They got out of the cab at the Reichstag and walked the three blocks to Harry’s apartment by a convoluted route. Bergmann had been highly agitated, almost frantic when they first set off, and Harry had slapped him down immediately. The back of a taxi was no place to discuss defections, security services or assassins. Bergmann had spent the rest of the journey looking mournfully out of the window, ducking his head whenever another vehicle came alongside, while Harry’s attention had been given over to the rear window, turning his head every few seconds to check if they were being followed.
His mind was buzzing, trying to work out what to do next. He’d never been in this situation before – I’m just a bloody analyst – and struggled to recall standard procedure in such an event. He couldn’t go to his office. The department already operated undercover so regardless of the circumstances, he couldn’t just stroll in with a defector, especially one whose security clearance had not yet and might never be issued. It could compromise the entire operation and put other people’s lives at risk. He’d be court-martialled and rightly so.
He knew there were other safe houses but not their current status and there was no way he could find out without going through Control, and that meant going through the department. He’d also come to the grim but obvious conclusion they had someone on the inside. There was no way Bergmann could have been targeted so soon or so accurately without inside knowledge. There was nothing more corrosive or destabilising than a breach of security that placed everyone and everything under suspicion and cast a dark shadow over the entire operation. On a practical level, and until it was resolved, no one could be trusted, rendering it virtually impotent.
There was one obvious solution and he tried to resist it, but he couldn’t think of an alternative. He had a secure phone in his apartment – a hot line to Control, standard issue in government buildings occupied by security personnel. To be used only in an emergency. Well, if this wasn’t an emergency, he couldn’t think of one even though harbouring a communist defector in a government-owned residential apartment would never have been sanctioned. He’d make the call and, provided he issued the correct codes, the boys in suits would be round within the hour.
But first he had to be sure they weren’t being followed. He’d fought off a creeping paranoia that made the cab driver, every man in the street, even Bergmann himself, the enemy. He dismissed the latter. The guy was unarmed, under-dressed, debilitated by a broken arm and, until the moment the assassin had struck, merely a victim of his own misfortune.
He’d had to consider Petra too. She couldn’t be exposed to this madness, but when he’d told her he was working that day she’d decided to jump on a train to Hanover to see her mother. By the time she got back, Bergmann would be long gone and she’d never know.
When they’d reached the Tiergarten he’d abandoned the cab and they’d walked across the park to the Hofjägerallee. It was open space and they’d be easy to spot by anyone who knew what they were looking for but then the same applied to any pursuer and he’d decided it was worth the risk. They’d picked up another cab on Tiergartenstraße that took them to the Reichstag. It was one forty-five when they arrived outside Harry’s apartment door.
He was acutely aware he was unarmed and however unlikely he thought anyone might be waiting inside, he couldn’t be certain. If they had inside knowledge of the safe house, they would probably know who’d been sent to interrogate him and by extension where he lived. Whoever was coordinating the attack could not yet know their operation had failed so it would take time for them to formulate a new plan. He had an old Enfield service revolver hidden in the back of a cupboard in the study but he hadn’t fired it in over ten years so it offered little more than a confidence boost, and not even that if he didn’t get to it first.
He examined the door and saw no evidence of tampering but that did nothing to reduce his anxiety. He’d said little to Bergmann in the last hour other than to issue curt instructions and Bergmann had followed him dutifully in silence.
“Wait here,” he whispered as he turned the key gently in the lock and pushed the door open. In an instant he was back in the farmhouse, stepping again into the unknown, but back then he’d been battle hardened, young and armed with a machine gun. He felt his heart beat in his chest and strained his ears to detect any unnatural sound, but the apartment was silent and gloomy, the window blinds still in place just as he’d left them. He ventured slowly down the short hall and into the sitting room then checked each room and, as he did, his confidence grew. He retrieved the Enfield, loaded the cylinder with six rounds from a battered box of nine and returned to the sitting room.
“Bergmann?” he called and the German appeared in the hall, looking worried and helpless. “Shut the door.”
“What are we going to do? I thought you people would protect me and instead you’re going to get me killed.”
“Stay calm, Klaus.” It was the first time he’d used Bergmann’s first name. “Help will be here soon.” Harry brushed past him and locked and bolted the front door.
“What help? If the Stasi can find me that easily what chance do we have?” Bergmann appeared panicky again but Harry had no time for histrionics.
“Shut up and sit down. I need to make a call.”
Bergmann sat nervously on the end of the sofa, hands between his legs, rocking gently back and forth. Harry went back into his study and laid the Enfield on his desk next to two telephone handsets: one black, one white. He dropped to his knees in front of a small safe and twirled the dial back and forth until he heard a click, gripped the handle and twisted it to the right. The door emitted a satisfying clunk and swung open. The safe contained cash in various currencies, three passports, a photograph of him with his platoon in Sicily in ’43, a number of maps of Berlin in different scales and a small ring-bound notebook secured by a rubber band.
Harry flicked through the notebook until he found the page he wanted and picked up the black phone. He dialled a four-digit number and waited. It was answered after three rings. He listened for a moment then spoke, reading from the codebook the responses to each question.
“Capricorn, Milkmaid, Albert, Concubine. Zero two four zero… Code ten… Safe house zero five. Two down… Terminal… Five zero nine seven… Immediate… Two chickens, one fox… Imminent… Roger, out.”
He replaced the receiver and put the notebook back in the safe, then returned to the sitting room.
“Let’s have some coffee.”
“Have you nothing stronger?”
Harry had a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the kitchen and he was tempted but dismissed the idea. He had to stay alert and didn’t feel inclined to mollycoddle Bergmann, who, after all, had got them into this mess in the first place. “’Fraid not.”
“You don’t smoke and you don’t drink? Admirable.”
Harry ignored the sarcasm and went over to the shutters but then thought twice about opening them. Better they stay in the gloom for the short time it would take for the experts to arrive. “I think you may have a security breach.” Harry ignored the taunt as he walked over to the stove and filled the coffee pot. “What makes you think this house is any safer than the last? Or the next?”
“Black?”
“White.”
“There are no guarantees, Klaus. You should know that. And there’s no going back. You made your bed and you have to lie in it.”
“You’re calling me a fool?”
“No. Just trying to manage your expectations.”
“I have no expectations. Not any more.”
“Good.” Harry leaned on the kitchen counter, waiting for the pot to boil. He craved nicotine, but it would reveal to both of them how weak he really was. He desperately tried to remain focused on the present, the task at hand, but the past was ever present. Bergmann no doubt wished he’d kept his mouth shut, abandoned his naïve notions of freedom, his quest to right the wrongs of others and just made the best of what he had. If he and his family got out of this alive, it wouldn’t be much of a life. He probably wished he could turn back the clock and have another go. Harry knew only too well what that felt like. What would have happened if he had made different decisions?
But there had been no other possible decisions. No other outcomes. He’d been through it time and time again. There was nothing he could have done, but it made no difference to the crushing weight of guilt that ate away at his soul, dragging him down little by little, day by day. When will it end? It’ll end when you’re dead. But then he was already dead. Dead a hundred or a thousand times. Dead every night and finally, mercifully at peace until he woke up and then he had to live through the nightmare all over again.
The coffee pot gurgled just as he heard the key in the lock and he snapped his head towards the sound. Bergmann got to his feet.
“Stay there,” hissed Harry moving swiftly towards the hall, Enfield in hand. Petra? No, too soon. Experts? No, they don’t have keys, or do they? Even if they do they’d either knock first or else break the door down, not casually let themselves in. The door shook, held by the bolts, and the lock rattled as whoever it was on the other side persisted with the key. Harry tiptoed silently up to the door, staying low, listening for any sound that might identify the caller. The noise stopped. He raised his body slowly upwards until his head was level with the peephole, feeling an ache in his chest from holding his breath. He stole a quick glance through the lens and pulled his head back sharply. He frowned in confusion. He took another look and breathed out. Frau Leitner.
She looked puzzled, examining the key in her hand. Harry relaxed and unbolted the door. Saturday wasn’t her normal day and he didn’t know why she was here but he didn’t care. He was just relieved it was nothing sinister. He opened the door and she looked up, equally surprised to see him, then, as if suddenly distracted by something, turned to her right.
Her head exploded, brains, teeth, hair and blood expanding in all directions, colliding with his face as if someone had thrown at him a bucket of hot steaming offal: warm, wet, slimy and repugnant. Frau Leitner’s body crumpled to the floor and Harry bent double, blinded, coughing and retching while instinctively reaching out to slam the door shut.
***
Schneider leapt over the old hag and burst through the closing door, crashing into the blood-soaked body of the man inside, catapulting it down the hall. The body twisted and writhed on the slippery wooden floor in a desperate attempt to recover and got to its knees only to meet the swing of a right leg, the boot landing a vicious kick to the head without having to break step. The man flew backwards and landed heavily, his head striking the floor with a satisfying thud and forcing him to release the antique revolver that clattered down the hall.
Schneider walked briskly into the sitting room and stopped in front of a paralysed Bergmann, who was still glued to the sofa. Schneider’s head twisted left then right, quickly taking in his surroundings, eyes checking for danger. There was none.
“Klaus Bergmann?”
Bergmann gave an imperceptible nod. Schneider raised the silenced Makarov and shot him in the chest. The impact of the soft-nosed bullet threw Bergmann backwards against the arm of the sofa, exiting his back, ripping foam and feathers from the sofa’s insides and spreading blood, muscle and fabric in a wide arc onto the wall. Bergmann looked down at his own chest, bemused by the rapidly expanding, saucer-shaped patch of red and coughed blood as it filled his lungs. He was as good as dead, but Schneider stepped forward to within thirty centimetres and shot him again between the eyes.
Noise on the stairwell: multiple boots on stone steps. They were coming. He glanced around the apartment. There was nowhere to go – three floors up, one way in and one way out. He’d have to fight. He expelled the clip from the Makarov and loaded a full one from his pocket. Eight rounds. One for the guy on the floor plus seven Polizei. Or one for himself. He strode over to the moaning, twitching figure lying flat on its back, face and chest caked in blood and gore, eyes closed. He raised his arm and pointed the weapon at the head, finger tight on the trigger.
But his brain had stalled, refusing to issue the instruction to pull. A tornado-like rush of air followed by the distant rumble of thunder filled his head and his gun hand began to shake uncontrollably. He stopped breathing and his vision blurred. He felt detached from the scene, a third-party observer of a hideous show, an audience of one at a gruesome play. He had lost himself in the moment and it was too late.
“Halt!”
He stood, rooted to the spot, incapable of voluntary movement. The Makarov wobbled in his grip as his arm lowered itself to his side and his head turned robotically to the door. Two uniformed Polizei crouched in the open doorway in front of two men in suits and fedoras who stood behind, all four of them with pistols pointed at him.
“Waffe weg!” He heard the shouted command telling him to drop the weapon echoing through the roar in his ears. Schneider/Radler – their lives were over. They were no more. He breathed in the scent of life reborn.