CHAPTER FIVE – WOTAN
Lindsay felt more affronted than frightened as the two men in dark suits bundled him into the car with darkened windows, and struggled angrily in a bid to reach the door handle. But the two men forced him back into the upholstery, and their hands were vice grips on his wrists, and suddenly he realised that he was trapped. He struggled again, because now the car was gathering speed, but the grips on his wrists tightened, and might well have been fashioned in iron.
One of the men shook him. ‘Sei ruhig, Schwein, oder du wirst es bereuen.’ The man’s voice was hard.
‘Where are we going?’ Lindsay tried to keep his voice brave, but now he no longer felt courageous, because his freelance game with a beautiful woman had turned into something menacing, and he was afraid.
The hand on his wrist twisted, bending his forearm back against itself painfully. ‘Halts maul’. The command was abrupt, and this time it brooked no continuation.
The car with the darkened windows sped through the suburbs of Berlin, and then slowed as it reached a district of large villas set in their own grounds, before turning into a long avenue bounded along one side by a high wall. It stopped in front of a grey metal gate, and a closed circuit television camera swung to focus down at it. The gate opened slowly onto a drive tunnelling through twin banks of rhododendrons, and Lindsay shivered despite himself, for he had a feeling that he was passing through a gate to hell, and entering a place that he might have great difficulty in leaving, with only his wits to help him. His mind flashed to Lester, and he breathed a silent prayer. Please heaven Lester would stir up some kind of a fuss, if only to profit from the publicity. Please heaven. He visualised a headline – ‘Times writer kidnapped in Berlin’. But then the vision melted. A second hope swelled momentarily. He could always hand over the package, and trade it for his freedom. But his courage failed again. Roswirtha’s enemies might well simply take her package and blow him away. He shivered again despite the summer heat. A cold finger of ice was touching his spine, and he knew that he was trapped. He was face to face with destiny, and his future would depend wholly on his ability to talk his way out of trouble.
The car slowed, driving along crisp gravel, and swung in a semi-circle to halt in front of a large white villa gleaming in the sun. Steps led up to a large door emblazoned with a great black maltese cross, the cross of the Teutonic Order. The door opened, and two men dressed wholly in black and carrying machine carbines came out to position themselves at either side. One held a large black dog on a tight leash. After a moment the dog sat back on its haunches, its tongue hanging, its ears pricked attentively.
One of Lindsay’s companions dragged him out of the car. ‘Komm.’
The large black dog stared at Lindsay and growled menacingly.
The villa door opened again, slowly, silently, like the door of some castle in a horror film. Then a tall man with white hair, dressed equally in black, but wearing a great silver maltese cross on a chain around his neck, stepsped into the sunlight and looked down at Lindsay curiously.
‘Are you the Englishman?’ His voice was flat and detached.
‘My name is Lindsay.’ Lindsay tried not to show any fear. He knew that he faced danger, and must keep control.
‘I believe Miss Schulz gave you something to give to me.’ The man stared at Lindsay, and his eyes were piercing.
Lindsay was silent.
‘My people can search you.’ The voice was pensive. But it carried an undertone of menace.
Lindsay holds his eyes, measure for measure. But he did not reply. This was a game of manoeuvering, and he must hide his cards.
‘Hmm.’ The man stared at the two men on either side of Lindsay, and nodded ost imperceptibly.
The blow caught Lindsay at the back of his neck, landing wholly without warning. It was a quick, sharp, scientific chop, dealt with the edge of a hand to a point between his jawbone and his ear, and he pitched forward onto his knees, pain clouding everything around him into a red mist. A hand clutched at the collar of his jacket, holding him upright, and he retched with agony.
‘I think you better give it to me.’ The man’s voice had not changed. It was still flat and detached, speaking in a slightly accented English. ‘This is just a beginning, and there may be more to come.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ Lindsay raised a hand to rub the back of his neck, and attempted to stand, but was forced back onto his knees. ‘My name is Lindsay, I’m a travel writer, I’m here to write for The Times and some other papers. I talked to Roswirtha on the plane, it was the first time I’d ever seen her.’
‘So you don’t mind if we search you?’ The man smiled slightly. It was plain that he saw himself holding the upper hand.
‘You’ll have to answer to the Foreign Office.’
A second blow exploded at the back of Lindsay’s head.
‘Do not try to be clever with me, Englishman.’ The man’s voice sharpened. ‘Do you want to hand over Miss Schulz’s package? Or do we have to take it from you?’
Lindsay took a deep breath. ‘She didn’t give me anything.’
One of the two men from the car began to empty his pockets onto the gravel in front of him. A small pile of belongings gathered – his wallet, a handkerchief, some small change, a ballpoint pen, a notebook. The tall man looked down at them in distaste.
‘I see.’ He was silent for a moment, as though considering possible courses of action. ‘Well, I suppose we must now examine you internally as well.’ He made a face, as though talking of something most unpleasant. ‘You will not like it.’
Now it was Lindsay’s turn to gamble. ‘I told you, she didn’t give me anything. We talked, and I asked her for a date.’
‘And she agreed?’
‘I thought she liked me.’
‘A pretty Englishman?’
Lindsay was silent.
‘Where did you plan to meet her?’
‘I’m staying at the Interglobal, I’m on a press trip. She said she would call me there.’
The tall man frowns. ‘So you planned to sit there and wait for her to call you?’ It was plain that he was not convinced.
‘I’ve got some features to write – I roughed them out on the plane.’ Lindsay heard his words spill out, and realised immediately that he had made a mistake, because he was signalling that he had more possessions in another place.
The tall man made a parallel connection. ‘Roughed them out? Where are they?’
Lindsay spoke quickly. ‘In my case.’
The tall man sighed. Wotan, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, realised that he had a problem. The two men in dark suits were blockheaded dunderheads, because they had brought a man, and left his belongings.
‘Hmm, okay.’ The word hung oddly from his thin, precise lips. ‘Tell me your room number, my men will collect your case, and then we will release you.’ He smiled thinly, in what was plainly meant to be a reassuring smile. But he had death on his mind.
Lindsay suddenly realised that he had some aces in his hand. ‘I don’t know it.’
‘What?’ Wotan frowned, snapping the word angrily. But he shook his head slightly as one of the dark-suited men prepared to chop at Lindsay again. ‘Why not? You must have made a booking.’
‘I’m with a press party organised by Interglobal. They’re handling all the arrangements.’
Wotan scowled. He had entered a blind alley, for the Interglobal was in the British sector, and both the Berlin police and the CIA would jib at crossing a jurisdictional boundary. He was silent for a moment, and then turned on his heel to re-enter the large white villa. He needed time to think, and prepare a plan. This Englishman was hiding something from him, he was sure of it. But he had no power to exert any pressure, and he was certain that the Englishman knew it. It was a stalemate, and not one that he could resolve by deleting the man, because all the world knew that The Times was an arm of British intelligence, and he could not afford to antagonise one of the three Western occupying powers. He would have to employ guile, and stealth, and bait a more subtle trap.
He made his way thoughtfully across the hall of the villa to a large room that he used as his library, and also as his office. The hall was large, but very bare, with a pair of heavy oak chairs standing guard on either side of a heavily carved oak console, and a large oil of Wotan’s predecessor as Grand Master on the wall, a man also in black, also with a great silver maltese cross hanging from a chain around his neck. A staircases rose at the back, curving round as it led to the upper floors of the villa, and the wall above the staircase was hung with the portraits of other former Grand Masters, each in black, each bearing the insignia of Grand Master. The paintings depicted a collection of proud men, and very strong men, and were a strength to Wotan every time he looked at them, because he knew that he was a successor in a powerful tradition.
The library of the villa was a room lined with books. A large desk at one end lookeds out through a window over an expanse of open lawn towards a small lake, and two small red and white and black flags of the Third Reich stoood guard either side of a small picture of the Fuhrer, for the spirit of the great man lived on in this house, even if his life had long since ended. This was the place where Wotan reflected, and planned, and decided many fates.
The desk had two telephones, one black, one red, and Wotan stood looking down at them for a moment before taking the red one in his hand. It was a secure line, and he waited a little impatiently for the scrambler to cut in.
‘Yup?’ It was an American voice.
‘We haven’t found Schulz’s parcel yet.’
‘Tell me.’ The American voice was terse. ‘The Brits are giving me sixteen different kinds of shit. Schulz is in a coffin at Dusseldorf, some guy called Lindsay has vanished at Tempelhof. What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’
‘I’ve got Lindsay here.’ Wotan’s voice was even. But a muscle twitched in his cheek.
‘I know, my people talked to Tempelhof.’ The American paused. ‘Let him go.’
‘I think the film is in his case.’
‘His case?’ The American voice sounded a little bewildered. ‘You don’t have it?’
‘My men picked him up as he came off the plane, before the baggage check-out.’
The line was silent for a moment. Then the American sighed. ‘You should get some new people.’
Wotan’s lips tightened. ‘I want to send them to the Interglobal with him.’
‘You want to do what?’ The American voice squawked the words. ‘You want to do what?’ His tone rose, and now he sounded angry. ‘You leave that fucking Limey alone. I’m taking enough incoming flak without your goons making any more trouble.’
‘And the film?’ Wotan knew that control over the situation was beginning to slip from his grasp, but he was not a man to give up without a fight.
‘We’ll put a tail on him. We have intelligence that she was either going to hand the film over at an RV in West Berlin, or take it through. We got people watching all the mouseholes.’
‘You mean just let him go, so he can deliver the film, tell all his friends and make monkeys out of us?’ This was a moment for apportioning blame, and responsibility, and Wotan was not carrying cans for anyone.
The American did not reply for a moment. Then he sighed. ‘Okay, tell him it was all a mistake, press a nice fat vanilla envelope into his palm, and charge us. He’s a journalist – he’ll understand that kind of talk. So much today, more when he gets back to Britain. We’ll look after him.’
Wotan replaced his telephone, and smiled slightly. He still had death in his mind, but now it was death delayed, death that someone else would deliver, and he would be blameless.
He turned, and walked back across the hall of the villa, and he had a new confidence in his step. He was a man who understood men, and the weaknesses of men, and he knows that Lindsay could be bought, and bound by his buying, particularly if payment was held out on deferred terms. However he paused for a moment, before stepping out into the sunlight again, because he needed to robe himself with the correct degree of gravitas. This was not a hand to be lost.
Lindsay still knelt on the gravel, close to the car with darkened windows, with the two men in dark suits standing close behind him. Wotan smiled thinly, the smile of a shark.
‘We are going to let you go, Mr. Lindsay.’ He gestured slightly to the men in dark suits and they stepped back, away from Lindsay. ‘Perhaps we made an error of judgement.’
Lindsay stared at him in astonishment. For a moment he was speechless, trying to assess whether this was some new move in a game of cat-and-mouse. He looked quickly over his shoulder, but the two men in dark suits had retreated several paces to his rear. He levered himself awkwardly to his feet and bent to rub a couple of small stones from his knees. His suit trousers were a little dusty, but seemed to have suffered no damage. He straightened himself, wincing a little at the dull pain that still throbbed at the back of his neck, and then noticed the small pile of his belongings at his feet and bent to recover them, wincing again.
‘We have verified your status, and we are prepared to accept that we made a mistake.’ Wotan delivered his words like a judgement. ‘Fraulein Schulz was a Communist agent, carrying a microfilm of important documents, and you were seen talking to her during your flight. Your conversation classified you as a security risk.’
Lindsay listened, marshalling a counter-attack. ‘Your people kidnapped me.’
Wotan nodded in acceptance. ‘It was an error.’
‘And you leave it at that?’
Wotan shrugged. But he was smiling within himself. This was a preface to a demand, and now they were playing poker. ‘Mr. Lindsay, we are very sorry.’
‘Just sorry?’ Lindsay spat out the word. ‘You kidnap me, beat me up, and then just apologise?’
‘What else can we do?’ Wotan spoke softly, because he could see an open hand, a begging bowl. ‘I don’t think you’ll like us much better if we pay for your suit to be cleaned. We are in the intelligence business, sometimes we have to move first, and reflect afterwards.’
Lindsay was a freelance, and his mind fastened immediately on this hint of possible compensation. ‘It’ll make a nice little story.’
‘Perhaps we could offer you a better reward.’
This was the crunch moment. Each man was sizing up the other, and each was trying to construct a decisive number.
‘We will give you ten thousand dollars.’ Wotan threw the figure out as though talking in pennies. ‘One of my men will bring part to your hotel, and you will get the rest in London. You will tell your friends that we mistook you for an associate of Schulz, and you will tell them no more than that.’
Lindsay swallowed. Ten thousand dollars was as much as he might normally expect to earn in two years. It was an amount to close any freelance mouth, to create total amnesia.
‘You will have two thousand dollars by three o’clock this afternoon.’ Wotan knew that he had won, and it was a triumph, even if only a small one. ‘You will say that you were taken to a police station, and questioned by police officers. They were correct with you, it was merely a routine enquiry. You will not mention your visit here.’
Lindsay’s nod was an assent. ‘I’ll be working in my room.’
‘Good. The money will be left at the hotel reception desk.’ Wotan stared at him for a moment, as though to register his face in his mind, and then turned on his heel. He would have Lindsay followed, for every moment the Englishman was in Berlin, and he would secure the film, recover his two thousand dollars, and it would be a lesson for the Americans. For it was easy to command, but victory did not always present itself on demand.