Free Close Call by Stella Rimington Page A

obsession with new build. This was a hotel designed for comfort rather than style. We have seen it all before , the hotel’s stone façade seemed to say. Fads come and go, but the Hotel Schmitzkopf remains the same.
    Warned by a text from Beckerman in his taxi, Anspach and Dimitz had stopped their Mercedes further up Unter den Linden, behind a skip that was half full of broken asphalt. They waited fifteen minutes, then Anspach got out. He turned into the square, climbed the steps to the glass and oak door of the hotel and went into the ground-floor lobby, where at this late hour the soft sofas and chintz-covered armchairs were unoccupied.
    At the reception desk a young blonde woman in a smart black suit gave a welcoming smile from behind a large bowl of wrapped sweets. Her face fell slightly when Anspach produced a card identifying him as a government official and asked for the manager.
    ‘He’s on his break,’ the girl said hesitantly. ‘Do you want me to fetch him for you, sir?’
    ‘That won’t be necessary. Tell me – a man came in a few minutes ago and checked in. A Herr Pigot, if I’m not mistaken.’
    ‘No, sir,’ said the girl. ‘That was Herr Pliska. He’s a Polish gentleman. He and his wife are in Room 403. She arrived this afternoon. We have no guest called Pigot and no booking in that name.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Anspach. Then, after a pause while he absorbed the new information he said, ‘I must have made a mistake. Got the wrong hotel. Please don’t mention to anyone that I was inquiring for Herr Pigot. It’s a matter of national security,’ he added solemnly.
    ‘Certainly not, sir,’ the girl replied, wide-eyed. ‘Shall I let you know if Herr Pigot turns up?’
    ‘Please do,’ replied Anspach. ‘Here is a card with a number to ring,’ and he handed her an official-looking card with no name on it and a telephone number that didn’t exist.

Chapter 13
    ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Annette Milraud got up from the chair where she had been watching TV as soon as Milraud walked into the hotel room. ‘Why did you tell me to change hotels and names? Did something happen in Paris?’
    She paused as Milraud dropped his bag onto the floor and sat down on the bed. He was tired. Tired of life on the run. He’d always known that things would be difficult when he cheated his old employer, the DGSE, and went underground. But he’d thought that eventually some sort of steady state would emerge, allowing him to live without constantly looking over his shoulder.
    He’d been wrong. His old employer had not forgotten him. And everywhere he went he’d been conscious that somewhere in the shadows they were there, waiting to pounce if he gave them the smallest chance. There had been financial rewards greater than anything he had ever enjoyed before, but with them went a total lack of peace of mind.
    Annette was always angry these days, always nagging. He was taking too many risks, she said, but he had tried to explain that it was only because he took risks that he could make the kind of money he did and she could live in the style she demanded. Risk and money were linked like uneasy soulmates, bonded as unhappily as . . . Milraud and Annette.
    They had been together seventeen years, married for fifteen of them. At first, they had been very happy. He enjoyed his work at the DGSE and she was content with their life in the prosperous Parisian suburbs, such a far cry from her humble origins in Toulon in the south of France. He realised later that her single goal then had been to have children, and that compared with this nothing else mattered.
    It was when, after every kind of test, the doctors had finally told them that having a family simply wasn’t going to happen, that Annette’s dissatisfaction had begun. It was as if money had replaced children as her objective, and making the kind of money she had in mind was no more likely for Milraud as an officer in the DGSE than having children with his