Stealing the Future

by Max Hertzberg

  I picked up the pace again, and skidded on the polished lino as I turned into a wider part of the corridor. Our fugitive was on the floor, holding his leg, face contorted in agony. Klaus stood above him, looking down, obviously unsure what to do.

  “What happened?”

  Klaus gestured towards the wall, where a paternoster lift clicked its way past an opening, a loop of chain running from the top floor to the basement and back again, from which boxes hang. You get in a box on one floor, and jump out when you’ve reached the floor you want. The lift doesn’t stop, just goes round in an endless, slow loop.

  “He ran down the stairs and jumped to get on the lift. He tripped, missed it—trapped his leg. I had to pull him out,” he shrugged. “But it looks like you’ve got your man after all.”

  I nodded, bent double, trying to get my breath back. After a while I straightened up to see Klaus examining Fremdiswalde’s left leg.

  “You’ll be all right, Sonny Jim, no blood. You’ll probably just have a big bruise in the morning.”

  Fremdiswalde didn’t seem impressed, he was still on the floor groaning.

  “Why don’t you find a phone and call the cops, I’ll stay here with him. Make sure he doesn’t leg it again,” grinned Klaus, taking a cigar out of his pocket.

  17:06

  It took quite a while for the bulls to show up and take Fremdiswalde into custody. I considered going with him, make sure he’d be treated right, but guessed that I probably wouldn’t be of much use. Besides, I had a mysterious appointment with Dmitri, Woltersdorf Lock he’d said. I knew it was somewhere on the eastern edge of Berlin, but wasn’t quite sure where, so I’d looked it up. Strange place. Get the S‑Bahn to Rahnsdorf, a station in the middle of the forests around Berlin-Köpenick, then change to a tram that went through the woods until it got to a little village just outside the city limits. I was lucky, Klaus gave me a lift to the nearest S‑Bahn station and the tram was waiting when I got off the train, so I climbed aboard, pushing my ticket into the stamping machine and pressing on the handle on the top to punch a hole. I sat down at the back, thinking about the tram ride with Annette last night.

  Only one other person got on, a middle aged man in a long brown coat and a trilby. He sat down in the front seat without looking around, content to stare out of the window, watching the people at the S‑Bahn station.

  With a jerk the tram moved off. It was a rattly old thing. After a few metres it left the road and swerved into the trees, grumbling over track joints, jolting and shaking the whole while. I wanted to have a think, try to process the day so far. There was so much to think about, but the lurching tram made it hard to do anything but look out of the window. After about a kilometre of trees the tram banged over some points, the track making a small loop next to an abandoned hut. The man sitting near the front seemed to take this as a cue, knocking at the driver’s window—a knock like a policeman’s, a hard triple-rap. The driver clicked open the door, and the man leant in, saying a few words. The tram was rattling too much for me to make out any of the short conversation, but the man seemed happy. With large, confident strides he came down the carriage, pulling open the rear door.

  “You, this is your stop. Out, now!” The tram had slowed a bit, it was going about walking pace. “Quick, out here, go down that path and you’ll be met there!”

  He spoke with a Slavic accent, and I think it was this combined with his confidence that made me follow his orders. I jumped down, my right knee almost giving way as I landed on the forest floor, the tram door slamming shut behind me as it hastened off, leaving the forest and disappearing round a bend.

  I looked around me. Nothing but the tram rails, the hut about fifty metres behind me and a track going off into the gloom. I followed the path, back the way I’d come, past the abandoned hut.

  “Grobe!”

  I looked around. No-one to be seen.

  “Grobe!”

  A closer look, the voice had come from the other side of the rails. I stepped over them, and found myself face to face with a Russian NCO. She didn’t say anything else, just beckoned me to follow. At this point I wasn’t seeing many alternatives, so I followed her for a few hundred metres. We headed directly into the forest, until, on a wider track we came upon a Soviet Army UAZ jeep, well disguised in its olive drab. Beside the passenger door stood a man wearing fatigues. And an eye patch. The KGB officer who had been watching me the other day at the Karlshorst HQ. A military haircut—short and greying, skin like parchment, shiny and without any wrinkles—somehow it gave him a youthful look, even though he was about my age. Without smiling he held out his hand for me to shake.

  “Dmitri Alexandrovich.”

  I took his hand, but didn’t say anything.

  “You must forgive me for these little games, but you were being followed. Here, take these, put them on. We don’t have much time.”

  He handed me a Soviet Army greatcoat and cap, and held the back door of the UAZ open for me. I shrugged into the coat, put the forage cap on, and climbed in. My guide got into the driver’s seat, and Dmitri climbed in beside her. The jeep made easy work of the rough logging track, and the three of us sat in silence as we sped through the woods. Anyone we passed would only have seen a Soviet vehicle with three Soviet Army soldiers in it—with the cap and coat I would be unrecognisable.

  We must have been on the go for about twenty minutes before we stopped. At first we had stuck to forest tracks, but then we crossed a railway line and sped through the centre of the small town of Erkner. Out the other end we headed east. After that I lost track, but now we’d stopped in a clearing. The NCO ran round the front of the jeep, holding Dmitri’s door open for him. I managed to get out under my own steam, by which time Dmitri was already heading down a narrow path. I followed, noticing that the NCO had got back behind the wheel, and was sitting there, eyes straight ahead, not looking towards me or her officer.

  I caught up with Dmitri, who had stopped and was waiting for me.

  “Once again, apologies, my friend, for all the silly games. But I have to be careful.” His one good eye assessed me: “And so do you, it seems.”

  “Why was I being followed? Is it because of you?”

  “Maybe. But I think it is fair to assume that you grew a tail some time ago, and not just today.” He’d started walking again, and I fell into step beside him. “After all, you are looking into the Maier affair. Think back. You know how this is done: remember! Think!”

  Dmitri was right. I hadn’t noticed, maybe I hadn’t wanted to notice, but there had been clues. The Trabant that started up and drove off when Nik and I came out of my house on the way to the bar on Sunday. The couple kissing in a doorway, too many people on the quiet, residential streets near the squat last night, all heading the same way as us.

  “You may be right,” I admitted.

  “Yes. You must think, observe. They will not just be following where you go, but also following what you do. The Maier case is very interesting to a lot of people.”

  “Is it related to what you told Nik about the operation run from Moscow?”

  “Martin, listen. You do not know if you can trust me. You do not know me. But I know you. I know your files, I know what you’ve done, what you do now, the way you think. So I can talk to you, but you? Do you listen to me? That is what you must decide. Trust no-one. Only the people closest to you, and do not trust even them with anything.”

  I laughed. It was too absurd, all too dramatic. I’d been given a secret note, practically been thrown off a moving tram, then abducted in a Soviet jeep, to be taken to a secret location: all to be told not to trust anyone.

  Dmitri didn’t respond, he just carried on walking. I watched him for a moment, considering whether to go back to the jeep, demand to be returned to civilisation. But Dmitri was right, I should trust no-one. Nevertheless, I needed to know more. I caught up with Dmitri again.

  “OK, let’s play it your way Dmitri Alexandrovich. What’s your interest in Maier?”
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  We’d reached a lake, and Dmitri stared out over it before answering. It wasn’t a huge lake, but big enough to take a rowing boat out on to. We were surrounded by dark forest and no sounds could be heard, not even birds.

  “I do not know, Martin. I wish I did. But the West Silesian problem ties in with the KGB, and what is happening in Moscow right now. So that makes it my problem too.”

  “But you’re KGB, surely you should know what’s going on?”

  “Not my area, but I’m trying to find out. And now this detachment from Moscow… I cannot use the normal channels. No drushba with these officers from the Third Directorate. No drinks and shared secrets,” Dmitri sighed, and turned away from the water, his eye pointing towards me again. “And you know even less, but perhaps we can help each other, I think.

  “So, in the KGB,” he continued in his low, slow voice, the Slavic accent hardly affecting his German pronunciation, “there are two factions. There are those who say the time is not yet right, we should support Gorbachev because with him we have the best chance of keeping the USSR together. But there are many more who say, it is now, it is time to remove Gorbachev, to move ahead with the plan.”

  “Do you think Gorbachev will survive this second crisis? And what’s this plan?”

  Dmitri considered his answer for a moment.

  “No, maybe he won’t survive. It all depends on my colleagues in Moscow, whether the right people support him. It’s difficult to say what will happen. We have the same problem as you. Agents have been put into key decision-making positions throughout the government—it’s their job to keep control of power, whichever way it goes. At the moment it looks like the power will be in the economy, rather than the Party apparatus. If Gorbachev doesn’t survive then Yeltsin will sell off land and industry, and my colleagues will be there with the cash, waiting to buy it all up.”

  “And if Gorbachev stays?”

  “If he stays then his attempts to roll out perestroika will meet further resistance and more coup attempts. The problem is, Gorbachev doesn’t understand economics. He’s not in control of his perestroika any more.”

  “But if Gorbachev doesn’t survive, how can we? We depend on Gorbachev to protect us from the West.”

  “That is why I am talking to you. Your little experiment here in the GDR depends on what happens to old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.” Dmitri looked at the lake for a moment, then picked up a small stone and threw it into the water.

  “See those ripples? The circles get larger and larger the further away from the centre they are. Gorbachev is at the centre—a small, insignificant pebble, and the GDR is a long way away from him. By the time the ripples get to you they make big circles, they seem quite significant. By the time they get to Bonn or London or Washington those ripples are part of a huge wash of water moving outwards from Moscow. It’s his reputation that is saving you, making the West think twice about moving in.”

  “Do you mean that if Gorbachev stops making ripples–”

  “I’m not sure what I mean,” Dmitri was still staring out at the water. The ripples were getting fainter and fainter. “Perhaps that you shouldn’t rely on Gorbachev. He has troubles of his own, and if you ask me, he’d be glad to be rid of what he sees as an unnecessary burden. I think he gave up on you years ago.”

  We stood together like that, Dmitri lost in his own world, while I thought about his words.

  “You mentioned that the KGB has officers in place in the Soviet government—are they here too? Is that the plan?”

  I had the Russian’s attention now. He gazed at me with his one good eye, a look of mild surprise crossing his features.

  “You don’t know? Mmm, I keep forgetting—you’ve not been directly briefed in these matters, you RS officers are just amateurs.”

  I tried not to feel nettled by what Dmitri said—after all, he wasn’t wrong. I concentrated on what he was saying.

  “But I know your minister has been briefed on the situation, I had hoped that the information had been passed down. No, the KGB isn’t involved any more, we left it all to the Stasi to run, even though the plan was developed by one of our officers based in Dresden, and the Stasi set it up with our help.

  “About six or seven years ago the Stasi began to put officers—Offiziere im besonderen Einsatz, OibE—into strategic political and industrial positions. There was a meeting in June 1989, all the socialist secret services were there—Egon Krenz represented the GDR—and they agreed the overall policy. If the economy begins to fail, or the political situation changes dramatically, they will be in place to steer decisions and policy. Their aim is to remain in control of the country no matter what happens. In Moscow they are still waiting and ready, we call them the Oligarchs—a few men with a lot of power. It doesn’t seem to be happening in other countries. But here in the GDR? Who knows? I think the general strike in November 1989 came as a surprise to them, maybe Mischa Wolf didn’t get the activation signal out in time. If they’re still in position then they’re still dangerous, they could take over at any time, and nobody would even notice until it was too late.”

  This was all news to me. It sounded like a conspiracy theory, but Dmitri seemed serious, and most importantly, believable. Markus Wolf—who liked to accentuate his Russian connections by calling himself Mischa—was until 1987 the head of the head of the HVA: the part of the Stasi that was responsible for foreign operations. He’d since fled to the West. Egon Krenz, the Crown Prince of the Party with a reputation as a hardliner had also gone West. Did they still have control of these OibE agents?

  “What would make them act? Are there any triggers other than this activation signal from Wolf?”

  “Could be anything,” Dmitri tossed another stone into the lake and watched the ripples until they lapped at his boots. “I think it would have to be some kind of major crisis. You’ve decentralised so much of your decision making; that will make it hard for them to exert too much influence here. But if there were a major crisis then they could engineer the re-centralisation of power structures, a state of emergency perhaps—that would give them back control, allow a task force to take power.”

  “And they could even organise that crisis? Is that what they’re doing in West Silesia?”

  “Precisely,” Dmitri looked up, pleased with his pupil.

  “So West Silesia is like a test run, to see how easy it is to sideline the Round Tables? And at the same time they can destabilise the whole of the Republic, setting the scene for a bigger crisis? But haven’t they gone a bit too far? I mean, by involving the Westgermans? Surely that’s not part of the KGB plan?”

  “Yes.” Dmitri was staring out over the water again, thinking, “I doubt the Westgerman involvement was part of the plan. But now that they are on the scene they’ll be turning the situation to their own advantage. Something went wrong, somebody went off the rails, is my guess. Perhaps that’s why some of the KGB are here at the moment, perhaps they’ve been sent by Moscow to try to sort out the mess.”

  “Why are you telling me this? It’s your colleagues that are involved.”

  “As I said, some of us think the time is not yet right. We do not want the Oligarchs to control our country. Or yours.” His tone of voice changed, the rolling R and the alien vowels of his Slavic accent became more pronounced.

  “For over 70 years we’ve made it our business to take people’s dreams, to make them our own. Then crush them without mercy. We told the world that we were a paradise, created and maintained by the iron discipline of the workers and peasants. We exported our revolutions, invited others to share our utopia at the barrel of a gun. We have failed. Our revolution was already doomed in 1917. The reforms are failing too. If Gorbachev loses his gamble then it is over for us. It will be your turn to carry the flag.”

  I didn’t know how to react. When a KGB officer is this lyrical and this critical you have to pinch yourself, check you’re still awake.

  “You’re a socialist?”

  “Something lik
e that. Perhaps something stuck, from school or Komsomol,” Dmitri answered. “And I think the same happened to you, no?”