A Question of Time

by James Stejskal

  Next he removed and burned all their paperwork from the Firm’s files.

  “They didn’t work out,” was his excuse. Nothing more was asked or said.

  Lila’s father was sentenced to two years in prison for “anti-government activities” and died there. He didn’t die of natural causes though. He was tortured and then murdered “attempting to escape.” The only saving grace was that his wife and Lila were never found. The government assumed they had escaped to the West. Fischer couldn’t bring himself to send them to the West though. He was selfish and wanted to keep Lila close by because of his growing affection for her.

  He kept her company when he could and saved his salary to help them out. With his help, she was eventually able to afford the bakery. Fischer came to their apartment often and they would listen to classical music and talk. Her mother would go to her bedroom early when he came over, thinking he was a suitable and honorable man for her daughter.

  That left him with a quandary. He thought he loved Lila. She was the first woman that he truly wanted to spend his life with, but he loved his job too, or thought he did.

  As one of the select few Germans at the Lenin School, he had advantages over most of the other officers in the Firm, which translated into valuable experience outside the country. His successes working with friendly foreign intelligence services gave him exposure to the highest levels of the business, both overseas and back home in Berlin. It was the kind of exposure that led to promotions.

  Fischer was good at persuading people to spy on their own country. He was equally good at finding spies who had been recruited by the enemy. He remembered one case vividly. His African liaison contact told him they suspected one of their own officers of providing information to a hostile power, but they didn’t know which. Fischer worked with that service’s counterintelligence section for six months on the case. Then, he stumbled onto a coincidence, a correlation actually. The officer often went to a local fish market, not randomly, but on specific days. He bought a fish and then gave the seller an envelope to pay for it. Fischer thought that odd. Why not just hand him the cash? The answer came later that day when a foreigner came and also bought a fish. He too paid the fishmonger with money in an envelope. After the next time the officer came and went, the security service waited for the foreigner. When he bought a fish, they pounced and searched the foreigner. Inside his fish was a plastic-wrapped envelope filled with tiny pieces of paper with encrypted text written on them. The foreigner was quickly expelled. Fischer was sure the African officer did not get off so easily and he didn’t like that consequence of his success. The saving grace of the affair, for him, was that the foreigner was a Russian. It was his first strike against the system which had raised him and then alienated him.

  Trips like that helped his profile and his career, but seven months was a long time away, and the absences took a toll on his relationship with Lila. His frequent absences led to arguments and a cooling of his feeling towards her. He felt she had no right to dictate what he did. He didn’t realize that she wanted him fully in her life as a partner, not as a part-time lover.

  Fischer was too busy to understand and too involved with his projects to look deeper into their problems. Then came the break that changed everything. In 1957, he disappeared from her life for eight months when he went off to Egypt without a word. He saw working with a partner service overseas as a chance for promotion. She saw it as his way to escape from her.

  When he came back, she wouldn’t see him. He took the easy way out and stopped trying.

  When he finally visited Lila’s bakery again after the Wall went up, he found that she was still single. They became friends again but, despite his feelings for her, he no longer dreamed of being with her. He knew his job would always be a problem. Instead, like a typical intelligence officer, he decided she might be useful to his work and kept her close. He recruited her to his cause after his tour in Zanzibar. Because of her father, she agreed to help him. She hated the regime even more than he did, but they did not speak of those things often. He wasn’t even sure if she felt anything for him other than a bit of gratitude. Nevertheless, she was still pleasant with him. “How are you, Herr Fischer? It’s been too long!” She smiled genuinely at him as she packaged up the pastries. She always greeted him so, even if it had been just days since his last visit. She also addressed him formally both out of respect for his position and because of the old ladies of the neighborhood watch who made it their life’s work to interfere and start rumors.

  “My work is hectic as usual, but it looks like you’re doing well,” he commented as he regarded the display cases that were more or less filled to capacity, a rarity in the Eastern sector.

  “Yes, business is good. I am selling everything we bake.”

  “I see you have Bienenstich today.”

  The extremely rich pastry sat in the corner display case oozing with a luscious custard filling that tempted even the most restrained.

  Lila paused as she wrapped Fischer’s packet of Berliners. Several heartbeats passed before she could respond to the pre-arranged phrase.

  “Yes, would you like to try a piece?”

  “No, thank you. My doctor would kill me. Besides I have other vices to contend with.”

  She passed the package to Fischer and he handed her several bills and a handful of coins, “That should take care of it, I think.”

  Lila sorted the coins and dropped all of them, save one, into the till. The last one, a five-Mark piece, went quickly and unobtrusively into her pocket. She again smiled up at Fischer and gave him a cheery send-off, “Yes, that’s fine. Until next time, Herr Fischer.”

  Fischer was already out the door and marching back down the streets towards his office with the package, his overcoat swirling out behind him. Lila was safe and his escape plan initiated. His next task would be to find out who had been compromised. As he strode along through the chilled air, Fischer’s mind was already busy plotting the next steps along his ever more perilous secret path.

  6

  Embassy Third Secretary Consular Assistant Matthew Brimley pushed his way through the crowd outside the Centrum department store complex. The Christmas holidays loomed; it seemed like every inhabitant of East Berlin was trying to get their shopping done early. Or perhaps they were just window shopping, because this was the most expensive store in the East.

  The previous day, Brimley had driven his usual route to work from the apartment complex that housed most of the American Embassy personnel. He followed the route meticulously each and every morning and evening, deviating only when he needed to go to a shop. Even then, he returned to the route and finished it as normal.

  The idea was that anyone who was watching him would be bored to death. His post at the embassy was just as boring to the watchers, if there were any. He sat behind a plate-glass window with a hole for talking and a slot for the paperwork the East Germans pushed through it. He reviewed the papers for correctness, made copies, and told the person who brought them to come back in a week or never to come back again. It was usually the former, because anyone who appeared at his window had already run the gauntlet of East German security outside the consulate. His job, as consular officer, was to validate the visas of persons who wished to visit the United States. In East Germany, like the rest of the Soviet Bloc, that meant the only people who made it to his window were those who had been approved by the regime. They were either government officials like diplomats, or engineers directed by the security service to steal American technology while pretending to attend a seminar in New York or Los Angeles. No regular East German citizens came seeking a tourist or student visa—they could visit Crimea or Yugoslavia if they needed a vacation and they could go to school in the Soviet Union. At least that’s what the government thought. Try changing your government’s opinion and you might end up in prison. That made Brimley’s job pretty routine.

  But he did have a sideline. He was trained to observe details and ask questions that others might ov
erlook. He would pass those details on to other people in the embassy and they would follow them up. That would usually take the form of a casual meeting with the visitor at the United Nations or a conference in Albuquerque to gauge their receptiveness to further meetings. Brimley was a spotter, a talent scout looking for potential recruits who might be interested in betraying their country. He was also an intelligence analyst who read the East German newspapers and journals brought to the embassy and pulled out interesting details for his reports from documents that otherwise might not make it out of the country—what in the business was called “open source” intelligence. He never left the embassy building other than to go home or shop. His routine was boring and he was boring. That was his job, to be boring.

  That was why the East Germans did not suspect him of being an intelligence officer. That was why he drove the same route every day. He was boring but he was searching for something, a signal. Every day, twice a day, back and forth, except on Sundays. He knew that he had to follow the route and he knew which window to look at every time he passed by.

  Communication was always about others and, in this case, it was a closed loop between two people. Matthew Brimley knew he was waiting for a signal. On the other side, an agent knew someone like Brimley would check a certain window twice a day. When the agent needed to pass a message, they would set the signal as instructed. Then the two would meet the next day at a set time, if only for a moment, in what was called a brush pass.

  Brimley didn’t know who this agent was. Even the Chief of Station didn’t know. All he knew was that when the signal was posted, Brimley had to conduct the brush-pass, a brief contact with an unknown agent. Brimley exercised the routine several times a year—he’d been in East Berlin for eighteen months—but yesterday the signal had been right there in the window and now he had to do the routine for real. He didn’t think he would be nervous; he knew the routine backwards and forwards. But now that he was in the store, Brimley admitted to himself that he was indeed feeling anxious.

  He headed for the toy section on the third floor. It was a place he actually enjoyed because he had a hobby—model trains. He loved N-scale trains and knew that the only people who built better model trains than the East Germans were the West Germans, specifically a company called Märklin. But you couldn’t buy a West German train for the price you paid for a nearly identical East German version at the Centrum. The exchange rate was what made all the difference.

  He was looking at all the different model trains and admiring their details as he waited for the appropriate time. He picked up a locomotive on display; a big Prussian P-10 steam engine known as a Mikado. It was beautifully executed, he thought. Suddenly he noticed a young boy gazing at the toy with envious eyes, his mother staring at him disapprovingly. He put the piece back on the shelf, picked up a smaller PIKO coal locomotive and turned away before the boy made him feel uncomfortable again.

  He paid for the train at the register and moved off, pausing here and there to appreciate the other trains and toys before he made his way to the escalator and started down, the shopping bag in his left hand, an umbrella in his right. If anything or anyone appeared to make him uncomfortable, he would switch the umbrella to his left hand to indicate danger.

  On the second floor, he wound around in a semi-circle to the next set of down escalators to the first floor and descended again. On the first floor, he stepped off to the side of the store and went down a short hallway to the men’s room. The hallway was crowded with people which forced him to slow down. As he did so, he felt a slight tug on his coat pocket. Not looking down, he kept moving into the washroom. He did his business and came back out, wiping his hands on the one cheap paper towel available to him. Unlike West Germany, there were no small dishes on a stool, left out by the janitorial staff for obligatory tips. There was an old cleaning woman sitting in a chair by the door, asleep. She was probably there to keep tabs on everyone coming and going but was failing in her patriotic duty.

  Returning to the main part of the store, Brimley headed down the escalator to the ground floor, wound his way through the displays and the shoppers, and headed outside to his parking place. He walked slowly and deliberately with his shopping bag, happily smiling at the people he passed, while inwardly his stomach tied in a knot. He got to the car, unlocked the door and slid into the driver’s seat. Only when he pulled out of the parking place did he relax. No one had confronted him.

  When he got to the safety of the embassy compound, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the object the unknown agent had left him. It was a five-Mark coin.

  7

  The next day, some 18 kilometers to the west, in the American Sector of West Berlin, Thomas Murphy sat at his desk reading from a pile of printed files and glancing at the screen of his secure electronic record-keeping system. Murphy was Chief of Berlin Operational Base, referred to by everyone in the Central Intelligence Agency as the BOB. Located inside Clay Compound, the US headquarters in West Berlin, it was one of the Agency’s most important posts worldwide and a gateway into East Germany. The smaller station in East Berlin was more constrained in its collection and recruitment activities because of the harsh security environment. East Berlin station officers were constantly under surveillance, which made their job as difficult as working in Moscow. Not that operating out of West Berlin was easy.

  Berlin was a plum job; to be on the cutting edge of the intelligence profession was both rewarding and a harbinger of better things to come—as long as you didn’t screw it up.

  Murphy’s road to this position had been an unusual one. He was a former Marine infantry officer and a good operator, but he came from outside the usual line of progression that led to Russia House. The fact that he possessed a persistent eidetic memory, the infinite capacity to absorb information and vividly recall it at a later date, was one factor in his success. People he worked with called it spooky when he mentioned a project or an agent and cited the exact cable number of an old message that covered the subject. It was one of many talents that served him well in his chosen vocation and hastened his upward mobility. It also knocked down barriers that stopped other officers from reaching this position. More than that, he was a good street operator and had recruited a significant number of productive agents.

  But the fact that he was here was even more remarkable when one considered that he did not come from the Eastern European side of the Agency. Murphy was an Africa hand and the European branch regarded officers who served in Third World countries skeptically. They felt the work in Europe was more challenging, both technically and operationally.

  “Africa is full of spies just waiting for a recruiter,” they would joke.

  What they meant was that every almost African politician, military officer, and government employee wanted Uncle Sam to pay their way to the high life. Murphy brought the detractors to heel with the facts.

  “We have had more high-value recruitments in Africa than anywhere else. And by that, I mean Russians.”

  His own tally of recruitments attested to that. It made him one of the best. He knew the main enemy—the Soviets— better than most and that was why he landed in this office just off the Clayallee in the quiet Berlin district of Dahlem. If he had spoken Russian rather than flawless German, he probably would have ended up in Moscow. He had done his share of clandestine ops on the street and in the hotels and bars of the world. A recruitment in Pretoria might be handled with meetings in Nairobi, Paris, or Doha. A lower-level asset might be handled in his home country, but always carefully. Those meetings often were dangerous, especially in hostile countries where an asset faced certain death if discovered and the handler might fall victim to an “accident.”

  Now he was essentially a dispatcher. He ran his operations mostly from the office, managing the younger case officers, communicating with headquarters, and meeting the chiefs of the British and French services along with West Berlin’s internal security service, the Verfassungschutz, to share whatever intelligence
was deemed shareable. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job and his mid-section had grown commensurate with his responsibilities.

  No exercise and too much good food.

  He once again vowed to follow his long-ignored resolutions. Then a knock on his always open office door brought him back to the present.

  “Boss, can we talk?”

  Murphy looked up to see his deputy motioning towards the back of the office space. Jamie Wheeler stood in the door taking up most of the available space. He was ex-Army Special Forces and notable because of his size. His name belied his Polynesian DNA; he was over six feet tall and weighed in at around 245 pounds. He was not a guy to take lightly in a bar fight or the jungle. He was no lightweight as an intelligence officer either.

  Wheeler’s gestures told Murphy whatever he wanted to talk about was serious. Without a word, Murphy got up and followed him to a secure door. The BOB had three levels of security. The first was the main office block, a secure facility in and of itself requiring entry through a sally port, an outer door that had to be closed before the inner door could open. At the rear of the main office was the second level, the communications room that could receive or send the highest classifications of information. Every message generated by the BOB went out as at least “Secret,” which included everything from routine supply requests to agent communications. Agent communications, especially those from assets who were considered to be at high risk, were sent out in tightly restricted traffic via special channels at levels above “Top Secret.”

  The third and last level of security in the office was the “bubble,” a sound-proof isolation chamber that prevented any conversation held inside from being overheard. Murphy and Wheeler were headed that way.

  The communications staff went about their business as Murphy and Wheeler walked past and through another door. Inside the room behind the door was a standalone enclosure that looked like a meat locker on stilts with its own ventilation system and another keypad lock. Punching the combination, Wheeler flipped the door lever, not unlike that of a railway boxcar, and pulled the heavy door open. At the flick of a switch the lights came on and the loud hum of the ventilation system filled the space. Once inside, the door was shut and the two men were locked away, isolated from the outside world.