The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  Pearson seemed to be trying hard not to smile. Bauer would not stand for any smiling at this stage.

  Ackermann, too, was disappointed about Delaney’s change of plans.

  “Come to Berlin just for tonight, Francis. We need to talk about this,” he said when Delaney called from an airport bar.

  “We can talk again on the phone later, Gunter. I’ll call you when I get back to Phuket and I’ll let you know how things are looking at that end. Or maybe an email’s better. I’ll tell you all about Heinrich and our French connection from there. It’s all coming together now, this story. OK? Don’t worry.”

  “This could be very big, Francis. It’s big.”

  “I know that,” Delaney said.

  “Tell me a bit of what you’ve got,” Ackermann said.

  “I’m a little worried about this phone now, Gunter. I’ll be in touch from Phuket.”

  “Give me some kind of indication of what you’ve got, Francis.” Delaney hesitated. “Gay,” he said.

  “Gay?” Ackermann said.

  “Yup.”

  “What, the two of them? Together?”

  “You got it.”

  “Great story,” Ackermann said.

  “You got it.”

  Chapter 16

  Delaney returned to Phuket at what the Thais would describe as a particularly auspicious moment. It was Sunday, April 3rd. Monday would be exactly one hundred days since the tsunami disaster killed thousands of people. Thai Buddhists believe that the hundred-day mark after a death—or after many thousands of deaths in this case—is precisely the moment when the souls of the dead can be put at rest and when those still living can move on.

  Elaborate ceremonies were planned for each of the major disaster sites around Phuket province. On Patong Beach, 14 kilometres outside of Phuket town, there was to be an international sunrise ceremony with prayers by Buddhist monks and by priests from a variety of religions, as well as speeches and thanksgiving and candle lightings and banners and the launching of wreaths and little model boats in memory of the dead. Families of the foreign victims were arriving in Phuket to join the observances, as were politicians and diplomats and police and media from dozens of countries. The airport was teeming with people when Delaney got off the shuttle from Bangkok. At first he was bewildered by the intense activity on a Sunday afternoon. The Phuket terminal had been busy ever since the tsunami, with identification teams arriving from all over the globe and aid workers coming and going, and with the relatives of the dead. But the throng when Delaney arrived was unusual.

  His taxi driver, wearing a bright red baseball cap with a CNN logo, told him what was going on, apparently shocked that anyone would not be aware.

  “One hundred days, one hundred days,” the driver sang out from the front seat. “Tomorrow big ceremony, very big. All ghosts will rest. Is very good. Tourists start to come back maybe. Fishermen go back out to the sea.”

  Delaney was, therefore, lucky to find accommodation of any sort at the Metropole Hotel. He had no reservation and was only able to get a room because of a last-minute cancellation. When he eventually got to his room and put down his bag, he went out on the balcony into the early-evening air and breathed deeply of the tropics. The heat and the humidity and the fragrant flowering plants could not have been more different from the cold spring rain and diesel fumes of Germany.

  He called Jonah Smith’s room at the Bay Hotel. No answer. He called Conchi’s room at the Royal. She was out too. Neither Smith nor Conchi carried cell phones. And, Delaney acknowledged as he took a first drink from the mini-bar, he had arrived unannounced. There was no reason for anyone to be waiting anxiously by their telephones for his return.

  Delaney woke fully clothed on his bed just after 10 p.m. A post-flight session of whiskies and a nap had gone on too long. He called Smith’s room again. This time the fingerprint man was in.

  “It’s me,” Delaney said.

  “Oh, Frank, good, I’m glad you’re back,”

  Smith said.

  “Careful what you say in that room of yours, Jonah,” Delaney said.

  He was glad that the room he himself had been randomly given at the Metropole could not have been wired up as Smith’s was. Not yet, in any case.

  “Sorry, sorry, yes, of course,” Smith said.

  “Silly of me.”

  “We’ve got a lot to talk over, Jonah. But let’s pick a proper spot to do that.”

  “Good, good,” Smith said. “When?”

  “Soon, as soon as possible.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Maybe. I’m thinking, though, that I might come over there and say a few choice words into your microphones first. Put up a little smokescreen. Then maybe we can have a real talk tomorrow. Something like that.”

  “Tomorrow’s the big ceremony at Patong, Frank. I’ve got to go to that. It’s really early in the morning. All the DVI teams have to go. Everybody’s going to go.”

  “Friend and foe alike.”

  “I would say,” Smith said.

  “I think I’d better come along,” Delaney said.

  He got to Smith’s hotel around 11 p.m. for a bit of preventative play acting. He hoped Smith’s acting skills were up to the challenge, for they would have no agreed script and a very attentive audience. Smith had a half-finished beer on the go and a fresh one already opened for his guest.

  “Great to have you back, Frank,” Smith said, pointing to a wall socket in the living room where they were standing.

  “Great to be back, Jonah,” Delaney said as he knelt to peer at the wallplate. Smith came closer, crouched down, and pointed at a tiny black semicircle that was just visible where the right side of the plate met the wall.

  They both stood up and moved over to a sofa facing the hidden microphone.

  “So, Frank, tell me. What did you come up with over there?” Smith said.

  “Nothing. Not a damn thing,” Delaney said. “A complete waste of time and money.” “Bad luck,” Smith said. “Heinrich, all of that? No go?”

  “We’re no further ahead. The guy who was helping me out came up with nothing we can use. It’s all a bit of a dead end. I’m stumped.” “Bad luck,” Smith said again. They drank beer.

  “And Horst Becker?” Smith said. Delaney thought Smith was showing a strong talent for disinformation. Becker himself might well be listening to their late-night performance, “No connection that I can see,” Delaney said. “I don’t see where he fits in at all.”

  “Bugger,” Smith said.

  “Yeah,” Delaney said. “Maybe after all this he’s actually just pissed off that we were unfairly accusing the German team of something. Like he says.”

  They tried not to make it all sound too lame and they did not go on for too long. They were amateur actors, after all. But they did what they could over their beers to make it as clear as possible to their listeners that the tsunami file story was not coming together as Delaney had hoped.

  “So who is it in that body bag then?” Smith asked.

  “I don’t see anymore how it could be Heinrich,” Delaney said.

  “It’s got to be,” Smith said. “The fingerprints matched.”

  “It can’t be him, Jonah. You only had a few decent prints off that body in the end. And people make mistakes.”

  “I don’t make mistakes like that,” Smith said sharply.

  Delaney hoped Smith’s professional pride and his absolute faith in the reliability of fingerprints would not make him protest too much. He appeared to be forgetting who he was supposed to be in their little morality play.

  “I don’t think I buy it anymore,” Delaney said. “I really don’t.”

  Smith’s expression turned glum. Delaney was suddenly having trouble seeing what was in character for the fingerprint man and what was not. He decided to end the performance and let their audi
ence go home to bed.

  “Don’t let it worry you, Jonah,” he said.

  “Sometimes things like this happen. I’ve had it happen a hundred times. In my line of work you sometimes think you’re on to a big story and it simply doesn’t pan out.”

  They finished their beers, chatted for a few minutes longer, agreed to meet before sunrise on Patong Beach, and said their goodbyes. They heard no applause coming out from the wallmounted listening device, but they very much hoped the performance had been a success.

  The world’s media like nothing better than well-organized public displays of grief, particularly in exotic locales. The hordes of TV crews and radio recordists and reporters jostling for position on Patong Beach the next morning got precisely what they were looking for.

  Diplomats and politicians and potentates also appreciate a good bit of pomp, pathos and ceremony. One hundred days after the Asian tsunami, on 4 April 2005, on Patong Beach at sunrise, they, too, got what they desired. Hundreds of people had gathered at the water’s edge before the sun came up. Almost all, locals and foreigners alike, were wearing white as requested by the organizers. In the slowly fading darkness, a sea of candles flickered and yellow mourners’ lanterns swayed. Dozens of bamboo poles, with multicoloured banners flying, had been driven into the soft sand.

  Delaney stood well back, with Smith and Conchi. He had found them with difficulty in the crowd, not quite where Smith had said they would be standing. Conchi, as usual, gave Delaney a kiss on both cheeks but even in the dim glow of lantern light he could see she was not entirely pleased that he was back. She saw him, Delaney thought, as an inauspicious arrival on what was supposed to be an auspicious day.

  A long column of Buddhist monks filed silently onto the sand wearing their burnt orange robes. Prayers were to begin the proceedings and then there would be speeches and testimonials and a minute’s silence. Delaney watched mourners weeping and holding tightly to each other. Conchi held tightly to Smith’s arm. She had apparently decided that on this occasion her sky blue UN shirt would not do. She wore a simple, locally made silk blouse, the brilliant white setting off her dark tan. Delaney could very much see what Smith saw in this young Spanish seeker of lost identities.

  He scanned the crowd for friend and foe. Not far from where he stood with Smith and Conchi he saw Stefan Zalm in amongst a crowd of Dutch police and forensics officers. They had not worn white; all wore their navy blue Dutch DVI team shirts instead. Delaney had long since decided that Zalm was not in the enemy camp.

  Far off, near the dignitaries’ stand, Delaney saw the German team. They too had decided against wearing white. Even in the lantern light and the faint glow of the coming sunrise, he could see that Horst Becker was there. There could be no mistaking his bald pate and short bulldog’s body. Delaney tapped Smith on the shoulder and pointed. Smith spotted Becker too. They said nothing.

  Becker was also scanning the crowd. As mourners let go of flimsy paper lanterns that then wafted gently skywards on warm air currents from the tiny candles burning inside, Becker also tapped a colleague’s shoulder and pointed to where Delaney and Smith were standing.

  Becker’s teammate leaned over and Becker said something into his ear. That man, too, scanned the crowd. He nodded gravely.

  After the Thai governor and other VIPs had spoken, a sombre Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian Braithwaite and an equally sombre Colonel Pridiyathorn, in fulldress police uniforms, then rose from their seats on the dignitaries’ stand and went together to the podium. First Pridiyathorn, speaking in Thai, then Braithwaite in English said the requisite words of grief and of thanks to all who were working in the disaster victim identification effort. Ruth Connolly trudged through the sand as they spoke, distributing press releases to assembled scribes seeking post-tsunami morsels to feed the insatiable media beast.

  It was Braithwaite and Pridiyathorn who led the ceremony into the minute of silence. As he stood with his head slightly bowed, Delaney again looked over toward Becker. Becker, too, was not properly concentrating on the officially designated sixty seconds of commemoration. The German pathologist glanced discreetly over at his foes, bullet-head not bowed at all. Like Delaney, his thoughts apparently focused on present difficulties, not on soothing the souls of the dead and the spirits of those bereft.

  With the brilliant tropical sun fully up and the ceremony over, people began to slowly drift away from the beach. Many remained, however, for further private mourning or perhaps because it was simply a beautiful place to be.

  Conchi said she had to head to work. Smith said he could take more time off.

  “Let’s talk here then,” Delaney said. “Just the right place for a confidential chat.”

  Becker & Company appeared to have left along with the departing throng.

  “I can’t stay,” Conchi said. “But I should stay, to stop you two mischief boys from making up some crazy plan.”

  “Don’t worry, Conchi. I’m just going to fill Jonah in on a few things. We’re not going to start an international incident right here on the beach,” Delaney said.

  “Not yet maybe,” Conchi said. “After you get off the beach maybe.”

  “Don’t worry, Conchi,” Smith said.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Conchi said. “Every time Frank Delaney is in Phuket that is all you can ever say.”

  Smith laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. He kissed her on the forehead. Delaney duly noted Smith’s increased capacity for public displays of affection and the way in which such displays were received. Conchi touched Smith’s face and then turned and walked off toward the road, sandals in hand as she made her way though the golden sand. Smith watched her go.

  “She is. Very,” Delaney said.

  “Yes, isn’t she,” Smith said. “Very.”

  “Complicated for you,” Delaney said.

  “No so much, Frank. Maybe not.”

  “Oh?”

  “Later, later,” Smith said. “First tell me what you’ve got.”

  They walked to the water’s edge and then strolled along the strip of firmer moist sand as they talked. The mourners and the journalists and the local officials who had stayed gave them the anonymity they required.

  Delaney filled Smith in on the details of what he had discovered in Berlin, then in Bonn and then in France. He held nothing back. This was to be a day for important decisions and careful strategy. Smith deserved to be fully briefed. He listened with the concentration of a man who has worked a long time with the police.

  “Incredible,” Smith said eventually.

  “That’s how I would describe it,” Delaney said.

  “Imagine a man with that kind of life story—East Berlin, West Berlin, Cold War, spying, constantly dissembling, all that kind of very, what, very mysterious, politicized European kind of life—ending up killed on a beach way out here in Thailand by a freak wave.”

  “Ends up in a body bag in an old shipping container, ends up getting identified by a fingerprint man from Scotland Yard via Interpol.”

  “Ends up getting identified by a reporter from Montreal,” Smith said.

  “I got some more details that we needed. You made the identification.” “You got his life story.”

  “Some of it. You never get it all.”

  “You got the Mueller story. This business of a gay affair between a major spy and the head of the BKA. Unimaginable. No one knows about that. It’s an incredible story and you got that for us.”

  “Some people know about that, Jonah.”

  “Not many. It’s never been public.”

  “No. That’s true.”

  “You’re very good at what you do, Frank,” Smith said. “Truly.”

  “So are you, Jonah. Truly.”

  “So here we find ourselves.”

  “Yup.”

  “And the next step?”

  “In
formation is not valuable unless it’s used, Jonah. Right?”

  Smith looked at him for a long time. “I’m a man who makes identifications and hands them over to my police brethren,” Smith said eventually. “All my life. Making the identification was the thing. Someone else decided what to do next.”

  “We don’t have that luxury, Jonah. It’s a big bad complicated world out there.”

  “So it is.”

  “I’m surprised I need to remind a Scotland Yard man about that.” Smith said nothing.

  “So?” Delaney said. “Next step?”

  “We tell someone,” Smith said.

  “Yeah? Like who? How? What for?”

  “Come on, Frank, for goodness’ sake,” Smith said.

  “You’re the ID man. We’ve got the ID now. What do you want to do with it?”

  Smith looked genuinely perplexed. He studied the tips of his fingers as he pondered the situation.

  “We’ll go to Braithwaite,” he said eventually.

  “OK,” Delaney said. “Then what? What happens to the information then? What’s the result?”

  Smith was starting to look extremely uneasy.

  “Come on, Frank. He’ll act on it.”

  “You sure?”

  “He’s a career policeman.”

  “So was Mueller.”

  “Come off it, man. What else is there for us?”

  “Well, as I told you, I’ve got some very good friends in the Canadian spy service. They have friends in a lot of other spy services. We can tell them, for example. Tell them the whole story and see what happens then.” “What would happen?”

  “Up to them. Just like with police. It would be up to them how they used the information.”

  “That’s no good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, what if they use it, I don’t know, some way that’s not good?”

  “Not good? Interesting concept. What does that mean?”

  “Not the way we think it should be used.”

  “Which is?”

  “Frank . . .”

  “What outcome do you want, Jonah?”