Len Deighton - Spy Sinker

'The last time I found myself without a gun was in Memphis, Tennessee. I strangled two guys with my bare hands.' He put a cardboard box on the table. 'Here's one of them,' he said, loosening the lid and holding it open an inch or two.

Werner looked into Thurkettle's cold eyes trying to decide whether it was a joke but, unable to tell, he looked down into the box. ' Gott im Himmel! ' said Werner as he caught sight of the contents. It was a human skull.

'So don't baby me,' said Thurkettle, closing the box and putting it beside him on the chair. 'Just have the dough ready.'

'I will have the money ready.'

'If you want to call it off, this is your final chance,' said Thurkettle. 'But once the job is done I'm like the Pied Piper of Hamelin; if I don't get paid I come back and do the job all over again. Get me?'

'I get you.'

'Used fifty-dollar bills,' said Thurkettle grimly.

Werner sighed and printed circles upon the table with his wet beer-glass. 'I told you: I will have it ready, exactly as I said.'

'You do your thing the way you were told: I do my thing the way I was told: we get along just fine. But if you foul up, old buddy…'He left the rest of it unsaid. He'd not yet encountered anyone so dumb as to default in payment to a hired killer. 'Just one more time: I meet you on the Autobahn, direction west. I take the exit marked Ziesar and Görzke. You'll be waiting on the exit ramp. Going off the Autobahn is illegal for Westerners, just wait at the bottom of the ramp.'

They'd been all through it before. 'I'll be there,' said Werner. He wondered if the skull was real or one of those plastic ones they make for medical students. It certainly looked real: very real. He was still wondering about that when the steaks arrived. They were big entrecotes, seared and perfect, cooked and delivered to the table by Willi Leuschner himself. He put down a big pot of home-made horseradish sauce, knowing that Werner liked it. Willi had been at school with Werner and the two men spent a moment exchanging the usual sort of pleasant remarks. The Leuschners were both coming to Werner's fancy-dress party that night. It seemed as if half of Berlin were planning to be there.

'More beer?' asked Willi finally.

'No,' said Werner, 'we both have to keep clear heads.' Willi scribbled the account on a beer-mat and dropped it back on the table.

Deuce Thurkettle left Werner to pay the bill. His BMW bike was outside. It was a big machine with two panniers in which he stowed all his gear. The engine roared and he gave a flip to the accelerator before settling into the saddle. With a quick wave of the hand as he passed the restaurant window he sped away.

He had a lot to do before getting to the rendezvous on the Autobahn, but seeing Werner was necessary. Thurkettle made a point of threatening his clients in that way. It was a part of the fastidious attention to detail that made him so effective.

Another reason for his success was knowing when to keep his mouth shut. Whoever had briefed Werner Volkmann had obviously told him some fairy story. The briefing that Thurkettle had been given by Prettyman in a fancy suite in the London Hilton had been rather more complete and certainly more specific. Prettyman had told him that under no circumstance must anyone be left alive except Bernard and Fiona Samson. No one left alive. Prettyman had been very insistent upon that.

The Brandenburg exit – the place arranged for Fiona Samson to change from one car to the other – was on East Germany's section of Hitler's Autobahn, built to connect Berlin to Holland and all points westwards. As well as being a major East German highway, this was one of the authorized routes along which Westerners were permitted to drive to West Berlin.

On this flat region immediately to the west of Berlin the rivers have spread to become lakes. It is a region of farmland and forest, and once outside the towns the traveller finds little cobble-streeted villages where little has changed since the Kaiser's photo hung in the schoolrooms.

Even one of East Germany's two-stroke motor cars can get there from Berlin in well under an hour; for Thurkettle's powerful motor cycle it was nothing. He arrived before dark. The workers from the construction site had gone: their earth-moving machines were neatly lined up, like tanks for an inspecting general.

Thurkettle broke the lock off the door of the portable hut used by the construction gangs. He used a flashlight to check his guns and ammunition and the stainless steel butcher's hacksaw he'd brought with him. Then he put on his coveralls and plastic medical gloves and looked at the skull and its neat dentistry. That done, he sat down, watched the pouring rain and waited patiently for it to get dark.

These things never go exactly according to plan. That was the most important of the lessons he'd learned over the years. Prettyman had told him that Erich Stinnes would be collecting Fiona Samson and bringing her to the rendezvous. Someone like her would remain there.

Thurkettle had been told that someone of exactly the same build as Fiona Samson must be killed and left at the rendezvous. It was Thurkettle who thought of the idea of using Fiona Samson's sister, and he was pleased with that. She was a drug addict, and such people were easy to control. His task was to put Fiona Samson into the car with her husband and let them depart alive. He then had to kill Stinnes and the sister, bury Stinnes in the excavated ditch the roadworkers had so conveniently provided close by, and burn the car with the sister's body inside it.

The Soviet investigators would never find Stinnes' body because by the time they realized that Stinnes had not gone over the frontier with Samson, there would be a hundred tons of solid concrete and a section of Autobahn over the burial place. The burned body would be identified as Fiona Samson because the two women were very much alike except for the dentistry, and the skull he'd shown Werner had been prepared for exactly that deception. The trickiest task was decapitating the sister, but her head would have to go in the ditch with the Stinnes corpse. Otherwise the forensic team examining the car would find a burned body with two heads, and that would alert even the doziest laboratory assistant.

It all went amiss; right from the very start. Tessa – unreliable in the way that addicts usually are – did not arrive on time. Despite everything Thurkettle had arranged, she went off to Werner's fancy-dress party. Tessa should have arrived first. Thurkettle became so anxious that he went off on his motor cycle, but came back when he recognized the car with Fiona and Stinnes in it. When finally Tessa did arrive, it was in the back of the Ford van with Bernard Samson. Stinnes had arrived in a Wartburg bringing Fiona Samson and Harry Kennedy too. And who could have guessed that Bernard Samson would arrive with some lunatic from London Central who perhaps thought it would be amusing to come directly from Werner's party wearing his fancy dress? A gorilla costume! Their Ford van was there within five minutes of the Wartburg, and parked in what Thurkettle approved as a good getaway position. The Wartburg was parked nose-out, with its sidelights on. Thurkettle expected Stinnes to bring the heroin consignment out of the car but no one emerged.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. Thurkettle remained in the darkness and watched. He was standing behind one of the bulldozers when it all started: a slim man, dressed as a gorilla, leapt from the Ford van, and started jumping around, shouting and waving a gun.

A gorilla. It looked so damned convincing for a moment that Thurkettle thought it was a real gorilla. It took a lot to surprise Thurkettle but that took him off guard. It must have taken Stinnes, or whoever was in the driver's seat of the Wartburg, off guard too, for someone switched on the car's full beams to see the gorilla more clearly.