Len Deighton - Berlin Game

'So what will she do?' I said.

'If she really is KGB, she'll have them arrange about getting your children out separately. Jesus, Bernie. It's too awful to think about. It couldn't be Fiona, could it?'

'We'll have to trust Dicky,' I said. 'He'll give you whatever you need. Take the children over to my mother. Make it all sound normal. I don't want Fiona to know I suspect her. But have someone with them all the time – guards, I mean, people who will know what has to be done, not just security men – and arrange things so I can swear I know nothing about it, Werner. Just in case I'm wrong about Fiona.'

'I'm sure you're wrong about her, Bernie.'

'You'd better get going. I'll drop you at a taxi rank and then take your car. I've got a busy day. See you at Rolf's tonight.'

'I'm sure you're wrong about Fiona,' said Werner, but every time he said it he sounded less and less convinced that I was wrong.

I went to see Brahms Four at his office in Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse. It used to be Wilhelmstrasse in the old days, and just down the street beyond the Wall it still was. The building too had changed its name, for this was the huge and grandiose Air Ministry block that Hermann Goring had built for his bickering bureaucrats. It was one of the few Nazi government buildings that survived the fighting here in the centre of the city.

After filling in the requisite form for the clerk on the reception desk, I was shown upstairs. Here was the man who'd come back from what Dicky described as 'some godforsaken little place in Thüringerwald' to dig me out of my hideout in a narrow alley behind the Goethe Museum in Weimar just minutes before they came to get me. I'd never forget it.

Goodness knows what clerk in London Central had named the network Brahms or by what chance this man had become its number 4. But it had been put on his documents decades ago and, for their purposes, it was his name still. His real name was Dr Walter von Munte but, living in the proletarian state of the German Democratic Republic, he'd long since dropped the 'von'. He was a tall gloomy man of about sixty, with a lined face, gold-rimmed glasses and grey closely cropped hair. He was frail-looking despite his size, and his stooped shoulders and old-fashioned good manners made him seem servile by the standards of today's world. The black suit he wore was carefully pressed but, like the stiff collar and black tie, it was well worn. And he wrung his hands like a Dickensian undertaker.

'Bernd,' he said. 'I can't believe it's you… after all these years.'

'Is it so long?'

'You were not even married. And now, I hear, you have two children. Or have I got it wrong?'

'You've got it right,' I said. He was standing behind his desk watching me as I went over to the window. We were close to the Wall: here I could almost see the remains of Anhalter railway station; perhaps from a higher floor I'd see the Café Leuschner. I carelessly touched the telephone junction box on the windowsill, and glanced up at the light fittings before going back again.

He guessed what I was doing. 'Oh, you need not worry about hidden microphones here. This office is regularly searched for such devices.' He smiled grimly.

Only when I sat down on the moulded plastic chair did he sit down too. 'You want to get out?' I said softly.

'There is not much time,' he said. He was very calm and matter of fact.

'What's the hurry?'

'You know what the hurry is,' he said. 'One of your people in London is reporting regularly to the KGB. It's only a matter of time…'

'But you're special,' I said. 'You are kept apart from everything else we do.'

'They have a good source,' he said. 'It must be someone at the top in London.'

' London want you to stay on,' I said. 'For two years at least.'

' London is Oliver Twist. London always wants more. Is that why you came here? To tell me to stay on?'

'It's one of the reasons,' I admitted.

'You've wasted your time, Bernd. But it's good to see you, just the same.'

'They'll insist.'

'Insist?' While he considered the idea of London forcing him to stay on, he carefully tore the edging from a block of postage stamps. 'How can they insist on anything? If I ceased to report to them, what could they do about that? If they betrayed me, the word would soon get around and your whole service would suffer.'

'There would be no question of London betraying you. You know that.'

'So what sanction do they have? How could they insist?' Having made the postage stamps look more tidy, he rolled up the stamp edging to make it into a ball.

I said, 'You'd have to give up all thoughts of going to the West. And I think you want to go to the West.'

'My wife wants to go. She wants to see her brother's grave. He was killed in Tunisia in the war. They were very close as children. But if it proves impossible, then so be it.' He shrugged and unrolled the stamp edging, smoothing it flat again.

'And you want to see your son in São Paulo.'

He said nothing for a long time, toying with the stamp edging as if he were thinking of nothing else. 'You are still as painstaking as you used to be, Bernd. I should have guessed you'd trace the payments.'

'A holding company in Luxembourg that receives money from Bayerische Vereinsbank in Munich, and transfers money to the São Paulo office of the Banco Nacional is not exactly deep cover,' I said. 'That publishing-company account isn't active enough to fool anyone for long.'

'Who else knows that?' He opened the brass flap on his ornate pen stand and looked at the dried-up sediment in the inkwell.

'I have told no one.'

'I appreciate that, Bernd.'

'You got me out of Weimar,' I said.

'You were young. You needed help.'

He screwed up the stamp edging a second time and tossed it into the dry inkwell with commendable accuracy before closing the brass flap. They arrested Busch the very next day.'

'That was a long time ago.'

'I gave them his address.'

'I know.'

'Who could have guessed the poor old fellow would go back home again?'

'I would have done the same,' I said.

'Not you, Bernd. You're made of harder stuff.'

'That's why they sent me to tell you to hang on,' I said.

He didn't smile. Without looking up from his desk, he said, 'Suppose I could help you find the traitor in London?'

So that was it. So that's what all the messages and the difficulties had been leading up to. I said nothing. Munte knew nothing about London except the identity of Silas, who'd been his friend and run him so long ago. And nowadays Silas had little contact with the day-to-day running of London Central. Surely Silas couldn't be one of them.

He spoke again, still fidgeting with the pen stand. 'I couldn't name him, but I could identify him positively to your satisfaction. And provide evidence that would satisfy even a law court, if that's the course that London decided upon.'

Giles Trent, perhaps. I had to find out if he was trying to sell me something I already had. 'How would you do that? What sort of evidence?'

'Could you get me out?'

'You alone?'

'Me and my wife. Together. It would have to be the two of us together. We wouldn't be separated.'

I felt sure that he was going to tell me about Giles Trent. If the KGB had discovered that we were playing Trent, I'd like to know. But I couldn't pull Munte out just for that.

Perhaps he guessed the sort of thoughts that were running through my mind. 'I'm talking about someone with access to London Data Centre,' he said, staring at me, knowing that I would be surprised to hear he even knew such a place existed. 'Someone with pass-codes prefixed "Knee jerk".'

I sat very still and tried to look impassive. Now there was no longer any way of avoiding the awful truth. The 'Knee jerk' codes were used only by a handful of specially selected top personnel in London Central. Used in the Data Centre's computer, they accessed the automatic link – hence 'Knee jerk' – to CIA data files. If they'd seen printout with 'Knee jerk' marks here in East Berlin, there was no limit to what might have been betrayed. It was not Giles Trent we were talking about; it was someone senior, someone very close to Operations. 'How soon could you get this evidence?'