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But calls had to be four seconds long, no more, to prevent the East Germans triangulating onto the source of the call and locating the safe house. Morenz had babbled on for nine seconds. Although McCready could not know it, the SSD listening watch had already got as far as the Leipzig area when the connection was severed. Another six seconds, and they would have had the safe house and its occupant. Morenz had been told to use the number only in dire emergency and very briefly.
“He’s cracked up,” said Johnson. “Gone to pieces.”
“For Christ’s sake, he was crying like a child,” snapped McCready. “He’s had a complete nervous breakdown. Tell me something I don’t know. What the hell did he mean—‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’ ”
Johnson was pensive. “He comes from Cologne?”
“You know that.”
Actually, Johnson did not know that. He only knew he had picked up McCready from the Cologne airport Holiday Inn. He had never seen Poltergeist. No need to. He took the local newspaper and pointed out the second lead story on the front page. It was Guenther Braun’s story from his Cologne newspaper, picked up and reprinted by the Nordbayerischer Kurier, the north Bavarian paper printed in Bayreuth. The story was datelined Cologne and the headline read, CALL GIRL/PIMP SLAUGHTERED IN LOVE-NEST SHOOT-OUT. McCready read it, put it down, and stared across toward the north.
“Oh, Bruno, my poor friend. What the hell have
you done?”
Five minutes later Archimedes phoned.
“We heard that,” said the duty officer. “So, I imagine, did everyone else. I’m sorry. He’s gone, hasn’t he?”
“What’s the latest?” asked Sam.
“They are using the name Hans Grauber,” said Archimedes. “There’s an all-points watch out for him all over southern Thuringia. Drink, assault, and theft of a police car. The car he drove was a black BMW, right? They’ve taken it to the SSD main garage at Erfurt. Seems all the rest of his gear has been impounded and handed over to the Stasi.”
“What time exactly was the crash?” asked Sam.
The duty officer conferred with someone.
“The first call to the Jena police was from a passing patrol car. The speaker was apparently the VOPO who had not been punched. He used the phrase ‘five minutes ago.’ Logged at twelve thirty-five.”
“Thank you,” said McCready.
At eight o’clock in the Erfurt garage, one of the mechanics found the cavity beneath the battery. Around him three other mechanics labored over what remained of the BMW. Its seats and upholstery were all over the floor, its wheels off and its tires inside-out. Only the frame remained, and it was there that the cavity was discovered. The mechanic called over a man in civilian clothes, a major of the SSD. They both examined the cavity, and the major nodded.
“Ein Spionwagen,” he said. A spy car. Work continued, though there was little more to do. The major went upstairs and called Lichtenberg, the East Berlin headquarters of the SSD. The major knew where to place the call; it went straight to Abteilung Ü, the Counterespionage Department of the service. There the matter was taken in hand by the Director of the Abteilung himself, Colonel Otto Voss. His first command was for absolutely everything connected with the case to be brought to East Berlin; his second was for everyone who had even glimpsed the BMW or its occupant since it entered the country, starting with the border guards at the Saale River, to be brought in and questioned minutely. That would later include the staff of the Black Bear Hotel, the patrolmen who had studied the BMW as they cruised alongside it on the Autobahn—especially the two who had caused the first rendezvous to abort—and the ones who had had their patrol car stolen.
Voss’s third order was for an absolute end to any mention of the matter on radios or on nonsecure telephone lines. When he had done that, he picked up his internal phone and was connected with Abteilung VI, Crossing Points and Airports.
At ten P.M. Archimedes phoned McCready for the last time.
“I’m afraid it’s over,” said the duty officer. “No, they haven’t got him yet, but they will. They must have discovered something in the Erfurt garage. Heavy radio traffic, coded, between Erfurt and East Berlin. A total shutdown of loose chit-chat on the airwaves. Oh, and all border points are on full alert—guards doubled, searchlights on the border working overtime. The lot. Sorry.”
Even from where he stood on the hillside, McCready could see that over the past hour the headlights of cars coming out of East Germany were very few and far between. They must be holding them for hours under the arc lights a mile away as they searched every car and truck until a mouse could not escape detection.
At ten-thirty, Timothy Edwards came on the line.
“Look, we’re all very sorry, but it’s over,” he said. “Come back to London at once, Sam.”
“They haven’t got him yet. I should stay here. I may be able to help. It’s not over yet.”
“Bar the shouting, it is,” insisted Edwards.
“There are things here we have to discuss—the loss of the package being not the least of them. Our American Cousins are not a happy group, to say the least. Please be on the first plane out of Munich or Frankfurt, whichever is the first of the day.”
It turned out to be Frankfurt. Johnson drove him through the night to the airport, then took the Range Rover and its equipment back to Bonn, a very tired young man. McCready grabbed a few hours’ sleep at the airport’s Sheraton and was on the first flight for Heathrow the next day, landing, with the one-hour time difference, just after eight o’clock. Denis Gaunt met him and drove him straight to Century House. He read the file of radio intercepts in the car.
Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya rose early that Thursday, and for lack of a gymnasium did her sit-ups in her own room at the KGB barracks. Her flight was not till midday, but she in tended to pass by the KGB headquarters for a last check on the itinerary of the man she hunted.
She knew he had returned from Erfurt to Potsdam in convoy the previous evening and spent the night in the officers’ quarters there. They were both due to take the same flight back from Potsdam to Moscow at noon. He would sit up front in the seats reserved, even on military flights, for the vlasti, the privileged ones. She was posing as a humble stenographer from the huge Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden, the real seat of power in East Germany. They would not meet—he would not even notice her; but as soon as they entered Soviet air space, he would be under surveillance.