Becker saw what he meant when they entered. It was like stepping back into another epoch, a throw-back to a time of despots and serfs. This would have been where the privileged gathered, and he could understand why it might hold less appeal for East Germans. Garishly ostentatious, gold and black brocade wallpaper and portraits of aristocrats and warriors decorated the walls. Heavy wooden stools and tables packed the room. Four men, who Becker judged to be from the Balkans, glanced at them and returned to their cigarettes, coffee, and small talk. Smoke hung in a blue-gray cloud that descended almost to the level of Becker’s head. He was grateful for the high ceilings.
Bergmann walked past the tables and through a small archway into a smaller area that was lined on both sides with private cubicles. He held the curtain of one aside for Becker and then slipped in behind him. The base chief, a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit, was waiting for them. He looked unremarkable and could easily be confused for any mid-level businessman on the street, which was how he preferred to be remembered or, more precisely, forgotten.
“Welcome to my Stammtisch.”
“Been waiting long?” Bergmann said.
“No, I slipped in the back just before you arrived.”
“Thomas, this is Kim, one of my most experienced men. Kim, this is Thomas.”
“Tom,” he said, “my friends call me Tom.”
A handshake settled the formalities and everyone sat down. A bottle of Talisker was produced and very healthy drams were poured in equal measure into three Baccarat crystal tumblers.
Murphy filled them in on details as he passed the glasses to his guests. “We can be comfortable here. It’s a safe space but we’ll talk in generalities nevertheless. So, what did you think of my request?”
Bergmann began, “We discussed it and agreed that we can probably help. We’ll need more specific information to plan, the whole who, where, and when thing. What restrictions do we have?”
“First, no restrictions. You plan, I support. You are seconded to us for this operation; the army has no input. Headquarters has given me authority to run this project without the participation of our office across the way,” he said pointing his thumb to the East, meaning the East Berlin station would not be involved.
Kim asked, “Can you better define the package?”
“Not yet, except it is in the open.”
“That is a relief. We won’t have to bust any doors down.” Becker paused and then added: “On the way in, at least.”
“But… I should mention, he says he can’t send out messages anymore. It’s too dangerous. That means you’ll need to make a visit to coordinate the plan beforehand.”
“Over there?” Becker said. “That will require some careful thought. We don’t want to tip our hand.”
“I know, but it might be necessary. And if it does need to be done, you’ll only have one shot at seeing him, no fall-backs, no alternates. I will send the full planning packet over to you tomorrow. It’s better you don’t come to our place because the bad guys monitor how late our lights stay on and when we order pizza.”
Bergmann added, “Once we have our general plan and requirements, we’ll brief it to you. I expect we will need your assistance on some items like papers.”
“Help is always available to those in need. We have the resources.” Murphy smiled, knowing he had the whole of the Agency behind him on this project. Then he stood up. “As always, it is a pleasure to see you Jeff, and to meet you Kim. See you soon.”
Then he was gone. Bergmann and Becker waited a few moments before departing.
“If he’s the big guy, doesn’t he worry about this place being watched?” Becker asked.
They stood up and Bergmann swept the curtain open. In front of them in the opposite cubicle was a man packing up a valise with various bits of counter-surveillance jamming gear. Two of the men from the front room flanked him. They looked at Bergmann and Becker briefly and went back to doing what they did well, which was to keep the area secure.
“That would explain it,” said Becker.
As they walked out the front, the front room was empty except for a single man at the front door who shooed them out into the brisk fall evening and locked the door. It was dark—night came early at this time of year, and they were nearly alone. Only a few people were on the street walking home late.
With the warmth of the sun gone, waiters chained up the chairs and tables outside the street-side restaurants for the night. If one wanted to eat, it would have to be inside. A few desperate hookers looking for well-heeled businessmen trolled the streets looking for that last chance before it was time to withdraw into their barren apartments. The Ku’damm was tame compared to where Becker was headed.
Becker and Bergmann shook hands. “I’ve got to check up on my men,” Becker said.
“Right, Kim. We’ll see you in the morning if you make it back from Potsdamer Platz.”
That section of Berlin was the city’s most notorious red-light district and the clientele matched the territory.
“Give me a break, we hang out in much better places than that.”
Bergmann turned and headed for the U-Bahn station. Becker watched him go before he headed off in the opposite direction. He checked his watch—which was the obligatory Special Forces soldiers’ accoutrement, a Rolex—and knew exactly where to rendezvous with his teammates. He walked east, passed close to the Zoo Bahnhof and decided it was too early to drink, so he took a break at a sidewalk Imbiss he knew and ordered a Döner Kebab, one of his favorite meals. He watched the proprietor shave thin strips off a pile of lamb and veal slices cooking on a vertical rotisserie and pile it up inside a flatbread. Stuffing the sandwich with red onions, lettuce, and tomatoes, the man asked if garlic sauce was required.
“Sehr viel, Kadir,” A lot, Becker affirmed. The sight of the yoghurt garlic sauce dripping onto the meat was enough to initiate spontaneous salivation. He felt like Pavlov’s dogs without the bells.
He had learned Kadir’s name after he realized he would be coming back here repeatedly and decided as long as he wasn’t married and liked to drink on the Ku’damm, he should find someone who could keep him fed. Kadir was one of several surrogates who kept him healthy.
The Kebab was a welcome supplement to the Talisker before what he assumed might be a couple of hours of carousing the evening away. He figured he deserved some relaxation after the last mission and before the impending task. As he walked in the door of the Blue Note bar, his teammates may have thought they were being raided—it was that rare to see Becker out and about with his team. He found four of them stuffed into a corner table listening to the music and watching the women. Fred Lindt and Paul Stavros were sitting with Hans Landau and Jan Pavlovich, both members of Team 2.
“Are you guys doing cross-cultural night? Why are you hanging around with these yahoos?” Becker said. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to his teammates or the Team 2 guys. He was always prepared to act as the peacemaker; they could figure it out in due course. Then he noticed a fifth man walking towards the table, a man he hadn’t seen in a very long time.
“Hallo, Detlef!”
“Hallo, Kim! You’ve graced us with your presence?” Detlef said it more as a question than a statement.
“I can slum with the best of them.”
“And this is your kind of hole in the wall, Boss,” Stavros said.
Detlef Beier was a true Berliner who shared more than alcohol with his American friends. An officer in the West Berlin Police’s Sondereinsatzkommando, the SEK, he was a team leader of the only German special mission unit in Berlin. Because the occupation treaty forbade the stationing of West or East German military personnel inside the city, the police took on the roles of cops and armed forces. The paths of the SEK and SDB had first crossed several years before, and they had never diverged. Beier was an outsider to the unit only because of his nationality. He and his team had run ops with SDB inside the city on a number of occasions. The latest had been a mission to crush a
Russian smuggling ring. The biggest problem with the relationship was the Germans kept trying to recruit the Americans away from the unit to stay in Berlin and work with them permanently. Luckily, the German police paid their people even more poorly than the American army.
“I have something new for you to try, Kim,” Detlef said. “Have you ever heard of a Depth Charge?”
He was holding a shot glass filled with something evil-looking menacingly over a mug of Kindl beer. He dropped it into the beer and handed it to Becker.
“Hau weg die Scheiße!”
Kim had seen it all before and knew he was present at the scene of a crime about to happen. The drink Detlef offered was just the beginning of a long, hard night.
11
It had been several days since Fischer first picked up the surveillance. It didn’t require him to make any changes as he had always practiced his daily routine as if he were suspect. In some ways, confirmation was liberating; in another it was menacing. He felt like he was waiting for the firing squad he knew he would face if he didn’t escape.
But he also knew that Großmann needed to have some kind of evidence before he could do anything. Großmann could pull him in for interrogation only with Mielke’s and, more importantly, Wolf ’s permission and that would require evidence, which Fischer was certain didn’t exist.
Unless…
Besides Lila, he had not contacted any of his sub-agents since the unwelcome discovery. He knew that his people had all been well trained because he had done it himself. Like Lila, each was selected and recruited only after he had explored their motivations and decided they were beyond just money or revenge. Those two incentives were easily subverted, as was blackmail. His people were committed to a democratic Germany for themselves and their families.
Once he had considered the possibilities and risks of contacting his network, he decided he needed to do some deeper investigation.
It’s time to find out who may have been caught.
Long ago Fischer had set up a proof-of-life system. If one of his people didn’t answer then they were likely under duress or had been arrested. He had also planned for the eventuality that they were under hostile control. Under normal circumstances, his agents would use the regular signal system. If they were under control and forced to put out a signal, a subtle change to the signal site would indicate “duress” and warn him. He had activated the system with a set of signals, each unique to a specific agent, and waited. After forty-eight hours, he would check each of the answering signal sites. He only had three sites to check, as he could discount Lila. She was alive and well.
On this fine, sunny, but cool Sunday, Fischer left his home on one of his long constitutional walks. It was a circuit that took him west to Alexanderplatz with its modern Potemkin village-like stores that held things that few could buy unless they were foreign diplomats. The center of the transport hub that consisted of bus, S-Bahn train, and U-Bahn underground stations was normally a maelstrom of activity on a weekday. Today, it was quiet. Families and young couples strolled through the open spaces gazing in the store windows and dreaming of whatever it was young people dreamed of. He walked past a small pastry shop that abutted an alleyway and saw what he needed to see. From 50 meters away the signal was visible. He kept moving. He had selected the signal sites based on his agents’ lifestyles and located them in easily accessible areas used by hundreds of people daily. It would be extremely difficult to correlate his movements with those of his assets.
In what would look like a lopsided triangle when plotted on a map, he walked north. The residential streets and gardens brought Fischer back to his childhood in Wedding when the parks had been his escape from the monotonous life of the workers’ apartment blocks. The lowest strata of Berlin workers—tradesmen, laborers, and petty vendors—lived in buildings that resembled nothing more than concrete beehives. Everyone was too overworked, too stressed, and too poor to have anything other than a colorless life. The open greens were the safe area he could escape to when he didn’t have chores, schoolwork, or wasn’t needed for his father’s errands. Pushing away the memories, he saw the second signal he was looking for and knew three of his agents were still operational. Fischer wandered seemingly aimlessly, remembering his pre-war days, until he reached another milepost of his life. When the Prater Biergarten came into view, he thought of his return to Berlin in 1946. The Prater had escaped the war more or less untouched and, before long, it was again the cultural hub of what would become East Berlin.
The government used the Prater to promote communism and German–Soviet friendship. Fischer found himself coming for the obligatory festivals and staying for the more interesting stage performances. The Prater was a cultural icon that subtly encouraged an alternative lifestyle inside a communist state. As a young man, he was fascinated by Maxim Gorki’s plays that depicted Soviet life at the most basic level. He began to realize that Gorki’s work, and that of others like him, were the threads that would slowly unravel the socialist dream.
He walked down Kastanienallee and entered the beer garden through its marqueed entrance, not bothering to look at the posted menu on the wall as he knew it by heart. He came often when he wanted to sit and relax in the big open space that was always packed in summer with hundreds of people who also wanted to enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Most of all, he liked the Prater’s food. Almost all of the restaurants in the East were controlled by the Handelsorganisation the state trade organization that ensured both mediocre food and service and showcased communism at its unfortunate best. The Prater was independent of the HO, and its proprietors and workers actually cared about customers and the service it provided.
The open-air garden was sheltered by huge, old chestnut trees that had also survived the war. Max’s footsteps clicked across the stone walkways as he walked through the now-empty space. The garden was closed in the fall and winter but he knew the indoor restaurant was open. It was one of the few places where he felt relaxed, as did the other patrons around him. It was a step back in time compared to the rest of East Berlin and reminded him of a more carefree time long before the Nazis came to power.
Fischer sat down at a small table and allowed himself the pleasure of a large Pils. When the waitress returned with his drink he ordered one of the Prater’s famous Wiener Schnitzel and sat back to enjoy the scenery. The waitress was talkative and friendly, obviously having no idea she was talking with a senior Stasi officer. Of course, Fischer made no mention of it; he didn’t allow his position to intrude into his personal life.
Drinking his beer and waiting for the food, Fischer reflected on what he knew so far. Three of his support agents were operational. He had one final site to check but even so, he would be no closer to solving the mystery if one of them was under hostile control and didn’t remember or couldn’t use his duress signal. At least he would know who still had the freedom to move and he could test them further. His veal finally came and he tucked into it, enjoying the food as only someone who knew it might be his last good meal could.
Fischer scanned the crowd as he had been doing all day. There hadn’t been any repeat faces, but he knew that many static surveillants and unofficial employees of the service were available to report on his activities. He expected that a copy of his bar bill would be included in the daily surveillance report. He had to give credit to Mielke; if you wanted to have a perfect police state, you couldn’t do much better than this. Mielke didn’t understand the subtleties of intelligence collection but he did understand internal security and suppression.
Fischer paid his bill, leaving some small change for the waitress. She would remember him for that if nothing else because no one tipped in East Berlin. He was certain that his shadows would interview her after he departed, as they would anyone who came close to him during the day. The surveillance teams were never very low key. If he went to the bathroom, they would search it to determine if he had left a signal or a message behind—he could count on their suspicions to k
eep them occupied. But he would only leave them with doubt.
He continued his circuit. The final leg would take him to the Prenzlauer Berg park where he could walk a number of paths to see if he had any close surveillance. He knew they would follow him if they thought he might make a message drop or have a brief agent meeting. If they chose not to stay with him, when he left the park the team would pick him up once again.
One way or the other, it doesn’t matter. I assume they are there. There is nothing suspicious I am doing they can observe.
He was in passive mode, looking for something the surveillance team would never see. Out of the park, he walked south and back towards his home. There was a bridge that crossed over the train tracks where he would find his last signal.
Below the bridge lay the Leninallee S-Bahn station. Metal staircases on both sides of the street descended to the station platform where commuters met the trains that plied their routes with an exactitude that Mussolini would have appreciated. The trains were one of the few precisely running features of life in the communist East and they maintained their efficiency on both sides of the Wall.
Fischer walked across on the south side of the bridge, his pace unchanged, his demeanor unremarkable. What he felt inside was different. This was a moment he had never before experienced, the feeling that the very delicate house of cards he had built was about to crash down on his head. There had been times when he felt fear or uncertainty, but those were short-lived and easily overcome by his training and experience.
This time, the feeling was magnified for those very same reasons. Despite the message to “sit tight, we’re coming” from the Americans, he had no easy escape and no immediate back-up. What he always called “my interesting life” was filled with unsavory characters, small dangers, hidden traps, and moral ambiguities. Those were to be expected, but there had been nothing to match his current situation. It compounded the anxiousness he felt and he had to put that anxiety into a box deep within himself, a box that he rarely opened. Now more than ever, he had to maintain control.
A Question of Time Page 8