“Okay,” came Ann’s voice from the second floor. “Coming down.”
• • •
The blue Golf screeched to a halt alongside the small group of people at the side of the road. Klaus and Stefan were in the ditch, trying with all their might to push the small Polo back onto the road. They were very dirty, the edges of their trousers were covered in mud, and Batsheva and Helena were looking on anxiously.
“What’s going on here?” asked the driver of the Golf, sticking his head out of the window.
“Come give us a hand,” Klaus groaned, as he and Stefan braced themselves against the Polo in an effort to prevent it from slipping back into the ditch.
The two men in the Golf exited the vehicle in one smooth movement. Like detectives in an American television series, Batsheva thought. Their car was parked at an angle, blocking the narrow road leading to the farm. The front doors remained open.
“Who are the two women?” one of them asked.
“Two Czechs who don’t know how to drive,” Klaus moaned ungraciously.
“What are they doing here? How did they get here?”
“They’re driving from Bremerhaven to Bremen, on country roads. Come help us, so we can get them the hell out of here.”
The driver of the Golf descended reluctantly into the muddy ditch. He aimed a hostile glance at Batsheva before allowing his eyes to linger on Helena for a little longer. She smiled shyly at him and said in English: “It’s my fault entirely, I’m the driver.” He grumbled, kept his eyes on her, winked almost unnoticeably, and then positioned himself between his two friends, straining his muscles. “Come on,” he said, “all together. One, two, three!”
• • •
The Golf had yet to arrive for some reason. Perhaps it stopped alongside Batsheva and Helena’s vehicle, Ya’ara thought. “We’ve earned a few extra minutes,” she said to Nufar and Ann, who were standing next to her. “Head for the woods now. Meet up there with Sayid and continue to the assembly point. I have one more small thing to do here and I’ll join you right away. Wait for me, because I have no way of getting out of this shithole without you. Okay?”
The two cadets left the farmhouse, through the back door as planned, and broke into a sprint. Ya’ara watched them move off into the distance and admired the beauty and ease of their running. Ah, the magic of youth, she said to herself, as if her youth were a distant memory. The magic of youth. How long does it last?
She moved the chair away from the front door and returned it to the kitchen. She then cautiously opened the door and ran, crouching, toward the barn. She paused for a short while after stepping inside to allow her eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. A beam of light that shone through an opening in the roof was casting a golden circle on the ground, like a powerful spotlight. But the barn for the most part was in darkness. Anyone hiding something would place it as far from the entrance as possible. Instinctively. And Ya’ara looked around as if she herself had something to hide in the dark barn, catching sight of the ladder leading to an open platform, a raised loft of sorts, at the back end of the structure. But having to continually climb up and down such a ladder with targets and Kalashnikovs wouldn’t be very easy. The hiding place had to be readily accessible and convenient. Piled up in the far corner were a collection of agricultural implements, wooden planks, and heaps of straw. As she approached, she noticed three large barrels standing there, too. There was a strong smell of gasoline coming off them. She felt them. They appeared whole and sealed, apart from the narrow plastic cap screwed to the top of each of them. No assault rifle was getting through an opening like that. She placed both her hands on the upper part of one of the barrels and tried to twist it. Clockwise and counterclockwise. Nothing. She moved on to the second barrel and did the same. When she tried turning the top of the barrel counterclockwise, as if she were opening it, nothing happened. When she applied force in the opposite direction, as if she were trying to close it, however, she felt something move. As if someone had made a cut around the entire circumference of the barrel, about two-thirds of the way up the side. She twisted the top part of the barrel until it detached from the barrel itself, leaving its contents exposed to her. It was actually a double-sided barrel, a cylinder within a cylinder. The outer cylinder was filled with gasoline. The inner cylinder was dry and contained a large leather bag sealed with a clasp. She removed the heavy bag, opened the clasp and examined the contents with the help of the thin flashlight she was carrying. She saw three assault rifles and a pistol. A large number of magazines. The gasoline was clearly there to help conceal the weapons from sniffer dogs. It was that understanding that had probably drawn her, somewhat subconsciously, to the barrels in the first place. She closed the leather bag and returned it to its hiding place. And then screwed the top of the barrel back on again. She noticed that the thin cut around the barrel was hidden by a sticker displaying the name of some fuel company. Someone had done a nice professional job there. She checked the third barrel. It, too, showed signs of opening, but she chose to leave it closed. She already had what she wanted. She examined the image of the barrel on her iPhone, and made sure that the corner of the barn looked exactly as it had when she first walked in. She cracked open the barn door. Through the narrow opening she saw the blue Golf pull into the yard at high speed before coming to a stop in the parking area. Out of the car stepped four men—three young and one older—looking grumpy and covered in mud and grease. The dog came running up behind them, panting, its ribs rising and falling, vapor rising from its mouth. Ya’ara smiled. Batsheva and Helena had tired them out good and proper. They walked by the barn and entered the farmhouse one after the other, turning on the electric lights in the living quarters. Long purple shadows were darkening the farmyard. The sun was sinking. The exhausted dog had fallen asleep under the car and Ya’ara hoped he wouldn’t wake suddenly on picking up her scent. She slipped out of the barn, gingerly closed the door, and moved pressed up against the barn’s walls until she no longer had a direct view of the farmhouse. The dog slept on. Walking crouched and at a quick pace she headed toward the earth embankment, climbed up and over, and then began making her way to the assembly point, on a small bridge near the grove of trees. The Glock pistol, which she had taken from the hidden leather bag and which was now tucked into her pants under her shirt, felt heavy and cold against the bare skin of her back.
31
They hadn’t had a chance to copy the contents of the iPad. And one of the laptops they’d copied in full was a total disappointment. A tedious collection of academic papers on anarchism and radicalism and Marxism and countless other isms. Most of them in German and English. Some in Russian. The emails indicated that the computer belonged to Klaus. He also starred in a collection of photographs they found. Unable to crack his password, however, they couldn’t get into his Facebook account. Although the chances of finding anything important there were very slim, Ya’ara had a hard time giving up. She angrily tried the name Trotsky before flailing her arms in theatrical despair. His profile was blocked.
The second laptop paved the way for them. Nufar got to work on the copied material. There wasn’t much. A total of three folders bearing the names of three people. Bernhard Schlein. Peter Haas. Franz Mannesman. A quick Google search revealed them to be three very senior bankers—the CEO of Commerzbank, the CEO of DZ Bank, and the deputy CEO of Deutsche Bank. Each folder contained photographs, some of which appeared to have been downloaded from the internet, with others—images of residences—seemingly captured in secret. Schlein and Mannesman, it turned out, lived in large, luxurious private homes. Photographs of a modern, elegant high-rise apartment block appeared in the Haas folder. A circle marked an apartment on the seventeenth floor. An arrow pointed to the entrance to the underground parking garage. Apart from the photographs of the residences themselves, the folders also contained pictures of the bankers, alone or with family members—wives and children, with the homes appearing in the background. There were a
lso images of the streets that probably led to the respective homes. Security cameras and police speed cameras were marked with circles. Marked out on maps of residential neighborhoods found in the folders were the homes of the bankers, as well as the nearest police stations and suburban train or subway stations. Public buildings in the vicinity were also marked on the maps. In the folders, too, were larger maps that displayed the areas within a fifty-kilometer radius of the three homes. Marked out on these maps were the nearby highways and the exits leading from them to the homes of the bankers. Each folder also included photographs, from a wide range of angles and distances, of several vehicles. All of them large, black luxury vehicles. One Maybach and two large Mercedeses. Some of the images were close-ups of the license plates of the vehicles. In all likelihood, they were the bankers’ official company cars. One of the pictures showed Schlein getting out of his ride, a driver in a dark suit opening the rear door for him.
Ya’ara went through the photographs of the receipts they found at the farm. Most of them were from stores and gas stations in the Bremen area. But almost half were from the Frankfurt area. Haas lived in the city itself. Schlein and Mannesman lived in small, affluent towns about a half-hour drive from the city. The receipts were conclusive proof that someone was covering the expenses of the group. Ya’ara hadn’t believed to begin with that the sloppy occupants of the farm could be running the show all on their own.
“Do you know what these are?” Ya’ara asked Aslan.
“Of course. Field dossiers.”
There wasn’t a shadow of doubt. The occupants of the farm had amassed intelligence on three subjects, in preparation for an operation—information on their residences, their vehicles, the roads in and out of the respective areas, the security measures in place in the vicinities.
All at once, the pieces of the puzzle slipped into place. Ya’ara looked at Aslan. The blood had drained from her face. She felt as if she was seeing ghosts. History never remains in the past, and here it was, coming back to haunt again.
“Do you realize what’s happening here?” she asked, as if she were talking to herself. “It’s looking like a rerun of Baader-Meinhof, but with smartphones and computers this time around. And the targets once again are the capitalist pigs. The bosses of the big banks, the despicable representatives of American imperialism. And the granddaughter of someone from the gang is at the very heart of the entire business, taking an interest in the dubious heritage of her grandmother from more than merely an academic perspective. And someone who is undoubtedly a Russian intelligence officer is mixed up with the group, and may even be steering them. And they’re conducting shooting drills with Kalashnikovs and nine-millimeter pistols.”
Aslan looked at her. He knew she might be right, but wondered at the same time whether it might not be a good idea to take a more cautious view of the situation. They were almost whispering, keeping their suspicions between the two of them.
“It could be other things too,” Aslan said, trying to remind her that doubt, too, played an important role in their line of work.
“Yes, you’re right,” Ya’ara responded. “The circumstances are different, the Soviet Union fell apart a long time ago, and the collective dreams have also changed. Still, I have no doubt it’s happening. That the Baader-Meinhof similarities and ties are not coincidental. You know, just like I do, that nothing is coincidental. I can’t believe it’s happening again.” She clasped her hands to her head. “Unfathomable madness.”
32
“We’ve got a positive ID on him!” Matthias excitedly exclaimed to Ya’ara. They were on a late-night call. “Your Ivan, as you call him, is a colonel in the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service. In the 1980s, he operated in Paris under the cover of a correspondent for TASS, the Soviet Union’s news agency. And some ten years back now, he served as the press attaché at the Russian Consulate in Munich. The French security services were suspicious of him already back in the late 1980s, and a high-ranking GRU officer who defected to Britain a few years later went on to confirm their suspicions and expose him as one of their agents. When he arrived in Munich, our security service kept a close watch on him and tried to keep him in check. After completing his service in Germany, he disappeared off the radar, and we lost track of him. Considering all the upheaval in Russia, he could very well have been dismissed from the military intelligence service or may even have left of his own accord to become a businessman, selling remnants of the Red Army, like half of the KGB and other intelligence personnel who had worked abroad.”
Ya’ara had yet to tell Matthias what they had found on the computers of the farm gang. She felt it was best to hold back that information from him, certainly at this stage. It was easy for her to keep things to herself, even if she hated doing so with Matthias. “How did you identify him?” she asked pertinently.
“I ran his image through various databases. The computer came back with four highly probable options. A long-serving desk clerk who happened to be passing by my desk at the time glanced at my computer, pointed at one of the images, and said, ‘Hey, that’s Colonel Denis Kovanyov! Where has he popped up from all of a sudden?’ I told her that one of my sources had photographed someone in one of the Baltic states. The source, I said, believed the man to be a Russian intelligence agent, but couldn’t prove it. And now the computer had thrown up four possibilities. ‘Lucky you like to peek at other people’s computer screens,’ I said to her. She didn’t appreciate the jab. ‘You’d do well to take him seriously,’ she said. ‘He’s a mean bastard, and did us a lot of damage when he was stationed in Munich.’ Brigita, the desk clerk, was working at the time for the counterespionage unit that operated out of headquarters, in Pullach.”
“Yes, I know a little bit about elderly desk officers with superpowers,” Ya’ara said. “But, getting back to business, do you know what name he usually went under?”
“Brigita called him Alexander the Great and said he was probably as crazy as his namesake. That was his operational name—Alexander.”
Ya’ara asked if Matthias knew how Kovanyov had entered Germany, and under what name, but he said he hadn’t yet managed to clarify those details. “I assume he’s using a forged passport,” Matthias said. “He almost certainly didn’t come in through an official German border crossing. In all likelihood, he made his way to Amsterdam or Copenhagen, and from there he continued by train or car to Bremen. A familiar modus operandi for the Russians.”
“It’s great that you’ve identified him, Matthias,” Ya’ara responded. “I need to hang up now, but please, please be available in the morning. By then I may have something important to tell you.”
• • •
It was after midnight. Ya’ara left the noisy pub so she could speak from somewhere quieter. The temperature had dropped rapidly, well below zero. Her breath felt as if it was turning to ice, but perhaps for the first time since arriving in Germany, the cold wasn’t troubling her.
She took an unused burner phone out of her pocket and called the number that Martina seemed to be using, the same number that had led them ultimately to the remote farm east of the city. She knew she was taking a gamble, and that the stakes this time were very high, but the cool, sharp clarity of her mind gave her confidence in her actions.
“I apologize if I’ve woken you, Martina,” she said in English, in a thick Russian accent, after hearing a female voice answer with a groan. “My name is Nadia. Alexander asked me to call you. He needs to see you right away, tonight, alone.”
“Who are you?” Martina asked, clearly somewhat sleepy still.
“It’s important and urgent. It concerns the customs official in Hamburg, and he doesn’t want the others to know.” Ya’ara was betting that the Russian colonel was still using his old operational name. She had refrained from referring to Matthias by his name. Kovanyov surely adhered to secure communication protocols in his dealings with the German group, and he certainly wouldn’t have mentioned specific names in phone call
s. She was convinced by now that Matthias was merely a pawn in the hands of the young woman who was talking to her. She held her breath, waiting for Martina’s response.
“So why doesn’t he call me himself?”
“He needs to take care of a loan and has important meetings in the morning at three banks.” Ya’ara was hoping that she had added an additional layer of credibility to her story. “If anyone else there is up, tell them that Alexander has summoned you for a final update. Take the Golf. It’s less conspicuous than the Land Rover. Make your way to the truck parking lot alongside the entrance to the port. I’ll take you to him from there. Martina”—she switched to Russian—“do everything quietly and calmly, but come quickly. It’s important. And drive carefully,” she switched back to English, “it’s black outside like a night in December.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Martina responded in a whisper, sounding wide awake by this time.
• • •
Ya’ara breathed a long, quiet sigh of relief on seeing the approaching blue Golf. She motioned for the car to stop, directing it to the side of the road. Martina lowered the window and Ya’ara saw her up close for the first time. She didn’t like the look of the young woman, and that certainly made things easier for her.
“Hi, I’m Nadia,” Ya’ara said, still in her Russian accent, which came to her naturally, after all. “I’ll join you, and show you the way. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
She opened the car door and sat down alongside Martina. “Security needs to be tighter than ever during the final moments before an operation,” she said. Martina glanced at her and began driving.
They drove alongside a seemingly endless array of shipping containers, turning right at the end of the road into an area of old warehouses. The headlights of the Golf revealed tall weeds growing out of the concrete surface on which they came to a stop. The darkness around them was truly heavy and opaque, almost solid. Ya’ara lit a flashlight and aimed it at the door of a dilapidated warehouse. “Come,” she said, “he’s waiting there for us.” Ya’ara turned on the light when they walked in. Two pale bulbs cast a weak and somewhat deceptive light over the dusty expanse. In the middle of the large space, under the swinging bulbs, stood a plain wooden table with a bottle of vodka and three glasses on its surface. “Sit, please,” Ya’ara said, “he’ll be joining us right away.”
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