The Deceiver (13 page)

For him, the worst was that he had sent a friend to certain capture, interrogation, and death because he had failed to note the warning signs that now—too late—were so blazingly clear. Morenz had been in no state to go. He had gone rather than let down his friend Sam McCready.

The Deceiver knew now—again, too late—that for the rest of his days, in the wee hours when sleep refuses to come, he would see the haggard face of Bruno Morenz in that hotel room. …

He tried to drive his guilt away and turned his mind to wondering what happens inside a man’s head when he undergoes a complete nervous breakdown. Personally, he had never seen that phenomenon. What was Bruno Morenz like now? How would he react to his situation? Logically? Crazily? He put through a call to the Service’s consultant psychiatrist, an eminent doctor known irreverently as “the Shrink.” He traced Dr. Alan Carr to his office in Wimpole Street. Dr. Carr said he was busy through the morning but would be happy to join McCready for lunch and an ad hoc consultation. McCready made a date for the Montcalm Hotel at one o’clock.

Punctually at ten, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya entered the main doors of the SSD headquarters building at 22 Normannenstrasse and was shown up to the fourth floor, the floor occupied by the Counterespionage Department. Colonel Voss was waiting for her. He conducted her into his private office and offered her the chair facing his desk. He took his seat and ordered coffee. When the steward left, he asked politely, “What can I do for you, Comrade Major?”

He was curious as to what had brought about this visit on what would for him undoubtedly be an extremely busy day. But the request had come from the commanding general at KGB headquarters, and Colonel Voss was well aware who really ruled the roost in the German Democratic Republic.

“You are handling a case in the Jena area,” said Vanavskaya. “A West German agent who ran off after a crash and left his car behind. Could you let me have the details so far?”

Voss filled in the details not included in the situation report that the Russian had already seen.

“Let us assume,” said Vanavskaya when he was finished, “that this agent, Grauber, had come to collect or deliver something. … Was anything found in the car or in the secret cavity that could be what he either brought in or was trying to take out?”

“No, nothing. All his private papers were merely his cover story. The cavity was empty. If he brought something in, he had already delivered. If he sought to take something out, he had not collected.”

“Or it was still on his person.”

“Possibly, yes. We will know when we interrogate him. May I ask the reason for your interest in the case?”

Vanavskaya chose her words carefully.

“There is a possibility, just a chance, that a case upon which I am working overlaps your own.”

Behind his impassive face, Otto Voss was amused. So this handsome Russian ferret suspected the West German might have been in the East to make contact with a
Russian
source, not an East German traitor. Interesting.

“Have you any reason to know, Colonel, whether Grauber was to make a personal contact or just administer a dead-letter box?”

“We believe he was here to make a personal meet,” said Voss. “Although the crash was at twelve-thirty yesterday, he actually came through the border at eleven on Tuesday. If he simply had to drop off a package or pick one up from a dead-letter box, it would not have taken over twenty-four hours. He could have done it by nightfall on Tuesday. As it was, he spent Tuesday night at the Black Bear in Jena. We believe it was a personal pass that he came for.”

Vanavskaya’s heart sang. A personal meet, somewhere in the Jena-Weimar area, along a road probably, a road traveled by the man she hunted at almost exactly the same time. It was you he came to meet, you bastard! she thought.

“Have you identified Grauber?” she asked. “That is certainly not his real name.”

Concealing his triumph, Voss opened a file and passed her an artist’s impression. It had been drawn with help from two policemen at Jena, two patrolmen who had helped Grauber tighten a nut west of Weimar, and the staff of the Black Bear. It was very good. Without a word Voss then passed her a large photograph. The two were identical.

“His name is Morenz,” said Voss. “Bruno Morenz. A full-time career officer of the BND, based in Cologne.”

Vanavskaya was surprised. So it was a West German operation. She had always suspected that her man was working for the CIA or the British.

“You haven’t got him yet?”

“No, Major. I confess I am surprised at the delay. But we will. The police car was found abandoned, late last night. The reports state its gasoline tank had a bullet hole through it. It would have run for only ten to fifteen minutes after being stolen. It was found here, near Apolda, just north of Jena. So our man is on foot. We have a perfect description—tall, burly, gray-haired, in a rumpled raincoat. He has no papers, a Rhineland accent, physically not in good shape. He will stick out like a sore thumb.”

“I want to be present at the interrogation,” said Vanavskaya. She was not squeamish. She had seen them before.

“If that is an official request from the KGB, I will of course comply.”

“It will be,” said Vanavskaya.

“Then don’t be far away, Major. We will have him, probably by midday.”

Major Vanavskaya returned to the KGB building, cancelled her flight from Potsdam, and used a secure line to contact General Shaliapin. He agreed.

At twelve noon, an Antonov 32 transport of the Soviet Air Force lifted off from Potsdam for Moscow. General Pankratin and other senior Army and Air Force officers returning to Moscow were on board. Some junior officers were farther back, with the mail sacks. There was no dark-suited “secretary” from the embassy sharing the lift home.

“He will be,” said Dr. Carr over the melon and avocado hors d’oeuvre, “in what we call a dissociated, or twilight, or fugue state.”

He had listened carefully to McCready’s description of a nameless man who had apparently suffered a massive nervous breakdown. He had not learned, or asked, anything about the mission the man had been on, or where this breakdown had occurred, save that it was in hostile territory. The empty plates were removed and the sole prepared, off the bone.

“Dissociated from what?” asked McCready.

“From reality, of course,” said Dr. Carr. “It is one of the classic symptoms of this kind of syndrome. He may already have been showing signs of self-deception before the final crackup.”

And how, thought McCready, Morenz had been kidding himself that a stunning hooker had really fallen for him, that he could get away with a double murder.

“Fugue,” Dr. Carr pursued as he speared a forkful of tender sole meunière, “means flight. Flight from reality, especially harsh, unpleasant reality. I think your man will by now be in a really bad way.”

“What will he actually do?” asked McCready. “Where will he go?”

“He will go to a sanctuary, somewhere he feels safe, somewhere he can hide, where all the problems will go away and people will leave him alone. He may even return to a childlike state. I had a patient once who, overcome by problems, retired to his bed, curled into the fetal position, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and stayed there. Wouldn’t come out. Childhood, you see. Safety, security. No problems. Excellent sole, by the way. Yes, a little more Meursault. … Thank you.”

Which is all very fine, thought McCready, but Bruno Morenz has no sanctuaries to run to. Born and raised in Hamburg, stationed in Berlin, Munich, and Cologne, he could have no place to hide near Jena or Weimar. He poured more wine and asked, “Supposing he has no sanctuary to head for?”

“Then I’m afraid he will just wander about in a confused state, unable to help himself. In my experience, if he had a destination he could act logically to get there. Without one”— the doctor shrugged—“they will get him. Probably got him by now. At latest by nightfall.”

But they didn’t. Through the afternoon Colonel Voss’s rage and frustration rose. It had been over twenty-four hours, coming up on thirty hours; police and secret police were at every street corner and roadblock in the region of Apolda-Jena-Weimar; and the big, shambling, ill, confused, disoriented West German had simply vaporized.

Voss paced his office at Normannenstrasse through the night; Vanavskaya sat on the edge of her cot in the female bachelors’ quarters of the KGB barracks; men sat hunched over radio sets at Schloss Löwenstein and Cheltenham; vehicles were waved to a halt by torchlight on every road and lane in southern Thuringia; McCready drank a steady stream of black coffees in his office at Century House. And … nothing. Bruno Morenz had disappeared.

MAJOR VANAVSKAYA COULD NOT SLEEP.
She tried, but she just lay awake in the darkness wondering how on earth the East Germans, reputedly so efficient in their control of their own population,, could lose a man like Morenz within an area twenty miles by twenty miles. Had he hitched a lift? Stolen a bicycle? Was he still crouched in a ditch? What on earth were the VOPOs doing down there?

By three in the morning, she had convinced herself there was something missing, some little part of the puzzle of how a half-crazed man on the run in a small area teeming with People’s Police could escape detection.

At four, she rose and returned to the KGB offices, perturbing the night staff with her demand for a secure line to SSD headquarters. When she had it, she spoke to Colonel Voss. He had not left his office at all.

“That picture of Morenz,” she said. “Was it recent?”

“About a year ago,” said Voss, puzzled.

“Where did you get it?”

“The HVA,” said Voss. Vanavskaya thanked him and put down the phone.

Of course, the HVA, the Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung, East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, which for obvious linguistic reasons, specialized in running networks inside West Germany. Its Head was the legendary Colonel-General Marcus Wolf. Even the KGB, notoriously contemptuous of satellite intelligence services, held him in considerable respect. Marcus “Mischa” Wolf had perpetrated some brilliant coups against the West Germans, notably the “running” of Chancellor Brandt’s private secretary.

Vanavskaya called and awoke the local head of the Third Directorate and made her request, citing General Shaliapin’s name. That did the trick. The Colonel said he would see what he could do. He called back in half an hour. It seemed that General Wolf was an early bird, he said; she would have a meeting with him in his office at six.

At five that morning the cryptography department at GCHQ Cheltenham finished decoding the last of the mass of low-level paperwork that had built up in the previous twenty-four hours. In its in-clear form it would be transmitted down a series of very secure land lines to a variety of recipients—some for the SIS at Century House, some for MI-5 at Curzon Street, some for the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. Much would be “copied” as of possible interest to two or even all three. Urgent intelligence was handled much more quickly, but the small hours of the morning was a good time to send the low-level stuff to London; the lines were not so busy.

Among the material was a signal on Wednesday evening from Pullach to the BND staffer at the West German Embassy in London. Germany, of course, was and remains a valued and respected ally of Britain. There was nothing personal in Cheltenham intercepting and decoding a confidential message from an ally to its own embassy. The code had been quietly broken sometime before. Nothing offensive, just routine. This particular message went to MI-5 and to the NATO desk in Century House, which handled all intelligence liaison with Britain’s allies except the CIA, which had its own designated liaison desk.

It was the head of the NATO desk who had first drawn Edwards’s attention to the embarrassment of McCready running an officer of the allied BND as his personal agent. Still, the NATO desk chief remained a friend of McCready’s. When he saw the German cable at ten that morning, he resolved to bring it to his friend Sam’s attention. Just in case. … But he did not have time until midday.

At six, Major Vanavskaya was shown into Marcus Wolf’s office, two floors above that of Colonel Voss. The East German spymaster disliked uniforms and was in a well-cut dark suit. He also preferred tea to coffee and had a particularly fine blend sent to him from Fortnum and Mason in London. He offered the Soviet major a cup.

“Comrade General, that recent picture of Bruno Morenz. It came from you.”

Mischa Wolf regarded her steadily over the rim of his cup. If he had sources, assets, inside the West German establishment, which he did, he was not going to confirm it to this stranger.

“Could you possibly get hold of a copy of Morenz’s curriculum vitae?” she asked.

Marcus Wolf considered the request. “Why would you want it?” he asked softly.

She explained. In detail. Breaking a few rules.

“I know it’s only a suspicion,” she said. “Nothing concrete. A feeling there is a piece missing. Maybe something in his past.”

Wolf approved. He liked lateral thinking. Some of his best successes had stemmed from a gut feeling, a suspicion that the enemy had an Achilles’ heel somewhere, if only he could find it. He rose, went to a filing cabinet, and withdrew a sheaf of eight sheets without saying a word. It was Bruno Morenz’s life story. From Pullach, the same one Lothar Herrmann had studied on Wednesday afternoon. Vanavskaya exhaled in admiration. Wolf smiled.

If Marcus Wolf had a specialty in the espionage world, it was not so much in suborning and traducing high-ranking West Germans, though that could sometimes be done, as in placing prim spinster secretaries of impeccable life-style and security clearance at the elbows of such bigwigs. He knew that a confidential secretary saw everything her master saw and sometimes more.

Over the years, West Germany had been rocked by a series of scandals as private secretaries to ministers, civil servants, and defense contractors had either been arrested by the BfV or had slipped quietly away back to the East. One day, he knew, he would pull Fräulein Erdmute Keppel out of the Cologne BND and back to her beloved German Democratic Republic. Until then, she would continue to arrive at the office an hour ahead of Dieter Aust and copy anything of interest, including the personnel records of the entire staff. She would continue, in summer, to take her lunch in the quiet park eating her salad sandwiches with prim precision, feeding the pigeons with a few neat crumbs, and finally placing the empty sandwich bag in a nearby trash can. There it would be retrieved a few moments later by the gentleman walking his dog. In winter she would lunch instead in the warm café and drop her newspaper into the garbage container near the door, whence it would be rescued by the street cleaner.