The woman who dances with death
Andreas Pflüger's new espionage thriller begins with a huge bang. On the Glienicke Bridge at the beginning of 1983, everything is prepared "for the greatest show the Cold War had to offer". The high-ranking KGB officer Rem Kukura is to be exchanged for the son of a Politburo member sentenced to lethal injection for murder in the USA. Nina Winter is standing next to the two men at the line that separates West Germany from East Germany in the middle of the so-called "Agents' Bridge". She is the only one who can identify Kukura. But the exchange goes dramatically wrong: the bridge blows up.
"Nina had a whistling in her ear that drove her crazy. The bridge was upside down. Its steel merged with the asphalt and the snow to form a three-dimensional painting by Baselitz. There was no longer any up or down, no near or far. It must be like this in space, weightless. Then the earth's gravity hammered it to the ground. It suddenly weighed tons. Thick smoke everywhere. The taste of blood."
Nina, a Slavicist and 10,000-meter runner, actually had a desk job as an analyst at the BND. After the action-packed opening, Pflüger jumps back in time to tell how she became the woman who had to perform a "barefoot tango on a dance floor full of poisonous blows". Four years earlier, Nina is the third person ever to be let in on one of the BND's best-kept secrets. There has long been a "Pink Star" in Moscow, the most successful top spy Pullach has ever had: Rem Kukura, code name "Pilger". Now his liaison officer has disappeared in an unexplained manner and Kukura has one condition for further cooperation: Nina is to lead him from now on.
There is hardly any time to prepare for the extremely dangerous mission. Nina is given a crash course in secret service techniques, learns how to create dead letter boxes and how to get rid of her tail with "shaking routes" and "cleaning sluices" in an hour-long game of cat-and-mouse. And she has to get rid of her open look, which identifies her as a Westerner. "Haven't you noticed that the Russians mostly stare into space when they're out and about?" her instructor asks her. "That's the way it is in Father Russia, if you're not in the KGB or the militia, not a high party member, not a general and not Brezhnev's deer pinscher."
"Someone like you makes death impatient"
Once in Moscow, Nina Winter becomes more than just Anja Gabriel. In order to survive, she has to be creative, quick-witted - in both senses of the word - and daring, in short: a fighter. And she continues to perfect her methods. "Someone like you makes death impatient," she says at one point. Her own motto: "Those who dance with death should know how to lead."
Nina soon notices a terrifying man watching her. She christens him "Moth" and he becomes her worst adversary. For spoiler reasons, we won't reveal any more at this point. Perhaps just this: The bridge explosion was not the climax of the escalation of violence. And: it becomes clear from the very first pages of the book, shortly before the planned exchange, that the BND does not know everything that happened in Nina's last days in Moscow - but other secret services do.
"Wie sterben geht" guarantees breathless suspense, is a real recommendation this fall and a must-read for all fans of espionage thrillers. After "Operation Rubikon", his trilogy about the blind BKA elite policewoman Jenny Aaron and most recently "Ritchie Girl", Pflüger proves once again that he is simply in a class of his own in the literary secret service field.
Distressingly topical
On each of the almost 450 pages, it becomes clear what a brilliant storyteller Pflüger is - always with the right sense of dramaturgy and rhythm. He guides his readers through the story in an almost cinematic way, using clear, concise language, surprising them with fresh linguistic imagery and not neglecting the humor in the dialogues.
He cleverly embeds his fictional storylines in historical events: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is mentioned, Nina arrives in the Russian capital at the time of the boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow and Brezhnev's successor Yuri Andropov, with whom a KGB chief officially took the helm, makes several appearances.
Even though Pflüger sets his novel at the height of the Cold War, much of it seems oppressively topical. He himself remarks in an afterword to the book, which he had already started before the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "While writing it, I wished there were fewer analogies between today's Russia and the Soviet Union of that time."
Source: www.ntv.de
