The Rendition (11 page)

Vanessa normally never used profanity. Our goodbye could have been worse, but not much.

Buck took a swallow of beer, and when he asked who was running the operation, I told him I still didn't know. “Shenlee said someone would be contacting me.”

“Probably, it'll be Shenlee himself. They like him in D.C.” Buck frowned. “But why wouldn't he tell you?”

I shrugged. “Jerry and I have never quite been on the same page.”

“They figure you don't need to know yet.” “

“‘Need to know.' I've heard that often enough.”

Buck was too considerate to say it, but the truth was Shenlee and Colonel Frost considered me expendable. Why not? I'd screwed up the Nadaj rendition. I'd nearly spilled my Sunday morning cup of coffee when I realized the deputy secretary of defense's vague comments to the interviewer were connected to our Kosovo rendition. Buck looked unusually thoughtful, and I had an idea he felt I was in way over my
head with this assignment. As with the Kosovo operation, there seemed to be too many unanswered questions.

“I gave Max Peters a call,” I said after a moment. “I filled him in a little. He knows the case, says it's been in the papers over there.” Max was a German cop Buck and I had worked with way back when, in the years before the Berlin Wall came down. But we knew that things were very different now in Europe from the way they were then.

“How's Max doing?”

“He sounded fine on the telephone. He's retired now.”

“Is there anyone else over there you're planning to talk to?” Buck, I knew, was referring to Irmie.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don't know.”

After paying our bill and saying goodbye to the waitress, we drifted out into the lobby, where people were coming and going, most of them with luggage, all of them in a hurry. In the distance, as we watched, a 747, its flaps down, eased its way down toward a runway.

What really bothered me was the thought that the people in charge didn't have complete confidence in me. I was rusty, that was true. But if they didn't have all that much confidence, why pick me? Again I came back to the same reason: I was expendable.

When I asked Buck if I was being too paranoid, I got the answer I expected. “C'mon, Alex, in this business, there's no such thing as ‘too paranoid.' Remember how it was on the other side of the Wall? Waking up in the middle of the night thinking there were Stasi agents under the bed?”

“Or KGB agents outside the door? Remember Yalta?” Buck grimaced. Yalta, where we vainly tried to recruit a vacationing staff officer in the KGB's First Directorate, was another city from which we had to make a hurried departure by boat. Now that I think of it, I doubt that even one percent of the stuff that went on during the Cold War ever got into the papers. By the time the historians get around to writing things down, there won't be anyone around to tell these stories, and everything will be pretty much forgotten. Maybe it's just as well.

Buck said he'd continue to nose around on his end, and we said goodbye in front of the hotel. He definitely left me with the thought that I never should have accepted this assignment.

As Buck's taxi receded in the distance, I thought again about Jerry Shenlee, a guy I'd known for twenty years, from the time we were both stationed in West Berlin and making the two-mile trip from Tempelhof to the intelligence gathering facility out at Teufelsberg. Tempelhof was the big Berlin airport that, as the Cold War began to heat up, became our headquarters for running agents and carrying on covert activities of every conceivable description. From the out-of-the-way installation at Teufelsberg, which was adjacent to the Grunewald, Berlin's big city park, the National Security Agency conducted electronic eavesdropping on microwave transmissions all over Eastern Europe. The resulting process was very much like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle from an array of tiny, strangely shaped pieces. With the tidbits of information we got—mostly from recon photographs, snatches of gossip, and overheard telephone conversations—the analysts targeted potential agents. While people like Jerry manned the desks and made the decisions—and, incidentally, seemed to get most of the promotions—it was guys like me and Buck who, using a combination of blackmail and enticement, went into the East and did the actual recruiting. Because I felt I was doing an important job that very few other people could do, or that anyone in his right mind would want to do, I still think of those years as a great time in my life.

And, of course, they were made even greater by the fact that I survived them.

But that was then—and now the need is for people who can operate in another part of the world and who can speak languages like Farsi, Pashto, and Arabic. Or maybe they speak Albanian, which would have been useful while I was in Kosovo and tangled up with Nadaj and his crew.

From my hotel room, I called Max Peters, my one good contact in Munich. Max didn't answer, and I left a message telling him when I'd be arriving.

While doing the last of my packing, I ordered two more bottles of beer to add to the three or four I'd already knocked down.

After my reassignment from South America in the 1980s, Buck and I spent three months at an NSA station in the Alps before being posted as “journalists” to Radio Free Europe, which at the time occupied a compound located in a secluded corner of Munich's English Garden. It took a while to adjust to the new situation. Germany—West and East—was the battlefield on which the Cold War was largely fought, and the way things were done in Europe was different from the way they were done in South America. But knowing the language the way my mother spoke it made life much easier—and permitted me to quickly make contacts and establish relationships that would hardly have been possible otherwise.

While I was working at RFE, Max Peters was one of the people I got to know well.

Unfortunately, my personal life took a turn for the worse toward the end of my tour in that part of the world—and I get a headache whenever I think about that. And the truth is I still think of it a great deal. But that's another story. Max and Irmie had been colleagues and, naturally enough I guess, it was the personal stuff to which he immediately referred when I met him a couple of hours after my arrival.

“You don't look happy, Alex,” Max said only minutes after we'd shaken hands and plunked ourselves down on a bench in the English Garden, Munich's big city park that, with its broad paths and rectangular shape, always put me in mind of New York City's Central Park.

“Does it show, Max?” I said, as I watched a teenager dribble a soccer ball across the broad expanse of grass.

“I'm afraid so,” Max said. “You're wishing you were somewhere else. I can see it in your eyes.”

Max was right, of course. The city held too many painful memories. Despite the piles of snow and slush-covered paths, the skaters and bike riders were zooming back and forth. As I looked around, I remembered the many hand-in-hand strolls that Irmie and I used to take here, often in the evenings after work. I'd left at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances, and that thought depressed me even further. Nevertheless, now that I was back and shooting the breeze with Max in the Bavarian-accented German that I'd learned from my mom and later picked up in these parts, I unexpectedly found myself thinking about Irmie again and wondering how she'd weathered the passing years.

Trying to get away from the personal stuff, I asked Max about Douglas Brinkman.

“I don't know if I can be of much help to you on this one, Alex,” Max said. That was about what I figured Max would say.

Max has wavy gray hair, bright blue eyes, a silvery mustache, a slightly flushed face, and a noticeable beer gut. During the Cold War, he was a Munich police detective, who spent a number of years as liaison between the city's police force and American intelligence, and that's how we met.

After my arrival that morning at nine a.m., I took a quick look around the new Franz Josef Strauss Airport, then took a taxi to the address Shenlee had given me. The city seemed to have changed considerably since my last visit nine years before. One improvement was a three-lane highway that I didn't remember having existed when I left, and in the distance I could see that the city's skyline exhibited a number of new buildings.

The apartment—or safe house—had a good location, on a quiet side street not far from the Hirschgarten, and I was relieved to find the keys Shenlee had given me all fit. It's anybody's guess how many of these setups our intelligence services have at their disposal around the world. From my experience in staying in quite a few of them, I can say they vary greatly as far as comfort and convenience go. In a couple I
recall having no running water and having to sack out in a sleeping bag on a concrete floor. After looking this one over and deciding it would be more than adequate, I tossed my gear into one of the two bedrooms and tried out one of the cell phones I found on the dining room table. I called Max, then took a taxi out to the English Garden.

When Max said that he couldn't be of much help, I asked him what the problem was.

“I have an uncomfortable feeling, Alex. The Vogt woman was a journalist. I don't want to be dragged into this case if it has political implications.” Max looked somber, more somber than I remembered him. He seemed to be at loose ends. His wife, Anna, had died two years before, and I had the idea that he hadn't gotten over losing her.

“Whatever you can do, Max, I'd appreciate it.” I hadn't been encouraged by the fact that when I called Max and told him what I wanted he suggested we meet on a bench in the English Garden rather than in a downtown restaurant. Or rather than in the noisy canteen in Munich's downtown police headquarters in the Ettstrasse, a place where, in the old days, we discussed a lot of business and drank a lot of coffee.

And had plenty of laughs. I already had the feeling that on this trip there wouldn't be too much to laugh about.

“Things aren't like they once were, Alex.” Max was referring to the fact that German-American relations had noticeably cooled in the years since the Wall came down and the Cold War ended. Germany, these days, seemed to be cozying up to Russia, its former enemy, while distancing itself from the United States, its former friend and protector. Because of quite a few harrowing East Bloc experiences, I knew I would always have problems thinking of Stasi and KGB types as dependable friends.

I wondered whether this might be a matter on which Max and I did not exactly see eye to eye—quite possibly, one of many such matters.

“Sure, Max. I read the papers too.”

“We don't need you to protect us from those big, bad Russians anymore. And we're still mad about the way your GIs were constantly taking our women back to America.”

“Could it be possible that we treat women better in the States? And
maybe us Yanks deserve some credit for pumping up the German economy for all those years.”

Max smiled, then nodded in the direction of the restaurant adjacent to the Chinese Tower, one of the English Garden's landmarks. “I'll buy you a beer. Then we'll be even.”

With the weather having turned cool, I was glad to go indoors.

After we'd found a table, Max said, “You're looking good, Alex. You haven't changed much since the last time I saw you.”

Max was being kind. My face still showed some signs from the banging around I got in Kosovo. There were a couple of small scars, one long scar, quite a large indentation in my forehead, and my nose now leaned slightly to the starboard. The emotional scars were invisible, at least I hoped they were.

I lowered my voice. “Like I said, Max, anything you can tell me about Brinkman would be helpful.”

“Do you have any kind of official status, Alex?”

I made a sour face. Jerry Shenlee had made a point of saying I'd be traveling as a tourist. As we watched the waitress set down two half-liter glasses of beer, I said, “I'm a concerned citizen. Isn't that enough?”

“Concerned citizen? What are you concerned about?” It was Max's turn to look serious.

“Cheers, Max. Prosit.”

“Prosit.” Max put down his glass, wiped his lips. “After you called, I talked to one of the homicide detectives who handled the case.”

“A good cop? Dependable?”

“He's not one of my favorite people. But that's neither here nor there. I got along better with his partner, but he's left the force.” Max's face clouded over. “Dropped out of sight, actually. He might be dead. No one knows for sure.”

“What did the detective say?”

“According to him, Brinkman and Miss Vogt were friendly, and spending a lot of time together. He's a former member of Special Forces, and he met her in Afghanistan, where he was stationed and where she was working as a correspondent for
Welt-Bericht
. According to the guy I spoke with, Brinkman's a violent guy with a short fuse.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked up his arrest record.”

“Brinkman was a Green Beret. Is that what you're talking about?”

“He was arrested some years back for fighting in a bar.”

I didn't say anything, recalling a few of the restaurants I'd broken up before I'd become at least partially socialized. Max saw that I was far from convinced.

Gazing at me over the beer glass with his cold blue eyes, he said, “Maybe Miss Vogt was about to give him the gate. He blew his stack.” He paused. “From what I understand, she was a looker.”

“You think that's the way it happened, Max? That sounds a little too pat.” I'm sensitive to the way the police, no matter what country they belong to, like to make the facts and circumstances of a situation fit whatever case they're trying to make.

“Alex, the woman had a dozen knife wounds in her. Then she was shot. Someone was very mad about something. Who else would it be but Brinkman? And there were other things.”