The Deceiver

Siegfried jerked his head and crawled through the hole. McCready followed, dragging his gunny sack. The German turned and pushed the cut mesh back into place. It would not be noticed except at close range, and the guards never crossed the strip to check the wire unless they had already noticed a break. They did not like minefields, either.

It was tempting to run across the hundred yards of plowed strip, now thickly grassed with extra-tall dock, thistle, and nettle growing at intervals in the grass. But there could be tripwires linked to sound-alarms. It was safer to crawl. They crawled. At the halfway point they were shaded by trees from the searchlight to their left, but then the one to their right came on. Both men froze in their green smocks and lay face down. They had blackened their faces and hands, Siegfried with boot polish, McCready with burnt cork that would wash off more easily on the other side.

The pale light splashed over them, hesitated, moved back, and went off again. Ten yards farther on, Siegfried found a tripwire and gestured McCready to crawl around it. Another forty yards, and they reached the minefield. Here the thistles and grasses were chest-high. No one tried to plow up the minefield.

The German looked back. High above the trees, McCready could see the white rock, a patch of paleness against the darkness of the pine forest. Siegfried swiveled his head and checked the giant tree against the rock. He was ten yards to the right of his line. He crawled again, down the edge of the minefield. When he stopped, he began to feel tenderly in the long grass. After two minutes McCready heard his breath hiss out in triumph. He held a fine strand of fishing line between finger and thumb. He pulled gently. If it was loose at the other end, the mission was over. It went tight and held.

“Follow the fishing line,” Siegfried whispered. “It will take you through the minefield to the tunnel under the wire. The path is only two feet wide. When do you come back?”

“Twenty-four hours,” said McCready. “Or forty-eight. Af­ter that, forget it. I will not be coming. I will use my pencil light from the base of the big tree just before I make the run. Hold the fence open for me.”

He disappeared on. his belly into the minefield, not quite hidden by the tall grass and weeds. Siegfried waited for the searchlight to wash over him one last time, then crawled back to the West.

McCready went forward through the mines, following the nylon line. Occasionally he tested it to make sure it was still straight. He knew he would not see any mines. These were not big plate-mines that could throw a truck in the air. They were small antipersonnel mines made of plastic, not respon­sive to metal detectors, which had been tried by escapers and had not worked. The mines were buried, pressure-operated. They would not explode for a rabbit or a fox, but they were sensitive enough for a human body. And vicious enough to blow away a leg or the entrails, or to tear out the chest cavity. Often they did not kill quickly but left the would-be escaper screaming through the night until the guards came after sun­rise, with guides, to retrieve the body.

McCready saw the rolling waves of razor-wire looming ahead of him, the end of the minefield. The fishing line led him to a shallow scrape under the wire. He rolled on his back, pushed the wire upward with his totebag, and kicked with his heels. Inch by inch, he slid beneath the entanglement. Above him he could see the glittering razors that made this kind of wire so much more painful than barbed wire.

There were ten yards of it, but piled eight feet high above him. When he came out on the Eastern side, he found the nylon strand attached to a small peg that was almost out of the ground. Another tug, and it would have come loose, aborting the whole crossing. He covered the peg with a mat of thick pine needles, noted its position directly in front of the outsize pine tree, held his compass in front of him, and crawled away.

He crawled on a heading of 90 degrees until he came to a track. There he stripped off his smock, bundled it around his compass, and hid them beneath more pine needles ten yards inside the forest. If any dogs came down the track, they would not be able to smell the buried clothing. At the edge of the track he broke off a branch above head height and left it hanging by a thread of bark. No one else would notice it, but he would.

On his return he would have to find the track and the broken branch and recover his smock and compass. A heading of 270 degrees would bring him back to the giant pine. He turned and walked away toward the east. As he walked, he noted every marker—fallen trees, piles of logs, twists and turns. After a mile, he came out on a road and saw the spire of the Lutheran church of Ellrich village ahead of him.

He skirted it, as briefed, walking through fields of cut wheat until he intercepted the road to Nordhausen, five miles farther on. It was just five o’clock. He stayed by the side of the road, prepared to dive into a ditch if a vehicle appeared from either direction. Farther south, he hoped his scuffed reefer jacket, corduroy trousers, boots, and forage cap, worn by so many German farm workers, would escape scrutiny. But here the community was so small that everyone would know everyone else. He did not need to be asked where he was going, even less where he had come from. Behind him, there was nowhere he could have come from but Ellrich village or the border.

Outside Nordhausen he had a lucky break. Over the picket fence of a darkened house, a bicycle was propped against a tree. It was rusty but usable. He weighed the risks of taking it against its usefulness in covering distance faster than a pair of legs. If its loss remained undiscovered for thirty minutes, it was worth it. He took it, walked for a hundred yards, then mounted it and rode to the railway station. It was five to six. The first train to Erfurt was due in fifteen minutes.

There were several dozen working men on the platform waiting to head south to work. He presented some money, was issued a ticket, and the train steamed in, an old-fashioned steam locomotive but on time. Accustomed to British Rail Commuter services, he was grateful for that. He consigned his bicycle to the luggage van and took his place on the wooden seats. The train stopped again at Sondershausen, Greussen, and Straussfurt before rolling into Erfurt at 6:41. He retrieved his bicycle and pedaled away through the streets toward the eastern outskirts of the city and the start of Highway Seven to Weimar.

Just after half past seven, a few miles east of the city, a tractor came up behind him. It had a flat trailer behind it, and an old man was at the wheel. It had been delivering sugar beet to Erfurt and was heading back to the farm. The old man slowed and stopped.

“Steig mal rauf,” he called above the snarl of the dilapi­dated engine, which belched rich black smoke. McCready waved his gratitude, hurled the bicycle onto the flatbed, and climbed on. The noise of the tractor engine prevented conver­sation, which was just as well, for McCready, fluent in Ger­man, did not possess that strange accent of Lower Thuringia. Anyway, the old farmer was happy to suck on his empty pipe and drive.

Ten miles out of Weimar, McCready saw the wall of sol­diers.

They were on the road, several dozen, spread out across the fields to left and right. He could see their helmeted heads among the maize stalks. There was a farm track off to the right. He glanced down it. Soldiers lined it, ten yards apart, facing toward Weimar.

The tractor slowed for the roadblock and stopped. A ser­geant shouted up to the driver, telling him to switch off his engine.

The old man shouted back in German, “If I do I probably won’t start it again. Will your men give me a push?”

The sergeant considered, shrugged, and gestured for the old man’s papers. He looked at them, gave them back, and came down to where McCready sat.

“Papiere,” he said. McCready handed over his ID card. It said he was Martin Hahn, farm worker, and had been issued by the Weimar administrative district. The sergeant, who was a townsman from Schwerin up in the north, sniffed.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Sugar beets,” said McCready. He did not volunteer that he was a hitchhiker on the tractor, and no one asked.

Nor did he point out that before carrying the sugar beets, the trailer had borne a much fruitier cargo. The sergeant wrinkled his nose, gave back the papers, and waved the tractor on. A more interesting truck was coming toward them out of Weimar, and he had been told to concentrate on people—or a man with gray hair and a Rhineland accent—trying to get out of the ring, not a smelly tractor trying to get in. The tractor went to a track three miles from the town and turned off. McCready jumped down, pulled his bicycle to the ground, waved his thanks at the old farmer, and pedaled into town.

From the outskirts on, he stayed close to the curb to avoid the trucks disgorging troops in the gray-green uniforms of the National People’s Army, the NVA. There was a fair sprinkling of the brighter-green uniforms of the People’s Police, the VOPOs. Knots of Weimar citizens stood on streetcorners staring in curiosity. Someone suggested it was a military exercise; no one disagreed. Maneuvers normally happened in the military, though not usually in the center of a town.

McCready would have liked a town map, but he could not afford to be seen studying one. He was not a tourist. He had memorized his route from the map he borrowed from the East German desk in London, which he had studied on the plane to Hanover. Coming into town on the Erfurterstrasse, he rode straight on toward the ancient town center and saw the Na­tional Theater looming up in front of him. The paved road became cobbles. He rode left into Heinrich Heinestrasse and on toward Karl Marx Platz. There he dismounted and began to push the bicycle, his head down, as the VOPO cars rushed by him in both directions.

At Rhathenau Platz he looked for Brennerstrasse and found it on the far side of the square. According to his recall, Bockstrasse should lie to the right. It did. Number fourteen was an old building, long in need of repair, like just about everything else in Herr Honecker’s paradise. The paint and plaster were peeling and the names on the eight bell-pushes were faded. But he could make out, against flat number three, the single name, Neumann. He pushed his bicycle through the large front door, left it in the stone-flagged hall, and walked up. There were two apartments on each floor. Number three was on the second floor. He took off his cap, straightened his jacket, and rang the bell. It was ten to nine.

Nothing happened for a while. After two minutes there was a shuffling sound, and the door opened slowly. Fräulein Neumann was very old, in a black dress, white-haired, and she supported herself on two canes. McCready judged her to be in her late eighties. She looked up at him and said, “Ja?”

He smiled broadly as if in recognition.

“Yes, it is you, Fräulein. You have changed. But not more than me. You won’t remember me. Martin Kroll. You taught me at primary school forty years ago.”

She stared at him levelly, bright blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses.

“I happened to be in Weimar today. From Berlin, you know. I live there now. And I wondered if you were still here, The telephone directory listed you. I just came on the off chance. May I come in?”

She stood aside, and he entered. A dark hall, musty with age. She led the way, hobbling on arthritic knees and ankles, into her sitting room, whose windows looked down on the street. He waited for her to sit, then took a chair.

“So I taught you once, in the old primary school on Heinrich Heinestrasse. When was that?”

“Well, it must have been ’43 and ’44. We were bombed out. From Berlin. I was evacuated here with others. Must have been the summer of ’43. I was in a class with ... ach, the names—well, I recall Bruno Morenz. He was my buddy.”

She stared at him for a while, then pulled herself to her feet. He rose. She hobbled to the window and looked down. A truck full of VOPOs rumbled past. They all sat upright, their Hungarian AP9 pistols bolstered on their belts.

“Always the uniforms,” she said softly as if talking to herself. “First the Nazis, now the Communists. And always the uniforms and the guns. First the Gestapo, and now the SSD. Oh, Germany, what did we do to deserve you both?”

She turned from the window. “You are British, aren’t you? Please sit down.”

McCready was glad to do so. He realized that despite her age, she still had a mind like a razor.

“Why do you say such an extraordinary thing?” he asked indignantly. She was not fazed by his show of anger.

“Three reasons. I remember every boy I ever taught at that school during the war and afterward, and there was no Martin Kroll among them. And second, the school was not on Heinrich Heinestrasse. Heine was Jewish, and the Nazis had erased his name from all streets and monuments.”

McCready could have kicked himself. He should have known that the name of Heine, one of Germany’s greatest writers, was restored only after the war.

“If you scream or raise the alarm,” he said quietly, “I will not harm you. But they will come for me and take me away and shoot me. The choice is yours.”

She hobbled to her seat and sat down. In the manner of the very old, she began to reminisce.

“In 1934 I was a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The youngest, and the only woman. The Nazis came to power. I despised them. I said so. I suppose I was lucky—I could have been sent to a camp. But they were lenient; I was sent here, to teach primary school to the children of farm laborers.

“After the war I did not go back to the Humboldt. Partly because I felt the children here had as much right to the teaching I could give them as the smart youth of Berlin; partly because I would not teach the Communist version of lies, either. So, Mr. Spy, I will not raise the alarm.”

“And if they capture me anyway, and I tell them about you?”

She smiled for the first time.

“Young man, when you are eighty-eight, there is nothing they can do to you that the good Lord is not going to do quite soon now. Why did you come?”

“Bruno Morenz. You do remember him?”

“Oh, yes, I remember him. Is he in trouble?”

“Yes, Fräulein, bad trouble. He is here, not far away. He came on a mission—for me. He fell ill, sick, in the head. A complete breakdown. He is hiding out there somewhere. He needs help.”

“The police, all those soldiers—they are for Bruno?”

“Yes. If I can get to him first, I may be able to help. Get him away in time.”

“Why did you come to me?”

“His sister in London, she said he had told her very little of his two years here during the war. Just that he had been very unhappy, and his only friend had been his schoolteacher, Fräulein Neumann.”

She rocked backward and forward for some time.

“Poor Bruno,” she said at length. “Poor, frightened Bruno. Always so frightened. Of the shouting and the pain.”

“Why was he frightened, Fräulein Neumann?”

“He came from a Social Democrat family in Hamburg. His father was dead, in the bombing, but he must have made some uncomplimentary remark about Hitler in his home before he died. Bruno was billeted with a farmer outside the town, a brutal man who drank much. Also, an ardent Nazi. One evening Bruno must have said something he learned from his father. The farmer took his belt to him and whipped him. Hard. After that, he did it many times. Bruno used to run away.”

“Where did he hide, Fräulein? Please, where?”

“In the barn. He showed me once. I had gone to the farm to remonstrate with the farmer. There was a barn at the far end of the hay meadow, away from the house and the other barns. He made a hole in the hay bales up in the loft. He used to crawl in there and wait until the farmer had fallen into his usual drunken sleep.”

“Where, exactly, was the farm?”

“The hamlet is called Marionhain. I think it is still there. Just four farms in a group. All collectivized now. It lies between the villages of Ober and Nieder Grünstedt. Take the road out toward Erfurt. Four miles out, turn left down a track. There is a signpost. The farm was called Müller’s Farm, but that will be changed now. It probably just has a number. But if it is still there, look for a barn set two hundred yards away from the group, at the end of the meadow. Do you think you can help him?”

McCready rose.

“If he is there, Fräulein, I will try. I swear I will try. Thank you for your help.”

He turned at the door.

“You said there were three reasons you thought I was English, but you gave me only two.”

“Oh, yes. You are dressed as a farm worker, but you said you came from Berlin. There are no farms in Berlin. So you are a spy. Either working for them”—she jerked her head toward the window, where another truck rumbled past—“or for the other side.”

“I could have been an agent for the SSD.”

She smiled again. “No, Mister Englander. I remember the British officers from 1945, for a short while before the Rus­sians came. You are much too polite to be SSD.”

The track off the main road was where she had said it would be, to the left, toward the tract of rich farmland that lies between Highway Seven and the Autobahn E40. A small sign said OBER GRÜNSTEDT. He cycled down the track to a junc­tion a mile farther on. The road split. To his left lay Nieder Grünstedt. He could see a wall of green uniforms surrounding it. On either side of him lay fields of uncut maize, five feet high. He crouched low over the handlebars and pedaled away to his right. He skirted Ober Grünstedt and saw an even narrower track. Half a mile down it, he could make out the roofs of a group of farmhouses and barns, built in the Thuringian style with steeply sloped tiles, towering peaks, and tall wide doors to admit the hay wains to the hollow square yards inside. Marionhain.

He did not want to pass through the hamlet. There might be farm workers there who would clearly spot him as a stranger. He hid his bicycle in the maize and climbed a gate to get a better view. To his right he saw a single tall barn, of brick and black-tarred timbers, set away from the main group. Crouching inside the maize, he began to work his way around the hamlet toward it. On the horizon the tide of green uniforms began to move out of Nieder Grünstedt.

Dr. Lothar Herrmann was also working that Saturday morn­ing. Since he sent the cable to Fietzau at the German Embassy in London that had elicited a reply which brought his investi­gation no further forward, the trail of the missing Bruno Morenz had gone cold. He did not usually work on Saturdays, but he needed something to take his mind off his predicament. The previous evening he had had dinner with the Director General. It had not been an easy meal.

No arrest had been made in the case of the Heimendorf slayings. The police had not even issued a wanted notice for a particular person whom they wished to interview. They seemed to be up against a brick wall on the issue of one set of fingerprints and two used pistol bullets.

A number of very respectable gentlemen in both the private and the public sector had been discreetly questioned and had finished the interviews puce with embarrassment. But each had cooperated to the limit. Fingerprints had been given, handguns turned in for testing, alibis checked. The result was ... nothing.

The Director General had been regretful but adamant. The Service’s lack of cooperation had gone on long enough. On Monday morning he, the DG, was going to go to the Chancel­lor’s office for an interview with the State Secretary who had responsibility, at the political level, for the BND. It would be a very difficult interview, and he, the DG, was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

Now Dr. Herrmann opened the thick file dealing with cross-border radio traffic covering the period of Wednesday to Friday. He noted that there seemed to be an awful lot of it. Some kind of flap among the VOPOs in the Jena area. Then his eye caught a phrase used in a conversation between a VOPO patrol car and Jena Central: “Big, gray-haired, Rhineland accent.” He became pensive. That rang a bell. ...

An aide entered and placed a message in front of his boss. If the Herr Doktor insisted on working on Saturday morning, he might as well get the traffic as it came in. The message was a complimentary pass-on from the internal security service, the BfV. It simply said that a sharp-eyed operative at Hanover airport had noted a face entering Germany on a London flight under the name of Maitland. Being an alert fellow, the BfV man had checked his files and passed his identification on to the Head Office in Cologne. Cologne had passed it on to Pullach. The man Maitland was Mr. Samuel McCready.

Dr. Herrmann was affronted. It was most discourteous of a senior officer in an allied NATO service to enter the country unannounced. And unusual. Unless ... He looked at the intercepts from Jena and the message from Hanover. He wouldn’t dare, he thought. Then another part of his mind said: Yes, he damned well would. Dr. Herrmann lifted a phone and began to make his dispositions.

* * *

McCready left the cover of the maize, glanced to the left and the right, and crossed the few yards of grass to the barn. The door creaked on rusty hinges as he let himself in. Light streaked into the gloom from a dozen splits in the woodwork, making motes of dust dance in the air and revealing the huddled shapes of old carts and barrels, horse-tackle and rusting troughs. He glanced up. The upper floor, reached by a vertical ladder, was piled with hay. He went up the ladder and called softly, “Bruno.”

There was no reply. He walked past the piled hay looking for recent signs of disturbance. At the end of the barn he saw a fragment of raincoat fabric between two bales. He gently lifted one of the bales away.

Bruno Morenz lay in his sanctuary on his side. His eyes were open, but he made no movement. As the light entered his hiding place, he winced.

“Bruno, it’s me. Sam. Your friend. Look at me, Bruno.”

Morenz swiveled his gaze toward McCready. He was gray-faced and unshaven. He had not eaten for three days and had drunk only stagnant water from a barrel. His eyes appeared unfocused. They tried to register as he looked at McCready.

“Sam?”

“Yes, Sam. Sam McCready.”

“Don’t tell them I’m here, Sam. They won’t find me if you don’t tell them.”

“I won’t tell them, Bruno. Never.”

Through a crack in the planking he saw the line of green uniforms moving across the maize fields toward Ober Grünstedt.

“Try and sit up, Bruno.”

He helped Morenz into a sitting position, his back against the hay bales.

“We must hurry, Bruno. I’m going to try to get you out of here.”

Morenz shook his head dully. “Stay here, Sam. It’s safe here. No one could ever find me here.”

No, thought McCready, a drunken farmer never could. But five hundred soldiers could and would. He tried to get Morenz to his feet, but it was hopeless. The weight of the man was too much. His legs would not work. He clutched his hands across his chest. There was something bulging under his left arm. McCready let him slump back into the hay. Morenz curled up again. McCready knew he would never get him back to the border near Ellrich, under the wire, and across the minefield. It was over.

Through the crack, across the maize cobs bright in the sun, the green uniforms were swarming over the farms and barns of Ober Grünstedt. Marionhain would be next.

“I’ve been to see Fräulein Neumann. You remember Fräulein Neumann? She’s nice.”

“Yes, nice. She might know I’m here, but she won’t tell them.”

“Never, Bruno. Never. She said you have your homework for her. She needs to mark it.”

Morenz unbuttoned his raincoat and eased out a fat red manual. Its cover bore a gold hammer and sickle. Morenz’s tie was off and his shirt open. A key hung on a piece of twine around his neck. McCready took the manual.

“I’m thirsty, Sam.”

McCready held out a small silver hip flask that he had taken from his back pocket. Morenz drank the whiskey greedily. McCready looked through the crack. The soldiers had finished with Ober Grünstedt. Some were coming down the track, while others fanned out through the fields.

“I’m going to stay here, Sam,” said Morenz.

“Yes,” said McCready, “so you are. Good-bye, old friend. Sleep well. No one will ever hurt you again.”

“Never again,” murmured the man, and slept.

McCready was about to rise when he saw the glint of the key against Morenz’s chest. He eased the twine from around his neck, stowed the manual in his totebag, slithered down the ladder, and slipped away into the maize. The ring closed two minutes later. It was midday.

It took him twelve hours to get back to the giant pine tree on the border near Ellrich village. He changed into his smock and waited beneath the trees until half-past three. Then he flashed his pencil light three times toward the white rock across the border and crawled under the wire, through the minefield, and across the plowed strip. Siegfried was waiting for him at the fence.

On the drive back to Goslar, he flicked over the key he had taken from Bruno Morenz. It was made of steel, and engraved on the back were the words Flughafen Köln. Cologne airport. Sam bade farewell to Kurzlinger and Siegfried after a sustain­ing breakfast and drove southwest instead of north to Hano­ver.

At one o’clock on that Saturday afternoon, the soldiers made contact with Colonel Voss, who arrived in a staff car with a woman in a civilian suit. They went up the ladder and exam­ined the body in the hay. A thorough search was made, the barn was almost torn apart, but no sign was found of any written material, least of all a thick manual. But then, they did not know what they were looking for anyway.

A soldier pried a small silver flask from the dead man’s hand and passed it to Colonel Voss. He sniffed it and mut­tered, “Cyanide.” Major Vanavskaya took it and turned it over. On the back was written HARRODS, LONDON. She used a very unladylike expression. Although his command of Rus­sian was basic, Colonel Voss thought it sounded like “You Motherfucker.”

At noon on Sunday, McCready entered Cologne airport, well in time for the one o’clock flight. He changed his Hanover-to-London ticket for a Cologne-London one, checked in, and wandered toward the steel luggage lockers to one side of the concourse. He took the steel key and inserted it into locker 47. Inside was a black canvas grip. He withdrew it.

“I think I will take the bag, thank you, Herr McCready.”

He turned. The Deputy Head of the Operations Directorate of the BND was standing ten feet away. Two large gentlemen hovered farther on. One studied his fingernails, the other the ceiling, as if looking for cracks.

“Why, Dr. Herrmann. How nice to see you again. And what brings you to Cologne?”

“The bag ... if you please, Mr. McCready.”

It was handed over. Herrmann passed it to one of his team. He could afford to be genial.

“Come, Mr. McCready, we Germans are a hospitable peo­ple. Let me escort you to your plane. You would not wish to miss it.”

They walked toward passport control.

“A certain colleague of mine ...” suggested Herrmann.

“He will not be coming back, Dr. Herrmann.”

“Ah, poor man. But just as well, perhaps.”

They arrived at passport control. Dr. Herrmann produced a card and flashed it at the immigration officers, and they were ushered through. When the flight boarded, McCready was escorted to the aircraft door.

“Mr. McCready.”

He turned in the doorway. Herrmann smiled at last.

“We also know how to listen to cross-border radio chit­chat. Good journey, Mr. McCready. My regards to London.”

The news came to Langley a week later. General Pankratin had been transferred. In future, he would command a military detention complex of prison camps in Kazakhstan.

Claudia Stuart learned the news from her man in the Mos­cow Embassy. At the time, she was still basking in the plaudits that rained down from on high as the military analysts studied the complete Soviet Order of Battle. She was prepared to be philosophical about her Soviet general. As she remarked to Chris Appleyard in the commissary, “He keeps his skin and his rank. Better than the lead mines of Yakutsia. As for us—well, it’s cheaper than an apartment block in Santa Bar­bara.”