by Alex Cugia
The two men started, almost got up from their chairs. “Dieter? The head of … ”
“Exactly!” Thomas interrupted Köpp. He was glad he had finally managed to get the two out in the open and he now knew that they would all close the deal. After the initial exclamation Bockmann took control again and looked at Thomas through narrowed eyes which expressed his astonishment and incredulity and, Thomas thought, a grudging respect.
“And I assume that we will be able to verify that the voice really is that of Colonel Dieter? Or is he the other agent you keep referring to, by any chance?” He raised his eyebrows and Thomas flushed at the mockery.
“So you don’t yet know that Dieter is dead?”
There was no reply. The news had clearly surprised Bockmann, who kept his eyes on Thomas, trying to guess whether the young man was lying.
“I guess then you don’t know everything after all.” Thomas continued, a slight smile raising the left side of his mouth. “He was murdered two days ago in his own house. You will, I think, find it particularly interesting to learn who had probably arranged that and why.”
Bockmann and Köpp glanced at each other and then Bockmann pursed his mouth, rested his chin on his clasped fists and stared at the table. There was a long silence.
“Tell me this, Mr Shultz. We know Dieter to be someone who trusted very few people, even among his colleagues. However, there were two people, not obvious people, he appeared to trust and, we believe, may have confided in from time to time. Who were they?”
“Perhaps you mean Bettina List as one. The other is probably Hanno Wornletz.”
“Hmmm. Perhaps we may be able to come to some arrangement after all, including on the matter of what you call the unjust prison sentence. That’s provided you can deliver what you claim and provided it all hangs together and meshes properly with what we already know. But if you’re bullshitting, and particularly if you’re lying, I guarantee we’ll put you behind bars for longer than you ever thought possible. Am I clear?”
Thomas nodded and they shook hands.
"Köpp. Give Mr Schultz something to eat and then get started checking the detail. If it stacks up he can go back tomorrow and we'll make arrangements to get the agent and any material brought safely over here in a day or two."
Chapter 44
Sunday January 21 1990
“I MISS lying with him curled round me,” she thought “warm, safe. Dammit! I need him back. I need him now.”
It was a couple of days since Thomas had left for Frankfurt and so a couple of nights that Bettina had been on her own. At first she'd coped well enough, self reliant, absorbed in her monitoring of the tapes. The worst times were when she listened to Dieter speaking and it had taken when it took all her professional self-control to put to one side her memories of the person and instead focus on the content. Every so often she'd catch her memory drifting back to the sight of Dieter lying bloodied and lifeless on the floor and she felt a fury towards his killers that surprised her. Then the fear started to take over, mixing with her anger and leading her to question whether she, whether Thomas and she, could escape this danger.
On the second day she even found herself doubting Thomas. Perhaps now that he was in Frankfurt he'd find it too difficult to return. He’d find some justification for not coming back. "Absurd!" she thought as she pushed the thought away firmly "He'd never desert me like that." But later it returned and with it an image of her father and his abandonment of his family. She stared out of the window for long periods, carefully standing back so as not to be noticed, watching the people on the street, coming and going, carrying out their their voyages and visits, doing their mundane daily tasks, unconcerned, and she envied them.
She prowled around the small apartment and then threw herself into the easy chair. Lying back, she drifted in and out of sleep, imagining Thomas and her together, their caresses exploding into urgent lovemaking with the world of spying and sudden death utterly forgotten. She smiled and wriggled into a more comfortable position, hugging herself.
Sometime later she was instantly awake, listening to light dragging steps outside the door accompanied by a soft, stifled cough. The door knob turned very slowly and quietly and the door creaked slightly as someone pushed against it. There was a scratching of metal at the lock and although she knew she’d secured it well after Thomas left she pushed back the safety catch and pointed her gun at the door, intensely alert. The door handle slowly reverted to its original position and she heard the same dragging steps moving away, descending.
She shivered, let out her breath pent up since the first hint of a possible intruder, pushed on the safety catch, and lay back in the chair, then laughed as a scene from a foreign jailbreak film she’d watched in a small art house cinema with her brother Paul just before he was arrested flashed into her mind. “Stir crazy! That’s me. I’m going stir crazy. God, where’s Thomas? Why isn’t he back yet?”
She’d worked late into the evening listening to the tapes, reluctant to go to bed and knowing that sleep would be hard to come. On that second night, lying awake, her mind churning, thinking over everything that happened and trying to make connections, she’d abandoned her attempt to sleep and got up at four in the morning, sitting down soon afterwards to eavesdrop on what had been happening in Dieter’s office. Now she was up to date and had made records of the tapes’ contents and the positions where anything of interest had happened.
Most of the conversations were about the situation in Dresden and it had taken time for Bettina to piece things together and begin to understand something of the interlinked events. She’d come to realise that Thomas and she had seen only hints of what had been going on and that the issue was much bigger than they’d thought.
Dieter kept asking someone about how Roehrberg and Spitze were reacting and had earlier talked also about Henkel and what was being said about his death.
"Putin?" Dieter had said on one of these occasions. "You mean the major in the KGB office?" There had been a long silence as he'd listened. "You did well." he'd said "I'm not surprised Roehrberg was angry if Putin was muscling in. I know he detests Putin anyway, thinks he's a thug. Well he is, of course, but he's a dangerous one too and he's clever, not someone to underestimate." There was another long silence.
"It's what I'd thought." he said. "The money vanishing just didn't make sense, given the security. It had to be someone inside and Roehrberg and Henkel were the obvious people. I suppose Böhm could have been part of it but, again, he and Roehrberg only just tolerate each other. Putting the blame on a dead Henkel gets rid of the problem. No one's going to investigate too deeply given the state we're in now." He'd laughed. "And then Putin turns up! I'd have given anything to see Roehrberg's face when he realised what was happening, that he was stuck." He laughed again, one of the few times Bettina had heard him. "Get that evidence back to me and any more you can find and we'll nail them all. And maybe even some here in Berlin."
He'd also asked what Bettina was doing, where she’d been and whom she’d met with. Thomas had only called Dieter once so it was clear that this was someone else who had been watching her movements.
Then she recalled Thomas’s comment that it was strange that Dieter would have sent Bettina on her own in such a difficult and possibly dangerous mission. Suddenly it all made sense. "There was another agent there in Dresden" she thought "and Dieter sent me as bait, to try to push Roehrberg, Henkel, or Spitze into making a mistake."
The other agent was hidden, conducting his investigation in the shadows, probably from within the Dresden office she now understood. She wished desperately that she could hear the other side of the telephone conversations, perhaps learn what the agent was telling Dieter or even recognise his or her voice.
"That's who it must have been," she realised suddenly "that man in the grey leather jacket who was in the kneipe that evening and who trailed me in the white car." Her eyes filled as she thought about it. "Oh, Dieter, Dieter," she thought "you might have exposed
me to danger but you made as sure as you could that I was protected. And I thought that guy was Roehrberg's man."
From a couple of comments made by Dieter later it seemed that the other agent had found more of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Henkel’s will had been deposited two weeks earlier at a notary’s, apparently the same Manfred Dornbush who had signed the fake privatisation document, and left everything to his close friend Rudolf Roehrberg. “Well, well!” thought Bettina “I expect the handwriting matches that on the suicide note!”
But it was what she learned about Phoenix Securities which particularly alarmed her. She knew that Dieter had asked Thomas to look into it from Dresden and this was apparently because it was too risky to investigate in Berlin. Apparently there was also a connection of some sort with Dresden although, frustratingly, the details were never specified in the conversations.
A couple of these conversations were with Hanno Wornletz. Dieter had told Hanno that he’d been contacted by a senior agent of Phoenix Securities some three months earlier. Phoenix was looking forrom help from the Stasi network of agents nationwide in order to provide monitoring assistance for a financing project and was prepared to pay a fee of close to a million DM for support for a week. Dieter had been cagey and tried first to probe for information but the person concerned had cut off all communication and disappeared from Dieter’s view.
Then he had learned recently that Phoenix had begun expanding dramatically all over the country and a couple of sources had confirmed to him that the growth was supported by the Stasi network. It was clear that someone within the Firm, someone at a very senior level and so able to deliver the whole network, had accepted the proposal and agreed to work with Phoenix. No doubt, in his typical style and in an attempt to test reactions, Dieter had dropped hints that he was himself looking into Phoenix and had found some interesting connections although nothing yet appeared certain.
As she knew from the earlier meeting Thomas was to find out what he could about the organisation and management of the company, and in particular who headed the scheme in West Germany. Hanno's role, however, was the more delicate one of investigating internally to find the rotten apple in the senior ranks of the Stasi, working closely with Dieter and using misinformation as necessary to trap others into revealing more than they intended.
"You've been placed in Sponden's office, haven't you?" Dieter had said "Keep your eyes and ears open, note anything unusual, let me know who visits, who calls."
"Oh, I don't think Sponden's inv... " Hanno had said and then stopped and as he did so the telephone rang and Dieter got caught up in a tedious administrative discussion, breaking off briefly to say to Hanno that they'd continue the discussion another time, presumably waving him out of the office.
Dieter had also used himself as bait but had had no one to save him when the shark had attacked, she thought. Now she and Thomas were in serious danger because Dieter had brought them in and they now knew too much. Hanno was at risk too, it seemed, and she wondered how she could warn him.
After the incident of the mysterious prowler outside the door she’d grabbed something to eat, levering open a can of lentils with a knife and washing the contents and a couple of slices of pumpernickel down with some fruit juice. She’d listened to the morning’s tapes but like all of those following Dieter’s death very little had happened. A couple of people whose voices she didn’t recognise had entered the office and spent some time searching for documents, found what they were looking for and had then left.
"Perhaps those were our files" she thought "and that makes us the next targets." And then she remembered, although it did little to reassure her, that Dieter had promised to keep their files with him and that therefore they had probably been hidden at his house. Thomas was right − their only hope lay in contacting the BND for help. On their own it was almost impossible for them to oppose Roehrberg and his colleagues.
As the afternoon wore on she paced the apartment, occasionally slumping into the chair and trying to doze but with little success. "Where is he? Where is he? Where is he?" she kept thinking. "His meeting was yesterday and he should have been back last night, this morning at latest." She paced around more, uncomfortable with waiting helplessly inside, somone who needed to act and be active.
Perhaps Thomas had been captured even before leaving and was in serious danger. Maybe he’d been shot and it was only a matter of time before they found her and killed her too. Or maybe he’d made it to Frankfurt but instead of doing a deal had been arrested as a spy and was now in jail. She couldn't stand not knowing.
She made a sudden decision. Towards dusk, around four thirty she calculated, she’d slip out of the apartment, make a quick phone call to the general BND number Thomas had left her, perhaps buy some bread and cheese, and be back in no time. The chances that anyone would mark her, let alone recognise her if she dressed appropriately, were remote. She longed to be outside and she was desperate to find out something of Thomas's movements. She might even manage to speak with him. The decision elated her and she thought with excitement of her coming adventure and temporary escape.
She found a dark brown scarf and, tying back her hair, used it to cover her head completely. She chose an old coat, a slightly shabby one in a sludgy greeny-brown wool, with a belt, which she'd never liked much but which she occasionally wore when it was particularly cold. She looked at herself in the mirror, pushed under the scarf a few stray bits of her distinctive blonde hair and decided that she looked older, a little run down and not someone that anyone would look at twice. Importantly, it would be difficult for anyone to recognise her unless they were very close. She must remember to look down and perhaps shuffle slightly, she thought. A battered leather shopping bag she found in a cupboard completed the illusion of a housewife out for supplies.
Bettina slipped her gun into a coat pocket, listened at the door for some minutes and then opened it cautiously. She looked down the stairs and over the rail into the well and, seeing no one and hearing nothing, pulled the door behind her using the key to prevent the lock clicking into place with a loud snap. She turned the key of the mortice lock carefully and in silence.
Again she looked over the rail and then quickly ran downstairs. It was a wonderful feeling to be able to move freely again. The apartment was so small her legs had almost felt numb and she’d felt heavy and dissatisfied with her lack of exercise. As she reached the bottom of the stairs she heard dragging footsteps but hardly noticed the old lady cleaning behind the staircase with a broom. Quickening her pace, anxious to get out into the open, she reached the front door as she heard a cough and then a voice behind calling out to her. Ignoring the sounds she opened the door and stepped out. Who the woman was she had no idea but she didn’t seem particularly friendly and Bettina saw no reason to engage with her.
Chapter 45
Sunday January 21 1990, evening
IT was now dusk and the street lights had come on, some of them not yet warmed up and so still fairly dim. She turned to the right, recalling there was a public phone not too far away. She felt slightly unstable as she made her way down the street, trying to avoid looking into the eyes of the people she passed. Lack of sleep and the constant nervous tension of being hunted had made her feel weak and the familiar streets outside almost seem part of a foreign country.
On the corner of Schillingstrasse, she again turned right. It was an area of Berlin she knew well since it was close to where she’d studied at university and near the Stasi offices. The small coffee shop where she’d brought Thomas on their second meeting was just around the corner, and she felt very tempted to make a detour and stop by. For her, the place was like home.
Then she had a sudden, unexpected vision of Dieter’s body lying on the floor in a pool of blood and had to stop, leaning briefly against a wall until the weakness and distress she felt passed. A man walking towards her hesitated as if to ask if she needed help, a movement that shook her and reminded her of how dangerous it could be for her to h
ave left the apartment. She straightened, lowered her head to avoid eye contact, coughed into her hand, and walked on. At least the phone booth was now close by in a small side street and in a moment, turning the corner, she saw it.
Searching in her pockets she at first found nothing but then, a couple of seconds later, crumpled and in a small inner pocket where she’d stowed it for safety, she found the piece of paper which Thomas had left her. She tried Stephan’s number first. Nobody answered. Hesitantly, she called the second number and asked to be put through. After four further rings, a firm, young-sounding voice, answered.
“Köpp.”
“I’m looking for Mr Schultz.” she said, in her most nondescript tone of voice. "He asked me to call through this number." She had no idea of how the discussions between Thomas and the agents had gone.
“There is no one of that name here. Who am I speaking to?”
“A friend. Do you know his movements? Is he on his way back?”
“Ah, I understand. You must be the other person he spoke to us about." Köpp became authoritative. "What is your code name? Where are you calling from?”
She hung up. There was no way she would start a conversation with a West German agent without knowing first what had happened to Thomas. Perhaps he was now in prison and they were trying to get hold of her. She stood in front of the phone unable to decide what to do next. She lifted the receiver to call Stephan again and leave a message but then put it down almost immediately. She knew she should head straight back to the apartment and wait but the sense of freedom kept her outside. Still she waited by the phone, reluctant to move, uncertain of what to do and continuing to relish being out in the open again. At least Thomas had made it to Frankfurt and met with Köpp, it seemed, but if he didn’t return by the next afternoon it would suggest that something had gone wrong.
