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“Eighty-one names,” he said. “Eighty-one tapes. Christ, if the names I do recognize are anything to go by, there must be enough here to bring down several state governments, maybe Bonn itself.”
“That’s odd,” said Schiller. “There are only sixty-one tapes.”
They both counted them. Sixty-one.
“You say there were three sets of prints lifted here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Assuming two were from Heimendorf and Hoppe, the third is probably the killer. And I have a horrible feeling he’s taken twenty tapes with him. Come on—I’m going to the President with this. It’s got beyond a murder, way beyond.”
Dr. Herrmann was finishing lunch with his subordinate, Aust.
“My dear Aust, we know nothing as yet. We simply have reason for concern. The police may quickly arrest and charge a gangster, and Morenz may return on schedule after a sinful weekend with a girlfriend at someplace other than the Black Forest. I have to say that his immediate retirement with loss of pension is beyond a doubt. But for the moment, I just want you to try and trace him. I want a female operative to move in with his wife in case he calls. Use any excuse you like. I will attempt to find out just what is the state of the police investigation. You know my hotel. Contact me if there is news of him.”
Sam McCready sat on the tailgate of the Range Rover in warm sunshine high above the Saale River and sipped coffee from a flask. Johnson put down his handset. He had been speaking to Cheltenham, the huge national listening station in the west of England.
“Nothing,” he said. “All normal. No extra radio traffic in any sector—Russian, SSD, or People’s Police. Just routine.”
McCready checked his watch. Ten to four. Bruno should be moving toward the lay-by west of Weimar about now. He had told him to be five minutes early and allow no more than twenty-five minutes if Smolensk failed to show up. That would count as an abort. He kept calm in front of Johnson, but he hated the waiting. It was always the worst part, waiting for an agent across the border. The imagination played tricks, creating a whole range of things that could have happened to him but probably had not. For the hundredth time, he calculated the schedule. Five minutes at the lay-by; the Russian hands it over; ten minutes to let the Russian get away. Four-fifteen departure. Five minutes to switch the manual from inside his jacket to the compartment under the battery; one hour and forty-five minutes of driving—he should be coming into view about six ... another cup of coffee.
The Police President of Cologne, Arnim von Starnberg, listened gravely to the young commissar’s report. He was flanked by Hart wig of the Murder Squad and Horst Fraenkel, Director of the whole Kriminalamt. Both senior officers had felt it right to come straight to him. When he heard the details, he agreed they were correct. This thing was not only bigger than a murder; it was bigger than Cologne. He already intended to take it higher. The young Schiller finished.
“You will remain completely silent about this, Heir Schiller,” said von Starnberg. “You and your colleague, Assistant Commissar Wiechert. Your careers depend on it, you understand?” He turned to Hartwig. “The same applies to those two fingerprint men who saw the camera room.”
He dismissed Schiller and turned to the other detectives.
“How far exactly have you got?”
Fraenkel nodded to Hartwig, who produced a number of large high-definition photographs.
“Well, Herr President, we now have the bullets that killed the call girl and her friend. We need to find the gun that fired those bullets.” He tapped two photographs. “Just two bullets, one in each body. Second, the fingerprints. There were three sets in the camera room. Two came from the call girl and her pimp. We believe the third set must belong to the killer. We also believe it was he who stole the twenty missing cassettes.”
None of the three men could know there were actually twenty-one missing cassettes. Morenz had thrown the twenty-first, the one of himself, into the Rhine on Friday evening. He was not listed in the notebook because he had never been a major blackmail prospect—just fun.
“Where are the other sixty-one tapes?” asked von Starnberg.
“In my personal safe,” said Fraenkel.
“Please have them brought straight up here. No one must view them.”
When he was alone, President von Starnberg began telephoning. That afternoon, the responsibility for the affair went up the official hierarchy faster than a monkey up a tree. Cologne passed the affair to the Provincial Kriminalamt in the provincial capital, Düsseldorf. That office passed it at once to the Federal Kriminalamt in Wiesbaden. Guarded limousines with the sixty-one tapes and the notebook sped from city to city. At Wiesbaden, it stopped for a while as senior civil servants worked out how to tell the Justice Minister in Bonn—he was the next up the ladder. By this time all sixty-one sexual athletes had been identified. Half were merely wealthy; the other half were both rich and firmly Establishment figures. Worse, six senators and parliamentarians of the ruling party were involved, plus two from the other parties, two senior civil servants, and an army general. That was only the Germans. There were two foreign diplomats based in Bonn (one from a NATO ally), two foreign politicians who had been visiting, and a White House staffer close to Ronald Reagan.
But even worse was the now-identified list of the twenty whose recorded frolics were missing. They included a senior member of the West German ruling party parliamentary caucus, another parliamentarian (federal), a judge (appeals court), another senior armed forces officer (air force, this time), the beer magnate spotted by Hartwig, and a rising junior minister. That was apart from some of the proud cream of commerce and industry.
“Naughty businessmen can be laughed off,” commented a senior defective in the Federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden. “If they are ruined, it’s their own fault. But this bitch specialized in the Establishment.”
In the later afternoon, simply for procedural reasons, the country’s internal security service, the BfV, was informed. Not of all the names, just the history of the investigation and its state of progress. Ironically, the BfV is headquartered in Cologne, back where it all started. The interdepartmental memorandum on the case landed on the desk of a senior officer in counterintelligence called Johann Prinz.
* * *
Bruno Morenz rolled slowly west along Highway Seven. He was four miles west of Weimar and one mile from the big white-walled Soviet barracks at Nohra. He came to a curve, and there was the lay-by, just where McCready had said it would be. He checked his watch; eight minutes to four. The road was empty. He slowed and pulled into the lay-by.
According to instructions, he climbed out, released the trunk, and removed the toolkit. This he opened and laid beside the front offside wheel, where it would be visible to a passerby. Then he flicked the catch and raised the hood. His stomach began to churn. There were bushes and trees behind the lay-by and across the road. In his mind’s eye he saw crouching agents from the SSD waiting to make a double arrest. His mouth was dry, but the sweat ran in rivulets down his back. His fragile reserve was close to snapping like an overstretched rubber band.
He took a wrench, the right size for the job, and bent his head inside the engine bay. McCready had showed him how to loosen the nut connecting the water pipe to the radiator. A trickle of water escaped. He changed the wrench for one clearly the wrong size and tried vainly to tighten the nut again.
The minutes ticked by. Inside the engine bay he tinkered vainly away. He glanced at his watch. Six minutes past four. Where the hell are you? he asked. Almost at once there was a slight crunch of gravel under wheels as a vehicle came to a halt. He kept his head down. The Russian would come up to him and say in his accented German, “If you are having trouble, perhaps I have a better set of tools,” and offer him the flat wooden toolbox from the jeep. The Soviet Army War Book would be under the wrenches in a red plastic cover.