He headed past the Rathaus, onto Lange Strasse, towards the heart of Rostock.
He was not certain.
The former Feldwebel, the taxi driver, eased the vehicle into gear. The hair was correct, but there were many with hair that colour in the city. He thought the height was near to correct, but it was an average height for a young woman. He had been told that the target woman was of slight build, but she wore a heavy sweater, he could see the neck of it and a quilted anorak, and he did not know whether she was slight or heavy.
He passed her, idling in the road, drove by her and then stopped so that he could see her in his mirror. In former times, when Ulf Fischer had served as a Feidwebel at the headquarters on August-Bebel Strasse he had not been required to make a decision, to act on initiative. As a taxi driver he did not make decisions, went where he was told to go. The Hauptman would be on the far side of the city, on the slip-road. He was nervous of alerting the Hauptmnn and being wrong. He rang Hoffmann on the mobile phone.
She came past him, but her head was turned away. He thought she walked towards the Hauptbahnhof.
The second secretary (consular), each week and alternating between their Moscow embassy offices, met the cultural attache for lunch. It was a source of some small annoyance to the London man from the Service that the Washington man from the Agency had the resources to serve up the better meal.
‘This Krause guy, the one your lady soldier rolled over, they’ve gotten into heavy excitement about him back home.’
‘Soon be there, the warrior wearing his wounds.’
‘They’ve moved the auditorium for him, at the Pentagon. He’s going where they can fit another fifty seats.’
The annoyance, to the Briton, was that the American was provided with quality equipment for his kitchenette – gas rings, a microwave and a fridge-freezer large enough to store half an ox, a coffee-bean grinder and a percolator. The room at the American embassy where they lunched was metal-walled, sheet steel plate on the windows, secure against electronic audio surveillance.
‘The man of the moment, the good Colonel Rykov… I can tell you, Brad, there’s a monumental inquest back home. Heads will roll for what happened to Krause. Is it right that the Germans are going over the pond mob- handed? It’s what I heard.’
‘Chipping away at the cement of the special relationship, David. What I hear, at Langley there’s a powerful number enrolling for German classes – hey, David, that’s intended as a joke. These days, for all the kids, the clerks, who go jogging in the lunch hour, Elgar is strictly dated, they’ve all put Beethoven tapes in their Walkpersons. OK, so that’s not funny, but can I hint to you, prickly Brit, that the special relationship still lives?’
‘I feed from the floor under your table.’
It was usual for them to share at their weekly lunches. Half an hour later, the Briton was on his way back to his embassy and formulating in his mind the text of the message that would go in cypher to Vauxhall Bridge Cross. Colonel Rykov, through his minister, had kicked with accuracy the testicles of the ‘reconstructed’ KGB, which was a dangerous old game, a game where the kicker might incur a serious hurt. It would go as a priority signal.
‘I think you did well, Fischer.’
‘I was not certain. I didn’t wish to waste the time of the Han ptrnan.’
They stood beside a cafe, closed for the winter. The sun had gone. The sleet came in the wind from the low cloud merged with the sea and whipped the beach. Hoffmann held his hand flat above his eyes to keep it from his face, to see better. She was a small grey figure holding bright flowers and she sat on the dull sand near the water line.
‘I think the Han ptman will be pleased with you, Fischer.’
‘Thank you.’ Ulf Fischer flushed with pride. She sat alone on the beach. Hoffmann made the call to Krause on the slip-road. Hoffmann had met him at the Hauptbahnhof, they had tried to track the train on the S-Bahn line north from the city to Warnemunde, had been held at red traffic lights behind a police van. They had seen her, for a few seconds, at a distance, near to the Hotel Neptun, had lost her because they could not park the car, found her again. The flowers moved, bobbed, carried by the faint figure as she pushed herself up from the dull sand. She was against the sea and the cloud and the sleet. She walked slowly on the beach, meandered, towards them, towards the breakwater over which the waves burst.
He used to tell his wife, when he came home in the evening from August-Bebel Strasse, each time that the Hauptman praised him.
He had the route, not the direct way, down the E22, the main road, through Bad Doberan and Kropelin. On the map he had marked the minor roads through the villages skirting the two towns and then coming to Rerik from the south, using Neubukow as the crossing point over the E22. Slower roads and a greater distance, but safe. Painstakingly, using a sliver of rolled paper, he measured the distance on the minor roads, so that he would know how long the journey would take. It had to be thought through. It was important to know the detail. He had telephoned for a hire car, using the trade directory, not a company from the centre but a small business in the Sudstadt, and he would pay extra and the car would be delivered to the pension.
When he was finished, Josh folded away the map and went methodically through his room, through the pockets of his clothes, through his bag. He left nothing that identified him. With his nail scissors from the wash-bag he cut out the label tabs in English on every item that would be left in the room. He satisfied himself. When he brought her back he would do the same in her room, bully her into allowing him to destroy her identity. His telephone rang, his hire car was downstairs. He checked the money in his wallet. It was later than he had hoped to be. She would have longer to walk on her beach and her breakwater.
The breakwater ran two hundred metres into the sea.
The base of it was huge quarried rocks, some as big as a saloon car, cut rough and jagged edged. To the west was the sand beach, scattered with debris seaweed, ice and snow packed solid at the tideline. To the east was the channel for the fishing boats of Warnemunde, and the river passage running the few kilometres to Rostock and the shipyards.
More snow, more ice had gathered in the rocks of the breakwater. It would melt in the next month, but the bitter Baltic wind and the harsh frost nights would keep it in place for the next few weeks.
There was a concrete walkway on top of the rocks and a single strand of metal tubing made a barrier to save the unwary from being blown by the gale, or slipping on the ice, and falling onto the rocks, onto the snow and ice, into the pounding sea that smashed on the breakwater.
At the end was a squat lighthouse, paint peeled by the force of the winter’s sea spray, daubed with the names of the summer’s tourists. There was no fence around the base of the lighthouse, only a low wall less than half a metre in height. Below it the rocks fell sheer to the foaming motion of the water.
The sleet in the wind had driven visitors from the breakwater. Years ago, before the day of ‘reassociation’, before the day that the crowd had pushed and elbowed their way into the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse, there had always been people standing on the breakwater, whatever the weather, huddled close to the curved wall of the lighthouse, to watch the big ferries sail for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and to dream.
The low cloud, carrying the stinging sleet, made a short, grey horizon.
The breakwater and the base of the lighthouse were deserted, empty, but for one small splash of colour.
They stood at the south end of the breakwater, bent forward against the wind. They narrowed their eyes against the driven sleet.
Fischer said, ‘We should wait for him, we should not take action until he is here.’
Peters jabbed a finger into the taxi driver’s arm. ‘We don’t wait for Krause – you guarantee me a better place and a better time, do you? Can you?’
The year after the anti-Fascist barrier had come down, in the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Gunther Peters had been given advice by an old man with a weathered walnut face. Never, in a matter of importance, hesitate in the taking of action. He had accepted the advice, and the proof was in his wealth held in numbered accounts in Lichtenstein and in the British-administered Channel Islands, in Gibraltar, in the investment companies based on the Caymans, and none of that wealth was flaunted. He moved money for the Sicilians. He moved cars, stolen in Germany, for the Russians and the Ukrainians. He moved weapons, bought at a knock-down price in Russia, for the Chechens, the Kurds and the Palestinians. He forswore a top-of-the-range car, gold necklaces and gold bracelets, a penthouse apartment in one of the new blocks in Leipzig, following more of the advice of the man from Agrigento. It