The Deceiver (14 page)

When she came east, Fräulein Keppel would arrive to a state reception, a personal greeting from Security Minister Erich Mielke or possibly Party boss Erich Honecker himself, a medal, a state pension, and a snug retirement home by the lakes of Fürstenwalde.

Of course, not even Marcus Wolf was clairvoyant. He could not know that by 1990 East Germany would have ceased to exist, that Mielke and Honecker would be ousted and disgraced, that he would be retired and writing his memoirs for a fat fee, or that Erdmute Keppel would be spending her declining years in West Germany in a place of seclusion rather less comfortable than her designated flat at Fürstenwalde.

Major Vanavskaya looked up.

“He has a sister,” she said.

“Yes,” said Wolf. “You think she may know something?”

“It’s a long shot,” said the Russian. “If I could go and see her …”

“If you can get permission from your superiors,” Wolf prompted her gently. “You do not, alas, work for me.”

“But if I could, I would need a cover. Not Russian, not East German.”

Wolf shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I have certain ‘legends,’ ready for use. Of course. It is part of our strange trade.”

There was a Polish Airline flight to London LOT 104, staged through Berlin-Schönefeld airport at ten
A.M.
It was held for ten minutes to enable Ludmilla Vanavskaya to board. As Wolf had pointed out, her German was adequate but not good enough to pass. Few people in London that she would meet spoke Polish. She had papers of a Polish schoolteacher visiting a relative. That would be plausible since Poland had a much more liberal regime.

The Polish airliner landed in London at eleven, gaining an hour due to time difference. Major Vanavskaya passed through passport and customs control inside thirty minutes, made two phone calls from a public booth in Terminal Two concourse, and took a taxi to a district of London called Primrose Hill.

The phone on Sam McCready’s desk trilled at midday. He had just put the phone down after talking again to Cheltenham. The answer was—still nothing. Forty-eight hours, and Morenz was still on the run. The new caller was the man from the NATO desk downstairs.

“There’s a chit came through in the morning bag,” he said. “It may be nothing; if so, throw it away. Anyway, I’m sending it up by messenger.”

The chit arrived five minutes later. When he saw it, and the timing on it, McCready swore loudly.

Normally, the need-to-know rule in the covert world works admirably. Those who do not need to know something in order to fulfill their functions are not told about it. That way, if there is a leak—either deliberate or through sloppy talk—the damage is reasonably limited. But sometimes it works the other way around. Sometimes a piece of information that might have changed events is not passed on because no one thought it was necessary.

The Archimedes listening station in the Harz Mountains and the East Germany-listeners at Cheltenham had been told to pass to McCready without delay anything they got. The words
Grauber
or
Morenz
were particular triggers for an instant pass-on. But no one had thought to alert those who listen to
Allied
diplomatic and military traffic to pass what they picked up to McCready.

The message he held was timed at 4:22
P.M.
on Wednesday evening. It said:

He never told me he had a sister in London. Never told me he had a sister at all, thought McCready. He began to wonder what else his friend Bruno had not told him about his past. He dragged a telephone directory from a shelf and looked under the name of Farquarson.

Fortunately, it was not a terribly common name. Smith would have been a different matter entirely. There were fourteen Farquarsons, but no “Mrs. A.” He began to ring them in sequence. Of the first seven, five said there was no Mrs. A. Farquarson to their knowledge. Two failed to answer. He was lucky at the eighth; the listing was for Robert Farquarson. A woman answered.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Farquarson.”

A hint of German accent?

“Would that be Mrs. A. Farquarson?”

“Yes.” She seemed defensive.

“Forgive my ringing you, Mrs. Farquarson. I am from the Immigration Department at Heathrow. Would you by chance have a brother named Bruno Morenz?”

A long pause.

“Is he there? At Heathrow?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, madam. Unless you are his sister.”

“Yes, I am Adelheid Farquarson. Bruno Morenz is my brother. Could I speak to him?”

“Not at the moment, I’m afraid. Will you be at that address in, say, fifteen minutes? It’s rather important.”

“Yes, I will be here.”

McCready called for a car and driver from the motor pool and raced downstairs.

It was a large studio apartment at the top of a solidly built Edwardian villa, tucked behind Regent’s Park Road. He walked up and rang the bell. Mrs. Farquarson greeted him in a painter’s smock and showed him into a cluttered studio with paintings on easels and sketches strewn on the floor.

She was a handsome woman, gray-haired like her brother. McCready put her in her late fifties, older than Bruno. She cleared a space, offered him a seat, and met his gaze levelly. McCready noticed two coffee mugs standing on a nearby table. Both were empty. He contrived to touch one while Mrs. Farquarson sat down. The mug was warm.

“What can I do for you, Mr. …”

“Jones. I would like to ask you about your brother, Herr Bruno Morenz?”

“Why?”

“It’s an Immigration matter.”

“You are lying to me, Mr. Jones.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. My brother is not coming here. And if he wished to, he would not have problems with British Immigration. He is a West German citizen. You are a policeman?”

“No, Mrs. Farquarson. But I am a friend of Bruno. Over many years. We go back a long way together. I ask you to believe that because that
is
true.”

“He is in trouble, isn’t he?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m trying to help him, if I can. It’s not easy.”

“What has he done?”

“It looks as if he has killed his mistress in Cologne. And he has run away. He got a message to me. He said he didn’t mean to do it. Then he disappeared.”

She rose and walked to the window, staring out at the late summer foliage of Primrose Hill Park.

“Oh, Bruno. You fool. Poor, frightened Bruno.”

She turned and faced him.

“There was a man from the German Embassy here yesterday morning. He had called before, on Wednesday evening while I was out. He did not tell me what you have—just asked if Bruno had been in touch. He hasn’t. I can’t help you, either, Mr. Jones. You probably know more than I do, if he got a message to you. Do you know where he has gone?”

“That’s the problem. I think he has crossed the border. Gone into East Germany. Somewhere in the Weimar area. Perhaps to stay with friends. But so far as I know, he’s never been near Weimar in his life.”

She looked puzzled. “What do you mean? He lived there for two years.”

McCready kept a straight face, but he was stunned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. He never told me.”

“No, he wouldn’t. He hated it there. They were the unhappiest two years of his life. He never talked about it.”

“I thought your family was Hamburg, born and raised.”

“We were, until 1943. That was when Hamburg was destroyed by the RAF. The great Fire Storm bombing. You have heard of it?”

McCready nodded. The Royal Air Force had bombed the center of Hamburg with such intensity that raging fires started. The fires had sucked oxygen in from the outer suburbs until a raging inferno was created in which temperatures rose so high that steel ran like water and concrete exploded like bombs. The inferno had swept through the city, vaporizing everything in its path.

“Bruno and I were orphaned that night.” She paused and stared, not at McCready but past him, seeing again the flames raging through the city where she had been born, consuming to cinders her parents, her friends, her schoolmates, the landmarks of her life. After several seconds she snapped out of her reverie and resumed talking in that quiet voice with the remaining hint of an original German accent.

“When it was over, the authorities took charge of us and we were evacuated. I was fifteen, Bruno was ten. We were split up. I was billeted with a family outside Göttingen. Bruno was sent to stay with a farmer near Weimar. After the war, I searched for him, and the Red Cross helped to reunite us. We returned to Hamburg. I looked after him. But he hardly ever talked about Weimar. I began to work in the British NAAFI canteen, to keep Bruno. Times were very hard, you know.”

McCready nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was the war. Anyway, in 1947 I met a British sergeant. Robert Farquarson. We married and came to live here. He died eight years ago. When Robert and I left Hamburg in 1948, Bruno secured a residential apprenticeship with a firm of optical lens makers. I have only seen him three or four times since then, and not in the past ten years.”

“You told that to the man from the embassy?”

“Herr Fietzau? No, he did not ask about Bruno’s childhood. But I told the lady.”

“The lady?”

“She left only an hour ago. The one from the Pensions Department.”

“Pensions?”

“Yes. She said Bruno still worked in optical glassware, for a firm called BKI in Würzburg. But it seems BKI is owned by Pilkington Glass of Britain, and with Bruno’s retirement approaching, she needed details of his life to assess his full entitlement. She was not from Bruno’s employers?”

“I doubt it. Probably West German police. I’m afraid they are looking for Bruno, too, but not to help him.”

“I’m sorry. I seem to have been very foolish.”

“You weren’t to know, Mrs. Farquarson. She spoke good English?”

“Yes, perfect. Slight accent—Polish, perhaps.”

McCready had little doubt where the lady had come from. There were other hunters out for Bruno Morenz, many of them, but only McCready and one other group knew about BKI of Würzburg. He rose.

“Try hard to think what little he said in those years after the war. Is there anyone, anyone at all, to whom he might go in his hour of need for sanctuary?”

She thought long and hard.

“There was one name he mentioned, someone who had been nice to him. His primary-school teacher. Fräulein … dammit … Fräulein Neuberg. No, I remember now, Fräulein Neumann. That was it. Neumann. Of course, she’s probably dead by now. It was forty years ago.”

“One last thing, Mrs. Farquarson. Did you tell this to the lady from the glass company?”

“No, I’ve only just remembered it. I just told her Bruno had once spent two years as an evacuee on a farm not ten miles from Weimar.”

Back at Century House, McCready borrowed a Weimar telephone directory from the East German desk. There were several Neumanns listed, but just one with
Frl
, short for
Fräulein
, in front of it. A spinster. A teenager would not have her own apartment and phone, not in East Germany. A mature spinster, a professional woman, might. It was a long shot, very long. He could have one of the East German desk’s agents-in-place across the Wall place a call. But the
Stasi
were everywhere, bugging everything. The mere question— “Were you once the schoolteacher of a small boy called Morenz and has he showed up?”—that could blow it all away.

His next visit was to the section inside Century House whose specialty is the preparation of very untrue identity cards.

He rang British Airways, who were unable to help. But Lufthansa was. They had a flight at five-fifteen to Hanover. He asked Denis Gaunt to drive him to Heathrow again.

The best-laid plans of mice and men, as the Scottish poet might have said, sometimes end up looking like a dog’s breakfast. The Polish Airlines flight from London back to Warsaw via East Berlin was due for takeoff at three-thirty. But when the pilot switched on his flight systems, a red warning light glowed. It turned out to be just a faulty solenoid, but it delayed the takeoff until six. In the departures lounge, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya glanced at the televised departure information, noted the delay “for operational reasons,” cursed silently, and returned to her book.

McCready was leaving the office when the phone rang. He debated whether to answer it and decided he ought to. It could be important. It was Edwards.

“Sam, someone in Funny Paper has been on to me. Now look, Sam, you are not—as in absolutely not—getting my permission to go into East Germany. Is that clear?”

“Absolutely, Timothy. Couldn’t be clearer.”

“Good,” said the Assistant Chief, and put the phone down.

Gaunt had heard the voice at the other end of the phone and what it had said. McCready was beginning to like Gaunt. He had joined the desk only six months earlier, but he was showing he was bright, trustworthy, and could keep his mouth shut.

As he negotiated Hogarth Roundabout, cutting a lot of corners in the dense Friday-afternoon commuter traffic on the Heathrow road, Gaunt chose to open it.

“Sam, I know you’ve been in more tight places than a shepherd’s right arm, but you’ve been black-flagged in East Germany and the boss has forbidden you to go back.”

“Forbidding is one thing,” said McCready. “Preventing is another.”

As he strode through the departure lounge of Terminal Two to catch the Lufthansa flight to Hanover, he cast not a glance at the trim young woman with the shiny blond hair and piercing blue eyes who sat reading two yards from him. And she did not look up at the medium-built, rather rumpled man with thinning brown hair in a gray raincoat as he walked past.

McCready’s flight took off on time, and he landed at Hanover at eight, local time. Major Vanavskaya got away at six and landed at Berlin-Schönefeld at nine. McCready rented a car and drove past Hildesheim and Salzgitter to his destination in the forests outside Goslar. Vanavskaya was met by a KGB car and driven to Normannenstrasse 22. She had to wait an hour to see Colonel Otto Voss, who was closeted with State Security Minister Erich Mielke.