The White Vixen (35 page)

***

At the moment, Oberst Becker was working on keeping his fear and anger in check. He was angry at himself, for leaving the vital VALKYRIE file on his desk. What a stupid mistake! The file was right where he’d left it, underneath the newspaper, but he couldn’t be sure whether Altmann or anyone else had disturbed it. Normally the file never left his briefcase except for those times he was actually working on it. He thought it had been about 1600 hours when he’d been examining it, and then some unrelated matters suddenly came up, requiring his immediate attention, and the file was left on the desk.

Becker knew that Altmann had stayed late, as was his habit, and he was sure the fussy young adjutant had also come into his office, which was also his habit. So it was likely Altmann saw the newspaper, and then the file underneath it, and he would have read it. Altmann had a high security clearance for normal ASBw work, after all. He would’ve assumed it was something rather routine.

The oberst picked up his phone and called the security desk. “Have you found Altmann yet?”

“No, Herr Oberst. My last report from the field units said they had checked his apartment and the public library. No one has seen him there this evening. He did, however, dine at his customary beer hall in Schwabing, and left around 2000 hours.”

Becker checked his watch. An hour ago. “You know where to look next,” he said.

“My men are scouring the neighborhood as we speak, Herr Oberst.”

“Very well. Keep me informed.”

Becker made another effort to compose himself. He would find Altmann, and then he would find out if he’d read the file, and then if he’d told anybody. At that point, the oberst knew he might have to make a very difficult decision.

***

Matthias left the brothel shortly after Altmann had recovered his senses, completed dressing and left with hardly a word. Matthias had carefully turned back the hands on the intelligence officer’s watch a half hour. Eventually Altmann would discover the time discrepancy, but by then it would be too late to do anything about it. As to their conversation, Altmann would remember nothing about it, or so the young man had been told.

The prostitute went to a public phone and placed a call. After a short conversation, which included a specific code word that Matthias had been warned to use only if he had extremely sensitive information, he hung up the phone and hailed a cab. Thirty minutes later, he was walking through a darkened public park. When he got close to the statue of Frederick the Great, he saw the man in the long coat waiting for him.

“Johann, you old fart, is that you?” Matthias asked.

“Johann went to Berlin last week,” the man replied. The identification code established, Matthias went up to the man. He spoke a few more whispered words, and the two of them went off through the park. Matthias hardly dared hope that this might be the time his information would actually earn his freedom, and that of his elderly mother back in Dresden. They’d told him they would do that, eventually; the Stasi officer who talked to him after his arrest six months ago made it clear that cooperation would be beneficial for him and his mother. Resistance, he said, would not be.

***

Johann’s friend knew he had something hot when the fag finished his story. The man had nothing but contempt for the little queer, but he had to run him anyway. The man was an officer of MfS, the
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,
the Ministry of State Security for the German Democratic Republic. Commonly known as Stasi, it was primarily responsible for internal security within East Germany, but also maintained a foreign intelligence directorate for operations in the Federal Republic and other NATO nations. Generally they passed their information on to the KGB, and the officer knew this particular report would quickly find its way to Moscow. First, though, he had to get it to his own people in East Berlin. What they would do with it was not his concern. He hoped, though, that the report’s sensitivity, and his efficiency in handling it, would pay off for him. Perhaps a promotion, but not a transfer back home. Like virtually all Stasi agents posted outside the worker’s paradise of the East, he had no desire to actually go back and live there. The West was decadent and its society was doomed, but in the meantime, it was a pretty nice place to live.

Unlike most government bureaucracies, intelligence agencies tended to move rather quickly when the information they received was deemed important. Stasi was no different. Among its ranks were men, and a few women, who were dedicated communists and loyal to the state. Most of them, though, were in the game for reasons other than service to the men in East Berlin who allegedly ran the country. Many were in it for the money and the perks, which for high-ranking Stasi officers were considerable, by comparison to the average worker in their gray, humorless nation. A fair number were in it for the excitement, and more than a few were there to satisfy certain base instincts that came into play whenever they uncovered individuals who were planning treason against the state.

Whatever their motivations, every one of the 90,000 people who staffed the agency, and their quarter-million informants who were in every city and hamlet in the East and most of those in the West, knew who was really running the show. That was why Matthias’ report, forwarded by the man in the park, quickly
worked its way up the ladder in Stasi’s East Berlin headquarters once the coded message was received from Munich.

At seven o’clock the next morning, as a frightened and exhausted Heinrich Altmann was being interrogated yet again by ASBw security officers in Munich, the general who was the head of MfS was reading the file that had been handed to him by a high-ranking officer of the Bavarian desk just minutes before, upon his arrival at his East Berlin office for another long day. The general read the file carefully twice through, asked some questions of the nervous colonel, was satisfied of the document’s authenticity, and dismissed his subordinate. The colonel breathed a silent sigh of relief and returned to his own office, thinking of a telephone call he would have to make later that day, which would undoubtedly lead to a very risky meeting sometime that night. In his own office, the MfS general read through the file one more time and reached for a certain telephone on his desk.

One hour later, at 0930 hours Moscow time, the general in charge of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate climbed a flight of stairs at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, carrying a red-bordered file whose contents had upset him greatly. He went directly to the office of the chairman and was waved inside by the secretary. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who was two months away from his fifteenth anniversary as head of the most powerful intelligence and security agency the world had ever known, was sitting behind his desk. He’d been forewarned of the general’s visit and was expecting to read something interesting. This file, however, was much more than interesting. Andropov read it twice, asked three questions of his subordinate, ordered him to verify the information with other sources in West Germany as quickly as possible, and dismissed him. The chairman then told his secretary to cancel his appointments for the rest of the day and hold his calls. He had to think this one through.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Fort Monckton, England

Saturday, March 27th, 1982

Jo Ann Geary pulled the headphones off and slumped back in her chair. The reels of tape kept turning on the machine in front of her, and after a moment she mustered the energy to reach forward and turn it off. The German voices in the headphones ceased, giving her a respite she knew would be short-lived.

She had to get some rest, that was all there was to it. She’d been in England only four days and her body was just now coming to grips with the jet lag. It hadn’t helped that she’d insisted on jumping right into orientation and training upon her arrival in London. Sir David gently suggested she rest for a day, but Jo would have none of it. Now she wished she’d taken his advice. Fatigue pulled at her eyes like cat’s paws.

Not too many people on the post seemed to be resting, though. Word had come through the previous day that Argentine marines had landed on South Georgia, part of the Dependencies, east of the Falklands. The Royal Marine garrison was outnumbered five to one, and it was said the Argies had warships ready to support their marines. The British position on the island was untenable, and there was no way to send in reinforcements. When the fighting started, it wouldn’t last long. The Falklands garrison had been put on war alert. The invasion was only days away, it was said, perhaps hours.

No formal training sessions were scheduled today or tomorrow anyway, and she suspected that was Sir David’s doing. Jo had decided to come to the language lab on her own. She was picking up the German pretty quickly and had no doubt that she would be fairly conversant in the language by the time she arrived in Buenos Aires. The Russian and the Armenian, however, would be another matter. Like Russian, Armenian did not use the Roman alphabet, but it didn’t use the Russian Cyrillic, either. Not only that, she had to learn a specific dialect, Eastern Armenian, since the woman she would impersonate had grown up in the capital, Yerevan. An Armenian from closer to the Turkish border would use the western dialect. She had no doubt that, given time, she could learn both Armenian and Russian, but time was one thing in short supply. Her instructors said it would be enough that she learned some common phrases in both and hope for the best. Most of the people she would be dealing with in Argentina would, after all, be speaking Spanish or German.

She glanced at her watch: nearly three p.m. She decided to knock off for the day and head to the gymnasium. A workout always served to energize her, and on her previous visits she’d noticed some of the personnel here at the MI6 training center were practicing martial arts moves. Perhaps she could find someone to spar with.

She’d asked permission to contact Ian, whom she thought was at his base in Poole, but had yet to get an answer. Security was obviously of the utmost concern here, but if anyone should have checked out as a good security risk, it was a decorated lieutenant colonel of SBS. But when she arrived back at her quarters, the message light on her phone was dark.

She had almost finished changing into her workout gear of tank top, shorts and sneakers when the phone rang. Her small room came with a double bed, a desk and nightstand, a radio and a television set. She’d found a classical music radio station and kept it on in the background when she studied, and she ignored the TV except for the nightly BBC newscast. The phone jangled again, and she picked it up. It was the duty officer in the commandant’s office, asking her to stop by as soon as possible.

Brigadier Reginald Paulson was British Army through and through; he was in command of Fort Monckton because it was, officially, an Army installation, although it was used almost exclusively for the training of MI6 agents as well as those from MI-5, its domestic counterpart. Paulson had met Jo Ann upon her arrival at the post two days ago. Now he welcomed her back into his office with a friendly smile. He was in uniform, and that made her feel a bit self-conscious.

“My signals officer received an urgent message from Century House a short time ago,” Paulson said. “I was ordered to present it to you personally.” He handed her a sealed file marked MOST SECRET, EYES ONLY, with her name underneath. “When you finish it, I’m to escort you to the burn room, where you are to destroy the file and its contents.” Paulson moved to the door. “Take your time, I’ll be outside.”

Jo broke the seal and opened the file. Inside was a single typewritten, single-spaced page. The FROM line featured her father’s name. It bore today’s date, and was marked RECEIVED only two hours before.

JoJo:

Some vital information has been received which impacts upon your assignment. This message stems from a discussion late last night with the DCI and the NCA…

Jo’s eyebrows rose. NCA was the National Command Authority. She had assumed her father might meet with the president every now and then. She kept reading. Five minutes later she closed the file, but one word from it stuck in her mind: VALKYRIE.

She wished Joseph could’ve been more specific.
“We don’t have a lot to go on at this point,”
he wrote.
“The source in Germany apparently only knew something vague about a suspected plan to move against the NATO nuclear armories. There were no dates, but we believe it’s too great a coincidence that reactionary Germans in Argentina are planning CAPRICORN at the same time reactionaries in Germany are working on this VALKYRIE. Be very careful when you’re down there.”

Her father hadn’t referred to anything happening in East Germany, but Jo knew enough about geopolitics to conclude that if something like this was being planned in the West, something similar had to be going on in the East, too. That meant the Soviets would be in the game very soon.

She stood up and gathered herself. Well, she knew this would be a dangerous assignment to begin with. Now it looked even more so. She refused to reconsider her decision, though. Too much was at stake. Ian would be going to the South Atlantic again very soon. He would be doing his part to prevent war. She could damn well do hers.