A concrete East German guard tower stood within a hundred yards. She wondered how the soldiers coped, all by themselves, day after day, watching over this desolate strip of cobblestones and weeds between two worlds. Two figures stood in the tower. One looked familiar. She squinted and could make out a uniformed border guard and someone in civilian clothes. The guard slid the reflective window closed.
But she knew who was there.
As she watched doves fly about the demarcation zone, she heard a loud group of Americans approaching. She glanced around and saw a dozen college students. The platform shook from the weight as they scrambled up the stairs. A young man wearing a Drury College sweatshirt maneuvered in the crowd and pushed in beside her. He set a leather bag down onto the platform next to the one she had carried, just as the Stasi instructions had described. Faith leaned over to him and whispered the code phrase in English, “Berlin wasn’t founded by the Romans like Vienna.”
“Huh? I guess so, but do you know where Hitler’s bunker is? I heard it’s supposed to be out there somewhere,” the young man said with an upper Midwest accent, pronouncing “out” as if he were from Northern Michigan or Canada.
Faith waved her arm toward the left of the no-man’s-land. “Over there. I’ve heard it rumored there are some really creepy murals from the SS still intact down there.”
“This is going to sound weird, but a woman around the corner gave me a hundred marks to bring this bag to you. Said I’m supposed to swap it with the one you’ve got. Said I get to keep it. That okay? I’m also not supposed to talk to you except to say something corny like ’the clock’s ticking.’ And she made it really clear I shouldn’t open it.”
Faith pointed to Potsdamer Platz as if they were still discussing the bunker. “You ever hear of RIAS radio station and the announcer Jo Eager?”
The young man nodded. Faith was certain he had never heard of that American institution in Berlin.
She smiled. “I could lose because I’m telling you this, but this is part of their annual ’Spy versus Spy’ contest. I’m a finalist and I’ve got ten thousand marks riding on this. Just quietly take the bag next to my feet and walk away as if nothing unusual is going on.”
“Got it. Good luck.” He whispered from the corner of his fever-blistered mouth and picked up the empty bag.
Faith glanced at her watch and knew Schmidt was looking at his. It was 10:54 A.M. The package had to be somewhere in Moscow by Sunday morning-in forty-eight hours. Her ribs hurt with each step as she climbed from the platform.
She walked on. Small white crosses behind the Reichstag marked where East Germans had been killed while scaling the Wall. She reached into the satchel’s side pocket and removed a slip of paper with a Moscow telephone number. A few feet west of the Wall, a faded white line traced the legal East-West demarcation. She intentionally crossed the line into the East and stood on the worn cobblestones between the line and the Wall.
“Here is the Border Patrol of the German Democratic Republic!” a guard said through a megaphone. “You are trespassing on the territory of the GDR. You are ordered to leave at once.”
The guard watched her through binoculars. Faith glared at him. He watched her. So did the shadowy figure behind his left shoulder. She stared; they watched.
Then Faith waved her middle finger at Kosyk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DEMOCRATIC BERLIN-KARLSHORST, KGB RESIDENCY
Major General Gennadi F. Titov, the KGB’s chief resident in the GDR, slammed the solid birch office door shut and stomped to his desk, muttering obscenities to himself. Lieutenant Colonel Bogdanov breathed deeply as she walked to a corner seat. Titov stared at the colonel for several minutes, his pockmarked face reddening with each passing moment. Bogdanov struggled not to blink, hoping the general’s blood pressure would reach critical mass and he would have a heart attack before beginning the meeting. She needed to assess whether the general was a threat to the operation.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, colonel?”
Your fly’s unzipped, sir. Colonel Bogdanov decided someone else could break that news to him later in the day. “Nothing that I’m cleared to discuss, sir.”
“Don’t you ever cut me out of the loop again. I don’t care how valuable they think you are in all of this. After this is over, I know you’re counting on a cushy position in the West. Mark my words, I’ll find a way to send you to Kabul, where the mujahedeen will be constantly chasing that pretty little ass of yours.” He grinned, slipping the tip of his tongue from his mouth to slowly lick his thin upper lip.
“Sir, we pulled out of Afghanistan a couple of months ago.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t get you sent there. Bet it would be even more fun now.” Titov stuck his thumb in his ear and twisted it. He pulled it out and sniffed it. “You made a fool of me in Moscow. And I don’t forget. Friends told me someone stationed here in my very own residency was putting together a coup. It didn’t take long to find out who it was. Stukoi told me everything. Operation Druzhba, huh? You wanted me cut off from the action, didn’t you? Save it all for yourself. If you weren’t on the right side of this little event, you’d be getting it from me right now. I know it’s what you really want and we all know you need it, you pervert.”
“I report directly to Colonel General Stukoi. I suggest if you have any questions or complaints about my work, you direct them to him.”
“And I don’t like that one bit. Suddenly a group of my staff is reassigned to some ’Internal Affairs’ op reporting to Stukoi. That’s a crock of shit. So what’s your little internal-affairs group up to?”
“Contact the general. I understand that I’m supposed to be enjoying your full cooperation.”
“And you’ll have it-until the second this is over, then I’m going to fuck you, real good and hard.”
Vasily Resnick sprinted up the residency stairs to his chief’s office. Titov was not a man to be kept waiting, and Resnick wanted nothing more than to curry his patron’s favor. Before entering, he checked his posture in a mirror and admired his Olympian physique and Nordic features. He marched into the KGB general’s office and stood at attention in a manner that would’ve made a Prussian proud. “Comrade General.”
“The idiot Stukoi chose Bogdanov to do a man’s job.” Titov bit off the end of a cigar and champed down on it. He shoved a file across his desk. It was marked FEDEX-TOP SECRET. “Follow FedEx. She has a delivery to make to our friends in Moscow. Make sure Bogdanov doesn’t fuck it up and get in her way.”
“When do you expect movement?”
“Now. And whatever you do, don’t involve any of our German friends-not even Kosyk. Keep this compartmentalized. Remember Comrade Lenin’s advice.”
“Whoever is not for us, is against us.” Resnick recited his mentor’s favorite phrase from the founder of the Soviet state.
“Do not forget that it’s also true for the KGB. Anyone outside of Operation Druzhba is your enemy. Treat them accordingly.”
Titov’s secretary slinked into the office with a message and the men stopped talking. Titov rustled through the papers piled on his desk, cursing under his breath. His secretary picked up a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and removed the general’s round reading glasses from the book. He snatched them away from her with a snarl. “Dismissed.” He skimmed the document. “Putin spotted FedEx in Tiergarten carrying a leather satchel. The fool lost her somewhere in Kreuzberg. She’s got the package and could leave the city anytime.”
“Do I understand correctly that I’m to escort this American to Moscow? Wouldn’t it make sense for me to dispose of her and take the item myself?”