Relocking the cabinet, then the strong room, Brue wedged the file under his arm and climbed the elegant staircase to the room where two hours earlier his weekend peace had been so brutally disturbed. The detritus of Mad Marianne strewn across his desk seemed a year ago, the ethical concerns of the Hamburg Stock Exchange irrelevant.
And yet again: Why?
You didn’t need the money, dear father of mine, none of us did. All you needed was to stay as you were: the rich, respected doyen of the Viennese banking world, soundness your watchword.
And when I barged into your office one evening and asked Frau Ellenberger to leave us alone—Fräulein, as she then was, and a jolly pretty fräulein too—and purposefully closed the door behind her, and poured us both a large scotch, and told you I was sick to the heart of hearing us referred to as Mafia Frères, what did you do?
You screwed on your banker’s smile—all right, a painful version of it, I grant you—and you patted me on the shoulder and told me there were secrets in this world that even a man’s beloved son is better off not knowing.
Your words. A total snow job. Even Fräulein Ellenberger knew more than I did, but you’d sworn her to silence from the day she began her noviciate.
And you had the last laugh as well, didn’t you? You were dying by then, but that was another of your secrets I wasn’t allowed to share. Just when it was beginning to look like a close-run race between the Grim Reaper and the Viennese authorities as to who would get you first, enter old Westerheim’s beloved Queen of England, who out of a clear blue sky had decided, for no reason known to mortal man, to command you to the British embassy, where with due pomp her loyal ambassador would appoint you a Member of the Order of the British Empire, an honor, I was afterwards informed, although you never personally told me, that you had coveted all your life.
And at the investiture you wept.
And so did I.
And so would your wife, my mother, have wept if she’d been around, but in her case the Grim Reaper had won long ago.
And by the time you joined her in the Happy Bank in the Sky, which with a return to your fabled prudence you accomplished a mere two months later, the move to Hamburg looked more attractive than ever.
Our clients are not what you would consider normal clients, Mr. Brue.
Chin in hand, Brue flipped back and forth through the skimpy, tight-lipped file. The index had been doctored, papers removed to protect the holder’s identity. An encounter report—only Lipizzaners had them—recorded the time and place of meetings between rogue client and rogue banker, but not the subject matter.
The account owner’s capital was invested in a Bahamian offshore management fund, standard practice for Lipizzaners.
The management fund belonged to a Liechtenstein foundation.
The account owner’s share of the Liechtenstein foundation was in the form of bearer bonds lodged with Frères.
These bonds were to be surrendered to the approved claimant on production of the relevant account number, satisfactory papers of identity and what was coyly defined as “the necessary instrument of access.”
For further details, see account owner’s personal file, except that you can’t because it went up in smoke on the same day that Edward Amadeus Brue, OBE, formally handed his son the keys to the bank.
In short, no formal transfer and, as near as made no odds, no due process: just a “hullo-it’s-me” from the lucky owner of the reference number, a driving license and the so-called instrument, and an undeclared slide of junk bonds from one grimy paw to another had taken place—your money launderer’s dream scenario.
“Except,” Brue muttered aloud.
Except that, in the case of Colonel Grigori Borisovich Karpov, formerly of the Red Army, the “approved claimant”—if that’s what he turns out to be—is one of the wretched of the earth who detests the fact that his approach is necessary, and half the time would rather starve. He’s also drowning, and all I have to do is hold out my hand. He believes that I am his salvation, and without me he will return to hell.
But it was Annabel Richter’s hand he was remembering: no rings, the fingernails childishly short.
The traffic had died. Friday. Mitzi’s bridge night. Brue glanced at his watch. Good lord, where had the time gone? However did it get so late? But what’s late? Sometimes their games went on into the wee hours. He hoped she was winning. It mattered to her. Not the money, the winning. His daughter, Georgie, was all the other way. A softie, Georgie was. Never happy unless she was losing. Dump her blindfold in a roomful of chaps and, if there’s one of them who’s a surefire no-hoper, you can bet your boots she’ll have palled up with him in minutes.
And Annabel Richter of Sanctuary North, which are you? A winner or a loser? If you’re saving the world, probably the latter. But you’ll go down with all guns blazing, that’s for sure. Edward Amadeus would have loved you.
Without further thought Brue once more dialed her cell phone.
3
The first intimation of Issa’s presence in the city penetrated the cramped quarters of the Foreign Acquisitions Unit of Hamburg’s grandly named Office for the Protection of the Constitution—in plain language, domestic intelligence service—on the late afternoon of his fourth day of roaming the city, at about the moment when he was shivering and perspiring on Leyla’s doorstep, begging to come in.
The Unit, as it was disparagingly known to its reluctant hosts, was housed not in the main body of the protectors’ out-of-town complex, but on the farthest side of the courtyard from it, and as close to the razor-wire perimeter as anyone could get without actually cutting himself. The unlovely home of the sixteen-strong team, with its skimpy complement of researchers, watchers, listeners and drivers, was a disused former SS riding stables with a defunct clock tower and an unobstructed view of car tires and garden allotments gone wild.
Wished on the protectors by Berlin’s recently formed Joint Steering Committee, which claimed as its mission the remodeling of Germany’s fragmented and famously inept intelligence community, the Unit was regarded as the harbinger of a plan to do away with precious demarcations in the name of a streamlined, integrated organization. Though on paper under local command and lacking the powers granted to the Federal Police, they were accountable neither to the protectors’ Hamburg station, nor to their headquarters in Cologne, but to the same vaporous, all-powerful body in Berlin that had imposed them on the protectors in the first place.
Of whom or what was this omnipotent body in Berlin then composed? Its very existence struck fear into the heart of Germany’s entrenched espiocracy. In name, true, Joint Steering was no more than a bunch of top players drafted from each of the main services, and charged with improving cooperation between them in the wake of a string of near-miss terror plots on German soil. After a gestation period of six months—thus the official version—its recommendations would be passed to the twin power centers of German intelligence, the Ministry of the Interior and the Office of the Chancellor, for their consideration, and that would be pretty well that.
Or not. For in reality, Joint Steering’s remit was of earth-shaking significance: no less than the creation of a brand-new system of command-and-control covering all major and minor intelligence services and, untypically of the Federal German system until now, presided over by a new-style intelligence coordinator—czar—with unprecedented powers.
Who then would this awesome new coordinator be?
No one doubted that he would be selected from the shadowy ranks of Joint Steering itself. But from which faction? With Germany’s political stability caught in the limbo of a capricious coalition, which way would he lean? What allegiances, what agenda would the coordinator bring to his formidable task? What promises had he to keep? And whose voice exactly would he be listening to when he wielded his new broom?
Would the Federal Police, for example, continue to outstrip the beleaguered protectors in their long-running power battle for primacy in the field of domestic intelligenc
e? Would the Federal Foreign Intelligence Service remain the only body authorized to operate covertly abroad? And if so, would it finally purge itself of the dead wood of ex-soldiers and quasi-diplomats who cluttered its overseas stations? Fine men, all, when it came to defending German embassies in times of civil riot, no doubt, but a lot less adept at the nuanced business of recruiting and running undercover networks.
No wonder then if, infected by the mood of suspicion and anxiety that swept through the entire German intelligence community, relations between the mysterious interlopers from Berlin and their reluctant Hamburg hosts were at best frigid, effecting even the smallest aspects of their daily intercourse; or that the interest aroused by Issa’s appearance on one side of the courtyard should not necessarily be reciprocated on the other. Without the imaginative—some said overimaginative—eye of the Unit’s volatile Günther Bachmann, indeed, the surreptitious arrival of the man who called himself Issa might never have been spotted at all.
And this Günther Bachmann fellow from Berlin—who was he, exactly when he was at home?
If there are people in the world for whom espionage was ever the only possible calling, Bachmann was such a person. The polyglot offspring of a string of mixed marriages contracted by a flamboyant German-Ukrainian woman, and reputedly the only officer of his service not to possess an academic qualification beyond summary expulsion from his secondary school, Bachmann had by the age of thirty run away to sea, trekked the Hindu Kush, been imprisoned in Colombia and written a thousand-page unpublishable novel.
Yet somehow, in the course of notching up these improbable experiences, he had discovered both his nationhood and his true calling: first as the occasional agent of some far-flung German outpost, then as a covert overseas official without diplomatic rank; in Warsaw for his Polish; in Aden, Beirut, Baghdad and Mogadishu for his Arabic; and in Berlin for his sins, while he cooled his heels after fathering a near-epic scandal of which only the sketchiest outlines had ever reached the gossip mill: excessive zeal, said the rumors; a blackmail attempt too far; a suicide, a German ambassador hastily recalled.
Then cautiously, under yet another name, back to Beirut, to do once more what he had always done better than anyone, if not necessarily according to the book—but since when had “the book” been necessary equipment in Beirut?—namely to trawl, recruit and run, by any means, live agents in the field, which is the gold standard of real intelligence gathering. Eventually even Beirut became too hot for him, and a desk in Hamburg seemed suddenly the safest place—if not to Bachmann, then to his masters in Berlin.
But Bachmann was never the one to be put out to grass. Those who said that Hamburg was a punishment posting didn’t know what they were talking about. Now stuck in his midforties, he was a scruffy, explosive mongrel of a man, stocky in the shoulders and frequently with ash on the lapels of his jacket until it was brushed off by the egregious Erna Frey, his long-standing workmate and assistant. He was driven, charismatic and compelling, a workaholic with a knockout smile. He had a mop of sandy hair that was too young for the crisscross wrinkles on his brow. Like an actor, he could blandish, charm or intimidate. He could be sweet-tongued and foul-mouthed in the same sentence.
“I want to keep him loose and keep him walking,” he told Erna Frey as they stood shoulder to shoulder in the researchers’ dank den in the SS riding stables, watching Maximilian, their star hacker, conjuring successive images of Issa onto his screens. “I want him to talk to whoever he was told to talk to and pray where he was told to pray and sleep wherever they told him to sleep. I don’t want anybody interfering with him before we do. Least of all those arseholes across the courtyard.”
The first sighting of Issa, if it could be called one, had been of no apparent interest to anybody. It was a search notice issued under European treaty rules by Swedish police headquarters in Stockholm advising all signatories that an illegal Russian immigrant, name, photograph, particulars supplied, had evaded Swedish custody, present whereabouts unknown. A single day might produce half a dozen such notices. In the protectors’ operations center across the courtyard, it was duly acknowledged, downloaded, added to rows of similar notices adorning the walls of the recreation room and ignored.
Yet Issa’s features must have lodged themselves on the retina of Maximilian’s inner eye, because over the next hours, as the atmosphere inside Bachmann’s researchers’ den thickened, team members from other corners of the stables began to trickle in to share the excitement. At the age of twenty-seven, Maximilian had a near-total stammer, a memory like a twelve-volume lexicon and an intuition for cobbling together extraneous scraps of information. But it was long past suppertime before he flopped back in his chair and linked his long, freckled fingers behind his ginger head.
“Play it again, please, Maximilian,” Bachmann ordered, breaking the churchlike silence with a rare snatch of English.
Maximilian blushed and played it again:
Issa’s Swedish police mug shot, full-face, both profiles, with WANTED blazoned over it and his name in capitals like a warning: KARPOV, Issa.
A ten-line text in thick type describing him as an escaped Muslim militant, born Grozny, Chechnya, twenty-three years ago, reportedly violent, approach with caution.
Lips pressed tight together. No smile offered or permitted.
Eyes stretched wide open in pain after days and nights in the stinking blackness of the container. Unshaven, emaciated, desperate.
“How do we know he gave his real name?” Bachmann asked.
“He didn’t.” Erna Frey this time, while Maximilian was still struggling to answer. “He gave a Chechen name but his mates from the container ratted on him. ‘He’s Issa Karpov,’ they said. ‘The escaped Russian aristocrat.’”
“Aristocrat?”
“It’s in the report. His mates decided he was stuck-up. Special somehow. How you can be stuck-up in a container is a secret we have yet to learn.”
Maximilian had overcome his stammer. “The Swedish police reckon he went back to the ship and paid off the crew,” he burst out, in a great splash of words. “And the ship’s last port of call was Copenhagen”—the word becoming a positive triumph of will over nature.
Muddied footage of thin bearded man in long dark overcoat, kaffiyeh and zigzag-patterned skullcap dismounting from the rear of lorry at dead of night.
Lorry driver waves.
Departing passenger does not wave back.
Familiar landmarks of Hamburg’s main station concourse, rank upon rank of pastel-yellow cabs.
Same thin figure stretched horizontal on station bench.
Same thin figure sitting up, speaking to gesticulating fat man, accepting paper beaker of refreshment from him, sipping from it.
Cross-cut comparisons between Issa’s mug shot and enhanced stills of thin bearded man on station bench.
Another still of same thin bearded man standing full length on station concourse.
“The Swedes measured him,” Maximilian said, after a couple of tries. “He’s tall. Pushing two meters.”
On the screen, a virtual measuring stick appears beside the bearded man lying down, then sitting up. The measuring stick reads one meter ninety-three.
“What in heaven’s name made you pick on the Hamburg railway station footage?” Bachmann protested. “Somebody gives you a mug shot from Sweden of a man who’s gone to Denmark, and you trawl the drunken layabouts at Hamburg railway station? I think I should have you arrested for being psychic!”
Scarlet with pleasure, Maximilian flung up a hand needlessly for attention, and with the other again clicked on his screen:
Enlarged image of same lorry in railway station concourse, side view, no markings.
Enlarged image of same lorry, rear view. Maximilian zooms in on vehicle registration plate. It is part covered by a knot of black rag. One side of a European Union emblem and first two figures of a Danish registration visible. Maximilian struggles to speak and fails. His pretty girlfriend, the half-Arab Niki from
audio section, speaks for him.
“The Swedes questioned the other stowaways about him,” she says while Maximilian nods. “He was on his way to Hamburg. Nowhere else would do. Everything was going to come right for him in Hamburg.”
“Did he say how?”
“No. He went all secretive and mysterious. His companions thought he was a nutter.”
“By the time they got out of that container they were all nutters. What languages does he speak?”
“Russian.”
“Just Russian. Not Chechen?”
“Not according to the Swedes. Maybe they didn’t try him.”
“But Issa’s his first name. As in Jesus. Jesus Karpov. He’s got a Russian surname and a Muslim first name. How in hell did he come by that?”
“Niki didn’t christen him, Günther dear,” Erna Frey murmurs.
“And no patronymic,” Bachmann complains. “What happened to his Russian patronymic? Did he leave it behind him in jail?”
Instead of answering him, Niki took back the story on her lover’s behalf: “Maximilian had a brainwave, Günther. He reckoned that if Copenhagen was the ship’s next port of call, and Hamburg was the boy’s destination, how about checking the video footage on the Hamburg station platform whenever a Copenhagen train came in?”
Sparing as always of his praise, Bachmann affected not to hear her. “Was Issa No-patronymic Karpov the only one to get out of that Danish lorry with the concealed registration plate?”
“He was alone. Right, Maximilian? Solo.” Enthusiastic nods from Maximilian. “Nobody else got out of the Danish lorry and the driver stayed inside his cab.”