18th January 1971, East Berlin.
Schneider arrived in the office early. He hadn’t wanted to be around family that morning. He put a call through to an old friend in HVA Dept X and asked him where Rieff had gone to after he’d left Disinformation and Active Measures. He told him that he’d done three years on National Security running the Wall and the Curtain under the direct orders of Secretary Erich Honecker.
He went through his in-tray until he came to the report he’d been looking for. Her face looked up at him. A bad photograph but it still quickened his blood. He leafed through the surveillance report. Everything normal. They’d even lied about her taxi ride from Ernst Thälmann Park back to the hotel, saying she’d gone back directly.
At 9.00 a.m. he put a call through to Yakubovsky, who growled, but agreed to a corridor meeting outside HVA Dept XX. Schneider prepared himself for the meeting by running up the stairs so that he would arrive out of breath, panicked. He overdid it. Yakubovsky took one look at him from the end of the corridor and nearly bolted back into his office. Schneider calmed, drew alongside.
‘I told you I couldn’t help you,’ said the Russian, annoyed.
‘It’s Rieff.’
‘I also told you that Rieff was not our friend. It is up to you to deal with him in your own way.’
‘But he’s like a wild dog after me. He knows everything about Stiller, what he was doing in the West…he’s even mentioned your name.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I denied your involvement,’ said Schneider. ‘But that’s not the problem. If it was just that sort of thing I could handle it…we could come to an arrangement. But this is not enough for him. He wants my blood. He’s accused me of being a double agent called the Snow Leopard. I’ve been through all the files at the AGA and I can’t find any reference to a Snow Leopard. You have to help me on this. Corruption is one thing. Prison, or maybe a labour camp…But treason…treason’s the guillotine.’
Yakubovsky stopped at the first mention of the Snow Leopard and let his eyebrows give Schneider their full attention.
‘What did Rieff say about the Snow Leopard?’
‘He’s furious with the KGB, too.’
‘But what did he say, Major?’
‘He says the KGB never share their information. They conduct their operations without…’
‘Major Schneider,’ said Yakubovsky, gripping his shoulder, ‘just tell me what Rieff said about the Snow Leopard.’
‘He said…he asked me about the Snow Leopard and, when I said I’d never heard of him, he replied that he didn’t think I would have, because…and these were his words: “I think you are the Snow Leopard.’”
‘Calm down, Major,’ said Yakubovsky. ‘You have nothing to be afraid of. You are not the Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopard is a KGB operation which will culminate in the next twenty-four hours. You are not to speak to anyone about this and especially not to Rieff. Afterwards, I will personally speak to Rieff.’
They parted, the Russian hitting him on the shoulder with his padded palm. Schneider went straight down to the toilets on the AGA floor, leaned his hot face against the cool cubicle wall and lit a cigarette, which did not calm him down.
Back in his office he put a call through to one of his patrol cars and ordered them to bring in a British national called Andrea Aspinall, a visiting maths postgraduate staying at the Hotel Neuwa and attending lectures with Günther Spiegel at Humboldt University. At lunchtime he was informed that the woman had been picked up and was waiting in Interrogation Room 4.
He shook himself down and felt for the passport and money in his pocket. He checked there was a full tape running for Interrogation Room 4 and went in. Andrea was sitting with her back to him, smoking.
‘I am Major Schneider,’ he said. ‘Have you been offered coffee?’
‘No,’ she said, annoyed.
‘I’m sorry. This isn’t supposed to be anything threatening. It’s just a routine matter, you understand. Our enemies have forced us to erect this anti-fascist protection barrier…’
‘Is that what you call the Wall?’
‘That’s what it is, Miss Aspinall.’
‘My God…when they sent your brain away, Major Schneider, it came back whiter than white.’
‘I can, if I wish…if you want to be rude to me, make this go very badly for you.’
Silence.
‘Sorry…you were saying…I think you were about to give me a lecture on enemies of state.’
‘Yes…we have built this wall to protect our citizens, but our enemies continue to make frequent attempts to penetrate it. They send people to spy on us. People such as visiting mathematics postgraduates from Cambridge. It is my job at the Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer to weed out the false and leave the true. I have two conflicting reports here, which is why I’ve had to bring you here for questioning.’
‘I’m not in East Berlin for very long, Major. This interruption cuts into my very short stay. I would be grateful if you could move it along.’
‘Of course. You arrived yesterday, took lunch in your hotel, the Neuwa, went to see Dr Spiegel, had a coffee in the canteen, attended a lecture, went back to your hotel and then went out to dinner with Dr Spiegel in his apartment in Ernst Thälmann Park.’
‘My God,’ she said. ‘I’d like to be able to say I find your surveillance comforting, Major, but I don’t.’
‘This is where we have the conflict. My report says you took a taxi back to the Neuwa Hotel.’
‘Which I did.’
‘The taxi picked you up at 21.55.’
‘Probably.’
‘The Neuwa Hotel reception reported that you came in at 23.10. That’s an hour and a quarter to go from Ernst Thälmann Park to Invalidenstrasse, which would leave approximately one hour unaccounted for.’
Silence. Over a minute of it.
‘I can’t believe this country.’
‘Believe it?’
‘Is that all you do all day…watch each other? Wait for each other to fall over so that you can report it? Ask the taxi driver. He took me on a tour of East Berlin. The Volkspark Friedrichshain, the statue of Lenin, the Volksbühne theatre, the…the famous water tower where the Nazis murdered communists back in the thirties. It was all very instructive and time-consuming.’
‘That still doesn’t account for the hour, Miss Aspinall.’
‘You said there was a conflict, Major. When did the surveillance people say I got back to the hotel?’
‘At 22.15.’
‘So who do you believe?’
‘On this occasion the Hotel Neuwa reception,’ said Schneider. ‘And you’re not going back to the university until that discrepancy’s been explained to my satisfaction.’
‘Before I left England they told me that the Stasi was no different to the Gestapo and, you know what…they were wrong. You’re worse.’
‘I have all day, Miss Aspinall. The rest of the week. A month. We are blessed with time on this side of the Curtain.’
They sat in silence for ten minutes, smiling, looking at each other.
‘This is ridiculous,’ she said.
Schneider stood and walked around the room. He came back to her, brought his face down to her level and put the passport and money into her open handbag.
‘Just tell me what happened in that hour, and as long as you weren’t spying or taking photographs of sensitive buildings, making contact with people without authorization…then you can go back to your hotel. If you don’t, I will have you taken down to a holding cell and…’
‘I want to speak to General Oleg Yakubovsky,’ she said, severe now.
Silence while Schneider blinked that information into his brain. Andrea slowly turned her head towards him. Their faces were only inches apart, their lips.
‘Did you hear me, Major?’
‘I did, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m just wondering why…I mean, how you know General Yakubovsky.’
‘I am operating under his authority…and that of Mr Gromov in London.’
Schneider stood, went back to his seat, his heart hammering away, even though he knew what was coming.
‘What is this operation?’
‘It is called Operation Snow Leopard and that is all I am saying, until General Yakubovsky is informed.’
Schneider stood, kicking his chair back as he did so. He offered his hand.
‘Please accept my apologies,’ he said. ‘We were not informed of your presence here. I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you unduly.’
‘You have, Major,’ she said. ‘And I’m wondering why you don’t call General Yakubovsky.’
‘It’s not necessary, Miss Aspinall. And…I would be very grateful if you could possibly not mention this to the general should you speak to him.’
She stood, picked up her handbag, refused his offered hand.
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Would you allow me to drive you back to the university or your hotel?’
‘You’re quite pathetic, Major, aren’t you?’ she said, and they left the room.
Schneider called up a car and, while they were waiting, retrieved the tape of the conversation. He drove her back to the university and returned to his office. He called General Rieff. The general was out and not due back until four o’clock.
General Rieff’s secretary kept him waiting with his tape and file for thirty minutes before she put the call through. Rieff added on another fifteen minutes before asking him to be sent in. Schneider laid Andrea’s file on the desk and asked permission to play the tape. He spooled it up and sat back to watch while General Rieff alternately rapped and slapped the arm of his chair, listening to the tape, half bored by what appeared to be the usual grind, until he heard her mention General Yakubovsky. Then he was still and listened intently through to the end.
‘Why didn’t you call General Yakubovsky?’
‘I’d already spoken to him.’
‘I’d asked him to help me. I told him that you’d accused me of being the Snow Leopard. I was desperate for him to intercede on my behalf. All he did was ask me how you knew about the Snow Leopard. And, of course, I didn’t know. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to worry, that I wasn’t the Snow Leopard, that the Snow Leopard was a KGB operation which would be concluded within the next twenty-four hours. He told me not to speak to anyone, and especially not to you.’
‘Did he?’
‘I’ve checked on Miss Aspinall and she’s flying back to London tomorrow at 11.00 a.m.,’ said Schneider. ‘I also personally drove her back to the university in order to ingratiate myself, so that she would not report the incident to General Yakubovsky. She has agreed that it would be between us.’
‘The Snow Leopard is not a KGB operation,’ said Rieff. ‘It is the codename of a double agent and we have as much right to him as the KGB. More right to him, because he is here, now, in this building giving away the names of our agents in the West, helping defectors…’
‘I’ll tap her phone and maintain surveillance on the Hotel Neuwa.’
‘You and only you, Major, will listen to the phone tap, and all surveillance will report back to you if she moves. Nobody else in this building is to know about it,’ he said, picking up the file. ‘Is this hers? Have you done a background check on her?’
‘I have, sir. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. She has spent the last two years doing pure maths research in Cambridge and before that she was a maths postgraduate at Lisbon University. I also checked on Mr Gromov, who she mentions on the tape. He has diplomatic status in the Soviet embassy in London, but he also holds the rank of colonel in the KGB.’
At 7.30 p.m. Andrea got back to the Hotel Neuwa from Humboldt University. She sat on the bed with her head in her hands and looked at the telephone. Her gums itched and she had a fit of gaping yawns. She picked up the phone and dialled Yakubovsky’s number.
‘The Snow Leopard’s made contact again,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘A note was given to me in the university canteen.’
‘Has he asked for a meeting?’
‘Of course, he has to, he needs my help.’
‘Where is the meeting?’
‘You remember what I said to you…I don’t want anybody there. We have to think of him as the kind of animal that he is.’
‘Of course, but I will have to make my report.’
‘The meeting will be above the arch on the third floor of the dreiterhof in the Mietskasern at number 11 Knaackestrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, at 22.00.’
At 7.38 p.m. Schneider relayed the phone tap to General Rieff.
‘What do you think this means?’ asked the general. ‘When she says, “I don’t want anybody there.”’
‘My understanding of that, sir, is that she is going to deal with the Snow Leopard herself.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I will not permit this to happen. The Snow Leopard must be interrogated. We have to find out the extent to which he has compromised our agents and who he is planning to help defect. If she kills him we will lose all this valuable information. We will lose the opportunity to become the Snow Leopard ourselves…the possibilities for disinformation are enormous. I will not allow it.’
‘Do you know this place where she’s going to meet him?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘So you know why she’s proposing to deal with the Snow Leopard herself?’ said Schneider. ‘It’s the only way she can be certain.’
‘You will leave me now and I shall think about this and decide on a course of action.’
‘To control one of those Mietskasernen I would suggest you need a hundred men, and if you turn up with a hundred men I am sure you will not see the Snow Leopard.’
‘Thank you for your advice, Major…you have been indispensable.’
‘May I add one other thing, General Rieff? That if you interfere I would suggest that it could lead to a lot of bad feeling between ourselves and the KGB.’
‘Herr Major?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I shit on the KGB.’
At 9.00 p.m. Andrea checked the gun. It was still fully loaded, as it had been the last fifty times she’d looked at it. She left the hotel and walked straight into a waiting taxi and asked him to go to the Jewish cemetery near Kollwitzplatz. She stood in a dark corner and watched. Nobody was following. Yakubovsky appeared to have kept his word and Schneider had made sure that nobody was tailing her from the hotel. She went back up Husemannstrasse, turned left into Sredzkistrasse.
Her breath clouded the air and dispersed into the still, freezing night. Her heels on the silver cobbles were the only sound in the street. As she hit Knaackestrasse she bore left and walked straight into the entrance of the Mietskasern. She leaned against the wall and dragged the icy air up her nostrils, tried to clear her mind, prayed for it to be twenty-four hours later and everything done.
He’d told her not to think about it. He’d told her to keep acting, never stop, never pause for a fraction of a moment’s thought. When she’d told him that she couldn’t, he’d reminded her of the ruthlessness with which everybody else was acting.
‘You just have to find your own values,’ he’d said, ‘the ones you’re prepared to protect with the same ruthlessness.’
An image came to her from God knows where in her memory. One she’d never seen. Judy Laverne in the flaming cage of her car crashing down into the ravine. Lazard had been ruthless. Yes. Beecham Lazard. The sight of that bullet tearing out his throat, the crashing noise of the gun, the blood. That was the only time she’d ever seen anyone killed close up, as close as she was going to be to this man. This man, who she didn’t know. The one who was going to save them. He’d told her how she would know the man, how she would know that he was there and the right man. He’d also told her the terrible thing she had to do, how to make it certain, how to make it look right. It was going to demand more of her than any other act in her life. Yes. Act, he’d said. Always act. It will not be you, he had said, but it was her.
She set off across the courtyard between the ersterhof and the zweiterhof, through the arch and into the next courtyard. She angled her walk towards the left-hand corner. She took out a torch she’d bought and walked up the stairs to the third floor, slowed down. She turned off the torch. Waited. She smelt the frozen air cut with the mustiness of degrading plaster, the mould of rotting timber. Her hand closed around the gun in her right-hand pocket. She walked steadily down the corridor until she arrived above the arch. She looked at her watch. A minute past ten. She shone her torch into the room, at the two piles of cement blocks on either side of the table. She sat on one of the piles, put her hand under the table and found the woollen ski mask, tucked it into the same pocket as the passport and money. She waited, desperate for a smoke but wanting to keep the air clear. Six minutes past ten. She turned off the torch and slipped out of her shoes.
She reached for the door, turned left down the corridor, one hand to the wall, the other holding the gun at waist height. She reached the first doorway, put her face into the blackness of the room, breathed in. She moved on to the next doorway. Nothing. Even before she reached the third doorway she could smell the unmistakable perfume of hair tonic. She stood in the doorway and clicked on her torch. Rieff was in the corner, gun hanging from his hand at his side, eyes wide in the torchlight. She fired quickly, three times. Three thuds into the heavy coat. His gun fell to the floor. She rushed at him as he began to fall forward and drove her shoulder into him so his knees buckled and he fell sideways against the wall. She tore the mask out of her pocket and stretched it over his head, not thinking, only acting, and to make it certain, to make it look right, fired a fourth shot through the ski mask into his face. His heavy head cracked back, destabilizing him, and he slid forward off the wall and ended face-down on the floor. She picked up his gun and stuffed it in his pocket. She took the passport and money out and put it into his other pocket. She ran out of the room, back down the corridor and into the room above the arch. She stepped into her shoes, sat on the cement blocks and put her head on the table and vomited between her feet.
Footsteps ran across the courtyard, sprinted up the stairs. Other, slower footsteps followed. Torch beams ricocheted down the corridor. Two armed men in combat gear appeared at the door. One stayed, the other moved on. The slower footsteps took forever to get up the stairs. They lumbered down the corridor. There was an exchange of Russian. Yakubovsky looked in on her and continued to where the other soldier was standing.
An order was given. The soldier reacted. There was a stunned silence. Another order was barked out. Yakubovsky moved back up the corridor, appeared in the doorway, passport in hand. He muttered something else and the soldiers staggered past with the body between them. He unhooked Andrea’s fingers from the gun and put it in his pocket with the passport. He picked up the torch, offered Andrea his arm and they left the building.
‘It’s always distressing,’ he said, ‘to find that one of one’s most valued colleagues is, in fact, a charlatan.’
In the morning, as a measure of respect due to a valued servant of the Soviet Union, General Yakubovsky ordered Major Kurt Schneider of the AGA to take Andrea to the airport. He picked her up at the hotel and they headed south out of the city, not talking for the first few minutes of the journey. Andrea sat in the back staring out at the greyscale of the framed cityscape.
‘You’re blaming yourself now, aren’t you, for what I had to do?’ she said to the back of his head.
‘I keep thinking that there must have been another way.’
‘I’m the strategist, remember, and there was no other way. The only uncertainty was that he would be there at all. When he was, I did as you said. It was ironic, that’s all.’
‘Ironic?’
‘My piano teacher was killed by a direct hit on his house back in the Blitz in 1940. I was sixteen and I said to myself then that I would kill a German. When the time came for me to even the score…I couldn’t find any of that old hate, only fear and certainty. I did it and there was no satisfaction.’
‘Certainty?’
‘From that ruthlessness you talked about.’
‘You shouldn’t have been put in that position in the first place.’
‘Now you’re going to blame Jim Wallis.’
‘I am.’
‘The way I see it is that I put myself in that position. I agreed to work for Gromov back in London. I took the step of going back to the Company. Jim Wallis just did his job,’ she said. ‘It surprised me to find he had that kind of toughness in him. I thought he was soft…good-natured.’
He took a buff envelope out of his pocket, handed it to her between the seats.
‘Your security,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t open it. Don’t look at it. Just give it to Jim, and tell him the negative is in safe-keeping in East Berlin.’
‘And what is it?’
‘It’s another one of those sad, seedy sideshows to our great intelligence industry,’ said Schneider. ‘It’s a photograph of Jim Wallis being buggered in a public lavatory in Fulham.’
‘Jim?’ she said, astonished. ‘Jim’s on his second marriage.’
‘Maybe that’s why the first didn’t work out,’ he said. ‘The glue that holds us together is, not infrequently, our shame.’
‘Even with this I’m going to get a hard time for sacrificing the Varlamov defection.’
‘Varlamov,’ said Schneider to himself. ‘Varlamov didn’t smell right from the beginning.’
‘Is this retrospective genius?’
‘Probably. When I was told to set the defection up, they were very firm on one point…that I should never make contact with the subject until they gave the go-ahead. I’m still waiting. Varlamov was going to be leaving today.’
‘Yakubovsky said they’re going to take him back to Russia in chains.’
‘I don’t think Varlamov wanted to defect. Jim Wallis used him to keep the KGB distracted. They thought that he was the goal of the operation whereas…well…everything’s worked. My cover is still intact, as is yours with the Russians, and Varlamov, a great servant of the State, has been discredited.’
They passed under the S-bahn between Schöneweide and Oberspree and the traffic eased up on the Adler-gestell. He put his hand back between the seats and she held it, stroked the knuckles with her thumb.
‘Why did you tell me about that dissident exchange you’re doing on Sunday night?’ she asked.
He threaded his fingers through hers.
‘I thought about going with them,’ he said, and she squeezed his hand, suddenly anxious. ‘I thought about driving them to the middle of the bridge for the exchange and then just keeping on driving. It…it would be possible…in my head.’
‘So you’re not going to do it.’
Their eyes connected in the rear view.
‘Elena and the girls,’ he said. ‘They’d let them drop through the floor.’
She turned her head, let her eyes fall on the road markings flashing past the car, the dirty snow, the bare trees.
At Grünau he took his hand back and they peeled off the Adler-gestell, turned back underneath it and headed south-west on the autobahn to Schönefeld. They went through a document check at the police post to leave Greater Berlin and from there it was a few minutes to the airport.
‘So this is it, for us?’ she said. ‘One day we might be on the same side.’
‘Our ration for the next quarter of a century,’ he said, putting his hand back to her again. ‘And we are on the same side…our side…where nobody else matters.’
‘Twenty-five years. That’ll be 1996,’ she said. ‘I’ll be seventy-two. They should have let me out of prison by then.’
‘They won’t send you to prison, and there’s always détente,’ he said. ‘We have to have faith in détente. London thinks that Ulbricht’s finished. Yakubovsky said that Rieff was well placed. Rieff used to work with Erich Honecker. I think Honecker will be Moscow’s new man.’
‘And what’s he like?’
‘A dry man but not arrogant like Ulbricht, not full of his own importance or hate for Willi Brandt…a better chance for détente…possibly.’
‘Or a better chance for the Russians to retain control,’ she said. ‘Dry doesn’t sound very flexible to me.’
‘Maybe it’s better…maybe he’s breakable…crumbly.’
‘In the end, Brezhnev dictates,’ she said, and was suddenly depressed. ‘You know why they use the word “détente”? I think it’s because it doesn’t sound as easy as “relaxation”.’
He swung into the airport and parked up close to departures.
‘We can add another two hours or so to our total,’ he said. ‘I worked it out once when I was in Krasnogorsk. We still haven’t managed a whole day together…yet.’
He squeezed her hand. The moment suddenly on them.
‘I know it hasn’t been a day,’ he said, ‘but I know you. I said it once to myself out loud in the apartment in Lisbon. I am not alone. It sounded stupid, like all these things do, but it’s what has mattered to me all this time, that at least there’s been somebody.’
‘When I flew back from Lisbon after putting Luís and Julião in the family mausoleum, I was panic-struck. I thought I’d become afraid of flying. But then I realized that it was the fear of suddenly finding myself alone. It was a sudden terror of crashing and dying in the company of strangers…unknown and unloved.’
‘We’re all strangers,’ he said. ‘Even more so in this business.’
‘That’s the point, Karl…’
‘Or is it Kurt?’ he said, his one operational eyebrow arched, and they both laughed.
She reached for the car door and he asked her for one last look at the photograph of Julião. He nodded it into his head.
He took her case, walked across the dry, frozen tarmac, cleared snow piled at the edges in solid ridges. He gave the case to a porter. They stood at the entrance, their breath joining in the icy air. He shook her hand and wished her a safe flight, stepped back and saluted her. He walked off without a backward glance, got into his car and drove away into his colourless world.
Wallis met her at the airport, took her by the arm as if he was going to march her straight into a waiting police car. They got into the back of a cab.
‘Clapham,’ he said, and sat back, pleased with himself.
‘There’s a police station at the top of the Latchmere Road,’ she said.
‘Come on, Andrea. No need for that. You did a great job.’
‘By accident, rather than design.’
‘Oh no, no, no, I think it was by design.’
‘And now?’
‘This isn’t Russia, you know. We’re not the KGB. No salt mines here, old girl. We take care of you. You go back to Admin, work hard, get your gong, take your pension.’
She checked him for sincerity. He returned her look. Karl had been right, he was still young behind that fat face, willing and eager to please. He made it all sound cosy.
‘And, of course,’ he said, ‘in return, we hope you’ll be amenable to maintaining a relationship with Mr Gromov.’
‘And if I’m not?’
‘Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred pounds. Go To Jail.’
‘I told Gromov I’d only do one job for him.’
‘Really? Why was that?’
‘I wanted that pension you’re talking about. I didn’t want to live my life in a constant sweat. And, besides, the hate’s gone. There’s nothing left in me to keep me going.’
‘Hate?’ asked Wallis. ‘Not sure what you’re on about there, old girl.’
‘How Louis Greig got me to work for Gromov in the first place.’
‘But “hate”? Who do you hate? Louis Greig?’
‘Louis turned pathetic,’ she said, and after a laden pause: ‘Perhaps I hate the same person you hate.’
‘I don’t hate anybody,’ said Wallis, shifting to the corner of the taxi, turning to her. ‘Hate…you know, Andrea, it’s not a very British thing that, is it? We don’t have those sort of…feelings.’
‘I know, Jim, you don’t even hate your traitors, do you? Or maybe you would if they were really close, right deep inside…I mean, in the Hot Room…that far inside.’
‘We’ve cleaned our house, old girl. Bad show in the sixties, but we’re spic-and-span now,’ said Wallis, defensive, taking this as a strangely personal attack.
‘Are you?’ she asked, deflected for the moment. ‘You know, when I told Gromov the contents of the Cleopatra file…the names.’
‘Yes, Cleopatra,’ said Wallis, taking it away from her, relieved, back to being high on the hog, ‘that was all a blind, just to test the…er…lines of communication between London, Moscow and Berlin. Moscow wanted to weaken Ulbricht, clear out his cronies, including Stiller. So Yakubovsky put Stiller on the list. You found out, told Gromov. Gromov presents the case to Moscow. Moscow ask Mielke what the hell is going on. Yakubovsky gets the order to execute. Andrea Aspinall passes her initiation test with Gromov.’
‘I see…so you planted the Cleopatra file on my desk and then let me get into the Hot Room?’
‘You pilfered Speke’s card.’
‘How did you know I was working for Gromov?’
‘Because we’ve been watching Louis Greig for the last five years.’
She nodded, remembering Rose’s interest at the funeral party.
‘You still haven’t let me tell you what Gromov said.’
‘After you gave him Stiller’s name?’
‘He said that the information would have to be checked. I was annoyed after the sweat I’d been through and asked him what he meant. He said: “Checked by somebody with Grade 10 Red status.’”
‘Pure mischief,’ said Wallis.
‘Is it? Why?’
Wallis tapped his lips with his forefinger, something not quite right. Day spoilt. Bloody shame.
‘You’re not going to turn me on Gromov,’ said Andrea. ‘There’d be no point until you’ve cleaned out your own house.’
‘They’ll stick you away, Andrea.’
‘No, they won’t,’ she said. ‘Because you’ll give me your full support, Jim.’
‘Only so far.’
‘No…all the way,’ she said and handed him the envelope. ‘To the hilt.’
‘What’s this?’
‘A gift from the Snow Leopard. He said that the negative was in East Berlin for safe-keeping. He also said you might not want to look in there. He told me not to and I didn’t.’
‘Not following you again, old girl,’ he said. ‘Bloody mysterious, aren’t you? Always have been.’
‘We’re back to talking about that person, the one we hate, the one who’s with us all the time, the one we can never get away from, the only one we can possibly know if we ever allow it.’
Jim Wallis shook his head. Cuckoo.
‘Did they put something in your water over there, old girl? Flipped your marbles? Bleached your brain?’
He pushed his finger under the flap and drew it along. He eased out the photograph as if he was hoping it was a lucky card and even his thirty years of professional dissembling couldn’t stop him from blanching.
On 3rd May 1971 Walter Ulbricht was delayed from attending the 16th Plenary Session of the Central Committee by two new bodyguards, appointed by the Stasi chief General Mielke. They took him for a long and exasperating walk along the River Spree. By the time he arrived at the session, Erich Honecker had been elected Secretary-General of the Central Committee and Chairman of the National Defense Council.