Liz sat up in her chair, her mind racing. Four days – that was enough time; Berlin was a two-hour flight away. But she would have to get her ducks in a row first. There was Geoffrey Fane to get round, and just as urgently, the Americans. According to Fane they would put the kibosh on any attempts to contact Mischa. But it was Mischa who was trying to contact her. Would that make them change their minds? She hoped so.
She picked up her phone and punched in a number. The phone at the other end was picked up immediately. ‘Hello, Miles,’ she said, trying not to sound too excited.
9
‘That’s one hell of a coincidence if you ask me.’ The image of Andy Bokus loomed over the video feed from Langley, a look of outrage on his face, while Miles Brookhaven watched from a secure conference room in the CIA suite in the Embassy in London. Miles could just make out the bulky frame below the large head, currently clothed in a khaki-coloured summer suit, white shirt and royal blue tie.
When Bokus had been Station Head in London several years before and Miles had been a junior officer, the two had never got on. Now Miles had succeeded him and it rankled with Bokus. Bokus was a former American football player, the grandson of an immigrant, and a Midwesterner; Miles was East Coast, Ivy League and a classic ‘preppy’. They were oil and water – socially, politically, personally. When Bokus disagreed with Miles, Miles knew that it was often out of instinctive antipathy rather than from any actual difference of opinion.
The best way to deal with Bokus’s aggression, Miles had learned over the years, was to punch back hard. He said sharply now, ‘What’s your point?’
Miles could see Sandy Gunderson, the Director of Counter-Intelligence and Bokus’s boss, sitting next to him. His face was a study in bland neutrality. Miles thought there was something bloodless about the man; he was entirely unlike his predecessor, the legendary Tyrus Oakes, who had been a much-admired character, a wry, diminutive Southerner with gentle manners that belied a will of steel and a penchant for writing copious notes during meetings on old-fashioned yellow legal pads. Gunderson, by contrast, kept his notes strictly in his head, and his desk and office were almost fanatically tidy, and as neutral as his expression now.
Across the Atlantic, Bokus sat back in his chair. ‘I’m not making any point,’ he snapped. ‘Just questioning the timing of all this. We tell the Brits we don’t want to contact Mischa since we’re trying to get a fix on his brother, and then lo and behold, up pops Mischa himself, demanding a meeting. Not with us, but with the Brits, no less.’
Miles was shaking his head. ‘If you’re suggesting this is a put-up job, I can’t agree. Until now, the Brits hadn’t heard from Mischa any more than we had. I saw the postcard Mischa sent. It’s legit.’
‘A postcard from Berlin,’ Bokus said scathingly. ‘It wouldn’t take Einstein to manufacture that.’
Gunderson’s expression remained impenetrable. Miles said firmly, ‘I’ve worked with the Brits before – almost as long as you, Andy. It’s not the kind of stunt they’d pull. And Liz Carlyle is a straight-shooter. Even you have to admit that.’
Bokus looked ready to dispute this, but then thought better of it. He sat back, lips pursed like an unhappy bullfrog.
Gunderson spoke at last, his voice roughly half the decibel count of Bokus. ‘You say that Mischa wrote to Miss Carlyle specifically?’
‘That’s right. She met with him in Tallinn, if you remember.’
‘Does she have any idea what he wants?’
Miles said, ‘No more than we do. But she’s determined to go herself, and given that he wrote to her, I think she’s right. You have to remember that Mischa has lived in Britain; he was at college here. He’s met Liz Carlyle and he must trust her as he wants to meet her again. If we sent one of ours instead he might well abort the meeting. We’d probably lose him for good then.’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’ It was Bokus again.
Miles nodded. ‘You’re right; I can’t. But then we can’t be completely sure of anything about this. It could be a set-up but I think it’s very unlikely.’
Was there the hint of agreement on Gunderson’s face? Miles hoped so, but it was impossible to tell, especially with the flickering feed of the video. Whatever Gunderson decided, both Miles and Bokus would have to accept it.
‘Gentlemen, I can see you’ve got a difference of opinion.’ He turned to Bokus. ‘Andy, we have no reason to distrust the Brits. If they say this is a legitimate approach, I’m sure it is. Miles has seen the communication and knows the circumstances of its arrival. If Mischa wants a meeting he must have something to say; so we should listen. It may be directly relevant to his brother’s position and if so we need to know what it is.’ He turned back to the camera to look at Miles. ‘Tell the Brits we have no objection to this meet. Offer them backup in Berlin if they want it, which I doubt, and make sure you get briefed by them pretty damn quick after Carlyle sees the guy. OK?’
‘Yes. Many thanks,’ said Miles as Gunderson stood up and moved out of camera range. As the video feed terminated and the picture faded, all Miles could see was the angry face of Andy Bokus.
10
It had been a dreadful week in Brussels, Dieter Nimitz thought, though flying home to Hamburg for the weekend wasn’t necessarily an improvement. A senior officer in the office of the EU Commissioner for Refugees, he worked devising and trying to implement European-wide policy on migration and refugees, but despite his best efforts and those of his colleagues the situation was a shambles. Thousands of refugees were pouring into the south of Europe and the member countries of the EU could not agree on even the first step of what to do about it.
Matters weren’t helped for Dieter by his boss, a Dutchman called Van der Vaart, who was both critical of his staff and unhelpful. Dieter mentally divided the Dutch into two categories: the benign, pipe-smoking type, with liberal opinions, and the less common Calvinist sort, dour and right-wing. Van der Vaart was decidedly of the latter, and it made him an intolerant taskmaster, always looking for someone to blame. Dieter, the most senior of the staff, bore the brunt of the Dutchman’s criticisms, and he sometimes felt that but for his friendship with his British colleague Matilda, and the loyalty of the juniors he spent much of his time defending, his job would be intolerable.
Coming through Customs now, Dieter froze. Ahead of him, waiting behind the rail, was a middle-aged woman, with greying hair parted in the middle. For a split second he thought it was his wife, come unexpectedly to meet his flight. But as the woman turned and the light fell on her face, he saw that it wasn’t Irma, and he relaxed.
Once it might well have been her: in the early days of their marriage, Irma would often drive the forty minutes to the airport to meet him as he flew in from Brussels. Ostensibly, she came out of love, so delighted to see her husband that she couldn’t wait for him to make his way home. But he knew even then, in the early days of their marriage, that she was there to keep an eye on him – to make sure he didn’t stray; that he hadn’t struck up a conversation with some blonde on the short flight home from Brussels.
Her jealousy seemed odd, since he didn’t believe she really felt strongly for him even then. Sometimes he wondered whether it was jealousy at all, or just some need to control him. Thank God she didn’t know about Matilda. There was nothing more than friendship between them, and there never would be, but that didn’t mean Matilda wasn’t special to Dieter. He was at pains to keep the friendship secret from Irma, and since he only saw Matilda during his working week in Brussels, that wasn’t difficult.
He took the train from the airport to Blankensee, the affluent suburb of Hamburg where he and Irma lived. Theirs was a pleasant villa, not one of the larger houses on the street, but ample for their needs; they had no children. It had a garden with rose bushes and an ancient elm that lost a branch or two in the storms each autumn. As he reached the house and climbed the steps to his front door, Dieter tried to remind himself how lucky he was. And how far he had come.
A m
onth prior to this, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had visited their offices. Van der Vaart had escorted her around, staying close to her side, reluctantly introducing her to his more senior staff with a proprietary air. When it was Dieter’s turn he had addressed the Chancellor in German. She had asked where he was from and he’d explained that he had grown up in Bavaria, which wasn’t true at all, but that he lived now in Hamburg. This made her smile as she explained that Hamburg was where she had been born – though she had moved as a little girl to East Germany.
Dieter thought of the ironies in their exchange. Merkel, born in Hamburg, had moved to Templin, sixty miles east of Berlin, and grown up in the German Democratic Republic. He had moved to Hamburg after a childhood that he claimed had been spent in a village in Bavaria, hundreds of miles south, but actually he had been born and raised in Templin. None of this did he ever admit to anybody.
Dieter Schmidt had known from his earliest years that his father worked for the government of the GDR. This meant the family was not poor – well, everyone was poor then in East Germany, but they were less poor than others. They lived in one of the Stalinist apartment blocks erected in their thousands in the 1950s. Theirs was a block for government officials but they had one more room than their neighbours. Dieter had attended a local primary school, then a Gymnasium¸ gradually learning from the mixture of apprehension and respect that his teachers showed towards him that his father worked not just for the government, but for its most feared part, the Stasi – East Germany’s lethal combination of intelligence service and secret police.
He never quite knew if this was why he was selected, but at the age of seventeen, as he prepared for his university entrance exams, two men came to visit the household. One of them wore a Homburg hat – he always remembered that – while his companion spoke German badly with an accent he later realised was Russian. His brothers and sisters had been sent outside, and his mother had withdrawn to the kitchen as they asked: Did he like school? Who was his closest friend? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he play football?
The two men had seemed almost bored by their own queries, until suddenly they became less banal. Was he good at languages? He was, as a matter of fact; he was top of his class in both Russian and English. Would he be interested in living abroad? Definitely – who in the grimness of East Germany wouldn’t be? And finally, could he keep a secret – a big secret? Wordlessly, he nodded.
The two men had gone away, without an explanation for their visit, and his parents, whatever they knew, told him nothing. He had almost forgotten about this strange interview when a few months later he was summoned to the Head’s office and found the man in the Homburg sitting there. ‘Sit down,’ the man said curtly, and nodded to the Head, who left the room. As Dieter listened with mounting incredulity, the visitor sketched out what the future was about to consist of.
And now, as he went into his house in Blankensee, calling out hello to Irma, Dieter reflected how accurate his forecast had proved.
He had been sent to Moscow immediately after his exams. There he had been schooled to an extraordinary degree in the details of what was to become his new identity. He felt like a man given a new shirt with instructions to memorise each and every stitch it contained. His name was changed immediately to Dieter Nimitz; thirty years later it took an effort of will to remember that he had been born ‘Schmidt’.
He had expected that he would be given intensive schooling in Russian, but in fact he was schooled intensively in Bavarian German, since, it was explained to him, that was what the young Dieter would have spoken at home. After six months, Dieter had been sent back to East Germany and, after a final emotional farewell with his family, he had left for West Germany. He had travelled with a teenage group sent West on a two-week exchange, but he was the one member of the group to stay behind. Ten days later he entered Hamburg University as a languages student, having apparently freshly graduated from a Gymnasium in Bavaria. He’d worked hard at university, graduating with distinction, and then, obeying instructions he received, he took a job with an import–export firm in Hamburg. There he acquired managerial skills and some business acumen. He stayed in that small family-owned firm for seven years, having no contact with his family in the East – and hearing nothing from his controllers. He had become convinced that they had forgotten about him, when suddenly he was told to apply to the European Commission in Brussels.
By then he had met and married Irma, a German schoolteacher whom he met through friends at a picnic on the banks of the Elbe. Irma was a formidable character, who knew what she wanted and usually got it. She made it clear she wanted Dieter, and he felt both amazed and helpless in the face of her determination; they were married within a year. His explanation for the absence of family on his side at the wedding ceremony was that he had been orphaned early in life and raised by a succession of foster parents.
Other than two sets of instructions as to his employment, Dieter heard nothing from the Russians. As far as he could tell, they had utterly and irrevocably changed his life for no apparent purpose. Yet he felt no anger or regret about this, even when the Berlin Wall fell, since he was confident that one day the Russians would need him for something – he didn’t know what, but he was certain of this. He also did not imagine his life would have been any happier had he stayed in Templin, and there was no prospect of going back there now – he learned of the deaths of his parents when browsing the online edition of the Templin local paper, and about his brothers and sisters, he knew nothing, and assumed they knew nothing of him.
He never revealed the truth about his real past to his wife; she seemed completely content with the version he had told her when they first met. He did sometimes think it strange that she never asked about his family, but they never talked much about their respective childhoods, so he knew very little about hers, either. It just was not something they ever discussed.
But from time to time, and more frequently as he got older, he thought of the man in the Homburg hat and the months in Moscow. At those times he felt certain that since a foreign power had gone to enormous pains to make him into something he was not, he would one day learn that there was a purpose to it all.
11
Dieter let himself into the house with his key. Pushing open the door, he stepped into the little entrance hall and called down the passage that led to the kitchen at the back of the house.
‘Irma. It’s me. I’m back.’
There was no reply, so he walked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Irma,’ he called, more loudly this time. Again, silence. He was a little surprised, since she was almost always home by now. Even though she worked in her study most evenings, and on the weekends as well, Irma liked to be home when he returned from his week in Brussels.
She had done well in her career as a teacher, and was now Head of the Freitang school, a new Gymnasium for immigrant children – once they’d been mostly Afghans and Iraqis; now they’d been joined by Syrians fleeing that country’s never-ending spiral of violence. The Freitang did not discriminate between its pupils on grounds of race or national origin or religion, but it was nonetheless selective – all its students were of above average intelligence, and many of them were clearly gifted. Though most of them had survived extremely traumatic circumstances, they learned astonishingly fast – nearly all were fluent in German within a year, and soon after that were tackling the most difficult parts of the Gymnasium curriculum. The school was especially strong in IT, something that amused Dieter, since Irma was a self-confessed technophobe.
Leaving his case by the stairs, he went into the kitchen. There was no sign of Irma, and no note. He opened the fridge door, wondering what supper would be. Two pork chops sat on a plate and there was a bottle of Riesling, which he didn’t dare open, even though he would dearly like a drink. Irma rationed alcohol in the same way she rationed affection – as something enjoyed in strictly limited doses.
He went upstairs, dumped his bag on the bedroom floor and swapped his jacket for
a jumper. At a bit of a loss what to do while he waited for Irma to come home, he went down the corridor and into the small room she used as a study. It looked out over their back garden and he peered through the window just in case she was out there, though he knew it was unlikely as it was he who was the gardener. There was no sign of her.
As he turned back to the door he noticed a piece of paper that had slipped down between the filing cabinet and Irma’s desk. He bent down and retrieved it, scanning it idly as he did so. It was a letter, addressed to Irma as Head of Freitang school, from the Director of the Lehrner Institute. He knew of the Institute; it was a local orphanage. In recent years, like similar institutions across Germany, it had been almost overwhelmed by the number of unaccompanied children who had arrived with the refugees flooding into Germany under Chancellor Merkel’s open-door policy. The Lehrner was unable to accommodate all of its quota of children, and had made a public appeal for private households to offer accommodation to some of the older children. The Institute retained responsibility for the children’s welfare but in many cases a close, almost fostering relationship developed between the children and their hosts. The brightest and most promising of the orphanage children were selected by the Freitang school for fast-track tuition, so Irma had many dealings with the orphanage as a result.
The opening sentence caught his eye, and piqued his curiosity. He read on:
Dear Frau Nimitz
I write further to our telephone conversation of last week about the enquiry from Herr and Frau Gravenstein. I accept of course your point that since the young man who has sparked these inquiries is legally an adult, you are no longer responsible for him or obliged to monitor his movements and activities. Notwithstanding this, I would be most grateful for any information you can provide. You will appreciate that the Gravensteins are worried because they have not heard from a young man they consider to be almost a surrogate son. I have tried to reassure them by relaying your message that he has resettled in North America of his own accord, and that it is entirely his decision whether to communicate with them or not. As you have pointed out it would not be appropriate for me to intervene in any way.
The Moscow Sleepers Page 4