Schönberg was still in a good mood as he strolled past the internet café and Conny’s Container, puffing away on his pipe. As a reflex, he scanned the people he encountered on the busy pavement, as well as the people who had got off the tram at Marienburger Straße and were now crossing Prenzlauer Allee. Mothers with prams. Students clutching lattes and laptop bags, white AirPods in their ears. White-haired, furrowed men in black, struggling with the heat, holding rosaries and walking sticks. It was necessary to keep an eye on them all equally. When he reached the pedestrian crossing and turned around and was unable to spot anyone who seemed to be following him, he smiled as he did so often at the genius of picking premises next door to Deutsche Post. Given that DP were blurred out on Google Street View for security reasons, FADO’s door was too, without any suspicions being raised. In practice, FADO was in far greater need of secrecy than Deutsche Post.
FADO stood for Frisch aus dem Orient, and it was a company that imported all sorts of foodstuffs from the Middle East for wholesale to restaurants across Germany. Julius Arnold Schönberg had been appointed managing director just a month earlier at the venerable age of seventy-two, and he still loved the scents that welcomed him as he stepped into the premises. Cinnamon sticks, chilis, garlic, figs, pistachios, mint, cardamom, coriander. Cornucopias in the form of large woven baskets filled with oriental treats. His diet had changed radically in the last month, since the company had vast quantities of goods such as dates, falafel, feta, bulgur, sambal oelek, lamb sausages and couscous that would only go to waste if he didn’t take them home with him.
After the Abu Rasil disaster, Schönberg was simply relieved that he hadn’t been sacked. If he hadn’t known the right people and had so little time left until retirement, he would almost certainly have gone on that day. It was undeniably advantageous that all the people involved in determining his fate were people he had hired, so instead of leaving he had requested and been granted a transfer to a completely different part of the BND – a front company that traded in oriental foods and was thus able to engage in intelligence gathering via its branches in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. They also did a modest trade in providing restaurants in the Middle East with German foods such as sauerkraut, maultaschen, spätzle and German sausages made using beef, chicken or turkey rather than pork. The official business was actually run in the black, which was more than could be said for the other fronts that Schönberg had worked for previously. But above all, FADO was enabling him to bring to fruition the plan he had been working on for so many years and that had almost hit the buffers when Abu Rasil had been unmasked in Sweden. He probably only had one chance left, one final opportunity to end his career in a spectacular fashion. He wouldn’t just hang up his hat and discreetly leave by a back door to be quickly forgotten – he would be remembered forever. He might even become an industry legend.
Schönberg nodded amiably at Samir and Leila, the young employees who managed contacts with the branches overseas, receiving and cataloguing information while also scrutinising every unfamiliar face that entered the premises. These unexpected guests could be everything from lost tourists and hungry Berliners who had mistaken the wholesaler for a regular shop, to spies dispatched there by foreign intelligence agencies. Samir and Leila always greeted people with a friendly Salam aleikum – Leila in her headscarf, Samir with his long beard, which hopefully gave the impression of orthodoxy. Of course, the two of them were actually BND officers with security clearance.
Schönberg grabbed an orange as he went by, stepped through the drapes at the rear of the unit into the small office with all the folders and sales records and the smell of incense. He went straight to the toilet and locked the door behind him. By undoing a catch behind the tap, he was able to push aside a wall in the shower cubicle. Behind this was a door made from armoured steel with a palm scanner and a separate iris scanner, just as he had for his safe room at home. Once his hand and eye had been checked, he was able to pass through the door and close the shower cubicle wall behind him.
He turned on the lights, put the orange on the desk and switched on the computer.
A flash. Something important had happened.
He read it.
Damn it!
Stiller was apparently incapable of even dying without causing trouble.
A message from Sweden. Sara Nowak had been going through everything and had somehow stumbled across the names Gerlach, Kremp, Rau and Werner. This was worrying in itself. But if he knew her, she wouldn’t give up until she had dug up the whole truth, which would cost many lives. Including most likely her own.
That Swedish bigwig Nyman had requested all the information the BND had on the four terrorists. Well, he could forget about that.
Schönberg bit into the orange without having peeled it, and quickly spat out the equally unexpected and unwelcome pieces of peel onto the desk. He began to pack tobacco into his pipe to bring a better taste to his mouth.
So she had found the old leftist command. This was not good news. He really had thought Stiller’s death would pass for a suicide.
What different times they had been! The Red Army Faction, the revolutionary cells and the 2 June Movement. And all the groups that had followed in their footsteps. It had all started in 1967 after a student, Benno Ohnesorg, had been shot dead by a police officer at a demonstration against the state visit of the Shah of Iran – on the second of June of that year. A fatal shooting that had shaken the entire radical world and triggered a tidal wave of terrorism, although it had transpired much later on that it had been perpetrated by a Stasi agent working as a West German police officer. Double-dealing and triple-dealing. If he ever wrote his memoirs, that would be a good title. He made a mental note.
The world was different now. In a way, it would be a relief to retire, but he couldn’t escape the gnawing anxiety about what might happen when he was no longer there to keep an eye on the bad guys. What sort of mischief would they get up to then?
And what would happen to everything he knew? He would never be able to set all his knowledge down on paper. How could you digitise practised instinct?
Schönberg had increasingly begun to think about how much knowledge vanished with each person who died. And not just the knowledge itself, but above all, the intuition, the gut feel for what was right, what might correlate, the sudden impulses where the ability to identify almost invisible connections that a computer would never manage came to the fore.
But that was how it was. And no one would ever find out which threats he had helped to neutralise, no one would ever find out how the world would have been if he hadn’t given his life to the nation’s security. His war on the invisible front would remain unknown. No one would remember his name.
What would his legacy be? Of course, he could influence that himself. As a fellow human being, he really ought to warn Sara Nowak – but as a representative of the BND, he refrained from doing do.
Rau would surely tidy things up now that he had disrupted the splendid order that had been established following the Cold War.
It was that order which the BND cared about, all that mattered in this case.
Admittedly, Nowak was a pity, but this was the only way, given what was at stake.
Rau was necessary, if the others were to be drawn in and that meant they couldn’t take any risks with Swedish detectives pursuing their own initiatives.
Schönberg logged on to the intranet and wrote a message to the top brass.
‘Problems with our good lady friend in Sweden. Request free hand to remedy.’
The reply came in less than a minute.
‘Granted.’