‘This – the coordinated killings – is way too big for the blacks. They were helped, had their hands held. Usually they’d fuck it up, open their mouths, brag. And on their biggest action of all, they don’t? Someone’s behind it.’
‘Your federal-government-as-the-arch-enemy theory again.’
‘Got to be. They want us weak, want us picked off. You come to give me my last rites?’
‘Nope. Enjoyed meeting you.’
A hostile stillness. ‘Special Agent, I could kill you in under a second.’
‘I could have you taken out of solitary, I could have you transferred, I could let it be known you’ve cooperated, I could tell the crews of the late Johnnie Gill and Freddie Coombs that you abetted in their homicides to improve your own position.’
‘Hard and soft. I like that in a lady. Almost makes me hard, if you know what I mean.’
‘Save your energy.’
‘Oh, I am. We’ve got combat a-comin,’ and we’re ready. Timing’s the only issue left.’
She believed him, had gained as much take as she ever would. The interview was heading for conclusion. ‘I might be the one person who ensures you don’t end up with a blade in your throat.’
‘By standing beside me in the showers?’ He puckered his lips and blew her a kiss. ‘You couldn’t even save your daughter, Special Agent Althouse. Tell me, did she have her cherry popped before her brains forced the exit hole?’
* * *
Germany
The dark side. It was how he had always viewed East Germany, through image-intensifiers and telescope optics, snatched glimpses or lengthy surveillance from clandestine observation scrapes along hundreds of miles of Cold War border. Occasionally, the agents of Markus Wolf and his Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung intelligence agency made mistakes, were seen dropping off microfilm, drinking in bars or heading out for hillside rendezvous. Kemp had followed them, joined British, American and West German colleagues in missions to wait and see or grab and turn. So much energy expended, so much trade in bluff and betrayal, and the only remnants were incomplete memories, collapsed bunkers, decaying watchtowers and a tightness in his chest and gut as he crossed the old demarcation line.
So, this was what defeat looked like. Abandoned plant and abandoned people, the decrepitude left by economic breakdown, communist meltdown, by a generation of deceitfulness and tampered production statistics. Difficult to invent a worse screw-up, a more convincing ruin. Certainty had gone, even the certainty of being lied to. They had moved from National Socialism through Marxism and on to nothing, nothing with the trappings and texture of a federal democracy. Small wonder so many yearned for the past, for its order, its authoritarian values. The seedlings of intolerance grew everywhere. Kemp drove southwest from Berlin, the grey-stained landscape unfolding around him, Soviet-era apartment blocks squatting and stranded among the empty factories and echoing warehouses. Dessau, a town as ugly as its neighbours, as dejected as the rest. It was where the Colonel had chosen to reside since defecting.
He had plainly been waiting. The door opened while Kemp climbed the last flight of uncarpeted steps; an outsize figure was framed in the entrance, arms stretched wide, voice booming a familiar greeting down the stairwell. He was a big man, hair and eyebrows thick and frosted white, grey eyes both open and sly, set in an alcohol-aged face that remained alertly handsome.
‘Hallo, du altes Arschloch!’
‘Wie geht’s dir, alter Drecksack?’
‘What did you expect – a red carpet, you stinking bourgeois capitalist?’
‘Stairs that supported my weight would be enough.’
‘It would undermine the meaning of struggle.’
Kemp reached the landing. ‘You always chose the hard way, Herr Oberregierungsrat.’ They hugged, the instant warmth of old friendship and shared history swapped in a lengthy bear-embrace. The Englishman extricated himself to hand over the bottle of Scotch single malt. His passport. It was held aloft for examination. ‘Anything more, and you would have accused me of bribery.’
‘Anything less, Kamerad, and you would have been asked to leave.’ He ushered Kemp through with a slap on the back. ‘I blame the Russians. They taught me how to drink and savour depression.’
‘They taught East Germans how to put up shit buildings like this.’
‘What can I say? I’m an idealist.’
He was far from that ideal, from his career in former West Germany’s BfV counter-espionage organization. Rated highly, ranked highly, he had been tipped as a future director, given responsibility for monitoring and meeting the mushroom-spread of European far-right groups and subversive cells backed by the East Germans. He was good, damn good, his instincts, encyclopaedic knowledge and imagination marking him from the rest, the pedestrian journeymen who crowded every level of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Most were concerned simply with protecting their own backsides. Not the Colonel, hero and giant-slayer. Seconded from MI5 to the British forces’ security organization, Kemp had met him in the early 1980s, liked him, worked closely with him. There was mutual respect, an enjoyment of the chase, of the danger-thrill in blowing wide the careful plans and complex legends of the opposition. They had run Western bloc academics and computing specialists through East German electronics institutes in order to test the enemy’s recruiting methods – embarrassing, in the process, Dresden-based KGB officer and future Russian president Vladimir Putin. They pursued HVA officers who had posed as census-takers and travelling salesmen to mount training assassination-runs on NATO military figures. And they had mapped the safe houses, cut-outs and logistics sources of several nascent terrorist bodies. A partnership, one that ended the night the Colonel vanished across the border and returned to his original paymasters. Several of his predecessors, including Otto John, the first director of the BfV, had done the same, helping to enhance the service’s ongoing reputation as the most penetrated security apparatus in the West. But, for once, the Colonel’s judgement sucked. The Berlin Wall was to fall a year later.
They passed along a weakly lit, mud-coloured corridor, through a double set of armoured doors and into a galleried hallway with an atrium roof set three storeys high. An extraordinary contrast. Discreet lighting set off works of modern art and picked out sculptures placed in alcoves; exotic plants grew in profusion from intricate ceramic and earthenware pots alongside black, low-set furniture. Cutting-edge interior design melding with palatial intentions, all masked by a building façade of unmitigated drabness. Betrayal must pay, Kemp mused.
‘Gangster chic. What do you think?’ his host asked, the voice accentless.
‘You haven’t lost your knack for camouflage.’
A good-natured laugh. ‘Nor you for irony.’ He crossed to a recessed lacquer drinks cabinet, added the whisky and extracted a different bottle. ‘Schnapps. The reunion demands it.’ He filled two shot glasses, handing one to Kemp. They were emptied, recharged. ‘You look well, Josh.’
‘You look prosperous.’
The Colonel beamed. ‘Ach. Put it down to practical Marxism and practising entrepreneurship.’
Reconciling, then fusing, ideological inconsistencies, was part of the man’s charm. He had backed the losing side, was obliged to be pragmatic, phlegmatic. Kemp could not begrudge him his material comforts. The past was another game. Scores had been decided, settled, a long while back, the players retired or moved on. It was unprofessional, unsporting, to harbour bitterness. They had behaved according to the rules of that period, the climate and terrain – they were expected to break many of those rules. The Colonel had done so with aplomb. It was pointless judging; the only true referee was history. Even the Bonn government had kissed arse, currying favour with the GDR – Ostpolitik was Deutsche-speak for sycophancy. Each to his own.
‘The environment suits you,’ Kemp observed.
‘Happiness and hypocrisy can coexist, Josh. This?’ The hand was waved in an expansive arc. ‘Proceeds of smuggling, mostly. For local people, it’s the chief sport aside from giving illegal Vietnamese cigarette-sellers a kicking.’
‘You’ve still got security contacts.’
‘It’s why I’m a free man. I keep the Bundeskriminalamt informed of important events, and my assets report on East Berlin fascist gangs around Prenzlauer Berg and Weissensee or charging round Schorfheide in combat fatigues. In this region, my intelligence machine is superior to the entire Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz.’
‘Hardly a contest.’
‘But a reminder why I decided to serve Markus Wolf and his professionals in the HVA instead.’
‘So, licensed piracy?’
