Take your men with you. He is with you now? What is his name?” Kosov scrawled
Hauer, Polizei Captain
on a notepad. “Ask him which station he intends to go to. Abschnitt 53?” Kosov wrote that down too, recalling as he did that Abschnitt 53 was in the American sector of West Berlin, on the Friedrichstrasse. “I’ll meet you there in an hour. It might be sooner, but these days you never know how Moscow will react. What? Be discreet, but if force becomes necessary, use it.
Listen
to me. Between the time the prisoners are formally charged and the time I arrive, you’ll probably have a few minutes.
Use
that time. Question each of your men about anything out of the ordinary they might have noticed during the night. Don’t worry, this is what you were trained for.” Kosov cursed himself for not putting a more experienced man on the Spandau detail. “And Sergei, question your men
separately.
Yes, now go. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Kosov replaced the receiver and searched his pocket for a cigarette. He felt a stab of incipient angina, but what could he expect? He had already outfoxed the KGB doctors far longer than he’d ever hoped to, and no man could live forever. The cigarette calmed him, and before he lifted the other phone—the red one that ran only east—he decided that he could afford sixty seconds to think this thing through properly.
Trespassers at Spandau. After all these years, Moscow’s cryptic warnings had finally come true. Had Centre expected this particular incident? Obviously they had expected something, or they wouldn’t have taken such pains to have their
stukatch
on hand when the British leveled the prison. Kosov knew there was at least one informer on his Spandau team, and probably others he didn’t know about. The East German Security Service (Stasi) usually managed to bribe at least one man on almost every KGB operation in Berlin.
So much for fraternal socialism
, he thought, reaching for a pencil.
He jotted a quick list of the calls he would have to make: KGB chairman Zemenek at Moscow Centre; the Soviet commandant for East Berlin; and of course the prefect of West Berlin police. Kosov would enjoy the call to West Berlin. It wasn’t often he could make demands of the arrogant West Germans and expect to be accommodated, but today wouldbe one of those days. The Moscow call, on the other hand, he would not enjoy at all. It might mean anything from a medal to expulsion from service without a word of explanation.
This was Kosov’s fear. For the past ten years, operationally speaking, Berlin had been a dead city. The husk of its former romance clung to it, but the old Cold War urgency was gone. Pre-eminence had moved to another part of the globe, and Kosov had no Japanese or Arabic. His future held only mountains of paperwork and turf battles with the GRU and the Stasi. Kosov didn’t give a damn about Rudolf Hess. Chairman Zemenek might be obsessed with Nazi conspiracies, but what was the point? The Soviet empire was leaking like a sieve, and Moscow was worried about some intrigue left over from the Great Patriotic War?
The Chairman’s Obsession. That’s what the KGB chiefs in Berlin had called Rudolf Hess ever since the Nuremberg trials, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau. Four weeks ago Kosov had thought he had received his last call about Spandau’s famous Prisoner Number Seven. That was when the Americans had found the old Nazi dead, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck.
Suicide
, Kosov remembered with a chuckle. That’s what the Allied board of inquiry had ruled it. Kosov thought it a damned remarkable suicide for a ninety-three-year-old man. Hess had supposedly hanged himself from a rafter, yet all his doctors agreed that the arthritic old Nazi couldn’t lift his arms any higher than his shoulders. The German press had screamed murder, of course. Kosov didn’t give a damn if it was murder. One less German in the world made for a better world, in his
Hauer, Polizei Captain
on a notepad. “Ask him which station he intends to go to. Abschnitt 53?” Kosov wrote that down too, recalling as he did that Abschnitt 53 was in the American sector of West Berlin, on the Friedrichstrasse. “I’ll meet you there in an hour. It might be sooner, but these days you never know how Moscow will react. What? Be discreet, but if force becomes necessary, use it.
Listen
to me. Between the time the prisoners are formally charged and the time I arrive, you’ll probably have a few minutes.
Use
that time. Question each of your men about anything out of the ordinary they might have noticed during the night. Don’t worry, this is what you were trained for.” Kosov cursed himself for not putting a more experienced man on the Spandau detail. “And Sergei, question your men
separately.
Yes, now go. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Kosov replaced the receiver and searched his pocket for a cigarette. He felt a stab of incipient angina, but what could he expect? He had already outfoxed the KGB doctors far longer than he’d ever hoped to, and no man could live forever. The cigarette calmed him, and before he lifted the other phone—the red one that ran only east—he decided that he could afford sixty seconds to think this thing through properly.
Trespassers at Spandau. After all these years, Moscow’s cryptic warnings had finally come true. Had Centre expected this particular incident? Obviously they had expected something, or they wouldn’t have taken such pains to have their
stukatch
on hand when the British leveled the prison. Kosov knew there was at least one informer on his Spandau team, and probably others he didn’t know about. The East German Security Service (Stasi) usually managed to bribe at least one man on almost every KGB operation in Berlin.
So much for fraternal socialism
, he thought, reaching for a pencil.
He jotted a quick list of the calls he would have to make: KGB chairman Zemenek at Moscow Centre; the Soviet commandant for East Berlin; and of course the prefect of West Berlin police. Kosov would enjoy the call to West Berlin. It wasn’t often he could make demands of the arrogant West Germans and expect to be accommodated, but today wouldbe one of those days. The Moscow call, on the other hand, he would not enjoy at all. It might mean anything from a medal to expulsion from service without a word of explanation.
This was Kosov’s fear. For the past ten years, operationally speaking, Berlin had been a dead city. The husk of its former romance clung to it, but the old Cold War urgency was gone. Pre-eminence had moved to another part of the globe, and Kosov had no Japanese or Arabic. His future held only mountains of paperwork and turf battles with the GRU and the Stasi. Kosov didn’t give a damn about Rudolf Hess. Chairman Zemenek might be obsessed with Nazi conspiracies, but what was the point? The Soviet empire was leaking like a sieve, and Moscow was worried about some intrigue left over from the Great Patriotic War?
The Chairman’s Obsession. That’s what the KGB chiefs in Berlin had called Rudolf Hess ever since the Nuremberg trials, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau. Four weeks ago Kosov had thought he had received his last call about Spandau’s famous Prisoner Number Seven. That was when the Americans had found the old Nazi dead, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck.
Suicide
, Kosov remembered with a chuckle. That’s what the Allied board of inquiry had ruled it. Kosov thought it a damned remarkable suicide for a ninety-three-year-old man. Hess had supposedly hanged himself from a rafter, yet all his doctors agreed that the arthritic old Nazi couldn’t lift his arms any higher than his shoulders. The German press had screamed murder, of course. Kosov didn’t give a damn if it was murder. One less German in the world made for a better world, in his
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