Cold Warriors (20 page)

Gunter's big fingers clattered nimbly over the computer keyboard, and a moment later a list was on the screen. Tomas took a second to marvel at this new technology, so far in advance of anything he could have imagined. Then he shook his head and scanned the names. It had only been a small company and it didn't take him long to go through them. "He isn't there," he said with satisfaction.

Anya's head cocked at a questioning angle.

"Heinrich Stumpf," Tomas told her. "He used to be high up in the Stasi. Any information about the artefacts is likely to have gone through him - but it looks like he slipped through Raphael's net."

Gunter studied Tomas. His eyes were such a pale blue they were almost silver. "You believe this man knows the location of the artefacts?"

Tomas shrugged. "He's the only lead we've got. And he's weak. We... we managed to blackmail him once, get him to spill some fairly important secrets."

One of the other men started tapping at his own keyboard. "Looks like Mr Stumpf is still around. He lives on Genter Strasse."

Gunter rubbed his big hands together and smiled hugely. "Wonderful. At last, some news that doesn't make me want to blow my own brains out. Well, Tomas, I don't know about you, but I think you should pay your old friend a visit."

Anya was sulking on the other bed. Morgan ignored her. He'd insisted they book a hotel to give him some time to translate the book, and short of trying to grab it from him and run, there hadn't been much Anya could do about it.

"Don't mind me," she said. "I'll just lie here and entertain myself, shall I?"

Morgan sighed. The book was balanced on his lap, a print-out of the runic alphabet on the plain orange bedspread beside him. "Give me a chance, I've only just started."

It was painstaking work. The runes were very similar, and he kept having to look between the chart and the book to make sure he'd identified the right one. And Nicholson had left no gaps between letters, nothing to indicate where one word ended and another began. But after a few minutes Morgan looked up, eyes blazing with excitement.

Anya caught his expression. "You were right, then - it is in English?"

"Yeah." His voice was husky and he had to cough to clear it. "I think it might be a diary. The first thing it says is Seventh of August, 1978."

She sat up, eyes widening. "That's right back near the start of the Hermetic Division. My god, if that book's a record of his time there, what he discovered... No wonder Raphael wanted it. What does it say?"

"If you shut up a minute, I can tell you."

She glowered but subsided, letting Morgan work on his translation in peace. After a few laborious minutes he found himself speeding up. He was learning to recognise the runic alphabet, but it was more than that. The words in the book began to take on the odd quality of something he already knew, but had temporarily forgotten.

The sun had moved behind a building by the time he'd finished the first entry, leaving the room in gloomy twilight.

"So what does he say?" Anya prompted, when Morgan finally looked up from the paper. "Is there anything there about the Ragnarok artefacts?"

Morgan almost wanted to tell her it was none of her business. His father's diary felt like something extremely private. Of course, he didn't have a choice.

"This is an absurd thing to do," Morgan read, glancing between the sheet of paper and Anya. "If the department had any idea I was keeping a diary, they'd skin me alive. 'Not good for security, old chap'."

"He's right," Anya said. "Especially when the code's so easy to break."

Morgan nodded and kept on reading. "It was the Polish priest who suggested it, when we met in Prague in '74. I don't know what made him say it, that our kind of work should be recorded for posterity. He was probably joking. Anyway, I hadn't thought about it - or about him, really - for a long time. But something today reminded me.

"Tomas and I have been spinning our wheels for far too long. The head honchos are starting to get impatient. The trouble is, my little parlour trick with the mirror and the wandering spirit whetted their appetite, and now they're hungry for tangible results. We've tried, we really have, but so far we've chased nothing but shadows and rumours.

"And that's all it was today, another rumour. We'd uncovered that copy of the
Prose Edda
weeks ago, but we hadn't bothered to read it. After all the fuss of getting it - those damn Norwegians seem to have wised up to what we're doing, and they were after it themselves. Anyway, after all that fuss, it didn't seem to contain anything new. But yesterday it came back from our translators.

"They were almost as excited by it as I was. Ten new lines that aren't in any previous edition. They want to publish it, of course, which can't possibly be allowed. I suspect we're going to have to find some way of silencing them. The lines are in the Gylfaginning, and they're allusive and vague. Well, of course they are. The Norse myths have always been a terrible jumble, mixing up older traditions with Christian eschatology till you hardly know what's original and what's a far later addition. But these lines feel authentic to me, though I can't really explain why. There's no description in them, just a casual mention of something they call the 'Ragnarok artefacts'. That's what made me think of the priest, I suppose. I'm sure he was the first person who ever told me those stories, late at night when we were hiding in some basement hoping the KGB wouldn't track us down. Anyway, it's not clear, but it seems these artefacts will have some role to play in bringing about the final end of things.

"Could it be true? Could these artefacts really exist? It's absurd to believe it, just a myth after all. And yet. And yet. If it is true, if there's even the slightest chance, one thing is very clear. We
have
to find these things."

"That's... that's fascinating," Anya said. Her face was almost glowing with excitement. "Any more translated beyond that?"

"Only the first line," Morgan admitted. "And the date's a week later. There's no more for that entry."

Anya got up to pace, her feet turning the nap of the carpet first one way, then the other. "This is great. But we need more - we need to find out exactly what
he
found out about the artefacts."

"Yes," Morgan said, but that wasn't really what interested him. "Who do you think the Polish priest is?"

"I imagine it's another code, a cipher within a cipher in case the first one was broken. It could be anyone. It might not even be a person."

Morgan nodded, yet he didn't really believe she was right. He knew it was crazy and impossible - the diary had been started nearly ten years before he was born. But Morgan felt certain it had been written for him.

Tomas emerged from the U-Bahn into the unbeautiful expanse of Alexanderplatz. The huge square was busier than he'd ever seen it, full of people who weren't looking over their shoulder to see who might be following them. Tomas hadn't needed to come to the square - there was a stop closer to where Heinrich lived - but he'd wanted a chance to walk through his old hunting ground.

The sun was hidden behind lowering clouds, the atmosphere hot and damp with unshed rain. The city looked grey in this light - but then Tomas thought East Berlin looked grey in pretty much any light. Nobody spared him a glance, and why would they? The person he was about to visit was one of the few who might remember him.

He took a turning off the main road, into a narrower street still noisy with evening rush-hour traffic. He noticed the way that pedestrians' eyes darted away from his own, heads held lower than in the west of the city. The legacy of oppression lingered, like a foul smell.

Genter Strasse was buried in the straggling, ugly suburbs. Tomas remembered coming to the area before, a visit to a low-level source he'd needed to pay off. But he'd never visited Heinrich here, in such a seedy, hopeless part of the city. He paused a moment to study the tower block where the old Stasi agent now lived. It had probably been put up some time in the sixties, but it already looked on the point of collapse. Substandard concrete, crumbling into dust, surrounded broken and boarded-up windows. The whole place felt half empty, but maybe that was because most of its residents preferred to stay hidden.

Tomas travelled up to the seventh floor in a lift that was dark with graffiti and stank of piss. He barely noticed. He was lost in memories, mostly painful ones.

When Tomas had last seen Heinrich, he'd been in an apartment in the heart of the city, only a few blocks from the Volkskammer. Heinrich had been living the highest life the communist state afforded, while those he spied on sank into poverty and despair. Tomas could picture him quite clearly, standing at his window and looking out over the streets he ruled like a king. Most East Berliners lived in constant fear, the nagging accompaniment to their every move. It was men like Heinrich who inspired that fear, and Tomas had known that the German man revelled in it. Tomas had felt a deep, visceral loathing for Heinrich which he'd found very hard to disguise.

The operation that had brought Tomas into contact with Heinrich had been a honey-trap, though Tomas hadn't felt the need to share that with Gunter earlier. Tomas and Kate had worked it together, back in eighty-one. Kate found Heinrich repellent, with his calculating eyes and self-important smirk, but she'd done what was needed to get the goods on him.

Tomas and Kate hadn't been an item then, but he'd hated it all the same. As the lift reached the seventh floor, and Tomas stepped out into a concrete hallway, he remembered how thoughts of her and Heinrich together had tormented him. He'd looked at the man's hands and imagined them on Kate's body, and it was all he could do not to break them.

His mental image of Heinrich was so strong - the slicked-back black hair, the bulbous nose and high slanting cheekbones - that for a moment Tomas stared dumbly at the shuffling old man who answered the door.

Heinrich stared back at him. He had lank grey hair and stooped shoulders, nothing left of the commanding presence he'd once used to intimidate.

"Tomas," he said eventually, stepping back to admit him. "So. Time has not changed you as it has me." His voice quavered with age, but there was still the same arrogant sneer hidden inside it.

Tomas didn't bother to answer, just brushed past the other man into the apartment. It was a study in brown linoleum, peeling at the corners and clashing horribly with the orange formica furniture. In the centre of the main room, a television sat on an old cardboard box. There was only one chair, a battered leather recliner, and it had been pulled round to face the screen. A curdling cup of tea rested on the floor beside it.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
, Tomas thought.

Heinrich sank into the chair with a relieved grunt. "So you actually let them do this to you... do you mind if I ask why?"

"I had my reasons."

"Hmm. Well, sit down, sit down. There's a stool in the kitchen if you want it."

The kitchen was little more than a corridor, lined with sagging cupboards on one side. Heinrich was far too old a hand to leave anything incriminating in plain sight, so Tomas just picked up the stool and headed back to the other room. It wobbled when he sat on it, and put his head a good foot below Heinrich's.

The amused twist of Heinrich's lips told him that had been deliberate. "Don't tell me," he said. "There's only one reason you're here - the Ragnarok artefacts. It doesn't surprise me. Quite a few of the usual suspects have been sniffing around them recently."

"Really?"

"Don't act coy with me. I'm far too old to have the patience for it." Heinrich took a sip from his tea, pointedly failing to offer Tomas a drink.

"OK," Tomas said. "Let's pretend it is about the artefacts. What would you be able to tell me?"

"I don't know," Heinrich said. "What would you be able to offer me? What
can
you offer me? Because now that those oh-so-incriminating photos you took are twenty years old, I'm not so interested in buying them back." He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, as if his back was paining him. "As I noticed you noticing, everything I ever had has been taken away from me. What can you possibly threaten me with now?"

Heinrich's voice was stingingly bitter, and Tomas knew his plans to use the soft approach were futile. "How about the loss of your freedom?" he asked. "Your old bosses might no longer be around to care about your indiscretions, but they turned a blind eye to plenty of other things that the new bosses would care about very much."

Heinrich's unhealthily pallid skin flushed red. "I see. And here I thought the years might have mellowed you. But of course they didn't pass for you, did they? No deal, Tomas. There's no evidence of anything. I made sure of it before the Wall fell."

"No physical evidence, maybe," Tomas said. "What about that girl you raped, then framed and shipped off to Schloss Hoheneck. Anna, that was her name. Think I might be able to track her down? I think I could. You and I both know you'd be dead before they let you out of prison."

Heinrich was quiet for a long time. Tomas almost felt sorry for him, this old man who really didn't have much left to lose. But Tomas had met Anna's parents, a long time ago. Heinrich didn't deserve anyone's pity.

"Fine," Heinrich said eventually. He laughed, an unhealthy rattle deep in his chest. "You win, as you always do, ruthlessness hidden behind a smile. The capitalist way."

"I don't need an ethics lecture from you," Tomas said sharply. "Where are the artefacts?"

Heinrich shrugged. "I don't have the first idea."

Tomas stood up, the stool toppling to the floor behind him. "Don't mess me around, Heinrich. I can't begin to tell you how much I'd enjoy seeing you behind bars." He knew he was being cruel, and he couldn't bring himself to care. Even now, he looked at the other man's hands, and he saw them pawing Kate, combing possessively through her chestnut hair.

Heinrich smiled thinly. "Do you really think I'd be living in this shithole if I had information like that to trade? But -" he held up a hand. "I think I may still be of some assistance. Enough to guarantee my freedom, at least." He said
freedom
as if the word scratched his throat on the way out.