Fear of detection, of prison, had all but disabled Gerhard Kleist. The Krysalis debacle was the last straw; he knew he would never forget that moment of dread when he had made himself enter the Lescombes’ house, only to discover that David might return at any moment. Even a cultured life in England could not compensate for such horrors.
Things had been all right when he was younger, and the tension affected him less. In those days he could lose himself in work. But then, too suddenly, and although not yet fifty, he was a widower and growing old. The slack skin at the jowls. Face no longer quite smooth, more the texture of an orange. Waking at three, most mornings and not only after a night out, to urinate, then unable to sleep again before dawn. Then sleeping like unto death until the alarm clock slugged him with its dreadful, heavy burden of consciousness.
He’d never stopped dreaming about the woman sitting opposite. In those dreams her face was bright, alive with intelligence, ever youthful. After marrying David she had forgotten Gerhard Kleist, or so he’d believed until the day before, when as she lay on the beach her body had told his massaging hands an altogether different story. Yesterday the fantasy had taken on a new tangibility. He knew she could be persuaded to go with him, forget the past, live only for the present….
But first it was necessary to concoct some way of dealing with Barzel. He must find an excuse to go to the bedroom. Once he had the gun …
Gerhard came back to reality to hear Barzel say, “So
now tell me—” he smiled, a beau soliciting some naughty confidence—“I am a convert. Having talked to you, I understand everything. But why must everyone else in Europe fall in love with you at the same time as me? Mm? Tell me!”
Anna’s nervous laugh alarmed Gerhard. Be careful, Anna. Keep it bottled up, as always; don’t choose this of all moments to change. As long as you have a secret, no matter how trivial, your life is safe.
You
must get the gun,
he told himself.
Now.
“Everywhere I go, I find my dear colleagues ahead of me. At the station. At the airport. Everywhere it’s the same. The English. The French. The
other
Germans. The—dear God help us all!—Italians.”
Anna’s eyes flickered, but she could not look away.
“Even at Corfu airport there were old-time spies standing around, trying to look like touts. You’d think they could afford at least one bottle of fake suntan lotion between them. Fortunately they didn’t see me, or I would have been obliged to nod my head, at least. One cannot be rude to colleagues. But Anna … in
Corfu!”
By now Anna was shrinking, or so it seemed to Gerhard.
“What have we here? I will tell you. A major security alert in NATO. You are ‘hot,’ Anna, that is how we say it. Scalding. I could cook a nice steak on you, and it would be overdone. Why? Perhaps you have something these people want very badly,
ja?”
Anna swallowed. There was a long silence, which Barzel broke by saying, “Do you have the Krysalis file here, perhaps?”
“No,” Anna said. Then, incredulously, “You
know
about that?”
Barzel nodded. “I know.” Gerhard noted with relief that he was smiling. “Where is it?”
Gerhard rapidly listed the possibilities. Lie, pretend the file was still in London? Hopeless. Either Barzel would tear the place apart and find Krysalis, in which case he would kill them, or he would use the HVA machine to run checks in London that must come up with the truth eventually. In which case also he would kill them. Tell the truth now, and have done with it? Once Barzel had Krysalis, there was no incentive for him to leave either Kleist or Anna alive ….
“The file’s in my bedroom,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
“What!”
Anna was on her feet, her face white. “But you said … you told me you’d leave it.”
Then Gerhard’s expression completed the tale and her legs gave way beneath her. At first she covered her face with her hands, but suddenly she seemed to lose all strength, for her head drooped forward onto the table, where she cradled it in her arms, defeated.
Gerhard stood up, telling Barzel with a look that he should guard her; only when the other man nodded his assent did he leave the room.
He closed the bedroom door behind him and ran to the bed. Seconds later, he was retrieving his Luger. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of a hand that shook, only to find that the beads of moisture broke through again at once. This was no time for cowardice. You have a weapon, he told himself.
Use it!
As he rose from beside the bed, the phone rang. Gerhard stared at it. Who on earth …?
Then he remembered. Iannis.
While in the very act of reaching out for the receiver, he heard footsteps in the passage. Torn between the needs to silence the phone and to conceal the gun,
Gerhard gritted his teeth, powerless to act. Next second he had thrust the Luger under the bed and was clamping the phone to his ear so hard that it hurt.
“Ne?”
he snapped, as Barzel entered the bedroom.
“I went again today,” the boy said. “Nothing.” Then Gerhard heard only the pun of a severed contact.
“Who was that?” Barzel asked.
“No one. Where’s Anna, you shouldn’t have—”
“What the hell do you mean ‘no one’?
Who?”
“Wrong number. Happens all the time, the phones here are crap.”
Barzel stared at him in silence, as if weighing the truth of his words. “Where’s this file?” he said at last.
Gerhard once more pushed the bed aside and rummaged in the hole. “Here …”
The two men returned to the kitchen. Gerhard poured himself another beer, knowing he’d lost more than a golden opportunity to dispose of his unwelcome visitor; he’d lost vital ground. Whatever Barzel thought when he arrived, he definitely mistrusted him now. Damn Iannis …
The boy had sounded odd. As if he wasn’t alone, someone was listening in. A girl? Gerhard hoped not; the last thing he wanted was Iannis messing around with strangers.
Strangers. What if Barzel had somehow managed to trace Iannis and … no, it was impossible. In that event, Barzel would have come to the island with reinforcements and enough hardware to fight a war. Keep your head, he told himself firmly, don’t panic now.
Barzel breezed through the file before beginning to study it more carefully. After he had finished he sat for a long time staring into space. At last he turned to
Gerhard and said, in English, “I think, if Anna will excuse us, we must talk quite seriously….”
“Will she run away?” he asked, as they reached the terrace.
“I doubt it. Even if she does, she won’t get far.”
“Unlike you. You, Kleist, appear to have got very far, without telling us. Surprised to see me here,
was!
You thought we didn’t know about your little love nest?”
“How the devil did you—”
“Oh, a little bird, you know? Many, many years ago. People used to have a good laugh about it. ‘The look on his face!’ that’s what we used to say. ‘When Kleist finds out that we know!’”
“What made you think I’d be here?”
“Berlin put out an alert when you and the woman were missing. Different people are searching for you in different places, I drew Greece.” Barzel glanced back toward the house. “Does she understand German?”
“No.”
“All right, we speak German then.” Barzel looked at his watch, a busy man with a plane to catch who had allowed himself to be sidetracked by a snake-oil salesman. “You’re an idiot.”
Gerhard had been expecting an accusation of rank treason. Barzel’s mildness took him off guard.
Think,
he told himself savagely. You’re not dead yet.
“Why?” he said, falling into the sofa-swing. “I bring you the biggest prize you’ve—”
“Point one, you brought us
nothing!
You have sat here quietly, keeping us guessing. We shall discuss that, I promise you. Point two: the file is
too
big! Files like that don’t come our way, Kleist.”
“But—”
“Suppose you were the President of the United States. Imagine someone approached you, just before a major superpower summit, and told you that he had papers, a microfiche, setting out the entire Warsaw Pact military dispositions and strategy. Would you believe him? Of course not. Why? First, because one of the ways you defeat spies is by keeping information in tiny gobbets; second, because in the run-up to a conference you don’t believe anything you’re told anyway.”
“England doesn’t work like that.”
“Everybody
works like that, comrade! This is a plant. We’re meant to read this rubbish, shuffle a dozen divisions in and out of Poland and I don’t know what else. It’s a trick, you’ve fallen for it. I’m telling you, Kleist, you’re a dead man. Dead.”
“But
you
told me to do this! ‘Anna’s your patient, she’s married to a top civil servant who’s interesting to us, get the file!’”
“Exactly.” Barzel swung around to face Gerhard. “That’s the point. Someone in MI5 discovered what was going on. This is pre-summit counterintelligence. It means your cover’s gone, mine too.” He paused. Then, amazingly, he smiled. “Ah … if only I could believe what I’m saying.”
Gerhard stared at him, incomprehension written all over his face, and Barzel chuckled. “Either the British are being very clever, or …” He came to sit beside Gerhard on the swing, one arm stretched along the back of the cushion. “Some prizes are so valuable they lure with such power…. The wolf won’t ignore this lamb, not with Vancouver mere weeks away.”
“The wolf …”
“Oh yes. It’s being run from Normannenstrasse.”
Gerhard felt a seed of hope sprout inside him. HVA’s
commander did not take a personal interest in silly tricks. If he could only manage to persuade HVA to see this as a coup, rather than a betrayal…. But then Barzel asked, “What about the woman? Whose side is she on?”
“No one’s. She hasn’t a clue what’s happening.”
“Maybe that’s so, maybe it isn’t. We’ve been rooting around, but so far without success. We can’t make a clear picture of your Mrs. Anna Lescombe. She’s hazy. We need focus. Does she realize you were responsible for introducing her to her husband?”
“No. As far as she’s concerned, we went sailing together, Lescombe happened to be in the next berth.”
“Coincidence?”
“Yes.”
“Then she must be very naïve.” Barzel shook his head, laughing. “How come people never seem to see through you, Kleist? Why have you dragged her here, anyway?”
“Because she screwed up.”
“Explain.”
“I knew her husband was away for the weekend, so I programed her to open the safe, bring me the file, wait while I copied it, take it back, put it in the safe, and forget everything.”
“So what happened?”
“She had a kind of breakdown. She’d built up inner resistance to my suggestions.”
“Didn’t you realize that at the time?”
“No, she seemed normal enough.”
“Aach, I don’t understand.” Barzel stood up and began to pace the terrace. “You were attempting the impossible. Everyone knows you can’t force a person to do things they don’t want to do under hypnosis.”
“Do
they?” Gerhard scoffed. “Then ‘everyone,’ comrade, is about twenty years out of date.”
“Are you telling me that if you put that woman into a trance and ordered her to sleep with me, she would?”
“No, not like that. But there are other ways.”
“Such as?”
“Given time, and a deep enough trance, I could persuade her that you were a doctor, and that it was necessary for you to examine her intimately. I could arouse her sexually by feeding erotica into her mind.”
“That would work?” Barzel sounded incredulous.
“How do you think I got the combination out of her in the first place?”
Barzel rejoined him on the swing. “Tell me.”
“I persuaded her that her husband’s career was in danger, because he couldn’t open the safe and needed help remembering the combination.”
“And she accepted that?”
“Of course.” Seeing the skepticism on his colleague’s face, Gerhard continued, “Remember, that woman has been my patient, with gaps, for sixteen years. She trusts me. She loved me, once.”
Barzel thought this over. “Why did she have that breakdown, then?” he snapped. “How come she failed?”
“I’m not sure.” Gerhard looked away. “I went too far too fast. We hadn’t seen each other for two years, my … my influence, if you like, must have faded.”
“You were lucky to get out of England.”
“Yes. What do you intend doing with her?”
“What do you think?”
For the first time Gerhard turned to look directly at Barzel. “You’ll kill her.” He could not keep the anguish out of his voice.
The other man’s hand strayed along the cushion to grasp Gerhard’s shoulder. Suddenly he smiled. “Of course.”
“You’d be making the biggest mistake of your whole career. Huper would never forgive you.”
“What?”
“Without the woman, you can’t begin to assess Krysalis’ importance. That file is like a beautiful painting, perhaps it’s an old master, perhaps it is by a gifted pupil, maybe it’s a fake, after all.” Gerhard sat forward, eager to impress Barzel with the sense of what he was urging. “You need to know its
provenance.
You must interview the
dealer.
Besides, by holding on to her, how can you lose?”
Barzel frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Well, isn’t it obvious? Either she’s the source of disinformation, like you say, stealing a hoax file at my behest, or she’s the possessor of the real thing. You’ve got to take her back to Berlin. There she can be interrogated properly and at length. If she’s a phoney, you’ll learn a lot about British methods. If she’s real, you’ll discover whatever it is that she knows about her husband’s affairs, not just this file but perhaps many other files as well. Now do you see?”
Gerhard could scarcely control the wild beating of his heart while he waited for Barzel’s reaction. When he’d first clapped eyes on his control coming off the ferry he’d turned numb. Yet HVA did not know about the fax he had sent to London, that much was obvious. If he once got them to accept that Anna should be brought to Berlin, he’d undoubtedly be called upon to play a role in her interrogation there. The power he had acquired over her as hypnotist and therapist was
beyond any coherent form of valuation. And when they had finished with her …