“That’s all you always say now, Jonah,” she said.
“It’s all I can say now, Conchi,” he said.
“Have you told Frank Delaney?”
“Yes I have. I sent him an email last night.”
“Maybe they read our emails too.”
“No, Conchi. I don’t think so.”
“We have to fix all this somehow, Jonah,” Conchi said. “I know that.”
“What should we do?”
“I think we have to wait for news from Frank.” This prospect seemed to give her no comfort.
They went back to the Bay Hotel together. Smith thought it appropriate to show Conchi one of the listening devices he had found. She stood silently as he carefully unscrewed one of the plates over the wall socket. He stood aside to let her look. She stared at the listening device for a long time. The silence in his room was heavy as she looked.
Then he carefully screwed the plate back into position, and, finger over his lips to call for more silence, motioned for Conchi to sit down while he opened up his laptop and looked for news from Frank Delaney.
Delaney’s email was timed well after midnight Berlin time. The message gave no indication of whether the author was drunk or sober, in a hotel room or elsewhere, alone or with a companion:
Jonah, Frank wrote, this bug thing is not good at all. We’re had too many talks in that room of yours for this to be any good at all. Luckily, we talked a lot on your balcony if I remember. And at the Whale Bar. That may help us a bit. And we don’t know how long those things have been in there. I agree that you should leave the bugs where they are. We don’t want to alert people that we know. And, maybe we could use them for some disinformation if we figure out what we want them to think we’re thinking. Let them hear what we want them to hear. Let me think that one over for a bit. But we both have to try to figure out if we can what we’re pretty certain they know that we know now. They probably know I’m in Berlin, I’d say, and they may even know we know the body out there is Heinrich. That would be very bad at this stage of the game. At least we were in my room when we looked at Stefan’s papers that day and you told us in my room what you got from Interpol that other time. I just can’t remember whether we used his name much in your room or on the balcony or God knows where now. We will just have to assume they know a lot about what we know, that’s for sure.
You’ll have to just keep on being careful and obviously now you can’t say anything you want in your room. But I don’t need to tell you that, really. We’ve just got to be careful until I find out what’s going on. I’m working on that. I may have found a guy over here who can let me have a look at the original autopsy report that was done for the body they found in that house in Bonn. That would be a good break and probably give us a steer in this. I’m hoping to get that stuff today or tomorrow, Jonah, so sit tight and who knows, we may get this thing sorted out fast. OK? Don’t panic just yet.
Smith motioned for Conchi to come over and read Delaney’s email over his shoulder. She read, grimfaced at first. She pointed to the words “Don’t panic just yet” and then twirled her index finger at her temple. Smith smiled. Conchi almost smiled.
The thing is, Delaney wrote, it’s really hard to figure out who might be doing what at this stage. There are actually a few people who might want to bug your room when you think about it. Becker, obviously. Probably it’s him. But then maybe Braithwaite could have ordered it up, to see what you’re telling people. Maybe. Or maybe the Thais. Colonel Pridiyathorn could have got wind of this and be worried enough to bug your room. He certainly wouldn’t want a scandal of any sort. It’s probably Becker’s people, I’d say, whoever they are, but it could be others. Zalm? You won’t buy that, though, I’m sure.
The thing is, Jonah, in my line of work, I find that the longer your list of potential enemies is, the more interesting the story actually becomes. Right? We’re starting to develop a good little list of possible enemies now.
Smith imagined Delaney, probably in his Berlin hotel, smiling as he wrote those last few words. He pointed at the lines for Conchi. She again made the sign with forefinger twirling at temple.
About the ID card thing, Delaney wrote, that was me. I thought it might be useful to have an official document of some kind with me here in Germany to show people who this Becker is and what he looks like. I stole it from his villa when I was there that day. It was on a table near the door. Tim couldn’t get a shot of him and I thought the ID card would be good for us to have anyway. Something official with his name and signature on it. And I figured it would piss Becker off something terrible to lose his ID card and I liked that idea too.
Even Conchi smiled broadly at the last line as she read it. Smith smiled too. He almost, for the first time that day, laughed out loud. He started to wonder if there wasn’t a lot more he should know about this bearded, middle-aged Canadian journalist who liked to steal official items from people’s houses. He wondered if there wasn’t a lot more about Frank Delaney—foreign correspondent, investigative journalist, book writer, thief—than met the eye.
Chapter 11
Delaney had taken the Pedophile Express to Germany—Lufthansa Flight 9715, nonstop Bangkok to Frankfurt. True, not all passengers on that flight were late middle-aged German males travelling alone and displaying clear signs of alcohol abuse, nicotine addiction, severe sunburn and a predilection for illicit sex with Asian children. Some of the late middle-aged German males on board were not travelling alone and were, in fact, travelling with young Thai women of barely legal age, or with extremely young Thai men.
And, yes, in fact, a good number of passengers on board Flight 9715 did not fit the sex-tourist profile at all. Delaney acknowledged as he found his seat that he had perhaps been in the information business too long, had become far too cynical and suspicious, had been rubbing shoulders with cynical and suspicious police officers for far too long. Some of the passengers on board were in fact regular tourists—backpackers from any number of European nations, nice little families heading home after impeccably wholesome vacations, impossibly young couples on possibly impeccable honeymoons. Not everyone heading to Frankfurt from Bangkok was a pedophile or a potential pedophile.
Still, any good demographer would find the population sample on board somewhat heavily weighted toward late middle-aged German males travelling alone. Middle-aged Canadian journalists travelling alone were no statistical anomaly, however, and were of course above suspicion.
The overnight flight left Bangkok airport at 23:40, precisely on time. Delaney had flown up to Bangkok on a tourist shuttle turboprop a few hours previously, after dropping off his rental car at Phuket airport and, understandably, taking extra care not to be murdered by drivers of speeding vans as he made his way from the parking area to the terminal building. The incident in the parking lot of the Metropole had left him wary, as well as bruised and scraped.
The flight to Frankfurt would take just over 14 hours. There would be a short wait in Frankfurt and then about an hour more in the air would bring him to Berlin. But Delaney was looking at the long journey to Europe as useful thinking time, analysis time, worrying time. There was much to consider, in the hours he would be confined to his dim Lufthansa cocoon.
Delaney was travelling in Economy Class, not an ideal place to spread out notebooks and documents for a long session of thinking and worrying. But, as he was far from sure that International Geographic would pay for a Business Class ticket for him to travel to a city 9,000 kilometres away from where he was supposed to be on assignment, on a journey that would almost certainly yield nothing the editors either expected or required him to publish, he had bought an Economy ticket.
The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, of course, always made sure that he travelled Business Class. But, as was so often the case, Delaney had not quite decided who he was working for on this assignment. Rawson, as always, would make the rash assumption that Delaney was b
ack on the CSIS freelance payroll. Delaney, as always, would delay making decisions about assigners and expense payers until the situation became clear.
And there was much that was still far from clear. He was counting on Gunter Ackermann, and the German journalist’s array of contacts, to help rectify that.
Like Ackermann, and despite the passenger demographics on Lufthansa Flight 9715, Delaney had ruled out a pedophile connection in this story. The Karl-Heinz Stahlman pedophile angle had simply not panned out. Delaney trusted Ackermann’s judgment and contacts and journalistic skills enough to accept that.
He also trusted Jonah Smith’s judgment and contacts and fingerprinting skills enough to accept that the body of the tsunami victim who apparently interested so many people so much was that of Klaus Wolfgang Heinrich. Delaney accepted that and he accepted that Heinrich had been a highly effective West German spy working in East Berlin for many years.
But beyond this, Delaney could be sure of nothing much at all. Why Heinrich had ended up dead in Phuket in 2004, and not in a cabin outside Bonn in 2001 as the world was meant to believe, was just one of many unanswered questions. Why would Heinrich want to fake his own death, if indeed that is what had gone on? Why might someone else want to fake Heinrich’s death in this way? Why would anyone then go to great lengths to prevent true identification of his body in Thailand? Why would anyone beat up and then threaten with blackmail a Scotland Yard man who started asking questions? Why would anyone try to run down a journalist who came across the story? And what, more importantly, might these people try to do next?
Nor could Delaney shake off his worries about young Stefan Zalm, apparently a dedicated young forensic dentist who also stole confidential files from friends and colleagues and then miraculously brought them to light once again just when needed. With Zalm’s help, the trail had suddenly pointed almost too easily to Heinrich. Was this just a lucky break or were there people who now wanted to make sure that Smith, and Delaney, or both, clearly saw the Heinrich connection?
Delaney found it quite easy to worry about such matters as he reclined in his grey faux-leather airplane seat en route to Frankfurt. He also worried a little about the health of his relationship with Kate Hunter, about the health of his old friend Brian O’Keefe, and about his various failings, misdeeds and misdemeanours, past and current. Such worries came naturally to him on a long overnight flight alone.
At one point somewhere over India, after too many hours of enforced introspection, he even began to worry that he had failed to renew his driver’s licence before leaving Canada. But eventually the drone of the engines soothed him, and the small airline blanket on his knees gave him a certain comfort. A series of very small airline whiskies played their part as well.
As always, Delaney had tried his very best to avoid eye contact, or any other contact, with his seat mate on an airplane. In this case, the strategy proved successful until the plane was making its final approach in to Frankfurt. But as people began gathering up the debris of a 14-hour journey, folding blankets and stowing magazines and jockeying for position outside lavatories, an extremely dishevelled woman of about 30, driven, it appeared, to the brink of madness by the long flight and unaccustomed solitude, looked over at Delaney and pleaded with her eyes for conversation.
Delaney broke one of his most important rules of a lifetime of travel and smiled weakly in the woman’s direction. This opened the floodgates.
“First trip to Germany?” she said, combing knotted ash-blonde hair with her fingers. “I’m from south London. I’ve been on a volunteer project in Laos. I’m doing international studies at City University. I went back to school late. For my Masters.”
“Interesting,” Delaney said, watching her struggle to put on a pair of extremely grubby hiking boots.
“What do you do?” the woman asked. “You a salesman? You’re wearing a suit jacket. Or was it a holiday? Wasn’t it just the most terribly long flight? How do you find it, travelling alone? I don’t like it much at all, really. Especially on a long flight. It gets me crazy.”
She began applying bright red lipstick without the aid of a mirror. The result was not good. “You getting off here?” the woman said.
“I’m going on to Berlin,” Delaney said.
“What for?” she asked.
“It’s a bit of a long story,” Delaney said.
“The mysterious type,” she said. “Well, Berlin’s the place for you. Used to be, anyway.”
“So I’m told,” Delaney said.
“Stay out of trouble.”
“I’ll try.”
Berlin Tegel airport is a throwback, like so much in the city, to the 1960s, to the Cold War, to a Europe that is fading fast. It’s an airport that could still be used, without too much work by set decorators, as a backdrop for a B-grade movie about glamorous people rushing along to some intriguing appointment with modernity—handsome spies in narrow-lapels and willowy women in haute couture in the afternoon, throwing expensive leather luggage into the back of throaty silver roadsters.
Delaney had always marvelled at the odd hexagonal design of the Berlin terminal, with its corridors and departure gates arranged around a yawning core. Even when the airport was far from capacity, the design produced the impression of congestion, confusion, urgency.
The flight from Frankfurt arrived at 7:55 a.m., once again precisely on time. Far too early, however, for Delaney to even dream of asking Ackermann to meet him even if his old friend had been able to get away from the newspaper that morning. Ackermann was Die Welt’s chief political editor, which, as he had reminded Delaney on the telephone, was a position of extremely heavy responsibility entrusted only to the very best minds that German journalism could produce.
Ackermann had said he would meet Delaney late that afternoon. This meant, Delaney knew all too well, that the night’s drinking and eating would begin early and still end extremely late.
A row of cream-coloured Mercedes taxis waited in an orderly line outside the terminal building. Delaney slid into the back of one driven by a broadshouldered woman with hair the colour and texture of brass wire.
“The InterContinental, please,” Delaney said.
“Budapester Strasse.”
Berliners, and those who know Berlin well, refer to the hotel as the InterConti. Like Tegel airport, it is a throwback, a medium-rise sixties structure with a checkerboard front and a glass pyramid lobby that dominates the local streetscape. Delaney liked it for the same reasons he liked the airport. It was also walking distance from Cold War landmarks such as the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz and the Berlin Zoo, backdrops to cloak and dagger plotlines almost since movies began to be made.
The taxi driver immediately launched into a heavily accented diatribe against Turkish guest workers, railing against them in particular and the decline of Germany’s gene pool in general.
“Scandal, scandal, do you follow?” she shouted over the seatback, watching in the mirror for any sign of inattention from Delaney. “These bastard Social Democrats are fucking this country with their immigration stupidities, do you follow? This Schroeder bastard must be thrown out, do you see?”
“Maybe in the election this year,” Delaney said wearily.
“Yes, yes, of course. No question. It is necessary, yes,” the driver shouted.
The dark marble and wood of the hotel lobby was a sanctuary after the cab ride. However, the young desk clerk—beautiful, elegant in her navy blue InterConti pantsuit, but, as the taxi driver would surely point out, suspiciously Turkish in appearance—first needed to be persuaded that it would not be a serious breach of her duties to allow Delaney to check in at approximately 9 a.m. when the rules clearly stated that check-in was to be carried out, always, at 3 p.m.
“Is there a room available now?” Delaney asked, his weariness increasing.
“Yes,” the clerk said without a smile.
“Well th
en I don’t see the problem.”
“Check-in is at 3 p.m., sir,” she said. “That is the hotel policy and it is indicated on your reservation slip. See, it is written just there.”
“You know it would be silly for me to wait for six hours to check in to my room if it’s vacant now,” he said.
“Those are the rules, sir.”
“You’re not going to make me call for the manager after my long flight from Asia, are you?” Delaney asked.
“Perhaps you should have scheduled yourself on a later flight?” the clerk said.
The manager proved extremely helpful and a model of flexible hospitality. But the clerk had stood her ground until given official dispensation to do otherwise. Problem solved, Delaney went immediately to his room for a long day’s sleep in the giant, 1960s-style InterConti bed.
Gunter Ackermann had always demonstrated a limitless capacity for drink, cigarettes and conversation. None of this had changed when Delaney met him that afternoon in a run-down workingman’s bar in what was once known as East Berlin.
Ackermann had just finished his day at Die Welt, which consisted, as he put it, of explaining the political situation of the country and the wider world to the German industrialist classes and bourgeoisie. He refused, however, to fraternize with his newspaper colleagues after work and he generally chose his drinking establishments in the comforting surrounds of the former German Democratic Republic.
As agreed, Delaney had brought with him a one-litre bottle of single malt whisky, an installment payment for Ackermann’s assistance and advice. He had also made a reservation for dinner that evening at Zur letzten Instanz, a move that he knew would cost him no less than 200 euros, minimum. He very much doubted that either International Geographic or Canada’s security agency would pay expenses for the night that was to come.
“The reservation tonight will of course have to be for three persons, Francis, for I am once again in love,” Ackermann said after he had embraced Delaney in a huge exhalation of cigarette smoke and beer fumes. Ackermann was getting fatter and redder by the year, it seemed. Two large bottles of Krombacher Pils beer sat at his place on the table, both empty. His tiny smudged drinking glass was in need of a refill and his ashtray badly needed emptying.
The Tsunami File Page 22
