Roach gave me the keys of the SAAB and I followed Sorgenicht through B Exit into the terminal.
Chapter 9: INGE
This place was a trap.
He was sitting over there by the wall, Sorgenicht, the man I'd tracked here, Karl Sorgenicht. There were two girls with him. One of them had been sitting by herself when I'd come into the cafeteria; I'd noticed her because she was striking, in the Nordic way: ice-blue eyes and ash-blonde hair, a wide sensual mouth. She wore a crimson leather ski-jacket and crimson calf-length boots; her bag was to match and had steel studs as a decoration. The whole outfit was Berlin-style bisexual-chic.
Sorgenicht had got himself a coffee at the service counter, and he'd been taking it across to the corner when the blonde had called out to him. He'd hesitated and then joined her. The other girl at the table was dark, slim, elegant in Pan Am uniform. She had joined the blonde just before Sorgenicht; the two girls were friends or acquaintances and they'd arranged to meet here: that was ray impression.
I had a girlfriend, Inge, Willi Hartman had told me in the night-club. She was very attractive. Helen had agreed: Yes. I thought she was terribly good-looking.
The girl over there wasn't necessarily Inge; there were a lot of good-looking girls in Berlin, and she could be cabin crew out of uniform. But she'd called Sorgenicht over to her table, and he was a Nemesis agent.
I poked at my eggs on toast, eating very little although I was hungry. This place was a trap and I might have to use muscle to get out of it and I didn't want the digestive process slowing the organism down.
It was a trap because that man Krenz would normally have kept in touch with his cell by telephone from the Mercedes. Nemesis had thought it important enough to send him to watch Sorge-nicht's house to see if anyone tried to track him when he left, and it would therefore be important for him to report on events. He hadn't done that. In terms of signals, he'd been missing ever since I'd taken over the Mercedes, and they wouldn't just assume the phone wasn't working: they would check up. They would know where Sorgenicht was going and they'd send some people here to look for Krenz and when anyone came in I paid attention.
Flight 147 to Frankfurt will be leaving from Gate 6 in ten minutes. Passengers for Flight 147 to Frankfurt should report to Gate 6 and board immediately.
There were four tables between my own and the table where Sorgenicht sat with the two girls, and the people in between provided reasonable but not perfect cover. As some of them moved in their chairs, leaning forward, leaning back, I moved my head so that I could keep observation and have tune to cover my image if Sorgenicht looked in this direction. If he did, he would recognise me. The lighting at the bottom of the stairs at the Cafe' Brahms last night had been subdued but we'd been facing each other, and unless the strike had left him with any degree of retrogressive amnesia he would remember me if he saw me now.
They were speaking in English over there. I haven't been trained in lip-reading but the difference between Yes and Ja is quite distinct, and you can pick up the affirmative in most languages by watching for a nod of the head. It's the same with No and Nein, and the shaking of the head is often more emphatic than the nod. The girl in the Pan Am uniform didn't speak German, perhaps, or not too well; or the others were simply showing courtesy to a foreigner.
Passengers for Flight 232 for London should go to Gate 17 immediately. Flight 232 for London will be leaving in fifteen minutes.
It worried me, the voice on the loudspeaker. This is what it had sounded like in Frankfurt that day: Flight 103 will be leaving in ten minutes. Passengers for London on Flight 103 should report to Gate 10 immediately. It was said later that few of them, perhaps none of them, had even heard of the remote Scottish village with the name of Lockerbie.
If that man Krenz was dead, that man with the massive skull in the Mercedes, if I'd gone too far, put too much force into the strike, I would have no conscience. None. I would have no conscience if, in the urgent process of the mission, others also died, and at my hands.
Three men came in and I watched them. Two were pilots.
I felt a resonance along the nerves; it was not unpleasant. If they found me here, the people of Nemesis, if Sorgenicht recognised me, I would have a fair chance of getting clear. It's very difficult to attack and subdue and seize or kill a man in a place as public as a major airport without bringing security or the police on the scene. The resonance along the nerves was due to excitement, not fear, because I had made access to Nemesis and I would stay with the opposition now wherever they moved, and if I got things right, if I didn't lose them, didn't slip, didn't fall, I would reach this man Dieter Klaus, and reach him in time, and bring him down before there was another hideous sunburst in the sky.
The man at the top now is Dieter Klaus, and I hope to Christ you never run into him. He's inhuman. His body shaking, setting up a vibration in the wheelchair.
It would be well, then, if Klaus were to follow Krenz.
One of the pilots who had just come in had parted from the other two men, moving between the tables until he came to the one where Sorgenicht was sitting with the girls. Sorgenicht and the blonde knew him; they shook hands perfunctorily. Then the blonde introduced the pilot to the Pan Am stewardess, and he gave a slight bow. I'd seen the winged flash on his uniform when he'd passed closer to my table. He flew for Iran Air.
It was twenty minutes before anyone at the table made a move. During that time I picked up what I could of the conversation, but it was difficult because I had to allow for German and Iranian accents. I gleaned more from their body language: Sorgenicht sat stolidly and said little, listened a lot, especially to the blonde, who sometimes leaned towards the Pan Am stewardess, touching her hand for emphasis. The two girls smiled now and then; the men did not. The Iranian pilot said almost nothing. I thought the name of the stewardess was probably Debbie: the lingual combination of 'd' and 'b' was often formed when the blonde spoke to her.
The Iranian was the first to move. The pilot he'd come in with passed close to the table, looking at his watch, and the Iranian nodded and got up, shaking hands with the blonde, nodding to the others as they began leaving too. As Sorgenicht turned away from the table I picked up my cup of coffee and held it in both hands like a bowl as I drank, masking the lower half of my face and keeping my eyes down, but I think he hesitated as he passed my table, not far away. I couldn't be sure, couldn't look up, but the feeling was there: that he'd recognised me but had kept on going.
I waited long enough for him to leave the cafeteria and then took what would probably be the biggest calculated risk of the whole mission and put the cup down and got up and turned and went out. Sorgenicht was in the main hall, going towards the telephones, his back to me. The two girls were near the elevators, shaking hands. Debbie, if that was her name, began crossing the hall as the blonde took the down elevator and I followed, keeping distance between us.