The Deceiver

“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-Wьrttemberg 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 fкtes, 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 Prдsidium.”

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