“The work being done at that shipyard is slow and shoddy, sabotage and Diversion is suspected. Months of surveillance, all our patient work, narrowing down suspects—and then you stumble in, like a bear that’s smelled honey! Perhaps we have to start from the beginning again, perhaps we will never know.” Another pause, just enough to let the information sink in. “So is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
What did Pozdniakov want to hear me say? How much did he know about Secondary Operation Merkur? Lütten had been questioned, so did Pozdniakov know what Merkur and I had hoped to find in Rostock? I imagined the grilling the Fischkopp must have been subjected to, he’d probably told them everything he knew. Armed with that information, the KGB would merely have had to monitor police and Ministry situation reports to find us.
No time to hold anything back, I told myself. Honesty sometimes being the safest policy, particularly if the person you’re talking to probably knows the whole story anyway.
“The imperialist agent Merkur and I went to Rostock this morning to retrieve the co-ordinates of a cache recently hidden by another Western agent. The cache allegedly contains proof that a member of the Ministry is a double agent,” I said.
“Did you find this cache?”
“The co-ordinates are encrypted, but we retrieved the key this morning—it is in Merkur’s possession.”
Pozdniakov’s face was still in shadow, I couldn’t swear that he reacted, but I’d be prepared to go as far as to say he may have twitched.
“Where is Merkur now?” I risked a question of my own.
“On the way to the border.” Pozdniakov reached into his pocket, pulled out an object that, in the darkness, looked about the right size and shape to be a packet of cigarettes. He tapped out something short and slender and put it between his lips. For a moment I was hopeful, I could really use a cigarette, even one of his pungent papirosas, but the packet went back into his pocket.
“Why is everyone always so keen to throw Merkur out of the country?” It was reckless to voice my frustration, I clearly needed that cigarette more than I’d realised.
“The head of your section, Major Kühn, requested Merkur be expelled. You disagree?” Pozdniakov’s hand dipped into his coat again, a faint rattling told me he had pulled out a box of matches. He struck one, it flared in the night, the flame imprinting on my retinas, adding to the blur left behind by the ascending MiG.
“Merkur can’t be trusted. His story changes by the hour. So far the only solid thing he’s provided is that cell in the shipyard. I was hoping to keep him around until I had my hands on the cache,” I replied, but I was still thinking about what the KGB major had just said about my boss Kühn. “You told Major Kühn about my trip to Rostock?”
“I did,” Pozdniakov took a long drag on his cigarette. “I also told him you were operating under my command.”
Perhaps I let out a small sigh, maybe my shoulders slumped a little in relief, because Pozdniakov felt the need to clarify the situation: “Don’t think I was protecting you—it is merely a case of protecting my investment.” A deep hum started up from the far end of the airfield—there had been noises from that direction the whole time, but this was different, a kind of buzzing. Behind me, the lights on the runway came on, and the humming changed in pitch, I turned back to Pozdniakov, who was still talking, his voice rising to be heard. “I got you into that department, and there’s work still to be done—so if I get you off the hook now, don’t think it’s because I like you.”
The MiG-27 thundered down the runway, the air shimmering from snarling turbines, the shriek of the compressor merging into the deep roar as it passed us, wheels no longer touching the runway. This time I wasn’t so close, but out here in the open air, the noise was as substantial as a fist in the face. The runway lights and the cars beyond the fence were lost in the glare of the exhaust and in that moment, blinded and deafened, I realised why Pozdniakov had brought me to this Soviet airbase.
The KGB officer was showing me he how easily he could put me on a plane—any time he chose, I could wake up on the other side of the Urals.
65
Soviet Airbase Lärz
My orders were simple: find and evaluate Bruno’s cache.
Pozdniakov had given me just twenty-four hours to complete my mission—he was thinking along the same lines as Merkur the day we met by the Müggelsee—keep me on the move, acting and reacting rather than plotting and planning.
Problem was, at that moment I had nothing to go on. Merkur had both parts of Bruno’s message—even if I had them in my possession, they may not have been enough to find Bruno’s cache. Was the cache even where Bruno had left it, or had it been discovered and removed by colleagues of mine or Merkur?
And if I established the location of the cache, there was no guarantee that I could retrieve it in time.
Pozdniakov’s only concession had been to agree to keep hold of Merkur and allow me to speak to him the next morning.
I steered the Shiguli back to the road, travelling alone this time. I felt my back loosen as I put some distance between myself and the airbase, but my jaw remained tight, no matter how many cigarettes I used to try to lever my teeth apart. My hand kept dropping from the steering wheel to pat my pockets, feeling the outline of my Makarov and my penknife—which the Russian had returned, along with a bonus surprise: my clapperboard.
I’ve had the penknife since I was a kid, the only thing I have from my father—a horn handled clasp-knife, the blade tarnished with age—but it was the mass-produced, bound piece of cardboard with badly printed pages that weighed most heavily in my pocket. That little booklet had more power in it than a W50 stuffed with hundred Mark notes—every time I touched it, I felt my sense of self-worth begin to swell to more usual proportions.
Perhaps I should have returned to the motorway, pushed the Shiguli to the speed limit and been at the edge of Berlin within an hour and a half. Instead, I took the scenic route to Neustrelitz, then the F96 south.
Some people get all stirred up about the F96. It starts in the darkest corner of Saxony, where the laws of physics dictate that decadent West-TV is out of reach. From there, it settles on a fairly even trajectory northwards through the Republic—apart from a minor diversion around the Soviet headquarters in Wünsdorf, and a major diversion around the capitalist thorn of West Berlin. After that, it continues on a northern bearing, all the way to the Baltic island of Rügen.
Some travellers on route 96 are in a hurry to get to Berlin for a FDJ youth movement rally, or to dance ’til dawn in an illegal club. Others have their wives in the passenger seat and Peggy and Ronny in the back when they take the Trabant up to the Baltic for the summer holidays. The F96 sees a lot of traffic, but not on a black February night.
It was an hour and a half before I could convince myself there was no-one on my tail. There’s never a way to be a hundred per cent about these things, but if anyone was back there, driving without lights on a night like this, then they were pretty much a suicidal case—if they were prepared to take their job that seriously then I was happy to concede the game.
The next town was Gransee, and that was where I decided to have a break. I turned off for the town centre, the road passed between the mediaeval town walls before leading me between dimly lit buildings that were almost as old as the ancient fortifications, but twice as crooked.
The rumble of car wheels on cobbles echoed off the shop windows, and other than the street lamps in their frosted glass skirts, there were no lights to be seen. Gransee closed early, which meant it was perhaps not the best town to find the kind of bar I was looking for.
Ahead of me, a shadow stumbled from the shelter of a wall and stood in the gutter, more lopsided than the surrounding houses. A drunk, struggling to remember his way home. And where there’s a drunk, there’s drink. I headed in the direction the toper had come.
After that helpful pointer, the bar wasn’t hard to find, light from the windows spilled onto the street and I took a g
ood look as I drove slowly past. Steamed up windows: check. Drawn curtains: check. Uninviting exterior: check. This was my kind of place.
I sat in the car, parked as far as possible from any working streetlamps, and peered into the darkness. All seemed quiet, so I reached under the seat and pulled out the shoe that Merkur had left behind.
The Westerner had form when it came to dropping heavy hints—although I’ll admit it had taken me too long to pick up on the significance of his repeated requests for directions to Heiligendamm. Now I was wondering about his seemingly innocent question back in Malchow: when a Western agent is arrested by a squad of Soviets, you’d think the last thing on his mind would be whether my shopping trip had been a success.
I pushed my hand inside the shoe, pressing my fingers as far as the toe but finding nothing but lining covering cold leather.
Taking my hand out again, I tried the heel, twisting, pushing and knocking the rubber tipped leather sole, but it remained firmly attached. No secret compartments there.
Finally, I ran my fingernail along the insole, trying to loosen it. One edge lifted a little, allowing me to get better purchase, then I had it out. I angled the shoe and a couple of pieces of paper slid into sight.
“Thank you, Polizeirat Portz,” I whispered, not bothering to ask why Merkur had left the one time pad and the encrypted message for me to find—that man had played false witness too many times for me to even begin to imagine his real motivations. So I stuck with tactical gratitude and took myself off to the bar for a celebratory drink.
66
Gransee
The bar was the usual kind of set-up, not as cosy as some places but good enough for the locals. Wednesday evening isn’t the busiest time, nevertheless the usual desperadoes were dotted around the taproom.
The wooden bar itself was old and dark, rubbed shiny by decades of elbows, but the tables placed around the room were standard issue, topped with stained Sprelacart boards, the metal tube seating upholstered with rough, red material.
I set myself in the corner, with a view of both bar and entrance, and when the barman finally saw fit to schlep himself over, ordered a Club Cola.
“Only have Vita,” he announced, already heading back to his perch.
“Wait, I’ll have a beer,” I called, remembering my clapperboard. With that back in my pocket, I could afford to lean on the no drink-driving rule.
The barman took his time finding the bottle of beer, then more time to locate a glass before placing them both on the wooden bar. After that he needed extra time to walk to the front of the bar and fetch the bottle and glass.
I let him have his fun, I was in no rush. I’d waited so long for this drink that another minute or two didn’t matter.
When he finally put the bottle on my table, I filled my glass. The first half went down fast. I slowed down after that and took a closer look at the clientele for a while. None of them had anything to do but to keep a watch on their own beers. The barman hunched himself onto a bar stool, ear pressed against the speaker of a valve radio that was older than the town walls.
I decided it was safe enough to decrypt Bruno’s message here, and got the necessaries out of various pockets.
On an empty page of my notebook, I copied out the message from the tiny slip of paper. Letter for letter, along the top of a page, turning over when there was no more room and filling the top line of the next page:
W K T R Z L V D 0 P D I W B M P V Y Y P E E Y P E Y W Y I L S C X P E J F J V B A H S U G H T O X
I hadn’t ever used a one time pad in earnest, although I’d learned how to decrypt them during basic training at the MfS high school near Potsdam. It was a long time ago, but the method is easy enough, I was sure I could still remember how to do it.
Turning back to the first page, I converted each letter into a number, using the basic scheme A=1, B=2 and so on, writing the number beneath each letter as I went.
W K T R Z L V D 0 P D I W B M P V Y Y P E E Y P E Y W Y I L S C X P E J F J V B A H S U G H T O X
23 11 20 18 26 12 22 4 26 16 4 9 23 2 13 16 22 24 25 16 5 5 25 16 5 25 23 25 9 12 19 3 24 16 5 10 6 10 22 2 1 8 19 21 7 8 20 15 24
Beneath that, I copied the key, converting each letter into a number, same as with the cipher.
D Q Z D V N L P S B P O E V U W S Q G U G K V H Q N E M F D Y O V I G Y N Q S T Y U E B M W A U J
4 17 26 4 22 14 12 16 19 2 16 15 5 22 21 23 19 17 7 21 7 11 22 8 17 14 5 13 6 4 25 15 22 9 7 25 14 17 19 20 25 21 5 2 13 23 1 21 10
Now it was time for the arithmetic: I subtracted the key from the cipher text, adding 26 to any negative numbers so they stayed within the range 1-26:
19 20 20 14 4 24 10 14 7 14 14 20 18 6 18 19 3 8 18 21 24 20 3 8 14 11 18 12 3 8 20 14 2 7 24 11 18 19 3 8 2 13 14 19 20 11 19 20 14
And there it was—once I’d cleaned up the numbers and converted them back to letters, I had Bruno’s message:
S T T N D X J N G N N T R F R S C H R U X T C H N K R L C H T N B G X K R S C H B M N S T K S T N
Trouble was, after all that work, it still didn’t make any sense. I copied the message out again, using lower case letters and exchanging each X for a full stop as I went, hoping the meaning would become clear:
sttnd. jngnntrfrschru. tchnkrlchtnbg. krschbmnstkstn
But it still had me scratching my head. I went back to the top, re-checking my maths, but the numbers added up the same way. Had I misremembered the procedure? Perhaps I should add the code to the cipher instead of the other way round? Or had Merkur mixed up which slip of paper was the message and which was the code?
I started to redo the maths, but the other way round, swapping round the codes on the pieces of paper, starting with the D, subtracting W from it. But when I turned the page to get to the next set of letters, I noticed something about my first attempt at decryption.
There was only one vowel: U followed by a full stop, probably for the word und. But what about all the other vowels?
I wrote out the decrypted string of letters again, leaving spaces between every letter that didn’t either demand an obvious vowel, or fit into a common combination:
st_t_n_d. jungen_n_t_r_forsch_r u. techniker Lichtenbg. k_r_sch_b_m_n_st_k_st_n
It was making more sense now—the first half of the message was easy to understand: Station der jungen Naturforscher und Techniker Lichtenberg: the Centre for Young Natural Scientists and Engineers in Lichtenberg.
Each county, and in Berlin, each borough, has one of these institutions, an after-school activity centre, encouraging kids’ interest in science. I never bothered with anything like that when I was that age—it was enough that I’d been marshalled into the FDJ, and later on, I’d been more interested in activities organised by the GST, the paramilitary organisation for the youth.
I didn’t even know where my local Station in Friedrichshain was, never mind the one in Lichtenberg, but that would be easy enough to find out.
Confident that I had the general location, I turned my attention to the second part of the message, which presumably localised the position of Bruno’s cache:
k_r_sch_b_m_n_st_k_st_n
I stared at the jumble of letters, wishing I was better at crosswords, but nothing jumped out. Another gulp of beer, light up a fresh coffin nail. Then I started to mentally insert vowels into the spaces, testing what fitted:
Kirsch came out pretty quickly: cherry.
After that, Baum was obvious: tree.
Stumped by the next few letters: Nast isn’t a word, but the next vowel, e, gave me Nest. A short leap of imagination took me to Nistkasten: nesting box.
Centre for Young Natural Scientists and Engineers Lichtenberg. Bird box in cherry tree
I raised my glass to Bruno. Suddenly Pozdniakov’s task didn’t seem so impossible.
67
Berlin Pankow
I noticed the tail as I came off the motorway in Pankow, coming down from the bridge over the S-Bahn tracks.
I’d taken the first side street after the end of t
he motorway—force of habit rather than any real concern. But if a car follows you into a small housing estate, you think to keep an eye on it.
I was in a good position to do just that—a quiet road, high wall running along one side, rows of housing blocks on the other—some of the early attempts at concrete slab builds. That was when I caught the car in my mirror for the third time, a Berlin registered, light coloured Polski 126.
There are two basic options in these situations: lose the tail or let it stay where it is. There’s a school of thought that says you should leave a shadow in place for as long as you can so you can keep track of it, but that night I couldn’t be bothered with the usual games. It had been a long day, I’d driven too far and had too much excitement along the way—so you won’t be surprised to hear that I began what, in this business, we call an offensive-preventative manoeuvre.
There was a sharp bend halfway along the road, and since the tail was keeping a respectful distance, that curve was just enough to get me out of sight for a few seconds.
As soon as the Polski had disappeared from my mirrors, I turned into a smaller road, switched off my lights and put my foot down hard.
I took my foot off the accelerator before the next junction, dabbing the brake to see what traction I had, then steered into the start of a fishtail skid as I entered the crossroads. The locals hereabouts were clearly good citizens, the kind that don’t park cars too close to the junction, so I had some lee-way for my next move.
Using the last of the momentum from the fishtail, I steered against the skid and let the back end of the car glide to the side of the road. A sudden stop told me I’d hit one of the heavy concrete flower pots they put around the place to catch idiots like me, but the car didn’t complain when I backed up a few metres, so it seemed I hadn’t damaged anything essential.
I’d halted on the wrong side of the road, but it wasn’t the time to worry about niceties, so I hunched down in the seat and waited to see whether my tail would turn up again.
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