Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Using the stairs, he found that the maids were cleaning the rooms on the tenth floor. He walked past their two trolleys and saw that while one of them wore her passkey around her neck, the other preferred to keep hers tied to the trolley handle on a piece of elastic. He watched them from behind the central elevator shaft as they moved clockwise around the circular landing. When they started vacuuming, he made his move. He unthreaded the passkey and opened one of the rooms they’d already cleaned, number 1015. He slotted a coin in between the door and frame to keep it open and returned the passkey to the trolley. Fifteen minutes later the maids moved up to the eleventh floor.

  Schafer let himself into the empty room, looked around. There was no need to be clever about this. He lifted the only painting in the room from the wall. The frame was deep enough to take the memory stick. He taped the plastic bag onto the back and replaced the painting. He left the room, went back down to his own, took a piece of notepaper, and wrote out a classified ad in German. This was for Plan C, in case B messed up. He checked the time: 12:30. Half an hour to get back into town for lunch.

  Of the twenty people on the platform at Schlump, the Company man stood out. There was no training ground for these people. By the time he’d hit thirty-five he’d done a decade of this sort of work in Berlin.

  He wanted his tail with him this time. They took the train to Jungfernstieg and walked along the front, with the wind whipping off the lake so that it was a relief to turn down Grosse Bleichen and an almost erotic experience to walk into the warmth of the Edelcurry restaurant. Three minutes early. He took a table deep in the restaurant and ordered a pilsner. The combination of last night’s alcohol and this morning’s adrenaline had put a tremble in his right hand. The beer corrected it, improved his spirits. He reminded himself to act happy.

  Thomas Lüpertz was the son of Schafer’s father’s best friend. They’d done exchanges between families so that Thomas could learn English and Roland could maintain his German. The adolescent friendship had been cemented when Schafer ended up on a posting to Hamburg after his first marriage had bust up in the early 1980s. The two men hadn’t seen each other for several years. It didn’t matter. They had a great time eating currywurst and drinking beer. They laughed about life’s absurdities. He asked Lüpertz to do him a favor, gave him the classified ad he’d written, and asked him to put it in the Hamburger Abendblatt and pay for it. His old friend didn’t even question it.

  Just after two o’clock Lüpertz left without taking his copy of Die Zeit, which he’d slapped on the chair next to him on his arrival. Schafer took the newspaper to the toilet with him. He had a long pee, all that beer, and spent time washing his hands. He returned to his seat and ordered a coffee. He drank two more over the next hour while reading the newspaper.

  The gloom was gathering for an early winter nightfall as he came out onto the street. His tail was looking very cold. He walked down to Axel-Springer-Platz and called Leena on his cell phone.

  “You said we could help each other,” he whispered.

  “Who is this?” she asked, missing a beat.

  “How many offers of help do you leave on drunks in hotel rooms?”

  “Per week?”

  He laughed. For real. It had been a long time.

  “I’m the drunk from the Water Tower Hotel, room seven thirteen.”

  “I’m with my accountant at the moment,” she said. “Why don’t you come to my place around seven o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll text the elevator codes to this number.”

  She hung up.

  He caught a train to Landungsbrücken, switched to the underground, and got out at Sternschanze, leaving his tail on the train. It was dark as he walked up to the hotel, and his feet crunched on ice.

  Back in his room he lay on the bed, burping currywurst. The news was full of the ongoing financial meltdown and President-elect Obama’s announcement that he would close Gitmo. Couldn’t happen sooner. He’d done his time down there. Depressed the hell out of him. He switched to Bloomberg, where all the presenters seemed too desperate for good news in a recession that had only just begun. He felt remarkably calm given that a new world order was taking shape less than seventy years after the last one, while he was getting down to the serious business of betraying his country.

  The television annoyed him. He turned it off and stared at the receding ceiling, letting fragmented thoughts of his third wife come to him. She was slipping away. Their separation and his drinking had brought them to a state of alienation he couldn’t bear. All that was left was the little girl. They’d called her Femi, the Egyptian for “love.” But that wasn’t going to be enough to keep them together. It had been the one thing that had pushed them apart. His wife had quit work, and he’d had to come out of retirement to fund it, but he hadn’t wanted to go back into the Company because he’d heard it had all gone bad in the 1990s.

  The stress rose in his chest. He rolled off the bed to the mini-bar and sucked down a miniature of vodka and a scotch. He went back to the bedside table, opened James Hewitt’s novel, and shook his head in dismay. They couldn’t even put the bookmark back in the right page.

  His cell phone vibrated, Leena sending him the elevator codes.

  * * * *

  They were sitting in the front of the Moroccan tea shop on Susannenstrasse; it was five in the afternoon. Any view of them from the street was obscured by the ranks of hookahs piled up in the window. Foley wasn’t impressed by the report that Spokes had just given him. He sensed the situation was getting out of control, could feel the weight of a heavy decision gathering on his shoulders.

  “Damian Rush checked into the Park Hyatt,” said Spokes. “He’s been out at the port most of the day, seems to be doing an article on the collapse of the German manufacturing miracle.”

  Foley said nothing in reply, drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Lüpertz is in his office, and Ms. Remer is back in her condo,” said Spokes.

  “I’m going to tell you this so you know what’s happening here and perhaps that will help you understand what we’re going to have to do? All right?” said Foley. “Schafer and Rush were together in Rabat.”

  He now had Spokes’s full attention.

  “After the July bombings in London, MI5 was desperate for intelligence and MI6 sent Rush to ask some questions for them. He and Schafer worked together on some of the interrogations.”

  “Right. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that they were here together in Hamburg.”

  “And that Rush left MI6 over a year ago and is now a journalist.”

  Spokes fell silent.

  “When Schafer’s contract was terminated along with the others’, I went to Rabat to close down the ‘black site’ just after the November election,” said Foley. “That was when I discovered that the private contractors’ memo was missing. And six weeks’ work later, by process of elimination of the other two members of Schafer’s Rabat squad, here we are in Hamburg with Schafer and Rush.”

  Spokes could sense Foley hardening with each of these revelations.

  “They still have to meet,” said Spokes.

  “I know that. And physical meetings and material exchanges are the most dangerous moments for operatives,” said Foley, quoting to Spokes from the manual. “And what do you think Schafer is doing about that, with all his field experience from the days of the Berlin Wall?”

  “He’s trying to confuse us.”

  “He’s not trying. He is,” said Foley. “We lost him last night and we lost him again this morning. He knows we can’t ask the Germans for help and we’ve got limited reliable resources at our disposal. So he’s spreading us thin on the ground. We’re already watching three corners: Rush, Lüpertz, and the wild card, Marleena Remer.”

  Spokes had suspected it would come to this. It was the nature of cover-ups. Once containment looked hopeless there was only one other course of action.

  “What did the Turk find this aft
ernoon?” asked Foley.

  “The elevator opens out into her apartment on the top floor,” said Spokes, on automatic. “There are two bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a walk-in closet for her clothes and shoes, a kitchen, dining room, a huge L-shaped living room, where he left the listening device, and an office. On the other half of that floor there’s an art gallery with around twenty works in it. More interesting is what’s below. That just consists of a room within a room.”

  “And?”

  “It was locked. Arslan said the door looked serious and the walls were made out of brick.”

  “Has the cleaner ever been in there?”

  “No, and she only does the six-foot walkway around the room when Marleena tells her to.”

  “Anything else in her apartment?”

  “No safe,” said Spokes. “Arslan mentioned that she had two spare legs of slightly different colors in the walk-in closet. That’s it.”

  “Are those elevator codes still operational?”

  “We intercepted an SMS from Leena to Schafer giving new codes.”

  “Tell the Turk to come and see me.”

  * * * *

  The elevator to the Park Hyatt hotel dropped into an upmarket shopping mall, which meant that the Turk did not have to wait outside in subzero for the Englishman to make an appearance at six o’clock that evening.

  Rush embarked on a circuitous route to the Hauptbahnhof before doubling back past the St. Jacobi and St. Petri churches and ended up going down into the Jungfernstieg station. The Turk didn’t want there to be any chance of Rush seeing him in such a well-lit place. He hovered for a minute before the Englishman came back up with a copy of the Hamburger Abendblatt under his arm. Arslan watched Rush from the station as he headed up the Ballindamm on the side of the road where the buildings were. Arslan tracked him from across the street under the trees next to the Binnenalster Lake. Rush went into the Café Wien, took a table, stripped off his coat and woolen hat, went to light a cigarette, remembered just in time, and put it back in the packet.

  The Turk paced the walkway beneath the trees, nervous and trying to keep warm. This was going to be his only opportunity. It was very dark under there, and the branches clacked overhead. The intense cold meant that there was no one around. Even the traffic, in the early evening on a day of business, was light. He watched as Rush ordered a coffee and read the newspaper in the well-lit café. The Englishman seemed to be studying columns of figures, something like the stock market numbers.

  Rush took out his cell phone, looked around him, decided against it. Too many people. He paid the waiter for the coffee, put his coat and hat back on. He still had his cell in his hand.

  The wind was cutting, and the Englishman winced as he came out of the Café Wien. He looked back up the street and then across the bridge between the two lakes. Arslan willed him to cross the street which, when the lights changed, he did. Rush walked between the trees before moving out to the railing above the steepish bank down to the water’s edge. He lit a cigarette under the lapel of his coat and made his phone call. Arslan moved quickly, using the trees for cover. Just as Rush closed down his cell, the Turk was on him, hit him with a savage blow across the side of the neck that tipped the Englishman over the rail and down the bank. Arslan vaulted the rail and scrambled down to the water’s edge, where Rush had come to rest. He heaved him into the icy water and held him under. There was a brief struggle, and it was all over. He kicked him out into the lake, picked up Rush’s cell phone, and threw it in after him.

  * * * *

  It was a short walk from the hotel to Leena’s condo on Schanzenstrasse. Schafer was excited at the prospect of seeing her again. It had been dark for nearly two and a half hours by the time he set off, just before seven o’clock. He picked up a tail waiting for him under the bridge. It didn’t bother him.

  He entered the elevator codes and went up to her apartment. The doors opened onto a wooden floor and Leena in a black miniskirt, boots over the knee, black tights, a long-sleeved black top, and a necklace of stainless steel lozenges. Her blonde hair was piled high, and makeup disguised the scar tissue on the side of her face.

  He wasn’t sure of the etiquette of the moment. Their strange earlier intimacy and mutual nudity called for more than a handshake. Leena kissed him on the cheek. Her lips made light contact with the corner of his mouth with electric effect. She led him by the arm to the huge window at the back of the apartment, which overlooked the old city toward the lake. The TV tower loomed to the left. They stared at the glittering city. He enjoyed the pressure of her hand on his bicep. He had an odd feeling that she was about to make him an outlandish offer, like: “All this for your soul.” She sat him on the sofa, offered him a drink. He took a scotch on the rocks. She joined him with what looked like a glass of water.

  “You’re looking better than you did this morning,” she said.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve slept like that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me.”

  “I don’t need to know.”

  “I meant about being able to help each other.”

  “I told you my expertise,” she said. “I think you’re an expert, too.”

  “I don’t feel like an expert in anything.”

  “You ask questions and you listen.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Nobody listens these days, unless you’re talking about them, and even then they’re selective about what they hear,” she said. “I thought, at first, you might be a policeman. A detective, you know, used to asking questions and listening . . . and thinking all the time. Conservative and ordered, hierarchical, but also seeing horrifying things and dealing with evil people.”

  “I’m not a cop,” he said. “I’m a bullshit merchant, remember?”

  “That’s part of your job,” she said. “Just to keep people from knowing who you really are.”

  His face did not betray a single emotion. He sipped his scotch slowly.

  “You’ve had three wives?” she said.

  “The middle one only lasted a few months.”

  “And you’re away a lot.”

  “How would you know?”

  “You’re not as American as most Americans,” she said. “You’ve assimilated the cultures you’ve been involved with. You speak German and other languages.”

  “Russian and Arabic,” he said, nodding.

  “And you’re fifty- ... six years old?”

  “Fifty-seven.”

  “There’s something of the old warrior about you, Roland.”

  “Did you say, ‘cold warrior’?”

  “I recognize you, I mean your type.”

  “Was your father in the military?”

  “Before he went into business,” said Leena, “he was in intelligence. It was one of the reasons he was so successful and it was also why my mother left him.”

  “And why was that?”

  “She never quite knew who she was with.”

  “Did she remarry?”

  “A plumber,” said Leena. “And she knows exactly where she stands with him.”

  “Yes,” said Schafer, “plumbers are safer than spies and more useful around the house. Did your father shoot himself because your mother left him?”

  Leena shook her head slowly, as if her father’s suicide had something to do with Schafer.

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” said Leena. “And my mother couldn’t tell me anything. But two weeks after his funeral I had a visit from a woman who told me that her husband and my father had worked together in Berlin in 1979. Her husband had never come back. She implied that my father had something to do with it. It was complicated by the fact that she wanted money. She might have seen me as someone easy to exploit. That’s certainly what my ex-husband thought.”

  “Did you see her again?”

  “A year ago. I’d done a bit of research among my father’s ‘friends’ by then, and I’d found that there wa
s some doubt as to his loyalty. Nothing that could be proved, but there were questions about where the capital came from to start up his shipping company,” she said. “I gave the woman some money.”

  “Was he ever politically motivated?”

  “Never,” she said. “You’re not a spy anymore though, are you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Last night. It wasn’t an act. I don’t think a spy would risk getting that drunk. My father used to drink himself senseless, but only on his own.”

  “I don’t work for anybody anymore,” said Schafer. “I used to be a spy some years ago, and then the Wall came down and I retrained.”