The Deceiver

get Morenz to his feet, but it was hopeless. The weight of the man was too much. His legs would not work. He clutched his hands across his chest. There was something bulging under his left arm. McCready let him slump back into the hay. Morenz curled up again. McCready knew he would never get him back to the border near Ellrich, under the wire, and across the minefield. It was over.

Through the crack, across the maize cobs bright in the sun, the green uniforms were swarming over the farms and barns of Ober Grьnstedt. Marionhain would be next.

“I’ve been to see Frдulein Neumann. You remember Frдulein Neumann? She’s nice.”

“Yes, nice. She might know I’m here, but she won’t tell them.”

“Never, Bruno. Never. She said you have your homework for her. She needs to mark it.”

Morenz unbuttoned his raincoat and eased out a fat red manual. Its cover bore a gold hammer and sickle. Morenz’s tie was off and his shirt open. A key hung on a piece of twine around his neck. McCready took the manual.

“I’m thirsty, Sam.”

McCready held out a small silver hip flask that he had taken from his back pocket. Morenz drank the whiskey greedily. McCready looked through the crack. The soldiers had finished with Ober Grьnstedt. Some were coming down the track, while others fanned out through the fields.

“I’m going to stay here, Sam,” said Morenz.

“Yes,” said McCready, “so you are. Good-bye, old friend. Sleep well. No one will ever hurt you again.”

“Never again,” murmured the man, and slept.

McCready was about to rise when he saw the glint of the key against Morenz’s chest. He eased the twine from around his neck, stowed the manual in his totebag, slithered down the ladder, and slipped away into the maize. The ring closed two minutes later. It was midday.

It took him twelve hours to get back to the giant pine tree on the border near Ellrich village. He changed into his smock and waited beneath the trees until half-past three. Then he flashed his pencil light three times toward the white rock across the border and crawled under the wire, through the minefield, and across the plowed strip. Siegfried was waiting for him at the fence.

On the drive back to Goslar, he flicked over the key he had taken from Bruno Morenz. It was made of steel, and engraved on the back were the words Flughafen Kцln. Cologne airport. Sam bade farewell to Kurzlinger and Siegfried after a sustain­ing breakfast and drove southwest instead of north to Hano­ ver.

At one o’clock on that Saturday afternoon, the soldiers made contact with Colonel Voss, who arrived in a staff car with a woman in a civilian suit. They went up the ladder and exam­ined the body in the hay. A thorough search was made, the barn was almost torn apart, but no sign was found of any written material, least of all a thick manual. But then, they did not know what they were looking for anyway.

A soldier pried a small silver flask from the dead man’s hand and passed it to Colonel Voss. He sniffed it and mut­tered, “Cyanide.” Major Vanavskaya took it and turned it over. On the back was written HARRODS, LONDON. She used a very unladylike expression. Although his command of Rus­sian was basic, Colonel Voss thought it sounded like “You Motherfucker.”

At noon on Sunday, McCready entered Cologne airport, well in time for the one o’clock flight. He changed his Hanover-to-London ticket for a Cologne-London one, checked in, and wandered toward the steel luggage lockers to one side of the concourse. He took the steel key and inserted it into locker 47. Inside was a black canvas grip. He withdrew it.

“I think I will take the bag, thank you, Herr McCready.”

He turned. The Deputy Head of the Operations Directorate of the BND was standing ten feet away. Two large gentlemen hovered farther on. One studied his fingernails, the other the ceiling, as if looking for cracks.

“Why, Dr. Herrmann. How nice to see you again. And what brings you to Cologne?”

“The bag ... if you please, Mr. McCready.”

It was handed over. Herrmann passed it to one of his team. He could afford to be genial.

“Come, Mr. McCready, we Germans are a hospitable peo­ple. Let me escort you to your plane. You would not wish to miss it.”

They walked toward passport control.

“A certain colleague of mine ...” suggested Herrmann.

“He will not be coming back, Dr. Herrmann.”

“Ah, poor man. But just as well, perhaps.”

They arrived at passport control. Dr. Herrmann produced a card and flashed it at the immigration officers, and they were ushered through. When the flight boarded, McCready was escorted to the aircraft door.

“Mr. McCready.”

He turned in the doorway. Herrmann smiled at last.

“We also know how to listen to cross-border radio chit­chat. Good journey, Mr. McCready. My regards to London.”

The news came to Langley a week later. General Pankratin had been transferred. In future, he would command a military detention complex of prison camps in Kazakhstan.

Claudia Stuart learned the news from her man in the Mos­cow Embassy. At the time, she was still basking in the plaudits that rained down from on high as the military analysts studied the complete Soviet Order of Battle. She was prepared to be philosophical about her Soviet general. As she remarked to Chris Appleyard in the commissary, “He keeps his skin and his rank. Better than the lead mines of Yakutsia. As for us—well, it’s cheaper than an apartment block in Santa Bar­bara.”

 

The hearing resumed on the following morning, Tuesday. Timothy Edwards remained formal courtesy itself, while pri­vately hoping the entire affair could be wound up with the minimum delay. He, like the two Controllers who flanked him, had work to do.

“Thank you for reminding us of the events of 1985,” he said, “though I feel one might point out that in intelligence terms, that year now constitutes a different and even a van­ished age.”

Denis Gaunt was having none of it. He knew he was entitled to recall any episode he wished from the career of his desk chief in an attempt to persuade the board to recommend to the Chief a variation of decision. He also knew there was scant chance of Timothy Edwards making that recommenda­tion, but it would be a majority choice at the end of the hearing, and it was to the two Controllers that he wished to appeal. He rose and crossed to the clerk from Records to ask him for another file.

Sam McCready was hot and becoming bored. Unlike Gaunt, he knew his chances were as slim as a dipstick. He had insisted on the hearing mainly out of contrariness. He leaned back and allowed his attention to wander. Whatever Denis Gaunt would say, he knew it already.

It had been so long, thirty years, that he had lived in the small world of Century House and the Secret Intelligence Service—just about all his working life. If he was ousted now, he wondered where he would go. He even wondered, not for the first time, how he had gotten into that strange, shadowed world in the first place. Nothing about his working-class birth could ever have predicted that one day he would be a senior officer of the SIS.

He had been born in the spring of 1939, the same year the second World War broke out, the son of a milkman in south London. Only vaguely, in one or two frozen flashback mem­ories, could he recall his father.

As a baby, along with his mother, he had been evacuated from London after the fall of France in 1940, when the Luftwaffe began its long hot summer of raids on the British capital. He remembered none of it. His mother told him later that they had returned in the autumn of 1940 to the small terraced house in poor but neat Norbury Street, but by then his father had gone to the war.

There was a picture of his parents on their wedding day—he remembered that very clearly. She was in