The Deceiver (9 page)

He climbed out and offered his passport. Other guards began to surround the car, all quite normal.

“Hood open, please, and trunk.”

He opened both; they began the search. A mirror on a trolley went under the car. A man pored over the engine bay. Morenz forced himself not to look as the guard studied the battery.

“The purpose of your journey to the German Democratic Republic?”

He brought his eyes back to the man in front of him. Blue eyes behind rimless glasses stared at him. He explained he was going to Jena, to discuss purchases of optical lenses from Zeiss; that if all went well, he might be able to return that same evening; if not he would have to have a second meeting with the foreign sales director in the morning. Impassive faces. They waved him into the Custom Hall.

It’s all just normal, he told himself. Let them find the papers themselves, McCready had said. Don’t offer
t
oo
much. They went through his attaché case, studied the letters exchanged between Zeiss and BKI in Würzburg. Morenz prayed the stamps and postmarks were perfect. They were. His bags were closed. He took them back to the car. The inspection of the car was finished. A guard with a huge Alsatian stood nearby. Behind windows, two men in civilian clothes watched. Secret police.

“Enjoy your visit to the German Democratic Republic,” said the senior border guard. He did not look as if he meant it.

At that moment there was a scream and several shouts from the column of cars across the concrete dividing reservation, the column trying to get out. Everyone spun around to look. Morenz was back behind the wheel. He stared in horror.

There was a blue Combi minivan at the head of the column. West German plates. Two guards were dragging a young girl out of the back, where they had discovered her hiding under the floor in a recess built for the purpose. She was screaming. The girlfriend of the West German youth driving the van. He was hauled out in a circle of straining dogs’ muzzles and submachine gun barrels. He threw his hands up, bone white.

“Leave her alone, you assholes,” he shouted. Someone hit him in the stomach. He doubled over.

“
Los
. Go,” snapped the guard beside Morenz. He let the clutch in, and the BMW surged forward. He cleared the barriers and stopped at the People’s Bank to change Deutschmarks into worthless Ostmarks at one-for-one and get his currency declaration stamped. The bank teller was subdued. Morenz’s hands were shaking. Back in his car he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the youth and the girl being hauled into a concrete building, still screaming.

He drove north, sweating profusely, his nerve completely gone, a burnt-out case. The only thing that held him together was his years of training—and his conviction that he would not let his friend McCready down.

Though he knew drinking and driving was utterly forbidden in the GDR, he reached for his hip flask and took a swig. Better. Much better. He drove on steadily. Not too fast, not too slow. He checked his watch. He had time. Midday. Rendezvous at four
P.M.
Two hours’ drive away. But the fear, the gnawing fear of an agent on a black mission facing ten years in a slave labor camp if caught, was still working on a nervous system already reduced to ruins.

McCready had watched him enter the corridor between the two border posts, then lost sight of him. He had not seen the incident of the girl and the youth. The curve of the hill meant he could see only the roofs on the East German side and the great flag with the hammer, compasses, and wheatsheaf fluttering above them. Just before twelve, far in the distance, he made out the black BMW driving away into Thuringia.

In the back of the Range Rover, Johnson had what looked like a suitcase. Inside was a portable telephone, with a difference. The set could send out or receive messages in clear talk, but scrambled, from the British Government Communication Headquarters, or GCHQ, near Cheltenham in England, or Century House in London, or SIS Bonn Station. The handset looked like an ordinary portable phone, with numbered buttons for dialing. McCready had asked that it be brought along so he could stay in touch with his own base and inform them when Poltergeist came safely home.

“He’s through,” McCready remarked to Johnson. “Now we just wait.”

“Want to tell Bonn or London?” asked Johnson.

McCready shook his head. “There’s nothing they can do,” he said. “Nothing anyone can do now. It’s up to Poltergeist.”

At the flat in Hahnwald, the two fingerprint men had finished with the secret compartment and were on their way. They had lifted three sets of prints from inside the room.

“Are they among the ones you got yesterday?” asked Schiller.

“I don’t know,” said the senior print-man. “I’ll have to check back at the lab. Let you know. Anyway, you can go in there now.”

Schiller entered and surveyed the racks of cassette boxes at the back. There was nothing to indicate what was in them, just numbers on the spine. He took one at random, went into the master bedroom, and slotted it into the video. With the remote control he switched both TV and video on, then hit the “play” button. He sat on the edge of the stripped bed. Two minutes later, he stood up and switched the set off, a rather shaken young man.

“
Donnerwetter nochmal
!” whispered Wiechert, standing in the doorway munching a pizza.

The senator from Baden-Württemberg may only have been a provincial politician, but he was well known nationally for his frequent appearances on national television, calling for a return to earlier moral values and a ban on pornography. His constituents had seen him photographed in many poses—patting children’s heads, kissing babies, opening church fêtes, addressing the conservative ladies. But they probably had not seen him crawling naked around a room in a spiked dog collar attached to a leash held by a young woman in stiletto heels brandishing a riding crop.

“Stay here,” said Schiller. “Don’t leave, don’t even move. I’m going back to the
Präsidium
.”

It was two o’clock.

Morenz checked his watch. He was well west of the Hermsdorfer Kreuz, the major crossroad where the north-south Autobahn from Berlin to the Saale River border crosses the east-west highway from Dresden to Erfurt. He was ahead of time. He wanted to be at the lay-by for the rendezvous with Smolensk at ten to four—no earlier or it would look suspicious, being parked there for so long in a West German car.

In fact, to stop at all would invite curiosity. West German businessmen tended to go straight to their destination, do their business, and drive back out again. Better to keep driving. He decided to go past Jena and Weimar to the Erfurt pull-off, go right around the roundabout, and come back toward Weimar. That would kill time. A green and white Wartburg People’s Police car came past him in the overtaking lane, adorned with two blue lights and an outsize bullhorn on the roof. The two uniformed highway patrolmen stared at him With expressionless faces.

He held the wheel steady, fighting down the rising panic. “They know,” a small treacherous voice inside him kept saying. “It’s all a trap. Smolensk has been blown. You’re going to be set up. They’ll be waiting for you. They’re just checking because you’ve overshot the turnoff.”

“Don’t be silly,” his cogent mind urged. Then he thought of Renate, and the black despair joined hands with the fear, and the fear was winning.

“Listen, you fool,” said his mind, “you did something stupid. But you didn’t mean to do it. Then you kept your head. The bodies won’t be discovered for weeks. By then, you’ll be out of the Service, out of the country, with your savings, in a land where they’ll leave you alone. In peace. That’s all you want now—peace. To be left alone. And they’ll leave you alone because of the tapes.”

The People’s Police, or VOPO, car slowed and studied him. He began to sweat. The fear was rising and still winning. He could not know that the young policemen were car buffs and had not seen the new BMW sedan before.

Commissar Schiller spent thirty minutes with the Director of First K, the Murder Squad, explaining what he had found. Hartwig bit his lip.

“It’s going to be a bastard,” he said. “Had she started blackmailing already, or was this to be her retirement fund? We don’t know.”

He lifted the phone and was put through to the forensic lab.

“I want the photographs of the recovered bullets and the prints—the nineteen of yesterday and the three of this morning—in my office in one hour.” Then he rose and turned to Schiller.

“Come on. We’re going back. I want to see this place for myself.”

It was actually Director Hartwig who found the notebook. Why anyone should be so secretive as to hide a notebook in a room that was already so well hidden, he could not imagine. But it was taped under the lowest shelf where the videos were stored.

The list was, they would discover, in Renate Heimendorf’s handwriting. Clearly she had been a very clever woman, and this was her operation—from the skillful refurbishment of the original apartment to the harmless-looking remote control that could turn the camera behind the mirror on or off. The forensic boys had seen it in the bedroom but had thought it was a spare for the TV.

Hartwig ran through the names in the notebook, which corresponded with the numbers on the spines of the video-cassettes. Some he recognized, some not. The ones he did not know, he reckoned would be men from out of state, but important men. The ones he recognized included two senators, a parliamentarian (government party), a financier, a banker (local), three industrialists, the heir to a major brewery, a judge, a famous surgeon, and a nationally known television personality. Eight names appeared to be Anglo-Saxon (British? American? Canadian?), and two French. He counted the rest.

“Eighty-one names,” he said. “Eighty-one tapes. Christ, if the names I do recognize are anything to go by, there must be enough here to bring down several state governments, maybe Bonn itself.”

“That’s odd,” said Schiller. “There are only sixty-one tapes.”

They both counted them. Sixty-one.

“You say there were three sets of prints lifted here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Assuming two were from Heimendorf and Hoppe, the third is probably the killer. And I have a horrible feeling he’s taken twenty tapes with him. Come on—I’m going to the President with this. It’s got beyond a murder, way beyond.”

Dr. Herrmann was finishing lunch with his subordinate, Aust.

“My dear Aust, we know nothing as yet. We simply have reason for concern. The police may quickly arrest and charge a gangster, and Morenz may return on schedule after a sinful weekend with a girlfriend at someplace other than the Black Forest. I have to say that his immediate retirement with loss of pension is beyond a doubt. But for the moment, I just want you to try and trace him. I want a female operative to move in with his wife in case he calls. Use any excuse you like. I will attempt to find out just what is the state of the police investigation. You know my hotel. Contact me if there is news of him.”

Sam McCready sat on the tailgate of the Range Rover in warm sunshine high above the Saale River and sipped coffee from a flask. Johnson put down his handset. He had been speaking to Cheltenham, the huge national listening station in the west of England.

“Nothing,” he said. “All normal. No extra radio traffic in any sector—Russian, SSD, or People’s Police. Just routine.”

McCready checked his watch. Ten to four. Bruno should be moving toward the lay-by west of Weimar about now. He had told him to be five minutes early and allow no more than twenty-five minutes if Smolensk failed to show up. That would count as an abort. He kept calm in front of Johnson, but he hated the waiting. It was always the worst part, waiting for an agent across the border. The imagination played tricks, creating a whole range of things that could have happened to him but probably had not. For the hundredth time, he calculated the schedule. Five minutes at the lay-by; the Russian hands it over; ten minutes to let the Russian get away. Four-fifteen departure. Five minutes to switch the manual from inside his jacket to the compartment under the battery; one hour and forty-five minutes of driving—he should be coming into view about six … another cup of coffee.

The Police President of Cologne, Arnim von Starnberg, listened gravely to the young commissar’s report. He was flanked by Hart wig of the Murder Squad and Horst Fraenkel, Director of the whole
Kriminalamt
. Both senior officers had felt it right to come straight to him. When he heard the details, he agreed they were correct. This thing was not only bigger than a murder; it was bigger than Cologne. He already intended to take it higher. The young Schiller finished.

“You will remain completely silent about this, Heir Schiller,” said von Starnberg. “You and your colleague, Assistant Commissar Wiechert. Your careers depend on it, you understand?” He turned to Hartwig. “The same applies to those two fingerprint men who saw the camera room.”

He dismissed Schiller and turned to the other detectives.

“How far exactly have you got?”

Fraenkel nodded to Hartwig, who produced a number of large high-definition photographs.

“Well, Herr President, we now have the bullets that killed the call girl and her friend. We need to find the gun that fired those bullets.” He tapped two photographs. “Just two bullets, one in each body. Second, the fingerprints. There were three sets in the camera room. Two came from the call girl and her pimp. We believe the third set must belong to the killer. We also believe it was he who stole the twenty missing cassettes.”

None of the three men could know there were actually twenty-one missing cassettes. Morenz had thrown the twenty-first, the one of himself, into the Rhine on Friday evening. He was not listed in the notebook because he had never been a major blackmail prospect—just fun.

“Where are the other sixty-one tapes?” asked von Starnberg.

“In my personal safe,” said Fraenkel.

“Please have them brought straight up here. No one must view them.”

When he was alone, President von Starnberg began telephoning. That afternoon, the responsibility for the affair went up the official hierarchy faster than a monkey up a tree. Cologne passed the affair to the Provincial
Kriminalamt
in the provincial capital, Düsseldorf. That office passed it at once to the Federal
Kriminalamt
in Wiesbaden. Guarded limousines with the sixty-one tapes and the notebook sped from city to city. At Wiesbaden, it stopped for a while as senior civil servants worked out how to tell the Justice Minister in Bonn—he was the next up the ladder. By this time all sixty-one sexual athletes had been identified. Half were merely wealthy; the other half were both rich and firmly Establishment figures. Worse, six senators and parliamentarians of the ruling party were involved, plus two from the other parties, two senior civil servants, and an army general. That was only the Germans. There were two foreign diplomats based in Bonn (one from a NATO ally), two foreign politicians who had been visiting, and a White House staffer close to Ronald Reagan.