by Mark Dawson
Mackintosh looked back to Geipel. The Stasi officer was wearing a white shirt with exaggerated lapels, a red cardigan and beige slacks. Cameron frisked him, removing a Makarov from a clip-on holster. He hauled him up and pushed the colonel back so that he was up against the wall.
“All yours,” Cameron said.
Mackintosh followed in, pressing the muzzle of his Beretta between the man’s eyes.
“Speak English?”
Geipel couldn’t nod with the muzzle pinning his head against the wall. “Yes,” he said. “I speak it.”
“We’re going back downstairs,” he said. “If you do anything stupid, we’ll kill you. I’m not bluffing. Say that you understand.”
“I understand,” he said. His eyes flickered between pain and fury.
“Good.”
Cameron put his hand on Mackintosh’s shoulder. “You go down first. Make sure it’s clear. Get Walker, go to your car and bring it to the front. Where do you want to take him?”
“I’ve rented a space in Marienfelde,” he said. “We need to get him there.”
Cameron grabbed a fistful of Geipel’s cardigan. “Let’s get him out.”
Mackintosh nodded and started for the door. Cameron took a moment, yanked Geipel away from the wall and propelled him to the door, following close behind.
32
Mackintosh found Walker where he had left him. The unconscious guard was still on the floor; he hadn’t moved.
“Let’s go,” Mackintosh said. “We’re getting out of here.”
Walker followed him out of the building. “What happened?”
“Morgan is dead. They’re bringing Geipel down. I need to get my car.”
“Then what?”
“We’re going to take him somewhere quiet.”
They made their way to the side road. Mackintosh told Walker to follow him, got into his staff car and drove back to the front of the building. He waited, fumes rising from the exhaust. He saw Fisher, Cameron and Geipel in the lobby and reached back to open the kerbside door; Cameron shoved Geipel, urging him outside and across the pavement. He pushed him into the car and slid alongside him, the gun pressed against his ribcage. Fisher hurried around the car and got in through the opposite door so that Geipel was pinned between the two SAS men.
“Go,” Cameron said.
Mackintosh set off, the wheels slipping on the ice and the rear end sliding out until the rubber found traction.
“This is a bad idea,” Geipel said.
Mackintosh replied without looking back. “Shooting my agents was a bad idea.”
“I’m a serving officer in the State Security Service,” he said.
“I don’t give a shit what you are. You must have known there would be consequences.”
Mackintosh drove them south through Schillerkiez with Walker following behind. He saw the usual evidence of frantic building work, with construction sites still replacing buildings that had been damaged during the war. The skyline bristled with cranes, and heavy vehicles lumbered across patches of open ground, the snow melting into slush and mud. Mackintosh took a left and, eventually, they reached Marienfelde. Mackintosh drove into a street that allowed access to a row of warehouses and industrial units. The buildings nestled tightly together, with narrow streets cutting between them.
He pulled up against a wire fence that prevented access to a small warehouse. Walker drew up behind him. Mackintosh stepped outside, shivering in the sudden cold, unlocked the padlock and slid the gate to the side. Walker drove in first, and Mackintosh followed. The two cars pulled up outside the warehouse.
“What are we doing here?” Geipel said.
“I need to spend a little quiet time with you, Colonel,” he said. “We have a lot to talk about.”
Mackintosh opened the door and stepped down to the icy pavement. The snow had fallen heavily and he hadn’t been here to clear it away for several days. He crunched through it, cracking the icy crust, the snow reaching up to his calves as he stomped over to the warehouse. He took the keys from his pocket and found the one to open the door. He pushed it back, turned to signal that the two soldiers should bring Geipel, and then went inside.
Mackintosh had done this before. He had served in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles, and had broken Provos who would rather have sold out their mothers than confess to a Brit. They had their own methods—baseball bats, hurley sticks, or cudgels spiked with nails; he had had to be inventive, to find new methods that would frighten even them. It had taken practice but, eventually, he had become very good at it. He hadn’t had to revisit those days for a long time, but he found that he wasn’t daunted by the prospect of what might come next. He focussed on Geipel and the role that he had played in Élodie’s murder. He thought about what Geipel could tell him, the things that he needed to know. They were worth a few hours of unpleasantness and much more besides.
33
Mackintosh had been renting the warehouse for six months. He had decided that it wasn’t safe to run this particular operation from the consulate, or from any of the other premises that were available to him. He was acutely aware that there was a mole problem in MI6, and he needed to be sure that his work here remained secret, now more than ever. The warehouse comprised two rooms: the first was an office, furnished with a table and three chairs. He had fastened cork boards onto three walls and had pinned a map of Berlin to one of the boards. The rest of the space was taken up with pages of written notes, newspaper clippings and index cards on which he had recorded his contact notes with PICASSO and, more recently, the details of the men he suspected of being involved in the ambush. Alex Geipel had his own card. There was a large photograph next to the map. It showed four men, each dressed in the black formal uniform of a Stasi officer. The photograph had been taken by an agent in East Berlin a year previously. It was a formal occasion, everyone done up to the nines. Geipel was one of the group. Karl-Heinz Sommer was standing next to him.
The second room was adjacent to the first. Mackintosh unpinned the photograph, put it in his pocket and went through. There was a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room. It cast its light down on Geipel. The colonel had been trussed up, his wrists tied to the arms of the chair and his ankles tied to the legs. Jimmy Walker was standing in the shadows, the gloom obscuring his face. Cameron and Fisher had gone.
Mackintosh went over so that he was standing in front of Geipel. “How are you feeling?”
Geipel didn’t reply.
“We need to talk, Colonel.”
“Do we?” His English was accented and the words dripped with sarcasm.
“You know who I am, don’t you?”
“I do,” Geipel said. “You should have stayed in London. Coming back here was unwise.”
“We’ll have to disagree about that. I need you to help me with some information.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Really? I was hoping this could be civil.”
Mackintosh stepped back and made his way to the edge of the room. There was a table there, and laid out across it was a selection of industrial tools. Mackintosh had thought about how he might like to conduct the interrogation. There were several ways he could go about it. He could be patient and try to explain to Geipel why he would, eventually, have to cooperate. But he didn’t have the time to go that way; he had no way of knowing where Günter was, and the longer he waited, the harder it would be to find him. But expediency was not the only motivati
on that Mackintosh was considering. He knew himself well enough to acknowledge that revenge was part of it. It was an itch that he had felt all week, a sensation that he couldn’t remove, one that he dearly wanted to scratch. Élodie was dead. Geipel had played a part in that.
And why just the one motivation? He would get the intelligence he needed, and he would get a measure of vengeance, too. Not enough, but a start.
He ran his fingers across the tools: a drill, a hammer, a chisel. He considered them all, but, in the end, decided that he would work up to the more unpleasant techniques at his disposal. He picked up a pair of small bladed pliers and clicked them open and closed, so that Geipel could hear them.
“I’ll be honest, Colonel,” he said. “I’m going to enjoy this. You’re going to tell me what I want to know and I’m going to punish you for what you did. I’m going to hurt you and, by the end of it, I’ll have what I want and you will wish you had been somewhere else at Christmas.”
He walked forward again until he was next to the chair.
“James,” he said. “Could you hold the colonel’s arm for me, please?”
Walker stepped out of the shadows. Mackintosh knew that Walker was a hard man—his file made that plain—but he fancied he saw a little uncertainty in his face as he approached the chair. He made his way behind Geipel and reached down so that he could secure his forearm.
Geipel struggled, but it did him no good; the bindings were tight, restricting his movement, and Walker was strong and had the benefit of leverage. Mackintosh took the colonel’s hand and isolated his index finger. He looked down at the nail; it was chewed, with a half-moon of dirt underneath it. Mackintosh took the pliers and fastened the teeth around the nail. He gave a hard yank and loosened the nail from the bed. Geipel screamed, but it didn’t matter; no one would hear him. Mackintosh gripped the finger more tightly, and yanked again. The nail was torn out of the bed and blood immediately bubbled up in the space where it had been.
Mackintosh waited for Geipel to stop screaming.
“I have some questions,” he said. “You’re going to answer them.”
“Fuck you,” Geipel said.
Mackintosh ignored that. He selected Geipel’s middle finger and closed the pliers around the nail.
“Where’s Günter Schmidt?”
“Fuck you,” Geipel repeated. “English dog—you were lucky to get away before. You won’t be so lucky—”
Mackintosh yanked again, tearing the nail out with just the one stroke. Geipel couldn’t staunch the scream. His face was pale, the blood drained away. He panted, gulping in air, and stared down at the bloodied ends of his fingers.
“It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” Geipel said, his voice thin and reedy. “There are hundreds of men who will take my place. You’ll be driven out of Berlin. You, and everyone else like you. You’ll go home and wish you’d never been here.”
“Where’s Schmidt?”
Geipel hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it at Mackintosh’s feet.
“Fair enough,” Mackintosh said. “Something else, perhaps.”
He went to the tools and picked up the drill. He plugged it into the socket and brought it over to the chair. He looked Geipel up and down: wrist, elbow, knee, hip. He decided on his knee, and pressed the bit against the bone. He pulled the trigger and the drill whined, chewing through the fabric of Geipel’s trousers and into the thin layer of skin.
“All right!” Geipel yelled. “Stop!”
Mackintosh pulled the drill back and let go of the trigger. “Where is Schmidt?”
“Roedeliusplatz.”
“Sommer’s place?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
“He lives there—it’s an old building; he had it rebuilt. He has rooms on the top floor, office space beneath, then the basement.”
“What’s in the basement?”
“The cells, interrogation rooms, and his vault.”
“You’ll draw me a plan?”
“Yes,” Geipel said.
“What else? Has he questioned him yet?”
“Yes.”
“He knows about Schmidt and Pabst?”
“Of course.”
“What about Schmidt’s photographs?”
“He wouldn’t tell him where they were. He says he wants Sommer to get him over the border first.” He laughed, the sound distorted by his pain. “That will never happen—he’s deluded if he thinks he’ll ever be let out again. Sommer doesn’t like being told no. He’ll interrogate him himself and he’ll take his time over it. Schmidt will tell him after the first minute and then Sommer will keep going to punish him for his insolence.”
“When will he do that?”
“Sommer wants those pictures. He won’t wait long.”
34
“Ready?”
Jimmy nodded.
“On three.”
He held onto Geipel’s ankles while Mackintosh held his wrists.
“One.”
They started to swing the body, back and forth. They had weighted it with a chain that Mackintosh had found in the warehouse, wrapping it around the man’s waist and then padlocking it in place. They had put the body into the boot of the car and driven to the Teltow Canal.
“Two.”
The body was heavy now and Jimmy was careful to make sure his feet were anchored on the icy platform that jutted out into the canal. It was dark, with no one to be seen. There was a cemetery on the other side of the water, its tombstones silhouetted by the occasional sweep of lights from the cars that passed beyond it.
“Three.”
Geipel’s body reached the apogee of the swing and they let go, watching as the dead man arced up and then plunged down, splashing into the glossy black water and vanishing beneath the surface. They both stood there for a moment, regaining their breath, watching it steam in front of their faces. There was a bridge fifty yards to their left and a night train rumbled across it, the lights in its carriages glowing through the struts and stanchions until it reached the other side and disappeared.
“Done,” Mackintosh said. “Let’s go.”
The evening had taken an unexpected turn. Geipel had decided that the pain—and the prospect of more of it—was not worth his silence. He had answered Mackintosh’s questions and had agreed to draw him a plan of the building where Günter Schmidt was being held. Mackintosh brought him a piece of foolscap paper and Jimmy watched as Geipel scrawled out a rough diagram of each floor. His cooperation had not bought him his life. Mackintosh had taken out his pistol and shot him at point blank range.
“The building,” Jimmy said as they trudged back to the car. “The one where Schmidt is being held.”
“What about it?”
“He said there was a vault.”
“And?”
“Is it true?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard rumours before.”
“What’s inside it?”
Mackintosh looked back at him, shaking his head in wry amusement. “What’s this, James? Professional curiosity?”
“I just wondered why he would need a vault.”
“A man like him hoards secrets. You don’t last as long as he has without leverage.”
“A vault, though? Why not a safe?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he has a lot of secrets.”
They ascended a treacherous bank to the road where they had parked the car. Jimmy decided to let the matter of the vault rest for now. He looked back at the trail in the snow that they had carved out as they dragged Geipel’s body to
the canal.
“What now?” Jimmy said.
“I have some arrangements to make. I’ll drop you back at the hotel.”
35
Mackintosh parked the car and followed Jimmy up to the room. He had brought a briefcase from the warehouse and he put it on the bed and opened it.
“What’s that?” Jimmy asked him
“There are a few things you need to know.”
Mackintosh hefted two thick files from his briefcase and gave them to Jimmy. A name was written on the side of each file. The first one was Günter Schmidt. The second was Karl-Heinz Sommer. Each bore legends on their covers that marked them as Top Secret.
Jimmy opened the file for Schmidt and flicked through it. There were reports, some typed and some in neat script. As well as the reports, there were a number of photographs, each of them featuring the same man. He was young, in his late teens, and had blond hair, pale skin and blue eyes. He wore a troubled expression in each photograph, as if the world were about to come crashing down around him.
“Remember him. Memorise his face. You’re going to be helping me to get him out.”
“This is the man with the photographs?”
“That’s right.”
Jimmy put the file aside and took up the one marked Sommer. He opened it.
“And this guy?”
“Generalleutnant Karl-Heinz Sommer. In charge of counter-intelligence for the Stasi. They call him die Spinne.”
“Meaning?”
“The Spider. Much of his history is disputed. Some say he was in the Hitler Youth. Some say he was in the SS.”
“I thought the Nazis were all rounded up after the war.”
“Don’t be naïve. Most of them? Of course. But not the intelligent ones. They went to America and Britain, at our invitation, to build our rockets and nuclear power plants. America wouldn’t have set foot on the moon without the Nazis. Sommer found a good home for his skills.”