The Ears of a Cat Read online

  Settled with beers on opposite beds, Wanless had a question.

  ‘No one’s supposed to know where I am.’

  ‘Tell that to Cindy.’

  ‘Ah, right.’

  In his vain attempts to colonise Horváth’s body, he’d told her too much over the last twelve months and now felt she was the only person he could confide in. Hjemdahl didn’t rate him, he knew that already, and he’d just alienated Cooper by ignoring her repeated warnings against direct action. You’ll just draw yourself, and us, to the attention of the authorities. You don’t want that, do you? Well, no, he didn’t, but nothing was happening. Something had to be done.

  ‘You dyed your hair.’

  ‘And shaved off my beard. Nothing else for it.’

  Wanless was sad as he said it, as if losing his beard was a major reverse not far removed from terminal cancer.

  He had now spent three days in this room, most of it lying on his bed with his eyes shut listening to the TV. As a result, the air had a musty smell which his visitor detected at once. Hjemdahl eyed him with distaste. Wanless was an idiot. He’d done an acceptable job on his hair, now a dark chestnut brown, but some blond still showed through. The dye he’d bought at the railway station wouldn’t do for eyebrows as well, as the hotel’s resident stylist could have told him. Bernat knew a thing or two about gels.

  ‘I know you’re looking at my eyebrows.’ Hjemdahl nodded. ‘The thing is, though, I can’t safely leave here just now for the appropriate product.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Maybe you could get it for me.’

  ‘Maybe I could. Let me think about that.’

  But Hjemdahl was thinking about something else entirely. How had Wanless got time off work?

  ‘Asbestos.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘They had to strip it from the warehouse, it was all over the place – roofing panels, pipe ducts. I could report to another depot for a week or take unpaid leave.’

  Hjemdahl rotated his bottle of Trois Dames, wondering how big the mortgage had to be to drink from the mini bar for a week. And despite the fact that he had just done something incredibly stupid, Wanless seemed strangely pleased with himself.

  ‘You may not have heard.’

  ‘You bumped off Xavier Grosjean, yes, we know.’

  ‘I’ve just been promoted to warehouse manager. More money for me, of course, but you wouldn’t believe what I can get my hands on now. And I can send it anywhere.’

  He was referring to everything from printed circuit boards to radio-controlled toys for the boys. City Electrical must have been desperate to promote a man like Eric Wanless, whose own internal wiring left much to be desired, especially between the ears. But he might yet have his uses.

  ‘Switchers, timers, you name it; anything we need.’

  For Hjemdahl this changed everything; he was going to be longer in this room than he’d intended. He stood up, took off his jacket and laid it carefully across the end of the bed, ensuring that his blade remained safely concealed in the inside pocket. He’d considered using a file to ram home the point, but a sharp-eyed pathologist might have linked the bodies of Wanless and Grosjean. Being clever is one thing, too clever something else again. As for letting this idiot live, for now it was a risk worth taking but he would have to be controlled. As his grandfather never tired of saying, a tied-up dog can’t stray further than its lead; though his grandfather had managed it himself when a stroke felled him in his kitchen-garden and liberated his soul into the ether. And not a moment too soon, Hjemdahl had thought at the time.

  ‘What do you do for food?’

  ‘Room service.’

  ‘And you’re telling me no one sees you when it’s delivered.’

  Wanless couldn’t honestly say that, but one pair of eyes was preferable to the many who’d clock him if he left his room to eat.

  ‘You disposed of the weapon safely?’

  ‘Wrapped it up, hid it under a bush, and before you ask, a good mile away from the scene.’

  Not nearly far enough, but Hjemdahl never held on to anything which couldn’t be changed.

  ‘So how do you propose to get home; what’s your plan?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that.’

  How amazing it was that someone dealing with practical matters like electric circuits paid so little attention to detail.

  ‘The time to do that was before you left.’

  ‘Easy for you to say, but I’m here now,’ as if to prove the point, ‘as you can see.’

  Hjemdahl already had views on crossing borders safely.

  ‘Whatever you do, avoid planes: airport security is way too tight. Take the train and hope no one checks your ugly mug against your passport photograph. If that happens, they’ll plug you into the mains and start asking serious questions,’ Hjemdahl glared at him to emphasise the point, ‘which you will not answer!’

  Wanless didn’t like what he was hearing.

  ‘But, Magnus, for Christ’s sake, I’ve already shelled out for a return flight!’

  Recently turned assassin, what was this man doing? Whining about the need to spend some money to avoid arrest. Tempted to smash him over the head with his bottle, Hjemdahl put it down on the bedside table, stood up and took him by the shoulders. Close up, his pale blue eyes were unpleasantly watery.

  ‘You’re a killer now, Eric, you must learn to think like one.’

  5

  Ursula Lang entered the room where Klein was waiting, folder at the ready. She didn’t take to him because there wasn’t much to take to. His thinning hair made him look older than he was, as did his tendency to adopt more formal wear than his colleagues. A tweed suit was surely going too far, and his stiff style of speech meant he came across exactly as he intended, though Lang could not pin this quality down with a native label since “fogey” was a word for which German had no equivalent. And so we must conclude, she thought, that a condition can exist in the absence of a word to define it.

  Klein indicated a seat and she sat on it.

  ‘Coffee? Tea? A soft drink, perhaps? Let it not be said that we do things by halves here at the Bundesnachrichtendienst.’ Getting the knife in now, he paused for effect. ‘Schwarzwaldkuchen?’

  Yes, she’d been less ample once but her brain hadn’t lost its edge.

  ‘I have always felt,’ he said, removing papers from his folder, ‘that you were happier in the backwaters of Pullach than you are now in what is, after all, a new, large-scale environment here in Berlin.’

  ‘One can have too much glass and concrete, Herr Klein, though as you know, I spend as little time in this building as possible.’

  ‘Be that as it may, and given the ever-increasing trend towards technology in our work, I have been asked to enquire what your attitude might be to retiring, either with immediate effect or in what we might term a phased transition towards a life of greater leisure.’

  Lang had seen this coming but wasn’t ready for retirement yet.

  ‘If you have a written offer to make, I shall, of course, consider it. Meanwhile, might I suggest we cut to the chase.’

  ‘As you wish. And so we move on to your targets.’

  Lang extracted a notebook from her knitting bag and read from it.

  ‘They drove together from Darmstadt to Berlin two days ago. They checked into the Crowne Plaza that same evening, neighbouring rooms, ate together in the hotel restaurant, spent some time in the bar and retired, each to his own room.’

  ‘Excellent.’ But Klein was looking at her bag with disapproval. ‘You still pursue the art of knitting, I see.’

  ‘It keeps me off the streets, Herr Klein and, if I may say so, provides valuable cover. No one sees in me anything other than a middle-aged woman plying her needles.’

  Klein was tempted to challenge the middle-aged bit b
ut let it pass in favour of any useful information she might have.

  Both from the European Space Agency, the two men had duly attended the first day of the conference. However, on the afternoon of the second day, Dr Weber had failed to appear, heading instead for Heinrich-Roller-Straße, where he entered a building facing the park, leaving it shortly afterwards.

  ‘No one at home?’

  ‘Perhaps, or someone who didn’t want to know. Anyway, at that point he produced a cell phone, looked up at one of the windows and shouted at it in an animated manner.’

  ‘Hand gestures?’

  ‘Many and varied.’

  ‘I have never understood,’ Klein said, ‘why otherwise intelligent people resort to gestures no one can see.’

  Since Klein had a computer where his brain was supposed to be, Lang believed him. Human weakness of any kind was not to be encouraged. Logic ruled.

  ‘And Weingartner?’

  ‘With the best will in the world, Herr Klein,’ though she knew it was absent on this occasion, ‘I cannot be in two places at once.’

  ‘Excuse me one moment, Frau Lang.’

  Klein consulted his notes but didn’t let her see them.

  ‘Yes, Dr Weber had the briefest of calls with one Catherine Cooper, who resides in that area. I have a photograph on file but little in the way of background information.’

  Taken from a university website, Lang recognised the woman at once; she’d seen her in the Café Air the previous day.

  ‘This woman, she is working for the opposition?’

  Klein laughed; a rare occurrence.

  ‘Really, Frau Lang, she’s forty if she’s a day, with mousy brown hair already showing signs of grey which, as we can see, she is doing absolutely nothing to conceal. This person,’ he said dismissively, ‘is the very antithesis of allure.’

  Lang was well aware that this description could apply just as easily to herself but she didn’t care.

  ‘Who is this Catherine Cooper, do we know?’

  ‘Dr Weber’s daughter.’

  With a name like Catherine Cooper, this was not obvious, but vetting had revealed that Dr Weber had cheated on his English wife with a succession of different women over the years, leading to an acrimonious divorce. As one consequence of these events, his daughter had reverted to her mother’s maiden name, Cooper, and deserted Katarine in favour of Catherine.

  ‘If I may ask, Herr Klein, has Frau Cooper formalised this change?’

  ‘Not as far as her passport is concerned, but with respect to her employer, yes.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The Free University. However, the salient point in all this, surely,’ Klein added, ‘is that Dr Weber’s morals leave much to be desired.’

  ‘But Herr Klein, really, that could be said of us all. His morals are hardly our concern.’

  Klein was outraged. ‘It could certainly not be said of me, and if I may say so, your own opportunities in this area must be narrowing with the years.’ He shook his head in sorrow. Ursula Lang was painfully slow on the uptake; the sooner she went the better. ‘In my opinion, you are betraying your limitations in making such a suggestion. A man like Weber, who will sleep with anyone, here and there as the mood takes him, will easily fall prey to a KSB honeytrap. Surely, that must be obvious?’ Ursula heard the words Even to you, though Klein had not spoken them. ‘And as I’m sure you are aware, delegates from the Russian Federation are attending this conference. Need I say more?’

  Having fought each other to a standstill, they took a few moments to gather their thoughts before Klein moved the conversation on, taking a more conciliatory note.

  ‘In the light of your information, Frau Lang, and while Weber and his daughter are both in the city, I suggest that we check her out too.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘To eliminate her as a subject of interest to the service.’

  Lang could live with that. Then, glancing at her notes through stray strands of wool, she recalled the glamorous blonde who had joined Cooper in the café.

  ‘There is something else I might mention, though it may not be significant.’

  Klein cast his eyes heavenwards, though his penetrating gaze was stopped by the panels of the suspended ceiling.

  ‘I have always held it to be the case, Frau Lang, that everything is significant. It only remains for us to establish, in any given case, what that significance might be.’

  6

  Some years since, Cindy Horváth had hoped to make her mark translating works of fiction into Hungarian, but many of her favourites had already been translated, not always so well in her opinion, and the publishers she approached either had no interest in the titles she suggested or, even worse, already had translators on their books. And so, on her flight from Gdańsk to Trondheim, she whiled away the time translating into Hungarian, not Barnaby Rudge nor Vanity Fair but technical specifications for washing machines and user guides for wireless printers.

  Her financial situation showed no real improvement till her employers requested video tutorials as part of the deal, bringing with them the prospect of more money. Hi there, I’m Cindy and here we have the OfficeJet Pro wireless printer. It’s really quite straightforward, so let me take you through it. With one exception, her first attempts were clumsy – her looks stole the show. With more effort on her part, Horváth could raise her employers’ profile greatly, becoming a minor hit on YouTube on the way. But they had their feet on the ground and their hands in their pockets. You will never compete with kittens, Miss Horváth, you must understand that.

  While Horváth knew this was true, her figure left little to be desired and in her preferred tight top and jeans even less to the imagination. Her hair did no harm either; for no obvious reason, men were attracted to blondes. And so, from small beginnings, she made a reputation for herself. Behind the camera, Tibor, with an eye to making it big in the industry, suggested possible improvements, low-cut tops included, and became more creative in his use of angles. A favourite was filming from an increased elevation, the better to disappear down her cleavage. Horváth found this alarming until she discovered his interest was in other men. Artfully packaged as a commodity, she was safe with this man in his basement studio.

  Because money was tight and breakfast included, she overnighted in the Chesterfield Hotel. Chesterfield didn’t sound Norwegian to her, a point she made at reception as she headed out for a smoke before going to bed. It has always been called that, the receptionist assured her. But how would a girl recently arrived from Estonia know that?

  Since she could not afford two nights in Trondheim, she waited till the twelve o’clock latest departure time before setting off, idling in a ground floor public room before hitting the street. With its leather armchairs and commodious sofas, the lounge made her feel young again, though at thirty-two she wasn’t old. And she didn’t look it either: a glance at the ornate gilt framed mirror assured her of that.

  Stenvik’s favourite haunt was Persilleriet, a café within easy walking distance for a fit young woman like her. She’d set up the meeting the day before by direct message, claiming to be interested in his work. Which, in a way, she was. And when she arrived, trailing her little pink suitcase on wheels, he was already there, a perfect match for his profile picture – late twenties, closely cropped hair and trim beard. She wasn’t convinced by beards. Some she’d come close to in the last year or two had looked good but had a sandpaper effect on the sensitive skin of her face. He pulled out a chair as he rose to greet her.

  ‘Ms Horváth.’

  ‘Yes, but you can call me Cindy.’

  She knew she was in trouble when he chose not to do that.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  Finding she had not, he recommended lefse with hummus and vegetable salad.

  ‘Lefse?’

  ‘Ah yes, a traditional Nor
wegian flatbread. You should see it being made. We use long wooden turning sticks and rolling pins with grooves.’

  ‘My goodness, sounds like an art in its own right.’

  ‘It is.’

  She took his word for it and ordered the hummuskubbe, which duly arrived on a neat little tray, but the more time passed, the harder the going became.

  ‘You say you are interested in my work, but it is not yet clear to me the nature of your interest.’

  ‘Well,’ Cindy said, ‘here’s the thing.’

  She did her best to explain but didn’t do it well. Her knowledge of nanobiology was based on half an hour’s reading in her room the night before, most of it beyond her comprehension. And that wasn’t the only problem.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Stenvik said, though Horváth had the impression he didn’t mind at all, ‘but I find your accent challenging to the ear.’

  Not the first time this had happened, it wouldn’t be the last.

  ‘I’m from Adelaide.’

  ‘I see.’

  Where she had grown up, diphthongs ruled, the downside being that foreign speakers of English were sometimes defeated by her vowels.

  ‘Horváth is a Hungarian name, I believe.’

  ‘My family emigrated to Australia after 1956. Anyway, to put it in a nutshell, Mr Stenvik, I and some like-minded people are evaluating the possible risks posed by innovation in several fields, including nanobiology. But we are not knowledgeable in this area.’

  ‘Like-minded people?’

  ‘Future World, you may have heard of us.’

  He had not. ‘Excuse me a moment.’

  Stenvik produced his mobile phone and visited the site. Apart from references to the benefits of scientific advance and the need to separate fact from fiction, the content was minimal.