1989, p.22
1989, page 22
There was no response to her knock. So she put her face close to the door and spoke clearly. ‘Colin, it’s Allie. Open up.’ A scramble of movement, then the door inched open, forcing her to step back. Colin’s anxious face appeared. ‘It’s really you,’ he gasped, pushing the door wide. ‘When did you get out?’
‘About an hour ago,’ Allie said, her voice clipped. ‘My partner knows what strings to pull.’
‘It’s great to see you,’ he said. Wiebke peered over his shoulder and her hand flew to her mouth.
‘Scheisse,’ she exclaimed, horrified. ‘Was this me?’ She pointed at Allie’s face.
‘Yes.’
She turned to Colin and said something in German. ‘She says she didn’t mean to hurt you so badly. She’s mortified.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Wiebke said.
‘Never mind that. It is what it is. Are you planning on staying in Berlin?’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because I need to be able to contact you, to answer any queries that come up when I’m placing the story, Colin.’
They exchanged a look. ‘As soon as Wiebke’s West German passport is issued, we’re going to the UK,’ he said. ‘I’ve given my tenants notice to quit so we can get back into the house in a month or so.’
‘She’ll have her passport by then?’ Allie was dubious; she couldn’t imagine any bureaucracy reacting so swiftly to someone who was, in her mind, an illegal immigrant.
Colin gave an indulgent chuckle. ‘The West German government passed a law years ago stating that if you were born in Germany, you’re German, regardless of whether that was in the West or the East. We went to the government offices yesterday, filled out some forms and handed over Wiebke’s GDR paperwork. She’ll have her new passport in a matter of days.’
‘Amazing,’ Allie said, meaning it. ‘That’s good, that you’re going back to the UK. So what we need to do now is go through the story from the very beginning.’
‘We’ve already written a lot of it down. Your girlfriend told us to make notes of all we knew about, and that’s what we did. Wiebke, can you go down to reception and get it from the safe?’ She nodded and left the room.
‘Thanks,’ Allie said. ‘Colin, I had a lot of time to think about things, stuck in a cupboard and then a cell—’
‘I’m sorry, and we’re really grateful—’
‘Yes, I get that. But I’m even more determined to get this story away with a following wind. It’s an utterly heartless exploitation of people who feel they’ve got nothing left to lose. So I really need chapter and verse from you on the black market operations that Zabre have used before. Names, places, the drugs involved.’
‘I understand. I’ll check back through my diaries. I always kept a record. Just in case it all went pear-shaped.’
‘Nothing like keeping your nose clean.’
He flushed. ‘I was too busy focusing on the science.’
‘Sure you were.’ As she spoke, Wiebke returned. They sat round the tiny table in the hotel room, going through the pages of data Wiebke had stolen. Allie struggled to get her head round some of the detail, but she made Colin repeat his translations till she was certain she had it straight. Then she got them to fill in the big picture of what was going on with Zabre and the East Germans. By then, they were all running out of steam. But Allie wasn’t finished. She held out the promise of drinks and food at the Haus der 100 Biere, which was enough of a bribe to draw out the story of Colin and Wiebke’s relationship and the details of their dramatic escape. The last act was for Allie to take a series of photographs of the happy couple on the Canon Sure Shot she always carried in her capacious shoulder bag.
Later, in the bar, supplied with food and drink, they toasted each other. Allie knew she had more than enough material for a powerful investigative story and the human interest sidebar that would make it come alive for readers. It had pushed her to the limits, but now it was beginning to feel worth it. She finished her food, drained her glass, then excused herself.
She was so tired she could barely put one foot in front of the other. She knew she should at least make a start on her copy while the interviews were fresh in her mind, but the sight of her bed was too tempting. Her last thought before sleep ran into her like a runaway train was that Ace Lockhart was not getting his hands on this.
37
Genevieve caught up with Hans at the tail end of a radical Greens meeting at the university. Fredi was speaking, clearly winding up with a rousing peroration that drew whoops and cheers from her audience. Genevieve squeezed her way through the crowd to Hans’ side and slipped her arm through his. Startled, he turned and she watched his face light up. ‘Genny,’ he exclaimed, leaning down to kiss her. ‘I wondered where you were.’
‘Business in the East,’ she said. ‘I had to make two trips – one to sort out a problem for my father, the other to chair a meeting at Pythagoras. The Checkpoint Charlie guards barely look at my passport these days.’
Fredi reached her impassioned conclusion, raising her fists to the sky. The room erupted. Genevieve wondered again at her new friend’s capacity for stirring a crowd. There were no waverers at the end of one of her speeches. They might wake up the next morning wondering whether the world was really as she’d laid it out for them. But on the night, everyone was a true believer. Genevieve envied her that gift. She couldn’t help feeling it was a better way to get people on side than her father’s attraction to ruling by fear.
Hans drew her to one side of the hall, out of the way of the audience who were trickling out, chattering excitedly to each other. Gradually they made their way to the front, where Fredi was surrounded by a small group of eager acolytes who wanted more. She caught Genevieve’s eye and a flash of relief crossed her face. ‘I’m sorry, I must go now,’ she said, gently extricating herself and embracing Genevieve. ‘Get me out of here,’ she muttered, linking arms with her.
They made it out of the hall and to a bar sufficiently distant to escape stray audience members. ‘That was exhausting,’ Fredi said, subsiding on to a wooden bench. ‘So many people are coming now, it’s really quite daunting to stand up there and lift the room.’
‘You? Daunted?’ Genevieve said. ‘I find that hard to believe. You radiate self-confidence and self-assurance. Nobody doubts a word you say.’
‘It’s not so easy,’ Hans said. ‘If we could only find a way to capture Fredi’s performance and scale it out. But there’s only one Fredi.’
‘You could make videos,’ Genevieve said. ‘You could even smuggle them into the East.’
He sighed. ‘We could. But to be effective, they need to have professional production values, and that’s one more thing that eats up money we don’t have.’ He got up and went to the bar.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Genevieve said. ‘I heard something today that gave me an interesting idea.’
Fredi raised her eyebrows. ‘That sounds intriguing. Tell me more.’
‘Let’s wait till Hans gets back with the drinks so I don’t have to go through it twice.’
Fredi frowned. She didn’t like to be kept waiting. She glanced over her shoulder and, seeing Hans was being served, she turned her attention back to Genevieve. ‘You’ve come up with an argument to persuade your father to bankroll us?’
Genevieve smiled. ‘In a way.’ She held up a finger. ‘Patience, Fredi,’ she teased.
Hans had barely set down the three steins of beer when Fredi spoke. ‘Genny has an idea.’
Genevieve couldn’t resist taking a mouthful of beer. ‘I understand you – damn it, we – need money to move this campaign forward. I already explained that I don’t believe my father will simply donate money to the cause. He just won’t. But I think I’ve hit on a way to get him to give us money for a different reason.’
‘Explain,’ Fredi demanded.
‘Earlier today, I had to go to the East to facilitate the release of one of Ace Media’s journalists. It’s a complicated story but at the heart of it was a plan to get a GDR scientist across the wall. A key part of it was pretending the journalist had been attacked and tied up and left in a cupboard while the scientist used her passport to escape. Obviously, the journalist was discovered and she stuck to the story about being the victim of an abduction to get her passport.’
Fredi laughed. ‘And did the Stasi believe her for a moment?’
‘No, they took her off to Ruschestrasse. They were threatening to try her on spying charges because all this happened inside a research facility.’
Hans drew his breath in sharply. ‘She must have been terrified.’
‘So how did you come to the rescue?’ Fredi demanded.
‘Her partner also works for Ace Media, in a senior role. When the journalist didn’t call home, her partner spoke to my father and asked him to intervene. He made a few phone calls to the Interior Ministry and they agreed to release her. I had to collect her passport and fetch her.’
‘Quite the dramatic day for you,’ Fredi said. ‘I hope she treated you like a hero. But how does that help us?’
‘This was a fake abduction. Involving someone my father doesn’t really care about. But he didn’t mess about, he sorted it out. How much more eager would he be to sort it out if he believed it was real and the victim was his beloved only daughter?’
Fredi and Hans caught each other’s eyes then quickly looked back at Genevieve. ‘Are you proposing that we stage a fake abduction?’ Fredi said carefully.
‘Exactly. We wouldn’t even have to do much in the way of staging. You just hide me somewhere you’re not directly connected to then you send ransom demands to my father. And he will pay up, because he loves me. And I’m all he’s got.’ She sat back, well pleased with herself.
‘You would do this to your father?’ Hans was incredulous.
She shrugged. ‘It’s kind of my money too. Well, it will be one day. At some point, either when he dies or before that, I’ll be in charge. I’m just screwing an advance out of him.’ She was choosing to ignore what her father had told her about Ace Media’s finances when he’d borrowed the pension fund money. But she was convinced of her father’s Houdini skills. He’d always pulled a rabbit out of the hat in the past; she was sure he could do it again. If push came to shove, there was more pension-fund money he could borrow. Then somehow he’d extricate them from their travails and make the company stronger than ever. She had no worries on that score.
‘He will take extreme measures to avoid paying this ransom,’ Fredi said. ‘And he will be afraid for you. You’re OK with all of that?’
‘It’s foolproof. He’ll have a few days of angst, and then it will all be over and you’ll have the money you need to keep campaigning for a unified Green Germany.’
‘It’s a crazy idea,’ Hans said. ‘But it’s also brilliant. It could work, Fredi.’
She frowned. ‘There are many places where such a plan could go wrong,’ she mused. ‘But with careful planning, we could succeed.’ She looked around. ‘But this is not the place to have this conversation. Let’s drink up and go back to my apartment. We will turn the music up loud and start to work out how to separate your father from his money.’
Ace Lockhart arrived back at Voil House with a sense of accomplishment. He’d exercised his influence with the government of the GDR to a degree that had reassured him he still had the power to shift the needle and change outcomes. And in the process he’d cemented Rona Dunsyre’s loyalties to Ace Media. He walked into his home office, threw off his jacket and kicked off his shoes. He poured a glass of the red wine he bought by the label, took a Cohiba Esplendido from the humidor and lowered himself into the chair.
Only when he had his cigar going to his satisfaction did he look at the small bundle of letters on his desk. Almost no mail arrived at Voil House; anything related to Ace Media was filleted out by his staff, leaving Lockhart with personal letters and cards. That evening, there was a letter from a philanthropist he’d met a few times, seeking a donation to his charity supporting Ethiopian Jews still recovering from the famine. Lockhart screwed it into a ball and tossed it in the bin. He was choosy about the charities he supported; he couldn’t see the point unless there was a way of finessing something in it for him.
Another letter from Camilla, who used to be his PA. Her eldest child was looking for a summer job, did Ace have some lowly position he might fill? Camilla had packed in her job after her youngest daughter had been left with catastrophic injuries after a car crash. She’d been the best PA he’d ever had, so Lockhart scribbled Find the lad something on the letter and put it in the ‘out’ tray.
The final envelope in the bundle was addressed in block capitals that gave him pause. It was hard to be precise about printed letters, but they looked disturbingly similar to a hand he’d seen more than once lately. The postmark was smudged but he thought it read ‘Glasgow’. Lockhart rubbed the envelope between his fingers. It felt as if it contained no more than a single sheet of paper. He stared hard at it, as if he might suddenly develop X-ray vision. He sucked on his cigar and shrouded his head in blue smoke before finally ripping it open and drawing out its contents.
A single page fluttered to the desk. It was the pale blue top sheet of one of the copy pads his journalists used. In firm blunt capitals, it said, WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE. WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID. IT’S JUDGEMENT DAY.
An involuntary shudder ran through Lockhart, making his surplus flesh wobble. He rammed the cigar into the ashtray and let out a roar that held anger and pain in equal measure.
How dare they? Whoever they were, how bloody dare they?
38
Because the only flights allowed in and out of West Berlin had to originate in West Germany, Allie was obliged to travel back to Manchester via Frankfurt, which more than doubled the time she had to spend fretting in airports. She’d considered flying to Glasgow, but since it was Friday, she was technically supposed to be back at work the following day. And Rona could skive off at lunchtime and drive down to spend the weekend with her.
Allie explored the Frankfurt terminal from one end to the other while she waited to board her flight. All she wanted was to close her own front door behind her and fold Rona into her arms. Her copy was written, hammered out on her portable typewriter in the Berlin hotel room the previous day. She’d wanted to write the story up while Colin and Wiebke were down the hall in case she stumbled on elements she needed to check or expand on.
It had taken her a good half-hour to reach an intro that satisfied her:
A British drug company is avoiding testing rules by running its trials behind the Iron Curtain. Its goal – to win approval for a revolutionary drug that may stop HIV turning into AIDS.
Early trials in the UK were halted when adverse results were reported. But desperate HIV+ patients will do anything to avoid their illness developing into the full-blown killer virus so Zabre Pharma knew they’d find a ready customer base for their product if they could get it to market.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to start the wheels turning. She’d worked all day on the copy, writing it as a two-part exposé. First the set-up, then ‘behind the scenes in East Berlin’ as the second part. That had been straightforward; this was a story that more or less told itself. What took longer was telling the human interest story without descending into sickly sentimentality. Colin and Wiebke falling in love when they couldn’t even hold hands for fear of being betrayed to the Stasi; their realisation that what they knew could be their ticket to freedom; and the audacious plot to get Wiebke across the border. There was only one sticking point. The three of them had wrangled over their late-night beers about whether to tell the truth about the escape plot or stick to the story that they’d used on the German authorities. Allie had prevailed; she felt entitled to the credit for taking a chance that could have ended up with her being the victim of a spy trial.
Now, the sheaf of copy was safely stowed in her carry-on, a carbon copy in the post to the house in Manchester. First thing on Monday morning, she’d find a home for it. Probably the Sunday Times or the Observer. Anything that wasn’t part of Ace Media would do.
Fed up with pacing, she found a news stand tucked away on the main concourse and bought a copy of the Globe. In a quiet corner, she scanned the headlines, only pausing when she saw a story about protest marches in Glasgow and Edinburgh over the new local government taxation scheme that had been imposed in Scotland on 1 April. The date – April Fool’s Day – added insult to the injury that it had been introduced a year ahead of its English counterpart. Dubbed the ‘poll tax’ because every adult was obliged to pay the same amount, ‘whether they are a duke or a dustman', as the story put it, it was causing both outrage and hardship. Allie couldn’t help a burst of pride that her fellow countrymen didn’t hesitate to take to the streets in protest, their lack of docility another reason for Thatcher’s Tories to loathe her homeland.
But the poll tax and the government and all its thrones and dominions disappeared like smoke in a gale at the announcement of Allie’s flight. In a couple of hours, she’d be on the tarmac at Manchester airport, a hot story in the bag, and ahead of her, the relief of sleeping in her own bed beside the woman she loved. The last vestiges of the terror and stress of the past few days slipped from her shoulders and Allie bounced to her feet, the churn of fear finally banished by the churn of anticipation.
Genevieve followed Fredi up a steep staircase to the fourth floor of an apartment building in a quiet side street in Reineckendorf in the former French sector. Their footsteps echoed in the stairwell, an unsettling clatter as they climbed. There were two doors on the top landing, and Fredi unlocked the farther one with a pair of formidable keys she drew from her bag. She held the door wide for Genevieve, bowing ironically as she waved them in. ‘Enter the domain of Tante Lisl,’ she said.
