The Midnight Swimmer (5 page)

‘For what?’

‘Combining love and realism.
Just because we love someone doesn’t mean that we don’t use them.’
Catesby paused.
For a second he wondered if he was talking to himself or to Andreas.
It didn’t matter.
We all need self-justifications; otherwise, the mirror image is unbearable to contemplate.

Andreas had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the ground.
He seemed more relaxed, almost smiling.
Catesby wanted to smile too.
It was the warm glow of job satisfaction.
It took years to become a good agent handler, a good interrogator.
Threats, fear and torture only worked when you were looking for something simple, like the combination to a safe that could be verified immediately and on the spot.
But such situations were very rare indeed.
The best agent handlers became their agents’ best friends: the fond sibling or soulmate that they had never had, but always longed for.
And to do that best, the handler had to like his agent too.
Catesby had begun, a little, to regard Andreas as a reincarnation of a dead infant brother.
One who needed help with girl problems.

Andreas finally looked up and gave a sly smile.
‘Katya isn’t,’ he said, ‘a real blond.’

‘And what else can you tell me about her?’

Andreas told everything in a flowing monologue of fondly remembered passion that included even the most fleeting of intimate details.
He was clearly a young man in love.
Nothing seemed sordid or pornographic as he recounted the various ways they made love.
It seemed to Catesby that Katya was the more imaginative and
experienced
of the two.
He began to envy Andreas with a certain bitterness.

‘I have to go now,’ said Catesby.
He realised the
treff
had taken far too long and that Jutta would be concerned.
He was about to make
arrangements
for further contacts when he heard a noise in the wood behind Andreas.
Then he saw movement and someone emerging from the undergrowth.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he snapped.
For a brief second, he regretted the anger in his voice.
Perhaps Jutta had come back because she was worried about his safety.
But then he saw the gun.

The first two bullets hit Andreas in the face.
His head jerked backwards and he crumpled.
Andreas made no effort to move or to defend himself.
Perhaps he recognised her – or perhaps he was paralysed with fear.
Catesby saw the gun turn towards his own face.
His only means of defence was the satchel with the thermos.
He swung it at Jutta.
She flinched and fired a shot wildly off target.
Catesby then flung the satchel at her and started running between the closely planted conifers.
He knew it wasn’t easy hitting a moving target with a handgun.
She fired two more shots.
Catesby heard her stumble and swear.
He kept running in a weaving crouch trying to plunge deeper and deeper into the undergrowth.
She was coming after him, but couldn’t aim and run at the same time.
Each time she stopped to fire a shot, Catesby gained on her.
Five minutes later he stopped and listened.
The woods were now silent except for his own heavy breathing.
He had flung himself into the thickest part of the wood, preferring cover as much as distance.
His hands and face were heavily scratched by the thick weave of low branches that he had plunged through.
There was no way that she could creep up on him without making a racket of snapping twigs.

Catesby decided that his cover was so good that it was safest to wait.
Maybe she was listening and waiting for him to move.
He looked at his watch; it would soon be getting dark.
If she was going to find him, she had to make a move fairly quickly.
As the minutes
ticked away Catesby began to feel safer and safer.
He wondered if she had given up the chase.

When he looked at his watch again half an hour had passed.
Catesby decided to make a move.
It was impossible to get out of the thicket without making noise, so he stopped every few yards and
listened
for answering sounds of stalking.
There were none.
After two more tentative moves, the grain of thought that had already been in Catesby’s mind began to grow.
He threw caution to the wind and began to move out of his prickly cover as quickly as possible.
He finally came to a path which led in the direction of the lake.
Catesby crouched beside it looking and listening for movement.
Even the jays were silent.
He was certain that she had given up the chase, if she had been chasing at all.
Catesby knew that she had not intended to kill him.
She had killed Andreas with cold competent professionalism.
It was simply not credible that she had not been able to kill him as well.
Catesby knew he wasn’t part of the contract.
She had been ordered to spare him.
But why?

When Catesby reached the beach the opaque November sun was setting over the Müggelsee.
For a second he wondered if Jutta was lying in ambush.
He skirted wide of the concrete pavilion that had been built in the 1930s as part of the Strength through Joy sports movement.
The pavilion’s hygienic rows of showers, toilets and changing rooms, now clogged with layers of rotting leaves, were an ideal place to hide in waiting.
Catesby sprinted past in a crouching run to the artificial white sand beach.
An elderly man walking with two young children looked at him with curiosity.
‘Why’s he doing that, Grandpa?’

Catesby smiled.
‘We’re playing cowboys and Indians.
Have you seen my little boy?’

‘No,’ said the old man, ‘what’s he look like?’

‘He’s ten,’ Catesby made a hand gesture, ‘about so high.’

‘I hope you find him.’

‘I’m sure he’ll turn up.’

Catesby turned away and walked up the beach towards the setting sun.
His cheeks were wet with tears.
If only the fictional child were a real one.
And if only he hadn’t left a dead young man in the wood behind him.
He hated violence and it always made him sick and depressed afterwards.
He was in the wrong job.
Catesby brushed away his tears and quickened his pace.
He’d catch the S-Bahn train at Friedrichshagen and wanted to get there before dark.

I
t was a wet and cold Berlin night when Catesby got back to his office at Olympic Stadium.
As always the adrenalin rush was being replaced by depression and tiredness.
And the fact that there was so much still to do made him even more tired.
He was tempted to have a beer and a bratwurst, but decided that strong black coffee and amphetamines were a better idea.
He had started the pill popping – uppers and downers too – after Petra’s death.
It was one way of coping.

The first job was a cable to London.
He went to the comm centre where he typed it directly on to the new DES encryption machine, a present from the Americans.
He classified the cable UK Eyes Alpha and stated the barest facts.

Catesby needed to contact the BfV to let them know that Jutta was working for the other side.
This was a more delicate business.
He suspected that the organisation was even more penetrated by East German agents than he had hitherto supposed.
It was obvious that the BfV officer who had chosen Jutta for the op was also one of Mischa’s agents – and maybe the one above him too.
Where did it stop?

On the other hand, was Jutta one of Mischa’s gang after all?
Berlin was a viper’s nest full of spies.
In any case, he needed to tell the BfV what had happened.
They could form their own conclusions.
Catesby decided to use the KY-3.
It was an STU, a Secure Telephone Unit – another present from the Americans – and it used voice-scrambling technology.
Catesby typed in the ‘urgent priority’ code and was soon put through to the senior duty officer.
The conversation was mostly
‘ja, ja, ja
’ on the German side as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
But despite the casual response, Catesby knew that a shit storm was going to erupt in the West German intelligence service.

Catesby signed the log so that the comm security officer would let him out of the centre.
The door was blast-proof steel with massive bolts like a bank vault’s.
As the door wheezed open the security man said, ‘Are you finished for the night, sir?’

‘No, I’ve got to develop my holiday snaps.’

The stadium’s lack of windows didn’t make SIS Berlin Station a cosy place, but it did make it easy to set up a darkroom.
Normally, there was a trusted and vetted technical grade who did the film and prints.
But not this time.
The nature of the intelligence service meant that on many occasions even the highest director grade had to spend tedious hours decoding a message, threading a tape recorder or printing a microfilm.
The need for secrecy was a great leveller and no one could ever forget the basic skills needed to process raw material.

The most difficult bit is winding the tiny film strip onto the reel so that none of the surfaces touch – and doing it in utter darkness.
Catesby enjoyed the delicacy of the task.
It was like repairing
something
in a womb.
The outside world no longer existed.
Once the film was securely in the developing tank, Catesby turned on the light.
This was the sorcerer’s apprentice stage – developer, stop-bath, fixer and rinse.
Catesby checked and rechecked the charts to make sure the temperatures and timings were correct.

The whole process took fifty minutes.
When the timer pinged, Catesby poured the final rinse into the sink and unscrewed the lid of the processing tank.
This was the moment of truth.
Catesby
carefully
unwound the dripping film and held it up to the neon strip light.
It had developed and the images were clearly documents, but were too small to read unless they were enlarged.
He carried the film to the drying cabinet and hung it up, but hesitated before he turned on the heater.
Ruining the film at this stage was the ultimate
nightmare
.
Robert Capa’s darkroom technician had done just that and destroyed nearly all of Capa’s D-Day photos – after the photographer had nearly lost his life on Omaha Beach.
No, thought Catesby, I’ll be patient and wait for them to dry naturally.

As he waited Catesby began looking through the newspaper file.
One of his staff prepared a daily news digest.
It contained articles from public domain news sources in all the languages that Catesby could read.
He regarded news reporting as a valuable intelligence source.
Quite often the better sort of journalist uncovered
something
that the intelligence professionals had missed.
But journalism, particularly from the big US syndicates and
Pravda/Isvestia
, was also valuable, perhaps more valuable, when the facts were wrong.
Why
were they wrong?
Who
was feeding the journalist
disinformation
?
Who
was pulling the ideological puppet strings?
And who was going to benefit?

Catesby started with the economic section of
Isvestia
.
It tested his vocabulary and had a certain surreal poetry:

He loved the heaviness of Russian names.
He put aside ‘News’ and picked up ‘Truth’, Pravda.
It was an important death, for the obituary was on the front page.

Catesby read the article twice, but found no clues other than terseness.
He didn’t find it odd that so little information was given about the actual crash or other fatalities.
And neither would Russian readers.
They were used to secrecy – and Nedelin may well have been on a visit or a mission that required secrecy.
But there had been rumours.

The rumours originated from Berne, the Swiss capital.
The city had always been a good listening post to pick up diplomatic
indiscretions
.
Maybe it was the mountain air or Swiss neutrality, but people often blabbed in a way they would never dream of doing in Moscow or Washington.
They seemed to think they were temporarily on a safe square and immune from surveillance.
In any case, it started with a tale about a dead cosmonaut.
The rumour was that the
Russians
had tried to surprise the world by launching a man into space – as a follow-up spectacular to the Sputnik dogs.
But it didn’t work.
The capsule failed to separate from the rocket and consequently both capsule and cosmonaut disintegrated.
Khrushchev, apparently, had been furious because he had planned to flaunt the achievement at the October Revolution parade.
He had berated Nedelin for the failure – and poor Nedelin had slunk off and committed suicide.
At least, that was the story doing the rounds.

Catesby sat back and tried to piece things together.
A Russian man in space would certainly have upstaged the US presidential
election which was due the very same day as the Bolshevik
Revolution
celebrations.
It would have been a stunning propaganda coup that would have wiped the new US president off the front pages of the world press.
No wonder Nedelin reached for his Makarov 9mm.
It did add up – and air crashes were the usual Soviet cover story for suicides and other unnatural deaths.

Catesby put
Pravda
aside and started browsing the American papers.
They were all full of the election which still seemed to be heading for a dead heat between Nixon and Kennedy.
There was much discussion in the FO and SIS about which one would be less bad for Britain.
Nixon was usually referred to as ‘the shit’ and Kennedy as ‘the young warmonger’.
Opinion seemed to prefer ‘the shit’ as the lesser of two evils and the easier to deceive.
There was still bitterness about Kennedy’s father, Joe, who as US Ambassador in London at the start of the war had relished the idea of a German victory.
Son Jack was suspected of warmongering because he had campaigned on a totally fictional ‘missile gap’ between the USA and the Soviet Union.
Catesby and his colleagues in the intelligence service knew perfectly well that the USA had ten times as many nuclear warheads as the Soviets.
And there was also considerable doubt as to whether the Soviet Union had a single missile capable of reaching the USA.
The grim fear in London was that a warmongering Kennedy
presidency
might panic the Russians into a pre-emptive strike against American bases in Britain – or that Britain would suffer retaliation for a pre-emptive US strike against the Soviet Union.
Either way tens of millions of Britons would die.
Personally, Catesby wanted to see the UK move towards neutrality – but it was an opinion he had to keep to himself.

The clock on the wall, like all the other clocks in the Berlin HQ, was run by battery – so that if war broke out and power lines were down they would still know what time it was.
It was now half past two in the morning.
What a lousy life.
Catesby looked at the cut on his thumb; it was finally starting to heal.
He had mistaken his thumb for an onion when he was tired and drunk and cooking a late-night meal in his bachelor flat.
It was a lousy life.
The only sound was the clock’s second to second click.
The second hand vibrated each time it moved and seemed to point at Catesby each time it reached the twelve.
It was bad.
It was the time of night he always thought of her when he lay awake.
He was glad that no one could see him crying.

Catesby wiped his eyes and suddenly remembered why he was still there at three o’clock in the morning.
The film.
It must be dry by now.
He went into the darkroom and turned on the red light so he could make prints.
He took the film down – nicely dry – and threaded it on the enlarger spools.
Work was good.
His grief dissipated and the excitement of maybe discovering something filled its space.
But he tried not to get his hopes up.
Most of the stuff you gathered – and even paid good money for – was a waste of time.
You had to pan through tons of silt before you found a nugget of gold.

The first frame was the beginning of the letter.
He adjusted the magnifier so the Cyrillic letters came out in sharp focus.
The person wrote in the clear script of someone used to doing technical work – like an architect or engineer:

Before he was even halfway through the letter, Catesby knew that he had panned gold.
And he also knew he needed to fly back to England on the first available flight out of Templehof.