As she prepared for the trip upstairs, her suspicions running in various unproven directions but self-consciously dwelling on those two empty wine bottles from Friday night, Oskar wandered in, his eye looking only a little better. “Any word on the face recognition?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I can call down.”
“Don’t rush them.” She used the edge of the desk to pull herself up, then took a few steps forward. Her feet were sore from the weekend, and she wondered miserably if she was going to have to buy a cane. That, really, would be the end.
She went alone to the elevator, and on the second floor young assistants with folders sped past her to their important duties. Room S, on her right, was locked, but through the blinds she saw four people positioned around a hectare of oak. The laptops were packed away.
Her heart sank. Standing around the head of the table, sipping coffee from a china cup, Brigit Deutsch and Franz Teufel were laughing at one of Teddi Wartmüller’s bad jokes, while Berndt Hesse, the one friendly but unexpected face in the room, sat nursing his cup as if no one were there. She knocked, and Berndt looked up and said something to Brigit, who pressed a button on the table to unlock the door.
“Erika!” Wartmüller announced as she came in. His cheeks were unusually red today, belying a long-lost youth that had been crushed by his rigorous climb to the top of Berlin’s intelligence apparatus. Not that his wild ways had disappeared entirely, though-the world of rumor had a special corner for stories of Theodor Wartmüller’s sexual escapades. A devout bachelor since a late-seventies divorce, he’d over the years let slip innuendoes about key parties, exotic clubs, and boys, though no one ever knew if they were true or only to embarrass guests.
“Please,” said Wartmüller, waving his hands around. “Sit down and I’ll have Jan bring some croissants.”
“Just coffee, please,” she said as she shut the door and gradually made it to a seat on Berndt’s side-he gave her a clandestine wink.
Wartmüller pressed another button and ordered a fresh round of coffees, then clapped his hands together. “We’re all here, then.”
Brigit and Franz took seats on either side of Wartmüller like, Erika thought, synchronized dancers. They were his twin acolytes-Wartmüller always kept two young apprentices to play off one another-and between them, in the middle of the table, was a single yellow file. Yellow-a departmental work order.
Jan, an elegantly attired Pole who’d come with Room S, arrived carrying a tray. He collected the empty cups and replaced them with steaming coffees, then left. With a twinkle in her eye, Brigit went to a cabinet at the end of the room. She took out an untouched bottle of Asbach brandy and said, “I’m going to spice mine up. Anyone else?”
A trick, Erika thought. She covered her cup with a hand, wondering if they’d actually gone over security footage just to find out how much she was drinking. Had things really become that petty? “Straight for me, thanks,” she said.
Brigit, unfazed, cracked open the bottle and poured a healthy dose into her own cup.
“Now that that’s out of the way,” Wartmüller said, giving Brigit a mock glare, “we can get to it. Erika has had a busy weekend.”
Talking as if she weren’t in the room was another Wartmüller technique, a very effective one.
“Perhaps she can tell us what she’s been up to?”
She saw no reason to lie, so she didn’t. As she talked, though, another part of her wondered how they’d learned about her activities-from their faces, none of what she said was news. She was confident enough of Oskar’s loyalty not to question it now, but perhaps poor, emotional Hans Kuhn had been cornered.
Then again, she had nothing to hide, so perhaps their source didn’t matter.
“Would you call this investigation a personal favor for your friend the policeman?” Wartmüller asked.
Berndt cut in, speaking his first words. “Favor or not, I think this falls under your jurisdiction.”
Erika appreciated the interruption. Back in West Germany, during that other time, she and Berndt had been confidantes of a sort. Once foreign policy had been reassessed after ’89 and each was forced to find new specialties, they had kept up contact. She remained in intelligence, while he moved on-she couldn’t quite call it up-into politics.
She said, “As Berndt points out, it did seem to fall within our scope. Yes, Inspector Kuhn called me because of our friendship, but I took it on because I considered it our responsibility. That’s why I felt free to use our resources.”
Wartmüller grinned. “Oskar Leintz-he’s one of our resources. Looks to me like you’ve been getting the poor boy into trouble.”
“He had an accident on some stairs.”
“I’ll bet.”
As this seemed to be his cue, Franz reached for the yellow file and pushed. It slid down the long table toward Erika but stopped halfway. Berndt had to get up and reach out to drag it the rest of the way. Because they worked as two sides of the same person, Brigit did the speaking for Franz. “This is part of your investigation?”
Inside the file was a still from the Berlin video. The man, clear from the excellent image reconstruction, had heavy, tired eyes but otherwise looked fit. Handsome in an entirely anonymous way as he talked to Adriana. She turned it over and scanned the next page, important details leaping out at her. The BMW the kidnapper had driven had been reported stolen and subsequently found, abandoned and clean, in the Tempelhof parking lot. The Opel driven by the kidnapper’s possible shadow had been rented by an American, whose name they had no record of. Then she saw that the face-recognition software had found a name: Milo Weaver. American. Last known employer: Central Intelligence Agency.
Despite the elegant surroundings, she said, “Scheisse.”
“Indeed,” Brigit said into her spiked coffee.
His point made, Wartmüller returned to the second person. “I’m beginning to wonder if you’re objective enough for this job, Erika. You do seem obsessed with the Americans.”
There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when the intelligence she offered on the Americans could be taken at face value. No longer. That had ended with Afghanistan, poppy fields, and processed heroin making it all the way to Hamburg.
She’d discovered the trail in late 2005, more luck than detective work, while tracking suspected terrorists who turned out to be simple drug barons. Yet the foil-wrapped bricks they brought into the EU had begun life in fields of Taliban prisoners guarded by the U.S. Army. The bricks were sold on to packagers and then distributors in Europe. All run by the CIA to fund things that its masters in Congress chose not to pay for, or didn’t know existed.
She’d brought the information to Wartmüller immediately, and his initial reaction had been the same as hers: disbelief, followed by outrage. She’d even been impressed that a man like him could still feel outrage. He praised her work and told her she would be a crucial part of the nasty job they were going to pull on the cretins at Langley.
A week passed, then two, and she finally got another appointment with him-his schedule had suddenly become full. The outrage was gone, replaced by the stoic pragmatism that she’d expected in the first place. Yes, they were all outraged, he explained, but it had been decided that the greater good needed to be served. In this case, the greater good constituted the reams of excellent intelligence the CIA shared with them as it battled terror around the world. “It’s a matter of keeping your head, Erika.”
Maybe Erika had been at fault-two years later she still couldn’t be sure. In her own estimation, she had kept her head, even as she arranged a slim package of evidence and, in a London pub, handed it off to a representative of Senator Harlan Pleasance, a Republican who was running a committee investigating CIA finances. Pleasance, she knew, was eager for the national spotlight and would squeeze the maximum use out of it. Which was what he did. The story spread like a pandemic, and in the face of protests Berlin had no choice but to condemn the CIA and sever many of its joint operations. Which was why Room S had never been used for its intended purpose.