Johnny stood outside the station entrance and looked across the square towards the International Hotel. He was early and his return ticket to Wernigerode was already in his pocket. Otto Guttmann would be late, because he was on holiday and he would be coming in a hurry and probably in an ill temper, and the girl would be fretting. And they would be confused and Johnny would be calm. That was the way it must be, for every hour and every minute that stretched before him in Magdeburg.
Johnny, with the reins tight in his fists.
Now 8.30 and the workers were scurrying for their offices and shops, for their desks and their cash counters and their construction sites. The slogan in front of him, 12 feet off the ground and 30 feet long, read 'DDR
30 — Werk des Volkes fur das Wahl des Volkes!' Impossible to know how many believed in the collective exhortations for greater striving and effort, impossible for Johnny to gauge how many of those brushing and bustling past him believed in the doctrine of 'the work of the people for the welfare of the people'. Don't they have any selfish buggers here? Just a myth, or is there really a Utopia that confronts capitalism?… They wore pressed and laundered clothes and dulled tired faces.
The presence of the Red Army at the station emphasised for Johnny the width of the bridge that he had crossed at Obeisfelde. Send them into apoplexy, wouldn't it? Johnny Donoghue, former holder of the Queen's Commission, former officer of the British Army Intelligence Corps, currently under contract to the Secret Intelligence Service, standing on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof of Magdeburg and running his mental check over their units and dispositions. Have a heart attack, wouldn't he, the Soviet military security commandant for the city? He saw the long serving men with their wide caps far back on their heads and badges of rank on their shoulders and their baggy trousers and floppy blouses. He saw the new recruits, some with the Asian tan and the narrow eyes of the far eastern territories and whose uniforms were poor fitting and whose boots were polished.
The Russians seemed to Johnny to dominate the station with their manpower and their transport. But this was what he had been told he would see, because this was a command area and Pierce had dinned that into his memory. Johnny saw the civilians thread and weave between the foreign troops, watched them ignore each other. Quit the rubbernecking, Johnny, that's the way you're noticed, that's the way the questions get asked. He walked away, turned his back on the military movement.
It was as he had thought it would be.
Otto Guttmann trailing his daughter. They came past him, Erica leading by two strides and heading straight for the ticket counter and leaving her father to rummage in his pocket for coins for a newspaper.
She would feel the burden of him, wouldn't she? Too fine a girl in her looks and bearing, as she stood in line in haughty impatience for the tickets, to be anchored to an old man. He wondered how they paced their evenings, what common ground they found for conversation. He swatted the mood away and set off in a leisured pursuit down the passageway to the platforms.
Across the track a troop train was loading. Children and wives, prams and parcels being stowed up the high steps and into the carriages. Men of the Soviet Military Police and the local Schutzpolizei overseeing.
Johnny the interloper. The families of a Signals Regiment returning to the Ukraine.
The loudspeakers blared the warning of the arrival of the train for Wernigerode.
Erica had her arm at her father's elbow. Johnny stood close and saw their heads merge as the girl whispered in her parent's ear. She laughed and he smiled, their crisis of departure was overcome. The train pulled into the platform and Johnny watched them climb on board and then walked to the next carriage.
He felt in his pocket for the envelope that contained the photographs, was reassured by the reminder of their presence and settled in a seat.
Sir Charles Spottiswoode drove fast along the A3 to London. The Volvo had brought him many column inches of comment and publicity in the national media after his well-docu- mented claim that the British motor industry produced vehicles of such poor workmanship that he, a patriot, had been forced to take delivery of a foreign produced motor. The Member for Guildford rejoiced in the brickbats that had been hurled at him, revelled in the abuse heaped at his doorstep.
But those who saw him as little more than an amusing by- product of public life had misread their man. The aggression and bitterness that haunted him were cultured in privacy. When he bit, he bit deep. He was not ignored.
The Prime Minister was seeing him that evening. In his mind he rehearsed the story that he would tell of the removal from a private house of a terrified young man at the hands of the louts of the Intelligence Service. He would demand the answer to his question of who sanctioned such behaviour, and by what legal right. The reputations of men previously unaccountable to Parliament would suffer, they would cringe away from the affair. That he guaranteed.
The team of Schutzpolizei had not concerned themselves with Johnny.
He'd felt the nerves wriggle and fidget in his body as they came into the carriage. Two men and two women. Navy blue trousers and navy blue skirts. Sexless powder blue blouses. Snug little pistols holstered at the waist; East German manufacture and a copy of the Soviet Makarov that in its turn was the copy of the West German Walther PP. Johnny tensed, slid his hand to the passport that he had collected from Reception before leaving the hotel and that carried the stamp of the Volkspolizei opposite his visa page. All trains going into the border areas were checked and under surveillance. Wernigerode was less than a dozen miles from the frontier, just routine. They had moved slowly, scraping their eyes over the passengers in the carriage. By the time that they were level with him Johnny had seen the pattern that they followed. The teenagers, the young ones, the kids with anoraks and rucksacks, they received attention.
Those who were going into the hills and forests towards the frontier, who were walking and camping in the Hartz, they were asked for their papers and tickets. The kids who had never known another life, who were ignorant of another colour, they were the risk. They were the runners.
Johnny stared out of the window. He repeated the catechism to himself. Not to take an interest, not to follow the gruff questioning and the hesitant answers. He must detach himself, follow the lead of people around him who closed their ears and eyes and minds. He wanted to smile and suppressed it. Out in the field, flat and stretching to a distant horizon was a corral of wire and floodlights and imprisoned inside was a single engine crop spraying aircraft. One last year, one this year… the way to the West at tree top height… the hope that the frontier guards weren't too accurate with the MPiKMs and the machine guns in the towers. Take a bit of nerve to lift a plane and fly out, a matter of courage and a fair load of luck. Up you, Comrade Honecker, because there were people here with nerve and courage and luck, and that's why a little aircraft has to have wire of 10 feet in height stretched round it. The man on the seat opposite Johnny would also have seen the plane, and his eyes were blanked and expressionless. Johnny pondered on what he thought of the sight, and had no possibility of knowing.
The Hartz gleamed green and lofty above the agricultural plain. He mused away the last minutes of the journey and was at the carriage door when the train stopped at Wernigerode station.
Otto and Erica Guttmann were not difficult to follow. Their pace and their steps were predictable.
Up the hill and towards the old, close knit town.
Into the Markt Platz where the hotels were and the tables and chairs were set and the stalls for the sale of vegetables. They had a coffee and Johnny surveyed them from a distance.
Along the gentle climb of the Burg Strasse, where the houses were timbered and painted, where the church was ageing and weeded, where the tourists were Party members and union officials and factory workers and holidaying with their families at the FDGB hostels.
By the bridge and over the shallow river. Johnny kept a gap of 30 to 40 yards between himself and the couple.
Across the road was a low roofed, century old stone chapel. There was a stall in front where an elderly woman guarded bundles of cut flowers, cheerful when set against the darkness of her clothes. Willi had talked of the cemetery, of the pilgrimage to the grave that would be made by Otto Guttmann and his daughter.
Johnny quickened his stride, closed the distance and reached in his inner pocket for the envelope.
Erica had paid for a spray of roses that were red and bold and erect, her father carried them and they nodded their thanks and passed into the cemetery. They threaded their way between the family plots. The old man struggled to maintain his straight, firm walk and his shoulder was tilted to his daughter as if he leaned more heavily for support. The grave they found was narrow, and there were tufts of grass sprouting between the gravel chips. With a quick gesture of annoyance Erica Guttmann bent down and snatched with her fingers at the grass stems and threw them to the pathway, then rose to stand in silence beside her father. A full minute Otto Guttmann waited, until the tears ran on his cheeks, and the tremble of emotion played at his lips, then he ducked and placed the flowers against the headstone and retrieved himself and stood again in stillness.
You're a pig, Johnny, you're the man in the night at the window of the Nurses' Home. A foul, nasty creature… Turn the screw, Johnny, turn it so that it hurts and brings agony. You're a pig, Johnny, and you don't give a shit.
Erica walked away from her father, leaving him to his inner contemplation, to the memories of the woman who had been his wife and given him his children, the memories of the woman who had died in the car that he had driven. Memories of holidays with a son and a daughter and picnics in these woods. Memories of shared happiness.
Erica was away from him and her back was turned and she browsed among other stones, other inscriptions, other flowers.
Johnny sidled forward, whittled the yards down, came to Otto Guttmann's shoulder.
'Doctor Guttmann…'
The old man's head cocked, jerked up at the stranger's voice. A spell broken, a mood disintegrated.
Johnny slid the envelope into the opened palm of Otto Guttmann's hand and as the fingers clenched and the eyes spun he was gone. Gone fast, gone because the work was finished.
Johnny didn't look back, did not expose his face, hurried in a fast walk to the cemetery gate. You've taken a chisel and hammered it into him, chosen the place where he'd be most vulnerable and beaten the sharp edge into him. You've destroyed him, Johnny.
On his daughter's arm Otto Guttmann climbed the path of stamped earth through the trees above the cemetery towards the Feudalmuseum.
This was the show piece of the town, the towering and restored castle that perched on a rock crag pinnacle above the houses. Several groups of walkers passed them because his steps were hesitant and the toes of his shoes bruised the stones in the path. Erica would notice nothing, would relate his stumbling progress to the graveside visit, equate his condition with the emotion generated by the cemetery.
He had looked once at the photographs in the envelope. Once also he had glanced at the words written on a single sheet of paper.
'If you ever wish to see your son, Willi, again, tell no-one of what you have been shown.'
In his mind there was a pandemonium of confusion. Five photographs of his son, cheerful and with a smile and clothes that he had not owned when he had left Moscow for Geneva. Willi on the streets of London because Otto Guttmann knew the symbols behind his son's back.. the red double decker buses, the policeman with his conical blue helmet, the monuments that were international and famous.
The photographs said to him that Willi was in London. But Willi was drowned in the Lake of Geneva.
His body had never been found.
That was explained. The man from the Foreign Ministry who had telephoned had said that it was possible in those waters for a corpse to stay submerged for many weeks. Possible, but unusual.
Which image should he take, which image should he accept? Willi with his face swollen and his stomach distended, caught in the weed, held in the slurry of the lake mud. Willi, drowned and dead and the file closed. Was that his son?… That, or the boy who posed with the grin and the wide smile of the photographs.
If it were a cruel trick then who would have the vicious- ness of mind to concoct it? The taunting of an old man with the resurrection of his son from the winding sheet.
They had come under the arch of the castle gatehouse, they had paused to find the coins for the admission charge, they had stepped into the strong light of the battlements adorned with cannon. He had no recollection of the man who had come in stealth behind him, could remember nothing of his face or features. He could recall only a slouched and disappearing back and the feel of the thin paper of the envelope in his fingers. If the palm of his hand had not been able to find the clear edges of the photographs in his pocket he would have known he had dreamed, imagined, that the mind of an old man could be harsh and vindictive.
He made an excuse to his daughter. He must find a lavatory. He would only be a few minutes. He left her to gaze down from the high walls across the panorama of the houses set in trees in the slope of the valley, and beyond to the rising woodlands and the Brocken mountain.
Behind a bolted door, cramped and closeted, he took the photographs from his pocket. The pictures admitted no possibility of doubt, nor of deception. Even in the meagre light he could see there was nothing fraudulent, no super- imposition, no trick… Willi in the centre of London… He felt his knees weaken and reached for the whitewashed walls for support. The tears flowed and he wept without inhibition.
Willi, his son. Willi, walking and alive and breathing the good air. He found his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and snivelled into its folds.
Why had the man come with such subterfuge? Why had he not stayed to offer explanation? Why did he torture him with such cruelty? When Otto Guttmann joined his daughter on the battlements she quizzed him sharply as to whether he felt faint, and he said that he was well.
This year, as every year, they set off to tour the state- rooms of the Feudalmuseum.
Too early for lunch, too early for the train back to Magdeburg, Johnny meandered along a wood path away from the cemetery. To his right, half hidden from him by trees was the road winding to the horizon of the hills. That would be the road to the Brocken, the summit at 1140 metres above sea level, the highest peak in the Hartz. Pierce had spoken of the Brocken, of the antennae of the Soviet technicians, of the principal Warsaw Pact listening post in the DDR. Triple towers rising into the skyline that could monitor NATO radio transmissions across West Germany. Less than 10 miles away and the most sensitive installation in the country and close to the frontier. And down the road he'd be drifting into the
Schutzzone that Smithson had warned of. He retraced his steps, turned his back on the far hill and its pylons.
The sign of the forking of the paths directed him to the Wildpark Christianental.
There were deer and pigs here that gazed sorrowfully from inside their wire lined compounds. A fox in a cement floored cage stared back at him and having no escape curled itself again into a fur ball. A wild cat scurried for its artificial cave. They were not the creatures that caught at Johnny's eye. It was the birds of the mountain that drew him. The buzzard and the sparrow hawk, the harrier and the peregrine, the merlin and the kestrel. Each with his stumpy wooden perch, each with his own chain for denying flight. What the bloody place is all about, a great sodding empire of clipped wings and restricted movement.
And Johnny would cut Otto Guttmann free. He would have loved to take a wire cutter to the birds, loved to watch them climb and soar again in the upper currents of the wind.
Suppose Otto Guttmann won't come, rejects it, won't entertain the drive down the autobahn… what then, Johnny? Cut the wires on those birds and they'll rise. Guttmann is the same, or he's a bloody lunatic.
It had taken Johnny half an hour to walk through the Wildpark. In front of him was the main road into Wernigerode.
Nothing more for him to do in this town. The dart had been thrust into the mind of Otto Guttmann. Its poison should be given time to run.
He would catch the early afternoon train to Magdeburg.
A pleasant sunshine in West Berlin. Crowds out on the Kaiser-Damm and the Bismarck Strasse. The people of this frenetic, isolated city around which 11 Divisions of the Red Army were stationed bobbed in and out of the department stores, crowded the pavements, jostled for seats in the cafes.
With the Brigadier's wife as his guide, Charles Mawby was shopping.
He had bought a cut glass vase for Joyce, now looked for something for the children. And he was frittering time, eating at the hours that stood before the launch- ing of DIPPER's run. He was poor company for the Briga- dier's wife, little that was amusing in his conversation, and the shopping expedition did nothing but aggravate the cutting edge of his impatience. The obsession that he could not share trampled on him. He carried full responsibility yet he would not be in Magdeburg when Johnny Donoghue met Otto Guttmann. He would not be on the autobahn for the pick-up. He would not be at Marienborn when the documents and passports were produced. He had taken responsibility but when the Dipper bird soared he could not influence its flight.
In three days the mission would be done with, finished. Either way, success or failure, it would be completed. In his working life he thought that he had never felt such choking awareness of the stakes for which he played.
On a scheduled Interflug flight the Trade Minister of the German Democratic Republic and his advisory team arrived at Heathrow.
The group was taken by car from the apron to the Queen's Building suite where was waiting for them a welcoming party formed of a junior minister, two senior civil servants from the Department of Trade and Industry and the East German ambassador to London. There was much smiling as the interpreters grappled with the introductions, many firmly clasped handshakes, an impression of lasting friendship. The Trade Minister was an important figure in the regime and the Party, a member of the Politburo, one of the 'old guard', a colleague of the founders of the
'other' Germany, a friend of Ulbricht and Stoph and Grotewohl and Pieck. A hardline man whose political career had been at its peak when Stalin sat in the Kremlin, an advocate of the march of the Red Army into Czechoslovakia.
The pleasure shown by Dr Oskar Frommholtz at his reception was a patchy mask, as if the guard over his face sometimes slipped to allow suspicion to flourish, the glimmer of caution to cloud his warm words.
There were short speeches, polite applause and then the Trade Minister was led to a News Conference.
It was not an auspicious start to the visit.
When a senior functionary of another country, whether from the socialist or capitalist camp, came to the German Democratic Republic a room full of journalists was guaranteed. All the trappings of serious scribblers hanging on the words of the visitor, and arc lights and microphones and turning cameras.
To hear Dr Frommholtz there had gathered only the Press Association, the airport news agency of Brenards, the BBC world service, and the representative of the communist Morning Star. Interest had been muted, the questions sparse until the proceedings were brought to a sharp close.
The request by the PA reporter for information on the release date of a young East German writer named by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience and charged with espionage ended the conference. The chairs had been snappily vacated, while the visitors sulked and the hosts twitched in embarrassment.
Facing the first Censure motion that the Opposition had tabled since he had assumed office, the Prime Minister had reacted with annoyance to the charges of incompetence and maladministration thrown across the Despatch Box of the House of Commons. In the morning he had been tetchy with his colleagues in Cabinet and Overseas Planning and Defence. In the afternoon he had given no quarter when fielding his twice weekly Questions. Uneasily his supporters on the benches behind him had cheered as he steam-rollered his opponents on the far side of the Chamber.
He had sat on in the front row of government when the Censure debate had commenced aware that he could expect only a difficult and acrimonious passage when his own time came to wind up the government case before the 10 o'clock voting division. He had heard out the opening exchanges, then with a walk of theatrical indifference left the Chamber.
Now in his private office the Prime Minister was weighing the paragraph cards of his speech when his PPS introduced the Member for Guildford, Sir Charles Spottiswoode.
'Nice to see you again, Charles.'
'Good of you to see me, Prime Minister.'
'You'll take a drink?'
'A small gin, thank you.'
The PPS poured the drinks at the walnut cabinet, and excused himself.
He had no doubt that with the third party gone the pleasantries would be short lived. Within 15 minutes he would have concocted a reason to return and break up the session.
The two men watched the door close.
'What can I do for you, Charles?'
'You can clear up a rather unpleasant and unacceptable bit of government action in my constituency.' Spottiswoode watched with a fleeting smile the flicker of discomfiture on the Prime Minister's face.
'Go on… let's have the complaint, and the reason why it was necessary to bring it to me.'
Spottiswoode dramatised a moment of silence, pondered his tie, brushed his nose with a handkerchief. 'In the hills between Guildford and Dorking, at Holmbury, is a country house that many years ago was taken over by the Secret Intelligence Service, or one of their agencies, a hush-hush place. A bit over a fortnight back, I have the exact date in my briefcase, if you want it…'
'That can wait, go on.'
'… a bit over a fortnight back, a young man with a German name but some sort of Soviet connection escaped from that place and was discovered half frightened to death — and I emphasise that, scared out of his wits — in a field between Ewhurst and the village of Forest Green. One of my constituents found him. Nothing appeared in the papers, of course, because government slapped on a D notice. You presumably were aware of that, Prime Minister?'
' I was aware of the use of a D notice which applied to the presence in this country of a Soviet defector. That notice is still in force, Sir Charles…' The admonition was sharply put.
Spottiswoode stiffened. 'You call him a defector, Prime Minister, which to me implies someone who has chosen and quite voluntarily to come to our country. This young man was in a state of abject terror when found, which I suggest is hardly the characteristic of a willing participant in whatever matter the Intelligence people were hatching
… I will continue. He was taken to the home of my constituent, soaked and chilled, and while he was there he specifically requested protection from the people holding him at Holmbury. He made a most serious allegation there in the presence of the householder and the local constable who had been summoned by telephone. He claimed that he was being forced to provide information which was to be used to facilitate the murder of his elderly father. I understand that his father is a citizen of the Soviet Union, but of East German extraction and that he takes his holiday in the country of his birth each summer, where the killing will take place. This young man alleged that the plan was far advanced, that the actual assassin was present at Holmbury.'
'It sounds a complete tale of fabrication.' A flush was in the Prime Minister's cheeks, the testiness in his words.
' I haven't finished. I'm sure you'll want to hear me out…'
Spottiswoode said. 'As a result of the information being passed through police channels that the boy had been taken to the house of my constituent, these freebooters from Holmbury were told of his presence.
They arrived, abused the police there, were vilely rude to a most pleasant lady, and dragged this young man from the premises half naked. There was no question of returning him into the hands of his former captors of his own free will.'
Anger was settling on the Prime Minister's face. He should have been sitting quietly, brooding with his speech, left to himself and his closest cronies. 'I'll look into it, you can be sure of that.'
'It's my hope that you will look into it, and most thoroughly at that.'
Spottiswoode was not to be easily moved from his bone and the marrow fat. 'Personally, I think it's a damned scandal if government agencies can cloak themselves in secrecy to cover what is at best disgusting behaviour, at worst a heinous and criminal act…'
' I have said, Sir Charles, I will look into the matter.'
'This is not a land of private armies, nor is this a police state. We should not tolerate Security and Intelligence carrying on like bandits… I have assumed throughout this interview, Prime Minister, that the actions of these people at Holmbury in this case do not have government approval
'You won't expect me to pass comment on that.'
The Prime Minister shifted in his chair, his fingers twisted on the fountain pen in his hand. Irritation and embarrassment. Could he admit that the Service often acted without informing the head of government?
Well enough known that was a fact, whispered about in the corridors of Westminster that the Service was a law to itself. But not for him to say in his own office to a querulous backbencher that he did not control the day to day activities of SIS. Admit that and he was not fitted for the high office he held.
But this was the grey area of the unmentionable — National Security — the area discussed by politicians with the same enthusiasm that a table of cigarette smokers will bring to the topic of terminal cancer. One of his predecessors, Harold Macmillan, had told the House that 'it is dangerous and bad for our national interest to discuss these matters'. Another occupant of Downing Street, Sir Harold Wilson, had written that a Prime Minister questioned in this field should phrase his answers to be
'uniformly uninformative'.
'I trust that those responsible in this case will be brought to heel and sharply. It would be unfortunate if people in this country, hard working and law abiding people, were to believe that there are agencies here that operate above democratic life… beyond your control, Prime Minister.'
There was a knock and the PPS came into the room. He coughed for attention.
' I think there are one or two points that have come up in debate that you might wish to rebut, Prime Minister…'
The Prime Minister gazed steely eyed across at the back- bencher.
'Thank you for your time. As far as is possible I will inform you of what I discover. I'm most grateful to you.'
'Thank you, Prime Minister. I hope I've been of help.'
They shook hands. With Sir Charles Spottiswoode gone the Prime Minister smacked a clenched fist onto the cards for his speech, scattered them across the table. The PPS, without comment, swept up his glass, took it to the cabinet, filled it heftily. No oil for the troubled waters, gin would have to do the job.
On a Thursday evening in Bonn it was usual for a representative of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) to meet with a senior official of the Bundesamt fur Verfassungeschutz (BfV). It was the regular conversation on matters of mutual interest between the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Internal Security Office.
Consultation between the two agencies had been demanded by successive Chancellors after the retirement of General Reinhard Gehlen, who had founded BND after the war and run the organisation with autonomous secrecy. It had been determined that never again would an arm of the secret service be permitted such free ranging power, and if BfV maintained a gentle spy role over the more senior brother there would be no complaint by the political administration.
There was always much for them to discuss. The damaging and publicised drain of defecting government secretaries to the East, the knowledge that within the Ministries existed the deep sleeper agents positioned by East Berlin, the efforts of DDR operatives to prise their way into the lives of lonely, menopausal female clerks. There were grounds for constant vigilance, the stability of the nation was threatened.
It was little more than 5 years since the worm had crawled to the very heart of the apple, since Willi Brandt had resigned after the discovery that an East German spy had nibbled his way to the Chancellor's private office.
The early talk in the office of the BND representative had concerned the vast scale of Positive Vetting procedures authorised by government.
The files were now locked back in their holding cabinets. Neither man was in a hurry to be on his way though their main business was completed. For each this had been the last appointment of the day and all that faced them was the traffic on Koblenzer Strasse, the tedium of the homeward journey. One produced a packet of cigarettes, the other his pipe. Time to ease back in their chairs, time to replace their pens in the inner pockets. The liaison worked well. They were old friends, men who had worked as young officers in Fremde Heere Ost, the section of staff officers in the former Wehrmacht that had concerned itself with Eastern front intelligence. They could confide in each other.
'Did you know that the British… SIS… had been round us, their man here, they sought a recommendation. They wanted a name of one of the organisations for bringing people from the East.' The BND officer dragged at his cigarette.
'They haven't been to us.'
'It was not a request through the usual channels, there is a procedure for the exchange of information, they did not use that.'
'And before they had been asked for what purpose they needed such information?'
'The intention must be clear… they wish to bring someone from the DDR.'
'They live in a delusion of their former times.' The BfV man coughed through the pipe smoke. 'Thirty-five years after the war, and you find those of them that believe they are still the occupying power.'
'Nothing about this was handled properly. I telephoned their man for guidance on their intentions, he was not available and he did not call back. He cancelled the usual liaison meeting for last week, so again we did not talk. Now they have said that we will meet next week
…'
'Which will be when their business is completed… they think they can walk over us.'
'It poses a difficulty, certainly, if we adhere to the policy of the Chancellery at this moment. Escape across the frontier is totally discouraged when aided by commercial organisations. If the request for the information they sought had been properly presented I doubt that it would have been granted. You have the risk of our involvement in a potential incident.'
'Whose name were the British given?' There was a glaze of hostility in the BfV man's face.
'Lentzer… Hermann Lentzer
'A Nazi, I know of him.'
'The British should not have gone about their business in this way, not in the country of an ally, a close ally. And afterwards when they have gone back to London, when they have dismantled their circus it is we who are left with the recrimination and sniping from East Berlin. And bad at this time, with the meeting of the Chancellor and Honecker coming…' The BND officer shrugged, enough time had been used. The Koblenzer Strasse traffic would be thinning.
'What are you going to do about it?'
'The Chancellor will not thank me for drawing him into the matter
…
The British would accuse us of gross interference in their plans, whatever they may be… I am going to do nothing.' The BND officer was on his feet, briefcase in hand.
'They never change, the British… they have never learned to accept their new place.'
As they parted a few minutes later in the car park a persistent drizzle sprayed them and the lights gleamed and shone and cast far shadows on the streets. His temper aroused by what he had been told, his forehead ploughed with irritation, the BfV man rattled his horn as he nudged into the traffic flow.
A black and miserable evening and a slow trek home.
Outside the door of his private office the Prime Minister accepted the congratulations of his supporters. Many crowded round him and his ears rang with the acclamation of their praise.
'A triumph, Prime Minister…'
'Absolutely marvellous stuff, sir, just what the party needed
'Quite destroyed them, kicked them where it hurts, damn good…'
The Prime Minister's face was set, furious and aggressive. His eyes ranged the corridor for the arrival of his PPS from the Chamber. The decision was taken on the course of action he would follow. Was it supposed to be one man government? Was he supposed to oversee every bloody department of Whitehall? Those buggers from the Service playing their games, living prehistoric dreams. He had been softened up and knocked down by an arrogant fool and that treatment from Spottiswoode outweighed the sycophancy gathered around him.
The PPS came smiling to the Prime Minister's side.
'Fine show…'
'What do I have tomorrow?'
'TUC economic committee at 10. Egyptian ambassador at 12 and he's lunching. Away for Chequers at 3.' The PPS marshalled the timetable effortlessly.
'Get hold of the Cabinet Secretary,' the Prime Minister said quietly.
'He's to bring the SIS man to Downing Street at 9 tomorrow… That's an instruction.'
The PPS slipped away from the gathering throng around the star of the night. He was baffled. Why on an evening such as this should the Prime Minister speak with such anger?