The Good Thief's Guide to Berlin (28 page)

“Oh,” I said to Buster, “you want a reward, is that what you’re telling me?”

“He’s adorable,” Victoria gushed.

“He’d certainly like you to think so.”

“Oh, come on, you’re smitten, I can tell.”

She lowered her face to the cage and grinned in at Buster.

“My name’s Buster,”
he squawked.
“What’s your name?”

“He’s so clever,” Victoria said, glancing up at me.

“Don’t you believe it. He’s plenty dumb.”

“I’m Victoria,” Vic said to Buster. “Can you say that? Can you say Victoria?”

“Buster likes crackers.”

“See,” I said. “One-track mind.”

“Wanna sing a song?”

I groaned. “Not this again.”

“Wanna hear Buster count?”

“Buster, the answer’s still no,” I said. “And you can take it from me, the answer’ll be no until we tell you otherwise.”

“That’s a bit mean,” Victoria said. “What does he sing, anyway?”

“No idea. And I have no intention of finding out. It’s hard enough to get him to shut up at the best of times.”

Victoria gave me a look that seemed to imply I was a heartless beast. “Maybe the ambassador can tell us?”

“Excuse me?”

“When we give Buster back to him. We have to return him, Charlie. He’s the ambassador’s special companion. He’ll be missing him.”

“Mmm.”

“He will. Believe me.”

Oh, I believed her all right. I just wasn’t so sure about making contact with the ambassador or Freddy ever again. They’d got me in enough trouble as it was. Speaking of which …

“Do you have your mobile?” I asked.

“No.” Victoria scowled. “That American cow confiscated it. She refused to give it back to me. I’ve lost all my contact numbers. A whole bunch of personal and business texts.”

“And not just that.” I groaned.

“Excuse me?”

“The code,” I told her. “Your phone had the images of the first four pages stored on it.”

“So?”

I nodded toward Gert, absorbed in his radio transmissions. “So Gert here cracked the cipher. He translated the final page.” I snatched up the pad from Gert’s desk and passed it to Victoria. I allowed her a moment to read through the message he’d translated. Then I explained about the meaning of the reference to the Devil’s Mountain.

She looked up from the pad with wonder in her eyes. “You really believe something is hidden there?”

“Yup,” I said. “Only we don’t know what it is. Perhaps we might have done if you’d still had the images of the other pages on your phone. Gert could have deciphered them, too. We might have discovered what this mess is really all about.”

“And now?”

I shrugged. “Now I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. It only took Gert a few minutes to figure out the cipher, so our American friends will definitely have it soon. In fact, they’re probably on their way to the Devil’s Mountain right now.”

“You sound bitter, Charlie. Why do you care?”

“It just rankles. They shouldn’t have snatched you, or backed out of paying me. And it bothers me that I don’t know whether they deserve to get their hands on whatever is up there or not. For all we know, it could be of real importance to the British embassy.”

“Or the Russians or the French.”

“Definitely the Russians,” I said. “They’ve had the first four pages longer than anybody. They’ll have cracked them long ago, so they know what’s been concealed and they’re eager to get their hands on it.”

Vic shook her head. “Not longer than anybody,” she said. “You’re forgetting, Jane Parker had those pages before that. And it’s likely the ambassador knew the final page was hidden in Buster’s cage. Chances are he put it there.”

I thought about that. There was something bothering me. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on just yet.

“Charlie?” Victoria asked. “What is it?”

“I think you’re right,” I told her.

“Well, I usually am. But right about what, exactly?”

“I should have thought of it sooner. I should have seen it that way.”

“What way?”

“The ambassador,” I said. “Jane Parker. The code.”

“You’re not making any sense, Charlie. You’re talking in riddles.”

But they weren’t riddles in my mind. I was thinking about the top secret file. I was thinking about the five pages that had been in the file when it was complete. My theory had been that all the relevant information was there. That once the code had been cracked, there’d be nothing else to know. That was the theory the Americans had been working on, too. Same for the Russians. Same for the French.

But maybe not the same for the British.

I rushed over to Gert and clicked my fingers in front of his face. He looked up, a little dazed and a touch alarmed, and I motioned for him to remove his earphones.

“Your network,” I said. “You listen, right? You learn from it? That’s how you knew about the threat I was facing.”

Gert nodded, still unsure where I was going with this.

“But the Americans and the Russians and the French must know about your network, too. They probably know it exists.”

“
Ja,
I guess.”

“And they have a history of eavesdropping electronically. I mean, that’s why the listening post exists on the Devil’s Mountain. And there must have been a similar culture in the east, too.”

Gert blinked his long lashes.

“What I’m thinking,” I told him, “is that you can use your network to
broadcast
information. To pass it around. You, personally, could put something out there that people would get hold of.”

He rubbed his pointed beard. “For sure, this is possible.”

“Great.” I lifted the pad before his eyes and tapped the deciphered message with my finger. “Then start broadcasting this. I don’t want the Americans to be the only ones who have it. I want to see who else shows up.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Gert broadcast the information about something of value being hidden at the Devil’s Mountain listening station for a good twenty minutes, and then he set his headphones to one side and guided Victoria and me out through the park and back into the woods.

It was fully dark by now, and I kept tripping over tree roots or walking into branches, but at least Buster had fallen silent again. I couldn’t be sure if it was because of the blackness, or if he was scared half out of his very small mind, but I appreciated the peace and quiet.

I was at the rear of our group, carrying Buster’s cage, and Victoria was in front of me, stooped at the waist and moving stealthily through the trees. I could see her white trainers and the white flashes on her blue tracksuit quite clearly. It made her look like she was out for some kind of impromptu jog that had gone horribly wrong. But I guessed it had to be better than being held captive against her will.

We broke out of the tree cover, and Gert beckoned us toward the split in the fence. He guided us through, and then he opened the driver’s door on the Trabbi for me. I dropped inside and Victoria walked around and climbed into the passenger seat. I popped Buster’s cage onto her lap, then gingerly gripped the steering wheel and gazed up at Gert.

“You’re sure you don’t mind us borrowing this?” I asked him.

“It is no problem,” he said. “Take it, please.”

“You have the keys?”

He smiled and shook his head. Then he crouched down and reached a spindly arm past my legs until he was grappling with a couple of loose wires hanging from beneath the steering column. He touched the wires together. A blue spark lit up the foot-well and the feeble engine coughed and spluttered into life, rattling the lightweight chassis.

“Something else you collected?”

Gert smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. Then he reached inside his jacket and removed a pair of prepaid phones. He handed one to me and prodded some buttons on the other. A few seconds later, my phone chimed and the screen glowed yellow.

“Now, you may call me,” he said, and jabbed his finger toward the number that had appeared on my screen. “Let me know if I can help.”

“You mean you won’t be listening in?”

He grinned. “Always, friend.”

I thanked him and told him in my most sincere voice that I owed him a real debt.

“Please, it is no problem.” He leaned inside and tapped the bars of Buster’s cage. “Good-bye, my little one. I think I miss you already.” He conjured a shy smile for Victoria, then backed out of the car. “Go now,” he told me. “And drive slowly,
ja
? The brakes, they are not so good.”

*   *   *

Gert was right—the brakes were terrible. So was the steering. Come to mention it, the lights weren’t anything to boast of, either. But the rumbling, gassy engine powered us across the city toward the far western zone of Charlottenburg, where I pulled over near the base of the Devil’s Mountain.

I left the Trabbi’s engine idling. It wasn’t as idle as I would have liked. The two-stroke unit was brash and tinny, and more than capable of drawing attention. But there was every chance we might need to leave in a hurry, and I didn’t feel inclined to place my faith in the haphazard spark between a couple of aging wires.

The Teufelsberg wasn’t as high as I’d imagined—certainly no mountain—but it was undeniably steep and it was covered in woodland. I popped my door and went around and opened Victoria’s, then offered her my hand and helped her out. We left Buster’s cage on the front seat and started to walk away.

“Wait,” I said. “Do you think I should crack a window?”

“Buster’s not a dog, Charlie. He’ll be fine.” Victoria rubbed her hands together, then zipped her tracksuit top up to her neck. “Besides, it’s freezing out here.”

I thought about that. I wasn’t convinced. I went back and rolled down a window. Better for Buster to be chilly than dead, I figured.

I avoided Victoria’s eyes as I passed by her again, then grabbed her hand and led her toward the base of the grassy mound.

Her palm was cold, but a little fizz of electricity was running up my arm. Stupid. I was behaving like a love-struck teenager. And I felt even dumber when Victoria started to speak.

“Er, Charlie. Can I have my hand back?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

“You were just squeezing it sort of tight.”

“My mistake. I’m a bit tense.”

Or a bit dim.

We climbed on, swerving around tree trunks and ducking beneath branches. It was tough going. The steep incline was slippery and I was having to concentrate on my footing. I was still looking down and panting hard when Victoria’s breath caught in her throat and she tapped me on the shoulder.

“Look,” she said. “Charlie, do you see?”

I did see. But I didn’t quite believe it.

The listening station was ahead of us, through a break in the trees. It was a vast, derelict complex. There were walls missing from a series of low, block-shaped buildings, their concrete interiors and metal girders exposed to the elements like the inside of a dollhouse. A cylindrical tower rose up from the middle, perhaps six stories tall. It was topped by a white spherical structure, like a golf ball on a tee. The tower and the sphere were constructed from a metal exoskeleton wrapped in white tarpaulin. The tarp was torn and badly shredded, and it flapped in the strengthening wind like the sails on a storm-tossed ship. I could see more spheres positioned lower down on the flat roofs of the concrete buildings. And I could see dark figures swarming around the entire structure with flashlights in their hands.

There were fifteen, maybe twenty people, their torch beams bouncing and jerking, illuminating the white globes from within, throwing snatches of graffiti into bright relief, or lancing out into the night sky through the ruptured fabric that surrounded the tower. We were too far away to identify who they were, but I was pretty sure the Americans and the Russians and the French guy with the freshly busted nose would be up there, along with a bunch of random treasure hunters Gert had managed to rustle up.

I grabbed Victoria by the arm and hauled her down to the muddy ground.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked, in a low voice, her breath misting on the air. “Do you want to join them?

“Not right now,” I whispered back. “I wouldn’t like to bump into the Americans. I doubt they’ll be too happy about all this.”

“It doesn’t look like a very organized search. Everyone’s running all over the place.”

“That’s what intrigues me.”

“How do you mean?”

I stared at her for a moment, her face pale and her eyes wet as dark pools. “Think about it. We know the Russians and the Americans had the first four pages of code. My assumption was that when they added the information from the fifth page, they’d know precisely what they were looking for, why it was important, and exactly where to find it. But maybe I was wrong.”

“Hmm. Or perhaps the Americans and the Russians have already left? Maybe one of them found whatever was stashed here right away before anyone else turned up?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“You’re not convinced?”

I sighed and leaned my weight on a tree trunk, wedging my shoulder against the knotted bark. “They’d have had to be pretty quick to get here and get away again.”

“The Americans had a head start.”

“Yeah, but not a big one. Thirty minutes, maximum. And if the Russians got here after them and found the hiding place empty, they’d have left by now, too. So no Americans and no Russians is the giveaway. That’s why I want to stay a while.”

“In case we see them?”

“Uh-huh. Think you can stand it?”

Victoria groaned and cleared a space on the ground with her toe. She settled cross-legged among the leaves, twigs, and mud, like she was practicing a yoga pose.

“You know, I wouldn’t mind one of your cigarettes,” she said. “I’m feeling a little sleepy. The Americans drugged me with something, and I think whatever they used is still floating around in my system.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but we can’t risk it. And we should probably stop talking. The wind could carry our voices.”

“Gee,” she whispered. “You really know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Victoria,” I told her, crouching alongside her, “you don’t know the half of it.”