A Question of Time

by James Stejskal

  Finch had already manipulated the tower door lock and now he pulled the creaking door open. He sprinted up the stairwell while Mann took his place on overwatch.

  In the guardroom, Finch took a quick look around to see if there was anything worth grabbing, but saw only a telephone on top of a cheap wooden table, two stools, and an empty cupboard. He located the telephone box and quickly removed the cover with his screwdriver. There was no power to connect to, so he inserted a battery-powered transmitter and the induction device and concealed them as best he could before closing the box. It would last for a couple of months on low power, so it was better than nothing. He stood up and checked the roads. Still all quiet. He had one thing left to do. He reached into his pocket and dropped a small packet on the table before running down the stairs to ground level.

  “Good to go?” Becker said.

  “Yeah. We’re in, but only on battery.”

  “Close enough for government work. Let’s go.”

  Ten minutes had passed. The team worked its way back across the sand. Walking backwards, they scoured the ground with two soft, rake-like brushes to remove their tracks. Becker led the way, carefully lifting his heels as he moved to avoid tripping. His gaze swung rhythmically from the team to the flanks where the road disappeared over a hill or around a bend. His suppressed MPiKMS assault rifle, the NVA version of the AK-47, was at the ready. It was another of the tools the unit had secretly acquired for just such a purpose, along with their clothing and equipment. Even if they missed a mark in the sand, the prints of their East German army boots would confuse trackers.

  Through the partially open door, Fred Lindt watched the team as they carefully picked their way back to the Wall. He pushed it all the way open and the three scrambled back into West Berlin. A quick touch-up of the sand and all was more or less as pristine as the Border Guard groundskeeping tractor had left it the day before. Fred relocked the door and then he and his partner, Nick Kaiser, unloaded and disassembled the suppressed M70 .300 Winchester Magnum rifles which had been protecting the team… just in case. The uniforms were quickly removed and switched for more appropriate city garb, the clothing stuffed into a soft briefcase, the sort used by most manual laborers to carry their lunch and beer to work each day.

  “How’d it go?” Fred asked.

  “Perfect. Everything in and locked back up tight.” Becker cut the conversation short. “Okay, let’s get out of here. Meet back at the team house at zero nine.”

  The team dispersed in bomb-burst fashion, quickly moving away from the Wall in different directions: the two long-gunners to a van, two others walking back to catch a late-night bus back to their car, parked far away.

  Becker waited and watched to ensure their work had gone unnoticed and that his men got away cleanly. As he looked back from a rise in the ground, Becker saw the greenish flare of headlights through the tree-line that preceded the scheduled security patrol. He crouched low and watched the truck pass by without slowing down.

  So far, so good.

  He turned and disappeared quietly through the forest towards the city.

  3

  Maximilian Fischer glanced out the kitchen window of his apartment as he poured his morning coffee. He was a distinguished-looking man, even in his bathrobe. Tall and fit with mostly black hair that made him look younger than his fifty-odd years, he stood near the counter that ran along the wall, looking out on the street below.

  At first, what he saw didn’t register, but then slowly he realized something was amiss. It was a frigid morning in East Berlin and in the street below exhaust smoke was curling up from the rear of a parked car. The car’s motor was idling. No one wasted precious fuel letting their car idle.

  Unless they were with the Firm.

  He spooned some sugar and added cream to his cup as he stood at the counter contemplating the car. The windows were fogged up. The person or persons inside must have been sitting there a long time, breathing very heavily, or maybe just talking a lot. He decided it was the latter and that the people inside were part of a static surveillance team. Whether there were other teams in the neighborhood, he had no idea. His first task would be to determine if they were indeed watching him.

  Fischer didn’t stare too long. He backed away from the window and considered the possibilities. He knew, from his job in the Stasi’s Main Reconnaissance Directorate, that no other security service employees lived nearby. As it was, he should have been living in Wandlitz with all the other Party Bonzen. But no, he said, it was unnecessary, he was single and it was more convenient for him to live close to the Firm’s headquarters.

  While this was true, living in the city had certain other advantages for Fischer. For one thing, it made it easier to carry out his other job—spying against the regime he appeared to work for so faithfully and diligently—without being detected. It was a regime he had grown to hate.

  He carried on as usual. He remembered all the tips he gave his own agents back when he routinely worked the streets. “If you detect surveillance, act normal, carry on as if everything is fine. Don’t panic or you will just confirm that you’re guilty,” he told them.

  So he took his time. He finished his coffee, dressed and collected his thoughts before descending the stairs of his row house to the entrance and walking out to the street to meet his car. The cold air stung his nostrils and he blew a cloud of mist every time he exhaled. The weather would have been exhilarating if not for the brown lignite coal smoke that assailed his senses. The driver was punctual as ever. Max stuffed his lanky frame into the black Tatra 603, wrapping his long, black wool coat around him as he settled in. Then it was off to the headquarters. He didn’t risk looking behind him or asking the driver if they were being followed, but he got his answer when the driver started to check the rearview mirror repeatedly, not part of his normal habit. It was not a long drive to the Zentrale, as everyone called the headquarters, but it was long enough to establish they were being followed. The car turned into Frankfurter Allee then onto Ruschestraße before entering the compound. The barriers were already open as they approached. With the guards’ salute, they breezed through and came to a stop at the entrance.

  “I’ll call for you when I need you,” he said as he unfolded himself out of the car in front of the glass entryway.

  Fischer swept through the open doors, into the building and up to the top floor of Haus 15. Greeting his secretary, he entered his office, the inner sanctum where he had always felt secure. As he stood before his desk, he again examined the possibilities and questioned that premise of inviolability now. The protection of rank, power, and privilege had its limits even in the all-powerful State Security Ministry. It could be that he was just placed under routine watch, but he doubted that. Senior-level officers were rarely subjected to checks unless there was strong suspicion of something being very wrong.

  Sitting at his desk, he shuffled through the in-box, looking for papers with an urgent or priority ribbon, but found none. It could be that he was being slowly strangled of information by a usurper to his position or it could be that Department S, the internal security section, had cut him off. It could also indicate nothing more than a slow day, unless one was paranoid.

  But he was.

  After all, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

  He knew that truth too well. He had worked foreign intelligence operations long enough to know you could never become complacent. He also knew that once an agent had been compromised, it was probably too late to escape. His agents had been extraordinarily lucky; none had ever been exposed. His long experience within the system revealed to him why the Americanand British-recruited agents were easily found and disposed of. It was quite simple: almost all of them were dangles—provocations set by Markus Wolf with the intention of fooling the enemy and luring him into a trap. That was also why Fischer had survived so long: he had seen things from both sides of the fence and knew when to take a risk and when not. He had taken risks all hi
s life.

  Max Fischer had started out running errands for his father long before the war. He grew up in a tenement building, one of a hundred such places deep in the Wedding district of Berlin. His father worked at the Siemens plant and his mother did a little of everything around the neighborhood but mostly cooked, kept the apartment clean, and the clothing mended.

  He remembered the fights at home, which were mostly about money. There was never enough of that and he and his younger brother always seemed to be hungry. He went to school most of the time, but occasionally, he and his friends skipped. No one seemed to care because the schools were overcrowded anyway. They often played army in the streets but before long they realized how they could use their teamwork to supplement their meagre diet.

  They called their game Blitzangriff—lightning strike. A swarm of kids would converge on the stalls at the market and a fight would begin, food would be thrown, the kids would be chased by the stall owners and policemen alike, and then another team would move in to fill their book bags with everything they could steal. Max led many of the raids until he was fingered by one of the workers who remembered him from a previous incident and corralled by the police. His mother was appalled and his father worked his belt on Max’s backside that night. He went back to school but had a hard time sitting for quite a while.

  He heard his father talking at one of the many meetings in their cramped apartment. They were talking about Kollektivs. Max decided that what he and his friends had created was a Kollektiv that benefitted their society.

  Father said, “Nice try.”

  But the more his father talked with the other men, the more Max understood. Lying on his small bed in the dark corner of the kitchen, he listened to them and their talk of unions and oppression. Talk of Brown Shirts beating up Jews and throwing communists into jail. His mother said he shouldn’t be allowed to listen. His father said it would be part of his life soon enough.

  The errands his father gave him were never quite what they seemed, nor were they innocent. It started with dropping packages off at other apartments or, sometimes, offices. Sometimes, he had to find things hidden in a park and bring them home.

  Then one night, his father came home breathless. He threw a cloth-wrapped bundle on the table and told Max’s mother to pack. Curious as ever, Max unwrapped the bundle. Inside was a revolver. Father had shot a policeman. The family left that night, traveling east, never looking back.

  Max Fischer lived the next several years in the Soviet Union, first in Moscow until the German Army got close, then further east in a small village near the Ural Mountains. He attended a special school for Germans, which was simply called the Lenin School. He kept his mother tongue, but learned Russian and English as well. He learned other subjects taught by interesting old men and women who knew his home as well as he, but who never answered personal questions. And then, as a young man, he was sent back to Berlin as part of a small cadre of communists. They were the vanguard of what would become the leadership of a new East Germany.

  It was 1946 and by that time the eastern part of Greater Berlin was occupied by the Russians. They called it Berlin—Capital of the German Democratic Republic. The western half of Berlin was occupied by the Americans, Brits, and French. The East Germans said the Allied presence was only a minor inconvenience; they would soon be forced out. In reality, Allied-occupied West Berlin was, and would remain, a thorn in the side of the Communist Party.

  When Max returned to Berlin, he settled in the Friedrichshain district and began his work with the Russians at their state security service headquarters in nearby Karlshorst along with other Germans who had returned from sanctuary across the Oder. They built a new security service from the ground up and called it the “Firm.” Granted, it was modeled after the Russian Cheka, but it was German through and through.

  Max was an intelligence officer, a case officer, the man who persuaded people to spy on their own country. It was the second oldest profession, and in some ways was not unlike the oldest—prostitution. It also required human contact, not so much physical as psychological. And the psychological effects could be severe. The act of recruiting a human being to do something that is against their laws and sense of decency can make the job unbearable for some. At the very least, it places a great strain on one’s conscience. For agents who can detach themselves from the emotion, espionage becomes a necessary fact for national survival. But the lies, the falseness of befriending someone just to ask them to risk their life, to betray their country: that slowly chews away at the soul. Max had spent many days and even more long nights searching for secrets that hid in the shadows.

  He had seen the work as part of his patriotic duty and his life in Berlin was good at first. The Nazis were gone and he felt he was serving a cause much bigger than himself, but slowly he began to see the differences between the East and the West. It wasn’t so much the material inequalities that disturbed him, it was the moral. He finally admitted to himself that he had made a mistake when the “Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier”—more popularly known as the Wall—went up. He knew that it hadn’t been built to keep fascists out: it was meant to imprison his fellow East Germans in their own country. The country was bleeding out its population through West Berlin. Everyone who wanted self-determination in their life and, yes, freedom, was escaping across the ill-defended border between the two Berlins. Had the Wall not been built, the GDR would have withered on the vine. Only when the flow of émigrés had been staunched could the economy even begin to move forward, but it would never thrive. He saw that and realized nothing can thrive under a totalitarian regime. He’d been living a lie and since then he had been working to make amends.

  He became a spy. He was not recruited or enticed: he volunteered. Deliberately and with no reason other than a desire to set things right. He didn’t need the money the Americans deposited into a special Swiss bank account for him, although he calculated it held just over 2.5 million US dollars. He needed only the gratification of knowing his information helped weaken the men who had deceived him in his youth. His reason to spy on his own country was what any case officer would tell you was the strongest motivation—ideology. The moment came along easily enough. Fischer had several opportunities to volunteer during his overseas tours but it wasn’t until he was posted to the African island country of Zanzibar as part of a diplomatic delegation that he took action. Ostensibly he was Chief of the Solidarity Committee which coordinated aid for the non-aligned states in Africa. In reality, he was advising ZISS, the Zanzibar Intelligence and Security Service, on how best to ensure their hold on power.

  It was a heady time, 1966, two years after a small group of African revolutionaries overthrew the Omani Arab leadership that had long dominated the archipelago. Shortly after the 1964 coup, their new leader, Abeid Karume, had brokered a deal with neighboring mainland Tanganyika to unite and form the larger nation of Tanzania. But while the United States and Britain vied for influence, Karume was drawn to the Soviet Union, China, and East Germany, as was his mainland African nationalist partner, Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Karume was also upset that the US and UK took too long to recognize his new regime. The East Germans would provide the “technical” expertise on how to run an efficient security service.

  ZISS was an aggressive and often ruthless service. Its officers were not long separated from a cruel colonial history that had been dominated first by Portuguese, then Arab overlords. Although Zanzibar had become a protectorate of the United Kingdom in 1890, an Omani sultanate continued to rule the islands until its protectorate status was terminated in 1963. By that time, the locals had had enough of their masters and when the revolution started, many

  Arabs did not escape the archipelago alive. That harsh tradition of dealing with political enemies continued and was even encouraged by many of the Stasi advisors who imparted their methods and skills to their new African comrades. Fischer was not one of those who condoned violence and torture. Far from it—rather he was disgusted by his Kampfg
enossen who thought brutality useful for the interrogation of enemies of the people.

  Because of his rank Fischer had more latitude than the officers under his supervision. He could move on his own and he remained watchful. In general, the Zanzibaris had little problem identifying most of the British and American intelligence officers on the island. In their zealousness, they also mistakenly identified some authentic diplomats as spies and threw them out of the country. There were, however, a few real intelligence officers they missed and Fischer, ever wary, looked for one that his “friends” hadn’t pegged. That would be his opening.

  Zanzibar’s main island of Unguja was not a big place and every outsider was closely watched by the locals whether they worked for ZISS, picked pockets, or were just curious. That made clandestine operations difficult for most Westerners who stuck out wherever they appeared.

  Fischer was patient. Before long, he decided one American appeared to be of interest. He lived in a beach house not far from where the US consulate was located and spent most of his days in the office, one of the four or five employees who remained. On occasion he would leave his office and travel out to the former site of NASA’s Project Mercury tracking station. The location was about 10 kilometers outside town on the southern edge of the island. Surrounded by palm, cinnamon, mango trees and brush inhabited by chattering and exceedingly curious Red Colobus monkeys, it was a quiet, isolated spot.

  The new government had demanded the American station’s removal shortly after taking power and the site had been dismantled. Only two empty Quonset hut buildings and the generators remained, and it was this man who seemed to maintain them. His name, Fischer learned from a local, was “Mister Frank.” Several months later, Mister Frank presented the generators to the government as a gift, but even after their removal from the compound he would visit the local villages nearby and gift the elders bags of rice and, on holidays, with a goat. He would sit with the elders and talk about their problems late into the evening until only one man remained. That elder was also a member of the island’s governing council.