But he, too, had been trained. Surveillance should never be avoided in an obvious way, he had learned, for that is a signal, to the other side, that you are up to something. Form regular habits, he had been told: go to Restaurant A every Monday, Bar B every Tuesday. Lull them into a false sense of security. But look for gaps in their watchfulness, times when their attention lapses. That will be when you can do something unobserved.
As he drove away from the U.S. embassy he saw a blue Skoda 105 tuck into the traffic two cars behind him.
The Skoda trailed him across the city. He saw Mario at the wheel and Ollie in the front passenger seat.
Cam parked in Alzacka Street and saw the blue Skoda pull up a hundred yards past him.
He was sometimes tempted to talk to Mario and Ollie, as they were so much part of his life, but he had been warned never to do that, for then the SB would switch personnel and it would take him time to recognize the new people.
He entered the Egyptian embassy and took a cocktail from a tray. It was so dilute he could hardly taste the gin. He talked to an Austrian diplomat about the difficulty of buying comfortable men's underwear in Warsaw. When the Austrian drifted away, Cam looked around and saw a blond woman in her twenties standing alone. She caught his eye and smiled, so he went to speak to her.
He swiftly found out that she was Polish, her name was Lidka, and she worked as a secretary in the Canadian embassy. She was wearing a tight pink sweater and a short black skirt that showed off her long legs. She spoke good English, and listened to Cam with an intensity of concentration that he found flattering.
Then a man in a pin-striped suit summoned her peremptorily, making Cam think he must be her boss, and the conversation broke up. Almost immediately Cam was approached by another attractive woman, and he began to think it was his lucky day. This one was older, about forty, but prettier, with short pale-blond hair and bright blue eyes enhanced by blue eye shadow. She spoke to him in Russian. "I've met you before," she said. "Your name is Cameron Dewar. I'm Tanya Dvorkin."
"I remember," he said, glad of the chance to show off his fluency in Russian. "You're a reporter for TASS."
"And you're a CIA agent."
He certainly would not have told her that, so she must have guessed. Routinely, he denied it. "Nothing so glamorous," he said. "Just a humble cultural attache."
"Cultural?" she said. "Then you can help me. What kind of painter is Jan Matejko?"
"I'm not sure," he said. "Impressionist, I think. Why?"
"Art really not your thing?"
"I'm more a music person," he said, feeling cornered.
"You probably love Szpilman, the Polish violinist."
"Absolutely. Such technique with the bow!"
"What do you think of the poet Wislawa Szymborska?"
"I haven't read much of his work, sadly. Is this a test?"
"Yes, and you failed. Szymborska is a woman. Szpilman is a pianist, not a violinist. Matejko was a conventional painter of court scenes and battles, not an impressionist. And you're no cultural attache."
Cam was mortified to have been found out so easily. What a hopeless undercover agent he was! He tried to brush it off with humor. "I might just be a very bad cultural attache."
She lowered her voice. "If a Polish army officer wanted to talk to a representative of the USA, you could arrange it, I guess."
Suddenly the conversation had taken a serious turn. Cam felt nervous. This could be some kind of trap.
Or it could be a genuine approach--in which case, it might represent a great opportunity for him.
He answered cautiously. "I can arrange for anyone to talk to the American government, naturally."
"In secret?"
What the hell was this? "Yes."
"Good," she said, and walked away.
Cam got another drink. What had that been about? Was it real, or had she been mocking him?
The party was coming to an end. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. He thought of going to the bar in the Australian embassy, where he sometimes played darts with amiable spooks from Oz. Then he saw Lidka standing nearby, again on her own. She really was very sexy. He said to her: "Do you have plans for dinner?"
She looked puzzled. "You mean recipes?"
He smiled. She had not come across the phrase plans for dinner. He said: "I meant, would you like to have dinner with me?"
"Oh, yes," she said immediately. "Could we go to the Duck?"
"Of course." It was an expensive restaurant, though not if you were paying in American dollars. He looked at his watch. "Shall we leave now?"
Lidka surveyed the room. There was no sign of the man in the pin-striped suit. "I'm free," she said.
They headed for the exit. As they were passing through the door the Soviet journalist, Tanya, reappeared and spoke to Lidka in bad Polish. "You dropped this," she said, holding out a red scarf.
"It's not mine," said Lidka.
"I saw it fall from your hand."
Someone touched Cam's elbow. He turned away from the confused conversation and saw a tall, good-looking man of about forty dressed in the uniform of a colonel in the People's Army of Poland. In fluent Russian the man said: "I want to talk to you."
Cam replied in the same language. "All right."
"I will find a safe place."
Cam could do nothing but say: "Okay."
"Tanya will tell you where and when."
"Fine."
The man turned away.
Cameron turned his attention back to Lidka. Tanya was saying: "My mistake, how silly." She walked quickly away. Clearly she had wanted to distract Lidka for the few moments the soldier was talking to Cam.
Lidka was puzzled. "That was a bit strange," she said as they left the building.
Cam was excited, but he pretended to be equally mystified. "Peculiar," he said.
Lidka persisted. "Who was that Polish officer who spoke to you?"
"No idea," Cam said. "My car's this way."
"Oh!" she said. "You have a car?"
"Yes."
"Nice," said Lidka, looking pleased.
*
A week later, Cam woke up in bed in Lidka's apartment.
It was more of a studio: one room with a bed, a TV, and a kitchen sink. She shared the shower and toilet down the hall with three other people.
For Cam, it was paradise.
He sat upright. She was standing at the counter making coffee--with his beans: she could not afford real coffee. She was naked. She turned and walked to the bed carrying a cup. She had wiry brown pubic hair and small pointed breasts with mulberry-dark nipples.
At first he had been embarrassed about her walking around naked, because it made him want to stare, which was rude. When he confessed this she had said: "Look all you want, I like it." He still felt bashful, but not as much as before.
He had seen Lidka every night for a week.
He had had sex with her seven times, which was more than in his entire life up to that point, not counting hand jobs in massage parlors.
One day she had asked if he wanted to do it again in the morning.
He had said: "What are you, a sex maniac?"
She had been offended, but they had made it up.
While she brushed her hair, he sipped his coffee and thought about the day ahead. He had not yet heard from Tanya Dvorkin. He had reported the exchanges at the Egyptian embassy to his boss, Keith Dorset, and they had agreed there was nothing to do but wait and see.
He had a bigger issue on his mind. He knew the expression honey trap. Only a fool would fail to wonder whether Lidka had an ulterior motive in going to bed with him. He had to consider the possibility that she was working under orders from the SB. He sighed and said: "I have to tell my boss about you."
"Do you?" She did not seem alarmed. "Why?"
"American diplomats are supposed to date only nationals of NATO countries. We call it the 'fuck NATO rule.' They don't want us falling in love with Communists." He had not tol
d her that he was a spy rather than a diplomat.
She sat on the bed beside him with a sad face. "Are you breaking up with me?"
"No, no!" The idea almost panicked him. "But I have to tell them, and they will check you out."
Now she looked worried. "What does that mean?"
"They'll investigate whether you could be an agent of the Polish secret police, or something."
She shrugged. "Oh, well, that's all right. They'll soon find out I'm nothing of the kind."
She seemed relaxed about it. "I'm sorry, but it has to be done," Cam said. "One-night stands don't matter, but we're obliged to report if it gets to be more than that, you know, a real loving relationship."
"Okay."
"We do have that, don't we?" Cam said nervously. "A real loving relationship?"
Lidka smiled. "Oh, yes," she said. "We do."
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The Franck family traveled to Hungary in two Trabant cars. They were going on holiday. Hungary was a popular summer destination for East Germans who could afford the petrol.
As far as they could tell, they were not followed.
They had booked their holiday through the tourist office of the East German government. They had half-expected to be refused visas, even though Hungary was a Soviet bloc country; but they had been pleasantly surprised. Hans Hoffmann had missed an opportunity to persecute them: perhaps he was busy.
They needed two cars because they were taking Karolin and her family. Werner and Carla were madly fond of their granddaughter, Alice, now sixteen. Lili loved Karolin, but not Karolin's husband, Odo. He was a good man, and he had got Lili her present job, as administrator of a church orphanage; but there was something forced about his affection for Karolin and Alice, as if loving them was a good deed. Lili thought a man's love should be a helpless passion, not a moral duty.
Karolin felt the same. She and Lili were close enough to share secrets, and Karolin had confessed that her marriage had been a mistake. She was not miserable with Odo, but nor was she in love with him. He was kind and gentle, but not sexy: they made love about once a month.
So the holiday group was six people. Werner, Carla, and Lili took the bronze car and Karolin, Odo, and Alice went in the white one.
It was a long drive, especially in a Trabi with a 600 cc two-stroke engine: six hundred miles all across Czechoslovakia. The first day took them to Prague, where they stayed overnight. When they left their hotel, on the morning of the second day, Werner said: "I'm pretty sure no one is following us. We seem to have got away with it."
They drove to Lake Balaton, fifty miles long, the largest lake in Central Europe. It was tantalizingly close to Austria, a free country. However, the entire border was fortified by one hundred fifty miles of electric fence, to prevent people escaping from the workers' paradise.
They pitched two tents side by side at a campsite on the southern shore.
They had a secret purpose: they were going to meet Rebecca.
It was Rebecca's idea. She had spent a year of her life looking after Walli, and he had succeeded in giving up drugs. He now had his own apartment near Rebecca's in Hamburg. In order to care for him, she had turned down a chance to stand for the Bundestag, the national parliament; but when he got well the offer had been renewed. Now she was an elected member, specializing in foreign policy. She had traveled to Hungary on an official trip, and seen that Hungary was deliberately attracting Western holidaymakers: tourism and cheap Riesling were the country's only means of earning foreign currency and reducing its massive trade deficit. The Westerners went to special, segregated holiday camps, but outside the camps there was nothing to stop fraternization.
So there was no law against what the Francks were doing. Their trip was permitted, and so was Rebecca's. Like them, she was coming to Hungary for a budget holiday. They would rendezvous as if by accident.
But the law was merely cosmetic in Communist countries. The Francks knew there would be terrible trouble if the secret police found out what they were up to. So Rebecca had arranged everything clandestinely, through Enok Andersen, the Danish accountant who still frequently crossed the border from West Berlin to East to see Werner. Nothing had been written down and there were no phone calls. Their greatest fear was that Rebecca would somehow be arrested--or even just kidnapped by the Stasi--and taken to a prison in East Germany. It would be a diplomatic incident, but the Stasi might do it anyway.
Rebecca's husband, Bernd, was not coming. His condition had deteriorated and his kidneys were malfunctioning. He was working only part-time, and could not travel far.
Werner straightened up from hammering in a tent peg to say quietly to Lili: "Take a look around. They didn't follow us here, but maybe they felt they didn't need to, because they had sent people on ahead."
Lili strolled around the site as if exploring. The campers at Lake Balaton were cheerful and friendly. As an attractive young woman, Lili was greeted and offered coffee or beer and snacks. Most tents were occupied by families, but there were some groups of men and a few of girls. No doubt the singles would find one another over the next few days.
Lili was single. She liked sex and had had several love affairs--including one with a woman, which her family did not know about. She had the same maternal instincts as other women, she supposed, and she adored Walli's child, Alice. But Lili was put off the idea of having children of her own by the dismal prospect of raising them in East Germany.
She had been refused a place at university, because of her family's politics, so she had trained as a nursery nurse. She would never have been promoted if the authorities had had their way, but Odo had helped her get a job with the church, where hiring was not controlled by the Communist Party.
However, her real work was music. Along with Karolin, she continued to sing and play guitar in small bars and youth clubs, often in church halls. Their songs protested against industrial pollution, destruction of ancient buildings and monuments, clearing of natural forests, and ugly architecture. The government hated them, and they had both been arrested and cautioned for spreading propaganda. However, the Communists could not actually be in favor of poisoning rivers with factory effluent, so they found it difficult to take drastic action against environmentalists, and in fact usually tried to co-opt them into the toothless official Society for Nature and Environmental Protection.
In the USA, Lili's father said, conservatives accused environment campaigners of being antibusiness. It was more difficult for Soviet bloc conservatives to accuse them of being anti-Communist. After all, the whole point of Communism was to make industry work for the people rather than for the bosses.
One night Lili and Karolin had sneaked into a recording studio and made an album. It was not officially released, but cassette tapes of it in unmarked boxes had sold by the thousand.
Lili made a circuit of the campsite, which was occupied almost exclusively by East Germans: the camp for Westerners was a mile away. As she was returning to her family she noticed, outside a tent close to theirs, two men of about her own age drinking beer. One had receding fair hair, the other was dark with a Beatle haircut fifteen years out of date. The fair one met her eye and looked quickly away, which aroused her suspicion: young men did not generally avoid her eye. These two did not offer her a drink or ask her to join them. "Oh, no," she muttered.
Stasi men were not hard to spot. They were brutal, not smart. It was a career for people who craved prestige and power but had little intelligence and no talents. Rebecca's first husband, Hans, was typical. He was little more than a nasty bully, but he had risen steadily and now seemed to be one of their top commanders, driving around in a limousine and living in a large villa surrounded by a high wall.
Lili was reluctant to call attention to herself, but she decided she needed to verify her suspicion, so she had to be brazen. "Hello, guys!" she said amiably.
Both men grunted a perfunctory greeting.
Lili was not going to let them off easily. "Are you here with your
wives?" she said. They could hardly fail to recognize that as a come-on.
The fair one shook his head and the other just said: "No." They were not clever enough to pretend.
"Really?" This was almost confirmation enough, she thought. What were two single men doing at a holiday camp if not looking for girls? And they were too badly dressed to be homosexual. "Tell me," said Lili, forcing a bright tone, "where do you go for a good time in the evenings here? Is there anywhere to dance?"
"I don't know."
That was enough. If these two are on holiday, I'm Mrs. Brezhnev, she thought. She walked away.
This was a problem. How could the Francks meet Rebecca without the Stasi men finding out?
Lili returned to her family. Both tents were now up. "Bad news," she told her father. "Two Stasi men. One row south and three tents east of us."
"I was afraid of that," said Werner.
*
They were to meet Rebecca two days later at a restaurant she had visited on her first trip. But before going there the Francks would have to shake off the secret police. Lili was worried, but her parents seemed unreasonably calm.
On the first day, Werner and Carla left early in the bronze Trabi, saying they were going to reconnoiter. The Stasi men followed them in a green Skoda. Werner and Carla were out all day and returned looking confident.
Next morning, Werner told Lili he was taking her for a hike. They stood outside the tent with rucksacks, helping each other adjust them. They put on stout boots and wide-brimmed hats. It was clear to anyone who looked that they were setting out for a long walk.
At the same time, Carla prepared to depart with shopping bags, making a list and saying loudly: "Ham, cheese, bread . . . anything else?"
Lili worried that they were being too obvious.
They were watched by the secret policemen, who were sitting outside their tent, smoking.
They set off in opposite directions, Carla heading for the car park, Lili and Werner for the beach. The Stasi agent with the Beatle haircut went after Carla, and the fair one followed Werner and Lili.
"So far, so good," said Werner. "We've split them."
When Lili and Werner got to the lake Werner turned west, following the shoreline. He had obviously scouted this the day before. The ground was intermittently rough. The fair-haired Stasi agent followed them at a distance, not without difficulty: he was not dressed for hiking. Sometimes they paused, pretending they needed a rest, to let him catch up.