“The magic this book describes is not like any you or I have ever used. Even calling it magic is a corruption of language, like calling the machine gunner’s craft an art. We have mastered many spells which can kill, but the magic in this book does more than that: it unmakes. It does not kill a man; it wipes away his very existence. It is, in short, the sort of magic no sane person would ever dare wield.”
Karen squirmed at the thought. Throughout all her magical training, she had been constantly irritated at the number of spells they were taught that were just variations on smiting your enemies. One spell to set something on fire, another to throw someone across a room, another to block the fire spell so you could then throw someone across a room. Like war itself, it had all seemed like so much energy spent on breaking the world rather than fixing it.
But magic like Ehle was describing . . . it wasn’t just destruction; it was magical nihilism.
Ehle went on, reluctantly. “There is little more I can tell of this book. It was written mostly in French, though some passages borrowed heavily from a dozen other languages, some remembered, some lost. And perhaps the most curious thing about this accursed book is that it was no musty tome from antiquity bound in unspeakable flesh. No, it was written by a steady hand in an accountant’s ledger, which had itself been printed in 1903.”
“This magic is a recent invention?”
Ehle shook his head. “It is as old as magic itself. Written on paper, parchment, or papyrus, by scholars, poets, or beggars. It has visited every great civilization in history, each time bringing death and despair. Until, inevitably, the book is destroyed. Yet without fail, time will pass and someone, somewhere, will again be inspired to put pen to paper and write: Concerning that which must never be . . .”
How had she never heard of such magic before? “The British had it?”
“A spoil of the First World War, we believe,” Ehle replied. “But while they possessed the book for some time, they had no magicians who could decipher its spells. A small mercy. And so it waited in the Tower of London, until the German army invaded.”
“But Voelker figured out how to use it.”
“Yes,” Ehle said. “When Berlin was encircled by blood-mad enemies and the Reich was breathing its last, Voelker brought the book to his headquarters in the Auttenberg district and made his preparations. Suffice it to say that magic of death can only be kindled with more death. Yet when he cast his spell, something went horribly wrong.”
Unspeakable magic was supposed to descend on the Reich’s enemies, Ehle explained, but instead it fell on Auttenberg, swallowing the entire district. Those stationed just outside of the magic’s influence reported hearing screams coming from inside Auttenberg for an entire day.
And then silence. “When Berlin fell, Auttenberg was in the Soviet’s zone of control, just on the border with the Western powers. At first they blamed their vanishing patrols on some hidden Nazi resistance, but eventually the magicians in the Red Army realized the truth: something terrible had been unleashed in Auttenberg.
“I cannot say how many lives were lost in the attempt to retake Auttenberg; if the Soviets kept such records, they did not share them with us. However, I know the number was staggering. And worse, those sacrifices accomplished nothing. In fact, there was a terrible suspicion that whatever lurked in Auttenberg grew stronger with each death. So at last an unthinkable decision was reached: they would ask for help.”
Karen’s mind raced to keep up. The existence of this horrible magic was enough to send her thoughts reeling, but she sensed the worst revelations were yet to come.
“An international conclave of magicians was assembled in secret. Each occupying power sent the best and most powerful to see what could be done about Auttenberg. The newly formed German Democratic Republic selected me, among others, to attend. There were, in fact, a number of my former colleagues represented, including the representative from the United States of America: the recently emigrated Dr. Max Haupt.”
Dr. Haupt. Operation Hobnail. The document had mentioned a “senior magical asset” on-site just before the Wall was raised. America had few talented magicians at that time, and none as talented as Dr. Haupt. She pictured his kindly, studious face. He had done so much for her career, for her development as a magician. She shuddered at the thought that he had been hiding this dark secret from her, from everyone.
“What did this conclave decide?” she asked with a dry, thick tongue.
“To lie, Miss O’Neil,” he said simply. “To lie. We all stared into that darkness and trembled. We knew we faced something that was beyond us, and so the decision was made to make Auttenberg disappear. Berlin was rebuilt around the cancerous district while every mention of it in any document or record or map was erased. Magical wards, the likes of which have rarely been summoned by men, were cast up around the district’s borders: spells to contain, to obfuscate, to hide away.
“But in the end, even this could not hold. So much magic shines like a beacon and the last thing anyone wanted was for the attention of the world’s magicians to fall on Auttenberg. It was not enough that no one could enter; humanity had to forget it was even there. So we had to hide our magic away, and what better silence than a roar?”
Karen couldn’t breathe. She had a sharp headache; when had that started? She needed air; she needed to think. But before that, she needed to speak. “The Wall,” she said, and the words sounded like thunder in her ears.
Ehle paused, and then nodded. “We needed to mask Auttenberg with something that had a believable purpose or it would draw too many of the wrong questions. The Soviets, conveniently, had a proposal.” He excavated a map of Berlin from a nearby pile of paper. “Do you mind if I deface your map?”
She handed him a wax pencil.
“We should burn this when we are finished,” Ehle said. “We would not want it discovered.”
“Are you planning on writing something treasonous on there?”
“This whole conversation is treasonous.”
Karen exhaled. Of course it was. “Do what you have to,” she said.
Ehle nodded. He traced around the city in a black line. “Do you recognize this?”
“The Wall,” she said.
“Exactly.” He completed the circle and then placed the tip of the pencil on the eastern border. “Except, on a Soviet or East German map, it would look like this.” His line deviated into East Berlin, carving out an island of space between the two markings. He tapped there. “This,” he said, “is Auttenberg. For those who remember it, it is a lost casualty of the war, either destroyed or occupied by the other side, while in reality, it is surrounded by the Wall.”
“But people cross the border,” she said. “They would notice Auttenberg was gone.”
“Magic is a powerful tool,” he said, “but it works best when it works in conjunction with human nature. And it is human nature to believe what is easy to believe. For a conquered people trying to survive in the hollows left by war, it is easier to forget Auttenberg ever existed than to consider any alternative.”
“What about planes? People could see it from the air.”
He almost smiled, though his face seemed to fight the expression. “You should have been with us as we designed the necessary spells,” he said. “We were weeks into planning before someone thought about airplanes. Another sortie in the long-lasting conflict between technology and magic. Let us simply say that Auttenberg is not a large district and that we applied a great deal of obfuscating magic upon it.”
“You guys thought of everything.”
“We were the best in the world,” he said, with perhaps a sad touch of pride.
“The best in the world,” Karen repeated. She looked down at her hands and watched them shake. “So the Soviets didn’t put the Wall there just to blockade Berlin. They needed to hide away some terrible magic that no one could control.” She forced
herself to look up, to stare at this man who had trusted her with a truth she had sought, but now wished she hadn’t. “And the Americans helped them.”
THIRTY-TWO
Arthur had just been starting to feel young again when he saw the stairs. The problem with doing legwork again was that it required using his legs, who were presently lodging a formal, aching protest at the thought of climbing to the fifth floor. This was why he had a staff of eager ignorant youngsters at his beck and call. But this little detour had to be done alone. It was hard to delegate when you couldn’t trust anyone. So for love of God and Country, he ignored his complaining joints and began the ascent.
It was more than likely that none of this even mattered. The reports he’d read coming out of Washington and Zehlendorf put the odds of this escalating to a real war uncomfortably high. It had always been a risk; they’d known that since the West had refused to abandon war-ruined Berlin. It had grown worse in recent weeks as the talk about rearming West Germany intensified. That was the real purpose of international borders: keeping a safe distance between you and the guy you never really liked anyway. But in Berlin, they’d never really had that option. The Wall had helped some, given everybody a bit of elbow room, but sooner or later it was destined to end up going to hell.
But even if Berlin was about to be put to the torch, Arthur wasn’t ready to catch a plane westward. There were only a few things in life that mattered more than victory, more than survival, and one of those was catching a traitor.
He paused on the second-floor landing to catch his breath. There was one good thing about getting old, he realized: no one was going to ask him to sign up for the infantry this go-around. Leave the soldiering to the young. They thought themselves invincible anyway, might as well let them test out that theory. Then, unbidden, memories of 1945 and all the dead invincible young men he had known washed over him, turning the beads of sweat on his back to ice. After all he’d seen in his life, even cynicism wasn’t satisfying.
Arthur eventually reached the fifth floor and found the right apartment. He knocked, one hand on the door, the other on the pistol in his pocket.
No one answered. He was met by nothing but silence.
Too much silence, in fact.
You learned something from a life of digging up what was meant to stay buried: the difference between the quiet of an empty apartment and the quiet of an apartment that someone wants to seem empty. You learned to read between the noise and the silence, to forget what you heard or saw and instead trust the less tangible senses. You learned to sense when a man was standing behind a closed door, waiting for you to leave.
And sometimes you just guessed and tried to sound confident.
“Open up,” Arthur said, whispering just a little too loudly. “Or I’ll have to make a scene. I doubt your neighbors will understand me, but they’ll wonder why that nice young man in the corner apartment got a visit from a belligerent American.”
He was rewarded with the sound of a turning lock, and then another, and then the door opened a crack.
“You are not supposed to know where I live,” Dieter said softly.
Arthur shrugged. “I know lots of things I’m not supposed to.” He gave the dour German his winningest smile; his wife had always called it ghastly. Dieter didn’t seem to care for it much more. “I need some help. Now, you going to invite me in or should we talk out here in the hall?”
* * *
• • •
Going down the stairs went more quickly than going up, but Arthur reminded himself that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Yet even as old, tired, and sober as he was, there was still a spring in his step. Nothing like a hunt to light the fire in a man’s blood, and nothing started a hunt off better than the right bait.
They had known. The damn Soviets had known the moment Jim’s little band had crossed into East Berlin, and now Dennis was dead and Jim lost. Someone had given them up. Someone betrayed them to Moscow. Someone sold out the West and traded away lives with some very specific secrets.
The problem with secrets, however, was that not everyone knew them. And these secrets, well . . . they were more secret than most. He hadn’t cleared the border crossing with the director and certainly not with DC; it was his operational prerogative to control the flow of mission-critical information. Within BOB, there had been very few with a need-to-know. Very few indeed.
His driver was waiting for him in front of the building. Arthur didn’t like loose ends, but he liked driving in Germany less.
“You get what you needed, boss?” the man behind the wheel asked as Arthur slid into the backseat.
Arthur considered what Dieter had told him, the trust he had placed in him. Nothing in life came without cost, but this was one he was willing to pay ten times over. For Dennis, for Jim.
“I did,” Arthur replied, settling back into the leather. “Time for some international diplomacy. I’ve got a little friendly information I’d like to pass along to our brethren.” And then wait and see what they do with it.
THIRTY-THREE
“Tell me,” Karen said, doing her best to keep her voice steady, “why should I believe a word you’ve told me?”
Ehle almost smiled at the question. “You should not believe anything anyone tells you, not in Berlin. This place has become a city of lies.” He intertwined his fingers and laid them on his chest. “And yet, I have forced you into a place where you must decide if you will take a leap of faith.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Your question has no answer,” he said. “When I began this undertaking, I did not anticipate that I would require help. Therefore I have spent little effort in establishing credibility.”
“And what undertaking is that exactly, Mr. Ehle?”
“Eventually someone will enter Auttenberg. They will take the book and they will use it. The Soviets, the Americans; the side does not matter. Men in power will always seek out more. And so that power must be destroyed. The temptation removed.”
Karen studied his face. Unsurprisingly, it revealed little. If what he said was true, then he had spent years hiding his true intentions from his Soviet masters, and they were far better at this than Karen O’Neil. “But you are immune to such temptation,” she said and watched for his reaction.
His lips twitched slightly, perhaps in annoyance? Or pain? “I would never use this book,” he said after a long silence, “because I have seen its magic at work.”
Karen narrowed her eyes. “What exactly was your job during the war, Mr. Ehle?”
Ehle took a breath before answering. “I was just a soldier, drafted from my home to serve the Fatherland,” he said. “A magician, but the Reich had many magician soldiers. Hitler, and in turn his servant Voelker, knew well how to leverage magic on the battlefield. I will not defend our cause as righteous, but I am German, and it was war.”
“And yet you were asked to help create the Wall?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I was not without talent,” he said, “and by war’s end, there were few German magicians left alive.”
“You know a lot of secrets for a lowly soldier.”
“I lived through the worst of times, Karen. In doing so, I learned many horrible things. It is my burden. A burden I would lift, with your help.”
Now here comes the real treason, Karen thought. “When you contacted me at the Wall, you said you could help me fix it. That’s why we went over there after you. That’s why Dennis gave his life bringing you back here.”
“The Wall cannot be fixed,” he said, shaking his head. “It all must fall in order to reach Auttenberg. The Wall’s magic is like a tapestry: as you cut the threads, it all comes apart. And after years of planning, I thought I was strong enough to do it, but without a locus, I failed.” There was something of a tremor in his voice now. “I thought the Wall was too powerful. But then a KGB colonel from Moscow came to
Berlin and told me that the West had found a breach. A hole in the unbreakable Wall. My efforts were not in vain. The Wall could be broken. I thought, perhaps with help from another magician, I could finish what I started. I thought my chances of finding an ally on this side of the Wall were more advantageous, so I attempted to make contact with the West in order to defect.”
“Through your prostitute,” Karen said, eyebrow up.
“Yes,” Ehle said, his cheeks a little red. “But I fear the Nightingale was one step ahead of me and my message never arrived. I was so close to my goal, but still too far. I had given up hope. In an act of desperation, I went under cover of darkness to find this breach. When I arrived, I sensed you nearby.”
“So what you told me at the Wall about fixing it was a lie.”
“I needed your help,” he said, his voice tightening. “I caused the breach, but it wasn’t enough. I helped to create the Wall; I know how to bring it down. I know the path to walk, but I need someone with stronger legs to carry me. I thought—”
“You thought I’d help you tear this city apart?” She heard the echo of gunshots and screams in the back of her mind; magical smoke hiding a massacre as refugees tried stupidly to rush the breach. “Have you seen the effects of your handiwork, Mr. Ehle? Have you seen the people dying because you weakened the Wall?”
Ehle’s inscrutable face returned. His entire body was perfectly still. “There are fates worse than death, Karen,” he said softly.
It was the war all over again. The fields of dead, the bombs raining from the sky. All for what? “How many?” she asked. “How many people have to die before it is all too much?”
There were cracks now, imperfections in the mask, glimpses of his true rage shining through like hot metal. Karen suddenly felt the gravity of her situation settle in the muscles of her shoulders, felt it tighten the tendons in her hands.
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