The Moscow Sleepers

by Stella Rimington

  All these assumptions now seemed utterly misconceived. To have accepted the destruction of one’s real identity to live as someone else was a betrayal of oneself. It had seemed worth it while it had a purpose. To find out now that there was no purpose at all to a lifetime of deceit was too much to bear. Especially when it turned out that the role he had for so long thought was assigned to him had actually been given to his wife, Irma.

  He wondered what would happen now that he had confided in Matilda and she in turned had talked to her husband, who was part of British intelligence. It seemed impossible that he would be allowed to stay in his Brussels post. The British intelligence people would feel obliged to discuss his case with their German counterparts, and one of these services would in turn speak with the security people at the Commission. The best outcome he could envisage for himself was early retirement, though probably without a pension, and the thought of returning to live in Hamburg with Irma seemed almost as bad a punishment as a prison sentence. Irma. The mere thought of her now filled Dieter with disgust. His disaffection with his wife had been tolerable only because he always had Brussels to look forward to. Without that, his life would be hell.

  It was a tradition of the house in Blankensee that on Saturday evenings Dieter cooked supper, the only occasion on which he was allowed in Irma’s kitchen. This afternoon he shopped locally, while Irma stayed at home doing her paperwork. He bought chicken and vegetables, ingredients for a stir-fry, something Irma didn’t like very much, which in his new-found fury and despair made him all the more eager to prepare it. ‘Too spicy,’ she would complain when Dieter made a hot sauce to liven it up. This evening he found himself adding even more spice than usual.

  He was wearing a long striped apron and using his favourite knife, a Japanese chef’s enamel blade with a deer horn handle that had been given to him by a delegation visiting the Commission. Chop chop chop it went through the carrot he was cutting into batons, then chop chop chop through the three heads of garlic he would add to the stir-fry. The two chicken breasts were thick, and he hacked them into pieces, venting his frustration and anger on them.

  ‘You’re making a lot of noise.’ Irma had come downstairs and into the kitchen without him hearing her. She was dressed as for work, in a grey jacket and skirt, a pair of carpet slippers the only concession to the weekend. With her short cropped hair and stocky figure, she was a dour sight.

  He shrugged. ‘Sometimes I think I’ve been silent for too long.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He turned towards her, holding the knife in one hand. Unaccountably, Irma laughed. ‘What is so funny? he demanded, incensed.

  Irma put a hand over her mouth, though her shoulders still heaved. Struggling to stop laughing, she said, ‘Forgive me, dear. It’s just that you look ridiculous – the apron, I mean, and that idiotic Japanese knife you like so much.’

  Dieter shook his head angrily. ‘I am sure you find many things ridiculous about me. What I don’t understand is why you have stood it all these years.’

  ‘Stood what?’ She was trying to sound baffled, but he could see it was an act.

  ‘Being married to me. A man you have no respect for. Don’t play with me, Irma; you know perfectly well there’s no point in pretending any more. I know exactly who you are and what you’ve been up to. I’ve been a fool, but at least now I know the truth. I feel sorry for these children you are sending abroad. They’re all refugees, aren’t they? Just when they feel settled you send them off again to God knows what and where.’

  Irma shrugged. ‘They will be grateful to me and the Freitang Gymnasium one day. They are learning a lot – German children their age would kill for such an opportunity.’

  ‘But do they know who they are doing this for?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Irma, widening her eyes in an effort at innocence. But she was also watching him carefully.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’ Dieter was not going to stop now.

  ‘How do you know anything about this?’ Irma’s voice was curt now, and she took a step back, as if to gather some perspective on what Dieter was saying. On the rare occasions when Dieter got angry, Irma usually ignored it, treating him as a parent would a petulant child, waiting for the tantrum to pass. But not tonight. ‘Is that what you’ve been doing in my study, poking around my papers?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I know.’

  Irma considered this for a moment, stroking her chin with her hand. Finally she said, much more softly, ‘I think it’s best if we don’t talk about this any more this evening. Let’s have supper, and then we can listen to a concert on the radio afterwards – the Berlin Symphony Orchestra is playing Brahms tonight, and I know you love Brahms. We can talk about things tomorrow, when each of us is calmer. But do remember that we have been married a long time. I would not want some little misunderstanding to jeopardise all that we have together.’

  She was smiling at him, with a saccharine expression he found repulsive. In the past he always accepted her efforts to calm any dispute, telling himself, Irma knows best. Had she not always been the strong one in the household? Had he not looked to her to bolster him up during moments of self-doubt, even though – quite unnecessarily he now knew – he’d never told her the truth about his past?

  But something had changed, and now he couldn’t just nod meekly and say, Of course, darling, and lapse back into being the servile husband he had been for so many years. It had all become too much. The burden of the past – his own, both the fabricated and real versions, and the past that the two of them shared – had all become overwhelming in the light of Peter Burnside’s revelations.

  For once, he would not let it go. Watching him, Irma seemed to sense this; her face began to alter from patronising to anxious. ‘You’re not going to do anything silly, are you, Dieter?’ Her voice was trying to resume its usual commanding air.

  ‘Silly?’ he asked, his voice rising. ‘Silly?’ He was shouting now. He had had enough of her sneering. ‘You mean silly as in – talk to someone else about all this?’

  He was hoping Irma would be shocked, but her face was expressionless now. She said, sounding quite calm, ‘I take it that means you already have.’

  ‘And what if I have? What you are doing is wrong. It must be stopped.’ He hesitated. ‘It will be stopped.’

  She nodded as if she were expecting this. ‘Who was the lucky beneficiary of your revelations? I doubt it was the police, and I doubt you have contacts with the German secret services. That leaves work – someone in Brussels. Perhaps your friend Matilda? You’ve mentioned her often enough.’

  Had he? He doubted it, though certainly he had dropped her name on occasion, to serve as cover were Irma ever to discover what good friends they really were.

  ‘And her husband,’ Irma went on. ‘He’s with the Embassy, if I remember. Some kind of attaché, I think you said. You smiled when you told me that; I think you thought he was a spy. In which case, who better to talk to about your perfidious wife?’

  The uncanny accuracy of her deductions, the contempt with which she looked at him as she made them, stunned Dieter. But he fought back. ‘The performance is over now. Over. Soon you will be talking to me through the bars of a prison visiting room.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ she asked him, her tone sardonic. She seemed oddly undisturbed by what he was saying. ‘You’re such an idiot, Dieter. No wonder they never activated you but thought your most useful role would be as cover for me. Far from a prison cell, if what you tell me is true, I will be living in a nice flat in Moscow within weeks.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘And even if they swap you, I wouldn’t fancy your prospects in Russia. Not when your entire programme for subversion has been stopped in its tracks. You can’t blame anyone but yourself for that.’

  She looked him straight in the face, then she burst out laughing. He didn’t understand this at all. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d ke
pt quite calm when he’d told her what he’d done, but why was she laughing at him? He felt his anger growing – why didn’t she understand that he had blown her whole game out of the water, that he had finally taken his revenge? That he had won not only the battle but the war?

  She was still guffawing, pausing only long enough to say, ‘Oh, Dieter, you are an even bigger fool than I thought you were.’

  ‘How dare you?’ he shouted, and took an angry step towards her. ‘I have uncovered a vile conspiracy. God knows what will happen to me, but your plans have been ruined. Do you hear me?’ He only dimly realised how loudly he was yelling. ‘Ruined!’

  ‘You sure of that?’ she replied mildly, then she was giggling again. Soon her broad shoulders were heaving and she sat down at the little kitchen table, as if it was all too funny to go on standing up. ‘Oh, Dieter, you’ve got it all wrong.’ She gave a final chuckle and stood up. ‘I think I’ll just go to bed.’

  ‘No you won’t!’ Dieter shouted, and he was glad to see surprise on Irma’s face.

  But she recovered almost at once, saying sarcastically, ‘It is a little late to assert yourself, Dieter. As I said, I’m going to bed. Stay up if you like.’ She added with a taunting laugh, ‘And keep your apron on. It suits you.’

  It was too much. Something gave way in Dieter, and he felt released from the ties that had bound him for years. He rushed at Irma, determined to slap her sneering face. He swept his arm towards its target, and he only realised halfway there that he was still holding the Japanese knife.

  Flinching reflexively, Irma jerked her head back from his approaching hand, but in tilting it back she exposed her throat. The knife in Dieter’s extended hand sliced through the protruding jugular as if it were soft butter.

  Irma brought her hands up, eyes agog, and clutched her throat. But the wound was wide and deep – blood spurted through her fingers like water gushing from a broken pipe.

  Dieter stood stock still while Irma tried helplessly to block the blood’s flow. Her lips moved in an effort to speak, but only gurgling sounds came out. Dieter stared at her. He felt totally detached and made no move to help her.

  Irma’s eyes were terrified as she tried to sit down on the chair, her hands still pressed to her throat. But her legs seemed to give way and she collapsed on the floor. The blood was gushing from her neck now, and Dieter stepped back. It wouldn’t do to get Irma’s blood on his shoes, he thought, as he watched without concern as the blood streamed towards the stove and his wife stopped breathing.

  41

  It was just seven o’clock in the morning when Sally Mortimer walked through the door of the British Embassy in Berlin. With a Guten Morgen to the security guards she took the lift to the fourth floor where the MI6 Station’s offices were located. Dumping her bag on top of the pile of newspapers that had already been placed on the small table outside the security door, she tapped the code into the pad and held the door open with her foot while she juggled her bag and the newspapers.

  Once inside she dropped everything on her desk as the door closed again with a reassuring click. She was obviously the first one to arrive. She hadn’t been sleeping well recently. The reason, she had decided, was that she was rather lonely. Not that there weren’t plenty of opportunities to go out with people. The Embassy was full of them and one in particular, the ambassador’s private secretary Giles Leith-Martin, was clearly very keen; he had asked her out several times. But, and it rather annoyed her to acknowledge it, she was missing Bruno Mackay. Their affair, if you could call it that, had barely got off the ground when he was spirited away on the mysterious operation for Geoffrey Fane.

  Sally knew Bruno had a long-standing reputation in MI6 as a serial philanderer, though it had been noted that since he had come back from a posting in Libya, where it was rumoured something unpleasant had happened to him, he had seemed more serious. Sally had been hoping that he was seriously keen on her. But then he had been whisked away and all she had heard of him was a postcard she had received a few weeks after he had gone out of circulation. It was a picture of Chicago, sent in an envelope through the Embassy mail; it showed the Hancock Tower, all one hundred storeys soaring into the sky, and on the back in Bruno’s handwriting: Not as high as my feelings for you… X.

  She didn’t for a moment believe that the card meant he was in Chicago or had been there on this trip, but it was something and it showed he had been thinking of her, at least when he wrote it – unless of course, as she suspected, he had written it before he left the country and had left it with somebody to post. Whatever the truth of it, she had propped the card up on the mantelpiece of her small flat in Berlin and she occasionally took it down and read it again.

  While she was thinking about Bruno she was plugging in the large coffee machine that served the MI6 Station. The first thing everyone seemed to want when they arrived in the morning was coffee and it was the duty of the first in to get it brewing. As the smell began to permeate the room, she took her coat off and sat down at her desk, casually turning over the top newspaper so she could read the headlines. It was her job as the most junior intelligence officer in the Station to scour the papers every day for items relevant to their operations or articles that might be of interest to Head Office. Elsewhere in the Embassy the same process was going on, on behalf of the diplomats and the Foreign Office in London. The online press got the same attention. It was a job Sally rather enjoyed. It was good for her German and gave her status as the person who knew most about everything that was going on – including, of course, what was on at the cinema and whether the latest play had received good or bad reviews.

  Settling down for a peaceful half hour or so, Sally turned over the first paper, the tabloid Die Welt, to read the headlines. It was immediately clear this was not going to be a normal morning:

  Bloodbath in Blankensee

  it shrieked. She read a few lines then grabbed another paper, the staid broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It had the same story on the front page, though the wording of its headline was different:

  Homicide/Suicide in Hamburg Suburb

  The next one had:

  School Head Murdered in Blankensee

  And so it went on; each paper had its own version, all of the same story.

  But what really gripped Sally’s attention was the mention, repeated in different words in each paper, of the suspected involvement of the Russian intelligence service, the FSB. Irma and Dieter Nimitz were described as ‘Soviet-era spies’, who had been allowed to operate in a quiet suburb of Hamburg under the very eyes of the German security services. Two papers had picked up on the fact that Irma had been Head of a school for refugee children, but their assessment of the significance of that differed. One suspected a terrorist link, speculating that the Russians had been feeding radicalised children into Germany, but didn’t speculate on why. The other hinted that the children were being trained as some sort of Fifth Column of spies.

  As to who had killed Irma Nimitz and why, many options were offered to the readers, with promises of more sensational information to come. Sally switched on the television in the corner of the office and found that the news channels were also leading on the story.

  By now Sally’s colleagues were arriving. An urgent meeting was called and jobs were quickly allocated. Sally was to inform Peggy Kinsolving in MI5, who had asked for the surveillance that had first revealed Irma’s connection to the FSB officer. Sally’s boss, Charles Fairclough, the Head of Station, was going to the ambassador’s morning meeting where he would have to answer questions about what the Station knew about the Nimitzes. A message was being drafted by someone else to inform Geoffrey Fane.

  In the middle of all this, Sally’s phone rang. It was Herr Lamme at the BfV. He was in a state of high excitement and Sally switched her phone to loudspeaker so her colleagues could hear the stream of furious German that was coming from him. He was accusing Sally and her colleagues of leaking the Russian connection to Irma Nimitz.

 
‘How has it become public knowledge?’ he was asking. ‘We have been most carefully investigating Irma Nimitz under conditions of great secrecy. Only you, the British, knew of this possible connection. Now there is a major scandal. Questions are being asked of the Chancellor’s office about what checks are being made on refugee children and how the schools they go to are controlled. The BfV is being accused of incompetence. They are saying spies have been operating under our noses and that the refugee policy has laid us open to infiltration. I have to go with the head of my Service to explain to ministers what we knew. We have a political crisis on our hands and I strongly suspect this information must have been leaked from your side.’

  He stopped talking for a moment, having run out of breath, and Charles Fairclough seized the phone. He spoke soothingly to Lamme, assuring him that no one on the British side had leaked anything to the press and no one there had shared details of Irma Nimitz with the Americans. He phrased that part very carefully as he had no idea how much was being shared with the Americans in London; when he looked at Sally questioningly, she shrugged to indicate she didn’t know either.

  ‘It is probably just lucky speculation,’ Fairclough said. ‘One journalist feeding off another.’ But Herr Lamme clearly didn’t believe that and, to be honest, neither did Charles Fairclough.

  Fairclough ploughed on nonetheless. ‘Herr Lamme, we have no information here about what has happened in the Nimitz household except what we read in the newspapers, of course. Could you please tell me exactly what occurred?’