by James Quinn
So it was on that day, sitting in the park with the sun warming her skin, that Lisbeth Vogel decided that she was going to become a spy.
Lisbeth let herself into the back of the house through the pantry. It was strange that Frau Obermann, the housemaid, wasn't at work. Normally, she would not be finished until just before dinner.
She took off her coat and gloves and then became aware that the double doors to the dining room were open. From inside, she could hear the crackle and snapping of the fire in the hearth. Her stomach sank; what had gone wrong? Had he found out about her life as a spy? What had it been?
She took a breath, determined to front it out, and entered the dining room. He stood staring into the heart of the fire. Tall, distinguished, the slicked back hair framed over a thin and chiselled face. He was wearing his customary grey suit and black tie; the unofficial uniform of a ranking officer of the SSD. When he became aware of her presence in the dining room, he turned to greet her. He instantly began to walk towards her.
“Ulrich, where is Frau Obermann?” she said, genuinely confused.
“I let her go early. I wanted us to be alone,” he said, his voice cold. He looked calm, measured and in control. Then, as he neared her, she saw the set of his jaw, the rigidity and anger in his eyes and that he was also wearing leather gloves… and she knew what that meant. Leather is tough and doesn't leave a mark on the hand of the person doing the hitting.
Who knew what it was that had made him angry this time? A personal slight at work? An operation that hadn't gone to plan? A scratch on his beloved SSD Mercedes on the way home? Or maybe it was just nothing and he needed to indulge the violence inside him? In truth, it mattered not. All that mattered to her was that she would feel his wrath.
He stopped directly in front of her, towering above her, his physical presence dominating her space. She remained still, her eyes lowered, not wanting to inflame the situation even more and then…
He roared, screamed directly into her face. His face was flushed with anger and raw aggression; spittle leapt from his mouth and flicked at her face. She closed her eyes tightly and waited, hoped, for the storm to pass…
But it never did, because the punches from the leather gloves started to target her small frame. Lisbeth was aware of being thrown around the room, landing on the floor and then there was weight upon her as punch after punch continued to rain down.
Chapter Seven
Berlin – June 1960
Jack Grant had been waiting at the café on Unter den Linden and, if he were honest, he was starting to feel a little bit exposed. He was alternating between staring at his hands, his watch and the street corner. None of which put him at his ease.
EMERALD was more than thirty minutes late for their regularly scheduled meeting. Once a week, if possible, they would meet either at the safe house to go over anything that their operation needed, or alternatively to do a quick brush-past contact to pass a message. That worried him because so far in their relationship her tradecraft had been superb and she had never put a foot wrong. So this was something unusual.
Standard operating procedure dictated that if an agent failed to show for a meeting, the case officer was to give them the standard amount of time to wait and then abort before having a backup meeting twenty-four hours later; same place, same time. If they failed to show after that, then the process would have to start all over again for the next time; safety signals, location, surveillance detection…
So far, Grant had given her more than the agreed-on fifteen minutes.
Had she been betrayed? Had she let the cloud of suspicion fall upon her in some way? Was she even now in some cellar, being interrogated by the SSD? Of course, it could have been something as simple as having a flat tyre on her bicycle, or that the tram was running late, or a hundred other plausible excuses.
Welcome to the world of the agent runner, he thought. Where paranoia is your friend, trust can get you killed and every day is like trying to cross the autobahn blindfolded.
The next day, the fall-back meeting also failed to happen. He 'sent the balloon up' as soon as he got back to the Covert Operations Group base. 'Sending the balloon up' was the phrase the spies used to put out the alert that something was wrong with an agent.
Grant and Mike Stern double-checked the contact procedures and dead drops around the city, but so far they were all empty. SIS Berlin had received nothing from EMERALD on the phone numbers in their operations wing, so by the end of the second day Grant was at his wits' end and decided to seek the guidance of Masterman.
Masterman thought about it for a while and said, “Well, let's be a little bit necky and go straight to the horse's mouth, shall we?”
Grant looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“Let's call the house on a pretext. Let's see if the housemaid at their residence can offer us anything. You'd be amazed at how much a cleaner or a housemaid will let slip. There's a girl at SIS Berlin base that has first-rate German, even better than yours, Jack, and she could sell snow to an Eskimo.”
So they tried it the next day, telephoning the residence on the pretext that Frau Vogel had ordered a new set of curtains for the master bedroom and had not collected them. Could she confirm that she still wanted them?
“I am sorry, Frau Vogel is indisposed. She will not be back for many days.”
“Can I call back next week and talk to her about her order?” asked the young girl politely, as she sat in the SIS Station with Markham leaning over her shoulder.
“She will not be able to talk, she will be resting after her medical procedure. She will be very tired. Please can I take your telephone number?” said the housemaid, a stern old battleaxe from Hamburg.
“It is fine. I have the address. I will have them delivered as soon as possible. I am sorry to have disturbed you,” she said, hanging up the phone. And with this new intelligence, the investigation delved further.
“Let's check the hospitals in East Berlin. When people go missing, they invariably end up there,” said Mike, trying to reassure Grant.
Or in Stasi interrogation cells, thought Grant.
They got a hit in the first hour; the Charité Hospital in East Berlin had admitted one Elisabeth Vogel to their emergency room after having had a serious bicycling accident. Slowly, the story began to filter in from various low level sources that SIS had access to around the city.
A hospital porter, who did a little black market selling, had a cousin who worked as a cleaner in the hospital and told them of a private patient, a woman, one with her own room, who was brought into the hospital as an emergency late at night. She had been heavily bruised and had bandages on her face. The patient had been accompanied by her husband – tall, slim, dark-haired and obviously someone with influence. The patient had two Stasi 'guardians' outside to stop people entering, with the exception of the doctors and medical staff.
The Gutterfighters made contact with the hospital porter directly and made a cash agreement for him and his sub-agent, the cleaner, to monitor the treatment of the mysterious patient. A week later, the porter got in touch; the patient had gone, been discharged and collected from the hospital by the same two Stasi 'minders' and taken to her home in Kopernick, according to a nurse that worked on that ward and who was known to gossip about patients.
“So what do we do now?” asked Mike Stern, more worried for his friend than for the patient.
Grant thought for a moment and said, “We wait. There is nothing else that we can do. If she's burned, then we dump her. If she's still active, we hang on and wait for her to make contact.”
But deep down, deep inside, there was a part of Jack Grant that was furious and wanted to go out and kill Ulrich Vogel. That was no cycling accident; Vogel was a wife-beater, pure and simple.
“Can we not remove him?” said Grant to Masterman. They were driving back from the SIS Station to the Gutterfighters' base after a meeting with Markham about how the EMERALD operation was going to develop.
Ma
sterman peered across at him. “Remove him? I'm sorry, Jack. I'm not quite sure what you mean.”
“You know what I mean, boss – remove him permanently.”
Masterman raised an eyebrow at that. “So let me get this right? You want to actively murder a conduit for information because he slaps his wife around?”
“It's a little more than a slap!” said Grant, getting frustrated with his senior officer.
“Agreed and we are not the police. We are an intelligence service. Killing Vogel would cut off that line of flowing information, and nobody wants that.”
But the Gorilla in Grant was not about to stop. “So we just have to accept it? Let him batter her whenever he feels like it? Is that it?”
“Yes. We do! You suck it up, Jack my boy. We point our agents in the right direction and let them run, but what we don't do is get involved in their marital affairs.”
“We've killed people for a lot less,” growled Grant.
“Certainly we have, but usually on orders from our government – officially sanctioned. You don't get to make those kinds of decisions,” said Masterman reasonably.
Gorilla sat in the car and fumed, partly out of frustration for not being able to help his agent, and partly because he knew, deep down, that Masterman was right, as usual.
He needed a more subtle approach – something that would fit into the world of intelligence-gathering that he was still a novice in. If they couldn't see or gain access to EMERALD and they couldn't eliminate Ulrich Vogel, then the minimum that could be done was to pass a non-verbal message to EMERALD. So Grant decided to head further into East Germany than he had ever done before. He wanted to see her but, more importantly, it was so that she could see him. His message was clear; we are still here for you, we are still watching for you, and come back to us when you can.
He had SIS Berlin run him up some false identity cards, dressed as a delivery driver and took one of the vans from the Gutterfighters' car pool. His ruse was that he was delivering the pair of green velvet curtains that had been ordered by Frau Vogel from one of the department stores in West Berlin. It was plausible and, as long as he wasn't stopped and questioned too closely, he would be fine.
The drive to the riverside house in Kopernick seemed endless, rather than its usual thirty minutes out of the city centre. Once he had reached the town, he parked the car along the promenade and walked the rest of the way with the brown paper parcel under his arm; just an everyday delivery for a customer, nothing unusual and nothing to see.
He walked past the house, stopped for a moment and removed his cap. The sun shining on his blond hair made it look almost white. He turned slowly in a full circle, almost as if he was admiring the view of the river, before his gaze finally rested back on the house in front of him. He replaced his cap and then walked through the front garden to the pathway and up the steps to the front door. A quick knock on the door and it was pulled open to reveal a stout, abrupt-looking elderly woman.
“Yes?” she snapped, glaring at him.
“Good morning. I have a delivery for a Frau… er… Vogel?” he said, looking down at the name on the parcel.
The suspicious eyes narrowed and stared back at him. “Frau Vogel is resting. I will take the parcel from you.”
A thick, gnarly hand reached out and snatched the brown paper parcel from him, before the door was slammed in his face. He took a breath and turned away back onto the street. Once he had reached the main road, he looked back at the house and noticed a shape in the upstairs bedroom window. Was it her, or was it shadows from the sun?
He had no idea if it was truly EMERALD that he had spotted in silhouette, standing in the window. He dared to hope that she had seen him and that his message was clear.
We are here. We are waiting. I have not left you, Lisbeth.
“I have heard a rumour that the British have a new source in the GDR.”
Ulrich Vogel sneered. There was always some new source for the British, Americans or French, but most of them were of no concern to him and of little value to the intelligence services that they were trying to work with. He was not unduly concerned.
“Someone of… value?” he asked. They were seated in a car just outside the grounds of Charlottenburg Palace, the shape of the Schloss inky black against the dark night sky. It was quiet and isolated and it was one of their regular meeting places where they could confer without being disturbed.
“It is hard to say at the moment. Just a rumour on the grapevine. I picked it up at a recent liaison meeting. As you would imagine there were no specifics, just a hint that MI6 have a new line of enquiry about state security operations.”
Vogel weighed up this latest intelligence from his agent and nodded. “Keep your ear to the ground and let me know if anything else occurs.”
“Absolutely,” said the spy.
The spy's codename was PATRICK and he was perfectly placed to discover the identities of any serious intelligence breaches within the SSD caused by a western spy; after all, PATRICK was the newly appointed Head of Counter-Espionage for the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the BND, the Federal Republic's foreign intelligence organisation. A former Nazi Intelligence Officer who had served under Walter Schellenberg, he had been captured by the British in 1945. He had subsequently been imprisoned for eighteen months, before agreeing to work as an informant for British Intelligence in Frankfurt to spy on Communist groups in the area.
In the early 1950s, he had been recruited into the Gehlen Organisation by General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's wartime intelligence chief on the Eastern Front, who now had cut a deal with the Americans to establish a future intelligence capability for the West German government.
PATRICK was what colleagues termed 'an intelligence officer's, intelligence officer'.
He had risen steadily through the ranks of the Gehlen Org., operating on the front line as a case officer, conducting operations against Soviet teams, before being promoted in 1957 to Senior Operations Director in the newly formed and restructured BND. But PATRICK was one of those one in ten million people; he actually enjoyed the game of espionage more than he relished his loyalty to his country. Bored and disgruntled with his life, he made contact with the enemy, the SSD, in East Berlin and offered to spy for them.
His contact had been a young and upcoming Stasi officer by the name of Ulrich Vogel and between them, over the past few years they had been able to advance each other's careers inside their respective intelligence services, so much so that their crowning glory had been manipulating events for PATRICK to take charge of counter-espionage operations for the BND. After all, what could be better for an East German intelligence officer than to have a spy inside the very unit designed to catch Stasi spies!
“My only concern about this possible new source of the British service is that, inadvertently, it might expose me,” said PATRICK.
Vogel turned towards his agent in the car. “Do not worry, haven't I always protected you? Looked after you? If this source has any value and if they get too close to your identity, I will… take measures to root them out and deal with them.”
PATRICK nodded. He understood what 'root them out' meant. In truth, he did not like the young SSD officer; PATRICK regarded him as a blunt force trauma thug. But he had kept to his word over the years and had protected him as a source inside the BND.
“Is there anything else that you have for me?” asked Vogel, directing the conversation away from unimportant spies and towards more active operations.
“Yes, I have some political documents that may be of use,” he said, handing over a newspaper that concealed an envelope.
Vogel took them and placed them in his inside pocket. He looked at his agent. “Do not worry. I can see it in your face. If there is a risk, I will deal with it. There are always spare bullets for traitors.”
PATRICK took his cue and readied himself to get out of the car. His own vehicle was parked half a mile away. The walk would help clear his mind from the nagging doubt that he was once again
vulnerable to exposure.
A week after Jack Grant had delivered the curtains, EMERALD came alive again.
A message was left in the Tiergarten dead letter box. It had become Grant's routine to regularly check each of the DLBs around the city in the hope that she would get in touch. So when he saw the chalk mark on the park's gates confirming that the DLB was active, he was both excited and terrified.
Working on the premise that she had been interrogated and turned by the Stasi, Grant took the decision to close down the known safe houses that he had used for meeting EMERALD – at least for the moment, until he could assess the damage limitation on her case. But first, he needed to confirm whether she had been 'burned' or not.
They had gone through the agreed communication protocols to reconnect; a message instigated by EMERALD in the dead letter box, and a return message from her handler and now it was the moment of truth for both of them to see if the agent was in play and if her case officer trusted her.
Grant rented a room at the famous Hotel Kempinski on Unter den Linden. He arrived early and had prepared the room perfectly. It was non-threatening, relaxing almost, and he had chosen an afternoon to keep it professional. After all, what kind of lady meets a gentleman in a hotel in the evening – even in Berlin!
There was a gentle knock on the door and he was on his feet, one hand leaning towards the door and the other on the pistol concealed beneath his suit jacket. He peered through the spy-hole, confirmed it was her, opened the door and stepped back to give her space.
Her face was disguised with make-up to hide the yellow-stained skin of her healing bruises and she walked a little more slowly because her muscles had not fully recovered from the beating she had received, but there was still a fire in her, a determination that knew she could see this thing through, no matter how much torture her body took, even if she did not believe it yet.
