by Iles, Greg
“A what?” Rose sounded incredulous. “What do you mean? A defector?”
Schneider spoke still lower. “No, Colonel, I think one of your officers has been taken over the Wall against his will—”
“Don’t say another word! ” Rose snapped. “Where are you?”
“The Tiergarten Kripo station.”
Colonel Rose pulled a map of Berlin from his bedside table. “Okay, Mr Detective,” he said slowly, “you know the Penta Hotel? Should be two blocks from where you are now.”
“I know it.”
“Be standing in the front service doorway in fifteen minutes. I’ll cruise by with my door open—you jump in. Got it?”
“Ja.
“You in uniform?”
“Nein. Kripo don’t wear uniforms.”
“When you move toward the car have both hands extended. Empty. Wait a second … what was your name? Full name?”
“Julius K. Schneider, Kripo Detective First Grade.”
“Right. Fifteen minutes.”
Schneider heard Rose disconnect. Looking at his watch, he decided to wait fourteen minutes in his office, then sprint the two blocks to the Penta. At two-twelve he donned his hat and overcoat, said good night to the duty sergeant and strolled casually out of the station. The wind hit his face like a shrew’s slap. Schneider turned into the blast and began running with surprising speed for a man of his bulk. He glanced at his watch as he crossed to the next block.
Two thirteen. Come on, Colonel … A car moved up from his rear, slowed, passed. Halfway up the second block, he ducked into the front service doorway of the imposing Penta Hotel. His gasps filled the lighted alcove with steam.
Two-fourteen, and still no colonel. Schneider pulled off his left boot and smashed the fluorescent bulb over his head. No sense in advertising, he thought, tugging the boot back on. As he straightened up, a battered US Army Ford came roaring up the Nürnberger Strasse. The passenger door swung open thirty metres from the Penta’s service door, but the car showed no signs of slowing.
Schneider judged the Ford’s speed at sixty kilometres per hour. Like a fullback he charged from the safety of his niche and sprinted alongside the car with both hands extended. He could see the bull-necked American colonel in the driver’s seat, scrutinizing him over the barrel of what looked like a .45 caliber pistol. Tiring quickly, Schneider flailed his arms for Rose to stop. The Ford slowed to thirty kilometres per hour. Schneider could hear Rose yelling for him to jump in.
Almost out of wind, he managed to catch hold of the doorframe and dive headlong across the front seat. When he tried to rise, he felt the cold metal of a gun barrel pressed to his temple. “That’s a Colt .45 on your noggin, son,” Rose growled.
“Don’t move until I say so. Understand?”
“Ja, ” Schneider grunted.
With a skilful swing of the steering wheel Rose simultaneously slammed the passenger door and swung onto the six-lane Hohenzollerndamm, heading west. “Full name?” he barked.
“Julius K. Schneider.”
“Rank?”
“Detective, First Grade.”
“Length of service?”
“Seven—no, eight years.”
“Name of spouse?”
“What the hell does it matter? I’m the one.”
Rose jammed the pistol barrel into Schneider’s ear. “Name of spouse!”
“Aarrghh! Liese, damn you!”
Rose withdrew the gun. “Okay, get up.”
Rattled and angry, Schneider thrust himself against the passenger door and rubbed his cheek where the gun had scraped it. “What the hell was that for?”’ he asked in German.
“You ought to have expected it,” Rose replied in English. “You call in the middle of the night to tell me one of my men has been kidnapped, and you expect a cocktail party?”
“Is this the way Americans return favours?” Schneider said stiffly.
“Last I checked, you hadn’t done me any favours. We’ll see how I return one when you do. Now what the hell’s this all about?”
“Major Harry Richardson,” Schneider answered, relishing the poorly concealed look of shock that crossed Rose’s face. “You know him?”
“Go on,” Rose said noncommittally.
“Very well, Colonel. Tonight I was called to the scene of a murder. A house near the Tiergarten. The murdered man was one Klaus Seeckt, an East German trade liaison employed by my government. My colleagues believe Seeckt surprised a gang of professional thieves who murdered him, then tried to make it look like suicide. And they could be right, of course. The Kripo are famous for their skill in solving homicides.”
“Get to the point, Detective.”
“I believe a real suicide took place, Colonel. Not a simple suicide, but a suicide still.”
“I’m listening. You can speak German, if you like.”
Schneider sighed with relief. “Physical evidence, Colonel. First, eight 7.65mm slugs fired into an interior wall beside the front door-burst pattern. We found no shell casings to match these slugs. Second, no fingerprints on the pistol in the corpse’s hand except his own. Third, I found something odd outside the house. It was a white
business card.” Schneider paused for effect. “With nothing but a telephone number on it.”
He saw Rose’s jaw tighten. “When I called the number on the card, I got an answering machine with a message from one Harry Richardson. As I’m sure you’re aware, Major Richardson makes a rather special effort to know Berlin. Consequently, we Berliners know him.”
Rose exited right off the Hohenzollerndamm onto ClayAllee, then looped under to the Avus autobahn. Solemn ranks of bare trees closed about the car as it rolled into the Grunewald. The colonel seemed to feel more comfortable here, Schneider noticed. Perhaps because from the heart of the Grunewald jutted the Teufelsberg—the Devil’s Mountain—a massive hill constructed from the millions of tons of rubble that was Berlin after the war. Schneider thought it depressingly symbolic that the highest peak in Berlin was crowned by the futuristic onion domes of a gargantuan US/British radar spying station.
Rose slowed and turned to Schneider as they rolled through the darkness. “And what does all that tell you, Mr Detective?”
“The 7.65mm slugs tell me Czech vz/61 Skorpion machine pistol. I translate that KGB. I know it would be stupid for them to use one here, but they’ve made stupid mistakes before. I also happen to know that, in spite of the drawbacks of the 7.65 cartridge, several Berlin-based KGB agents still favour the Skorpion. Granted, burglars could use one, but I haven’t seen any pass through the evidence room lately.”
Rose eyed the German with increasing interest.
“Then there’s the weapon that killed Seeckt. If burglars faked a suicide, they had to shoot Seeckt, wipe the pistol, then press a set of his fingerprints onto it. Leaving what? One good set of Seeckt’s prints. But there were dozens. If they used gloves, they’d have smudged many of Seeckt’s original prints. But they didn’t. So what happened? Burglars forced Seeckt to kill himself? Unlikely. But the KGB? It’s possible. If KGB agents had just discovered that Richardson had turned Seeckt, for example, Seeckt might have preferred a quick bullet to what would have been waiting for him in Lubyanka. My trieb, Colonel—my instinct—tells me that’s what happened. The question is, what was your man doing there in the first place? Was Klaus Seeckt working for you?”
Rose said nothing.
“One more thing,” Schneider added. “There was blood near the card.”
Rose winced.
“A good bit of it, too. Colonel, I think Richardson, dropped that card as an SOS. Why else would it be there?”
Without really knowing why, Rose decided to trust the German. He really didn’t have much choice. “Harry Richardson’s an exceptional officer,” he said tersely. “A bit of a loner, maybe, but sound as a K-bar. Especially in tradecraft. But even if he has been kidnapped, what makes you think he’s not still in West Berlin?”
Schneider’s barrel ch
est swelled a size; he recognized the respect that came with Rose’s decision to trust him. “Because Russians wouldn’t have the nerve to keep him here,” he explained. “East Germans would—the Stasi has assets all over the city. But this crime scene was too clumsy for the Stasi. They would never, ever use weapons of Eastern manufacture in the West. Also, burglars-turned-kidnappers would soon recognize their mistake in snatching an American officer. Unless they were part-time terrorists, it would scare them to death. That leaves one option—KGB. It has to be.”
“Alert the checkpoints,” said Rose, his voice taking on the weight of command. “See if any known agents have passed through tonight.”
“I’ve already checked,” Schneider told him. “It’s too late. A border officer at Heinrich-Heine Strasse told me four KGB agents with flawless cover passed through at eleven fifteen tonight. Richardson was probably inside that car.”
“Goddamn!”
“What was Richardson working on, Colonel?”
“Sorry, Schneider. I can’t go that far.”
“I see,” the German said icily. “Well, then. I’ll leave you to discover the remaining facts for yourself.”
Rose slammed on the brakes and glared at Schneider. “Don’t you hold out on me, Schneider! This is still a US military zone of occupation. I can have your ass detained for a year if I need to!”
“That is true,” Schneider retorted. “But while you carry out that useless exercise, your man could be dying in a KGB cell. Or worse yet, he could be on the next flight to Moscow. Even the KGB is smart enough to know that in East Berlin, a live American major is more of a liability than an asset.”
“You’re pushing, Schneider.”
The German’s voice hardened. “I want this case, Colonel.”
Rose pursed his lips and leaned back into his seat. “Okay, Detective,” he said finally. “Quid pro quo. You give me everything you’ve got, and I’ll see you’re included in any developments on this side of the Wall.”
Schneider searched out Rose’s eyes in the darkness. “You give me your word as an American officer and a gentleman?”
Rose eyed the German strangely. “I didn’t think that bought much overseas anymore.”
“It does from me,” Schneider said solemnly.
Rose felt as if he had somehow stepped back in time. “As an officer and a gentleman, then,” he vowed.
“Gut,” grunted the German. Quickly he told Rose about Lieutenant Luhr’s unusual appearance at the murder scene, and his interest in Richardson’s card. When Schneider revealed that Prefect Funk was personally directing the Spandau case from Abschnitt 53, Rose looked very uncomfortable.
“Was Richardson working on something related to the Spandau incident?” Schneider asked.
Rose nodded slowly.
The German shook his large head. “Something very big is happening, Colonel. I can feel it. At 10:20 p.m. the prefect issued an all-district alert for two police officers who allegedly murdered a third in a dispute over drugs. And this murder supposedly took place in that police station.”
“What?”
Schneider nodded. “One of the ‘fugitives’ is a decorated officer, a GSG-9 adviser, no less. And both”—the German smiled thinly—“were on the team assigned to guard Spandau Prison last night.”
Rose’s eyes widened. “Holy shit!”
Schneider smiled with satisfaction. “Stasi agents call you ‘God, the All-Knowing,’ Colonel. Did you know that?”
“I’ve heard,” Rose answered, barely listening.
“I guess they exaggerate.”
Rose grabbed the German’s beefy shoulder. “Okay, Schneider, you listen. Richardson wasn’t due to report until 0800 this morning, so technically he’s still on schedule. But I’ve got a bad feeling about this. My sphincter’s twitching, and that ain’t good.” He paused. “You got any whiskey on you?”
Schneider shook his head, nonplussed by the American’s sudden change of demeanour.
“Okay, here’s the deal. Harry was looking into the Spandau thing for me. He thought there was a lot more to it than your bosses were letting on, and with the damned State Department and the Brits breathing down my neck, I was all too willing to give him room to manoeuver.” Rose paused angrily. “If you’re right, and the Soviets have taken my boy over that Wall…” He smashed his fist against the Ford’s dashboard. With an oath he jerked the car into gear, made a screeching U-turn in the wooded lane, jammed the accelerator to the floor and bored through the ranks of frozen trees, making for the forest’s edge. “You gotta be anywhere, Schneider?” he growled.
“Nein.”
“You wanna be temporarily seconded to my command?”
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”
“Jesus Christ,” Rose snorted. “Will you cut out that Kraut lingo? Makes me nervous. You sound like you’re in a goddamn John Wayne movie.” He glanced suspiciously at the German. “And on the wrong side.”
Schneider choked off an acid reply. To the German’s astonishment, Rose snatched up a radiotelephone and began transmitting en clair. Schneider couldn’t believe it. Hundreds of listening devices constantly sampled the ether over Berlin and fed the intercepted transmissions into tape recorders in every sector of the city. Rose’s call would be heard by at least a hundred people before morning, yet he seemed unconcerned.
“Clary!” he shouted.
“Who’s this?” came the sleepy reply.
“Wake up, son!”
“Colonel?”
“Clary, we’ve got a loose fish tonight, you copy that?”
Schneider heard deep breathing. He imagined the stunned sergeant, wakened from a dead sleep to crazy code words coming from his telephone.
“Roger that, sir,” Clary mumbled. “Loose fish. Is the fish still in the boat?”
“Probable negative on that, Clary. The fish is out, repeat, out of the boat. Copy?”
“That’s a roger, sir.”
Schneider looked bewildered.
“ETA camp ten minutes,” Rose snapped.
“Copy that, sir, I’m outta here.”
“Out.”
Rose pushed the speed limit all the way through the Grunewald. The American certainly knew his way around, Schneider reflected. Despite the labyrinth of icy lanes winding through the forest, he burst out of the trees less than a mile from U.S. Army headquarters. “Russians,” he muttered. “Idiots.”
“I beg your pardon, Colonel?”
“The Russians, Schneider. The goddamn Russkies, Reds, Commies, whatever.”
“What about them?” Schneider bit his lip. He had almost called the American colonel “sir.”
“I’ll tell you what about them,” Rose grumbled. “If those sons of bitches have kidnapped my man and taken him over the Wall, that’s a goddamn act of war, that’s what. And they’re gonna find out who really runs this burg, that’s what!”
Schneider shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “And that is?”
“The US Army, by God.”
The German gave a hollow laugh, “Cut out that American imperialist lingo, would you, Colonel? It makes me nervous.”
Rose wasn’t laughing.
2.05 AM The Natterman Cabin: Wolfsburg, FRG
“Professor, wake up!” Hauer prodded the old man. “Professor!”
Natterman moaned, then his eyes twitched open and his right arm shot outward. “Karl!” he shouted.
Hans grabbed his outstretched hand. “Professor, it’s Hans! We’re at your father’s house.”
The old man’s eyes focussed at last. He pulled his hand free. “Yes … Karl is dead?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Hauer. He leaned over the sofa where Natterman lay and held up something shiny in his left hand. “What do you make of this, Professor?”
Natterman took the object and examined it briefly. “It’s a gold Krugerrand. Standard unit of currency in South Africa.”
“Is it common?”
The professor shrugged. “Thousands of Germans own millio
ns of them, I should think. On paper, of course.”
“Is the coin common?”
“I wouldn’t think so. Where did you get it?”
“Hans picked it up outside, standing watch.”
Natterman sat up. “My God!”
“What is it?”
“The man who attacked me … I remember now! I recognized his accent. It was Afrikaans!”
“Afrikaans? What do you make of that?”
Natterman pursed his lips. “I don’t know. That man—the Afrikaner—came here to steal something, but I don’t believe he knew exactly what he was after until he actually saw the papers. He didn’t seem to believe it, even then.”
“An errand boy?”
“That was my impression. What time is it, Hans?”
“A little after two a.m.”
“Two! Don’t let me fall asleep again. Is the telephone working?”
“Yes,” Hauer replied, “but we haven’t learned anything.”
He had tried in vain to reach Josef Steuben at Abschnitt 53. And at Steuben’s home he’d got only the men he’d sent to protect Steuben’s family. No sign of his friend.
“The apartment’s empty,” Hans said anxiously.
“Ilse is all right,” Natterman assured him. “You must believe that. Even if someone has taken her, it’s you they want. They need her alive to draw you. They believe you will bring them what they seek.”
Hans nodded. “They’re right.”
Natterman’s eyes grew wide. “Have you lost your senses? The Spandau papers are much too important to be surrendered to anyone like that.”
Hans glared balefully at the old man. “I don’t give a damn about those papers, Professor. You’d better understand that now. I’d give them to the devil himself to have Ilse here with us now.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Where are the papers?”
Natterman looked hunted. “They’re … in the bathroom,” he said. “I’ll get them.”
Hauer kept silent. His brain was spinning. Bruderschaft der Phoenix, the gold Krugerrand and the Afrikaner accent—like the calls from Prefect Funk to Pretoria—had dropped into place like two more tumblers in the lock that protected Phoenix from the outside world. But what did South Africa have to do with Germany? What did Pretoria share with Berlin? Hauer was still puzzling over this when the klaxon ring of the old telephone in the bedroom shattered his concentration. Both he and Hans raced to the phone.
