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By Root 1516 0

blocks in search of a secluded spot where he could wait until five. The rain had stopped and he began to look around for a cash machine, only to realize that any transaction he made would instantly give away his position to any interested party with a track on his credit cards. Some of the paranoia and anxiousness he had felt before entering the club now began to return. The sun had come up, bringing a low blue light to deserted streets still damp from the early-morning rain. Three times Gaddis looked at his watch, only to find the time creeping towards five o’clock with a maddening slowness. He felt that his body language, his entire demeanour as he walked, was a living clue to his guilt. Any passer-by would surely notice this strange foreigner, walking the streets to no discernible purpose, turning around too frequently, looking nervously down every alleyway and street. Gaddis was conscious of moving his hands incessantly in and out of his pockets, of touching his face and hair. He was finding it impossible to relax.

Eventually, pulling out the last of his cigarettes, he turned into a straggly park populated by dogs and restless pigeons and settled on a bench to smoke. He would get through the cigarette, then switch on the phone, waiting for Tanya’s instructions. He had no passport, no change of clothes, no means of contacting his friends or colleagues, other than by using a mobile phone which, when switched on, would give away his position like a fire lit suddenly in the darkness of a valley. The isolation was total.

He stubbed out the cigarette. The park was overlooked by a concrete flak tower smothered in incomprehensible graffiti. A relic of the Second World War. Gaddis took out the phone and switched it on. The simple act of pressing the power button felt like an admission of defeat, as if he was deliberately surrendering to the inevitability of his own capture. He listened to the innocent pings and melodies of the phone as it booted up and felt sure that, within moments, an army of jackbooted militia would come tearing down the street to arrest him. He stared at the phone’s tiny screen. He was at the mercy of a piece of technology smaller than his own hand. The system appeared to have locked on to a signal, with five full bars of reception. But nothing was happening. No text from Tanya. No missed call. Nothing.

A minute passed, two. Gaddis looked at his watch repeatedly. It was already almost five past five. How long could he afford to keep the phone switched on? He wondered if he had misunderstood Tanya’s instructions and booted up either an hour too early or an hour too late. Had she meant five o’clock Austrian time, or five o’clock in London? Across the park, a woman was stretching her back beside a set of children’s swings. Two hundred metres to her left, half-obscured by a screen of trees, two men appeared to be eating breakfast in the front seat of a car. Everybody now was a potential surveillance operative or paid assassin. Gaddis wondered if he would ever again be free of this constant paranoia.

The phone beeped. Gaddis plunged to it with a manic relief.

CUCKOO CLOCK. DIZZY MOUSE.

He spoke aloud to himself: ‘What?’ and looked again at the screen. It made no sense. Cuckoo clock? Dizzy mouse? What did Tanya mean? He had been expecting detailed instructions, the address of a safe house in Vienna, at the very least the timetable of trains leaving for Prague or Zurich. Not this. Not four apparently meaningless words in the small hours of the morning.

Cuckoo clock. His mind went to work. It was plainly a code. Tanya was trying to conceal her instructions from third parties who might be looking in. She could not afford to risk anybody knowing where MI6 were intending to meet him. That meant that she was speaking directly to Gaddis, using what she knew about him to create a private language which only he would understand. Dizzy Mouse. What did that mean? Was there more to come? He waited another thirty seconds for any further messages, but the mobile remained frustratingly inert. He knew that he had to switch