Breach

by W. L. Goodwater

  “It is easy to lose your footing in a city like Berlin. The ground is always shifting,” he had told her. “So trust your instincts and you will succeed, my dear. I have no doubt.”

  What if her instincts told her to quit?

  “Have you ever thought of visiting Berlin again, sir?” she’d asked as he walked her to the door. “Any fond memories of home?”

  He did not reply immediately. She knew he was reluctant to discuss his personal history, but thought if he would share with anyone, it would be her. “This is my home now,” Dr. Haupt said, patting her hand. “Berlin is my past. I prefer to focus on the future. As should you. Yours will be bright indeed, my dear. I have no doubt.”

  How could she go home and disappoint him now?

  But what choice did she have? She could sit in the bowels of the Berlin Operating Base until she was withered and gray and still might not understand the complexity of the Wall magic, let alone whatever else was at work. Better to give up now and let someone more qualified come and solve this mess, before things got worse. Before someone got hurt.

  Like Bill. Someone had taken a CIA agent and manipulated his mind using outlawed magic and then made it look like he was just drunk. The Germans? The Soviets? Maybe more importantly, why? What had Bill found out? Or what had they found out from him?

  It chilled her to think about, but there was no use denying it: this was war and she had no business taking part in it. She’d be better off if . . .

  Her eyes opened and she sat up.

  Magic had been the first thing in her life that had made her feel like she was in control. Was she going to give that up, just because things had gotten hard?

  As a junior at St. Cyprian’s, she had found herself afloat. Many of her classmates already knew what they wanted after graduation: careers, marriage, the usual litany of life experiences when you are young and powerful. It wasn’t that Karen didn’t want any of those things, but every option, no matter how minor, seemed mired in so much uncertainty that she felt paralyzed. She’d no longer felt capable of knowing what she truly wanted.

  So she had gone to see Dr. Haupt. He had listened carefully and quietly as she described her malaise. The words all sounded so childish as she said them and she felt her face burn with shame. But he had been kind and told her the simple truth that uncertainty is unavoidable.

  “If you are going to change the world, Karen,” he had said, “you can never let yourself be overcome by your fears or by regret. Do what you believe is right. Trust your instincts, not your fears.”

  Trust your instincts, not your fears.

  She dressed quickly in the dark, rummaging through already-packed bags for practical clothes: jeans, boots, a jacket. Her hair would be a mess, but that’s why God invented ponytails. She found her notes, a map, and a flashlight. Lastly she hung her leather pouch around her neck. The weight there felt right, like it agreed with her plan.

  Now she just needed a plan.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stanley hated the night shift. He never had a problem staying awake; the Germans had no shortage of coffee. No, it was the opposite problem: he could never force himself to sleep when the sun was out. It was like his brain rebelled at the very thought. It’s daytime, dummy, he heard it say when he’d toss and turn, so get out there and do something. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Sleep just wasn’t willing to change schedules.

  But he had a hard time complaining. Here he was, right back in Germany, but he didn’t mind it this time around. Fewer people were trying to kill him on this visit. Sure, he still carried a gun, but he never expected to use it. Who would be nuts enough to try to attack the CIA’s Berlin headquarters? Even the Soviets weren’t that crazy. So as jobs went, his was pretty swell.

  He glanced at his watch: 3:17 A.M. Only a few hours left. Almost time for a sandwich.

  Voices drifted in from the hallway behind him. That was odd; there were always people about in BOB, but usually pretty few at this hour. But his job was to keep the bad guys out and these were coming from inside, so he just shrugged.

  “. . . Stanley . . .” This made his ears perk up. Were they talking about him?

  “. . . spying . . .” another distant voice murmured. “. . . East Germans.”

  He sat up in his chair. What was that? Spying for the Germans? He quickly tried to think of another Stanley who worked at BOB, but came up blank. Who could they be talking about?

  He got up as quietly as the old springs in the chair would allow and moved toward the door. Light from the hallway spilled into the guardroom, but he couldn’t see anyone through the crack.

  But Stanley heard the next word clear enough: “. . . traitor.”

  Now his heart was going. Why would he betray his country?

  Enough of this, he thought, pushing the door open and barging out into the hall. Whoever had the nerve to question his loyalty in the middle of the office in the middle of the night, they were about to get a piece of his mind.

  There was no one in the hall. He heard only the soft buzz of the lightbulbs.

  Behind him, the door to the guardroom slid closed.

  He spun and grabbed at the handle, but it was too late. He didn’t remember leaving it locked, but it wasn’t budging. “No, no, no,” he said, rattling the knob. But there was no one to hear him, just his mind playing tricks and him playing along.

  Worst of all, now he had to go wake Earl to unlock the door. He wasn’t going to be happy. Earl was never happy, but he was going to be even less so at 3:21 A.M.

  Sighing, Stanley hurried down the hall before anyone else noticed he was away from his post.

  And so he missed the sound of the main door unlocking and the sight of the visiting magician slipping out into the cold Berlin darkness.

  * * *

  • • •

  Karen had the taxi drop her off more than a mile from the breach site. No need to draw any more attention than necessary. Not to mention, the extra subterfuge made her feel more like a spy. She had been worried the CIA might have placed a guard on the site itself, but it looked abandoned. A guard would have drawn questions, questions no one wanted asked. She watched the quiet windows in the nearby apartments. Any one of them could hide some prying eyes, so she did her best to slip in quietly.

  When she reached the tarp-covered area concealing the breach, she let out a gasp: the breach had grown, nearly doubling in size since her last visit. While she had been running and rerunning calculations, this crisis-in-the-making hadn’t been idle. How much longer could they keep this hidden? And what would happen once people started to notice?

  She set down her satchel and stared at the decaying magic. Just you and me, she thought. Time to surrender your secrets.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two hours later, she remembered why giving up had seemed so attractive.

  There was just too much noise from the Wall to make sense of any measurement she could take. A spell like this was a diva, pushing all other magic aside for its time in the spotlight. Whatever else was involved was subtle, an assassin rather than an armored column, a slow poison rather than a gunshot.

  A wind had started to pick up, snapping the tarp overhead, but she barely noticed until it spoke.

  “. . . hear me . . .” it said.

  She stopped midspell. Was someone coming? The street still seemed empty.

  The wind tugged again at the canvas. “. . . please . . .” it said. “. . . can you hear me . . .”

  Okay, she thought, the universe is punishing me for the trick I played on poor Stanley. She had thought it a clever way to draw the guard away while she made her escape, funny even; it didn’t seem so funny now.

  But whereas Stanley was convinced the voices he heard were his colleagues, Karen knew magic when it whispered plaintively in her ear.
<
br />   “Yes,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I can hear you.”

  “. . . do not have . . . much time . . .” said the wind. “. . . tell them . . . they must come . . . to East Berlin . . . I can help . . . with the Wall . . .”

  I promise, if I make it back to BOB alive, I’ll apologize to Stanley.

  “. . . tell them . . .” another gust said, stronger now, “. . . come tomorrow night . . . or do not come at all . . .”

  “Who are you?” she asked, which seemed both a vital and a silly question to ask the wind.

  “. . . my name . . . is Erwin . . . Ehle . . .” the wind said. It was quieter now, its strength fading. “. . . you must lead them . . . when they come . . . you will know where . . . I will show you . . . convince them . . . convince them . . .” The wind stilled for a moment before, with its last breath, almost too soft for any to hear, it added, “. . . or flee.”

  FIFTEEN

  “You lost me at the part where you violated this building’s perimeter.”

  Jim was quick to interject. “In all fairness, she broke out, Chief, not in.”

  “Jim,” Arthur said, speaking slowly, “this is one of those times when it is better to be seen and not heard.”

  “Boss—”

  Karen interrupted; Jim was grateful, since he wasn’t exactly sure how he would have finished that sentence anyway. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am. I just wanted another look at the Wall before . . . before I put in a request to go home.”

  “If you’d asked, we would have taken you,” Arthur said.

  “I know. But it was late and . . . I’m sorry.”

  Nicely done, Jim thought. Arthur could come down hard when he needed to (Jim certainly had experience with that), but even the boss couldn’t much argue with a sincere apology. Especially when it came alongside a potential lead. Jim was just glad that Milt Garriety had so far kept quiet as he loomed in the corner.

  “You’re sure about the name?” Arthur asked, sighing.

  “Erwin Ehle,” she repeated. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “That information,” Arthur said, “is classified.”

  “Come on, Chief,” Jim said before he remembered he was supposed to be quiet. “I think we’re a little past ceremony now. She’s on our side.”

  “Jim, don’t—”

  “I don’t need to know the details,” Karen said quickly. “Maybe I don’t want to know. But this man said I needed to come, that he’d show me how to find him.”

  “That’s assuming anyone goes,” Arthur said.

  “We can’t just let this one slip through our fingers,” Jim said; he’d never been good at keeping his mouth shut before, so why start now? “Not if he can help us. Not if he can explain what’s going on around here.”

  Arthur rested his hands on his desk. The boss’s office had always seemed small to Jim. He assumed Arthur liked it that way, liked his visitors to feel uncomfortable. Jim could attest that it was working.

  “Milton,” Arthur said, “what do you think?”

  The glowering vampire who looked like he’d had maybe an hour of sleep the night before unfolded himself from his perch. “I think,” he said, “that this is nonsense. And in choosing that word, I am being gracious. Otherwise, the word I might choose to describe sending agents into hostile territory on a moment’s notice with no intel other than the word of an untested civilian magician would be ‘suicidal.’ I would forbid any of my agents from taking part.”

  “You heard him, Jim,” Arthur said.

  “You both are just going to pretend that this is a coincidence?” Jim stared at the two men. They both were sharing the same expression: the look you get when you see an insect you’d really like to crunch. “After what happened to Bill, suddenly this particular asset asks for us to meet him?”

  “Did he?”

  “Come on, Milt. How else did she know the man’s name?”

  “Not everyone in this room is cleared for this discussion,” Garriety said.

  “I’ll leave,” Karen said, “but I’ll be on my way to East Berlin.”

  “Chief,” Jim said, “we’re in crisis mode. She can help. You tell her, or I will. You can fire me later.” As the words were coming out of his mouth, part of Jim’s brain wondered if he would be fighting so hard if their guest magician didn’t have such a cute smile.

  Arthur puffed out his cheeks then blew out a rush of frustrated air. “I wouldn’t fire you,” he said. “I’d send you to prison.”

  “Well,” Jim said, that same part of his brain laughing at him now. Another fine mess, brought to you by the ladies. “What I meant was . . .”

  “Shut up,” Arthur said. “Miss O’Neil, have a seat.”

  “Arthur . . .” Garriety said.

  “Erwin Ehle is a high-ranking East German magician,” Arthur said as if he couldn’t hear the espionage chief; Jim would have to learn that trick. “One of their top guys, if our intel is worth a damn. Most of said intel comes from a single source: a prostitute that Bill handled. He was going to meet with her the night he . . . got lost.”

  “Wow,” Karen said, finally sitting in the offered chair. “That’s quite the coincidence.”

  “Furthermore,” Arthur said, “the best we can tell, this Ehle is one of the magicians who worked on the original Wall spell.”

  Karen was looking at Arthur, but Jim could see her magic wheels turning. If Arthur thought he could stop her from making contact now, he’d need to find an empty cell in the basement and throw away the key.

  “Then we have to go,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She leaned forward. “I won’t lie to you, sir: I don’t know what is wrong with the Wall. But it is getting worse. If Ehle wants to help, we have to go over there and talk to him.”

  “It is not that simple,” Arthur said.

  “I’m not CIA,” she said. “I have a passport. I can go over, find him, find out what he knows, and be back before anyone is the wiser.”

  At this, Garriety laughed. It was about as patronizing a sound as a human was capable of making. “I don’t know much about your little magic world,” he said, for the first time addressing Karen directly. “But I do know mine. And while I’m not sure magic is all you magicians claim it to be, I know the Soviets and the East Germans are very careful about it. They have trained people watching the crossings. They’d know an American magician was entering East Berlin before you even got within a mile of Checkpoint Charlie.”

  It made Jim’s skin crawl, but he had to agree with Garriety. “Someone knew to grab Bill, probably when he was trying to pass through the gate. They would see you coming.”

  “I snuck out of here easily enough,” she said, daring the men to deny it.

  Arthur didn’t. “Don’t remind me,” he said. “But they’re a lot less nice than we are.”

  “What I am hearing,” Karen said, “is a bunch of excuses why we can’t do something that we have to do.” She wasn’t smiling now. “Is this how intelligence work usually gets done? You guys have a little competition to see who can be the most useless?”

  Jim could see Garriety’s whole body tense, his knuckles white. Jim wasn’t used to hearing women talk like Karen did, and he guessed Milt was far less accustomed and certainly less charmed by it. But he never got his chance to vent his bile, because of a strange sound emanating from the head of BOB: laughter. Jim wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard the boss laugh before; it was unsettling.

  “Actually, yes,” Arthur said, still chuckling. “I’d say you got us pegged, Miss O’Neil. Don’t you agree, boys?”

  “Arthur,” Garriety said, “I don’t like this.”

  Mirth died painfully on Arthur’s face, as if Garriety’s voice reminded him of some bad news he had hoped to forget. “You don’t like it? Big surprise. I haven’t liked a single thing since I
came to this dump,” Arthur said. “The food, the weather, even the beer tastes like dirt. Luckily Uncle Sam didn’t send us here for our well-being. He sent us here to do our damn jobs.”

  “Chief,” Jim said. “You’re a genius.”

  “What?”

  “Dirt,” Jim said, a grin stretching across his face. “I think I know how we can pay Mr. Ehle a visit.”

  SIXTEEN

  Looking down into the tunnel was like staring into an open grave. Karen’s whole body shuddered at the thought of disappearing through the narrow opening. And yet she couldn’t deny that she felt compelled by it, like standing on a cliff’s edge, afraid of the inexplicable instinct to jump.

  “Claustrophobic?” Jim asked pleasantly.

  “Never had the chance to find out,” she answered.

  She told herself she didn’t have room to complain; she was, after all, the one who had demanded to go over. Plus, as dank earthen tunnels went, this one wasn’t that bad. It had lights hung at somewhat steady intervals, and while it wasn’t high enough to really stand up, she wasn’t going to be sliding into East Berlin on her belly either. It had taken a lot of work to cut this path through the German soil and she ought to be grateful it had been made available to them.

  She decided to save her gratitude for when she emerged safely on the other side.

  Jim slid a dark glass bottle out from a nearby rack. “Good year,” he said, eyeing the label. The tunnel had been dug into a wine cellar of a home near the Wall, carefully concealed among the rows of reds and whites. “A swig of this might help. Think they’ll notice one missing?”

  “You often get drunk before your secret spy missions?” Karen asked.

  “Only the dangerous ones,” said Jim.

  “Well now,” said a big voice behind her, “sure am glad you didn’t ask me to come along on this wee adventure. I think you’d have to widen it a bit first.” The voice belonged to a Scotsman called Alec, a senior member of British intelligence, Karen was told. Arthur had insisted that key representatives of the other Western powers be informed of their plan. The US had to be careful not to act like it was running the show, Arthur said, and never more so than when it actually was.