Baker arrived promptly at noon for our rendezvous. He wore plain brown clothes and carried a small case. He handed me the case. It was full of Deutsche Mark banknotes. I took him to an empty building near the Elbe River. The area had still not recovered from the North Sea flood back in February and was sparsely occupied.
“We’ll leave tonight,” I told him. “Try to get some rest. It will be a busy night.”
I went to a bank and deposited the money in one of my accounts. Baker had paid the full amount up front. I would have been surprised if he had not but sometimes clients try to shortchange me. He had fulfilled his end of the deal. Now I had to uphold my end.
I drove us to a spot about a kilometer from the border and well away from the main road. We walked through woods to as close as we could to the border without breaking cover. We were about fifteen meters from the double fenceline. The fences themselves were on the East Germany side so we would be trespassing as soon as we reached them. I had checked this section of the fences a few days ago to make sure the concealed breaches were still there. With any luck they had not been discovered and fixed. Besides the ten meters between the two fences, there was another half kilometer of open ground on the far side to cross without running into a border guard patrol. This part was tricky enough for a young healthy person like me. Dragging an old man along was insanity. At least this section wasn’t mined.
We stayed hidden in our position for a while. Immediately after a patrol passed by I grabbed Baker’s arm. “Let’s go.”
We dashed to the first fence. I dropped down in from of where the breach should be. Baker was lagging several feet behind me. I cursed softly. We didn’t have a lot of time. I opened up the breach and pushed Baker through when he got to me. I crawled after him. We stayed there until I was satisfied the breach was properly concealed again. After sprinting to the next fence, we repeated the procedure to pass through. We still had to cross the half kilometer of open ground to reach the woods on this side of the fence. I could make it in around a minute and a half of sprinting. Baker would take too long to cross. Another patrol would be by any time now.
“Baker, crawl over to that fencepost and lay still until I tell you to move.” I crawled to a different one. A moment later I heard an engine. A searchlight danced along the fence as the patrol vehicle approached. Baker and I wore dark clothing so hopefully we would blend in with the fence. The vehicle was so close I could hear the guards speaking. My heart almost skipped a beat as the vehicle slowed down and the searchlight played across the section of fence we were hiding at. After an impossibly long few seconds, the patrol drove off.
I signaled to Baker to get up. We walked quickly to the woods. I grabbed his hand and pumped it a couple of times. “Welcome to East Germany.”
We made our way to the nearest town and parted there. Baker was going to Schwerin to meet up with a Stasi contact. Before he left, I handed him a note. “Baker, I’m looking for someone in the Stasi. If you meet Hans Glickenhoff, send a letter to Lorelei Neumacher at this address. I’ll know it’s from you.”
Baker gave me an inquiring look. “What’s so special about Glickenhoff?”
I smiled at him. “I want to do some business with him. I hear he has an interest in certain rare commodities that I may be able to get for him.”
“I see.” He slipped the note into a pocket. “Thank you for getting me this far. Goodbye.”
I headed to East Berlin. I didn’t have contraband so there was no need to sneak back across the border. Through careful management of my identities I usually had at least one set of papers with the right stamps for a legal return to the West. I crossed into West Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie. The next morning I went to the airport and caught the BEA flight from West Berlin to Hamburg.
Two days later there was a knock on my apartment door. That was unusual since very few people knew where I lived and I wasn’t expecting any of them. I set down my coffee, threw a robe over my nightclothes and went to the door. A look through the peephole revealed Rupert Hyde standing outside.
I was expecting to see my other British Intelligence contact. But I had never told him where I lived. I wasn’t surprised that he’d had me tailed or paid someone off for that information. I was surprised that he tipped his hand and let me know that he knew.
I opened the door and let Hyde in. He was a short, slim man in his mid thirties. I thought about what Baker had said back in the café. Hyde was one of those “schoolboys” he had railed about. He was young and ambitious. Neither Baker nor Hyde spoke about it in front of me but I could tell Hyde was the superior. Barring any major scandals, Hyde had a bright career ahead of him in British Intelligence.
Hyde turned down my offer of coffee and sat on the worn sofa in the main room. He pulled out an expensive looking cigarette case. “Do you mind?” He spoke English. I gave an indifferent shrug. He lit a cigarette with an equally expensive looking lighter. “Have you seen Alex Baker recently?”
I had learned English after the war. I could speak with a pretty good British accent when I wanted to but with Baker and Hyde I used a noticeable German one. “I had a meeting with him last week.”
Baker may have been under surveillance when he met me at the café. Lying about the meeting would make Hyde suspicious.
“What did you talk about?”
“He asked about smuggling a person across the border. I told him I don’t take people across. It’s too dangerous.” The best lies contain as much truth as possible. “Don’t you two talk to each other?”
“Baker was working on his own private project. He didn’t share the details with me.”
I had to admire Hyde’s cool demeanor. He must be under a lot of pressure from London. One of his subordinates was missing. A defector on his watch would not be good for Hyde’s career. He had to be hoping Baker was dead in some back alley, killed in a bar fight. What I had just told him added weight to the defector story.
Hyde took a long drag from his cigarette. “Did you help him find another smuggler who would help him get someone across?”
“There’s not a smuggler’s trade union where I can go post jobs. I work alone and don’t want to know any of my competitors.”
“So as far as you know Alex Baker did not find a way to cross into East Germany?”
That was when I realized Hyde was probably recording our conversation. He was such a sneaky bastard. If he ever found out I really had helped Baker, he had proof I had lied and worked against British Intelligence.
“Why don’t you ask Baker?”
“Baker hasn’t been seen for three days. Do you know where he is?”
“I have no idea where Baker is. I didn’t help him but that doesn’t mean he didn’t find someone else.”
Hyde put out his cigarette in an ashtray and rose. “Thank you for your time. If you happen to hear anything about Baker you will let me know, of course.”
I shut and locked the door after he left. What a bastard.
The rest of the day went at a leisurely pace. I spent most of the day in my apartment reading an Agatha Christie novel. English is such a mishmash of words with so many random spellings that reading it can be a challenge. Late in the afternoon I went out to check mail at the local post office and shop for groceries. I had just stepped into my apartment with a bag of groceries on one arm when the three men rushed me from behind.
Bread and vegetables went flying as I was pushed to the floor and held down by two of the men. The third one shut the door. He poured something from a small bottle onto a cloth and knelt next to me. The sweet smell of chloroform filled my nose as he pressed the cloth against my face. I struggled in vain to get free.
“She should be out by now,” one of the men holding me said in German. “Use more chloroform.”
“Shut up, idiot,” the man with the cloth said. “We need her alive.”
He patiently held the cloth under against my face until I slipped into unconsciousness.
I woke in a dark cell. I was lying on a metal bunk along one wall. The room was about three meters square with a small metal toilet in a corner. There was no window in the cell. The only light came from a small barred window in the door. So much for privacy.
I looked out the window. My cell was about halfway down a corridor lined with doors similar to mine. At one end of the corridor was a uniformed guard. A Stasi uniform. So I was in East Germany, probably East Berlin.
One effect of my kind’s fast healing is that anesthetic is less effective on us. It takes more to knock us out and we regain consciousness sooner than a human would. I must have been out for hours so whoever was behind this probably knew what I really was. I considered the different possibilities and didn’t like any of them.
After a while a tray holding dark bread, some unidentifiable gravy covered meat and a cup of water were shoved in through a hatch in the bottom of the door. I was too hungry to be picky so I ate. While I was wolfing down food the door opened and Alex Baker walked into the cell.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, taking a seat on the bunk. I stayed on the floor near the door. “I had no idea any of this would happen.”
“What exactly is this, Alex?” I sopped up the last of the greasy gravy with the remaining piece of bread and popped in into my mouth.
“You’re here to testify at a tribunal.”
“Yours?”
“No. But I accused a Stasi official of being a double agent really working for the British. He’s on trial. My credibility is being challenged. You’re supposed to testify about me.”
“I don’t know you very well.”
“You know I crossed on my own, without the help of British Intelligence. Hyde came to see you. I assume he was asking about me.” I nodded. “Tell them that. After you testify this will be over.”
“You could have just asked me to testify.”
“This treatment wasn’t my idea. The prosecutor didn’t think you would come here voluntarily.”
“I was kidnapped, Alex. Do you really expect me to be cooperative?”
“The Stasi won’t let you go if you don’t. They can execute you just for the smuggling and illegal border crossing. The prosecutor has assured me you’ll be released after the tribunal. He’s interested in your offer.”
“Offer?”
“The offer you made when we crossed. The prosecutor is Hans Glickenhoff. He’s looking forward to meeting you.”
A cold shill ran up my spine. Glickenhoff had been a minor Nazi official during the war and quickly changed his loyalties to the new bosses when the Soviets took over. He rose quickly in the Stasi by being ruthlessly efficient at counter intelligence work. I knew so much about him because he was also a Hunter I had been following for a long time. In the 1930s he was part of a group of Hunters traveling around Europe hunting my kind. The rest of the group was dead, many of them by my hand. Glickenhoff was the last of the men who killed my parents. And I had fallen right into his hands.
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