by John Gardner
“Sorry about this, Max.” Herbie had the pistol nudged into Max’s ribs. “Switch off the engine.”
Max looked at him, puzzled. Then, “Bastard. They said to watch you.”
“Like an eel, they said,” Herbie sounded cheerful. “Terribly sorry, Max, but it’s for the good of Service and country.” He coughed, which was the prearranged signal, and Schnabeln, from the rear, chopped hard to the back of Max’s neck. Herbie winced, putting out a hand to stop the minder falling across the wheel.
They tied him with his own belt, took his gun, emptied it and pocketed the spare magazines. He was not miked-up, which had been Herbie’s main worry.
Nobody lurked in the alley. People passed in the sunshine on the main street, but today was a day for minding your own business. Gagging Max was easy; Herbie saw to it while Schnabeln disconnected the ignition and horn. They locked the doors, went round to the back and hefted Herbie’s cases from the boot.
Hals und Beinbruch” Herbie told Christoph Schnabeln—break your neck and leg: good luck.
“If there’s no booking for you by six I’ll write one in,” Schnabeln told him. “Otherwise, plain sailing. Don’t worry. I’ll do everything.”
Timing, thought Herbie. Timing was everything now. They went their different ways, Herbie walking at speed—a sight to see, the rolling unco-ordinated gait, dodging and ducking through the crowds. He did not see Schnabeln leave. The man just disappeared, like a spectre.
Herbie stopped three times on his way to the Bristol Kempinsky Hotel. Once to buy cigars, and once to purchase a camera and film. He knew exactly what he wanted, and the shop assistant did not argue. The last stop was to pick up a hat—a little trilby with a feather in it. Herbie did not usually wear hats. It made a great difference; so it was not the old Herbie Kruger who walked past the wall tanks, full of tropical fish, in the lobby of the Kempinsky—hat on head, heavy glasses, cigar stuck between his teeth, camera slung around his neck. The two bags were removed, very smoothly, by one of the porters. The staff saw him as the lone American traveller and hoped for largesse.
He had a reservation. Made by ’phone from London. The accent was German-American—he alternated words and sentences. Herbie was good at American-born Germans. Name of Krust. Elmer L. Krust, “Like in bread. Ha-ha.”
The very correct assistant at the check-in desk smiled thinly. American humour was a closed book to him.
Herbie registered as from Denver, Colorado, signing his name with a flourish, cigar smoke curling. “A bath. I gotta have a bath or a shower.” Then, suddenly, as if it had just come to mind, Herbie said that, as he was staying for a few days only, he wanted to make a trip into the East. “They do coach trips, don’t they? See the nightlife?”
They did. The coaches left at six-thirty from depots near the Friedrichstrasse. There were several firms. Elmer L. Krust said he had one that was recommended, giving the name of the firm for which Schnabeln worked.
They would try and get him on tomorrow’s tour. “They are heavily booked, Mr. Krust. Always difficulties.”
Hell, tomorrow was no good. Tonight. Get him on tonight. They doubted the possibility, but would try. If he would go to his room, they would call him.
From the window of his room, Herbie could see the rising radio tower of the Funkfurm, its red light winking at the top. It was no time to look at views; or remember. Big Herbie, the quick-change artist. Out of his loose grey suit, into the checked trousers, an ill-matching shirt and the tartan jacket. Go through the pockets: tick off the list.
The telephone rang.
Mr. Krust was lucky. The firm had one place left on tonight’s coach, but he would have to hurry. The coach left at six-thirty. Get him a cab. Mr. Krust would be down in three minutes.
Herbie looked at himself in the mirror. Tannenbaum, he thought. A bloody Christmas tree. He was going clean: no cases, not even the briefcase. Clean as the proverbial whistle. Only the Browning, because he might well need that. In tonight, out by Sunday night, with the job done. Schnabeln would see to the legwork: put a call out for Luzia Gabell, or Lotte Krug, or whatever she called herself these days; arrange the safe house meetings with the Telegraph Boys, even Electra, whom he would try and clear tonight …
The Browning lay snug in one of his rear pockets, the spare magazines in the other. They didn’t check individually on the coaches. The firm took the passports in, and the Vopos came out to return them on the coach. You filled in all the forms before boarding in the West. Virtually a head count.
Downstairs, in the early evening bustle of the Kurfurstendamm, a cab waited for the big, overdressed American. It sagged visibly as he climbed into the rear, and took off into the traffic.
They got there with only five minutes to spare. Schnabeln talked and smoked with the driver; coming over to assist Elmer L. Krust to fill in the form, which the American did with ill grace—“What the hell they want to know how much money I got?” Regulations, said Schnabeln. You had to put down the exact amount. “And your passport, please, Mr. Krust.”
On the coach there were other tourists—some English, and a lot of Americans. “My family originated from here,” Elmer Krust confided in a little old lady from Des Moines. “I come on a visit. Promised my grandpa when I was a kid. Good, eh? Europe’s like coming home. Three days in London, two in Berlin, then back to Paris, and last of all Rome.”
The Eternal City, the old lady from Des Moines commented.
“No, Rome,” said Elmer L. Krust. “Where the Pope comes from.”
Somebody said not this Pope. He came from the East; and the coach started off, heading towards the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint: Checkpoint Charlie, of other days and other lives.
11
IN LONDON, ON A corner near Westminster Bridge, a young art student—doing a special project on modern architecture—was setting up his camera and tripod. He glanced at his light meter, certain he could get a good dramatic shot of the tall, oblong concrete and glass building.
He squinted into the lens, making the necessary adjustments to the mounting. He was the genuine article: innocent as a babe. It was a shock, therefore, when the unmarked police car drew up with a squeal, disgorging a pair of uniformed police who asked him, without courtesy, what in hell he thought he was doing?
He told them, truthfully, what he was doing and why. They examined his Student Union card, and one of the policemen returned to the car, to see if his name showed up in CRO. This usually only took a couple of minutes, because Criminal Records Office is now fully computerised. It took a mite longer in this case, because the police officer asked for a political check as well.
The boy was clean. “On your bike then, son,” one of the policemen told him.
“Why?”
They said, no real reason. But he couldn’t take any pictures of that particular building. “There are people who work there that don’t like their pictures taken, lad. Right? So leave it alone, eh, there’s a good boy.”
The security officer on the eighth floor had spotted the student and called up the patrol. It was standard practice. At the Service Headquarters they did not like having photographs taken.
The Director and Tubby Fincher had not gone off for a Saturday afternoon, to their butterflies and kite flying, as Herbie had hoped. It was better, they argued, for them to be on tap in the top floor offices.
At Headquarters the top floor was where the Director lived, moved and had his being; but it was not really the top floor. The top floor was the penultimate floor. The next storey had windows made of black glass which no lens on earth could penetrate: that was the real top floor—where the communications people worked: ‘C & C, they called it—Communications & Cryptanalysis.
At the moment the police were warning off the young student one of the cipher machines clattered out a signal in the C & C rooms. This particular message was long-haul, via Finland, to one of the Service’s receiving stations in the far north of Scotland, thence to the main Cipher Station near Cheltenham. There, on
starting to unzip the cipher, a senior cryptanalyst spotted the designation: Head of Service or G Staff Only. He had handled this traffic before, so dispatched it, direct, on a scrambled cipher machine to the C & C floor in London.
At the London end the operator picked up his telephone to ask where the Director was—surprised to learn that, on a Saturday afternoon, his chief was actually in the building. The Duty Head of C & C glanced at the signal and took it from the operator, heading for the lift, carrying it personally to the Director’s office. Only the Director, or some designated officer, would be able to turn the groups of letters, typed on the blue signal sheet, into an en clair message. The Duty Head of C & C, a small sharp Welshman—known to all in the headquarters building as Jones the Spy—had also seen signals with this designation before. He had no idea of its origin: nor did he wish to know.
The Director knew immediately. “Flash, urgent, from Stentor,” he threw the information at Tubby Fincher, while halfway between his desk and the safe, in which, among other things, he kept the Stentor ciphers.
In the Iliad Stentor was the herald, before Troy, with a fifty voice-power: hence Stentor being the cryptonym of the Service’s deep penetration agent inside the First Directorate of the Russian Intelligence Service. It had taken years, and a series of devious ploys, to establish such a man deeply within Moscow Centre. Stentor was used with immense care: as infrequently as possible. He came to them, as a general rule. Only rarely did the Service go to him. Because of Stentor’s age, and the method employed to place him, the man had only a couple more years of active life in him. Urgent flashes from Stentor invariably meant trouble.
The Director sat at his desk—the safe door still open—with the cipher books next to the signal: untangling the groups, his pen flicking between the blue flimsy and the lists of figures and letters, running in precise columns, in the book. Tubby Fincher watched the square face become more grave as he translated. Finally, in silence, the Director read through the signal twice, before passing it over to Fincher.
The urgent flash for Head of Service only, read:
AIRWAVE ERASED. LONG TERM BOIL ABOUT TO BURST DRENCHING TELEGRAPH BOYS THROUGH CIPHER TRAPEZE. NO KNOWLEDGE TRAPEZE. REGRET PROBABLY TOO LATE SAVE. ADVISE ATTEMPT. STENTOR
Airwave was a group of three agents, doing exactly the same early-warning job as Kruger’s Telegraph Boys: though Airwave worked within Mother Russia itself.
The Director already had his hand on the telephone. He would have to go naked, as he called it: a direct open-line telephone conversation, through normal channels, to the top floor of the Mehring Platz building. There might still be time for Herbie to warn Schnabeln. If not, Berlin Station would have to be called in for a bring-’em-back-alive caper: lifting the Telegraph Boys into the West. He doubted the feasibility of this last option; but, whatever, Kruger’s Trepan operation, to disinfect the Telegraph Boys, would have to be aborted.
The coach stood at the East Berlin end of Checkpoint Charlie, its passengers waiting patiently for their two friendly guides to return from the control and security offices. These days, in spite of the tightening of regulations, the East Berlin authorities made it as easy as reasonably possible when it came to coach parties of tourists.
Grepos, armed with Kalashnikov machine pistols, stood in pairs, occasionally glancing at the coach. One of them had, half-heartedly, pushed a mirror, mounted on wheels, attached to a long pole—like some child’s toy—under the coach. Two others made the driver open up the vast luggage boot, which was empty.
A German officer came out with the two guides, carrying the passengers’ passports and documents. He climbed on to the bus, the guide calling out names, the officer returning the passports to their owners, wishing them a pleasant evening in East Berlin. “You will enjoy yourself,” he said to each passenger. It sounded like an order, but the whole business was most courteous.
The huge American, Elmer L. Krust, sat by patiently. He knew this place only too well, and memories jostled each other in his mind, quickening the tempo of his thoughts, so that he could almost hear them, a chaos, in his head.
Herbie did his best to neutralise this building cacophony of memories: of the times he had travelled East-West, and West-East. Of that hot August night in 1961 when the Wall went up, and the border closed, almost trapping him in the West. Of the years of clandestine shuttles; and the final debacle.
Faces floated through his mind—Julie Zudrang, Emil Habicht, shot down in the street; Willy Blenden; the Birkemanns making their escape; Gertrude Muller; Becher; Reissven; Kutte, and the treacherous Luzia Gabell. For a second he imagined he was going back to them. Then normality returned, and his mind locked on to the Telegraph Boys—the true reason for this dangerous, unauthorised, journey.
For a second he railed within himself, on the complacency of the man in the street within his adopted country. They slept with their glossy dreams—the house on the HP, the television, the car, the right to work; cheap package tours; the demos, escorted by police to show that demo meant democracy as well as demonstration.
On his way to the coach offices in the Friedrichstrasse the taxi had been forced to pull over as four police cars and vans dashed past, sirens wailing. In his assumed American-German Herbie asked what that was all about.
“Terrorists again,” the driver shrugged. “Young idealists with their eyes closed to reality.”
Four young men had hit one of the smaller government buildings, holding some civil servants and a minister to ransom. “They want two of their colleagues released and sent to Egypt, or somewhere.” The driver made a hopeless gesture. “Tomorrow they’ll be dead or arrested. But they’ll be saints to their cause.”
Herbie tried to marshal his thoughts: concentrating on his Telegraph Boys, wondering what each of them was doing at this very moment. In fact, all six were getting on with their individual lives, in different places, all of them not so very far from where Herbie Kruger sat, as Elmer L. Krust, in the coach at Checkpoint Charlie.
Martha Adler, Hecuba, was dressing in her bedroom. She knew well enough who the Russian major was, but he would serve her purpose. Major Kashov could be of great value, and she had no doubt about what he was after. Russian officers—even seasoned KGB people like Kashov—were not over-subtle when it came to dealing with women. The present he had handed to her, as she left the Political HQ just after five, was wrapped in gold paper. Silk stockings and underwear. French labels; real silk. Probably brought back into Russia by one of Kashov’s team of travelling acrobats. What was it to her? She put it all on, admiring herself in the mirror. For her age her body was still very good. She would meet Kashov at eight. He would give her dinner and, later, the clothes would all come off. His presents were not really the kind of things women put on to wear, but to take off. Hecuba shook out her long ash blonde hair, twirling in front of the mirror. Not bad at all.
At the Soviet Embassy, on the Unter den Linden, ‘The Professor’—Otto Luntmann, Horus—was just going on duty. Being on nights pleased him. As a civilian messenger he found there was never much work to do at nights, and he helped out the security guards, giving him the chance to ferret a little. Better than that, it allowed him long periods of solitude during which he could sit back and read. The schoolmaster’s stamp had never left Otto Luntmann, and the stooped shoulders signalled many hours of poring over books. At the moment he had dedicated himself to a complete study of the Roman Empire, and was ploughing through a translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. That evening he checked in at the Embassy with the happy thought that he would probably be able to finish the section on The Pagan Counter-Reformation. This pleased the scholar in him. Within his other life he also looked forward to a brief peep into the Soviet Military and Air Attache’s office. The secretaries were not good on security: occasionally gems were to be found in the litter bins.
Nikolas Monch, who had been cursed with grey hair since the age of twenty, was in his bath. Today, during the laborious work of wheeling filing trolleys
from point to point along the avenues and corridors of the Nationale Volksarmee HQ, he had chanced on a dossier of some interest. The file contained more information concerning his most recent reports about pilots of the DDR’s Air Force being in the process of converting to the Russian Foxbat fighters. The file in question listed most detailed data on the number of pilots to undergo the conversion courses; dates; and training areas. There was also a note concerning delivery of the Russian fighters to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, their dispersal and reorganisation of the DDR’s Fighter Wings.
Monch had a good memory. As he lay in his bath he went over the figures, places and dates. Later, after a meal—there was a small piece of stewing steak cooking—he would settle down to compose a report and transfer it to cipher. Tomorrow he had a drop set up, on his way to collect the milk. Every other Sunday was a free day for Monch. Tomorrow he did not have to go to work.
In her neat little apartment Ursula Zunder sat crouched over the table, composing her next cipher. It was important; her target—the Minister of the Interior—had now been summoned, after all those countless meetings at the Political HQ, to a special delegation in Moscow, on the third of next month. She gathered that the Moscow trip had something to do with reorganisation of Soviet and East German forces.
Ursula paused, in the middle of completing the first half of the cipher, her mind suddenly alert, as though she expected something to happen. Her nerves were on edge. It had been like this for the last few weeks. She had dreamed a lot of the large man whose heart she still held within her own. A wave of misery clouded her for a few moments, before she pulled herself together. Life was not fair: fairy tales did not always have happy endings. Not asking for love, she had found and lost it—irretrievably now. Yet, there was a stirring in the air. The scent of the past, redolent in her nostrils, as though she could smell her old lover close at hand.
