Frederick Forsyth - The Deceiver

“That’s the problem. I think he has crossed the border. Gone into East Germany. Somewhere in the Weimar area. Perhaps to stay with friends. But so far as I know, he’s never been near Weimar in his life.”

She looked puzzled. “What do you mean? He lived there for two years.”

McCready kept a straight face, but he was stunned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. He never told me.”

“No, he wouldn’t. He hated it there. They were the unhappiest two years of his life. He never talked about it.”

“I thought your family was Hamburg, born and raised.”

“We were, until 1943. That was when Hamburg was de­stroyed by the RAF. The great Fire Storm bombing. You have heard of it?”

McCready nodded. The Royal Air Force had bombed the center of Hamburg with such intensity that raging fires started. The fires had sucked oxygen in from the outer sub­urbs until a raging inferno was created in which temperatures rose so high that steel ran like water and concrete exploded like bombs. The inferno had swept through the city, vaporiz­ing everything in its path.

“Bruno and I were orphaned that night.” She paused and stared, not at McCready but past him, seeing again the flames raging through the city where she had been born, consuming to cinders her parents, her friends, her schoolmates, the landmarks of her life. After several seconds she snapped out of her reverie and resumed talking in that quiet voice with the remaining hint of an original German accent.

“When it was over, the authorities took charge of us and we were evacuated. I was fifteen, Bruno was ten. We were split up. I was billeted with a family outside Göttingen. Bruno was sent to stay with a farmer near Weimar. After the war, I searched for him, and the Red Cross helped to reunite us. We returned to Hamburg. I looked after him. But he hardly ever talked about Weimar. I began to work in the British NAAFI canteen, to keep Bruno. Times were very hard, you know.”

McCready nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was the war. Anyway, in 1947 I met a British sergeant. Robert Farquarson. We married and came to live here. He died eight years ago. When Robert and I left Hamburg in 1948, Bruno secured a residential apprenticeship with a firm of optical lens makers. I have only seen him three or four times since then, and not in the past ten years.”

“You told that to the man from the embassy?”

“Herr Fietzau? No, he did not ask about Bruno’s child­hood. But I told the lady.”

“The lady?”

“She left only an hour ago. The one from the Pensions Department.”

“Pensions?”

“Yes. She said Bruno still worked in optical glassware, for a firm called BKI in Würzburg. But it seems BKI is owned by Pilkington Glass of Britain, and with Bruno’s retirement ap­proaching, she needed details of his life to assess his full entitlement. She was not from Bruno’s employers?”

“I doubt it. Probably West German police. I’m afraid they are looking for Bruno, too, but not to help him.”

“I’m sorry. I seem to have been very foolish.”

“You weren’t to know, Mrs. Farquarson. She spoke good English?”

“Yes, perfect. Slight accent—Polish, perhaps.”

McCready had little doubt where the lady had come from. There were other hunters out for Bruno Morenz, many of them, but only McCready and one other group knew about BKI of Würzburg. He rose.

“Try hard to think what little he said in those years after the war. Is there anyone, anyone at all, to whom he might go in his hour of need for sanctuary?”

She thought long and hard.

“There was one name he mentioned, someone who had been nice to him. His primary-school teacher. Fräulein ... dammit ... Fräulein Neuberg. No, I remember now, Fräulein Neumann. That was it. Neumann. Of course, she’s probably dead by now. It was forty years ago.”

“One last thing, Mrs. Farquarson. Did you tell this to the lady from the glass company?”

“No, I’ve only just remembered it. I just told her Bruno had once spent two years as an evacuee on a farm not ten miles from Weimar.”

Back at Century House, McCready borrowed a Weimar tele­phone directory from the East German desk. There were several Neumanns listed, but just one with Frl , short for Fräulein , in front of it. A spinster. A teenager would not have her own apartment and phone, not in East Germany. A mature spinster, a professional woman, might. It was a long shot, very long. He could have one of the East German desk’s agents-in-place across the Wall place a call. But the Stasi were everywhere, bugging everything. The mere question— “Were you once the schoolteacher of a small boy called Morenz and has he showed up?”—that could blow it all away.

His next visit was to the section inside Century House whose specialty is the preparation of very untrue identity cards.

He rang British Airways, who were unable to help. But Lufthansa was. They had a flight at five-fifteen to Hanover. He asked Denis Gaunt to drive him to Heathrow again.

The best-laid plans of mice and men, as the Scottish poet might have said, sometimes end up looking like a dog’s breakfast. The Polish Airlines flight from London back to Warsaw via East Berlin was due for takeoff at three-thirty. But when the pilot switched on his flight systems, a red warning light glowed. It turned out to be just a faulty solenoid, but it delayed the takeoff until six. In the departures lounge, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya glanced at the televised departure information, noted the delay “for operational reasons,” cursed silently, and returned to her book.

McCready was leaving the office when the phone rang. He debated whether to answer it and decided he ought to. It could be important. It was Edwards.

“Sam, someone in Funny Paper has been on to me. Now look, Sam, you are not—as in absolutely not—getting my permission to go into East Germany. Is that clear?”

“Absolutely, Timothy. Couldn’t be clearer.”

“Good,” said the Assistant Chief, and put the phone down.

Gaunt had heard the voice at the other end of the phone and what it had said. McCready was beginning to like Gaunt. He had joined the desk only six months earlier, but he was showing he was bright, trustworthy, and could keep his mouth shut.

As he negotiated Hogarth Roundabout, cutting a lot of corners in the dense Friday-afternoon commuter traffic on the Heathrow road, Gaunt chose to open it.

“Sam, I know you’ve been in more tight places than a shepherd’s right arm, but you’ve been black-flagged in East Germany and the boss has forbidden you to go back.”

“Forbidding is one thing,” said McCready. “Preventing is another.”

As he strode through the departure lounge of Terminal Two to catch the Lufthansa flight to Hanover, he cast not a glance at the trim young woman with the shiny blond hair and piercing blue eyes who sat reading two yards from him. And she did not look up at the medium-built, rather rumpled man with thinning brown hair in a gray raincoat as he walked past.

McCready’s flight took off on time, and he landed at Hano­ver at eight, local time. Major Vanavskaya got away at six and landed at Berlin-Schönefeld at nine. McCready rented a car and drove past Hildesheim and Salzgitter to his destination in the forests outside Goslar. Vanavskaya was met by a KGB car and driven to Normannenstrasse 22. She had to wait an hour to see Colonel Otto Voss, who was closeted with State Security Minister Erich Mielke.

McCready had telephoned his host from London; he was expected. The man met him at the front door of his substantial home, a beautifully converted hunting lodge set on a sweep of hillside with a view, in daylight, far across a long valley clothed in conifers. Only five miles away, the lights of Goslar twinkled in the gloom. Had the day not already faded, Mc­Cready might have seen, far to the east on a distant peak of the Harz, the roof of a high tower. One might have mistaken it for a hunting tower, but it wasn’t. Its purpose was the hunting not of wild boar but of men and women. The man McCready had come to visit had chosen to spend his comfort­able retirement within sight of the very border that had once made his fortune.