by Len Deighton
‘It was all part of a play, you fool. I told him to promise it to Moscow. I promised him the System because I wanted to keep him on the hook while I reeled him in.’
‘It was an official play, you mean?’
‘You bloody fool, Rolf.’
‘I killed the poor bastard for nothing?’
‘You messed up my plan, Rolf.’
‘Oh, my God, Bernd.’
‘You’d better show me where I’m to sleep, Rolf. I have a busy day tomorrow.’
He stood up and mopped the sweat from his brow with a red handkerchief. ‘I won’t get to sleep, Bernd. It’s a terrible thing I have done. How can I sleep with that on my conscience?’
‘Think of all the poor bastards you killed in those artillery bombardments, Rolf, and add one.’
22
The next morning was very sunny. Even Prenzlauer Berg looked good. But Rolf Mauser’s second-floor apartment faced out onto a cobbled courtyard almost entirely filled by a large soot-caked chestnut tree. The greenish light reflected from its young leaves made it seem as if the whole place was under water.
Only a few stunted bushes grew in the yard. But there were bicycles there by the dozen and prams double-parked. Rows of rubbish bins too, their contents distributed far and wide by hungry cats that woke me in the night with their angry screeches. The narrow peeling stucco walls of the courtyard, which had brought the chestnut into early bud, echoed every sound. Everyone could hear the admonitions, arguments and shouted greetings of two women who were throwing pailfuls of water onto the mess and scrubbing energetically with stiff brooms.
‘It’s not exactly the Kaiserhof in its heyday,’ said Rolf, serving himself from a dented pot of coffee and leaving me to do the same. He had the bluff manner of a soldier, the self-centred ways of a man who’d lived alone too long. ‘Those damned cats kept me awake.’
‘Cobbler’s Boys,’ I said, picking up one of the triangular wholemeal rolls that Berliners eat at breakfast time. ‘I slept very well. Thanks for the bed, Rolf. I’ll push on today.’
‘It’s difficult to get them now,’ said Rolf. ‘All bread prices are controlled. None of these lazy swines of bakers want the extra work of making anything but ordinary bread.’ He’d recovered from his self-doubts of the night before, as all soldiers must renew their conscience with every dawn.
‘It’s the same everywhere,’ I said.
‘Stay a week if you want to. I get a bit fed up being here alone. The couple who let me share it are away visiting their married daughter.’ He took his cup of coffee from the tray he’d brought, put milk into it, and sat down on the bed while I finished shaving. ‘But you’ll have to take your turn carrying coal from the cellar.’
‘I hope I won’t need a week, Rolf.’
‘You’re going to see Brahms Four?’
‘Probably.’
‘Is there really a person called Brahms Four?’
‘I hope so, Rolf.’
‘I always thought it was the code name for a syndicate. Why else would the Brahms Four material always be kept separate from everything else we sent?’
‘Nothing so unusual about that.’
‘Officially he’s in the Brahms network.’ He paused to let me know he was about to say something significant. ‘But no one in the Brahms network has ever seen him.’
‘How do you know that?’ I said sharply. ‘Damn it, Rolf, you should know better than to discuss named agents with third parties.’
‘Even if the third parties are also agents?’
‘Especially then, because the chances of them being interrogated are that much greater.’
‘You’ve been a long time away, Bernd. You’ve been sitting behind a desk in London too long. Now you talk like one of those memos that Frank Harrington likes to write.’
‘Save some of that coffee for me, Rolf,’ I complained.
He stopped filling his cup, and looked up and grinned at me. ‘Suppose you find he doesn’t exist?’ he said, pouring the last of the coffee into my cup, dregs and all. ‘Suppose you find he’s just a postbox in the KGB building and you’ve been made a fool of for years and years?’
‘Is that your guess, Rolf?’
He bit off a mouthful of roll and chewed it. ‘No. I’m just being devil’s advocate.’
Rolf Mauser was right: although not a Departmental employee, I trusted Werner Volkmann more than anyone Berlin Station could provide. He had a car he used on the East side of the Wall. He was waiting for me at that part of Schönhauserallee where the underground trains come up into the daylight and rattle along the antiquated construction that patterns the whole street with shadows.
I opened the door and got in beside him. Without a word of greeting, he started up and headed north.
‘No wonder Brahms Four is getting jumpy,’ I said. ‘Too many people are becoming curious about him.’
‘He’ll not go undetected for another six months,’ said Werner.
‘London were hoping to squeeze another two years out of him.’
He made a noise that expressed his contempt for London Central and all their plans and ambitions. ‘With Brahms network channelling his reports?’
‘Other ways could be tried,’ I said.
‘Such as VHF radio, just powerful enough to transmit to Olympia Stadion?’ said Werner with an unmistakable edge to his voice.
‘That was mentioned,’ I admitted. It had been Dicky’s one and only contribution to a very long meeting the previous month.
‘By a fool,’ said Werner.
‘But what’s the alternative? Putting him into a different network?’
‘It could be done, couldn’t it?’
‘You’ve never had a job of introducing an agent into a network,’ I said. ‘Most of the nets are run by temperamental prima donnas. I couldn’t face all the arguments and anxieties that go with these damned shotgun marriages.’
‘Put him in contact with another network and you’ll slow up the delivery,’ said Werner. He was guessing, of course; he had no knowledge of what other networks we had with access to Berlin. But in fact his guess was right. There are lots of men like Werner; they just can’t stop working, pay or no pay. It was probably Werner who’d held Brahms together so long.
‘And you increase the number of people who know he exists,’ I said.
‘Does he exist?’ said Werner. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’
‘Have you been talking to Rolf Mauser?’
‘Of course I have,’ admitted Werner. ‘Do you imagine the network can handle material for years and not wonder where it’s coming from? Especially when we get bombarded with priority demands for immediate handling.’
‘I’m seeing him as soon as possible,’ I said. Werner looked away from the road for long enough to study my face. ‘You’re sharing secrets today, are you? That’s out of character, Bernie. Why would you tell me you’re seeing him?’
‘Because you’ve guessed already.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Werner. ‘That’s not it.’
‘Because we might have to get him out of East Berlin fast, Werner.’
‘I’ll take you to wherever you want to go,’ offered Werner. ‘Downtown? I have nothing to do.’
‘I’ll need the car, Werner. You’ve got plenty to do. I want you to take the London flight and be back here by evening.’
‘What for?’
‘When it happens, it will happen very fast.’
‘When what happens?’
‘Suppose, Werner…’ It was hard saying it out loud. ‘Suppose it’s Fiona who’s the KGB agent in London.’
‘Your wife?’
‘Well, think about it. Everything fits: the Giles Trent fiasco, and the way she tried to pin the leak of that Karlshorst signal on him. Bret wasn’t in Berlin at the time in question. Dicky never saw the signal. Fiona is the only one in the right place at the right time, every time.’
‘You can’t be serious, Bernie.’
‘I want to be wrong, Werner. But if it is
Fiona and she decides to run for it, she’ll take the children too.’ I wanted him to say I was talking nonsense.
‘But, Bernie, the duty officer at the airport would probably recognize her. Going out alone, she could say she was working. But with two kids I’d say any airport duty officer would be bound to check back with the office before letting her through.’
‘So what will she do?’ I said.
‘If she really is KGB, she’ll have them arrange about getting your children out separately. Jesus, Bernie. It’s too awful to think about. It couldn’t be Fiona, could it?’
‘We’ll have to trust Dicky,’ I said. ‘He’ll give you whatever you need. Take the children over to my mother. Make it all sound normal. I don’t want Fiona to know I suspect her. But have someone with them all the time – guards, I mean, people who will know what has to be done, not just security men – and arrange things so I can swear I know nothing about it, Werner. Just in case I’m wrong about Fiona.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong about her, Bernie.’
‘You’d better get going. I’ll drop you at a taxi rank and then take your car. I’ve got a busy day. See you at Rolf’s tonight.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong about Fiona,’ said Werner, but every time he said it he sounded less and less convinced that I was wrong.
23
I went to see Brahms Four at his office in Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse. It used to be Wilhelmstrasse in the old days, and just down the street beyond the Wall it still was. The building too had changed its name, for this was the huge and grandiose Air Ministry block that Hermann Göring had built for his bickering bureaucrats. It was one of the few Nazi government buildings that survived the fighting here in the centre of the city.
After filling in the requisite form for the clerk on the reception desk, I was shown upstairs. Here was the man who’d come back from what Dicky described as ‘some godforsaken little place in Thüringerwald’ to dig me out of my hideout in a narrow alley behind the Goethe Museum in Weimar just minutes before they came to get me. I’d never forget it.
Goodness knows what clerk in London Central had named the network Brahms or by what chance this man had become its number 4. But it had been put on his documents decades ago and, for their purposes, it was his name still. His real name was Dr Walter von Munte but, living in the proletarian state of the German Democratic Republic, he’d long since dropped the ‘von’. He was a tall gloomy man of about sixty, with a lined face, gold-rimmed eyeglasses and grey closely cropped hair. He was frail-looking despite his size, and his stooped shoulders and old-fashioned good manners made him seem servile by the standards of today’s world. The black suit he wore was carefully pressed but, like the stiff collar and black tie, it was well worn. And he wrung his hands like a Dickensian undertaker.
‘Bernd,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it’s you…after all these years.’
‘Is it so long?’
‘You were not even married. And now, I hear, you have two children. Or have I got it wrong?’
‘You’ve got it right,’ I said. He was standing behind his desk watching me as I went over to the window. We were close to the Wall: here I could almost see the remains of Anhalter railway station; perhaps from a higher floor I’d see the Café Leuschner. I carelessly touched the telephone junction box on the windowsill, and glanced up at the light fittings before going back again.
He guessed what I was doing. ‘Oh, you need not worry about hidden microphones here. This office is regularly searched for such devices.’ He smiled grimly.
Only when I sat down on the moulded plastic chair did he sit down too. ‘You want to get out?’ I said softly.
‘There is not much time,’ he said. He was very calm and matter of fact.
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘You know what the hurry is,’ he said. ‘One of your people in London is reporting regularly to the KGB. It’s only a matter of time…’
‘But you’re special,’ I said. ‘You are kept apart from everything else we do.’
‘They have a good source,’ he said. ‘It must be someone at the top in London.’
‘London want you to stay on,’ I said. ‘For two years at least.’
‘London is Oliver Twist. London always wants more. Is that why you came here? To tell me to stay on?’
‘It’s one of the reasons,’ I admitted.
‘You’ve wasted your time, Bernd. But it’s good to see you, just the same.’
‘They’ll insist.’
‘Insist?’ While he considered the idea of London forcing him to stay on, he carefully tore the edging from a block of postage stamps. ‘How can they insist on anything? If I ceased to report to them, what could they do about that? If they betrayed me, the word would soon get around and your whole service would suffer.’
‘There would be no question of London betraying you. You know that.’
‘So what sanction do they have? How could they insist?’ Having made the postage stamps look more tidy, he rolled up the stamp edging to make it into a ball.
I said, ‘You’d have to give up all thoughts of going to the West. And I think you want to go to the West.’
‘My wife wants to go. She wants to see her brother’s grave. He was killed in Tunisia in the war. They were very close as children. But if it proves impossible, then so be it.’ He shrugged and unrolled the stamp edging, smoothing it flat again.
‘And you want to see your son in São Paulo.’
He said nothing for a long time, toying with the stamp edging as if he were thinking of nothing else. ‘You are still as painstaking as you used to be, Bernd. I should have guessed you’d trace the payments.’
‘A holding company in Luxembourg that receives money from Bayerische Vereinsbank in Munich, and transfers money to the São Paulo office of the Banco Nacional is not exactly deep cover,’ I said. ‘That publishing-company account isn’t active enough to fool anyone for long.’
‘Who else knows that?’ He opened the brass flap on his ornate pen stand and looked at the dried-up sediment in the inkwell.
‘I have told no one.’
‘I appreciate that, Bernd.’
‘You got me out of Weimar,’ I said.
‘You were young. You needed help.’
He screwed up the stamp edging a second time and tossed it into the dry inkwell with commendable accuracy before closing the brass flap. ‘They arrested Busch the very next day.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘I gave them his address.’
‘I know.’
‘Who could have guessed the poor old fellow would go back home again?’
‘I would have done the same,’ I said.
‘Not you, Bernd. You’re made of harder stuff.’
‘That’s why they sent me to tell you to hang on,’ I said.
He didn’t smile. Without looking up from his desk, he said, ‘Suppose I could help you find the traitor in London?’
So that was it. So that’s what all the messages and the difficulties had been leading up to. I said nothing. Munte knew nothing about London except the identity of Silas, who’d been his friend and run him so long ago. And nowadays Silas had little contact with the day-to-day running of London Central. Surely Silas couldn’t be one of them.
He spoke again, still fidgeting with the pen stand. ‘I couldn’t name him, but I could identify him positively to your satisfaction. And provide evidence that would satisfy even a law court, if that’s the course that London decided upon.’
Giles Trent, perhaps. I had to find out if he was trying to sell me something I already had. ‘How would you do that? What sort of evidence?’
‘Could you get me out?’
‘You alone?’
‘Me and my wife. Together. It would have to be the two of us together. We wouldn’t be separated.’
I felt sure he was going to tell me about Giles Trent. If the KGB had discovered that we were playing Trent, I’d like to know. But I couldn’t pull
Munte out just for that.
Perhaps he guessed the sort of thoughts that were running through my mind. ‘I’m talking about someone with access to London Data Centre,’ he said, staring at me, knowing that I would be surprised to hear he even knew such a place existed. ‘Someone with pass-codes prefixed “Knee jerk”.’
I sat very still and tried to look impassive. Now there was no longer any way of avoiding the awful truth. The ‘Knee jerk’ codes were used by only a handful of specially selected top personnel in London Central. Used in the Data Centre’s computer, they accessed the automatic link – hence ‘Knee jerk’ – to CIA data files. If they’d seen printout with ‘Knee jerk’ marks here in East Berlin, there was no limit to what might have been betrayed. It was not Giles Trent we were talking about; it was someone senior, someone very close to Operations. ‘How soon could you get this evidence?’
‘This evening.’
‘When would you want to travel?’ This development changed everything. If Brahms Four could help identify such a well-placed Soviet agent, London would want him there to give evidence.
‘You know what women are like, Bernd. My wife would probably need a few days to think about it.’
‘Tomorrow. I’ll take you back with me. But let me make this clear. Unless you produce irrefutable evidence that enables me to identify the person who is supplying this material, the deal is off.’
‘I’ll bring you four handwritten pages of data. Would that satisfy you?’
‘Handwriting? Then it’s certainly not genuine. No agent would be that stupid.’
‘Is that what you think, Bernd? Sometimes – when it’s late, and one is tired – it becomes very difficult to take all the necessary precautions. Blame the KGB controller in the London Embassy who forwarded the original instead of making a copy. Or blame the clerks here in Berlin who have left the document in the file, Bernd. I feel sorry for the agent. I know exactly how he felt.’
‘Handwritten? And no one here remarked on it?’
‘Lots of our papers are handwritten. We are not quite so automated as you are in the West. It’s a distinctive hand – very neat with curly loops.’
