The Nostradamus Traitor: 1 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  The guard would be changed at five-thirty, according to normal routine; so he would have to leave soon. He must go when the duty man was at his lowest ebb, thinking of his time off during the coming day.

  Slowly he put on the uniform jacket: straightening it, pulling it at the back so it settled neatly on his shoulders. Checking his appearance in the mirror, he experienced the same old feeling of irrevocable loss. This time it was coupled with the strange knowledge that the whole of his life was being left behind. Whatever happened now, this was the great crossroads. For the last time he hesitated, a sudden flurry of indecision; then rationalised that this was exactly what they would expect of him.

  He put on his uniform cap, and it came to him that this may well be the final time he would perform such an ordinary, everyday function. Then he picked up the briefcase, went to the door and stepped outside.

  Even at this time in the morning, the humidity hit him like a fine steaming mist. The clouds were low, smudged with ink blots; battening down over the city like a lid on a cauldron.

  The guard at the main gate made no attempt to stop him. Nobody appeared to take any interest.

  “You’ll get wet, Comrade Captain,” the guard shouted. “It’s going to rain. A storm.”

  “I’ll only be ten minutes,” he called back, tapping the briefcase as though it had some special significance. Within ten minutes the guard would have completed his duty.

  He had already decided which route to take. He would go by rail, from the Friedrichstrasse station. As long as they did not pick him up there he would be home. Not dry, though. Already thunder was rumbling in from the west. He wondered if it were an omen.

  It was almost six-thirty when he arrived at the Friedrichstrasse station; but looking a different man.

  Near the Unter den Linden he had used a public toilet, stuffing his uniform jacket and cap into the cistern, scuffing the well-polished brown shoes, taking the raincoat from his briefcase and emptying the pockets.

  He parted his hair on the other side, adjusted the rimless spectacles, buttoned up the raincoat, leaving his real identity papers in his hip pocket, and put the passport and permit into the briefcase, together with the samples in their little boxes. The Old Man had thought of everything. If they get me, they’ll come after you. However badly you feel, save yourself. Either destroy the stuff or use it. Then do as I’ve told you. Guile. Remember the guile.

  Now, as he approached the station, he was transformed into a German—Hans-Martin Busch, Chief Sales Representative of a lens manufacturing firm. His business in the West was a meeting with a British manufacturer. The British firm was interested in the bulk purchase of cheap lenses for their equally cheap range of binoculars, to be sold in chain stores. It was all there—authorisation to travel; time and place of meeting; purpose—all arranged over three weeks ago. He had, in fact, filled in the relative details at four that morning, in the officers’ quarters at Karlshorst—subconsciously committing himself that early. He had used his left hand to disguise the writing.

  Still nobody queried anything. Only a pompous woman control officer reminded him that he had to return, through the same checkpoint, before nine that night. He assured her, in fluent German, that he would be back long before then.

  By the time he reached West Berlin the rain had started; huge thunder drops hissing and exploding on to buildings, drenching the roads. He took the U-Bahn through to the Uhlandstrasse, and then ran—from the rain and from himself. He wanted to turn back. Running was the only way to get over the barricade in his conscience. By the time he reached number twelve he was soaked, his hair and face streaming with water.

  Number Twelve Uhlandstrasse was the office of the Consulate General of Great Britain.

  2

  HERBIE KRUGER WAS RELIEVED. There was always a sense of freedom as he left Germany—even though his bulk, and the length of his legs, made for discomfort on board a British Airways Trident. It seemed to him that the seats on that particular aircraft had been designed for transient parties of midgets.

  The stewardess at the Bonn check-in gave Herbie a seat towards the front of the aircraft, allowing a fraction more leg room. Herbie Kruger, however, hardly noticed this kindness. As the Trident thrust itself from the runway, setting its course for London, he breathed a sigh, and looked around for the in-flight stewardess to see how quickly he could get his large hand around a plastic beaker of vodka.

  Herbie Kruger’s relief stemmed from the fact that he was leaving the country of his birth. Bonn was not his favourite city—though he would, if pressed, admit preferring it to Berlin. “Like Isherwood,” he would say, “I was a very young camera in Berlin—but at a later and even more unpleasant time.”

  He was always glad to get out of either city: particularly since leaving proper field work to operate from London. In the past few months Herbie had discovered these most necessary trips into the Federal Republic, or West Berlin, were more and more irksome.

  Once a fortnight it was either Bonn or Berlin. Everything else could be handled efficiently enough from the Annexe off Whitehall, just far enough away from the tall, steel, concrete and glass building that housed most of his colleagues.

  As for the bulk of these colleagues who lived in the partitioned world of intelligence, they took the bait offered by Department Heads: regarding Herbie with respect, and that deferential sympathy due to someone who has been a first-class field officer, but who was now blown; over the hill; facing a desk job to jog him along until pension time—which, in Herbie Kruger’s case, was almost fifteen years away. The fact produced added sympathy. “He’s like a great orator who’s lost the power of speech,” one of them said.

  Big Herbie Kruger—as his natural nickname suggested—possessed none of the physical secret attributes. By virtue of his build it seemed impossible for him to move unseen, or adopt a nondescript disguise. He was the permanently visible man.

  In his favour lay his deceptively slow and gentle, lumbering manner. Unless you knew the man deeply—and few did—this same quiet ungainliness appeared to have transferred itself to his mind. The eyes—set brightly into a face which appeared to have been fashioned from lumpy porridge—contained a look of almost permanent bewilderment. While other people talked, Herbie always gave the impression that he was experiencing grave difficulty in following the sentences. It was the same with his smile—slow, foolish and open. The smile, like the man himself, had been the undoing of many people. Only those who were in full confidence of his track record knew exactly how good he had been; indeed, still was.

  To the innocent junior members of the Service, Big Herbie was a cuddly, hard-drinking teddy bear, inclined towards outbursts of great emotion. High-ranking personnel allowed this inaccurate and deceptive legend—including the marked tendency towards drink and sentiment—to be perpetuated. It suited them for people to imagine that Herbie was a bit of a clown; oafish or tearful when drunk. They preferred for it to be put about that Herbie Kruger was a burned-out case. These things get back.

  Officially, Herbie spent much of his time on routine Eastern Bloc paperwork; a bit of vetting when necessary, and some hurried activity when trade delegations from the Soviet countries needed checking. To the very few initiates, however, Herbie Kruger was possibly one of the most important officers in the Service. Nor did he give up easily.

  Having run a superb network in the DDR, mainly in East Berlin, throughout the fifties and early sixties (known within the secret files as ‘the Schnitzer Group’), Herbie had finally been forced to close down all but a few of his long-term assets, and get out by his fingernails.

  They had used him in Bonn for a while after that. But then there were complaints from the Federal security services that he was operating in their territory without clearance; so Herbie trekked back to London, muttering dire warnings.

  “They’ve been penetrated. The government offices. NATO itself. Crawling with them,” he grumbled to the confessors who had debriefed him at Warminster.

&nb
sp; Later he talked at length to the Director, and some Heads of Department; and his prophecies came true. In late 1977 the first of the many Bonn secretary scandals broke. In the following two years, young men and women, compromised in the West, broke and ran for the East.

  Herbie shook his head sadly. “They’re still at it. The Russians are teaching us a lesson. It’s bodies on the ground that count. Black box intelligence is all very well, but you need personnel.” He was talking about the constant argument between electronic intelligence-gathering versus the old agent-in-place style. The black box was in favour. Yet Herbie forced the issue. “I still have six people doing one of the most important jobs in East Berlin, and they’re not even being serviced properly. There are no regular handling facilities.” He was told that the Service was in the midst of a job-shrinkage crisis, and money was tight. The six people in East Berlin about whom Herbie had spoken were known to a guarded few as ‘The Telegraph Boys’.

  In the end he won the day. The Minister—touchy about money—was finally convinced, and Herbie Kruger’s office work in the Whitehall Annexe became a recruiting drive.

  Now he ran servicing agents. There were four of them—infiltrated by Herbie with great success into the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, his own old stamping ground before he had been forced to get out, and return to what the Service wits called ‘a grace and favour apartment’ in St. John’s Wood.

  The fortnightly trips to West Germany or Berlin (“He’s in Brighton for a few days,” young Worboys usually informed any enquiring uninitiate) were debriefing sorties. Meetings with one or another of his officers who had easy access to the West.

  Once every fortnight Herbie was forced to live for a matter of forty-eight hours in some small safe house, watched over by local officers in Bonn, or West Berlin, while he went through a painstaking question-and-answer debriefing. He then carried the results back home, breaking them down into a raw report before passing the details on to the evaluators and assessors. To the latter Herbie’s operation was known as ‘Source Six’, the phrase simply referring to any information gleaned by the Telegraph Boys, then passed back to London via the Quartet. For both groups their main concern was the early warning of troop and missile movements in East Berlin and its environs within the DDR. The reports usually included highly accurate political and military policy statements.

  On the Trident out of Bonn, Herbie Kruger had just left one of these debriefings. For the past two days he had been closeted with a man known as Walter Girren: a small, thin ghost of a person, with a constantly sour expression, who was especially well-placed for making regular excursions into the West. Originally Girren’s parents hailed from Westphalia (he thought of himself as a Westphalian) but, in the chaos of split and displaced families at the end of World War Two, the Girrens found themselves living within the Soviet sector of Berlin. Young Walter was born there.

  Girren now worked for the Berliner Ensemble as an audio technician. Naturally his education had been undertaken in the DDR, but he had been recruited and trained for the British Service while working on an exchange visit with the National Theatre in London. Almost thirty years of age, Girren had been a member of the Communist Party since his teens. Disenchantment arrived before his twenty-second birthday; so, as far as Herbie was concerned, he was in possession of impeccable bona fides.

  The safe house had been a second storey apartment in a narrow street not far from the Provincial Museum: three rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Also two telephones, only one of which worked. It was a normal routine. The ’phone that worked had no number on its dial, but Herbie feared that the official tenants of all the Bonn safe houses were, in reality, whores, and therefore highly suspect. There were traces of powder on the dressing tables; some women’s bits and pieces in the bedrooms; and what Herbie called, “the scent of fallen underwear and fallen women”. His first action in a Bonn safe house was always to open all the windows: no matter what the weather.

  They had spent a day and a half going through the minutiae of Girren’s special responsibilities. It was only over lunch, almost by accident, that the other matter came up at all.

  As the Trident’s engines changed pitch on reaching their cruising altitude, Herbie finally got his two miniature vodkas. He then settled back to concentrate on the small and puzzling piece of information which had been nagging at him ever since Girren mentioned it.

  It had its beginnings years ago; and, what seemed to be its end, only a couple of days before Herbie had left to meet Girren. In the daily digest, read by all senior officers, Herbie had spotted a Tass obituary. Brief, and without details of career, it announced that a Colonel-General Jacob Vascovsky, attached to the forces of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, had died in East Berlin. Suddenly, of a coronary thrombosis.

  The digest added what Herbie knew well enough: that Jacob Vascovsky was a senior officer of the KGB. Second-in-command of the Third Chief Directorate in East Berlin.

  Herbie Kruger was oddly moved by the news of this officer’s passing. He respected the man—his professionalism, dedication and the astute practice of his trade. He had dealt with Jacob Vascovsky many times.

  During the years when Herbie ran his famous network, and set up the important, long-standing contacts within the DDR—with no assistance from the politicians, and only plain cover as an engineer—Vascovsky had been to him what Napoleon must have been to Wellington; Rommel to Montgomery.

  In the darkness of the Cold War, Vascovsky had, time and again, set entrapments for Kruger and his people. They had fenced with one another, and in the end Vascovsky almost won. Many of Kruger’s people actually went down to the Russian until, finally, the network was rolled up and Herbie got out.

  When Herbie first became aware of this notable opponent Vascovsky had been a senior major. It was Vascovsky as a full colonel who had at long last caused Kruger to dismantle and jump clear—leaving some special assets in limbo.

  Herbie, who in private was not intellectually modest about his own effectiveness in the field, could only acknowledge the high capabilities of Jacob Vascovsky. He had kept an eye on the man’s rising fortunes ever since.

  The demise of Jacob Vascovsky left an important assignment to be filled. For the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB in East Germany has responsibility for the security of Soviet forces in Germany; and counter-espionage, with special consideration for the American, British and other NATO agencies. Its second-in-command has almost total control over this latter role.

  When the important business with Girren had been disposed of, Kruger placed a casual question concerning a rumour about the appointment of a new second-in-command to the Third Chief Directorate. It was meant as a feeler, a seed to plant in Girren’s mind, a nudge that might bring in an answer during their next session a couple of months hence—or sent back sooner, via one of the other officers, or by the electronic fast-sender.

  Girren looked as though he had been stung, loudly voicing an obscenity against himself. Then he assumed the demeanour of a schoolboy caught cheating. Cursing himself, he apologised. He should have mentioned it to Herbie before this. Only a tiny oddity, but puzzling and worth passing on. Then—

  “Have you ever heard of a person dying from a coronary, and being found without a head?”

  Herbie remained cool, shaking his own head slowly, as though checking it was still in place.

  “Tell me.” The big man was now fully alert, aware that it was from tiny remnants of information like this that something larger, more urgent, could emerge.

  Apart from Girren’s agent-handling duties, his brief was to turn as many stones as possible; to look for new talent; to catch straws in the wind. In that particular line it is often relatively easy to milk simple information, over a considerable period of time, without the informant even knowing that he, or she, is being tapped. Girren was adept at this exercise, being a good mixer, a witty talker—in spite of his sour expression—and a drinker of no mean capability.

  He was already a recogni
sed regular in a number of bars and cafes in East Berlin, choosing with care those places most frequented by government employees, troops, or workers close to military establishments.

  In a bar on the Karl-Marx-Allee he often drunk with off-duty members of the East German Nationale Volksarmee—in particular a garrulous sergeant of the medical corps. The man was an idiot, a very heavy drinker; but Girren hoarded him against the day; reasoning that he could prove useful.

  On the night before making his duty trip into the West, to attend the briefing with Herbie, Girren found the sergeant in fine form. It turned out that he had only recently been moved to the Volkspolizei Hospital, to be put in charge of the mortuary—a fact that led Girren to think they had finally rumbled the man’s inefficiency.

  Well in his cups, the sergeant mentioned, with some pride, that for one night he had been in sole charge of the corpse of a high ranking Russian officer. Bragging, he even gave Vascovsky’s name; and later indicated that all was not as it seemed.

  Girren bought him a couple of drinks, to tip him over the brink of discretion. It was then that the man disclosed that the officer was supposed to have died of a coronary thrombosis; but, to use the medical sergeant’s own words: “Never have I seen a coronary case with an exploded head. Mind you, I wasn’t supposed to see. Nothing left except the neck and chin. The doctors came in and put wadding and gauze where the head should have been before they flew him home to his Mother Russia and a great military funeral.”

  Kruger’s huge hands lifted and fell, palms flat, on to his knees. He looked at Walter Girren. Neither of them spoke for a long time.

  “It’s water in the mouth that does it,” Kruger eventually said, almost to himself.

  “Eh?”

  “Water in the mouth,” Herbie repeated, this time for Girren’s benefit. “Blows the head right off. Effective.” He had read about it somewhere. If a man is determined to shoot himself but remains afraid that the bullet will not kill—leaving him only with serious brain damage—he fills his mouth with water, inserts the muzzle of the pistol through pursed lips, and pulls the trigger. The pressure of the water does the trick. The head is blown to shards.