The Helsinki Pact (53 page)

The two men started, almost got
up from their chairs. “Dieter? The head of … ”

“Exactly!” Thomas interrupted
Köpp. He was glad he had finally managed to get the two out in the
open and he now knew that they would all close the deal. After the
initial exclamation Bockmann took control again and looked at
Thomas through narrowed eyes which expressed his astonishment and
incredulity and, Thomas thought, a grudging respect.

“And I assume that we will be
able to verify that the voice really is that of Colonel Dieter? Or
is he the other agent you keep referring to, by any chance?” He
raised his eyebrows and Thomas flushed at the mockery.

“So you don’t yet know that
Dieter is dead?”

There was no reply. The news had
clearly surprised Bockmann, who kept his eyes on Thomas, trying to
guess whether the young man was lying.

“I guess then you don’t know
everything after all.” Thomas continued, a slight smile raising the
left side of his mouth. “He was murdered two days ago in his own
house. You will, I think, find it particularly interesting to learn
who had probably arranged that and why.”

Bockmann and Köpp glanced at each
other and then Bockmann pursed his mouth, rested his chin on his
clasped fists and stared at the table. There was a long
silence.

“Tell me this, Mr Shultz. We know
Dieter to be someone who trusted very few people, even among his
colleagues. However, there were two people, not obvious people, he
appeared to trust and, we believe, may have confided in from time
to time. Who were they?”

“Perhaps you mean Bettina List as
one. The other is probably Hanno Wornletz.”

“Hmmm. Perhaps we may be able to
come to some arrangement after all, including on the matter of what
you call the unjust prison sentence. That’s provided you can
deliver what you claim and provided it all hangs together and
meshes properly with what we already know. But if you’re
bullshitting, and particularly if you’re lying, I guarantee we’ll
put you behind bars for longer than you ever thought possible. Am I
clear?”

Thomas nodded and they shook
hands.

"Köpp. Give Mr Schultz something
to eat and then get started checking the detail. If it stacks up he
can go back tomorrow and we'll make arrangements to get the agent
and any material brought safely over here in a day or
two."

Chapter 44

Sunday January 21
1990

“I MISS lying with him curled
round me,” she thought “warm, safe. Dammit! I need him back. I need
him now.”

It was a couple of days since
Thomas had left for Frankfurt and so a couple of nights that
Bettina had been on her own. At first she'd coped well enough, self
reliant, absorbed in her monitoring of the tapes. The worst times
were when she listened to Dieter speaking and it had taken when it
took all her professional self-control to put to one side her
memories of the person and instead focus on the content. Every so
often she'd catch her memory drifting back to the sight of Dieter
lying bloodied and lifeless on the floor and she felt a fury
towards his killers that surprised her. Then the fear started to
take over, mixing with her anger and leading her to question
whether she, whether Thomas and she, could escape this
danger.

On the second day she even found
herself doubting Thomas. Perhaps now that he was in Frankfurt he'd
find it too difficult to return. He’d find some justification for
not coming back. "Absurd!" she thought as she pushed the thought
away firmly "He'd never desert me like that." But later it returned
and with it an image of her father and his abandonment of his
family. She stared out of the window for long periods, carefully
standing back so as not to be noticed, watching the people on the
street, coming and going, carrying out their their voyages and
visits, doing their mundane daily tasks, unconcerned, and she
envied them.

She prowled around the small
apartment and then threw herself into the easy chair. Lying back,
she drifted in and out of sleep, imagining Thomas and her together,
their caresses exploding into urgent lovemaking with the world of
spying and sudden death utterly forgotten. She smiled and wriggled
into a more comfortable position, hugging herself.

Sometime later she was instantly
awake, listening to light dragging steps outside the door
accompanied by a soft, stifled cough. The door knob turned very
slowly and quietly and the door creaked slightly as someone pushed
against it. There was a scratching of metal at the lock and
although she knew she’d secured it well after Thomas left she
pushed back the safety catch and pointed her gun at the door,
intensely alert. The door handle slowly reverted to its original
position and she heard the same dragging steps moving away,
descending.

She shivered, let out her breath
pent up since the first hint of a possible intruder, pushed on the
safety catch, and lay back in the chair, then laughed as a scene
from a foreign jailbreak film she’d watched in a small art house
cinema with her brother Paul just before he was arrested flashed
into her mind. “Stir crazy! That’s me. I’m going stir crazy. God,
where’s Thomas? Why isn’t he back yet?”

She’d worked late into the
evening listening to the tapes, reluctant to go to bed and knowing
that sleep would be hard to come. On that second night, lying
awake, her mind churning, thinking over everything that happened
and trying to make connections, she’d abandoned her attempt to
sleep and got up at four in the morning, sitting down soon
afterwards to eavesdrop on what had been happening in Dieter’s
office. Now she was up to date and had made records of the tapes’
contents and the positions where anything of interest had
happened.

Most of the conversations were
about the situation in Dresden and it had taken time for Bettina to
piece things together and begin to understand something of the
interlinked events. She’d come to realise that Thomas and she had
seen only hints of what had been going on and that the issue was
much bigger than they’d thought.

Dieter kept asking someone about
how Roehrberg and Spitze were reacting and had earlier talked also
about Henkel and what was being said about his death.

"Putin?" Dieter had said on one
of these occasions. "You mean the major in the KGB office?" There
had been a long silence as he'd listened. "You did well." he'd said
"I'm not surprised Roehrberg was angry if Putin was muscling in. I
know he detests Putin anyway, thinks he's a thug. Well he is, of
course, but he's a dangerous one too and he's clever, not someone
to underestimate." There was another long silence.

"It's what I'd thought." he said.
"The money vanishing just didn't make sense, given the security. It
had to be someone inside and Roehrberg and Henkel were the obvious
people. I suppose Böhm could have been part of it but, again, he
and Roehrberg only just tolerate each other. Putting the blame on a
dead Henkel gets rid of the problem. No one's going to investigate
too deeply given the state we're in now." He'd laughed. "And then
Putin turns up! I'd have given anything to see Roehrberg's face
when he realised what was happening, that he was stuck." He laughed
again, one of the few times Bettina had heard him. "Get that
evidence back to me and any more you can find and we'll nail them
all. And maybe even some here in Berlin."

He'd also asked what Bettina was
doing, where she’d been and whom she’d met with. Thomas had only
called Dieter once so it was clear that this was someone else who
had been watching her movements.

Then she recalled Thomas’s
comment that it was strange that Dieter would have sent Bettina on
her own in such a difficult and possibly dangerous mission.
Suddenly it all made sense. "There was another agent there in
Dresden" she thought "and Dieter sent me as bait, to try to push
Roehrberg, Henkel, or Spitze into making a mistake."

The other agent was hidden,
conducting his investigation in the shadows, probably from within
the Dresden office she now understood. She wished desperately that
she could hear the other side of the telephone conversations,
perhaps learn what the agent was telling Dieter or even recognise
his or her voice.

"That's who it must have been,"
she realised suddenly "that man in the grey leather jacket who was
in the kneipe that evening and who trailed me in the white car."
Her eyes filled as she thought about it. "Oh, Dieter, Dieter," she
thought "you might have exposed me to danger but you made as sure
as you could that I was protected. And I thought that guy was
Roehrberg's man."

From a couple of comments made by
Dieter later it seemed that the other agent had found more of the
missing pieces of the puzzle. Henkel’s will had been deposited two
weeks earlier at a notary’s, apparently the same Manfred Dornbush
who had signed the fake privatisation document, and left everything
to his close friend Rudolf Roehrberg. “Well, well!” thought Bettina
“I expect the handwriting matches that on the suicide
note!”

But it was what she learned about
Phoenix Securities which particularly alarmed her. She knew that
Dieter had asked Thomas to look into it from Dresden and this was
apparently because it was too risky to investigate in Berlin.
Apparently there was also a connection of some sort with Dresden
although, frustratingly, the details were never specified in the
conversations.

A couple of these conversations
were with Hanno Wornletz. Dieter had told Hanno that he’d been
contacted by a senior agent of Phoenix Securities some three months
earlier. Phoenix was looking forrom help from the Stasi network of
agents nationwide in order to provide monitoring assistance for a
financing project and was prepared to pay a fee of close to a
million DM for support for a week. Dieter had been cagey and tried
first to probe for information but the person concerned had cut off
all communication and disappeared from Dieter’s view.

Then he had learned recently that
Phoenix had begun expanding dramatically all over the country and a
couple of sources had confirmed to him that the growth was
supported by the Stasi network. It was clear that someone within
the Firm, someone at a very senior level and so able to deliver the
whole network, had accepted the proposal and agreed to work with
Phoenix. No doubt, in his typical style and in an attempt to test
reactions, Dieter had dropped hints that he was himself looking
into Phoenix and had found some interesting connections although
nothing yet appeared certain.

As she knew from the earlier
meeting Thomas was to find out what he could about the organisation
and management of the company, and in particular who headed the
scheme in West Germany. Hanno's role, however, was the more
delicate one of investigating internally to find the rotten apple
in the senior ranks of the Stasi, working closely with Dieter and
using misinformation as necessary to trap others into revealing
more than they intended.

"You've been placed in Sponden's
office, haven't you?" Dieter had said "Keep your eyes and ears
open, note anything unusual, let me know who visits, who
calls."

"Oh, I don't think Sponden's
inv... " Hanno had said and then stopped and as he did so the
telephone rang and Dieter got caught up in a tedious administrative
discussion, breaking off briefly to say to Hanno that they'd
continue the discussion another time, presumably waving him out of
the office.

Dieter had also used himself as
bait but had had no one to save him when the shark had attacked,
she thought. Now she and Thomas were in serious danger because
Dieter had brought them in and they now knew too much. Hanno was at
risk too, it seemed, and she wondered how she could warn
him.

After the incident of the
mysterious prowler outside the door she’d grabbed something to eat,
levering open a can of lentils with a knife and washing the
contents and a couple of slices of pumpernickel down with some
fruit juice. She’d listened to the morning’s tapes but like all of
those following Dieter’s death very little had happened. A couple
of people whose voices she didn’t recognise had entered the office
and spent some time searching for documents, found what they were
looking for and had then left.

"Perhaps those were our files"
she thought "and that makes us the next targets." And then she
remembered, although it did little to reassure her, that Dieter had
promised to keep their files with him and that therefore they had
probably been hidden at his house. Thomas was right − their only
hope lay in contacting the BND for help. On their own it was almost
impossible for them to oppose Roehrberg and his
colleagues.

As the afternoon wore on she
paced the apartment, occasionally slumping into the chair and
trying to doze but with little success. "Where is he? Where is he?
Where is he?" she kept thinking. "His meeting was yesterday and he
should have been back last night, this morning at latest." She
paced around more, uncomfortable with waiting helplessly inside,
somone who needed to act and be active.

Perhaps Thomas had been captured
even before leaving and was in serious danger. Maybe he’d been shot
and it was only a matter of time before they found her and killed
her too. Or maybe he’d made it to Frankfurt but instead of doing a
deal had been arrested as a spy and was now in jail. She couldn't
stand not knowing.