The Deceiver (3 page)

McCready moved out of the darkness to let the Russian see him, paused to establish that he too was alone, and went forward.

“Yevgeni. It’s been a long time, my friend.”

At five paces they could see each other clearly, establish that there had been no substitution, no trickery. That was always the danger in a face-to-face. The Russian might have been taken and then broken in the interrogation rooms, allowing the KGB and the East German SSD to set up a trap for a top British intelligence officer. Or the Russian’s message might have been intercepted, and it might be he was moving into the trap, thence to the long dark night of the interrogators and the final bullet in the nape of the neck. Mother Russia had no mercy for her traitorous elite.

McCready did not embrace or even shake hands. Some assets needed that: the personal touch, the comfort of contact. But Yevgeni Pankratin, Colonel of the Red Army, on attachment to the GSFG, was a cold one: aloof, self-contained, confident in his arrogance.

He had first been spotted in Moscow in 1980 by a sharp-eyed attaché at the British Embassy. It was a diplomatic function—polite, banal conversation, then the sudden tart remark by the Russian about his own society. The diplomat had given no sign, said nothing. But he had noted and reported. A possible. Two months later a first tentative approach had been made. Colonel Pankratin had been noncommital but had not rebuffed it. That ranked as positive. Then he had been posted to Potsdam, to the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, the GSFG, the 330,000-man, twenty-two-division army that kept the East Germans in thrall, the puppet Honecker in power, the West Berliners in fear, and NATO on the alert for a crushing break-out across the Central German Plain.

McCready had taken over; it was his patch. In 1981 he made his own approach, and Pankratin was recruited. No fuss, no outpourings of inner feelings to be listened to and agreed with—just a straight demand for money.

People betray the lands of their fathers for many reasons: resentment, ideology, lack of promotion, hatred of a single superior, shame for their bizarre sexual preferences, fear of being summoned home in disgrace. With Russians, it was usually a deep disillusionment with the corruption, the lies, and the nepotism they saw all around them. But Pankratin was the true mercenary—he just wanted money. One day he would come out, he said, but when he did, he intended to be rich. He had called the dawn meeting in East Berlin to raise the stakes.

Pankratin reached inside his trenchcoat and produced a bulky brown envelope, which he extended toward McCready. Without emotion he described what was inside the envelope as McCready secreted the package inside his duffle coat. Names, places, timings, divisional readiness, operational orders, movements, postings, weaponry upgrades. The key, of course, was what Pankratin had to say about the SS-20, the terrible Soviet mobile-launched medium-range missile, with each of its independently guided triple-nuke warheads targeted on a British or European city. According to Pankratin, they were moving into the forests of Saxony and Thuringia, closer to the border, able to range in an arc from Oslo through Dublin to Palermo. In the West huge columns of sincere, naive people were on the march behind socialist banners demanding that their own governments strip themselves of their defenses as a gesture of goodwill for peace.

“There is a price, of course,” said the Russian.

“Of course.”

“Two hundred thousand pounds sterling.”

“Agreed.” It had not been agreed, but McCready knew his government would find it somewhere.

“There is more. I understand I am being slated for promotion. To Major-General. And a transfer back to Moscow.”

“Congratulations. As what, Yevgeni?”

Pankratin paused to let it sink in. “Deputy Director, Joint Planning Staff, Defense Ministry.”

McCready was impressed. To have a man in the heart of 19 Frunze Street, Moscow, would be incomparable.

“And when I come out, I want an apartment block. In California. Deeds in my name. Santa Barbara, perhaps. I have heard it is beautiful there.”

“It is,” agreed McCready. “You wouldn’t like to settle in Britain? We would look after you.”

“No, I want the sun. Of California. And one million dollars, U.S., in my account there.”

“An apartment can be arranged,” said McCready. “And a million dollars—if the product is right.”

“Not an apartment, Sam. A block of apartments. To live off the rents.”

“Yevgeni, you are asking for between five and eight million American dollars. I don’t think my people have that kind of money, even for your product.”

The Russian’s teeth gleamed beneath his military moustache in a brief smile. “When I am in Moscow, the product I will bring you will be beyond your wildest expectations. You will find the money.”

“Let’s wait till you have your promotion first, Yevgeni. Then we will talk about an apartment block in California.”

They parted five minutes later, the Russian to return, in uniform, to his desk at Potsdam, the Englishman to slip back through the Wall to the stadium in West Berlin. He would be searched at Checkpoint Charlie. The package would cross the Wall by another safer but slower route. Only when it joined him in the West would he fly back to London.

October 1983

Bruno Morenz knocked on the door and entered in response to the jovial “
Herein
.” His superior was alone in the office, in his important revolving leather chair behind his important desk. He was delicately stirring his first cup of real coffee of the day in the bone china cup, deposited by the attentive Fräulein Keppel, the neat spinster who waited upon his every legitimate need.

Like Morenz, the Herr Direktor was of the generation that could recall the end of the war and the years thereafter, when Germans made do with chicory extract and only the American occupiers and occasionally the British could get hold of real coffee. No longer. Dieter Aust appreciated his Colombian coffee in the morning. He did not offer Morenz any.

Both men were nudging fifty, but there the similarity ended. Aust was short, plump, beautifully barbered and tailored, and the director of the entire Cologne Station. Morenz was taller, burly, gray-haired. But he stooped and appeared to shamble as he walked, chunky and untidy in his tweed suit. Moreover, he was a low-to-medium-rank civil servant who would never aspire to the title of Director, nor have his own important office with Fräulein Keppel to bring him Colombian coffee in bone china before he started the day’s work.

The scene of a senior man summoning a low-level staffer to his office for a talk was probably being enacted in many offices all over Germany that morning, but the area of employment of these two men would not have been mirrored in many other places. Nor indeed would the conversation that followed. For Dieter Aust was the Director of the Cologne outstation of the West German Secret Intelligence Service, the BND.

The BND is actually headquartered in a substantial walled compound just outside the small village of Pullach, some six miles south of Munich, on the River Isar in the south of Bavaria. This might seem an odd choice bearing in mind that the national capital since 1949 has been in Bonn, hundreds of miles away on the Rhine. The reason is historical. It was the Americans who, just after the war, set up a West German spy service to counteract the efforts of the new enemy, the USSR. They chose for the head of the new service the former wartime German spy chief Reinhard Gehlen, and at first it was simply known as the Gehlen Organization. The Americans wanted Gehlen within their own zone of occupation, which happened to be Bavaria and the south.

The Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, was then a fairly obscure politician. When the Allies founded the Federal German Republic in 1949, Adenauer, as its first Chancellor, established its unlikely capital in his hometown of Bonn, fifteen miles along the Rhine from Cologne. Almost every federal institution was encouraged to establish there, but Gehlen held out and the newly named BND remained at Pullach, where it sits to this day. But the BND maintains outstations in each of the
Land
or provincial capitals of the Federal Republic, and one of the most important of these is the Cologne Station. For although Cologne is not the capital city of North Rhine—Westphalia, which is Düsseldorf, it is the closest to Bonn, and as the capital of the republic, Bonn is the nerve center of government. It is also full of foreigners, and the BND is concerned with foreign intelligence.

Morenz accepted Aust’s invitation to sit, and he wondered what, if anything, he had done wrong. The answer was, nothing.

“My dear Morenz, I won’t beat about the bush.” Aust delicately wiped his lips on a fresh linen handkerchief. “Next week our colleague Dorn retires. You know, of course. His duties will be taken over by his successor. But he is a much younger man, going places—mark my words. There is, however, one duty that requires a man of more mature years. I would like you to take it over.”

Morenz nodded as if he understood. He did not. Aust steepled his plump fingers and gazed out the window, folding his features into an expression of regret at the vagaries of his fellow man. He chose his words carefully.

“Now and again, this country has visitors, foreign dignitaries, who, at the end of a day of negotiations or official meetings, feel in need of distraction … entertainment. Of course, our various ministries are happy to arrange visits to fine restaurants, the concert, the opera, the ballet. You understand?”

Morenz nodded again. It was as clear as mud.

“Unfortunately, there are some—usually from Arab countries or Africa, occasionally Europe—who indicate quite strongly that they would prefer to enjoy female company. Paid-for female company.”

“Call girls,” said Morenz.

“In a word, yes. Well, rather than have important foreign visitors accosting hotel porters or taxi drivers, or haunting the red-lit windows of the Hornstrasse or getting into trouble in bars and nightclubs, the government prefers to suggest a certain telephone number. Believe me, my dear Morenz, this is done in every capital of the world. We are no exception.”

“We run call girls?” asked Morenz.

Aust was shocked. “Run? Certainly not. We do not run them. We do not pay them. The client does that. Nor, I must stress, do we use any material we might get concerning the habits of some of our visiting dignitaries. The so-called ‘honey trap.’ Our constitutional rules and regulations are quite clear and not to be infringed. We leave honey traps to the Russians and”—he sniffed—“the French.”

He took three slim folders from his desk and handed them to Morenz.

“There are three girls. Different physical types. I am asking you to take this over because you are a mature married man. Just keep an avuncular, supervisory eye on them. Make sure they have regular medicals, keep themselves presentable. See if they are away, or unwell, or on holiday. In short, if they are available.

“Now, finally. You may on occasion be rung by a Herr Jakobsen. Never mind if the voice on the phone changes—it will always be Herr Jakobsen. According to the visitor’s tastes, which Jakobsen will tell you, choose one of the three, establish the time for a visit, and ensure that she is available. Jakobsen will ring you back for the time and place, which he will then pass on to the visitor. After that, we leave it up to the call girl and her client. Not a burdensome task, really. It should not interfere with your other duties.”

Morenz lumbered to his feet with the files. Great, he thought as he left the office. Thirty years’ loyal work for the Service, five years to retirement, and I get to baby-sitting hookers for foreigners who want a night on the town.

Early the following month, Sam McCready sat in a darkened room deep in the subbasement of Century House in London, headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS—usually miscalled by the press MI-6; referred to by insiders as “the Firm.” He was watching a flickering screen upon which the massed might (or a part of it) of the USSR rolled endlessly over Red Square. The Soviet Union likes to hold two vast parades each year in that square: one for May Day, and the other to celebrate the Great October Socialist Revolution. The latter is held on November 7, and today was the eighth. The camera left the vista of rumbling tanks and panned across the row effaces atop Lenin’s mausoleum.

“Slow down,” said McCready. The technician at his side moved a hand over the controls, and the pan-shot slowed. President Reagan’s “evil empire” (he would use the phrase later) looked more like a home for geriatrics. In the chill wind the sagging, aged faces had almost disappeared into the collars of their coats, whose upturned edges reached to meet the gray trilbies or fur
shapkas
above.

The General Secretary himself was not even there. Yuri V. Andropov, Chairman of the KGB from 1963 to 1978, who had taken the power in late 1982 following the too-long delayed death of Leonid Brezhnev, was himself dying by inches out at the Politburo Clinic at Kuntsevo. He had not been seen in public since the previous August, nor ever would he be again.

Chernenko (who would succeed Andropov in a few months) was up there, with Gromyko, Kirilenko, Tikhonov and the hatchet-faced Party theoretician Suslov. The Minister of Defense, Ustinov, was muffled in his marshal’s greatcoat with enough medals to act as a windbreak from chin to waist. There were a few young enough to be competent—Grishin, the Moscow Party Chief, and Romanov, the boss of Leningrad. To one side was the youngest of them all, still an outsider, a chunky man called Gorbachev.

The camera lifted to bring into focus the group of officers behind Marshal Ustinov.

“Hold it,” said McCready. The picture froze. “That one, third from the left. Can you enhance? Bring it closer?”

The technician studied his console and fine-tuned carefully. The group of officers came closer and closer. Some passed out of eyeshot. The one McCready had indicated was moving too far to the right. The technician ran back three or four frames until he was full center, and kept closing. The officer was half hidden by a full general of the Strategic Rocket Forces, but it was the moustache, unusual among Soviet officers, that clinched it. The shoulder boards on the greatcoat said Major-General.