“Walter!” she laughed, swatting his hand away. “Not in the Lord’s house!”
“Awww, God probably likes it. This place probably hasn’t seen a good lovemaking session since it was built. Besides, can’t an old man get a little happiness before he dies?”
“Not in the Lord’s house,” she replied saucily.
“Now don’t get my heart beating that fast for nothing. If I have to have a third heart attack, I want to know it was for something.”
Yes, Walter was a rare treasure in these dark times. He was cantankerous, but it was a pleasant sort of cantankerous. He had such an ornery streak, what with his occasional off-color jokes, various pranks, and love for that godawful rock music. Yet he loved Mick and Herr so dutifully—boxing their ears the one moment, and then cussing and smoking with them the next (when she wasn’t looking, of course). He truly had a youthful heart, and Gertrude enjoyed his company.
Of course, she couldn’t tell him the real reason she dragged him off to the churches. Walter was a spy for the Stasi, and Gertrude was a radio operator for the Americans. She knew that he gave regular reports on her doings and dealings (even though she knew he hated doing so). Thus, she knew the best cover story she could possibly have would be to keep him around nearly all the time, filling his reports on her. She knew he knew—at least partially. She also knew he was grateful not only for the company, but for the lies. She made his job much easier to do and saved him from the pain of betraying her to his Stasi handlers. He would, in turn, further serve to obscure her little missions. And it was very important he do so tonight: these were important messages.
Sunshine had breathlessly swung by her apartment earlier to deliver a to-go order of currywurst, some loose change and the adjoined receipts. For nearly an hour, she had carefully opened up one of the small coins with a razor to reveal the millimeter-wide dot of microfilm. Then, for nearly two hours, she carefully developed the pictures. She could generally tell the difference between Analog’s and Open-Wide’s work, but the gut-wrenching nature of the sordid photos was something she couldn’t quite pinpoint—it looked perhaps like a hidden static camera. She didn’t really stare at it long enough to figure it out, however. She knew the way the world worked and she wasn’t stupid. Still, certain things no one needed to see.
Then, she spent the next few hours working on the receipt. She had a great love for cryptography, and had discovered she had a knack for unlocking encoding messages. But her true love was for the art of steganography—the act of obscuring encoded messages. She knew these tactics well, hiding damnable information out in the open. From there, she need only place the developed information in an envelope—with a few marks for the Lord, of course—and head out to the church.
The Boss always tried to use the elderly whenever he could, as he felt it gave them some much-needed excitement and purpose. It was also difficult to peg someone of her advanced age as a secret agent. And he had been right: the work had given her some excitement and purpose. The Boss was a master at using the bent and broken. In his mind, they made the most loyal and trustworthy workers, unlike like the Stasi and HVA who ruled with fear and paranoia.
He also had a gift for using their unique personalities. He wasn’t a believer himself, of course. Few in his position were, as they had just seen too much of the world. But the Boss knew Gertrude Schroeder, and he knew that the Bible was a very large book. This made it handy for designing crypto keys. Her love for the Bible had actually benefited The Boss, as on her word, he had been able to make use of this chapel’s priest—codename: Black-Sail.
She wasn’t entirely too familiar with how the Americans functioned outside of the GDR. But within the network inside of the GDR, she had become the de-facto hub. Grips (before he was taken), Spanish, Open-Wide and a few others would busy themselves with the main operations of obtaining HUMINT (Human Intelligence… however they went about garnering that), and finding GDR-specific ways of transmitting that information back to her. Gertrude’s job was simple: receive instructions from the outside world and disseminate them where needed.
From there, a few messenger assets—including Sunshine—would make a run to ‘The Drugstore’ where Too-Shy would have messages further sent to Gertrude for decryption. There was only one other radio operator in the GDR, but Gertrude wasn’t allowed to know who that was for safety. After all was said and done, Gertrude would deliver the non-encrypted (and mostly un-secure) messages to ‘The Isle of Tortuga’, where Black-Sail would see the messages off to The Boss.
Things had always been secretive, of course, and complicated by nature. To properly deliver messages, it had to be done cautiously and securely. This rarely meant that it could be done quickly, or even in a timely manner. It was common to show up for meetings two-hours late, or for information to be an entire week behind its needed delivery date, or for the information to be poorly-formed and incomplete. Of course, deciphering the information was the job for analysts back in safer waters.
However, things had reached a fevered pace since Grips had been taken. Since that incident, an entire section of the network had been taken down, and the only other radio operator was now entirely running counter-intelligence to protect the assets and agents under that crypto’s umbrella. This had somehow resulted in the surprise inclusion of Sunshine, whom Gertrude worried about terribly. Sunshine was a bright young person, but her training had been uneven. The HVA had been training her to provide tell-tail signs that she was being followed, which meant that they knew she had (or soon would) be propositioned by Gertrude’s people, which further meant that they might suspect Matt York. Sunshine hadn’t had nearly enough training time with The Boss to counteract that, nor had Gertrude been given permission to pick up the slack.
And Analog… this was someone that Gertrude worried about terribly. Analog had been a smart asset, but had been dealt an extremely complicated hand. Analog was being watched as well as could be, given the circumstances of the Wall. But should that asset go under, it could cause untold damage. If Gertrude—the only remaining radio operator running actual operations—went down… well, she simply couldn’t consider the implications of that.
“Can Christians even have sex?” Walter interrupted her musings.
“Walter!” she exclaimed, whacking him on the arm.
“Well, it’s an honest question!”
“Of course, they can. It’s the Catholics that can’t.”
“You would be surprised,” an elderly voice called from across the room.
“Ah, Black-Sail,” Gertrude mused. She had never known a religious figure that spoke with such candor and whimsy as this man. In part, that was why The Boss had seen to bestow upon him such a mischievous codename. But that had largely came down to a joke the priest had told him about a passing seagull pooping in the eye of a pirate with a newly-acquired hook.
“Oh, don’t you encourage him, Father.” Gertrude chastised the man.
“Don’t call me Father, woman. It makes me feel old,” he fired back, as he walked closer.
“Oh, but your religious stature!”
“Not shrinking like I suspect my physical stature is.”
“Oh, you will always be tall and handsome to me.”
“If only we could convince those young punks running around what real beauty looked like, eh?” he quipped.
“They don’t know what they’re missing.”
“I know what I’m missing,” Walter said sadly, to the ensuing laughter of the other two.