Brandenburg (46 page)

‘What sort of problem?’

‘I can’t say because I don’t know.’

‘But we
are
going ahead. Everything’s in place your end?’

‘Not now. Call me later.’ There was a click as he hung up.

Rosenharte replaced the receiver feeling troubled, but he decided to put Vladimir’s manner down to routine cautiousness. He unplugged the phone from the electricity supply and followed the cables to the back of the house where a small dish had been erected. This he removed, then he coiled the wire and went to place the phone on top of the large bags. Ulrike was staring out of the window.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘I don’t remember more than a couple of cars passing on that stretch of road yesterday, but I’ve just seen a van and three cars pass in the last minute.’ She motioned him over. ‘And is that a vehicle parked by those trees, or am I seeing things in the mist?’

Rosenharte thought he made out the canopy of a truck but couldn’t be sure. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

Just as he was about to pick up one of the bags an idea came to him. He ran over to the stove and stoked the open front with the remains of the floorboards he’d broken for heat in the middle of the night. Using a poker he levered the plate from the top and exposed the fire below. He rammed one gas cylinder down the opening and balanced the other across a metal lip on the front of the stove, so that the flames licked one side.

They rushed to the back of the farmhouse and forced open a door into a thicket of bramble and hazel. He went first and turned and pushed backwards so she could follow. The car lay about two hundred yards away and they would have to cross one of the tracks leading up to the farmhouse. Ulrike got snagged by the brambles several times and Rosenharte had to turn and slash at the tentacles with his knife. Once they got through the worst of it he left her and snaked through the bushes towards the track. There he waited and listened. All was clear. He beckoned to her and they dived across the track and plunged in to some dead bracken.

They heard a vehicle moving slowly down the track.

Rosenharte cursed and shoved her head down into the grass. ‘Don’t move until I say,’ he hissed.

He glimpsed the car - a black saloon with four men inside - and began to crawl through the trees on his elbows, each step of the way placing the bag with the phone in front of him. He reached the firm ground where he’d parked the Wartburg, slipped the catch on the boot, inched it open and placed the phone dish inside. Two more journeys to fetch the bags followed, then he led Ulrike to the car.

They were hidden from the house but close enough to hear the men talking in the still morning air. One was speaking into a radio. Evidently they were waiting for further instructions before entering the farmhouse. He looked at Ulrike’s fearful expression and touched her cheek with his fingertips to calm her. She gave him a tight little smile. A minute or two later they heard more vehicles approaching from different directions. He crab-walked to the driver’s side, reached to the door handle and, still crouching, worked the action to see if he could open it without making a noise. There was a click followed by a metallic yawn from the hinge. He froze, one hand holding the door, the other splayed on the ground. Ulrike grimaced and shut her eyes.

But no one had heard. The other vehicles were pulling up at the bottom of the hillock and the sound of doors banging reached them. He beckoned her, indicating she should climb across into the passenger seat, then followed and gently pulled the door to.

He pulled out the choke and put his hand to the ignition key. At this precise moment two almighty bangs occurred in quick succession, which seemed to shake everything around them. The explosions reverberated in the woods and birds scattered from all around them into the sky. He started the engine and pumped the accelerator a little, but rather than lunging forward, he nosed the car into the track, letting the wheels roll down into the tyre ruts with almost no sound.

Then he hit the accelerator and they shot forward. ‘Are they following?’

‘I can’t see anything except the smoke.’

‘Well at least it means they can’t see us.’

In a few seconds they reached the golden cover of the great beech forest and were going like the blazes along a well-made road littered with beechnuts that snapped and popped as they ran over them. One or two mushroom hunters were out, but they saw no one for the next twenty minutes as they headed for somewhere that Rosenharte knew would be the very last place the Stasi would search for them.

Harland took no part in the interrogation of Abu Jamal. A team from London was flown in to the military base sixty miles from the BND headquarters at Munich-Pullach. As well as the SIS and BND officers, the CIA had conjured a dozen anti-terrorism and Middle East specialists to comb through the documents taken from the villa. But he noted with satisfaction that what had generally been dismissed as his hare-brained operation in Trieste had already produced important results.

Two men had been picked up, one in Vienna and the other in Italy, and now that the identities of Abu Jamal’s main contacts were known, the embassies of six nations had been alerted across the Middle East to pay special attention to the comings and goings at East German missions, and to the movement of known Stasi operatives. Harland’s stock was high in London and he had received a note from the Chief of SIS congratulating him on his ‘superb effort’ in neutralizing Abu Jamal. The celebrations, however, were muted. The Arab no longer represented a threat, but the size, sophistication and ambitions of his network did give cause for alarm, particularly as so little of it was picked up on Western intelligence radar. The more important lesson, defined by Costelloe in an instant piece of analysis, was that Misha Lomieko and the East Germans had inspired the terrorists with techniques and a boldness of vision that was utterly new. This knowledge had escaped into the ether for ever.

Feeling triumphant but also rather superfluous, Harland went to seek out Alan Griswald, whom he hadn’t seen since he got back from Leipzig. He found him in a corridor of one of the low wooden buildings reading
Small Boat
magazine, clutching the perennial Styrofoam cup of coffee. ‘Hey Bobby, that was a wonderful operation. Just beautiful. You must be feeling pretty pleased with yourself.’

Harland nodded his appreciation.

‘Is he talking yet?’

‘Not much, but we got his address book, a fake passport or two and, most important, papers relating to the bank accounts. It’s all there. Have you seen him yet?’

‘No, but that’s part of the reason why I came - and to get my laptop.’

‘Oh, didn’t I mention that we left it in the truck?’ said Harland.

Griswald nodded, signalling that he knew his leg was being pulled. ‘Right, Bobby.’

‘I’ll give it you before you return to Berlin. Let’s go and see the Arab being questioned. There’s an observation window we can use.’

Abu Jamal faced his three interrogators calmly, hands folded on the table in front of him, answering in a soft, amenable voice. He was wearing a black corduroy cap and behaving as though he was about to leave, glancing at the place on his wrist where an expensive watch had been. His line was to deny all knowledge of the man named Abu Jamal, saying he had never heard of the name, still less Mohammed Ubayd. It was all a grotesque case of mistaken identity for which the West would pay dearly. Every ten minutes or so he demanded that he should be taken back to East Germany.

‘He’s playing for time,’ said Harland as they watched through the one-way mirror. ‘He doesn’t know we’ve got his little cache of secrets, so he thinks he’s giving the East Germans as much time as possible to retrieve the stuff from the villa and alert their people abroad.’

‘Maybe,’ said Griswald, ‘but who’s to say they knew everything he was up to? We think that even Misha didn’t have the full story. That’s what makes Abu Jamal such a helluva big catch.’

‘What makes you say that Misha didn’t have the full story?’

‘It’s not my theory but the Russians’. We’ve had formal contact with them on this - more than the usual back channel. There was a suspicion that they might develop things when we first received information from them. They were aware of the situation and had a very good estimate of Abu Jamal’s plans. And get this - they knew when and where you were going to snatch him. They were right up to speed and didn’t inform the Stasi. So we took that as a sign of their good faith and had our little talk yesterday.’

‘And . . .?’ Harland knew Griswald enough to know that there was more to come.

‘And you’re going to take me to the finest restaurant in London if—’

‘Agreed - wherever you want.’

‘Well, we think that your man Rosenharte told them everything.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Harland. ‘He’s managed to get some passes in Hohenschönhausen for Saturday morning which only the Russians could supply. So he did a deal. That was very smart of him.’

‘Once a spy . . .’

‘Always an untrustworthy bastard,’ said Harland.

‘There’s a KGB man in Dresden who he’s been talking to, and you’re right - they’re helping him.’

‘How do you know this? Did the Russians tell you?’

‘Unlike you, Bobby, we made an intelligent guess.’

‘You want that laptop back, Al? Because you’re talking as though you don’t.’ He looked at Griswald. ‘What’s going on?’

‘There’s been some pretty high-level contact with the Soviets on terrorism for a couple of months now. You see, for a good part of the last fifteen years we’ve been pushing the idea that every bad thing that came out of the Mid East was the Soviets’ fault. They’re kind of pissed about the reputation they’ve gotten. Under Gorbachev they decided to show they’re whiter than white. They’re really helping now.’

They took one more look at the Arab hunched at the table and left the airless space for the corridor.

‘Let’s take a walk, Bobby. I need to see the daylight.’

They left through a door where a couple of armed US military policemen stood guard. Griswald nodded to them. ‘It’s all right if we go out here for a couple of minutes?’

‘Sure thing, Mr Griswald,’ said one.

‘You’re known here?’

‘We occasionally have business we want to do away from you people. No offence, but we all have our secrets. However, because you are who you are, Bobby, and I like you, I’m going to tell you something interesting.’

‘What?’

Griswald stopped and thrust his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

‘The other side have got someone in here. A senior BND officer is reporting straight to Schwarzmeer.’

‘Jesus, which one?’

‘The woman sitting in on the interrogation, Doctor Lisl Voss.’

‘Their chief analyst! Christ!’

‘Indeed.’

‘Do they know?’

‘We just told them. That’s really why I came here, Bobby, not to look at your chubby British cheeks.’

‘Do they know what we plan for Saturday?’

‘No, we don’t think so.’

‘Does she know that Kafka and Prince are still in the East?’

‘Well, that’s very much the immediately relevant point. And that’s why I’m telling you
entre nous
. I’d hate to see you end up in Hohenschönhausen just as you really got the wind in your sails, Bobby. The BND don’t know what you’re planning in Berlin, so there’s no real risk with the woman Voss. But you can use her to your advantage and gain a little extra security perhaps.’

‘How?’

‘Bobby! Tell me you’re not losing it.’ Griswald enjoyed having Harland wriggling on the end of his line. He grinned. ‘It’s simple: we let her know that the two people responsible for the operation against Abu Jamal are being brought to the West at this very moment. That way the Stasi will stop looking for them.’ He looked at Harland with the odd, open-mouthed expression he had when he was being serious. ‘And make no mistake, when Zank found you at the villa it was a racing certainty that he would put it all together. He knows Kafka and Prince are in this thing. He would understand that it was all one operation.’

‘You’re saying that he knows all that bullshit in Trieste with Annalise and the extraction of Abu Jamal are one and the same thing? How can he make that leap?’

‘Believe me, he has. The Stasi know the disks are baloney and that they’ve been had.’ He put his hand on Harland’s shoulder. ‘Still, it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it? You’re riding high and you’ve got permission to go to Berlin to get Konrad Rosenharte. Don’t screw up and get caught. We don’t want to have to swap you for Abu Jamal.’

Harland looked across a helicopter pad to a stand of pine trees. ‘So let me get this straight. Lisl Voss is passing them everything we’re learning here. Jesus! Everything?’

‘Fortunately she has been involved in just one part of the interrogation, and then only as an observer so that she’s able to make her report to the German Chancellor. She doesn’t know about the documents you found and she’s ignorant of the means and methods used in this exfiltration. So you see there’s a real good opportunity to mislead the GDR in a number of ways while the West Germans build their case against her with phone taps and the usual surveillance. It’s a gift.’

‘So who’s going to do this?’

‘You are. When they break for lunch, you join them and casually let it be known that Rosenharte and Kafka are about to arrive safely in the West. Don’t use any names. Just say that things have worked out perfectly. She’ll be wetting herself to make the call to her controller to tell the Stasi that the Arab isn’t talking. At the same time she will pass on your information that Rosenharte and Kafka are out.’

‘You don’t think this will jeopardize the brother’s situation in Hohenschönhausen?’

‘Look, I can’t tell you how they’re gonna react, but I do know that you can help your operation immeasurably by doing this. The Stasi are in chaos with all these demonstrations. They’ll be thankful that the Arab isn’t talking and that they’ve got time to get their act together and distance themselves from any fallout.’

‘How long are the West Germans going to let Dr Voss run?’