'These are the people you will see at the rendezvous.' Werner produced photos from his pocket and passed them across the table. What exactly was going to happen, who was to be murdered and why, Werner had not been told. His presence at the rendezvous was not required. It was just as well, for tonight he was committed to a big celebration at Tante Lisl's: a fancy-dress party with all the trimmings. Just about everyone he knew in West Berlin would be there. But now the evening would be spoiled for him: he'd spend all the night worrying about Fiona Samson's escape.
Thurkettle pretended to study the passport-style pictures, but he had seen all these people before at some time or other. Thurkettle prepared carefully for each job, that's why he was highly paid, and that's why he was so successful. After a minute or two he passed the pictures back.
Werner tapped the photo of Stinnes. This is your drug peddling contact. Right?'
Thurkettle grunted assent.
'Stinnes will arrive with this woman.' Werner indicated Fiona Samson's photo. 'She will depart with this man.' He indicated the photo of Bernard Samson. 'Probably this man will also be there.' He showed him a photo of Harry Kennedy.
Thurkettle looked at Werner, at the photos, and then at Werner again. 'I'll take care of them.'
Werner said, 'Don't take care of the wrong people.'
'I won't,' said Thurkettle with a cold smile.
'Bernard Samson and Fiona Samson. Make sure they are safe.'
Thurkettle nodded. Now he felt sure that Werner Volkmann was not a party to the real secret: the way that Tessa was to die and change identity with her sister.
'The Brandenburg exit,' added Werner, who was anxious that there should be no misunderstanding.
'No sweat. I know the place. The half-completed highway widening work. I went there yesterday and took a look-see. I'll have a shovel, overalls and a can of gas.'
'Gas? Petrol?' Werner put a map on the table.
'To torch the car. The guy in London, who gave me my orders, wants the car burned.'
'Afterwards you'll meet me here.' He showed Thurkettle on the Autobahn map. 'The cash will be in a leather case. If you don't want to carry a case, you'd better have something to put it in. When you are paid, come back up the Autobahn and through the Border Control Point at Drewitz into West Berlin. You'll go through without any trouble. In Berlin phone the number I gave you and say the job is finished. From then on you are on your own. You have the airline ticket? Don't go back into East Berlin.'
'I won't go back to the East.'
'Have you arranged about a gun? I was told to make sure you had a gun if you needed it.'
'The last time I found myself without a gun was in Memphis, Tennessee. I strangled two guys with my bare hands.' He put a cardboard box on the table. 'Here's one of them,' he said, loosening the lid and holding it open an inch or two.
Werner looked into Thurkettle's cold eyes trying to decide whether it was a joke but, unable to tell, he looked down into the box. 'Gott im Himmel!' said Werner as he caught sight of the contents. It was a human skull.
'So don't baby me,' said Thurkettle, closing the box and putting it beside him on the chair. 'Just have the dough ready.'
'I will have the money ready.'
'If you want to call it off, this is your final chance,' said Thurkettle. 'But once the job is done I'm like the Pied Piper of Hamelin; if I don't get paid I come back and do the job all over again. Get me?'
'I get you.'
'Used fifty-dollar bills,' said Thurkettle grimly.
Werner sighed and printed circles upon the table with his wet beer-glass. 'I told you: I will have it ready, exactly as I said.'
'You do your thing the way you were told: I do my thing the way I was told: we get along just fine. But if you foul up, old buddy…'He left the rest of it unsaid. He'd not yet encountered anyone so dumb as to default in payment to a hired killer. 'Just one more time: I meet you on the Autobahn, direction west. I take the exit marked Ziesar and Görzke. You'll be waiting on the exit ramp. Going off the Autobahn is illegal for Westerners, just wait at the bottom of the ramp.'
They'd been all through it before. 'I'll be there,' said Werner. He wondered if the skull was real or one of those plastic ones they make for medical students. It certainly looked reaclass="underline" very real. He was still wondering about that when the steaks arrived. They were big entrecotes, seared and perfect, cooked and delivered to the table by Willi Leuschner himself. He put down a big pot of home-made horseradish sauce, knowing that Werner liked it. Willi had been at school with Werner and the two men spent a moment exchanging the usual sort of pleasant remarks. The Leuschners were both coming to Werner's fancy-dress party that night. It seemed as if half of Berlin were planning to be there.
'More beer?' asked Willi finally.
'No,' said Werner, 'we both have to keep clear heads.' Willi scribbled the account on a beer-mat and dropped it back on the table.
Deuce Thurkettle left Werner to pay the bill. His BMW bike was outside. It was a big machine with two panniers in which he stowed all his gear. The engine roared and he gave a flip to the accelerator before settling into the saddle. With a quick wave of the hand as he passed the restaurant window he sped away.
He had a lot to do before getting to the rendezvous on the Autobahn, but seeing Werner was necessary. Thurkettle made a point of threatening his clients in that way. It was a part of the fastidious attention to detail that made him so effective.
Another reason for his success was knowing when to keep his mouth shut. Whoever had briefed Werner Volkmann had obviously told him some fairy story. The briefing that Thurkettle had been given by Prettyman in a fancy suite in the London Hilton had been rather more complete and certainly more specific. Prettyman had told him that under no circumstance must anyone be left alive except Bernard and Fiona Samson. No one left alive. Prettyman had been very insistent upon that.
The Brandenburg exit – the place arranged for Fiona Samson to change from one car to the other – was on East Germany's section of Hitler's Autobahn, built to connect Berlin to Holland and all points westwards. As well as being a major East German highway, this was one of the authorized routes along which Westerners were permitted to drive to West Berlin.
On this flat region immediately to the west of Berlin the rivers have spread to become lakes. It is a region of farmland and forest, and once outside the towns the traveller finds little cobble-streeted villages where little has changed since the Kaiser's photo hung in the schoolrooms.
Even one of East Germany's two-stroke motor cars can get there from Berlin in well under an hour; for Thurkettle's powerful motor cycle it was nothing. He arrived before dark. The workers from the construction site had gone: their earth-moving machines were neatly lined up, like tanks for an inspecting general.
Thurkettle broke the lock off the door of the portable hut used by the construction gangs. He used a flashlight to check his guns and ammunition and the stainless steel butcher's hacksaw he'd brought with him. Then he put on his coveralls and plastic medical gloves and looked at the skull and its neat dentistry. That done, he sat down, watched the pouring rain and waited patiently for it to get dark.
These things never go exactly according to plan. That was the most important of the lessons he'd learned over the years. Prettyman had told him that Erich Stinnes would be collecting Fiona Samson and bringing her to the rendezvous. Someone like her would remain there.
Thurkettle had been told that someone of exactly the same build as Fiona Samson must be killed and left at the rendezvous. It was Thurkettle who thought of the idea of using Fiona Samson's sister, and he was pleased with that. She was a drug addict, and such people were easy to control. His task was to put Fiona Samson into the car with her husband and let them depart alive. He then had to kill Stinnes and the sister, bury Stinnes in the excavated ditch the roadworkers had so conveniently provided close by, and burn the car with the sister's body inside it.