The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  Fischer’s eyes narrowed. ‘So long ago . . . We know little about him at that time. Many of the oldest Stasi files were destroyed during the days before the wall came down and Herr Hoffmann is not a man who gives information unless he absolutely must.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that. It took me four years to get a name out of him.’

  ‘Ah yes. Herr Kesselring told me about “Papagena”, the woman in the British army headquarters. So what exactly do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything you can tell me about him. Is he still active?’

  ‘I think that he is not. Or not very. Herr Hoffmann is nearly seventy. He lives with his wife in the Karl-Marx Hof. They are lovers of music and fresh air. They go to concerts and for long walks in the Wienerwald.’

  The answer was too glib. ‘You don’t think he’s still active? You mean he’s not sending you reports any more?’

  Fischer’s jaw hardened. Sam suspected he wasn’t sure how much he was allowed to reveal. ‘Herr Hoffmann still has good contacts,’ he replied enigmatically. ‘And he still informs us about certain people who do business in Vienna.’

  ‘People like Vladimir Kovalenko . . .’

  Fischer glanced sideways and ventured an awkward smile. ‘Except we don’t think Kovalenko is in Vienna at the moment. Everybody is looking for him. You too?’

  ‘That’s not the reason I’m here, no. But d’you think Hoffmann ever dealt with Kovalenko?’

  ‘I have not seen his name in Herr Hoffmann’s reports. The truth is that we don’t hear often from him. The arrangement we made when we ended his interrogation was a good idea but it has not proved very useful. Herr Hoffmann has many loyalties, but they are not to us.’

  ‘Loyalties to his old friends, you mean. I know about that.’

  Fischer nodded. ‘Papagena,’ he murmured.

  ‘But let me get this straight. D’you think he’s done business with his old Russian chums here in Vienna? Like worked with them on some of their scams?’

  ‘It is possible. Herr Hoffmann has good connections in the German speaking world. He could be very useful to Russians.’

  ‘And they would pay good money for those connections?’

  ‘As I have said, we only know what he tell us, Herr Packer. If he make money from these people, then he keeps it well hidden.’

  ‘No private Schloss in the Tyrol . . .’

  Fischer smiled. ‘No private anything. Herr Hoffmann has strong political principles. Still very much a socialist, I would say. Puts the national interest above personal comfort. The apartment where he lives has only three rooms. He passes a lot of time at the Staatsbibliothek – the national library – studying the history of the German peoples. Every Saturday afternoon and other days also. His only big expense is the Opera. If he was making big money he would use it for some cause that he believed in, not spending it on himself.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  Fischer pursed his thin lips. ‘Maybe two month ago.’

  ‘He contacts you, or you contact him?’

  ‘The first. As I said, we don’t expect much from him these days. He is too old. The Russians in Vienna are most aged thirty to forty.’

  Sam glanced out of the window as they crossed the wide, brown streak of the Danube. He smiled, remembering Hoffmann saying that only a musician could have convinced the world that Vienna’s river was blue.

  ‘So you think he’s on the same side as you now?’ Sam suggested.

  ‘Or on no side at all,’ Fischer answered briskly. ‘How long do you stay in Vienna?’

  ‘For as long as it takes. It’ll be my luck to find that Hoffmann’s gone away this morning.’

  ‘Your luck is not that bad. He is still here. One of my assistants telephoned him one hour ago to check.’

  ‘What? And mentioned I was coming?’

  ‘Of course not. He was pretending to offer financial advice. Here in Austria there are many companies that make such calls.’

  ‘Makes a change from double glazing.’

  Ten minutes later Fischer dropped him at his hotel. He handed Sam a business card.

  ‘Please, before you leave Vienna, you will tell me if you learn anything interesting?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Brussels

  Commissioner Blanche Duvalier called the meeting to order. It was already mid-morning, the session having been delayed by the late-arriving flight from Vienna bringing in Anders Klason, head of the EC’s new racial equality unit. Klason was scheduled to give the opening address, so the day’s programme couldn’t start without him.

  Blanche Duvalier watched Klason settle down at his place in the horseshoe of the Salle Bertrand at the Commission headquarters. His bearing, his bright blue eyes and golden skin made him a godlike figure. A Nordic Adonis. If the opportunity arose she had every intention of adding him to her list of lovers. This morning however there seemed to be something wrong with him. He was frowning a lot, as if trying to catch up with himself. Unsettled by the delayed flight, she decided. She would give him a moment to compose himself.

  It was an important meeting this morning. The European Union faced a punishing influx of refugees from the war-torn Balkans and the bankrupt states of Eastern Europe. And matters were worsening, with experts predicting a catastrophe in Kosovo. The vast majority of European citizens had been tolerant of the new arrivals in their midst, but there’d been demonstrations of intense xenophobia by fascist groups in several member states, culminating in the violence of last weekend. Blacks, Asians and Jews had also been subject to renewed hostility in many parts of the continent. What the meeting today needed to achieve was a strategy for dealing with the issue, so that ministers could discuss it at their next council session in three weeks’ time.

  Blanche Duvalier looked around her. A pleasantly spacious conference room with glass panels at the far end behind which the linguists sat, ready for their gruelling stint of simultaneous translation. There were twenty-six delegates seated at the horseshoe, most of them appointed by member governments, many of them academics well used to theorising and pontificating, a good half of them with an excessive fondness for their own voices. Her task would be to keep them ruthlessly to the point. If she didn’t, then the chances of anything useful coming out of the two-day session were remote.

  Thank God they had Klason here to kick things off, she thought. Anders was one of the most down-to-earth men she’d ever met.

  Anders Klason, however, felt very peculiar this morning. It had started when he woke up. For a few moments he hadn’t known where he was, even though it was his own bed with Nina’s warm nakedness beside him. At first he hadn’t been able to remember what it was he had to do today. Then, later, on the journey to the airport, he found he couldn’t remember which airline he was flying with and had needed to look at his ticket. Other things had stayed perfectly clear in his head. The speech he was to give, and the fact that by making this journey to Brussels he was avoiding one of his mother-in-law’s visits. But there were gaps. As if someone had bored holes in his memory.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,’ Blanche Duvalier began, speaking her native French. ‘May I welcome you to this meeting and wish us all success in formulating ideas for countering the resurgence of racism in Europe which we all fear.’

  Anders Klason gaped. The sounds from her mouth weren’t words to him at all, but strange animal twitterings. He searched the faces of his fellow delegates. Attentive. Listening. Pretending, all of them. Pretending things were normal when they so obviously weren’t. A smile flitted across his face. This was laughable. The woman at the desk bridging the two ends of the horseshoe, whom he thought he knew but now couldn’t quite place, was playing some extraordinary game. And everyone else was conniving at it. Like the Emperor’s new clothes. Everyone except him. Then he looked closer at the faces around him and realised there wasn’t a single soul here that he recognised. An assembly of strangers. He’d made a terrible mistake. Gone through the wrong doo
r. He pushed the chair back and levered himself to his feet.

  Suddenly he heard his name. Spoken by the woman at the head of the table. He stared at her. How did she know him? They were all looking at him. Expectant faces. Total strangers into whose midst he’d suddenly been dropped. He had no recollection of how he’d come to this place, or why. No idea where this place was. He stared down at the desk, his vision strangely tunnelled. There were papers there with words that made no sense. He felt desperately tired. He knew he must lie down.

  ‘Anders?’ Concern and curiosity on the woman’s face.

  Klason wanted out of there. Back to bed, away from this mistake. No. He wasn’t all right. His legs suddenly gave way.

  Blanche Duvalier stood up in horror. ‘Call an ambulance, someone!’ She walked round the back of the horseshoe to where Anders lay, his mouth goldfishing, eyes fixed on nothing. His face was ashen, a tail of saliva dribbled from the corner of his lips.

  ‘He’s had a stroke,’ she whispered. She’d seen it before. A French government minister with whom she’d had a long affair. She screwed up her face. ‘Anders! Can you hear me? Say something.’

  But he couldn’t. They didn’t know it then, but Anders Klason would never speak again.

  HMS Truculent

  Commander Talbot ordered the boat to eighteen metres for the second time in an hour. The periscope slid up. The sea around them was clear. They were safe, at a distance of about five miles from Lastovo island.

  He’d diverted from his track towards the evening’s rendezvous with the helicopter at the request of Communications Technician Arthur Harris. The direction-finding equipment in the intercept mast had located the source of the Russian voices as being east of the island, in an area of rocky outcrops which the charts on board described as uninhabited. The biggest of them and the most likely source of the transmissions was called Palagra. They still had a hundred metres of sea beneath the keel. Any closer in and the waters became significantly shallower.

  Talbot had been reluctant to deviate from his original course. He’d wanted a steady, risk-free transit to their rendezvous with the Lynx from the frigate HMS Suffolk in six hours’ time. The tapes of the last ten days of intercepts of Serb and Kosovan military communications were urgently needed back in the UK. They still had a hundred miles to run to the pre-arranged point in the ocean. Four hours was the minimum at a full-power dash, but their sonar would be degraded by noise at that speed. He preferred a more modest cruising rate. He’d told the CTs they could have an hour to play with. At a pinch he would give them two.

  Lt Harvey Styles was studying the chart, familiarising himself with waters they’d not explored before. One more hour on duty for him before the watch changed. He noted the arrival of the captain’s lean deputy, Lt-Commander Martin Hayes, the only man on board apart from the skipper who’d passed the command course.

  The captain saw him too and stretched. ‘Keep the CTs on a tight rein,’ he cautioned as Hayes took up position by his elbow. ‘Don’t want them delaying us so we end up blowing a gasket trying to make the RV with the Lynx.’

  Styles overheard and moved closer to the two senior officers. ‘The First Lieutenant’s a demon on the exercise bike, sir. Hook him up to the shaft and we might get a few more revs out of the propulsor.’

  Talbot smiled and slid off the command seat. ‘I shall be in my cabin. You have the submarine, First Lieutenant.’

  ‘I have the submarine, sir.’

  Martin Hayes had the race-bred looks of a greyhound, a body on which there was not an ounce of flesh that wasn’t sinew. Keeping fit was hard for submariners. Life on board for most of the men revolved around work, sleep and large meals. There was an exercise bike in the swelteringly hot machinery spaces aft of the reactor, and a running machine on the lower deck next to the coxswain’s office. Hayes used them both whenever he could, but most of the crew didn’t.

  In command of the boat for the next couple of hours, he began to take stock of their position. The Command System screen showed half a dozen small contacts off the coast of Lastovo, none fast moving and all more than three miles distant. He crossed to the chart table as Styles vacated it to take over the periscope from the ship control chief. Clear of these islands the Adriatic was deep, but if they ever had to go in amongst them great care would be needed. The bottom shelved to less than the sixty metres which was their normal operational minimum.

  Styles’s quip about the exercise bike had irritated him. An innocent enough witticism to the others, but to Hayes it was just one more jibe. Six months ago his relationship with the TSO had become unpleasantly personal, when the girl he planned to marry switched allegiance. From the moment this patrol began, Styles had lost no opportunity to talk about his ‘delightful’ Frances whenever Hayes was in earshot. A Chinese water torture of deliberate insensitivity.

  Hayes brushed past Harvey Styles and stepped into the trials shack. Seeing the First Lieutenant walk in, Arthur Harris removed his headphones. ‘They’re not sending at the moment, sir. Quiet as the grave.’

  ‘What exactly did you pick up earlier?’ Hayes asked, perching on a stool.

  ‘It appeared to be comms between a boat called the Karolina and someone ashore. Two men, the first saying they’d be alongside in five minutes. Complaining about how many boxes he had on board and how it wasn’t his job to hump them all. The complaint seemed to work, because the other man said he’d be at the landing stage to help.’

  ‘Holidaymakers bringing in fresh supplies of slivovitz,’ Hayes suggested.

  ‘That’s not impossible, sir,’ Harris conceded. ‘But a little unlikely. The Russians go for jazzy resorts like Limassol where they can flash their money around, not remote Croatian rocks.’

  ‘Well whatever, we can’t hang around for ever waiting for them to transmit again.’

  ‘I know that, sir.’

  Hayes stood up again. ‘Keep me posted.’

  ‘I will, sir.’

  Vienna

  The air in Vienna was hot and dry, a wind known as the Föhn, blowing in from the Sahara, a fickle breeze, said to induce migraines in the susceptible and to drive the suicidal towards their ultimate ambition. When Sam had come here last, three years ago, it had been early winter, before the snows had iced the roofs, but with a fetid fog clinging to the dank waters of the Danube. Sam had bought Hoffmann a Viertel of new wine in a Heurige, then been taken back to his flat in the Karl-Marx Hof to be told at last the real name of the woman who’d spied on the British Rhine Army headquarters.

  Sam left his bag at the pension off the Ringstrasse, then boarded a U-Bahn heading north from the baroque city centre. Fifteen minutes later, the almost empty train emerged from its tunnel, passing factories and oil storage tanks before terminating at the suburb of Heiligenstadt on the edge of the Wienerwald. Facing Sam as he emerged from the station was the monolithic, ochre and terracotta apartment complex built with tax levies by Red Vienna’s socialist administration at the end of the 1920s. He remembered Hoffmann being proud of his new home’s history.

  He waited for a bus to pass, then crossed the road and walked through one of the building’s wide arches into an enclosed garden on the far side of the block. Young women lounged and chatted on a bench while their children swung perilously on a climbing frame. He turned to stare up at the building. Social realist statues looked down from their keystones. It had puzzled him how Hoffmann had been able to move from Berlin and immediately find a flat here. Accommodation was hard to secure in Vienna – Austrians even joined political parties in an attempt to bump their way up the housing lists. He’d come to the conclusion that thirty years in the Stasi must have given Hoffmann a thick file of Austrian contacts to pressure and cajole.

  Sam found the staircase he needed and made his way to the third floor. He remembered Hoffmann’s wife as being a homely woman of indeterminate shape with drawn-back hair, the sort it was impossible to imagine being young. She’d worked as a schoolteacher in East Berlin, he recalled, but had
been forced to retire after the fall of the wall because of her inability to separate history from dogma. Sam remembered her stiff greeting in the small hallway, the doors to all rooms except the lounge firmly shut. She’d brought them coffee and cake, then retired to some other part of the flat. He’d imagined her listening in to their conversation on headphones.

  It was a shared love of the sea that had got him close to Günther Hoffmann. The old spy stemmed from Greifswald on the Baltic coast and had inherited a small family house there in the fourteenth-century Altstadt. Hoffmann told how he and his childless wife would spend weekends there in the summer, sailing their elderly ketch. It was a coastline Sam also knew, having spent a summer in the 1980s sailing from Denmark to Leningrad. Accompanied by an unnervingly virginal WREN and equipped with two Irish passports, they’d observed Warsaw Pact harbours from the cockpit of a sloop.

  The stairwell he was climbing smelled of disinfectant. Somewhere nearby a cleaning bucket clanked. On the small third-floor landing were four front doors. Number 12 – Hoffmann’s place – was the only one without a name. A glass spyhole was set into the panel above the bell push. Sam pressed it, then turned his face away, far from sure his visit would be welcome.

  He heard no sound from inside and pressed the bell again, holding the button for longer. He could still visualise that living room where Hoffmann had talked with pride and sadness about Papagena, who was by then close to death. There’d been a wooden model of their Baltic ketch on a bookcase, and above it a perfect copy of a work by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, done by a Stasi forger.

  With still no response, Sam tried a neighbour’s bell. The door opened a crack, held back by a chain. He saw a bespectacled eye, a beak of a nose and caught a whiff of cats.

  ‘Grüss Gott,’ he smiled.

  ‘Grüss Gott. Wer sind Sie?’ The woman’s voice scratched like a broken quill.

  ‘Ich suche Herr Hoffmann . . .’ Sam inclined his head towards her neighbour’s flat.