Cooper arrived at Clay Headquarters alone. He came twenty minutes early and paced the hallway outside Winslow’s office until the brusque orderly opened the massive oak doors.
“They’re ready for you.”
Cooper pushed through the door impatiently, feeling his displeasure, and marched toward the long mahogany conference table. Cooper expected to see Inspector Praeger and Winslow—that’s who had summoned him—but he also saw Praeger’s BKA colleague, Detective Keller. They all looked up when he barged in, but Cooper particularly noticed Keller. Dark rings under his eyes and a nervous disposition gave him the appearance of a man who hadn’t slept.
“Good, good,” Winslow said. “Just in time.”
Cooper took a seat opposite the other three. A Meissen serving dish held the crumbs of a pastry breakfast and their coffee cups were in different stages of having been drunk. Cooper had a taste for coffee, but there was no cup for him. He nodded at Winslow and the two Germans. They had the same drawn expressions, the same awkward reticence. He looked from one to the next.
“We believe we know where he is,” Winslow announced.
The corners of an East Berlin map were held down by saucers liberated from their orphaned cups. Winslow laid the tip of a telescoping pointer on a white area on the map. The empty zone had no streets. It was blank, as if someone had erased one whole section of the city.
“She saw him here,” Winslow said. “He was traveling in this direction.” Winslow moved the pointer a few inches to the area that was an irregularly shaped jigsaw puzzle piece missing from the mapped grid. “Honecker lives here, so do other senior members of the Party. It’s a good bet Kruger drove his bike from Stasi Headquarters to his home in this zone.”
Winslow looked around the table and saw that he had everyone’s attention. “I believe he is going to escape to the West. If he lives there…” Winslow pointed to the blank space. “I expect he will try to cross to West Berlin here.” Winslow used the pointer to trace a path from the blank zone to Bornholm Bridge.
Winslow looked directly at Cooper. “Does she trust you?”
“Anne?”
“Yes.”
“What’s this about? Does she trust me?” He looked at the three men. “Yes, she trusts me. About this much.” He opened a two-inch gap between thumb and index finger.
Winslow nodded. “That’s enough.”
Cooper laughed. He raised his hand, questioning Winslow’s ambiguous answer. “What’s this about?”
“We have intelligence,” Praeger said. “The Soviets are worried that Kruger wants to escape to the West. We know from a source inside the KGB that they think Kruger is a risk. We know of Kruger’s long acquaintance with a senior KGB officer—a man by the name of Dmitri Kondrashev. Kondrashev was seen boarding a military flight in Moscow for East Berlin.”
Winslow moved to the huge stone fireplace where dying embers gave off meager heat. Suddenly he turned. “If Kruger wanted to reach Moscow he would have already left. But he hasn’t. Anne saw him. We have to assume he was collecting files from his office. For what? To blackmail the Soviets? Bargain with us? Pay bribes?”
Winslow lowered his head and resumed pacing, hands behind his back. His stride was steady and he moved with the concentration of a man struggling with a stubborn problem.
“We can assume he is frightened. A hunted man. Hiding. He knows there are no friends in this business. What are his choices? Arrested by us? Silenced by them? Flee?”
Winslow stopped and looked at the others. “He has a son in Lisbon. He will look to disappear. It’s not a hard choice.” Winslow again placed the pointer on Bornholm Bridge.
“This is where he will cross. It isn’t the closest spot, but it is the easiest. The most open with the most traffic.”
“You’re speculating,” Detective Keller said. He had been quiet throughout, but leaned forward, skeptical. “How can you be certain?”
“We monitored the son’s call with Kruger,” Winslow said. “They had a short conversation. Kruger made fun of Helmut Kohl and he asked his son to get in touch with a lawyer whose name is Vogel. Vogel happens to be the man who represented Rudolf Abel in the exchange for Gary Powers at Glienicke Bridge in 1962. So, he would be a logical choice to represent Kruger.” Winslow looked at the others.
“However, Vogel is close to the Stasi and the KGB,” Winslow said, “and Kruger wouldn’t trust him. The call was a signal Kruger planned to escape to the West over a bridge. He won’t try Glienicke Bridge because it’s under Soviet control. Bornholm Bridge makes the most sense.”
Suddenly, the door opened and the orderly entered. He spoke to Winslow. “George Mueller is on the line for you.”
“I need one minute,” Winslow said to the orderly.
The meeting concluded. Winslow thanked his German colleagues and promised to coordinate the next steps. Having seen them out, Winslow turned to Cooper.
“They resent us. They don’t like that we’re calling the shots on this.”
“Do you believe Praeger?”
“I confirmed his information with someone we have inside the BND. The KGB doesn’t want Kruger to get to the West.” Winslow paused. “I also confirmed that Vogel is in East Berlin. Kruger will cross on Bornholm Bridge. Kruger is a student of history and he would know that Abel crossed the bridge on February 10, 1962. It will give him some satisfaction to escape East Berlin on the anniversary of Abel’s exchange.” Winslow looked at Cooper. “He studied Thucydides while the rest of us read Hemingway.”
Cooper was opposite Winslow’s desk when he took the telephone call from Langley. Cooper listened to one side of the conversation. A call from the deputy director of Central Intelligence was always an important event that provoked curiosity. There were two telephones on the desk. Winslow had picked up the red one.
Cooper couldn’t help eavesdropping on the conversation, even as his eyes wandered across the room and the desk. An amethyst geode paperweight held down Winslow’s call list for the day. The desk’s meticulous order reflected the mind of a controlling man—a glass sat on a coaster beside an elegant silver water pitcher and a Montblanc pen lay straight on a blank notepad. Cooper was finishing an elaborate doodle when he heard a voice squawk from the telephone. Winslow held the handset away from his ear waiting for the deputy director to finish his agitated speech. Cooper couldn’t understand what the deputy director said, but his harsh tone was clear.
“Of course,” Winslow said. “Everything by the book. No embarrassments. Keep the Germans happy.” Winslow kept his eyes on Cooper as he spoke. “Yes, Cooper. A good man. I’ll fill him in. Everything by the book.”
Winslow put down the telephone, ending the conversation, and looked at Cooper with skeptical eyes. “Somewhere along the line you must have impressed George Mueller. What I’m going to tell you doesn’t leave this room, understand?”
Winslow folded his veined hands on his desk and spoke with the reluctance of a man conditioned to say only what was needed to get what he wanted. “We have a Soviet defector—Yuri Nosenko. You may have heard his name.
“He approached me in Vienna in 1962. His defection was a coup. In his debriefing, we learned that he was the KGB officer responsible for handling Lee Harvey Oswald when he showed up in Moscow offering his services. He claimed that Oswald was a nutcase and unsuitable for intelligence work. I saw signs from the beginning that Nosenko might be a plant. There were contradictions in his story and unlikely circumstances that he couldn’t explain. He admitted to lying about his reasons for defecting, but he refused to confess that the KGB sent him as an agent of disinformation. I was the skeptic on the team. I knew that his clumsy performance and self-contradictions made him a plant. Others argued that the contradictions were evidence he couldn’t be a plant. A plant would have a better story. I argued that the best plant was the one who was least likely to act as a plant.”
Winslow nodded at the telephone. “Mueller believed him. So did others. The dispute was settled when I was removed from the case.”
Winslow paused a long moment. “We’ve always feared there is Soviet mole high up in the agency. I now believe it was the mole who engineered my removal. I was getting too close.” He looked at the telephone again. “Mueller was Nosenko’s advocate. Mueller pushed me off the team.” Winslow let the implications of his comment amplify in the silence that followed.
Afternoon light streamed into the office and cast a deep shadow on Winslow’s grim face.
“That is what this is about?” Cooper said.
“This stays between us. Kruger will know the truth about Nosenko, and with luck, he’ll lead us to the mole. Kruger is important to us. He’s important to me.”
Winslow unfolded his hands and became quiet. His eyes came off the telephone and he looked at Cooper. “They force us out at a certain age. It’s always better to leave on your own terms. I haven’t stayed in the game for a pension, or a pat on the back, or a flattering roast at a restaurant. I know the risk of success here.”
Winslow rose. The meeting was over. He walked beside Cooper and they stopped at the door. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but sometimes when I’m alone in this office I think about what it must have been like for Goering, sitting at that desk in the final months of the war. Germany was defeated, the city was in ruins, and people were dying from bombs and hunger. What was on his mind in those final weeks?”
He put his hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “We need to bring Kruger in. We need to find him before Krondashev gets to him. The stakes are high. A failure here won’t be good for my career—or yours.”
The two men faced each other.
“It’s up to both of us, but you’re the one she trusts.”