Stealing the Future Read Online Free Page A

clear that he meant we should leave it. Presumably he’s got someone else working on it? We shouldn’t just go against him like that. And anyway, what’s the point?”
    Klaus shrugged, sitting back in his chair again and crossing his legs. We all sat looking at each other, slurping coffee from our mugs. All except Bärbel who was still making notes in shorthand.
    “Now that I think about it…” I started, wondering whether I was saying the right thing. “He seemed sort of, shifty. Like he was unhappy that I was involved, and couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”
    “Doesn’t have to mean anything. Probably just a bit stressed or busy. I think it’s safe to assume that the case is being dealt with, no doubt by another department. Klaus—do you really think we should carry on looking into Maier’s death?” Laura asked in a matter of fact way.
    She saw herself as the grounded and rational one in the office, and she wasn’t wrong about that. She had a mixture between a bossy character and a need to keep busy, and see others around her being kept busy too—I think this led her to chivvy us along, make sure we were doing our work, that our meetings didn’t go off topic and down sidelines. It could be annoying, but on the whole I think we appreciated having her around—she kept us on our toes.
    “No, not really. It just all sounds a bit weird. But no, I think you’re right,” Klaus looked down, concentrating on fiddling with one of his evil cigars.
    “OK, so shall we leave it there then?” Still the voice of reason, Laura was looking around at us, checking that each of us was agreeing. “Right, so that’s that. What else have we got on the agenda today?”
     
    After the meeting I decided to write up the report on my trip to Weisswasser, get it out of the way so that I could concentrate on the stuff that I ought to be doing. It didn’t take too long, after all there wasn’t too much to say. I went to West Silesia, I saw a body and a mining machine, the police seemed to be taking care of everything so I came home. I didn’t bother mentioning that we’d had a look at Maier’s Stasi files—it didn’t seem relevant, particularly since we weren’t actually going to do anything with that information.
    I finished the last page and pulled it out of the typewriter, putting the top sheet with the others in a file to take to the Ministry. The two carbon copies went in another pair of files, one to keep here, the other for the central RS archives. I sat back in my chair and peered through the dusty net curtains. It was a nice day out there, the sun was shining, the sky blue. Shame to be cooped up in the office, I thought, much better to be outside.
    10:23
    I handed my report to the secretary, I could have sent it in the internal post, but I had enjoyed the short walk from the S‑Bahn station to the Ministry. I was about to leave when she did that thing with her hand again, the disdainful wave at the chairs. I looked at her, and waited while she decided whether she was going to tell me what she wanted.
    “If you would take a chair, the Staatssekretär’s assistant wishes to speak to you.”
    The secretary handed my report back to me, and I took both the file and a chair, like a good little boy. So Gisela Demnitz, the assistant to the senior civil servant at the Ministry, wanted to see me. She was the person I usually dealt with, the one with the responsibility for all the peripheral agencies in the Ministry of the Interior.
    She didn’t make me wait long—a buzzer on the secretary’s phone sounded, and she informed me that Frau Demnitz was ready to receive me. I walked along the corridor and went into Frau Demnitz’s office after a polite knock. She was sat behind her desk, a standard woodchip number, with grey steel legs.
    “Herr Grobe,” she said, as she stood up to shake my hand. She and I were still on formal terms, perhaps because she’d always worked for the Ministry and valued the traditional