Early October
He loved the ritual. It was as essential to his enjoyment of the countryside as the open space or clean air. A final stroll around the property before bed, the last of a cigar to smoke, the glowing embers of a good cognac warming his stomach. His only regret was that he didn’t come here often enough. Otto Heilmann stepped out of his dacha onto brittle grass; five below zero, he estimated, perhaps even ten.
His guests had gone to bed. Their cars were parked beside the boat-shed; a black Mercedes 4×4 with dark glass, and an Audi A8 with an auxiliary engine and armour-plating. Frost had turned both windscreens opaque.
Heilmann wandered to the edge of the lake, trailing clouds of breath and smoke. The silvery light of a three-quarter moon shone on the ice. He saw buttery pinpricks in the blackness of the far shore; two dachas, one belonging to a senior prosecutor from St Petersburg, the other to a Finnish architect.
There was no cloud and only the faintest whisper of a breeze. Heilmann smoked for a while. As Bruno Manz, a Swiss travel consultant based in St Petersburg, he felt a very long way from the grim years of the German Democratic Republic. A long way from Erich Mielke, his Stasi boss during those years, and a long way from Wolfasep, the ubiquitous industrial-strength detergent that was the defining odour of the Honecker regime for millions of East Germans. Once smelled, never forgotten, a scar of memory.
He tossed his soggy cigar stump onto the ice and continued his circuit. Along the lake shore, past the creaking jetty, up towards the wood-shed.
‘Hello, Otto.’
A female voice. He thought he recognized it. Except she was supposed to be in Copenhagen. But it was her face that emerged from the darkness of the birch forest.
Heilmann clutched the coat over his chest. ‘I hope you know what to do if I have a heart attack.’
Krista Jaspersen stared deep into his eyes and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Otto. I’ll know exactly what to do.’
He wasn’t reassured.
She was wearing thick felt boots, a great overcoat and the sable hat he’d given her two nights ago at the Landskrona restaurant on top of the Nevskij Palace Hotel in St Petersburg.
He tried to recapture his breath. ‘What are you doing, Krista?’
‘Waiting for you.’
‘Out here?’
‘I remembered your routine.’
An answer of sorts, Heilmann conceded, yet hardly adequate. ‘You could have phoned to say you were coming. Like normal people do.’ He glanced over one shoulder, then the other. ‘How did you get here?’
‘By car.’
‘I mean … here.’
‘The men at the gate let me through.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
She looked the same—long fair hair, dark green eyes, a mouth of invitation—but she was radiating a difference that Heilmann couldn’t quite identify.
‘It’s freezing,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside.’
‘You have guests.’
‘They’re asleep.’
‘I’m not staying, Otto.’
‘The mystery is why you’re here at all. You should be in Copenhagen.’
Krista reached inside her coat and pulled out a gun. A SIG-Sauer P226. Moonlight glittered on a silencer.
There was no outrage. That surprised her; Heilmann had a notoriously fragile temper. Instead, after a digestive pause, he simply nodded glumly and said, ‘Let me take a guess: you’re not even Danish.’
She shook her head. ‘Not really, no.’
‘Who are you?’
The seconds stretched as they stared at each other, eyes watering in the cold, neither prepared to look away.
‘The stupid thing is, I knew it,’ he murmured. ‘In my head, I knew it. But I let my heart overrule and…’
‘More likely it was another part of your anatomy.’
‘You were too good to be true. That was my initial reaction to you.’
‘I’ve been accused of many things but never that.’
A deep breath deflated slowly. ‘So … what is it?’
‘You’ll never guess.’
‘The ghosts of the past?’
‘That doesn’t narrow the field much, does it? Not after your glittering career with the Stasi. But no, it’s not that.’
His surprise seemed genuine. He considered another option. ‘The S-75s?’
Krista smiled. ‘I knew you’d say that.’
The S-75 air defence missile was a relic of the Soviet era, prominent in conflicts from Vietnam to the Balkans. Hundreds of them had been transported from the nations of the Warsaw Pact to the Ukraine for decommissioning and dismantling. Many had vanished into thin air, leaving no trace, a feat made possible by the astonishing elasticity of the accounting practices at the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.
‘Scrapyard junk,’ Heilmann declared.
Copyright © 2005 by Mark Burnell
