Winter Work, page 13
On the opposite side of the street was a walled complex of blocky tan buildings. The biggest one housed the American consulate. Since the U.S. embassy was in the West German capital of Bonn, the consulate was where local Germans went to get visas for travel to the United States, and where Americans went for diplomatic assistance.
Tucked toward the back of those buildings was a low-slung wing that housed the local CIA base. Emil figured that’s where the American woman he’d seen fleeing the Russians was now located, probably seated in some windowless room as she offered her version of how things had gone so terribly wrong. Maybe the older guy who had hailed the cab was there, too, lending his own descriptions and a little moral support.
Emil knew from personal experience how the aftermath tended to work for ops that fell apart. The routine was the same no matter whose side you worked for, especially in cities where your service had a sizable presence. The operative returned straightaway to headquarters to regroup, and to face the mandatory grilling of skeptical—and possibly hostile—overlords.
It was now nearly 6 p.m., or about an hour since the two Americans had fled in the taxi. He supposed it was possible the debriefing was already over, and that the woman had departed, but he doubted it. Spymasters never reacted well when things didn’t go as planned. They tended to go over and over the same ground until they were certain they’d considered every possible flaw—or every possible flaw that didn’t involve their own planning. It would have taken her about half an hour to get here, and the debriefing would last at least an hour, maybe longer, meaning she wasn’t likely to emerge for another thirty to sixty minutes.
Emil crossed in front of the main gate, which was well lit and had a guardhouse to one side. The visa office was closed for the day, so the gate was shut. He’d expected that. He also knew from HVA surveillance reports that the local CIA crowd tended to enter and exit from a smaller gate around the corner from here, on Saargemünder Strasse, and he’d have to backtrack to get there. So, after reaching the corner of Hüttenweg, a busy road that led to the Autobahn, Emil doubled back past the main gate and turned left up Saargemünder Strasse. The entrance was about a hundred yards down on the left.
There were few good places for him to wait. The ideal observation post would have been in one of the apartment buildings across the street, but most of those units were rented by U.S. military families. He knew because the HVA had tried without success to place a tenant there.
Fortunately, the Americans never seemed to patrol any of these streets, either with sentries or undercover people. They relied on the wall around the compound, the soldiers manning the gates, and their security people inside. The CIA contingent also enjoyed the sense of safety offered by the unwritten compact that had long been in force between Berlin’s rival spy agencies: Don’t harm our people, and we won’t harm yours.
That’s one reason Emil had been mildly surprised by the note of menace in the confrontation at the café. Would the Russians have actually abducted the woman? He doubted it, although since November the old rules no longer seemed to apply. Just ask Lothar.
Emil adjusted his scarf against a gust of wind as he walked by the gate. It, too, was well lit, which was a plus. He’d be able to clearly see anyone exiting without having to use his monocular scope. He walked another sixty yards until he reached a bus bench. It was an obvious spot—too obvious, especially if he had to wait more than half an hour—but it was the only realistic choice apart from pacing back and forth, which would be even more likely to draw unwanted attention.
He sat, feeling the chill of the hard plastic against the seat of his pants. As he settled in, he experienced an odd professional kinship with the older American he’d spotted earlier at the tram stop. He, too, had stood out, for similar reasons. Sometimes in this business you had to take what was offered, even if it made you an easy mark.
Much of what Emil knew about the Americans had come in the context of supervising his spies who worked at the Brussels headquarters of the NATO military alliance. He’d grown accustomed to reports of generals and staff officers who drank too much, had a weakness for flesh, and were surprisingly willing to dish dirt about their counterparts at the State Department. Lothar had been their resident expert on America, and by listening to him Emil had learned of the CIA’s preferred ways of doing business, the prevalent personality types of its station chiefs, and the Agency’s constant need to fight rearguard actions against Washington budget-cutters.
Lothar’s stable of operatives in the United States had been relatively small, and on that front their most worrisome adversary had been the FBI, the law enforcement agency in charge of domestic counterintelligence. Lothar had described the Bureau’s people as thorough but unimaginative plodders in dark suits and short haircuts—a prevalence of midwesterners and Irish Catholics who tended to be prudish about sex and mistrusted all things European. To Lothar’s amusement, the FBI men had disliked the CIA almost as much as the Stasi. Similar, Emil supposed, to the way he and Lothar felt about Krauss’s Spezialkommission.
The sound of American voices made Emil glance down the street, but it was only two young men coming out the gate, their breaths vaporing in the lamplight as they laughed and talked, their tone collegial. They headed off in the other direction.
He sat back and peered into the darkness around the apartment buildings across the street. A few windows glinted back at him, reflecting the glow of the streetlamps. It reminded him of Yuri Volkov’s flinty eyes, which now seemed to be watching him from the shadows. Emil thought again of the whitewash report of the murder in Leipzig, signed by Dieter Krauss. He imagined how the two men, Krauss and Volkov, must have cooperated at the time, putting all their lies into neat rows of perfect agreement.
Men like that, once they discovered the utility of a new partnership, tended to exploit it again whenever necessary. Relationships like theirs were as symbiotic as that of a shark and a remora. And these were certainly times when useful contacts were more valuable than ever.
The wind gusted. Emil shivered and glanced back toward the gate. Still no sign of his target. He hadn’t yet decided exactly how to make his approach once she came into view. The most important thing was to get close enough to pass a message. A brush pass—bumping into her on the street, for example, or while riding the U-Bahn—was one option, although that seemed especially tricky when only one party was in on the plan, because the other party might try to avoid contact. It had another drawback as well: He might not get a good look at her. Emil needed to engineer a way to see her face and, equally important, hear her speak, so he’d know whether she was the woman who had phoned Lothar’s dacha early that morning.
Counterintuitively, he also wanted her to get a good look at him, as part of his plan to begin establishing mutual trust in a business where trust was often nonexistent. Yes, the rules of the game were indeed changing.
An idea occurred to him, a possible stratagem, and he took out the small notebook he always carried with him, along with a stubby pencil. Ink pens were often unreliable in the damp winters of Berlin, as he had discovered to his misfortune early in his career.
Emil considered what he wanted to say and began to write. He was done in only a minute or so. Another man exited the gate. Emil shut his notebook and waited until the man was out of sight before opening it back up.
He looked at the words he’d written in German, crossed them out, then flipped to the next page and began writing in English. He then paused to reconsider the timing. By writing this note, he was committing himself to taking the next step forward. Unless he wanted to end up like Lothar, he’d better allow enough time to plan it out carefully.
He came up with a time and date, and added them to what he had already written. After double-checking his grammar and spelling, he tore out the page. Then he took out his wallet to remove a banknote—not one of his precious new deutschmarks, but a wrinkled bill of East German money, a five-mark note in blueprint blue, with the image of Thomas Müntzer, who’d led a sixteenth-century peasant revolt. It already looked sadly obsolete.
Emil folded the bill around the sheet of notepaper and stuck it in his pocket. He put away the notebook and pencil and sat back against the cold bench. He was ready.
Four more people exited the gate during the next half hour. None was the woman or the older man. Two buses came and went. The doors levered open, and he waved them away. He was certainly pressing his luck, and his buttocks felt like blocks of frozen wood.
Then, four minutes later, there she was, the blonde woman, unaccompanied as she passed through the gate onto the sidewalk, the light shining on her hair as she headed away from him, toward Clayallee.
Emil stood and set off. His thighs were stiff and his knee ached for the first few strides, although he soon eased into an easier gait. Those long walks in the woods were paying their dividends.
Up ahead, the blonde was already checking her flanks, alert to her surroundings. Emil was quite certain she had already noted his presence, but he was fine with that. Being noticed was part of his plan.
Soon enough, it would be time to make his move.
18
Claire realized she was being tailed before she even reached the corner of Clayallee. As with the muscle-bound Russians, her pursuer’s interest was all too obvious, although this fellow seemed to be alone, and was neither young nor menacing. He also looked local. Instead of a shorn head and a slick leather jacket, he had disheveled gray hair that poked from beneath a drooping flat cap. He wore a long wool overcoat that was downright shabby, as was the pale scarf that fluttered from his neck like a flag of surrender. His utter lack of guile told her he was either woefully undertrained or simply didn’t care.
She decided it was the latter after crossing the boulevard to the entrance of the U-Bahn station, where she stopped in front of the doors to the stairwell, turned, put her hands on her hips, and stared at him. He reacted by also stopping, twenty yards back, and then took a halfhearted glance at his watch. No sign that he was worried or flustered, and when she moved on so did he. It was like turning on the lights in a bug-infested kitchen only to have all the roaches hold their ground, as if daring you to smush them.
Was this how it was going to be in Berlin from here on out, now that the Wall was down—all of the spies announcing their intentions out in the open? It would certainly change the nature of their business, rendering much of their training useless.
But after descending to the platform and walking to the end, she noticed that he at least seemed to be checking his own flanks as well. His presence was annoying nonetheless, and she knew better than to underestimate the threat based on his obviousness.
After catching a train toward the city center and watching him board the car behind hers, she resolved to either lose or confront him unless he forced the issue first with some sort of approach. She certainly couldn’t let him follow her all the way to her next destination, which was a meeting with Baucom. Fortunately, she had also ditched the tracking beacon, probably because Ward figured her mission was over.
The location was the apartment of Konrad Lehmann, eldest son of the barkeep and friend who had served Baucom all those wondrous drinks for so many years. Baucom had met him at Lehmann’s funeral, and they had remained in touch. He sold insurance and lived in Wilmersdorf, only a few stops along the S-Bahn from Baucom’s place, and he had readily agreed to let his father’s old pal use his place as an impromptu safe house.
They had set the appointment so that she could share Ward’s reaction to the failed rendezvous. Claire figured she owed Baucom at least that much, after he had saved her from an abduction, or worse. She had a sagging sense that the meeting would be their swan song, partly because with each passing minute she had begun wondering if maybe Ward was right. What if the Russians, in their ham-handed and overly aggressive way, really had only been trying to offer her something?
Whatever the case, she had lost Ward’s confidence, and probably Gentry’s as well. After debriefing Baucom she would bid him farewell and return to her hotel room to await the final verdict. The likelihood was a quick trip back to Paris. Life could be worse, but she was disappointed. The final act in the drama of Cold War Berlin would proceed without her.
She took some solace from knowing that if the Russians had been trying to offer something, they would certainly know how to contact the Agency for a second try. The traffic of espionage “walk-ins” at Berlin base since the Wall had come down had picked up to a brisk average of nearly three new arrivals per week, even though most of them had little of value to offer. Buyer’s market, indeed.
If Lothar Fischer had been scared off from today’s appointment, she supposed that he would probably get back in touch as well, although it was doubtful he would accept Claire as his contact, now that she had been so thoroughly compromised.
A few stops later, Claire switched to an S-Bahn line for the trip up to Wilmersdorf. The disheveled man dutifully followed, and this time boarded the same car. With a closer look at his scuffed and muddy shoes, she decided he was probably East German, and at that point she began wondering if he might even be Lothar Fischer. Then she noted the bulge in his overcoat pocket. Was he armed? All the more reason to lose him.
He certainly didn’t match the description of Fischer that they had on file—too tall, too thin. Fischer also supposedly favored British-style outerwear and was generally “impeccably groomed.” The wardrobe could be a disguise, but he couldn’t have remade his body. Besides, why go to the trouble of a disguise only to make himself so obvious? Claire decided to ride to a stop beyond the one nearest the safe house. She would then shake him before boarding another train back.
She descended the stairs from the platform to the street as he dutifully shuffled along twenty yards in her wake. Two blocks farther on she bought a Tagesspiegel at a news kiosk. A block after that she went into a bar and seated herself at a table near the front. He took one to the side. She ordered a beer from a waiter, put down her paper as if to hold her place, then stepped into a rear hallway that led to the restroom.
A glance behind her showed that he couldn’t see the corridor from his current vantage point, so she kept walking past the women’s room to a fire exit at the rear. Fortunately the door did not sound an alarm when she pushed through it into a rear alley.
From there she made her way back toward the S-Bahn station from the opposite side of the rail line. No one was following. Her last turn before reaching the stairs was into a darkened tunnel for a street that crossed beneath the tracks. She rounded the corner onto the cobbles and…there he was, standing at the end of the tunnel, as patiently as if he’d been waiting for hours.
For the first time since she’d noticed him following her, they were now alone. The only sounds were the drip of water in a downspout, the rumble of an approaching train.
His expression was as bland as ever. His hands were out of his pockets, as if to show that he was not armed. She stood, waiting, fifteen yards away. Then he spoke. In English, no less, as if to make the point that he knew exactly what she was and who she worked for. His accent was German.
“Excuse me, miss, but I believe you must have dropped this a little while back, and I wanted to return it.”
He put a hand into his right pocket, and Claire tensed, ready for anything. But he pulled out only a folded wad of paper and held it forward. She stepped closer for a better look. His hand remained outstretched, as if to give her every opportunity to inspect it. Don’t take candy from strangers, she thought.
Unless, of course, it’s really interesting candy.
Claire moved to within six feet of him, just beyond range of a lunging grasp, and saw that he was holding a folded five-mark note of East German currency. She studied his face and his build. Definitely not Lothar Fischer, and he wouldn’t look her in the eye. He instead kept his gaze on the folded money in his right hand.
She was on the verge of saying it couldn’t possibly be hers, if only to test his reaction. But something about his demeanor told her he wasn’t accustomed to playing roles in clandestine transactions, and she felt an unexpected stab of pity, or maybe it was professional embarrassment. The man was desperate.
So, instead of refusing, or testing him further, she said, “Thank you, sir. That’s kind of you,” and boldly stepped forward to take the money from his palm.
Their eyes met as she did so. The folded bill was damp from his sweat. It was also a little thicker than she’d expected, a promising sign that the money was concealing something more. Could this be Lothar’s cutout? His emissary? Such an unlikely choice.
Their gaze lingered for a second as she dropped the item into her purse. She sensed they were both assessing each other. There was wisdom in those brown eyes, and more experience than she had initially guessed.
Then, with a tilt of his head, he turned and strolled off through the end of the tunnel and around the corner, quickly moving out of sight.
The clatter of an arriving train drowned out the sound of his departing footsteps as it pulled into the station overhead. Claire headed for the stairs, breaking into a run so she wouldn’t miss it, but also to get away from this suddenly vulnerable position. She half expected someone to leap from the shadows, having just witnessed the entire exchange, maybe even photographing it.
But no one else was on the stairs, and hardly anyone was up on the platform as she hopped through the open doors of a red car of the S-Bahn only a moment before they slid shut with a heavy bang.
She didn’t dare take out the little parcel for inspection, not in the full light of a train car. A dozen other passengers were reading newspapers or idly observing their surroundings. She resisted this urge all the way to the entrance of the younger Lehmann’s apartment building, where, ten minutes later, she entered the main doorway and then paused by the mailboxes in the chilly alcove.
