2

Quirin Kaiserley left the autobahn in Adlershof in his fourteen-year-old Golf GTI and steered towards the glowing city of glass and dreams. He had already lost his bearings by the first traffic light. Cursing, he turned and tried his luck in the other direction. He thought about the cathedral in Cologne being built over the course of 600 years, with people being able to get accustomed to the sight. But Berlin put entire new quarters up so quickly that you sometimes thought it was a mirage. He glanced nervously at his watch. Almost six. His edginess and impatience increased.

Buildings in which particle accelerators and satellite systems had been developed appeared in front of him. Quirin vaguely recalled a visit over twenty years ago. Back then, no one had thought of a so-called science and technology cluster. Adlershof had seemed unapproachable, closed. State broadcaster of the GDR. Ammunition depot for the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. Previously the Reich broadcaster and an aerodynamics testing facility. Grey barracks, bumpy roads. Conspiratorial meetings between the CIA and the BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. Exploratory talks. Meetings on neutral territory. Exchanges of information. Troop withdrawal. Logistics. The world had changed since then. But the people remained the same.

Quirin followed the signs to Adlershof Media City. He turned off the motor, but didn’t get out. He took a deep breath. This wasn’t stage fright. He had already spent too much time seated in the fake leather couches, bathed by spotlights, and had mastered the role of intelligence expert so well that it was almost routine. This was the tense expectation that he could barely contain. The time had come.

Quirin adjusted his rear-view mirror so that he could see his face. His eyes looked tired, a wreath of wrinkles around them. The blue from his eyes had faded. Twenty-five years on the hunt had left traces. He had spent nearly half of his life looking for a phantom. It had cost him his job, his family, his friends. He saw himself pulling up to the iron gate in the Munich suburb of Pullach. In his hands lay a work reference issued by the Federal Asset Management Munich for ten years of salaried work in the branch office for special assets. Parting by mutual consent. Hardly worth the paper it was printed on. A web of lies to the end. You could always rely on the BND for that.

Quirin reached for the briefcase on the passenger seat, left the car without locking it – he would be on the winning side of a theft with this scrap heap – scurried over the car park, and slowly climbed the front stairs to the studio complex. The doorman knew him and held out a visitor’s badge that had already been filled out for him. The seating area in the foyer was empty.

‘Did anyone ask for me?’

The man was a fossil from the era of state broadcasting, a survivor of seismic shifts because his grey cotton uniform made him nearly invisible. He adjusted the reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and studied the visitor registry with unnerving meticulousness.

‘No.’

‘Or leave anything for me?’

Absurd. No one would leave material of such explosive nature in the hands of a frustrated studio doorman, of all people. The man rose with some effort and walked to an empty wooden shelf, which he viewed contemplatively, as if seeing it for the first time.

‘No.’

Quirin nodded and walked towards a group of chairs, but only set his briefcase on the ground next to it. He walked back and forth and kept an eye on the entrance. She would come. She had to come. Just an hour left until they started recording. Until the moment of truth. Until their triumph. A young unit manager, recognisable by her headset, clipboard and black-framed glasses, hurried through the foyer.

‘Good evening! You must be Mr Kaiserley.’ She wore her hair combed back neatly into a ponytail and was dressed in the uniform nerdy chic of the hip upper-middle class. ‘I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Kirsten.’

Kirsten-without-a-surname beamed at him with that hopeful maybe-we’ll-get-drinks-afterwards gaze, solely because his face was not unfamiliar in the media.

‘I’m still waiting for someone.’

Kirsten tapped her schedule with her pencil. ‘I’ll take you to your dressing room and let the doorman know.’

‘Is Juliane already there?’

Her smile lost a degree of warmth. She adjusted her glasses and glanced at her schedule.

‘Ms Westerhoff is in make-up.’

Kerstin led the way. Quirin grabbed his suitcase and in passing cast a glance through the wide opened studio doors. Three to One, a political talk show, was produced in Adlershof and broadcast every Friday at the end of the main evening programme, after the crime serial and before the midnight news. The time slot was well chosen, the ratings excellent. Domestic political topics of an explosive nature were his specialty. The camera likes you, Juliane had explained one evening at the obligatory after-show party. Heat, wine and too much adrenaline that coursed through his veins like champagne after the show. And I like you too.

How long had they known each other? A quarter-century? He had kept an eye on her career, and she had followed his. That is, as long as he had a career. His crash had been from the greatest heights. She was one of the few people who hadn’t turned their back on him afterwards. Had he thanked her for that back then?

Tonight, he thought. Today they would both celebrate. Page one. Top ratings. Juliane’s glowing eyes. A couple of days of springtime in his soul.

When Quirin had called her up a couple of weeks before and told her about his source – with all due caution – she had been fired up with excitement. She wanted to light the fuse at the end of the show, but like any good journalist, had asked for evidence.

‘We’ll present it.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Sorry. Protection of sources.’

I know what happened back then. I’m in possession of something that will be of interest to you and 3,000 others. Codeword ‘Rosenholz’. Interested?

Rosenholz. Quirin’s pulse had accelerated when he read the email. The sender’s name was Aquavit, and at their first and only meeting had turned out to be a woman. Mid-thirties, no-nonsense, with a hard, northern accent.

She didn’t give her name. The wide, pale face with the narrow eyes below an overgrown fringe seemed detached. She wore a white T-shirt with a Coca-Cola logo across the front. She had been waiting for him in the back room of a bar on Oranienburgstrasse, a small tin in front of her. Florena cream. When he opened the lid and saw the rolled microfilm he knew she hadn’t been lying.

‘Do you have the full file?’ he had asked her, holding his breath.

‘Yes. Filtered from hundreds of thousands of index cards. Produced in 1984 during the filming of the Stasi archive. This is the original. Not the pitiful leftovers that the KGB and CIA gave you after the fall of the wall. These are the real names of all of the GDR’s foreign agents.’

‘What do you want for it? I don’t have any money.’

‘But you have contacts. I want the highest price a German media company is willing to pay. Because this here,’ patting her bag, which the tin had disappeared back into, ‘will finally make heads roll.’

She waited for his answer. She was well informed. About him, about Rosenholz, about what had happened back then.

‘Where did you get it from?’ he had asked. ‘And why only now?’

‘I have my private reasons. I’m not just here because of you. I have to take care of a couple of things before you shout it from the rooftops. Don’t you dare try to cheat me or follow me. Whoever was able to hide this material for twenty-five years is better than all of you put together. So: Deal or no deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘How do you picture it going down?’

‘A bombshell.’

The woman’s narrow eyes became even more tapered.

‘Three to One. The talk show with Juliane Westerhoff. Everyone will be there. Spiegel, Focus, Stern.’

‘Cash? I want 100,000 euros.’

‘I have to negotiate.’

‘Then do it.’

Quirin nodded reluctantly. He was disturbed by the greed, the way she tilted her head.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Write me when and where. No tricks. I know how to handle them. Any attempt to track me and the deal’s off.’

‘Under one condition.’

‘Which would be?’ she asked quickly.

‘I want to be the first to see the films.’

‘A score to settle?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sassnitz?’

If he had needed further evidence – this single word sufficed. She was an insider. She was far too young. She couldn’t have been there back then.

‘What do you know about Sassnitz?’

‘Enough,’ she replied. It was the first time he heard a hint of candour in her voice. ‘Believe me. Enough to know that you would give everything to get a glimpse of the only existing material.’ She took her bag and got up. ‘Settling scores is a hard business. They are never completely settled. Least of all through morality or justice.’

He had watched her go. She was right, he thought. Kirsten glanced at her watch.

‘I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes. You have your own dressing room. We’ve provided for everything. Even the special requests.’

She smiled tellingly and rushed off. Quirin entered a sparsely furnished room. His gaze fell on a machine in the middle of the room with a platform for microfiche and a lens. He flipped the switch and checked if the lamp and automatic film feed were working. His hands were shaking. A quarter-hour left. Where the hell was she? He placed the briefcase on a chair and opened the bottle of mineral water that stood next to the device, along with two glasses, poured himself a glass and gulped it down. Scores to settle.

The stale air, mixed with the smell of plastic adhesive and disinfectants, almost took his breath away. He opened the window, looking out on the car park, and saw someone closing the door to his car and hastily walking away. Tough luck. He didn’t even have a car radio. And whoever thought that a former BND agent would leave anything of value inside a car was an absolute beginner.

He took the electric razor, which he always had along on such occasions, out of his briefcase. Beneath it lay a file labelled Rosenholz. Without the new material it was as worthless as a bundle of old Reichsmarks. He went to the small sink next to the door and while he ran the device over his cheeks he sensed that his nerves were already stretched to breaking point. Someone knocked quietly. He left the razor in the sink and jerked the door open.

‘Quirin! Are you alone?’

Juliane Westerhoff slipped inside. The heavy make-up gave her face the mask-like beauty of a diva from the silver screen. She had already adopted a certain public persona, vaguely reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich at the beginning of her career. Chilly gaze, high cheekbones, finely drawn eyebrows, her dark-brown hair combed away from her face in soft waves – that’s how she was known on screen. No one would recognise her on the street. The mask was a shield she wore like a second skin.

She smiled at him. He hoped that she wouldn’t notice how wretched he felt.

‘Your big night. How does it feel?’

Her green, unnaturally large eyes examined him as if she wanted to test his suitability for television. There were icy grey strands running through his thick dark hair. At six foot one with the wiry figure of a passionate long-distance runner, he was a man who was given gifts by age instead of being robbed by it. For now.

He motioned to the open briefcase. ‘My publisher wants his advance back if I don’t deliver soon.’

‘Then you have it?’

‘Listen . . .’ He had to let her in the loop. ‘I think there’s a problem.’

‘A problem? What problem? The station’s legal department is on standby. The journalists are sitting in the front row. I even saw several of your former colleagues in the audience.’

She moved a step closer and looked deep into his eyes. ‘We’ve prepared some establishing shots. Archive material about the old cards in the Stasi Records Agency, exteriors from Pullach and the BND construction site in Berlin. The colleagues from the late news have their weapons ready, are waiting to hear every single sentence from your lips and pass it on to the news agencies. A representative from the domestic security agency VS is among the guests who will make sure that the material can be transferred and analysed immediately after the show. So I’m asking you . . .’

She moved yet another step closer and he registered a whiff of Opium, the perfume that Dietrich was said to have worn. Her voice became hushed, nothing friendly remained.

‘. . . what’s the problem?’

‘She should have been here long ago.’

‘You’re kidding.’ But she could see that he wasn’t joking. ‘She’s not here?’

She looked around as if someone could have hidden themselves somewhere in the room, which was as Spartan as a jail cell.

‘But you said you were going to bring her with you!’

‘Yeah, I know!’ He turned away, slamming his briefcase shut with a loud bang. She twitched, but then immediately got herself back under control. One simply does not endanger one’s schedule or one’s make-up so close to the taping. Stony-faced, she looked to the side and mechanically ran her right palm over her midnight blue blazer.

‘Oh fuck,’ she murmured. She removed her walkie-talkie from her blazer pocket and spoke into it. ‘Check if a “Florena” is waiting in the foyer. Immediately.’

They had agreed to use this name after Quirin had told Juliane how the source transported the films.

‘No?’ Her big eyes looked at Quirin. She put the device away. ‘She’s not there. What does that mean? She should be here! With you!’

‘We had an agreement . . .’

‘Agreement? Am I hearing “agreement”? I thought you were Siamese twins! Do you have any idea what this means for the show? For me? The entire statute of limitations debate would have been top of the agenda. And now?’

Stasi Background Checks: For or Against? The trailer had been running on television the entire week. This is the topic on Friday evening with Juliane Westerhoff. My guests: representatives from the parties in parliament, the state government in Brandenburg, the head of the Stasi Records Agency, and the former BND Agent Quirin Kaiserley.

Someone knocked. Kirsten peeked inside. A short technician dressed in faded black appeared behind her.

‘Ms Westerhoff? The parliamentary speaker from the left-wing Linke party is here. And Mr Kaiserley should be wired by now.’

‘In a moment!’

Kirsten pulled her head back and disappeared. Juliane took a deep breath.

‘Where are the films?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Dammit! I’ve been running the trailer for a week now! I believed you!’

‘And I saw it. With my own eyes!’

‘So what? You still don’t get what all of this is worth without evidence? Have you learned nothing?’ Quirin watched Juliane shake her head, close to despair. ‘They’re wild accusations, pipe dreams of a crazy former agent!’

He didn’t understand at first. She slowly calmed herself and chose her words more carefully.

‘This story has already hung you out to dry once before,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ll look ridiculous.’

Ridiculous.

When had it begun? The day he handed over his badge? Or much earlier, when no one believed that he had returned from Sassnitz? Perhaps it had also been a gradual process. A long, meandering downward path from BND superstar to being a target in a shooting gallery.

‘OK. I’ll go.’

‘You’re staying. It’s too late now. Concentrate on your role as an expert on intelligence agencies during the cold war. Then I might still be able to save the show.’

‘That’s not what this is about.’

She instantly raised her index finger. ‘Oh yes it is. That’s exactly what this is about.’

Without taking her eyes off him, she went to the door. ‘It’s about your cold ashes after you burn at the stake.’

The spotlights on the rig flashed. The images from the six cameras were already being shown on the monitors in the production booth. A production assistant entered the studio from the lobby. The soft murmur of the audience, kept happy with wine and salty pretzels, was muffled but perceptible.

A technician handed Quirin the transponder of the wireless microphone.

‘Sound check, please.’

‘One, two, three, four,’ Quirin said.

The man listened to what the distant voices in his headset were saying, and then nodded. The production assistant asked Quirin to take the last seat on the right.

‘And one at position one,’ he heard the floor manager from the loudspeakers.

The boxy silhouette of a mobile camera emerged from the semi-darkness. Two young men pushed the pedestal towards the stage. The little red light next to the lens glowed. Up in the control room Quirin’s face filled monitor one.

‘Please don’t look directly into the camera,’ the production assistant said. She seemed jittery, stressed and slightly out of her depth at barely twenty years of age. In contrast to Kirsten, she looked like she worked a side job as a roadie for a rock band. Quirin nodded. The spotlights were blinding. He squinted and spotted Juliane, who was engrossed in a quiet conversation with her managing editor behind the stairs to the audience seats.

‘Two and three, please.’

Two cameramen with Steadicams circled him.

‘Would you like your mineral water sparkling or still?’

‘Sparkling,’ Quirin answered. ‘Did someone ask for me? Or was something dropped off?’

‘No. But I can check again in a second.’

The production assistant leaned down to him.

‘Stupid question, but did you feed the meter?’

Quirin pondered, but then he shook his head. He hadn’t seen a machine anywhere.

‘They’ve started towing recently. I’ll take care of it for you, if that’s OK.’

Quirin forced a smile. It took some effort to act as if everything was the same as normal. ‘That’s more than OK.’

She knelt down. ‘I really inhaled your last book. Completely captivating. I kept asking myself: do those old Russian arms depots still exist?’

She was referring to his second to last publication. He had exposed the fact that any treasure hunter could dig up the hastily buried remains of the departed Soviet Army practically without trying. To the best of his knowledge, nothing had happened beyond the initial hysterical outcry. The girl in front of him gave him the impression she would have liked to head off to look immediately.

‘Not really,’ he lied. Maybe it was better if some things weren’t made public after all.

‘Too bad. Oh well. I’ll go get your water.’ She stood up and scurried off.

Quirin took a breath. He felt as if this short conversation had taken the last of his energy. He would have liked to get up and go. Somewhere where he could be alone and scream out the disappointment that was churning in his guts.

‘The four. Where’s the four?’ The floor manager sounded irritated. ‘Thank you. And the next.’

Following the command, the arm of a crane swept past, just a couple of feet from his head. Camera five.

‘And the six. Teleprompter. Frontal.’ The last camera was pointed directly at the semicircle. ‘Thanks, everyone. That’s it. In position in twenty minutes.’

Quirin stood up and left the stage. His source had vanished. He was sitting high and dry.

The seventh camera on the lighting rig moved. Its lens was barely larger than a finger and with its black metal casing it was almost indistinguishable from the mounting brackets. It followed Quirin’s movements through the room until he disappeared behind the stairs with a short nod in Juliane’s direction.

The CCTV camera was produced by Great Choon Brothers, a top manufacturer from Shenzhen, and sent high-resolution images to a transponder via a secure frequency. This was not located in the AMC control room, but beyond the studio in the cracked stump of a transmitter mast formerly belonging to the Reich Broadcasting Company. From there, the encrypted signal travelled ten miles across the city in a mere 0.87 seconds. It arrived at a computer that sent it two metres further, to a television screen on the wall of the Executive Suite of the Hotel de Rome in Bebelplatz.

Angelina Espinoza removed the headphones.

‘Zoom in.’

She had a voice used to giving commands, the voice of a high-ranking woman, but she could combine her authority with a kind of steely charm that weakened the knees of every man within a hundred metres.

Tobias Täschner, known as TT to colleagues, nodded. He was nervous and glad that he was seated. Espinoza was in her late forties, so a good ten years older than him, a CIA agent, and her real identity was surely completely different. Their last encounter had also started professionally, before ending rather privately. At the moment there was nothing to indicate that she could remember that night at all. She put the headphones back on and nodded to him briefly – ‘let’s roll.’ He zoomed so close to Kaiserley that his face filled the screen. He had set up his equipment on the coffee table, which was so huge that a roller-skater could have pirouetted on it. Everything in this hotel was huge: the bed, which he had only seen in passing through a half-opened door, the flatscreen on the wall delivering brilliant images, the massive chair, the columns in the foyer, the backs of the ten-foot-long crescent-shaped benches a doorman had led him to with a friendly smile, and even he was at least a head taller than TT at around six foot six. When he entered the building in the stone heart of Berlin and had looked around his first thought was ‘Mussolini meets Versace.’

Angelina Espinoza, in contrast, was a dainty five two. Yet when she entered a room, she was as assertive as she was graceful, as if a hotel suite of this size was her custom-made stage, and the rest of the world was too small. She had shoulder-length brown hair that fell across her face in curly waves however often she pulled it back. She wore a trouser suit in subdued beige, paired with a white blouse, all in all a proper business outfit, but TT was still nervous in her presence.

He had met her in Virginia when he, along with the then foreign minister and his entourage, had made a kind of excursion to the CIA with several colleagues from the ‘Federal Office for Telecommunication Statistics, Analysis Department.’ In Langley, they had celebrated the opening to civilian use of GPS, which until then had been used purely militarily. The headquarters had impressed him with the sheer number of buildings on the campus, the auditorium and the expansive memorial garden. The only reminder of the plantation it had once been was the old mansion, Scattergood. Their American colleagues had held a small reception there. Kellermann, his boss, had acted like the Sun King and not even noticed how TT had suddenly found himself trapped in the dark eyes of Warrant Officer Angelina Espinoza behind the back of his superior. Before he could count to three, she had conquered him, led him away and transferred him to her apartment half an hour from Langley, where he enjoyed the rest of the evening and the entire night in near ecstasy: Angelina knew who he was and who he worked for. No tall tales, no silence, no ‘I’m an IT technician at the Berlin Continental Savings and blah blah blah bank,’ but rather the truth, about which it didn’t pay to talk because their experiences were too similar.

The only thing they didn’t do was say their real names. That was taboo. Even – especially – in situations like this. He was Täschner; she was Espinoza. They worked for their respective agencies and were known publicly by these names. Additional aliases and legends were nothing unusual. TT had internalised his work name to such an extent that he could hardly remember his birth name. Or hardly wanted to. The latter was more likely.

Their affair was barely worthy of the name, and so they had left a reunion to the rules of chance. TT welcomed the fact that chance had taken him in hand with this assignment in Berlin, of all places.

She had checked in under the name Sandra Kerring, and he had introduced himself as Oliver Mayr at reception. So he hadn’t known who was awaiting him at the door. His job consisted of recording the live images from the CCTV in Adlershof here at the Hotel de Rome, setting up a dedicated line with Kellermann, and preventing it from being interrupted at any point during the operation if at all possible. And of course anticipate the every need of the specialist from the Agency, who had been specially requested for this mission and was being paid by the BND through a consulting agreement. The instant that Angelina opened the door, he was ready to do his duty with the utmost enthusiasm, even put his body on the line if necessary.

Not her. She was thinking of nothing but her assignment. She reached for a glass of mineral water, drank and TT stared at the light imprint of lipstick her mouth left on the rim of the glass. That would probably be the furthest her physical commitment would go. She seemed focused, the consummate professional.

‘Go back to him and the young woman.’

He moved the joystick and stopped the recording at the beginning of the conversation. The CCTV had an excellent directional microphone – he didn’t even need to hack into the radio signal from Quirin’s mic.

‘Would you like your mineral water still or sparkling?’

‘Sparkling.’

Angelina nodded. ‘Continue.’

‘Stupid question, but did you feed the meter?’

She squinted and observed Quirin’s reaction. Then she had the passage replayed repeatedly in slow motion. Finally, she signalled to TT with a flick of her hand to let the recording continue.

‘Do those old Russian arms depots still exist?’

‘No.’

Angelina smiled and looked at TT. ‘He’s lying. No one took care of finally cleaning up those dumps. Who’s the girl? She’s doing a good job.’

‘No idea.’

The girl was new to the covert operations team and belonged to Kellermann’s exclusive group of favourites. Depending on the boss’s mood, TT was another. But despite all the collegial solidarity and, as closely as they were sitting next to each other, he couldn’t forget that Angelina was working for the competition. And this evening, quite possibly not even exclusively for them.

It was nothing unusual by now. CIA agents supposedly even trained brokers on Wall Street in tactics and disguise, provided through so-called research and advisory firms. They taught their clients the art of deception as well as the detection of lies. Agents had been regulars at Goldman Sachs and SAC Capital Advisors – and had pocketed fat consultancy fees. What was perfectly unremarkable in America, hiring state specialists for private aims, would be unthinkable for virtuous German civil servants. TT didn’t even want to know the sums that would land in Angelina’s private bank account after this job. The suite was surely on expenses.

He zoomed even closer on the face of the renegade. So this is what Kaiserley looked like when he was lying. The traitor. Fouling his own nest. Angelina was occupied with the former agent’s facial expressions, frame by frame, for a solid fifteen minutes. TT followed her orders without interrupting her once. Finally she leaned back on the sprawling cushions and closed her eyes.

‘He winks. He doesn’t blink.’

TT pushed the rack to one side so he could put his feet on the edge of the coffee table and get comfortable himself.

‘And what’s the difference?’

‘Blinking is something you can’t control. Winking, you can. Besides . . .’

She shifted back into an upright position, much to TT’s regret.

‘His pupils contract. Just for a fraction of a second. And then he has one quirk that’s very rare. He . . .’

She wrinkled her nose.

‘What?’

Angelina laid her head on her left shoulder. Her hair slid in front of her face like a glistening veil. She bent forward and TT had to pull himself together to prevent his eyes wandering to her plunging neckline.

‘That,’ she said, ‘is the difference between the pay scale of a federal civil servant and ten thousand dollars. We’ve got twenty minutes.’

She kissed him. Adrenaline shot into TT’s bloodstream. It was like in Langley. Hot, quick, and nearly honest. He asked himself if he had mentioned in her personal dossier back then how quickly she got down to business. Then the time for thinking had passed.

Quirin Kaiserley cast a sideways glance at the neighbour to his right, a deputy leader in the Brandenburg State Parliament. Still fifteen minutes until the end of recording. Right now, he was lecturing on why, in his opinion, the regional government should continue to rule, despite the fact that at least a quarter of them, including the party leader and chairman, had cooperated with the Stasi in the GDR. Juliane wouldn’t let him get his excuses out.

‘In the other states in Germany, Stasi “informal collaborators” are barred from the state legislature. In Thuringia they were even declared “unworthy” of parliament. The western part of the Federal Republic isn’t familiar with the problem. But it exists. Because the former West Germany wasn’t a Stasi-free zone.’

A video recording was played over loudspeaker and monitors. Juliane’s voice came from offstage.

‘What’s certain is that the Ministry for State Security also recruited a large number of citizens in the Federal Republic of Germany. Their names can be found in the so-called “Rosenholz” file.’

Quirin flinched in a way that was hardly perceptible. He searched for Juliane’s gaze. She was looking at her moderator’s cards and sorted them while the segment was running on the screens.

The piece explained that Rosenholz was the name of an intelligence operation in 1993. German Federal Intelligence Officers flew to Washington and were permitted by the CIA to view selected files from the Stasi archives. After long, arduous negotiations the were files returned to the German Federal Government and the Stasi Records Agency – of course only after their American friends had finished their analysis. There were gaping holes in the lists of names, either because CIA agents had also worked for the Stasi, or because the Americans wanted to protect certain sources.

Rosenholz was a bone that had been gnawed clean.

The film didn’t say how the files got to Virginia. It didn’t mention that they had been hidden for weeks in an allotment garden just off the B1 federal motorway before it takes you out of Germany. That had been in Mahlsdorf, just inside the city limits. Quirin had had a tip and immediately informed his colleagues at HQ in Pullach.

It was said a Stasi general and a KGB officer had hidden the material in the cellar of a dacha. But the BND didn’t retrieve it. Why this unique, historic chance had been missed – this was another of the nagging questions that Quirin had never had an answer to. Who was being protected? Who was protecting themselves? And who sat high enough up to keep the hiding spot secret from his own people?

Juliane’s beautiful face reappeared on screen. She looked past Quirin right into the camera before turning to him.

‘Over 3,000 West German citizens might have been Stasi spies. Has the Rosenholz file really uncovered all of them? Quirin Kaiserley, you’re a former agent of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, and are more than sceptical in this regard.’

Quirin saw himself in the monitors. He was too surprised to answer immediately.

‘You say that Rosenholz isn’t the whole story. Is that right?’

He cleared his throat. ‘Yes.’

‘How so?’

‘Part of the files were missing after they were finally given back by the CIA following tough negotiations.’

‘Which parts?’

‘Among others, the entire alphabetic register from La to Li.’

‘So the files were manipulated? By the CIA, the KGB or the Stasi?’

She wanted to corner him. Wanted a public execution. And he was putting his head on the chopping block for her.

‘I can only say that far from all of the Stasi’s foreign agents have been uncovered. They’re still around. They’re holding high and influential positions in this country. Not just this country. They’re susceptible to blackmail. They’ve never spoken to their families about it. They fear for their reputations in politics and business. So they have a great deal of interest in putting an end to the debate.’

There was a slight commotion in the crowd.

But I won’t let that happen, Quirin continued the sentence mentally. They had already tried it in Sassnitz. An entire family was erased. They had trusted me and I failed them. And all the efforts to find the mole were unsuccessful. Maybe I’m not the only one who can’t forget.

Somewhere out there a complete microfilm file existed. The original. It should have been here on this table, in front of the eyes of millions of viewers. And he would have finally known who had betrayed all of them. Could have finally closed that chapter of his life.

Instead, once again he stood there with empty hands. The audience was whispering in their seats.

‘Mr Kaiserley?’

Quirin jumped.

‘Is there evidence for these claims?’

The murmurs fell silent. Juliane shot him daggers. He breathed deeply.

‘Yes,’ he answered. Everyone should hear. Above all, those who had felt secure for twenty-five hellish long years. ‘Yes. There’s proof. I’ve seen the files.’

‘And where are they now?’

Everyone stared at him. Quirin stared at himself through the monitor.

‘Mr Kaiserley, when did you see them? In what circumstances? Do you have evidence?’

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Not yet. But I’ll find it.’

Angelina lay naked on the huge bed’s velvet blanket. TT had connected the equipment in the bedroom so that they could follow the taping from a horizontal position. The CIA agent had stared at the screen the whole time and instructed TT to show her the last thirty seconds once more.

‘Split screen.’

The image on the monitor separated. On the left were the pictures from the AMC camera, the right showed what the CCTV caught. Angelina put her headphones back on, TT followed her cue.

‘Give me Kellermann.’

TT made the camera pan over the rows of audience members and paused at a man in the second-to-last row. He zoomed a little closer. Kellermann was leaning back, arms crossed, a town crier condemned to listen. He was in his early sixties, powerful, good-looking in a casual way with a large nose and uneven facial features. His short hair and brawny physique gave him the air of a wrestler in a tailored suit. But he was one of the highest-ranking department leaders in the BND – and he loved it when his opponents underestimated him. The closing remarks were being presented and you could see the audience to his left and right preparing to leave.

‘Kellermann?’

She pronounced his name in an American way, which almost sounded like Killerman. If TT’s boss was pleased, then he only let it show through the slightest smile.

‘He’s telling the truth.’

Kellermann gave the signal: he clicked the cartridge of his pen and put it in his left jacket pocket.

‘Give me the other positions.’

The CCTV swung around to the production assistant, who reached to her ear at that precise moment, listened attentively, left her position at the foot of the stairs and hurried towards the exit. Then the camera panned to the four other spots, all in the first row. The men who had been seated there had already got up and had slipped away into the mass of people streaming towards the exits.

The left half of the monitor went black. The taping was over. TT used the joystick to direct the CCTV at Kaiserley. He was trying to get rid of his microphone cable without tearing his shirt off.

‘You would have arrested him on the spot, right?’

TT let out a sigh. ‘No idea.’

Angelina laughed quietly. ‘Don’t try to fool me. I spotted one guy from VS and two from BKA. Not to mention the mutts from the press. It wouldn’t be the first time the guy pissed in your . . . muesli?’

‘Cornflakes,’ TT corrected her attempt at German slang. He was upset that Kaiserley got away and was allowed to continue to spread his lies unpunished. The man trampled on everything that the service had once meant to him. He had been a role model for TT. His role model. And now . . .

Angelina ran her fingers softly through his hair. ‘Don’t let it get to you. There are dogs like that everywhere. And you always blame us . . .’ She softly bit his earlobe. ‘If the full files existed, wouldn’t you have found them long ago?

TT looked at her with astonishment. Relations between the two intelligence agencies were close, for long stretches almost brotherly. Although there was no doubt who was the little brother. In the nineties the working relationship was so close that there were even joint operations between German and American agents that Pullach only found out about after the fact. But that was a long time ago. Before TT’s time. Sometimes Kellerman talked about it in his office after he was off the clock. Those were stories like the ones cowboys in the Wild West told around the campfire, or veterans at D-day anniversaries. Kaiserley occasionally appeared in them. Kellermann’s eyes glowed then, until he remembered what had become of his great hero: a journeyman labourer who continuously spread lies and half-truths about the BND.

‘If you don’t have them . . .’ TT said, consciously leaving the end of the sentence hanging in the air.

‘The real Stasi identities?’ Angelina stood up and went into the bathroom, which could easily have swallowed TT’s entire one-bedroom Munich apartment. She continued talking while wrapping herself in a soft, voluminous terrycloth bathrobe and filling the bath.

‘We really have other concerns. I don’t think those original files still exist. Whatever is still in circulation are counterfeits. Things like that always surface. Alleged copies of the Stasi file cards were already floating around on the market in the eighties. They were offered to several newspapers. But at the time no one had the courage to snap them up. So why the big fuss now?’

She returned to the bedroom. ‘What’s so important about these ancient lists of names?’

TT shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s above my pay grade. You shouldn’t ask me.’

She loosened the belt on her bathrobe and came closer.

‘Who then? Killerman?’

She lowered herself onto his lap and TT instantly felt his willingness to deepen transatlantic relations. He was able to reach past Angelina and turn off the monitor. She purred like a cat.

‘Don’t try to fool me. You’re looking for a real bastard.’

She kissed him. ‘Then you lot have to set a trap for him.’

She kissed him again. ‘So give him some bait.’

She kissed him once more. TT’s phone rang. He needed a minute to find it. It lay under the bed, and he asked himself how it had got there. Then he noticed the chaos around them and he didn’t wonder anymore, he just grinned. Unknown caller. Headquarters must have patched him through because his number was secret.

With the uneasy feeling that always overcame him when somebody called him around this time of night, he answered.

‘Yes?’

‘Everything OK?’

TT recognised his boss’s raw voice, filtered to sound chummy.

‘Couldn’t be better.’

‘Listen, I know it’s late. But I need you to do me a favour.’

That didn’t sound good. When Kellermann was acting pally, stress was on the horizon. TT shot a glance at Angelina, who was just getting a bottle of champagne from the minibar. She sensed something had changed as TT sat up and listened with concentration. Finally he nodded.

‘I’ll take care of it.’

He hung up and got out of bed. Angelina raised the bottle and looked at him questioningly.

‘What about this?’

‘I’ll be back in an hour. There’s something I need to take care of first.’

‘Business or pleasure?’

TT pulled on his pants and grinned. ‘Business. The hunter is checking the traps.’