Frederick Forsyth - The Deceiver

“Dissociated from what?” asked McCready.

“From reality, of course,” said Dr. Carr. “It is one of the classic symptoms of this kind of syndrome. He may already have been showing signs of self-deception before the final crackup.”

And how, thought McCready, Morenz had been kidding himself that a stunning hooker had really fallen for him, that he could get away with a double murder.

“Fugue,” Dr. Carr pursued as he speared a forkful of tender sole meunière, “means flight. Flight from reality, especially harsh, unpleasant reality. I think your man will by now be in a really bad way.”

“What will he actually do?” asked McCready. “Where will he go?”

“He will go to a sanctuary, somewhere he feels safe, somewhere he can hide, where all the problems will go away and people will leave him alone. He may even return to a childlike state. I had a patient once who, overcome by prob­lems, retired to his bed, curled into the fetal position, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and stayed there. Wouldn’t come out. Childhood, you see. Safety, security. No problems. Excellent sole, by the way. Yes, a little more Meursault. ... Thank you.”

Which is all very fine, thought McCready, but Bruno Morenz has no sanctuaries to run to. Born and raised in Hamburg, stationed in Berlin, Munich, and Cologne, he could have no place to hide near Jena or Weimar. He poured more wine and asked, “Supposing he has no sanctuary to head for?”

“Then I’m afraid he will just wander about in a confused state, unable to help himself. In my experience, if he had a destination he could act logically to get there. Without one”— the doctor shrugged—“they will get him. Probably got him by now. At latest by nightfall.”

But they didn’t. Through the afternoon Colonel Voss’s rage and frustration rose. It had been over twenty-four hours, coming up on thirty hours; police and secret police were at every street corner and roadblock in the region of Apolda-Jena-Weimar; and the big, shambling, ill, confused, disori­ented West German had simply vaporized.

Voss paced his office at Normannenstrasse through the night; Vanavskaya sat on the edge of her cot in the female bachelors’ quarters of the KGB barracks; men sat hunched over radio sets at Schloss Löwenstein and Cheltenham; vehi­cles were waved to a halt by torchlight on every road and lane in southern Thuringia; McCready drank a steady stream of black coffees in his office at Century House. And ... nothing. Bruno Morenz had disappeared.

Major Vanavskaya could not sleep. She tried, but she just lay awake in the darkness wondering how on earth the East Germans, reputedly so efficient in their control of their own population,, could lose a man like Morenz within an area twenty miles by twenty miles. Had he hitched a lift? Stolen a bicycle? Was he still crouched in a ditch? What on earth were the VOPOs doing down there?

By three in the morning, she had convinced herself there was something missing, some little part of the puzzle of how a half-crazed man on the run in a small area teeming with People’s Police could escape detection.

At four, she rose and returned to the KGB offices, per­turbing the night staff with her demand for a secure line to SSD headquarters. When she had it, she spoke to Colonel Voss. He had not left his office at all.

“That picture of Morenz,” she said. “Was it recent?”

“About a year ago,” said Voss, puzzled.

“Where did you get it?”

“The HVA,” said Voss. Vanavskaya thanked him and put down the phone.

Of course, the HVA, the Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung, East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, which for obvious linguistic reasons, specialized in running networks inside West Germany. Its Head was the legendary Colonel-General Marcus Wolf. Even the KGB, notoriously contemptuous of satellite intelligence services, held him in considerable re­spect. Marcus “Mischa” Wolf had perpetrated some brilliant coups against the West Germans, notably the “running” of Chancellor Brandt’s private secretary.

Vanavskaya called and awoke the local head of the Third Directorate and made her request, citing General Shaliapin’s name. That did the trick. The Colonel said he would see what he could do. He called back in half an hour. It seemed that General Wolf was an early bird, he said; she would have a meeting with him in his office at six.

At five that morning the cryptography department at GCHQ Cheltenham finished decoding the last of the mass of low-level paperwork that had built up in the previous twenty-four hours. In its in-clear form it would be transmitted down a series of very secure land lines to a variety of recipients—some for the SIS at Century House, some for MI-5 at Curzon Street, some for the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. Much would be “copied” as of possible interest to two or even all three. Urgent intelligence was handled much more quickly, but the small hours of the morning was a good time to send the low-level stuff to London; the lines were not so busy.

Among the material was a signal on Wednesday evening from Pullach to the BND staffer at the West German Embassy in London. Germany, of course, was and remains a valued and respected ally of Britain. There was nothing personal in Cheltenham intercepting and decoding a confidential message from an ally to its own embassy. The code had been quietly broken sometime before. Nothing offensive, just routine. This particular message went to MI-5 and to the NATO desk in Century House, which handled all intelligence liaison with Britain’s allies except the CIA, which had its own designated liaison desk.

It was the head of the NATO desk who had first drawn Edwards’s attention to the embarrassment of McCready run­ning an officer of the allied BND as his personal agent. Still, the NATO desk chief remained a friend of McCready’s. When he saw the German cable at ten that morning, he resolved to bring it to his friend Sam’s attention. Just in case. ... But he did not have time until midday.

At six, Major Vanavskaya was shown into Marcus Wolf’s office, two floors above that of Colonel Voss. The East Ger­man spymaster disliked uniforms and was in a well-cut dark suit. He also preferred tea to coffee and had a particularly fine blend sent to him from Fortnum and Mason in London. He offered the Soviet major a cup.

“Comrade General, that recent picture of Bruno Morenz. It came from you.”

Mischa Wolf regarded her steadily over the rim of his cup. If he had sources, assets, inside the West German establish­ment, which he did, he was not going to confirm it to this stranger.

“Could you possibly get hold of a copy of Morenz’s curric­ulum vitae?” she asked.

Marcus Wolf considered the request. “Why would you want it?” he asked softly.

She explained. In detail. Breaking a few rules.

“I know it’s only a suspicion,” she said. “Nothing con­crete. A feeling there is a piece missing. Maybe something in his past.”

Wolf approved. He liked lateral thinking. Some of his best successes had stemmed from a gut feeling, a suspicion that the enemy had an Achilles’ heel somewhere, if only he could find it. He rose, went to a filing cabinet, and withdrew a sheaf of eight sheets without saying a word. It was Bruno Morenz’s life story. From Pullach, the same one Lothar Herrmann had studied on Wednesday afternoon. Vanavskaya exhaled in ad­miration. Wolf smiled.

If Marcus Wolf had a specialty in the espionage world, it was not so much in suborning and traducing high-ranking West Germans, though that could sometimes be done, as in placing prim spinster secretaries of impeccable life-style and security clearance at the elbows of such bigwigs. He knew that a confidential secretary saw everything her master saw and sometimes more.