The Lucifer Network (27 page)

Suddenly the hull began to tilt. They'd begun the transition to periscope depth. He found the map he'd been looking for and replaced the storage box under the others that had covered it. He had no particular reason for wanting to listen in to the Croatian naval base on Lastovo, but he hated wasting an opportunity when it was there. He squeezed past the boxes, then climbed the ladder back to 2 deck.

In the control room, the TSO crossed to the navigator's position and nudged his fellow lieutenant aside so he could look at the chart. From beneath the navigation table a dot of light shone, marking their position on the chart as plotted by the Ship's Inertial Navigation System. The TSO jabbed his finger at it.

‘Plus or minus how much, Vasco?' The SINS had been drifting of late.

‘A mile at the most. When we stick the mast up we'll get a GPS correction.' A mile of error wouldn't matter in the open sea and the Global Positioning System satellites
would quickly locate them to within a few metres of their exact position.

Styles liked to throw his weight around when he was officer of the watch. He knew he'd make a damned good skipper when he'd passed his ‘Perisher'. Fail the stressful commander's course and he would never serve in a submarine again. Pass and he should have his own boat to drive within five years, so long as the captains he served under didn't take against him. Flag rank was what he was aiming for. A vice-admiral's job at least. Maybe even the very top.

He crossed the control room to check data on the small screen next to the Command System panel. A graph recorded changes in salinity and the biological condition of the water around them as they came up from the depths, all of which could affect the way sound waves reached them. A sharp kink in the trace showed they'd passed through a layer that could have blanketed out noise from the surface directly above them.

Commander Talbot had seen it too. Warily, he ordered eighteen metres – periscope depth – and a speed of three knots.

Styles hovered by the search periscope ready to seize its grips when the order came to raise it.

‘New contact, sir!' An alert from the sound room.

‘Damn!' Talbot grunted. The submarine was at its most vulnerable just below the surface. ‘Bearing?'

‘Red zero five. One shaft, five blades. Large merch.'

‘Damn! Starboard thirty,' Talbot ordered. The planesman pulled hard on his wheel.

‘Moving left.' The sonar chief again. ‘Range five to seven thousand yards.'

‘That's better,' Talbot muttered. Far enough for safety and moving away from them. Everyone in the control room relaxed.

‘Three minutes to the broadcast, sir,' Styles cautioned. If they missed the slot it'd be four hours before they could try again.

The boat began to wallow in the surface swell, the planesman riding his controls to keep her level.

‘Ops, control. No more contacts.'

‘Thanks control. Raise the search periscope.'

The stainless steel shaft hissed up from its well. Harvey Styles pressed his face to the soft rubber of the eyepiece. Water splashed silently against the outer glass of the sight. Overhead the sky was overcast. The slate grey sea heaved and chopped in a stiff breeze which flicked spray from the wave crests. Styles checked the horizon. Satisfied it was clear ahead of them, he swept the sight through a full 360 degrees.

‘No visual contacts, sir.' He began a second sweep to make sure. ‘I estimate visibility at five thousand yards.'

‘The Radar Warner has low level E and F band,' another voice shouted. Civilian radars. No threat. ‘Risk of detection nil.'

‘Good.' Talbot relaxed. ‘Raise the comms mast and the intercept mast. Let's make the CTs happy.'

Three minutes later the signals officer reported that the satellite broadcast from London had been taken in successfully.

‘Excellent.' Talbot beamed. Apart from routine operational matters the signal should include the solution to yesterday's
Telegraph
crossword. He stepped across to the periscope as Styles relinquished it. ‘Nice sailing weather up there?'

‘Depends on your stomach, sir.'

A few feet from the control room, Arthur Harris and two of his fellow communications technicians hunched over the racks in their shack. Harris's knowledge of
Serbo-Croat was basic, Russian being his main skill. He was due to attend a course in the language when he'd completed his leave at the end of this patrol. His two companions were fluent, however.

This far from land their expectations of intercepts were low. A week ago they'd been close in to the mainland, monitoring tactical chat between Serb units in the Kosovo mountains to the north of them. Harris watched the squiggles on the spectrum analyser, randomly selecting transmissions to dip into. Dull stuff, mostly. Marine band VHF – the ramblings of local boatmen. If the Croatian Navy was active on Lastovo, it was being damned quiet about it. Harris kicked his shoes off. His feet had been itching of late – some fungal infection between the toes that seemed resistant to athlete's foot powder.

Suddenly a new spike appeared on the VHF display. He tuned in quickly, activating filters to minimise the background hiss to the voices he was hearing. The transmitter must have been on low power or at the limits of its range.

Then he sat bolt upright, pressing the headphones to his ears, his interest galvanised. What he was listening to wasn't Serbo-Croat. It was Russian.

Coming from a place where no Russians ought to be.

Vienna

Sam's flight touched down at Schwechat Airport just after midday. The attack by the
shpana
from Odessa had left
him badly rattled. Stumbling into ambushes seemed to be becoming a habit. Last night after escaping from the mafiya killer, he'd phoned Bennett with a description of his assailant, but they'd both known the chances of his being found were slim.

Sam walked from the arrivals gate past a long line of overpriced boutiques. He was dressed in his light grey suit. A bored official on the EU passport counter waved him through, then while waiting for his bag, he queued at the tourist desk and booked a room in a small pension near the Ringstrasse.

When he'd phoned Hans Kesselring his German intelligence contact yesterday to check on Hoffmann's whereabouts, he'd asked for an update on the man when he got to Vienna. The response was waiting outside the arrivals door, a copy of
Spiegel
magazine clutched in his fist.

‘Fischer,' said the fair-haired German, introducing himself. He was a centimetre taller than Sam and wore a dark blue suit. ‘I am in post at the Embassy here in Vienna.'

‘Packer' said Sam, happy that the man's English was okay. His own German had become rusty through lack of use. ‘Good of you to meet me.'

They headed towards the exit and waited until they were in the car heading in to the city before talking again.

‘May I ask why you still have an interest in Herr Hoffmann so long after he retires?' Fischer asked.

‘History,' Sam replied. ‘We think he can throw light on something that happened in Britain twenty-seven years ago.' Sam didn't feel the need to elaborate further.

Fischer's eyes narrowed. ‘So long ago . . . We know little about him at that time. Many of the oldest Stasi files were destroyed during the days before the wall
came down and Herr Hoffmann is not a man who gives information unless he absolutely must.'

‘I'm well aware of that. It took me four years to get a name out of him.'

‘Ah yes. Herr Kesselring told me about “Papagena”, the woman in the British army headquarters. So what exactly do you want to know?'

‘Anything you can tell me about him. Is he still active?'

‘I think that he is not. Or not very. Herr Hoffmann is nearly seventy. He lives with his wife in the Karl-Marx Hof. They are lovers of music and fresh air. They go to concerts and for long walks in the Wienerwald.'

The answer was too glib. ‘You don't
think
he's still active? You mean he's not sending you reports any more?'

Fischer's jaw hardened. Sam suspected he wasn't sure how much he was allowed to reveal. ‘Herr Hoffmann still has good contacts,' he replied enigmatically. ‘And he still informs us about certain people who do business in Vienna.'

‘People like Vladimir Kovalenko . . .'

Fischer glanced sideways and ventured an awkward smile. ‘Except we don't think Kovalenko
is
in Vienna at the moment. Everybody is looking for him. You too?'

‘That's not the reason I'm here, no. But d'you think Hoffmann ever dealt with Kovalenko?'

‘I have not seen his name in Herr Hoffmann's reports. The truth is that we don't hear often from him. The arrangement we made when we ended his interrogation was a good idea but it has not proved very useful. Herr Hoffmann has many loyalties, but they are not to us.'

‘Loyalties to his old friends, you mean. I know about that.'

Fischer nodded. ‘Papagena,' he murmured.

‘But let me get this straight. D'you think he's done business with his old Russian chums here in Vienna? Like worked with them on some of their scams?'

‘It is possible. Herr Hoffmann has good connections in the German speaking world. He could be very useful to Russians.'

‘And they would pay good money for those connections?'

‘As I have said, we only know what he tell us, Herr Packer. If he make money from these people, then he keeps it well hidden.'

‘No private Schloss in the Tyrol . . .'

Fischer smiled. ‘No private anything. Herr Hoffmann has strong political principles. Still very much a socialist, I would say. Puts the national interest above personal comfort. The apartment where he lives has only three rooms. He passes a lot of time at the Staatsbibliothek – the national library – studying the history of the German peoples. Every Saturday afternoon and other days also. His only big expense is the Opera. If he was making big money he would use it for some cause that he believed in, not spending it on himself.'

‘When did you last see him?'

Fischer pursed his thin lips. ‘Maybe two month ago.'

‘He contacts you, or you contact him?'

‘The first. As I said, we don't expect much from him these days. He is too old. The Russians in Vienna are most aged thirty to forty.'

Sam glanced out of the window as they crossed the wide, brown streak of the Danube. He smiled, remembering Hoffmann saying that only a musician could have convinced the world that Vienna's river was blue.

‘So you think he's on the same side as you now?' Sam suggested.

‘Or on no side at all,' Fischer answered briskly. ‘How long do you stay in Vienna?'

‘For as long as it takes. It'll be my luck to find that Hoffmann's gone away this morning.'

‘Your luck is not that bad. He is still here. One of my assistants telephoned him one hour ago to check.'

‘What? And mentioned I was coming?'

‘Of course not. He was pretending to offer financial advice. Here in Austria there are many companies that make such calls.'

‘Makes a change from double glazing.'

Ten minutes later Fischer dropped him at his hotel. He handed Sam a business card.

‘Please, before you leave Vienna, you will tell me if you learn anything interesting?'

‘Of course.'

Brussels

Commissioner Blanche Duvalier called the meeting to order. It was already mid-morning, the session having been delayed by the late-arriving flight from Vienna bringing in Anders Klason, head of the EC's new racial equality unit. Klason was scheduled to give the opening address, so the day's programme couldn't start without him.

Blanche Duvalier watched Klason settle down at his place in the horseshoe of the Salle Bertrand at the Commission headquarters. His bearing, his bright blue eyes and golden skin made him a godlike figure. A Nordic Adonis. If the opportunity arose she had every intention
of adding him to her list of lovers. This morning however there seemed to be something wrong with him. He was frowning a lot, as if trying to catch up with himself. Unsettled by the delayed flight, she decided. She would give him a moment to compose himself.

It was an important meeting this morning. The European Union faced a punishing influx of refugees from the war-torn Balkans and the bankrupt states of Eastern Europe. And matters were worsening, with experts predicting a catastrophe in Kosovo. The vast majority of European citizens had been tolerant of the new arrivals in their midst, but there'd been demonstrations of intense xenophobia by fascist groups in several member states, culminating in the violence of last weekend. Blacks, Asians and Jews had also been subject to renewed hostility in many parts of the continent. What the meeting today needed to achieve was a strategy for dealing with the issue, so that ministers could discuss it at their next council session in three weeks' time.

Blanche Duvalier looked around her. A pleasantly spacious conference room with glass panels at the far end behind which the linguists sat, ready for their gruelling stint of simultaneous translation. There were twenty-six delegates seated at the horseshoe, most of them appointed by member governments, many of them academics well used to theorising and pontificating, a good half of them with an excessive fondness for their own voices. Her task would be to keep them ruthlessly to the point. If she didn't, then the chances of anything useful coming out of the two-day session were remote.

Thank God they had Klason here to kick things off, she thought. Anders was one of the most down-to-earth men she'd ever met.

Anders Klason, however, felt very peculiar this morning. It had started when he woke up. For a few moments
he hadn't known where he was, even though it was his own bed with Nina's warm nakedness beside him. At first he hadn't been able to remember what it was he had to do today. Then, later, on the journey to the airport, he found he couldn't remember which airline he was flying with and had needed to look at his ticket. Other things had stayed perfectly clear in his head. The speech he was to give, and the fact that by making this journey to Brussels he was avoiding one of his mother-in-law's visits. But there were gaps. As if someone had bored holes in his memory.