“Hold it,” said McCready. The picture froze. “That one, third from the left. Can you enhance? Bring it closer?”
The technician studied his console and fine-tuned carefully. The group of officers came closer and closer. Some passed out of eyeshot. The one McCready had indicated was moving too far to the right. The technician ran back three or four frames until he was full center, and kept closing. The officer was half hidden by a full general of the Strategic Rocket Forces, but it was the moustache, unusual among Soviet officers, that clinched it. The shoulder boards on the greatcoat said Major-General.
“Bloody hell,” whispered McCready, “he’s done it. He’s there.” He turned to the impassive technician. “Jimmy, how the hell do we get hold of an apartment block in California?”
“Well, the short answer, my dear Sam,” said Timothy Edwards two days later, “is that we don’t. We can’t. I know it’s tough, but I’ve run it past the Chief and the money boys, and the answer is he’s too rich for us.”
“But his product is priceless,” protested McCready. “This man’s beyond just gold. He’s a mother lode of pure platinum.”
“No dispute,” Edwards said smoothly. He was younger than McCready by a decade, a high-flyer with a good degree and private wealth. Barely out of his thirties and already an Assistant Chief. Most men his age were happy to head up a foreign station, delighted to command a desk, yearning to rise to Controller rank. And Edwards was just under the top floor.
“Look,” he said, “the Chief’s been in Washington. He mentioned your man, just in case he got his promotion. Our Cousins have always had his product since you brought him in. They’ve always been delighted with it. Now it seems they’ll be happy to take him over, money and all.”
“He’s tetchy, prickly. He knows me. He might not work for anyone else.”
“Come now, Sam. You’re the first to agree he’s a mercenary. He’ll go where the money is. And we’ll get the product. Please ensure there’s a smooth handover.”
He paused and flashed his most winning smile.
“By the way, the Chief wants to see you. Tomorrow morning, ten A.M. I don’t think I’m out of order in telling you he has in mind a new assignment. A step up, Sam. Let’s face it—things sometimes work out for the best. Pankratin’s back in Moscow, which makes him harder for you to get at; you’ve covered East Germany for an awful long time. The Cousins are prepared to take over, and you get a well-deserved promotion. A desk, perhaps.”
“I’m a field man,” said McCready.
“Why don’t you listen to what the Chief has to say,” suggested Edwards.
Twenty-four hours later, Sam McCready was made Head of Dee-Dee and Psy Ops. The CIA took over the handling, running, and paying of General Yevgeni Pankratin.
It was hot in Cologne that August. Those who could had sent the wives and children away to the lakes, the mountains, the forests, or even their villas in the Mediterranean and would join them later. Bruno Morenz had no holiday home. He soldiered on at his job. His salary was not large and was not likely to increase, for with three years to retirement when he turned fifty-five, a further promotion was extremely unlikely.
He sat at an open-air terrace café and sipped a tall glass of keg beer, his tie undone and jacket draped over the back of his chair. No one gave him a passing glance. He had dispensed with his winter tweeds in favor of a seersucker suit that was, if anything, even more shapeless. He sat hunched over his beer and occasionally ran a hand through his thick gray hair until it was awry. He was a man who had no vanity in the area of personal appearances, or he would have put a comb through his hair, shaved a bit closer, used a decent cologne (after all, he was in the city that had invented it), and bought a well-tailored suit. He would have thrown out the shirt with the slightly frayed cuffs and straightened his shoulders. Then he would have appeared quite an authoritative figure. He had no personal vanity.
But he did have his dreams. Or rather, he had had his dreams, once, long ago. And they had not been fulfilled. At the age of fifty-two, married, the father of two grown-up children, Bruno Morenz stared gloomily at the passersby on the street. Had he known it, he was suffering from what the German call Torschlusspanik. It is a word that exists in no other language but means the panic of closing doors.
Behind the facade of the big amiable man who did his job, took his modest salary at the end of the month, and went home each night to the bosom of his family, Bruno Morenz was a deeply unhappy man.
He was locked into a loveless marriage to his wife Irmtraut, a woman of quite bovine stupidity and potatolike contours who had, as the years ebbed away, even stopped complaining of his lowly salary and lack of promotion. Of his job she knew only that he worked for one of the government agencies concerned with the civil service and couldn’t have cared less which one. If he was unkempt with frayed cuffs and a baggy suit, it was in part because Irmtraut had ceased to care about that, either. She kept their small apartment in a featureless street in the suburb of Porz more or less neat and tidy, and his evening meal would be on the table ten minutes after he arrived home, semicongealed if he was late.
His daughter Ute had turned her back on both parents almost as soon as she left school, espoused various left-wing causes (he had had to undergo a positive vetting at the office because of Ute’s politics), and was living in a squat in Düsseldorf with various guitar-strumming hippies—Bruno could never work out with which. His son Lutz was still at home, slumped forever in front of the television set. A pimply youth who had flunked every exam he had ever taken, he now resented education and the world that set store by it, preferring to adopt a punk hairstyle and clothes as his personal protest against society but stopping well short of actually accepting any job that society might be prepared to offer him.
Bruno had tried; well, he reckoned he had tried. He had done his best, such as it was. Worked hard, paid his taxes, kept his family as best he could, and had little enough fun in life. In three years—just thirty-six-months—they would pension him off. There would be a small party in the office, Aust would make a speech, they would clink glasses of sparkling wine, and he would be gone. To what? He would have his pension and the savings from his “other work” that he had carefully hoarded in a variety of medium-to-small accounts around Germany under a variety of pseudonyms. There would be enough there, more than anyone thought or suspected; enough to buy a retirement home and do what he really wanted. ...
Behind his amiable facade, Bruno Morenz was also a very secretive man. He had never told Aust or anyone else in the Service about his “other work”—in any case, it was strictly forbidden and would have led to instant dismissal. He had never told Irmtraut about any of his work, or his secret savings. But that was not his real problem—as he saw it.
His real problem was that he wanted to be free. He wanted to start again, and as if on cue he could see how. For Bruno Morenz, well into middle age, had fallen in love. Head over heels, deeply in love. And the good part was that Renate, the stunning, lovely, youthful Renate, was as much in love with him as he was with her.
There, in that café on that summer afternoon, Bruno finally made up his mind. He would do it; he would tell her. He would tell her he intended to leave Irmtraut well provided for, take early retirement, quit the job, and take her away to a new life with him in the dream home they would have up in his native north by the coast.
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sp; Bruno Morenz’s real problem, as he did not see it, was that he was not heading for, but was well into, a truly massive midlife crisis. Because he did not see it and because he was a professional dissimulator, no one else saw it, either.
Renate Heimendorf was twenty-six, at five feet seven inches a tall and handsomely proportioned brunette. At the age of eighteen she had become the mistress and plaything of a wealthy businessman three times her age, a relationship that had lasted five years. When the man dropped dead of a heart attack, probably brought on by a surfeit of food, drink, cigars, and Renate, he had inconsiderately failed to make provision for her in his will, something his vengeful widow was not about to rectify.
The girl had managed to pillage their expensively furnished love-nest of its contents, which, together with the jewelry and trinkets he had given her over the years, fetched at sale a tidy sum.
But not enough to retire on; not enough to permit her to continue the life-style to which she had become accustomed and had no intention of quitting for a secretarial job and a tiny salary. She decided to go into business. Skilled at coaxing a form of arousal from overweight, out-of-condition, middle-aged men, there was really only one business into which she could go.
She bought a long lease on an apartment in quiet and respectable Hahnwald, a leafy and staid suburb of Cologne. The houses there were of good solid brick or stone construction, in some cases converted into apartments, like the one in which she lived and worked. It was a four-story stone building with one apartment on each floor. Hers was on the second. After moving in, she had carried out some structural refurbishment.