The Berlin Conspiracy (2 page)

And no one, especially me, had the slightest idea why.

It would be a significant understatement to say that the guys in Berlin were unhappy about this request. The chief of station at the time was a joker named James Powell. A mid-forties, tall, slender, tailored-suit kind of a guy with a head too big for his shoulders, he was a Yale man who thought he was a real smooth operator. I thought he was a pretentious asshole, but that didn’t matter. You came across a lot of pretentious assholes in the intelligence business. I even liked a few of them. Not Powell, though.

He didn’t care much for me, either, which was understandable for a man in his position. No station chief would’ve liked having an outsider brought in to handle a routine letter drop, but having me show up out of retirement (they called it exile) would’ve really got under his skin. He must have lobbied Washington hard to keep me out of it and been overruled. Everyone knew I’d ditched the agency and thought they knew the reason why, not that I cared what they thought. I was back for a limited engagement and didn’t want to get into any of that old bullshit.

Still, I was curious about my mystery man. Why the hell would some East German official single me out for contact? I’d been out of the game for two years and I’d never worked Europe anyway. It must have intrigued Washington, too. Whoever the guy was, he had access to files on me, and he’d found something in one of them that got his attention. They must’ve figured he was a player, and it wasn’t often that you got the real thing to volunteer. Usually they’d have to be bribed, extorted, or drugged into betraying their country, which took a lot of time and planning, and more often than not you still came up empty. This was a potential gift, one that would come at an extremely opportune moment. Hence the middle-of-the-night phone call from Sam and the pissed-off Berlin chief of station.

Everyone was a bit on edge. Except me, of course. I had no bet in this game. Or so I thought.

The instructions went like this: I was to be at the eastbound Charlottenburg S-Bahn station at 8
P.M.
on Saturday night, the twenty-second of June. Being a suburban station, used mostly by commuters, it would be pretty well deserted at that hour. I was instructed to sit at the most forward bench on the platform reading a copy of the
Herald Tribune.
If
I was alone, a man with a cane would make contact. The letter had been very clear about me being alone, but of course I wasn’t. Washington wouldn’t have allowed it even if Powell had.

The station sat on a grassy bank above a small tree-lined road, where a black four-door sedan was parked up on the shoulder. It looked empty, but scrunched down in the front seat, Powell and a young field op named Andy Johnson were monitoring me on a two-way radio link. Johnson was a fresh, crew-cut kid from West Texas who wore big “Buddy Holly” glasses. Very military. I spoke to him through a microphone that I had in my shirt pocket and he communicated to me over a small, wireless speaker in my ear.

Our man was thirty minutes late when I noticed a guy on the opposite platform taking an interest in me. He wasn’t the subject, but I thought he might be a scout. “There’s a guy across the tracks in a blue overcoat,” I whispered into my pocket. “I think he’s in love because he keeps making eyes at me.”

“That’s ‘Mama Bear,‘” Johnson said in my ear. One of the sillier aspects of intelligence work is the code names. On this night Powell was “Papa Bear,” Johnson was “Baby Bear,” and I was “Goldilocks.” Mama Bear, it turned out, was a mental case named Roy Chase, a guy I’d heard about but had been lucky enough to avoid up until now. He’d spent a lot of time in Manila, which was the main staging point for operations throughout Southeast Asia. In fact, I was kind of surprised to find Chase in Berlin. It was a very different game here and called for a lighter touch than he had a reputation for. They hadn’t told me he was going to be spotting me, but the guy was so clumsy Ray Charles would’ve made him.

“Well, tell Mama Bear to take a walk,” I said too loudly. “He might as well be wearing a fucking sign.”

There was a pause, then Johnson came back on the radio, to Chase. “Uh, Mama Bear, this is Baby Bear. Papa Bear wants you to give Goldilocks some room. … But stay with the action.” Chase shot a nasty look across the tracks, then wandered down to the other end of the platform and pretended to read a train schedule.

8:37. The street lamps were coming on as the last light of day faded away. It wasn’t going to happen. Either the guy was a civilian and chickened out or, more likely, a pro who’d spotted Chase and decided to give it a miss. Either way I’d come a long way for nothing. To my surprise, I felt let down. Being back in action, even such as it was, had my adrenaline going again and my curiosity was aroused.

It started to drizzle.

“We’ve been stood up, guys,” I said into my pocket. “Anyway, it’s getting wet out here and Goldilocks needs some hot porridge.”

Long pause, me getting wetter while the message was relayed.

“Papa’s not ready to call it,” I finally got in my ear. “We’ll go till twenty-one hundred.”

Powell knew the guy wasn’t going to turn up. He just wanted to avoid any second-guessing from Washington, but meanwhile I was the jerk getting wet. “Sure,” I said, keeping my cool. “But I’m lodging a formal complaint with my union.”

“We’ll be sure to put that in the report,” Baby Bear assured me. “And, ah … Papa Bear requests that you knock off the chatter.”

“No problem.” Now I wanted to knock Papa Bear’s arrogant head off his gray flannel shoulders.

The rain started to pick up. I was about to tell Powell where to get off when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a figure with a cane approaching. I buried my nose in the
Tribune,
muttered, “Heads up,” into the microphone.

“Yeah, we see it,” I got back from Johnson.

My heart picked up a beat.

The figure stopped, maybe fifteen feet short of the bench. I stole a look and saw it was a woman holding a closed umbrella. Mid- to late thirties, with dark hair falling out of a cream-colored nylon scarf with faded red roses around the edge. She looked tired, kind of used up. I noticed a small run in her stocking along her right calf that she had mended with nail polish. She became aware of my look, glanced back over her shoulder, and opened the umbrella.

There was no reason that our mystery man couldn’t be a mystery woman. Of course, an umbrella wasn’t a cane but that could’ve been a glitch in translation. (It wasn’t that unusual. I once saw a description of an especially tall Venezuelan contact translated as “he is unusually high.” The meeting never came off because our guys were looking for somebody who was stoned out of his mind. It really happened.)

I went back to the newspaper, but kept one eye on her. She was doing the same with me, but not very subtly. I could tell that she was going to make a move and after a few more peeks she did, faking interest in a movie poster to move closer to the bench. I waited, thinking we were wasting our time—this was strictly Amateur Hour.

Finally she turned to me and, in German, said, “You’re getting wet.”

My German was pretty rusty, but I tried anyway, saying something like, “Are you offering to share your umbrella?”

She paused for a beat, looked me over, then, in English, said, “Would you like to have some company?”

I couldn’t help laughing, which took her by surprise. She turned away, looking more embarrassed than offended, which she had every right to be. I was about to apologize when I got Powell in my ear.

“For Christ’s sake, Teller, get rid of the whore,” in that weary Ivy League way. Fuck you, I thought, she’s just trying to earn a living, probably a more honorable one than you earn. I removed the earpiece, put it in my jacket pocket, and got off the bench.

“Hey, I wasn’t laughing at you.” She looked at me, dubious. “I just thought it was funny that you switched to English. Is my German that bad?”

She smiled. “Terrible.” It was a nice, natural smile. She had nice eyes, too. Light brown. Too bad they were massacred with mascara.

“I don’t do this all the time,” she said after an awkward pause. “I’m a nurse.” She didn’t need to explain anything to me, but if it made her feel better that was fine.

I said that in fact I wouldn’t mind sharing her umbrella, and as soon as I was under she started to tell me about how she needed the money to pay for her sick mother’s medical bills and how little a nurse made and how she only went with nice men. I asked her how she could tell if they were nice and she said she could just tell, like she did with me. I thought she probably said that to all her potential customers, but I didn’t mind listening. At least I was dry.

I heard the door of the sedan slam and a minute later Powell was storming the platform with Baby Bear Johnson in tow. They stopped about ten feet away, like they were staking me out.

“What the hell are you doing, Teller!” A vein was throbbing violently in Powell’s right temple and his head looked like it could explode any minute. He really needed to loosen his tie.

“I was just talking to—” I turned to the lady. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Rita,” she responded, looking kind of apprehensive.

“I’m Jack,” I smiled. “Jack Teller.”

“Hello.” She nodded warily.

“Zip it up, Jack. Fun’s over,” Powell barked.

I started to say that I hadn’t actually had a lot of laughs so far, that maybe Rita and I would try to salvage the evening, but I stopped short because that’s when I saw him—standing under a street lamp on the road below was our man, watching the whole scene with an expression of utter contempt on his face. He didn’t move, just stood there like a statue, one hand in the pocket of his raincoat, the other holding the cane, rain splashing off his fedora, waiting patiently for us to spot him.

“Looks like we all got caught with our pants down.” I nodded toward the street.

He waited for Powell to see him, then turned and disappeared into the darkness. Powell signaled Chase on the opposite platform and he took off after him, hoping to get some kind of ID—a car, a face, anything, but I knew he’d come up empty. This guy wasn’t your run-of-the-mill East German bureaucrat building a retirement fund. He was for real, you could tell.

I wondered again why I would be of such interest. I’d been turning it over since I was briefed, thinking about operations I’d been involved in that might have attracted his attention. Iran, Guatemala, Mexico, or even Cuba—nothing connected. I’d been active in all that stuff and knew a lot, but nothing a lot of other guys didn’t know, too. The most reasonable explanation was that I looked like a candidate for recruitment because of the way I walked out, but that didn’t work, either. If they wanted to try me they’d have used a discreet approach, at the beach maybe, with a well-stuffed bikini as bait, not a letter that alerted the entire intelligence community to their intentions. No, it had to be something else that hooked him. But now it looked like I’d never know—it was highly unlikely that he’d give us a second shot.

“We won’t see him again,” I said.

“If that’s true, you’re in big fucking trouble,” Powell flashed. “Hell, you’re in big fucking trouble anyway.”

“Really?” I answered as coolly as I could. “I’m the only one who’s supposed to be standing on this platform. Besides, I’m here on a guest pass, so if anyone’s in big fucking trouble it’s you, Chief.”

Powell signaled Johnson with a nod. The kid reached out to take hold of my arm, and without really meaning to, I laid him out pretty cleanly with a simple left hook. To be fair, he wasn’t expecting it, but it felt good anyway. Powell sighed like a frustrated headmistress.

“For Christ’s sake, Teller, was that really necessary?”

I shrugged, offered Johnson a hand up, and pulled him onto his feet. “Sorry, kid, you took me by surprise.”

“No problem,” he drawled, dabbing at a tiny spot of blood on his lip. “Would I be taking you by surprise now?”

My throat was firmly in his grasp before he finished the sentence. I knew the move, but I’d never been on this side of it. It’s kind of like having your trachea in a vise—the slightest pressure will collapse the thin wall of membrane that runs from the larynx to the bronchi, blocking the only air passage to the lungs, causing the subject to suffocate within seconds. Of course, conversation is out of the question in these circumstances, so I never got a chance to say good-bye to Rita.

We adjourned to the Company car, where I massaged my throat while we waited for Chase. He finally climbed into the front seat beside Powell and reported that our man had disappeared into thin air. I was about to make a comment, but decided to shut up for once.

“Langley wants a report tonight,” Powell fretted. “How the fuck do I write this up?”

“Chase got too close, let the subject make us,” Johnson said matter-of-factly. “It was clumsy.”

Chase turned, gave the kid an icy stare. Even in the dark you could see that this one was dangerous—the kind of guy who could snap at any moment, but you’d never be able to predict when or why. The kid didn’t flinch, though. I was starting to like him, in spite of my sore throat.

“How about I say the target walked because Jack was hitting on a chick?” Powell looked to me for a reaction.

“A chick?” I forced a laugh through the bruises on my vocal cords. “Do you know how silly you sound when you say that?”

“We can’t all be as cool as you, Jack.”

“I guess that’s right.” I opened the door to get out. “Tell Washington whatever you want. Tell them I was getting a blow job. I didn’t ask for this shit, you guys came to me.”

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“To get some fresh air. Don’t bother waiting up.”

Johnson asked if he should stop me, but Powell was smart enough to know it would only make his report that much harder to write.

I stumbled onto a beer hall
tucked away in a small side street not far from the rail station. It was called Stru-wwelpeter after the fairy-tale kid who never washed or trimmed his fingernails. A painting of the boy over the door brought back an image from a book my mother used to read to me. Memories of that time were pretty rare for me, so I guess Berlin was jostling something. Anyway, it made me smile.