The Moscow Sleepers

41

It was just seven o’clock in the morning when Sally Mortimer walked through the door of the British Embassy in Berlin. With a Guten Morgen to the security guards she took the lift to the fourth floor where the MI6 Station’s offices were located. Dumping her bag on top of the pile of newspapers that had already been placed on the small table outside the security door, she tapped the code into the pad and held the door open with her foot while she juggled her bag and the newspapers.

Once inside she dropped everything on her desk as the door closed again with a reassuring click. She was obviously the first one to arrive. She hadn’t been sleeping well recently. The reason, she had decided, was that she was rather lonely. Not that there weren’t plenty of opportunities to go out with people. The Embassy was full of them and one in particular, the ambassador’s private secretary Giles Leith-Martin, was clearly very keen; he had asked her out several times. But, and it rather annoyed her to acknowledge it, she was missing Bruno Mackay. Their affair, if you could call it that, had barely got off the ground when he was spirited away on the mysterious operation for Geoffrey Fane.

Sally knew Bruno had a long-standing reputation in MI6 as a serial philanderer, though it had been noted that since he had come back from a posting in Libya, where it was rumoured something unpleasant had happened to him, he had seemed more serious. Sally had been hoping that he was seriously keen on her. But then he had been whisked away and all she had heard of him was a postcard she had received a few weeks after he had gone out of circulation. It was a picture of Chicago, sent in an envelope through the Embassy mail; it showed the Hancock Tower, all one hundred storeys soaring into the sky, and on the back in Bruno’s handwriting: Not as high as my feelings for you… X.

She didn’t for a moment believe that the card meant he was in Chicago or had been there on this trip, but it was something and it showed he had been thinking of her, at least when he wrote it – unless of course, as she suspected, he had written it before he left the country and had left it with somebody to post. Whatever the truth of it, she had propped the card up on the mantelpiece of her small flat in Berlin and she occasionally took it down and read it again.

While she was thinking about Bruno she was plugging in the large coffee machine that served the MI6 Station. The first thing everyone seemed to want when they arrived in the morning was coffee and it was the duty of the first in to get it brewing. As the smell began to permeate the room, she took her coat off and sat down at her desk, casually turning over the top newspaper so she could read the headlines. It was her job as the most junior intelligence officer in the Station to scour the papers every day for items relevant to their operations or articles that might be of interest to Head Office. Elsewhere in the Embassy the same process was going on, on behalf of the diplomats and the Foreign Office in London. The online press got the same attention. It was a job Sally rather enjoyed. It was good for her German and gave her status as the person who knew most about everything that was going on – including, of course, what was on at the cinema and whether the latest play had received good or bad reviews.

Settling down for a peaceful half hour or so, Sally turned over the first paper, the tabloid Die Welt, to read the headlines. It was immediately clear this was not going to be a normal morning:

it shrieked. She read a few lines then grabbed another paper, the staid broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It had the same story on the front page, though the wording of its headline was different:

The next one had:

And so it went on; each paper had its own version, all of the same story.

But what really gripped Sally’s attention was the mention, repeated in different words in each paper, of the suspected involvement of the Russian intelligence service, the FSB. Irma and Dieter Nimitz were described as ‘Soviet-era spies’, who had been allowed to operate in a quiet suburb of Hamburg under the very eyes of the German security services. Two papers had picked up on the fact that Irma had been Head of a school for refugee children, but their assessment of the significance of that differed. One suspected a terrorist link, speculating that the Russians had been feeding radicalised children into Germany, but didn’t speculate on why. The other hinted that the children were being trained as some sort of Fifth Column of spies.

As to who had killed Irma Nimitz and why, many options were offered to the readers, with promises of more sensational information to come. Sally switched on the television in the corner of the office and found that the news channels were also leading on the story.

By now Sally’s colleagues were arriving. An urgent meeting was called and jobs were quickly allocated. Sally was to inform Peggy Kinsolving in MI5, who had asked for the surveillance that had first revealed Irma’s connection to the FSB officer. Sally’s boss, Charles Fairclough, the Head of Station, was going to the ambassador’s morning meeting where he would have to answer questions about what the Station knew about the Nimitzes. A message was being drafted by someone else to inform Geoffrey Fane.

In the middle of all this, Sally’s phone rang. It was Herr Lamme at the BfV. He was in a state of high excitement and Sally switched her phone to loudspeaker so her colleagues could hear the stream of furious German that was coming from him. He was accusing Sally and her colleagues of leaking the Russian connection to Irma Nimitz.

‘How has it become public knowledge?’ he was asking. ‘We have been most carefully investigating Irma Nimitz under conditions of great secrecy. Only you, the British, knew of this possible connection. Now there is a major scandal. Questions are being asked of the Chancellor’s office about what checks are being made on refugee children and how the schools they go to are controlled. The BfV is being accused of incompetence. They are saying spies have been operating under our noses and that the refugee policy has laid us open to infiltration. I have to go with the head of my Service to explain to ministers what we knew. We have a political crisis on our hands and I strongly suspect this information must have been leaked from your side.’

He stopped talking for a moment, having run out of breath, and Charles Fairclough seized the phone. He spoke soothingly to Lamme, assuring him that no one on the British side had leaked anything to the press and no one there had shared details of Irma Nimitz with the Americans. He phrased that part very carefully as he had no idea how much was being shared with the Americans in London; when he looked at Sally questioningly, she shrugged to indicate she didn’t know either.

‘It is probably just lucky speculation,’ Fairclough said. ‘One journalist feeding off another.’ But Herr Lamme clearly didn’t believe that and, to be honest, neither did Charles Fairclough.

Fairclough ploughed on nonetheless. ‘Herr Lamme, we have no information here about what has happened in the Nimitz household except what we read in the newspapers, of course. Could you please tell me exactly what occurred?’

‘All I can tell you at present is that at three thirty yesterday afternoon Dieter Nimitz threw himself under a train at Blankensee station. He was identified by the documents in his wallet. When police went to his house to inform his relatives, they found Irma dead on the floor of the kitchen with her throat cut; she had bled to death. It is clear that her husband killed her. His prints were on the knife they found in the kitchen beside her body. The pathologist reckons she died many hours before he did.’

By now Lamme was speaking more calmly and rationally but then his tone switched back to agitation. ‘I am being called now to go to the ministerial meeting. I will tell the government that I have your assurance that the British have not passed information about German citizens to the press or to the Americans.’

‘Yes,’ said Charles, his fingers tightly crossed. ‘Please do.’ He put down the phone, let out a long heartfelt sigh of relief and left to go to the ambassador’s morning meeting, while Sally poured herself a cup of coffee and picked up the phone to speak to Peggy Kinsolving in London.