The Deceiver

by Frederick Forsyth

  “Ein Spionwagen,” he said. A spy car. Work continued, though there was little more to do. The major went upstairs and called Lichtenberg, the East Berlin headquarters of the SSD. The major knew where to place the call; it went straight to Abteilung Ü, the Counterespionage Department of the service. There the matter was taken in hand by the Director of the Abteilung himself, Colonel Otto Voss. His first command was for absolutely everything connected with the case to be brought to East Berlin; his second was for everyone who had even glimpsed the BMW or its occupant since it entered the country, starting with the border guards at the Saale River, to be brought in and questioned minutely. That would later include the staff of the Black Bear Hotel, the patrolmen who had studied the BMW as they cruised alongside it on the Autobahn—especially the two who had caused the first rendezvous to abort—and the ones who had had their patrol car stolen.

  Voss’s third order was for an absolute end to any mention of the matter on radios or on nonsecure telephone lines. When he had done that, he picked up his internal phone and was connected with Abteilung VI, Crossing Points and Airports.

  At ten P.M. Archimedes phoned McCready for the last time.

  “I’m afraid it’s over,” said the duty officer. “No, they haven’t got him yet, but they will. They must have discovered something in the Erfurt garage. Heavy radio traffic, coded, between Erfurt and East Berlin. A total shutdown of loose chit-chat on the airwaves. Oh, and all border points are on full alert—guards doubled, searchlights on the border working overtime. The lot. Sorry.”

  Even from where he stood on the hillside, McCready could see that over the past hour the headlights of cars coming out of East Germany were very few and far between. They must be holding them for hours under the arc lights a mile away as they searched every car and truck until a mouse could not escape detection.

  At ten-thirty, Timothy Edwards came on the line.

  “Look, we’re all very sorry, but it’s over,” he said. “Come back to London at once, Sam.”

  “They haven’t got him yet. I should stay here. I may be able to help. It’s not over yet.”

  “Bar the shouting, it is,” insisted Edwards.

  “There are things here we have to discuss—the loss of the package being not the least of them. Our American Cousins are not a happy group, to say the least. Please be on the first plane out of Munich or Frankfurt, whichever is the first of the day.”

  It turned out to be Frankfurt. Johnson drove him through the night to the airport, then took the Range Rover and its equipment back to Bonn, a very tired young man. McCready grabbed a few hours’ sleep at the airport’s Sheraton and was on the first flight for Heathrow the next day, landing, with the one-hour time difference, just after eight o’clock. Denis Gaunt met him and drove him straight to Century House. He read the file of radio intercepts in the car.

  Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya rose early that Thursday, and for lack of a gymnasium did her sit-ups in her own room at the KGB barracks. Her flight was not till midday, but she in tended to pass by the KGB headquarters for a last check on the itinerary of the man she hunted.

  She knew he had returned from Erfurt to Potsdam in convoy the previous evening and spent the night in the officers’ quarters there. They were both due to take the same flight back from Potsdam to Moscow at noon. He would sit up front in the seats reserved, even on military flights, for the vlasti, the privileged ones. She was posing as a humble stenographer from the huge Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden, the real seat of power in East Germany. They would not meet—he would not even notice her; but as soon as they entered Soviet air space, he would be under surveillance.

  At eight she walked into the KGB headquarters building half a mile from the embassy and made her way to the Communications Office. They would be able to call Potsdam and confirm that the flight schedule was unchanged. While waiting for her information, she took coffee and shared a table with a young lieutenant who was plainly very tired and yawned often.

  “Up all night?” she asked.

  “Yep. Night shift. The krauts have been in a flap the whole time.”

  He did not use her title because she was in plain clothes, and the word he used for the East Germans was uncomplimentary. The Russians all did that.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Oh, they intercepted a West German car and found a secret cavity in it. Reckon it was being used by one of their agents.”

  “Here in Berlin?”

  “No, down at Jena.”

  “Where is Jena, exactly?”

  “Look, love, my shift’s over. I’m off to get some sleep.”

  She smiled sweetly, opened her purse, and flashed her red-covered ID card. The Lieutenant stopped yawning and went pale. A full major of the Third Directorate was very bad news indeed. He showed her—on the wall map at the end of the canteen. She let him go and stayed looking at the map. Zwickau, Gera, Jena, Weimar, Erfurt—all in a line, a line followed by the convoy of the man she hunted. Yesterday ... Erfurt. And Jena fourteen miles away. Close, too damned close.

  Ten minutes later, a Soviet Major was briefing her on the way the East Germans worked.

  “By now, it will be with their Abteilung II,” he said. “That’s Colonel Voss, Otto Voss. He’ll be in charge.”

  She used his office phone, pulled some rank, and secured an interview at the Lichtenberg headquarters at the SSD with Colonel Voss. Ten o’clock.

  At nine, London time, McCready took his seat at the table in the conference room one floor below the Chief’s office at Century House. Claudia Stuart was opposite, looking at him reproachfully. Chris Appleyard, who had flown to London to escort the Soviet War Book personally back to Langley, smoked and stared at the ceiling. His attitude seemed to be: This is a limey affair. You screwed it up, you sort it out. Timothy Edwards took the chair at the head, a sort of arbitrator. There was only one unspoken agenda: damage assessment. Damage limitation, if any was possible, would come later. No one needed to be briefed as to what had happened; they had all read the file of intercepts and the situation reports.

  “All right,” said Edwards. “It appears your man Poltergeist has come apart at the seams and blown the mission away. Let’s see if there’s anything we can salvage from the mess.”

  “Why the hell did you send him, Sam?” asked Claudia in exasperation.

  “You know why. Because you wanted a job done,” said McCready. “Because you couldn’t do it yourselves. Because it was a rush job. Because I was stopped from going myself. Because Pankratin insisted on me personally. Because Poltergeist would be the only acceptable substitute. Because he agreed to go.”

  “But now it appears,” drawled Appleyard, “that he had just killed his hooker girlfriend and was already at the end of his tether. You didn’t spot anything?”

  “No. He appeared nervous but under control. Nerves are normal—up to a point. He didn’t tell me about his personal mess, and I’m not clairvoyant.”

  “The damned thing is,” said Claudia, “he’s seen Pankratin. When the Stasi get him and go to work, he’ll talk. We’ve lost Pankratin as well, and God knows how much damage his interrogation in the Lubyanka will do.”

  “Where is Pankratin now?” asked Edwards.

  “According to his schedule, he’s boarding a military flight from Potsdam to Moscow right about now.”

  “Can’t you get to him and warn him?”

  “No, dammit. When he lands, he’s taking a week’s furlough. With army friends in the countryside. We can’t get our emergency warning code to him till he gets back to Moscow— if he ever does.”

  “What about the War Book?” asked Edwards.

  “I think Poltergeist’s got it on him,” said McCready.

  He got their undivided attention. Appleyard stopped smoking.

  “Why?”

  “Timing,” said McCready. “The rendezvous was at twelve. Assume he quit the lay-by at about twelve-twenty. The crash was at twelve-thirty, ten minutes and five miles away, on the othe
r side of Jena. I think if he had had the manual stashed in the compartment beneath the battery, even in his state he’d have taken the drunk-driving rap, spent the night in the cells, and paid his fine. Chances are the VOPOs would never have given the car a rigorous search.

  “If the manual was lying in the BMW, I think some hint of the elation of the police would have come through on the intercepts. The SSD would have been called in within ten minutes, not two hours. I think he had it on him—under his jacket, maybe. That’s why he couldn’t go to the police station. For a blood test, they’d have taken his jacket off. So he ran for it.”

  There was silence for several minutes.

  “It all comes back to Poltergeist,” said Edwards. Even though everyone now knew the agent’s real name, they preferred his operational code-name. “He must be somewhere. Where would he go? Has he friends near there? A safe house? Anything?”

  McCready shook his head. “There’s a safe house in East Berlin. He knows it from the old days. I’ve tried it—no contact. In the south, he knows nobody. Never even been there.”

  “Could he hide out in the forests?” asked Claudia.

  “It’s not that kind of area. Not like the Harz with its dense forests. Open rolling farmland, towns, villages, hamlets, farms.”

  “No place for a middle-aged fugitive who’s lost his marbles,” commented Appleyard.

  “Then we’ve lost him,” said Claudia. “Him, the War Book, and Pankratin. The whole deal.”

  “I’m afraid it looks so,” said Edwards. “The People’s Police will use saturation tactics. Roadblocks on every street and lane. Without sanctuary, I fear they’ll have him by midday.”

  The meeting ended on that gloomy note. When the Americans had gone, Edwards detained McCready at the door.

  “Sam, I know it’s hopeless, but stay with it, will you? I’ve asked Cheltenham, East German Section, to step up the listening watch and let you know the instant they hear anything. When they get Poltergeist—and they must—I want to know at once. We’re going to have to placate our Cousins somehow, though God knows how.”

  Back in his office, McCready threw himself into his chair in deep dejection. He took the phone off the cradle and stared at the wall.

  If he had been a drinker, he would have reached for the bottle. Had he not given up cigarettes years earlier, he would have reached for a pack. He had failed, and he knew it. Whatever he might tell Claudia of the pressures they had put on him, it had, finally, been his decision to send in Morenz. And it had been a wrong one.

  He had lost the War Book and probably blown away Pankratin. It would have surprised him to know that he was the only man in the building to hold these losses as secondary to another failure.

  For him, the worst was that he had sent a friend to certain capture, interrogation, and death because he had failed to note the warning signs that now—too late—were so blazingly clear. Morenz had been in no state to go. He had gone rather than let down his friend Sam McCready.

  The Deceiver knew now—again, too late—that for the rest of his days, in the wee hours when sleep refuses to come, he would see the haggard face of Bruno Morenz in that hotel room. ...

  He tried to drive his guilt away and turned his mind to wondering what happens inside a man’s head when he undergoes a complete nervous breakdown. Personally, he had never seen that phenomenon. What was Bruno Morenz like now? How would he react to his situation? Logically? Crazily? He put through a call to the Service’s consultant psychiatrist, an eminent doctor known irreverently as “the Shrink.” He traced Dr. Alan Carr to his office in Wimpole Street. Dr. Carr said he was busy through the morning but would be happy to join McCready for lunch and an ad hoc consultation. McCready made a date for the Montcalm Hotel at one o’clock.

  Punctually at ten, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya entered the main doors of the SSD headquarters building at 22 Normannenstrasse and was shown up to the fourth floor, the floor occupied by the Counterespionage Department. Colonel Voss was waiting for her. He conducted her into his private office and offered her the chair facing his desk. He took his seat and ordered coffee. When the steward left, he asked politely, “What can I do for you, Comrade Major?”

  He was curious as to what had brought about this visit on what would for him undoubtedly be an extremely busy day. But the request had come from the commanding general at KGB headquarters, and Colonel Voss was well aware who really ruled the roost in the German Democratic Republic.

  “You are handling a case in the Jena area,” said Vanavskaya. “A West German agent who ran off after a crash and left his car behind. Could you let me have the details so far?”

  Voss filled in the details not included in the situation report that the Russian had already seen.

  “Let us assume,” said Vanavskaya when he was finished, “that this agent, Grauber, had come to collect or deliver something. ... Was anything found in the car or in the secret cavity that could be what he either brought in or was trying to take out?”

  “No, nothing. All his private papers were merely his cover story. The cavity was empty. If he brought something in, he had already delivered. If he sought to take something out, he had not collected.”

  “Or it was still on his person.”

  “Possibly, yes. We will know when we interrogate him. May I ask the reason for your interest in the case?”

  Vanavskaya chose her words carefully.

  “There is a possibility, just a chance, that a case upon which I am working overlaps your own.”

  Behind his impassive face, Otto Voss was amused. So this handsome Russian ferret suspected the West German might have been in the East to make contact with a Russian source, not an East German traitor. Interesting.

  “Have you any reason to know, Colonel, whether Grauber was to make a personal contact or just administer a dead-letter box?”

  “We believe he was here to make a personal meet,” said Voss. “Although the crash was at twelve-thirty yesterday, he actually came through the border at eleven on Tuesday. If he simply had to drop off a package or pick one up from a dead-letter box, it would not have taken over twenty-four hours. He could have done it by nightfall on Tuesday. As it was, he spent Tuesday night at the Black Bear in Jena. We believe it was a personal pass that he came for.”

  Vanavskaya’s heart sang. A personal meet, somewhere in the Jena-Weimar area, along a road probably, a road traveled by the man she hunted at almost exactly the same time. It was you he came to meet, you bastard! she thought.

  “Have you identified Grauber?” she asked. “That is certainly not his real name.”

  Concealing his triumph, Voss opened a file and passed her an artist’s impression. It had been drawn with help from two policemen at Jena, two patrolmen who had helped Grauber tighten a nut west of Weimar, and the staff of the Black Bear. It was very good. Without a word Voss then passed her a large photograph. The two were identical.

  “His name is Morenz,” said Voss. “Bruno Morenz. A full-time career officer of the BND, based in Cologne.”

  Vanavskaya was surprised. So it was a West German operation. She had always suspected that her man was working for the CIA or the British.

  “You haven’t got him yet?”

  “No, Major. I confess I am surprised at the delay. But we will. The police car was found abandoned, late last night. The reports state its gasoline tank had a bullet hole through it. It would have run for only ten to fifteen minutes after being stolen. It was found here, near Apolda, just north of Jena. So our man is on foot. We have a perfect description—tall, burly, gray-haired, in a rumpled raincoat. He has no papers, a Rhineland accent, physically not in good shape. He will stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “I want to be present at the interrogation,” said Vanavskaya. She was not squeamish. She had seen them before.

  “If that is an official request from the KGB, I will of course comply.”

  “It will be,” said Vanavskaya.

  “Then don’t be far away, Major. We wil
l have him, probably by midday.”

  Major Vanavskaya returned to the KGB building, cancelled her flight from Potsdam, and used a secure line to contact General Shaliapin. He agreed.

  At twelve noon, an Antonov 32 transport of the Soviet Air Force lifted off from Potsdam for Moscow. General Pankratin and other senior Army and Air Force officers returning to Moscow were on board. Some junior officers were farther back, with the mail sacks. There was no dark-suited “secretary” from the embassy sharing the lift home.

  “He will be,” said Dr. Carr over the melon and avocado hors d’oeuvre, “in what we call a dissociated, or twilight, or fugue state.”

  He had listened carefully to McCready’s description of a nameless man who had apparently suffered a massive nervous breakdown. He had not learned, or asked, anything about the mission the man had been on, or where this breakdown had occurred, save that it was in hostile territory. The empty plates were removed and the sole prepared, off the bone.

  “Dissociated from what?” asked McCready.

  “From reality, of course,” said Dr. Carr. “It is one of the classic symptoms of this kind of syndrome. He may already have been showing signs of self-deception before the final crackup.”

  And how, thought McCready, Morenz had been kidding himself that a stunning hooker had really fallen for him, that he could get away with a double murder.

  “Fugue,” Dr. Carr pursued as he speared a forkful of tender sole meunière, “means flight. Flight from reality, especially harsh, unpleasant reality. I think your man will by now be in a really bad way.”

  “What will he actually do?” asked McCready. “Where will he go?”

  “He will go to a sanctuary, somewhere he feels safe, somewhere he can hide, where all the problems will go away and people will leave him alone. He may even return to a childlike state. I had a patient once who, overcome by problems, retired to his bed, curled into the fetal position, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and stayed there. Wouldn’t come out. Childhood, you see. Safety, security. No problems. Excellent sole, by the way. Yes, a little more Meursault. ... Thank you.”