The Contract

by Gerald Seymour

  There was a knock and the PPS came into the room. He coughed for attention.

  ' I think there are one or two points that have come up in debate that you might wish to rebut, Prime Minister . . .'

  The Prime Minister gazed steely eyed across at the back- bencher.

  'Thank you for your time. As far as is possible I will inform you of what I discover. I'm most grateful to you.'

  'Thank you, Prime Minister. I hope I've been of help.'

  They shook hands. With Sir Charles Spottiswoode gone the Prime Minister smacked a clenched fist onto the cards for his speech, scattered them across the table. The PPS, without comment, swept up his glass, took it to the cabinet, filled it heftily. No oil for the troubled waters, gin would have to do the job.

  On a Thursday evening in Bonn it was usual for a representative of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) to meet with a senior official of the Bundesamt fur Verfassungeschutz (BfV). It was the regular conversation on matters of mutual interest between the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Internal Security Office.

  Consultation between the two agencies had been demanded by successive Chancellors after the retirement of General Reinhard Gehlen, who had founded BND after the war and run the organisation with autonomous secrecy. It had been determined that never again would an arm of the secret service be permitted such free ranging power, and if BfV maintained a gentle spy role over the more senior brother there would be no complaint by the political administration.

  There was always much for them to discuss. The damaging and publicised drain of defecting government secretaries to the East, the knowledge that within the Ministries existed the deep sleeper agents positioned by East Berlin, the efforts of DDR operatives to prise their way into the lives of lonely, menopausal female clerks. There were grounds for constant vigilance, the stability of the nation was threatened.

  It was little more than 5 years since the worm had crawled to the very heart of the apple, since Willi Brandt had resigned after the discovery that an East German spy had nibbled his way to the Chancellor's private office.

  The early talk in the office of the BND representative had concerned the vast scale of Positive Vetting procedures authorised by government.

  The files were now locked back in their holding cabinets. Neither man was in a hurry to be on his way though their main business was completed. For each this had been the last appointment of the day and all that faced them was the traffic on Koblenzer Strasse, the tedium of the homeward journey. One produced a packet of cigarettes, the other his pipe. Time to ease back in their chairs, time to replace their pens in the inner pockets. The liaison worked well. They were old friends, men who had worked as young officers in Fremde Heere Ost, the section of staff officers in the former Wehrmacht that had concerned itself with Eastern front intelligence. They could confide in each other.

  'Did you know that the British . . . SIS . .. had been round us, their man here, they sought a recommendation. They wanted a name of one of the organisations for bringing people from the East.' The BND officer dragged at his cigarette.

  'They haven't been to us.'

  'It was not a request through the usual channels, there is a procedure for the exchange of information, they did not use that.'

  'And before they had been asked for what purpose they needed such information?'

  'The intention must be clear . .. they wish to bring someone from the DDR.'

  'They live in a delusion of their former times.' The BfV man coughed through the pipe smoke. 'Thirty-five years after the war, and you find those of them that believe they are still the occupying power.'

  'Nothing about this was handled properly. I telephoned their man for guidance on their intentions, he was not available and he did not call back. He cancelled the usual liaison meeting for last week, so again we did not talk. Now they have said that we will meet next week . ..'

  'Which will be when their business is completed . . . they think they can walk over us.'

  'It poses a difficulty, certainly, if we adhere to the policy of the Chancellery at this moment. Escape across the frontier is totally discouraged when aided by commercial organisations. If the request for the information they sought had been properly presented I doubt that it would have been granted. You have the risk of our involvement in a potential incident.'

  'Whose name were the British given?' There was a glaze of hostility in the BfV man's face.

  'Lentzer . . . Hermann Lentzer

  'A Nazi, I know of him.'

  'The British should not have gone about their business in this way, not in the country of an ally, a close ally. And afterwards when they have gone back to London, when they have dismantled their circus it is we who are left with the recrimination and sniping from East Berlin. And bad at this time, with the meeting of the Chancellor and Honecker coming . . .' The BND officer shrugged, enough time had been used. The Koblenzer Strasse traffic would be thinning.

  'What are you going to do about it?'

  'The Chancellor will not thank me for drawing him into the matter . . .

  The British would accuse us of gross interference in their plans, whatever they may be ... I am going to do nothing.' The BND officer was on his feet, briefcase in hand.

  'They never change, the British . . . they have never learned to accept their new place.'

  As they parted a few minutes later in the car park a persistent drizzle sprayed them and the lights gleamed and shone and cast far shadows on the streets. His temper aroused by what he had been told, his forehead ploughed with irritation, the BfV man rattled his horn as he nudged into the traffic flow.

  A black and miserable evening and a slow trek home.

  Outside the door of his private office the Prime Minister accepted the congratulations of his supporters. Many crowded round him and his ears rang with the acclamation of their praise.

  'A triumph, Prime Minister . . .'

  'Absolutely marvellous stuff, sir, just what the party needed

  'Quite destroyed them, kicked them where it hurts, damn good. ..'

  The Prime Minister's face was set, furious and aggressive. His eyes ranged the corridor for the arrival of his PPS from the Chamber. The decision was taken on the course of action he would follow. Was it supposed to be one man government? Was he supposed to oversee every bloody department of Whitehall ? Those buggers from the Service playing their games, living prehistoric dreams. He had been softened up and knocked down by an arrogant fool and that treatment from Spottiswoode outweighed the sycophancy gathered around him.

  The PPS came smiling to the Prime Minister's side.

  'Fine show. . .'

  'What do I have tomorrow?'

  'TUC economic committee at 10. Egyptian ambassador at 12 and he's lunching. Away for Chequers at 3.' The PPS marshalled the timetable effortlessly.

  'Get hold of the Cabinet Secretary,' the Prime Minister said quietly.

  'He's to bring the SIS man to Downing Street at 9 tomorrow . . . That's an instruction.'

  The PPS slipped away from the gathering throng around the star of the night. He was baffled. Why on an evening such as this should the Prime Minister speak with such anger?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Friday morning. Johnny rose at six and dressed at once. The noise of the first trams and buses of the day boomed along the street below his window. Friday, and the coming of the critical hours.

  He sat at the table and took a sheet of hotel notepaper. Otto Guttmann would have followed instructions, would not have reported the contact.

  That was Johnny's feeling and he had backed it by sitting in the foyer the previous evening and watching. He would have seen the policemen coming to the lift . . . there had been none . . . Better to use the hotel paper, to blazon the proximity, because anything that disturbed the old man suited Johnny's purpose. He wrote the clear directions that Guttmann should follow and on the reverse side drew a map of the route to the railway bridge by way of Sandtor Strasse and Rogatzer Strasse.<
br />
  Simple, bold lines for the map. He slipped the paper into an envelope and sealed it.

  Johnny took the lift downstairs, walked out into the street and towards the square behind the Centrum. It was where he had seen the telephone kiosks. He rang the number of the International, spoke in natural German, and asked for the number of the room of Dr Otto Guttmann. He was a friend, he said, later he would be sending a book to the hotel and he wanted to ensure that the package was correctly addressed. The girl on the switchboard would be busy at this time of the morning with the waking calls. Over the line he heard the yawn, then the turning of paper as she searched for the information.

  'Doctor Guttmann, or Miss Erica Guttmann?'

  'Doctor Guttmann.'

  'Room 626.'

  'Thank you.'

  Johnny replaced the receiver and strolled away. It had rained in the night, but the day promised well and the banking clouds were falling behind the Elbe and the sun flickered after them. He went back to the hotel and to any who watched him in the hallway he would have seemed a man who had slept badly and taken an early walk to freshen himself.

  Unremarkable behaviour. Johnny had been a good pupil to Smithson.

  He nodded the day's greeting to Comrade Honecker . . . he took the lift to the sixth floor.

  There was a maid in the corridor with her trolley and bucket and brooms and stacked clean sheets. Johnny waited, admired a grim water colour of hills and lake shores until she had found a vacated room where she could work. He walked the length of the corridor looking for 626, and paused outside Otto Guttmann's door.

  He looked once over his shoulder, heard the sounds of muffled radios in the rooms, the soft voice of the maid as she sang. .The corridor was empty. He bent and pushed the envelope under the door. He knocked.

  There was a distant, indistinct grunt of acknowledgement.

  'A letter for you, Dr Guttmann,'Johnny called softly.

  'What...?'

  'A letter for you under the door.'

  'Who is it. . . what time is it... ?'

  Johnny heard no more. Away down the corridor, light- footed to the lift. The old man would not be quick to find his light switch, stumble to the door, turn the key. If he bothered to search for the carrier of the letter then he would find only a corridor frightening in its emptiness.

  Johnny dropped into an armchair across the hallway from the restaurant. He made himself comfortable and waited for the breakfast service to begin.

  'What should we do?'

  Erica was by the window, a willow figure in a long cotton nightdress.

  The letter was in her hand, the photographs were

  spread on the low table beside the easy chair. Erica was pale and her lips bit tight.

  ' I have to go to the bridge, as I am told.'

  Otto Guttmann stood in the centre of his daughter's room. His dressing gown hung from his thin shoulders, his hair wisped and straggling, his eyes confused.

  'What if it is a trick . .. ?'

  ' It is Willi in the photograph.'

  ' It's horrible, evil. .. the people who have done this

  'They know that I will follow, to find Willi.'

  'Who would tell us that he is alive, who would tell us in this way?'

  She gazed into her father's face and her hair that was not combed fell across her cheeks. Erica who was his leaning staff at Padolsk, on whom he depended. Erica as fearful as a child in a darkened house.

  A smile broke the smoothness of the skin at his mouth. 'The pictures are taken in London ... in the centre of a NATO capital. If they are not a fraud then Willi has gone to the military opponent of the Soviet Union.'

  Her fingers crumpled the single sheet of paper, dropped it to the carpet.

  'Then Willi is a traitor

  'That is how he would be seen by many.'

  'What will they want of you?'

  ' I don't know,' the old man said simply.

  'They will want your mind.'

  ' I don't know.'

  'What are you going to do ?'

  ' I must go to the bridge.' Spoken with tenderness, spoken by a man who has seen the precipices of grief and does not believe he can be hurt any further.

  'You can go to Renate's friend, to the Schutzpolizei. . .'

  'Then I have disobeyed the instruction.'

  ' It is your duty to go to the police ... to the Spitzer . . .'

  'Then I do not see Willi.'

  ' If it is not reported, then we have joined the conspiracy, you see that?'

  ' I am too old to be afraid.'

  'Willi is with our enemy . . .'

  'In the photograph Willi is happy, as if he has found friends. .

  She came quickly to him. The slender arms circled his neck, the softness of her mouth nuzzled against his bristled chin.

  ' I will come with you to the bridge.'

  They stood together a long time, drawing on each other's courage, and the photographs lay on the table, and Willi's smile was with them. They could hear his voice and see his face in laughter. Willi's presence was overwhelming. Their cheeks were damp when at last they broke apart to begin to prepare to face the day.

  The Second Secretary, Commercial, slipped out of the British Embassy on Unter den Linden, and hurried towards the bridges over the Spree river. His briefcase weighed heavily in his hand. Twice he stopped and turned in one movement . . . surveillance of embassy personnel by the Staatssicherheitsdienst followed no regular pattern and he rated his chances of going without observation as best in the early morning.

  Before eight and the tourists not yet on the streets.

  He was the junior of the two SIS men attached to the embassy staff and working under the wing of diplomatic immunity. This was not the work that he enjoyed, playing the old delivery routines. He was an analyst, an interpreter of information.

  The contact would be an older man, an East German national long employed by the British and with an account at a bank in Zurich. Not that he could use the money. But the day would come, the forged passport, the train through the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint. But the contact was not encouraged to think of that time, urged only to soldier on.

  For five minutes the Second Secretary sat on a bench in a square across the river and under the Television Tower, then opened his briefcase and took out the package. It was

  wrapped as for a present. After another minute he left it on the seat, under a newspaper. When he walked back towards the bridge he did not try to watch the collection. Once over the river he stopped at the cafe beside the History Museum and ordered himself a coffee and a pork sandwich.

  It was a vulgar scandal when a foreign intelligence service mounted an operation from Federal territory with neither the courtesy of liaison nor the consideration of the repercussions. Vulgar and arrogant.

  Since the assault on the Lufthansa jet at Mogadishu, since the British had loaned two 'storm experts' and their equipment, since hostages had been freed and terrorists killed, the British had taken too much for granted. The congratulations and thanks offered by the Chancellor to their Prime Minister had left them with an illusion as to their rights.

  Any connivance, official or otherwise, in the use of a commercial organisation to breach the frontier was potentially disastrous. Transit on the corridor autobahn between the Federal Republic and West Berlin was based on a fragile enough agreement, the Soviets had talked only eighteen months before of renouncing the arrangement if the Bonn government did not take acton to curb the escape groups.

  The British were blundering onto thinly frozen water, and without authority.

  Once in his office the man from BfV switched on his electric kettle, and selected two tea bags from the packet in the lower drawer of his desk. He phoned his clerk to provide him with the file on Hermann Lentzer, he ordered an immediate surveillance put on the man, he started the process of discovering the time schedule of the operation for which the British had employed him.

  That done the temper that had lingered with him
from the previous evening was improved. He would not have admitted that pique or spite fuelled the remorseless attention he now turned on Lentzer. He regarded himself as a good servant, committed simply to the welfare of his country.

  On the table behind his desk the kettle spluttered and the lid bounced over an eruption of steam.

  The Prime Minister sat shoulders back, erect and straight.

  On the sofa, with his legs crossed and with the unhappi- ness of a man drawn into a dispute for which he has no stomach, was the Secretary to the Cabinet.

  'Take a chair, please.' The Prime Minister was aloof.

  'Thank you, Prime Minister,' the Deputy-Under-Secre- tary said firmly.

  That was what he had learned over the years. The maxim of no surrender. Stare them out and don't whimper. Stand your ground. He looked at the Cabinet Secretary and smiled and received for his pains only a turned head. He would find no ally there; not in this room, not at this moment. Worthwhile to know.

  'We had a discussion a few day ago over the areas of consultation that I required between your Service and Downing Street . ..' Measured words from the Prime Minister.

  ' I remember, sir. I've asked my people to get something onto paper, there'll be a minute through in the next few days.'

  '. . . Our discussion then followed my complaint that a D notice had been requested without ministerial approval following the disappearance of an East German defector who was in the hands of your people.'

  'That's about correct, sir.'

  'At that meeting you provided me with a sketchy brief. . .'

  ' I explained the young man's relevance. I told you of an area in which he might be of some help to us.'

  The Prime Minister ignored the interruption, swept on. 'You led me to understand that this defector was being questioned because he had some slight knowledge of a Soviet anti-tank missile system.'