‘We don’t want him dead, Ursula.’
It seemed safe to promise that much.
Five days after the extraction of Ursula from the East, Gavriela faced the real challenge.
Getting Ursula into the British Sector had been only stage one, but after that she wore an RAF uniform and carried official documentation, journeying aboard a military lorry on one of the three authorised roads to West Germany. Still, Gavriela had been nervous. When the package received signal finally came in, Gavriela had gone for a walk around the Kleine Tiergarten in falling snow, where wind and cold were sufficient explanation for the tears in her eyes.
Now Gavriela was making the journey from Ku-Damm to Alt-Moabit on foot, while two armed officers in heavy over-coats trailed her, and four more were already in place around the café where Dmitri was due to appear. In one sense, it was a show of strength on both their parts: Dmitri had chosen the area, demonstrating that he, too, could cross between sectors via clandestine means.
Gavriela was not party to the operational details, but some-how messages had moved both ways between her and Dmitri, requesting and agreeing to a rendezvous.
Much of the cityscape she walked through was ruins. The major difference between now and a decade ago was that the rubble had been stacked and sorted, even cleaned, to produce an urban paradox: a tidy catastrophe. Cities like Frankfurt and Munich were revitalised, but sad old Berlin had only one thing to show for the new freedom in the western sectors: rich department stores amid the ruins, especially on the Kurfürsten-Damm, with a dazzling array of goods on offer in their bright interiors. See what you’ll get, they whispered to East Berliners, if you overthrow your Communist masters.
In the café, a large radio was playing ‘Hound Dog’, and Dmitri was sitting behind a table at the rear with his legs crossed – a posture that reminded her of Rupert – and a cup of thick Turkish coffee in front of him. There were no genuine customers, and according to the sign on the door she had entered through, the place was closed.
The bulky owner fetched a coffee for Gavriela and placed it on the table, then moved back behind the counter where his weapons would be at hand. An SIS man stood with coat unbuttoned, watching. One of his colleagues would be up-stairs, two more outside at the rear. The pair who had followed Gavriela remained on the street.
‘I’m very impressed,’ said Dmitri, giving no sign that almost three decades separated today from their only other meeting, hiding in the loft above a school assembly hall. Afterwards, he had saved them both from SA attackers in a churchyard, then escorted her home.
Where he first saw Ilse, at that time engaged to Erik.
‘Precautions seemed in order,’ said Gavriela. ‘Danger seems to follow you around.’
‘Oh, no. I mean I’m impressed with your callous manipulation of a vulnerable schoolgirl, your own niece, in order to serve your political masters.’
Gavriela controlled her breathing.
Keep balanced.
‘Don’t think I’m impressed with you, Colonel.’
Surrounding Dmitri, flickers of darkness, like licking tongues, came into existence and disappeared like short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs.
‘May I?’ He pointed at a cloth-wrapped bundle. ‘Your people have already checked it.’
She looked at the man behind the counter, then said: ‘OK.’
What Dmitri unwrapped was a shard of metal, nothing more. ‘I was stationed in Siberia after the war, until I proved myself.’
Because initially he had remained in hiding, here in Berlin. SIS found out because he had been forced to use an old cover identity, which rang alarm bells during routine denazification procedures. Returning to Moscow, he must have faced some difficult times before his rehabilitation and reinstatement within the KGB.
Gavriela smiled.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Tunguska event, 1920s. Cataclysmic meteor strike, but you’re going to tell me – what, exactly? A crashed UFO?’
There were rumours that the USSR was planning to get devices into orbit, followed by actual people. Some kind of KGB-designed disinformation was consistent with this, enemy confusion being the goal.
‘I didn’t say the material was extraterrestrial, Dr Wolf. You did.’
A wide area of tingling curled around her back.
Something very strange about it . . .
Dmitri wrapped the metal once more.
‘My archaeologist friends were puzzled, because this was beneath ice-preserved fossilised wood that was carved with runes. If the Tunguska event was anything, it was a successful take-off performed by a similar vessel, while this is a fragment of one that blew up centuries before. Maybe it was searching for the first one, the one we found. Assuming you believe any of that, of course.’
The word Russia derived from the Rus, the red-headed Vikings who headed east to explore and trade, and settled there, producing descendants. While Gavriela’s father, who claimed Viking descent, had never been further eastward than Berlin, she remembered Ilse’s words from the night that Dmitri had met her and the Wolf family.
‘Never mind Erik,’ Ilse had told Dmitri. ‘You and Gavriela could be brother and sister.’
That intense stare, Dmitri’s stare, was not too different from the gaze that Gavriela encountered daily in the mirror.
‘I find it curious,’ she said, ‘that a repressive Communist state where religion is outlawed is nevertheless rife with superstition. Or maybe it’s because of that repression that people believe in such nutty things.’
‘As you say.’ Dmitri pushed the bundle aside. ‘That’s a more likely explanation, isn’t it?’
‘If you were thinking of offering that to the British Museum, Colonel . . . Well, it’s not much of an offer.’
‘So what did you have in mind? Details of uranium shipments?’
They were getting to the heart of it.
‘Possibly,’ said Gavriela. ‘What would you want in return?’
‘My daughter back, of course.’ Dmitri’s eyes shone hard. ‘What did you expect me to demand?’
‘She’s safe in the West. Why would she want to come back?’
‘Why would her wishes matter to your government? Ursula is a schoolgirl. A German schoolgirl.’
‘Not Dutch?’ said Gavriela.
Ilse and Erik had been living in Amsterdam when the Wehrmacht invaded.
‘You want to turn me,’ said Dmitri. ‘So I can feed you classified information, now your famous tunnel has been blown. Very well, I agree. Provided you send her back to me.’
If it had not been for the flickering darkness, Gavriela might have agreed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not acceptable.’
Rupert might have made a different decision, but he wasn’t here. In such matters as recruiting agents and turning the opposition, nuance and context – and the case officer’s interpretation – were everything. She could justify refusing Dmitri’s demands simply by stating that she did not believe they were genuine.
The last thing London wanted, particularly after Burgess and Maclean, was to be played like fools, fed titbits of truth along with massive lies, manipulated from Moscow.
But they should also realise – Rupert certainly must – that she would have no intention of handing Ursula back to her monstrous stepfather. A new thought: Gavriela wondered if Rupert was in fact counting on that, because he believed in the darkness but could not share that belief with his fellow officers.
Perhaps Rupert, unlike his colleagues and superiors, wanted her to sabotage any attempt by Dmitri to work for SIS.
‘If I were to live in England,’ said Dmitri, ‘would I have access to Ursula? Controlled occasional access with your people watching – that would be acceptable.’
‘Who said anything about England?’
Dmitri’s gaze flicked towards the counter, and the SIS man standing ready.
What are you capable of, Dmitri?
If he could call on pseudo-mesmeric powers the way she had seen others of his kind utilise before, only violence on her part would stop him. This meeting could yet become catastrophe.