9
Schnucki slept on Cooper’s bed every night and sometimes, in the small hours, padded through to his litter tray in the kitchen. The last thing she needed was a mess to clear up if a shut bedroom door stopped him reaching it. So she always kept it open. And the arrangement worked well, except when she had visitors engaging in noisy sex on her living room rug before giving up on the fun and retiring to their respective sofas. Apart from animal noises, only to be expected, she was troubled by a question: why did they bother? They didn’t hate each other but they didn’t like each other either. Hjemdahl thought Horváth was an airhead, which she was not; Horváth considered Hjemdahl oafish and uncultured, which he was. When she put her concern to him, his reply was brutal. Cathy, come on, you don’t have to like a toilet to use it. Horváth was emerging from the kitchen at the time and didn’t hear what he said.
Though her fridge had not been stocked for unexpected visitors, Cooper managed to lay on a modest breakfast of orange juice, coffee and toast. Dieter Klein would doubtless have challenged the marmalade, contravening as it did the Konfitürenverordnung as detailed in the Federal Law Gazette, back numbers of which were filed in his study. But she’d bought it at a farmers’ market, where the product was perfectly legal. Marmalade reminded her of her youth, besides which, she liked it.
‘I just don’t get it.’
According to the evidence of Cooper’s ears the night before, he definitely had, so he was talking about something else.
‘What don’t you get this time, Magnus?’
Hjemdahl wasn’t in a helpful mood. ‘The price of fish.’
He checked his diary and looked at Horváth.
‘If we leave at eleven, we could share a taxi.’
If it saved money, this was fine by her.
Magnus looked out of the window to the park opposite.
‘Good, then I have time for a run.’
Cooper wondered where it came from, all the energy this young man felt the need to work off, not to mention the dubious activities he employed to do it. She looked at her wall clock, straight from Etsy, the hands moving slowly over the painted face of a cat.
‘You do, and still have time for a shower when you get back.’
‘If I’m not in it already,’ Horváth said, ‘with nothing on.’
Hjemdahl smiled grimly. ‘In that case, we shower together.’
Lacing his trainers to the correct tension proved a strangely challenging task but when he finally left, Cooper shot her friend a questioning look.
‘Last night, yes, sorry about the noise. If I could figure out a way to have sex in a vacuum, I’d do it.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘Just for you.’
‘Any word from Eric? For reasons best known to himself, he tells you more than anyone else.’
They both knew what these reasons were but let it lie.
‘He’s back in his warehouse now, monarch of all he surveys. Went by train.’
‘Good. Unlikely as it sounds, he could yet be useful.’
Horváth took a healthy swig of orange juice and moved on to what she wanted to know.
‘Anyway, Catherine, you have a meeting.’
‘Half eleven, could be our best lead yet. She works in a biotech lab.’
‘How did you find her?’
‘She found me. Gudrun Grönefeld. We’ve exchanged emails but that’s it. She claims to have serious concerns.’
‘What about?’
‘Haven’t a clue. She said she’d run them past me but only in person.’
Cooper didn’t know who she worked for either, and Grönefeld’s lack of any online presence left her no way in. She had, however, included a photograph in her last message so that Cooper could pick her out from the crowd. Horváth looked at it in amazement.
‘I could never bring that off, a halo braid!’
‘I’m sure you could. Anyway, my assumption is that Grönefeld works in a lab which handles pathogens, maybe for a government agency or a private company. Who knows?’
‘And she could help us?’
‘Maybe. I’ll just have to play it by ear. About Stenvik.’
Cooper felt bad about Horváth’s trip to Trondheim. She worked well on the move and liked to travel, but money was too tight right now to waste on long shots like that.
‘Couldn’t get round him at all, and believe me, I tried.’
‘The usual charm failed you for once.’
Looking at Horváth, attractive, open, her warm oestrogen glow enough to light up a darkened room, Cooper found this hard to credit.
‘He’s cautious to the point of paranoia, oh, and he flashed his wedding ring several times to warn me off. But he gave me a name. Could be useful.’
Horváth was so relaxed Cooper knew she hadn’t heard.
‘You realise he’s dead.’
Horváth didn’t believe it for a moment. ‘I have that effect on people.’
‘I’m serious. He was killed by a car, hit and run.’
She studied Horváth’s reaction carefully; she was close to being offended.
‘I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with it!’
‘Of course not, but you may have been the last person he talked to.’
‘So I should expect a knock on the door? I don’t think so somehow.’
‘Your name might be in his diary.’
This seemed likely, but why would anyone follow that up for a traffic accident? She changed the subject, abruptly as usual.
‘About your friend in LA. We all know the dangers of hacking but this is ridiculous. We can’t encrypt bits of paper from a typewriter, so what’s the point? And anyway, the authorities can open letters at will. All they need is a kettle!’
Cooper conceded the point. ‘True, but how often do they bother?’
Lang didn’t know the answer either: figures were not collected on certain subjects in case someone asked for them, a member of the Bundestag, for example, a journalist, a lawyer. You cannot withhold what you do not have.
10
Klein didn’t have a cat – or a dog, a canary or a goldfish. In fact, he felt no fellowship whatsoever with the natural world because, as he saw it, he was himself unnatural. Homosexuals had always existed and in some societies nothing was thought of it. He had gone so far as to study inscriptions on Athenian red figure vases which supported this view but was impaled by his own implacable logic. With sex had come death, but with it had also come the mutations which gave species flexibility in response to change. The sole purpose of sex was breeding and homosexuals did not breed: from which he inferred that they had no point. Which meant that he, Dieter Klein, had no point.
And when he came to this conclusion, Klein was relieved. It gave him the reason he needed to avoid sexual contact entirely, which suited a disposition which Ursula Lang had once referred to as anal-retentive when she didn’t know he was listening. Yes, he kept himself to himself, and that included his body. But his attitude also stemmed from the view that agents of the security service who happened to be homosexual were at particular risk of blackmail. Work for us, Herr Klein, the words rang in his ear in a ham Russian accent, or we will make your proclivity public. We will shout it from the Brandenburg Gate! He didn’t like the sound of that, for in addition to its love of logic, the good ship Klein always ran for safety whenever storm clouds blew.
He often thought how fortunate he was to live on the leafy Kreuzberg Straße. Yes, the Bavarian Quarter was the place to be if you could afford it. Which he could and the blousy Ursula Lang could not. And what did she have to say for herself when all was said and done? Her breasts had never been employed for their intended purpose, the sustenance of children, so, sexually speaking, she was no more relevant than he was.
He sat at his breakfast bar with a glass of deionised water planning the day ahead. Gudrun Grönefeld was meeting
someone at the Vapiano, identity as yet unknown. And that was because her train from Vienna arrived at the Hauptbahnhof, where a branch of the café was situated. He looked at his file. Fräulein Grönefeld was a person of interest because she worked at Breakout, a subsidiary of a US biotech company which dealt, among other things, with viruses so lethal they were subject to stringent control. It seemed she had concerns and had taken them to the Austrian Security Service. The BVT hadn’t shared them, but they had shared her name with their colleagues over the border in the Bundesrepublik, who added it to their watchlist. And behold, lo, here was the woman herself paying them a friendly visit.
Klein looked up from his file to the leafless trees in the outside world beyond, noting the potted plant on the windowsill, a cyclamen with beautiful pink petals shading to red at the base. It pleased him that something which looked so natural was artificial, had no effect whatever on the quality of the air inside his apartment and needed no water either. The downside was the dust it attracted. Something to do with static electricity? He had no idea.
He did have a shower, though, and liked to use it before leaving the house. Swinging open the door, he stepped in to tidy himself up. In his case, this involved a ritual. Once the water was at the desired temperature, he perched on a white plastic stool and shaved. Unlike most men, he didn’t stop at the face. On hygiene grounds, he believed in removing body hair wherever he could find it. At first, this hadn’t proved easy. A cut to the scrotum proved troublesome for several days, and a build-up of hair in the trap obliged him to visit a hardware store and install a stainless steel hair sieve in the tray. Since then, the only thing which had made him question his daily routine was the knowledge that certain suicide bombers also removed their body hair before strapping on their vests. They even used eau de cologne, something he liked to do himself. But he could live with that even if they could not.
Far too often everything happened at once, an irritating feature of life he had never fully accepted. At five to eleven, Hjemdahl and Horváth appeared on the pavement with cases and got into an airport transfer car, a silver Mercedes. At which point his phone rang. Ursula Lang. Should she follow them or stay where she was, keeping a lookout for Cooper and another guest appearance of her father? Klein had no way of knowing, but on a mental toss of the coin told Lang to follow the travellers. Who were they and where were they going? He’d really like to know. Oh, and by the way, they probably booked online and paid by card. Check that out. Great advice, she’d never have thought of that.
She followed the couple to Tegel Airport. From what she could see they knew each other well but were far from bosom buddies. She detected a certain stiffness in Hjemdahl as he stood with Horváth on the concourse checking departure screens; she’d never have guessed what they’d been up to in Cooper’s apartment the night before. But over the next two hours she discovered that Horváth was going to Budapest and Hjemdahl to Stockholm. In due course, she would learn more about both.
By then, Klein, clean and sweet-smelling, had left his apartment and travelled by bus to the Hauptbahnhof and the Cafe Vapiano. Since being on time was never good enough, he arrived twenty minutes before Grönefeld was due. Taking a ticket from a machine and waiting in a queue wasn’t his idea of classy eating, but in the interests of national security he put up with it. Just as unsettling were the long tables, calling to mind a refectory in a student hall. But he found a suitable space for himself, his coffee and croissant, and enjoyed ten minutes peace until a group of Spanish tourists arrived and joined him.
Klein groaned; this was the last thing he needed. Several consulted mobile phones, checking maps and routes. But what amazed him, as it always did, was the range of hand and arm gestures, the flailing, the pointless repertoire. What was it, a form of punctuation? It certainly added nothing to meaning, all of which was carried by words. And Klein knew a thing or two about words; he’d been halfway through a dissertation on The Man Without Qualities when he’d abandoned the project. There was nothing worth saying about the book which hadn’t been said already.
Under a young man’s Superdry jacket, Klein detected a black sweatshirt with the words Vaya con Dios in gold. Specially selected for the journey as added insurance, Klein thought. He’d start praying next. The man was so distracting that Klein almost failed to notice Gudrun Grönefeld arrive. She went through the ordering routine and sat at a neighbouring table with a fruit juice and risotto, which she picked at while leafing through Morgenpost. She bore a close resemblance to the photograph on file, light brown hair arranged in a halo braid – useful for keeping her hair out of the way and stuffing under protective headgear at work.
And then it happened. Klein was seldom astonished, he’d seen it all in his time, yet even he was taken aback when Grönefeld was joined by Catherine Cooper. His initial surprise was followed by a warm glow almost as nourishing as lentil soup, the warm glow of knowing that when he’d told Ursula Lang to forget about Cooper and follow the others he’d made the right choice. And this couldn’t be down to chance; this could not be a coincidence – though, as he often found in his musings, defining what something was not left him no nearer to knowing what it actually was.
He saw from their handshakes that these women had not met before. If things ran to course, they would waste their time with vacuous social pleasantries before getting down to business. And in his efforts to overhear what that business might be, he was helped by the departure of the Spanish travellers, one of them at least going with God.
Even so, the background noise of a busy café made hearing difficult and he had no surveillance team to help him out. The women conversed in German, which helped a bit, and referred on several occasions to Future World, which he took to be a magazine, book or website. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have taken them for sisters, Cooper being the elder and solicitous with it. Though, unlike Grönefeld, she let her shoulder-length brown hair go hang in no definable style. And while Grönefeld was sparing with makeup, Cooper used none at all.
Some twenty minutes into their meeting, Grönefeld was becoming more animated. To judge from her expression, she was concerned about something, probably the issue she’d raised with the BVD, though he noted that at no point did documents change hands. Whatever these women were talking about, they were keeping it off the record, suspicious in itself. And when they rose to go their separate ways, they parted, again with a shake of the hand. Grönefeld smiled at Cooper and Cooper smiled back, patting her sympathetically on the arm. This was clearly the start of something. He was fortunate to be in at the beginning.
11
Gudrun Grönefeld had regular meetings with her line manager, Danie Pienaar, a South African who equated managerial skills with scientific knowledge. He’d gone so far as to wear a lab coat in lieu of a biology qualification, a tactic which fooled no one and amused many. He usually greeted her with a smile, but not on this occasion.
‘It has come to my attention that you contacted the BVD regarding the safety of our work here. You should have raised your concerns with me directly. I must say, I’m disappointed, very disappointed.’
Grönefeld was distracted by Pienaar’s accent, at times so guttural he seemed to be clearing his throat as he spoke. She looked at him with dismay; she had spoken to the BVD in confidence.
‘I raised them back in July and you told me then there was nothing to worry about.’
Pienaar consulted a file on his monitor, beside it a framed portrait of his wife, an Austrian national he considered his passport to remain in the European Union.
‘You raised certain misgivings on that occasion, though in terms so general there was really no way of addressing them.’ Which was hardly to wonder at; being specific with a man who didn’t understand the technicalities had left her little option. ‘So what, exactly, is your problem?’
‘As I pointed out then, and find myself pointing out again now, the genetic modification of already dangerous viruses
is a hazardous path to go down.’
‘As you are well aware, Fräulein Grönefeld, we here at Breakout have rigorous safeguards in place. We are accredited for work at biohazard levels three and four, and there are no higher levels than that.’ He raised his hands from his desk, palms upwards, in a gesture worthy of a despairing mime artist. ‘So I really must ask you again – what do you imagine could possibly go wrong?’
But Gudrun Grönefeld did not believe it was possible to predict what could go wrong, however hard you tried, and said as much to Pienaar.
‘If I may say so, a ludicrous stance to take. Containment is all. Agreed?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Get containment right and we are safe in all eventualities. And I have it on the highest authority that we have it right.’
Grönefeld was beginning to feel uncomfortable in Pienaar’s office. In addition to his critical tone, he never opened his windows, resulting in a claustrophobic, airless feeling she didn’t like. Either there was too little oxygen in the room or such oxygen as there was had been recycled too often. The downside of containment, she thought. As for the highest authority Pienaar referred to, this was their head of research, Dr Lucas Heidegger, and there was no denying his credentials. Except in one area.
‘So when terrorists break in here with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, how will our containment procedures help us then?’
Pienaar sighed; this woman was all hairstyle and no brain.
The Ears of a Cat Page 4