‘We’ll take the Newcomer; you take the main man,’ ordered Anspach on the car’s radio. ‘When you’ve housed him at the hotel, come and help us. If he goes somewhere else, stick with him.’
Anspach settled down to wait for the black man he’d labelled Newcomer, and a few minutes later he emerged, with Beckerman fifteen metres behind him, examining a map of Berlin with apparent concentration. Anspach waited until Newcomer had walked a couple of hundred metres away from Unter den Linden, towards a shopping district, busy on a Saturday morning. When it got hard to see him in the crowd on the pavements, Anspach nodded at Dimitz, who started up the car and drove in the direction their target had gone. They could see Beckerman, struggling to keep up with Newcomer, who was striding quickly past the shops as if on his way to keep an urgent appointment.
They drove past both men, and Dimitz pulled up, just short of a pedestrian-only area. Anspach hopped out, waved to Dimitz as if to thank him for the lift, and walked swiftly into Nadelhoff’s department store, an old-fashioned emporium that was adjusting badly to its new concrete and glass quarters. Inside he loitered on the ground floor, looking at men’s shirts near the front windows, waiting for Newcomer to walk past. When he did, Anspach abandoned the shirts and left Nadelhoff’s, just in time to see his target disappear through the swing doors of a shopping centre – six stories of small independent shops known collectively as the Boutique Mall. Whoever this elegant black man was, he seemed to know his way around this part of Berlin.
Anspach spoke into the mike under his lapel. ‘He’s gone into the Boutique Mall. I’ll try and keep with him in there; park the car and come round to cover the rear entrance. Beckerman, watch the front. Controclass="underline" get the other team over here as soon as they’ve seen their target home.’
Anspach spotted his target easily enough as soon as he went into the Mall. He was in a record shop on the ground floor, leafing through CDs. Anspach walked past and went into a shop opposite; from there he could see the door of the record shop.
He was beginning to feel desperately exposed but he didn’t want to call in either of the other two to take his place for fear of leaving the exits unmonitored. The black man was taking his time – or was he killing time? He had twice looked at his watch but he went on flipping through CDs.
Then he moved, suddenly and quickly, heading straight for the atrium in the centre of the Mall. If he had clocked Anspach he didn’t show it; he walked fast, looking straight ahead, and by the time Anspach was out of the shop, he had crossed the atrium and was striding down the aisle leading to the rear exit.
‘Dimitz, target coming your way. He’s yours,’ he said into his mike. He was hanging back now to avoid detection if his target should look back. He gave it a good sixty seconds, then said into his mike, ‘Have you got him?’
The reply was a grunt.
‘Which way is he going?’
‘He’s not “going”. The bastard’s just standing on the kerb.’
‘Any cabs around?’
‘No. If he wanted one there’s a taxi rank that he walked right past.’
So what was he doing? Waiting to see if he was being tailed? Possibly, but there were better ways to shake off surveillance, or even just to see if it was there. Waiting in one spot wouldn’t do the trick, since the watchers didn’t have to show themselves.
Anspach decided he should risk a closer look. He had reached the rear entrance and could see the black man now, across the street, staring into the window of a women’s shoe shop. It seemed contrived, unnatural. Was he using the window to spot surveillance? Anspach had a premonition. ‘Dimitz, quick get the car.’
‘I’m in it already. Just round the corner.’
‘Come and pick me up.’
But it was too late. There was a whoosh of an approaching car – a black Mercedes limousine, with tinted windows – the screech of brakes, and in an instant the black man had disappeared into the back seat, slamming the door behind him. The Mercedes executed a three-point turn at the expert hands of an invisible driver, then accelerated away down the street.
By then Anspach had his phone in his hand, and its camera snapped and snapped again. ‘Dimitz, where the hell are you?’ he shouted into his mike, not caring now if he was overheard.
‘I’m stuck. There’s a rubbish truck in front of me and I can’t get round.’
Chapter 16
Anspach strode round the corner into a cacophony of car horns. Dimitz was sitting at the wheel of his car, at the head of a line of stationary cars, all blowing their horns at the garbage truck blocking their way.
‘What in heaven’s name is going on?’ shouted Anspach.
‘The driver’s in that café and he won’t come out.’
‘I’ll get him out fast enough,’ said Anspach, and headed into the café waving a card identifying him as on special government business. In seconds he was out again, shouting at a couple of men in yellow jackets who had come out of the café. They got into the rubbish truck and drove it off up the street. By then Beckerman had joined his colleagues in the car.
‘I’ve passed the registration number of the Mercedes to Control and he’s asking the traffic police to look out for it,’ said Anspach. ‘We’ve got no reason to stop him, unless Traffic can get them for exceeding the speed limit, but at least we should get a fix on where he’s going.’
‘I got some good photographs of both of them in the gallery,’ said Beckerman. ‘I swear that was no chance meeting. They were discussing something. It was an RV.’
‘Yeah. And I think that black fellow clocked us, at least by the end. That was a very smooth getaway,’ added Anspach.
‘Where to, boss?’ asked Dimitz.
Anspach snorted. ‘God knows. We’ll join up with the other team and hope Traffic get lucky.’
And they did – up to a point. Ten minutes later a report came in that a traffic patrol car had spotted the Mercedes heading north on the E26 near Westend. Unfortunately the patrol car had been going in the other direction.
A quick conference with Control sent both teams off to Tegel airport, where the BfV officers and the police and immigration officials were all alerted to look out for a tall, elegantly dressed black man, and to note his passport details and where he was heading.
Tegel was crowded when Anspach and his team arrived. They had to push past long queues of passengers at the departure desks in the hexagonal International Terminal A to reach the office where the airport team had their base. There was no news of their target. He had not been observed going through security or passport checks at Departure and no sightings of the Mercedes had been reported by police outside the terminal.
But Anspach wasn’t going to give up; he found a ticketing supervisor, and with the man by his side, slowly worked his way along the lines of check-in desks – British Airways, Lufthansa, Delta and all the other airlines running international flights from the airport, showing the desk clerks the clearest picture he had of the dozens taken by Beckerman in the Schweiber Museum. As each desk clerk peered at the tiny image on the mobile phone’s screen they responded with a shake of the head.
As he was working his way along the desks he heard Beckerman’s voice through his earpiece say, ‘They’ve seen the car at Terminal D.’
‘What’s Terminal D?’ he asked the supervisor, who was still with him.
‘It’s Air Berlin – domestic flights.’
He looked at the man, puzzled. ‘Domestic flights?’ Surely their target wasn’t going somewhere else in Germany.
The man added, ‘Private jets use it as well.’
‘How do I get there?’