Echo of the Reich

27

24 July 2012

Bronson removed the battery from the mobile phone, placed the components in the Hyundai’s glovebox, then started the car and drove out of the service area and back onto route 13, heading south.

As he pulled out into the light early-morning traffic, he glanced frequently in his rearview mirror. And what he saw confirmed his suspicions. He’d only just cleared the end of the slip road when he noticed two marked police cars heading south toward him, and traveling very quickly. A short distance behind them, a Mercedes van was matching their speed. As he watched, the two police cars slowed and turned into the service area, disappearing from view. The Mercedes van continued along the autobahn, slowing all the time, and then turned right onto the end of the slip road, partially blocking it.

It could, of course, have been some kind of exercise, or a mere coincidence that the German police had arrived in force at a location he had just left, but Bronson didn’t believe in coincidences. He was now certain that his mobile phone was being tracked. If he’d spent just two more minutes on his call to Angela, he knew he’d now be in custody and awaiting extradition back to England to face whatever charges Detective Inspector Davidson thought he could make stick.

The phone would have to go, obviously, but he would still need to be able to contact Angela, and using public pay phones simply wouldn’t work. He needed another mobile phone. And, just as important, so did she, because the only way the Metropolitan Police could possibly have worked out that he was using this particular mobile was if they’d placed a watch on Angela’s home, office and mobile numbers.

He would have to risk one final call to her from that phone.

The next exit from the autobahn was the Gro? Koris junction. Bronson took the slip road and then turned east toward Klein Koris. As soon as he found somewhere to park safely beside the road, he stopped the car, reassembled the mobile phone, and called Angela’s mobile. She answered almost immediately.

“It’s me again,” Bronson said. “This is important, so just listen and please don’t interrupt. My phone’s being tracked by the police here, and they must have discovered the number by monitoring my calls to you. I’m getting a new phone this morning, and I want you to do the same. Just buy an ordinary pay-as-you-go mobile for cash and load the SIM card with as much credit as it’ll take, but at least twenty pounds. Keep your present mobile with you, and I’ll text you the number of my new phone as soon as I’ve got it.”

“If you do that, won’t the police also know your number?” Angela protested. “And you’re in even more trouble now, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m at about the same depth as usual, I suppose. And sending a text should be safe. I’ll explain why later. Now, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you this evening.”

Bronson again removed the battery from the phone and drove on. He hoped he was right about a text message being safe. It was one thing for the Metropolitan Police to ask a mobile phone company to locate the position of a particular handset by checking which radio masts the unit was in contact with, or even to obtain a listing of the calls made and received by that mobile, but it was quite another to monitor the calls and messages themselves. That needed warrants or court orders, and Bronson doubted if Davidson had enough evidence to convince anybody that he needed to be able to listen to what Angela Lewis, a respected ceramics conservator working for the British Museum, a lady who had never been given so much as a parking ticket in her life, was saying, or what her texts comprised.

And unless they had obtained a warrant to record her calls, there was no way they’d be able to track him once he’d ditched his original mobile. After that, their conversations would just be from one unregistered mobile in London to another unregistered mobile near Berlin.

That thought gave him some comfort as he continued east toward Klein Koris. All he had to do now was find somewhere to buy a new phone.

In fact, that didn’t prove too difficult. When he reached the town, he easily found a parking place in a side street, locked the car and walked the short distance to the main shopping area. At the end of a short parade of shops, he found the kind of retail establishment that would be instantly familiar to any British shopper: smart and glitzy, staffed by bright young things, and with examples of all the latest handsets mounted in racks on the walls.

Bronson had no interest in the number of texts he could send at no charge, or the length of time he could spend pointlessly surfing the Internet on a phone with a screen the size of a large postage stamp. All he wanted was the cheapest pay-as-you-go phone the shop had to offer. And eventually, after a good deal of gesticulating, pointing and miming, and even trying out a bit of his French on the assistant, Bronson got what he wanted: a cheap phone with a mains charger and a SIM card in a colorful box, plus the largest amount of credit the unit would accept, all of which he paid for in cash.

He returned to the car, opened the box and checked the phone. All the instructions were in German, obviously, but mobile phones aren’t complicated to use, and he didn’t expect to have any trouble getting it to work, especially after he went into the menu system and changed the display language to English.

The owner of the Hyundai had helpfully left a universal phone charger in the glovebox, perhaps because he used several different phones for different purposes-a common trick employed by drug dealers-and Bronson quickly found the correct adapter for his new unit. He plugged the other end of the charging lead into the cigarette lighter socket, and left the phone switched on. Now he needed to send the text to Angela, and then lose the old unit.

He checked the map book. He still believed that the house he’d been taken to lay somewhere to the southeast of Berlin, but he guessed he was too far south. The fastest way to drive to the north would be along the autobahn he’d recently left, but he was reluctant to do that just in case there were any checks or roadblocks on it. He much preferred the freedom of choice and multiplicity of routes offered by the normal roads.

Bronson started the car again and drove straight through Klein Koris to the T-junction with route 179, where he turned left. About five miles north of the junction, he found a convenient turnout and pulled in. He reinserted the battery in his old mobile phone and switched it on.

He’d just entered the phone number of his new mobile when a thought struck him: there was something, something important, that he hadn’t asked Angela to do. After the mobile number he quickly added a few

sentences: REMOVE BATTERY FROM NEW PHONE WHEN IN OR NEAR OFFICE OR FLAT. PHONE CAN BE TRACED IF BATTERY ATTACHED. ONLY SWITCH ON WHEN ABOUT TO CALL ME. ONLY CALL ME FROM CAFE OR RESTAURANT OR OTHER CROWDED LOCATION. UNDERSTAND?

He left the phone switched on for a couple of minutes while he worked out the route he was going to follow, just in case Angela replied quickly. And she did, just before Bronson was going to start the engine and drive away. Her message was just as abrupt and terse as his had been. I GET IT, she’d sent. Bronson grinned, pulled out the phone’s battery, and drove away.

Near Korbiskrug he pulled into a garage to fill the car’s fuel tank, and buy some snacks and a couple of cans of drink. While he was in the garage, he looked at some of the other items on display, and in what looked like a “special offer” section-which was probably stuff the owner was desperate to get rid of-he found exactly what he wanted. And it was cheap, too.

A mile or so further up the road he pulled into a large turnout to eat his scratch lunch before starting his search for the house in earnest. There were three other vehicles parked in the turnout, two cars and a pickup truck with an open flat-bed rear, full of bits of furniture and other stuff. Bronson pulled his car to a stop a few yards away from it, and looked at it thoughtfully, a simple plan forming in his mind.

He reached over and opened the glovebox, put the battery back in his old mobile and turned on the unit. The driver of the pickup truck was sitting in the vehicle, eating a large sandwich and chatting to his passenger. The sound of country-and-western music was faintly audible through the truck’s open windows, and neither of them seemed to be paying too much attention to their surroundings.

There were various bits of rubbish littering the floor of the Hyundai, and a bin a few feet in front of the truck-to Bronson this seemed like a good opportunity for a bit of housekeeping. He picked up most of the rubbish, got out of the car and made his way past the vehicle, watching the truck’s side mirror carefully. When he was sure that the passenger was looking away from him, at the driver, he quickly tucked the phone into the back of the pickup, sliding it under a piece of tarpaulin and out of sight. Then he strode across to the bin, dumped everything in it, and retraced his steps.

About five minutes later, the truck’s engine started, and the vehicle moved away, pausing for a second or two beside the bin so that the passenger could dispose of the remains of the early lunch the two men had been eating. Bronson watched it drive out of the turnout and cross the carriageway before accelerating away down the road, heading south.

A few minutes later Bronson finished his own lunch, started the car and drove out of the turnout, heading north toward Konigs Wusterhausen. When he reached the town, his satnav guided him faultlessly through the center and steered him north, across the Berliner Ring on the L30, which would take him along the southeast bank of the V-shaped Gro?er Zug lake.

He’d studied the map and identified a couple of places that could be close to Marcus’s house. The first of these was a small town named Wernsdorf, which, according to the map, did have a main road running through it that followed an S-shaped path, and two roads that crossed straight and narrow stretches of water. One of these was the river, which joined two larger bodies of water, the Krossinsee and the Wernsdorfer See, and the other was the Oder-Spree-Kanal. And the final clincher was that Wernsdorf itself lay very close to both the river and the canal. In fact, it was on the banks of both and, as far as Bronson could see, that town was the best match to what he had seen from the back of the BMW as he was driven away from the house.

But when, about ten minutes after he crossed the Berliner Ring, he entered Wernsdorf, nothing that he saw seemed in any way familiar. He drove slowly through the town, and in the center continued along the L30, which swung right onto the Dorfstra?e, heading for the bridge over the canal. If Wernsdorf was the town he’d been driven through, that had to be the road he’d been on, because of his recollection of the way the main road had turned in the town center.

Bronson knew for certain that he was in the wrong place when he drove across the bridge over the canal. The waterway was a lot wider than he remembered, but, more important, the structure and design of the bridge was entirely different from the picture he was carrying inside his head.

The second place he’d identified as a possible location lay due east of Wernsdorf, a small town named Spreenhagen. A short distance north of the bridge over the canal, Bronson eased the Hyundai in to the side of the road and reprogrammed the satnav. Spreenhagen was only about twenty miles away, and he didn’t think it would take him much longer than three-quarters of an hour to get there.

His rough estimate was fairly accurate, though as he got nearer the town, Bronson was concentrating only on what he could see through the windscreen. The L23 ran through the village of Latzwall and then straightened up as it approached Spreenhagen, and as soon as he saw the road junction at the end of the straight, a flood of recognition washed over him.

He hadn’t been driven down the stretch of road he was on at that moment, but he was certain that the junction with the minor road on his left was where the BMW had emerged. As he passed the junction, he caught a glimpse of the small collection of buildings that he remembered seeing the previous evening. And as he steered the car around a gentle curve at the end of the straight, Bronson saw, on the left-hand side of the road, the sign that he had spotted in yesterday’s twilight. Now, in full daylight, he could see quite clearly that it didn’t read Kauptstra?e, as he’d thought, but Hauptstra?e. He was definitely in the right place.

Now he knew he’d be able to find the house. What he still wasn’t entirely sure about was what he should do when he did so.