Page 16

“You’ll only need the attaché case and the overnight bag. Study the attaché case and its contents. The security lock opens to the numbers of your fictional birthday, fifth April ’34, or 5434. The papers all concern your desire to purchase Zeiss products for your firm. Your signature is Hans Grauber in your own handwriting. The clothes and washkit are all genuine Würzburg purchases, laundered and used, with Würzburg laundry tags. Now, old friend, let’s have some dinner.”
Dieter Aust, Director of Cologne’s BND out-station, missed the evening TV news. He was out to dinner. He would regret it later.
* * *
At midnight, McCready was collected in a Range Rover by Kit Johnson, a communications man from the SIS Bonn Station. They drove off together to be at the Saale River in northern Bavaria before Morenz.
Bruno Morenz stayed in McCready’s room, ordered whiskey from room service, and drank too much. He slept badly for two hours and rose when the bedside alarm went off at three. At four that Tuesday morning, he left the Holiday Inn, started the BMW, and headed through the darkness toward the Autobahn south.
At the same hour Peter Schiller awakened in Cologne beside his sleeping wife and realized what it was about the Hahnwald apartment that had puzzled him. He telephoned and awoke an outraged Wiechert and told him to meet him at the Hahnwald house at seven. German police officers have to be accompanied on an investigation.
Bruno Morenz was slightly ahead of time. Just south of the border, he killed twenty-five minutes at the Frankenwald service area restaurant. He did not drink liquor; he drank coffee. But he filled his hip flask.
At five to eleven that Tuesday morning Sam McCready, with Kit Johnson beside him, was concealed amid pine trees on a hill south of the Saale River. The Range Rover was parked out of sight in the forest. From the treeline they could see the West German border post below and half a mile in front of them. Beyond it was a gap in the hills, and through the gap, the roofs of the East German border post, half a mile farther on.
Because the East Germans had built their controls well inside their own territory, a driver would be inside East Germany as soon as he left the West German post. Then came a two-lane highway between high chain-link fencing. Behind the fencing were the watchtowers. From the trees, using powerful binoculars, McCready could see the border guards behind the windows with their own field glasses, watching the West. He could also see the machine guns. The reason for the half-mile corridor inside East Germany was so that anyone bursting through the eastern border post could be cut to pieces between the chain-link fencing before reaching the West.
At two minutes to eleven, McCready picked out the black BMW moving sedately through the cursory West German controls. Then it purred forward into the corridor, heading for the land controlled by the East’s most professional and dreaded secret police, the Stasi.
Chapter 3
“It’s the bathroom, it has to be the bathroom,” said Commissar Schiller just after seven A.M. as he led a sleepy and reluctant Wiechert back into the flat.
“It looks all right to me,” grumbled Wiechert. “Anyway, the forensic boys cleaned it out.”
“They were looking for prints, not measurements,” said Schiller. “Look at this closet in the passage. It’s two yards wide, right?”
“About that.”
“The far end is flush with the door to the call girl’s bedroom. The door is flush with the wall and the mirror above the headboard. Now, as the bathroom door is beyond the built-in wall closet, what do you deduce?”
“That I’m hungry,” said Wiechert.
“Shut up. Look, when you enter the bathroom and turn to your right, there should be two yards to the bathroom wall. The width of the cupboard outside, right? Try it.”
Wiechert entered the bathroom and looked to his right. “One yard,” he said.
“Exactly. That’s what puzzled me. Between the mirror behind the washbasin and the mirror behind the headboard, there’s a yard of space missing.”
Poking around in the hall closet, it took Schiller thirty minutes to find the door catch, a cunningly concealed knothole in the pine planking. When the rear of the closet swung open, Schiller could dimly discern a light switch inside. He used a pencil to flick the switch, and the inner light came on, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.
“I’ll be damned,” said Wiechert, looking over his shoulder. The secret compartment was ten feet long, the same length as the bathroom, but it was only three feet wide. But wide enough. To their right was the rear side of the mirror above the headboard next door, a one-way mirror that exposed the whole bedroom. On a tripod at the center of the mirror, facing into the bedroom, was a video camera, a state-of-the-art high-tech piece of equipment that would certainly provide clear-definition film despite shooting through the glass and into subdued lighting. The sound-recording equipment was also of the best. The entire far end of the narrow passageway was ceiling-to-floor shelving, and each shelf held a row of video-cassette cases. On the spine of each was a label, and each label had a number. Schiller backed out.
The phone was usable, since the forensic men had cleaned it of prints the previous day. He called the Präsidium and got straight through to Rainer Hartwig, Director of First K.
“Oh shit,” said Hartwig when he had the details. “Well done. Stay there. I’ll get two fingerprint men down to you.”
It was eight-fifteen. Dieter Aust was shaving. In the bedroom the morning show was on television. The news roundup. He could hear it from the bathroom. He thought little of the item about a double murder in Hahnwald until the newscaster said, “One of the victims, high-class call girl Renate Heimendorf.
That was when the Director of the Cologne BND cut himself quite badly on his pink cheek. In ten minutes he was in his car and driving fast to his office, where he arrived almost an hour early. This much disconcerted Fräulein Keppel, who was always in an hour ahead of him.
“That number,” said Aust, “the vacation contact number Morenz gave us. Let me have it, would you?”
When he tried it, he got the “disconnected” tone. He checked with the operator down in the Black Forest, a popular vacation area, but she told him it appeared to be out of order. He did not know that one of McCready’s men had rented a vacation chalet, then locked it after taking the phone off the hook. As a long shot Aust tried Morenz’s home number in Porz, and to his amazement he found himself speaking to Frau Morenz. They must have come home early.
“Could I speak to your husband please? This is Director Aust speaking, from the office.”
“But he’s with you, Herr Direktor,” she explained patiently. “Out of town. On a trip. Back late tomorrow night.”