the sort adolescents make showing off in front of their friends, disguising their voices by pitching them high or low and speaking through paper. There were the usual sexual demands and insults, so I started to hang up, when a particular phrase or series of words were used that stunned me.
I'd heard them before-from Freddie! I shouted, My God, is that you, Freddie?" .. . I can still hear the agonizing scream that followed, and I knew I'd been right and Harry was wrong."
"What we saw tonight was a variation of that monster," Drew said.
"I wonder if he's still on drugs."
"I have no idea. Perhaps a psychiatrist should be brought in to watch the tape Lieutenant Anthony made."
""I can't wait to see it myself. That tape could be a gold mine.. Karin, what does Witkowski know?"
"Again, I have no idea. All he said to me was that there were unanswered questions from the past. I don't know what he meant."
"Let's ask him." Latham turned and addressed the colonel, who was sitting on the starboard gunwale with the two commandos.
"Stan, can you come here a minute?"
"Sure." The colonel walked across the deck and stood between Drew and Karin.
"Stosh, you knew more about tonight than you told either of us, didn't you?"
"No, I didn't know, I merely assumed the possibility. One of Freddie de V's favorite personas when he went undercover was that of a priest, and, Lord knows, he was blonder than Marilyn Monroe when he didn't dye his hair. When the captain described a blond priest around six feet tall, I was next to you, Karin, and watched you go ballistic. Suddenly memories came back to me."
"That doesn't answer why you could even imagine it might be her husband up there," said Latham.
"Well, now you're going back a few years. When G-Two got word of Frederik de Vries's death at the hands of the Stasi, there were a few gaps we couldn't fill, such as why they recorded his 'interrogations' and death in such detail. It wasn't normal, not normal at all. Usually that stuff was buried, deep; the lessons of the concentration camps were learned."
"That 5s what first struck me," said Karin.
"Harry, too, but he ascribed it to the mentality of Stasi fanatics who knew they were about to lose their power, lose everything. I couldn't go along with that because Frederik talked about the Stasi so frequently, how brutal they could be, now manipulative, yet how basically insecure they were. Insecure men don't condemn themselves with their own words."
"What did my brother say when you told him that?"
"I never did. You see, Harry wasn't just Frederik's control, he was very fond of him. I didn't have the heart to tell him about our difficulties. There was no point, Freddie was dead-for the record."
"There were a couple of other things too," said the colonel softly, "things you couldn't know, Karin. In his last three penetrations, the information De Vries brought out was patently false. By that time we ourselves had compromised quite a few Stasi who knew they were soon going to be unemployed and indictable, so they were happy to cooperate. Several brought out proof that contradicted De Vries's findings."
"Why didn't you call him on it?" asked Drew.
"Pull him out and put him on the grill?"
"It was a lousy, fogged-up area," replied Witkowski, shaking his head in the shadows.
"Had he been duped, outsmarted? Was it burnout? He had been outstanding in the past, so were these simply lapses as a result of overwork? You figure, we couldn't."
"You mentioned a 'couple of things," Stanley," said Karin.
"What were they?"
"Only one really, but it was confirmed by two of our turnarounds who didn't know each other, and we confirmed that. The Stasi was an octopus with a hundred eyes and a thousand tentacles; in a sense it ran the underside of the country.. .. Your husband was flown twice to Munich and met with General Ulrich von Schnabe, later established to be one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi movement. He was assassinated while in prison by one of his own people before he could be interrogated."
"So the seed was planted and a poison flower called Gfinter jAger bloomed," said Karin, arching her head back in disbelief.
"How? In the name of sanity, how?"
"Maybe the tape will tell us something." Latham gently shoved the colonel away and put his arm around her shoulders, then turned to Witkowski.
"Use your fancy phone and call Moreau's people here in Bonn. Tell them to get us