Martin Kreutzmer

Who they are

For nearly all of Joe Country this man is Peter Kahlmann: the Park’s name for Hannah Weiss’s German handler, Pynne’s opposite number at the BND, the far side of a low-risk operation. The name is also the one thing Lech Wicinski did that he cannot explain — a flagged name he ran through Service search engines before his life fell apart, and the only lead he has when he asks a favour of a man who will not help him.

C14 resolves the name into a person. The man reading the Daily Mail in Fischer’s is Martin Kreutzmer; “Peter Kahlmann, on the other hand — his primary cover — was a Daily Mail man through and through”. The reveal is not that a foreign handler exists, which the Park always knew, but that this one has another name, another service behind him, and a history the Park’s own records had lost — and that the wreckage around Wicinski was the price of keeping that name quiet.

This page is filed under the real name, with the printed cover name as an alias, in the same way the series files cover identities under the person. Chapter links therefore show C14 as the chapter where the name changes, not as the first appearance.

What they want

To keep the asset, the name that protects her, and the arrangement that lets him move around London unremarked. He also wants to stop the roses and to move Hannah past what he calls the tradecraft of flowers, and, on the bench in C14, simply to get through the afternoon.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C05 — He exists first as a line in Pynne’s update: Hannah’s BND handler, Pynne’s opposite number, the safe half of a two-part job, named to Taverner only in passing.
• C06 — Wicinski asks Pynne to run the name through GCHQ’s trigger list before his hearing; it is the only thing Wicinski can point to, and it is bluffed away on a pub bar.
• C08 — In the park behind the Savoy he is shown as the man Hannah actually reports to; he resolves to stop the roses and to deal with Wicinski, and is reassured that the BND values her too little to protect her.
• C11 — The name comes back flagged. Wicinski tells Jackson Lamb it is all he can think of that preceded his fall, and it becomes the thread Lamb pulls.
• C14 — Lamb finds him through Molly Doran and a database that remembers, and accuses him of having the laptop seeded and Wicinski beaten. Kreutzmer has a second stroke on the bench, agrees to carry a message, and believes he has a free pass — one Lamb says he promised but never gave. The message’s destination surfaces as the same chapter’s closing news: Frank Harkness, shot once in the head in a parked car in Poitiers.

Tells

• Roses, carried to a clandestine meeting, and the thing he resolves to stop.
• The newspaper and the open table: he reads the Mail under the cover name, in public, which is either nerve or habit.
• Frailty used as camouflage — a stroke known to three people, and a second one that arrives at precisely the wrong moment.
• “You got fat and old.” His first line to Lamb is an insult, and it implies the two men already knew each other.

Open questions

• What the message Lamb gave him said is never given, only what it produced.
• Whether Kreutzmer’s belief in a free pass survives the discovery that Lamb told Diana Taverner about the mole is left outside the book.
• Whether he ordered the beating as well as the seeding is not separated on the page: Lamb’s accusation bundles both, and no denial or admission is recorded.
• His actual standing at the BND — serving, former, or freelance — is never stated outright; the chapter pages only call him Hannah’s handler.