The Deceiver (17 page)

“Where did he hide, Fräulein? Please, where?”

“In the barn. He showed me once. I had gone to the farm to remonstrate with the farmer. There was a barn at the far end of the hay meadow, away from the house and the other barns. He made a hole in the hay bales up in the loft. He used to crawl in there and wait until the farmer had fallen into his usual drunken sleep.”

“Where, exactly, was the farm?”

“The hamlet is called Marionhain. I think it is still there. Just four farms in a group. All collectivized now. It lies between the villages of Ober and Nieder Grünstedt. Take the road out toward Erfurt. Four miles out, turn left down a track. There is a signpost. The farm was called Müller’s Farm, but that will be changed now. It probably just has a number. But if it is still there, look for a barn set two hundred yards away from the group, at the end of the meadow. Do you think you can help him?”

McCready rose.

“If he is there, Fräulein, I will try. I swear I will try. Thank you for your help.”

He turned at the door.

“You said there were three reasons you thought I was English, but you gave me only two.”

“Oh, yes. You are dressed as a farm worker, but you said you came from Berlin. There are no farms in Berlin. So you are a spy. Either working for them”—she jerked her head toward the window, where another truck rumbled past—“or for the other side.”

“I could have been an agent for the SSD.”

She smiled again. “No, Mister Englander. I remember the British officers from 1945, for a short while before the Russians came. You are much too polite to be SSD.”

The track off the main road was where she had said it would be, to the left, toward the tract of rich farmland that lies between Highway Seven and the Autobahn E40. A small sign said
OBER GRÜNSTEDT.
He cycled down the track to a junction a mile farther on. The road split. To his left lay Nieder Grünstedt. He could see a wall of green uniforms surrounding it. On either side of him lay fields of uncut maize, five feet high. He crouched low over the handlebars and pedaled away to his right. He skirted Ober Grünstedt and saw an even narrower track. Half a mile down it, he could make out the roofs of a group of farmhouses and barns, built in the Thuringian style with steeply sloped tiles, towering peaks, and tall wide doors to admit the hay wains to the hollow square yards inside. Marionhain.

He did not want to pass through the hamlet. There might be farm workers there who would clearly spot him as a stranger. He hid his bicycle in the maize and climbed a gate to get a better view. To his right he saw a single tall barn, of brick and black-tarred timbers, set away from the main group. Crouching inside the maize, he began to work his way around the hamlet toward it. On the horizon the tide of green uniforms began to move out of Nieder Grünstedt.

Dr. Lothar Herrmann was also working that Saturday morning. Since he sent the cable to Fietzau at the German Embassy in London that had elicited a reply which brought his investigation no further forward, the trail of the missing Bruno Morenz had gone cold. He did not usually work on Saturdays, but he needed something to take his mind off his predicament. The previous evening he had had dinner with the Director General. It had not been an easy meal.

No arrest had been made in the case of the Heimendorf slayings. The police had not even issued a wanted notice for a particular person whom they wished to interview. They seemed to be up against a brick wall on the issue of one set of fingerprints and two used pistol bullets.

A number of very respectable gentlemen in both the private and the public sector had been discreetly questioned and had finished the interviews puce with embarrassment. But each had cooperated to the limit. Fingerprints had been given, handguns turned in for testing, alibis checked. The result was … nothing.

The Director General had been regretful but adamant. The Service’s lack of cooperation had gone on long enough. On Monday morning he, the DG, was going to go to the Chancellor’s office for an interview with the State Secretary who had responsibility, at the political level, for the BND. It would be a very difficult interview, and he, the DG, was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

Now Dr. Herrmann opened the thick file dealing with cross-border radio traffic covering the period of Wednesday to Friday. He noted that there seemed to be an awful lot of it. Some kind of flap among the VOPOs in the Jena area. Then his eye caught a phrase used in a conversation between a VOPO patrol car and Jena Central: “
Big, gray-haired, Rhineland accent
.” He became pensive. That rang a bell. …

An aide entered and placed a message in front of his boss. If the Herr Doktor insisted on working on Saturday morning, he might as well get the traffic as it came in. The message was a complimentary pass-on from the internal security service, the BfV. It simply said that a sharp-eyed operative at Hanover airport had noted a face entering Germany on a London flight under the name of Maitland. Being an alert fellow, the BfV man had checked his files and passed his identification on to the Head Office in Cologne. Cologne had passed it on to Pullach. The man Maitland was Mr. Samuel McCready.

Dr. Herrmann was affronted. It was most discourteous of a senior officer in an allied NATO service to enter the country unannounced. And unusual. Unless … He looked at the intercepts from Jena and the message from Hanover. He wouldn’t dare, he thought. Then another part of his mind said: Yes, he damned well would. Dr. Herrmann lifted a phone and began to make his dispositions.

*   *   *

McCready left the cover of the maize, glanced to the left and the right, and crossed the few yards of grass to the barn. The door creaked on rusty hinges as he let himself in. Light streaked into the gloom from a dozen splits in the woodwork, making motes of dust dance in the air and revealing the huddled shapes of old carts and barrels, horse-tackle and rusting troughs. He glanced up. The upper floor, reached by a vertical ladder, was piled with hay. He went up the ladder and called softly, “Bruno.”

There was no reply. He walked past the piled hay looking for recent signs of disturbance. At the end of the barn he saw a fragment of raincoat fabric between two bales. He gently lifted one of the bales away.

Bruno Morenz lay in his sanctuary on his side. His eyes were open, but he made no movement. As the light entered his hiding place, he winced.

“Bruno, it’s me. Sam. Your friend. Look at me, Bruno.”

Morenz swiveled his gaze toward McCready. He was gray-faced and unshaven. He had not eaten for three days and had drunk only stagnant water from a barrel. His eyes appeared unfocused. They tried to register as he looked at McCready.

“Sam?”

“Yes, Sam. Sam McCready.”

“Don’t tell them I’m here, Sam. They won’t find me if you don’t tell them.”

“I won’t tell them, Bruno. Never.”

Through a crack in the planking he saw the line of green uniforms moving across the maize fields toward Ober Grünstedt.

“Try and sit up, Bruno.”

He helped Morenz into a sitting position, his back against the hay bales.

“We must hurry, Bruno. I’m going to try to get you out of here.”

Morenz shook his head dully. “Stay here, Sam. It’s safe here. No one could ever find me here.”

No, thought McCready, a drunken farmer never could. But five hundred soldiers could and would. He tried to get Morenz to his feet, but it was hopeless. The weight of the man was too much. His legs would not work. He clutched his hands across his chest. There was something bulging under his left arm. McCready let him slump back into the hay. Morenz curled up again. McCready knew he would never get him back to the border near Ellrich, under the wire, and across the minefield. It was over.

Through the crack, across the maize cobs bright in the sun, the green uniforms were swarming over the farms and barns of Ober Grünstedt. Marionhain would be next.

“I’ve been to see Fräulein Neumann. You remember Fräulein Neumann? She’s nice.”

“Yes, nice. She might know I’m here, but she won’t tell them.”

“Never, Bruno. Never. She said you have your homework for her. She needs to mark it.”

Morenz unbuttoned his raincoat and eased out a fat red manual. Its cover bore a gold hammer and sickle. Morenz’s tie was off and his shirt open. A key hung on a piece of twine around his neck. McCready took the manual.

“I’m thirsty, Sam.”

McCready held out a small silver hip flask that he had taken from his back pocket. Morenz drank the whiskey greedily. McCready looked through the crack. The soldiers had finished with Ober Grünstedt. Some were coming down the track, while others fanned out through the fields.

“I’m going to stay here, Sam,” said Morenz.

“Yes,” said McCready, “so you are. Good-bye, old friend. Sleep well. No one will ever hurt you again.”

“Never again,” murmured the man, and slept.

McCready was about to rise when he saw the glint of the key against Morenz’s chest. He eased the twine from around his neck, stowed the manual in his totebag, slithered down the ladder, and slipped away into the maize. The ring closed two minutes later. It was midday.

It took him twelve hours to get back to the giant pine tree on the border near Ellrich village. He changed into his smock and waited beneath the trees until half-past three. Then he flashed his pencil light three times toward the white rock across the border and crawled under the wire, through the minefield, and across the plowed strip. Siegfried was waiting for him at the fence.

On the drive back to Goslar, he flicked over the key he had taken from Bruno Morenz. It was made of steel, and engraved on the back were the words
Flughafen Köln
. Cologne airport. Sam bade farewell to Kurzlinger and Siegfried after a sustaining breakfast and drove southwest instead of north to Hanover.

At one o’clock on that Saturday afternoon, the soldiers made contact with Colonel Voss, who arrived in a staff car with a woman in a civilian suit. They went up the ladder and examined the body in the hay. A thorough search was made, the barn was almost torn apart, but no sign was found of any written material, least of all a thick manual. But then, they did not know what they were looking for anyway.

A soldier pried a small silver flask from the dead man’s hand and passed it to Colonel Voss. He sniffed it and muttered, “Cyanide.” Major Vanavskaya took it and turned it over. On the back was written
HARRODS, LONDON.
She used a very unladylike expression. Although his command of Russian was basic, Colonel Voss thought it sounded like “You Motherfucker.”

At noon on Sunday, McCready entered Cologne airport, well in time for the one o’clock flight. He changed his Hanover-to-London ticket for a Cologne-London one, checked in, and wandered toward the steel luggage lockers to one side of the concourse. He took the steel key and inserted it into locker 47. Inside was a black canvas grip. He withdrew it.

“I think I will take the bag, thank you, Herr McCready.”

He turned. The Deputy Head of the Operations Directorate of the BND was standing ten feet away. Two large gentlemen hovered farther on. One studied his fingernails, the other the ceiling, as if looking for cracks.

“Why, Dr. Herrmann. How nice to see you again. And what brings you to Cologne?”

“The bag … if you please, Mr. McCready.”

It was handed over. Herrmann passed it to one of his team. He could afford to be genial.

“Come, Mr. McCready, we Germans are a hospitable people. Let me escort you to your plane. You would not wish to miss it.”

They walked toward passport control.

“A certain colleague of mine …” suggested Herrmann.

“He will not be coming back, Dr. Herrmann.”

“Ah, poor man. But just as well, perhaps.”

They arrived at passport control. Dr. Herrmann produced a card and flashed it at the immigration officers, and they were ushered through. When the flight boarded, McCready was escorted to the aircraft door.

“Mr. McCready.”

He turned in the doorway. Herrmann smiled at last.

“We also know how to listen to cross-border radio chitchat. Good journey, Mr. McCready. My regards to London.”

The news came to Langley a week later. General Pankratin had been transferred. In future, he would command a military detention complex of prison camps in Kazakhstan.

Claudia Stuart learned the news from her man in the Moscow Embassy. At the time, she was still basking in the plaudits that rained down from on high as the military analysts studied the complete Soviet Order of Battle. She was prepared to be philosophical about her Soviet general. As she remarked to Chris Appleyard in the commissary, “He keeps his skin and his rank. Better than the lead mines of Yakutsia. As for us—well, it’s cheaper than an apartment block in Santa Barbara.”

THE HEARING RESUMED
on the following morning, Tuesday. Timothy Edwards remained formal courtesy itself, while privately hoping the entire affair could be wound up with the minimum delay. He, like the two Controllers who flanked him, had work to do.

“Thank you for reminding us of the events of 1985,” he said, “though I feel one might point out that in intelligence terms, that year now constitutes a different and even a vanished age.”

Denis Gaunt was having none of it. He knew he was entitled to recall any episode he wished from the career of his desk chief in an attempt to persuade the board to recommend to the Chief a variation of decision. He also knew there was scant chance of Timothy Edwards making that recommendation, but it would be a majority choice at the end of the hearing, and it was to the two Controllers that he wished to appeal. He rose and crossed to the clerk from Records to ask him for another file.

Sam McCready was hot and becoming bored. Unlike Gaunt, he knew his chances were as slim as a dipstick. He had insisted on the hearing mainly out of contrariness. He leaned back and allowed his attention to wander. Whatever Denis Gaunt would say, he knew it already.

It had been so long, thirty years, that he had lived in the small world of Century House and the Secret Intelligence Service—just about all his working life. If he was ousted now, he wondered where he would go. He even wondered, not for the first time, how he had gotten into that strange, shadowed world in the first place. Nothing about his working-class birth could ever have predicted that one day he would be a senior officer of the SIS.