The Deceiver Read online

  Sam McCready sat on the tailgate of the Range Rover in warm sunshine high above the Saale River and sipped coffee from a flask. Johnson put down his handset. He had been speaking to Cheltenham, the huge national listening station in the west of England.

  “Nothing,” he said. “All normal. No extra radio traffic in any sector—Russian, SSD, or People’s Police. Just routine.”

  McCready checked his watch. Ten to four. Bruno should be moving toward the lay-by west of Weimar about now. He had told him to be five minutes early and allow no more than twenty-five minutes if Smolensk failed to show up. That would count as an abort. He kept calm in front of Johnson, but he hated the waiting. It was always the worst part, waiting for an agent across the border. The imagination played tricks, creating a whole range of things that could have happened to him but probably had not. For the hundredth time, he calculated the schedule. Five minutes at the lay-by; the Russian hands it over; ten minutes to let the Russian get away. Four-fifteen departure. Five minutes to switch the manual from inside his jacket to the compartment under the battery; one hour and forty-five minutes of driving—he should be coming into view about six ... another cup of coffee.

  The Police President of Cologne, Arnim von Starnberg, listened gravely to the young commissar’s report. He was flanked by Hart wig of the Murder Squad and Horst Fraenkel, Director of the whole Kriminalamt. Both senior officers had felt it right to come straight to him. When he heard the details, he agreed they were correct. This thing was not only bigger than a murder; it was bigger than Cologne. He already intended to take it higher. The young Schiller finished.

  “You will remain completely silent about this, Heir Schiller,” said von Starnberg. “You and your colleague, Assistant Commissar Wiechert. Your careers depend on it, you understand?” He turned to Hartwig. “The same applies to those two fingerprint men who saw the camera room.”

  He dismissed Schiller and turned to the other detectives.

  “How far exactly have you got?”

  Fraenkel nodded to Hartwig, who produced a number of large high-definition photographs.

  “Well, Herr President, we now have the bullets that killed the call girl and her friend. We need to find the gun that fired those bullets.” He tapped two photographs. “Just two bullets, one in each body. Second, the fingerprints. There were three sets in the camera room. Two came from the call girl and her pimp. We believe the third set must belong to the killer. We also believe it was he who stole the twenty missing cassettes.”

  None of the three men could know there were actually twenty-one missing cassettes. Morenz had thrown the twenty-first, the one of himself, into the Rhine on Friday evening. He was not listed in the notebook because he had never been a major blackmail prospect—just fun.

  “Where are the other sixty-one tapes?” asked von Starnberg.

  “In my personal safe,” said Fraenkel.

  “Please have them brought straight up here. No one must view them.”

  When he was alone, President von Starnberg began telephoning. That afternoon, the responsibility for the affair went up the official hierarchy faster than a monkey up a tree. Cologne passed the affair to the Provincial Kriminalamt in the provincial capital, Düsseldorf. That office passed it at once to the Federal Kriminalamt in Wiesbaden. Guarded limousines with the sixty-one tapes and the notebook sped from city to city. At Wiesbaden, it stopped for a while as senior civil servants worked out how to tell the Justice Minister in Bonn—he was the next up the ladder. By this time all sixty-one sexual athletes had been identified. Half were merely wealthy; the other half were both rich and firmly Establishment figures. Worse, six senators and parliamentarians of the ruling party were involved, plus two from the other parties, two senior civil servants, and an army general. That was only the Germans. There were two foreign diplomats based in Bonn (one from a NATO ally), two foreign politicians who had been visiting, and a White House staffer close to Ronald Reagan.

  But even worse was the now-identified list of the twenty whose recorded frolics were missing. They included a senior member of the West German ruling party parliamentary caucus, another parliamentarian (federal), a judge (appeals court), another senior armed forces officer (air force, this time), the beer magnate spotted by Hartwig, and a rising junior minister. That was apart from some of the proud cream of commerce and industry.

  “Naughty businessmen can be laughed off,” commented a senior defective in the Federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden. “If they are ruined, it’s their own fault. But this bitch specialized in the Establishment.”

  In the later afternoon, simply for procedural reasons, the country’s internal security service, the BfV, was informed. Not of all the names, just the history of the investigation and its state of progress. Ironically, the BfV is headquartered in Cologne, back where it all started. The interdepartmental memorandum on the case landed on the desk of a senior officer in counterintelligence called Johann Prinz.

  * * *

  Bruno Morenz rolled slowly west along Highway Seven. He was four miles west of Weimar and one mile from the big white-walled Soviet barracks at Nohra. He came to a curve, and there was the lay-by, just where McCready had said it would be. He checked his watch; eight minutes to four. The road was empty. He slowed and pulled into the lay-by.

  According to instructions, he climbed out, released the trunk, and removed the toolkit. This he opened and laid beside the front offside wheel, where it would be visible to a passerby. Then he flicked the catch and raised the hood. His stomach began to churn. There were bushes and trees behind the lay-by and across the road. In his mind’s eye he saw crouching agents from the SSD waiting to make a double arrest. His mouth was dry, but the sweat ran in rivulets down his back. His fragile reserve was close to snapping like an overstretched rubber band.

  He took a wrench, the right size for the job, and bent his head inside the engine bay. McCready had showed him how to loosen the nut connecting the water pipe to the radiator. A trickle of water escaped. He changed the wrench for one clearly the wrong size and tried vainly to tighten the nut again.

  The minutes ticked by. Inside the engine bay he tinkered vainly away. He glanced at his watch. Six minutes past four. Where the hell are you? he asked. Almost at once there was a slight crunch of gravel under wheels as a vehicle came to a halt. He kept his head down. The Russian would come up to him and say in his accented German, “If you are having trouble, perhaps I have a better set of tools,” and offer him the flat wooden toolbox from the jeep. The Soviet Army War Book would be under the wrenches in a red plastic cover.

  The dropping sun was blocked by the shadow of someone approaching. Boots crunched on gravel. The man was beside and behind him. He said nothing. Morenz straightened. An East German police car was parked five yards away. One green-uniformed policeman stood by the open driver’s door. The other was beside Morenz, gazing down into the BMW’s open engine bay.

  Morenz wanted to vomit. His stomach pumped out acid. He felt his knees becoming weak. He tried to straighten up and nearly stumbled.

  The policeman met his gaze. “Was ist los?” he asked.

  Of course it was a ploy, a courtesy to mask the triumph. The inquiry if anything was wrong was to precede the screams and shouts and the arrest. Morenz’s tongue felt as if it were stuck to the roof of his mouth.

  “I thought I was losing water,” he said. The policeman put his head into the engine bay and studied the radiator. He removed the wrench from Morenz’s hand, stooped, and came up with another one.

  “This one will fit,” he said. Morenz used it and retightened the nut. The trickle stopped.

  “Wrong wrench,” said the cop. He gazed at the BMW engine. He seemed to be staring straight at the battery. “Schöner Wagen,” he said. Nice car. “Where are you staying?”

  “In Jena,” said Morenz. “I have to see the foreign sales director at Zeiss tomorrow morning. To buy products for my company.”

  The policeman nodded approvingly.

 
“We have many fine products in the GDR,” he said. It was not true. East Germany had one single factory that produced Western-standard equipment, the Zeiss works.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I wished to see Weimar ... the Goethe memorial.”

  “You are heading in the wrong direction. Weimar is that way.”

  The policeman pointed down the road behind Morenz. A gray-green Soviet GAZ jeep rolled past. The driver, eyes shaded by a forage cap, gazed at Morenz, met his eyes for a second, took in the parked VOPO car, and rolled on. An abort. Smolensk would not approach now.

  “Yes. I took a wrong turn out of town. I was looking for a place to turn when I saw the water gauge misbehaving.”

  The VOPOs supervised his U-turn and followed him back to Weimar. They peeled off at the entry to the town. Morenz drove on to Jena and checked into the Black Bear Hotel.

  At eight, on his hill above the Saale River, Sam McCready put down his binoculars. The gathering dusk made it impossible to see the East German border post and the road behind it. He felt tired, drained. Something had gone wrong up there behind the minefields and the razor-wire. It might be nothing of importance, a blown-out tire, a traffic jam. ... Unlikely. Perhaps his man was even now motoring south toward the border. Perhaps Pankratin had not shown up at the first meet, unable to get a jeep, unable to get away. ... Waiting was always the worst, the waiting and the not knowing what had gone wrong.

  “We’ll go back down to the road,” he told Johnson. “Can’t see anything here anyway.”

  He installed Johnson in the parking area of the Frankenwald service station, on the southbound side but facing north toward the border. Johnson would sit there all night, watching for the BMW to appear. McCready found a truck driver heading south, explained that his car had broken down, and hitched a lift six miles south. He got off at the Münchberg junction, walked the mile into the small town, and checked into the Braunschweiger Hof. He had his portable phone in a totebag if Johnson wanted to call him. He ordered a cab for six A.M.

  Dr. Herrmann had a contact in the BfV. The two men had met and collaborated years earlier, working on the Guenther Guillaume scandal, when the private secretary of Chancellor Willy Brandt had been revealed as an East German agent. That evening at six, Dr. Herrmann had rung the BfV in Cologne and asked to be put through.

  “Johann? This is Lothar Herrmann. ... No, I’m not. I’m here in Cologne. ... Oh, routine, you know. I was hoping I could offer you dinner. ... Excellent. Well, look, I’m at the Dom Hotel. Why don’t you join me in the bar? About eight? I look forward to it.”

  Johann Prinz put the phone down and wondered what had brought Herrmann to Cologne. Visiting the troops? Possibly. ...

  Two hours later, they sat at the corner dining table and ordered. For a while, they fenced gently. How are things? Fine. ... Over the crab cocktail, Herrmann moved a little closer.

  “I suppose they’ve told you about the call girl affair?” he asked.

  Prinz was surprised. When had the BND learned of it? He had only seen the file at five. Herrmann had telephoned at six, and he was already in Cologne.

  “Yes,” he said. “Got the file this afternoon.”

  Now Herrmann was surprised. Why would a double murder in Cologne have been passed to counterintelligence? He had expected to have to explain it to Prinz before asking for his favor. “Nasty affair,” he murmured as the steak arrived.

  “And getting worse,” agreed Prinz. “Bonn won’t like those sex tapes floating around.”

  Herrmann kept his face impassive, but his stomach turned over. Sex tapes? Dear God, what sex tapes? He affected mild surprise and poured more wine.

  “Got that far, has it? I must have been out of the office when the latest details arrived. Mind filling me in?”

  Prinz did so. Herrmann lost all his appetite. The odor in his nostrils was not so much of the claret as of a scandal of cataclysmic proportions.

  “And still no clues,” he murmured sorrowfully.

  “Not a lot,” agreed Prinz. “First K have been told to pull every man off every case and put them onto this one. The search, of course, is for the gun and the owner of the fingerprints.”

  Lothar Herrmann sighed. “I wonder if the culprit could be a foreigner?” he suggested.

  Prinz scooped up the last of his ice cream and put down his spoon. He grinned. “Ah, now I see. Our external intelligence service has an interest?”

  Herrmann shrugged dismissively. “My dear friend, we both accomplish much the same task. Protecting our political masters.”

  Like all senior civil servants, both of these men had a view of their political masters that wisely was seldom shared with the politicians themselves.

  “We do, of course, have some records of our own,” said Herrmann. “Fingerprints of foreigners who have come to our attention. ... Alas, we haven’t got copies of the prints our friends in the KA are seeking.”

  “You could ask officially,” Prinz pointed out.

  “Yes, but then why start a hare that will probably lead nowhere? Now, unofficially—”

  “I don’t like the word unofficial,” said Prinz.

  “No more do I, my friend, but ... now and again—for old times’ sake. You have my word, if I turn anything up, it comes straight back to you. A joint effort by the two services. My word on it. If nothing turns up, then no harm done.” Prinz rose. “All right, for old times’ sake. Just this once.” As he left the hotel, he wondered what the hell Herrmann knew, or suspected, that he did not.

  In the Braunschweiger Hof in Münchberg, Sam McCready sat at the bar. He drank alone and stared at the dark paneling. He was worried, deeply so. Again and again he wondered if he should have sent Morenz over.

  There was something wrong about the man. A summer cold? More like the flu. But that doesn’t make you nervous. His old friend had seemed very nervous. Was his nerve gone? No, not old Bruno. He had done it many times before. And he was “clean”—as far as McCready knew.

  McCready tried to justify sending Bruno. He had had no time to find a younger man. And Pankratin would not “show” for a strange face. It was Pankratin’s life on the line, too. If he’d refused to send Morenz, they’d have lost the Soviet War Book. He had had no choice ... but he could not stop worrying.

  Seventy miles north, Bruno Morenz was in the bar of the Black Bear Hotel in Jena. He too drank, and alone, and too much.

  Across the street he could see the main entrance to the centuries-old Schiller University. Outside was a bust of Karl Marx. A plaque revealed that Marx had taught in the philosophy faculty there in 1841. Morenz wished the bearded philosopher had dropped dead while doing it. Then he would never have gone to London and written Das Kapital, and Morenz would not now be going through his misery so far from home.

  At one A.M. Wednesday, a sealed brown envelope arrived at the Dom Hotel for Dr. Herrmann. He was still up. The envelope contained three large photographs: two of various 9mm slugs, one of a set of thumb, finger, and palm prints. He resolved not to wire them down to Pullach but to take them himself that morning. If the tiny scratches along the sides of the bullets, and the prints, matched up with his expectations, he was going to face a very major quandary. Whom to tell, and how much. If only that bastard Morenz would show up. ... At nine A.M. he caught the first flight back to Munich.

  At ten Major Vanavskaya in Berlin checked again on the whereabouts of the man she was tracking. He was with the garrison outside Erfurt, she was told. He leaves at six tonight for Potsdam. Tomorrow he flies back to Moscow.

  “And I’ll be with you, you bastard,” she thought.

  At half past eleven, Morenz rose from the table in the coffee bar where he had been killing time and made for the car. He felt hung over. His tie was undone, and he could not face his razor that morning. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin. He did not look like a businessman about to discuss optical lenses in the boardroom at the Zeiss works. He drove carefully out of town, heading west toward Weimar.
The lay-by was three miles away.

  It was bigger than the lay-by of yesterday, shaded by leafy beech trees that flanked the road on both sides. Set into the trees across from the lay-by was the Mühltalperle coffee house. No one seemed to be about. It was not seething with guests. He pulled into the lay-by at five to twelve, got out his toolkit, and opened the hood again. At two minutes after twelve, the GAZ jeep rolled onto the gravel and stopped. The man who got out wore baggy cotton fatigues and knee-boots. He had corporal’s insignia and a forage cap pulled over his eyes. He strolled toward the BMW.

  “If you are having trouble, perhaps I have a better toolbox,” he said. He swung his wooden toolbox into the engine bay and laid it on the cylinder block. A grubby thumbnail flicked open the catch. There was a clutter of wrenches inside.

  “So, Poltergeist, how are you these days?” he murmured.

  Morenz’s mouth was dry again. “Fine,” he whispered back. He pulled the wrenches to one side. The red-plastic-covered manual lay underneath. The Russian took a wrench and tightened the loose nut. Morenz removed the book and stuffed it inside his light raincoat, jamming it with his left arm under his armpit. The Russian replaced his wrenches and closed the toolbox.

  “I must go,” he muttered. “Give me ten minutes to get clear. And show gratitude. Someone might be watching.”

  He straightened up, waved his right arm, and walked back to his jeep. The engine was still running. Morenz stood up and waved after him. “Danke,” he called. The jeep drove away, back toward Erfurt. Morenz felt weak. He wanted to get out of there. He needed a drink. He would pull over later and stash the manual in the compartment beneath the battery. Right now he needed a drink. Keeping the manual pinned beneath his armpit, he dropped the engine cover, tossed his tools into the trunk, closed it, and climbed into the car. The hip flask was in the glove compartment. He got it out and took a deep, satisfying pull. Five minutes later, his confidence restored, he turned the car back to Jena. He had spotted another lay-by, beyond Jena, just before the link road to the Autobahn back to the border. He would pause there to stash the manual.