Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  Mundy meanwhile is clinging to the windowsill with both bloody hands, but unfortunately he hasn’t got the attic to himself anymore. There are two frogmen standing behind him, loosing off burst after burst of submachine gun fire through the open window at the blacked-out neighboring houses, just as coolly as if they were on the range at Edinburgh. And though they are patently oversupplied with weapons, they seem keen to use them all, no sooner firing one gun than dropping it, picking up another and firing with that.

  And there’s a third, tall fellow joined the party who, for all the tack he’s wearing, can’t disguise his lazy Bostonian walk. He’s backing away from Mundy as if he’s scared of him, and he’s putting his pistol back in his belt. But make no mistake: this is not the gesture of someone preparing to talk sweet reason with a wounded man lying on the ground. What this masked, languid antiterrorist needs is something heavier to shoot with, which turns out to be some sort of sophisticated rifle with sights so big that an uninformed and recumbent person at the receiving end—such as Mundy—might not know which hole to watch when he is being shot. But this is not something that bothers the shooter, clearly, because when he’s got himself as far away from Mundy as the room allows—until he’s right up against the wall, in fact—he puts this same rifle to his shoulder and, with studied deliberation, fires three high-velocity sniper bullets into Mundy, one straight through the center of his brow and two more at leisure into the upper body, one to the abdomen and the other to the heart, though neither can have been strictly necessary.

  But not before Mundy has filled his lungs for one last intended yell of Hang on, it’s all right, I’m coming, to his dead friend lying in the square.

  15

  THE SIEGE OF HEIDELBERG, as it immediately became known to the world’s media, sent shock waves through the courts of Old Europe and Washington, and a clear signal to all critics of America’s policy of conservative democratic imperialism.

  For five full days, press and television were forced to observe something close to a puzzled silence. There were headlines—sensational ones—but there was no hard news, for the good reason that the security forces had operated the equivalent of a closed film set.

  An entire sector of the city had been cordoned off, and its perplexed inhabitants evacuated to specially staffed hostels and held incommunicado throughout the operation.

  No photographers, print or television journalists were admitted to the scene of the outrage until the authorities were satisfied that every last shred of potential intelligence had been removed for analysis.

  When a television news company’s helicopter attempted to overfly the area, it was seen off by American gunships and the pilot was arrested on landing. When the journalists complained, they were reminded that similar reporting restrictions had operated in Iraq. “And what goes for the terrorists in Iraq sure as hell goes for terrorists in Heidelberg,” said a senior U.S. defense official, on condition he not be named.

  The involvement of American special forces in the siege was celebrated rather than denied, though it was the cause of some anger to the more liberal German constitutionalists. Journalists, however, were blandly reminded that the United States reserved to itself the right to “hunt down its enemies at any time in any place, with or without the cooperation of its friends and allies.”

  In confirmation, German officials would only speak uncomfortably of “ignoring artificial national barriers in the greater interest of the common struggle.” By common struggle was understood the war on terrorism.

  One skeptical German commentator referred to the role of the German security services as a “coalition of the belatedly almost willing.”

  By the time the schoolhouse was finally opened to the press, there had obviously been a fair amount of cleaning up, but what remained to be photographed was still rewarding. A total of 207 bullets fired from the terrorists’ hideaway had spattered against empty neighboring buildings. The absence of casualties among security forces was regarded as providential. A commentator for Fox News spoke of the Hand of God.

  “This time we got lucky,” said the same senior Washington defense official who wished to remain anonymous. “We went in there and we did what we had to do, and we came out without a nick on our finger. Unfortunately, there’s always a next time. Nobody around here is crowing too loud.”

  In addition to the bullet holes there were photo opportunities for bloodstains on the cobbles that had either escaped the cleaners’ attentions or been left out of consideration for the press. By following their path it was easy to reconstruct the last moments of Terrorist A, now unmasked as a former Baader-Meinhof sympathizer in middle age known as Sasha, the son of a respected Lutheran pastor.

  Sasha, it was revealed by unnamed sources close to the U.S. Intelligence community, had worked in some of the darkest corners of East German Intelligence during the Cold War. His spying activities for the Communists had included the provision of training and other facilities to Arab terror groups.

  When the Berlin Wall came down, Sasha exploited his old connections by signing up with a hitherto unknown splinter group of Arab militants believed to have links with Al Qaeda. This information was fed to the press piecemeal over several days, allowing ample time for journalistic license.

  Details of Sasha’s twilit career, and his close contacts with members of the German and French radical establishment, were also emerging. Documents discovered in a briefcase he was carrying at the time of his attempted escape were being examined by forensic experts and intelligence analysts.

  But it was of course the so-called Academy of Professional English that provided the most blood-chilling insight into the terrorists’ intentions. For weeks—until it was ruled unsafe and summarily closed on the orders of the city authorities—the devastated schoolhouse offered all the attractions of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. Television teams gorged themselves and came back for more. No news flash was complete without the public’s favorite images being replayed. And where the cameras went, the print media dutifully followed.

  Some classrooms were so perforated by gunfire that, to quote one journalist, they resembled cheese graters. The main staircase looked as though it had been torpedoed in shallow water. The library, which at the time of the battle was in the throes of being restored, had been blown to pieces, its marble fireplace pulverized, its molded ceilings torn open and blackened by blast.

  “When bad guys shoot first, it’s true we get kind of testy,” the same anonymous Washington defense official conceded.

  The testiness showed. Doors and windows were eyeless voids. The art nouveau skylight, point of entry for one team of invaders, was reduced to a rubble of colored glass.

  From these scenes of havoc the cameras turned lovingly to the prize exhibits: the bomb-making factory, the arsenal of small arms, submachine guns and hand grenades, the boxes of commercial chemicals, the urban guerrilla’s handbooks, the crates of inflammatory literature, the fake passports and the wad of loose cash for two terrorists who wouldn’t be going anywhere anymore. And best of all, the detailed maps of American military and civilian installations in Germany and France, some ominously ringed in red, the prize exhibit being a ground plan of U.S. military headquarters, Heidelberg, together with covertly taken photographs of the entrance and perimeter.

  Estimates of how many terrorists had been inside the school when it was attacked varied between eight and six. Ballistics experts found evidence of six separate weapons firing into the square. Yet only two men were accounted for and one of them never reached the building. So where were the rest?

  Townspeople living close to the evacuated area testified to grüne Minnas tearing past their windows with lights flashing and sirens going. Others spoke of ambulances escorted by police cars and armored personnel carriers. Yet no local hospital reported receiving any VIP casualties, no local mortuary or prison could boast a new inmate. On the other hand, the concentration of U.S. military facilities and personnel stationed in the area—since 9/11 prote
cted by electronically enhanced high wire—left open the possibility that casualties and prisoners had found their way there.

  The devastation inside the school building made it nigh impossible to reconstruct the scene. The builders, questioned by journalists and police, recalled no visitors except for tradesmen and the tall Englishman since identified as Mundy. Bits of crockery and food found scattered around the rubble provided no hard evidence. Builders also have to eat. Terrorists, it is well known, are capable of sharing cups.

  The official answer provided little comfort: “To divulge further details at this time could endanger vital ongoing operations. Other persons found on the premises are in custody.”

  What kind of persons? What age? What nationality, sex, race? What custody? Are they in Guantánamo already?

  We have nothing further to add at this time.

  One mystery figure who appeared to offer the chance of a breakthrough was the driver of a tan-colored BMW rental car who had collected Mundy from the house on the day of the raid and was said by witnesses to have visited several of the city’s historical attractions in his company. The unknown man was described as fesch—well-dressed, fit-looking and aged fifty-five to sixty.

  The BMW was swiftly traced. The hirer was one Hans Leppink, a resident of Delft in Holland. Credit card, passport and driving license confirmed this, but the Dutch authorities denied any knowledge of him, and offered no explanation of how he might have obtained such plausible Dutch identity documents. There was nothing for it but to go back to the two dead desperadoes, both in their fifties.

  Sasha was clearly the easier of the two to categorize. A flock of terror psychologists from obscure universities descended from their academic perches to do just that.

  He was a German archetype, a child of Nazidom, a seeker after absolutes, the poor man’s shrill philosopher, now anarchist, now Communist, now homeless radical visionary in search of ever more extreme ways of subjecting society to his will.

  His physical disability, and the sense of inferiority it engendered, drew comparison with Hitler’s propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. It was common ground, on evidence nobody could afterwards remember, that he hated Jews.

  His estrangement from his pious father, his mother’s dementia and the prolonged, now suspicious, death of an elder brother while Sasha looked on callously from the boy’s bedside, were awarded their proper significance.

  So was there a particular moment in Sasha’s life—these wise men and women speculated—was there some kind of epiphany, when Sasha saw the path of violence, the black road, open up before him and took it?

  One writer, from the New York Times, knew above all others that there was. Under a sworn oath of secrecy, she said, she had received her story straight from the horse’s mouth: an American Intelligence professional as modest as he is elusive, the acknowledged mastermind who had single-handedly brought Sasha and his British accomplice to justice. No physical or other description of this fine operative was vouchsafed by the gushing journalist, beyond the revelation that he was tall, rather formal in his manner and “the kind of man I just dream of being taken out to dinner by, and never am.”

  Sasha habitually spoke of the desert as his wilderness, this superhero had confided to her: “You may think I’m crazy, Sally, but I personally am convinced that while Sasha was out there in what he called his wilderness, he underwent some kind of very yucky, self-induced religious conversion. Okay, he was an atheist. But he was a reverend’s son and he hallucinated. Maybe he used drugs, though I have no direct evidence of that,” he added, speaking as a man who takes the truth seriously.

  But it was Ted Mundy who put their penetrative powers to the test. It was the Pakistan-born public-school cricketer, son of a soldier, Oxford dropout, Berlin anarchist, British Council flunky, failed teacher and Muslim sympathizer, who received the full benefit of the dissectors’ knives. One tabloid even went in pursuit of the dog called Mo. MO—OR MAO? it screamed, and for a couple of issues Mo became the canine equivalent of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud.

  Much quiet compassion was lavished on Mundy’s ex-wife Kate, New Labor’s ambitious member for Doncaster Trent, now happily wedded to one of the party’s leading backroom policy makers, but with her shining future suddenly uncertain.

  “Though our marriage lasted eleven years, it was in reality short-lived,” said Kate, reluctantly facing the cameras on her second husband’s arm to read a prepared statement. “There was never any overt friction. Ted was a loving man in his way, but very secretive. For most of the time we were together his thoughts were a complete mystery to me, as I am afraid they will be today to many people round the world. I cannot begin to explain how he became what he apparently became. I never heard him speak of Sasha. I was totally unaware of his political activities while he was studying in Berlin.”

  Jake, standing at her other side, was even briefer. “My mother and I are extremely distressed and confused,” he declared through his tears. “We ask you to respect our grief as we struggle to come to terms with this tragedy.” And in a grammatical solecism that must have had Mundy spinning in his grave: “As my natural father, I shall always feel there is a hole in my life I can never fill.”

  Gradually, however, under the intense scrutiny of commentators, Mundy the closet terrorist was winkled out of his shell.

  His early obsession with Islam was confirmed by school contemporaries: Mundy insisted on referring to school chapel as the mosque, said one.

  So was his angry nature. One former schoolmate referred to the near-manic ferocity of his fast bowling: He was just so f***ing aggressive (Daily Mail).

  Another shed light on his unhealthy preoccupation with anything German. There was an old chap who taught cello and German. He called himself Mallory. Some of the boys reckoned he was a Nazi in hiding. Ted made an absolute beeline for him. He used to spout German poetry at us until we told him to belt up.

  A leaked American intelligence report revealed that, during an unexplained period of residence in Taos, New Mexico, Mundy had formed a relationship with two Soviet agents presently serving prison sentences: the notorious Bernie Luger, who used his cover as a painter to obtain photographs of U.S. defense facilities in the Nevada desert, and his Cuban accomplice, Nita.

  Speculation about how the British Council had come to employ someone with a West Berlin police record of mob violence and no university degree led to calls for a public inquiry.

  Murmurings that Mundy had maintained secret contact with “cultural attachés” from Communist embassies in London were not directly denied by the Council’s spokesman. WHY THE HELL DIDN’T THEY SACK HIM? a tabloid demanded, over a disturbing statement from one of Mundy’s former colleagues:

  Ted was a total drone. None of us understood how he survived. All he did was work the Commie arts circuit and sit about drinking coffee in the canteen.

  The bouncer of a Soho strip club claimed to recognize his photograph. I’d know him anywhere. Big, gangly bloke, one of the overfriendly ones. Give me the grubby mackintosh brigade anytime.

  But for the final clue to this complex man, it was widely agreed, the world would have to wait until the woman Zara, a retired prostitute and Mundy’s common-law wife in Munich, could be persuaded to reveal her story. British checkbook journalists were already storming the prison outside Ankara.

  Zara, who significantly had fled to Turkey with her eleven-year-old son on the very day of the siege, was arrested on arrival and was presently being questioned. There was speculation that the Americans had only allowed her to return to her homeland because Turkish interrogation methods were known to be robust. She had arrived in Germany as the bride of a Turkish laborer now in a Berlin jail serving a seven-year sentence for aggravated assault. Zara herself was described as religiously observant, intelligent, near-silent and strong-willed. The imam of her mosque in Munich, who was being held indefinitely under investigative detention, insisted that she was “no sort of fanatic,” but this view was challenged by one of
her co-religionists, who refused to be named. She’s the type we must purge from our community as we progress into the twenty-first century. It was later learned that Zara had borrowed a coat from her, and failed to return it before she left for Turkey.

  Recent reports from Turkish police sources indicated that Zara, though a tough nut to crack, was beginning to see the wisdom of cooperating with the forces of justice.

  So it was inevitable, once the mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic had beaten their brains out solving the question of how Britain and Germany could have spawned two such heinous characters, that the usual Alternative Voices should have their irritating day.

  The most prominent was to be found on a not-for-profit website pledged to transparency in politics. The offending article was entitled THE SECOND BURNING OF THE REICHSTAG—THE AMERICAN RIGHTISTS’ CONSPIRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY, and its author was described as a long-serving field operative of British Intelligence who had recently resigned his post and was writing “at risk of his pension and even prosecution.” The main plank of the article was that the entire siege, like Hitler’s notorious burning of the Reichstag, was a sham, perpetrated by what he termed “agents of a self-elected junta of Washington neoconservative theologians close to the presidential throne.” The two dead men were as innocent of their trumped-up crimes as was poor Van der Lubbe, the Reichstag’s alleged arsonist.