'Where are you ringing from?'
'Riuvamani.'
'Where?'
'From Riuvamani. In the letter, it says if anything happens, I am to ring this telephone number and say 'Reindeer is dead'.'
'Reindeer is dead?'
'Yes. "Reindeer is dead".' That's all she knew, her husband’s life had been his own. She paused before she went on. 'Will I still get the money?'
His instinct was to hang up, but he knew these phones were connected to the past. It was time to pass the buck upstairs.
'Wait,' he said. 'I will get someone more senior to talk to you. Don't hang up. Don't go away.'
He put the receiver down and hurried back to his terminal. He switched the programme out of the Wall Street file before he dialed the senior night officer. There was no way he wanted to be fired from the service for insider dealing. The pay wasn't great, but it was steady.
'Phil Tucker,' came the immediate response from upstairs.
'Phil, it's Greg in the European room. I've got a call on one of those direct lines.'
'What direct lines?'
'The old ones. The ones we keep for back-up.'
There was a pause. 'You're kidding? Who?'
'I don't know. A woman. Foreign.'
'What's she want?'
'Says she's been told to report in.'
'Who by?'
'Don't know. Just says "Reindeer's dead.".
'Reindeer?'
'That's it'
'Is that an open code?'
'Haven't checked the book yet.' He didn't add he didn't know which Cypher manual to check.
'Fuck it, I'm coming down. Who the hell's Reindeer?'
Before the clerk could answer, the phone went dead in his hand. As he waited, he remembered it had been Kuwait's invasion by the Iraqis that had been triggered off by these phones. He hoped this wasn't going to be the start of another such crisis. Only this time it was Europe. It had to be the Russians. 'Damn it,' he thought. 'The Cold War's over.' Then he grinned. Crisis meant falling stocks. He decided to ring his broker first thing in the morning and sell before this leaked out and prices started to tumble.
Across the room, at the other end of the phone that had unexpectedly broken the silence at Langley, Mrs Santa Claus waited patiently to find out if the death of her husband a few hours earlier also meant the death of her housekeeping money.
Times were hard and she hoped those nice Americans would go on sending the dollars that her husband used to pick up in a plain envelope once a month at the local Post Office.
As she waited, she also wondered who Reindeer was.
Ch. 3
Hans Putiloff sipped his decaf and wondered how he was going to get into Room 17 before its occupant, a senior officer in the German Luftwaffe, returned from the Goose air base.
Ever since the Germans had built a new hangar for their NATO exercise aircraft at Goose, the Royal Inn Hotel had become the centre for their off duty pleasures. Visiting aircrews tended to stay there before they were billeted on the base. It was an ideal situation for someone who wanted to pick up loose talk amongst serviceman.
Goose Bay, a small township on the inhospitable east coast of Labrador, is one of the West's most strategic air bases. With two long runways, it is the centre for NATO exercises and houses large British, German and other NATO contingencies in addition to the Royal Canadian Air Force. Under snow for nearly five months of the year, it is also a safe haven and staging post for the many small private aircraft that are ferried across the North Atlantic on their way to and from Europe.
The town's economy is based on the airport and its three hotels are usually fully booked. Two of them, The Labrador Inn and the Royal Inn, are of a wooden structure with blockboard partitions between the rooms. Privacy is not one of the luxuries guests expect in these three star outback hotels.
But, as Hans Putiloff often said, one man's misery was another's reward. Now approaching his sixty ninth birthday, he had, to all intents and purposes, come to Canada as an immigrant from East Germany in 1956. Of German origin, he had adopted the identity of a dead Polish sailor called Lalek Widowski, and had thus, with the appropriate forged documents, escaped from East Germany and into Western Europe. In those days, before the Berlin Wall split the continent, it was an easy escape route for those who were prepared to take it. It hadn't taken him long to work his passage across to Canada, where he eventually applied for an immigrant's permit. Five years later he swore allegiance to the Canadian flag and became a citizen. He changed his name to Lou Widders and began work as a refueller for Shell Aviation Services at the civil terminal at Goose Bay Airport. In time, when his foreign accent had been replaced by Canadian clip talk, people forgot about his Polish background and his European ancestry.
To them Lou Widders was a Canadian. Which would have pleased his Russian masters in what had been the GRU and become in more recent years, the KGB. It had been there, in Moscow, at the KGB Headquarters in 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, that the young Hans had been exhaustively trained to prepare for his future role as a Canadian citizen. Hans Putiloff, who became Lalek Widowski, now residing as Lou Widders, was one of the great sea of unknown spies planted across the western world as 'sleepers', those who integrated into local communities and waited to be called one day to exercise their duties by Moscow.
It had been a long wait. And now, in this time of perestroika, it was unlikely that the call would ever be made.
But that didn't worry Lou Widders. He was one of a rare breed, a conscientious, workaholic spy. He did it because he loved it. Even the thought of returning to a unified Germany had not excited him after all these years. But then there was always that other past which had been wiped clean by his Russian masters all those years ago. Dachau. The little town near Munich. A place of death where birds still never sang. It had been Hans Putiloff's playing fields, a playground where he had exercised his pleasure on those unfortunate inmates who were placed under his care. When he saw the war coming to an end, he escaped to the east. His instincts told him the Russians would appreciate his talent for cruelty; what he hadn't expected was to be sent out to Canada and simply cease to exist.
He was over zealous in his duties. Rather than wait for his orders, commands he knew might never be made, he had, over the years set about building up the most comprehensive file on Goose Bay, its airport, visiting aircraft and crews, and improving weapons systems. These files, handwritten for the first thirty years, were now totally inscribed on two 180 megabyte hard discs that were linked to his Apple Mac 11 personal computer. It was a record that his Control in 2 Dzerzhinsky Square would dearly have loved to have, if only they had contacted him.
But the only contact was a member of the Russian diplomatic staff whose annual holiday always coincided with Hans' in Niagara Falls. The meetings were brief, the contact simply checked that Hans was well and out of trouble. The next was scheduled for the following Tuesday.
With this in mind, and eager for more information, Hans waited for the moment when he could go into Room 17 and see if the German officer had left anything that would be a valuable addition to his data base. He smiled as he sipped his decaf. The thin walls at the Royal Inn and the Labrador Inn were to his advantage. He had often slid into an empty room next to someone he was spying on and listened through the blockboard to secret conversations. There had been surprises over the years. The happily married station commander with a penchant for young men, the visiting diplomat who had waited to be beaten in his room by a black French airman, the cypher clerk who dealt in narcotics. These, and many more, were the daily paraphernalia that filled his computer life.