Day of Judgment

Her mind rejected the idea totally so that she ran as if from the consequences of her action, blundering through the trees in the darkness, aware of the cries of her pursuers behind. And before her was only the river, its waters, swollen by heavy rain, flooding across the weir.

One of the Vopos loosed off a burst from his machine-pistol and she cried out in fear, running even faster, one arm raised against the flailing branches, tripped over a log and rolled down the steep bank into the river.

The Vopos arrived a moment later and the sergeant flashed his torch in time to see her out there in the flood, an arm raised despairingly, and then she went under.

It was just after eight o’clock on the following evening when the black Mercedes saloon drew up to the entrance of the Ministry of State Security at 22 Normannenstrasse in East Berlin. Helmut Klein got out of the rear and hurried up the steps to the main entrance for he had an appointment to keep – probably the most important appointment of his entire career – and he was already late.

Section Five was located on the third floor. When he went into the outer office, his secretary, Frau Apel, rose from her desk considerably agitated.

‘He arrived ten minutes ago,’ she whispered, glancing anxiously at the three men in dark overcoats who stood by the inner door. Hard, implacable faces, ready for anything and capable of most things, from the look of them.

There was a fourth man, lounging in the window-seat reading a magazine. Small, with good shoulders, dark hair and grey eyes that had a transparent look to them. The left-hand corner of the mouth was lifted into a slight ironic half-smile that contained no humour, only a kind of contempt directed at the world in general. He wore a dark trench-coat.

Klein gave his coat to Frau Apel and moved towards him, hand outstretched. He spoke in English. ‘Well, we got him, Harry. It worked, just like you said. The girl did exactly as she was told.’

‘I thought she might.’ The voice was soft and pleasant. Good Boston-American. ‘Where is she now?’

‘Dead.’ Klein explained briefly what had happened.

‘What a pity,’ the small man said. ‘She was rather pretty. You’ve got the man himself in there, by the way. I almost got to touch the hem of his garment as he swept by.’

Klein glanced quickly at the security men by the door and dropped his voice. ‘Exactly the kind of remark we can do without. When I call you in, try and behave yourself.’

He opened the door to his office and entered. The man in the trench-coat stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but didn’t bother to light it. He smiled down at Frau Apel and for some reason she was aware of a slight flutter of excitement.

‘Big night, eh?’ he said in German.

‘A great honour.’ She hesitated. ‘They may be a while. Perhaps I could get you a cup of coffee. Herr Professor?’

He smiled. ‘No thanks. I’ll just go back to the window-seat and wait. I get an excellent view of your legs from there under the desk. You really are a very disturbing person, did anyone ever tell you that?’

He returned to the window. She sat there, her throat dry, unable to think of a thing to say and he stared at her with those grey, dead eyes that gave nothing away, the perpetual smile as if he was laughing at her. She reached for a sheet of typing paper quickly. As she put it into the machine, her hands were shaking.

When Klein entered his office, the man behind the desk glanced up sharply. His suit was neat, conservative, the beard carefully trimmed, the eyes behind the thick lenses of the glasses apparently benign. Yet this was the most powerful man in East Germany – Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the Council of State.

‘You’re late,’ he said.

‘A fact which I sincerely regret, Comrade Chairman,’ Klein told him. ‘Several main roads leading into the city from the west are flooded. We were obliged to make a detour.’

‘Never mind the excuses,’ Ulbricht said impatiently. ‘You got him?’

‘Yes, Comrade.’

Ulbricht showed no particular emotion. ‘I fly to Moscow in the morning and as I shall be away for a week at least I want to make sure this thing is fully under way. The man you have chosen to accomplish the task, the American, Van Buren. He is here?’

‘Waiting outside.’

‘And you believe he can do it?’

Klein opened his briefcase, took out a folder which he placed on the desk before Ulbricht. ‘His personal file. If you would be kind enough to have a look at it before seeing him, Comrade. I think it speaks for itself.’

‘Very well.’ Ulbricht adjusted his glasses, opened the file and began to read.

* * *

In the early months of 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that he had evidence that a number of employees of the American State Department were Communists. Arthur Van Buren, a Professor in Moral Philosophy at Columbia University, was injudicious enough to write a series of letters to the New York Times in which he suggested that in this new development the seeds of a fascist state were being sown in America.

Like others, he was called to Washington to stand before a Senate sub-committee in the greatest witch-hunt the nation had ever seen. He emerged from it totally discredited, branded a Communist in the eyes of the world, his career in ruins. In March 1950 he shot himself.

Harry Van Buren was his only son, at that time twenty-four years of age. He had majored in psychology at Columbia, researched in experimental psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London, taking his doctorate at London University in February 1950.

He arrived home in time to stand beside his father’s grave when they buried him. He didn’t really know what to make of it all. His mother had died when he was five.

His father’s brother was in the machine-tool business and almost a millionaire; his Aunt Mary was married to a man who owned forty-seven hotels. They seemed more concerned with the possibility that the senator from Wisconsin had been right. That his father was indeed a Red. It was up to Harry to restore the family honour, which he did by joining the Marine Corps the moment the Korean war started.

Nonsensical behaviour, of course. As a professional psychologist he could see that. Could even understand the reasons for it and yet he went ahead, lying on his enlistment papers about his education, a need, he told himself, to purge some kind of guilt.

He pulled mess duty, swabbed out the heads, endured the close proximity of companions he found both brutal and coarse and kept himself to himself. He took everything they handed out to him and developed a kind of contempt for his fellows that he would not have thought possible.

And then came Korea itself. A nightmare of stupidity. A winter so cold that if the M1 was oiled too much it froze. Where grenades did not explode, where the jackets of the water-cooled heavy machine-guns had to be filled with antifreeze.

In November of 1950 he found himself part of the First Marine Division facing northwards to Koto-Ri to end the war at one bold stroke as General Douglas MacArthur intended. Except that the Chinese Army had other ideas and the Marines walked into a trap that was sprung at the Choisin Reservoir and led to one of the greatest fighting retreats in the history of war.

For a while he played his part with the others who fought and died around him. He killed Chinese with bullet and bayonet, urinated on the bolt mechanism of his carbine when it froze, and staggered on with frostbite in his left foot and a bullet in the right shoulder. And when a boot in the side stirred him into waking one misty morning, it was something like a relief to look up into a Chinese face.

It was at the camp in Manchuria that he’d decided he’d had enough after the first month in the coal mine. The indoctrination sessions had given him his opportunity. The chief instructor was crude in the extreme. Easy enough not to contradict, but to reinforce the points he was making. A few days of that and Van Buren was sent for special interrogation during which he made a full and frank confession of his background.

He was used at first to work as a missionary amongst his fellow prisoners until he came to the attention of the famous Chinese psychologist, Ping Chow, of Peking University, who at that time was making a special study of the behaviour patterns of American prisoners of war. Chow was a Pavlovian by training and his work on the conditioning of human behaviour was already world-famous at an academic level.

In Van Buren he found a mind totally in tune with his own. The American moved to Peking to research in the psychologydepartment of the university there. There was no question in his own mind now of any return to America.

Soon enough both the Pentagon and the State Department became uncomfortably aware of his existence, but kept quiet about it for obvious reasons so that he remained on that list of those missing, presumed dead, in Korea.

By 1959 he was an expert in thought reform and by special arrangement moved to Moscow to lecture at the university there. By 1960 his reputation in the field of what the Press popularly termed ‘brainwashing’ was already legendary. There was not a security department in any Iron Curtain country which had not called upon his services.

And then, in April 1963, while lecturing at the University of Dresden in the German Democratic Republic, he had received a visit from Helmut Klein, Head of Section Five in the State Security Service.

Walter Ulbricht closed the file and looked up. ‘There is one flaw in all this.’

‘Which is, Comrade Chairman?’

‘Professor Van Buren is not, and never has been, a Communist.’

‘I agree entirely,’ Klein said. ‘But for our purposes he is, if I may say so, something far more important – a dedicated scientist. He is a man obsessed by his work to an astonishing degree. I have every faith in his ability to accomplish the task we set him.’

‘Very well,’ Ulbricht said. ‘Show him in.’

Klein opened the door and called. ‘Harry