The Berlin Conspiracy

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Other Books by this Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I left Berlin
on the morning after my mother was buried. A few hours before she died, my brother and I were roused from our beds and told we should say our final good-byes. The memory of that night is still vivid, even through the fog of all those years.

A band of warm light spilled into the room as we entered, illuminating her face. She didn’t look real, already more an angel than our mother. After a moment, she spoke, softly, on shallow breath.
“Kommt,”
she whispered. “Come. … Don’t be afraid.” She was young, far too young to die, but even I could see that precious little life was left in the slender frame that faded into the shadows.

Outwardly, nothing had changed. The dressing table was neatly arranged with lipsticks, rouge, and powders; the music box still sat on the mantel, its waltzing couple frozen in silent midstep. Next to the bed stood a formal wedding
photo in a silver frame and, on the wall, a fuzzy picture of a smiling man in uniform—black ribbon and medal of honor draped over the image of a husband and father who, like many others, never returned from “The War to End All Wars.” Everything was in its place, yet the room had changed in some way. The smell of medicine was gone; now there was death in the air.

I took Josef’s hand and led him to our mother’s side. He was only eight, five years younger than me, and probably didn’t fully understand what was happening. Nobody had explained it to us, not in so many words.

She lay there, very still, for what seemed like an eternity and the thought crossed my mind that she might’ve died in the time it took us to cross the room. Finally her eyes lifted and turned toward us. She studied our faces for a long time, as if trying to memorize them. Or maybe she was gathering strength, determined to use those last few breaths to carry the words that she wanted to leave behind.

“Give me your hands,” she whispered. I felt her weakness as she attempted to close her fingers around ours. “You see…” She tried to smile. “A family… Do you understand?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure that I did.

“Say it,” she demanded.

“A family,” I responded obediently.

She slipped her hand away, leaving Josef’s palm in mine. “And now—” she breathed. “Still a family … Always a family.”

I felt that she wanted to say more but was unable to summon the strength. I wanted to say something, too, but words wouldn’t come. Not because I was too emotional. In fact, I can remember wondering why I wasn’t more upset. I loved my mother dearly and I knew she loved us more than anything, but for some reason I felt removed from it
all, watching the scene from someplace far away, like I am now.

Not many came to her funeral. Three, maybe four faceless men in dark suits and polished shoes standing a few steps behind us, heads bowed, hats in hand. I didn’t know any of them. Josef and I stood in front of the open grave with Auntie between us. The lady who came once a week to clean the house—I don’t remember her name—was the only one who sobbed quietly as the priest said his prayers and remarked that although it was sad our mother had left her sons orphans, God knew best and must have needed her in heaven more than we did on earth. I hadn’t thought of myself as an orphan before that.

I think Josef and I each placed a flower on top of her coffin as it was lowered into the ground, but I’m not sure. I remember that we stayed long after everyone else had gone, wanting to see that the headstone was properly placed. It read simply:

On the first night she lay in her grave, I lay on my bed thinking about a cold December day, shortly before my brother was born, when she and I went to a toy shop in central Berlin. I was completely mesmerized by a display of wooden soldiers in the window, two opposing armies—complete with cavalry and artillery batteries—lined up against each other in neat rows of red and blue. She tried to interest me in all sorts of other toys and games—spinning tops, puppets, a bright red fire truck—anything other than those soldiers. But I could see nothing else. Two weeks later, on
Christmas Eve of 1918, I found a small box under the tree with my name on it. Inside were two soldiers, one red and one blue.

Two full battalions now faced each other across the floor of the attic room I shared with Josef. I studied the carefully arranged formations into the early hours of that morning, until I finally drifted into a restless dream, where I joined the painted soldiers in combat and felt the gut-wrenching fear of a position being overwhelmed by opposing forces. When I woke, something had changed. The soldiers no longer came to life.

A boy’s battles are fought on the field of his imagination. There’s no cause, no doctrine, nothing to gain, it’s just Blue vs. Red. Not so different from life, I guess, except that in life the colors can get muddied, making it hard to tell which side is which. I must have sensed that there were other battles waiting for me, bigger battles to be fought on a larger field. Or maybe it’s a smaller field. Anyway, I knew it was time to put my toys away. I found an old tin box and began to dismantle my childhood fantasies.

Josef woke and watched respectfully from his bed as I carefully placed each soldier in the box. Not until I had closed the tin did he feel he could speak.

“Where will we live now?” he wondered.

“You’ll stay with Auntie,” I said without looking up.

“Where will you be?” he asked with growing concern.

“America,” I said. “I’m leaving today.” As far as I can remember, it was the first time the idea had entered my head, but it seemed as good a plan as any, so I stuck with it.

“I’ll go with you,” Josef quickly decided.

“No,” I said flatly. “You’re too young.”

“So are you,” he frowned.

“I’ll come back for you when you’re older,” I said, thinking that I might, in fact, return for him once I’d established myself.

“Did Auntie say you could?” he asked, knowing full well that the idea could not have been authorized.

“You can’t tell anyone, Josef. It’s a secret.”

“Mama says not to keep secrets.”

“It depends on the secret,” I explained. “Some secrets are like promises. If you tell the secret you break the promise. Then you become a traitor and a traitor is nothing more than a coward.” But I understood my brother well enough to know that this lesson in ethics wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. I held the box of soldiers out to him.

“Would you like to have these?” I asked enticingly.

“Until you come back?” he ventured, looking very skeptical.

“For as long as you keep our secret,” I said. He let that sink in for a moment, then smiled conspiratorially and took the tin into his possession. I suppose there’s a moment in everyone’s life when they learn the value of a secret. That was Josef’s moment.

So it was that on a sunny morning in late September of 1927, at the auspicious age of thirteen, I packed a bag and set out to begin my adventure with the world. Maybe I actually believed that one day I’d return for my younger brother, fulfilling our mother’s last wish that we remain a family. But life didn’t work out that way.

In 1963, the world
was divided into two camps, and Berlin was on the front line. They called it a “Cold War,” but one spark in that divided city and it wouldn’t be cold for long—the whole damn planet would go up in flames. Of course, I’d contributed more than my share to this nonsense doing contract work for the Company through the fabulous fifties, but after Cuba the shine had gone off and I dropped out of the insanity.

I found an agreeable retirement spot in a small bungalow near Pompano Beach, Florida, about forty miles north of Miami. At that time it wasn’t much more than a couple of bars and a convenience store on a strip of sand off the highway, but it suited me fine. The idea was to get rich as a bestselling author of spy novels and then find more desirable living quarters. I had a typewriter and loads of material, but
nothing ever came together in my head, let alone on paper. So I did a lot of fishing.

It wasn’t the first time Sam Clay had phoned in the middle of the night, but it was the first time in a while. Sam was DDP (Deputy Director for Plans, in charge of covert operations) and as near to a real friend as I had, even though I’d only seen him once since I dropped out. I hadn’t left the agency on the best of terms, not that Sam held any of that against me, but when you’re out you have to be completely out. I’d made my own bed and didn’t mind sleeping in it, if it wasn’t for the cockroaches, that is.

Anyway, I was surprised to hear Sam’s voice. He didn’t waste time asking how the fishing was, just got to the point, which was a ticket waiting at the TWA desk in Miami for the morning flight to New York, connecting through to Frankfurt and Berlin. There would be a car waiting for me at the airport and he’d see me in a few days. That was it. No small talk, no explanation. Not that I would’ve expected one over the phone.

I hung up, sat on the side of the bed, and wished I had a Marlboro. There was an ocean breeze coming through the window and I got up, stood in front of the screen to let it wash across my bare chest. It was pretty black out there, just the sound of the waves slashing onto the beach. Why had I gone along with Sam? I may not have been cutting it as a writer—or as a fisherman, for that matter—but I had no desire to get back into the game. I’d had enough subversion and betrayal for one lifetime and I certainly had no wish to revisit the city of my youth. It might as well have been someone else’s childhood memories knocking around in my brain, that’s how removed I felt from it. There was nothing left of Berlin to revisit, anyway. The places I once knew had
been reduced to rubble and rebuilt into something else that I didn’t care about one way or another. It wasn’t that I wanted to avoid my past, either. I just didn’t give a damn.

I guess the easy answer was that I was tired of hauling in empty lures by day and staring at blank pieces of paper by night. A change of scenery would do me no harm. And I owed Sam. Anyway, whatever the reason, I packed my bag and thirty-six hours later I was back in the business of chasing shadows.

It would’ve been a routine operation if not for an unusual request, made in a letter written by an unidentified East German official and dropped in the car of a State Department staffer, somebody’s secretary I think it was. The anonymous official said he had important information that he might be willing to share, under the “right circumstances.” Those kinds of letters were fairly frequent in Berlin and the “right circumstances” usually meant the right price, which was invariably paid, even though the information was usually pretty lame. But the author of this particular enticement wasn’t interested in money or even a one-way ticket west. He had just one demand: me. I was the only person he’d talk to.