Edge of Eternity Read online

  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

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  A Penguin Random House Company Copyright (c) 2014 by Ken Follett Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  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 (c) 1963, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., copyright (c) 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 978-0-69816057-6

  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 (c) 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, nee 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) Er
ich 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 Walesa, 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 Biro, 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 deta
iled 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?"

  "Yes. He has a factory making television sets. But my mother is determined to stay in the East. She says we must solve our problems, not run away from them."

  "I've met her. She's a tiger."

  "That's the truth. And the house we live in has been in her family for generations."

  "What about your husband?"

  "He's dedicated to his job."

  "So I don't have to worry about losing you. Good."

  Rebecca said: "Bernd--" Then she hesitated.

  "Spit it out."

  "Can I ask you a personal question?"

  "Of course."

  "You left your wife because she was having an affair."

  Bernd stiffened, but he answered: "That's right."

  "How did you find out?"

  Bernd winced, as if at a sudden pain.

  "Do you mind me asking?" Rebecca said anxiously. "Is it too personal?"

  "I don't mind telling you," he said. "I confronted her, and she admitted it."

  "But what made you suspicious?"

  "A lot of little things--"

  Rebecca interrupted him. "The phone rings, you pick it up, there's a silence for a few seconds, then the person at the other end hangs up."