Born to Die in Berlin: A Thriller

by Alex Carlson

  Rhys swatted the man’s arm away and punched him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He would have fallen to the floor, but Rhys had grabbed him by the back of his collar and he lowered him gently to the ground while keeping his eyes up scanning for other threats. Sure enough, another man sprung up from his seat and lunged toward Rhys. Rhys stepped to the side and grabbed the man’s extended arms, pulling them forward so that the attacker’s excessive weight carried him to the ground. He struggled to get up and Rhys went down to one knee and punched him in the face, splitting his lip, loosening his teeth, and leaving a dazed look in his eyes.

  Then there was pandemonium. The girls fled through a door and down a hall. The remaining men backed up and gave Rhys space, communicating that they were just there for the pussy, not the trouble.

  Rhys looked to the bar knowing that that’s where a gun would be. Sure enough, the bartender was fumbling around under the counter, unable to find what he was looking for because he didn’t take his eyes off Rhys.

  Rhys reached around his back and secured the Glock. He pulled it around and aimed it at the barkeep’s face. “Don’t,” he said. “Back away. Hands up slowly.” The man knew when to back off and did what Adler said, though he saved face by looking pissed off instead of scared. Rhys walked around the bar without breaking his aim. The barkeep backed up to keep space between them.

  Rhys glanced under the bar and saw what the man had been searching for. With his right hand, he reached down and grabbed it. It was a short-barreled Beretta. Rhys stuffed it in the pocket of his jacket.

  “How many are upstairs?” he asked.

  “Just one.”

  “Bullshit. Andrei and Yevgeni came in a few minutes ago. How many total?” Rhys stepped forward and took more careful aim as if ready to shoot.

  “Three,” the man said, defeated. “Andrei, Yevgeni, and Davit, the owner.”

  Rhys knew they’d be down in a second, having heard the commotion. He knew that they’d be armed. And he reminded himself that this was the life they had chosen.

  “Go to the others,” he said, indicating the men who had just come to get laid and let off steam. The bartender did so and Rhys raised his voice: “Everybody down on the floor. Curl up and cover your ears. You’ll be alright as long as you don’t do anything stupid.”

  He then crouched around the corner of the bar and looked to the stairs. He saw shadows moving on the wall and knew the guys upstairs were preparing to descend. Sure enough, a man—it was Andrei—bound down the stairs with a gun in hand and a snarl on his face. He looked first to the men curled up on the ground, then looked toward Rhys for understanding. Andrei fired a single shot from about ten meters away.

  Rhys felt the bullet wiz by his ear and fired off a shot of his own, hitting Andrei on the right side of his chest. It blew him back and left him reaching for any kind of support. He found nothing and slowly and deliberately put his hands on the ground. He briefly hunched over on his hands and knees and tried to get up, but his legs gave out and he fell on his side as his legs twitched out the remaining energy of his life.

  Yevgeni was preparing to come down the stairs, but he was too smart by half. He had slithered head first down the stairs to keep cover behind the lee of the ceiling. But the contortions required to maintain his position made it impossible to find a decent firing position and he emptied his clip in a mad five seconds, all of the shots going ridiculously low. His position also made it impossible to retreat. Rhys took advantage of the man’s predicament and aimed the killing shot at his head. He squeezed the trigger and the man’s head exploded, evacuating out the back of his skull onto the red-carpeted steps. His body went instantly slack.

  Rhys charged up the steps three at a time, avoiding the skulls fragments and globs of brain that covered the steps. He turned the corner of the staircase and charged into the open door of a room at the top of the stairs. A man cowered behind a high-backed chair while holding a mobile phone to his ear. Rhys charged at him and swung his gun, hitting the phone out of his hand. It skittered on the floor and Rhys went to it and stomped on it.

  The man had collapsed into a fetal position as he massaged the hand that had been holding the phone. He clearly wasn’t SVR. Probably the club’s manager.

  “The security disks, where are they?” Rhys demanded.

  “There, over there,” the man said. “In the safe.”

  Rhys looked and saw an open safe with a bank of a dozen DVD players.

  “Where’s the ambassador’s?” Rhys demanded. He came closer and threatened more aggression.

  “He’s in room number three.” The man was shaking. “It’s labeled on the player.”

  Rhys found it and saw the green light on. He ejected the disk and pocketed it.

  “Come with me. Down with the others.”

  The man got up, left the room, and descended the stairs, seeing Yevgeni’s legs splayed all akimbo on the stairs. The manager hesitated, but Rhys pushed him forward, and he weaved his way through the blackish blood and gobs on the deep red steps.

  “Where’s his room?”

  “Three doors down,” the manager said. “On the left.”

  “Go to the corner. Get in the same position as the others.” The man did so as fast as he could. “Just a moment longer, people. Don’t do anything stupid and you’ll get out without getting hurt.”

  Rhys raced down to the third door on the left and kicked the door in.

  “Ambassador,” his voice was calm. “Come with me. Now.”

  Chapter Nine

  Terry McClellum woke up with a hangover. He suspected it was from the stress, not from the amount of alcohol he had drunk, which had been considerable. It had been a rough night. A very rough night.

  Waking alone in the light of day, he appreciated the gravity of what had transpired. Stirewalt, in fact, had read him the riot act.

  He didn’t want to get out of bed. Normally he woke up with a bang, fired up and ready to start the day. It was one of his gifts. But today he stared up at the white ceiling and felt safe under the covers. But it was pointless, he knew. You never solved a problem by lying around in bed. He got up and waddled to the bathroom.

  McClellum hadn’t learned the name of the man who pulled him out of Maxime’s and manhandled him into the car. Colin hadn’t been any help, claiming he needed to concentrate on the road as they raced to Clayallee. The man had been focused and rough, and the ambassador felt bruises on his arm from the guy’s grip. The one thing that could be said in his favor was that he was timely. Colin had sped off just as the first sirens could be heard. Then again, the police wouldn’t have come at all had Stirewalt’s guy not shot up the place.

  Berlin’s CIA headquarters is located within the functional and architecturally uninspired government buildings of the dated Clayallee complex, the old American military headquarters dating back to the Allied occupation of Germany. Refurbishments and renovations did little to spruce up the place and the complex’s grayness matched the Berlin winter’s sky. Additional security precautions after 2001 made it a boring fortress.

  Clayallee’s security guards had been expecting the car and they ushered it through without the usual ID checks. Colin then hustled McClellum past the skeletal night crew and into Stirewalt’s office, where she was waiting for him with a doctor who was there to check his vitals.

  The doctor did his tests, announced him to be in acceptable condition, and then left. Stirewalt barely waited for the door to close behind him. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “You will not talk to me like that. I am the ambassador here!”

  “You’re the ignorant asshole here and I will talk to you like that! You’ve burned any inclination I had to be deferential, not to mention to show any respect toward what your title may have earned you. You can’t possibly be so stupid as to do what you did tonight.”

  McClellum was unprepared for the dressing down and it sparked an outburst for which even he wasn’t prepared.

  “E
verything was fine until that fucking troglodyte of yours came in and blew the place up!”

  He felt his face flushing with anger and knew himself well enough to know this was not the best condition to win an argument. He paused, collected himself.

  “Let me explain the situation, put it in context before we continue.” He inhaled visibly, communicating that he had regained control of himself. He smiled and looked to Stirewalt as he would to a friend. “I had an idea, something I had read about. I thought it might be possible to increase our leverage vis-à-vis the Russians here in Berlin by snapping some photos of Ambassador Petrov in a compromising position. Tereza, my date, is a prostitute. I knew that all along. It was, in fact, part of my plan.” He grinned, knowing that the station chief was smart enough to know where this was heading. “I encouraged her to be flirtatious, to snuggle up to Petrov. My hope was that he would reciprocate. And boy did he!” He pulled out his phone and slid through pictures until he found one of the Russian ambassador with Tereza’s legs draped over his lap. He looked at Stirewalt expectantly. “We got him.”

  McClellum took Stirewalt’s speechlessness as an attempt to consider the avenues to which the pictures could lead. He sat back in his chair.

  She looked at him as though she were trying to comprehend what she had just heard.

  “A honey trap?” she finally asked. “You seriously thought you could set up a honey trap?” She wasn’t screaming, but her intensity scared him a little bit.

  “Er, yes, a honey trap. That’s what you call it.” He suddenly felt less confident. “It all went well until your guy arrived. You’ll have to answer for that.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Stirewalt. “You brought a prostitute to the Russian embassy. Afterward, she brought you to a whorehouse. And you think you have snagged him in a honey trap? And you did this to gain leverage on the Russians? You do know that the Cold War is over, don’t you?”

  “We can still use the photos—“

  Stirewalt held up her hand to silence him. “Maxime’s is connected to the Russian intelligence service, the SVR.” She spoke slowly, slow enough for a child to understand. “They lure people in, usually German bureaucrats or military personnel, and record them having sex, and then they blackmail them. They never dreamed of getting an American ambassador. Congratulations, you’ve exceeded their wildest expectations. You are the one who fell in the honey trap. And you should thank that troglodyte for getting you out, because he also got the recording of your romp with Tereza.”

  McClellum knew enough to remain silent. It was quite possible that the night might have unfolded as Stirewalt had said, but he’d have to consider it. Worse case scenario, he began to think, was that now he and Petrov had something on each other. Stalemate.

  “Go home,” she said. “I need time to assess. Perhaps we’ll bring Sophia into this and get her input.”

  “That’s not necessary. Petrov isn’t a fool. Like us, he doesn’t want anything that happened tonight out in the open.”

  Now, in the bright morning that shined through the large windows of the ambassador’s residence, he was able to work over what had happened last night. The residence, he realized after seeing Petrov’s, was not all he had hoped for. Hell, he thought, my Georgetown townhouse is worth more, not to mention my gabled twenty-seven room cottage on the Maine coast, which has more charm, and my Brooklyn loft, which since the renovations has more modern features than this place.

  When the residence had been built in 1940, it was controversially modern, representing Bauhaus architecture that bordered on entartete Kunst. Whereas the ambassador’s residence in Paris and London were palatial and fit for the likes of marquises and lords, the building on Pücklerstrasse in Dahlem was a two-floor box, with white stucco walls and large glass plains on the ground floor and a horizontal string of narrow windows on the second. It looked as though the architect had once seen photos of an early Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece and tried to recreate it without giving any thought to location, function, or the organic properties of the building.

  But the residence did have history, McClellum knew. Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt held secret meetings here with the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to East Berlin in 1966, talks that paved the way for Brandt’s Ostpolitik. Those were the days, weren’t they? A real border that divided ideological worlds. Spies were required to cross that border and physically remove information recorded on some tangible thing. Today, data travels effortlessly in digital form without risk of life or limb. What’s the fun in that?

  Well, perhaps the troglodyte had risked life and limb last night, but he ought to thank me for the excitement. Better than sitting behind a computer screen like those NSA desk jockeys had to do.

  Still, McClellum knew he had dodged a bullet. Stirewalt wouldn’t tell Venegas. Stirewalt was in the intelligence business and from what he had heard she was quite good. She’d hold it, knowing she could better influence him that way. She’d use it to call in a favor he otherwise wouldn’t grant.

  He needed to negate that somehow.

  As he looked in the mirror, he saw nothing but exhaustion. Fundamentally he was healthy and he knew he’d look good after a shave and shower, but he didn’t like what he now saw. Increasingly, his looks took work.

  The way to negate Stirewalt’s power over him was to go over her. He needed to build relationships with Washington so that her superiors would tell her what to do. Despite the shenanigans on both sides, he and Petrov had connected. He wasn’t such a bad guy, after all. They had hit it off, even if each attempted to stab the other in the back. If anything, there was now respect between the two men. He could work with that. Perhaps they’d laugh about it one day.

  The beginning of an idea began to take shape as he shaved away the stubble that had grown since last night. Stirewalt had said something the other day about attempts to hinder the free movement of Islamists in Europe. He had had the impression that she was throwing him a bone, revealing something that wasn’t so important really. Well, he’d make it important. He knew both the Americans and the Russians had an interest in helping the Germans clamp down on radicals who had snuck into the country with the waves of refugees from Syria.

  He wiped his now clean-shaven face, felt its smoothness, and stepped into the shower. That was the key, wasn’t it? Cooperation between the Americans and Russians on an issue that was crucial to Germany. Perhaps it wasn’t as dramatic as the joint occupation of Germany after the war, but alas the Cold War really was over. Maybe this was the next best thing. If he orchestrated it correctly, spy craft could still play a role and he would have some fun. He’d leave his mark on the city of espionage.

  He got dressed with newfound energy and went down to his office on the residency’s ground floor. He took his coffee there as he planned his phone calls. He dialed Washington first. The Secretary of State was at the moment in Washington. It was Saturday afternoon in D.C., but this early in a new administration, she was probably hard at work. He knew her well. Both donated to and campaigned for the president. The Secretary of State was just able to donate a little bit more. That’s all right, he reasoned. Play this right and I’ll fill her shoes in the second term.

  Chapter Ten

  Rhys’ apartment was nothing like the ambassador’s residence. It was on the second floor of an unrenovated Altbau, a building that had survived the bombings during World War II and had made it through the years of communist neglect in East Berlin and had yet to be sold to a developer who would modernize it and sell it to rich investors. The building was structurally sound, but everything needed to be redone. The wiring was dodgy, the floors creaked and the walls, inside and out, needed painting. The windows were drafty and the doors were big heavy things with locks that required keys that were six centimeters long.

  But the apartment had charm. They didn’t build buildings with such high ceilings anymore and fewer and fewer could boast coal heating. As it does, the oven had burned down to a few embers during the night. Rhys opened th
e door and threw in three bricks. He left the door ajar and opened the flue. The draft was sufficient to get the embers glowing. A promising start, but you could never tell with these old things, so leaving the door open a crack was key. It caused a fine level of ash-dust to coat everything in the apartment, but the heat was unbeatable. Never too hot, it just felt warm, welcoming, and comforting. No better word fit: it felt gemütlich.

  Rhys looked out the window of his kitchen into the Hinterhof and saw his R75/5, the cover hiding its personality. I’ll get you purring again soon, he said, almost out loud.

  What a fucked up night it had been. He had waited outside Stirewalt’s office as the station chief ripped the ambassador a new asshole. He could hear it through the door as he sat with a Marine who was assigned to watch him. Despite his time in the Agency, he was now a guest, albeit one with permission to sit outside the chief’s office. Still, rules were rules and he had to have a chaperone. The two men listened to the shouting. He had a set of lungs on him, but she silenced him. Both Rhys and the Marine were amused.

  “You finally got some entertainment in this post,” Rhys said.

  The Marine smiled.

  “I always thought embassy Marine guard detachment was a waste of a good Marine.”

  “It’s necessary,” said the Marine.

  “I suppose it is. Still, can’t be much fun.”

  The name patch on the Marine’s camouflage uniform said Hernandez. His black hair was high and tight, of course, and his dark eyes communicated a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude that contrasted with a surprising openness and friendly disposition. Once they started talking, Hernandez opened up, talking about where he had been stationed before Berlin. That had included Afghanistan, but not Iraq, which he was too late for, a fact he didn’t seem to mind at all. There were a few gaps in his background and Rhys figured he had been involved in some sensitive parts of the world that he wasn’t at liberty to discuss.