May 1983
The Russian colonel stepped out of the shadows slowly and carefully, even though he had seen and recognized the signal. All meetings with his British controller were dangerous and to be avoided if possible. But this one he had asked for himself. He had things to say, to demand, that could not be put in a message in a dead-letter box. A loose sheet of metal on the roof of a shed down the railway line flapped and creaked in a puff of predawn May wind of that year, 1983. He turned, established the source of the noise, and stared again at the patch of darkness near the locomotive turntable.
“Sam?” he called softly.
Sam McCready had also been watching. He had been there for an hour in the darkness of the abandoned railway yard in the outer suburbs of East Berlin. He had seen, or rather heard, the Russian arrive, and still he had waited to ensure that no other feet were moving amidst the dust and the rubble. However many times you did it, the knotted ball in the base of the stomach never went away.
At the appointed hour, satisfied they were alone and unaccompanied, he had flicked the match with his thumbnail, so that it had flared once, briefly, and died away. The Russian had seen it and emerged from behind the old maintenance hut. Both men had reason to prefer the gloom, for one was a traitor and the other a spy.
McCready moved out of the darkness to let the Russian see him, paused to establish that he too was alone, and went forward.
“Yevgeni. It’s been a long time, my friend.”
At five paces they could see each other clearly, establish that there had been no substitution, no trickery. That was always the danger in a face-to-face. The Russian might have been taken and then broken in the interrogation rooms, allowing the KGB and the East German SSD to set up a trap for a top British intelligence officer. Or the Russian’s message might have been intercepted, and it might be he was moving into the trap, thence to the long dark night of the interrogators and the final bullet in the nape of the neck. Mother Russia had no mercy for her traitorous elite.
McCready did not embrace or even shake hands. Some assets needed that: the personal touch, the comfort of contact. But Yevgeni Pankratin, Colonel of the Red Army, on attachment to the GSFG, was a cold one: aloof, self-contained, confident in his arrogance.
He had first been spotted in Moscow in 1980 by a sharp-eyed attaché at the British Embassy. It was a diplomatic function—polite, banal conversation, then the sudden tart remark by the Russian about his own society. The diplomat had given no sign, said nothing. But he had noted and reported. A possible. Two months later a first tentative approach had been made. Colonel Pankratin had been noncommital but had not rebuffed it. That ranked as positive. Then he had been posted to Potsdam, to the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, the GSFG, the 330,000-man, twenty-two-division army that kept the East Germans in thrall, the puppet Honecker in power, the West Berliners in fear, and NATO on the alert for a crushing break-out across the Central German Plain.
McCready had taken over; it was his patch. In 1981 he made his own approach, and Pankratin was recruited. No fuss, no outpourings of inner feelings to be listened to and agreed with—just a straight demand for money.
People betray the lands of their fathers for many reasons: resentment, ideology, lack of promotion, hatred of a single superior, shame for their bizarre sexual preferences, fear of being summoned home in disgrace. With Russians, it was usually a deep disillusionment with the corruption, the lies, and the nepotism they saw all around them. But Pankratin was the true mercenary—he just wanted money. One day he would come out, he said, but when he did, he intended to be rich. He had called the dawn meeting in East Berlin to raise the stakes.
Pankratin reached inside his trenchcoat and produced a bulky brown envelope, which he extended toward McCready. Without emotion he described what was inside the envelope as McCready secreted the package inside his duffle coat. Names, places, timings, divisional readiness, operational orders, movements, postings, weaponry upgrades. The key, of course, was what Pankratin had to say about the SS-20, the terrible Soviet mobile-launched medium-range missile, with each of its independently guided triple-nuke warheads targeted on a British or European city. According to Pankratin, they were moving into the forests of Saxony and Thuringia, closer to the border, able to range in an arc from Oslo through Dublin to Palermo. In the West huge columns of sincere, naive people were on the march behind socialist banners demanding that their own governments strip themselves of their defenses as a gesture of goodwill for peace.
“There is a price, of course,” said the Russian.
“Of course.”
“Two hundred thousand pounds sterling.”
“Agreed.” It had not been agreed, but McCready knew his government would find it somewhere.
“There is more. I understand I am being slated for promotion. To Major-General. And a transfer back to Moscow.”
“Congratulations. As what, Yevgeni?”
Pankratin paused to let it sink in. “Deputy Director, Joint Planning Staff, Defense Ministry.”
McCready was impressed. To have a man in the heart of 19 Frunze Street, Moscow, would be incomparable.
“And when I come out, I want an apartment block. In California. Deeds in my name. Santa Barbara, perhaps. I have heard it is beautiful there.”
“It is,” agreed McCready. “You wouldn’t like to settle in Britain? We would look after you.”
“No, I want the sun. Of California. And one million dollars, U.S., in my account there.”
“An apartment can be arranged,” said McCready. “And a million dollars—if the product is right.”
“Not an apartment, Sam. A block of apartments. To live off the rents.”
“Yevgeni, you are asking for between five and eight million American dollars. I don’t think my people have that kind of money, even for your product.”
The Russian’s teeth gleamed beneath his military moustache in a brief smile. “When I am in Moscow, the product I will bring you will be beyond your wildest expectations. You will find the money.”
“Let’s wait till you have your promotion first, Yevgeni. Then we will talk about an apartment block in California.”
They parted five minutes later, the Russian to return, in uniform, to his desk at Potsdam, the Englishman to slip back through the Wall to the stadium in West Berlin. He would be searched at Checkpoint Charlie. The package would cross the Wall by another safer but slower route. Only when it joined him in the West would he fly back to London.
October 1983
Bruno Morenz knocked on the door and entered in response to the jovial “Herein.” His superior was alone in the office, in his important revolving leather chair behind his important desk. He was delicately stirring his first cup of real coffee of the day in the bone china cup, deposited by the attentive Fräulein Keppel, the neat spinster who waited upon his every legitimate need.
Like Morenz, the Herr Direktor was of the generation that could recall the end of the war and the years thereafter, when Germans made do with chicory extract and only the American occupiers and occasionally the British could get hold of real coffee. No longer. Dieter Aust appreciated his Colombian coffee in the morning. He did not offer Morenz any.
Both men were nudging fifty, but there the similarity ended. Aust was short, plump, beautifully barbered and tailored, and the director of the entire Cologne Station. Morenz was taller, burly, gray-haired. But he stooped and appeared to shamble as he walked, chunky and untidy in his tweed suit. Moreover, he was a low-to-medium-rank civil servant who would never aspire to the title of Director, nor have his own important office with Fräulein Keppel to bring him Colombian coffee in bone china before he started the day’s work.
The scene of a senior man summoning a low-level staffer to his office for a talk was probably being enacted in many offices all over Germany that morning, but the area of employment of these two men would not have been mirrored in many other places. Nor indeed would the conversation that followed. For Dieter Aust was the Director of the Cologne outstation of the West German Secret Intelligence Service, the BND.
The BND is actually headquartered in a substantial walled compound just outside the small village of Pullach, some six miles south of Munich, on the River Isar in the south of Bavaria. This might seem an odd choice bearing in mind that the national capital since 1949 has been in Bonn, hundreds of miles away on the Rhine. The reason is historical. It was the Americans who, just after the war, set up a West German spy service to counteract the efforts of the new enemy, the USSR. They chose for the head of the new service the former wartime German spy chief Reinhard Gehlen, and at first it was simply known as the Gehlen Organization. The Americans wanted Gehlen within their own zone of occupation, which happened to be Bavaria and the south.
The Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, was then a fairly obscure politician. When the Allies founded the Federal German Republic in 1949, Adenauer, as its first Chancellor, established its unlikely capital in his hometown of Bonn, fifteen miles along the Rhine from Cologne. Almost every federal institution was encouraged to establish there, but Gehlen held out and the newly named BND remained at Pullach, where it sits to this day. But the BND maintains outstations in each of the Land or provincial capitals of the Federal Republic, and one of the most important of these is the Cologne Station. For although Cologne is not the capital city of North Rhine—Westphalia, which is Düsseldorf, it is the closest to Bonn, and as the capital of the republic, Bonn is the nerve center of government. It is also full of foreigners, and the BND is concerned with foreign intelligence.
Morenz accepted Aust’s invitation to sit, and he wondered what, if anything, he had done wrong. The answer was, nothing.
“My dear Morenz, I won’t beat about the bush.” Aust delicately wiped his lips on a fresh linen handkerchief. “Next week our colleague Dorn retires. You know, of course. His duties will be taken over by his successor. But he is a much younger man, going places—mark my words. There is, however, one duty that requires a man of more mature years. I would like you to take it over.”
Morenz nodded as if he understood. He did not. Aust steepled his plump fingers and gazed out the window, folding his features into an expression of regret at the vagaries of his fellow man. He chose his words carefully.
“Now and again, this country has visitors, foreign dignitaries, who, at the end of a day of negotiations or official meetings, feel in need of distraction ... entertainment. Of course, our various ministries are happy to arrange visits to fine restaurants, the concert, the opera, the ballet. You understand?”
Morenz nodded again. It was as clear as mud.
“Unfortunately, there are some—usually from Arab countries or Africa, occasionally Europe—who indicate quite strongly that they would prefer to enjoy female company. Paid-for female company.”
“Call girls,” said Morenz.
“In a word, yes. Well, rather than have important foreign visitors accosting hotel porters or taxi drivers, or haunting the red-lit windows of the Hornstrasse or getting into trouble in bars and nightclubs, the government prefers to suggest a certain telephone number. Believe me, my dear Morenz, this is done in every capital of the world. We are no exception.”
“We run call girls?” asked Morenz.
Aust was shocked. “Run? Certainly not. We do not run them. We do not pay them. The client does that. Nor, I must stress, do we use any material we might get concerning the habits of some of our visiting dignitaries. The so-called ‘honey trap.’ Our constitutional rules and regulations are quite clear and not to be infringed. We leave honey traps to the Russians and”—he sniffed—“the French.”
He took three slim folders from his desk and handed them to Morenz.
“There are three girls. Different physical types. I am asking you to take this over because you are a mature married man. Just keep an avuncular, supervisory eye on them. Make sure they have regular medicals, keep themselves presentable. See if they are away, or unwell, or on holiday. In short, if they are available.
“Now, finally. You may on occasion be rung by a Herr Jakobsen. Never mind if the voice on the phone changes—it will always be Herr Jakobsen. According to the visitor’s tastes, which Jakobsen will tell you, choose one of the three, establish the time for a visit, and ensure that she is available. Jakobsen will ring you back for the time and place, which he will then pass on to the visitor. After that, we leave it up to the call girl and her client. Not a burdensome task, really. It should not interfere with your other duties.”
Morenz lumbered to his feet with the files. Great, he thought as he left the office. Thirty years’ loyal work for the Service, five years to retirement, and I get to baby-sitting hookers for foreigners who want a night on the town.
Early the following month, Sam McCready sat in a darkened room deep in the subbasement of Century House in London, headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS—usually miscalled by the press MI-6; referred to by insiders as “the Firm.” He was watching a flickering screen upon which the massed might (or a part of it) of the USSR rolled endlessly over Red Square. The Soviet Union likes to hold two vast parades each year in that square: one for May Day, and the other to celebrate the Great October Socialist Revolution. The latter is held on November 7, and today was the eighth. The camera left the vista of rumbling tanks and panned across the row effaces atop Lenin’s mausoleum.
“Slow down,” said McCready. The technician at his side moved a hand over the controls, and the pan-shot slowed. President Reagan’s “evil empire” (he would use the phrase later) looked more like a home for geriatrics. In the chill wind the sagging, aged faces had almost disappeared into the collars of their coats, whose upturned edges reached to meet the gray trilbies or fur shapkas above.
The General Secretary himself was not even there. Yuri V. Andropov, Chairman of the KGB from 1963 to 1978, who had taken the power in late 1982 following the too-long delayed death of Leonid Brezhnev, was himself dying by inches out at the Politburo Clinic at Kuntsevo. He had not been seen in public since the previous August, nor ever would he be again.
Chernenko (who would succeed Andropov in a few months) was up there, with Gromyko, Kirilenko, Tikhonov and the hatchet-faced Party theoretician Suslov. The Minister of Defense, Ustinov, was muffled in his marshal’s greatcoat with enough medals to act as a windbreak from chin to waist. There were a few young enough to be competent—Grishin, the Moscow Party Chief, and Romanov, the boss of Leningrad. To one side was the youngest of them all, still an outsider, a chunky man called Gorbachev.
The camera lifted to bring into focus the group of officers behind Marshal Ustinov.
“Hold it,” said McCready. The picture froze. “That one, third from the left. Can you enhance? Bring it closer?”
The technician studied his console and fine-tuned carefully. The group of officers came closer and closer. Some passed out of eyeshot. The one McCready had indicated was moving too far to the right. The technician ran back three or four frames until he was full center, and kept closing. The officer was half hidden by a full general of the Strategic Rocket Forces, but it was the moustache, unusual among Soviet officers, that clinched it. The shoulder boards on the greatcoat said Major-General.
“Bloody hell,” whispered McCready, “he’s done it. He’s there.” He turned to the impassive technician. “Jimmy, how the hell do we get hold of an apartment block in California?”
“Well, the short answer, my dear Sam,” said Timothy Edwards two days later, “is that we don’t. We can’t. I know it’s tough, but I’ve run it past the Chief and the money boys, and the answer is he’s too rich for us.”
“But his product is priceless,” protested McCready. “This man’s beyond just gold. He’s a mother lode of pure platinum.”
“No dispute,” Edwards said smoothly. He was younger than McCready by a decade, a high-flyer with a good degree and private wealth. Barely out of his thirties and already an Assistant Chief. Most men his age were happy to head up a foreign station, delighted to command a desk, yearning to rise to Controller rank. And Edwards was just under the top floor.
“Look,” he said, “the Chief’s been in Washington. He mentioned your man, just in case he got his promotion. Our Cousins have always had his product since you brought him in. They’ve always been delighted with it. Now it seems they’ll be happy to take him over, money and all.”
“He’s tetchy, prickly. He knows me. He might not work for anyone else.”
“Come now, Sam. You’re the first to agree he’s a mercenary. He’ll go where the money is. And we’ll get the product. Please ensure there’s a smooth handover.”
He paused and flashed his most winning smile.
“By the way, the Chief wants to see you. Tomorrow morning, ten A.M. I don’t think I’m out of order in telling you he has in mind a new assignment. A step up, Sam. Let’s face it—things sometimes work out for the best. Pankratin’s back in Moscow, which makes him harder for you to get at; you’ve covered East Germany for an awful long time. The Cousins are prepared to take over, and you get a well-deserved promotion. A desk, perhaps.”
“I’m a field man,” said McCready.
“Why don’t you listen to what the Chief has to say,” suggested Edwards.
Twenty-four hours later, Sam McCready was made Head of Dee-Dee and Psy Ops. The CIA took over the handling, running, and paying of General Yevgeni Pankratin.
It was hot in Cologne that August. Those who could had sent the wives and children away to the lakes, the mountains, the forests, or even their villas in the Mediterranean and would join them later. Bruno Morenz had no holiday home. He soldiered on at his job. His salary was not large and was not likely to increase, for with three years to retirement when he turned fifty-five, a further promotion was extremely unlikely.
He sat at an open-air terrace café and sipped a tall glass of keg beer, his tie undone and jacket draped over the back of his chair. No one gave him a passing glance. He had dispensed with his winter tweeds in favor of a seersucker suit that was, if anything, even more shapeless. He sat hunched over his beer and occasionally ran a hand through his thick gray hair until it was awry. He was a man who had no vanity in the area of personal appearances, or he would have put a comb through his hair, shaved a bit closer, used a decent cologne (after all, he was in the city that had invented it), and bought a well-tailored suit. He would have thrown out the shirt with the slightly frayed cuffs and straightened his shoulders. Then he would have appeared quite an authoritative figure. He had no personal vanity.
But he did have his dreams. Or rather, he had had his dreams, once, long ago. And they had not been fulfilled. At the age of fifty-two, married, the father of two grown-up children, Bruno Morenz stared gloomily at the passersby on the street. Had he known it, he was suffering from what the German call Torschlusspanik. It is a word that exists in no other language but means the panic of closing doors.
Behind the facade of the big amiable man who did his job, took his modest salary at the end of the month, and went home each night to the bosom of his family, Bruno Morenz was a deeply unhappy man.
He was locked into a loveless marriage to his wife Irmtraut, a woman of quite bovine stupidity and potatolike contours who had, as the years ebbed away, even stopped complaining of his lowly salary and lack of promotion. Of his job she knew only that he worked for one of the government agencies concerned with the civil service and couldn’t have cared less which one. If he was unkempt with frayed cuffs and a baggy suit, it was in part because Irmtraut had ceased to care about that, either. She kept their small apartment in a featureless street in the suburb of Porz more or less neat and tidy, and his evening meal would be on the table ten minutes after he arrived home, semicongealed if he was late.
His daughter Ute had turned her back on both parents almost as soon as she left school, espoused various left-wing causes (he had had to undergo a positive vetting at the office because of Ute’s politics), and was living in a squat in Düsseldorf with various guitar-strumming hippies—Bruno could never work out with which. His son Lutz was still at home, slumped forever in front of the television set. A pimply youth who had flunked every exam he had ever taken, he now resented education and the world that set store by it, preferring to adopt a punk hairstyle and clothes as his personal protest against society but stopping well short of actually accepting any job that society might be prepared to offer him.
Bruno had tried; well, he reckoned he had tried. He had done his best, such as it was. Worked hard, paid his taxes, kept his family as best he could, and had little enough fun in life. In three years—just thirty-six-months—they would pension him off. There would be a small party in the office, Aust would make a speech, they would clink glasses of sparkling wine, and he would be gone. To what? He would have his pension and the savings from his “other work” that he had carefully hoarded in a variety of medium-to-small accounts around Germany under a variety of pseudonyms. There would be enough there, more than anyone thought or suspected; enough to buy a retirement home and do what he really wanted. ...
Behind his amiable facade, Bruno Morenz was also a very secretive man. He had never told Aust or anyone else in the Service about his “other work”—in any case, it was strictly forbidden and would have led to instant dismissal. He had never told Irmtraut about any of his work, or his secret savings. But that was not his real problem—as he saw it.
His real problem was that he wanted to be free. He wanted to start again, and as if on cue he could see how. For Bruno Morenz, well into middle age, had fallen in love. Head over heels, deeply in love. And the good part was that Renate, the stunning, lovely, youthful Renate, was as much in love with him as he was with her.
There, in that café on that summer afternoon, Bruno finally made up his mind. He would do it; he would tell her. He would tell her he intended to leave Irmtraut well provided for, take early retirement, quit the job, and take her away to a new life with him in the dream home they would have up in his native north by the coast.
Bruno Morenz’s real problem, as he did not see it, was that he was not heading for, but was well into, a truly massive midlife crisis. Because he did not see it and because he was a professional dissimulator, no one else saw it, either.
Renate Heimendorf was twenty-six, at five feet seven inches a tall and handsomely proportioned brunette. At the age of eighteen she had become the mistress and plaything of a wealthy businessman three times her age, a relationship that had lasted five years. When the man dropped dead of a heart attack, probably brought on by a surfeit of food, drink, cigars, and Renate, he had inconsiderately failed to make provision for her in his will, something his vengeful widow was not about to rectify.
The girl had managed to pillage their expensively furnished love-nest of its contents, which, together with the jewelry and trinkets he had given her over the years, fetched at sale a tidy sum.
But not enough to retire on; not enough to permit her to continue the life-style to which she had become accustomed and had no intention of quitting for a secretarial job and a tiny salary. She decided to go into business. Skilled at coaxing a form of arousal from overweight, out-of-condition, middle-aged men, there was really only one business into which she could go.
She bought a long lease on an apartment in quiet and respectable Hahnwald, a leafy and staid suburb of Cologne. The houses there were of good solid brick or stone construction, in some cases converted into apartments, like the one in which she lived and worked. It was a four-story stone building with one apartment on each floor. Hers was on the second. After moving in, she had carried out some structural refurbishment.
The flat had a sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, and an entry hall and passageway. The sitting room was to the left of the entry hall, the kitchen next to it. Beyond them, to the left of the passage that turned to the right from the hall, were one bedroom and the bathroom. The larger bedroom was at the end of the passage, so that the bathroom was between the two sleeping rooms. Just before the door of the larger bedroom, built into the wall on the left, was a two-yard-wide coat-closet that borrowed space off the bathroom.
She slept in the smaller bedroom, using the larger one at the end of the passage as her working room. Apart from building the coat-closet, her refurbishment had included the soundproofing of the master bedroom, with cork blocks lining the inside walls, papered and decorated to hide their presence, double-glazed windows, and thick padding on the inside of the door. Few sounds from inside the room could penetrate outside to disturb or alarm the neighbors, which was just as well. The room, with its unusual decor and accoutrements, was always kept locked.
The closet in the passage contained only normal winter wear and raincoats. Other closets inside the working room provided an extensive array of exotic lingerie, a range of outfits running from schoolgirl, maid, bride, and waitress to nanny, nurse, governess, schoolmistress, air hostess, policewoman, Nazi Bund Mädchen, campguard,. and Scout leader, along with the usual leather and PVC gear, thigh boots, capes, and masks.
A chest of drawers yielded a smaller array of vestments for clients who had brought nothing with them, such as Boy Scout, schoolboy, and Roman slave apparel. Tucked in a corner were the punishment stool and stocks, while a trunk contained the chains, cuffs, straps, and riding crops needed for the bondage and discipline scene.
She was a good whore; successful, anyway. Many of her clients returned regularly. Part actress—all whores have to be part actress—she could enter into her client’s desired fantasy with complete conviction. Yet part of her mind would always remain detached—observing, noting, despising. Nothing of her job touched her—in any case, her personal tastes were quite different.
She had been in the game for three years and in two more intended to retire, clean up just once in a rather major way, and live on her investments in luxury somewhere far away.
That afternoon, there was a ring at her doorbell. She rose late and was still in a negligée and housecoat. She frowned; a client would only come by appointment. A glance through the peephole in her front door revealed, as in a goldfish bowl, the rumpled gray hair of Bruno Morenz, her minder from the Foreign Ministry. She sighed, put a radiant smile of ecstatic welcome on her beautiful face, and opened the door.
“Bruno, daaaaarling ...”
* * *
Two days later Timothy Edwards took Sam McCready out to lunch at Brooks’s Club in St. James, London. Of the several gentlemen’s clubs of which Edwards was a member, Brooks’s was his favorite for lunch. There was always a good chance one could bump into and have a few courteous words with Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, deemed to be possibly the most influential man in England and certainly the chairman of the Five Wise Men who would one day select the new Chief of the SIS for the Prime Minister’s approval.
It was over coffee in the library, beneath the portraits of that group of Regency bucks, the Dilettantes, that Edwards broached specifics.
“As I said downstairs, Sam, everyone’s very pleased, very pleased indeed. But there is a new era coming, Sam. An era whose leitmotif may well have to be the phrase ‘by the book.’ A question of some of the old ways, the rule-bending, having to become, how shall I put it ... restrained?”
“Restrained is a very good word,” agreed Sam.
“Excellent. Now, a riffle through the records shows that you still retain, admittedly on an ad hoc basis, certain assets who really have passed their usefulness. Old friends, perhaps. No problem, unless they are in delicate positions ... unless their discovery by their own employers might cause the Firm real problems.”
“Such as?” asked McCready. That was the trouble with records—they were always there, on file. As soon as you paid someone to run an errand, a record of payment was created. Edwards dropped his vague manner.
“Poltergeist. Sam, I don’t know how it was overlooked so long. Poltergeist is a full-time staffer of the BND. There’d be all hell let loose if Pullach ever discovered he moonlighted for you. It’s absolutely against all the rules. We do not, repeat do not, ‘run’ employees of friendly agencies. It’s way out of court. Get rid of him, Sam. Stop the retainer. Forthwith.”
“He’s a mate,” said McCready. “We go back a long way. To the Berlin Wall going up. He did well then, ran dangerous jobs for us when we needed people like that. We were caught by surprise. We hadn’t got anyone, or not enough, who would and could go across like that.”
“It’s not negotiable, Sam.”
“I trust him. He trusts me. He wouldn’t let me down. You can’t buy that sort of thing. It takes years. A small retainer is a tiny price.”
Edwards rose, took his handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed the port from his lips.
“Get rid of him, Sam. I’m afraid I have to make that an order. Poltergeist goes.”
At the end of that week, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya sighed, stretched and leaned back in her chair. She was tired. It had been a long haul. She reached for her packet of Soviet-made Marlboros, noticed the full ashtray, and pressed a bell on her desk.
A young corporal entered from the outer office. She did not address him, just pointed to the ashtray with her fingertip. He quickly removed it, left the office, and returned it cleaned a few seconds later. She nodded. He left again and closed the door.
There had been no talk, no banter. Major Vanavskaya had that effect on people. In earlier years some of the young bucks had noticed the shining short-cropped blond hair above the crisp service shirt and slim green skirt and had tried their luck. No dice. At twenty-five she had married a colonel—a career move—and divorced him three years later. His career had stalled, hers taken off. At thirty-five she wore no more uniforms, just the severe tailored charcoal-gray suit over the white blouse with the floppy bow at the neck.
Some still thought she was beddable, until they caught a salvo from those freezing blue eyes. In the KGB, not an organization of liberals, Major Vanavskaya had a reputation as a fanatic. Fanatics intimidate.
The Major’s fanaticism was her work—and traitors. An utterly dedicated Communist, ideologically pure of any doubts, she had devoted herself to her self-arrogated pursuit of traitors. She hated them with a cold passion. She had wangled a transfer from the Second Chief Directorate, where the targets were the occasional seditious poet or complaining worker, to the independent Third Directorate, also called the Armed Forces Directorate. Here the traitors, if traitors there were, would be higher-ranking, more dangerous.
The move to the Third Directorate—arranged by her colonel-husband in the last days of their marriage, when he was still desperately trying to please her—had brought her to this anonymous office block just off the Sadovaya Spasskaya, Moscow’s ring road, and to this desk, and to the file that now lay open in front of her.
Two years of work had gone into that file, although she had had to squeeze that work in between other duties until people higher up began to believe her. Two years of checking and cross-checking, begging for cooperation from other departments, always fighting the obfuscation of those bastards in the army who always sided with one another; two years of correlating tiny fragments of information until a picture began to emerge.
Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya’s job and vocation was tracking down backsliders, subversives, or, occasionally, full-blown traitors inside the army, navy, or air force. Loss of valuable state equipment through gross negligence was bad enough; lack of vigor in the pursuit of the Afghan war was worse; but the file on her desk told her a different story. She was convinced that somewhere in the army there was a deliberate leak. And he was high, damned high.
There was a list of eight names on the top sheet of the file before her. Five were crossed out. Two had question marks. But her eye always came back to the eighth. She lifted a phone and was put through to the male secretary of General Shaliapin, head of the Third Directorate.
“Yes, Major. A personal interview? No one else? I see. ... The problem is, the Comrade General is in the Far East. ... Not until next Tuesday. Very well then, next Tuesday.”
Major Vanavskaya put down the phone and scowled. Four days. Well, she had already waited two years—she could wait four more days.
“I think I’ve clinched it,” Bruno told Renate with childlike delight the following Sunday morning. “I’ve just got enough for the freehold purchase and some more left over for decorating and equipping it. It’s a wonderful little bar.”
They were in bed in her own bedroom—it was a favor she sometimes allowed him because he hated the “working” bedroom as much as he hated her job.
“Tell me again,” she cooed. “I love to hear about it.”
He grinned. He had seen it just once but fallen for it completely. It was what he had always wanted and right where he wanted it—by the open sea, where the brisk winds from the north would keep the air crisp and fresh. Cold in winter, of course, but there was central heating, which would need fixing.
“Okay. It’s called the Lantern Bar, and the sign is an old ship’s lantern. It stands on the open quay right on the Bremerhaven dock front. From the upper windows you can see as far as Mellum Island—we could get a sailboat if things go well and sail there in summer.
“There’s an old-fashioned brass-topped bar—we’ll be behind that serving the drinks—and a nice snug apartment upstairs. Not as large as this, but comfy once we’ve fixed it up. I’ve agreed on the price and paid the deposit. Completion is at the end of September. Then I can take you away from all this.”
She could hardly keep herself from laughing out loud. “I can’t wait, my darling. It will be a wonderful life. ... Do you want to try again? Perhaps it will work this time.”
If Renate had been a different person, she would have let the older man down gently, explaining that she had no intention of being taken away from “all this,” least of all to a bleak and windswept quay in Bremerhaven. But it amused her to prolong his delusion so that his eventual misery would be all the greater.
An hour after Bruno and Renate’s conversation in Cologne, a black Jaguar sedan swept off the M3 motorway and sought the quieter lanes of Hampshire, not far from the village of Dummer. It was Timothy Edwards’s personal car, and his Service driver was at the wheel. In the back was Sam McCready, who had been summoned from his habitual Sunday pleasures at his apartment in Abingdon Villas, Kensington, by a telephoned appeal from the Assistant Chief.
“Without the option, I’m afraid, Sam. It’s urgent.”
He had been enjoying a long, deep, hot bath when the call came, with Vivaldi on the stereo and the Sunday newspapers strewn gloriously all over the sitting-room floor. He had had time to throw on a sports shirt, corduroy trousers, and jacket by the time John, who had picked up the Jaguar at the motor pool, was at the door.
The sedan swept into the graveled forecourt of a substantial Georgian country house and came to a halt. John came around the car to open the rear passenger door, but McCready beat him to it. He hated being fussed over.
“I was told to say they will be round the back, sir, on the terrace,” said John.
McCready surveyed the mansion. Timothy Edwards, ten years earlier, had married the daughter of a duke, who had been considerate enough to drop off his perch in early middle age and leave a substantial estate to his two offspring, the new duke and Lady Margaret. She had collected about three million pounds. McCready estimated that about half of that was now invested in a prime piece of Hampshire real estate. He wandered round the side of the house to the colonnaded patio at the back.
There were four easy cane chairs in a group. Three were occupied. Farther on, a white cast-iron table was set for lunch for three, Lady Margaret would doubtless be staying inside, not lunching. Neither would he. The two men in the rattan chairs rose.
“Ah, Sam,” said Edwards. “Glad you could make it.”
That’s a bit rich, thought McCready. No bloody option was what I was given.
Edwards looked at McCready and wondered, not for the first time, why his extremely talented colleague insisted on coming to a Hampshire country house party looking as if he had just been gardening, even if he was not staying long. Edwards himself was in brilliant brogues, razor-creased tan slacks, and a blazer over a silk shirt and neckerchief.
McCready stared back and wondered why Edwards always insisted on keeping his handkerchief up his left sleeve. It was an army habit, started in the cavalry regiments because on dining-in nights cavalry officers wore trousers so tight that a bunched handkerchief in the pocket might give the ladies the impression they had put on a touch too much perfume. But Edwards had never been in the cavalry, nor in any regiment. He had come to the Service directly from Oxford.
“I don’t think you know Chris Appleyard,” said Edwards, as the tall American held out his hand. He had the leathery look of a Texan cowhand. In fact, he was a Bostonian. The leathery look came from the Camels he chain-smoked. His face was not suntanned, just medium rare. That was why they were lunching outside, Sam mused. Edwards would not want the Canalettos covered in nicotine.
“Guess not,” said Appleyard. “Nice to meet you, Sam. Know your reputation.”
McCready knew who he was from the name and from photographs: Deputy Head, European Division, CIA. The woman in the third chair leaned forward and held out a hand.
“Hi, Sam, how’re you doing these days?”
Claudia Stuart, still at forty a great-looking woman. She held his gaze and his hand a mite longer than necessary.
“Fine, thanks, Claudia. Just fine.”
Her eyes said she did not believe him. No woman likes to think a man with whom she once offered to share her bed has ever completely recovered from the experience.
Years earlier, in Berlin, Claudia had had a serious crush on Sam McCready. It had puzzled and frustrated her that she had gotten nowhere. She had not then known about Sam’s wife, May.
Claudia had been with the CIA’s West Berlin Station; he had been visiting. He had never told her what he was doing there. Actually, he was recruiting the then Colonel Pankratin, she learned later. It was she who had taken him over.
Edwards had not missed the body language. He wondered what was behind it and guessed aright. It never ceased to amaze him that women seemed to like Sam. He was so ... rumpled. There was talk that several of the women at Century House would like to straighten his tie, sew on a button, or more. He found it inexplicable.
“Sorry to hear about May,” said Claudia.
“Thank you,” said McCready. May. Sweet, loving, and much-loved May, his wife. Three years since she had died. May, who had waited through all the long nights in the early days, always been there when he came home from across the Curtain, never asking, never complaining. Multiple sclerosis can act fast or slow. With May, it had been fast. In one year she was in a wheelchair and two years later gone. He had lived alone in the Kensington apartment since then. Thank God their son had been at college, just summoned home for the funeral. He had not seen the pain or his father’s despair.
A butler—there would have to be a butler, thought McCready—appeared with an extra flute of champagne on a salver. McCready raised an eyebrow. Edwards whispered in the butler’s ear, and he came back with a tankard of beer. McCready sipped. They watched him. Lager. Designer beer. Foreign label. He sighed. He would have preferred bitter ale, room temperature, redolent of Scottish malt and Kentish hops.
“We have a problem, Sam,” said Appleyard. “Claudia, you tell him.”
“Pankratin,” said Claudia. “Remember him?”
McCready studied his beer and nodded.
“In Moscow we’ve run him mainly through drops. Arm’s length. Very little contact. Fantastic product, and very pricey payments. But hardly any personal meets. Now he has sent a message. An urgent message.”
There was silence. McCready raised his eyes and stared at Claudia.
“He says he’s got hold of an unregistered copy of the Soviet Army War Book. The entire Order of Battle. For the whole of the Western front. We want it, Sam. We want it very badly.”
“So go get it,” said Sam.
“This time he won’t use a dead-letter box. Says it’s too bulky. Won’t fit. Too noticeable. He will only hand it over to someone he knows and trusts. He wants you.”
“In Moscow?”
“No, in East Germany. He begins a tour of inspection soon. Lasts a week. He wants to make the hand-over in the deep south of Thuringia, up near the Bavarian border. His swing will take him south and west through Cottbus, Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and on to Gera and Erfurt. Then back to Berlin on Wednesday night. He wants to make the pass Tuesday or Wednesday morning. He doesn’t know the area. He wants to use lay-bys—road pull-offs. Other than that, he has it all planned how he’ll get away and do it.”
Sam sipped his beer and glanced up at Edwards. “Have you explained, Timothy?”
“Touched on it,” said Edwards, then turned to his guests. “Look, I have to make it clear that Sam actually can’t go. I’ve mentioned it to the Chief, and he agrees. Sam’s been black-flagged by the SSD.”
Claudia raised an eyebrow.
“It means that if they catch me again over there, there’ll be no cozy exchange at the border.”
“They’ll interrogate him and shoot him,” added Edwards unnecessarily. Appleyard whistled.
“Boy, that’s against the rules. You must have really shaken them up.”
“One does one’s best,” said Sam sadly. “By the way, if I can’t go, there is one man who could. Timothy and I were discussing him last week at the club.”
Edwards nearly choked on his flute of Krug. “Poltergeist? Pankratin says he’ll only make the pass to someone he knows.”
“He knows Poltergeist. Remember I told you how he had helped me in the early days? Back in ’81, when I brought him in, Poltergeist had to baby-sit him till I could get there. Actually, he liked Poltergeist. He’d recognize him again and make the pass. He’s no fool.”
Edwards straightened the silk at his neck.
“Very well, Sam. One last time.”
“It’s dangerous, and the stakes are high. I want a reward for him. Ten thousand pounds.”
“Agreed,” said Appleyard without hesitation. He took a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Here are the details Pankratin has provided for the method of the pass. Two alternate venues are needed. A first and a back-up. Can you let us know in twenty-four hours the lay-bys you’ve picked? We’ll get it to him.”
“I can’t force Poltergeist to go,” McCready warned. “He’s a free-lance, not a staffer.”
“Try, Sam, please try,” said Claudia. Sam rose.
“By the way, this ‘Tuesday’—which one is it?”
“A week from the day after tomorrow,” said Appleyard. “ Eight days away.”
“Jesus Christ,” said McCready.