1989, page 17
They walked down the hallway, the walls painted a bilious green. There was nothing to indicate what went on in the building behind the closed doors that lined the corridor. A noisy lift transported them to the third floor, and at once Allie was on familiar territory. She knew what labs looked like, and this was definitely one.
‘Wiebke’s got her own office,’ Colin said as they walked past a glass wall beyond which white-coated figures did the kind of things Allie expected scientists to do – stare down microscopes, lean into computer screens, squirt liquid into test tubes and watch it change colour.
‘You mentioned that.’
‘It’s the key to the whole plan.’
‘You mentioned that as well.’
Colin stopped at a closed door. He knocked three times and waited. The door opened to reveal a tall woman in a lab coat. She gave Allie a severe look. ‘I am Wiebke,’ she said, waving them into her office.
Allie took her in and her heart sank. This was never going to work. They were all going to spend the rest of their lives in a gulag.
28
Less than a mile away from Allie’s hotel, Genevieve Lockhart was folded into an uncomfortable chair in a lecture theatre listening once more to Fredi holding forth on the need for a revolution. Not the Marxist revolution she might have expected, even on the West side of the wall, but a green revolution. A revolution that would save the planet if they would only turn their backs on the fossil fuels and the nuclear energy that threatened our very existence.
Fredi couldn’t seem to stand still. She commanded the stage and the room, striding around in her Cuban-heeled boots, tight jeans and black polo neck. She’d adopted the look as her uniform, and looking around, Genevieve could see half a dozen other women who had copied Fredi’s style, with varying degrees of success. But none of them sparked with the charisma that drew in Fredi’s audience.
Her style seemed eminently appropriate to the venue, Genevieve thought, smiling to herself. FU Berlin, the West Berliners’ riposte to losing their precious Humboldt University to the East. When she’d first been told by her East German manager where to go to connect with this movement, Genevieve had thought it bold of the locals to express their disgust so unequivocally. When it had dawned on her that the initials stood for Freie Universitat, she felt very stupid, and glad she hadn’t tried to make a joke of it. The feisty junior professor on the platform had a reputation for wit, but never at the expense of her politics. There would have been no revolutionary course credits for Genevieve if she’d tried to crack wise about freedom. She’d spent enough time in Fredi’s company to realise that.
Fredi was building to a climax now. Genevieve knew what was coming. Her new friend had rehearsed tonight’s arguments over dinner the previous evening, inviting Genevieve and their two companions to pick holes in what she planned to say. Hans and Berndt had made a couple of minor points and Genevieve had plucked up courage enough to suggest a small addition about Gorbachev’s collusion in the Chernobyl cover-up. Fredi had turned the full beam of her attention on her, her dark blue eyes warm and clear. ‘Good point, Genny. I like the way your mind works.’
The last couple of weeks had provoked enough of those moments for Fredi to have pulled Genevieve into the orbit of her select inner circle of radical Green movers and shakers. This wasn’t how she’d planned to establish a beachhead in East Germany for the aftermath of change, but she had a sneaking suspicion it might work even better than the strategy she’d already honed in half a dozen Soviet satellites.
She’d realised very quickly that she had no chance of evading the pervasive scrutiny of the state in the GDR. She’d never really paid the Stasi a great deal of attention in the past; she’d expected to be continually spied on in a country where people estimated that one in four of the population was connected to the state’s surveillance network. And she had been someone they were courting, someone who brought hard currency into their overstressed and overstretched economy. Wise to keep an eye on her movements and her contacts lest she be seduced from the straight and narrow path that East German communism dictated she should follow.
Even those with special status like the Lockharts and their Pythagoras Press had to travel on fixed tramlines. Genevieve had never needed to cross them before, but as soon as she attempted to move outside her proscribed limits, the GDR head of Pythagoras had warned her of dire consequences. She had asked him to walk her back to her hotel so they could speak without eavesdroppers, and told him what the true purpose of her trip was. He told her she had no chance of carrying out her aim of ingratiating herself with the subversives. ‘As soon as you speak to a dissident, they will know. And you will be arrested.’
When she’d protested, he’d cut her off, abrupt as he’d never dared be previously. ‘Listen to me, Fraulein Lockhart. They will arrest you. And it will take your father and your diplomats several days to discover where you are being held. And they will be very uncomfortable days.’
‘They wouldn’t dare.’
He’d given her a pitying look. ‘I was born here. I have lived here for forty-two years with the constant anxiety of putting a foot wrong. Working for a Western company, even one led by a man as sympathetic to the Honecker regime as your father – that’s automatically grounds for suspicion. I am watched. Day and night.’ He scoffed mirthlessly. ‘For all you know, I could be a Stasi plant and even now your fate could be sealed.’
‘This feels a bit paranoid,’ she complained.
‘Genevieve, I owe it to your father to advise you, this is a crazy idea.’ He looked as if he might burst into tears. He had never used her first name before; he had always been Germanically formal. That told her something about the sincerity of his fear.
‘What if I think it’s worth the risk?’
The last traces of colour left his face. ‘If you won’t be careful on your own account, then think of the people you’ll be implicating. The ones who have no recourse to your father or your Foreign Office. If they arrest you, they will round up the rest of us. Your dissident contacts. My office staff. Me.’ He took a deep breath, ‘And because they like pressure points, my family. And we will not be treated kindly. Their methods are not constrained by the European Convention on Human Rights.’
She had been shocked by the harshness of his words. She felt the protection of her privilege slip to one side for a moment as she let her imagination loose. But Genevieve was her father’s daughter and she wasn’t about to abandon her mission so easily. ‘So how do I secure the future for all of us? You know change is on the way. The old men in the politburo might be in denial, but even in the time I’ve been coming to the East, I can see things are falling apart. Broken street lights. Potholes in the roads. Nothing in the shops.’ They were passing a children’s playground and she nodded towards it. ‘Even the swings are broken. Moscow’s singing a new song, and everybody in East Germany’s hearing it except Honecker. You know I’m right.’
He glanced nervously to either side. ‘Go west, Fraulein Lockhart. The dissidents here are supported by radical groups there. It’s safer to deal through them. Safer for everyone.’
‘You mean West Berlin?’
‘When the rumours from Chernobyl started to leak out, a group from the Greens reached out. Not the mainstream Greens, a splinter group. More radical.’
Genevieve frowned. ‘How do you know this? It’s not like you can read about it in the newspapers.’
He sighed. ‘My son. He’s seventeen and he wants to change the world. He takes stupid risks and I don’t know how to stop him. Every time he goes out of the apartment, his mother and I, we can’t eat, we can’t sleep till he’s home again. My only hope is that he can avoid being arrested until things start changing.’
They walked on in silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I had no idea.’
‘We live with the habit of secrecy here.’ He managed a wry little laugh. ‘I tell you all this only because you have already compromised yourself.’
‘The cold comfort of Mutually Assured Destruction,’ she said. ‘Do you know where I can find these radical Greens?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know any details. All I know is that my son justifies his new convictions by arguing that these are the beliefs of university professors. So maybe the university is where you should start.’
Genevieve made one last attempt to shake off the followers she now saw everywhere. She tried the sort of tricks she’d seen in spy movies – jumping on board a tram at the last minute, entering a cinema and leaving by a fire exit, taking off her scarf and using it to cover her hair. But she kept seeing the same two or three faces time after time. They were far better at finding her than she was at losing them.
She conceded, which had never been a course of action she found easy.
She’d found Fredi by simply wandering around the university till she found where the students hung out when they were avoiding anything resembling studying. She stuck around long enough to be unimpressed. Genevieve wondered how any of them planned to make a living when they were pushed out of the nest. She’d partied hard at St Andrews and MIT, but she’d worked hard too. Lazing around talking adolescent politics had never been part of her life, from choice. There were other ways to form ideas about the world, she thought. Like talking to people who had actually achieved something.
But at least the posters on the walls gave her a sense of where she might find what she was looking for. There was a debate scheduled for that evening, featuring four speakers. It was billed as Green/Red: Who owns the future? Genevieve turned up a few minutes after the advertised starting time and found a seat at the side of the hall.
First up was a bearded Marxist who insisted that the only problem with the Soviet Union was that it was doing Marxism wrong. They just needed to fix that and everything would be wonderful. Fredi spoke next and she was electrifying. She spoke about putting the needs of the planet first, so that humanity could flourish. She was passionate, coherent and convincing. Genevieve was used to politicians pontificating round the Lockhart dinner table. She’d even heard a few who could hold an audience. Tony Benn always made her pay attention. And even though she despised Margaret Thatcher’s politics, nobody could deny that now she’d been groomed in her presentation, she could hold the room. But Frederika Schroeder was in a different league.
Genevieve Lockhart smiled and relaxed her shoulders for the first time in days. Fuck the Stasi. She’d finally found what she’d been looking for. The rest would be easy. And so it had proved.
29
Allie woke the next morning, astonished that she’d slept. She’d considered herself towards the intrepid end of the spectrum, even after her run-in with the brutal wrestler. But her first trip behind the Iron Curtain had unnerved her to a degree that had taken her aback. Colin Corcoran’s litany of all the reasons to be careful and the consequences of carelessness had left her feeling as if it wasn’t just her own life in her hands but also those of her fellow conspirators.
She’d spent the evening in her hotel room, running over what she’d learned and what she had to remember. Never say anything inside a building that you wouldn’t happily say to a Stasi officer. Never attempt a joke that touched on anything to do with security. Never attempt a joke, full stop. Never criticise or compare unfavourably to anything in the West. Smile politely but avoid frivolity. Never go anywhere inside the East German pharmaceutical complex unless you are accompanied by a member of staff. And that includes the toilet. Be earnest about the excellent work being done here. And above all, don’t even hint at any kind of deal.
Colin had explained that there would be one opportunity for them to go over their plans – in the lunch break, they could take their food outdoors and sit at picnic tables dotted around a potholed area of tarmac between the research labs and the clinical trials building. If nobody joined them, they could quickly run through the plan for the following day.
It had almost worked as a stratagem. They’d found a table as far from the buildings as possible and Colin had started to outline how things would play out. He’d got as far as explaining where and when they’d swing into action when a tubby man in a lab coat over his shirt and tie had plonked himself down next to them. His thin brown hair was arranged in a comb-over so spectacular that Allie couldn’t help admiring the skill and dedication that must have gone into it.
Wiebke immediately jumped to her feet. ‘This is Herr Doktor Kasimir, who is supervising the clinical trial I am working on. Herr Doktor, I think you have met Herr Doktor Corcoran, who is leading the trial for Zabre Pharma?’
Kasimir nodded. The sun glinted on his square spectacles, making his eyes invisible. ‘Of course, we wrote the protocol together.’ Behind his back, Colin raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘But who is your distinguished colleague, Herr Doktor?’
‘This is Fraulein Burns, who is with our communications team. She will be writing a series of articles for the scientific and general press about the great advances that have been made possible by Zabre’s revolutionary collaborative process with you here in Berlin.’ They all knew there was nothing Kasimir could question about this introduction. If Allie hadn’t already been approved, she wouldn’t be here. And the cash that Zabre was bringing to the GDR table meant that she’d have been hard to refuse accreditation.
Allie smiled sweetly. ‘It’s a great pleasure to be here,’ she said. ‘I apologise that my German is not very good.’
Kasimir gave a tight little smile. ‘I am sure that my colleagues are making certain all is clear to you.’
‘We’re giving Fraulein Burns a very exhaustive tour,’ Wiebke said.
‘There’s so much to see here. So much to absorb. It’s very impressive,’ Allie enthused.
‘So much that we must come back tomorrow,’ Colin added. ‘It’s a real treat for me to be able to show off what we’re doing here.’
Kasimir’s face was stony. ‘Let us hope Fraulein Burns paints a picture that will bring other companies to our door. Have you visited the clinical trials wards yet?’
‘We are going there next,’ Wiebke said.
‘I shall accompany you.’ There was no discussion, nor was there any option other than to toss the remains of their meagre lunches in the bin and follow him as he waddled off. He’d stuck to them like glue as they made their way through the wards, where patients lay obediently in bed, eyeing their visitors warily. When Wiebke spoke to them about their treatment, they said little, except to express gratitude for being chosen. It was more like custody than hospital, Allie thought, with the medical staff having the authority of prison officers rather than doctors and nurses. The contrast with the AIDS ward in Manchester was startling; the patients without hope had seemed more cheerful than those ones here who were supposedly its recipients.
Kasimir glanced at charts, but he seemed to have little interest in the patients. In contrast, Allie felt his eyes on her all afternoon, gauging her clothes, her hair, her figure. He said nothing untoward, but he didn’t have to. She thought he’d have assessed a carcass in a butcher’s shop in much the same calculating way.
As the clock crept round past three o’clock, Allie was relieved to hear Colin say, ‘I think we’ve covered more than enough ground for Fraulein Burns today. When we come back tomorrow, we can look again at any questions that might have arisen.’
Kasimir walked them back to the front desk and stood next to Wiebke till they drove off. ‘What a creep,’ Allie said.
‘Now you see why Wiebke’s so desperate to get out,’ Colin said. ‘Can you imagine what that’s like, day after day?’
It wasn’t so different from what it had felt like working in a Glasgow newsroom at the start of her career, Allie thought. ‘I don’t mean to sound snarky,’ she said, changing the course of the conversation. ‘If I was anybody except the journalist writing this story, this would be right out of order. But I have to ask. Given the constraints of communication, how exactly did you and Wiebke get it together?’
His ears went pink. ‘I know it sounds like some stupid Mills and Boon novel, but it was like a spark between us the first time I clapped eyes on her. I don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes you just know?’ Even in profile, he looked like a puppy pleading not to be kicked.
‘And she felt it too? The spark.’ Determinedly keeping the scepticism from her voice.
He let out a long breath. ‘She did. We couldn’t do anything about it to begin with. You’ve seen how they spy on everybody all the time here. Then Wiebke got a transfer to the team working directly with Zabre and it was quite natural for us to sit together for lunch. The first time we spoke, it was like we’d known each other for years.’
I bet it was. ‘And it just grew?’
‘Yeah. Allie, I know you think I’m deluding myself. To think that Wiebke actually loves a geek like me. You think she’s just using me as a route to the West. But it’s not like that. She’s risking her life to be with me on the other side of the wall.’
‘She’s also risking your life. How can you be sure about this? Have even kissed her? Never mind slept with her?’
He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Look, I don’t expect you to understand. I know she’s the one for me. I don’t have to kiss her or go to bed with her to know that. Just the thought of what that’ll mean for us both? That keeps us going. I am sure about this, Allie. And you’d better be too, because we’re counting on you.’ A note of steely defiance at the last.
Or course she recognised that Wiebke’s was the greatest risk. But if the first part of the plan worked out, Wiebke would soon be well outside the iron grasp of the Stasi. And Allie would still be firmly in the lion’s den. ‘I must be out of my mind, taking a risk like this for a story, Colin. But before I come back through Checkpoint Charlie, you’re going to have to give me a lot more detail than the pair of you managed at lunchtime.’
