Exit Day: Brexit; An Assassin Stalks the Prime Minister

by David Laws

  Harry, who thought he detected a tone of disapproval in the innkeeper’s voice, approached the seated figure, smiled and extended a hand.

  “You wanted to talk about old times,” the scratchy voice said.

  “Sure.” Harry grinned. “Can I get you another drink?”

  A discussion about the best brew in the house was always a good conversational opener, but Herr Norbert Demmler, even with a fresh tankard of wheat beer in his liver-spotted fist, was still a little stiff. “I heard you were asking around,” he said. “Didn’t say anything for a while. I’ve learned the hard way – in the new Germany, it pays to stay silent about the recent past.”

  Harry nodded and took a breath, ready to launch into a prepared pitch, but Demmler beat him to it. “I want you to know,” he said, “I’m still loyal. I’m not talking as a traitor to our former state.”

  “Fine,” Harry shrugged.

  “It’s time someone spoke up, spoke the truth. Take the Wall, for instance – they all denigrate it round here, but it was a necessity, a service to humanity.”

  “Really?” Harry expected self-justification from an old Stasi officer, but quailed before the idea of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of peace. “What about all those people shot dead on the wire?” he objected.

  “Necessary to defend our threatened nation. Prevent imperialism from contaminating the East.”

  “And how are you finding it now?” Harry asked. “Living in the capitalist world?”

  “I live,” Demmler said, “amongst the enemy.”

  Harry sipped his drink, silent for a moment, wondering how to tackle this man’s aggressive stance. However, he guessed that behind all the attitude Demmler was glad of the social contact and the chance to talk. He looked like an isolated man. To have someone approach him politely to ask his opinion, without obvious hostility, must have been a welcome change. It probably hadn’t happened in a long time. Harry sat up and professed himself impressed with the efficiency of GDR methods.

  Demmler was suspicious. “But why do you want to know about our old depot?”

  Harry put his elbows on the table, nodding his head, looking earnestly ahead, his attempt at talking his way into his fake persona, the academic researching the history of rival national intelligence operations. His sketchy knowledge of Britain’s wartime Special Operations Executive became the basis of his balloon of fictitious nonsense. He threw in a list of Alexander Stock’s past books and he made the wartime Brits at Guildford sound like amateurs. He’d studied similar approaches in other countries, he said, and was keen to learn how it had been done in the East.

  How long could he keep this up?

  Long enough, it turned out, to be rewarded with a priceless nugget of information: confirmation that the old mansion at Kriebswalde was indeed an establishment for the training of special agents. And an even better development arrived with the approach of another figure – stiff grey hair and a military moustache – who joined the conversation without introduction. Harry’s tactic had been overheard and had provoked, as he had hoped, the desire to trump him, to go one better, to prove the East was superior. They simply couldn’t keep quiet in the face of Harry’s ramblings. Get a man to talk about his job, the theory went, and it’s open sesame. He silently nicknamed them the Demmler Duet. Demmler and his nameless companion were boastful, replies made to the tune of “We did better than that”, and Harry mentally soaked up the details: how training sessions were specially tailored for those returning to the decadent West involving deep investigations into a subject’s past life; how the subjects had to purge their former selves and prove they were now shiny new socialist personalities, fundamentally different from the old. The proof was a total rejection of their former flawed existence, and the means was to denounce everything and everyone – friends, colleagues and, above all, families.

  “A kind of confession?” Harry suggested.

  A nod. “They would confess their criminal or defective pasts. Thefts, cheating in exams, making a girl pregnant, some immoral act. Then the parents: damning Father’s drinking, smoking, gambling, swearing, idleness, disdain for the working class and selfishness. Pointing out Mother’s antisocial attitudes, self-obsession and poor parenting. Lambasting an employer’s meanness, incompetence and hierarchical disdain. The subjects had to make a pledge to undermine every facet of the capitalist system and promise to be its dedicated and unremitting saboteur.

  “But what,” Harry interrupted, “if they forgot all that when they returned to the comfort of their old ways?”

  “Control, constant checks,” Demmler said. “They would be reminded of their duty and, if necessary, forcibly.”

  “How?”

  The old man looked at Harry. A long hesitation. He seemed to be deciding if he should continue, if he could trust Harry’s professed scholarly neutrality. Then he said, “Their promises of loyalty were recorded. They would be reminded of this and told that if necessary the relevant tape could be sent to their family, their associates or their workplace – whichever would be the most shaming, the most personally devastating to the agent. To have the denunciation of Mother and Father or the boss exposed to their ears…”

  He trailed off, not needing to finish.

  “But that would defeat the regime’s purpose,” Harry objected. “It would expose the Stasi’s methods, reveal the whole spying operation and blow the agent. An own goal, surely?”

  “We made very sure the denunciations were sufficiently strong to constitute a lifetime’s deterrent,” Demmler said. “And if necessary we could embellish with a little black propaganda of our own.” There was a short pause before he added, “In every case, the threat was enough.”

  Not all of Harry’s pitch to curator Johanna Hartmann was moonshine. He’d told her the truth: he was going after the Crabs. So far he had only half a package of incriminating evidence, still not enough to sink his adversary, the Right Honourable Christopher Tresham. He could prove the Home Secretary had been a Stasi agent in 1984 and he could demonstrate the methods used to indoctrinate him and his like, with vows to destroy the capitalist system. What he still wanted were the actual words of denunciation, to condemn the man out of his own mouth.

  Harry knew from his visit to the Leipzig museum that material like this would be secreted away in one of those strange brown metal containers and hidden in some secret underwater location.

  But which ones contained the relevant file? And where? He knew it was hopeless to tap Herr Demmler for the information, even if he knew it. The man was still insanely loyal to the former regime, and without insider information any kind of search would be based on intuition.

  The best Harry could hope for was to use his imagination to guess a location and fish for as many Crabs as possible. Even if he couldn’t find the one with Tresham’s details, the others would demonstrate in documentary form the way the Stasi operated.

  By this time, Vogler had become an enthusiastic collaborator. “Depends how much you’ve got to spend,” he said, before drawing up a list of likely locations. “The Stasi wouldn’t just dump the Crabs in the river. They’d want to be able to retrieve them at some later date, and to do that they’d have to have the means to do it.”

  One of the disposal team had been known in the village. He’d been a railwayman, Vogler told Harry, so they started their search at a steam locomotive depot twenty kilometres to the west. It was the one place in the region that had not dismantled the old facilities. Harry gingerly placed one foot on the bottom rung of a rusting steel ladder clamped to the side of the water tower, hesitating while assailed by smells of coal dust, damp and rust.

  “Come on!” urged Vogler. “I thought you said you were a flyer.”

  Harry shrugged and started to climb. Each step was painful, the narrow steel struts digging into the soles of his feet. Higher and higher he went, feet sore and arms aching, trying not to look down at all the tr
ackwork below and the great hulks of silent and moribund steam locomotives. Over halfway up he paused, conscious of the flaking joints and fading paintwork, and wondered how long it had been since anyone inspected this installation for stability. He had an unpleasant vision of the ladder detaching from its ancient fixings, peeling and bowing in the air with him clutching at it like a monkey climbing a bendy tree. He swallowed and forced himself to keep going. At the top he looked over the metal lip, shining a lantern around the rim and peering intently into the black depths of several hundred gallons of stagnant water.

  “Look for a chain attached to the side, just below the surface,” Vogler had suggested. “They’d want an easy way to get those Crabs back. Wouldn’t want to go under… any more than you do.”

  Despite Harry’s diligent probing, the result was negative.

  Next best guess was a canal basin, where the engineers’ hut and the winding mechanisms were examined without result, then a fountain and a small weir. “Could be any water tank anywhere,” Harry said dispiritedly after their fourth failure. “Might be industrial, might be domestic, in someone’s loft. Any loft.”

  It was a bad moment, but Harry would not be beaten. There had to be another way, he told himself, sitting again in the Brauhaus Schiller, sinking two litres of wheat beer and thinking through the problem. Just then he espied Demmler in his usual corner and decided to try the old man again, pushing one stage further his pitch as an espionage academic. When Demmler’s grey-headed friend once again edged into the conversation, Harry experienced a sudden burst of excitement. This could be the opportunity he sought. Perhaps, just possibly, these old Stasis were ripe for disclosure.

  Old Grey-Head, it transpired, was called Richter, and in the midst of another bout of Cold War braggadocio Harry discovered that he had been in ‘counter-propaganda’. His pulse quickened. “Tell me about your best black ops against the West,” he urged. “I’m already well up on the Willy Brandt case.”

  Richter smirked. “Smart, that.”

  “And all those West German politicians you blackguarded as ex-Nazis.”

  “Our best tactic. Our favourite. They were always vulnerable to that. The press in the West just loved our leaks. Gobbled them up.”

  Harry nodded as if in admiration and hoped his quickening sense of anticipation wasn’t obvious. This man might just be on the brink of providing the answers he’d sought for fourteen years. “And then, of course, there were the Brits. I recall some scandal at the embassy in Berlin,” he said, trying to keep his voice engaged, to sound suitably vague on detail. “A group of diplomats, wasn’t it? Didn’t they all get sent home?”

  Richter chuckled. “Another one chalked up to us.”

  Harry forced a smile. Was this the moment of ultimate reveal? “Tell me.”

  “Six of them. We named them as spies. Mocked up photos of them emptying dead-letter drops. They had diplomatic immunity, of course, but the Government in London couldn’t stand the heat and had them sent home.”

  “All false, naturally?”

  “It’s what it was. Black propaganda. What the struggle with the West was all about.”

  “But unfair on the individuals named, wouldn’t you say? If they were innocent.”

  “Innocent or guilty, what did it matter?”

  “You were the moving spirit behind all this?”

  “For my sins.”

  Harry sat up sharply in his chair, dropping the languid air, junking the pose of the supportive academic. “Then, there’s something I want to tell you,” he said. They looked at him, fish-eyed, as he wagged a finger. “One of your victims was my father.”

  He stared hard at them, savouring the sudden death of their bravado, the shock they felt at being lulled into unintended revelation. Then he poured out the detail into an embarrassed silence. “He was a middle-grade diplomat who never went outside the embassy. Never met a spy in his life. Never emptied one of your fictitious dead-letter drops. Despite that, you blackened his name, got him sent home, his career bombed and he was never the same again.”

  Another silence.

  “What I want from you” – Harry’s finger was jabbing the air – “is an admission to clear the family name. That the sting was all bogus, a put-up job.”

  When there was no response, he went on: “A written statement that this was a propaganda operation, a false accusation, to wipe clean the stain from this man’s reputation.”

  “No way!” Richter found his voice. “We’re not into admissions. I will not be a party to inflicting reputational damage…”

  “Reputation?” Harry sneered openly. “What reputation? The Stasi hasn’t got one. Just one big black mark against the history of the regime.”

  “Can’t do that.” Richter’s attitude had turned hostile and he wasn’t budging.

  Harry knew he’d taken this as far as he could. There was to be no damning evidence, no admission of injustice, no statement of vindication for his father. He would just have to be content with milking the moment of their humiliation.

  Then he thought again. He might not have extracted a confession, but he could still turn this situation to account. If he could manipulate them into helping him expose Tresham, that would be his father’s true legacy. Not an apology but a triumph for a wider kind of justice; a final public accounting for all the Stasi’s manipulation and lies.

  Harry continued to glare at the two old men – and just as they seemed about to rise and slink away from his accusative stare, he shrugged and said, “Oh well, I suppose there is another way you could make recompense.”

  Richter was on his feet, Demmler halfway up, when they stopped to look questioningly at him.

  “Tell me where you dumped the Crabs.”

  It had taken some serious pressing to overcome Richter’s resistance. At first the man blustered and refused to talk, then professed complete ignorance, finally admitting only to knowledge in the vaguest outline of the regime’s dispersal policy. It amounted to this: the Stasi did not use rivers, reservoirs or lakes. They needed still water, easy access and the ability to recover. This Harry had already guessed, but the detail he finally extracted was crucial.

  The answer was water cisterns.

  Which ones, and where? Arms were raised in dramatic gestures of innocence, shoulders were shrugged, faces paled into expressions of outright innocence.

  Harry glared at them until they retreated in silent humiliation, then he dispatched the ever-helpful Vogler to interrogate his sources among the regulars of the stammtisch. He had no idea if this move would work, and was surprised when, just twenty minutes later, his helper was back, exuding a bright confidence and a big smile.

  “The biggest cistern in these parts… a place down by the river,” he said.

  Chapter 38

  Saturday 23nd March 2019; 6 days to go

  Breathing heavily, she rounded the corner by Rushbuttom Wood, past a huge bank of stinging nettles close to the brook, easing her pace while crossing a slippery wooden bridge, then on to the next footpath, turning north, back towards the Grange.

  Erika was damp with perspiration, her jogging shoes muddy, and a trail of thorn scratches described a bloody pattern down the flesh of one leg. She was oblivious. The pre-dawn mist of the Suffolk countryside was no place for anyone save the lone jogger from Blackthorpe Grange. Too early for the farmer, too soon for the businessman. Households still slept comfortably in their beds. Keeping in shape was what mattered to her, and doing it out of sight of any curious observer. No one in the village would ever remark on the woman who kept fit and sharp and ready.

  On days when Harry was at home she would pressure him into joining her, only on these occasions they would motor out away from Bury to somewhere remote and unobserved. Then they would follow a footpath circle around some object of interest. The pace would be slower. Harry did not like hills. And in a more sedate fashion th
ey would conclude the jog – sometimes it was a walk – with a visit to a museum or stately home. She wanted to get him used to this routine. They’d already done Somerleyton Hall and Ickworth House, so he would find another country house circuit at some time in the future quite unremarkable and routine.

  Chapter 39

  6 days to go

  The place was a medieval castle ruin just up the valley from the River Elster. It was presently a museum open to the public, and Harry and Vogler had to wait for closing time to enter illicitly. The cistern was housed under a vast wooden canopy and wedged between two boulders amongst the castle ruins. The canopy, Harry hoped, would help conceal their presence.

  “What is this place?” he whispered, as he uncurled a length of rope, tying the end to a large bucket. They’d been to town to spend more of Patronella’s funds on preparations.

  “They couldn’t dig wells in those days.” Vogler had got the story from the inn. “Too rocky, so they drained the rainwater off the roofs of all the other buildings and ran it into this pit.”

  Vogler was still an enthusiast – cash the incentive – but it was Harry taking the big risks. First, he tried fishing, dipping the bucket in and paying out the rope, hoping to catch anything that might be buried at the bottom of the pit or perhaps hanging from the side.

  But all he managed to find when they hauled it up was a brown sludge from the bottom.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Vogler complained. “The Stasi wouldn’t want to get their feet wet any more than you, and burying it deep… no!” He shook his head. “If they used diving gear or lowered themselves down using mountaineering techniques they’d attract attention and destroy any chance of secrecy. There has to be another way.”

  Harry was using a torch to examine all the dark corners of the cistern and located some iron footholds spiked into the rocky sides. Peering over the edge with the lantern, he spotted a ledge several feet below. Was it worth it?