The Deceiver (15 page)

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.

SIEGFRIED LAY ON HIS BELLY
at the edge of the treeline and studied the dark contours of the forest three hundred yards away that marked East Germany. McCready lay beside him. It was three
A.M.
on Saturday.

Five years earlier, also in darkness, Siegfried had cut his rabbit run from the base of a particularly tall pine tree on the eastern side, in the direction of a gleaming white rock high on the hill slope on the Western side. His problem now was, he had always thought he would see the rock from the east, gleaming palely in the dim light before dawn. He had not foreseen that he would ever have to head the other way. Now the rock was high above him, screened by the trees. It would become visible only from a position far out in No Man’s Land. He judged the line as best he could, crawled forward the last ten yards of West Germany, and began to snip quietly at the chain-link fence.

When Siegfried had his hole, McCready saw his arm rise in a beckoning motion. He crawled out of cover toward the wire. He had spent the five minutes studying the watchtowers of the East German border guards and the sweep of their searchlights. Siegfried had chosen his spot well—halfway between two of the watchtowers. An added bonus was that the tree-growth of summer had caused some of the pine branches across the minefield to extend outward by several feet; one searchlight, at least, was being partially blocked by this extra growth. In autumn, tree surgeons would come to prune back the branches, but they had not done so yet.

The other searchlight had a clear view of their intended path, but the man behind it must have been tired or bored, for it sent off for minutes on end. When it came on again, it was always pointing the other way. Then it would make its sweep toward them, sweep back, and go out. If the operator kept up this pattern, they would have a few seconds’ warning.

Siegfried jerked his head and crawled through the hole. McCready followed, dragging his gunny sack. The German turned and pushed the cut mesh back into place. It would not be noticed except at close range, and the guards never crossed the strip to check the wire unless they had already noticed a break. They did not like minefields, either.

It was tempting to run across the hundred yards of plowed strip, now thickly grassed with extra-tall dock, thistle, and nettle growing at intervals in the grass. But there could be tripwires linked to sound-alarms. It was safer to crawl. They crawled. At the halfway point they were shaded by trees from the searchlight to their left, but then the one to their right came on. Both men froze in their green smocks and lay face down. They had blackened their faces and hands, Siegfried with boot polish, McCready with burnt cork that would wash off more easily on the other side.