9

Klaus Dombrowski had paternal feelings. Of course they weren’t compatible with those that he’d had at the births of his three children by three different women. But he characterised this vague mood of responsibility as such because he couldn’t think of a better way to describe the way he felt about Judith.

He stood in his office and watched the return of his employees like a Roman commander overseeing the homecoming of the victorious cohorts: trucks manoeuvred in the yard, vans arrived and delivered the cleaning crew from the early shift directly in front of the door of the changing rooms. He looked at the clock on the wall – a little after three. Josef was the first to climb out. He was followed by that useless intern. Dombrowski had seen at first glance that he either needed basic army training or someone like Judith to make him get his act together. Six additional workers followed, the last closing the door. The van was empty; Judith wasn’t there. And there was a vehicle missing.

Dombrowski furrowed his brow. The bouquet of roses was still in his office reminding him that something strange had happened in Judith’s life. He went over to the barracks and was just in time to catch the useless intern swiping a time card through the slot. Dombrowski grabbed it out of his hand, and held up the photo on the card, next to the boy’s impertinent face.

‘I don’t see any similarity. Not in the slightest,’ he growled. He turned ‘Josef?’ he yelled. No answer. ‘Josef?’

The second call rang out through the tiled room like a trumpet blast. Josef, smock half off, peered out of a door in the hallway.

‘Yeah, boss?’

‘Come along. Both of you.’

Josef and the useless intern stood before him in his office with heads hanging low. Dombrowski prowled back and forth and almost chewed his cigarillo to bits in his fury.

‘Where’s she gone?’

Josef looked up. ‘No idea, boss. This guy here showed up and said he was supposed to fill in for her.’

The boy was chewing on his lower lip, leaning against the wall in a James Dean pose, hands in his pockets. Dombrowski stood in front of him menacingly until he finally bothered to look him in the eye.

‘It’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘It’s not like I’m coming back.’

He pushed himself off the wall. Dombrowski grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him back into his starting position. ‘I only did her a favour . . .’

‘Where’d she go?’

‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘And where’s the vehicle? What happened to the vehicle?’

‘How the hell would I know?’

Dombrowski’s gaze swivelled to Josef.

‘She was suddenly gone,’ the foreman said. ‘I don’t ask who does the work. Main thing is that it gets done.’

Dombrowski huffed. He knew things happened in his company that he’d rather not know about. He’d always turned a blind eye up until now. The time card trick was the oldest thing since the time-punch machines had been invented. He tossed the plastic card on the table and felt stupid as he said: ‘It’s fraud. Instant dismissal.’

‘I’m not even employed,’ the smarty-pants intern pointed out and stared insolently at the massive bouquet of roses. You could see on his face what he thought about men who decorated their offices with wax-yellow flower arrangements over three feet high. Something snapped inside Dombrowski. He would have liked nothing better than to slap the boy. But he restrained his inner boxer and nodded.

‘And that’s exactly what we’ll do now. Josef? The boy will take Judith’s place. Until she returns. And if you’re not here first thing in the morning at 5:30 tomorrow, I’ll knock down your door and pull you out of bed myself.’

‘Nope.’ The boy started shuffling towards the door. ‘Not happening. I did her a favour. You can’t lock me up for that.’

He tore open the door, fast as lightning. Dombrowski signalled to Josef who grabbed the runaway, and hauled him back.

‘Hey!’

Josef stood in front of the door and crossed his arms. He was at least a head taller than the intern.

‘I think we have to explain something to you,’ Dombrowski said. ‘How things work with us. Some people say, cling together, swing together. Others just call it keeping your word.’

Dombrowski took the card and held it under the boy’s nose.

‘You promised you’d stand in for her?’

The boy glanced quickly at the door. Josef shifted his weight from one foot to another.

‘Yes.’

‘Then do it. Until she comes back. You’ll sign in with this card in the morning and sign out each evening.’

Josef nodded in agreement. He made it look like a serious threat.

The boy looked at the card. ‘How long?’

‘Are you deaf? Until she’s back. Or until you can remember where she headed off to.’

‘Sure.’ He put the card in his back pocket and shrugged. ‘I don’t know where she wanted to go. She went to the mortuary and then she split.’

Liepelt. Dombrowski spat out a crumble of tobacco.

‘Out.’

Josef and the boy disappeared like bolts of lightning. Dombrowski went to the desk and fell into the chair. Olaf Liepelt. Also one of Judith’s protégés. She had pulled him out of the alley and organised a job for him at the mortuary a year later.

Dombrowski pulled open the drawer. The gun was still there. He’d give Judith twenty-four hours. If she didn’t show up after that, he’d have some choice words with Liepelt.

The telephone rang. It was the same guy on the line who had been annoying him all morning.

‘No! She’s not here. She’ll get back to you!’ he yelled and hung up.

He kicked the drawer shut with a bang. Paternal feelings. Fucking hell. She had run off. She’d never done that. Maybe there was a man involved. Not the one who was constantly calling and had already left his number a million times. Someone who sent yellow roses and acted mysterious. Someone who didn’t call, just sent his message via a bouquet. Dombrowski went to the window, ripped it open and sent a shrill two-finger whistle across the yard.

‘Josef!’

Already on his way back into the locker rooms, the foreman jumped and turned around.

Whoever sends a wreath like that to a woman was either gay or wanted something. Judith wasn’t the ideal candidate for either option. But there was nothing he could do while he couldn’t get his hands on her. Dombrowski looked at his notebook. There were three telephone numbers written down. The first belonged to the rose gentleman. The second to this annoying guy, Kaiser-whatever, who kept hassling him with questions. The third was a cop who claimed to be called Franz Ferdinand Maike. He pulled up his rolodex and turned it to L. Liepelt. There we go. He carefully wrote down his number as the fourth on the list. He took his cold cigarillo and sucked on it thoughtfully. From zero to four in forty-eight hours.

‘Boss?’

Dombrowski motioned to the bouquet.

‘Get rid of it.’

Josef nodded. When the office looked like an office again and not a drag queen’s dressing room, Dombrowski leaned back in his chair. He took the notebook and looked at the numbers again. He’d call them, one after another. And if any of them was responsible for Judith’s being in trouble, Dombrowski would break every one of his bones.

Josef carried the bouquet across the yard ignoring the jeering comments of his colleagues and threw it in one of the containers due to go back to the recycling plant in the next couple of days.

There were two rusty spring mattresses stacked next to the container and several small pieces of furniture, remnants from apartments that the clean-out crews had deposited in the yard. He used the opportunity to toss everything into the container. All the flowers were squashed, except for one bloom that was severed and rolled a bit further into the corner. If Josef had looked more closely, then he might have recognised a two millimetre long piece of silver wire that protruded out of the broken stem. It had been connected with a ferrite rod only a couple of seconds before, which delivered energy between 0.6 and 6 volts via a button battery. That power was sufficient for a radius between fifty and one hundred metres.

The assembly kit had a value of around eighty cents and had been a bit of DIY equipment. Most of the intelligence services built their own bugs, partly because of cost – specialised listening devices could easily cost a hundred times more – but also, because homemade bugs were much harder to identify and therefore corresponded to the maxim of plausible deniability.

Josef knew nothing about this principle, but then Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair probably also wouldn’t have interested him. In his eyes, plausible deniability simply meant: you’re lying. And if you were caught lying, you had to pay. Not getting caught was the trick.

He ran quickly to the changing room. Time to knock off.

TT sat at a desk in the ground floor of the Department for Technical Reconnaissance – SIGINT – and looked out at the three cameras that were watching over the entrance to Heilmannstrasse 30 in Munich Pullach. A faded concrete wall shielded the compound from the outside world. The secret city. Streets, tennis courts, loosely grouped units of buildings, separated by park-like green areas.

The SIGINT building was opposite the Leadership and Information Centre, or ‘General Situation’ for short. His days in Pullach were numbered. When the headquarters moved to Berlin, he would go along too, but he would miss all the green and the exclusivity of this workplace. He had seen a model of the new intelligence headquarters. They could sugar-coat it as much as they wanted but it still remained a concrete bunker in the middle of a metropolis. Nothing comparable with the West German stolidity and the small-town charm of Pullach.

In Berlin he wouldn’t have a direct line of sight to the parking spaces of the department directors. There he wouldn’t know that Kellermann had arrived at the General Situation two hours before and still hadn’t let him know. Not a good sign. TT was on tenterhooks.

He tried to concentrate on his task: evaluating Angelina Espinoza, confirming her identity, her character, her preferences – it was precisely at this point that he was having serious problems. He would have left it out if it had been possible.

Ms Espinoza explained openly that she was paid for the analysis of the target person, and fulfilled her task with great expertise and competence.

He stared at the computer monitor. He had taken a half-hour to write that sentence. And only because he wanted to avoid getting to the point. Of course he could explain the quickie. Things like that happened and were even desirable, from case to case. The more that was known about a person working for another service, the better. Who knew what these compromising details could be worth someday?

After the conclusion of the observation of Quirin Kaiserley, there was a continuation of non-work activities. However, this was initiated by Ms Espinoza . . .

He deleted the sentence.

Despite her forty-eight years, Ms Espinoza is in excellent physical condition. This can be attributed to her athletic activities. I was able to confirm that no noteworthy external changes had taken place since our last work contact.

Did Kellermann read the reports? What was he doing? He should been long done with his session with the department president. Surely the Berlin mishap was discussed. TT looked back over to the General Situation building but except for two dark Mercedes Benz limousines, carelessly parked in front of the entrance rather than in the subterranean garage, nothing indicated that anyone was there at the moment.

The president was hardly ever seen anyway. Whether he was staying in his work mansion in Berlin – the rumour that it was located in Wannsee had surfaced repeatedly – or in his office in Pullach, his whereabouts were known only by his secretary at best. Perhaps also by people like Kellermann, who had connections at the top because they had pushed everything else out of the way. From time to time there was speculation about Kellermann’s retirement, but he had stayed put, despite some hiccups in his career. He was like a boxer: knocked down occasionally but never knocked out. By now he had established himself so firmly that his name was being whispered as a successor to the current president.

Kellermann belonged to a different generation. One of the most senior department heads, it was rumoured he had once looked Khrushchev in the eye via satellite. A cold warrior. A power seeker. Someone who rolled up his sleeves and occasionally put his foot down. And that was exactly what branded him a dinosaur in the eyes of younger agents.

For TT the future of the intelligence services was in the hands of those who had grown up with computers rather than an abacus. What he had to do with this report had little to do with the intelligence service as he understood it. Reports. Confirmation of identities. That was yesterday. Tomorrow belonged to those who could line up zeros and ones. He was overqualified for this shit.

OK. There was no way around it. TT bent over the keyboard. Angelina Espinoza had probably already written her report. Everyone did that. Allegedly shady characters were even invented for the purposes of assignments to test if they would correctly report everything. TT would have liked to know what Angelina wrote about him.

Sexual activity occurred. However, this remained within the context of the usual and did not take an excessive nature.

The last sentence excited him because it was greatly understated. The telephone rang. TT recognised the Berlin area code. Angelina? He didn’t know how long she wanted to stay in Germany. Maybe she missed him. Maybe she was also busy writing something like . . . was a form of stress reduction attributable to work and the situation . . . or Tobias Täschner is an extraordinarily experienced lover for his young age . . . TT grinned. The security conference in Munich was starting in two weeks. Maybe . . .

‘Tobias?’

TT didn’t reply.

‘Or Karsten Michael Oliver Whatever? I can’t ever decide whom I should address. So many names. You’re carving out a career.’

‘TT,’ answered TT. ‘Simply TT. Can I do anything for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean can I patch you through or something like that?’

‘I’ll be in Munich in two hours. I want to see you.’

‘No.’

TT hung up. Kaiserley. How did he get his number? And the aliases? The telephone rang again.

‘Don’t have time.’

‘I reserved a table at Rabenwirt for six p.m. We have to talk.’

‘I’m sorry. Find someone else if you’re lonely.’

Kaiserley didn’t say anything. TT cut the connection. The telephone rang again but he didn’t pick up. A colleague from next door, on his way to the coffee machine, stopped in front of his open door and glanced inside.

‘Everything OK?’

TT nodded, and the colleague continued on. The telephone rang again. Repeatedly, persistently and noisily. He would have liked to rip the device from the wall and fling it onto the car park. He stared at the keyboard. The colleague returned.

‘Why aren’t you answering your telephone? Kellermann wants to talk to you. In his office.’

Kellermann’s office was on the top floor of the same building. Nothing special. A metal cabinet for the files, a picture of the Federal President on the wall, a large desk with steel corners and his own shredder. Next to the telephone the customary framed photograph. TT didn’t know who was in the picture but he guessed it was the wife mid-golf swing.

Kellermann motioned to the pair of Le Corbusier style, black leather sofas. TT took a seat and examined the crystal bowl on the coffee table. Probably from the stock of gifts that the foreign heads of allied services brought along with pleasant regularity. Presumably there was a rumour circulating internationally that Germany was running short on crystal bowls.

Kellermann’s secretary, a middle-aged woman with the charm and erotic charisma of a parking warden, served coffee and biscuits. Kellermann took the thermos can and TT held out his cup. His hands were shaking and the cup clattered on the saucer. The secretary left and they were all alone.

‘Dumb mistake,’ the boss said and took a seat. He pushed the plate with the biscuits in TT’s direction. ‘But no reason to get nervous right away. We know a lot. But how cleaning ladies divvy up their time is one of the great mysteries of the universe.’

TT took a biscuit.

‘It was a fluke. Things like that can’t happen but they do anyway. The human factor. Was this the woman who ambushed you?’

Kellermann went to his desk and took a photo, handing it over to TT. Presumably taken by Unit 6, the camera that TT had left in his hasty departure. TT nodded.

‘That’s her. But she didn’t have some kind of smock on, she wore a special suit instead. And she had a gas cylinder along with . . .’

He paused.

‘Oxygen,’ Kellermann completed the sentence. Without losing sight of TT, he sat back down. ‘She was there to clean up the crime scene. A death scene cleaner. However, what she was doing in the apartment at this time of night is beyond our knowledge. But we’d like to know.’

Kellermann took the photo out of TT’s hand and placed it on the table.

‘We need to know what she has planned.’

TT nodded and drank a sip of coffee. Only after the pause in the conversation had stretched out a little too long did he realise that he was expected to give an answer.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Kellermann put his fingertips together and studied the photo as if it was a snapshot from an American spy plane.

‘Her name is Judith Kepler. She works at a building cleaning company by the name of Dombrowski Facility Management in Berlin Neukölln. Everything you see was put together by dearest Clary.’

Kellermann never used the proper name of his secretaries. And ‘dearest Clary’, ‘little Mary’, ‘Annie’ all accepted this habit with stoic serenity, aware that a boss who didn’t demand much more than physical presence was a rarity in the Munich metropolitan area.

TT nodded.

‘We have to find the woman. But we don’t know where she is. You’ve got to help us.’

Now the chummy stuff was back. Perhaps his situation must not be that bad after all.

‘Phone?’

‘Turned off.’

‘Credit cards? Cash machines?’

‘That’s your job.’

TT thought. ‘A Trojan?’

They weren’t allowed to hack into computers but they did anyway. Every once in a while there were initiatives to make such operations subject to authorisation, but this was always vetoed by the Minister of the Interior. As long as there weren’t any relevant regulations and every single online investigation had been registered with the Federal Parliament’s Control Committee, then they were in a grey area.

Kellermann crossed his arms and nodded. TT set down his cup.

‘So when you order something like that . . .’

‘That’s not an order. It isn’t even a question. This conversation officially never happened. Just like your nocturnal operation in Berlin and the loss of Unit 6. You talk to me and no one else. You inform me immediately when you’ve found out what Judith Kepler is up to. You’ll get new cover stories, and the case will be closed. Do you understand?’

TT nodded quickly. Kellermann’s abrupt move from the informal to the formal irritated him every time. His boss handed him the photo.

‘One question.’

‘Yes?’ Kellermann snapped.

‘What happened in that apartment? Was that us?’

Kellermann looked at him for a long time. Only when TT no longer expected to get an answer did he say: ‘I have no idea. And can I tell you something? I don’t even want to know.’