'No, that's not true. That's not…'
'That's it. That's all it ever was.'
He stood up and pushed her away, knocking her to the floor. He managed to pull his shorts up and left her in her misery. In time, when she had composed herself, she rose and went to the window and looked out on the Californian coast.
She hated her loneliness, knew he was right. But it wasn't just the sex; like most women she could live without that. It was the loneliness. It was the emptiness that comes from going home and having no-one to share the day's gossip with.
She wished she could go to work. If only there was something worthwhile to go to work for. She'd got no further with the task Langley had set her, and now Tucker had called to say she was expected to nursemaid a scientist. She wondered if they knew what they were doing.
The dread of that awful memo on her desk, still not answered, sent her into a deeper depression. It wasn't right, taking away her job after all these years. Damn it.
It was a miserable Christmas.
In Washington the DDA put the phone down.
He was surprised the Exec Director had agreed so readily to his plan of action. He knew the DDI would be against it, which is why he'd gone directly to his superior.
The Exec Director had told him he would ring London direct.
The DDA hoped there'd be an answer by Christmas evening. He wanted to see the look on the DDI's face. He grinned as he imagined his colleague's discomfort and angry reaction.
He heard his wife calling. The first of their many guests were arriving.
Then he went through into the dining room to carve the Christmas turkey, to slice it as cleanly as he hoped his news would slice the DDI.
Ch. 14
They buried Willi Kushmann in the city of his birth on the day after Christmas. It was a cold, bitter morning, still dark at six a.m., with storm clouds threatening a rain that never seemed to come.
The cemetery was on the southern outskirts of the old city, an overgrown place that had been little tended over the years. Many of the gravestones had been broken and lay littered over the three acre site. Its appearance was of a disused and forgotten spot, not something amiss in an East Germany that was busily being re-unified.
Dresden, like East Berlin and Leipzig and most of what was East Germany, is a city where time has stood still. Its architecture, that which was left standing after one of the most devastating bombing raids of the last war, is a mixture of 1950's drab and fine German baroque
The strength of the city and its people was their link with the past. Not so much in what Germany had once been, but what it could once again become. Their past was their hope. If they had achieved greatness before, then they could achieve it once again. The shining example of West Germany was their torch, the memory of pre-war days their ambition.
Unlike the West, without the freedom of a democratic society, many of them had secretly clung to their heritage. To them, the war had finally finished when the Wall came down and the Russian troops had evacuated their land. There was now an urgency to redress what was lost, a need to wear their nationalistic badge proudly once again.
Because of this stubborn conviction, there were now many separate nationalistic groups, embryo political parties who wanted a slice of power for themselves and felt they deserved a bigger say in a united Germany's future. Not all of them believed in the Western system of democracy. Some of these groups were secretive in their intent and their membership. Unlike their fellow countrymen in the West, who they saw as softened by the extravagances of a modern society, the new freedom was the first step to their rightful place as the world's most powerful nation.
Old habits die hard. Especially when they've been suppressed for nearly fifty years.
Willi Kushmann had belonged to such a group and been one of its most influential members. A lawyer by profession, he had concentrated on corporate legislation as soon as he realised that the two Germanys were to be united. He realised, unlike his own experiences in the communist environment, that economic power was supreme. The major corporations had a major say, if not controlled, the prosperity and destination of the more powerful states.
West Germany was one of those powerful states.
In his view, East Germany must join ranks with her sister country and become the most powerful state. His destiny lay in the West, so he concentrated all his efforts to that end. Within a surprisingly short time he had joined a major law firm in Frankfurt and was put in charge of a department that dealt solely with the legalities of corporate reunification. Mergers and takeovers became his speciality, he was the expert everyone turned to.
His list of contacts increased and he was seen at all the right functions, all the correct social gatherings. He became part of the establishment and no-one questioned why he had climbed the ladder to success so rapidly. But he knew, and more important, understood the significance of his link with the past. It was a chain that must never be broken.
Reunification wasn't just about the East Germans swopping their Trabants and Wartburgs for Mercedes and BMWs. It was about a dream that had been stifled fifty years earlier. A dream that passed through the generations, lost for some but deeply yearned for by others. A secret shared over the years between many powerful people both in East and West Germany.
The dream had been kept alive by the older ones, kept alive through their shame and disgrace of the Russian jackboot. It had been handed down to those like Willi Kushmann, passed down, not as a memory or a footnote in history, but as a flame to be kept burning as strong as ever.
Willi Kushmann had been the bright hope who would turn that dream into reality.
Except that now he was being laid to rest in a neglected graveyard in the city of his birth. And that at a time in the morning when few people were about, when the funeral would pass relatively unnoticed.
For such a seemingly unimportant funeral in such a forgotten place there were many more mourners than should be expected.
On the pot holed road that skirted the mortuary, there was a line of cars, an eclectic mixture of black Mercedes, Travants and Wartburgs.
At the entrance to the graveyard, where a large wooden gate had once stood between the stone wall, three men waited, one of them sitting on the wall, his legs idly swinging beneath him. The other two stood on the path that led to the graveyard and the mourners hidden by the trees that masked the graveyard. They were big men, short cropped hair, skinheaded and brutish in appearance. They all wore dark grey overcoats, but that was so as not to draw attention to themselves. Underneath the topcoats, they were dressed in identical mustard brown shirts with military insignia in the shape of a cross with the ends linked up and with an eagle's head at its centre. The breeches were of a darker brown shade, tucked into knee length black leather boots.
The graveyard was in the public domain, but no member of the public would be allowed to attend this funeral without the permission of those on the gate.
There were seven other guards scattered over the area, most of them hidden in the trees. Unlike those on the gate and in spite of the cold, they displayed their uniform proudly, their topcoats on the ground beside them. You could see they carried no weapons, apart from the short police batons that were strapped to the back of their belts. Each guard also had a scout's hunting knife tucked in the top of his right boot with the same military insignia stamped in gold on its black handle.
The funeral was over, Kushmann's coffin had been lowered into the earth and was being covered by the grave diggers. The mourners, some forty of them, wandered around the graves in small groups, looking for forgotten names amongst the headstones. For many it had been the first time they had returned to the East, to this part of Germany that reminded them of their youth. Most of the mourners were in their sixties; some expensively dressed, the others in simple suits that had seen better days. Most surprising of all was that there were no women present.