The train clattered into St. Pauli and a minute later lunged out. He caught sight of himself in the glass of the window. It wasn’t the heavy pouches under his eyes and the depth of the lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth that disturbed him. It was more that he didn’t quite recognize himself, had to put his hand up to his face to make sure it was him. This was what losing your moral center did to you. This was what betraying your country did to you.
And with that terrifying admission he got to the point. He had not gone to the toilet in the bookstore. He’d been so disturbed by Leena coming on to him, certain that she was a honey trap, that he hadn’t dared to go in there even to relieve himself.
At Schlump he walked fast, an icy wind at his back, to the bookstore. He sat down with a cup of coffee and a German copy of James Hewitt’s latest novel. Last night’s chairs and microphones had been cleared away, and the floor area was now reoccupied by tables laden with books.
He heard the door open. The shop emptied as the two members of staff and a customer left for a smoke on the front step. Schafer went to the toilet, locked the door, lifted the seat, stood on the rim, and, using a penknife, unscrewed the extractor fan housing high up by the ceiling. His most trusted courier had left the black plastic bag that he now found inside the fan. It contained a folded sheet of paper and a memory stick, which he pocketed. He refitted the extractor fan housing, cleaned off the rim of the toilet, flushed, and, leaving the seat raised, went back to resume his reading. The staff returned. The customer flicked his cigarette and moved off.
Schafer appeared to read a couple of chapters while he was actually thinking about Leena. The note. “I think we can help each other.” With his paranoia subsiding he was sure, once again, that she was not a honey trap. Quite apart from the “come on” of the note being far too strong, she was too quirky for the average Company operative and her story too powerfully authentic to be anything other than the truth. The note made him think that maybe, given that the Company would know about her by now, she could be of some help in Plan B. He slotted the piece of paper into his book, which he paid for.
He backtracked and crossed the Sternschanzenpark to the hotel, where he knew he’d be followed again. Back in his room he entered Leena’s number into his cell phone memory. He tore her note in half, leaving only the message part as the bookmark and left it inside the novel on the bedside table. He screwed up the other half and put it in his pocket.
He took some tape from his suitcase and opened the plastic bag he’d taken from the bookshop toilet. He checked that it was the memo to private contractors that he’d stolen six weeks earlier. He wasn’t mentally up to checking the contents of the memory stick on his laptop, but he confirmed that the small mark he’d engraved on the plastic casing was still there. He put the paper and stick back in the plastic bag and sealed it with tape. He wanted to deliver the two pieces of evidence together, personally, because he was going to supply a commentary to the devastating pictures on the memory stick to Rush. Given that he was sealing his fate and that of others, including his fellows on the assignment, his Company superiors, and senior officers in the Pentagon, he should have realized they wouldn’t make it easy for him.
Using the stairs, he found that the maids were cleaning the rooms on the tenth floor. He walked past their two trolleys and saw that while one of them wore her passkey around her neck, the other preferred to keep hers tied to the trolley handle on a piece of elastic. He watched them from behind the central elevator shaft as they moved clockwise around the circular landing. When they started vacuuming, he made his move. He unthreaded the passkey and opened one of the rooms they’d already cleaned, number 1015. He slotted a coin in between the door and frame to keep it open and returned the passkey to the trolley. Fifteen minutes later the maids moved up to the eleventh floor.
Schafer let himself into the empty room, looked around. There was no need to be clever about this. He lifted the only painting in the room from the wall. The frame was deep enough to take the memory stick. He taped the plastic bag onto the back and replaced the painting. He left the room, went back down to his own, took a piece of notepaper, and wrote out a classified ad in German. This was for Plan C, in case B messed up. He checked the time: 12:30. Half an hour to get back into town for lunch.
Of the twenty people on the platform at Schlump, the Company man stood out. There was no training ground for these people. By the time he’d hit thirty-five he’d done a decade of this sort of work in Berlin.
He wanted his tail with him this time. They took the train to Jungfernstieg and walked along the front, with the wind whipping off the lake so that it was a relief to turn down Grosse Bleichen and an almost erotic experience to walk into the warmth of the Edelcurry restaurant. Three minutes early. He took a table deep in the restaurant and ordered a pilsner. The combination of last night’s alcohol and this morning’s adrenaline had put a tremble in his right hand. The beer corrected it, improved his spirits. He reminded himself to act happy.
Thomas Lüpertz was the son of Schafer’s father’s best friend. They’d done exchanges between families so that Thomas could learn English and Roland could maintain his German. The adolescent friendship had been cemented when Schafer ended up on a posting to Hamburg after his first marriage had bust up in the early 1980s. The two men hadn’t seen each other for several years. It didn’t matter. They had a great time eating currywurst and drinking beer. They laughed about life’s absurdities. He asked Lüpertz to do him a favor, gave him the classified ad he’d written, and asked him to put it in the Hamburger Abendblatt and pay for it. His old friend didn’t even question it.
Just after two o’clock Lüpertz left without taking his copy of Die Zeit, which he’d slapped on the chair next to him on his arrival. Schafer took the newspaper to the toilet with him. He had a long pee, all that beer, and spent time washing his hands. He returned to his seat and ordered a coffee. He drank two more over the next hour while reading the newspaper.
The gloom was gathering for an early winter nightfall as he came out onto the street. His tail was looking very cold. He walked down to Axel-Springer-Platz and called Leena on his cell phone.
“You said we could help each other,” he whispered.
“Who is this?” she asked, missing a beat.
“How many offers of help do you leave on drunks in hotel rooms?”
“Per week?”
He laughed. For real. It had been a long time.
“I’m the drunk from the Water Tower Hotel, room seven thirteen.”
“I’m with my accountant at the moment,” she said. “Why don’t you come to my place around seven o’clock?”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’ll text the elevator codes to this number.”
She hung up.
He caught a train to Landungsbrücken, switched to the underground, and got out at Sternschanze, leaving his tail on the train. It was dark as he walked up to the hotel, and his feet crunched on ice.
Back in his room he lay on the bed, burping currywurst. The news was full of the ongoing financial meltdown and President-elect Obama’s announcement that he would close Gitmo. Couldn’t happen sooner. He’d done his time down there. Depressed the hell out of him. He switched to Bloomberg, where all the presenters seemed too desperate for good news in a recession that had only just begun. He felt remarkably calm given that a new world order was taking shape less than seventy years after the last one, while he was getting down to the serious business of betraying his country.