Free Close Call by Stella Rimington

Dimitz wore a dark blue suit and had now put on a peaked cap. Holding a sign reading Herr Rossbach , he went to stand alongside the waiting chauffeurs next to the exit point from Customs.
    Anspach stood further back at a newsstand, idly examining a copy of Der Spiegel . As he turned the pages he kept a deceptively casual eye on everyone emerging into the Hall. He wasn’t relying on Beckerman’s call to tell him the suspect was coming through, for it was perfectly possible that Monsieur Pigot might now have a different name, and a different passport, from those he had used to board in Paris.
    His phone vibrated and he glanced down at its screen. Coming now. Brown leather coat , read the message attached to a photograph of a man in a leather coat and roll-neck sweater, carrying a laptop bag on one shoulder.
    And then, not thirty seconds later, he spotted him.
    Pigot was medium height, broad-shouldered, dressed in the smart casual clothes of a businessman. But, unlike a visiting businessman, he wasn’t carrying a suit bag, only the laptop case hanging from a shoulder strap. He was walking quickly – though not so quickly as to call attention to himself – and heading towards the far exit, under the sign for taxis. Anspach followed, knowing both Dimitz and Beckerman were behind him.
    Outside, the sky was pitch-black, but the pavement was eerily illuminated by the series of sodium lights lining the front of the terminal’s façade. Anspach saw his quarry standing in the taxi queue, which was short this late at night. He waited until Dimitz passed him, no longer wearing his peaked chauffeur’s hat. Then both men got into the back of a Mercedes saloon parked by the kerb in which the final member of the team had been sitting in the driver’s seat. He’d prevented vigilant security and parking staff from having it towed away by waving his security pass at them.
    From the car they watched Pigot enter a taxi. When it drove off they followed. Beckerman, having joined the taxi queue two behind Pigot, was in another taxi, not far behind. The convoy headed off on Route 11 for the centre of Berlin.
    Ten minutes later a message flashed up on Anspach’s phone. ‘Booking in name of Pigot made two days ago at Westin Grand Hotel, Unter den Linden. 3 nights, arriving yesterday. Await further inquiries.’
    ‘What do they mean, “Await further inquiries”?’ muttered Anspach. ‘How can we await anything? We’re right behind the guy,’ and he tapped furiously on his phone.
    Twenty minutes later as they drove, still in convoy, into the centre of Berlin, Anspach’s phone vibrated again. ‘A Madame Pigot checked out of Westin Grand this pm. No forwarding address. No trace so far of any other booking in central hotels in name of Pigot.’
    ‘Don’t lose that cab,’ said Anspach to the driver. ‘We don’t know where the hell we’re going now.’
    ‘Well, we’ll be on Unter den Linden in a minute,’ he replied. ‘So perhaps he’s rebooked.’
    The lights were bright along the pavements of Unter den Linden, traditionally Berlin’s most glamorous avenue, but the atmosphere was marred by a darkened construction site running all the way down the street’s centre, where work was going on to connect the subway between the former west and east sectors of the city. The beautiful trees were virtually invisible behind the boards and railings; what could be seen of them was covered in white dust that each day’s excavations threw up.
    ‘If he gets out here and crosses the road we’ll lose him behind the hoardings,’ said Dimitz.
    ‘It depends if he’s spotted us,’ grunted Anspach.
    But the taxi containing Pigot didn’t stop. It drove on at a stately pace down Unter den Linden until it turned off into a small quiet square and drew up in front of the Hotel Schmitzkopf, an ornate six-storey building with little balconies and flower boxes, an oasis of nineteenth-century solidity amid the city’s East German decrepitude and its