Brandenburg (42 page)

One of the BND men straightened and waved Harland forward, while the other struggled to heft the driver out of his seat and into the back. This accomplished, he got in and drove the car off.

Harland waited for a few seconds before pulling down a ski mask and running to the front door where the other German, now also masked, was trying a series of skeleton keys in the lock. The mechanism succumbed very quickly. By the time he and his German companion had reached the main room, four others were standing round a bemused Abu Jamal who had not had time to move from the table. One of the Germans told him formally that they were executing warrants issued by the French, German and American courts for numerous acts of terrorism, and on the basis of evidence of his plan to carry out further attacks in the West. Abu Jamal looked around the masked faces, astonished. He began to protest in good German that he was an engineer named Halim al Fatah from Egypt. He was in Leipzig legitimately receiving medical treatment and he knew nothing about terrorism. He offered to show them a passport. His head turned from one masked face to another before he let out a stream of indignation - he was too ill to be moved; his guards would be checking any moment; anyone laying hands on him would be arrested and shot as spies. Harland found himself noticing that Abu Jamal dyed his hair and eyebrows and that his lower lip protruded to show a very sick-looking mouth.

He nodded and two of the Germans lifted him up and hustled him out of the front door to the Lada, which Macy Harp had turned round. In a few minutes Abu Jamal would know nothing of his journey through the suburbs to the truck that would take him south. He wouldn’t wake until he reached the BND HQ at Munich-Pullach half an hour away, where he’d be given a medical assessment before interrogation.

Harland watched them go, then shut the door. They needed to search the villa. Despite the use of the arrest warrants, there was absolutely no intention by any of the governments to impede the investigations into Abu Jamal’s operations by consigning him to a drawn-out judicial process. His life expectancy was too short and the threat too large for this to be considered. But documents could be important, partly to prove the active support of Honecker’s regime but mostly because the West needed the vital intelligence to trace Abu Jamal’s network before word leaked out that he had been abducted. At best they had forty-eight hours before the news would pass from East Germany to its embassies all over the Middle East.

They moved around the villa sweeping everything of remote interest into a holdall, but they didn’t find the cache that Harland and the lead German intelligence officer, Claus Neurath, knew must be there. Twenty minutes into the search, Harland thought back to Abu Jamal’s arrival that evening. He was wearing an overcoat that they had forced him to put on before he was bundled into the car. And he was carrying a sheaf of newspapers, which could easily have been used to conceal something. One of the watchers thought he had seen a folder under his arm.

Harland went to the front door, turned and looked at the route that Abu Jamal must have taken into the house. He knew that there had been no time for him to go into another room between being sighted with the nurse at the front of the villa and his appearance in the main room. On the left was a toilet, which contained no conceivable hiding place, and on the right, a little further on, a kind of dresser which was fixed to the wall and included coat pegs, a mirror, a clothes brush that hung from a hook beside the mirror and three drawers at the bottom. Harland searched inside the drawers and felt underneath the dresser but found nothing. He stood up, slipped his hand behind the dresser and pulled up a stiff black plastic wallet. It could have been a free gift from a bank or an insurance company and indeed he noticed the remains of a gold-printed logo on the cover. He withdrew the papers inside and handed them to Neurath, a good Arabic speaker, who whipped through them then clapped him on his back. There couldn’t be any doubt about it - they’d found the file that Kafka had spoken of in her first communication with the West: the money file, which proved the extent of Abu Jamal’s operation and the range of his contacts in Europe and the Middle East.

This was placed inside the holdall, then they prepared to leave via the sliding door. First Harland went round and switched off the lights in the house. When he returned to the main room he saw Neurath flattened against the wall, making agitated downward motions to silence him. He froze. Someone was at the door. Neurath flashed his head round the corner to look at the entrance and raised two fingers. He had seen their shadows on the frosted glass. Whoever it was had entered and they were now making their way down the corridor. In the half light Harland saw that the BND team were all aiming guns in the direction of the corridor. Before he had time to slip backwards into the doorway that led to the stairs, there was a brief commotion in which the two men were surrounded and pushed to the floor with pistols to the back of their heads. Hardly a voice was raised. Harland glanced down at the man nearest to him, a lean blond in a suit. He recognized him immediately from the files as Colonel Peter Zank of the Main Department for Counter-Intelligence, and cursed under his breath. But he said nothing to Neurath for fear of betraying his English accent. In any case it was clear from the look that darted from the slits in Neurath’s ski mask that he knew who Zank was, and moreover he had already decided on precisely the course of action to be taken. Zank and his partner were hauled up, placed on chairs, bound with the ropes, gagged and unceremoniously injected with flunitrazepam. Both men were laid sideways on the floor facing away from each other a yard apart. The last lights were extinguished and the party left the villa through the sliding door and stole through the park to a spot where two cars were waiting with a couple of the best drivers in West Germany. The operation had gone well, but Harland wasn’t celebrating. Zank’s presence in the villa meant he and his department had made the vital connections. Rosenharte and Kafka were in mortal danger and he had no way of contacting them.

He hoped like hell they’d have the sense to leave the city that night.

Towards the close of the service Rosenharte’s gaze drifted across the nave of the church to the galleries on the south side and came to rest on the face of the man he had seen outside Ulrike’s home - Colonel Biermeier’s swaggering young sidekick. Unlike the rest of the Stasi and the Party membership, he had managed to infiltrate the genuine part of the congregation in the galleries and as before was showing every sign of devotion. Rosenharte scanned the rest of the congregation for Biermeier and Zank, but didn’t see them. The light was fading outside and the recesses of the lower gallery were completely in shadow. Maybe they were there or directly below them. He nudged Ulrike and pointed in the man’s direction. She touched his thigh and said she’d talk about it later.

A few seconds before the end of the peace prayers, they slid from their seats and went down the stairway so that when the final blessing was over they were at the main entrance before the rest of the congregation. What greeted them as the doors opened was by no means a riotous mass, but rather a sea of faces, many lit in the dusk by candles that people shielded in their hands. Ulrike had told him about this - if the people were holding candles there could be no mistaking their peaceful intentions. A gentle cheer went up. Rosenharte wondered if the crowd sensed that many of the first people to emerge were in fact Party members who had sat stiffly through the service, trying desperately to defuse the sense of moment that filled the aisles. They had failed, and now, as the congregation spilled out into the square, the rush of benevolence made even the grim loyalists smile.

Ulrike took all this in with an ecstatic, slightly manic grin, then linked arms with Rosenharte and Kurt and surged through the crowd towards the other end of the church. Several well-known figures seemed to be making for the same spot. Ulrike nodded and called out to them. She seemed to know everyone of any importance there. When they reached what appeared to be the head of the march, she withdrew her arms and told Rosenharte and Kurt that she was joining the people at the front. They should walk just behind her so they didn’t lose touch. The demonstration moved off northwards from the Karl-Marx-Platz towards Leipzig’s main station. At a high point in the road Rosenharte and Kurt turned to see the huge swell of people behind them. They had no way of estimating the numbers, but guessed there were anything between 70,000-100,000 Leipzigers on the streets. As before, the overwhelming majority were under thirty years of age. Some of them shouted, ‘We’re staying here!’ and ‘Join us now!’ as they passed onlookers and buildings where the lights were on, but once the crowd was moving, things settled down. It seemed the people had decided that the best way of making their point to the formations of helmeted riot troops and soldiers glimpsed along the way was to pass them in silence.

The aim was to march round the four sides of the Georgi Ring without being stopped - and so achieve the symbolic encirclement of the city. Along the first leg, which took them through a wide canyon of bleak apartment and office blocks, Ulrike broke away from the front rank and came back to them. She pointed to the top of the church that they were passing on the right, and said that a cameraman had hidden in the clock tower to record the demonstration. By the following day the film would be broadcast in the West. She didn’t want her face on every TV screen.

‘What are you going to do afterwards?’ asked Rosenharte.

‘Celebrate,’ she said, as though he was being stupid.

He bent down to her. ‘But if they’ve removed our friend, life is going to become very difficult for you.’

‘I don’t see why. If they’ve done it well, no one will know where he’s gone.’

‘The man’s sick. They’ll know that he hasn’t just left town on a whim. You have to hide.’

‘We’ll see.’ Her expression was so exultant that he wondered whether she was absorbing anything he said. For his part, he knew that he wasn’t going to remain in the city. He would ask her if he could borrow the car until Thursday, by which time he would be making his way to Berlin to meet up with Vladimir and Harland again. He touched her on the shoulder. ‘Ulrike, you have to pay attention. I saw one of the Stasi men come from your house. The same man was in the Nikolaikirche. Maybe he was bugging the place. Maybe he’s tailing you.’

‘Not everything is as it seems,’ she said.

This irritated him. ‘Look, I know this man! I saw him with a colonel in the foreign intelligence service - Biermeier. I told you about him. I saw him last Monday with Zank, here in Leipzig! This is no coincidence.’

She took his hand and looked at it then let her eyes travel up to his face, where she held his gaze with a strange expression. ‘When you arrived at the Nikolaikirche I told you that everything was over. If the foreigners managed to take our friend, which I imagine they did, then it
is
over. My life of deceit is over. And with this demonstration,’ she gestured at the crowd with her free hand, ‘everything changes. Where are the police and the Stasi now? Nowhere. Things have changed for good tonight.’

‘Don’t talk too soon. We have a long way to go and they may arrest people as they make their way home. Violence is still a possibility.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s not going to happen now. The people up in front have had assurances there will be no violence. They have talked to the Vopos and the Party leadership. That’s what they’ve been telling me. The professor was right. Krenz - or someone - overruled the Minister for State Security. Don’t you see? We’ve won.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you’re safe. When they find the Arab missing, they’ll know you had something to do with it. That’s why Zank has been in Leipzig. He’s on to something, I’m sure of it. And this other man - Biermeier’s associate - he’s here for a reason too.’

‘In which case you’re also in danger.’

‘Exactly. And I need to remain free to get Konrad out.’

‘So your solution is?’

‘We hide. I know a place.’

The progress of the march had been slowing and now it came to an abrupt halt alongside a piece of hideous futuristic architecture known as the Tin Box, which had been built a few years before as a symbol of progress. The crowd had shunted into them from behind and she was pressed close. Her fine hair shimmered in the breeze and he smelled her scent. She looked up into his eyes, gently shook her head and mouthed, ‘I’m staying here.’

‘Then I will go without you.’

‘If that’s what you want to do. But you must stay tonight and drink to our victory and remember every minute for when you return to Dresden. Your city will have its own moment. We have set the pattern.’

‘I won’t be returning. My schedule doesn’t allow it. Anyway, they fired me from the gallery on Friday.’

‘You told me you had some kind of protection.’

‘What protection was that?’ he asked.

‘You said someone squared the director of the gallery so you could be absent for long periods.’

‘I didn’t tell you that.’

‘You did.’

He shook his head. ‘How did you know?’

She ignored him and pointed to a couple in front of them. ‘I’m seeing so many people I know tonight. Over there is Max Klein, who is an evolutionary biologist. He was prevented from researching inheritance because the Party does not permit studies that suggest traits such as intelligence are passed from generation to generation. So he does simple research into mice at his home. His wife Sarah is a research psychologist, but because her husband’s work was banned she failed to get the university post she wanted. At the front there’s a woman whose son refused to do military service. He was locked up for eighteen months and came out of Bautzen with a nervous breakdown. My friend Kurt is a brilliant lyricist but he may not have his songs performed in public. And you see the guy he’s talking to?’ Rosenharte craned his neck and saw a small man in leather with a shaved head and two thin sideburns. ‘That’s Ebbe - he’s a graphic artist who works as a plasterer because he once drew a rude cartoon of Chernenko. Those little old monsters - Honecker and Mielke - have been sitting on our heads for too long. Tonight is the beginning of the end for them.’