The two VOPOs were so stunned by what had happened that they reacted slowly. Nothing in their training or previous experience as People’s Police had accustomed them to this kind of civil disobedience. They had been publicly assaulted and humiliated in front of a crowd of people, and they were beside themselves with rage. A fair amount of shouting took place before they worked out what to do.
The uninjured officer left his broken-nosed colleague on the scene while he headed back to the police station. They had no personal communicators because they were accustomed to using the car radio to report to HQ. Appeals to the crowd for a telephone had met with shrugs. Working-class people did not have telephones in the GDR.
The Party member with the battered Trabant asked if he could leave and was promptly arrested at gunpoint by Broken Nose, who was prepared to believe that anyone could have been part of the conspiracy.
His colleague, marching up the road toward Jena, saw a Wartburg coming toward him, flagged it down (also at gunpoint), and ordered the driver to take him straight to the police station in central Jena. A mile farther on, they saw a police patrol car coming toward them. The VOPO in the civilian Wartburg frantically waved his colleagues to a stop and explained what had happened. Using the patrol car’s radio, they checked in, explained the nature of the several crimes that had been committed, and were told to report immediately to police HQ. Meanwhile, backup prowl cars were sent to the crash scene.
The call to Jena Central was logged at 12:35. It was also logged many miles away, high in the Harz Mountains on the other side of the border by a British listening post code-named Archimedes.
At one P.M. Dr. Lothar Herrmann, back at his desk in Pullach, lifted his phone and took the awaited call from the BND ballistics laboratory in a neighboring building. The lab was situated adjacent to the armory and firing range. It had the shrewd practice, when issuing a sidearm to an operative, not simply to note the serial number of the gun and get it signed for, but to fire two rounds into a sealed chamber, then to retrieve and keep the slugs.
In a perfect world, the technician would have preferred the actual bullets from the cadavers in Cologne, but he made do with the photographs. All rifle barrels are different from one another in minute respects, and when firing a bullet, each barrel leaves miniscule scratches, called lands, on the discharged slug. They are like fingerprints. The technician had compared the lands on the two sample slugs he still retained from a Walther PPK issued ten years ago with the photographs he had been given and about whose origin he had no idea at all.
“A perfect match? I see. Thank you,” said Dr. Herrmann. He called the fingerprint section—the BND keeps a full set of prints of its own staffers, apart from others who come to its attention—and received the same reply. He exhaled deeply and reached for the phone again. There was nothing for it; this had to go to the Director General himself.
What followed was one of the most difficult interviews of Dr. Herrmann’s career. The DG was obsessive about the efficiency of his agency and its image, both in the corridors of power in Bonn and within the Western intelligence community. The news Herrmann brought was like a body blow to him. He toyed with the idea of “losing” the sample slugs and Morenz’s fingerprints but quickly dismissed the idea. Morenz would be caught by the police sooner or later, the lab technicians would be subpoenaed—it would only make the scandal worse.
The BND in Germany is answerable only to the Chancellor’s Office, and the DG knew that sooner or later, and probably sooner, he would have to take news of the scandal there. He did not relish the prospect.
“Find him,” he ordered Herrmann. “Find him quickly, and get those tapes back.” As Herrmann turned to leave, the DG, who spoke English fluently, added another remark.
“Dr. Herrmann, the English have a saying that I recommend to you. ‘Thou shall not kill, yet need not strive/officiously to keep alive.’ ”
He had given the rhyming quotation in English. Dr. Herrmann understood it but was puzzled by the word officiously. Back in his office, he consulted a dictionary and decided the word unnötig—unnecessarily—was probably the best translation. In a lifetime’s career in the BND, it was the broadest hint he had ever been given. He rang the central registry in the Personnel Office.
“Send me the curriculum vitae of one of our staff officers, Bruno Morenz,” he ordered.
At two o’clock Sam McCready was still on the hillside where he and Johnson had been since seven. Though he suspected the first meet outside Weimar had aborted, one never knew; Morenz could have motored over at dawn. But he hadn’t. Again, McCready ran through his timings: rendezvous at twelve, departure twelve-ten, an hour and three-quarters driving—Morenz should be appearing at almost any time. He raised his binoculars again to the distant road across the border.
Johnson was reading a local newspaper he had bought at the Frankenwald service station when his phone trilled discreetly. He picked it up, listened, and offered the handset to McCready.
“GCHQ,” he said. “They want to speak to you.”
It was a friend of McCready, speaking from Cheltenham.
“Look, Sam,” said the voice, “I think I know where you are. There’s been a lot of radio traffic suddenly broken out not far from you. Perhaps you should call Archimedes. They have more than we do.”
The line went dead.
“Get me Archimedes,” McCready said to Johnson. “Duty officer, East German Section.” Johnson began to punch in the numbers.
In the mid-1950s the British government, acting through the British Army of the Rhine, had bought a dilapidated old castle high in the Harz Mountains, not far from the pretty and historic little town of Goslar. The Harz are a range of densely wooded uplands through which the East German border ran in twisting curves, sometimes across the flank of a hill, sometimes along a rocky ravine. It was a favorite area for potential East German escapers to try their luck.
Schloss Löwenstein had been refurbished by the British, ostensibly as a retreat for military bands to practice their art. This ruse was maintained by the continuous sounds of band practice issuing from the castle with the aid of tape recorders and amplifiers. But in repairing the roof, engineers from Cheltenham had installed some very sophisticated antennae, upgraded with better technology through the years. Although local German dignitaries were occasionally invited to a real concert of chamber and military music by a band flown in for the occasion, Löwenstein was really an out-station of Cheltenham, code-named Archimedes. Its job was to listen to the endless babble of East German and Russian radio chit-chat from across the border. Hence the value of the mountains; the height gave perfect reception.
“Yes, we’ve just passed it down the line to Cheltenham,” said the duty officer when McCready had established his credentials. “They said you might call direct.”
He talked for several minutes, and when McCready put the phone down, he was pale.
“The police in Jena District are going apeshit,” he told Johnson. “Apparently there’s been a crash outside Jena. Southern side. A West German car, make unknown, hit a Trabant. The West German slugged one of the VOPOs who attended the crash and drove off—in the VOPO car, of all things. Of course, it might not be our man.”
Johnson looked sympathetic, but he no more believed it than McCready.
“What do we do?” he asked.
McCready sat on the tailgate of the Range Rover, his head in his hands.
“We wait,” he said. “There’s nothing else we can do. Archimedes will call back if more comes through.”
At that hour the black BMW was being driven into the compound of the Jena police headquarters. No one was thinking of fingerprints—they knew who they wanted to arrest. The VOPO with the damaged nose had been patched up and was making a long statement, his colleague likewise. The Trabant driver was being detained and questioned, as were a dozen onlookers. On the desk of the precinct commandant lay the passport in the name of Hans Grauber, picked up from the street where the broken-nosed VOPO had dropped it. Other detectives were going through every item in the attaché case and overnight bag. The foreign sales director of Zeiss was brought in, protesting that he had never heard of Hans Grauber, but yes, he had done business in the past with BKI of Würzburg. When confronted with his forged signature on the introduction letters, he claimed it looked like his signature but could not be. His nightmare was just beginning.
Because the passport was West German, the People’s Police Commandant made a routine call to the local SSD office. Ten minutes later they were back. We want that car taken on a low-loader to our main garage in Erfurt, they said. Stop putting fingerprints all over it. Also, deliver all items retrieved from the car to us. And copies of all statements from witnesses. Now.
The VOPO colonel knew who was really in charge. When the Stasi gave an order, you obeyed. The black BMW arrived at the SSD main garage in Erfurt on its trailer at four-thirty and the secret police mechanics went to work. The VOPO colonel had to admit the SSD was right. Nothing made sense. The West German would probably have faced a hefty fine for drunk-driving—East Germany always needed the hard currency. Now he faced years in prison. Why had he run? Anyway, whatever the Stasi wanted with the car, his job was to find the man. He ordered every police car and foot patrol for miles around to keep an eye open for Grauber and the stolen police car. The description of both was passed by radio to all units—up to Apolda north of Jena and west to Weimar. No press appeals were made for assistance from the general public. Public help for the police in a police state is a rare luxury. But all the frantic radio traffic was heard by Archimedes.
At four P.M., Dr. Herrmann called Dieter Aust in Cologne. He did not tell him the result of the lab tests, or even what he had received the previous night from Johann Prinz. Aust had no need to know.
“I want you to interview Frau Morenz personally,” he said. “You have a woman operative with her? Good, keep her there. If the police come to interview Frau Morenz, do not impede, but let me know. Try and get from her any clue as to where he might go, any vacation home, any girlfriend’s apartment, any relative’s house—anything at all. Use your entire staff to follow up any lead she gives you. Report back anything to me.”
“He hasn’t got any relatives in Germany,” said Aust, who had already been through Morenz’s past life as revealed in the personnel files, “other than his wife, son, and daughter. I believe his daughter is a hippie, lives in a squat in Düsseldorf. I’ll have it visited, just in case.”
“Do that,” said Herrmann, and he put down the phone. Based on something he had seen in Morenz’s file, he then sent a blitz-category-coded signal to Wolfgang Fietzau, the BND agent on the staff of the German Embassy, Belgrave Square, London.
At five o’clock, the phone set on the tailgate of the Range Rover trilled. McCready picked it up. He thought it would be London or Archimedes. The voice was thin, tinny, as if the speaker were choking.
“Sam? Is that you Sam?”
McCready stiffened. “Yes,” he snapped, “it’s me.”
“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m so sorry. I messed it up.”
“Are you okay?” said McCready urgently. Morenz was wasting vital seconds.
“ ’Kay. Yeah, k as in kaput. I’m finished, Sam. I didn’t mean to kill her. I loved her, Sam. I loved her.”
McCready slammed down the phone, severing the connection. No one could make a phone call to the West from an East German phone booth. All contact was forbidden by the East Germans. But the SIS maintained a safe house in the Leipzig area, occupied by an East German agent-in-place who worked for London. A call to that number, dialed from inside East Germany, would run through pass-on equipment that would throw the call up to a satellite and back into the West.
But calls had to be four seconds long, no more, to prevent the East Germans triangulating onto the source of the call and locating the safe house. Morenz had babbled on for nine seconds. Although McCready could not know it, the SSD listening watch had already got as far as the Leipzig area when the connection was severed. Another six seconds, and they would have had the safe house and its occupant. Morenz had been told to use the number only in dire emergency and very briefly.
“He’s cracked up,” said Johnson. “Gone to pieces.”
“For Christ’s sake, he was crying like a child,” snapped McCready. “He’s had a complete nervous breakdown. Tell me something I don’t know. What the hell did he mean—‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’ ”
Johnson was pensive. “He comes from Cologne?”
“You know that.”
Actually, Johnson did not know that. He only knew he had picked up McCready from the Cologne airport Holiday Inn. He had never seen Poltergeist. No need to. He took the local newspaper and pointed out the second lead story on the front page. It was Guenther Braun’s story from his Cologne newspaper, picked up and reprinted by the Nordbayerischer Kurier, the north Bavarian paper printed in Bayreuth. The story was datelined Cologne and the headline read, CALL GIRL/PIMP SLAUGHTERED IN LOVE-NEST SHOOT-OUT. McCready read it, put it down, and stared across toward the north.
“Oh, Bruno, my poor friend. What the hell have you done?”
Five minutes later Archimedes phoned.
“We heard that,” said the duty officer. “So, I imagine, did everyone else. I’m sorry. He’s gone, hasn’t he?”
“What’s the latest?” asked Sam.
“They are using the name Hans Grauber,” said Archimedes. “There’s an all-points watch out for him all over southern Thuringia. Drink, assault, and theft of a police car. The car he drove was a black BMW, right? They’ve taken it to the SSD main garage at Erfurt. Seems all the rest of his gear has been impounded and handed over to the Stasi.”
“What time exactly was the crash?” asked Sam.
The duty officer conferred with someone.
“The first call to the Jena police was from a passing patrol car. The speaker was apparently the VOPO who had not been punched. He used the phrase ‘five minutes ago.’ Logged at twelve thirty-five.”
“Thank you,” said McCready.
At eight o’clock in the Erfurt garage, one of the mechanics found the cavity beneath the battery. Around him three other mechanics labored over what remained of the BMW. Its seats and upholstery were all over the floor, its wheels off and its tires inside-out. Only the frame remained, and it was there that the cavity was discovered. The mechanic called over a man in civilian clothes, a major of the SSD. They both examined the cavity, and the major nodded.
“Ein Spionwagen,” he said. A spy car. Work continued, though there was little more to do. The major went upstairs and called Lichtenberg, the East Berlin headquarters of the SSD. The major knew where to place the call; it went straight to Abteilung Ü, the Counterespionage Department of the service. There the matter was taken in hand by the Director of the Abteilung himself, Colonel Otto Voss. His first command was for absolutely everything connected with the case to be brought to East Berlin; his second was for everyone who had even glimpsed the BMW or its occupant since it entered the country, starting with the border guards at the Saale River, to be brought in and questioned minutely. That would later include the staff of the Black Bear Hotel, the patrolmen who had studied the BMW as they cruised alongside it on the Autobahn—especially the two who had caused the first rendezvous to abort—and the ones who had had their patrol car stolen.
Voss’s third order was for an absolute end to any mention of the matter on radios or on nonsecure telephone lines. When he had done that, he picked up his internal phone and was connected with Abteilung VI, Crossing Points and Airports.
At ten P.M. Archimedes phoned McCready for the last time.
“I’m afraid it’s over,” said the duty officer. “No, they haven’t got him yet, but they will. They must have discovered something in the Erfurt garage. Heavy radio traffic, coded, between Erfurt and East Berlin. A total shutdown of loose chit-chat on the airwaves. Oh, and all border points are on full alert—guards doubled, searchlights on the border working overtime. The lot. Sorry.”
Even from where he stood on the hillside, McCready could see that over the past hour the headlights of cars coming out of East Germany were very few and far between. They must be holding them for hours under the arc lights a mile away as they searched every car and truck until a mouse could not escape detection.
At ten-thirty, Timothy Edwards came on the line.
“Look, we’re all very sorry, but it’s over,” he said. “Come back to London at once, Sam.”
“They haven’t got him yet. I should stay here. I may be able to help. It’s not over yet.”
“Bar the shouting, it is,” insisted Edwards.
“There are things here we have to discuss—the loss of the package being not the least of them. Our American Cousins are not a happy group, to say the least. Please be on the first plane out of Munich or Frankfurt, whichever is the first of the day.”
It turned out to be Frankfurt. Johnson drove him through the night to the airport, then took the Range Rover and its equipment back to Bonn, a very tired young man. McCready grabbed a few hours’ sleep at the airport’s Sheraton and was on the first flight for Heathrow the next day, landing, with the one-hour time difference, just after eight o’clock. Denis Gaunt met him and drove him straight to Century House. He read the file of radio intercepts in the car.
Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya rose early that Thursday, and for lack of a gymnasium did her sit-ups in her own room at the KGB barracks. Her flight was not till midday, but she in tended to pass by the KGB headquarters for a last check on the itinerary of the man she hunted.
She knew he had returned from Erfurt to Potsdam in convoy the previous evening and spent the night in the officers’ quarters there. They were both due to take the same flight back from Potsdam to Moscow at noon. He would sit up front in the seats reserved, even on military flights, for the vlasti, the privileged ones. She was posing as a humble stenographer from the huge Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden, the real seat of power in East Germany. They would not meet—he would not even notice her; but as soon as they entered Soviet air space, he would be under surveillance.
At eight she walked into the KGB headquarters building half a mile from the embassy and made her way to the Communications Office. They would be able to call Potsdam and confirm that the flight schedule was unchanged. While waiting for her information, she took coffee and shared a table with a young lieutenant who was plainly very tired and yawned often.
“Up all night?” she asked.
“Yep. Night shift. The krauts have been in a flap the whole time.”
He did not use her title because she was in plain clothes, and the word he used for the East Germans was uncomplimentary. The Russians all did that.
“Why?” she asked.
“Oh, they intercepted a West German car and found a secret cavity in it. Reckon it was being used by one of their agents.”
“Here in Berlin?”
“No, down at Jena.”
“Where is Jena, exactly?”
“Look, love, my shift’s over. I’m off to get some sleep.”
She smiled sweetly, opened her purse, and flashed her red-covered ID card. The Lieutenant stopped yawning and went pale. A full major of the Third Directorate was very bad news indeed. He showed her—on the wall map at the end of the canteen. She let him go and stayed looking at the map. Zwickau, Gera, Jena, Weimar, Erfurt—all in a line, a line followed by the convoy of the man she hunted. Yesterday ... Erfurt. And Jena fourteen miles away. Close, too damned close.
Ten minutes later, a Soviet Major was briefing her on the way the East Germans worked.
“By now, it will be with their Abteilung II,” he said. “That’s Colonel Voss, Otto Voss. He’ll be in charge.”
She used his office phone, pulled some rank, and secured an interview at the Lichtenberg headquarters at the SSD with Colonel Voss. Ten o’clock.
At nine, London time, McCready took his seat at the table in the conference room one floor below the Chief’s office at Century House. Claudia Stuart was opposite, looking at him reproachfully. Chris Appleyard, who had flown to London to escort the Soviet War Book personally back to Langley, smoked and stared at the ceiling. His attitude seemed to be: This is a limey affair. You screwed it up, you sort it out. Timothy Edwards took the chair at the head, a sort of arbitrator. There was only one unspoken agenda: damage assessment. Damage limitation, if any was possible, would come later. No one needed to be briefed as to what had happened; they had all read the file of intercepts and the situation reports.
“All right,” said Edwards. “It appears your man Poltergeist has come apart at the seams and blown the mission away. Let’s see if there’s anything we can salvage from the mess.”
“Why the hell did you send him, Sam?” asked Claudia in exasperation.
“You know why. Because you wanted a job done,” said McCready. “Because you couldn’t do it yourselves. Because it was a rush job. Because I was stopped from going myself. Because Pankratin insisted on me personally. Because Poltergeist would be the only acceptable substitute. Because he agreed to go.”
“But now it appears,” drawled Appleyard, “that he had just killed his hooker girlfriend and was already at the end of his tether. You didn’t spot anything?”
“No. He appeared nervous but under control. Nerves are normal—up to a point. He didn’t tell me about his personal mess, and I’m not clairvoyant.”
“The damned thing is,” said Claudia, “he’s seen Pankratin. When the Stasi get him and go to work, he’ll talk. We’ve lost Pankratin as well, and God knows how much damage his interrogation in the Lubyanka will do.”
“Where is Pankratin now?” asked Edwards.
“According to his schedule, he’s boarding a military flight from Potsdam to Moscow right about now.”
“Can’t you get to him and warn him?”
“No, dammit. When he lands, he’s taking a week’s furlough. With army friends in the countryside. We can’t get our emergency warning code to him till he gets back to Moscow— if he ever does.”
“What about the War Book?” asked Edwards.
“I think Poltergeist’s got it on him,” said McCready.
He got their undivided attention. Appleyard stopped smoking.
“Why?”
“Timing,” said McCready. “The rendezvous was at twelve. Assume he quit the lay-by at about twelve-twenty. The crash was at twelve-thirty, ten minutes and five miles away, on the other side of Jena. I think if he had had the manual stashed in the compartment beneath the battery, even in his state he’d have taken the drunk-driving rap, spent the night in the cells, and paid his fine. Chances are the VOPOs would never have given the car a rigorous search.
“If the manual was lying in the BMW, I think some hint of the elation of the police would have come through on the intercepts. The SSD would have been called in within ten minutes, not two hours. I think he had it on him—under his jacket, maybe. That’s why he couldn’t go to the police station. For a blood test, they’d have taken his jacket off. So he ran for it.”
There was silence for several minutes.
“It all comes back to Poltergeist,” said Edwards. Even though everyone now knew the agent’s real name, they preferred his operational code-name. “He must be somewhere. Where would he go? Has he friends near there? A safe house? Anything?”
McCready shook his head. “There’s a safe house in East Berlin. He knows it from the old days. I’ve tried it—no contact. In the south, he knows nobody. Never even been there.”
“Could he hide out in the forests?” asked Claudia.
“It’s not that kind of area. Not like the Harz with its dense forests. Open rolling farmland, towns, villages, hamlets, farms.”
“No place for a middle-aged fugitive who’s lost his marbles,” commented Appleyard.
“Then we’ve lost him,” said Claudia. “Him, the War Book, and Pankratin. The whole deal.”
“I’m afraid it looks so,” said Edwards. “The People’s Police will use saturation tactics. Roadblocks on every street and lane. Without sanctuary, I fear they’ll have him by midday.”
The meeting ended on that gloomy note. When the Americans had gone, Edwards detained McCready at the door.
“Sam, I know it’s hopeless, but stay with it, will you? I’ve asked Cheltenham, East German Section, to step up the listening watch and let you know the instant they hear anything. When they get Poltergeist—and they must—I want to know at once. We’re going to have to placate our Cousins somehow, though God knows how.”
Back in his office, McCready threw himself into his chair in deep dejection. He took the phone off the cradle and stared at the wall.
If he had been a drinker, he would have reached for the bottle. Had he not given up cigarettes years earlier, he would have reached for a pack. He had failed, and he knew it. Whatever he might tell Claudia of the pressures they had put on him, it had, finally, been his decision to send in Morenz. And it had been a wrong one.
He had lost the War Book and probably blown away Pankratin. It would have surprised him to know that he was the only man in the building to hold these losses as secondary to another failure.
For him, the worst was that he had sent a friend to certain capture, interrogation, and death because he had failed to note the warning signs that now—too late—were so blazingly clear. Morenz had been in no state to go. He had gone rather than let down his friend Sam McCready.
The Deceiver knew now—again, too late—that for the rest of his days, in the wee hours when sleep refuses to come, he would see the haggard face of Bruno Morenz in that hotel room. ...
He tried to drive his guilt away and turned his mind to wondering what happens inside a man’s head when he undergoes a complete nervous breakdown. Personally, he had never seen that phenomenon. What was Bruno Morenz like now? How would he react to his situation? Logically? Crazily? He put through a call to the Service’s consultant psychiatrist, an eminent doctor known irreverently as “the Shrink.” He traced Dr. Alan Carr to his office in Wimpole Street. Dr. Carr said he was busy through the morning but would be happy to join McCready for lunch and an ad hoc consultation. McCready made a date for the Montcalm Hotel at one o’clock.
Punctually at ten, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya entered the main doors of the SSD headquarters building at 22 Normannenstrasse and was shown up to the fourth floor, the floor occupied by the Counterespionage Department. Colonel Voss was waiting for her. He conducted her into his private office and offered her the chair facing his desk. He took his seat and ordered coffee. When the steward left, he asked politely, “What can I do for you, Comrade Major?”
He was curious as to what had brought about this visit on what would for him undoubtedly be an extremely busy day. But the request had come from the commanding general at KGB headquarters, and Colonel Voss was well aware who really ruled the roost in the German Democratic Republic.
“You are handling a case in the Jena area,” said Vanavskaya. “A West German agent who ran off after a crash and left his car behind. Could you let me have the details so far?”
Voss filled in the details not included in the situation report that the Russian had already seen.
“Let us assume,” said Vanavskaya when he was finished, “that this agent, Grauber, had come to collect or deliver something. ... Was anything found in the car or in the secret cavity that could be what he either brought in or was trying to take out?”
“No, nothing. All his private papers were merely his cover story. The cavity was empty. If he brought something in, he had already delivered. If he sought to take something out, he had not collected.”
“Or it was still on his person.”
“Possibly, yes. We will know when we interrogate him. May I ask the reason for your interest in the case?”
Vanavskaya chose her words carefully.
“There is a possibility, just a chance, that a case upon which I am working overlaps your own.”
Behind his impassive face, Otto Voss was amused. So this handsome Russian ferret suspected the West German might have been in the East to make contact with a Russian source, not an East German traitor. Interesting.
“Have you any reason to know, Colonel, whether Grauber was to make a personal contact or just administer a dead-letter box?”
“We believe he was here to make a personal meet,” said Voss. “Although the crash was at twelve-thirty yesterday, he actually came through the border at eleven on Tuesday. If he simply had to drop off a package or pick one up from a dead-letter box, it would not have taken over twenty-four hours. He could have done it by nightfall on Tuesday. As it was, he spent Tuesday night at the Black Bear in Jena. We believe it was a personal pass that he came for.”
Vanavskaya’s heart sang. A personal meet, somewhere in the Jena-Weimar area, along a road probably, a road traveled by the man she hunted at almost exactly the same time. It was you he came to meet, you bastard! she thought.
“Have you identified Grauber?” she asked. “That is certainly not his real name.”
Concealing his triumph, Voss opened a file and passed her an artist’s impression. It had been drawn with help from two policemen at Jena, two patrolmen who had helped Grauber tighten a nut west of Weimar, and the staff of the Black Bear. It was very good. Without a word Voss then passed her a large photograph. The two were identical.
“His name is Morenz,” said Voss. “Bruno Morenz. A full-time career officer of the BND, based in Cologne.”
Vanavskaya was surprised. So it was a West German operation. She had always suspected that her man was working for the CIA or the British.
“You haven’t got him yet?”
“No, Major. I confess I am surprised at the delay. But we will. The police car was found abandoned, late last night. The reports state its gasoline tank had a bullet hole through it. It would have run for only ten to fifteen minutes after being stolen. It was found here, near Apolda, just north of Jena. So our man is on foot. We have a perfect description—tall, burly, gray-haired, in a rumpled raincoat. He has no papers, a Rhineland accent, physically not in good shape. He will stick out like a sore thumb.”
“I want to be present at the interrogation,” said Vanavskaya. She was not squeamish. She had seen them before.
“If that is an official request from the KGB, I will of course comply.”
“It will be,” said Vanavskaya.
“Then don’t be far away, Major. We will have him, probably by midday.”
Major Vanavskaya returned to the KGB building, cancelled her flight from Potsdam, and used a secure line to contact General Shaliapin. He agreed.
At twelve noon, an Antonov 32 transport of the Soviet Air Force lifted off from Potsdam for Moscow. General Pankratin and other senior Army and Air Force officers returning to Moscow were on board. Some junior officers were farther back, with the mail sacks. There was no dark-suited “secretary” from the embassy sharing the lift home.
“He will be,” said Dr. Carr over the melon and avocado hors d’oeuvre, “in what we call a dissociated, or twilight, or fugue state.”
He had listened carefully to McCready’s description of a nameless man who had apparently suffered a massive nervous breakdown. He had not learned, or asked, anything about the mission the man had been on, or where this breakdown had occurred, save that it was in hostile territory. The empty plates were removed and the sole prepared, off the bone.
“Dissociated from what?” asked McCready.
“From reality, of course,” said Dr. Carr. “It is one of the classic symptoms of this kind of syndrome. He may already have been showing signs of self-deception before the final crackup.”
And how, thought McCready, Morenz had been kidding himself that a stunning hooker had really fallen for him, that he could get away with a double murder.
“Fugue,” Dr. Carr pursued as he speared a forkful of tender sole meunière, “means flight. Flight from reality, especially harsh, unpleasant reality. I think your man will by now be in a really bad way.”
“What will he actually do?” asked McCready. “Where will he go?”
“He will go to a sanctuary, somewhere he feels safe, somewhere he can hide, where all the problems will go away and people will leave him alone. He may even return to a childlike state. I had a patient once who, overcome by problems, retired to his bed, curled into the fetal position, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and stayed there. Wouldn’t come out. Childhood, you see. Safety, security. No problems. Excellent sole, by the way. Yes, a little more Meursault. ... Thank you.”
Which is all very fine, thought McCready, but Bruno Morenz has no sanctuaries to run to. Born and raised in Hamburg, stationed in Berlin, Munich, and Cologne, he could have no place to hide near Jena or Weimar. He poured more wine and asked, “Supposing he has no sanctuary to head for?”
“Then I’m afraid he will just wander about in a confused state, unable to help himself. In my experience, if he had a destination he could act logically to get there. Without one”— the doctor shrugged—“they will get him. Probably got him by now. At latest by nightfall.”
But they didn’t. Through the afternoon Colonel Voss’s rage and frustration rose. It had been over twenty-four hours, coming up on thirty hours; police and secret police were at every street corner and roadblock in the region of Apolda-Jena-Weimar; and the big, shambling, ill, confused, disoriented West German had simply vaporized.
Voss paced his office at Normannenstrasse through the night; Vanavskaya sat on the edge of her cot in the female bachelors’ quarters of the KGB barracks; men sat hunched over radio sets at Schloss Löwenstein and Cheltenham; vehicles were waved to a halt by torchlight on every road and lane in southern Thuringia; McCready drank a steady stream of black coffees in his office at Century House. And ... nothing. Bruno Morenz had disappeared.