Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “In the bookshop, we were on a sofa by the window and, when you weren’t staring into my head like my neurosurgeon, you were looking up and down the street as if your life depended on it.”

  He blinked. No recollection.

  “We were at a reading,” said Leena, to be helpful. “By an American writer called James Hewitt.”

  “I know him. He writes spy fiction.”

  “There were about twenty of us in the audience,” she said. “You drank two glasses of wine before the reading and another during it.”

  “You were keeping an eye on me.”

  “I like older guys,” she said. “Afterwards, I asked if you’d read James Hewitt and I bought you a glass of wine.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “The owner of the bookshop rents one of my apartments. He invites me to readings, especially the ones with foreigners because of my English.”

  “And after the reading?”

  “Ten of us crossed the street to a restaurant where they’d laid on a late table for us. It was about ten-thirty.”

  “We all sat together?”

  “You were opposite me. I was next to James Hewitt. One of his friends was on your left, a musician with a long blond pony-tail. You told him you played the alto sax.”

  That jerked him back in his chair. Nobody knew that. Not even his second and third wives. Nor his ex-colleagues in the Company. He hadn’t played music for more than twenty-five years.

  “So you’re a woman of independent means,” he said, to cover his shock. “Did Daddy leave you a fortune?”

  “You see what I mean? You listen in a way that nobody else listens and then you ask that question. You’re brutal. What do you do, Roland?”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  “Only if you’re what my ex-husband would have called ‘a bullshit merchant.’”

  “What work did you used to do that journalists had to stroke you?”

  “Don’t think I don’t know your game,” said Leena, tapping the side of her head. “I ran my own coffee import company from the age of twenty-one. I created a whole new way of packaging coffee. I was young and beautiful—an exciting combination for the media. Tell me about your military training.”

  “How did your father die, Leena?”

  “He shot himself.”

  The wind buffeted against the building. The lamp hummed.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, softening, taking to her more now as the possibility of her being a Company recruit diminished. “A beautiful, wealthy woman in a hotel room with some sap who’s old enough to be your father.”

  She stared at him with unblinking, fathomless eyes.

  “I recognize damage,” she said.

  The wail with a painting on it went grainy in his vision. The towel felt rough in his lap. He winced at a twinge in his side.

  “Because you’ve been damaged yourself,” said Schafer uneasily. “I can see that.”

  “The worst damage is never visible,” she said.

  “Why did your husband leave you?” he asked, swerving away from her insight.

  Tucked under the duvet, she looked at him like a small child, but with the eyes of a troubled adult.

  “I wasn’t alone in the car,” she said quietly.

  With that he was conscious of a terrible pain cornered in the room.

  “My four-year-old son was in the backseat and he took the full force of the impact. He died instantly.”

  Silence, with a heightened awareness of the two of them naked in a room in the water tower while the world obliviously churned out its future beyond the window He wanted to say something, but realized there was nothing to be said. He didn’t know what he would do with himself if his daughter died, let alone if he felt in some way responsible for it. He wasn’t sure how he was going to cope with her absence, given that by next week she would be unlikely to speak to him ever again. But at least she wouldn’t be dead.

  “You’re the first person, outside the small circle of people I used to call my friends, that I’ve told that to,” she said.

  “Why me?”

  “Something’s ruined you in the same way that I’ve been ruined.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m an expert in guilt,” she said. “I recognize all the symptoms.”

  He knew now why he was calm. Her recognition made him feel that he belonged again. His eyes were suddenly full. He blinked fast and swallowed to quell the emotion. And with that last attempt at control, a fatigue so profound it couldn’t possibly have been physical overwhelmed him, and he dropped into a lethal sleep.

  * * * *

  Two men sat in a coffee shop a stone’s throw away from the Sternschanzenpark. They were gray men, made grayer by the cold and the coats that they were wearing. The older man, Foley, was skimming a report that the younger one, Spokes, had just produced entitled “Marleena Remer.”

  “Did she inherit?” asked Foley.

  “She got his sixty percent of the shipping company, the house in the country, and his apartment in the city, plus twenty million euros.”

  “So she doesn’t have to work.”

  “Her head injuries were severe,” said Spokes. “There was talk of brain damage and psychological problems. Her accountant sold the coffee company for her while she was still in the hospital.”

  “Have you got a tax return?”

  “There’s an income from the shipping company, but most comes from property. She lives in the top two floors of an apartment building which she owns, renting out the other apartments. She has a rental income of just under a million euros and investment income of about half that.”

  “That doesn’t sound so brain damaged to me.”

  “Maybe not, but there’s something ‘off’ about her,” said Spokes.

  “Tell me,” said Foley, tossing the report.

  “Ali, from the Moroccan teahouse on Susannenstrasse, has a daughter who cleans the apartment building’s communal spaces and Marleena’s condo. She says there’s a private elevator to Marleena’s quarters so she knows exactly who goes up there,” said Spokes. “And Leena, as she’s known, gets frequent visits from a number of older men in their fifties and sixties. Same ones, some regular, some not so regular. All times of day and night.”

  “She’s brain damaged enough to turn hooker?”

  “Maybe,” said Spokes, shrugging. “She underwent three neuro ops and she’s on antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers, which is what she has in her medicine cabinet, according to the cleaner.”

  “What’s Schafer getting into now?” muttered Foley.

  “Ali’s daughter cleans today. Leena will text her the elevator codes, which she changes later on.”

  “Someone will have to go up there with her,” said Foley. “Get the Turk to join her.”

  “Arslan?” said Spokes. “Isn’t that a bit. . . radical?”

  “He’s just going to take a look at things,” said Foley. “But if we need him to be ‘radical,’ at least he knows the place. That way we limit the number of people who know about this.”

  “You think it’s going to come to that?”

  “People far more senior than I am have their jobs riding on the outcome of this,” said Foley. “And I’ve just heard from London that Schafer’s English buddy, Damian Rush, gets into Hamburg at eight-forty-five.”

  “Under his own name?”

  “He’s only a journalist now.”

  “I’d better get out to the airport.”

  “Look,” said Foley, nodding out toward the park.

  They sipped their coffees as Marleena Remer walked past in an ankle-length, fur-collared black coat, a black fur hat, and gloves.

  “You wouldn’t know it,” said Foley into his coffee.

  * * * *

  Schafer woke up in the armchair, his head pounding so hard he kept absolutely still while he checked the room. There was a note on the towel in his lap. Leena, an address on the Schanzenstrasse, a
telephone number, and a message: “Call me. I think we can help each other.” He checked his watch. 8:30. He’d slept for more than three hours. Unheard of in his state. He was more rested than he’d been in months.

  As a wise, old operative he should have been uneasy about her, but instead he felt something he couldn’t quite define: almost like first love, but without the innocence. He stood, grunting under the pummeling his brain was taking.

  The window revealed a bleak dawn, fleisch grossmarkt still shone blue, but a building was taking shape beneath it as the bare branches of the trees by the railway tracks flailed in the wind. Patches of green showed through the snow. His eyes came to rest on the window ledge on which there were sharp wire spokes. On the seventh floor they weren’t there to stop people getting in.

  He slurped down three Tylenol with water from the sink in the bathroom. He showered and dressed. In a sudden return of his occupational paranoia he made a meticulous search of his room and found nothing, which was as he’d expected, but it left him unnerved, too. He went down to breakfast. It was going to be a long, hard day.

  A bowl of muesli. Fried bacon, blutwurst, and eggs. Ham and cheese on rye. Four sweet coffees and some pastries. He was going to need some insulation out there. Zero, with an ugly wind coming from the North. He went straight out, wearing a thick sweater under a reversible coat—blue showing, brown not. He also had a couple of hats and some spectacles—a few basic tools to disguise himself.

  In this sort of weather he’d have normally taken the U-Bahn from Schlump into the Gänsemarkt, but he wanted to see what sort of resources the Company had at its disposal, so he opted for a walk in the park around the deserted Japanischer Garten. It was cold and damp, and his trousers stiffened up like cardboard before he’d even crossed the road beneath the TV tower.

  Since 9/11 and the discovery of the Hamburg cell the Company had developed plenty of immigrants—Turks, Moroccans, Iranians—for basic footwork: listening in at the mosques and sniffing around the Koran schools. The Company wouldn’t want too many of them to know that they were being used to tail an ex-colleague, but it wouldn’t have to worry about loyalty from those who did.

  The café in the park was closed, the chairs stacked and the umbrellas under wraps, waiting for spring, which seemed a long way off. The water features below had been drained so that they wouldn’t freeze over. The plants in huge stone half-eggs had been bagged against the frost. The park, as he’d suspected, was empty of people.

  Schafer spotted his first tail at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station ahead of him. A square-headed guy, probably from the Maghreb, who was standing at the entrance of the station, freezing cold, making a show of reading a newspaper. He led him down Dammtorstrasse to the Gänsemarkt. He used to come to this square as a kid with his mother, although it was a triangle and there had never been any geese; it had always been a big part of his family life at Christmas. The lights were on in the huge arched windows of Essen & Trinken, and there was some snow gone to ice on its green copper roof. Schafer quickly lost his tail in the station, saw him looking up and down the wrong platform as he boarded the train to Jungfernstieg.

  Coming out of the underground Schafer turned his back on the gray, choppy expanse of the Binnenalster Lake and counted across the buildings from left to right. Third building. Fourth row of windows. Second along. The blind was down. Damian telling him he had company. What did he expect? He’d been arrogant to think that they could pull this off unnoticed. He went to the S-Bahn station and left a chalk mark on the inside of the right-hand steel support. Plan B.

  He took a walk down the Alsterfleet canal by the side of the Rathaus. He wanted to see the Elbe but drifted onto the Altstadt square in front of the neorenaissance facade of the nineteenth-century town hall, which looked black and Gothic in the gloom. Back in 1962, at the age of ten, he’d stood here with his parents for a remembrance service to the three hundred victims of the North Sea flood. He recalled the great sadness of the adult crowd on that day, which as a child he hadn’t been able to comprehend. He felt more emotional about it now than he had then.

  When he arrived at the river Elbe, which was flat as sheet iron at this point, he began to wonder what he was doing. He stared across the water, at the cranes ranked along the port quays, with eyes that had always kept the secrets they’d seen. Now he was going to blow it all open, and he realized there was something valedictory about his movements around his old town.

  He got on a train at the Landungsbrücken station. First things first, he had to collect what he was supposed to pick up last night at the reading before the woman, Leena, had thrown everything into disarray. He headed back out to Schlump. Was this any sort of a job for a grown man? Endlessly going around in circles, finding different ways to check your back?

  Now that he was on the train and certain that he was free of tails, he took stock. The drinking was out of control—that was clear. He tried to retrace the scene in the bookstore last night, but he still couldn’t remember meeting Leena. How could he forget that? She was the whole reason he’d left without what he’d gone in there for. But he did realize that. He had come out empty-handed . . . hadn’t he? His certainty wavered in his paranoid mind. Was that why he was so anxious to get to the bookstore? Why he’d searched his room? To make sure he hadn’t picked up, taken the material back to his hotel room, and let Leena walk away with it this morning? He knew it hadn’t happened like that. For a start, she wouldn’t have been there when he woke up. He’d definitely aborted the mission. But he had to work his way back through the fog, blankness, and memory obliteration of booze to get to it.

  The train clattered into St. Pauli and a minute later lunged out. He caught sight of himself in the glass of the window. It wasn’t the heavy pouches under his eyes and the depth of the lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth that disturbed him. It was more that he didn’t quite recognize himself, had to put his hand up to his face to make sure it was him. This was what losing your moral center did to you. This was what betraying your country did to you.

  And with that terrifying admission he got to the point. He had not gone to the toilet in the bookstore. He’d been so disturbed by Leena coming on to him, certain that she was a honey trap, that he hadn’t dared to go in there even to relieve himself.

  At Schlump he walked fast, an icy wind at his back, to the bookstore. He sat down with a cup of coffee and a German copy of James Hewitt’s latest novel. Last night’s chairs and microphones had been cleared away, and the floor area was now reoccupied by tables laden with books.

  He heard the door open. The shop emptied as the two members of staff and a customer left for a smoke on the front step. Schafer went to the toilet, locked the door, lifted the seat, stood on the rim, and, using a penknife, unscrewed the extractor fan housing high up by the ceiling. His most trusted courier had left the black plastic bag that he now found inside the fan. It contained a folded sheet of paper and a memory stick, which he pocketed. He refitted the extractor fan housing, cleaned off the rim of the toilet, flushed, and, leaving the seat raised, went back to resume his reading. The staff returned. The customer flicked his cigarette and moved off.

  Schafer appeared to read a couple of chapters while he was actually thinking about Leena. The note. “I think we can help each other.” With his paranoia subsiding he was sure, once again, that she was not a honey trap. Quite apart from the “come on” of the note being far too strong, she was too quirky for the average Company operative and her story too powerfully authentic to be anything other than the truth. The note made him think that maybe, given that the Company would know about her by now, she could be of some help in Plan B. He slotted the piece of paper into his book, which he paid for.

  He backtracked and crossed the Sternschanzenpark to the hotel, where he knew he’d be followed again. Back in his room he entered Leena’s number into his cell phone memory. He tore her note in half, leaving only the message part as the bookmark and left it inside the novel on the bedside
table. He screwed up the other half and put it in his pocket.

  He took some tape from his suitcase and opened the plastic bag he’d taken from the bookshop toilet. He checked that it was the memo to private contractors that he’d stolen six weeks earlier. He wasn’t mentally up to checking the contents of the memory stick on his laptop, but he confirmed that the small mark he’d engraved on the plastic casing was still there. He put the paper and stick back in the plastic bag and sealed it with tape. He wanted to deliver the two pieces of evidence together, personally, because he was going to supply a commentary to the devastating pictures on the memory stick to Rush. Given that he was sealing his fate and that of others, including his fellows on the assignment, his Company superiors, and senior officers in the Pentagon, he should have realized they wouldn’t make it easy for him.