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“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “Damned Westerners, think you can drive like maniacs!”
He had the small round badge of the Socialist Unity Party in his jacket lapel. The Communists. A Party member. Morenz jammed his left arm tight to his body to hold the manual in place, climbed out, and reached for a wad of Marks. Ostmarks, of course; he couldn’t offer Deutschmarks—that was another offense. People began to stroll toward the scene.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll pay for the damage. This must be more than enough. But I really am very late.”
The angry East German looked at the money. It really was a very large wad.
“That’s not the point,” he said. “I had to wait four years for this car.”
“It’ll repair,” said another man standing nearby.
“No, it damn well won’t,” said the aggrieved one. “It’ll have to go back to the factory.”
The crowd now numbered twenty. Life was boring on an industrial housing estate, and a BMW was worth looking at. That was when the police car arrived. Routine patrol, but Morenz began to shake. The policemen got out. One looked at the damage.
“It can be fixed,” he said. “Do you want to prefer charges?”
The Trabant driver was backing off. “Well ...”
The other policeman approached Morenz. “Ausweis, bitte,” he said. Morenz used his right hand to bring out his passport. The hand was trembling. The cop looked at the hand, the bleary eyes, the unshaven chin.
“You’ve been drinking,” he said. He sniffed and confirmed it. “Right. Down to the station. Come on, into the car.”
He began to hustle Morenz toward the police car, whose engine was still running. The driver’s door was open. That was when Bruno Morenz finally disintegrated. He still had the manual under his arm. At the police station it would be found anyway. He swung his one free arm violently back, hit the policeman under his nose, breaking it, and knocked the man down. Then he leaped into the police car, slammed it into gear, and drove off. He was facing the wrong way, north toward Jena.
The other policeman, stunned, managed to fire off four shots from his sidearm. Three missed. The VOPO car, swerving wildly, disappeared around a corner. It was leaking gasoline from the fourth bullet, which had drilled a hole in the tank.
Chapter 4
The two VOPOs were so stunned by what had happened that they reacted slowly. Nothing in their training or previous experience as People’s Police had accustomed them to this kind of civil disobedience. They had been publicly assaulted and humiliated in front of a crowd of people, and they were beside themselves with rage. A fair amount of shouting took place before they worked out what to do.
The uninjured officer left his broken-nosed colleague on the scene while he headed back to the police station. They had no personal communicators because they were accustomed to using the car radio to report to HQ. Appeals to the crowd for a telephone had met with shrugs. Working-class people did not have telephones in the GDR.
The Party member with the battered Trabant asked if he could leave and was promptly arrested at gunpoint by Broken Nose, who was prepared to believe that anyone could have been part of the conspiracy.
His colleague, marching up the road toward Jena, saw a Wartburg coming toward him, flagged it down (also at gunpoint), and ordered the driver to take him straight to the police station in central Jena. A mile farther on, they saw a police patrol car coming toward them. The VOPO in the civilian Wartburg frantically waved his colleagues to a stop and explained what had happened. Using the patrol car’s radio, they checked in, explained the nature of the several crimes that had been committed, and were told to report immediately to police HQ. Meanwhile, backup prowl cars were sent to the crash scene.
The call to Jena Central was logged at 12:35. It was also logged many miles away, high in the Harz Mountains on the other side of the border by a British listening post code-named Archimedes.
At one P.M. Dr. Lothar Herrmann, back at his desk in Pullach, lifted his phone and took the awaited call from the BND ballistics laboratory in a neighboring building. The lab was situated adjacent to the armory and firing range. It had the shrewd practice, when issuing a sidearm to an operative, not simply to note the serial number of the gun and get it signed for, but to fire two rounds into a sealed chamber, then to retrieve and keep the slugs.
In a perfect world, the technician would have preferred the actual bullets from the cadavers in Cologne, but he made do with the photographs. All rifle barrels are different from one another in minute respects, and when firing a bullet, each barrel leaves miniscule scratches, called lands, on the discharged slug. They are like fingerprints. The technician had compared the lands on the two sample slugs he still retained from a Walther PPK issued ten years ago with the photographs he had been given and about whose origin he had no idea at all.
“A perfect match? I see. Thank you,” said Dr. Herrmann. He called the fingerprint section—the BND keeps a full set of prints of its own staffers, apart from others who come to its attention—and received the same reply. He exhaled deeply and reached for the phone again. There was nothing for it; this had to go to the Director General himself.
What followed was one of the most difficult interviews of Dr. Herrmann’s career. The DG was obsessive about the efficiency of his agency and its image, both in the corridors of power in Bonn and within the Western intelligence community. The news Herrmann brought was like a body blow to him. He toyed with the idea of “losing” the sample slugs and Morenz’s fingerprints but quickly dismissed the idea. Morenz would be caught by the police sooner or later, the lab technicians would be subpoenaed—it would only make the scandal worse.
The BND in Germany is answerable only to the Chancellor’s Office, and the DG knew that sooner or later, and probably sooner, he would have to take news of the scandal there. He did not relish the prospect.
“Find him,” he ordered Herrmann. “Find him quickly, and get those tapes back.” As Herrmann turned to leave, the DG, who spoke English fluently, added another remark.
“Dr. Herrmann, the English have a saying that I recommend to you. ‘Thou shall not kill, yet need not strive/officiously to keep alive.’ ”
He had given the rhyming quotation in English. Dr. Herrmann understood it but was puzzled by the word officiously. Back in his office, he consulted a dictionary and decided the word unnötig—unnecessarily—was probably the best translation. In a lifetime’s career in the BND, it was the broadest hint he had ever been given. He rang the central registry in the Personnel Office.
“Send me the curriculum vitae of one of our staff officers, Bruno Morenz,” he ordered.
At two o’clock Sam McCready was still on the hillside where he and Johnson had been since seven. Though he suspected the first meet outside Weimar had aborted, one never knew; Morenz could have motored over at dawn. But he hadn’t. Again, McCready ran through his timings: rendezvous at twelve, departure twelve-ten, an hour and three-quarters driving—Morenz should be appearing at almost any time. He raised his binoculars again to the distant road across the border.