Berlin Reload

by James Quinn

  The flight had been smooth but a pregnant woman on a plane was never going to be in a completely comfortable state. Her physician in Cairo had recommended her not to travel by plane until the baby was born, but she dismissed the idea instantly. She would give birth on German soil and that was the end of the matter. Her time in Egypt had been a distraction, at best, but now she wanted to focus on the only thing that mattered; being a mother. Lisbeth was willing to bet that at this point in time, she was the only pregnant deep undercover spy that was operational!

  The thought amused her. How could this frightened little thing from years gone by suddenly be this strong mother-to-be and covert intelligence agent? Life was a wheel and, she reflected, it brings us back to the people that we truly are. All she knew now was that she was fat, swollen, hot and wanted nothing more in the world than to enjoy a cool spring evening in Germany again.

  In Cairo, she couldn't get comfortable, so she would pad naked around the house that they had lived in for the past five months within the Embassy compound. The last few days before her departure, she had busied herself tidying the house and packing things ready for her premature return to Berlin.

  The first few months in Egypt had been difficult, getting used to a new life, new routine and looking after herself. When she had told Vogel that she thought she was pregnant, he was only mildly interested – in fact, he didn't even look up from the papers on his desk. In a sense, that had been a blessing in disguise; he didn't ask too many questions and instead preferred to focus on his work with the Mukhaberat.

  The obstetrician at the Cairo Hospital had listened to her with his stethoscope, checked and then re-checked, just to confirm it. Two heartbeats, he had said, both of them regular and strong.

  Twins!

  The realisation of there being two babies inside her, filled Lisbeth with both shock and excitement. Her whole perspective changed yet again; this time, she had the responsibility of two lives to protect.

  As for her espionage work, she watched and listened and remembered. For the first few months, the young SSD officer and his stylish wife were whisked around diplomatic dinners and cocktail parties. They would meet politicians, intelligence officers, diplomats and all manner of entourages. The flow of indiscreet information was dazzling and in the end she gave up trying to remember most of it – it was just too overwhelming. Instead, on one of her infrequent organised trips to the souk and markets, she purchased a small leather-bound notebook, and it was this that she used to record any information. She would carefully write it down at the end of every night, concealed from Ulrich and the house staff, and then secrete it behind a loose skirting board in the second bedroom.

  After his initial bout of indifference about the pregnancy, Ulrich began to become more authoritative in tone, certainly about the baby and its future. Thankfully, Lisbeth had been relegated to a junior position in his thoughts which allowed her to stay off his radar.

  Following their coupling all those months ago, Ulrich Vogel had only tried to seduce her on one other occasion. It had not been as successful as the first time and after that he had chosen to 'lose interest' in his wife. So it came as no surprise that when she asked to be allowed to return to the GDR to have the baby, he agreed. In truth, she suspected that he was tired of seeing her and that the Egyptians had provided him with a retinue of whores to keep him occupied. What a silly little man he was.

  Once she was back in the GDR, Lisbeth returned to the house in Kopenick and began to get some kind of normality back. The ever stoic Frau Obermann was there, ready and on duty, as her housekeeper, helper and informant for Ulrich Vogel.

  For days, Lisbeth debated about contacting SIS again with the information she had gathered in Cairo. In truth, she could simply have destroyed the diary and got on with her life, as her career as a spy was over for good. But that was not her way. She still believed in what she was doing and, if she was being honest with herself, she had become even more addicted to the secret world than she knew was good for her. It was the right thing to do, she decided, and so, finally, she made contact.

  She placed the diary in the dead letter box, a wobbly brick behind a loose drainpipe at the back of a grocery store in a side street off the Kurfurstendamm. The 'filled' signal was to the secure contact telephone number that she knew. She called from one of the street payphones in West Berlin and stated that, “Gerald is full today.”

  “Thank you, caller,” said an anonymous voice in response, already getting ready to pass the message to Markham at the SIS base.

  Lisbeth's job was done for the moment; the package was secured, the contact procedure was in place and EMERALD was active again in Berlin.

  It was on the morning of the 11th of May that her waters broke.

  Lisbeth had been sitting in the garden, enjoying the cool air and breeze off the river, when she felt the fluid running down her legs. The past three days had been uncomfortable, the babies moving constantly, and she knew that her time was drawing close.

  Frau Obermann telephoned for an SSD driver, as per Ulrich Vogel's instructions, to take his wife to the maternity ward at the Charité Hospital. Just to be on the safe side, Frau Obermann readied hot water, towels, rubbing alcohol and scissors. Men could be so unreliable, she thought, and this wouldn't be the first baby that she had delivered into the world.

  By early evening, Lisbeth was already in the labour room and the process that she had waited for was happening, actually happening! It seemed almost surreal. She held onto the hand of the nurse, sucking in great bursts of oxygen and pushed… pushed hard… kept on pushing… and then a relief!

  Hands moved all around her as the midwives grabbed at the child to clean it up and swaddle it. It was a girl, she heard someone say to her. But the thought was quickly taken from her mind as the second wave was starting. “Push again,” she heard a man's voice say. But she was exhausted and was not sure that she had the strength to carry on.

  “One more big push please, Elisabeth. Just one more… and another.”

  Eventually, there was nothing more to push for. The second of the twins was out and was being taken care of. And only then was she able to lie back exhausted as the surgical staff cleaned her up and sutured her.

  “A boy and a girl!” said a nurse, smiling down at her. “Congratulations! You have a full set. Do you have names yet?”

  Lisbeth nodded, half drifting off to sleep. “Yes… of course. Katherine… and Peter. My angels…”

  The news that EMERALD had contacted them again lifted the spirits of the SIS Base in Berlin. Markham immediately asked for Masterman to send Grant over.

  “Your girl has reached out to us, Jack! She's back in town!” exclaimed Markham.

  “With what?” said Grant. He was playing it cool until he had a chance to talk to Lisbeth face to face. Until that moment happened, it was all a little too vague.

  “Well, about her adventures in warmer parts of the world. We have a mother-lode of names and contacts relating to Stasi operations and Egyptian intelligence officials. I've a meeting with the BND counter-intelligence chief later this week and I'm going to do a little horse-trading of information, thanks to EMERALD. Maybe I'll throw him the odd titbit? So I want you to ready yourself. If she wants to work with us again, I want you there leading her by the hand as her case officer,” said Markham, already planning how he could use or trade this information.

  “You want me to set up all the plumbing again for the EMERALD operation?” said Grant formally.

  Markham nodded. “Very much so. Safe houses, DLB, secure telephone numbers, recognition codes, all the plumbing!”

  “And what if she doesn't want to play anymore?” asked Grant, playing the case officer once again. “Last time we spoke, she was leaning towards making a new life in the West. What then?”

  “Well, according to some of our lower-ranking informants, that won't be happening for a good while yet,” said Markham.

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “EMERALD
became a mummy the other day. Twins, I heard! Her focus will be on that for a while longer, so if we can get a bit more mileage out of her, so much the better,” suggested Markham.

  So it's happened. The baby – no, babies – are here, he corrected himself. I'm a father and I didn't even know anything about it. The gravity of it rocked him for a moment. “How do we keep in touch with her?” he asked, trying to focus.

  “That's easy,” said Markham. “EMERALD has opted for the Unter den Linden DLB for when she is ready to get in touch with us. There was a coded note tucked inside the diary that she provided us with. So you, my boy, are to monitor that site constantly over the next few weeks. Our little agent is back in play!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Berlin – June 1961

  The meeting place for their reunion was the Tiergarten; a place that they both knew well and loved. It had a surreal, disconnected feeling to it, almost like their own private garden, where the monsters of Berlin could not reach them.

  Jack Grant had arrived early and had spent thirty minutes getting the feel of the place and trying to calm down. He was both excited and nervous.

  I am meeting my agent again, he thought. I am a father. I am meeting my children for the first time.

  Then he saw her walking along the pathway, pushing the pram in front of her; she looked stylish and radiant. He fell in beside her smoothly. To the casual observer, they would have looked like a young family walking in the park for the morning.

  “Why didn't you tell me?” he asked casually.

  She thought for a moment and then said, “Would it have mattered, made a difference to anything?”

  “It might have,” he said weakly.

  She smiled sadly. “It wouldn't and you know it.”

  They carried on walking along the pathway, each wanting to say more but not knowing how to communicate their feelings. In the end it was Grant who took a leap of faith.

  “Where are you staying?” he said.

  “I am at the farmhouse in Magdeburg. It is quiet, peaceful, it helps with the children, and it calms them. I was given a small car to help me to get out and travel about. It's a kind of freedom, I suppose.”

  They walked on, not hurrying, keeping a slow, steady space, each of them wanting to stretch out the experience for as long as possible.

  “The diary, was it of use?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Berlin Station is very happy with it. Thank you.”

  She shrugged. “It is of no matter. I simply wrote down what I saw and heard. You trained me well, Jack.”

  “Lisbeth, can I see them. Can we stop?” He gently laid a restraining hand on her arm.

  “Do you want to?” She sounded surprised. She'd hoped that he would, but thought that he would pretend that the children, his children, were mere cover stories. No, that was unfair, she decided. For all his work in subterfuge and deception, Jack Grant was a good man. He was no Ulrich Vogel.

  “I do, I really do,” he said and she believed him.

  They stopped at a park bench, underneath a tree so as to keep the sunlight off the children. He stood back and watched as she sat and made adjustments inside the pram. He heard a gurgling noise from inside the cover as she lifted a bundle up.

  “This is Katherine. She was born first. She is the eldest by several minutes. Here, take her for me,” she said, not giving him time to think and handing the little girl over to him. Then she reached into the pram again and retrieved the other baby.

  “And this is Peter,” she said proudly, holding him up so that Grant could see his son.

  “Katherine and Peter,” he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. “You chose good names.”

  “Do you have a camera with you?” she asked.

  “Of course.” He always had some kind of camera with him, just in case. Today, it was a pocket-sized Zenith 35mm.

  “Then here, sit down and I will take a photo of you with the children.”

  He allowed himself to be directed by her as she took the camera from him and posed the three of them on the bench. Jack Grant carefully held the bundles in the crooks of his arms, their faces barely poking out of the hats and swaddled blankets.

  “Smile,” she said and snapped away with the camera. She laughed at him. “You look adorable.”

  He handed Katherine back to Lisbeth but continued to look down at Peter. “It's not my natural environment, but I'm willing to learn.”

  They sat in silence for a while, enjoying the summer and each other's company, taking turns with the babies.

  “I love you. Come with me. I can get you out tonight,” he said, and she noted the yearning and desperation in his voice.

  She shook her head. “No… no… no. I still have much work to do here.”

  Grant was frustrated. She could be so stubborn, so much so that she was willing to risk her life. “No, you don't. How long do you think you can last before you are blown to the SSD? Think about the children, Lisbeth… the babies. There will always be other spies. You can't win this war on your own.”

  But she was having none of it. “The babies will be fine, I will look after them. They will be safe.”

  It was in these moments that he hated her. That bloody-mindedness, that refusal to see things clearly. She would dig her heels in and go on a course of self-destruction and there was nothing he could say or do to change her mind. Self-sabotage was her weak spot.

  Finally, frustrated, he said, “The phone number that I gave you, do you remember it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I can be reached there at any time of the day. Call it and I will get you out,” he said, his tone was determined.

  “It won't come to that…”

  He held her hand to get his point across. “Lisbeth, listen to me. Call me and I will come. I love you. Please. Promise me.”

  She looked into his eyes and smiled. “I promise you, Jack. If I am in danger, I will make the call.”

  Jurgen Lauder was and always had been Urich Vogel's best operator.

  They had climbed the ladder together at the SSD; Vogel the brains and Lauder the brawn. Lauder was big; big in the shoulders and the hands. So it was only right that Vogel exclusively used him for the more physical aspects of his SSD operations.

  But Lauder's real speciality was covert surveillance. It was something that he enjoyed and excelled at and, for a man of his size, he was remarkably deft at the art of watching and staying hidden.

  So when a secret mission came direct from his superior officer and comrade for a bit of 'unofficial' surveillance, Jurgen Lauder was glad of the opportunity. The job was simple; keep Elisabeth Vogel under surveillance, watch where she goes and see who she speaks to. But above all else, came the order, make sure nothing happens to those children.

  So far, Lauder had fitted a rudimentary, Russian-made, radio frequency finder to the inside of her car, allowing him to track the vehicle inside a one kilometre radius. For the rest of the time, it was footwork along the streets of Berlin. He would do the best that he could for Ulrich Vogel while he was stationed in Cairo; the Stasi always look after their own.

  In the days following the birth of the children, it had been uneventful; his target very rarely left the farmhouse in Magdeburg, only occasionally visiting the city. But today, after weeks of 'Nothing To Report' files, something interesting seemed to be happening.

  Frau Vogel had been taking a leisurely stroll, pushing the pram through the Tiergarten, when a man had started walking beside her. The man was in his late twenties perhaps, fit-looking, with blond hair. Lauder surmised that they clearly knew each other and this was confirmed when the couple stopped to take the babies out of the pram and be photographed with them.

  He followed them for the next twenty minutes or so, occasionally snapping some photographs from a hidden camera secreted inside his newspaper. Finally, they came to a natural fork in the pathway and Lauder held back. He watched them talk for a few moments more, and then the blond man leaned down to
see the children. When he straightened up, the target, Frau Vogel, kissed him.

  Lauder pulled away from the scene, determining that he had enough evidence to pass back to his senior officer. But, knowing Ulrich Vogel as he did, he knew that the man would not take the news of what he had just witnessed very well at all. In fact, Ulrich Vogel scared him to death.

  Jurgen Lauder felt sorry for Elisabeth Vogel.

  “If Ulrich was my motivation, then you were the beating heart that kept me spying, Jack,” she said. “But I will decide my own fate from this moment onwards – for me and for our children. I will stop spying when I choose to.”

  He shook his head, refusing to accept her decision. “Look, you did what you had to do to survive, I understand that. We all have to make difficult choices to survive sometimes – in spying, as in life. But that doesn't have to be your future… it doesn't have to be our future, Lisbeth!”

  She leaned forward and they kissed. Those green eyes of hers, they always kept him entranced.

  “I will be in touch, my beautiful Jack. I promise you,” she said. Then she turned and walked back the way that she had come, away from him and towards the East of the city.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cairo, Egypt – July 1961

  He had already trashed the apartment and slapped around the Arab whore that was his for the night, and still he had a rage inside him that would not abate. Eventually, he had screamed at her and the whore had left him, running out of the apartment half-dressed in case he beat her around the face once again.

  He took a pull on the half-empty bottle of Schnapps. Calm yourself, think! Let the anger work for you, not against you, he reasoned.

  Ulrich Vogel had received two pieces of bad news that day. The first had come from one of his most trusted operatives, a brute of a man, but good at staying hidden and watching. It had been received in the Diplomatic bag from the Embassy and had contained a detailed surveillance report complete with several black and white photographs.