The Deceiver

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 immigr
ation 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.”

  Interlude

  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.

  He had been born in the spring of 1939, the same year the second World War broke out, the son of a milkman in south London. Only vaguely, in one or two frozen flashback memories, could he recall his father.

  As a baby, along with his mother, he had been evacuated from London after the fall of France in 1940, when the Luftwaffe began its long hot summer of raids on the British capital. He remembered none of it. His mother told him later that they had returned in the autumn of 1940 to the small terraced house in poor but neat Norbury Street, but by then his father had gone to the war.

  There was a picture of his parents on their wedding day—he remembered that very clearly. She was in white, with a posy, and the big man beside her was very stiff and proper in a dark suit with a carnation in his buttonhole. It stood on the mantle shelf above the fireplace, in a silver frame, and she polished it every day. Later, another picture took its place at the other end of the shelf, of a big smiling man in uniform with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.

  His mother went out every day, leaving him in the care of Auntie Vi, who ran the sweet shop down the road. She caught the bus to Croydon, where she scrubbed the steps and hallways of the prosperous middle-class people who lived there. She took in washing, too; he could just recall how the tiny kitchen was always full of steam as she worked through the night to have it ready by morning.

  Once—it must have been 1944—the big smiling man came home and picked him up and held him high in the air as he squealed. Then he went away again to join the forces landing on the Normandy beaches and to die in the assault on Caen. Sam remembered his mother crying a lot that summer, and that he tried to say something to her but did not know what to say, so he just cried as well, even though he did not really know why.

  The next January, he started at a play school. He thought that was a pity because Auntie Vi used to let him lick his finger and dip it into the sherbet jar. It was the same spring that the German V-1 rockets, the doodlebugs, began to rain down on London, launched from their ramps in the Low Countries.

  He remembered very clearly the day, just before his sixth birthday, when the man in the air raid warden’s uniform had come to the play school, his tin hat on his head and his gas mask swinging at his side.

  There had been an air raid, and the children had spent the morning in the cellar, which was much more fun than lessons. After the all-clear sounded, they had gone back to class.

  The man had a whispered conversation with the headmistress, and she took him out of class and led him by the hand to her own parlor behind the schoolroom, where she fed him seed cake. He waited there, very small and bewildered, until the nice man from Dr. Barnardo’s came to take him away to the orphanage. Later they told him there was no more silver-framed picture and no more photo of the big smiling man with the sergeant’s stripes.

  He did well at Barnardo’s and passed all his exams, and he left to join the army as a boy soldier. When he was eighteen, they posted him to Malaya, where the undeclared war was going on between the British and the Communist terrorists in the jungle. He was seconded to the Intelligence Corps as a clerk.

  One day he went to his Colonel and made a suggestion. The Colonel, a career officer, promptly said, “Put it in writing,” so he did.

  The counterintelligence people had captured a leading terrorist with the help of some local Malay Chinese. McCready proposed that information be leaked through the Chinese community that the man was singing like a canary and was to be moved down from Ipoh to Singapore in a convoy on a certain day.

  When the terrorists attacked the convoy, the van turned out to be armored inside and to contain slits hiding machine guns on tripods. When the ambush was over, there were sixteen Communist Chinese dead in the bush, twelve more badly injured, and the Malay Scouts cleaned up the rest. Sam McCready remained at his duties in Kuala Lumpur for another year, then left the army and returned to England. The proposal he had written for his Colonel was certainly filed away, but someone somewhere must have seen it.

  He was waiting in line at the Labour Exchange—they did not call them Job Centers in those days—when he felt a tap on his arm, and a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket and brown trilby suggested he come to the nearby pub for a drink. Two weeks and three more interviews later, he was recruited into the Firm. Since then, for thirty years, the Firm had constituted the only family he had ever had.

  He heard his name mentioned and snapped out of his reverie. Might as well pay attention, he reminded himself; it’s my career they’re talking about.

  It was Denis Gaunt, with a bulky file in his hands.

  “I think, gentlemen, we might with advantage consider a series of events in 1986 that alone might justify a reconsideration in the case of the early retirement of Sam McCready. Events that started, at least as far as we are concerned, on a spring morning on Salisbury Plain. ...”

  The Price Of The Bride

  Chapter 1

  There was still a hint of fog hanging, away to their right, over the stretch of woodland known as Fox Covert, presaging a warm clear day to come.

  On the knoll that dominated the rolling stretch of ground known to generations of soldiers as Frog Hill, the group of mixed military officers took their station to observe the forthcoming army maneuvers that would simulate a battle at battalion strength between two matched sets of opponents. Both groups would be British soldiers, divided for the sake of diplomacy not into “the Brits” and “the enemy” but into the Blues and the Greens. Even the usu
al designation of one group as “the Reds” had been changed, in deference to the composition of the officers on the knoll.

  Across the stretch of open country at the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, so beloved by the British Army as a perfect maneuver ground much resembling the Central German Plain, over which it had been assumed the Third World War might have to be fought, umpires were scattered who would award points that would eventually decide the outcome of the battle. Men would not die that day; they would just prepare to.

  Behind the officer group were the vehicles that had brought them there: several staff cars and a greater number of less comfortable Land-Rovers in camouflage stripes or dull green. Orderlies from the Catering Corps set up field kitchens to provide the succession of mugs of steaming tea and coffee that would be demanded throughout the day and began to unpack a cold collation of snacks.

  The officers milled about or stood stationary in the poses and activities of observing officers anywhere in the world. Some studied maps protected by plastic sheeting, on which notations in chinagraph pencils would later be made and erased. Others studied the distant terrain through powerful field glasses. Others conferred gravely among each other.

  At the center of the group was the senior British general, the commanding officer of Southern Command. Beside him stood his personal guest, the senior ranking general of the visitors. Between and slightly behind them stood a bright young Subaltern fresh out of language school, who murmured a running translation into the ears of both men.

  The British group of officers was the larger, just over thirty men. They all wore an air of gravity, as if well aware of both the unusualness and the importance of the occasion. They also seemed somewhat wary, as if unable quite to shake off the habit of years. For this was the first year of perestroika, and although Soviet officers had been invited to watch British maneuvers in Germany, this was the first time they had come to the heart of England as guests of the British Army. Old habits die hard.