Tom Clancy Red Winter, page 26
“Maybe,” Ryan said, in the understatement of the year. “But as my colleague has explained, we need to establish your bona fides.”
“Listen to me,” Pfeiffer said. “I speak with you at great risk to my own life. If we are caught, my people will put you in prison. Yes, there would be no small amount of torture, but we accept that when we undertake this line of work. Do we not? Perhaps a few of your bones will be broken, a tooth or two damaged, but in the end, the DDR would trade you back to your government for someone . . . something we need. I would be a different story altogether. I, too, would be tortured, even more brutally than you, for you see, we save our best for our own when they go astray. Your torture will be a means to extract information, but mine will focus on inflicting as much pain as possible for as long as possible. They must demonstrate to others in my position the dangers of betraying one’s country. So yes, I am who I say I am—a dead man walking, if you decide not to help me.”
* * *
—
In the apartment next door, Elke Hauptman pressed a six-inch section of plastic pipe between the common wall and her ear. It worked well to focus the sound, better than the water glass people always used in the movies. Her mouth hung open in shock. She’d known Pfeiffer was here to meet someone, but she’d assumed it was a woman. He was a predator, a sociopathic bastard who fed on the misery of the women he forced to sleep with him. But never in her wildest dreams had she imagined him to be a traitor.
The possibilities that had suddenly been placed in front of her were enormous.
This. Changed. Everything.
The words were muffled, but East German walls were notoriously thin, and Elke heard enough to know that treason was unfolding mere inches away from her. She smiled, forcing herself to keep from jumping up and down. Pfeiffer had intruded into the most intimate aspects of her home with all manner of sophisticated electronic bugs and cameras—and now she listened to every word he said through a short length of plumbing pressed against the wall.
She froze, suddenly fearful that she might sneeze or make some tiny misstep that would reveal her presence. Surely the pounding of her heart would give her away.
She’d followed Kurt Pfeiffer to put a bullet in his head, but this was better. Oh, the ending would be the same for him, but if Elke played the right cards, she would not have to be the one who pulled the trigger.
That morning, she’d gone to the Stasi headquarters building directly after saying good-bye to Uwe. The poor man had no idea that she had been planning to commit murder for the past week—or that she’d been betraying him with this foul Stasi officer who was now droning on about his importance on the other side of the wall.
Known as the Round Corner from the curvature of its façade, the Berlin headquarters building of the Ministry for State Security, the Sword and Shield for sticking it to the people, was very close in color to the baby-shit-yellow Schwalbe scooter. Pfeiffer’s office was on the second floor, as was his secretary, an attractive woman named Marta Wunch, with strong shoulders and large bosoms she proudly displayed beneath tight cashmere sweaters. She wore long golden locks in braids like the perfect Aryan woman from a Third Reich propaganda poster. Elke had never met her, but Pfeiffer had shown her photographs. He spoke of “his Marta” often, bragging incessantly of her abject devotion.
It was not bad enough that the pig forced Elke to sleep with him, but he took perverse pleasure in bringing up his secretary at every turn, as if it were possible for Elke to be jealous over someone whom she did not want to be with in the first place. Marta does it this way, or Marta is over the moon when I . . . Marta becomes so cross if I miss our date for coffee each and every morning . . .
He would be at his office. Elke was certain of it.
It was almost lunchtime before he finally left the building, alone in his black Lada. He’d made half-hearted attempts to see if anyone was following him—doubling back, going around and around several blocks. Elke would have lost him had she not been on her Schwalbe. The little scooters were everywhere, but hardly noticed by anyone. Threats did not come on two wheels, which surely accounted for why so many of them were run off the road every year. She cut in and out of traffic to keep the Lada in view, careful to keep her distance. He stopped at several shops, all run by women over whom he apparently lorded some kind of control. Elke couldn’t hear the conversations taking place through the shop windows, but she could tell by the look on the women’s faces that they were all in the same predicament as she was.
He’d made other stops, too, one at an abandoned typewriter repair shop. She’d watched him drop off an envelope there, and thought of trying to read it, but she would have lost him.
Elke followed him here just after dark. He parked around the corner, casting a furtive but ineffective glance over each shoulder before grabbing a suit bag and a small insulated cooler from the trunk of his Lada before heading upstairs. It had made perfect sense when she first saw it. Kurt Pfeiffer was driven by three appetites—fine clothes, rich food, and women.
He planned to meet someone. Elke followed him, sprinting up the stairs just in time to see him disappear into the apartment. The entire floor was vacant, under construction. The door to the apartment next to his did not even lock. She’d slipped in and waited, working up the courage to burst through Pfeiffer’s door, savoring the look she would see on his terrified face when he realized she had a gun. She could not have dreamed of a spot more perfect to kill someone . . . And still, as much as she loathed the man, shooting him . . . shooting anyone . . . was not as easy as she’d imagined it would be.
Then the Americans had arrived, and her options grew exponentially. She did not have to use the wretched black revolver to kill anyone. It was so simple. Finally, she could prove her loyalty to the state and convince them to leave her family alone. She would listen carefully and learn where the next meeting was to take place. Then, when they had all gone, she would return to the Round Corner and inform the Stasi of the traitor in their midst and the American spies who’d come to help him.
46
I must tell you,” Pfeiffer said, his top lip quivering. “I had envisioned this as a much happier moment. Tell me, Jack, what must I do to establish my bona fides?”
“You can start with the dead boy on Clayallee,” Foley said. She had far more experience at recruiting assets, and they’d established early on that she would ask the hardball questions, giving Ryan an opportunity to observe. Pfeiffer had made it easy for her to be the “bad cop,” treating her from the moment they’d met as if she were Ryan’s secretary.
The major got a pained look on his face, as if he had a case of indigestion.
“Who?”
“Freddie Heinrich,” Foley said. “The nineteen-year-old punk rocker who you hired to steal Ruby Keller’s purse and create the diversion.”
“Ah, yes, him.” Pfeiffer looked at her, licking his lips like a reptile tasting the air. “That was an unfortunate turn of events. I did not know his name, nor the name of the girl, for that matter. Keller, you say? She was chosen at random because she left your consulate to go to that horrible little café every day for almost a week. I paid the boy five marks to take the purse and drop in my message.”
“And then poisoned him?” Foley prodded.
“Not at all,” Pfeiffer said. If being accused of murder bothered him, he showed no outward sign of it. If anything, he grew calmer. “You know as well as I do that the KGB and agents from my own HVA make a habit of following your diplomats. I believe they were following this Keller girl already. When they saw the mugging, they thought it was a brush-pass and moved to intercept.”
“And the woman who returned the bag?” Ryan asked.
Pfeiffer shrugged and turned to peek around the edge of the heavy canvas tarp tacked to the window. “A Good Samaritan, perhaps? She was a stranger to me. I am just fortunate my message was not intercepted.”
“Indeed,” Ryan said.
He and Foley exchanged looks. Neither of them believed his story. Pfeiffer had silenced the kid to tie up a loose end. The “Good Samaritan” was probably lucky to be alive . . . if she still was.
Foley folded her arms, canting her head to study the man. “All right, Major Pfeiffer. Let us suppose just for a moment that this bullshit story of yours is true. Tell us why.”
Pfeiffer spun away from the window, facing her. “What do you mean, ‘why’?” Ryan couldn’t tell if he was getting nervous or just angry that they weren’t welcoming him in with open arms.
“You had to come to the West to leave your message,” Ryan said. “Why would you run the risk of having us meet you on this side of the wall? Forgive me, Major, but you could have approached anyone. West Berlin is crawling with soldiers and diplomats—”
“And moles,” Pfeiffer said. “I am personally aware of at least one turncoat among you. I naturally assume there are more. My life would be cut short all too quickly if I happened to present myself to the wrong person.”
“This mole,” Ryan asked. “Do you have a name to give us? That would go a long way.”
“In time,” Pfeiffer said. “You do not quite trust me . . . Well, the feeling is mutual, I assure you.”
Ryan looked the major up and down, getting a measure of the man. He carried himself with a haughty confidence, nose up, chin out. His suit looked like something off Savile Row and surely cost more than a Stasi major would make in one month. Ryan’s homicide detective father had taught him early on to pay attention to a man’s footwear—both the type and the way he took care of them.
Pfeiffer’s cap-toe oxfords were polished to a high sheen. Expensive, possibly even bespoke like his suit, but they were far from new. This was a man who put a good many miles on his shoe leather. Not a boss or a desk jockey, he was a worker bee who enjoyed the finer things in life. Stasi majors were likely the same as majors stationed at the Pentagon—field-grade officers getting coffee for a bunch of colonels and generals.
Pfeiffer exhaled quickly through his nose, the verbal equivalent of stomping his foot. “I am here offering you troves of information, intelligence treasures you can only dream of.”
A soft smile spread over Foley’s face, surprisingly demure from the Mary Pat she’d been displaying over the past ten minutes. Pfeiffer was a big fish that needed to be played gently but firmly.
“You and I are in the intelligence business, Major,” she said. “If the situations were reversed and I showed up under exactly these circumstances, with exactly this kind of information, would you take my word for it out of hand?”
He shook his head. “If vital intelligence fell into my lap, I’d be happy to get it.”
“You know as well as we do that there are only a handful of reasons people switch sides. To put it bluntly, our bosses want to know your reasons before they trust you.”
Pfeiffer waved her off like a bothersome fly and addressed Ryan directly. “This information regarding radar cloaking . . . I am talking about invisibility here. Is not that kind of knowledge appealing? It could make your career!”
“I will admit it looks promising,” Ryan said. “But, as my colleague asked, if the shoe were on the other foot, would it be enough for you?”
Pfeiffer’s face screwed into a tight grimace, a pouting child in an expensive suit. “I suppose not . . .”
Both Ryan and Foley were silent, letting Pfeiffer stew. He paced the length of the room twice, peeked through the thin gap between the tarp and the window again, and then turned abruptly with a long sigh, completely resigned.
“There is a story, my dear,” he said. “A joke, really, but it illustrates my point. It seems that Erich Honecker, the general secretary of the DDR, took a trip to Moscow. Khrushchev wined him and dined him and provided a harem of beautiful Russian women to see to his every carnal need.” Pfeiffer eyed Foley with a lascivious grin. When she didn’t respond, he continued.
“At the end of the visit, Khrushchev gifted Honecker a fine new ZiL-4104. Beautiful and glossy black, the limousine was luxurious, fitting, he said, of the leader of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. But when it was time to leave, Honecker found that the shiny ZiL had no motor. He complained, of course, but Khrushchev explained, ‘You do not need a motor when you are only going downhill.’ ”
“So,” Foley said. “You believe East Germany is failing—”
“To use your words, my dear, you, too, are in the intelligence business. How long do you Americans think the DDR can continue as a viable nation? One month? Ten years? Those Soviet bastards have troubles of their own. They have all but abandoned us. Even now, our utopian society is little more than flaking paint and rust. If you had any intelligence apparatus at all, you would see that this country is held together with nothing but coal dust and the tears of Erich Honecker. Not too many years will pass before there will be no DDR left for me to betray. I, and men like me, have at times been forced to take drastic measures to protect and shield the state. As I feel certain you would have under similar circumstances. And what will we have to show for our decades of service when this great experiment ends? We will fade into the shadows—if we are not hunted down for some Nuremberg show trial and hanged for imagined offenses . . . or shot by a vengeful comrade’s bullet who boo-hoos about how badly he has been treated.” His eyes narrowed. “I have seen a good deal of death in my time, Jack and Mary, or whatever your names are. I do not choose to have my brains spattered against a wall because I happened to be good at my job.”
Ryan shot a glance at Foley. Time to add a little pressure—carefully, though; they were still in his backyard. “What is the saying? A police state is not so bad if you’re the state police.”
Pfeiffer raised a brow, eyeing him, dead serious. “Precisely.”
“How do you see this playing out?” Foley asked.
“That is simple,” the major said. “I give you what you’re looking for. You provide me with resettlement and a reasonably comfortable life in the United States. Somewhere warm, if it’s all the same to you. Oh, and I would rather retire. I am too old and set in my ways to stomach any of the vocational retraining I have heard you offer. There will be no need to spirit me out of the DDR as you people are always attempting to do. I am free to travel. I will come to your diplomatic mission on Clayallee and walk in as soon as you can assure my safety. You can fly me out of the country from West Berlin.”
“That could be arranged,” Foley said. “As long as our superiors think your information is valuable enough.”
Pfeiffer fished a bright red pack of cigarettes from his pocket. His movements were precise, choreographed. Ryan and Foley braced, thinking for a moment this might be a signal for anyone watching on hidden cameras to swoop in and arrest them.
He lit a cigarette, then picked a bit of tobacco off his lip and flicked it toward Foley.
“Valuable enough? Who do you think you are talking to? I am a Stasi major. The information I possess would make you piss your panties, my dear.” He took a deep drag off the cigarette and turned to Ryan. “What I have to offer is—”
“Look at me, Major,” Foley snapped, dispensing with the sweetheart act completely. “Not him. We can meet your demands, but you must be vetted.”
As Ryan suspected, they had the stronger hand.
Pfeiffer held the cigarette to one side while he weighed his options. Then he looked directly at Foley and tried to sweeten the pot.
“I will provide you with the name of the mole.”
Foley kept her game face, but Ryan knew this had piqued her interest.
“That would go a long way to prove veracity,” she said. “But, again, we can’t just take you at your word.”
Pfeiffer’s face began to twitch, and he looked like he was about to boil over. “So I am to sit in the DDR and twist in the wind while you stir a hornets’ nest in the West?”
Foley frowned. “I didn’t say that. You could accuse anyone of being a mole and then watch from the sidelines as we devour our young. It is a favorite tactic of the KGB.”
Pfeiffer smoked in silence, the wheels turning in his head.
Ryan extended a hand toward the cigarette, catching the major’s eye and shooting a sidelong glance at Foley, as if to say, Hey, I have to work with this battle-ax.
Pfeiffer took out the pack of Roth-Händles and shook out a cigarette. He put it between his lips next to his own, lit it, and then handed the half-smoked one to Ryan. Ryan pretended to be grateful. A real piece of work, this guy.
“HVA is the part of the Stasi that handles foreign intelligence,” Ryan said. He pushed thoughts of what Cathy would say about him smoking again out of his mind.
“That is correct.” Pfeiffer eyed him as if unsure about where this was going. “You would call HVA our Directorate for Reconnaissance.”
“And what do you run?”
Pfeiffer twitched again. “I . . . Various programs. Many, actually.”
“I see,” Ryan said. “But you are stationed in the DDR, while most HVA agents are overseas.”
“Correct again, or in West Germany. But some must remain here. I oversee Division A, military technology. Even so, I am kept apprised of the names of many operatives and operations. I will be happy to provide them once we have come to an accord. I will tell you now, though, we’ve never had much luck infiltrating institutions in the United States. We tend to leave that to the KGB.” He scoffed and blew a smoke ring. “You have no idea . . .”
“What can you tell us about Nevada?” Ryan asked.
Pfeiffer’s eyes flashed. A smile perked at the corners of his lips, as if he’d won. He calmed himself with a long drag off his cigarette.
“Nevada?”
“Yes.”
Pfeiffer nodded slowly. “Nevada is a very large place.”
“Yes, it is,” Ryan said. “Tell me what you know about HVA there.”
