Close Call

Chapter 12

Hans Anspach of the BfV stifled a yawn as the flight information line on the board at Tegel airport flipped over. Air France 1134 from Paris had landed. Anspach signalled to his colleague, Pieter Dimitz, who was coming back from the terminal’s Starbucks with two cardboard cups of coffee in his hands. ‘You’d better dump those,’ he said.

The junior officer groaned. ‘Don’t tell me the flight’s on time.’

‘Yes. It’s just landed. And I bet our man will be one of the first through. Control has just told me that the French say he has no checked baggage on board.’

Anspach had been halfway home when the call had come, telling him to go to Tegel airport where a French arms dealer called Pigot would land at ten minutes past nine. Anspach and his hastily put together team were to follow Pigot wherever he went and stay with him till they were told to stand down. No reason was given at this stage, though according to the French he was likely to be alert for surveillance.

That probably means they screwed up and he saw them, thought Anspach grumpily. He was missing seeing his son’s school play and he was going to get hell from his wife when he eventually got home.

Sitting inconspicuously in a small interview room just behind the passport control desks, Gunter Beckerman was waiting for a buzzer to alert him that Pigot was at the passport desk. He would send a warning to Anspach’s phone, before following Pigot through Customs and into the Arrivals Hall.

There Anspach and Dimitz were taking up their positions. Dimitz wore a dark blue suit and had now put on a peaked cap. Holding a sign reading Herr Rossbach, he went to stand alongside the waiting chauffeurs next to the exit point from Customs.

Anspach stood further back at a newsstand, idly examining a copy of Der Spiegel. As he turned the pages he kept a deceptively casual eye on everyone emerging into the Hall. He wasn’t relying on Beckerman’s call to tell him the suspect was coming through, for it was perfectly possible that Monsieur Pigot might now have a different name, and a different passport, from those he had used to board in Paris.

His phone vibrated and he glanced down at its screen. Coming now. Brown leather coat, read the message attached to a photograph of a man in a leather coat and roll-neck sweater, carrying a laptop bag on one shoulder.

And then, not thirty seconds later, he spotted him.

Pigot was medium height, broad-shouldered, dressed in the smart casual clothes of a businessman. But, unlike a visiting businessman, he wasn’t carrying a suit bag, only the laptop case hanging from a shoulder strap. He was walking quickly – though not so quickly as to call attention to himself – and heading towards the far exit, under the sign for taxis. Anspach followed, knowing both Dimitz and Beckerman were behind him.

Outside, the sky was pitch-black, but the pavement was eerily illuminated by the series of sodium lights lining the front of the terminal’s façade. Anspach saw his quarry standing in the taxi queue, which was short this late at night. He waited until Dimitz passed him, no longer wearing his peaked chauffeur’s hat. Then both men got into the back of a Mercedes saloon parked by the kerb in which the final member of the team had been sitting in the driver’s seat. He’d prevented vigilant security and parking staff from having it towed away by waving his security pass at them.

From the car they watched Pigot enter a taxi. When it drove off they followed. Beckerman, having joined the taxi queue two behind Pigot, was in another taxi, not far behind. The convoy headed off on Route 11 for the centre of Berlin.

Ten minutes later a message flashed up on Anspach’s phone. ‘Booking in name of Pigot made two days ago at Westin Grand Hotel, Unter den Linden. 3 nights, arriving yesterday. Await further inquiries.’

‘What do they mean, “Await further inquiries”?’ muttered Anspach. ‘How can we await anything? We’re right behind the guy,’ and he tapped furiously on his phone.

Twenty minutes later as they drove, still in convoy, into the centre of Berlin, Anspach’s phone vibrated again. ‘A Madame Pigot checked out of Westin Grand this pm. No forwarding address. No trace so far of any other booking in central hotels in name of Pigot.’

‘Don’t lose that cab,’ said Anspach to the driver. ‘We don’t know where the hell we’re going now.’

‘Well, we’ll be on Unter den Linden in a minute,’ he replied. ‘So perhaps he’s rebooked.’

The lights were bright along the pavements of Unter den Linden, traditionally Berlin’s most glamorous avenue, but the atmosphere was marred by a darkened construction site running all the way down the street’s centre, where work was going on to connect the subway between the former west and east sectors of the city. The beautiful trees were virtually invisible behind the boards and railings; what could be seen of them was covered in white dust that each day’s excavations threw up.

‘If he gets out here and crosses the road we’ll lose him behind the hoardings,’ said Dimitz.

‘It depends if he’s spotted us,’ grunted Anspach.

But the taxi containing Pigot didn’t stop. It drove on at a stately pace down Unter den Linden until it turned off into a small quiet square and drew up in front of the Hotel Schmitzkopf, an ornate six-storey building with little balconies and flower boxes, an oasis of nineteenth-century solidity amid the city’s East German decrepitude and its obsession with new build. This was a hotel designed for comfort rather than style. We have seen it all before, the hotel’s stone façade seemed to say. Fads come and go, but the Hotel Schmitzkopf remains the same.

Warned by a text from Beckerman in his taxi, Anspach and Dimitz had stopped their Mercedes further up Unter den Linden, behind a skip that was half full of broken asphalt. They waited fifteen minutes, then Anspach got out. He turned into the square, climbed the steps to the glass and oak door of the hotel and went into the ground-floor lobby, where at this late hour the soft sofas and chintz-covered armchairs were unoccupied.

At the reception desk a young blonde woman in a smart black suit gave a welcoming smile from behind a large bowl of wrapped sweets. Her face fell slightly when Anspach produced a card identifying him as a government official and asked for the manager.

‘He’s on his break,’ the girl said hesitantly. ‘Do you want me to fetch him for you, sir?’

‘That won’t be necessary. Tell me – a man came in a few minutes ago and checked in. A Herr Pigot, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘No, sir,’ said the girl. ‘That was Herr Pliska. He’s a Polish gentleman. He and his wife are in Room 403. She arrived this afternoon. We have no guest called Pigot and no booking in that name.’

‘Oh,’ said Anspach. Then, after a pause while he absorbed the new information he said, ‘I must have made a mistake. Got the wrong hotel. Please don’t mention to anyone that I was inquiring for Herr Pigot. It’s a matter of national security,’ he added solemnly.

‘Certainly not, sir,’ the girl replied, wide-eyed. ‘Shall I let you know if Herr Pigot turns up?’

‘Please do,’ replied Anspach. ‘Here is a card with a number to ring,’ and he handed her an official-looking card with no name on it and a telephone number that didn’t exist.