The Helsinki Pact Read online

  Alex Cugia

  The Helsinki Pact

  eBook first published June 2016 by The Chesil Press, Dorset, UK

  at and distributed by Smashwords

  Cover design by Nicole Anderson

  Copyright 2016 Alex Cugia

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  This book is a work of fiction

  Thank you for downloading this ebook, which is licensed for your personal use. The book remains the copyrighted property of the named author or publisher and should not be distributed to others, whether commercially or non-commercially. If you would like to share it then please obtain authorised copies for other readers or advise them where to get one. If this copy was not obtained for your personal use then please visit your favourite ebook retailer to obtain your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's hard work in producing the book you're enjoying.

  This book is also available in a print edition

  http://www.chesilpress.com/

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: March 1989 Herren does a deal with General Lushev

  Chapter 1: Friday September 1 1989 Thomas smuggles in the maps, meets and falls for Bettina

  Chapter 2: Friday September 1 and Saturday September 2 1989 Kai and Bernhard plan their escape

  Chapter 3: Sunday September 3 through to Saturday September 9 1989 The dig begins

  Chapter 4: Thursday September 14 1989 Thomas takes Bettina to dinner, meets Mark later, car crashes

  Chapter 5: Thursday September 14 and Friday September 15 1989 Stephan learns details of the project

  Chapter 6: Friday September 15 1989 Thomas wakes up in a dungeon, meets Colonel Dieter

  Chapter 7: Friday September 15 1989 Dieter offers Thomas a deal, then brings in Thomas's handler

  Chapter 8: Friday September 15 1989 The dig continues, Schwinewitz becomes suspicious

  Chapter 9: Friday September 15 1989 A night at the opera with Stephan and Camille

  Chapter 10: Saturday September 16 through Sunday September 17 1989 The diggers break through

  Chapter 11: Sunday September 17 1989 Kai, Bernhard and Ulrike take to the tracks

  Chapter 12: Monday September 18 1989 Bettina briefs Thomas, tells him some home truths

  Chapter 13: Monday October 2 1989 Thomas meets Stephan in Frankfurt, learns of the project

  Chapter 14: Tuesday October 3 1989 Thomas lies at his debriefing and gets beaten up

  Chapter 15: Sunday October 8 1989 High level Party meeting at Honecker's house to discuss the protests

  Chapter 16: Thursday October 12 1989 Thomas meets Stephan again, discusses opportunites for gain

  Chapter 17: Thursday November 9 1989 The Wall opens; Thomas makes his way to Bettina

  Chapter 18: Friday November 10 1989 Bettina and Thomas have a meeting with Dieter

  Chapter 19: Saturday January 13 1990 Dieter tells Bettina and Thomas of the theft in Dresden

  Chapter 20: Sunday January 14 1990 Bettina and Thomas drive to Dresden and find a room

  Chapter 21: Sunday January 14 1990, evening Thomas and Bettina break into Henkel's house

  Chapter 22: Sunday January 14 1990, evening Phoenix Securities' meeting in Frankfurt

  Chapter 23: Sunday January 14 1990, evening and on to early morning Thomas and Bettina discuss Henkel's death

  Chapter 24: Monday January 15 1990, morning onwards Bettina visits Dresden Stasi HQ, meets Roehrberg

  Chapter 25: Monday January 15 1990, morning onwards Thomas tries to find out about Phoenix

  Chapter 26: Monday January 15 1990, morning onwards High level meeting with Helmut Kohl about the project

  Chapter 27: Monday January 15 1990, afternoon Bettina has a prickly meeting with Georg

  Chapter 28: Tuesday January 16 1990 Bettina interrogates Spitze about the Dresden Stasi

  Chapter 29: Tuesday January 16 1990, evening Thomas breaks into Roehrberg's house

  Chapter 30: Tuesday January 16 1990, evening Thomas is nearly caught in Roehrberg's office

  Chapter 31: Tuesday January 16 1990, evening Patrick and Klaus fight at the Phoenix Securities' meeting

  Chapter 32: Wednesday January 17 1990, early hours of the morning Thomas and Betta fight, then get it on

  Chapter 33: Wednesday January 17 1990 Bettina gets useful background information from Georg

  Chapter 34: Wednesday January 17 1990, afternoon Vladimir Putin decides to blackmail Roehrberg

  Chapter 35: Wednesday January 17 1990, afternoon, evening and night Thomas breaks into the archives

  Chapter 36: Thursday January 18 1990, early hours Georg appears unexpectedly, finds the document for them

  Chapter 37: Thursday January 18 1990 Bettina visits Georg to collect the photo prints

  Chapter 38: Thursday January 18 1990, evening Thomas and Stephan have dinner in Dresden

  Chapter 39: Thursday January 18 1990, evening and on past midnight Thomas and Bettina rush back to Berlin

  Chapter 40: Friday January 19 1990, early hours of the morning Thomas rushes Bettina to Kai's flat to hide

  Chapter 41: Friday January 19 1990, early morning They listen to the clandestine tapes to learn more

  Chapter 42: Friday January 19 1990 Bettina tells Thomas all she knows about Stasi dealings

  Chapter 43: Friday January 19, evening, then Saturday January 20 1990 Thomas meets with BND agents

  Chapter 44: Sunday January 21 1990 Bettina decides to risk leaving the flat

  Chapter 45: Sunday January 21 1990, evening She bumps into Hanno, later runs for her life to the flat

  Chapter 46: Sunday January 21 1990, evening Thomas returns to the empty flat, Bettina rushes in

  Chapter 47: Sunday January 21 1990, evening They escape through the tunnel chased by Hanno

  Chapter 48: Saturday July 28 1990, evening Great changes for everyone

  End notes

  Prologue

  March 1989

  IT was a strange setting in which to discuss the future of a nation.

  Alfred Herren rubbed his gloved hand over the room window to clear it and watched as the dark grey Tupolev jet rebounded twice on the icy air field and ground to a halt. The Soviet officials were fifty minutes late. "In all likelihood deliberately," he thought "a crude negotiating tactic." But calling this meeting on Soviet ground, in an abandoned military base on the Finnish border, was at least an admission of interest. Chancellor Kohl had confided to him that his overture to President Gorbachev had struck a chord. Now it was time to lay all the cards on the table. If the information he had received on the economic situation in the Soviet Union was correct then the deck was stacked in his favour.

  Herren removed a glove, blew on his numbed fingers and pondered the potential outcomes. As CEO of Deutsche Bank he had lived through countless business negotiations and had generally been able to pull off the expected result. But businessmen were by definition rational beings, even if they didn't always act that way. Seen from the Soviet side, where it would be viewed as a political move, his proposal could seem a provocation, an insult to a ruling superpower. The meeting could last a few minutes and officially would never have taken place. No trace would exist in the records. Or the lives of millions of people and the very shape of Europe would later change forever as a result of the processes started by their discussions.

  Through the whirlwind of snow and ice fragments raised by the jet’s exhausts he could make out the silhouettes of two men leaving the plane. Herren immediately identified the first, tall, well-built and in military uniform, as General Lushev, Commander of the Warsaw Pact forces. "The man behind him is probably a political emissary." he thought. He glanced through the dossier prepared by the German Interior Ministry. "Ah. Undersecretary Pershev." he realised as
the men came closer. Pershev was a rising star, educated in the United States and young to have reached the eminence he had. A little younger than Herren at just over forty he was the former head of one of the country’s largest conglomerates and now one of Gorbachev’s most influential advisors.

  Herren shut the report with a wry smile. "They mean business," he mused to himself "if they’re sending a Herren clone to negotiate."

  The door at the far end of the now abandoned training room opened loudly and the noise of General Lushev’s boots on the cement floor resonated across the bare walls. He looked considerably older than the picture in Herren’s file but no less imposing. He was over six feet tall with vivid green eyes that betrayed intelligence and suspicion and that contrasted with his grey-white hair. Herren sensed their intensity as the eyes scanned him, searching for a weak spot. A massive hand took his a moment later and gripped hard.

  Lushev broke off, turned to Pershev and spoke a long sentence in Russian. There was a long, awkward silence before Pershev nodded, taking three chairs from a stack in the corner and gesturing to everyone to sit down.

  “Mr Herren, please take a seat.” he said in fluent English. His tone was pleasant yet firm. “I hope you’ll forgive us the discomfort of this deserted air base as a meeting place, but we understood that confidentiality was of the utmost importance.” He was dressed elegantly: and with his dark grey suit, starched white shirt and yellow tie he could have easily passed as a successful Western European businessman. “Now, we understood from President Gorbachev that your Chancellor has a proposal aimed at enhancing German-Soviet cooperation. I’m afraid we’ve only been given a very sketchy outline but I’m sure you won’t mind expanding.”

  Herren looked at him and then at Lushev. “If you’ll forgive my lack of diplomacy I’ll go straight to the point. We each have something the other needs. The Soviet Union is on the verge of economic collapse. Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms so far have had a disastrous effect on the economy. Trying to keep up with President Reagan’s increase in military spending, his so-called Star Wars Program, has caused your engine to melt down. The queues for food have never been longer. Social unrest is mounting.”

  He paused for effect, as Pershev translated. He tried to read some form of reaction in General Lushev’s eyes, but could see no trace of agreement or denial.

  “A mounting wave of nationalism is being used by local politicians to snatch power for themselves. Requests for independence are cropping up everywhere: Hungary, Georgia, Lithuania, now Kazakhstan. The USSR is ready to explode. To hold it together you only have two options: repressive military action or money.”

  Herren waited, but still no reaction. There was no doubt that the picture he had painted was correct−the Soviet Union was close to the brink. In all likelihood this was the main reason Gorbachev had been incessantly visiting the Western capitals in the last few months. The biggest threat to the USSR was coming not from its historical enemies but from within itself.

  “Military intervention against the provinces would go against all of Gorbachev’s tenets and compromise his credibility worldwide.” Herren continued. “The rouble is non-convertible, and the internal savings rate abysmal. So you need foreign capital. But no Western government believes in your reforms enough to risk their own money. None except ours, that is. We are ready to put fifty billion Deutsche Marks on the table immediately. At a price, of course.”

  “What price?” Lushev intervened, in a thick Russian accent.

  Herren moved toward the whiteboard to draw a rough sketch. “You have a vast empire, the biggest in the world in land area. The USSR stretches from Asia and the Pacific Ocean in the east, here, just across the Bering Straits from the US, and west to Europe, over 10,000 kilometres in distance. But the DDR, the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, call it as you will, is a Soviet creation. A puppet country. It should return to being part of Germany. We want you to cut the strings and let history take its natural course.”

  Pershev shot up from his chair. “You have the nerve to propose we sell you the DDR for fifty billion Deutsche Marks?” he shouted. He seized the cloth and wiped Herren’s drawing in one swift move. “And this is what your Chancellor meant by enhancing the Soviet-German relationship?”

  “Gentlemen, please.” Herren said, noticing that Lushev was still sitting motionless in his chair. “We’re all men of the political world here and we know how these things work. A proposal of financial assistance scandalizes you? Just over a hundred years ago, you sold Alaska to the United States. What is the lesser evil? You need our money desperately. And we can accomplish our mission with an invisible hand, so the Soviet Union will not lose face. In fact it will gain further in credibility. There is only one German nation, not two. Sooner or later, they will reunite. But if you hold on for too long it will be too late for the Soviet Union.”

  Two hours later, the snow cut slantingly through the freezing wind as Alfred Herren hurried back toward his private jet. Part of him was elated, another extremely worried. How long could negotiations be kept hidden from the DDR informants? East Germany's despotic ruling elite would use every means in its power to avoid being wiped away. The road to a new Europe was likely to be paved with dead bodies. Would his be among the first, he wondered, and he sat on the plane and took from his wallet a picture of his wife and their new born baby. The serene bliss of that moment during the summer holidays seemed ages away and he felt a chilling premonition about what his own future might be.

  But first he had to report to Kohl. Lushev and Pershev would report in turn to Gorbachev. Assuming all went well, and he was certain that it would knowing how desperate the USSR was for hard currency, they would all meet again in a week, this time in Finland, neutral territory. He pulled out a pad from his briefcase, wrote The Helsinki Pact neatly at the top of a sheet, and began to make notes for his meeting with Kohl first thing in the morning.

  Chapter 1

  Friday September 1 1989

  ALWAYS when Thomas crossed he felt adrift in a time he couldn’t quite grasp. Deceptively similar to his own, this country was one where he was no longer able to understand intuitively how things worked. "Make a simple mistake here," he thought "even from ignorance, and you could find yourself in jail."

  He had been entering through the Friedrichstrasse crossing for months now but invariably he would feel apprehensive and uneasy until he was safely through. Even when he’d escaped to the city streets this feeling of wariness as to what might happen persisted for at least an hour, often longer. Each time the city's drabness struck him, marking the contrast with the determined jollity of the western sector. The brutalist architecture of the new buildings casually thrown down, it seemed, among the elegant constructions of the past didn't help, but there was also a general strangeness to the country, something at the same time familiar but also quite foreign to him.

  Twice already he had stopped suddenly, wheeled round and walked rapidly back in the direction he’d come, scanning carefully the people on all sides, convinced that he was being followed. He’d been on edge from the moment he’d woken up, and the slow shuffle to the immigration desk had made things worse. He wished he hadn't learned of the soundproofed room deep in the building. Kai had joked about it but Thomas couldn’t get it out of his mind, wondering if he’d end up there, wondering how he would cope if he did.

  He’d been making regular crossings for months now but previously he’d had nothing more incriminating with him than some excess currency. This crossing was different.

  Convinced he’d overlooked some detail which would have him suspected and given a full body search, his nerves at breaking point as a result of the stuttering movements of the queue and the menace brought by the armed guards round the stuffy hall, he’d nearly abandoned the attempt in order to return to the safety of his apartment. And then he’d thought that his risk was nothing to that of Kai, who was risking his life. He’d breathed slowly and deeply to steady his nerves, tried not to think of the
soundproofed room, had shuffled forward with the rest trying to look a bit bored, a bit annoyed with the delays, and then suddenly he was through, out in the open.

  Now on the streets of East Berlin, hurrying towards Kai’s apartment, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that something would go wrong, that he’d be stopped and invited - that was the word they used, although it was no use declining – to visit a drab, anonymous office hidden away somewhere where he would have to explain to the police or Stasi officers just what he'd been up to.

  This time when he wheeled round and walked back he’d stopped on the corner, looked ostentatiously at his watch and exaggerated his gesture of annoyance as if whoever he was due to meet there was very late. He then spent several minutes scrutinising the passers-by, checking to see if there were any faces he’d seen recently or if anyone seemed to be paying him particular attention. There were two men in identical belted raincoats approaching him on the crossing who had looked at him and said something to each other. As he idly turned he saw one glancing back.

  “Damn this!” he thought. “I’m getting paranoid!” He took a final scan of the streets, turned, and set off on the last few hundred metres towards Kai’s apartment.

  He crossed the wide Alexanderplatz, next to the towering TV antenna which had become the world recognised symbol of East Berlin. A closed subway station, now unused, faced him on the right. He recognised the landmarks and remembered that Kai’s apartment block was just round the corner.

  Visiting East Germans at home was not actually prohibited but it was strongly discouraged. Thomas had visited Kai only once before, shortly after he’d moved in, and he wondered if he was pushing his luck. People trying to escape were usually shot, if caught in the attempt, and anyone helping escapees could expect pretty much an indefinite jail sentence.

  The building was old, unlovely, and not especially well maintained but its location, close to the now abandoned subway station, was exactly what Kai had been seeking for some time. Kai’s apartment was right at the top but had a private utility room in the basement. This was the last of a row of such rooms, separated from the others by a noisy boiler room which the caretaker rarely visited, and on the closest side of the building to the Alexanderplatz.