‘You fool, Philip!’
‘Until I was with her. Then I realized you were right. She’s not twenty. And if she’s not twenty, she probably isn’t a student at the University of Bonn. And much as it pains me to admit it, she probably doesn’t fancy me. And when she quickly turned the conversation to where we were going today, I knew for sure why she was interested in me.’
‘You didn’t tell her?’
‘I did tell her.’
‘Phil!’
‘I told her Lothar was on a Greek island. Skiathos. It was the destination we planned to head for when we were hitching across Europe. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is very complimentary about it.’
Emma grinned. ‘Did she believe you?’
‘I think so.’
‘Maybe you’re not such a fool after all.’
Phil smiled. ‘Maybe I’m not.’
Emma touched his arm. ‘I’m sorry. I know you liked her. It must be awful to know you were being deceived all along.’
There was something in her touch, in the tone of her voice, that made Phil realize this sixty-four-year-old woman did understand. And then he realized that at about his age she too had slept with someone who was deceiving her.
‘All right,’ said Emma. ‘We need a plan.’
‘Don’t we have a plan? We’re driving to Spain.’
‘The KGB will be watching us. Following us. They will be expecting us to head towards Greece. Which we will do. Until we lose them.’
‘How are we going to do that?’
‘I’ll think of something.’ Emma pulled out her road atlas and studied it closely.
They had no problem at the border and stopped for breakfast at a service station on the other side. They sped past Braunschweig, both of them ignoring the signs, and then turned south on an autobahn heading to Munich and Austria, and ultimately Yugoslavia and Greece.
Half an hour south of Nuremberg, in Bavaria, Emma announced it was time for lunch. They pulled off the autobahn and stopped at a garage with a little shop which sold sandwiches and local maps. They bought both.
Phil had been looking out for cars following him, but couldn’t spot any. More accurately, there were dozens of cars following them on the long journey, and there was no way of telling if any of them contained KGB agents.
Much easier on a straight stretch of country road. Which, by examining her newly purchased map closely, Emma found.
They pulled over on the verge of a straight on a back road a couple of kilometres west of the garage. A blue van, a silver Opel, and a green BMW with a single male driver passed them and disappeared around a corner a kilometre away. They munched their sandwiches, checking each passing vehicle carefully. On one side cows grazed a low hill; on the other, tidy Bavarian farmland stretched into the distance.
‘Ready?’ Emma asked, once they had finished their sandwiches.
‘Ready.’
‘Let’s go.’
Phil drove as fast as he could along the country roads, Emma giving him a bewildering series of directions. He called out the type and colour of any vehicle that appeared in his rear-view mirror; Emma suggested this as an aide to spot a particular car reappearing. None did. They spent a frustrating two minutes trapped behind a slow-moving tractor before Phil accelerated past it on a blind corner. In ten minutes they were back at the entrance to the autobahn, which headed south to Munich.
‘That way,’ said Emma, pointing to a sign.
North.
Fifty-Five
Heike and Rozhkov stood beside their BMW on the low hill overlooking the distinctive green British sports car, Rozhkov training his powerful binoculars down on them.
‘They know they’re being followed,’ he said in his Slavic-accented German.
‘They can’t have spotted us,’ said Heike.
Rozhkov had planted a radio tracker in the TR6 in the hotel’s garage, and Heike had followed Phil and his grandmother on a heavy portable display plugged into the BMW’s cigarette lighter. Rozhkov had kept at least a couple of kilometres behind the British sports car the whole way. The only time they had got close was when they had driven past the stationary TR6 on the lane down there, and Heike had slipped down low in the passenger seat out of sight.
‘It’s all very well stopping for a picnic somewhere,’ Rozhkov said. ‘But they have just pulled over on to a verge. It’s not a natural stopping place. They want to lose us.’
‘They are not doing a bad job of it,’ said Heike. ‘But they don’t know we know they are heading to Greece.’
‘Phil knows,’ Rozhkov said.
‘Phil knows I know,’ Heike said. ‘He doesn’t know you do. He doesn’t suspect me, I’m sure of it.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Rozhkov said. ‘In which case they will be on the autobahn heading south in half an hour or so.’
Rozhkov stiffened. ‘They’re off. And they’re not going back the way they came. That means they are trying to lose us.’
Rozhkov and Heike jumped in the car. Heike put the bulky display on her lap and tried to read it. The display showed bearing and approximate range, which was fine on a straight autobahn, but was very difficult on winding country roads, especially without a detailed map.
They spent a frustrating fifteen minutes doing their best to keep up, Rozhkov letting his impatience show. Heike had had no training on the system. She suggested that they switch and she drive, but Rozhkov wasn’t having any of that. He was the man, so he had to drive.
Turned out Rozhkov was just as much a jerk as the hapless Marko, just in his own special way.
It was with relief that they crested a low hill and saw both the autobahn, and a green sports car moving towards it.
‘That’s them!’ Heike said, and put the display to one side.
A ‘well done’ would have been appreciated.
Rozhkov drove steadily to the junction and joined the highway heading south.
‘OK. How far ahead of us are they? I want to get the separation right.’
This was easier. Heike checked the display. It didn’t make sense. The dot was at the bottom of the concentric circles.
‘Hold on. They’re behind us!’
‘They can’t be.’
‘Look.’
Rozhkov leaned over and looked.
‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘They’re heading north! We’ll have to double back at the next junction.’
He glared at Heike and muttered something in Russian.
Russian was compulsory in East German schools and Heike had been good at it.
He had just called her a stupid female dog.
At the next junction, they veered off the autobahn and rejoined it heading north. After a frantic twenty minutes of seriously fast driving, a blip appeared on Heike’s screen, this time where it should be. At the top. Ahead of them.
They followed it on what was to be a long journey north, and then west, and then south through France.
To Spain.
Part Five
Spain
Fifty-Six
July 1979, Jávea, Spain
Lothar’s house stood at the end of a road which wound up a hillside of rock and surprisingly green forest. The blue of the Mediterranean flashed between the trees as they drove.
Emma studied the local map they had bought in the old coastal town of Jávea, a few kilometres to the north. After their picnic manoeuvre in Bavaria, they had driven for the rest of the day and holed up in a hotel near Lyon in France. The following night, they had stayed in Valencia, so that they could meet Lothar at a reasonable hour in the morning.
They drove past the villa slowly. It was a single-storey building with a red-tiled roof behind a low white wall rimmed with purple flowers. There was indeed a stone lion grinning at them by the iron gate on the short driveway leading down to a garage.