The Deceiver

  The crash was not even his fault. South of Jena, in the suburb of Stadtroda, when he was driving between the huge and hideous apartment blocks of the housing estate, a Trabant came bucketing out of a side road. He nearly stopped in time, but his reflexes were poor. The much-stronger BMW crunched the rear of the East German mini.

  Morenz began to panic almost at once. Was it a trap? Was the Trabant driver really the SSD? The man climbed out of his car, stared at his crushed rear, and stormed up to the BMW. He had a pinched, mean face and angry eyes.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “Damned Westerners, think you can drive like maniacs!”

  He had the small round badge of the Socialist Unity Party in his jacket lapel. The Communists. A Party member. Morenz jammed his left arm tight to his body to hold the manual in place, climbed out, and reached for a wad of Marks. Ostmarks, of course; he couldn’t offer Deutschmarks—that was another offense. People began to stroll toward the scene.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll pay for the damage. This must be more than enough. But I really am very late.”

  The angry East German looked at the money. It really was a very large wad.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “I had to wait four years for this car.”

  “It’ll repair,” said another man standing nearby.

  “No, it damn well won’t,” said the aggrieved one. “It’ll have to go back to the factory.”

  The crowd now numbered twenty. Life was boring on an industrial housing estate, and a BMW was worth looking at. That was when the police car arrived. Routine patrol, but Morenz began to shake. The policemen got out. One looked at the damage.

  “It can be fixed,” he said. “Do you want to prefer charges?”

  The Trabant driver was backing off. “Well ...”

  The other policeman approached Morenz. “Ausweis, bitte,” he said. Morenz used his right hand to bring out his passport. The hand was trembling. The cop looked at the hand, the bleary eyes, the unshaven chin.

  “You’ve been drinking,” he said. He sniffed and confirmed it. “Right. Down to the station. Come on, into the car.”

  He began to hustle Morenz toward the police car, whose engine was still running. The driver’s door was open. That was when Bruno Morenz finally disintegrated. He still had the manual under his arm. At the police station it would be found anyway. He swung his one free arm violently back, hit the policeman under his nose, breaking it, and knocked the man down. Then he leaped into the police car, slammed it into gear, and drove off. He was facing the wrong way, north toward Jena.

  The other policeman, stunned, managed to fire off four shots from his sidearm. Three missed. The VOPO car, swerving wildly, disappeared around a corner. It was leaking gasoline from the fourth bullet, which had drilled a hole in the tank.

  Chapter 4

  The two VOPOs were so stunned by what had happened that they reacted slowly. Nothing in their training or previous experience as People’s Police had accustomed them to this kind of civil disobedience. They had been publicly assaulted and humiliated in front of a crowd of people, and they were beside themselves with rage. A fair amount of shouting took place before they worked out what to do.

  The uninjured officer left his broken-nosed colleague on the scene while he headed back to the police station. They had no personal communicators because they were accustomed to using the car radio to report to HQ. Appeals to the crowd for a telephone had met with shrugs. Working-class people did not have telephones in the GDR.

  The Party member with the battered Trabant asked if he could leave and was promptly arrested at gunpoint by Broken Nose, who was prepared to believe that anyone could have been part of the conspiracy.

  His colleague, marching up the road toward Jena, saw a Wartburg coming toward him, flagged it down (also at gunpoint), and ordered the driver to take him straight to the police station in central Jena. A mile farther on, they saw a police patrol car coming toward them. The VOPO in the civilian Wartburg frantically waved his colleagues to a stop and explained what had happened. Using the patrol car’s radio, they checked in, explained the nature of the several crimes that had been committed, and were told to report immediately to police HQ. Meanwhile, backup prowl cars were sent to the crash scene.

  The call to Jena Central was logged at 12:35. It was also logged many miles away, high in the Harz Mountains on the other side of the border by a British listening post code-named Archimedes.

  At one P.M. Dr. Lothar Herrmann, back at his desk in Pullach, lifted his phone and took the awaited call from the BND ballistics laboratory in a neighboring building. The lab was situated adjacent to the armory and firing range. It had the shrewd practice, when issuing a sidearm to an operative, not simply to note the serial number of the gun and get it signed for, but to fire two rounds into a sealed chamber, then to retrieve and keep the slugs.

  In a perfect world, the technician would have preferred the actual bullets from the cadavers in Cologne, but he made do with the photographs. All rifle barrels are different from one another in minute respects, and when firing a bullet, each barrel leaves miniscule scratches, called lands, on the discharged slug. They are like fingerprints. The technician had compared the lands on the two sample slugs he still retained from a Walther PPK issued ten years ago with the photographs he had been given and about whose origin he had no idea at all.

  “A perfect match? I see. Thank you,” said Dr. Herrmann. He called the fingerprint section—the BND keeps a full set of prints of its own staffers, apart from others who come to its attention—and received the same reply. He exhaled deeply and reached for the phone again. There was nothing for it; this had to go to the Director General himself.

  What followed was one of the most difficult interviews of Dr. Herrmann’s career. The DG was obsessive about the efficiency of his agency and its image, both in the corridors of power in Bonn and within the Western intelligence community. The news Herrmann brought was like a body blow to him. He toyed with the idea of “losing” the sample slugs and Morenz’s fingerprints but quickly dismissed the idea. Morenz would be caught by the police sooner or later, the lab technicians would be subpoenaed—it would only make the scandal worse.

  The BND in Germany is answerable only to the Chancellor’s Office, and the DG knew that sooner or later, and probably sooner, he would have to take news of the scandal there. He did not relish the prospect.

  “Find him,” he ordered Herrmann. “Find him quickly, and get those tapes back.” As Herrmann turned to leave, the DG, who spoke English fluently, added another remark.

  “Dr. Herrmann, the English have a saying that I recommend to you. ‘Thou shall not kill, yet need not strive/officiously to keep alive.’ ”

  He had given the rhyming quotation in English. Dr. Herrmann understood it but was puzzled by the word officiously. Back in his office, he consulted a dictionary and decided the word unnötig—unnecessarily—was probably the best translation. In a lifetime’s career in the BND, it was the broadest hint he had ever been given. He rang the central registry in the Personnel Office.

  “Send me the curriculum vitae of one of our staff officers, Bruno Morenz,” he ordered.

  At two o’clock Sam McCready was still on the hillside where he and Johnson had been since seven. Though he suspected the first meet outside Weimar had aborted, one never knew; Morenz could have motored over at dawn. But he hadn’t. Again, McCready ran through his timings: rendezvous at twelve, departure twelve-ten, an hour and three-quarters driving—Morenz should be appearing at almost any time. He raised his binoculars again to the distant road across the border.

  Johnson was reading a local newspaper he had bought at the Frankenwald service station when his phone trilled discreetly. He picked it up, listened, and offered the handset to McCready.

  “GCHQ,” he said. “They want to speak to you.”

  It was a friend of McCready, speaking from Cheltenham.

  “Look, Sam,” said
the voice, “I think I know where you are. There’s been a lot of radio traffic suddenly broken out not far from you. Perhaps you should call Archimedes. They have more than we do.”

  The line went dead.

  “Get me Archimedes,” McCready said to Johnson. “Duty officer, East German Section.” Johnson began to punch in the numbers.

  In the mid-1950s the British government, acting through the British Army of the Rhine, had bought a dilapidated old castle high in the Harz Mountains, not far from the pretty and historic little town of Goslar. The Harz are a range of densely wooded uplands through which the East German border ran in twisting curves, sometimes across the flank of a hill, sometimes along a rocky ravine. It was a favorite area for potential East German escapers to try their luck.

  Schloss Löwenstein had been refurbished by the British, ostensibly as a retreat for military bands to practice their art. This ruse was maintained by the continuous sounds of band practice issuing from the castle with the aid of tape recorders and amplifiers. But in repairing the roof, engineers from Cheltenham had installed some very sophisticated antennae, upgraded with better technology through the years. Although local German dignitaries were occasionally invited to a real concert of chamber and military music by a band flown in for the occasion, Löwenstein was really an out-station of Cheltenham, code-named Archimedes. Its job was to listen to the endless babble of East German and Russian radio chit-chat from across the border. Hence the value of the mountains; the height gave perfect reception.

  “Yes, we’ve just passed it down the line to Cheltenham,” said the duty officer when McCready had established his credentials. “They said you might call direct.”

  He talked for several minutes, and when McCready put the phone down, he was pale.

  “The police in Jena District are going apeshit,” he told Johnson. “Apparently there’s been a crash outside Jena. Southern side. A West German car, make unknown, hit a Trabant. The West German slugged one of the VOPOs who attended the crash and drove off—in the VOPO car, of all things. Of course, it might not be our man.”

  Johnson looked sympathetic, but he no more believed it than McCready.

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  McCready sat on the tailgate of the Range Rover, his head in his hands.

  “We wait,” he said. “There’s nothing else we can do. Archimedes will call back if more comes through.”

  At that hour the black BMW was being driven into the compound of the Jena police headquarters. No one was thinking of fingerprints—they knew who they wanted to arrest. The VOPO with the damaged nose had been patched up and was making a long statement, his colleague likewise. The Trabant driver was being detained and questioned, as were a dozen onlookers. On the desk of the precinct commandant lay the passport in the name of Hans Grauber, picked up from the street where the broken-nosed VOPO had dropped it. Other detectives were going through every item in the attaché case and overnight bag. The foreign sales director of Zeiss was brought in, protesting that he had never heard of Hans Grauber, but yes, he had done business in the past with BKI of Würzburg. When confronted with his forged signature on the introduction letters, he claimed it looked like his signature but could not be. His nightmare was just beginning.

  Because the passport was West German, the People’s Police Commandant made a routine call to the local SSD office. Ten minutes later they were back. We want that car taken on a low-loader to our main garage in Erfurt, they said. Stop putting fingerprints all over it. Also, deliver all items retrieved from the car to us. And copies of all statements from witnesses. Now.

  The VOPO colonel knew who was really in charge. When the Stasi gave an order, you obeyed. The black BMW arrived at the SSD main garage in Erfurt on its trailer at four-thirty and the secret police mechanics went to work. The VOPO colonel had to admit the SSD was right. Nothing made sense. The West German would probably have faced a hefty fine for drunk-driving—East Germany always needed the hard currency. Now he faced years in prison. Why had he run? Anyway, whatever the Stasi wanted with the car, his job was to find the man. He ordered every police car and foot patrol for miles around to keep an eye open for Grauber and the stolen police car. The description of both was passed by radio to all units—up to Apolda north of Jena and west to Weimar. No press appeals were made for assistance from the general public. Public help for the police in a police state is a rare luxury. But all the frantic radio traffic was heard by Archimedes.

  At four P.M., Dr. Herrmann called Dieter Aust in Cologne. He did not tell him the result of the lab tests, or even what he had received the previous night from Johann Prinz. Aust had no need to know.

  “I want you to interview Frau Morenz personally,” he said. “You have a woman operative with her? Good, keep her there. If the police come to interview Frau Morenz, do not impede, but let me know. Try and get from her any clue as to where he might go, any vacation home, any girlfriend’s apartment, any relative’s house—anything at all. Use your entire staff to follow up any lead she gives you. Report back anything to me.”

  “He hasn’t got any relatives in Germany,” said Aust, who had already been through Morenz’s past life as revealed in the personnel files, “other than his wife, son, and daughter. I believe his daughter is a hippie, lives in a squat in Düsseldorf. I’ll have it visited, just in case.”

  “Do that,” said Herrmann, and he put down the phone. Based on something he had seen in Morenz’s file, he then sent a blitz-category-coded signal to Wolfgang Fietzau, the BND agent on the staff of the German Embassy, Belgrave Square, London.

  At five o’clock, the phone set on the tailgate of the Range Rover trilled. McCready picked it up. He thought it would be London or Archimedes. The voice was thin, tinny, as if the speaker were choking.

  “Sam? Is that you Sam?”

  McCready stiffened. “Yes,” he snapped, “it’s me.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I’m so sorry. I messed it up.”

  “Are you okay?” said McCready urgently. Morenz was wasting vital seconds.

  “ ’Kay. Yeah, k as in kaput. I’m finished, Sam. I didn’t mean to kill her. I loved her, Sam. I loved her.”

  McCready slammed down the phone, severing the connection. No one could make a phone call to the West from an East German phone booth. All contact was forbidden by the East Germans. But the SIS maintained a safe house in the Leipzig area, occupied by an East German agent-in-place who worked for London. A call to that number, dialed from inside East Germany, would run through pass-on equipment that would throw the call up to a satellite and back into the West.

  But calls had to be four seconds long, no more, to prevent the East Germans triangulating onto the source of the call and locating the safe house. Morenz had babbled on for nine seconds. Although McCready could not know it, the SSD listening watch had already got as far as the Leipzig area when the connection was severed. Another six seconds, and they would have had the safe house and its occupant. Morenz had been told to use the number only in dire emergency and very briefly.

  “He’s cracked up,” said Johnson. “Gone to pieces.”

  “For Christ’s sake, he was crying like a child,” snapped McCready. “He’s had a complete nervous breakdown. Tell me something I don’t know. What the hell did he mean—‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’ ”

  Johnson was pensive. “He comes from Cologne?”

  “You know that.”

  Actually, Johnson did not know that. He only knew he had picked up McCready from the Cologne airport Holiday Inn. He had never seen Poltergeist. No need to. He took the local newspaper and pointed out the second lead story on the front page. It was Guenther Braun’s story from his Cologne newspaper, picked up and reprinted by the Nordbayerischer Kurier, the north Bavarian paper printed in Bayreuth. The story was datelined Cologne and the headline read, CALL GIRL/PIMP SLAUGHTERED IN LOVE-NEST SHOOT-OUT. McCready read it, put it down, and stared across toward the north.

  “Oh, Bruno, my poor friend. What the hell have
you done?”

  Five minutes later Archimedes phoned.

  “We heard that,” said the duty officer. “So, I imagine, did everyone else. I’m sorry. He’s gone, hasn’t he?”

  “What’s the latest?” asked Sam.

  “They are using the name Hans Grauber,” said Archimedes. “There’s an all-points watch out for him all over southern Thuringia. Drink, assault, and theft of a police car. The car he drove was a black BMW, right? They’ve taken it to the SSD main garage at Erfurt. Seems all the rest of his gear has been impounded and handed over to the Stasi.”

  “What time exactly was the crash?” asked Sam.

  The duty officer conferred with someone.

  “The first call to the Jena police was from a passing patrol car. The speaker was apparently the VOPO who had not been punched. He used the phrase ‘five minutes ago.’ Logged at twelve thirty-five.”

  “Thank you,” said McCready.

  At eight o’clock in the Erfurt garage, one of the mechanics found the cavity beneath the battery. Around him three other mechanics labored over what remained of the BMW. Its seats and upholstery were all over the floor, its wheels off and its tires inside-out. Only the frame remained, and it was there that the cavity was discovered. The mechanic called over a man in civilian clothes, a major of the SSD. They both examined the cavity, and the major nodded.