Then he picked up the two bags and led her into the terminal.
Five minutes later they walked through the departure lounge for national and European community destinations to the Piper Arrow that was parked on the ramp.
Nine minutes later the plane was airborne from the pitted runway. It was a visual flight plan route, with no destination recorded.
'Where the fuck's he gone now?' Coy's superior asked him later. It had taken them over an hour to find the F40.
'No idea. We've got air traffic onto it. The plane came in from Manchester. The pilot was hired to fly them in a chartered plane.'
'To where?'
'Nobody knows. It's a visual flight. They don't need flight plans if it's out of controlled airspace.'
'Who's the pilot?'
'The same one, a girl, who flew them across the Atlantic.'
'Dear God. It gets deeper by the minute. Anything else?'
'Not yet.'
'We'll keep this away from the Yanks for now. Come back when you've got something.'
Coy put down the phone. There was nothing he could do anyway. Not until the plane surfaced. And that would take time. It was impossible to contact every air traffic control unit in Europe, every airfield, every charter company.
Blast, it had been a long night. He put his feet up on the desk, tilted back the swivel executive chair and went to sleep.
'Thanks,' said Jenny, taking the traveller's cheques from Adam and putting them into her flying jacket. 'Nice to do business with you.'
'Take care when you get back.'
'No problem. As you said, you're not running drugs, or anything like that. It was just another charter.'
'Even so, the intelligence arm will want to grill you.'
'Tsk, Tsk,' she clucked. 'They're not going to torture me, are they? Pull my nails out one by one.'
Adam laughed. 'I doubt it. But they will question you. And remember, when they ask about Billie, say she was edgy, always nervous. Seemed scared of me.'
'Aye, aye, captain.'
'And thanks. Safe journey back.'
Adam went to get the hire car as Billie and Jenny said their goodbyes. Twenty minutes later they were on the Salzgitter autobahn, heading for Nordhausen, some one hundred and ten kilometres to the south.
Ch. 63
'Yes, Dimitri Dimitrovitch,' said Rostov into the phone.
'The Americans are growing more concerned by the minute,' reported Sorge over the receiver. 'They now think the British know more than they're admitting.'
'The British know nothing.'
'They are frightened that we are all working against them.'
'Poppycock.'
'That's what I told them.'
'You must take the heat out of the situation. Just because some of them don't know their arse from their elbow doesn't mean that we’ve lost control.'
'You want me to repeat that?'
Rostov laughed. 'No. But diffuse it. Calm them down.'
'I will do my best.'
There was a considerable pause before Rostov continued. 'We've found Albert Goodenache.'
'Can I inform them?'
'Yes.'
'And tell them where?'
'No. Just that we think we've traced him. That we're following it up.' He didn't tell Sorge about the sleepers who still operated throughout Europe, agents that were never authorised or listed on any budget seen outside the most secret areas of the KGB. He'd identified various locations where Goodenache was likely to turn up. He'd even questioned some of the older members of the Lucy Ghosts in private to help trace the fugitive. Nordhausen had been one of them. And his people there had soon found the scientist.
'I'll pass that on.'
'Good. We will resolve this situation, Dimitri Dimitrovitch. Just keep the Americans calm. This thing is bigger than they realise. I now have some idea of what it's about. But I don't have all the answers. Time is short, but I need all I can get.'
'I will, as they say here, keep them off your back.'
'I know you will. These people have crawled out of the sewers. And that's where we've got to go, if we want to end it.'
Ch. 64
The road from Hannover to Nordhausen passed through all that was best in West Germany and all that was worst in the East. The first section is a mixture of three laned autobahns and twin laned primary roads. The traffic moves at a fast pace and averaging a speed of over one hundred kilometres an hour is not difficult. The surrounding countryside is fertile, a mixture of productive fields and bulbous forests that spread over the horizon. The towns and villages are prosperous, clean and bustling with enterprise. The people look affluent and busy.
When the four wheel drive saloon they had hired, an Audi Quattro, reached the old border that split the villages of Tenterborn and Mackenrode, everything changed. The transformation was sudden. The old wall still stood, stretched across the countryside like a giant twenty-foot picket fence, disappearing over the horizon on both sides. The road, where the border post had once split it, became narrow, just wide enough for two cars to pass each other. The tall metal and concrete watch towers to the left and right, now unmanned and unarmed, still dominated the skyline on their high steel footings.
They parked the Audi where the guardhouse had once stood. They walked across the field to where the wall stopped, sliced in its eternal stride by some giant wire cutters.
'I always thought it was solid,' said Billie, coming up to it, reaching out and touching it in awe.
There were two walls, running parallel with each other. The one they stood at was made of heavy chain link, stretched between towering concrete posts that were spaced fifteen metres apart. The second row, the inner wall, was of the same design. The gap between them, that area which had been mined and guarded by machine guns from the watch towers, was about forty metres wide. There was little growth there, just patchy, overgrown grass, a desolate, don't-come-here-or-you’ll-regret-it sort of place.
They stayed there for about twenty minutes, walked where there once had been fear and intimidation, tried to imagine it as it had been, wondered who'd died there, whose dreams had been shattered.
'I guess they'll get round to dragging it off to the junk yard,' said Billie, her arm linked through his as they made their way back towards the car. ‘Some waste dealer’s going to make a fortune.’
'That’s capitalism. They should leave it. To remind us about the dark side of life.'
It was different now, the countryside more desolate, less machinery in the fields. The roads were potholed and had received little maintenance since 1944. The villages and towns they passed through were shabby where buildings had long since been left to decay. Sleek Mercedes Benz and BMWs intermingled with smoke belching, rattling Trabants, Wartburgs and Ladas, but it was still an environment that lacked the hurly burly of enterprise.
Then there was Nordhausen.
An industrial centre that was an ecological disaster. An old town, its wealth based on brewing before the second world war came along and transformed it into a steel and munitions centre. Since then, under the communists, Nordhausen remained a metal town, spewing its untreated black smelter smoke into the atmosphere and polluting the beautiful countryside that surrounded it. In time, the forest trees in the magnificent Harz Mountains started to thin out as they were poisoned. In time the untreated smoke and grime turned Nordhausen into a dirty city, with dirty people, all with little to do except work and drink and then go back to work. The town had suffered from the worst of industrial enterprise. It would take many years before Nordhausen became a green town, many years before it could even start to ease back on the pollution it coughed onto its inhabitants and the surrounds in which they existed.