He followed events in silence.
He had difficulty believing it was really true.
The man who had been Otto Rau, who had been working for the DDR and Stasi on Gladio’s orders, planning and implementing various acts of terror, who had threatened and murdered, inciting his comrades to go even further. All in the name of freedom and democracy. The man who had been deployed to crush the enemy from within.
He had now succeeded.
He and his co-conspirators. Officially, it would obviously be claimed that the success was the result of their soft tactics. Diplomacy, propaganda, cultural influence. As if rock stars and pairs of Levi’s were what it took to bring the Cold War to an end. What a joke! He and all the other secret operatives knew there had only been one way to crush the evil empire. Through violence. By urging them to show their true face, to give peace-loving Western Europeans a bloody nose and make them realise how impossible dialogue was.
He had wanted to share that moment with someone, but both his mission and his personality demanded solitude in the crucial moments.
His wife was ‘resting up’ at her parents’. She was weak. But it was a good job that she was staying there until the bruises went away. It was a shame that she had to constantly annoy him. It presented a social obstacle when they were unable to participate in the parties and social gatherings that came with his assignment. Or that had been associated with it. Because now it was over.
It was finally happening. Before the eyes of an unprepared world.
The Berlin Wall fell.
It was hacked into pieces by exhilarated East Germans lent a hand by celebrating West Berliners. People helped each other up and began dancing on the Wall which until then it had been potentially lethal to approach.
Grim-faced East German border guards merely stood there. The reporter acted as interpreter for the whole world’s surprise at the fact that this was permitted to take place, that the guards weren’t dispersing the masses, or opening fire on them.
In Hungary, the border had been dismantled that summer, but in China the popular uprising in Tiananmen Square had been brutally quelled, with tanks and dead freedom activists as a result. The same reaction that had been expected here.
But it did not come.
The anti-capitalist protective rampart fell without anyone defending it and no one had any idea whom they should thank.
Lotta called and was shaken by the betrayal. She was sixteen years old and blinded with hatred and a desire for revenge. He had drilled her well, supplementing the gardener’s theoretical instruction with practical exercises. Weapons, explosives, close combat. Sexual prowess. All key to undermining the other side.
And now it was over. He had built a human missile that would never be put to use.
So much power that wouldn’t be channelled.
Fanatical Lotta couldn’t understand how her world could crumble like this. The Wall was there to protect the DDR and its people. What would happen now?
‘Is it over now?’ she said, equal parts crushed and furious.
‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s now that it begins. Just lie low.’
Then he had said that she could come over if she wanted. He had realised that if he stuck to his assumed role as a terrorist, he could have fun with Lotta for many years to come while pretending to plan their great revenge in the meantime.
She said she was on her way and hung up, and then he thought about the money.
Fifty million kronor for their big operation – Wahasha. It was to have been spent on pistols, automatic weapons, hand grenades, explosives, cars, safe hiding places in Sweden and abroad, false passports, fees for helpers and flights via many transit points to a well-disposed country in the Middle East. It was an enormous operation that would have resounded across the world.
But now the taskmasters were gone and the Palestinian group didn’t know where the money was. Nor did the other members of Kommando 719. Only he did. No one would ever think to ask for it back. Back where?
With the Wall gone, he realised what would happen. The Stasi was dead and the DDR would rapidly vanish – the whole system eradicated by its own functionaries.
Desperate instructions reached him during the evening: ‘Destroy everything.’
He realised that the Stasi were burning and shredding files as quickly as they could, that alternative stories were being constructed, that all connections to the opposition were being dug up and invoked.
History was being rewritten. The past was being erased.
That suited him fine.
The fortune they had given him for the operation had no sender any longer. No one he had to report to.
The money was his.