Chapter 16: SIROCCO

The sun was a pale disc in the haze, still low above the horizon. Its light glinted on metal and glass surfaces, on the mascot of the Mercedes limousine as it swung in a half-circle by the VFW-Fokker and halted. Klaus got out first and we followed.

There were two other cars already here, with people standing near them in a group, waiting for Dieter Klaus, watching him. His bodyguards – four women and two men – closed in around him as he walked towards the plane with that implacable energy of his. There was a small dog among the people who stood waiting. The pilot came down the ramp and saluted Klaus, standing aside and waiting for him to board the company jet. Klaus spoke to him and got an answer; I didn't hear any actual words but I suppose he was asking the pilot about the weather forecast: the haze was thick towards the horizon.

I joined the group, one of the male guards walking a little way behind me: I'd been under what amounted to close escort since we'd left the house, and I didn't expect that to change. Geissler, the man who'd interrogated me in the garage, had come with us in the limousine, and went aboard the plane soon after Klaus. The rest of us were following now, and the woman in the camelhair coat gave me a flashing smile and said in English – 'Hello, I'm Helen Maitland, and this is George, my husband.'

'Hans Mittag. Delighted.'

I'd caught sight of her earlier this morning, getting into one of the cars at the house.

'Dieter told us about you,' Maitland said. 'Most interesting.' Then he hurried up the ramp, a short man, quick in his movements and with the same nervous tension in him that Klaus had.

The focus of this operation – Shatner, in London briefing – is on a man named Maitland. Or rather, on his death. A week ago he was murdered, and his body taken away. His flat was broken into with some violence, and the police found evidence of massive blood loss. There were marks on the floor indicating that his body had been dragged out of the flat to the lift. The telephone was hanging by its cable – he'd been talking to a woman friend, who came forward, when the flat was entered. She reported sounds of the door being smashed in, an outbreak of voices and finally a cry.

Helen kept close to me as we went up the ramp, and I thought I heard her whisper, 'I'm sorry…'

Maitland had sat down with Klaus in one of the forward seats behind the flight deck. The pilot had taken his place next to the navigator, and a stewardess was greeting us as we came aboard. Her smile, I thought, was over-bright, as Helen's had been just now when she'd greeted me. No one was talking much; they seemed to be taking their cue from Dieter Klaus, from their fuhrer, and this morning he was totally changed from last night: in the limousine there'd been none of his brief outbursts of laughter. I took as long a look at Maitland as I could when I went past his seat: later I might need the ability to recognise some of the people here, perhaps quickly and at a distance.

Maitland, Willi Hartman had told me in the night-club, had been interested in the Red Army Faction. He began asking me questions about them. Then later I realised he was – how will we put it? – playing a kind of game with himself. He had a master plan, he told me once, about how to assassinate Moammar Gadhafi.

A counter-terrorist game, then? He fancied himself as an armchair counter-terrorist?

I think, yes. George was a very unusual man. Very intense.

The twin jets began moaning.

He was neurotic, Willi had said with sudden force. May I say that?

Helen hadn't objected. Oh, of course. Terribly so, terribly neurotic, yes. He fascinated me.

The olive-skinned girl in the mink coat was the last to board; she'd been sitting next to Klaus at the ice-hockey game, and Inge had said her name was Dolores. She was last to board, I think, because her little dog had been giving trouble, scared by the noise of the jets, and as she pulled it through the doorway by the leash I saw Dieter Klaus swing his head – 'I told you I didn't want that thing on the plane!' – and in the next second he was on his feet and the kick caught the dog in the flank and it went spinning through the doorway onto the tarmac with the leash whipping after it. 'Now shut that door!'

The stewardess stood frozen for a moment with her mouth in an O as she stared out at the dog; then she reached for the security lever and pulled the door shut and made it fast and came quickly along the aisle looking at no one, her face white. The dog wasn't yelping out there; from my window I could see that its neck was broken.

Would you please fasten your seat-belts, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to roll. Thank you.

No one was looking at anyone else. Helen sat with her head lowered, picking at her nails; the lacquer was already chipped. It couldn't, I thought, have been an easy decision to join George Maitland again when she found out he was still alive.

We listened to the exchange between the flight deck and the tower through the doorway as the wheels began rolling; then the stewardess came back and slid the door shut and sat down on the single rearward-facing seat with her head turned to the window, her eyes glistening. On the other side of the aisle I could see Khatami, the Iranian pilot, in a black bomber jacket and flying boots. He was sitting alone. His was the only face I'd seen when we'd come aboard that hadn't looked tight, nervous. On the contrary, he'd looked in a strange way exalted.

We got the green from the tower and the full thrust of the twin jets came on and the runway lights began flicking past the windows.

Blood from a butcher's shop, I suppose, or they'd cut a dog's throat to give the scene realism. But why had they gone to so much trouble: couldn't he have just disappeared?

Picking at her nails.

Terribly neurotic, yes. He fascinated me.

That alone could have been why she'd gone back to him, had stayed with him even though she'd seen what it would have to mean – being absorbed into Nemesis, living among people like these. Perhaps she was easily fascinated by people like George Maitland with his neurotic intensity, by the girls in the night-club, by anything or anyone illicit, by whatever dared to take its fill of the forbidden. It would be consistent with her character as far as I knew it, with her schoolgirl naivete.

When we'd reached our ceiling and the power levelled off I asked her quietly, 'Was it Kurt Muller?'

She turned her pale face to me. 'What did you say?'

'Was it Kurt Muller who told Klaus you were in Berlin?' He'd been the man who'd recognised her in the night-club, the one I'd asked her about in the taxi when we'd left there. She hadn't hesitated, or not for long. Oh, he was just someone I knew, a friend of George's at the embassy.

'I'm not sure,' she said. 'It could have been. I didn't ask.'

Muller must have been one of the few people who'd known that George Maitland was still alive, and he'd phoned him that night, told him that he'd seen his wife, that she was here in Berlin.

'He didn't have to do that,' she said.

'Who?

'Dieter.'

Didn't have to kill the dog.

I said, 'You're running with the wrong set.'

How many hotels had Klaus phoned before he'd found her? He would have started with the big ones, so it wouldn't have taken him long. It must have put her into shock, a voice from the dead, his voice. But she'd gone to him, left her things behind, just walked out of the hotel and down the street and found a taxi once she was out of sight.

He fascinated me. Well yes, he must have, and still did. But there was something else she'd said. I've only just realised how much I hated him. But then hate is as close to love as laughter is to tears.