Edge of Eternity
ALSO BY KEN FOLLETT
The Modigliani Scandal
Paper Money
Eye of the Needle
Triple
The Key to Rebecca
The Man from St. Petersburg
On Wings of Eagles
Lie Down with Lions
The Pillars of the Earth
Night over Water
A Dangerous Fortune
A Place Called Freedom
The Third Twin
The Hammer of Eden
Code to Zero
Jackdaws
Hornet Flight
Whiteout
World Without End
Fall of Giants
Winter of the World
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Copyright © 2014 by Ken Follett
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All quotations from the words of Martin Luther King Jr. are reprinted by arrangement with the heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House, as agent for the proprietor, New York, New York, and are copyright © 1963, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., copyright © renewed 1991 and 1996, Coretta Scott King.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Follett, Ken.
Edge of eternity / Ken Follett.
pages cm—(Century trilogy; book three)
ISBN 978-0-698-16057-6
1. World politics—1945–1989—Fiction. 2. Political fiction. I. Title.
PR6056.O45E46 2014 823'.914—dc23 2014005306
Family tree illustrations by Dave Hopkins
Map copyright © by David Atkinson, Hand Made Maps Ltd.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Contents
Also by Ken Follett
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cast of Characters
The Families at the Beginning of EDGE OF ETERNITY
Map
PART ONE: WALL (1961)
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART TWO: BUG (1961–1962)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART THREE: ISLAND (1962)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
PART FOUR: GUN (1963)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
PART FIVE: SONG (1963–1967)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
PART SIX: FLOWER (1968)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
PART SEVEN: TAPE (1972–1974)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
PART EIGHT: YARD (1976–1983)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
PART NINE: BOMB (1984–1987)
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
PART TEN: WALL (1988–1989)
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
EPILOGUE (November 4, 2008)
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Acknowledgments
To all the freedom fighters,
especially Barbara
CAST OF CHARACTERS
American
DEWAR FAMILY
Cameron Dewar
Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister
Woody Dewar, his father
Bella Dewar, his mother
PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY
George Jakes
Jacky Jakes, his mother
Greg Peshkov, his father
Lev Peshkov, his grandfather
Marga, his grandmother
MARQUAND FAMILY
Verena Marquand
Percy Marquand, her father
Babe Lee, her mother
CIA
Florence Geary
Tony Savino
Tim Tedder, semiretired
Keith Dorset
OTHERS
Maria Summers
Joseph Hugo, FBI
Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon
Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov
Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy
Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson
Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter
Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day
Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter
Frank Lindeman, television network owner
REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS
John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president
Jackie, his wife
Bobby Kennedy, his brother
Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy
Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president
Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president
Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president
Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president
George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president
British
LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY
Dave Williams
Evie Williams, his sister
Daisy Williams, his mother
Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father
Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother
MURRAY FAMILY
Jasper Murray
Anna Murray, his sister
Eva Murray, his mother
MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE
Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin
Lew, drummer
Buzz, bass player
Geoffrey, lead guitarist
OTHERS
Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz
Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray
Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent
Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star
Eric Chapman, record company executive
German
FRANCK FAMILY
Rebecca Hoffmann
Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother
Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father
Walli Franck, son of Carla
Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla
Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother
Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband
OTHERS
Bernd Held, schoolteacher
Karolin Koontz, folksinger
Odo Vossler, clergyman
REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE
Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist)
Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor
Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker
Polish
Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer
Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar
Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist
REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE
Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver
Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity
General Jaruzelski, prime minister
Russian
DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY
Tanya Dvorkin, journalist
Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother
Anya Dvorkin, their mother
Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather
Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother
Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle
Zoya, Volodya’s wife
Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend
OTHERS
Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS
Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief
Vasili Yenkov, dissident
Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry
Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband
Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky
Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary
Valentin, Dimka’s friend
Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy
REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS
Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev
Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev
Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers
Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor
Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev
Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov
Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko
Other Nations
Paz Oliva, Cuban general
Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician
Enok Andersen, Danish accountant
PART ONE
WALL
1961
CHAPTER ONE
Rebecca Hoffmann was summoned by the secret police on a rainy Monday in 1961.
It began as an ordinary morning. Her husband drove her to work in his tan Trabant 500. The graceful old streets of central Berlin still had gaps from wartime bombing, except where new concrete buildings stood up like ill-matched false teeth. Hans was thinking about his job as he drove. “The courts serve the judges, the lawyers, the police, the government—everyone except the victims of crime,” he said. “This is to be expected in Western capitalist countries, but under Communism the courts ought surely to serve the people. My colleagues don’t seem to realize that.” Hans worked for the Ministry of Justice.
“We’ve been married almost a year, and I’ve known you for two, but I’ve never met one of your colleagues,” Rebecca said.
“They would bore you,” he said immediately. “They’re all lawyers.”
“Any women among them?”
“No. Not in my section, anyway.” Hans’s job was administration: appointing judges, scheduling trials, managing courthouses.
“I’d like to meet them, all the same.”
Hans was a strong man who had learned to rein himself in. Watching him, Rebecca saw in his eyes a familiar flash of anger at her insistence. He controlled it by an effort of will. “I’ll arrange something,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll all go to a bar one evening.”
Hans had been the first man Rebecca met who matched up to her father. He was confident and authoritative, but he always listened to her. He had a good job—not many people had a car of their own in East Germany—and men who worked in the government were usually hard-line Communists, but Hans, surprisingly, shared Rebecca’s political skepticism. Like her father he was tall, handsome, and well dressed. He was the man she had been waiting for.
Only once during their courtship had she doubted him, briefly. They had been in a minor car crash. It had been wholly the fault of the other driver, who had come out of a side street without stopping. Such things happened every day, but Hans had been mad with rage. Although the damage to the two cars was minimal, he had called the police, shown them his Ministry of Justice identity card, and had the other driver arrested for dangerous driving and taken off to jail.
Afterward he had apologized to Rebecca for losing his temper. She had been scared by his vindictiveness, and had come close to ending their relationship. But he had explained that he had not been his normal self, due to pressure at work, and she had believed him. Her faith had been justified: he had never done such a thing again.
When they had been dating for a year, and sleeping together most weekends for six months, Rebecca wondered why he did not ask her to marry him. They were not kids: she had then been twenty-eight, he thirty-three. So she had proposed to him. He had been startled, but said yes.
Now he pulled up outside her school. It was a modern building, and well equipped: the Communists were serious about education. Outside the gates, five or six older boys were standing under a tree, smoking cigarettes. Ignoring their stares, Rebecca kissed Hans on the lips. Then she got out.
The boys greeted her politely, but she felt their yearning adolescent eyes on her figure as she splashed through the puddles in the school yard.
Rebecca came from a political family. Her grandfather had been a Social Democrat member of the Reichstag, the national parliament, until Hitler came to power. Her mother had been a city councilor, also for the Social Democrats, during East Berlin’s brief postwar period of democracy. But East Germany was a Communist tyranny now, and Rebecca saw no point in engaging in politics. So she channeled her idealism into teaching, and hoped that the next generation would be less dogmatic, more compassionate, smarter.
In the staff room she checked the emergency timetable on the notice board. Most of her classes were doubled today, two groups of pupils crammed into one room. Her subject was Russian, but she also had to teach an English class. She did not speak English, though she had picked up a smattering from her British grandmother, Maud, still feisty at seventy.
This was the second time Rebecca had been asked to teach an English class, and she began to think about a text. The first time, she had used a leaflet handed out to American soldiers, telling them how to get on with Germans: the pupils had found it hilarious, and they had learned a lot too. Today perhaps she would write on the blackboard the words of a song they knew, such as “The Twist”—played all the time on American Forces Network radio—and get them to translate it into German. It would not be a conventional lesson, but it was the best she could do.
The school was desperately short of teachers because half the staff had emigrated to West Germany, where salaries were three hundred marks a month higher and people were free. The story was the same in most schools in East Germany. And it was not just teachers. Doctors could double their earnings by moving west. Rebecca’s mother, Carla, was head of nursing at a large East Berlin hospital, and she was tearing her hair out at the scarcity of both nurses and doctors. The story was the same in industry and even the armed forces. It was a national crisis.
As Rebecca was scribbling the lyrics of “The Twist” in a notebook, trying to remember the line about “my little sis,” the deputy head came into the staff room. Bernd Held was probably Rebecca’s best friend outside her family. He was a slim, dark-haired man of forty, with a livid scar across his forehead where a shard of flying shrapnel had struck him while he was defending the Seelow Heights in the last days of the war. He taught physics, but he shared Rebecca’s interest in Russian literature, and they ate their lunchtime sandwiches together a couple of times a week. “Listen, everybody,” Bernd said. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Anselm has left us.”
There was a murmur of surprise. Anselm Weber was the head teacher. He was a loyal Communist—heads had to be. But it seemed his principles had been overcome by the appeal of West German prosperity and liberty.
Bernd went on: “I will be taking his place until a new head can be appointed.” Rebecca and every other teacher in the school knew that Bernd himself should have got the job, if ability had been what counted; but Bernd was ruled out because he would not join the Socialist Unity Party, the SED—the Communist Party in all but name.
For the same reason, Rebecca would never be a head teacher. Anselm had pleaded with her to join the party, but it was out of the question. For her it would be like checking herself into a lunatic asylum and pretending all the other inmates were sane.
As Bernd detailed the emergency arrangements, Rebecca wondered when the school would get its new head. A year from now? How long would this crisis go on? No one knew.
Before the first lesson she glanced into her pigeonhole, but it was empty. The mail had not yet arrived. Perhaps the postman had gone to West Germany, too.
The letter that would turn her life upside down was still on its way.
She taught her first class, discussing the Russian poem “The Bronze Horseman” with a large group seventeen and eighteen years old. This was a lesson she had given every year since she started teaching. As always, she guided the pupils to the orthodox Soviet analysis, explaining that the conflict between personal interest and public duty was resolved, by Pushkin, in favor of the public.
At lunchtime she took her sandwich to the head’s office and sat down across the big desk from Bernd. She looked at the shelf of cheap pottery busts: Marx, Lenin, and East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Bernd followed her gaze and smiled. “Anselm is a sly one,” he said. “For years he pretended to be a true believer, and now—zoom, he’s off.”
“Aren’t you tempted to leave?” Rebecca asked Bernd. “You’re divorced, no children—you have no ties.”
He looked around, as if wondering whether someone might be listening; then he shrugged. “I’ve thought about it—who hasn’t?” he said. “How about you? Your father works in West Berlin anyway, doesn’t he?”