Rostock Connection by Max Hertzberg

Author:Max Hertzberg [Hertzberg, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OV Press
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Bingen

The next day Weber was called in for a meeting in Wiesbaden and while she was away I was confined to barracks. I sat at my bedside window for a while, trying to catch the sideways slip of human movement between the trees. They were good, I’ll give them that—it took me half an hour to be sure I’d spotted the two sentries discretely doing their rounds in the woods below the house.

Weber and I ventured out from the house on Wednesday, once again returning to Rüdesheim. Allowing ourselves to be shunted up to the top of the Drosselgasse, we switched into the queue for the cable car that linked the town with the Niederwald Monument two hundred vertical metres up the side of the gorge.

As the cable car, an aluminium pod barely large enough to contain its two seats, shuddered out of the base station and along the wire, I asked a question which, in operational terms, was completely unnecessary but had bothered me ever since I’d spoken to Weber in the exercise cell at Magdalena prison.

“Will you tell me your real name? Or do I have to continue using your cover name?”

She didn’t reply immediately, and I waited patiently for her to decide to trust me. But after a while I realised she wasn’t going to answer, so I tried another question—one that felt equally important to me, even if it was just as operationally irrelevant as her name.

“Why are you helping me?”

Again Weber didn’t answer. She stared instead at the strakes of cirrocumulus clouds heading down the Rhine.

The car scraped and shuddered as it cleared a pylon, it rocked in the slow wind.

“You mean, why am I helping you, even though you betrayed me to the KGB?” she finally responded.

I wasn’t interested in a discussion about whether I’d betrayed her, instead I tried to find whatever words that would work in this situation.

“I wasn’t given any choice. The Russians knew about you—the KGB major we met at Wünsdorf, he knew everything. If I’d tried to keep you away from him he would have put us both in the glasshouse.”

“Yet we both ended up there anyway.”

I held out my hand, palm downwards, just as I had on the bus the day we left the GDR. This time it was steady. “Except the KGB didn’t lock me up, it was my own Firm. They found out that I’d collaborated with your boss, Portz, when I was trying to find the evidence against Sachse. They’re not stupid—once they started looking, they worked out how I’d tried to warn you about the KGB.” The best lies are based on the truth, they’re the only kind that will stand up to any kind of scrutiny. “They let me out to do this job. If I do it right, if I meet the operational objectives then they’ll drop their investigation into my activities.”

I waited to see whether she was going to swallow my sob story, and it looked like she might, because she left the clouds where they were and dropped her blue eyes to meet mine.

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