Sam McCready spent most of the next day, Monday, poring over large-scale maps and photographs. He went back to his old friends still on the East German desk and asked a few favors. They were protective of their territory but complied—he had the authority—and they knew better than to ask the Head of Deception and Disinformation what he was up to.
By midafternoon he had two locations that would suit. One was a sheltered lay-by just off East Germany’s Highway Seven, which runs in an east-west line parallel to Autobahn E40. The smaller road links the industrial city of Jena to the more pastoral town of Weimar and thence to the sprawl of Erfurt. The first lay-by he chose was just west of Jena. The second was on the same road, but halfway between Weimar and Erfurt, not three miles from the Soviet base at Nohra.
If the Russian general was anywhere between Jena and Erfurt on his tour of inspection the following Tuesday and Wednesday, he would only have a short run to either rendezvous. At five, McCready proposed his choices to Claudia Stuart at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. A coded message went to CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia; they approved and passed the message to Pankratin’s designated controller in Moscow. The information went into a dead-letter box behind a loose brick in Novodevichi Cemetery in the early morning of the next day, and General Pankratin picked it up on his way to the Ministry four hours later.
Before sundown on Monday, McCready sent a coded message to the head of the SIS station in Bonn, who read it, destroyed it, picked up the telephone, and made a local call.
Bruno Morenz returned home at seven that evening. He was halfway through his supper when his wife remembered something.
“Your dentist called. Dr. Fischer.”
Morenz raised his head and stared at the congealed mess in front of him.
“Uh-uh.”
“Says he should look at that filling again. Tomorrow. Could you come to his office at six.”
She returned to her absorption in the evening game show on television. Bruno hoped she had gotten the message exactly right. His dentist was not Dr. Fischer, and there were two bars where McCready might want to meet him. One was called “office,” the other “clinic.” And “six” meant midday, during the lunch hour.
On Tuesday morning, McCready had Denis Gaunt drive him to Heathrow for the breakfast-hour flight to Cologne.
“I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he said. “Mind the shop for me.”
At Cologne, with only a briefcase, he moved swiftly through passport and customs controls, took a taxi, and was dropped off outside the opera house just after eleven. For forty minutes he wandered around the square, down the Kreuzgasse and into the busy pedestrian mall of Schildergasse. He paused at many shop windows, doubled suddenly back, and entered a store by the front and left by the back. At five to twelve, satisfied he had not grown a tail, he turned into the narrow Krebsgasse and headed for the old-style, half-timbered bar with the gold Gothic lettering. The small tinted windows made the interior dim. He sat in a booth in the far corner, ordered a stein of Rhine beer, and waited. The bulky figure of Bruno Morenz slid into the chair opposite him five minutes later.
“It’s been a long time, old friend,” said McCready.
Morenz nodded and sipped his beer.
“What do you want, Sam?”
Sam told him. It took ten minutes. Morenz shook his head.
“Sam, I’m fifty-two. Soon I retire. I have plans. In the old days it was different, exciting. Now, frankly, those guys over there frighten me.”
“They frighten me too, Bruno. But I’d go in spite of it, if I could. I’m black-flagged. You’re clean. It’s a quick one—go over in the morning, back by nightfall. Even if the first pass doesn’t work, you’ll be back the next day, midafternoon. They’re offering ten thousand pounds, cash.”
Morenz stared at him.
“That’s a lot. There must be others who would take it. Why me?”
“He knows you. He likes you. He’ll see it isn’t me, but he won’t back off. I hate to ask you this way, but this is really for me. The last time, I swear it. For old times’ sake.”
Bruno finished his beer and rose.
“I must get back. ... All right, Sam. For you. For old times’ sake. But then, I swear, I’m out. For good.”
“You have my word, Bruno—never again. Trust me. I won’t let you down.”
They agreed on the next rendezvous, for the following Monday at dawn. Bruno returned to his office. McCready waited ten minutes, strolled up to the taxi stand on Tunistrasse, and hailed a cab for Bonn. He spent the rest of the day and Wednesday discussing his needs with Bonn Station. There was a lot to do, and not much time to do it.
Across two time zones, in Moscow, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya had her interview with General Shaliapin just after lunch. He sat behind his desk, a shaven-headed, brooding Siberian peasant who exuded power and cunning, and read her file carefully. When he had finished, he pushed it back toward her.
“Circumstantial,” he said. He liked to make his subordinates defend their assertions. In the old days—and General Shaliapin went right back to the old days—what he had in front of him would have sufficed. The Lubyanka always had room for one more. But times had changed and were still changing.
“So far, Comrade General,” Vanavskaya conceded. “But a lot of circumstances. Those SS-20 rockets in East Germany two years ago—the Yanks knew too quickly.”
“East Germany is crawling with spies and traitors. The Americans have satellites, RORSATS—”
“The movements of the Red Banner fleet out of the northern ports. Those bastards in NATO always seem to know.”
Shaliapin smiled at the young woman’s passion. He never disparaged vigilance in his staff—it was what they were there for. “There may be a leak,” he admitted, “or several. Negligence, loose talk, an array of small agents. But you think it’s one man ...”
“This man.” She leaned forward and tapped the photo on top of the file.
“Why? Why him?”
“Because he’s always there.”
“Nearby,” he corrected.
“Nearby. In the vicinity, in the same theater. Always available.”
General Shaliapin had survived a long time, and he intended to survive some more. Back in March, he had spotted that things were going to change. Mikhail Gorbachev had been rapidly and unanimously elected General Secretary on the death of yet another geriatric, Chernenko. He was young and vigorous. He could last a long time. He wanted reform. Already, he had started to purge the Party of its more obvious dead wood.
Shaliapin knew the rules. Even a General Secretary could antagonize only one of the three pillars of the Soviet state at a time. If he took on the Party old guard, he would have to keep the KGB and the Army sweet. He leaned over the desk and jabbed a stubby forefinger at the flushed major.
“I cannot order the arrest of a senior staff officer within the Ministry on the basis of this. Not yet. Something hard—I need something hard. Just one tiny thing.”
“Let me put him under surveillance,” urged Vanaskaya.
“Discreet surveillance.”
“All right, Comrade General. Discreet surveillance.”
“Then I agree, Major. I’ll make the staff available.”
* * *
“Just a few days, Heir Direktor. A short break in lieu of a full summer vacation. I would like to take my wife and son away for a few days. The weekend, plus Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.”
It was Wednesday morning, and Dieter Aust was in an expansive mood. Besides, as a good civil servant, he knew his staff were entitled to their summer vacations. He was always surprised that Morenz took so few holidays. Perhaps he could not afford many.
“My dear Morenz, our duties in the Service are onerous. The Service is always generous with its staff holidays. Five days is not a problem. Perhaps if you had given us a bit more forewarning—but yes, all right, I will ask Fräulein Keppel to rearrange the rosters.”
That evening, at home, Bruno Morenz told his wife he would have to leave on business for five days.
“Just the weekend, plus the next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday,” he said. “Herr Direktor Aust wants me to accompany him on a trip.”
“That’s nice,” she said, engrossed in the TV.
Morenz in fact planned to spend a long, self-indulgent, and romantic weekend with Renate, give Monday to Sam McCready and the day-long briefing, and make his run across the East German border on Tuesday. Even if he had to spend the night in East Germany for the second rendezvous, he would be back in the West by Wednesday evening and could drive through the night to be home in time for work on Thursday. Then he would hand in his notice, work it out through the month of September, make his break with his wife, and leave with Renate for Bremerhaven. He doubted if Irmtraut would care—she hardly noticed whether he was there or not.
On Thursday, Major Vanavskaya suffered her first serious setback, let out a very unladylike expletive, and slammed the phone down. She had her surveillance team in place, ready to begin shadowing her military target. But first she had needed to know roughly what his routines and usual daily movements were. To find this out, she had contacted one of the several KGB Third Directorate spies inside the military intelligence organization, the GRU.
Although the KGB and its military counterpart, the GRU, were often at daggers-drawn, there is little doubt which is the dog and which the tail. The KGB was far more powerful, with a supremacy that has been strengthened since the early sixties, when a GRU colonel called Oleg Penkovsky had blown away so many Soviet secrets as to rank as the most damaging turncoat the USSR had ever had. Since then, the Politburo had permitted the KGB to infiltrate scores of its own people into the GRU. Although they wore military uniform and mingled day and night with the military, they were KGB through and through. The real GRU officers knew who they were and tried to keep them as ostracized as possible, which was not always an easy task.
“I’m sorry, Major,” the young KGB man inside the GRU had told her on the phone. “The movement order is here in front of me. Your man leaves tomorrow for a tour of our principal garrisons in Germany. Yes, I have his schedule here.”
He had dictated it to her before she put the phone down. She remained for a while deep in thought, then put in her own application for permission to visit the Third Directorate staff at the KGB headquarters in East Berlin. It took two days to ratify the paperwork. She would leave for the Potsdam military airfield on Saturday morning.
Bruno made a point of getting through his chores as fast as he could on Friday and escaping from the office early. As he knew he would be handing in his notice as soon as he returned in the middle of the following week, he even cleared out some of his drawers. His last chore was his small office safe. The paperwork he handled was of such low-level classification that he hardly used the safe. The drawers of his desk could be locked, his office door was always locked at night, and the building was securely guarded. Nevertheless, he sorted out the few papers in his safe. At the bottom, beneath them all, was his service-issue automatic.
The Walther PPK was filthy. He had never used it since the statutory test-firing on the range at Pullach years before. But it was so dusty, he thought he ought to clean it before handing it back next week. His cleaning kit was at home in Porz. At ten to five he put it in the side pocket of his seersucker suit and left.
In the elevator on the way down to the street level, it banged so badly against his hip that he stuck it into his waistband and buttoned his jacket over it. He grinned as he thought this would be the first time he had ever shown it to Renate. Perhaps then she would believe how important his job was. Not that it mattered. She loved him anyway.
He shopped in the center of town before driving out to Hahnwald—some good veal, fresh vegetables, a bottle of real French claret. He would make them a cozy supper at home; he enjoyed being in the kitchen. His final purchase was a large bunch of flowers.
He parked his Opel Kadett round the corner from her street—he always did—and walked the rest of the way. He had not used the car phone to tell her he was coming. He would surprise her. With the flowers. She would like that. There was a lady coming out of the building as he approached the door, so he did not even have to ring the front bell and alert Renate. Better and better—a real surprise. He had his own key to her apartment door.
He let himself in quietly to make the surprise even nicer. The hall was quiet. He opened his mouth to call “Renate, darling, it’s me,” when he heard a peal of her laughter. He smiled. She would be watching the cartoons on television. He peeked into the sitting room. It was empty. The laughter came again, from down the passage toward the bathroom. He realized with a start at his own foolishness that she might have a client. He had not called to check. Then he realized that with a client she would be in the “working” bedroom with the door closed, and that the door was soundproofed. He was about to call again when someone else laughed. It was a man. Morenz stepped from the hall into the passageway.
The master bedroom door was open a few inches, the gap partly obscured by the fact that the big closet doors were also open, with overcoats strewn on the floor.
“What an arsehole,” said the man’s voice. “He really thinks you’re going to marry him?”
“Head over heels, besotted. Stupid bastard! Just look at him.” Her voice.
Morenz put down the flowers and the groceries and moved down the passage to the bedroom door. He was puzzled. He eased the closet doors closed to get past them and nudged the bedroom door open with the tip of his shoe.
Renate was sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed with the black sheets, smoking a joint. The air was redolent of cannabis. Lounging on the bed was a man Morenz had never seen before—lean, young, tough, in jeans and a leather motorcycle jacket. They both saw the movement of the door and jumped off the bed, the man in a single bound that brought him to his feet behind Renate. He had a mean face and dirty blond hair. In her private life Renate liked what is known as “rough trade,” and this one, her regular boyfriend, was as rough as they came.
Morenz’s eyes were still fixed on the video flickering on the TV set beyond the end of the bed. No middle-aged man looks very dignified when making love, even less so when it is not happening for him. Morenz watched his own image on the TV with a growing sense of shame and despair. Renate was with him in the film, occasionally looking over his back to make gestures of disdain at the camera. That was apparently what had caused all the laughter.
In front of him now, Renate was almost naked, but she recovered from her surprise quickly enough. Her face flushed with anger. When she spoke, it was not in the tones he knew, but the screech of a fishwife.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, well you’ve fucking surprised me. Now bug off. Go home to your stupid potato sack in Porz.”
Morenz took a deep breath.
“What really hurts,” he said, “is that you could have told me. You didn’t need to let me make such a fool of myself. Because I really did love you.”
Her face was quite contorted. She spat the words.
“Let you? You don’t need any help. You are a fool. A fat old fool. In bed and out. Now bug off.”
That was when he hit her. Not a punch—an open-handed slap to the side of the face. Something snapped in him, and he hit her. It caught her off balance. He was a big man, and the blow knocked her to the floor.
What the blond man was thinking of, Morenz later could never decide. Morenz was about to leave when the pimp reached inside his jacket. It seemed he was armed. Morenz pulled his PPK from his waistband. He thought the safety catch was on. It should have been. He wanted to scare the pimp into raising his arms and letting him go. But the pimp went on pulling his pistol out. Morenz squeezed the trigger. Dusty it may have been, but the Walther went off.
On the shooting range Morenz could not have hit a barn door. And he hadn’t been on the range for years. Real marksmen practice almost daily. It was beginner’s luck. The single bullet hit the pimp right in the heart at fifteen feet. The man jerked, an expression of disbelief on his face. But nervous reaction or not, his right arm kept coming up, clutching his Beretta. Morenz fired again. Renate chose that moment to rise from the floor. The second slug caught her in the back of the head. The padded door had swung shut during the altercation; not a sound had left the room.
Morenz stood for several minutes looking at the two bodies. He felt numb, slightly dizzy. Eventually, he left the room and pulled the door closed behind him. He did not lock it. He was about to step over the winter clothes in the hall when it occurred to him, even in his bemused state, to wonder why they were there at this time of year. He looked into the coat closet and noticed that the rear panel of the closet appeared to be loose. He pulled the loose panel toward him. ...
Bruno Morenz spent another fifteen minutes in the apartment, then left. He took with him the videotape of himself, the groceries, the flowers, and a black canvas grip that did not belong to him. He could not later explain why he had done that. Two miles from Hahnwald he dropped the groceries, wine, and flowers into separate garbage cans by the roadside. Then he drove for almost an hour, threw the videotape of himself and his gun into the Rhine from the Severin Bridge, turned out of Cologne, deposited the canvas grip, and finally made his way home to Porz. When he entered the sitting room at half-past nine, his wife made no comment.
“My trip with the Herr Direktor has been postponed,” he said. “I’ll be leaving very early on Monday morning instead.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” she said.
He sometimes thought he could come in from the office of an evening and say, “Today I popped down to Bonn and shot Chancellor Kohl,” and she would still say, “Oh, that’s nice.”
She eventually prepared him a meal. It was uneatable, so he did not eat it.
“I’m going out for a drink,” he said. She took another chocolate, offered one to Lutz, and they both went on watching television.
He got drunk that night. Drinking alone. He noticed that his hands were shaking and that he kept breaking out in sweat. He thought he had a summer cold coming on. Or the flu. He was not a psychiatrist, and there was none available to him. So no one told him he was heading for a complete nervous breakdown.
That Saturday, Major Vanavskaya arrived at Berlin-Schönefeld and was driven in an unmarked car to KGB headquarters, East Berlin. She checked at once on the whereabouts of the man she was stalking. He was in Cottbus, heading for Dresden, surrounded by army men, moving in a military convoy and out of her reach. On Sunday he would reach Karl-Marx-Stadt, Monday Zwickau, and Tuesday Jena. Her surveillance mandate did not cover East Germany. It could be extended, but that would require paperwork. Always the damned paperwork, she thought angrily.
The following day, Sam McCready arrived back in Germany and spent the morning conferring with the head of Bonn Station. In the evening he took delivery of the BMW car and the paperwork and drove to Cologne. He lodged at the Holiday Inn out at the airport, where he took and prepaid a room for two nights.
Before dawn on Monday, Bruno Morenz rose, long before his family, and left quietly. He arrived at the Holiday Inn about seven on that bright, early September morning and joined McCready in his room. The Englishman ordered breakfast for both from room service, and when the waiter had gone, he spread out a huge motoring map of Germany, West and East.
“We’ll do the route first,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you leave here at four A.M. It’s a long drive, so take it easy, in stages. Take the E35 here past Bonn, Limburg, and Frankfurt. It links to the E41 and E45, past Würzburg and Nuremburg. North of Nuremburg, pull left on the E51 past Bayreuth and up to the border. That’s your crossing point, near Hof. The Saale Bridge border station. It’s no more than a six-hour drive. You want to be there about eleven. I’ll be there ahead of you, watching from cover. Are you feeling all right?”
Morenz was sweating, even with his jacket off.
“It’s hot in here,” he said. McCready turned up the air conditioning.
“After the border, drive straight north to the Hermsdorfer Kreuz. Turn left onto the E40 heading back toward the West. At Mellingen, leave the Autobahn and head into Weimar. Inside the town, find Highway Seven and head west again. Four miles west of the town, on the right of the road, is a lay-by.”
McCready produced a large blown-up photograph of that section of the road, taken from a high-flying aircraft, but at an angle, for the aircraft had been inside Bavarian airspace. Morenz could see the small lay-by—some cottages, even the trees that shaded the patch of gravel designated as his first rendezvous. Carefully and meticulously, McCready ran him through the procedure he should follow and, if the first pass aborted, how and where he should spend the night and where and when to attend the second, backup rendezvous with Pankratin. At midmorning they broke for coffee.
At nine that morning, Frau Popovic arrived for work at the apartment in Hahnwald. She was the cleaning lady, a Yugoslav immigrant worker who came every day from nine until eleven. She had her own keys to the front door and the apartment door. She knew Fräulein Heimendorf liked to sleep late, so she always let herself in and started with the rooms other than the bedroom so that her employer could rise at half-past ten. Then she would tidy the lady’s bedroom. The locked room at the end of the passage, she never entered. She had been told—and had accepted—that it was a small room used for storing furniture. She had no idea what her employer did for a living.
That morning, she started with the kitchen, then did the hall and the passage. She was vacuum-cleaning the passage right up to the door at the end when she noticed what she thought was a brown silk slip lying on the floor at the base of the locked door. She tried to pick it up, but it was not a silk slip. It was a large brown stain, quite dry and hard, that seemed to have come from under the door. She tut-tutted at the extra work she would have to scrub it off, then went to get a bucket of water and a brush. She was working on her hands and knees when she kicked the door. To her surprise it moved. She tried the handle and found it was not locked.
The stain was still resisting her attempts to scrub it off, and she thought it might happen again, so she opened the door to see what might be leaking. Seconds later, she was running screaming down the stairs to hammer at the door of the ground-floor apartment and arouse the bewildered retired bookseller who lived there. He did not go upstairs, but he did call the 110 emergency number and ask for the police.
The call was logged in the Police Präsidium on the Waidmarkt at 9:51. The first to arrive, according to the unvarying routine of all German police forces, was a Streifenwagen, or patrol car, with two uniformed policemen. Their job was to establish whether an offense had indeed been committed, into which category it fell, and then to alert the appropriate departments. One of the men stayed downstairs with Frau Popovic, who was being comforted by the bookseller’s elderly wife, and the other went up. He touched nothing, just went down the passage and looked through the half-open door, gave a whistle of amazement, and came back down to use the bookseller’s phone. He did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that this one was for Homicide.
According to procedure, he first called the emergency doctor—in Germany, always supplied by the fire brigade. Then he called the Police Präsidium and asked for the Leitstelle, the Violent Crime switchboard. He told the operator where he was and what he had found and asked for two more uniformed men. The message went up to the Mordkommission or Murder Squad, always known as “First K” on the tenth and eleventh floors of the ugly, functional, green-concrete building covering all of one side of the Waidmarkt square. The Director of First K assigned a commissar and two assistants. Records showed later that they arrived at the Hahnwald apartment at 10:40 A.M., just as the doctor was leaving.
He had taken a closer look than the uniformed officer, felt for signs of life, touched nothing else, and left to make his formal report. The commissar, whose name was Peter Schiller, met him on the steps. Schiller knew him.
“What have we got?” he asked. It was not the doctor’s job to do a post-mortem, simply to establish the fact of death.
“Two bodies. One male, one female. One clothed, one naked.”
“Cause of death?” asked Schiller.
“Gunshot wounds, I’d say. The paramedic will tell you.”
“Time?”
“I’m not the pathologist. Oh, one to three days, I would say. Rigor mortis is well established. That’s unofficial, by the way. I’ve done my job. I’m off.”
Schiller went upstairs with one assistant. The other stayed below to try and get statements from Frau Popovic and the bookseller. Neighbors began to gather up and down the street. There were now three official cars outside the apartment house.
Like his uniformed colleague, Schiller gave a low whistle when he saw the contents of the master bedroom. Renate Heimendorf and her pimp were still where they had fallen, the head of the near-naked woman lying close to the door, under whose sill the blood had leaked outside. The pimp was across the room, slumped with his back to the TV set, the expression of surprise still on his face. The TV set was off. The bed with the black silk sheets still bore the indentations of two bodies that had once lain there.
Treading carefully, Schiller flipped open a number of the closets and drawers.
“A hooker,” he said. “Call girl, whatever. Wonder if they knew downstairs. We’ll ask. In fact, we’ll need all the tenants. Start to get a list of names.”
The assistant commissar, Wiechert, was about to go when he said, “I’ve seen the man somewhere before. ... Hoppe. Bernhard Hoppe. Bank robbery, I think. A hard man.”
“Oh, good,” said Schiller ironically, “that’s all we need. A gangland killing.”
There were two telephone extensions in the flat, but Schiller, even with gloved hands, used neither. They might have prints. He went down and borrowed the bookseller’s phone. Before that, he posted two uniformed men at the door of the house, another in the hall, and the fourth outside the apartment door.
He called his superior, Rainer Hartwig, Director of the Murder Squad, and told him there might be gangland ramifications. Hartwig decided he had better tell his own superior, the president of the Crime Office, the Kriminalamt, known as the KA. If Wiechert was right and the body on the floor was a gangster, then experts from other divisions besides Murder Squad—robbery and racketeering, for example—would have to be consulted.
In the interim Hartwig sent down the Erkennungsdienst, the forensic team, one photographer and four fingerprint men. The apartment would be theirs and theirs alone for hours to come; until, in fact, every last print and scraping, every fiber and particle that could be of interest, had been removed for analysis. Hartwig also detached eight more men from their duties. There was a lot of door-knocking to be done, the search for witnesses who had seen a man or men come or go.
The log would later show that the forensic men arrived at 11:31 A.M. and stayed for almost eight hours.
At that hour Sam McCready put down his second cup of coffee and folded up the map. He had taken Morenz carefully through both rendezvous with Pankratin in the East, shown him the latest photograph of the Soviet general, and explained that the man would be in the baggy fatigues of a Russian army corporal with a forage cap shading his face and driving a GAZ jeep. That was the way the Russian had set it up.
“Unfortunately, he thinks he will be meeting me. We must just hope he recognizes you from Berlin and makes the pass anyway. Now, to the car. It’s down there in the parking lot. We’ll go for a drive after lunch, let you get used to it.
“It’s a BMW sedan, black, with Würzburg registration plates. That’s because you’re a Rhinelander by birth, but now live and work in Würzburg. I’ll give you your full cover story and backup papers later. The car with those number plates actually exists. It is a black BMW sedan.
“But this one is the Firm’s car. It has made several crossings of the Saale Bridge border point, so hopefully they’ll be accustomed to it. The drivers have always been different because it’s a Company car. It has always driven to Jena, apparently to visit the Zeiss works there. And it has always been clean. But this time there is a difference. Under the battery shelf there is a flat compartment, just about invisible unless you really look for it. It is big enough to take the book you will receive from Smolensk.”
(On a need-to-know basis, Morenz had never known Pankratin’s real name. He did not even know the man had risen to Major-General or was now based in Moscow. The last time he had seen him, Pankratin was a colonel in East Berlin, code-name Smolensk.)
“Let’s have lunch,” said McCready.
During the meal, from room service, Morenz drank wine greedily and his hands shook.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked McCready.
“Sure. This damned summer cold, you know? And a bit nervous. That’s natural.”
McCready nodded. Nerves were normal—with actors before going onstage. With soldiers before combat. With agents before an illegal run into the Sovbloc. Still, he did not like the shape Morenz was in. He had seldom seen a case of nerves like this. But with Pankratin unreachable and twenty-four hours to the first contact, he had no choice.
“Let’s go down to the car,” he said.
Not much happens in Germany today that the press does not hear about, and it was the same in 1985, when Germany was West Germany. The veteran and ace crime reporter of Cologne was and remains Guenther Braun of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. He was lunching with a police contact who mentioned that there was a flap going on in Hahnwald. Braun arrived outside the house with his photographer, Walter Schiestel, just before three. He tried to get to Commissar Schiller, but he was upstairs, sent word he was busy, and referred Braun to the Präsidium press office. Fat chance. Braun would get the sanitized police communiqué later. He began to ask around. Then he made some phone calls. By early evening, well in time for the first editions, he had got his story. It was a good one, too. Of course, radio and TV would be ahead of him with the broad outlines, but he knew he had an inside track.
Upstairs, the forensic team had finished with the bodies. The photographer, Schiestel, had snapped the corpses from every conceivable angle, plus the decor of the room, the bed, the huge mirror behind the headboard, and the equipment in the closets and chests. Lines were drawn around the bodies, then the cadavers were bagged and removed to the city morgue, where the forensic pathologist went to work. The detectives needed the time of death and those bullets—urgently.
The entire apartment had yielded nineteen sets or partial sets of fingerprints. Three were eliminated; they belonged to the two deceased and to Frau Popovic, now down at the Präsidium with her prints carefully on file. That left sixteen.
“Probably clients,” muttered Schiller.
“But one set the killer’s?” suggested Wiechert.
“I doubt it. It looks pretty pro to me. He probably wore gloves.”
The major problem, mused Schiller, was not lack of motive but too many. Was the call girl the intended victim? Was the murderer an outraged client, a former husband, a vengeful wife, a business rival, an enraged former pimp? Or was she incidental, and her pimp the real target? He had been confirmed as Bernhard Hoppe, ex-con, bank robber, gangster, very nasty, and a real low-life. A settling of accounts, a drug deal that went sour, rival protection-racketeers? Schiller suspected it was going to be a tough one.
The tenants’ statements and those of the neighbors indicated no one knew of Renate Heimendorf’s secret profession. There had been gentlemen callers, but always respectable. No late-night parties, blaring music.
As the forensic team finished with each area of the flat, Schiller could move around more and disturb things. He went to the bathroom. There was something odd about the bathroom, but he could not figure out what it was. Just after seven, the forensic team finished and called to him that they were off. He spent an hour puttering about the gutted flat while Wiechert complained that he wanted his dinner. At ten past eight, Schiller shrugged and called it a day. He would resume the case tomorrow up at headquarters. He sealed the flat, left one uniformed man in the hallway in case someone returned to the scene of the crime—it had happened—and went home. There was still something that bothered him about that flat. He was a very intelligent and perceptive young detective.
McCready spent the afternoon finalizing the briefing of Bruno Morenz.
“You are Hans Grauber, aged fifty-one, married, three children. Like all proud family men you carry pictures of your family. Here they are, on holiday: Heidi, your wife, along with Hans Junior, Lotte, and Ursula, known as Uschi. You work for BKI Optical Glassware in Würzburg—they exist, and the car is theirs. Fortunately, you once did work in optical glassware, so you can use the jargon if you have to.
“You have an appointment with the director of foreign sales at the Zeiss works in Jena. Here is his letter. The paper is real; so is the man. The signature looks like his, but it is ours. The appointment is for three P.M. tomorrow. If all goes well, you can agree to place an order for Zeiss precision lenses and return to the West the same evening. If you need further discussions, you may have to overnight. That’s just if the border guards ask you for such a mass of detail.
“It’s extremely unlikely the border guards would check with Zeiss. The SSD would, but there are enough Western businessmen dealing with Zeiss for one more not to be a cause for suspicion. So here are your passport, letters from your wife, a used ticket from the Würzburg Opera House, credit cards, driving license, a bunch of keys including the ignition key of the BMW. The baggy raincoat—the lot.
“You’ll only need the attaché case and the overnight bag. Study the attaché case and its contents. The security lock opens to the numbers of your fictional birthday, fifth April ’34, or 5434. The papers all concern your desire to purchase Zeiss products for your firm. Your signature is Hans Grauber in your own handwriting. The clothes and washkit are all genuine Würzburg purchases, laundered and used, with Würzburg laundry tags. Now, old friend, let’s have some dinner.”
Dieter Aust, Director of Cologne’s BND out-station, missed the evening TV news. He was out to dinner. He would regret it later.
* * *
At midnight, McCready was collected in a Range Rover by Kit Johnson, a communications man from the SIS Bonn Station. They drove off together to be at the Saale River in northern Bavaria before Morenz.
Bruno Morenz stayed in McCready’s room, ordered whiskey from room service, and drank too much. He slept badly for two hours and rose when the bedside alarm went off at three. At four that Tuesday morning, he left the Holiday Inn, started the BMW, and headed through the darkness toward the Autobahn south.
At the same hour Peter Schiller awakened in Cologne beside his sleeping wife and realized what it was about the Hahnwald apartment that had puzzled him. He telephoned and awoke an outraged Wiechert and told him to meet him at the Hahnwald house at seven. German police officers have to be accompanied on an investigation.
Bruno Morenz was slightly ahead of time. Just south of the border, he killed twenty-five minutes at the Frankenwald service area restaurant. He did not drink liquor; he drank coffee. But he filled his hip flask.
At five to eleven that Tuesday morning Sam McCready, with Kit Johnson beside him, was concealed amid pine trees on a hill south of the Saale River. The Range Rover was parked out of sight in the forest. From the treeline they could see the West German border post below and half a mile in front of them. Beyond it was a gap in the hills, and through the gap, the roofs of the East German border post, half a mile farther on.
Because the East Germans had built their controls well inside their own territory, a driver would be inside East Germany as soon as he left the West German post. Then came a two-lane highway between high chain-link fencing. Behind the fencing were the watchtowers. From the trees, using powerful binoculars, McCready could see the border guards behind the windows with their own field glasses, watching the West. He could also see the machine guns. The reason for the half-mile corridor inside East Germany was so that anyone bursting through the eastern border post could be cut to pieces between the chain-link fencing before reaching the West.
At two minutes to eleven, McCready picked out the black BMW moving sedately through the cursory West German controls. Then it purred forward into the corridor, heading for the land controlled by the East’s most professional and dreaded secret police, the Stasi.