Samson 05 - Hope, page 18
‘I can only think that someone was keen to prevent the severed hand going to the forensic lab.’
‘Because?’
‘Perhaps they didn’t want us to establish for certain that the hand wasn’t that of George Kosinski.’
‘But they didn’t stop us,’ argued Frank. ‘The hand went to the lab, and we didn’t find out that it wasn’t George Kosinski’s, did we?’
‘The lab said they couldn’t make an identification. The flesh was too soft.’
‘Well then. How does your theory hold together?’
I assume that someone was afraid the lab would say categorically that it wasn’t the hand of George Kosinski.’
‘That’s quite a long leap, Bernard. I mean: we still don’t know for certain that it’s not.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘You mean perhaps it was a double bluff? They give us the hand, then pretend to want it back, because that will make us think it, belongs to George Kosinski?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘Perhaps …’ Frank reached for a wooden pencil, one of a dozen or so he liked to keep in a decorative drinking mug emblazoned with a talking doughnut proclaiming itself lecker locker leicht tasty, spongy and light. He used the pencil to tap a closed dossier on his desk and give emphasis to his words. ‘But I am tempted to believe that this Stasi agent … I visualize him as a sharp and devious fellow, always ready with a bit of double bluff or treble bluff, if that suits him. A Stasi hoodlum … but otherwise a bit like you, Bernard, I suspect. I am tempted to believe that his superior is a blunt old fool like me, incapable of working out in advance the sort of intricate games you youngsters like to play.
‘Yes, Frank.’ This was one of Frank’s favored poses: the blunt, no-nonsense, pipe-smoking Englishman who had no time for knavish foreign tricks. But I knew Frank better than to fall for that. I might have been heard more than once saying that the esteemed prizes he won at University as a Classics scholar did not make him the ideal man to run the Berlin Meld Unit, but I had no doubts about Frank’s agile mind. And this was Berlin: this was Frank’s kingdom, and this was Frank assuming that humble manner that comes naturally to men with extensive and absolute powers.
‘It’s just as well you are here in Berlin, and away from it all, Bernard. Of course you’d rather be with your lovely wife … and your children. But in many ways it’s better that you are here with me. George Kosinski being your family … It’s not fair, not appropriate, that you should be closely involved with this rumpus about him. I’m surprised Dicky didn’t see that.’
‘Is that why you asked for me?’
‘I didn’t ask for you, Bernard,’ said Frank, holding the pencil to his face, scowling as he studied it carefully, as if he’d never encountered one before.
‘You said that feelingly, Frank.’
‘I didn’t ask for you, because I thought London would never let you go. I set my sights rather lower.’ Frank dropped the pencil back amongst its fellows in the doughnut mug, and opened the brown folder he’d been tapping. ‘So you’ve read this?’
‘DELIUS? Yes, it kept me up all night.’
‘Yes, it would,’ said Frank. ‘It’s not pleasant to think that any of our people are in trouble over there. What should we do?’
‘There’s nothing we can do for the time being, Frank. The Stasi are waiting for our reaction. You know their methods far better than I do.’
‘Perhaps.’ He fingered his telephone. ‘But your instincts are often good ones. I want to bring Robin into this.’ He picked up the telephone handset and waved it in the air while he called the extension. ‘The young man who went with you to Magdeburg. I want you to go through your thoughts while he’s here with us.’
‘I hope I’ve not come here to be the resident nursemaid, Frank.’
‘Don’t be a curmudgeon, Bernard. Think of all the people who played nursemaid to you when you were a youngster. We’ve got to mould the people who are coming up.’
‘Very well, Frank. If that’s what you want.’ The lanky kid came in almost immediately, he must have been waiting for Frank’s call. He gave me a smile that revealed his crooked teeth, but his deep polished voice was one hundred percent English upper-class. After we’d shaken hands and confirmed each other’s well-being, he sat, down and I went through what little we knew about the sudden and ominous silence that had descended upon the normally very active DELIUS network operating for us in Allenstein, a small town or more accurately a sprawling village a few miles east of Magdeburg.
‘The very last we heard was on the Friday,’ I said, flicking the folder. ‘And that could have been a garbled routine from some other network. So there has been enough time for the contact string.’
Frank raised a schoolmaster’s eyebrow at Robin.
‘The roll call for survivors,’ said Robin patiently. ‘But we don’t do that from this end any more. These cells are virtually self-contained nowadays.’
‘Out-of-contact signals?’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s none of our business either?’
Frank said, ‘There have been no out-of-contact signals. None at, all. They have closed down. My best radio man will vouch for that.’
The kid said, ‘We just have them send us the reports nowadays. The Stasi interception people are very efficient. The less time spent on the air the better, even with these modem high-speed sets.’
I said, ‘Are we still monitoring the Stasi signals?’
‘Not the Berlin teleprinter any more, alas,’ said Frank. ‘We lost Berlin in the big Stasi shake-up last summer, and so far we’ve made no breakthrough on the new codes.’
‘But nothing on the police radio?’ I said. ‘No general alarm? Not even a suspicious activity alert for the local cops?’
‘Nothing at all,’ said the kid. ‘It may all be a non-starter. You know how these amateur nets blow apart and then come together again. There have been domestic flare-ups before with this group. Two years ago: November.’
‘Amateurs have a role to play,’ said Frank, enduringly paternal and preparing his response to the reprimand from London that almost invariably followed the collapse of a network. ‘Don’t underestimate their skills and effectiveness. Amateurs built the Ark, remember; professionals built the Titanic.’
‘Are they all Church people?’ I asked, after we’d all smiled at Frank’s joke. I knew they weren’t all Church people at least one of them was a declared atheist but I wanted to see what they’d say.
‘No. And two of them are chronically difficult. It’s a small community. The wives don’t all get along and there are the usual feuds and vendettas. It’s only the pastor who holds them together.’
Frank said, ‘You met the pastor.’
‘Yes,’ I said. He’d sheltered me and the kid when we were leaving Magdeburg in a hurry.
‘The funny old man,’ said the kid. ‘The turbulent priest.’
Frank said, ‘Allenstein is critical. If it was BARTOK or one of the networks in the Dresden area, or those troublemakers in Rostock, I might say thank goodness, and let them stew in their own juice. But we pass too many people through Magdeburg. It’s our most reliable line for people coining and going. We need an active setup in Allenstein to nurse them and pass them back if they get into trouble.’
‘Isn’t this a problem London Central should deal with, Frank?’ I said. ‘Any failure in Operations should have the Coordination people watching it to see if it’s part of some bigger pattern.’
‘London won’t wear that, Bernard. I tried that on Monday morning. I went through it all with Operations. But we’re not dealing with Harry Strang any more. Operations are more cautious since Bret Rensselaer has been Deputy D-G. London Ops don’t want to hear: they spend their time trying to dump their problems on us. I tried hard.’
‘I’m sure you did, Frank,’ I said, although I wondered to what extent Frank wanted to let London take control, or whether he only wanted London to know how hard he worked. Berlin’s power and influence had been eroded over the last year or more. I suspected that he needed to ring all the bells about an occasional crisis out there in the DDR sticks if he was to make a convincing case for Berlin Field Unit’s finances next year.
After I’d taken rather too long in offering any comment, Frank said, ‘You know how things work over there at ground level. What’s the prognosis, Bernard?’
‘I went right back through the three years of DELIUS files.’
‘Did you? When?’
‘This morning.’
‘Oh,’ said Frank, as if I’d taken unfair advantage of him. Frank never checked back through old files. The Me clerks in the Berlin Registry wouldn’t have recognized Frank had he ever knocked on their door.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘DELIUS has had a lot of arguments and splits and reassembling. I don’t like that. Every time a network regroups, more and more people get to see each other. It’s the sort of risk the Stasi are good at provoking and exploiting.’
‘They are amateurs,’ said the kid. ‘We can’t treat them as if they were trained and experienced professionals.’
‘Well that’s how the Stasi treat them,’ I said.
‘Someone will have to go and sort it out,’ said the kid, obviously seeing himself as the right one to do it.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Frank hurriedly. Then added, ‘Unless that’s what Bernard thinks.’
‘Let’s leave it for a few more days,’ I said.
‘I thought you would want to get in there immediately, Mr. Samson,’ said the kid.
‘Why?’
He looked at Frank before saying to me, ‘The Romeo Effect.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’ Trust the kid to pluck that old joker out of the deck.
‘What is the Romeo Effect?’ Frank asked.
The kid said, ‘Mr. Samson once said that when a network is penetrated, there is a danger that it will simply destroy itself without outside action. Romeo effect. Kill itself in despair, the way that Juliet did when she awoke from drugged sleep to find that Romeo was dead.’
‘Too poetic for me,’ said Frank.
‘Destroy the network in a panic,’ explained the kid, giving me a self-conscious glance. ‘Eliminate the codes and all traces. Split and destroy the network so that not a trace of any evidence remains.’
‘Oh,’ said Frank, touching the end of his nose with a pencil. ‘I thought it was Juliet who killed herself first.’
‘It wasn’t my theory,’ I said. ‘It’s a KGB theory and they named it. The Soviets lost two important networks in Washington in the Fifties. The Moscow inquiry afterwards lasted six months, and finally produced a report that said that neither network had been truly penetrated.’
‘And had they?’ Frank asked.
‘Sort of. One net had been under observation for a long time. A new man arrived in town. The FBI banged on his door and found a list of contacts. He claimed diplomatic immunity and they gave him his list back and apologized. But the other one might have gone on forever. Husband and wife, both working in the Pentagon, feeding torn but not shredded photocopies out through a clerk who had the job of disposing of top-secret waste paper. The wife had her handbag stolen; the thief found papers marked secret inside and told the cops. Nothing much more than that would have happened, but once inside the police station the husband panicked and confessed the whole works.’
‘The Romeo Effect,’ said Frank reflectively. ‘What a name to give it. I’ll never fathom the Russians.’
‘I mentioned it in a lecture at the training school,’ I explained. ‘Years ago. The real lecturer hadn’t turned up. I filled in at short notice.’
‘Six more working days before we act,’ said Frank, closing the cardboard folder and pressing upon it with his flattened hand like a man testifying on oath.
‘All days are working days in the field,’ I said.
Frank gave me the sort of smug and distant smile used by VIPs inspecting guards of honor. ‘We’ll probably hear from them tomorrow,’ he announced in a cheerful clubby voice. ‘I remember this time two years back. Christmas. Those people in Zwickau went off the air for ten days, and then blandly explained that they had had trouble with their batteries.’ He gave an avuncular chuckle to show that he bore them no ill will.
‘But they were wiped out the following year,’ I reminded him. ‘Six months later the Stasi went in and picked them off one by one, like ripe cherries. I’ve always wondered if that six-month period was the Stasi waiting a decent interval while their own inside man got clear.’
‘No,’ said Frank, who preferred not to give the enemy the benefit of the doubt. ‘We looked into it. A review board spent six weeks on it. There was no penetration of that network. The batteries fiasco wasn’t a cause, but it should have been a warning to us at this end. It should have reminded us that ill-disciplined networks are vulnerable. It’s always been that way. Look at France in nineteen forty-four.’
Keen to avoid Frank’s account of what intricacies of ill-discipline afflicted the French networks in 1944, I said, ‘Don’t let’s say six days; or specify any period of time, Frank. Let me keep my ear to the ground and report back to you.’
‘I’m away for a few days in London,’ said Frank. ‘I’m catching the seven o’clock flight. Another of those Estimates Committees. I have to be there, or the others will gang up to persuade the old man to give Hong Kong, or some other godforsaken outpost, the money Berlin needs.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you want a record of this meeting?’
‘We’d better have something on the file,’ said Frank. ‘Something that will make it clear that we earn our pay,’ he added, in case his reference to the Estimates Committee hadn’t alerted us to the fact that all our jobs were in constant jeopardy unless we not only did our work but recorded it in triplicate.
I stood up, but the kid remained sitting in his chair and flipping through thick files of paperwork he’d brought with him. It was not until Frank said ‘Look at the time’ to politely indicate that his presence was no longer required that he suddenly slammed his papers together and remembered unfinished work downstairs and departed.
‘Robin is a good lad,’ said Frank.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You heard that Dicky Cruyer is giving a dinner at Claridge’s? To celebrate the official commendation he got for the shooting … the severed hand and all that.’ Frank looked at me quizzically. ‘The old man is attending, so is Bret. I’m surprised that you’re not going too, Bernard.’
‘I thought it was better to get here and report to you,’ I said. In fact, joining the fawning admirers at Dicky’s celebration had not appealed to me greatly.
Perhaps Frank read my thoughts. ‘Give Dicky credit for fast thinking, Bernard. He recognized the Stasi man, retrieved the severed hand and shot the fellow carrying it. Mind you, he admits to feeling nervous until he’d phoned Berne and confirmed his identification.’
‘Dicky has always been very fast-thinking,’ I said. ‘I’ve never denied it.’
‘A commendation will do wonders for Dicky,’ said Frank. ‘It will probably be enough to get him confirmed as Europe supremo. And the word is that this Stasi fellow Dicky shot is the sniper they used to kill that defector in the safe house.’
‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ I said.
‘VERDI, the rufflan you and Werner Volkmann took to the Notting Hill safe house.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Special Branch appointed an investigation team for it. They’re now saying it was the same man; but no solid evidence as yet. I can’t think why you and Werner took that VERDI chap to Notting Hill. Isn’t that safe house known to every Stasi and KGB man in Europe?’
‘It is now,’ I said.
‘And the Fletcher House annex job was very nearly successful for them wasn’t it? Nothing to suggest to you that that was a Stasi operation? You’re the one who wrote the book.’
‘They used a black getaway car,’ I said blandly.
Frank laughed. ‘They used a black car, did they?’ There was a long-standing belief in the Berlin office that the hoodlums we faced would always choose a black car. The official cars used by the Eastern Bloc Party officials, the top cops and the security generals were invariably black. ‘Me lesser lights the heavies and the hit men let loose in the West could seldom resist adopting this status symbol. ‘And you are feeling well?’ he asked.
‘Do I look ill?’
‘I would have thought you’d have been raring to go and sort out the DELIUS problem. In the old days you never passed up a chance to chase around over there.’
‘I was younger then. And even more foolish.’
Frank looked at me and nodded. ‘You’ll be in charge here for the next few days, but I’m not far away. Don’t do anything without we discuss it.’
‘On the matter of the DELIUS net?’
‘In the matter of anything.’ He got to his feet and looked at his appointment book. The page was blank, as the pages of Frank’s appointment book so often were.
‘No, sure.’
He fixed me with his clear and piercing gray eyes and said, ‘The last thing I need is a débâcle here now. I’m too old for it.’ I knew what he meant. Berlin was to the Department what Las Vegas was to the glittering stars of showbiz: a perfect showcase for a brilliant youngster, but a burial ground for has-beens. But where did that leave me? I was too old to be a promising youngster but still too young to be a has-been. Too old to seek employment elsewhere, and that was the bitter truth of it. I could see that verdict in Frank’s eyes too as he looked at me and added, ‘But we both have to make the best of things, Bernard.’
‘Yes, Frank.’
He took my arm: ‘ “T’is not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.” Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene Two. We did it at my prep school for half-term; I played the apothecary.’
‘The apothecary,’ I said. ‘What perfect casting, Frank.’
As soon as Frank had departed for his plane, I exercised my newfound authority as Deputy Director of the Berlin Field Unit. I took a set of false identity papers from the safe and went across to the car pool and signed out a big BMW motorcycle. Once through the checkpoint as a West German national I left the motorcycle in the East, in a lock-up garage in Prenzlauerberg. From there I took instead a noisy little Trabant motorcar that was kept fueled and ready for such purposes. From a hiding place in the garage I picked up a suitcase containing a new lot of identity papers and I changed into a baggy suit of the cut that made citizens of the DDR instantly recognizable. Skirting the city I drove westwards, the Trabant’s two-stroke engine running smoothly, as such engines did in the cold weather. There was very little traffic on the road. At one time the East German army and the Soviet garrison forces had always made their military redeployments after dark, but nowadays there were far fewer tactical military movements. Soviet troops, and East German units too, were being kept out of sight. There were few signs of individual soldiers either. Their pay constantly in arrears, they found it cheaper to get drunk in their camps and barracks. The only military vehicles I passed were three eight-wheel armored personnel carriers, their hatches closed down, and bearing the markings of some northern factory militia. They were rattling along at high speed, manned by workers ordered away from their benches for their regular two weeks of winter exercises.
