promotion. He could not be labeled as a member of this or that clique; even those who had worked close to him in the Abteilung could not say where he stood in its power complex. Fiedler was a solitary; feared, disliked and mistrusted. Whatever motives he had were concealed beneath a cloak of destructive sarcasm.
“Fiedler is our best bet,” Control had explained. They’d been sitting together over dinner–Leamas, Control and Peter Guillam–in the dreary little sevendwarfs’ house in Surrey where Control lived with his beady wife, surrounded by carved Indian tables with brass tops. “Fiedler is the acolyte who one day will stab the high priest in the back. He’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt–” here Guillam had nodded–“and he hates his guts. Fiedler’s a Jew of course, and Mundt is quite the other thing. Not at all a good mixture. It has been our job,” he declared, indicating Guillam and himself, “to give Fiedler the weapon with which to destroy Mundt. It will be yours, my dear Leamas, to encourage him to use it. Indirectly, of course, because you’ll never meet him. At least I certainly hope you won’t.”