by Mark Dawson
“Copy that. SALISBURY out.”
Mackintosh put the radio back into his pack.
“I’m going to go outside,” he said.
Cameron stepped forward. “I don’t think that’s wise. We haven’t planned for it.”
“I’m going out,” Mackintosh insisted. “I know the area. And he should be here by now.”
He looked from the soldier’s face to Élodie’s. She was as concerned as he was, yet there was something else on her face, too. They had only been seeing each other for a short while, and they had managed—at least they thought they had—to keep their relationship private. He looked at her, saw the damp shine to her eyes, the hesitant upturn to her lips, and saw the affection there.
He couldn’t let that stop him. PICASSO was too important, his potential too great.
Élodie mouthed two words: Be careful. Mackintosh wanted to reciprocate, but while Foulkes had his back to Élodie and couldn’t see her, he was looking dead at Mackintosh and he would see him.
“Eyes open,” he said. “I won’t be long.”
4
Mackintosh opened the door and stepped out onto the street. Strelitzer Straße was cobbled with two rows of four-storey apartment blocks that faced each other. Cars had been slotted against the kerb with their noses poking out, leaving enough space for two lines of traffic to proceed in either direction. An attempt had been made to soften the brutal architecture with the planting of a row of young elms, although the winter winds had long since plucked the last leaves from the branches. Mackintosh took a step away from the door and turned left and right to look for any sign that there was anyone else here with him. The street was heavy with snow, save a slushy stripe where the cars had been passing. Mackintosh looked left and saw the Fernsehturm, the enormous television mast in Alexanderplatz that was visible all across the city. He had always hated it; the Communists had erected it in an attempt to demonstrate their power, but it had always embodied their surveillance to Mackintosh, the sense that they loomed over everything and that nowhere was safe from their suspicious gaze.
Mackintosh started to the east, walking slowly across the compacted snow and ice. There was a builder’s van parked on his side of the street. The locals were doing some work on a nearby building, fixing it up after what looked like years of neglect. The van was old and dirty, and it had a ragtag collection of equipment in the flatbed: a cement mixer, ladders, a wheelbarrow.
He had passed the back of the van when he saw movement at the junction with Rheinsberger Straße. He was fifty feet away, and the person he saw was looking in the opposite direction. Mackintosh didn’t think that he had been seen. He walked on and saw that the person was male, that he was wearing a fitted black overcoat and a Russian-style ushanka on his head. Mackintosh drew closer and saw that the man’s hair, just visible under the lowered flaps of the hat, had been dyed a bright platinum blond.
It was PICASSO.
Mackintosh picked up his pace.
“Günter,” Mackintosh said, his voice as quiet as he could make it while still being loud enough for the man to hear.
The man froze and then turned around to face him. His cryptonym was PICASSO, but his real name was Günter Schmidt. He was nineteen years old and he had pale skin and blue eyes that were filled with fear. Mackintosh reached out a hand; Schmidt took it and they shook.
“Is everything okay?” Mackintosh asked him in German.
“I’m scared,” Schmidt said.
“You’re fine,” he said, smiling at him.
“I couldn’t remember the number of the house.”
“You’re on the wrong street,” Mackintosh said gently, taking Schmidt by the sleeve and angling him toward the junction. “It’s over here.”
Mackintosh glanced over at the young man as they walked. The coat he was wearing was the oversized herringbone that Mackintosh had bought for him a month ago. Günter had a fixation with David Bowie, and he had seen him wearing a similar coat in a photoshoot by Helmut Newton that had been published in Sounds. Mackintosh had brought him regular copies of the magazine as he had gently recruited him, a slow dance that had taken months to bring to fruition. He had smuggled the coat across the border to consummate their arrangement and had given it to him at their last meeting in Treptower Park.
“I’m frightened,” Schmidt said.
“There’s no reason to be.”
“The border guards?”
Mackintosh shook his head. “None. It’s quiet.”
“But what about the tunnel?”
“It’s fine.”
“I get claustrophobic.”
“I’ve just come through it,” Mackintosh said, reminding himself to speak kindly. “It’s safe. A marvel of engineering. You’ll see.”
5
Élodie had arranged for Mackintosh to meet Schmidt. He had claimed to be in possession of evidence that would cause chaos at the very highest levels of the Stasi. Mackintosh had immediately seen how valuable Schmidt could be. And he had seen how recruiting the young man would add a layer of gilt to a career that had already been impressive. Mackintosh’s tours of Belfast had seen him chop away at the leadership of the IRA, developing relationships with several informants including a man who had served on the infamous “Nutting Squad,” the Provos’s counter-intelligence and interrogation unit. He had used the informant’s intelligence to pick off key players, and, in the process, had developed an aptitude for interrogation that had produced startling results while, at the same time, leaving him feeling as if he had been bathing in a sewer.
PICASSO, though, would be an order of magnitude above everything else that he had achieved, and the prospect of bringing him in was intoxicating.
Mackintosh had been meticulous about everything, and his tradecraft had been the most thorough of his career. He wanted to get a measure of the target before their first meeting and had followed him for a week. Each day had begun with a marathon surveillance detection routine, backed by a ten-man Franco–British counter-surveillance detail, to ensure that he was black before going anywhere near the target. He would pick up the young man as he ended his working day at five each afternoon and follow him on his walk home. His route was the same every day: he left the building on Normannenstraße, went south on Kynastraße, crossed the Spree and then made his way through Treptower Park.
Surveillance was backed up with extensive research on the subject, his bona fides and the credibility of the story he was offering to sell. The assessment from London and Paris was that he was telling the truth.
The offer Mackintosh and Élodie could make Schmidt would be difficult to turn down, but it would also be fraught with great danger. If Schmidt said yes and there was any misstep, his future would be bleak: interrogation in the basements of the Hohenschönhausen and then a bullet in the back of the head.
Mackintosh had almost had second thoughts about making the offer.
But who was he kidding? Here was an intelligence coup that might be priceless. Schmidt had offered to work with them after being submerged in the misery of his fellow Berliners all of his life. He wanted to do something about that, and, thanks to the unfortunate proclivities of the Minister for State Security, he had been given the means to do so.
Mackintosh had put him in a position to win his freedom.
6
They made their way back along Strel
itzer Straße to the derelict apartment. Mackintosh allowed himself a buzz of confidence: it was going to happen. They were going to pull it off.
A woman emerged from the door, wearing a woollen hat that she had taken from the soldiers: it was Élodie. Mackintosh wanted to yell out that she should get back into the house, but he dared not. He would spook Schmidt, and there was no telling who else might be listening.
“Élodie?” Schmidt said hopefully.
“She wants to make sure you get out, too.”
Mackintosh put his hand on the young man’s back and nudged him forward. He smiled at him and told him that he would be fine, that the British government looked after those who were willing to risk their lives for the West, that everything—everything—would be fine.
“The tunnel,” Schmidt said. “It is dirty?”
He gestured down at Mackintosh’s trousers; Mackintosh looked and saw the streaks of mud that he had missed.
“A little,” he admitted with a smile.
“What about my coat? It’ll be ruined.”
Mackintosh smiled with indulgent patience. “I’ll get you a new one.”
Élodie came alongside. “Everything okay?”
“Yes. All fine. What are you doing outside?”
“We couldn’t see you.”
“Let’s get off the street.”
They were still thirty feet from the door to number 55 when a black van raced around the corner and came to a stop on the other side of the road. It was a Barkas B1000, the transport that the Stasi used to snatch people from the street. A man stepped out of the driver’s compartment, leaving the door open behind him. A second man got out.
“Merde,” Élodie hissed.
Mackintosh reached with his left hand, took Schmidt by the elbow and picked up the pace. He let his right arm hang loosely by his side, his fingers ready to reach around for the gun that was going to be pressed into the small of his back.
The men walked across the ice-slicked cobbles in their direction.
“Achtung!”
Mackintosh held onto Schmidt’s arm and kept walking. They were outside number 49, with just a few more paces to the door to 55. If they could get inside, maybe…
He heard the sound of an engine from behind him, the crunch of tyres across compacted snow. Mackintosh turned his head to look back; another black Barkas van had arrived, this one blocking the road behind them. A further two men had stepped down from the cab and were coming their way.
He swallowed down on a throat that was suddenly very dry.
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.
The Stasi.
Border guards were dumb and predictable; they followed orders, did what they were told, shunned originality for rote. The Stasi were different. They were ruthless. They killed whenever they had the chance. Mackintosh’s former head of station had been gutted in the street as he lit a cigarette. His replacement’s car had been fitted with a bomb and blown up while he waited to pick up a secretary at Tempelhof. They had eyes everywhere and they were slowly tightening their grip around what they saw as the hostile intelligence services ranged against them. They were implacable, ruthless, and driven by a cold ideological animus that could not be reasoned or negotiated with.
And they knew. Someone had tipped them off. Fear wrapped around him, icy cold. It tightened, forcing his breath from his lungs.
The two agents ahead of them were carrying Makarov PMs. Mackintosh recognised one of them: it was Axel Geipel, a colonel in the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, the Stasi’s Main Directorate for Reconnaissance. Geipel had a reputation for brutality; Mackintosh had heard the stories of what happened to the men and women he took back to Hohenschönhausen prison. But worse than Geipel’s reputation was that of his patron; Geipel worked for Karl-Heinz Sommer, and Sommer was a devil.
“Get your hands up!” Geipel shouted in English. “Now!”
Mackintosh stopped.
Not like this. Not without a fight.
Élodie stopped next to him. Her hand twitched toward her weapon.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “Not yet.”
Mackintosh released Schmidt’s wrist and held his left hand aloft, his open palm facing forward.
Geipel waved his gun. “Both hands!”
He raised his right hand, too, and stretched both of them above his head.
7
The ground floor window of number 55 exploded outwards in a cascade of glass shards. A submachine gun chugged as one of the soldiers unloaded the magazine of his MP5-SD. The two Stasi agents were diagonally opposite the window; the volley streaked across the cobbled street and detonated against the graffiti-scarred wall behind them. Chunks of plaster were blown into the air and a cloud of fine dust choked that side of the road. One of them fell; Geipel fired back.
Mackintosh knew their opportunity would last for moments and no more. He heard the gunfire from behind them, flinched with the expectation that he was about to be struck, but felt nothing. He grabbed Schmidt by the arm and dragged him into the cover offered by the front of the builder’s van. At the same time, he reached behind his back, snagged the butt of the pistol, and yanked it clear so hastily that the iron sight scored a groove on his skin. He aimed at the two agents in front of him, but he could only see the unmoving body of one of them; Geipel had slipped into cover behind the black van.
He turned the other way, looking for Élodie, and saw blood.
Lots of blood.
He panicked.
Élodie was on the pavement, face down, arms and legs akimbo. Her head was turned in Mackintosh’s direction and he could see her face. There was panic there. Terror.
“I can’t move my legs.”
He reached for her arm and dragged her, heedless of the risk that he was taking in coming out of cover and the damage that he might be doing by moving her. Adrenaline buzzed in his veins, gave him fresh strength, and Élodie wasn’t heavy; he hauled her out of harm’s way before the agents behind them could fire again.
She stammered something in French that he didn’t catch. Her hand was underneath body, clasped to her stomach and, when she held it up to look at it, he saw that her palm was red with blood. He could guess what must have happened: she had been shot in the back, the bullet passing through her spine and then exiting through her gut. She had been paralysed and, unless he could get her back to the West, she would bleed out. The impossibility of what he would have to do swamped him; how could he get her through the tunnel like this? Hopelessness turned to desperation and then became anger: it was his fault. He should have told her to stay on the other side of the Wall.
Mackintosh heard a whimper and drew his focus back. PICASSO was curled on his side, looking up at him. He wore an expression of surprise, the moment of shock that would quickly pass as pain overwhelmed it. Mackintosh checked him over, top to bottom, and saw the blood on his thigh. Schmidt was clasping his leg with both hands and blood was running out between his fingers.
Mackintosh was filled with a bubbling of dread; the only woman who cared for him had been badly hurt and the operation that would have made him a hero was turning to ash.
He heard the sound of another engine and saw a third van as it rumbled into the street, coming to a halt behind the one that was sheltering Geipel. The doors opened and four men dropped down, each of them armed with submachine guns. They stayed behind the van, using its bulk to cover them from the shooters in the apartment.
It was a standoff. The two SAS warrant officers could keep Geipe
l and the newcomers covered. The two men who had shot Élodie and Schmidt might be approaching from behind, but they would have to move with caution. They must have expected that Mackintosh was armed.
“I’m going to get you out,” he said to Élodie.
“No,” she said. “You can’t. You have to leave me.”
Her voice was weak, but there was certainty there, and Mackintosh knew that she was right even though it cut him to follow the logic to its only possible conclusion.
“They’ll fix you up,” he said. “They have to. You’re a diplomat. Tell them. I’ll speak to Claude. He’ll sort it out.”
She reached up with her hand. Mackintosh clasped it and held it tight.
He turned to Schmidt. “Do you think you can move?”
“My leg,” Schmidt said. “It hurts. And the bleeding won’t stop.”
Mackintosh gritted his teeth. It was finished. Even if he could get Schmidt into the apartment, how was he going to get him down the ladder? Even if he managed to get to the bottom of the shaft, the tunnel required effort to traverse; how would Schmidt manage that with one leg? He would have to ask the SAS men to stay behind and hold up the Stasi, but that would be a death sentence. It was impossible. They were done.
He was going to have to leave them both.
“Herr Mackintosh.”
He froze. The shout had come from behind the van in front of him.
“My name is Karl-Heinz Sommer. I’m sure you know who I am.”
Mackintosh did know who Sommer was; they all did. He was a killer. He was an interrogator and executioner, an officer so enamoured with his grim vocation that his victims argued he was more demon than man, an angel of death who left piles of corpses in his wake. Sommer had risen through the Stasi’s ranks to Generaloberst and now he was in charge of counter-intelligence. He operated a network of informers, traitors and turncoats who supplied him with a flow of information that sometimes made him seem as if he had been blessed with clairvoyance. They called him die Spinne. The spider at the centre of a web that covered all of Berlin, East and West.
