Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“But they would never understand, never forgive me,” she said. There was a hint of tears in her dark eyes. “They will call me a traitor. I shall be an exile.”

“One day, perhaps, this madness will end. One day, per­haps, you can come back. Listen, my love, we cannot stay longer. It’s too risky. There is one last thing. I need your pri­vate phone number. No, I know we agreed that I would never ring. But I will not see you again until you are in the West in safety. If there should by any remote chance be a change of plan or date, I may have to contact you as a mat­ter of emergency. If I do, I will pretend to be a friend called Gregor, explaining that I cannot attend your dinner party. If that happens, leave at once and meet me in the park of the Mojarsky Hotel at the top of Kutuzovsky Prospekt.”

She nodded meekly and gave him her number. He kissed her on the cheek.

“I’ll see you in London, my darling,” he told her, and was gone through the trees. Privately he knew he would have to resign and take the icy anger of Sir Nigel Irvine when it be­came plain the Nightingale was not Anatoly Krivoi but a woman, and his wife-to-be. But by then it would be too late for even the service to do anything about it.

Ludwig Jahn stared at the two men who occupied the avail­able chairs of his tidy bachelor flat in Wedding, the working-class district of West Berlin, with growing fear. They bore the stamp of men he had seen once, long before, and whom he had hoped never to see again.

The one who was talking was undoubtedly German; Jahn had no doubt about that. What he did not know was that the man was Major Gerhard Schulz, of the East German secret police, the dreaded Staatssicherheitsdienst, known simply as the SSD. He would never know the name, but he could guess the occupation.

He could also guess that the SSD had copious files on ev­ery East German who had ever quit to come to the West, and that was his problem. Thirty years earlier, as an eighteen-year-old, Jahn had taken part in the building workers’ riots in East Berlin that had become the East German uprising. He had been lucky. Although he had been picked up in one of the sweeps by the Russian police and their East German Communist acolytes, he had not been held. But he recalled the smell of the detention cells, and the stamp of the men who ruled them. His visitors this March 22, three decades later, bore the same stamp.

He had kept his head low for eight years after the 1953 ri­ots; men in 1961, before the Wall was completed, he quietly walked into the West. For the past fifteen years he had had a good job with the West Berlin civil service, starting as a guard in the prison service and rising to Oberwachmeister, chief officer of Two Block, Tegel Jail.

The other man in his room that evening kept silent. Jahn would never know that he was a Soviet colonel named Kukushkin, present on behalf of the “Wet Affairs” depart­ment of the KGB.

Jahn stared in horror at the photographs the German eased from a large envelope and placed before him slowly, one by one. They showed his widowed mother in a cell, terrified, aged nearly eighty, staring at the camera obediently, hopeful of release. There were his two younger brothers, handcuffs on wrists, in different cells, the masonry of the walls showing up clearly in the high-definition prints.

“Then there are your sisters-in-law and your three delight­ful little nieces. Oh, yes, we know about the Christmas presents. What is it they call you? Uncle Ludo? How very charming. Tell me, have you ever seen places like these?”

There were more photographs—pictures that made the comfortably plump Jahn close his eyes for several seconds. Strange, zombielike figures, clad in rags, moved through the pictures, shaven, skull-like faces peering dully at the camera. They huddled; they shuffled; they wrapped their withered feet in rags to keep out the Arctic cold. They were stubbled, shriveled, subhuman. They were some of the inhabitants of the slave labor camps of the Kolyma complex, far away at the eastern end of Siberia, north of the Kamchatka Peninsula, where gold is mined deep in the Arctic Circle.

“Life sentences in these ... resorts ... are only for the worst enemies of the state, Herr Jahn. But my colleague here can ensure such life sentences for all your family—yes, even your dear old mother—with just one single telephone call. Now, tell me, do you want him to make that call?”

Jahn gazed across into the eyes of the man who had not spoken. The eyes were as bleak as the Kolyma camps.

“ Nein ,” he whispered. “No, please. What do you want?”

It was the German who answered.

“In Tegel Jail are two hijackers, Mishkin and Lazareff. Do you know them?”

Jahn nodded dumbly.

“Yes. They arrived four weeks ago. There was much pub­licity.”

“Where, exactly, are they?”

“Number Two Block. Top floor, east wing. Solitary con­finement, at their own request. They fear the other prisoners. Or so they say. There is no reason. For child rapists there is a reason, but not for these two. Yet they insist.”

“But you can visit them, Herr Jahn? You have access?”

Jahn remained silent. He began to fear what the visitors wanted with the hijackers. They came from the East; the hi­jackers had escaped from there. It could not be to bring them birthday gifts.

“Have another look at the pictures, Jahn. Have a good look before you think of obstructing us.”

“Yes, I can visit them. On my rounds. But only at night. During the day shift there are three guards in that corridor. One or two would always accompany me if I wished to visit them. But in the day shift there would be no reason for me to visit them. Only to check on them during the night shift.”

“Are you on the night shift at the moment?”

“No. Day shift.”

“What are the hours of the night shift?”

“Midnight to eight A.M. Lights are out at ten P.M. Shift changes at midnight. Relief is at eight A.M. During the night shift I would patrol the block three times, accompanied by the duty officer of each floor.”

The unnamed German thought for a while.

“My friend here wishes to visit them. When do you return to the night shift?”

“Monday, April fourth,” said Jahn.

“Very well,” said the East German. “This is what you will do.”

Jahn was instructed to acquire from the locker of a vaca­tioning colleague the necessary uniform and pass card. At two A.M. on the morning of Monday, April 4, he would descend to the ground floor and admit the Russian by the staff entrance from the street. He would accompany him to the top floor and hide him in the staff dayroom, to which he would acquire a duplicate key. He would cause the night duty officer on the top floor to absent himself on an errand, and take over the watch from him while he was away. Dur­ing the man’s absence he would allow the Russian into the solitary-confinement corridor, lending him his passkey to both cells. When the Russian had “visited” Mishkin and Lazareff, the process would be reversed. The Russian would hide again until the duty officer returned to his post. Then Jahn would escort the Russian back to the staff entrance and let him out.

“It won’t work,” whispered Jahn, well aware that it proba­bly would.

The Russian spoke at last, in German.

“It had better,” he said. “If it does not, I will personally ensure that your entire family begins a regime in Kolyma that will make the ‘extrastrict’ regime operating there seem like the honeymoon suite at the Kempinski Hotel.”

Jahn felt as if his bowels were being sprayed with liquid ice. None of the hard men in the “special wing” could com­pare with this man. He swallowed.

“I’ll do it,” he whispered.

“My friend will return here at six in the evening of Sun­day, April third,” said the East German. “No reception com­mittees from the police, if you please. It will do no good. We both have diplomatic passes in false names. We will deny ev­erything and walk away quite freely. Just have the uniform and pass card awaiting him.”