Major Vanavskaya could not sleep. She tried, but she just lay awake in the darkness wondering how on earth the East Germans, reputedly so efficient in their control of their own population,, could lose a man like Morenz within an area twenty miles by twenty miles. Had he hitched a lift? Stolen a bicycle? Was he still crouched in a ditch? What on earth were the VOPOs doing down there?
By three in the morning, she had convinced herself there was something missing, some little part of the puzzle of how a half-crazed man on the run in a small area teeming with People’s Police could escape detection.
At four, she rose and returned to the KGB offices, perturbing the night staff with her demand for a secure line to SSD headquarters. When she had it, she spoke to Colonel Voss. He had not left his office at all.
“That picture of Morenz,” she said. “Was it recent?”
“About a year ago,” said Voss, puzzled.
“Where did you get it?”
“The HVA,” said Voss. Vanavskaya thanked him and put down the phone.
Of course, the HVA, the Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung, East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, which for obvious linguistic reasons, specialized in running networks inside West Germany. Its Head was the legendary Colonel-General Marcus Wolf. Even the KGB, notoriously contemptuous of satellite intelligence services, held him in considerable respect. Marcus “Mischa” Wolf had perpetrated some brilliant coups against the West Germans, notably the “running” of Chancellor Brandt’s private secretary.
Vanavskaya called and awoke the local head of the Third Directorate and made her request, citing General Shaliapin’s name. That did the trick. The Colonel said he would see what he could do. He called back in half an hour. It seemed that General Wolf was an early bird, he said; she would have a meeting with him in his office at six.
At five that morning the cryptography department at GCHQ Cheltenham finished decoding the last of the mass of low-level paperwork that had built up in the previous twenty-four hours. In its in-clear form it would be transmitted down a series of very secure land lines to a variety of recipients—some for the SIS at Century House, some for MI-5 at Curzon Street, some for the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. Much would be “copied” as of possible interest to two or even all three. Urgent intelligence was handled much more quickly, but the small hours of the morning was a good time to send the low-level stuff to London; the lines were not so busy.
Among the material was a signal on Wednesday evening from Pullach to the BND staffer at the West German Embassy in London. Germany, of course, was and remains a valued and respected ally of Britain. There was nothing personal in Cheltenham intercepting and decoding a confidential message from an ally to its own embassy. The code had been quietly broken sometime before. Nothing offensive, just routine. This particular message went to MI-5 and to the NATO desk in Century House, which handled all intelligence liaison with Britain’s allies except the CIA, which had its own designated liaison desk.
It was the head of the NATO desk who had first drawn Edwards’s attention to the embarrassment of McCready running an officer of the allied BND as his personal agent. Still, the NATO desk chief remained a friend of McCready’s. When he saw the German cable at ten that morning, he resolved to bring it to his friend Sam’s attention. Just in case. ... But he did not have time until midday.
At six, Major Vanavskaya was shown into Marcus Wolf’s office, two floors above that of Colonel Voss. The East German spymaster disliked uniforms and was in a well-cut dark suit. He also preferred tea to coffee and had a particularly fine blend sent to him from Fortnum and Mason in London. He offered the Soviet major a cup.
“Comrade General, that recent picture of Bruno Morenz. It came from you.”
Mischa Wolf regarded her steadily over the rim of his cup. If he had sources, assets, inside the West German establishment, which he did, he was not going to confirm it to this stranger.
“Could you possibly get hold of a copy of Morenz’s curriculum vitae?” she asked.
Marcus Wolf considered the request. “Why would you want it?” he asked softly.
She explained. In detail. Breaking a few rules.
“I know it’s only a suspicion,” she said. “Nothing concrete. A feeling there is a piece missing. Maybe something in his past.”
Wolf approved. He liked lateral thinking. Some of his best successes had stemmed from a gut feeling, a suspicion that the enemy had an Achilles’ heel somewhere, if only he could find it. He rose, went to a filing cabinet, and withdrew a sheaf of eight sheets without saying a word. It was Bruno Morenz’s life story. From Pullach, the same one Lothar Herrmann had studied on Wednesday afternoon. Vanavskaya exhaled in admiration. Wolf smiled.
If Marcus Wolf had a specialty in the espionage world, it was not so much in suborning and traducing high-ranking West Germans, though that could sometimes be done, as in placing prim spinster secretaries of impeccable life-style and security clearance at the elbows of such bigwigs. He knew that a confidential secretary saw everything her master saw and sometimes more.
Over the years, West Germany had been rocked by a series of scandals as private secretaries to ministers, civil servants, and defense contractors had either been arrested by the BfV or had slipped quietly away back to the East. One day, he knew, he would pull Fräulein Erdmute Keppel out of the Cologne BND and back to her beloved German Democratic Republic. Until then, she would continue to arrive at the office an hour ahead of Dieter Aust and copy anything of interest, including the personnel records of the entire staff. She would continue, in summer, to take her lunch in the quiet park eating her salad sandwiches with prim precision, feeding the pigeons with a few neat crumbs, and finally placing the empty sandwich bag in a nearby trash can. There it would be retrieved a few moments later by the gentleman walking his dog. In winter she would lunch instead in the warm café and drop her newspaper into the garbage container near the door, whence it would be rescued by the street cleaner.
When she came east, Fräulein Keppel would arrive to a state reception, a personal greeting from Security Minister Erich Mielke or possibly Party boss Erich Honecker himself, a medal, a state pension, and a snug retirement home by the lakes of Fürstenwalde.
Of course, not even Marcus Wolf was clairvoyant. He could not know that by 1990 East Germany would have ceased to exist, that Mielke and Honecker would be ousted and disgraced, that he would be retired and writing his memoirs for a fat fee, or that Erdmute Keppel would be spending her declining years in West Germany in a place of seclusion rather less comfortable than her designated flat at Fürstenwalde.
Major Vanavskaya looked up.
“He has a sister,” she said.
“Yes,” said Wolf. “You think she may know something?”
“It’s a long shot,” said the Russian. “If I could go and see her ...”
“If you can get permission from your superiors,” Wolf prompted her gently. “You do not, alas, work for me.”
“But if I could, I would need a cover. Not Russian, not East German.”
Wolf shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I have certain ‘legends,’ ready for use. Of course. It is part of our strange trade.”
There was a Polish Airline flight to London LOT 104, staged through Berlin-Schönefeld airport at ten A.M. It was held for ten minutes to enable Ludmilla Vanavskaya to board. As Wolf had pointed out, her German was adequate but not good enough to pass. Few people in London that she would meet spoke Polish. She had papers of a Polish schoolteacher visiting a relative. That would be plausible since Poland had a much more liberal regime.
The Polish airliner landed in London at eleven, gaining an hour due to time difference. Major Vanavskaya passed through passport and customs control inside thirty minutes, made two phone calls from a public booth in Terminal Two concourse, and took a taxi to a district of London called Primrose Hill.
The phone on Sam McCready’s desk trilled at midday. He had just put the phone down after talking again to Cheltenham. The answer was—still nothing. Forty-eight hours, and Morenz was still on the run. The new caller was the man from the NATO desk downstairs.
“There’s a chit came through in the morning bag,” he said. “It may be nothing; if so, throw it away. Anyway, I’m sending it up by messenger.”
The chit arrived five minutes later. When he saw it, and the timing on it, McCready swore loudly.
Normally, the need-to-know rule in the covert world works admirably. Those who do not need to know something in order to fulfill their functions are not told about it. That way, if there is a leak—either deliberate or through sloppy talk—the damage is reasonably limited. But sometimes it works the other way around. Sometimes a piece of information that might have changed events is not passed on because no one thought it was necessary.
The Archimedes listening station in the Harz Mountains and the East Germany-listeners at Cheltenham had been told to pass to McCready without delay anything they got. The words Grauber or Morenz were particular triggers for an instant pass-on. But no one had thought to alert those who listen to Allied diplomatic and military traffic to pass what they picked up to McCready.
The message he held was timed at 4:22 P.M. on Wednesday evening. It said:
Ex-Herrmann
Pro-Fietzau.
Top urgent. Contact Mrs. A. Farquarson, nee Morenz, believed living London stop Ask if she has seen or heard of or from her brother in last four days endit.
He never told me he had a sister in London. Never told me he had a sister at all, thought McCready. He began to wonder what else his friend Bruno had not told him about his past. He dragged a telephone directory from a shelf and looked under the name of Farquarson.
Fortunately, it was not a terribly common name. Smith would have been a different matter entirely. There were fourteen Farquarsons, but no “Mrs. A.” He began to ring them in sequence. Of the first seven, five said there was no Mrs. A. Farquarson to their knowledge. Two failed to answer. He was lucky at the eighth; the listing was for Robert Farquarson. A woman answered.
“Yes, this is Mrs. Farquarson.”
A hint of German accent?
“Would that be Mrs. A. Farquarson?”
“Yes.” She seemed defensive.
“Forgive my ringing you, Mrs. Farquarson. I am from the Immigration Department at Heathrow. Would you by chance have a brother named Bruno Morenz?”
A long pause.
“Is he there? At Heathrow?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, madam. Unless you are his sister.”
“Yes, I am Adelheid Farquarson. Bruno Morenz is my brother. Could I speak to him?”
“Not at the moment, I’m afraid. Will you be at that address in, say, fifteen minutes? It’s rather important.”
“Yes, I will be here.”
McCready called for a car and driver from the motor pool and raced downstairs.
It was a large studio apartment at the top of a solidly built Edwardian villa, tucked behind Regent’s Park Road. He walked up and rang the bell. Mrs. Farquarson greeted him in a painter’s smock and showed him into a cluttered studio with paintings on easels and sketches strewn on the floor.
She was a handsome woman, gray-haired like her brother. McCready put her in her late fifties, older than Bruno. She cleared a space, offered him a seat, and met his gaze levelly. McCready noticed two coffee mugs standing on a nearby table. Both were empty. He contrived to touch one while Mrs. Farquarson sat down. The mug was warm.
“What can I do for you, Mr. ...”
“Jones. I would like to ask you about your brother, Herr Bruno Morenz?”
“Why?”
“It’s an Immigration matter.”
“You are lying to me, Mr. Jones.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. My brother is not coming here. And if he wished to, he would not have problems with British Immigration. He is a West German citizen. You are a policeman?”
“No, Mrs. Farquarson. But I am a friend of Bruno. Over many years. We go back a long way together. I ask you to believe that because that is true.”
“He is in trouble, isn’t he?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m trying to help him, if I can. It’s not easy.”
“What has he done?”
“It looks as if he has killed his mistress in Cologne. And he has run away. He got a message to me. He said he didn’t mean to do it. Then he disappeared.”
She rose and walked to the window, staring out at the late summer foliage of Primrose Hill Park.
“Oh, Bruno. You fool. Poor, frightened Bruno.”
She turned and faced him.
“There was a man from the German Embassy here yesterday morning. He had called before, on Wednesday evening while I was out. He did not tell me what you have—just asked if Bruno had been in touch. He hasn’t. I can’t help you, either, Mr. Jones. You probably know more than I do, if he got a message to you. Do you know where he has gone?”
“That’s the problem. I think he has crossed the border. Gone into East Germany. Somewhere in the Weimar area. Perhaps to stay with friends. But so far as I know, he’s never been near Weimar in his life.”
She looked puzzled. “What do you mean? He lived there for two years.”
McCready kept a straight face, but he was stunned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. He never told me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He hated it there. They were the unhappiest two years of his life. He never talked about it.”
“I thought your family was Hamburg, born and raised.”
“We were, until 1943. That was when Hamburg was destroyed by the RAF. The great Fire Storm bombing. You have heard of it?”
McCready nodded. The Royal Air Force had bombed the center of Hamburg with such intensity that raging fires started. The fires had sucked oxygen in from the outer suburbs until a raging inferno was created in which temperatures rose so high that steel ran like water and concrete exploded like bombs. The inferno had swept through the city, vaporizing everything in its path.
“Bruno and I were orphaned that night.” She paused and stared, not at McCready but past him, seeing again the flames raging through the city where she had been born, consuming to cinders her parents, her friends, her schoolmates, the landmarks of her life. After several seconds she snapped out of her reverie and resumed talking in that quiet voice with the remaining hint of an original German accent.
“When it was over, the authorities took charge of us and we were evacuated. I was fifteen, Bruno was ten. We were split up. I was billeted with a family outside Göttingen. Bruno was sent to stay with a farmer near Weimar. After the war, I searched for him, and the Red Cross helped to reunite us. We returned to Hamburg. I looked after him. But he hardly ever talked about Weimar. I began to work in the British NAAFI canteen, to keep Bruno. Times were very hard, you know.”
McCready nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was the war. Anyway, in 1947 I met a British sergeant. Robert Farquarson. We married and came to live here. He died eight years ago. When Robert and I left Hamburg in 1948, Bruno secured a residential apprenticeship with a firm of optical lens makers. I have only seen him three or four times since then, and not in the past ten years.”
“You told that to the man from the embassy?”
“Herr Fietzau? No, he did not ask about Bruno’s childhood. But I told the lady.”
“The lady?”
“She left only an hour ago. The one from the Pensions Department.”
“Pensions?”
“Yes. She said Bruno still worked in optical glassware, for a firm called BKI in Würzburg. But it seems BKI is owned by Pilkington Glass of Britain, and with Bruno’s retirement approaching, she needed details of his life to assess his full entitlement. She was not from Bruno’s employers?”
“I doubt it. Probably West German police. I’m afraid they are looking for Bruno, too, but not to help him.”
“I’m sorry. I seem to have been very foolish.”
“You weren’t to know, Mrs. Farquarson. She spoke good English?”
“Yes, perfect. Slight accent—Polish, perhaps.”
McCready had little doubt where the lady had come from. There were other hunters out for Bruno Morenz, many of them, but only McCready and one other group knew about BKI of Würzburg. He rose.
“Try hard to think what little he said in those years after the war. Is there anyone, anyone at all, to whom he might go in his hour of need for sanctuary?”
She thought long and hard.
“There was one name he mentioned, someone who had been nice to him. His primary-school teacher. Fräulein ... dammit ... Fräulein Neuberg. No, I remember now, Fräulein Neumann. That was it. Neumann. Of course, she’s probably dead by now. It was forty years ago.”
“One last thing, Mrs. Farquarson. Did you tell this to the lady from the glass company?”
“No, I’ve only just remembered it. I just told her Bruno had once spent two years as an evacuee on a farm not ten miles from Weimar.”
Back at Century House, McCready borrowed a Weimar telephone directory from the East German desk. There were several Neumanns listed, but just one with Frl, short for Fräulein, in front of it. A spinster. A teenager would not have her own apartment and phone, not in East Germany. A mature spinster, a professional woman, might. It was a long shot, very long. He could have one of the East German desk’s agents-in-place across the Wall place a call. But the Stasi were everywhere, bugging everything. The mere question— “Were you once the schoolteacher of a small boy called Morenz and has he showed up?”—that could blow it all away.
His next visit was to the section inside Century House whose specialty is the preparation of very untrue identity cards.
He rang British Airways, who were unable to help. But Lufthansa was. They had a flight at five-fifteen to Hanover. He asked Denis Gaunt to drive him to Heathrow again.
The best-laid plans of mice and men, as the Scottish poet might have said, sometimes end up looking like a dog’s breakfast. The Polish Airlines flight from London back to Warsaw via East Berlin was due for takeoff at three-thirty. But when the pilot switched on his flight systems, a red warning light glowed. It turned out to be just a faulty solenoid, but it delayed the takeoff until six. In the departures lounge, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya glanced at the televised departure information, noted the delay “for operational reasons,” cursed silently, and returned to her book.
McCready was leaving the office when the phone rang. He debated whether to answer it and decided he ought to. It could be important. It was Edwards.
“Sam, someone in Funny Paper has been on to me. Now look, Sam, you are not—as in absolutely not—getting my permission to go into East Germany. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely, Timothy. Couldn’t be clearer.”
“Good,” said the Assistant Chief, and put the phone down.
Gaunt had heard the voice at the other end of the phone and what it had said. McCready was beginning to like Gaunt. He had joined the desk only six months earlier, but he was showing he was bright, trustworthy, and could keep his mouth shut.
As he negotiated Hogarth Roundabout, cutting a lot of corners in the dense Friday-afternoon commuter traffic on the Heathrow road, Gaunt chose to open it.
“Sam, I know you’ve been in more tight places than a shepherd’s right arm, but you’ve been black-flagged in East Germany and the boss has forbidden you to go back.”
“Forbidding is one thing,” said McCready. “Preventing is another.”
As he strode through the departure lounge of Terminal Two to catch the Lufthansa flight to Hanover, he cast not a glance at the trim young woman with the shiny blond hair and piercing blue eyes who sat reading two yards from him. And she did not look up at the medium-built, rather rumpled man with thinning brown hair in a gray raincoat as he walked past.
McCready’s flight took off on time, and he landed at Hanover at eight, local time. Major Vanavskaya got away at six and landed at Berlin-Schönefeld at nine. McCready rented a car and drove past Hildesheim and Salzgitter to his destination in the forests outside Goslar. Vanavskaya was met by a KGB car and driven to Normannenstrasse 22. She had to wait an hour to see Colonel Otto Voss, who was closeted with State Security Minister Erich Mielke.
McCready had telephoned his host from London; he was expected. The man met him at the front door of his substantial home, a beautifully converted hunting lodge set on a sweep of hillside with a view, in daylight, far across a long valley clothed in conifers. Only five miles away, the lights of Goslar twinkled in the gloom. Had the day not already faded, McCready might have seen, far to the east on a distant peak of the Harz, the roof of a high tower. One might have mistaken it for a hunting tower, but it wasn’t. Its purpose was the hunting not of wild boar but of men and women. The man McCready had come to visit had chosen to spend his comfortable retirement within sight of the very border that had once made his fortune.
His host had changed over the years, thought McCready as he was shown into a wood-paneled sitting room hung with the heads of boars and the antlers of stags. A bright fire crackled in a stone hearth; even in early September it was chilly at night in the high hills.
The man who greeted him had put on weight; the once-lean physique was now fleshed out. He was still short, of course, and the round pink face topped by white candy-floss hair made him look even more harmless than ever. Until you looked into his eyes. Cunning eyes, wily eyes that had seen too much and made many deals about life and death and that had lived in the sewers and survived. A malign child of the Cold War who had once been the uncrowned underworld king of Berlin.
For twenty years, from the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 until his retirement in 1981, Andre Kurzlinger had been a Grenzgänger, literally, a border-goer, a border-crosser. It was the Wall that had made his fortune. Prior to its construction, East Germans wishing to escape to the West simply had to go to East Berlin and walk into West Berlin. But during the night of August 21, 1961, the great concrete blocks had been slammed into place, and Berlin became the divided city. Many tried to jump the Wall; some succeeded. Others were hauled back screaming and sent to long terms of jail. Others were machine-gunned on the wire and hung there like stoats until cut down. For most, crossing the Wall was a one-time exploit. For Kurzlinger, who until then had been just a Berlin black marketeer and gangster, it became a profession.
He brought people out—for money. He went across in a variety of disguises, or sent emissaries, and negotiated the price. Some paid in Ostmarks—a lot of Ostmarks. With these, Kurzlinger would buy the three products in East Berlin that were good: Hungarian pigskin luggage, Czech classical LPs, and Cuban corona coronas. They were so cheap that, even with the cost of smuggling them west, Kurzlinger could make a huge profit.
Other refugees agreed to pay him in Deutschmarks once they had reached the West and gotten a job. Few reneged. Kurzlinger was meticulous about collecting debts; he employed several large associates to ensure he was not cheated.
There were rumors he worked for Western intelligence. They were not true, though he occasionally brought out someone on contract to the CIA or SIS. There were rumors he was hand-in-glove with the SSD or the KGB; that was unlikely, as he did East Germany too much damage. Certainly he had bribed more border guards and Communist officials than he could remember. It was said he could smell a bribable official at a hundred paces.
Although Berlin was his bailiwick, he also ran lines through the East German-West German border, which ran from the Baltic to Czechoslovakia. When he retired finally with a handsome fortune he chose to settle in West Germany, not in West Berlin. But he still could not drag himself away from that border. His manor was only five miles from it, high in the Harz Mountains.
“So, Herr McCready, Sam my friend, it has been a long time.”
He stood with his back to the fire, a retired gentleman in a velvet smoking jacket, a long way from the animal-eyed alley-kid who had crawled out of the rubble in 1945 to start selling girls to GIs for Lucky Strikes. “You are retired also now?” he asked.
“No, Andre, I still have to work for my crust. Not as clever as you, you see.”
Kurzlinger liked that. He pressed a bell, and a manservant brought crisp Mosel wine in crystal glasses.
“Then,” asked Kurzlinger as he surveyed the flames through the wine, “what can an old man do for the mighty Spionage service of Her Majesty?”
McCready told him. The older man continued staring at the fire, but he pursed his lips and shook his head.
“I am out of it, Sam. Retired. Now they leave me alone. Both sides. But you know, they have warned me, as I think they have warned you. If I start again, they will come for me. A quick operation, across the border, and back before dawn. They will have me, right here in my own home. They mean it. In my time I did them a lot of damage you know.”
“I know,” said McCready.”
“Also, things change. Once, in Berlin, yes, I could get you across. Even in the countryside I had my rabbit runs. But they were all discovered eventually. Closed down. The mines I had disconnected were replaced. The guards I had bribed were transferred. You know they never keep guards on this border for long. Constantly switch them around. My contacts have all gone cold. It is too late.”
“I have to go over,” said McCready slowly, “because we have a man over there. He is sick, very sick. But if I can bring him out, it will probably break the career of the one who now heads Abteilung II. Otto Voss.”
Kurzlinger did not move, but his eyes went very cold. Years ago, as McCready knew, he had had a friend. A very close friend indeed, probably the closest he had ever had. The man had been caught crossing the Wall. Talk was, later, that he had raised his hands. But Voss had shot him all the same. Through both kneecaps first, then both elbows and both shoulders. Finally in the stomach. Soft-nosed slugs.
“Come,” said Kurzlinger, “we will eat. I will introduce you to my son.”
The handsome young blond man of about thirty who joined them at table was not actually Kurzlinger’s son, of course. But he had formally adopted him. Occasionally, the older man would smile at him, and the adopted son would look back adoringly.
“I brought Siegfried out of the East,” said Kurzlinger, as if making conversation. “He had nowhere to go, so ... now he lives here with me.”
McCready continued eating. He suspected there was more.
“Have you ever heard,” said Kurzlinger over the grapes, “of the Arbeitsgruppe Grenzen?”
McCready had. The Borders Working Group. Deep within the SSD, apart from all the Abteilungen with their Roman-numeral designations, was a small unit with a most bizarre specialty.
Most times, if Marcus Wolf wanted to spirit an agent into the West, he could do it by passing through a neutral country, the agent adopting his new legend during the stopover. But sometimes the SSD or the HVA wanted to put a man across the border on a “black” operation. For this to happen, the East Germans would actually cut a rabbit run through their own defenses from East to West. Most rabbit runs were cut from West to East to bring out people who were not supposed to leave. When the SSD wanted a rabbit run cut for its own purposes, it used the experts of the Arbeitsgruppe Grenzen for the job. These engineers, working at dead of night (for the West German Frontier Service also watched the border), would burrow under the razor-wire, cut a thin line through the minefield, and leave no trace of where they had been.
That still left the two-hundred-yard-wide plowed strip, the shooting ground, where a real refugee would probably be caught in the searchlights and machine-gunned. Finally, on the Western side, there was the fence. The Arbeitsgruppe Grenzen would leave that intact, cut a hole for the agent as he went through, and lace it up again after him. The searchlights, on the nights they ran someone westward, would be facing the other way, and the plowed strip was usually thick with grass, especially in late summer. By morning, the grass would have straightened itself, obliterating all traces of the running feet.
When the East Germans did it, they had the cooperation of their own border guards. But breaking in was another matter; there would be no East German cooperation.
“Siegfried used to work for the ACG,” said Kurzlinger. “Until he used one of his own rabbit runs. Of course, the Stasi closed that one down immediately. Siegfried, our friend here needs to go across. Can you help?”
McCready thought that he had judged his man aright. Kurzlinger hated Voss for what he had done, and the man’s grief for his murdered love was not to be underestimated.
Siegfried thought for a while.
“There used to be one,” he said at length. “I cut it myself. I was going to use it, so I did not file the report. In the event, I came out a different way.”
“Where is it?” asked McCready.
“Not far from here,” said Siegfried. “Between Bad Sachsa and Ellrich.”
He fetched a map and pointed out the two small towns in the southern Harz, Bad Sachsa in West Germany and Ellrich in the East.
“May I see the papers you intend to use?” asked Kurzlinger. McCready passed them over. Siegfried studied them. “They are good,” he said.
“What is the best time to go?” asked McCready.
“Four o’clock. Before dawn. The light is darkest, and the guards are tired. They sweep the plowed strip less frequently. We will need camouflage smocks in case we are caught by the lights. The camouflage may save us.”
They discussed details for another hour.
“You understand, Heir McCready,” said Siegfried, “it has been five years. I may not be able to recall where it was. I left a fishing line on the ground where I cut the path through the minefield. I may not be able to find it. If I cannot, we will come back. To go into the minefield not knowing the path I cut is death. Or my former colleagues may have found it and closed it down. In that case we come back—if we still can.”
“I understand,” said McCready. “I’m very grateful.”
They left, Siegfried and McCready, at one o’clock for the slow two-hour drive through the mountains. Kurzlinger stood on the doorstep.
“Look after my boy,” he said. “I only do this for another boy Voss took from me long ago.”
“If you get through,” said Siegfried as they drove, “walk the six miles into Nordhausen. Avoid the village of Ellrich—there are guards there, and the dogs will bark. Take the train from Nordhausen south to Erfurt, and the bus to Weimar. There will be workers on both.”
They drove quietly through the sleeping town of Bad Sachsa and parked at the outskirts. Siegfried stood in the darkness with a compass and a penlight. When he had his bearing, he plunged into the pine forest, heading east. McCready followed him.
Four hours earlier, Major Vanavskaya had confronted Colonel Voss in his office.
“According to his sister, there is one place he could go to hide in the Weimar area.”
She explained about Bruno Morenz’s evacuation during the war.
“A farm?” said Voss. “Which farm? There are hundreds in that area.”
“She didn’t know the name. Just that it was not ten miles from Weimar itself. Draw your ring, Colonel. Bring in troops. Within the day you will have him.”
Colonel Voss called Abteilung XIII, the intelligence and security service of the National People’s Army, the NVA. Phones rang in the NVA headquarters out at Karlshorst, and before dawn trucks began to roll south toward Weimar.
“The ring is formed,” said Voss at midnight. “The troops will move outward from Weimar town, sweeping by sectors, outward toward the ring. They will search every farm, barn, store, cowshed, and pigsty until they reach the ten-miles ring. I only hope you are right, Major Vanavskaya. There are now a lot of men involved.”
In the small hours he left in his personal car for the south. Major Vanavskaya accompanied him. The sweep was due to start at dawn.