The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  “So now, we have a little vodka buzz, and we are friends, we have not been impolite to each other and now you will tell me why you need to talk to me. I will not be offended. I will not feel used and abused. You have done the right thing. We have waited the decent amount of time. I love Canadians. They are so polite.”

  She touched him briefly on the side of his face.

  “Go,” she said. “Tell me now.” Delaney put down his vodka glass.

  “Your uncle,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said.

  “Ah,” Delaney said.

  The vodka had increased his blood pressure as it was invented to do. His face burned slightly and he felt a pleasant pulse in his head.

  “You are doing a story about my Uncle Ulrich.”

  “No story. Not yet.”

  “It’s a very sad story, my Uncle Ulrich’s story,” she said.

  She had not put her vodka glass down. She drank another large shot, poured herself a refill. He eyes locked in again on Delaney’s.

  “I need to know why he resigned his job so suddenly,” Delaney said. “Gunter said you might be able to help me understand that.”

  “You need to know, or you want to know?” she said.

  “Both,” he said.

  “I see,” she said. “For a story.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “If not a story, then what?”

  Despite Ackermann’s suggestion, Delaney had really not prepared very well for this interview, if that is what it could be called. He had not decided beforehand how much of the tsunami story he would share with Mareike Fischer, how much she would need to know before deciding whether to help him.

  He hesitated. Mareike did not.

  “My uncle was treated very badly by the BKA at the end, Frank Delaney,” she said. “The police eat you up when you make a mistake. They will eat me up one day. I am making lots of mistakes. I enjoy making such mistakes. But they will eat me up eventually when I make one mistake too many.” The giant smile again illuminated her face. “Why should I tell you secrets about my uncle?” she asked.

  “Because I’m someone who can tell his story, maybe. Would that be enough? I can help you tell people that he was treated unfairly.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “It’s what I do, when I can,” Delaney said.

  “And in this case, it would help me understand something even bigger, maybe.”

  The vodka, or the end-of-the-world mood, or any number of other things, loosened his tongue and he, quite unwisely perhaps, told her a little—far from everything, but a little—about the tsunami file, and the Klaus Heinrich connection.

  “Now I need to know if there is a connection between your uncle, or your uncle’s resigning, and Klaus Heinrich,” Delaney said.

  “An intriguing question,” Mareike said.

  “But do you know the answer?” Delaney said. The giant smile.

  “Some of it,” she said. “But maybe not enough of it. No one has asked me about this for a long time. And no one has actually asked it in quite this way.

  There was never a tsunami in the background.” “So was there a connection?”

  “Why do people always think there has to be a special connection between things?” she asked. “Police, journalists. Why can’t things just happen here and there, just like that?”

  “There’s just too much of a coincidence between the big Heinrich story—he dies suddenly in a fire—and your uncle’s story. The head of the German federal police resigns suddenly, just like that, at almost the same time. I just have this strong feeling there must be some kind of connection.”

  Delaney then for some reason thought it appropriate that evening to say: “I was in love with a psychologist in Montreal once who really believed there were significant connections a lot of the time between seemingly unrelated events. She thought you just had to look at things properly to see this. Synchronicity. The so-called acausal connecting principle. She was a Jungian.”

  Natalia had also frequently said that the connections people start to see could tell you just as much about a person’s psychological state as about the situation itself. Delaney didn’t at all know what she might have said that night about his current psychological state.

  Mareike looked at him closely.

  “You know, Frank Delaney, you are starting to seem a little bit like a relatively interesting man,” she said.

  The smile again. She sipped vodka and slipped deeper down into her overstuffed old sofa.

  “He’s very sick, you know,” she said eventually.

  “Your uncle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he here in Berlin?”

  “No. He is in France. In disgrace, in France.” She lit a cigarette. “Smoke?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Pot? Nice with vodka in the evening. Let’s smoke some confiscated police pot together.”

  Delaney had not smoked marijuana for a long time. The suggestion brought back a sudden intense memory of smoking with Nathan Kellner’s Thai girlfriend on the balcony of the missing journalist’s Bangkok apartment on a sultry evening when there was still hope that Kellner had not been killed in Burma.

  “Not right away,” Delaney for some reason thought it appropriate to say.

  “We are working,” Mareike said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “After,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  Mareike seemed willing to tell him some of what he needed to know. But she claimed she did not know everything. She also seemed to think it was her uncle who needed to tell the rest, whatever that was. If her uncle wished to do so.

  “He was a really excellent police officer, Frank Delaney. The best. Not like me. Always everything by the rules. He joined the BKA when he was a young man, it would have had to be in the 1960s. He worked hard and he had his little wife in the suburbs of Weisbaden. Never children—he was too busy fighting the bad guys to have children. That is what he would say. But I was like his daughter, I suppose. He loved me. I know that. But he would not approve of the police work I do these days, not very much. Not the way I do undercover.”

  Delaney let her reminisce and muse. Musings and reminiscence can be a deep and productive gold mine for journalists, and for spies, depending on the assignment in question.

  “He shocked everyone when he said he was going to leave the police. It was all sudden, sudden, sudden you know, like a big storm. He would have been able to retire in a year or two years, maybe. He didn’t retire. He just quit. He stopped. After all those years on the police. He said he had had enough of the BKA. My aunt couldn’t believe what was happening. She said he changed. He got sad and quiet, she said. She then got sad and quiet too. Then he left her. Can you imagine? A good German of that age, the head of the BKA. He just left his wife and moved to France. Then she killed herself. Like that. Poof. It was like in a play by Shakespeare. They found her dead in their nice little house in Weisbaden. It was pills. My uncle didn’t even come back to Germany for the funeral. He must have had good reasons, no?”

  Delaney began to see some possible reasons for Mareike Fischer’s deep undercover lifestyle. She was working undercover in a place where memories like this didn’t often intrude. But she seemed willing for some reason to come partway out of her hiding place to look at them tonight.

  “What do you think his reasons were, Mareike?” he asked.

  She paused, drank, smoked.

  “He said he had been betrayed, Frank Delaney.”

  “How? Who by?”

  “He never told me. I call him on the telephone in France sometimes or write him letters. He would just say he had been betrayed when I still bothered to ask about it. The newspaper stories about him said all sorts of crazy things at the time. He said all of the stories we
re wrong.”

  “A man like that would normally just retire, even if his career fell apart.”

  “The BKA didn’t seem to think he deserved his pension.”

  “What income did he have, then?”

  “I don’t know. They were savers, my auntie and he. I don’t know. They had some money.” “How does he live in France?”

  “He bought a big old ruined chateau house. Not big like a chateau castle. A big house like they used to call a chateau in the old days. It was beautiful but ruined and cheap. I saw it once or twice. I visited. He fixed it up slowly, and it wouldn’t cost much to live down there now. It is in nowhere, in the Ardeche. Not in Provence, not like that. In the Ardeche hills south of Lyon. It’s hard even to find his house it’s so nowhere.”

  She sat silently for a time—musing, reminiscing, and probably, like Delaney, very much enjoying the secret warmth that superior-quality vodka can bring.

  “He is very sick, Frank,” Mareike said again, eventually. “He will die soon. I’m sure of this. But maybe you are what he actually needs right at this moment. Maybe it’s the moment in his life for him to tell his story. Maybe yes.”

  Delaney felt the short, sharp jolt that any good reporter feels when he believes he is onto a story that is about to break.

  “I could go to speak to him,” he said.

  “You would go down to France?”

  “Of course.”

  “A man of action.”

  “Ask Gunter.”

  This time they both smiled at the same time. “OK, Frank Delaney, I will do you and my old friend Gunter Ackermann this favour. I will ask my uncle if he maybe wants to talk to someone who can help him tell his story. OK? Before he dies. I will tell him that I personally think this may be the right moment to do this. Because I do think that this might truly be the right moment. Is that OK for you?”

  “Very OK,” Delaney said.

  “Drink? Smoke?” Mareike said. “A toast?”

  “Of course. Drinks.”

  She poured two more vodkas for them, the latest in what had been a long series that evening.

  “To the Bundeskriminalamt,” she said, raising her brimming shot glass. “That we may one day teach them a lesson.” “To the BKA,” Delaney said.

  “And to Ulrich Mueller. Policeman and BKA chief, now retired.”

  “And to disaster victims everywhere,” Delaney said.

  When Delaney smoked marijuana on the balcony of Nathan Kellner’s Bangkok apartment months and years before, the smoke and Asia’s humid night air and a lonely Thai girl had wafted him into an extremely comfortable bed. In Berlin, in a dimly lit and overstuffed apartment, the smoke and the rainsoaked European air and the extremely pretty woman beside him also wafted him eventually towards the bedroom.

  Mareike’s ancient bed was piled high with brocade cushions, velour cushions, satin cushions. The dim lamp beside it shone with a welcoming yellow light. They floated to her bed at the end of the night on streams of potent smoke and the vodka that still ran warm in their veins. Delaney’s end-of-theworld mood and the smoke and the vodka wafted him gently, ever so gently, into the smiling policewoman’s bed. He hardly thought of policewoman Kate Hunter or of psychologist Natalia Janovski at all.

  Rawson seemed genuinely delighted to hear Delaney’s voice when the call from Berlin came through. Delaney called him early Berlin time the next morning, Wednesday. It was very late Tuesday night Ottawa time.

  “Ah, Francis, the prodigal spook,” Rawson said. “So good of you to call.” “Were you sleeping?” Delaney asked. He had come back to the InterContinental from Friedrichshain in a taxi a few minutes before. He could not identify his condition as hung over. Delaney could not accurately identify his condition that morning at all.

  “No, no,” Rawson said. “Working at home. Worrying. It’s a dangerous world out there.”

  “Not with guys like us on the watch, Jonathan.”

  “Maybe. Where are you?”

  “Still in Germany.”

  “Berlin still?”

  “What do your Thai intelligence pals tell you?”

  “BND pals at this stage, Francis. The Germans love me too. They tell me Berlin.”

  “Hotel?”

  “InterContinental.”

  “Very good.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “And who have I been seeing?”

  “Ah, well, special surveillance, that’s another story. Even my German friends balk at such BND overtime expense on behalf of CSIS. Unless the matter is very important indeed.”

  “Is it?”

  “You tell me, Francis.”

  “You guys seem a little overexcited that I’m looking at the Klaus Heinrich story. Or you did a couple days ago.”

  “Oh, we’re still excited, Francis. And glad to have you on the case, as it were.”

  “I’m not sure where this is headed at the moment, Jonathan.”

  “We aren’t either.”

  “So why the excitement?”

  “Because Heinrich is a big name in certain circles. Or was. Before he went and died on us.”

  “Big name for the Germans. Not for the Canadians, surely.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion, Francis.”

  “Why would Canada’s little spy service give a shit what happened to a guy like Heinrich?”

  “Because, as you yourself pointed out a couple of emails ago or a couple of phone calls ago, we are in the information business over here in Ottawa. We like to be ahead of the game once in a while, so as to have things to trade. Always useful to have little trinkets in your satchel when at the world information bazaar.”

  “This is not new, Jonathan.”

  “Well, Francis, how’s this then? I’ll tell you something to capture your attention and then you’ll see why we want you working with us on this one. OK? I’ll let you peek inside my information satchel for a bit, and then I get to look inside yours, OK?”

  “As always.”

  “We pay top rates, as you know.”

  “What have you got, Jonathan?”

  “How about the Germans were shopping this guy around to a few nice Western democracies a while back, seeing if anybody wanted to take him in and make him a new person somewhere comfortable and quiet.”

  “Who, Heinrich?”

  “Yes.”

  “What, a new identity? In Canada?”

  “Yes. Or New Zealand or Australia. Or somewhere similar. So we gathered. They asked around a fair bit at the time, apparently.”

  “When?”

  “Around 2000 or so. Maybe late 2000, early 2001.”

  “Why would they do that? Heinrich had a nice little setup in Bonn. Why would they want to move him?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Not sure.”

  Delaney had worked with Rawson & Company long enough to not immediately accept that this was factual.

  “You must have a theory Jonathan. CSIS always has theories.”

  “Well, it could be any number of things. They could have detected a threat against him, for example. Stasi might have decided to take him out. Payback.”

  “Stasi was washed up by then.”

  “Not entirely, Francis. There were still some guys out there, there still are, who did good work for Stasi for years and years and saw the Wall coming down as just a minor inconvenience on the road to democratic socialism. They’d meet for drinks, talk all night, that sort of thing. Like the old Nazis used to do. Sing songs, have a beer or two, plot and scheme.”

  “I don’t know, Jonathan.”

  “Or try this. Stasi files being reassembled. CIA working very hard on this. Others in Germany working hard. Files, files, coming to light all the time. You ever hear of the Rosew
ood file, Francis?”

  “Yeah. Once. Lately.”

  “Thought you might have. Full of interesting stuff apparently. Decrypted version was due out any day, around then, apparently, or so it was said. That’s why we want you on this. You hear things earlier than most people. So, all right, what if something big was coming out about Heinrich or about his service? I don’t know what. But wouldn’t you maybe ask the nice Canadians or the Aussies or someone where there’s fresh air and sunshine to set your man up somewhere new, just in case?”

  “But for what? What might have been coming out?”

  “Maybe nothing. I don’t know. We don’t know. You find out for us. You want to go back on the freelancers’ payroll right now? We pay expenses.”

  “Why wouldn’t your guys have agreed to set him up somewhere new in Canada?”

  “We’re nice, Francis, but not that nice. I wasn’t right in on that one, but they tell me people here felt they weren’t getting the full story from the German side. Apparently no one over here was ever sure the idea had an official German government stamp on it. The Social Democrats were in government in 2000. Schroeder. But Heinrich was being run all through the eighties when the Christian Democrats were in power. Helmut Kohl’s people. They were the ones who set him up in Bonn after the Wall came down. So we weren’t sure who actually needed the favour—Kohl’s CDU guys, or Schroeder’s SPD, or maybe just some nervous old West German spooks. The numbers didn’t all add up, so we didn’t buy in.”

  “Cloak and dagger,” Delaney said.

  “That’s my game,” Rawson said.

  “Interesting.”

  “So what have you got for us that’s interesting?”

  “Well, Heinrich surely didn’t go to Australia, Jonathan. He ended up in a body bag in Phuket, Thailand.”

  “Imagine our surprise when you told us that, Francis. But that’s old news by now, right? You’ve told us that already. What have you got that’s new?”

  On Wednesday, Delaney found himself once again on a crowded Lufthansa aircraft, this time an earlymorning flight from Berlin to Bonn. He had toyed with the idea of taking the earliest flight possible, 6:45 a.m., but Ackermann warned him that this one would be too full of “industrialists and class enemies.” As well, Delaney was still nursing the effects of too much alcohol and illicit plant material so he treated himself to an extra hour’s sleep and took Lufthansa Flight 268 at the relatively civilized hour of 8:15 a.m.