He walked towards the car and opened the back door, reached inside for his briefcase. They saw the blood on his knuckles.
Raub blurted, ‘You have not committed, Doktor Krause, an illegal act?’
Goldstein whispered, hoarse, ‘Did you not find her, Doktor Krause, or have you missed her?’
‘An illegal act, in our company, is quite forbidden.’
‘Is she running ahead of you, to Rostock?’
The face was set, savage. He took the briefcase, slammed the door behind him. He walked away. They watched in the mirror. He was walking towards the junction of Saarbrucker Strasse and Prenzlauer and he had the mobile phone at his ear.
They ran from the car and up the three flights of stairs. The door was open, angled because one hinge was broken free, and there was a smashed chair on the floor, as if it had been used to barricade the door. The food on the table was scattered. There were two coats thrown down on the rug in the centre of the room, a man’s and a woman’s, and all the pockets of each of the coats were pulled out. There was a photograph on the floor and the wreckage of a frame. The photograph had been torn to many pieces. They stood, rock still, in the centre of the room. The quiet as around them. The far door was open. In the kitchen, the window was open. Goldstein understood and leaned out. He was high above a concrete yard, above the washing lines, and he saw a smashed stone. He looked along the narrow platform below the window and saw the void from which the stone had fallen. He would not have done it, could not have gone along the stone platform. He stared down. His body shook with trembling. There was a man’s coat, she was not alone. If she had gone along that stone platform then she must have had the smell in her nose of evidence.
‘Get to the car. Telephone for the ambulance.’
They were behind the door. Their last refuge had been the space between the door and the refrigerator. Raub was bent over them. They held each other, their hands were together. Blood trickled down their faces.
Goldstein ran for the stairs and the telephone. Raub was close behind him with the two coats that had been on the rug. He did not give his name to the ambulance Kontrol.
They drove away.
Goldstein understood that they should be gone before the ambulance came, that they should not be involved in illegality.
Albert Perkins came off the telephone, the secure line, to London. He sat at the desk of the station head, used the man’s chair. He could be a pig when he wanted to. What the station heads posted abroad all detested was to have a man in from Vauxhall Bridge Cross who camped in their space, used it as if it were his own. At the station head’s desk, Albert Perkins riffled in the drawer and found the Sellotape roll. He sealed the two envelopes, the one containing the Iranian material, the other holding his report on progress concerning the matter of Tracy Barnes/Joshua F. Mantle. The station heads, in Albert Perkins’s experience, were from independent schools and good colleges at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They had come along well-oiled tracks, of connection and recommendation, to employment with the Secret Intelligence Service. They would detest him as a vulgar little man, a former tea-boy and one-time Library clerk, nightschool educated, without pedigree… but the vulgar little man had scrambled his unlikely way up the promotion ladder and was now a London deputy desk head and, with tolerable satisfaction, had the rank on overseas staffers, and they’d not be permitted, ever, to forget it.
He smiled his superiority. ‘Just get them off to London, please, first courier you’ve got travelling over. That young fellow, the one straight out of kindergarten, I’ll need him up in Berlin. May have to sit on his hands for a few days, but I’ll have him there. Oh, yes, and I’ll need a Berlin flight soonest, hire car as well at the other end. You won’t forget those chocolates I mentioned, not too expensive. By the by, don’t go worrying about your Iran file, topping it up, it’s all in here. There’s a good chap.’
They were in the soundproofed bunker on the second floor of the embassy in Bonn. It was assumed that the steel-lined walls of the room would deflect the listening equipment that was presumably used by the BfV. It was always right to assume that respected allies employed their state-of-the-art electronics to eavesdrop on valued friends. Old Trotsky had known the truth of it, had said an ally had to be watched like an enemy. The station head, flushed, did the bidding, went to the outer office to instruct the station manager to arrange the courier, confirm a flight and a hire car, and to tell young Rogers, who was ‘straight from kindergarten’ with a first-class honours in ancient history and who was the second son of a brigadier general, that he was off to Berlin, open-ended. Albert Perkins finished the coffee that had been brought to him. He walked at a leisured pace to the door.
‘What you’re going to do – I’ve worked very hard for good contact relations here, are you going to wreck them?’
He smiled at the station head. ‘By the time I’ve finished here, your German friends, my German allies, will spit on the ground I’ve walked on.’
Asked with steeled dislike, ‘Am I privy – am I allowed to be told how long you’re in Berlin?’
‘Berlin is just transit. It’s Rostock where it’s at. I’ll be there.’
Dieter Krause drove fast. He had taken the autobahn 55.
He drove his own car, the BMW 7 series, that they had given him. It was six days since he had flown out from Tempelhof to London and in seven days he was booked on the flight to Washington. There was no speed restriction on the autobahn and he drove faster than 160 kilometres per hour, hammering in the outside lane. In those six days his world had fractured; within the next seven the fracture could be stressed to collapse point.
He went north. The autobahn would take him around the towns of Oranienburg and Neuruppin, it would skirt Wittstock, go past the Plauer See and the Insel See, where he had fished with Pyotr Rykov. It would bypass Gustrow where their families had camped at weekends, and Laage. He was going home, going to face the crisis in his world, going back to Rostock.
They called him as he drove, telephoned his mobile, as he had said they should.
He had the small scrap of notepaper on the seat beside him, with the names.
North of Neuruppin, the mobile rang – Klaus Hoffmann, aged thirty-six, formerly a Leutnant.
Klaus Hoffmann did not complain of ‘reassociation’. The merging of the two Germanys had been kind to him. He had served twelve years in the MfS, was fluent in Russian, English and Czech. He would have described himself as a pragmatist. The old life had offered opportunities, the new life offered further opportunities. He sold property, acting as a broker for Western companies and international corporations that looked to locate in the East. He had understood the old system and exploited it, he had mastered the new system and made it work for him. He was flaxen-haired, athletic, and tanned from his most recent visit to the Tunisian resorts. He could offer the companies and corporations a detailed knowledge of the necessary procedures to slice through bureaucracy in the matter of planning applications and in the business of gaining federal government grant-aid. He wavered in his business close to the line drawn by the law, crossed it, recrossed and crossed it again. He had knowledge of so many officials: he could provide introductions to those who might be slipped a small brown envelope and he could threaten those who would crumble at the prospect of the unveiling of dirt. Through bribery, through blackmail, he won access to those whose signatures were needed to approve planning permission and to grant funds. He had been taught well in the MfS. He had a fine house in the Wandlitz area of Berlin, once occupied by a senior economic planner. The old wife had gone, a believer in the regime that was washed out, a new wife had been acquired. He had the Mercedes, and investments in the overseas markets and in the safer German companies… What he had built was at risk. On the night of 21 February 1988, on attachment from Magdeburg to Rostock, working late, he had been called out by Hauptman Dieter Krause to a shit place on the coast. The kid, the spy, had been on the ground: he had kicked the head of the kid, the spy, he had helped to drag the body back to the trawler and he had helped to weight it. He stood to lose the good life. He confirmed by his car phone that he was coming to Rostock.