Spy 06- Sinker (1990)

by Len Deighton

  Thurkettle looked at Werner, at the photos, and then at Werner again. ‘I’ll take care of them.’

  Werner said, ‘Don’t take care of the wrong people.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Thurkettle with a cold smile.

  ‘Bernard Samson and Fiona Samson. Make sure they are safe.’

  Thurkettle nodded. Now he felt sure that Werner Volkmann was not a party to the real secret: the way that Tessa was to die and change identity with her sister.

  ‘The Brandenburg exit,’ added Werner, who was anxious that there should be no misunderstanding.

  ‘No sweat. I know the place. The half-completed highway widening work. I went there yesterday and took a look-see. I’ll have a shovel, overalls and a can of gas.’

  ‘Gas? Petrol?’ Werner put a map on the table.

  ‘To torch the car. The guy in London, who gave me my orders, wants the car burned.’

  ‘Afterwards you’ll meet me here.’ He showed Thurkettle on the Autobahn map. ‘The cash will be in a leather case. If you don’t want to carry a case, you’d better have something to put it in. When you are paid, come back up the Autobahn and through the Border Control Point at Drewitz into West Berlin. You’ll go through without any trouble. In Berlin phone the number I gave you and say the job is finished. From then on you are on your own. You have the airline ticket? Don’t go back into East Berlin.’

  ‘I won’t go back to the East.’

  ‘Have you arranged about a gun? I was told to make sure you had a gun if you needed it.’

  ‘The last time I found myself without a gun was in Memphis, Tennessee. I strangled two guys with my bare hands.’ He put a cardboard box on the table. ‘Here’s one of them,’ he said, loosening the lid and holding it open an inch or two.

  Werner looked into Thurkettle’s cold eyes trying to decide whether it was a joke but, unable to tell, he looked down into the box. ‘Gott im Himmel!’ said Werner as he caught sight of the contents. It was a human skull.

  ‘So don’t baby me,’ said Thurkettle, closing the box and putting it beside him on the chair. ‘Just have the dough ready.’

  ‘I will have the money ready.’

  ‘If you want to call it off, this is your final chance,’ said Thurkettle. ‘But once the job is done I’m like the Pied Piper of Hamelin; if I don’t get paid I come back and do the job all over again. Get me?’

  ‘I get you.’

  ‘Used fifty-dollar bills,’ said Thurkettle grimly.

  Werner sighed and printed circles upon the table with his wet beer-glass. ‘I told you: I will have it ready, exactly as I said.’

  ‘You do your thing the way you were told: I do my thing the way I was told: we get along just fine. But if you foul up, old buddy…’ He left the rest of it unsaid. He’d not yet encountered anyone so dumb as to default in payment to a hired killer. ‘Just one more time: I meet you on the Autobahn, direction west. I take the exit marked Ziesar and Görzke. You’ll be waiting on the exit ramp. Going off the Autobahn is illegal for Westerners, just wait at the bottom of the ramp.’

  They’d been all through it before. ‘I’ll be there,’ said Werner. He wondered if the skull was real or one of those plastic ones they make for medical students. It certainly looked real: very real. He was still wondering about that when the steaks arrived. They were big entrecotes, seared and perfect, cooked and delivered to the table by Willi Leuschner himself. He put down a big pot of home-made horseradish sauce, knowing that Werner liked it. Willi had been at school with Werner and the two men spent a moment exchanging the usual sort of pleasant remarks. The Leuschners were both coming to Werner’s fancy-dress party that night. It seemed as if half of Berlin were planning to be there.

  ‘More beer?’ asked Willi finally.

  ‘No,’ said Werner, ‘we both have to keep clear heads.’ Willi scribbled the account on a beer-mat and dropped it back on the table.

  Deuce Thurkettle left Werner to pay the bill. His BMW bike was outside. It was a big machine with two panniers in which he stowed all his gear. The engine roared and he gave a flip to the accelerator before settling into the saddle. With a quick wave of the hand as he passed the restaurant window he sped away.

  He had a lot to do before getting to the rendezvous on the Autobahn, but seeing Werner was necessary. Thurkettle made a point of threatening his clients in that way. It was a part of the fastidious attention to detail that made him so effective.

  Another reason for his success was knowing when to keep his mouth shut. Whoever had briefed Werner Volkmann had obviously told him some fairy story. The briefing that Thurkettle had been given by Prettyman in a fancy suite in the London Hilton had been rather more complete and certainly more specific. Prettyman had told him that under no circumstance must anyone be left alive except Bernard and Fiona Samson. No one left alive. Prettyman had been very insistent upon that.

  The Brandenburg exit – the place arranged for Fiona Samson to change from one car to the other – was on East Germany’s section of Hitler’s Autobahn, built to connect Berlin to Holland and all points westwards. As well as being a major East German highway, this was one of the authorized routes along which Westerners were permitted to drive to West Berlin.

  On this flat region immediately to the west of Berlin the rivers have spread to become lakes. It is a region of farmland and forest, and once outside the towns the traveller finds little cobble-streeted villages where little has changed since the Kaiser’s photo hung in the schoolrooms.

  Even one of East Germany’s two-stroke motor cars can get there from Berlin in well under an hour; for Thurkettle’s powerful motor cycle it was nothing. He arrived before dark. The workers from the construction site had gone: their earth-moving machines were neatly lined up, like tanks for an inspecting general.

  Thurkettle broke the lock off the door of the portable hut used by the construction gangs. He used a flashlight to check his guns and ammunition and the stainless steel butcher’s hacksaw he’d brought with him. Then he put on his coveralls and plastic medical gloves and looked at the skull and its neat dentistry. That done, he sat down, watched the pouring rain and waited patiently for it to get dark.

  These things never go exactly according to plan. That was the most important of the lessons he’d learned over the years. Prettyman had told him that Erich Stinnes would be collecting Fiona Samson and bringing her to the rendezvous. Someone like her would remain there.

  Thurkettle had been told that someone of exactly the same build as Fiona Samson must be killed and left at the rendezvous. It was Thurkettle who thought of the idea of using Fiona Samson’s sister, and he was pleased with that. She was a drug addict, and such people were easy to control. His task was to put Fiona Samson into the car with her husband and let them depart alive. He then had to kill Stinnes and the sister, bury Stinnes in the excavated ditch the roadworkers had so conveniently provided close by, and burn the car with the sister’s body inside it.

  The Soviet investigators would never find Stinnes’ body because by the time they realized that Stinnes had not gone over the frontier with Samson, there would be a hundred tons of solid concrete and a section of Autobahn over the burial place. The burned body would be identified as Fiona Samson because the two women were very much alike except for the dentistry, and the skull he’d shown Werner had been prepared for exactly that deception. The trickiest task was decapitating the sister, but her head would have to go in the ditch with the Stinnes corpse. Otherwise the forensic team examining the car would find a burned body with two heads, and that would alert even the doziest laboratory assistant.

  It all went amiss; right from the very start. Tessa – unreliable in the way that addicts usually are – did not arrive on time. Despite everything Thurkettle had arranged, she went off to Werner’s fancy-dress party. Tessa should have arrived first. Thurkettle became so anxious that he went off on his motor cycle, but came back when he recognized the car with Fiona and Stinnes in it. When finally Tessa did arrive, it was in the back
of the Ford van with Bernard Samson. Stinnes had arrived in a Wartburg bringing Fiona Samson and Harry Kennedy too. And who could have guessed that Bernard Samson would arrive with some lunatic from London Central who perhaps thought it would be amusing to come directly from Werner’s party wearing his fancy dress? A gorilla costume! Their Ford van was there within five minutes of the Wartburg, and parked in what Thurkettle approved as a good getaway position. The Wartburg was parked nose-out, with its sidelights on. Thurkettle expected Stinnes to bring the heroin consignment out of the car but no one emerged.

  Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. Thurkettle remained in the darkness and watched. He was standing behind one of the bulldozers when it all started: a slim man, dressed as a gorilla, leapt from the Ford van, and started jumping around, shouting and waving a gun.

  A gorilla. It looked so damned convincing for a moment so that Thurkettle thought it was a real gorilla. It took a lot to surprise Thurkettle but that took him off guard. It must have taken Stinnes, or whoever was in the driver’s seat of the Wartburg, off guard too, for someone switched on the car’s full beams to see the gorilla more clearly.

  The gorilla raised his pistol and was about to fire at the Wartburg. Thurkettle suddenly saw his reputation threatened and his fee in jeopardy. The Samson woman had to get away safely. Prettyman in London had been most specific about that. If Fiona did not arrive safely in the West, no fee would be paid beyond the small initial ‘contract’ payment.

  So Thurkettle fired at this crazy gorilla. His silenced gun made no more noise than a carefully opened bottle of wine. But by this time Thurkettle was rattled and his shot missed.

  Then the gorilla fired. He must have heard Thurkettle’s shot, for he was virtually in line with the barrel, where the silencer has least effect. The glass of the Wartburg’s windscreen smashed and Thurkettle thought Fiona Samson had been hurt, but then he saw her get out of the car. She shouted something, and then her doped-out sister came floating into view. Tessa came dancing, arms outstretched to display a long yellow diaphanous dress that was some sort of fancy costume.

  There must be no mistakes this time. Thurkettle picked up the shotgun and aimed low. Tessa seemed to see him. She grinned as he pulled the trigger twice, hitting her with both shots. As she went down, the gorilla fired again and this time his round put out one of the Wartburg’s headlights. Thurkettle didn’t like the way it was developing. Given the darkness one or two of these people could get away. But he wasn’t by any means certain how many people were there.

  There were more shots, fired in rapid succession, a sign of nerves. Stinnes probably, he could be trigger-happy. One of them had to find a mark. The gorilla screamed, ran, stumbled and crashed into the mud. Thurkettle stayed in the darkness. Somewhere in this muddy arena Bernard Samson lurked, and Samson was a pro. Then Stinnes stepped out to make sure the gorilla was dead. What a reckless thing to do. Thurkettle remained very still in the darkness and kept silent.

  ‘It’s safe,’ called Stinnes. He beckoned to a second man: a tall fellow in a smart trenchcoat: Kennedy.

  ‘How many did they send?’ Kennedy asked. He looked round nervously and the light from the single passing headlight caught his face. From his position Thurkettle could see both men clearly and identified them beyond chance of mistake: yes, Erich Stinnes and Harry Kennedy.

  Then Fiona Samson walked forward. Some instinct, or understandable trepidation, made her walk so as to avoid the pool of light. London must have briefed her to go for the van, for she was heading towards it, past the men, when two shots were fired. They came from somewhere so close to Thurkettle that the sound made him jump half out of his skin. Fiona Samson disappeared. Damn!

  Bang. Some damned great handgun. Kennedy jumped back, arms flailing like a rag doll as he was knocked over, and lay in the mud as still as a bundle of old clothes. He was unmistakably dead. Sometimes it goes like that, a lucky accident and one shot is enough.

  Bang. Again the cannon went off. Stinnes lurched round, firing his gun with one hand and clutching his neck with the other, the blood spraying through his fingers. It went everywhere and spattered Fiona. That shot was enough to tell Thurkettle that these were not lucky accidents. There was someone, a too damned close to him someone, who’d silently clambered up on to a piece of heavy machinery to get a better vantage point; some cold-blooded someone who didn’t say hands up; someone who hadn’t perfected his shooting on the range: Samson.

  Thurkettle’s mouth went dry. He always made it a rule not to tangle with professional hit men or pros like Samson. It was bad enough facing these KGB goons but Samson was a number one no-no.

  The remaining headlight of the Wartburg was switched off. It was dark now except when the lights of passing traffic swept across the mud and debris and the bodies. Thurkettle froze and hoped he hadn’t been spotted. Neither Bernard Samson nor his wife had been told of Thurkettle’s role in this drama. Only Tessa and Stinnes had expected him to be here, and they were both dead.

  Thurkettle crouched lower behind the tracks of the bulldozer and looked at the eastern horizon. Soon it would be dawn. He didn’t want to be here when it got light: any passing driver on the Autobahn might spot him. Cops might arrive. ‘Are we going to wait here all night, Samson?’ he called finally. ‘You can take the woman and take the Ford and go. Take your gorilla too. I don’t want any of you.’ When there was still no response he called, ‘Do you hear me? I’m working your side of the street. Get going. I’ve got work to do.’

  It was a breach of contract but only a minor breach: the two Samsons were on the side of the man who employed him. They’d just have to keep their mouths shut. Anyway by the time they were debriefed Thurkettle would have his money and be over the hills and far away.

  Fiona Samson might still have been sitting there had she not used every last atom of will-power to get to her feet. Something inside her had snapped. Was this the breakdown of will that she had been dreading for so long? Inside her head there was a noise that she couldn’t recognize. It blotted out her thoughts and distorted her vision. She didn’t know who she was and couldn’t remember where she was supposed to be.

  With the sluggish posture of a sleep-walker Fiona Samson emerged from the dark. Spattered with blood, and stumbling in the soft ground, she inched towards the Ford van. She was totally disabled by seeing Kennedy, dear sweet Harry whom she loved, so brutally shot dead, and not by an avenging husband but by a cold-blooded professional. Tessa too. The sister she cherished more than she could say was dead in a pool of blood.

  This was that ‘Last Judgment’ she’d discovered with such a shock. Here were the monsters come to torment her for all eternity. Wracked with sin, she had stepped beyond the cosy world of the Pariser Platz into the bloody nightmare on her wall, and there would be no escape. Her mind numbed, and suffering an anguish from which she would never completely recover, she moved through her frenzied world like an automaton.

  Bernard Samson watched Fiona get into the van. Then, suspicious to the last, he ran to get behind cover. When no shots were fired at him he climbed into the Ford van beside his wife. The engine started and, slowly and carefully, bumping over the pot-holes, the van moved off. Only when the site was clear did Thurkettle decide it was safe enough to emerge from his hiding place.

  Left alone, Deuce Thurkettle took off his trenchcoat so that only his coveralls would get soiled. He got his hacksaw and hastily but carefully started his grisly work. When the head was severed he dragged Tessa’s body into the car and arranged it with the skull he’d brought with him. The other bodies – the man in the gorilla suit, Harry Kennedy and Stinnes – ended up in the deep part of the excavations.

  Thurkettle heaved a sigh of relief as he threw his blood-saturated coveralls into the muddy ditch with them. He tossed the guns after them and, using the shovel, covered everything there with mud and debris.

  Setting fire to the car was easier. He watched the Wartburg burn and made sure that everything inside it was go
ing to be thoroughly consumed in the flames. Only then did he mount his motor cycle and ride away to collect his money.

  Werner Volkmann was sitting in a Skoda car at the Ziesar exit ramp, as arranged with Thurkettle. Werner had spent the evening at a fancy-dress party of which he was the nominal host. He had drunk only mineral water but now he was tired. Werner had always wanted to be a secret agent. He’d started doing little jobs for the British when he was still a teenager and the whole business of espionage still intrigued him. This was the finale. He knew that. The D-G had shaken hands with him and muttered something about an award: not money, some sort of medal or certificate. On his last visit to California Bret Rensselaer had said what Werner recognized as a final goodbye. By tomorrow morning Werner would be back in his West Berlin hotel and a private citizen again: his career in espionage over. He’d never tell anyone. Secrets shared were not his idea of what secrets should be.

  He looked at the pistol that London Central had supplied to him that morning. He’d hoped they would give him something that would satisfy his romantic yearnings: a lovely Colt Model 1911, a stylish Walther P.38 or a classic Luger. Instead London had sent him another of these cheap little ‘chamberless expendables’. It looked like a gadget used to ignite the flame on a gas stove. Its surface was hatched to provide a grip but also to eliminate any surface upon which a fingerprint could remain. It used triangular-sectioned cartridges – ‘trounds’ – in a ‘strip clip’, and almost everything was made by a plastics corporation in America. It was new, unidentifiable and in perfect working order, but it did not give Werner the satisfaction that he would have got from an old-fashioned weapon. Oh well, one had to move with the times. He put the gun in his inside pocket where it would be easy to reach.

  Dawn was breaking as Werner spotted Thurkettle arriving on his motor cycle. He waved airily to Werner and gave a little flip to the accelerator. Deuce enjoyed riding the big bike but now the time had come for him to dispose of it. He’d parked a Volkswagen camper nearby. As soon as he’d collected his payment from this lugubrious schmo, he’d walk to where he’d left the camper. In it there were clean clothes, soap, towels and food. Buried nearby he’d left a Swiss passport wrapped in plastic. The passport had a visa for a three-week camping tour of East Germany. He’d shave off his beard, change his appearance and drift around seeing the sights like a tourist until the heat died down. Then he’d drive north and take the ferry boat to Sweden.