The Helsinki Pact (48 page)

He could feel fear prickling his
skin. It was midnight-quiet, still and silent, and whenever leaves
rustled beside the car shivers ran down his spine. His heartbeat
seemed all over the place and at times he had difficulty breathing
but he continued stroking Bettina’s hair and calming
her.

“We must go. We really must go.
It’s dangerous here.” he whispered.

She nodded, moved away from him
and sat back in her seat, now calmer but gulping occasionally, her
eyes still wet.

“Drive over to my place. We need
to rest. There’s no way now we’ll be able to do anything about
Roehrberg.”

“Whoever killed Dieter will be
looking for us as well. Could be Roehrberg but whoever it is
they’ll know about you. Your apartment is the first place they’ll
look. This is the Firm we’re talking about, the people who make it
their business to know what everyone's doing, remember. We need to
avoid all your usual hangouts at least until we understand better
what’s going on.”

They drove across the city and as
they neared the centre, approaching the police station and the
former Stasi’s operative offices in the Alexanderplatz, Bettina
became increasingly agitated. Surely if they were hiding from
agents they were in exactly the wrong area, she thought. It was
late, but anyone could be around, a car out at this hour could be
noted and she knew that her car’s make and registration would be in
her file.

Sensing her concern Thomas
reached out, took her hand and pressed it. "Not far now. We'll be
safe once we're inside."

He turned into a small dog-leg
back street with a few run-down houses and which ended in a patch
of rough ground frequented by prostitutes and their clients.
Although the police made high profile visits every month or so the
area was generally undisturbed and a car left round the corner was
unlikely to attract attention. Gathering their things they set off
for Kai’s apartment, less than a kilometre away.

As Thomas pushed open the solid
wooden street door and they climbed the four flights to the
apartment he prayed silently that John had visited daily to do what
Thomas had asked. Thomas had arranged matters initially to give him
leverage against Dieter and the difficult situation in which he’d
found himself but now, as things had turned out, their lives might
depend on matters having worked as he'd planned.

When they entered the apartment
Thomas saw that the stereo was still on but the TEAC four track
wasn’t moving. He walked over, put the headphones on and pressed
the rewind button, hoping it was a temporary problem. The large
reel started turning slowly. Bettina was still standing at the
entrance, staring at him and the equipment.

“Where are we? What’s all this
equipment?”

“We’re in a friend’s apartment.
As for this,” he said indicating the TEAC, “you should know better
than anyone else. Isn’t half the country being listened to by the
Stasi?” He sat down on the battered sofa and patted it to have her
sit beside him.

“I was a little slow in realising
what you two had done. Once I'd recovered a bit from the battering
Dieter's goons had given me I spent a little time trying to figure
out just how Dieter knew I’d been lying about my Frankfurt visit.
You were tense when I came into the room and I saw how you reacted
to my answers but why didn't really strike me at the time. Then
that came back to me later and that made me realise you'd already
known everything. Dieter’s questioning was just a farce. It was a
chance for me to tell the truth, to be seen as reliable, and to
hide the fact that you’d been listening to me somehow.
Right?”

“Yes.” She stared at the old
carpet, swallowed and then forced herself to look at Thomas. “I
willed you to tell the truth. You don’t know how much I willed you
to do that. I knew what would happen if you didn’t but I ... but I
... ” She looked away again and once more grief for Dieter’s death
welled up, mixed with her earlier betrayal of Thomas, and she again
sobbed bitterly as he held her.

“Nobody at the canteen could have
overheard our conversation. Stephan wasn’t a spy, otherwise you
wouldn’t have needed me.” He got up and opened the fridge. John had
almost finished the beers but there was still most of the UHT milk
he’d brought over. He reached for the Bialetti moka machine and
began preparing coffee for them both. The reel had now rewound
completely and had stopped with a snapping, cracking sound. Bettina
was watching him, following his movements, waiting in silence for
him to continue.

“There were only two plausible
explanations. One was that you'd been able to place microphones
inside the Deutsche Bank canteen. But it was impossible for you to
know where we would sit and not realistic to wire the whole
canteen. The other reason was that you also seemed very much aware
of what had happened during my interviews. You couldn’t have miked
the whole building. Or again, if you had, you wouldn’t have needed
me.”

Bettina nodded as he continued
his analysis.

“Oh, by the way,” he continued.
“I’ve been wondering all this time, but couldn’t really ask you, if
the person listening to my conversations was a young man lying on
the grass of the Taunusanlage.”

“With a Walkman?”

“Exactly. I saw him from the
interview window and envied him, lying there in the sunshine. It
was only much later that I realised it was probably he who had
nailed me.”

“His name is Sylvan Battenmeier.”
she said. “He likes to travel, so Dieter sends him on the easy
missions. The Walkman idea is his, his trademark approach. He hates
sitting in a car the whole time, so he miniaturised the radio
receiver system and put it inside an old Walkman he picked up on
one his trips.”

“Wiring the building was
impossible so you must have planted the micc on me somehow. At
first I thought of my clothes. But I hadn’t changed before I went
to dinner and you seemed to have lost contact then. And you
couldn't be certain of what I'd be wearing anyway so it had to be
something I'd definitely have with me. There was only one
explanation - the briefcase. It was a classic, a realthe Trojan
horse! A nice present just before the first mission.”

“When did you find
out?”

“No more than a couple of weeks
or so after I got beaten up. From then on, I let you hear only what
I wanted you to hear. I always had the briefcase with me in
meetings with you or Dieter but otherwise only when it suited me.
It was all carefully crafted.”

The coffee made its
characteristic gurgling sound as it filled the upper chamber and
Thomas poured it into two cups, adding milk to one and then
continuing his explanation.

“Now, when Dieter called the
meeting after the Wall came down I realized there was a big risk
that I’d be prosecuted as a spy in the West. That was crazy. I was
already being forced to spy on my country and I was now risking
being put in prison for doing something against my will. I needed
to have some evidence, something to hand over to the Western agents
in case I was put on trial. The only hope I had of saving myself
was to prove I was a double agent, or at least was trying to be.
Even if Dieter didn’t give my file to the BND, I had no way of
knowing my name hadn’t already been recorded somewhere. And as much
as I had by then learned to respect and trust Dieter, I couldn’t
base my future on his word alone.”

“So that’s when you bought this?”
she said, indicating the TEAC 4 track recorder.

“Yes. Rudimentary, but very
efficient. I had a limited budget and this worked fine for my
purposes. Although I had to spend a fortune on the miniaturised
microphone and the signal amplifier. Those really are state of the
art. I was lucky enough that this flat was available and that it
was so close to the Stasi offices, suitably within wireless range
with a decent antenna here.”

She sat up and stared at him.
“You planted a microphone in our offices?” Her hand jerked,
spilling coffee over her hand and the floor. “Damn! That’s hot.
You’re joking!” she said, looking intently at him, and then “Aren’t
you?” He laughed at her surprise, enjoying the release of tension
from their situation.

“In Dieter’s office, to be
precise. During that last meeting, while Dieter was talking and you
were both looking out of the window at something across the
street.”

She stood looking at him,
wrinkling her forehead and shaking her head slowly, her slightly
amused expression flitting between incredulity and
admiration.

“When we left for Dresden, I’d
arranged for a friend to come over and change the tapes every day.
It should have recorded everything from about ten each morning to
maybe eight in the evening. I'd have done it for longer but it was
a case of balancing the recording time on a reel against when
something might be happening.”

“Dieter gets in early and usually
works late. You could have missed something vital.”

“He does, yes, but not many
others do and it’s the interaction, the meetings and conversations,
that I was interested in. You can’t tape people’s thoughts. And
anything particularly secret is more likely to be discussed when
the office is pretty empty, particularly later at night. I had to
make a judgement, balance the time I could run the thing against
when things might be happening. As I explained I initially set it
up for entirely different reasons but now it should help us
understand what happened to Dieter and who may have wanted him
dead, fill in the background to what led to that
perhaps.”

“Can you find my last
conversation with him?” Bettina asked. “He behaved very strangely,
just as if he couldn’t talk freely.”

Thomas started looking through
the reels piled on the table, each of them with John’s neatly
written date and start time in black marker. “Shit!” he said
finally. “Yesterday’s seems to be missing. Why the hell did he
overlook that one?”

Bettina looked at him in dismay.
Then she started laughing and pointed at the machine with the tape
he’d just rewound. Thomas began laughing as well, shook his head
slowly and tapped his temple, then put on the headphones and began
listening, fast forwarding periodically for long bursts. He smiled
at her, stuck a thumb up in the air, and then switched the output
through the speakers.

“You’re right. That was yesterday
so of course it was the tape in the machine.” He breathed a sigh of
relief. “What time was your call?”Somewhere towards the end of the
day .”

“7.30 anyway, probably nearer 8,
I think.”

“Hmmm. Let’s hope it’s
there.”

He breathed a sigh of
relief.

He fast forwarded slightly then
set the tape playing again. “... so there’s been no reaction yet.”
It was Dieter’s voice, loud and clear. A long pause followed his
words as if he were talking on the phone.

Thomas moved the fast forward
button again. He fast forwarded the tape then, pressing play
periodically and listening for a second or two each
time.

“Hello Hyena. Anything urgent to
report?” It was Dieter’s voice, followed by a long pause. “Yessss
...” Thomas said, punching the air, happy that the system had
worked and that the quality was good though he wished he’d been
able to put the microphone inside the telephone instead of
underneath the table. They listened to the conversation, then
Thomas rewound the tape again.

“It’s as if he wants someone to
hear that he’s calling the investigation off. Probably the person
who was in the office with him then. Listen to it again.” He
pressed the play button once more.

“
... seems all clear
and straightforward ... your mission is over ... another urgent
matter ... ”

Bettina’s lip trembled as
Dieter’s familiar voice reached them. “You’re right. Dieter would
never have called the investigation off until he’d heard what we
had to say.”

“Let’s try to see what happened
before you rang.” Thomas said.

He rewound the tape, listening to
the helium-gabbling until there was a sharp crack and then silence.
He fast forwarded to the crack, backtracked a few seconds and then
set the machine to play. The speakers gave the sound of a door
being slammed shut, heavy footsteps and an angry voice becoming
louder and clearer as it approached the area of the hidden
microphone under Dieter’s desk. They listened, silently holding
their breaths as if they would otherwise give themselves away, as
the tape played on slowly and the angry voice berated Dieter. The
words were hard to make out, coming and going, as if the person
were walking around the room and only occasionally talking in the
direction of Dieter or approaching the desk.

Thomas pressed the stop button
and turned to Bettina. “Do you recognize the voice?”

“No,” Bettina said. “I don’t
think I’ve ever heard it before.”

Thomas rewound for a second or
two then pressed the play button again. He started jotting down the
words he could make, hoping to fill in the gaps later.

“
... an investigation
going on of which I’m not aware. Since when do you have the
authority to conduct missions without my ... understand what and
who ... ” There was a sudden bang as if the unknown man had slammed
his fist on to the desk to vent his fury.