Sasha, it was revealed by unnamed sources close to the U. S. Intelligence community, had worked in some of the darkest corners of East German Intelligence during the Cold War. His spying activities for the Communists had included the provision of training and other facilities to Arab terror groups.

When the Berlin Wall came down, Sasha exploited his old connections by signing up with a hitherto unknown splinter group of Arab militants believed to have links with Al Qaeda. This information was fed to the press piecemeal over several days, allowing ample time for journalistic license.

Details of Sasha's twilit career, and his close contacts with members of the German and French radical establishment, were also emerging. Documents discovered in a briefcase he was carrying at the time of his attempted escape were being examined by forensic experts and intelligence analysts.

But it was of course the so-called Academy of Professional English that provided the most blood-chilling insight into the terrorists' intentions. For weeks--until it was ruled unsafe and summarily closed on the orders of the city authorities--the devastated schoolhouse offered all the attractions of Scotland Yard's Black Museum. Television teams gorged themselves and came back for more. No news flash was complete without the public's favourite images being replayed. And where the cameras went, the print media dutifully followed.

Some classrooms were so perforated by gunfire that, to quote one journalist, they resembled cheese graters. The main staircase looked as though it had been torpedoed in shallow water. The library, which at the time of the battle was in the throes of being restored, had been blown to pieces, its marble fireplace pulverized, its molded ceilings torn open and blackened by blast.

"When bad guys shoot first, it's true we get kind of testy," the same anonymous Washington defense official conceded.

The testiness showed. Doors and windows were eyeless voids. The art nouveau skylight, point of entry for one team of invaders, was reduced to a rubble of colored glass.

From these scenes of havoc the cameras turned lovingly to the prize exhibits: the bomb-making factory, the arsenal of small arms, submachine guns and hand grenades, the boxes of commercial chemicals, the urban guerrilla's handbooks, the crates of inflammatory literature, the fake passports and the wad of loose cash for two terrorists who wouldn't be going anywhere anymore. And best of all, the detailed maps of American military and civilian installations in Germany and France, some ominously ringed in red, the prize exhibit being a ground plan of U. S. military headquarters, Heidelberg, together with covertly taken photographs of the entrance and perimeter.

Estimates of how many terrorists had been inside the school when it was attacked varied between eight and six. Ballistics experts found evidence of six separate weapons firing into the square. Yet only two men were accounted for and one of them never reached the building. So where were the rest?

Townspeople living close to the evacuated area testified to _grune Minnas__ tearing past their windows with lights flashing and sirens going. Others spoke of ambulances escorted by police cars and armored personnel carriers. Yet no local hospital reported receiving any VIP casualties, no local mortuary or prison could boast a new inmate. On the other hand, the concentration of U.S. military facilities and personnel stationed in the area--since 9/11 protected by electronically enhanced high wire--left open the possibility that casualties and prisoners had found their way there.

The devastation inside the school building made it nigh impossible to reconstruct the scene. The builders, questioned by journalists and police, recalled no visitors except for tradesmen and the tall Englishman since identified as Mundy. Bits of crockery and food found scattered around the rubble provided no hard evidence. Builders also have to eat. Terrorists, it is well known, are capable of sharing cups.

The official answer provided little comfort: "To divulge further details at this time could endanger vital ongoing operations. Other persons found on the premises are in custody."

What kind of persons? What age? What nationality, sex, race? What custody? Are they in Guantanamo already?

We have nothing further to add at this time.

One mystery figure who appeared to offer the chance of a breakthrough was the driver of a tan-colored BMW rental car who had collected Mundy from the house on the day of the raid and was said by witnesses to have visited several of the city's historical attractions in his company. The unknown man was described as _fesch__--well-dressed, fit-looking and aged fifty-five to sixty.

The BMW was swiftly traced. The hirer was one Hans Leppink, a resident of Delft in Holland. Credit card, passport and driving license confirmed this, but the Dutch authorities denied any knowledge of him, and offered no explanation of how he might have obtained such plausible Dutch identity documents. There was nothing for it but to go back to the two dead desperadoes, both in their fifties.

Sasha was clearly the easier of the two to categorize. A flock of terror psychologists from obscure universities descended from their academic perches to do just that.

He was a German archetype, a child of Nazidom, a seeker after absolutes, the poor man's shrill philosopher, now anarchist, now Communist, now homeless radical visionary in search of ever more extreme ways of subjecting society to his will.

His physical disability, and the sense of inferiority it engendered, drew comparison with Hitler's propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. It was common ground, on evidence nobody could afterwards remember, that he hated Jews.

His estrangement from his pious father, his mother's dementia and the prolonged, now suspicious, death of an elder brother while Sasha looked on callously from the boy's bedside, were awarded their proper significance.

So was there a particular moment in Sasha's life--these wise men and women speculated--was there some kind of epiphany, when Sasha saw the path of violence, the _black road,__ open up before him and took it?

One writer, from the _New York Times,__ knew above all others that there was. Under a sworn oath of secrecy, she said, she had received her story straight from the horse's mouth: an American Intelligence professional as modest as he is elusive, the acknowledged mastermind who had single-handedly brought Sasha and his British accomplice to justice. No physical or other description of this fine operative was vouchsafed by the gushing journalist, beyond the revelation that he was tall, rather formal in his manner and "the kind of man I just _dream__ of being taken out to dinner by, and never am."

Sasha habitually spoke of the desert as his _wilderness,__ this superhero had confided to her: "You may think I'm crazy, Sally, but I personally am convinced that while Sasha was out there in what he called his _wilderness,__ he underwent some kind of very yucky, self-induced religious conversion. Okay, he was an atheist. But he was a reverend's son and he hallucinated. Maybe he used drugs, though I have no direct evidence of that," he added, speaking as a man who takes the truth seriously.

But it was Ted Mundy who put their penetrative powers to the test. It was the Pakistan-born public-school cricketer, son of a soldier, Oxford dropout, Berlin anarchist, British Council flunky, failed teacher and Muslim sympathizer, who received the full benefit of the dissectors' knives. One tabloid even went in pursuit of the dog called Mo. _MO--OR MAO?__ it screamed, and for a couple of issues Mo became the canine equivalent of Citizen Kane's Rosebud.

Much quiet compassion was lavished on Mundy's ex-wife Kate, New Labor's ambitious member for Doncaster Trent, now happily wedded to one of the party's leading backroom policy makers, but with her shining future suddenly uncertain.

"Though our marriage lasted eleven years, it was in reality short-lived," said Kate, reluctantly facing the cameras on her second husband's arm to read a prepared statement. "There was never any overt friction. Ted was a loving man in his way, but very secretive. For most of the time we were together his thoughts were a complete mystery to me, as I am afraid they will be today to many people round the world. I cannot begin to explain how he became what he apparently became. I never heard him speak of Sasha. I was totally unaware of his political activities while he was studying in Berlin."

Jake, standing at her other side, was even briefer. "My mother and I are extremely distressed and confused," he declared through his tears. "We ask you to respect our grief as we struggle to come to terms with this tragedy." And in a grammatical solecism that must have had Mundy spinning in his grave: "As my natural father, I shall always feel there is a hole in my life I can never fill."

Gradually, however, under the intense scrutiny of commentators, Mundy the closet terrorist was winkled out of his shell.

His early obsession with Islam was confirmed by school contemporaries: _Mundy insisted on referring to school chapel as the mosque,__ said one.

So was his angry nature. One former schoolmate referred to the near-manic ferocity of his fast bowling: _He was just so f***ing aggressive__ (_Daily Mail__).

Another shed light on his unhealthy preoccupation with anything German. _There was an old chap who taught cello and German. He called himself Mallory. Some of the boys reckoned he was a Nazi in hiding. Ted made an absolute beeline for him. He used to spout German poetry at us until we told him to belt up.__ A leaked American intelligence report revealed that, during an unexplained period of residence in Taos, New Mexico, Mundy had formed a relationship with two Soviet agents presently serving prison sentences: the notorious Bernie Luger, who used his cover as a painter to obtain photographs of U. S. defense facilities in the Nevada desert, and his Cuban accomplice, Nita.

Speculation about how the British Council had come to employ someone with a West Berlin police record of mob violence and no university degree led to calls for a public inquiry.

Murmurings that Mundy had maintained secret contact with "cultural attaches" from Communist embassies in London were not directly denied by the Council's spokesman. _WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY SACK HIM?__ a tabloid demanded, over a disturbing statement from one of Mundy's former colleagues: _Ted was a total drone. None of us understood how he survived. All he did was work the Commie arts circuit and sit about drinking coffee in the canteen.__ The bouncer of a Soho strip club claimed to recognize his photograph. _I'd know him anywhere. Big, gangly bloke, one of the overfriendly ones. Give me the grubby mackintosh brigade anytime.__ But for the final clue to this complex man, it was widely agreed, the world would have to wait until the woman Zara, a retired prostitute and Mundy's common-law wife in Munich, could be persuaded to reveal her story. British checkbook journalists were already storming the prison outside Ankara.

Zara, who significantly had fled to Turkey with her eleven-year-old son on the very day of the siege, was arrested on arrival and was presently being questioned. There was speculation that the Americans had only allowed her to return to her homeland because Turkish interrogation methods were known to be robust. She had arrived in Germany as the bride of a Turkish laborer now in a Berlin jail serving a seven-year sentence for aggravated assault. Zara herself was described as religiously observant, intelligent, near-silent and strong-willed. The imam of her mosque in Munich, who was being held indefinitely under investigative detention, insisted that she was "no sort of fanatic," but this view was challenged by one of her co-religionists, who refused to be named. _She's the type we must purge from our community as we progress into the twenty-first century.__ It was later learned that Zara had borrowed a coat from her, and failed to return it before she left for Turkey.

Recent reports from Turkish police sources indicated that Zara, though a tough nut to crack, was beginning to see the wisdom of cooperating with the forces of justice.

So it was inevitable, once the mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic had beaten their brains out solving the question of how Britain and Germany could have spawned two such heinous characters, that the usual Alternative Voices should have their irritating day.

The most prominent was to be found on a not-for-profit Web site pledged to transparency in politics. The offending article was entitled THE SECOND BURNING OF THE REICHSTAG--THE AMERICAN RIGHTISTS' CONSPIRACRY AGAINST CONSPIRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY, and its author was described as a long-serving field operative of British Intelligence who had recently resigned his post and was writing "at risk of his pension and even prosecution." The main plank of the article was that the entire siege, like Hitler's notorious burning of the Reichstag, was a sham, perpetrated by what he termed "agents of a self-elected junta of Washington neoconservative theologians close to the presidential throne." The two dead men were as innocent of their trumped-up crimes as was poor Van der Lubbe, the Reichstag's alleged arsonist.

Signing himself ARNOLD--whether as a surname, first name or cover name was not vouchsafed, though the use of capitals suggested the last--the writer identified "a shadowy former coperative of the CIA" as the creator of the deception, and Sasha and Mundy as his sacrificial victims. The accused man, referred to by ARNOLD with the letter J and described as a "latter-day born-again Christian of Irish-American descent," was regarded by the orthodox intelligence community as a dangerous maverick.

J's unholy accomplice in the "Second Burning" was an equally unsavory Georgian-Russian known only as DIMITRI, a professional agent provocateur and intelligence peddler with pretensions as a poet and failed actor. Having worked--sometimes concurrently--for the KGB, the CIA and the Deuxieme Bureau, he was presently living in Montana under the Witness Protection Act as a reward for providing details of a bomb attack on an American Air Force base which he himself had inspired.

The same ARNOLD further claimed that while Downing Street officials had refused to be party to advance details of the "Second Burning," they had made clear in off-the-record conversations with their Washington partners that they would welcome any initiative that silenced once and for all Franco-German carping at America's conduct of the War Against Terrorism, not to mention Britain's.

As evidence of this he pointed to the so-called Heidelberg-Sorbonne Axis of Evil so beloved of the British right-wing press, and the witch hunt mounted by those who wished to name and shame the "freethinking" French and German intellectuals featured in Sasha's now notorious lists of "mind poisoners" (_Daily Telegraph__) who had willingly signed up (according to the same newspaper) to "indoctrinate impressionable minds in the three R's of pseudo-liberalism: Radicalism, Revolution and Revenge."

ARNOLD's fulminations became wilder as his article ran on. Ted Mundy may have looked like an ex-British Council deadbeat, he wrote, but he was an unsung hero of the Cold War, and his friend Sasha was another. Together, the two men had over a number of years supplied the Western Alliance with priceless intelligence on the Communist threat. ARNOLD even maintained that Mundy was the holder of a secretly awarded British gallantry medal, a claim promptly denied by palace sources.

And as a _bonne bouche,__ ARNOLD alleged that J, by means of a sophisticated smokescreen of proxies, was the sole shareholder of a security company specializing in bulletproof cars, personal protection and survival counseling for prominent Americans in the corporate and entertainment fields who were contemplating a trip to terrorist-stricken Europe. The same company owned the copyright in the only piece of video footage of the siege ever to appear. This showed a posse of unidentifiable heroes in full antiterror rig storming through clouds of Hollywood smoke across the roof of the school building. In the background, just distinguishable between the chimney pots, lies the body of the Euro-terrorist Sasha, shot dead in the very act of flight. Medics are running over the cobbles towards him; a battered briefcase lies beside him. The clip, run and rerun on every television station in the world, had earned millions of dollars for its owner.

Downing Street's reaction to the ARNOLD piece was appropriately contemptuous. If ARNOLD exists, let him come forward and his allegations will be looked into. More likely, the offending article was the work of rogue elements of British Intelligence whose evident aim was to discredit New Labor and undermine Britain's Special Relationship with the United States. The Downing Street spokesman urged his audience to address larger issues such as real world outcomes, step-changes and effectuality indicators. The _Daily Mail__ carried a searing attack on the "latest whistle-blower to emerge from the shadows of the secret world" and pondered darkly on the hidden agenda of "closet saboteurs of our nation's good name, masquerading as its protectors."

Summing up the whole tawdry affair, a well-placed and reliable senior official with access to the highest levels of government was reported as saying that some people these days were getting a bit too George Orwell for their own health. He was referring, of course, not to Downing Street or Washington, but to the spies.

The political consequences of the siege were not slow to manifest themselves. Sasha's prediction that an Islamist-inspired Euro-anarchist outrage on German soil would have its citizens rushing to the shelter of their American Big Brother was no exaggeration. At first, the Social Democratic German chancellor evinced a churlish reluctance to take the point. An early statement actually contested the _tendentious and premature conclusions__ of the German right, which since the night of the siege had assumed a substantial lead in the polls. Realizing that he was running counter to popular opinion, he was, however, forced to change tack, first by announcing an independent investigation by German agencies, then by lamenting that his country, having played unwitting host to several of the perpetrators of 9/11, should _apparently have been selected as the showplace for further senseless acts of violence against our American friends.__ For his conservative critics the statement was insufficiently abject. Why wait a full week before speaking out? they demanded to know. Why bother with an independent investigation when the evidence is there for every idiot to see? And what's this weaselly _apparently__ that has crept into the text? Go down on your knees, Mr. Chancellor! Grovel! Have you looked at Germany's bank statements recently? Don't you know that America will only do business with its _friends?__ Don't you realize they still hate us for siding with the French and Russians over Iraq? And now _this,__ for God's sake!

But in the end, all was well. The chancellor did everything short of sending Washington his head on a charger. The Bundestag's opposition parties joined the chorus. The dire fiscal punishments threatened by the U. S. administration were deferred on the understanding that the federal government would adopt a more helpful attitude in "the next stage of the war on terror," by which was clearly meant Iran. A further understanding--implicit if not stated--was that the federal government, God willing, would by that time be a conservative one.

Sasha was right too about the Frankfurt stock exchange, which after a period in the doldrums recovered its spirits. A gleeful columnist of Germany's powerful right-wing press boasted that Gunter Grass was more prescient than he knew when he declared that we are all Americans now.

Only France, truculent as ever, refused to be moved by her neighbor's display of self-flagellation. An unnamed spokesman for French Intelligence pronounced the list of French left-wing academics supposedly linked to "the Heidelberg school of Euro-terror" to be "an Anglo-Saxon phantasm." The integrity of France's fabled thinkers and academics would remain unscathed. A statement by a French presidential spokeswoman to the effect that "the entire episode reeked of news manipulation of the most amateurish kind" was dismissed as particularly arrogant. More bottles of French wine were poured down American drains, french fries became freedom fries, and the Tricolor was ceremoniously burned in the streets of Washington.

Ingenious Russia, though worn down by economic cares, achieved a double benefit: the silencing of the last remaining voices of "antisocial" opposition to the government, whether in the media or parliament, on the grounds that irresponsible protest was the basis of all terror; and Washington's unstinted encouragement to pursue, with even greater vigor than hitherto, its murderous war on the people of Chechnya.

A final postscript was provided by the two dead terrorists themselves. Both men, it transpired, had made a will. Perhaps all terrorists do that. Both had expressed a wish to be buried alongside their respective mothers: Sasha the German in Neubrandenburg, and Mundy the Englishman on a sunbaked hillside in Pakistan. An intrepid journalist tracked down Mundy's final resting place. The mist, she reported, never quite lifts, but the broken Christian masonry makes it a popular place for children to stage their mock battles.

_Cornwall, June 9, 2003__

The End

Acknowledgments.

MY SINCERE THANKS to Sandy Lean, Ann Martin, Tony McClenaghan and Raleigh Trevelyan for their British India and Pakistan, to Imama Halima Krausen for her generous instruction in Islamic practices, to Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy. net and Judith Herrin for their radical Britain in the sixties and seventies, to Timothy Garton Ash, Gunnar Schweer and Stephan Strobel for historical and editorial advice far beyond the call of friendship, to Konrad Paul for his Weimar and Lothar Menne for his Berlin and much more, to Michael Buselmeier for his Heidelberg and John Pilger for his words of wisdom over dinner. I must also confess my indebtedness to the superb _Plain Tales from the Raj__ by Charles Allen.

My apologies to the peerless administrators of King Ludwig's Linderhof, who in real life employ none but the best-informed guides, have no plant room in their basement, and whose only visitors are of the highest discernment and sobriety.

Cover Blurb By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days when a cinder-block Wall divided Berlin, and the enemy was easy to recognize.

Today, Mundy is a down-at-heel tour guide in South Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served.

And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of his old German student friend, radical, and one-time fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer and chaos addict.

After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only answer to life--this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they?

Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than treachery and fear?

Some free gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could. In Absolute Friends, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of Communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for--a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.