Читать книгу Day of Judgment - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 6

It was ten o’clock on Tuesday evening when the old army truck loaded with turnips pulled up the hill out of the village of Neustadt. About a quarter of a mile further on it turned in to the side of the road under pine trees.

Father Conlin wore a corduroy jacket and peaked cap, a grimy blue scarf knotted around his neck. His companion, the driver of the truck, wore an old army tunic and badly needed a shave.

‘This is it, Karl, you are certain?’ Conlin asked in German.

‘The cottage is a couple of hundred yards from here at the end of the farm track through the woods, Father. You can’t miss it, it’s the only one,’ Karl told him.

Conlin said, ‘I’ll take a look. You wait here. If everything’s all right I’ll be back for you in a few minutes.’

He moved away. Karl took the stub of a cigar from behind his ear and lit it. He sat there smoking for a while, then opened the door, got down and stood at the side of the truck to relieve himself. There was no sound at all, so that the blow that was delivered to the back of his head came as a total surprise. He went down with a slight groan and lay still.

There was a light at one of the cottage windows for the curtains were partially drawn. When Father Conlin approached cautiously and peered inside he saw Margaret Campbell, dressed in sweater and slacks, sitting in front of a blazing log fire reading a book.

He tapped on the pane. She glanced up, then crossed to the window and peered out at him. He smiled, but she did not smile in return. Simply went to the door and opened it.

Conlin moved into the warmth of the room, shaking rain from his cap. ‘A good night for it.’

‘You came,’ she said in a choked voice.

‘Didn’t you think I would?’ He was warming himself at the fire and smiled at her. ‘Your father – how is he?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I haven’t seen him for weeks now. They wouldn’t allow me.’

He saw it then of course, saw all of it, now that it was too late. ‘Oh, my poor child,’ he said and there was only concern for her in his voice, compassion in the faded blue eyes. ‘What have they made you do?’

The kitchen door creaked open behind, a draught of air touched his neck coldly and he turned. A man was standing there, tall, rather distinguished-looking, dark hair turning to silver, a strong face – a soldier’s face. He wore a heavy overcoat with a fur collar and smoked a thin cheroot.

‘Good evening, Father Conlin,’ he said in German. ‘You know who I am?’

‘Yes,’ Conlin said. ‘Helmut Klein. I believe you once enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the youngest full colonel in the Waffen SS.’

‘Quite right,’ Klein said.

Two men in raincoats emerged from the kitchen to stand beside him. At the same moment, the outside door opened and a couple of Vopos entered armed with machine-pistols, followed by a sergeant.

‘We got the truck-driver, sir.’

‘What, no comrade?’ Father Conlin said. ‘Not very socialistic of you, Colonel.’ He turned to Margaret Campbell. ‘Colonel Klein and I are old adversaries, at a distance. He is Director of Section Five, Department Two of the State Security Service which is charged with the task of combating the work of refugee organizations in Western Europe by any means possible. But then, you’d know that.’

Her eyes were burning, her face very pale. She turned to Klein. ‘I’ve done what you asked. Now can I see my father?’

‘Not possible, I’m afraid,’ Klein said calmly. ‘He died last month.’

The room was very quiet now and when she spoke it was in a whisper. ‘But that can’t be. It was only three weeks ago that you first sent for me. First suggested that I …’ She gazed at him, total horror on her face. ‘Oh, my God. He was dead. He was already dead when you spoke to me.’

Father Conlin reached out for her, but she pulled away and launched herself on Klein. He struck her once, knocking her back into the corner by the door. She lay there dazed. As Conlin tried to move towards her, the two men in raincoats grabbed him and the Vopos advanced.

‘Now what?’ the old priest asked.

‘What do you expect, whips and clubs, Father?’ Klein asked. ‘Nothing like that. We have accommodation reserved for you at Schloss Neustadt. Comfortable – or otherwise

– the choice is yours. A change of heart is what I seek. As publicly as possible, naturally.’ ‘Then you’re wasting your time entirely,’ the old man said.

Behind them, the door banged as Margaret Campbell slipped out into the night.

* * *

She had no idea where she was going, her brain unable to focus properly after the stunning shock she had received. Klein had lied to her. Used her love for her father to betray a remarkable man.

Her mind rejected the idea totally so that she ran as if from the consequences of her action, blundering through the trees in the darkness, aware of the cries of her pursuers behind. And before her was only the river, its waters, swollen by heavy rain, flooding across the weir.

One of the Vopos loosed off a burst from his machine-pistol and she cried out in fear, running even faster, one arm raised against the flailing branches, tripped over a log and rolled down the steep bank into the river.

The Vopos arrived a moment later and the sergeant flashed his torch in time to see her out there in the flood, an arm raised despairingly, and then she went under.

It was just after eight o’clock on the following evening when the black Mercedes saloon drew up to the entrance of the Ministry of State Security at 22 Normannenstrasse in East Berlin. Helmut Klein got out of the rear and hurried up the steps to the main entrance for he had an appointment to keep – probably the most important appointment of his entire career – and he was already late.

Section Five was located on the third floor. When he went into the outer office, his secretary, Frau Apel, rose from her desk considerably agitated.

‘He arrived ten minutes ago,’ she whispered, glancing anxiously at the three men in dark overcoats who stood by the inner door. Hard, implacable faces, ready for anything and capable of most things, from the look of them.

There was a fourth man, lounging in the window-seat reading a magazine. Small, with good shoulders, dark hair and grey eyes that had a transparent look to them. The left-hand corner of the mouth was lifted into a slight ironic half-smile that contained no humour, only a kind of contempt directed at the world in general. He wore a dark trench-coat.

Klein gave his coat to Frau Apel and moved towards him, hand outstretched. He spoke in English. ‘Well, we got him, Harry. It worked, just like you said. The girl did exactly as she was told.’

‘I thought she might.’ The voice was soft and pleasant. Good Boston-American. ‘Where is she now?’

‘Dead.’ Klein explained briefly what had happened.

‘What a pity,’ the small man said. ‘She was rather pretty. You’ve got the man himself in there, by the way. I almost got to touch the hem of his garment as he swept by.’

Klein glanced quickly at the security men by the door and dropped his voice. ‘Exactly the kind of remark we can do without. When I call you in, try and behave yourself.’

He opened the door to his office and entered. The man in the trench-coat stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but didn’t bother to light it. He smiled down at Frau Apel and for some reason she was aware of a slight flutter of excitement.

‘Big night, eh?’ he said in German.

‘A great honour.’ She hesitated. ‘They may be a while. Perhaps I could get you a cup of coffee. Herr Professor?’

He smiled. ‘No thanks. I’ll just go back to the window-seat and wait. I get an excellent view of your legs from there under the desk. You really are a very disturbing person, did anyone ever tell you that?’

He returned to the window. She sat there, her throat dry, unable to think of a thing to say and he stared at her with those grey, dead eyes that gave nothing away, the perpetual smile as if he was laughing at her. She reached for a sheet of typing paper quickly. As she put it into the machine, her hands were shaking.

When Klein entered his office, the man behind the desk glanced up sharply. His suit was neat, conservative, the beard carefully trimmed, the eyes behind the thick lenses of the glasses apparently benign. Yet this was the most powerful man in East Germany – Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the Council of State.

‘You’re late,’ he said.

‘A fact which I sincerely regret, Comrade Chairman,’ Klein told him. ‘Several main roads leading into the city from the west are flooded. We were obliged to make a detour.’

‘Never mind the excuses,’ Ulbricht said impatiently. ‘You got him?’

‘Yes, Comrade.’

Ulbricht showed no particular emotion. ‘I fly to Moscow in the morning and as I shall be away for a week at least I want to make sure this thing is fully under way. The man you have chosen to accomplish the task, the American, Van Buren. He is here?’

‘Waiting outside.’

‘And you believe he can do it?’

Klein opened his briefcase, took out a folder which he placed on the desk before Ulbricht. ‘His personal file. If you would be kind enough to have a look at it before seeing him, Comrade. I think it speaks for itself.’

‘Very well.’ Ulbricht adjusted his glasses, opened the file and began to read.

* * *

In the early months of 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that he had evidence that a number of employees of the American State Department were Communists. Arthur Van Buren, a Professor in Moral Philosophy at Columbia University, was injudicious enough to write a series of letters to the New York Times in which he suggested that in this new development the seeds of a fascist state were being sown in America.

Like others, he was called to Washington to stand before a Senate sub-committee in the greatest witch-hunt the nation had ever seen. He emerged from it totally discredited, branded a Communist in the eyes of the world, his career in ruins. In March 1950 he shot himself.

Harry Van Buren was his only son, at that time twenty-four years of age. He had majored in psychology at Columbia, researched in experimental psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London, taking his doctorate at London University in February 1950.

He arrived home in time to stand beside his father’s grave when they buried him. He didn’t really know what to make of it all. His mother had died when he was five.

His father’s brother was in the machine-tool business and almost a millionaire; his Aunt Mary was married to a man who owned forty-seven hotels. They seemed more concerned with the possibility that the senator from Wisconsin had been right. That his father was indeed a Red. It was up to Harry to restore the family honour, which he did by joining the Marine Corps the moment the Korean war started.

Nonsensical behaviour, of course. As a professional psychologist he could see that. Could even understand the reasons for it and yet he went ahead, lying on his enlistment papers about his education, a need, he told himself, to purge some kind of guilt.

He pulled mess duty, swabbed out the heads, endured the close proximity of companions he found both brutal and coarse and kept himself to himself. He took everything they handed out to him and developed a kind of contempt for his fellows that he would not have thought possible.

And then came Korea itself. A nightmare of stupidity. A winter so cold that if the M1 was oiled too much it froze. Where grenades did not explode, where the jackets of the water-cooled heavy machine-guns had to be filled with antifreeze.

In November of 1950 he found himself part of the First Marine Division facing northwards to Koto-Ri to end the war at one bold stroke as General Douglas MacArthur intended. Except that the Chinese Army had other ideas and the Marines walked into a trap that was sprung at the Choisin Reservoir and led to one of the greatest fighting retreats in the history of war.

For a while he played his part with the others who fought and died around him. He killed Chinese with bullet and bayonet, urinated on the bolt mechanism of his carbine when it froze, and staggered on with frostbite in his left foot and a bullet in the right shoulder. And when a boot in the side stirred him into waking one misty morning, it was something like a relief to look up into a Chinese face.

It was at the camp in Manchuria that he’d decided he’d had enough after the first month in the coal mine. The indoctrination sessions had given him his opportunity. The chief instructor was crude in the extreme. Easy enough not to contradict, but to reinforce the points he was making. A few days of that and Van Buren was sent for special interrogation during which he made a full and frank confession of his background.

He was used at first to work as a missionary amongst his fellow prisoners until he came to the attention of the famous Chinese psychologist, Ping Chow, of Peking University, who at that time was making a special study of the behaviour patterns of American prisoners of war. Chow was a Pavlovian by training and his work on the conditioning of human behaviour was already world-famous at an academic level.

In Van Buren he found a mind totally in tune with his own. The American moved to Peking to research in the psychologydepartment of the university there. There was no question in his own mind now of any return to America.

Soon enough both the Pentagon and the State Department became uncomfortably aware of his existence, but kept quiet about it for obvious reasons so that he remained on that list of those missing, presumed dead, in Korea.

By 1959 he was an expert in thought reform and by special arrangement moved to Moscow to lecture at the university there. By 1960 his reputation in the field of what the Press popularly termed ‘brainwashing’ was already legendary. There was not a security department in any Iron Curtain country which had not called upon his services.

And then, in April 1963, while lecturing at the University of Dresden in the German Democratic Republic, he had received a visit from Helmut Klein, Head of Section Five in the State Security Service.

Walter Ulbricht closed the file and looked up. ‘There is one flaw in all this.’

‘Which is, Comrade Chairman?’

‘Professor Van Buren is not, and never has been, a Communist.’

‘I agree entirely,’ Klein said. ‘But for our purposes he is, if I may say so, something far more important – a dedicated scientist. He is a man obsessed by his work to an astonishing degree. I have every faith in his ability to accomplish the task we set him.’

‘Very well,’ Ulbricht said. ‘Show him in.’

Klein opened the door and called. ‘Harry

– in here.’

Van Buren entered, hands in the pockets of his coat. He stood in front of the desk, that slight, mocking smile set firmly in place.

‘You find something amusing?’ Ulbricht enquired.

‘My deep regrets, Comrade Chairman,’ Van Buren said. ‘But the smile is beyond my control. A Chinese bayonet in the face at Koto-Ri in Korea in the winter of nineteen-fifty when I was serving with the American Marines. Eight stitches, very badly administered by a medical orderly who didn’t really know much better. He left me looking on the bright side permanently.’

‘This Conlin affair,’ Ulbricht said im patiently. ‘You understand the implications?’

‘They’ve been explained to me.’

‘Then allow me to refresh your memory. Conlin, as you know, stood beside Niemoller in opposition to the Nazis. Went to Dachau for it.’

‘And survived,’ Van Buren said. ‘Which means he must be quite a man. I’ve been looking him up. At his trial in nineteen-thirtyeight the Nazis were able to prove that his organization had helped more than six thousand Jews to escape from Germany over a two-year period. The Israelis gave him honorary citizenship two years ago.’

‘None of which is material to the present issue,’ Ulbricht said. ‘We have a situation in which thousands of misguided comrades persist in attempting to cross over to West Germany. In the main, they have to rely on the help of organizations based on the other side who operate purely for financial gain.’

‘Exactly. This League of the Resurrection of his asks for nothing.’

‘Very charitable of them.’

‘Which unfortunately makes for excellent publicity,’ Klein said. ‘It has made Conlin a celebrity again. He was featured on the front of Life magazine in America only four months ago. Last year he was recommended for a Nobel peace prize and had to turn it down because the Church didn’t approve.’

‘I should imagine that must have been the first time in years he took any notice of the Vatican,’ Van Buren commented.

Ulbricht said, ‘You know that President Kennedy visits Berlin next month?’

‘I had heard.’

Ulbricht was angry now, removed his glasses and polished them vigorously. A dedicated Communist of the old school, he had managed to prevent, in East Germany at any rate, the de-Stalinization movement which had swept Eastern Europe after the death of the Russian dictator. There was no one he hated more than the present American president, especially since his triumph in the Cuban crisis.

‘If it could be proved in a public trial that Father Conlin’s actions were motivated not so much by Christian ideals as by political ones, if he could be made to admit to the world his involvement with the American CIA and their espionage activities directed against our Republic; this would have the most damaging effect on Kennedy’s visit to Berlin. It would, in fact, make it totally worthless as a diplomatic gesture.’

‘I understand.’

‘For God’s sake, man.’ Ulbricht was almost angry now. ‘Rats in cages, dogs oozing saliva at the sound of a bell. I know as much of this Pavlovian psychology as anyone, but can you really change a man? Make him act like a different person? Because that’s what we need. Conlin to stand up in court before the cameras of the world and freely admit to having been a political agent acting for the Western powers.’

‘Comrade,’ Harry Van Buren said crisply, ‘I could make the Devil himself think he was Christ walking on the water, given enough time.’

‘Which is exactly what we don’t have,’ Klein said. ‘The problem of the Campbell girl and her knowledge of the affair has solved itself, but there will be others. Conlin’s associates in this League of Resurrection will be aware, within a matter of days, that something has gone badly wrong.’ He hesitated, then said carefully to Ulbricht, ‘And then, of course, Comrade, there are certain traitors in our own ranks still …’

‘I know that, man, I’m not a fool,’ Ulbricht said impatiently. ‘What you are saying is that there are those in the West who will discover what’s happened and attempt to do something about it?’ He shook his head. ‘Not officially, believe me. The Americans are heavily concerned to improve relations with Russia at the moment and Pope John’s attempts to come to terms with the Eastern bloc speak for themselves. And what can they say? Conlin has simply ceased to exist. After all, he shouldn’t have been here in the first place, should he?’

He actually permitted himself a smile.

‘Of course, Comrade,’ Klein said.

‘I have every confidence in your ability to deal with any such attempts with your usual efficiency, Colonel.’

There was a slight silence. Ulbricht adjusted his glasses and said to Van Buren, ‘You have a month. One month, that’s all, before Kennedy’s visit. You have those papers, Colonel Klein?’ Klein produced a sheaf of documents instantly and laid them before Ulbricht, who took out his pen and signed them, one after the other.

‘These give you full authority, civil and military, in the district of Neustadt where Conlon is being held at the Schloss. Power of life and death, total and complete, Comrade. See that you use it wisely.’

Van Buren took them from him without a word and Klein came forward with the Chairman’s coat as Ulbricht stood up. He helped him into it, then escorted him to the door.

Ulbricht turned, looking from one to the other. ‘When I was a boy, my mother was

very fond of reading the Bible to me. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” I remember that phrase particularly. The Council of State feels exactly like that, Comrades, towards those who succeed, but for the failures …’

He put on his hat and went out, closing the door behind him.

Klein turned to Van Buren. ‘So, my friend, it begins,’ he said.