A Spy in BerlinAstrid Julian

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Astrid Julian 2014Published by Northland Publishing at Smashwords

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Except in the case of historical fact any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Table of Contents

DedicationWashington, DC Know Who Your Friends Are1 Berlin2 Berlin3 Prague4 Berlin5 Lakewood, Ohio6 Berlin7 Prague8 Prague9 Prague10 Berlin11 Berlin12 Berlin13 Berlin14 On the Run15 Berlin16 Berlin17 Berlin18 Kaliningrad19 Berlin20 Kaliningrad21 KaliningradAbout the AuthorAlso by Astrid JulianConnect with Astrid Julian

Dedication

DEDICATED TO EDWARD R. INGRAM ELLIS, Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Dr. Ingram taught that history is found not just in books written by professional historians, but all around, even in the unorthodox alternative histories told by father, as he dragged his little German immigrant family across Canada. Papa showed us the histories of ordinary people, the ones we never had time to learn about in school. He showed us where the passengers of the underground railway disembarked and built their houses in Chatham, bought us the German-Mohawk grammar books written by missionaries to preserve First Nations languages, made us walk along the Ontario trails first travelled by French voyageurs, and much, much more.

Dr. Ingram’s History 100 assignment, a ten-page history of the 3rd

Partition of Poland using only the ten facts he wrote on the blackboard was challenging. Even more challenging is living an ordinary life aware of the historical events, the economics, the politics, languages and cultures, past and present that make us who we are. Because of Ted I began listening to Udo and found my way in life.

As for my fiction, there I accept full responsibility. Dr. Ingram and Papa are entirely blameless.

Washington, DC

Prologue

BELONGING… THAT WAS ALL FRITZI JORDAN had ever wanted.

At the American Department of Defense school in Ramstein, Ger-

many, Fritzi Jordan had been the German kid because of her mother.

And on the playground behind her German grandmother’s house, she had

been the American, the Ami. A US Armed Forces dad and a foreign

national mom had left her forever the outsider, and she hated it.Things changed when her dad began a new life as a farm machine

mechanic with a small military pension. He repatriated his little family to Cody, Wyoming and during her first two years of high school Jordan succeeded in blending in. She hid her fluency in German and French and never spoke about the places her family had travelled. For a while, she was like everybody else. She belonged.

Then came that stupid math test and the after-school programs and the summer camps for the mathematically-talented. School hallways filled with whispers from small-minded classmates as she walked by. She became known as the geekiest of all the math geeks at Buffalo Bill Cody High School. An outsider. Once again, not belonging.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. How could she have been so dumb?College, where liking math and being good at it was less strange,

seemed to offer her a second chance. But really, who was she kidding? Most of her fellow students studied math because a math major made a teaching job a sure bet. Jordan studied math because she was genuinely interested. It gave her new thoughts to think and puzzles to solve. The more she learned and studied, the more intense her passion for mathematics became. And the less she belonged.

Then she attended a tour for new summer interns at the National Security Agency’s biggest data repository, the NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. She found herself surrounded by people as multilingual

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and mathematically-gifted as herself, and for the first time in her life, she truly and honestly felt she belonged.

Her parents weren’t enthusiastic about her career choice. Not even when she showed them the generous offer NSA had made her. Nor how the Agency would pay for her graduate degrees. But they told her the decision was hers, and didn’t stand in her way.

All in all, she was happy at NSA. She had what all young American college graduates said they wanted…a job that earned enough so she wouldn’t be a burden to her parents…interesting work assignments…a friend or two with whom to while away an occasional evening or weekend…and best of all…a speedy promotion to NSA Headquarters in suburban Washington, DC.

It was the best of times. She was happy, and she belonged.She had no idea, when she opened that desk drawer in her new office

that it would cause her to lose everything… Ordinary desk litter…half a ream of paper, assorted rubber bands, paper clips, forgotten pens, and an abandoned flash drive took away everything she cared about…her career, her friends, her family, her country, and worst of all, her mathematics. She was truly alone, abandoned and belonging nowhere.

She shouldn’t have opened that flash drive. She shouldn’t have looked into the files. She should have just thrown it away. But after all those early morning lectures about saving the taxpayers’ money, reusing the drive had seemed the responsible thing. It hadn’t been tagged classified or top-secret. She had assumed it was empty, or that it contained blank forms from Human Resources, or the Pdf instruction manuals for the office cappuccino machine or the laser printer.

She’d been more concerned with accidentally formatting photos someone had brought in to share with his or her coworkers. Missing photos were a sore point in her family. Fritzi’s mother’s baby photos had all been destroyed, and her grandmother had never stopped complaining about it. So, on the off-chance that the drive contained personal material someone might not want to lose, she popped it into her computer and opened a few files.

What she found was a collection of corporate emails and phone logs sorted by types of business…nuclear power generation, petroleum and

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mining companies, waste management and solar energy equipment suppliers. Nothing personal, but still something someone might eventually miss. She dropped it back into the drawer and thought no more about it. She actually forgot she had the drive until a man flashing a National Security Agency ID knocked on her door and asked for it.

Jordan had never been good at reading people. Number-crunching was her forte, but something in the way the man asked her if she had looked into the files had frightened her. And so she had lied.

Too nervous to look up into the friendly smiling face a second time, she had stared at his expensive tie. That had been a mistake. She forced her eyes up only seconds later, but glimmers of doubt were already flickering in his eyes.

He probed, asked more questions.She was careful to tell the same story each time, panicking inside,

sure now the man was up to no good. Why hadn’t she thrown that damned drive out or given it to her supervisor?

The man had pocketed the drive and left.She took a deep breath and tried to forget him, but her number-

crunching, fact-glomming mind couldn’t help absorbing the details… online…in the media…at the water cooler. The man’s name was Usher, Michael Usher. His current title was Temporary Assistant Director for Media Relations at the National Security Agency. This was his third NSA stint. Every two years or so, he shuttled back and forth between Wall Street consulting jobs and GS-12 or higher positions at government agencies in Washington. With each new assignment, his personal wealth grew by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

She tried to forget him, but every time she turned around at work, there he was. Almost as if he were stalking her.

She should have turned whistleblower while she had had the evidence in hand. She should have turned that flash drive over to her supervisor. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps had it become legal for NSA to collect private-sector corporate communications. But she thought not, and her doubts grew. Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian account of NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden’s odyssey from Hawaii to Hong Kong to Moscow had left her wary. She used a public computer

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at the DC Public Library to look up NSA’s whistleblower policies and concluded that it was too late.

Snowden had had hard drives and thumb drives full of information. She had nothing. Even if she could recall names and facts and figures, Usher had his

drive back. Who would believe what a lowly number cruncher had to say about an NSA managing director?

Six weeks later she was being read out of the NSA, fired in disgrace, and Michael Usher was standing there, overseeing the process.

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KNOW WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE

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1 Berlin

FRITZI JORDAN LEFT WASHINGTON knowing that she would never be as good with people as she was with numbers. Maybe understanding human feelings and intentions would come to her in time. Maybe it would come by going someplace far, far away from Washington. She hoped so. Maybe that was why she fled to Berlin, to graduate school.

Berlin was safe. Here she was surrounded by young people. They made it easy to forget Ft. Meade and Washington, and people in power suits. Interesting painters and performance artists huddled in the city’s cafés. Oddballs like herself. One third of Berliners were non-German. Museums filled with French and Italian tourists during the days; and in the evenings, three opera houses, seven professional symphony orchestras, and fifty theaters meant someone was always on the way to someplace. At night techno clubs pounded beats and laser lights out into the streets until early morning. Fritzi liked watching the city’s people. Sitting in a Berlin café made it easy to pretend she was one of the crowd.

If the hustle and bustle of living in the de-facto capital city of the EU got to her, well then, with nine times the area of Paris, Berlin offered uncounted numbers of parks and gardens only a short walk or subway ride away. Forty percent of the city was green space.

Berlin’s vibrant activist hacker scene had tempted her, but she remembered the lessons of Edward Snowden. And of Michael Usher.

Sitting on the fringes, watching…pretending… It was okay… really… she told herself, as she watched the students at Humboldt University smile and joke with each other, and even with strangers, like herself. Berliners were upbeat. More importantly, after the shame of her firing, they respected her privacy.

All except for that guy sitting two rows behind her.

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For the past two days whenever she turned around, there he was, almost as if he were stalking her. Like Michael Usher had at the NSA so many lifetimes ago.

Her stalker seemed to be just a bit overly friendly, but she couldn’t be sure. After what happened in Washington, she would never be sure.

By keeping to herself, she thought she was making it clear that she wanted to be left alone, but the man was arrogant enough to imagine he was the exception to the rule. She wished he would say something, so she could decline and refocus her energy on her studies.

Things were starting to come together again. Not that she’d had many options after Washington. The papers the National Security Agency forced her to sign during her firing ruled out computer programming, cryptography and most fields involving higher mathematics anywhere in the English-speaking world.

She decided to go back to graduate school, but when she applied, she realized how huge her mistake had been. No university receiving American government research funds would hire her. Not after they called that number on her NSA performance evaluation. Michael Usher had made sure of that.

So she took a closer look at Germany and saw that most papers, including dissertations, could be written in English. Tuition and fees were one-tenth of those in the US and fellowships were generous. She chose Humboldt University in Berlin where the History Department was thrilled to have a graduate student who understood the mathematics invented by the men and women whose lives she intended to research.

Berlin made forgetting what happened in DC easier. It wasn’t quite the same thing as being happy, but she held out little hope for that. Not with higher mathematics, her one true passion denied to her by NSA’s non-compete clause.

She had however found a new friend. She sat watching her friend, Professor Dr. Dr. Robert Schultz

scribble on the whiteboard in a classroom that had once been the bedroom of Prince Heinrich, King Frederick the Great of Prussia’s younger brother.

No high-tech here. The room had probably looked the same when Albert Einstein had taught here. No overhead projectors, no beamers nor

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Power Point Presentations. Nothing to remind her of her past life in Maryland and suburban DC.

German students usually didn’t say more than ‘good morning’ to their professors, but old Professor Schultzi was from the east, he had told her, when they bumped each other on the commuter train after class one night. East German professors prided themselves on being accessible, and so he became her friend, her only friend, and to quote Berlin’s gay mayor Wowereit on his own alternative lifestyle, “und das ist gut so”… It’s good like that.

During their long S-Bahn commutes home she would explain the mathematics behind the neoclassical Schinkel churches and museums. ‘Divide the front of that building in half and you’ve got the height of the roof, Schultzi. That’s why the stairs work off to the side like that. It’s the Pythagoreans’ Golden Mean. The 1:62 ratio is the basis of good design in architecture, photography, even in film.’

In return old Schultzi would dust off his repertoire of legends about the famous mathematicians, the Kroneckers and Kummers, the Einsteins and the Eulers, who had taught at Humboldt, when it had been called plain old University of Berlin.

Karl Weierstrass had lectured in this very classroom. Back in the 1860’s the world’s eager young men of mathematics had struggled for standing room behind Fritzi’s bench. Women hadn’t been allowed in at all; not even Weierstrass’ greatest student, the Russian mathematician Sonja Kowa-lewskaya. He had scandalized the university and all of Berlin by tutoring the woman he considered the most brilliant mathematician of her generation during long walks along the city’s tree-lined streets, or over a slice of torte in Gendarmenmarkt cafés.

Schultzi’s marker squealed on the whiteboard as he wrote.Fritzi wondered if old Schultzi could even imagine a twinkle attack-

prone encryption algorithm, or a qubit, or an ion trap, or a nuclear spin memory, or any other part of the fabled Blue Widow, the quantum computer that could crack almost any encryption code.

She had been warned to keep the knowledge of how deep her mathematics went to herself. But Schultzi had become her refuge, her rock, and as her faculty advisor, or Doktor-Vater, he needed to know her

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first degrees were in mathematics. Later, he had been kind enough to call her German good, and after trying out her French and Russian, he had asked the usual questions. Why history? Why not a doctorate in mathematics? Or in linguistics, since she seemed to have a knack for seeing patterns, rules… Had he actually said codes, or had she imagined it? Old NSA paranoias still haunted.

Schultzi held up three slim books by famous theorists. “You must think about the uses of history, meine Damen und Herren,” he told the students. “Why do we write history? Why do governments subsidize its teaching in schools? Why do we have state archives? How do museums decide what to collect? Why do people pay huge amounts at auction for a piece of history; the letter signed by Shakespeare, when a paperback contains the same words, or an authentic impressionist painting, when a color print is as beautiful?” Fritzi had heard it before on long walks home through the Botanical Garden.

Schultzi seemed to sense that she had secrets, but he never pried. His friendship was making her strong enough to look at where she had taken her wrong turn. Her doubts had begun long before she met Michael Usher. She should have listened to her parents’ warning; or asked herself, why she was earning so much more than any of her friends on that first internship at NSA’s Utah Data Center. The supervisors’ weaselly demands that she anesthetize her conscience should have had her running… Never mind what the data are being used for, Ms. Jordan. Leave the ethical concerns with your NSA sup-eriors. Only they have the big picture to keep the world safe in the Age of Global Terror.

She became a perfectly greased cog deep in the twisted bowels of the NSA, working on a software program that analyzed banking transactions for probable terrorist activity until that day when she opened that drawer and found that untagged flash drive.

How could she have been so naïve?She never dreamed NSA could be collecting private sector data.That changed everything.If she had never found that flash drive, she’d still be in Maryland

helping the good guys.

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But she had found it. Worse, she had examined its contents. Most awful of all, when a man named Michael Usher asked if she had looked at the data, she had lied and said, no.

She tried to forget, but her mathematical mind had refused to let it rest. Data floated through her brain and clicked into place.

She tried rationalizing it away. The world’s Gazproms and Rupert Murdochs didn’t always play nice. Why shouldn’t NSA collect information on the world’s multinationals? They were often richer and more powerful than entire nations. Perfectly normal to keep tabs on the foreign competition, especially in strategic industries vital to US interests. Aviation. Defense. Oil. In the War on Terror, combat wasn’t only on the battlefield. What if Airbus acquired Boeing, and America had to buy its fighter planes from France? NSA had to consider the strategic needs of the United States wherever they overlapped into the global private sector.

In a world divided into good guys and bad guys, we are the good guys, she reminded herself.

The slamming of a book on a desk in a Berlin lecture hall startled her out of her daydream.

She watched Professor Schultz pick up another book, one with his name on the cover. “The history I write, meine Damen und Herren, is not the history you will write.” He dropped the book and picked up a third. “But before you become world-famous authors, please make time to read this short book by E. H. Carr on the uses of history.

“You will write amazing things, meine Damen und Herren. Things your old professor can’t even imagine.”

Like she had never imagined that an NSA director could be collecting confidential corporate communications. Once she saw it though, the puzzle pieces fell into place; the Washington Post feature on Michael Usher, the Bloomberg bio. Usher was a millionaire who called his three government stints “giving back” to the country he loved. He’d gone from a job at Lehman Brothers to Commerce, then back to Wall Street, this time to AIG, and followed that with two years at State.

While serving as NSA’s Acting Assistant Director for Public Affairs, Michael Usher had culled confidential corporate communications

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intercepted by NSA spy satellites to grow his own portfolio. He bought shares in a company just before plans for a private equity takeover were announced, then sold them after the news drove up share prices. Even when he played hold ‘em, and waited for workforce reductions, wage freezes, and the elimination of legacy liabilities like employee pensions and health care to bring up share prices, he made money.

No one wondered how one man could be so incredibly lucky, and no one did anything to stop him.

By the time Fritzi understood how Usher had become a “Master of the Universe,” he had his flash drive back, and she was left holding only her own suspicions.

Googling the words ‘NSA’ + ‘whistleblower’ told her that no one would believe anything a lowly number cruncher had to say about an NSA Director, even a Temporary Assistant Director for Public Affairs. In spite of the so-called ‘whistleblower protection laws’ enacted by Congress, NSA managers still made whistleblowers take a battery of psychological tests at NSA’s Office of Security, where they were routinely labeled as delusional, paranoid, or psychotic. If she doubted Google, she had only to read the UK Guardian’s account of Edward Snowden, stranded in the Moscow after his US passport was confiscated by his own country.

She had chickened out. She had been a coward, without the backbone to take on NSA’s security apparatus. She couldn’t. Not without that flash drive.

From then on, everything she did at NSA was tainted. She only wanted out. But it was too late. Though she never openly challenged him, the flash drive had put her on Michael Usher’s radar. She hadn’t understood how vicious he was until she applied to graduate school in Boston. Usher had altered her NSA Performance Evaluation and used her friendship with a Polish national to spread rumors that she was unpatriotic; that she couldn’t be trusted. That hurt. Her family understood patriotism in a way few families did. Her father was an Army veteran, and though his wife, Fritzi’s mother, had been born in Germany, she put their extended American family to shame with her elaborate 4th of July and Memorial Day celebrations.

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Fritzi resigned from NSA without a fight. No one in her family, especially not her father, could ever learn that she had left in disgrace.

She had never lied to her NSA supervisors about Jan Pawlowski. She had mentioned him at every FBI vetting. Jan had even applied for American citizenship. For a few weeks, even after she found that flash drive, it had looked like she could have it all…her mathematics, Jan, and an NSA career.

Then along came a spider who twisted the facts and spun a web of lies around her. It still galled how Michael Usher had personally inserted himself into her life by listing all of Jan’s crooked schemes in that meeting. Without that flash drive she had had to shut up and listen while he spun his awful web.

She truly hadn’t known. Once she heard, she ended the relationship.Jan denied nothing when she confronted him, not even fixing the

Swedish boxer’s championship fight. He hadn’t become bitter or tried to hurt her. He just left, his quiet dignity still intact.

The spider, on the other hand, kept spinning lies so that Fritzi Jordan would never again work as a mathematician anywhere in the English-speaking world.

If only she had been brave enough to break the law by making a copy of that flash drive.

If only she had fought back like Edward Snowden had.Instead she had run away to Berlin.And she had found Schultzi, who refused to divide the world into

good guys and bad guys. Not in the job description for a historian, he had told her.

The Humboldt University classroom was quiet.Schultzi had stopped talking and writing. He was staring at her.So were the other students, Fritzi realized in horror.She had seen his lips move, but hadn’t processed the words. What

had he asked?A bit of torn paper floated onto her notebook. It read, Napoléon.She looked up at the whiteboard. Idiot, she thought at the note writer.

Of course, Napoléon. The dates told her Napoléon.Could the note writer provide a better clue? She didn’t dare look.

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Schultzi waited unflinchingly for the confirmation that his lecture had bored her.

Better to be thought stupid, than to hurt her only friend’s feelings. She stayed silent.

More seconds passed, endless seconds, then Schultzi himself came to her rescue. “Was halten Sie von unserem alten Freund Napoléon, Frau Jordan?” What do you think of our old friend Napoléon? An open-ended question. She could say almost anything without admitting her daydreaming. ‘Almost’ being the operative word.

The lecture hall grew quieter.Words slipped out. “A scientific education might have kept him out

of trouble and saved Europe a lot of hardship.”Had she missed the mark? She snuck a look at the note-sender. It

was her stalker. He was her age, perhaps a year or two older, black hair combed straight back, razor stubble shading a perfect jaw line, striking blue eyes that lit up with amusement, and he was drop-dead gorgeous when he grinned like that.

The other students laughed, but there was a smile on the old professor’s lips.

Schultzi mattered most.He waved his hands for the laughter to stop. “Weiter…” True to the

form they had developed on their long walks, he invited her to say more.Fritzi stood up and spoke. “Gaspard Monge, the mathematician used

to tell a story… After Napoléon abandoned his men at Waterloo and ran away back to Paris, he told Monge about plans for a second conquest. This time of the sciences. ‘To leave behind works and discoveries worthy of a Napoléon.’ He planned to use his war booty to build an Institute of the Sciences in America; and needed the old man, Monge, to ‘put him abreast of the present state of the sciences,’ after which he would explore both North and South America, then build his institute in Québec, or in St. Louis, or Rio de Janeiro.”

“Napoléon harbored a secret love for the sciences?” the old professor asked.

“Yes. Our ancestors would have avoided a lot of turmoil if his parents had been wealthy enough to forego the free education the army offered.”

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More student titters.“But science is a thing of the mind, Frau Jordan. Why did Napoléon

think he needed to travel to America to do science?”“Europe was a disappointment to him, full of treacherous, small-

minded people. That, he told Monge, was the real cause of his defeat at Waterloo. The reforms and the revolutionary new governments he had organized in central Europe were being overthrown and the same old governmental messes reestablished.” She slyly added a stray quote. “Napoléon said he would become a second Alexander von Humboldt, infinitely greater than the first.”

Schultzi fought a chuckle. “How fortunate then, for us at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, that the English thought to confiscate his money and lock him up in the South Atlantic. If they hadn’t, perhaps no one would recognize our namesake today.”

The students laughed again. “There you have your assignment, boys and girls. One thousand

words on what Europe would be like if Napoléon hadn’t marched along Unter den Linden, right past our own university. To be posted on your history blogs by eight am Monday morning. “Would Italians, Germans and Poles still have formed states according to nationality? Or would central Euro-peans have found something greater to unite them? Ideals perhaps? Or economic alliances like the Hanseatic League of Cities, or the WTO? Don’t forget your links. See if you can send your dinosaur professor to a source he hasn’t seen before.

“For Frau Jordan, an additional 1,000 words on how the vocabulary of the nation-state affected the development of scientific thought in central Europe. Perhaps, Frau Jordan, you will report to us on Monday that Napoléon left his mark on the sciences after all.”

Great. There went her weekend.Schultzi resumed his lecture.Another strip of paper appeared on Fritzi’s notebook. ‘You owe me a

Cappuccino.’ She turned to the note writer and shook her head. She didn’t owe

anyone anything. The dates had told her Napoléon, and she was finished with gorgeous-looking central European men, be they German or Polish.

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His smile said, he wasn’t taking no for an answer. Where had he come from? Until two days ago she had never seen

him in any lecture, nor in the mensa at lunch, nor in the bookstore. What kind of a student missed so many lectures?

She returned to her notes and jotted down ideas for her assignment. Napoléon would have decided what was ‘good’ science in the same

way that he redrew new, ‘more logical’ political boundaries across Europe; and when political leaders decided what constituted good science, it rarely coincided with what scientists thought. Doubtless Napoléon would have found ‘French’ science more worthy than ‘German’ science.

She would make her point with the imprisonment of Carl Friedrich Gauss whose crime was having France’s best minds publicly call him their ‘master in all things mathematical.’ Despite Napoléon’s supposed admiration of the sciences, he hadn’t been at all troubled that the young German was too poor to pay the war reparations that would have released him from his imprisonment in the oubliette. French scientists had been appalled. French mathematician Laplace even paid Gauss’s war tax, not once, but three times, before realizing that an anonymous fourth gift was the only way to keep the young professor from returning the money to Paris.

Schultzi’s lecture ended, and Fritzi found her path blocked. Her stalker held out his hand. “Bliss. Ray Bliss. But everybody calls me, Bliss,” he said, adding in German, “Es freut mich.”

American, Fritz realized, though the accent was barely perceptible. A wave of homesickness hit, keeping her from walking away. She shook his hand. “Friederike Jordan.”

“Who likes to be called Fritzi.”Old NSA paranoias resurfaced. “I’ve sat behind you and Professor Schultz on the train,” Bliss

explained, in English now.“Have you?” How could she not have noticed? ‘Walk away!’ she

warned herself. ‘Now! You’re lousy with people.’ Then he smiled a most amazingly American smile, as warm and

welcoming as his accent, and her suspicions faded.“Coffee?”

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“Actually we, that is, Schultzi and I, usually head home now.”Bliss nodded in the old professor’s direction. “I don’t think he’ll

mind.”Schultzi winked at her and packed his briefcase. “He thinks, I don’t have enough friends my own age. But I have

reading to catch up on.” “How about tomorrow?”“Okay,” she said, and wondered how she could be agreeing.

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2 Berlin

ANTI-TERROR TASK FORCE OPERATIVE RAY BLISS couldn’t get the questions out of his head as he hurried through the corridors of the American Embassy Berlin. How could a train filled with recycled plutonium and under continuous electronic surveillance just vanish? A train with eight GPS-tagged cars couldn’t just disappear, could it?

Bliss, like hundreds of security operatives around the world, had trained for this nightmare hypothetical, but he still couldn’t believe it was real. What first seemed to be nothing but a fluke, a GPS snafu, was now escalating rapidly. Bliss desperately wanted to get out into the field to kick some terrorist ass, but the umbrella agenc,y which American spooks used to share information in the brave new world of post-9/11 intelligence sharing, the multiagency Anti-Terror Task Force, or ATTF, had assigned him to the “B” plan. If the combined militaries of the EU, the US and Russia with all their high-tech toys didn’t locate the train within the next 48 to 72 hours, and the unthinkable hadn’t happened, an agent would be sent in. Bliss’ job was recruiting that agent.

So while the rest of the world sprang into action, he had spent the last two days dogging a young American graduate student around Berlin.

He hated recruiting agents. Especially sweet naïve kids like Fritzi Jordan. The task force must be desperate to think of turning to her for help. She would make a terrible agent. How could Fritzi, with her face like an open book, have secrets dark enough to interest the ATTF?

Bliss stepped aside so that his guide, Michael Usher, a tall, buff, dark-haired man in his early forties, could insert a key into the elevator control panel, then followed ATTF’s CIA Liaison, Laura Murphy and her FBI counterpart, Mackenzie Kilbane, into the elevator.

Usher’s official title was ‘Director of the Commercialization Initiative for Eastern Europe.’ It sounded impressive. But while still shaking Bliss’ hand in the security cage just inside the Embassy front

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door, Usher had already made it clear that his assignment to Commercial was both temporary and below his usual pay grade.

Bliss watched Usher greet private contractor after private contractor with top-secret clearance badges and wondered about the brave new world of American espionage. He was used to seeing US government operations at NASA, Department of Defense, even NSA, DIA and CIA farmed out to temporary workers, AKA ‘private contractors’. But the way Usher glad-handed his way past guards and through sliding glass security doors down, down, down into the National Security Agency’s super secret Berlin complex took privatization to a whole new level.

The elevator doors slid open, and they entered the third sub-basement of the Embassy. While Usher was distracted with an iris scan at the final security check, Bliss stole a glance at Laura Murphy and Mackenzie Kilbane.

Murphy was hiding her true feelings and gave Usher her best, smiling, ‘I’m so very impressed’ mask.

Mackenzie arched a perfectly tweezed and penciled eyebrow at Bliss. Usher’s tour-guiding was annoying her as well. But then, what didn’t annoy Mackenzie, his ex-wife’s best friend? He knew she was thinking the same thing he was… a millionaire playing tour guide through a secret government facility was more that just odd.

Bliss had spent most of his working life watching high-status males sniff out their territory, but the vibes he was getting from Usher felt wrong. He was trying too hard to blend in with the US government mandarins in their central European outpost.

Bliss’ own disguise, his daily one-and-a-half hours in the gym, was intended to reinforce the idea that he was brawn, not brains. If someone happened to recognize Bliss from the tabloids, his athletic appearance kept them believing everything they had read about him and his ex-wife, Cheryl, the celebrity daughter of an American Senator. It must all be true, no? Bliss was an intellectual lightweight. Beer-drinking buddy material. Bliss could follow orders, but was unlikely to strike off on his own.

It was a disguise that worked.

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Usher’s friendly smile had discounted brawn-not-brains Bliss seconds after their introduction. He had moved on with that sixth sense Washingtonians were so blessed with, to the people he identified as holding the real reins of power, Mackenzie Kilbane and Laura Murphy.

As the ten-inch thick vault doors slid open, Usher took four sets of specially-coated glasses from a rack.

Below pay-grade or not, Usher was enjoying this, Bliss thought, as they entered an enormous brick-lined, underground cavern.

Bliss had never been inside, but he had heard the legends… Built by the Nazis the cavern had been intended as the Brandenburg Gate Subway Station, but it had never actually been connected to the Berlin transportation grid. It had had to be abandoned when the nearby Spree River began leaking in through the stone ceiling.

Now owned by the US, the ‘cave’ was so deep underground that no radio, no TV, no electromagnetic signals of any kind got in or out, unless NSA wanted them to, Usher said.

He explained how the glasses enhanced the visibility of the cave’s communications lasers. They slipped them on and walked to the railing of the observation platform.

In the center of the huge cavern a meter-wide blue column of laser light stretched down from the ceiling. Signals collected up on the Embassy’s rooftop by the antennas under its radio-transparent shed were sent directly down here into the cavern for analysis.

Until Edward Snowden, Usher told them, sustainability-minded Berliners assumed the tent-like structure on top of the American Embassy was a passive cooling system intended to reduce global warming by scaling down the Embassy’s reliance on air conditioning. It had been great while it lasted.

They watched more tubes of light flicker on. Blue, and as big around as a man’s arm, they beamed from the center column to five van-sized supercomputers, which radiated pencil-thin, lateral blue beams outward, like giant, spinning, bicycle wheels. These thin secondary beams were reflected by rapidly rotating mirrors through clear glass cubicle dividers into the workstations of individual analysts.

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Usher pointed out an intricate web of red light rays hovering near the top of the central laser column just under the ceiling. It enclosed a flickering blue light cloud.

A Blue Widow, Bliss realized, even though he had never seen one. It just had to be… A quantum computer, right here in Berlin, in the heart of the EU. This was the real reason NSA intelligence gatherers were called spiders. Neither their spy satellite networks, nor their globe-spanning listening installations had earned them that nickname.

No jewelry, not even metal eyeglasses were allowed, Usher told them. No reflective surfaces to accidentally deflect or slow the flow of ion qubit processed information from the fabled quantum computer known as, yes, it really does exist, wink, wink, the ‘Blue Widow.’

For years competing camps had argued whether quantum dots or quantum wire was the best material for a quantum computer, he went on. Once the quantum tunneling effect was fully understood, the answer was obvious. Dots were combined with wires and the world saw its first working quantum computer.

The luminous blue cloud flecked with rainbow sparkles drifted downward.

They were seeing billions of superconducting quantum wires made of assembled metallic carbon nanotubes, Usher explained. The rainbow-coloured flickering was caused when quantum dots were confined inside microscopic crystal matrices.

He gave them a minute to admire the show, then continued. The lights were an optical artefact, a meaningless, though pretty side-effect. The photons doing the actual work inside a quantum computer were in the microwave range and not part of the visible light spectrum.

The Blue Widow could capture and analyze 100 billion bits of data per second. Emails, attachments, faxes, every type of communication… they were all pulled into the Widow’s gigantic maw once the semantic trigger was activated. Phone calls over the internet, landlines, satellites or cell towers… they were all the same to her. Inside her maw, the quantum spider could digest data streams from a million-plus DSL lines simultaneously.

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Even the most highly-encrypted communications snared in the Widow’s web weren’t immune to her delicate touch, Usher went on. She could detect the spin of a mere ion, and whether or not it had been altered. Ordinary encryption schemes, 512-bit RSA algorithms and Abelian discrete logs could be cracked in an instant. Here he gave the ‘girls,’ Murphy and Mackenzie, a friendly grin in case their mathematics couldn’t follow the technical details.

The Widow was so fast, she all but eliminated the need to physically crack encryption. Real-time metadata analyzers were triggered, hitting targets almost instantaneously and allowing the quantum computer to follow digital communications out into the real world, at the speed of light, finding suspected terrorists before they logged off a network. Encrypting and decrypting mathematics were being obsoleted, and Blue Widows here in Berlin, back home in Bluffdale, Utah, in Bude in Cornwall, in southern England, and in Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia were becoming NSA’s new ‘brain’ centers, keeping the world safe, not just for Americans, but for all of humankind.

Ray Bliss tried to look impressed, but he was old-fashioned enough to believe the best intelligence was collected by people with their feet on the ground, walking through a souk in Syria, or Kabul, or in a restaurant on the fifth floor of Berlin’s KaDeWe department store watching who a German senator met for lunch. People, not machines, made the world safer, and they did it by befriending others, by cultivating agents. Much as he hated doing it, it worked.

The Widow was a mindless insatiable carnivore, nothing brain-like about her. The fantastic amount of information in this cavern was nothing but undigested pap culled from the electronic ether that surrounded the Earth. No one could seriously call it intelligence.

They handed their glasses back to Usher, and the room turned into an ordinary high-ceilinged workspace.

As Usher led them along a raised walkway, Bliss noticed that the spiderlings wearing green, private consultant security badges were in the majority. For-profit patriotism at its finest. The defense contractor who sold the Widow concept to NSA was no doubt earning additional billions by providing the analysts to sort through the “chatter” the Widow trapped in her maw.

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They entered a glass-enclosed conference room where the rest of the ATTF team waited. Usher indicated the empty chairs at the oval table and Murphy pulled out the chair next to Bliss. She was sticking to him like a shadow now that he had agreed to help.

“What happened with Fritzi Jordan?” Murphy whispered, after they sat down.

“Please tell me you’ve located the train,” he answered.Murphy shook her head.“She’s going to make a terrible spy. We’ve got to find someone

else.”“She’s all we have,” Murphy said.Usher shut the door and flicked a switch built into the tabletop.

Faraday cage, he told Bliss, when nothing happened. The glass walls were impregnated with platinum wire that emitted camouflaging electromagnetic signals and jammed electronic snooping. Layers upon layers of security even within the NSA complex itself, he explained, then flicked a second switch to opaque the glass conference room walls.

Was it really necessary to hide what happened in here from the spiderlings outside, Bliss wondered? More likely another billionaire defense contractor with friends in Washington had sold the government something it didn’t need. A Faraday cage this deep underground was typical of security-industrial-complex overspending. The Berlin Embassy was a fortress, and this conference room was at its very core, so deep underground that you couldn’t get more secure.

Bliss lost patience with Usher’s incessant bragging about NSA technology. “Have the train hijackers given us a list of their demands?” he asked the assembled ATTF members.

A deer-caught-in-the-headlights look appeared on faces around the room. How could they not know they were dealing with a hijacking. What else could it be?

“Not yet,” Murphy answered. She nodded to the ATTF member from Defense Intelligence and the briefing began.

“We’ve checked and rechecked. The GPS satellites are functioning normally. No sign of the plutonium train’s signal for more than 24 hours now.”

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The Air Force intelligence officer nodded for a satellite specialist, a civilian expert from Rayojet, to provide details.“We’ve moved two spy birds into position.”

“One bird has a high resolution camera; the other a variety of instrumentation including on-board radiation detection that will locate the train if some whacko manages to crack the nut.”

“Crack the nut?” someone from State asked.A DOE physicist summarized the technology. “Each 60-ton castor is

a set of three casks, one inside the other, like those Russian dolls. Three lids, each weighing 2 tons, are screwed, welded and bolted over an inner cask containing 300 rods of plutonium and spent nuclear fuel glued together by a lead slurry.

“Plutonium is an alpha-emitter and relatively safe to handle, since alpha particles can’t pass through a simple sheet of paper, let alone human skin. Mixing plutonium from decommissioned nuclear missiles with beta- and gamma particle emitters, the highly toxic fission products from nuclear power generation is the best way to safeguard plutonium and keep it out of the hands of terrorists.

“To extract the plutonium the lead slurry has to be melted and the rods sorted with a gamma counter. Those rods that don’t emit gamma radiation are the plutonium. They have to be found in under ten minutes. Any longer, and the terrorist is doing a Litvinenko…remember that Russian guy in London? He will be committing suicide by radiation poisoning.”

“What are we telling the press?” Bliss asked.“Nothing until we have to,” Usher said. “We’ve released a piece

announcing NATO air search-and-rescue practice exercises to explain the helicopters.”

“Practice exercises?” an Army Special Forces officer sneered.“Yes, practice,” Murphy said. “Terror feeds on public panic. If there

isn’t any immediate danger to the general public, we contain the terror by keeping a low profile.”

“What about the anti-nuke demonstrators along the train’s route?” Bliss asked. “How long before they start asking what happened to the train.”

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“The Germans and Poles have issued a joint statement saying the train was redirected to avoid the demonstrations.” Murphy said. “That should give us a day or two.”

“And the blogosphere?” Bliss asked. “What do the internet conspiracy theorists say?”

“We found a blogger trying to go public through anonymizers in Norway and Finland about an hour ago,” Usher said.

“Did we pinpoint his location?” Murphy asked. “He could be connected to the hijackers.”

“He disappeared from the net as soon as he noticed us,” Usher answered. “But NSA has intercepted a cell phone call that seems related. I’ve had the analysts go over it. They’ve typed up a report.” He slid a stack of paper onto the table, and ATTF members reached for a copy.

“If it’s all the same to you, Mike,” Defense Intelligence interrupted, “I think we should listen to the original intercept. Relying on the analysts is what let 9/11 happen.”

“Of course.” Usher nodded agreeably, but the way he added sugar and cream to his coffee while the aide played the recording said, he wasn’t liking this. Why? Bliss wondered.

After several seconds of digital break up, they heard a man’s voice. His accent was so heavy; it took several seconds more to recognize his words as English. Usher paused the recording. “Russian still leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouths of east Europeans. English has become their lingua franca.” He nodded for the recording to resume.

“…if nothing goes wrong,” the man said, before highway noise rendered his words unintelligible.

“Nothing will go wrong,” a second man said. “The train goes missing for a day, maybe two. Then, once our demands are met, it reappears.”

“And if they aren’t met?”“Then the Americans will learn the hard way that we don’t need

feudal overlords. They can’t just move into eastern Europe and take over our businesses like modern-day Teutonic Knights.”

“Or like Russians?”

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“Exactly. The train will be a strike back for all of us, for Poland, Latvia, Armenia, Belarus, Azerbaijan…We’ll show them they can’t just do whatever they want.”

The response was indecipherable.“When they can’t find the train, the Americans will turn to us,” said

the second man. We will show them that they need us to maintain security on our own territory, not those lazy know-it-all defense consultants in their expensive suits.”

Usher signaled the tech to stop.“Did you trace it?” Murphy asked.“No chance. The signals were rigged to bounce the from cell tower

repeater to cell tower repeater in a two hundred kilometer circle in southern Poland.” Usher said. “But we do know we’re not dealing with Muslim terrorists. NSA linguists have identified the highway speaker as Belorussian.”

The grim smile Usher used to share this small triumph screamed ‘performance.’ What was he hiding? Bliss wondered.

“NSA hit pay dirt with ID-ing the second voice,” Usher said, his voice artificially cheery.

He was unhappy that the voice had been ID-ed, Bliss realized. Why?Mackenzie Kilbane, ATTF’s FBI Liaison, opened the orange folder

lying in front of her. “His name is Pawlowski… Jan Pawlowski. He’s head of the Polish Sports Ministry. Because of his many media appearances… opening new soccer stadiums, introducing Polish athletes to TV audiences, and so on, his voice was easy to ID.”

“What are we waiting for? Let’s go get him,” the Air Force general said.

“We can’t,” said the State Department lawyer next Mackenzie. “He’s a government official.”

“But we have the recording. Let’s take it to the Polish police, or Interpol, if the Poles won’t do anything.”

“If EU law enforcement officials find out about this recording, they’ll come at us with human rights and privacy complaints,” Mackenzie added. “Remember Edward Snowden and all the trouble that caused?”

“We don’t want to go there,” agreed the lawyer from State.

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“Can’t we contact the Polish government directly?” the general asked. “They’re usually on board with our thinking on security.”

“We can’t chance someone tipping him off,” Murphy said.“We can get in, grab him, and be back out before they know what hit

them,” said a former Special Forces major.“Poland is our ally,” the State Department woman reminded. “A plutonium heist by a government minister? Nice ally,” the major

countered.“It’s not like he’s the Polish president.” Defense Intelligence sided

with the major, and the discussion fell apart into crosstalk.“Plutonium!” The Air Force general shook his head. “This

Pawlowski can’t have any idea what he snagged.”“At least we’re not dealing with Salafists.”“No. Just plutonium, the stuff in nuclear bombs!”“How do we know the train isn’t in Chechnya, as we speak.”“Christ! How out of control do we let this get? I say, let’s nab him.

Now.”“Right. If the Poles don’t like it, too bad. They voted this creep into

office.”“Actually they didn’t,” Mackenzie interrupted. “He was appointed.”

She pulled a folder from her briefcase. “Let me start at the beginning.” “In the late 90's Jan Pawlowski was a Sports Management major at

Catholic University in Washington, DC. He overstayed his visa after graduation and became a boxing promoter with small potato clients… unknown eastern Europeans with dreams of hitting it big in America. After two expired visa warnings he went home to Poland, then came back legit.

“Things grew complicated when he started dating an NSA mathematician.” She pointed her smart phone at the white board. The phone’s on-board beamer projected a Power Point slide of a Maryland driver’s license that showed an attractive young black woman named Friederike Jordan, the agent Bliss had been hired to recruit.

“How Pawlowski met Friederike, AKA Fritzi, Jordan remains a mystery,” Mackenzie said. “Jordan’s FBI background file actually calls

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her a recluse. Regardless, they were linked romantically and became an item.”

Bliss watched Usher doodling on a legal pad, trying to hide that he wasn’t liking this. Why? he wondered.

“When the foreign-national boyfriend came up at Jordan’s monthly security vetting,” Mackenzie continued, “She tendered her resignation, but her situation was complicated.

“Mike, you were at NSA then. Why don’t you brief us on Jordan?”Usher put down his pen and spoke. “She was working on Mojo, a

vital NSA program that posed significant mathematical challenges. Pawlowski seemed a minor risk compared to letting a talent like Jordan walk. NSA decided to up her debriefings to once a week until Mojo was complete…”

“Mojo? What does Mojo do?” someone asked.“Classified…need-to-know only,” Usher said.Mackenzie’s perfectly made-up face froze into a look Bliss knew

only too well.“It’s a banking software,” she said, squashing the ‘my-secret-is-

bigger-than-yours’ pissing contest before it could start.Ms. Bitch hadn’t changed, Bliss thought. But this time she was right.

Alpha male chest-beating wasted time.“Mojo analyzes banking deposits and withdrawals for patterns

indicating money laundering, terrorist funding, or other illegal activity, and sends a report to analysts at the FBI,” she continued. “Any bank doing business in the US, along with its affiliates worldwide, is required to install Mojo on their computer systems.”

“Even Arab banks use it,” Murphy added. “Since they don’t trust American banking software, NSA provides Mojo free-of-charge to Grumbeer AG, the Swiss company that provides most of the Arab world with its banking transaction software.

Mackenzie returned to her file. “Pawlowski was already on our radar apart from his relationship with Jordan. Minor allegations like placing bets on fights and forgetting to pay the taxes on his winnings. He had a good lawyer who made it all go away.

“Things came to a head after the World Heavyweight Fight at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The champ, a Swedish hulk with the

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constitution of a bear and a reputation for extreme good health, no booze, no drugs, not even food preservatives, a man who ate only organically-grown chicken and fish, was struck by dizziness in the middle of the fourth round. Twenty seconds later a light tap from the New Jersey challenger sent him sprawling and the casinos scrambling to cover the bets Pawlowski had on the challenger.

“The new champ turned out to be a one trick pony. The former titleholder returned almost immediately to his former good health and was accused of having taken a dive. His dizzy spells remained a mystery. He had a sworn doctor’s statement that an examination after the fight had shown indications of possible insulin poisoning, but the customary blood and urine samples taken in the dressing room right after the fight had already disappeared from the Las Vegas anti-doping lab by the next morning. Without those he couldn’t prove his innocence. The Boxing Commission banned him for life from fighting anywhere in the US, effectively ending his career.”

“We showed Jordan photos of the disgraced champ in the back room of a Stockholm fight club watching the video and trying to understand how he had been defeated,” Usher said.

“Maybe that got to her,” Mackenzie said. “Maybe it was seeing how rich Pawlowski got by betting against him. Maybe it was something personal between the two of them. Whatever it was, Jordan ended it. Refused to see Pawlowski again.”

“That was when we discovered an NSA flash drive missing from an office next to Jordan’s.” Usher broke in.

“Yes. That was worrisome.” Mackenzie’s polished exterior cracked slightly, as she let her annoyance with Usher show. Intentionally, like a cat flexing its claws.

Usher backed off, and she went on. “Pawlowski returned to Poland and used his winnings to set himself up in politics, but Polish elections proved harder to fix than Las Vegas fights. His ambitions remained thwarted until the Polish Sports Minister was gunned down, gangland-style, on a Warsaw street. Pawlowski was appointed his successor.

“He hasn’t done a bad job. He’s taken kids off the street by expanding after-school sports clubs. He has also renovated sports

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stadiums, and so on. Polish internet gambling and sports betting have exploded. In fact his bank accounts have grown so rapidly, that Interpol suspects he’s using the gambling as a money laundry for profits from his other criminal activities.

“You name it and he’s got a finger in the pie…smuggling untaxed cigarettes into western EU countries, counterfeiting pharmaceuticals, providing the German black market with gangs of low-wage illegals for construction work, shipping recreational drugs to Amsterdam, weapons to Uzbekistan. We’ve used Mojo to shut down his accounts at American banks and their EU affiliates, but now he’s borrowing a page from the Camorra down in Naples by putting his cash into landfilling. That makes stopping him significantly harder.”

Mackenzie sipped water. “Garbage is the ideal money laundry. Paperwork can be forged. Tonnage inflated. Landfill pit liners are paid for on paper, but never delivered or installed. Waste haulers take something no one wants and they make it go away. As long as the garbage doesn’t lie around stinking up the streets, nobody cares. Not even when links to organized crime start showing up.”

“It’s such a good deal, Pawlowski is about to have himself appointed Environment Minister,” Murphy added.

“But we caught a break,” Mackenzie said. “Incredibly, Friederike Jordan, Pawlowski’s ex-girlfriend from his Washington days is living right here in Berlin.”

“How do we know she isn’t still seeing him?” Usher asked. “Berlin is less than a hundred miles from the Polish border.”

“Because my people say, no,” Murphy answered. “She’s been a good girl. Stays away from pure math and encryption as per her NSA termination agreements, and checks in with the Embassy regular as clockwork.”

“What about that flash drive that disappeared while she was at NSA?” Usher asked.

“Circumstantial. If NSA does a thorough check, they’ll probably find a filing error.” Mackenzie let her sweetest, most polished smile slip over her face. “Maybe even by your own staff, Michael.”

“What are you trying to say?” “Why don’t you leave the field operations to us, Michael?”

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Usher returned to his notes and tried to hide his anger.Mackenzie turned to Bliss. “Has she agreed to help?”“Not yet. Frankly, I don’t think she’s going to bite,” he said.“Just bring her to the party, Ray. We’ll keep her safe.”Bliss raised an eyebrow.“Nothing is guaranteed.”Right, he thought, not even supplementing a government pension by

odd-jobbing for Uncle Sam. He should have quit after his logistics stint in Anatolia, when that first job took him back to Europe.

30

3 Prague

MICHAEL USHER SAT IN A RENTED OPEL and sipped coffee. The embassy meeting had ended better than he had hoped. Everyone was still calling the missing castor train a GPS snafu.

The plan to recruit Fritzi Jordan as an agent was just plain harebrained. She was such an odd duck that even the ATTF’s über-recruiter, Ray Bliss, would have trouble working his usual magic. That would give Usher what he needed most, time to straighten things out.

He watched Jan Pawlowski eat breakfast at the sidewalk café across the street from where the Opel was parked. He wasn’t crazy enough to hijack a train full of recycled plutonium was he? No. He wouldn’t have been talking like that if he knew a castor train had actually gone missing. Look at how calm he was… holding his fancy china cup by the handle, pinky in the air, watching tourists stroll by. Would he be so calm, if he had just hijacked a train? That spy satellite intercept was nothing. It had merely caught him at his bullshitting best, trying to impress the local lowlife. But the NSA intercept confirmed that it was time to cut him loose.

First though, Usher had to make sure Pawlowski took the evidence of Meitner-Poland’s inadequate security to the press. Then everything else would fall into place, and whether or not Ray Bliss succeeded in recruiting Jordan wouldn’t matter.

The United States had messed up big time in not anticipating the economic collapse of the Soviet satellite states. The Fall of the Berlin Wall had tumbled socialist planned economies like a row of dominoes, and what had the world’s greatest economy done in response?

Nothing. The lack of foresight, the total lack of planning… a Marshall Plan for redeveloping all those failed economies should have been waiting in the wings.

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Now, 30 years later, it was almost too late. Russia had rediscovered its natural resources and the power oil and gas wielded in an energy-starved world; and the western Europeans, especially the Germans, were buying up everything. America was being left out in the cold.

That fuck-up wasn’t going to continue on Usher’s watch.The first step in stopping it was Jan Pawlowski. He had proved

useful since Usher first sent him to buy the beer for the student intern party at Freedom Commons, the Washington, DC think tank for Eastern European Studies. Pawlowski had come far since then. He had a dodgy underside that proved useful and could be sent into a ticklish situation and trusted to keep his mouth shut.

But that stuff with the train. Even if it was all BS, that was going too far. And why was he insisting on this meeting? Come yourself, Mike. To Prague. It will be worth your while. I promise.

Usher didn’t like it. If an old National Security Agency contact hadn’t tipped him… the CIA, the FBI, even the ATTF could be tailing Pawlowski already.

Usher had one last job for Pawlowski. Then he would cut him loose for good.

He watched Pawlowski refold his Financial Times to the business section, trying to impress the locals with his English. He probably didn’t understand half of what he was reading with his two-bit MBA in Sports Management. Infuriating, how he acted like he had all morning, when their meet was in 30, no, Usher rechecked his watch, make that 27 minutes.

One more job. Pawlowski would make sure Meitner-Poland’s financing fell through, and Usher’s company, Blue Sky, would become the America’s Preferred Provider in Poland.

It was a good deal. Blue Sky would make great things happen for Poland. Thirty years after the 1989 revolutions and Polish air was still next to unbreathable, and practically no sewage was being treated. Rebuilding Poland’s infrastructure, landfilling its garbage, and building modern highways and toll collection systems would grow Blue Sky into a multinational to rival the likes of Halliburton and KBR, and that would drop a tidy bundle into Michael Usher’s own bank accounts.

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A well-deserved bundle, as Pawlowski’s demonstration of Meitner’s inadequate security was about to show the world. Usher had arranged for him to discover low-level nuclear sludge from an atomic power reactor in Lithuania. It was only radioactive effluent, not the stuff that appealed to terrorists, but the point would be made. It had been lying in Meitner’s new landfill in western Poland for over a week now, and still no security alarms had been tripped.

How long could it take Pawlowski to photograph a bunch of barrels and go to the press? By now photos of Meitner’s ‘gross disregard for the Polish environment’ should be plastering the tabloids, but there had been nothing.

Instead Pawlowski was playing games. First the NSA intercept… hijacking a castor train, for crying out loud… then, ‘Come yourself, Mike. To Prague.’

The barrels had been in the landfill for eight days now. That was safe, wasn’t it?

Yes, yes. The engineer Usher had sent to plant the barrels had assured him that cooling ponds were overkill for sludge, not needed for the few days it took to alert the press.

Pawlowski drained his coffee, flicked euros onto the table, and stood.

At last.Usher eased his car into traffic.Pawlowski dodged brightly-dressed shoppers on Wenceslaus Square.

Tourists. Czech women were too practical to wear whites and pastels, but that would change once Blue Sky rebuilt Prague’s antiquated water supply network and modern washers and dryers could be hooked up.

Pawlowski slowed next to sidewalk scaffolding and lit a cigarette. Masons balancing stucco trays on shoulders climbed past him to repair a crumbling third-story art nouveau façade.

He flicked his butt onto the sidewalk and entered an instrument shop.Usher could see him through the window, peering into the f-holes of

a shiny brown violin like a connoisseur. As if he had ever played anything except an MP3 player.

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Outside again, Pawlowski flirted with a street vendor, bought a flower for his lapel, and entered a park shaded by yellow-leaved linden trees.

Usher drove into the parking lot and watched.A mother and son sailed a radio-controlled boat across an artificial

pond. Two teenagers played ping-pong at an outdoor table, and three old women loaded down with shopping bags gossiped next to the fountain. No one seemed interested in Pawlowski.

He got out of the car and followed the crushed brick path to the bench where Pawlowski leafed through his Times.

Cool, calm and collected now, Mike. Don’t underestimate him. He outsmarted a lot of sharp operators with his boxing and gambling scams. Everyone had their suspicions, but no one ever proved a thing, and now he’s in the Polish government, more or less legit.

Alerted by the crunch of shoes, Pawlowski spoke without lowering his paper. “Well, if it isn’t the Director.”

“Morning, Jan.”“How’s things in Berlin?” He set the paper aside. Perfect white teeth

shone up at Usher with a preternatural glow.“Let’s walk,” Usher said, and headed for a grove of birch trees to

confound any automatic microphone tracking devices.“OK. It’s a bit chilly for sitting anyway. What’s up?” he asked, as

they reached the trees.“You, Jan. I’d say, you are up. You and your damned entrepreneurial

spirit.”“Entrepreneurial spirit?” The teeth grinned. “Hey, wait a minute.

That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Why would hard-line capitalist Michael Usher get in a snit about entrepreneurial spirit?”

“Do you know how many alarms you’ve tripped with your talk of hijacking a train?”

Pawlowski grinned. “So Edward Snowden’s tales about the Five Eyes, or I should say, the Five Ears, are true.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled. “You know us east Europeans, Mike. Full of big plans about how we’re going to make the world respect us. Tell your spy friends,

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relax. It’s all bullshit; a pep talk for the troops.” He leaned against a birch.

Usher felt relief. He had known it was meaningless chatter. Now, the tricky part. “I’m afraid you’ve gone too far this time, Jan. What you can’t know, because we’ve kept it out of the media, is that a castor train has actually gone missing. Worse, it disappeared in Poland.”

Pawlowski’s grin widened. “Probably the GPS. It’s often unreliable.”

“Let me give you a friendly warning. Even if it is all bullshit, if you have anything to do with that train, I suggest the ‘GPS problem’ get solved. Half of NATO is flying over Poland and Belarus right now.”

Pawlowski grinned like the village idiot in a bad play.“And after you leak news of the barrels to the press…” Usher

hesitated, then dropped his bomb. “We’ll have to rethink our association.”

The grin widened. What now? Hadn’t he understood? Slavs were usually quick to pop a

cork, but he didn’t seem angry at all.“Our relationship has been mutually beneficial over the years,”

Usher tossed him a bone. “But after this… what I’m trying to say… It’s over.”

“Have I given offense?” Pawlowski’s voice dripped insincerity.“That stuff with the train, Jan. It’s… You’ve pissed in the wrong

pond. You’re poison. For old times’ sake, I can hold them off two, maybe three days. After that, you’ll need to watch your own backside.

Impossibly, the grin grew wider. This was going nowhere. “For godsakes, man! What’s happening with the barrels? By now I should be reading about Meitner AG’s lax security in newspapers across the EU. Instead I’m dicking around with you here in Prague.”

No excuses. Just that idiot grin. “Look, we can’t just let a German company receive funds the US has

earmarked to clean up the Polish environment.”“No. American taxpayers wouldn’t like that, would they?” The smile

dimmed. “Perhaps I should remind you…In our country, the company goes by the name Meitner-Poland.” He traced a heart carved in the birch bark with his finger.

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“A technicality. You know the company is German.”“My, my. Such an old-fashioned attitude. Ours a global world, Mike.

As long as the bonuses for bankers and consultants keep growing and stock prices keep rising, nobody cares what country a company is chartered in.”

Usher refused to get drawn into an off-topic discussion.“Okay, say Meitner is German,” Pawlowski said. “What if this

German company is better equipped to do the job? What if it has lower rates than Blue Sky? What if it does environmental remediation naturally, using the newest technologies without exposing Poles to more chemical hazards than those left behind by the communists?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Anyone can do the clean-up part. We’re talking garbage here, not building supercomputers.”

Pawlowski laughed.“Look, I agree, in the main, it doesn’t much matter who does what,

except you keep forgetting the one thing America does better than…” Pawlowski cut him off before he could get the word ‘security’ out.

“German companies are the greenest. They build wind farms; put solar shingles on their roofs. Ordinary Germans sell the electricity they make at home to the power companies. They’ve got houses that cost 80 euros a year to heat, and have you seen what they’re doing for North Africa? Give the Germans a fair shot at the bidding, and Poles will get a good return on those investment dollars. So will the American taxpayers footing the development grant. With a state-of-the-art infrastructure, Poland can even stop buying oil and gas from Russia.”

“But the Germans don’t provide security.” Usher fought to control his anger. Was he playing stupid on purpose? “You keep forgetting about security, Jan. We’re not just talking toxic waste, but radioactive materials. If we don’t get the right companies in place, nuclear waste will wind up in landfills where any criminal can stumble onto it and sell it to the terrorists. I know you get this. Wasn’t that what your ‘pep talk’ about hijacking a castor train was all about?”

The grin disappeared. “Why would they look in Poland when we’ve never built a single nuclear power plant? Russia is filled with radioactive stuff the communists left lying around.”

36

Usher fought to stay calm. “The sludge barrels, man? Why didn’t you go to the press? It’s what you were paid to do.”

“What if there’s another company?” Pawlowski asked with a coy smile.

Here it comes, Usher thought. Well, sometimes you just had to thump a thug into submission. “What? A two-bit startup up in East Bumfuck, Poland?”

Pawlowski leaned back against a birch, shut his smiling mouth, and lazily let the sun warm his face for long seconds. “Suppose another American-owned company wants to bid?”

“Forget it,” Usher told him. “No fucking way is the US government going to approve a contract with an unproven startup. You can’t even sell that to the Poles.”

A cloud passed in front of the sun. “Now that’s where you’re wrong, Mike,” Pawlowski said. The idiot

grin reappeared. Why was he enjoying this so much?“Poles might talk about joining the North American Free Trade

Zone,” he continued. “But that’s more like my…um…little indiscretion with the train. It’s just talk. When we think of all those investment dollars being eaten up by the exorbitant salaries that American bankers and corporate CEOs demand…Well, we Poles turn out to be as thrifty as our western European neighbour.”

Usher felt warm in spite of the brisk fall wind. He loosened his tie and fought to keep from shouting. “I won’t stand for this. I’ve worked too hard. Blue Sky is the only…”

“Meitner AG has agreed to sell its Polish operation to RGB Waste of New Jersey. That’s New Jersey in the USA. So you see, Mike, you’re worrying about nothing.”

Insolent bastard. How dare he? “So you’ve engineered a corporate takeover to milk American development aid, is that it?” Usher asked. “You must be proud…”

“Gee, Mike, ‘corporate takeover’ sounds so… so nasty… so cutthroat. Why don’t we say ‘merger’? It’s friendlier. Better for Polish-American relations. Your little side job helped me meet my new partner. Nothing’s final. But things are looking good for yours truly.”

ASTRID JULIAN

“You wouldn’t even know what a landfill is, if I hadn’t sent you to Meitner.”

“You’re right. Without you, I would never have learned how much more profit there is in garbage than in sports. Athletes can be so unreliable, and garbage…well, it’s everywhere, isn’t it? I’ve decided to make a lateral move in my public service career, from the Sports Office over to the Environment Ministry.

“You can’t own a landfill company,” Usher tried. “That’s a conflict of interest.”

“In America perhaps.” Pawlowski peeled a piece of bark from a birch and held it up to the sun. “We Europeans are more pragmatic. Being invested in an industry can help you write the legislation governing it. Look at Berlusconi and his Italian media empire.”

Usher felt cold sweat trickle under his shirt. “Go ahead. Complain to the WTO, Mike. Tell them about my

‘conflict of interest’. While you’re at it, why don’t you tell them also, how you know so much about internal affairs at Meitner and all those other companies daring to bid against Blue Sky.”

Pawlowski couldn’t know, Usher told himself, but the sweat ran down his back now. Had Jordan told him something? He didn’t think so. He had to be guessing.

“Go ahead, and I’ll tell everyone in your cushy little Commercial Service Office in Berlin exactly how you find out what goes on at Meitner AG.”

“I know it can’t handle the security. That’s enough.”“Indeed.” The toothy smile returned. Frightening in its perfection. “In two weeks, I will be Meitner in Poland, Mike. An American

company, RGB Waste, will be my financial partner. We have a deal in the works to buy up all the Meitner subsidiaries in eastern Europe. As the deal broker, the one who brought a very lucrative deal to the right people at RGB, I stand to make a fortune. To think I owe it all to you.”

“What kind of underhanded…”“Anything underhanded exists only in your sleazy imagination,

Mike.” He peeled another layer of bark from the birch.

38

The man was a vandal. What was he doing to that tree? In a park, for crying out loud.

“Relax. You’ll have a bona fide American company to distribute those funds to.” He peeled away the white top layer of birch and studied the pink under-layer. “But before you give Blue Sky taxpayer dollars to build water treatment plants in Mumbai or Nairobi, you should know a thing or two about them.”

He pulled a stack of photos from his jacket and handed them to Usher.

Usher pulled his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket with shaking hands and struggled to get them onto the bridge of his nose.

The first photograph showed a yellow nuclear waste barrel. Labels identified it as belonging to the nuclear energy plant in Ignalina, Lithuania. Exactly what Pawlowski was supposed to find. Heartened, Usher looked at the next photo. A stack of yellow barrels lying in a landfill pit, lined to prevent leachate from seeping into groundwater, but otherwise totally inadequate for the long-term storage of nuclear waste. The missing cooling pond would get environmentalists even more fired up against Meitner.

Usher looked up.Pawlowski was peeling more bark from the round tree trunk. Round

like a barrel.With the next photo it fell into place.A long strip of paint had been peeled away from the barrel.

Underneath was the logo of Blue Sky’s atomic energy plant in Michigan. Fuck. Usher’s thoughts were a mad scramble, as he went into

damage control. “You can’t fall for this,” he tried. “Someone’s trying to frame Blue Sky.”

The crazy grin returned. “I’m not twenty-five anymore, Mike. Know what I mean?

“This proves nothing.”“The sports-betting was a profitable sideline. So was working for

you. But all good things have to end. It’s been fun being a bandido, but there’s not much future in it. We all have to grow up. Go legit. You’re right about one thing, though. Time for us to end our association.”

“You ungrateful…”

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“Not at all. I owe you a lot, it’s just…Life as a bad boy…My god, the company you have to keep.”

“Meitner is playing dirty tricks.”“You’re right about dirty tricks, but I wonder who’s playing them?

Whoever planted the barrels removed the GPS tags, but the data matrices were so small, they were easy to overlook. Every single barrel is still tagged with a Blue Sky data matrix chip. Do you know how hard it is to forge data matrices? They are on file with the government. That’s the US government.”

Usher felt like he was underwater. Gennady Filshin, the man he had sent to plant the barrels, flooded his brain. The Russian engineer’s lackadaisical dress. His sloppy, slouching walk. His ‘don’t worry so much, Boss, Russian ingenuity will be solving. Russians aren’t having money, so we are forced to be relying on brains, and they are growing accordingly. Survival of the fittest, like the biziness-man is saying.’ What had amused Usher in the past, now threatened to destroy him.

Pawlowski continued in a quiet voice. “You, Mike, will make sure those contracts get awarded to my new company, RGB International, the EU branch of RGB Waste of Newark, New Jersey. That’s in the US of A, Mike, and every bit as American as Blue Sky.”

What had possessed Filshin? Getting real Ignalina barrels had to be easier than shipping Blue Sky barrels in from the States.

Pawlowski seemed disappointed by Usher’s silence. “What do you think the WTO, or the American news media will do with these photos?”

Suddenly his hands burned. He held the photos out to Pawlowski. “Keep them. I have duplicates tucked away.” “There’s got to be an explanation,” Usher tried. “A Meitner worker

out for revenge after losing that contract to Blue Sky in the Georgian Republic.”

“Right. And that Meitner employee just slipped into the US where every single German tourist gets photographed and fingerprinted on arrival at the airport, in case he decides to turn terrorist while on vacation, and snagged some nuclear waste in Michigan. American security is so lax these days.” Pawlowski’s voice dripped sarcasm. “And Homeland Security claims America is a fortress.”

40

Usher fought to take charge. “Blue Sky probably contracted Meitner to dispose of those barrels. We’ve caught Meitner at this kind of thing before. In Naples.”

The smile turned sympathetic. “Nice try, except for one thing. I’ve seen Meitner’s books. There was no deal with Blue Sky.”

“The paperwork got lost. You’ll see.”Mock concern drifted onto Pawlowski’s face. “It would be a shame

to destroy a company’s reputation over an honest mistake.”“Blue Sky grew out of the defense industry. It exists to stop this kind

of thing. I’m sure there’s an explanation.” “I’m waiting to hear it.”“Me? What makes you think I know anything?”“Come now…You are Blue Sky’s biggest cheerleader.”How could this be happening? “Blue Sky is generous,” he tried.

“You could sell them your new company. Retire.”“I’m too young to retire. Besides, I like working.”“You’re not listening. They’ll pay you to walk out of the deal. You

could buy a fucking Caribbean island, man.” Usher felt the sweat roll down his cheeks.

“I should just hand over everything to Blue Sky when they’ve never so much as dirtied their hands at an academic conference on the Polish environment? I don’t think so.”

“Cash up front, Jan. The US government will deal only with Blue Sky. Your two-bit, rinky-dink outfit will never see any of those development dollars. Nothing can change that.”

“The only thing Blue Sky has going for it is Michael Fucking Usher and a bunch of lobbyists back in Washington.”

Pawlowski stepped so close, Usher felt the warmth of his body crowding him, mocking his Anglo-Saxon need for personal space. Don’t react. He closed his eyes and reclaimed his privacy by expanding his inner space.

The garlicky odor of Pawlowski’s skin invaded his nostrils.A bead of sweat rolled into his mouth. Concentrate. He has photos,

but he doesn’t know who did this, or who ordered it.

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Pawlowski’s breathing warmed the skin of his left ear, and God help him, if images of sex with Emma didn’t flood his mind. Emma, naked and sweaty.

“This could cause an international incident,” Pawlowski taunted, his voice a whisper. “It could make Poland a very unfriendly place for American multinationals.”

Focus. He knows nothing. This was bad, but he could find a way out, if he kept his cool. Pawlowski probably faked the photos. Doctored them on his computer.

He reopened his eyes.Pawlowski’s leer hovered, disembodied, too close. “CIA’s not doing

industrial espionage these days, is it?”“Don’t be ridiculous.” Usher turned his back and walked away. “Does seem farfetched.” He stayed on his Usher’s tail. “Do you

know what Germans do to polluters, Mike?” he asked. “Hope you like Berlin.”

Usher increased his stride.Pawlowski’s voice got louder. “We’re talking serious jail time. Five

years in Moabit Prison. Long enough for your lovely Emma to find herself another man, for your kids to find a new father, and for your mother to sew you a matching bedspread and curtains to homey up your cell. Think of it, five years in a cell the size of a New York City bathroom.”

Usher reached his car, unlocked the door, and climbed in. Odious little creep was power mad. He had nothing to connect him to the barrels. Only a note from a library computer telling him to look around Meitner’s Red Eagle Landfill.

“No cable TV. Only broadcast,” Pawlowski kept the car door open. “Your German will get very, very good before they decide you’ve been rehabilitated.” He slammed the door shut.

Wheels screamed, as Usher whipped out of parking spot.Pawlowski sprang out of the way and laughed. “Hey, what’s your

hurry? They’ve got great restaurants here in the Czech Republic. Let me buy you lunch, as thanks for the consulting. I couldn’t have done it without you, Mike. Bread dumplings sound good?”

42

Usher found first gear but popped the clutch. He recranked the ignition.

“Hey, you all have a safe trip back to Berlin, won’t you? “ The leer returned. “And say ‘hi’ to the Mrs. from me.” He laughed a hyena laugh and pounded the car’s roof with his fists.

Damn that Filshin. No wonder no one wanted to do business with the Russians. They couldn’t do anything right.

He patted the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. No. He wouldn’t let the little turd get to him. He reached for the nicotine gum in the ashtray instead.

He would clean up this mess, but first he had to cover his trail. What if Pawlowski tipped the police, or worse, the FBI, before he got back to Berlin?

Think, Michael, think. There was nothing on the office computer, was there? No, his executive assistant needed access. He had encryption at home, black market, from a kid in Norway. NSA could crack it, but the FBI couldn’t have a look-see without permission. Could documents there connect him to Filshin? Something from the job they met on, the decontamination of a Russian army base in Georgia? Maybe. But so what? So they worked together. Filshin wasn’t stupid enough to go to the police. Not with a wife and four kids.

He would ride this out. Poland was a temporary setback. The big, blue, globalized world was filled with opportunities. But first he would deal with Pawlowski. That snake wouldn’t get away with this. Meitner-Poland, or RGB International, or whoever the hell he was working with, should have known better than to do business with that worm.

Pawlowski’s perfect sparkling white teeth menaced him through the growing dark and rain all the way back to Berlin. Every time he drove under a street lamp on that long, long journey he saw those teeth reflected in the windshield. Brilliant. Glowing whitely. Gnashing. Like a nightmare from that nutso Czech writer. What was his name? Kafka. Yeah, that was it. Usher wished he had punched in those beautiful white teeth while he had the chance.

That missing castor train was turning into a stroke of luck. If Pawlowski was involved, and the police arrested him… no one would believe a word he said.

4 Berlin

RAY BLISS’ MOBILE BLIPPED with a text message to come upstairs to FBI Liaison Mackenzie Kilbane’s office asap.

Minutes later, a flourish of Mackenzie’s arm waved him to the chair next to Laura Murphy while she finished her phone call.

She hung up and spoke. “London police have found a gym bag containing an explosive device that may be connected to the train hijacking.

“A security guard at New Wembley Stadium spotted it lying on the soccer field in the pouring rain and called it in because of its similarity to the backpack train bombs in Madrid. The Brits say it’s an RDD, a radiological dispersion device.”

“A dirty bomb?” Murphy asked.“Yes. But lucky for us, it didn’t have a triggering device.”“Even without a trigger, an RDD is scary,” Bliss said. “Was it spiked

with plutonium from the train?” “No. Cesium chloride from a radiation therapy machine, like in those

junkyard poisonings in Mexico.”“Thank god, it’s not connected to our train.”“I’m afraid it is. There was a note. ‘The train for what is ours.’”“Our train? The missing castor train?” Murphy asked. “It makes sense,” Mackenzie answered.“Why leave a note in London?” Bliss asked.“Because the train originated in England? Or maybe the hijackers are

based there,” Mackenzie said. “Who knows? Criminals don’t always play with a full deck.”

“You’ve got that right,” Laura Murphy said. “DoD and DoE have gone over the castor train specs. Even Livermore would have trouble extracting the plutonium.”

“But it is possible,” Bliss said.

“Maybe. But not without a fully equipped lab that includes cranes and radiation shielding. The hijackers will be downed by radiation poisoning long before they can arm a bomb. They won’t even last as long as that Litvinenko guy in London.”

“The train for what is ours… Any idea what ‘ours’ could be?” Bliss asked.

“Could it refer to the old pre-WWII boundaries?” Murphy said. “The train disappeared in Poland, and a huge chunk of Poland was given to the Soviet Union.”

“After seventy years?” Mackenzie said. “Not likely.” “Why should Polish land remain in Russian hands decades after the

dissolution of the Soviet Union? And with the rise in Polish nationalism…”

“We need to snatch Pawlowski and beat the train’s location out of him,” Bliss said. “An RDD in London is a game changer. We can make it look like an attack by a rival criminal gang. Once we have a confession, even the Eurocrats will understand how necessary it was.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Murphy said. “But there’s a slight problem…”

“No one knows where he is,” Mackenzie finished. “We had him going south, in the direction of the Czech Republic, then poof. He shook our tail.”

Bliss didn’t want to hear it, but Murphy said it anyway. “We need Jordan more than ever now. We have to lure him out into the open. “Get her ready, Bliss.”

The meeting ended, and Bliss had to do what he hated the most… play the snake in the Garden of Eden.

5 Lakewood, Ohio

GENNADY FILSHIN SAT ON AN ALUMINUM BENCH in Lakewood High School’s warm pool building. Profligate, this keeping the water so warm, but offering his children such luxury made him happy.

His wife Natasha, and Alexander, their toddler son, were singing ‘motorboat’, a song the American high schoolers running the class had taught them. Mother and son giggled and put their chins in the water to blow bubbles.

He wondered at the American children who had to be coaxed into the water by their parents. If the children of this suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio couldn’t appreciate such prosperity, he knew the children of Kiev could. Unbelievable, how different this pool was from the crumbling concrete cold-water monster where he had learned to swim.

The lives of these children were filled with so much good. They never questioned their right to such riches. He wondered, if he should he be happy that his own children were growing up expecting such wealth, or sad that they would never really appreciate it.

The main pool was almost Olympic-sized and steel-sided. Four sets of steel ladders for the kids to climb out on and not a speck of rust anywhere. Diving boards and platforms stood unused at a separate pool. Computerized scoreboards lined the walls opposite a huge spectator gallery that he had never seen filled to capacity.

He breathed in moist, chlorine-tinged air and decided he should be happy. How could such wealth be wrong when it was lavished on children?

“Look, Papa,” his wife squealed and laughed. “Look, Sasha is swimming.” The boy proudly made motorboat sounds, sputtered, and failed to reach his mother’s arms, but by the time she fished him out, he was laughing again.

Yes, happy, and proud that one of his own babies would grow up expecting the world’s riches to be laid at his feet.

Natasha looked like a young girl playing in the water, not like the mother of four, with three almost-grown children. Alexander, Sasha, was the happiest of all their children. Their love child, conceived as the American dream finally took root in Filshin’s little immigrant family. Alexander was their America baby. Their gift to this new country. Symbol of everything good that had happened to them here.

America had been good to all his children. His daughters were graduate students in piano and violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music and would become music teachers, perhaps even performers. The youngest still played viola in the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra where world-famous conductors, like Ya Ya Ling and Kurt Masur sometimes spent a Saturday afternoon making music with the young people.

His other son, Misha, was also making the most of the opportunities offered by his adopted homeland. He was enrolled in pre-med at Case Western Reserve University. Filshin’s own mother had been a doctor. If she could have seen the tools this new doctor would have available to him, she too would have pronounced such riches good.

As accomplished as their children were, he and Natasha hadn’t done badly either. Natasha, a programmer for a big Cleveland bank, finally had work that paid her fairly, according to her ability and her disciplined work habits. No more convoluted Bolshevism. ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ sounded good on paper, but in the rapidly privatizing real world back home, the nomenklatura, the ex-KGB and the former Communist party officials always ended up needing so much more than the rest of the Russian people.

Times had been hard in Russia, but Americans had helped. Filshin had hooked up with a team of engineering consultants from Blue Sky who were helping the Russian Army and the Georgian Ministry of the Environment clear away orphan radiation sources, lost or forgotten nuclear materials, abandoned near former Soviet military bases.

Scientists and engineers in Russia were a dime a dozen. What had set Filshin apart were his English and his connections with former party aparatchniks. The job itself had been mostly handholding. Sitting in

ASTRID JULIAN

meetings assuring the Americans that work would be done to their specifications. No off-spec Russian ingenuity. The Americans had liked that. Russian engineers, used to inadequate funding and outdated equipment, often made do with shortcuts that Americans felt compromised quality.

Filshin had learned what they required, and he had made it so. OJT… On the Job Training, the Americans called it. Filshin called it JPL… Just Plain Lucky… Lucky to meet the right people in the right place at the right time. Blue Sky management saw that he was a quick study, efficiently adapting their amazing environmental technologies for use by Russian subcontractors.

In the west, orphan radiation sources, abandoned x-ray machines, and oil drilling equipment were confined to special landfills. But Stalin, in his hurry to defeat the US, had given little thought to the disposal of radioactive materials. They were useless for creating nuclear bombs and Soviet restrictions on travel kept people from accidentally wandering into danger. With the breakup of the Soviet Union all that changed. Hundreds of radioactive caches dotted the countryside. From abandoned piles of radium-emitting night vision gun sights to single radiation sources buried under a soccer field or thrown into forests on the edge of nowhere, they needed to be found and cleaned up.

Power sources were the most dangerous. The Soviets had used the heat from radioactive decay to power radio communications on Stalin-era construction projects. No one knew where they all were, but their high temperature, in excess of 400º C, kept most people away. Smaller radiation sources were harder to contain. Cesium pellets were used as nifty hand warmers in the coat pockets of border guards. Metallic devices were scavenged and sold as scrap.

Filshin believed in the work and he liked the American scientists and engineers helping to clean up the mess. It had taken courage to quit a secure Russian government job to become a freelance engineer, but he never regretted the move. Not until he worked for Michael Usher.

It took less than a week to develop an active dislike of the man.Coworkers claimed Usher worked for the CIA. He never learned if

that was true, but if he hadn’t already known from working with the Blue

48

Sky engineers that all Americans weren’t like Usher, he would never have brought his family here. Better they should starve in Russia.

He wondered if Usher cared about anything besides money? Had he never opened a novel? Read a story by Flaubert or Tolstoy? A Goethe poem? Or attended a classical concert or an opera where Blue Sky wasn’t a corporate sponsor?

Sometimes Filshin felt like Faust in the Goethe play. In his hurry to provide his family with the riches America had to offer, Filshin had made a deal with the devil and his name was Michael Usher.

Usher had arrived in Georgia muttering about inadequate Russian security. The Russians had tried to explain how the Russian Army kept civilians out, but Usher hadn’t listened. To him it made no difference that the radiation sources they dealt with couldn’t be used to build weapons. Day and night he complained about security, saying they should hire specialists. He knew somebody at KBR or at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Because of Filshin’s knowledge of English, he was assigned to address the man’s concerns. They got on well enough, and Usher promised him a permanent job with Blue Sky once he learned how Americans did things. He had tempted him. Usher told him he could fix the paperwork. Get him a guest worker visa or whatever they called it, so Filshin’s family could live in America while he worked in Georgia. “You scratch my back, Gennady, and I’ll scratch yours. That’s how things are done back home.”

In spite of his personal dislike of the man, Filshin had said, yes, and he never regretted it, until like Faust’s devil, Usher called, waking Filshin from his American dream and demanding payment.

He had a job for Filshin. Undercover, but sponsored by the CIA. Filshin was to handle it alone, hiring local talent with money funneled through a Cayman Islands account. There would be no official help from the Americans if he were caught.

By then Filshin had been in the US long enough to know Americans respected the law. What Usher was proposing was illegal. Filshin said, no. Two months later Usher found out that Natasha’s Latvian father had applied for a visa to immigrate to the US. If Filshin didn’t do the job, Usher would give American Consular officers and Russian authorities

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evidence from American-held Nazi archives showing Natasha’s father had been a German collaborator. That meant he wouldn’t be able to come to America or remain in Kiev.

Filshin knew it couldn’t be true. His father-in-law had been seventeen when the war ended. No one would believe he had been a collaborator, would they? Were people that gullible?

Yes. He had read of cases where both Americans and Russians used faked documents to deport or imprison people. By the time the fakery was exposed, his father-in-law could be dead.

The devil had won.But Filshin wasn’t about to risk his own life getting Usher’s ‘job’

done. He had four children, a wife, and a father-in-law to support, and criminals in eastern Europe had organized and become even more dangerous since his emigration.

He knew some quiet, respectable Russians who needed money. They had a cousin on a Russian freighter that sometimes docked in Cleveland. Losing some paperwork, removing a few radioactive waste barrels from a Blue Sky storage site and repainting them to look like they came from an eastern European power plant wasn’t difficult.

He rented a fishing boat and helped load the barrels onto the freighter in the middle of Lake Erie himself. There, JPL, Just Plain Lucky came to his rescue again. Homeland Security checked for radiation on ships entering the US, but rarely checked those sailing out down the St. Lawrence Seaway. If inspectors armed with radiation detectors later boarded her in the Atlantic or in the Baltic Sea, the ship’s manifest, a cargo of x-ray machines bound for St. Petersburg, would provide ample cover. Once the barrels were in Russia, it was even easier. He hadn’t needed to go there at all.

He had also hired a headhunter to find another job. Michael Usher could find someone else to carry out his dirty work. Filshin wasn’t Blue Sky executive material after all.

The laughter of happy children, the warm air, and the evening sunshine streaming through the pool’s skylight conspired to put him to sleep. He dreamed of wading upstream through the Inguri River in Georgia. He followed warm water to a radioactive thermocouple that had

50

set the river on fire, only now he was standing on a dock along the burning Cuyahoga River and his own personal devil, Michael Usher, was beckoning him onto a powerboat.

A cool draft of air woke him. Someone had opened a door and his beeper was vibrating.

Cold Russian fatalism crawled up his back like a snake.He didn’t need to see the Berlin area code to know it was Michael

Usher calling from a pay phone at the other end of the city from his apartment. Filshin had given him his barrels in a German-owned landfill in the middle of Poland. What could he want now?

He waved to his wife. “I’ve got to go,” he told her in Russian. “Business. Here are the car keys.” He waved them at her and placed them on her towel. “I’ll get a cab.”

The devil had won. He hoped to hell he could keep Natasha from ever meeting him in person. That was the only reason he was returning the call.

He walked to the pay phone at the front of the high school building where Natasha wouldn’t spot him on her way out to the parking lot.

He heard traffic in the background when Usher answered. He glanced at his watch. Midnight in Berlin.

“What were you thinking?” Usher said.“I am doing dirty work for you,” Filshin told him. “Now be leaving

me alone. I am looking for work with new company. Blue Sky and me isn’t working out. Is not good fit.”

“ ‘Is not good fit!’ Have you gone crazy?”“I was telling you, would be bad to be doing this thing.”“Bad? I’ll give you bad! You didn’t do the job right, you jerkoff. A

Polish official found the barrels. He’s threatening to expose us.”“Not ‘us’, Mr. Usher. He threatens you and company Filshin will not

be working for much longer. Everything you are doing, you are making worse. Worse for me. Worse for you. Worse for Poland. Worse for America.”

“Shut up and listen, you fuckwad. There’s a package on its way to you. With pictures and instructions. You caused this problem. You’re going clean it up by eliminating that trouble-making Pollack.”

Did Usher expect him to murder someone now?

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“It’s no more than he deserves,” Usher said. “If you want to be kil l ing someone, go and kill him yourself, Mr.

Usher.”“You’re forgetting Natasha’s father. You know what’s lying on my

desk?”“So what? He was boy. Only seventeen.”“The Justice Department has deported people that were only sixteen.

What do you think the Russians will do when they see the papers? Or the Ukies for that matter?”

Who knew? Technically Natasha’s father was Latvian, but he had left Latvia so long ago, he only spoke Russian. In 1948 he was declared an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia. He didn’t have many friends among Kiev’s Russians, nor its Ukrainians. Technically even Natasha, who had been born in Siberia years later, was also ‘an enemy of the Russian people’. Her family had needed decades to quasi-rehabilitate themselves and get permission to move to Kiev.

“They will see is forgery.” Filshin bluffed. “They are not being so naïve like Americans, paying thousands for fake Nazi garbage.”

“Why don’t I call your wife and see how she feels about it? I wonder…will Natasha agree with your decision?”

Filshin could have killed Usher then. Natasha wouldn’t want to take any chances with her father. Filshin couldn’t put her in such a position.

“No. Don’t call. I will be taking care of problem.”“Yourself. No proxies this time. Do the job right, and do it yourself.

He’s in Prague. Be there by the end of the week. I’ll set it up. I don’t want him leaving Prague again.”

What had he expected? When you did business with the devil, the deal didn’t end with a friendly acquisition or merger.

In Russia Filshin had done what he had to to survive, no matter how much he had hated it. In Cleveland he had been able to get back to that other JPL, Just Plain Living. Or so he thought. He saw now, he was still trapped. If Usher went down, he would take Filshin with him.

And Natasha would file for divorce. She wouldn’t stand for anything illegal tainting their perfect new life

in America.

52

What if Usher pressured her to do something illegal?He couldn’t let him get any closer to his family, Filshin decided.

Even if it meant divorce, the best way to keep Natasha safe was to tell her the truth. She needed to know what a snake Usher was and stay away. He would tell her about his deal with the devil and that would give her time to warn her father. Natasha’s sister was living in Toronto and that was only a five hour drive from Cleveland. If her father moved there, Usher’s threat would be neutralized.

He walked back through the school building and waited at the pool entrance for the swimming lesson to end.

6 Berlin

THE SMS TEXT FROM RAY BLISS asked Fritzi Jordan to meet him at the Café Nicolai on the Gendarmenmarkt. It was such a short walk away from the university, she wondered why had she never noticed the place before.

A friendly waiter in white shirt and black pants bowed to them, then led the way past a pianist playing understated Mozart, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with worn leather books, and an artsy crowd dressed in black evening wear.

“One of my favorite places,” Bliss said, as they reached a quiet corner table with a white tablecloth and single apricot-colored rose in a bud vase. He ordered cappuccinos, then waved his smartphone at the spiral staircase leading up to the second floor. An app read their GPS location and displayed historical sketches and prewar photos of the Café Nicolai. A second app opened a virtual storefront showing photos of the rare books the café’s owner was selling up in the second story loft.

“Can’t believe Schultzi has never dragged you in here,” Bliss said as he plucked a book from the shelf behind his chair, and moved the rose aside. “Look at this.”

Candlelight illuminated a dusty volume by Hermann Schreiber called, The Germans and the East. He leafed through the pages pointing out photos of forgotten cities from a time before world wars; Königsberg, Danzig, Breslau; cities that didn’t exist on modern maps.

She looked up at him. Why was he showing her this?“This book could help you with your assignment for Schultzi,” he

told her.He asked for names of scientists from those old cities, and, as she

spoke, turned the pages to the cities where they had been born, or had studied, or had taught. He did it quickly. So quickly that, she thought for an absurd moment, he must have rehearsed for their meeting.

Ridiculous, she told herself. Schutzi was right. She needed friends her own age. That would banish old NSA paranoias once and for all.

“So what will you write? What’s the connection between Napoléon and science?” Bliss asked.

She stared at his hands, unwilling to speak.He waited.Could he really be interested? “Something generic,” she said.

“Maybe how scient ific thought fractured along national boundaries after Na-poléon.”

She looked up into his eyes, blue, as a sunny summer sky. Could he actually be interested?

She continued, “The loss of Latin, which had been the common European language for sharing scientific ideas, led to needless duplication of work. I’m thinking of using the discovery of oxygen as an example. The Swedes say it was Scheele; the French, Lavoisier; the British and Americans, Priestley.”

His smile was startlingly perfect in its proportions. “And now we’re in an era where one language, English, dominates once again,” he said. “How helpful to scientific progress.”

Was that sarcasm? Did he actually care?“Have you ever thought about what we lose by making English the

world language and American the world culture?” he asked. “Or how our thoughts in America and Canada and the UK are limited by our laziness in learning foreign languages?”

She was amazed. Could this man with his perfect smile really share her interests? She let his words caress and sipped coffee.

“If we speak only English, we only ever see the world through the prejudices of our own culture,” he told her, then stopped talking. Had he sensed he was revealing to much, too soon?

He redirected the conversation, told her about finding the café, gossiped about its regular patrons, the elegant old ladies at the window table. Would the wind outside blow away their enormous hats? Where can you buy a hat like that anyway?

He pulled another book from the shelf; a Berlin travel guide containing an article he had written, and her last suspicions melted away. His reasons for being interested in those old cities and in the Café

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Nicolai were genuine. They had nothing to do with her or the NSA. He made his living telling people about interesting tourist sites.

He smiled his beautiful smile while she read and admired.His smile was almost as beautiful as her Polish angel’s had been in

those long ago days before the Fall. He had been studying Sports Management and was running, always

running, or working out with weights, or sparring. They met at a Washington cocktail party that she hadn’t wanted to attend, but her NSA boss had insisted on.

Brief flirtations on the Mall after work had followed; then wonderful Sunday afternoons antiquing in Virginia hamlets.

How she had loved hearing the soft sibilant sounds of his Polish when he talked to his friends on the phone.

He once hopped over a wall into a Virginia churchyard and picked a ridiculously large bouquet of lilacs, which he presented to her with a European flourish and bow just as the rectory door opened.

She had died a thousand deaths. But he calmly stuffed the bouquet under his sweatshirt and turned to wish the rector good morning. The rector never commented on his lumpy belly, and forever after she couldn’t smell lilacs without thinking of him. How beautiful his body had been, stretched out on a grassy riverbank, sprinkled with the four-petaled lilac florets left behind by the bouquet.

His body, his mathematics unique to him had overwhelmed her. Too much. Too soon. Her mind hadn’t been able to stop writing equations to describe the curves in his forearm, the slope of his nose, the angle where his earlobe touched his cheek. Beautiful Polish math. Mandelbrot fractal equations for the beautiful blonde Polish curls of his hair, as he lay dreaming and she lay watching.

Did he have any idea what their relationship had cost her? Sleeping with a Pole, a ‘foreign national’? For two days after having been ‘allowed to resign,’ she wondered what he would do when she told him. Then Michael Usher showed her the video of the Swedish boxer, and it was over.

She fled Washington and her Polish angel.

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“You all right?” Bliss’ question startled her. “You were in La-la-land.”

“Sorry. Bad habit.” He was holding her hand. She jerked it away.“No, no… My fault,” he said, staring at his empty hand, as if he felt

sorry for it. “I was boring you with my travelogue. Pitching the café, as if I were trying to sell you a magazine article.”

He looked up into her eyes, and his smile was back. “One of my New York editors has been bugging me for new material for a GPS app, a walking tour through Berlin. Augmented reality is all the rage when it comes to digital add-ons for travel guides. Could you do me a favor?”

“What?” she asked warily.“I’ve sold him on a science tour. First Berlin, then all the world’s

great science cities. Who was living where, when they worked on whatever it was that made them famous. My publisher thinks adding a virtual tour for smartphones could push my sales high enough that I could actually live on my writing income.

“Here in Berlin, I thought I’d do an Einstein tour. Show where he worked… where he played his violin. Maybe add a picture of his villa, if it’s still standing, or where he liked to eat lunch.

“You’re a mathematician as well as a historian, aren’t you, Fritzi?”How did he know that? Had he eavesdropped on her conversations

with Schultzi?“I’d like to add a few mathematicians to the mix and was hoping you

could give me some tips.” Blue eyes pleaded. Too much. Too soon.Schultzi was wrong. She wasn’t ready for this. “You should ask

Professor Schultz.” she said. “He has lived in Berlin all his life.”Bliss wouldn’t be put off. “I heard Leonhard Euler lived here.”“Only a year. He didn’t get along with old Fritz.”“Not many people did. Frederick the Great would have hated this

coffee shop. All these young Germans starting their day with coffee instead of good old-fashioned beer soup.”

His perfect smile resurfaced. “Euler’s mathematics were probably beyond the old guy, and it pissed him off.”

Fritzi couldn’t help laughing. How did Bliss make himself so easy to talk to? And why was he doing it, her old NSA paranoia wondered.

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“Don’t waste your time,” she told him, balling up her napkin in stuffing it into her empty coffee cup. “The old places of mathematics don’t exist anymore. What the British and Americans didn’t bomb to smithereens, the Russians blew up to make room for cinder block housing.”

Bliss shrugged. “The Russians did unveil a statue of Immanuel Kant in Kaliningrad a few years back. Who knows what else they’ve rebuilt?”

He signaled the waiter for two more coffees and talked about his work… about writing assignments for the American Embassy. Life as a writer meant scrambling after any job you could get, and if you had to travel to Turkey, to Kazakhstan, or to Iraq, well, the American government paid better than most. Then he spoke about his past; how he wound up in European Studies at American University because of his last name. He had wanted to learn how his family could be German when his grandparents were from Odessa.

That had confused her as a child too, she admitted. Her grandmother had only ever spoken about Deutsch-Krone and Breslau, and Fritzi wondered, why she couldn’t find them in her high school atlas. Her grandmother had lived on a farm near Wałcz until her husband moved the family to Wrocław, which back then had been called Breslau.

The conversation drifted back to the Schreiber book, to Torún, the former free city of Thorn, Copernicus’ birthplace, and then to Wałcz, where Weierstrass had served ten years in math purgatory as an elementary school teacher before he moved to Berlin.

“Ever been back there?”“No time.”“I’ve never been to Odessa either,” Bliss said.

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7 Prague

SOMEONE WAS BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Volvo parked down the street from the pharmacy known as the Faust House.

Gennady Filshin wished it were Michael Usher; carnivore capitalist extraordinaire. An American wolf in a business suit, waiting for Filshin’s improvised crime gang to deliver his prey to the window of his luxury car, just as if he were waiting for a triple espresso at a drive-in Starbucks back in Washington.

Watching the action unfold from inside a car would be Usher’s style. Filshin could even imagine him driving that ugly metal box.

When it came to cars, the man knew nothing. All that mattered was showing the world, especially here in the former communist countries, that he was well-heeled enough to drive the most expensive thing on the road. He even called his cars ‘bait’, teasing his prey, eastern European businessmen, by flaunting America’s wealth. ‘Let them see what happens when you make deals with the world’s strongest economy, Gennady.’ Usher didn’t even own the cars. He leased them for as much as some people back in Cleveland, Ohio paid on their monthly mortgage.

Filshin had enjoyed exasperating him by calling it showing off and just plain stupid, which invariably forced Usher to retreat into his standard rant on how the West worked, ‘It’s good for business, Gennady’.

Now what was good for business had taken Usher from driving ugly cars around Europe to ordering people killed.

If only the man in the Volvo were Usher. Then Filshin could take the whole B-roll melodrama his life had turned into and dump into in his lap where it belonged. But Michael B. Usher wouldn’t be foolish enough to risk his own skin by appearing in Prague at the exact time he had ordered Filshin to do this thing.

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A big black poodle, its distractedowner reading the newspaper as he walked, stopped to sniff at the Volvo and urinated on a tire.

Filshin allowed himself a grin. Mephistopheles had appeared to Faust as a poodle. Perhaps Usher was here, after all. Disguised as a black poodle to remind him of his bargain. In the weird cloud-filtered orange evening sunlight the poodle’s eyes even glowed green, just as they had in the medieval Faust story.

He watched the dog pee. No, it was just an ordinary dog, and he was being foolish. But he couldn’t keep the chords of Gounod’s Faust from playing in his head. Heralding the evil to come.

Even the fall sky above looked like an opera set. The top edges of the cumulus thunderclouds were lined by golden orange light. Their bottoms, dark grey and heavy as lead, seemed undecided about whether to unleash a torrent, or to let the sun’s rays shine onto Prague’s cobbled streets.

Filshin sat ‘reading’ on a bench across the street from the pharmacy where Usher had arranged the hit on Pawlowski.

Pretending his reading was boring him, he laid down the DK guide to Prague, and watched the people walk by.

He hated this waiting, this having to be here, but he couldn’t trust his men to do this alone.

He had planned everything as well as could be done on short notice. An old personnel file from his time as a Blue Sky manager in Georgia had helped him to find the men… people he had rejected three years before.

The hiring process for the Filshin gang had veered between farce and Blue Sky Management Training 101 “How-Not-to-Hire” war story. In Georgia he had hoped he was hiring mere down-and-outers and not criminals. This time he rode the edge, hoping his new hires would step over the line, yet remain under his control. His men scared him. But if they did exactly as they were told, he might just pull this off without anyone getting hurt.

Because of time constraints, Usher had finessed the operational details. ‘A pharmacy will be perfect for this, Gennady. It will look like Pawlowski got in the way of a drug heist. End of story, problem solved.’

60

The pharmacy looked respectable enough. Damn that guidebook. Calling it the ‘Faust House’ was making him morose.

Filshin, as he assembled his team, had kept asking himself, why hadn’t Usher chosen a bank? Or a gas station where they could just drive by, shoot Pawlowski, and jump back onto the main road? Why this old building in the middle of Old Town with its winding cobble-stoned streets? Had Usher wanted to add another legend to the pharmacy’s chequered past? Christ, what was he? A criminal who plotted out his crimes like high art? It would have been funny in the cinema, but not in the here and now. Besides, he doubted Usher even knew who Faust was. If it wasn’t something he could earn money from, he wouldn’t care about the history of Prague, nor how the Faust House got its name.

The building’s supernatural history swirled through Filshin’s brain like Gounod’s melody.

You’re an engineer, he told himself. Think science. Science is the antidote for superstition and jitters.

During the Middle Ages people too lazy to study science often accused wise old women and men, the midwives, doctors and pharmacists who studied healing plants of being in league with the devil. Illness was God’s punishment for an intemperate life. Knowledge must be evil, they argued. If the knowledge came from God, we would all be born with it. Man had no business interfering.

In this new century the devil had been relegated to fairy tale; belief supplanted by science. Science had battled for centuries to rid itself of superstition, and for the most part it had won.

In the past alchemist pseudoscientists had become rich, right here in Prague, by claiming that belief (and a bit of funding) would let them change worthless metals into gold.

Belief was still letting people get duped.Wasn’t that the real magic behind Usher’s success? No wasted years

of studying chemical engineering, or developing new pharmaceuticals, just a little belief in the power of an expensive suit and a fancy car.

The Faust Pharmacy looked like any other old building in Prague’s Old Town, but science and belief had fought spectacular battles behind its thick walls.

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During the reign of Elizabeth I of England, the guidebook said, an earless English alchemist named Edward Kelly had lived there. Kelly had promised Prague’s Rudolf II that he would find the Philosopher’s Stone and make more gold than the city could ever spend. Years of funding fruitless ‘experiments’ later, Rudolf was told by a traveling musician that the cutting off ears was an English punishment for fraud.

After finding Kelly a suitable retirement home in the Karlstein Castle dungeons, Rudolf began funding real, observation-based science, even bringing Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to his court. Their predictions of planetary position were published by Rudolf in the Tabulae Rudolphinae, copies of which were brought to England and used by Isaac Newton to develop his theory of gravitation.

Stopping Edward Kelly had been simple compared to stopping Michael B. Usher.

Leaking news of the Blue Sky barrels to the press wouldn’t work. Nothing tied Usher to the barrels, and something could point at Filshin. But Usher had to let his guard down sometime. Filshin would find something to warn the world… peeing poodles, missing ears, an article in the New York Times.

He wished the job was over, that he was back in Cleveland with Natasha sending out résumés and setting up interviews.

He wished he had never heard of Blue Sky or Michael Usher, but now he had to do this thing. If Usher asked someone else, one of his CIA friends, or an independent contractor, a mercenary who didn’t ask questions like a Russian soldier desperate for back wages, then Pawlowski really would die.

Natasha had decided he must go to Prague and do what he could to save the man. Let Usher think Pawlowski dead until they found a way out of their mess and could release him again.

If Usher wanted to play cowboy, Natasha had said, then someone had to be the Indian and lie down and pretend to die. That was the way Americans played the game.

How well she had adapted to their new homeland. While Filshin had spent days being confused, she just ‘got it’.

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“If you don’t agree to do this thing, Jenye, he will find someone else,” she had whispered late into the night, trying not to wake their children. The frightened tears beading on her eyelashes and rolling down her cheeks trapped sparkles from the moonlight.

“Perhaps the police are different here. Perhaps we should go to them,” she suggested. But that too was frightening. The maze of competing jurisdictions was bewildering; the sheriffs, the city police, the FBI, the State Department, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, Usher’s bosses at the CIA, or whoever he worked for now. How could Filshin know where to go, or who to trust? What would happen to the children if he guessed wrong? Would they have to go back to Russia before the girls finished their university degrees?

Only Natasha had seen through the confusion to the real problem. If Filshin didn’t go, Usher would hire someone else.

Everything would work out, Filshin had reassured her. It had been a long time since his army days, but he was still fit, and if he wasn’t worried, she shouldn’t be either.

The lie had made her laugh, so he laughed too. Then they made love like teenagers, like in the old days.

He had to do this. For his family, and for the man named Pawlowski.He didn’t dare take a chance on the new crop of young east

European hoodlums. They followed no rules. But his own hand-picked crew was every bit as unsavory as Edward Kelly. Some spoke no Russian, but they all had a few words of mangled English. Caspar, the German, was the only young one. The others were as old as Filshin himself. None were nice.

Popov, the bald-headed Russian, creeped him out the most, with his grinning, and his trying to sell Filshin red mercury, the oldest con in the book. Who did he think he was talking to? Just because Filshin had taken a job in the west, it didn’t mean he had left his brains behind. Popov was in his early fifties and hadn’t quite figured out that the New World Order had left Russia somewhere near the bottom. Popov ranted incessantly about well-funded, but unproductive American science and the superiority of Russian ingenuity. Funny, how he never exhibited any. It had escaped his notice that even criminal organizations needed

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occasional innovation, something beyond muscle, and old Soviet-style nomenklatura connections for their scams to fly.

“We’ll be partners, see? With your connections in America we’ll make a fortune,” Popov said, fishing for his smokes with prison-tattooed fingers. His yellow teeth slipped from view for a second then reappeared as his right hand, missing its index and middle fingers, lifted yet another fat brown cigarette to his wide smiling mouth and inhaled.

Right, Filshin thought, Russian scientific ingenuity was so superior that loggers in the Siberian gulag, where Moscow sent criminals like Popov, still lost fingers to frostbite. Even thieves deserved better.

Popov held his papirossa between his ring and little finger and used his thumb to flick the ashes. He left a trail on the hotel room carpet, as the Filshin gang made its plans. His rap was nonstop, like his grin. We Russians can do so much more with all that money. Russian scientists created red mercury with next to nothing, and look at what a marvel that is. Not only can red mercury initiate nuclear fission in a plutonium bomb the size of a grapefruit, but word on the street is, it can speed up supercomputer processors, increase the precision of missile guidance systems, improve aerial radar, and cool off atomic reactors.

Popov, the car thief, bragged about red mercury as only someone totally ignorant of the sciences could. Like an alchemist of old Prague boasting about turning lead into gold, he swore that red mercury could impregnate photocopied euros with authenticating watermarks. All for the bargain price of only $375,000 a kilo. Did he forget he was speaking to a fellow Russian?

Short, swarthy Mario, was a Camorristi on the lam since a Naples crackdown on the gangs that controlled the ciy’s garbage collection. He understood barely enough Russian to buy cigarettes, but his English wasn’t bad. With his American connections, wealthy cousins in New Jersey and New York, Mario would have made a better target for Popov, but he wasn’t buying either.

Caspar, tall and blonde like a Russian, was an ethnic German who spoke no German. Stalin had deported his great-grandparents from their village along the Volga to Kazakhstan. Inherited German citizenship gave him the much-coveted legal status to work in the EU, but Caspar

64

lacked the education for anything other than manual labor. Deciding he was meant for better things than washing dishes, he turned to the underground economy and offered his services to the highest bidder, progressing from sex work on the streets of Hamburg, to drug pushing in Dublin. He had just finished smuggling two truckloads of semiautomatic rifles no longer needed by the Real IRA into Chechnya and was between jobs when Mario brought him to meet Filshin. Caspar’s charm and pleasant personality, legacies of his years in Ireland, unnerved Filshin. It was hard to keep himself from thinking about how well the very handsome Caspar would get along with his oldest daughter, who had a reputation for being difficult.

The only man Filshin could trust was Bogosian, the blue-eyed Armenian. Short, lean, and in his early forties, he had been a contractor who had managed a Blue Sky team in Georgia. Bogosian was perpetually broke, but always for the best of reasons. Most recently because he had used his Blue Sky paycheck to buy hepatitis serum to inoculate babies at the Azerbaijani government clinic in Baku. An Armenian saving Azeri babies because he had once dated an Azeri nurse who told him about the high infection rate in Azeri clinics; there was a lot to like about Bogosian. He made Filshin feel guilty for not sending money to fix that crumbling mess of a swimming pool in Kiev. Bogosian questioned what they were about to do, but he still hoped for a salaried position at Blue Sky, and Filshin let him believe this job was his ticket to America.

The sun disappeared behind clouds that threatened rain. Customers leaving the Faust House Pharmacy drew their jackets closed and pulled on gloves.

The Faust House was neither suspicious nor mysterious, he told himself. It was an ordinary pharmacy in an old building, The red cross hanging above the door was a signal that here scientific knowledge had banished superstition.

A blonde-haired man stood at the pharmacy door. Pawlowski?Filshin took a photograph from his coat pocket. Yes.The man undid the white silk scarf hanging around his neck and

pulled it off. That was the sign.Filshin tensed and speed-dialed his cell. He’s here, he texted.

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Fifteen minutes to make the snatch. In a half an hour it would all be over.

Pawlowski stuffed his scarf into a pocket and went inside.Filshin walked to the curb, waited for a break in traffic, and

followed. Inside, dark wood apothecary pigeonholes transmuted EU modernity

into Austro-Hungarian quaintness. How many customer hands had it taken to smooth those dark brown countertop edges to beige, he wondered. The druggist stood behind the counter filling paper envelopes with pills, powders and teas, and chatted amiably.

The smell of herbal teas and soaps filled Filshin’s nostrils. A Cleveland drug store wouldn’t sell soap without plastic wrappers, and medicinal teas with their slim profit margins couldn’t be found in an American drugstore.

He felt as homesick as the American ex-pats riffling through the US candy display at the front of the shop, searching for a taste of home. What wouldn’t he give to be sharing a Malley’s chocolate shake with his America baby right now?

Filshin stayed by the window to watch the street.His team would enter from the back alley where their van was

parked.Pawlowski put a Sports Illustrated and a Snickers bar on the counter.“Děkuji,” the checkout girl said, and reached for his korunas with a

plump hand. Filshin watched the girl’s eyes fill with fear, as she looked over

Pawlowski’s shoulder.His team had arrived.He willed his heart to beat more slowly.You have no choice, Jenye. You have to do this thing.The girl stiffened, and Pawlowski whirled around to look at the back

door.

66

8 Prague

NIKOLA ALEXANDROVICH POPOV STEPPED INTO THE PHARMACY with his wool scarf pulled so high over his mouth and nose that it touched his bug-eyed sunglasses.

Customers stopped talking and froze. They stared at his big submachine gun.

Pumped up and in-charge. The power thrilled him.He felt the others slip through the doorway behind him, weapons

drawn. They positioned themselves around the pharmacy.Even Filshin, that pussy, had put down the bar of soap he had been

pretending to buy and reached inside his jacket for his sweet 9 mm Beretta. What a muppie! Should be against the law for middle-aged urban professionals to buy really sweet guns. Look at how he pointed his Beretta at the counter. Like it was a tire gauge for his Porsche!

The pharmacist dropped a glass beaker and lifted his hands in the air.A woman screamed. Filshin’s lame-ass, wobbly pistol pointing was working on the

amateurs, but Pawlowski was no fool. He had flattened himself against the wall in the space at the end of the magazine rack and was reaching into his jacket.

Popov put his papirossa between his teeth, raised the converted M1, and sprayed bullets at the shelves above Pawlowski’s head.

Glass exploded. Colored powders, pills and liquids splashed onto the pharmacist’s white coat. The screaming woman fell; ending her annoying noise. A man standing at the counter grabbed his leg and collapsed.

The pharmacist dove behind the ice cream freezer.Pawlowski’s hands came back out of his jacket empty and went over

his head“I said no one gets hurt!” Filshin yelled.

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Popov spat out his cigarette. “Collateral damage,” he said. Stupid fuck was going to get them caught, the way he was bending over the moaning man. He would live. The woman was already coughing up blood. Nothing Filshin did would save her.

He should have demanded for Filshin to give his money up front. Dumb fuck would have given it to him too. Then he could shoot Filshin and be done with him.

“Mario! Now! Let’s go!” Popov ordered.Caspar burst through the alley door behind Popov. “Politsiya!” he

shouted. Sirens. They were getting louder. A setup! And Filshin had fallen for

it.He could see the police cars through the pharmacy’s front window.

Czech police were shouting into megaphones.“Mario, Caspar, grab Pawlowski. Get him in the van.”Pawlowski heard his name and shrank deeper into the corner. Caspar tucked his gun in his waistband, yanked Pawlowski up and

pinned his arms from behind.Mario punched him in the stomach. “So you don’t get any ideas,” he

said, his face inches away from Pawlowski’s. The shiny steel barrel of his pistol dug into his temple. The skin bled.

Caspar pushed him from behind, but Pawlowski stood his ground.Mario’s pistol cracked against his jaw and blood bubbled out of his

mouth. “They won’t pay for damaged goods.” Filshin shouted.Pawlowski spat out a mouthful of blood and three teeth, and began

walking.

68

9 Prague

WITH THE YELLING, SCREAMING, SIRENS, AND MEGAPHONES, Filshin was surprised to hear the soft ticking of Pawlowski’s teeth striking the wood plank floor.

It was the sound of failure. Of a dream dying… Cleveland. His job with Blue Sky. Natasha. His family. Tick, tick, tick, tick, and it was all over.

He could never go home again.Now he had to stay alive. Out-think his gang. God forbid they should

find out about Natasha and the kids. He backed out the rear door.He needed money now. Money to keep Pawlowski and himself,

alive. More money than Usher had given him. Much more. Money to make sure the others followed him, not Popov.

Outside in the alley, the clouds finally released the rain.A thunderclap made him jump. He spun around and saw a gust of

wind bang the back door of the Faust House shut.Thunder, megaphones, sirens, and pounding rain blended into a

caterwauling modern symphony that Gounod could never have imagined.Prague dealt swiftly and harshly with those who walked on the dark

side. Mephistopheles swept Faust up through the roof of this very house to

spend eternity in Hell.Edward Kelly was taken out the front door to die in the dungeons of

Karlstein Castle. Jan Pawlowski, the Pole, who had dared to blackmail Michael Usher

with barrels of atomic sludge dumped in a Polish landfill was dragged out of the back door of the Faust House and driven off into the wild, wild east.

10 Berlin

AS HE FOLLOWED MACKENZIE KILBANE AND MURPHY down the Embassy hallway, Bliss couldn’t keep from thinking what a bad idea it had been to date Mackenzie all those lifetimes ago. He had been working for PERSCOM at the Hoffman Building in Washington and his career had had Pentagon written all over it. Then Mackenzie handed him over to her best friend, Cheryl, the Senator’s daughter, and it was the beginning of the end for his Army career.

What had made him ignore the screams of protest from his misbegotten feminine intuition and ask Mackenzie out? He had seen how her men ended up as perfectly lacquered and starched into place as her hair and the creases of her crisp white blouse and Ann Taylor suit. He had been warned, and still it hadn’t kept him from asking her out.

He watched Mackenzie slow her walk and lean toward Murphy for an intimate, feminine aside.

Close enough now for a whiff of her perfume, Bliss thought how fitting the name ‘Viper’ was for anything dabbed behind her ears. The smell awakened an old queasiness in the pit of his stomach. He slowed his steps until the scent faded, but halfway down the hall the tip-tapping of her red high heels stopped, as she and Murphy turned around to wait for him.

She was even more perfect from the front, except for the single flake of dandruff that dared to spot the padded shoulder of her black power suit.

Suddenly he remembered what had made her so irresistible. An immature need to see where the perfection ended and the woman began. It was a puzzle that had remained unsolved, and forever after he regretted letting it get personal.

Inside her office she waved at the chairs opposite the couch and coffee table. Not a short meeting then. His growling stomache began wishing he had stopped for a sandwich.

She sat primly on the edge of her couch, but before they could start her phone rang. She walked to the neat, empty desk and pressed buttons with bright pink fingernails while Murphy and Bliss sat in silence. Murphy wouldn’t test his limits with banter. Not in Mackenzie’s office.

The phone call stretched on and on. She was wasting their time.Watch this, he signaled Murphy, and ran his fingers through his hair.

In Washington, all those centuries ago, fiddling with his hair had earned him lectures on how common he was being by grooming himself in public.

Mackenzie’s mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. He winked at Murphy as Mackenzie said, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up.

“Can we get to why you hauled us in here, Mackenzie?” he said.“A few minutes on the social graces are always well spent, Ray.

Even on the phone.”“Yeah, well a missing plutonium train in Poland and a dirty bomb in

the middle of London must be getting to me.” No smile. Letting Mackenzie think you were friends didn’t pay.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.” She took a folder from the coffee table. “Pawlowski is scheduled be sworn in as Environment Minister on Friday.”

“Great.” He turned to Murphy. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go get him.”

“He hasn’t resurfaced yet,” Murphy said. “He told his staff he had some personal business to take care of first. He’s late, but they aren’t particularly concerned. Apparently it’s standard operating procedure for him.”

“And let me guess, snatching him during the swearing in…”“Too risky. We could get caught. At least he won’t be sworn in as

Finance Minister,” Murphy said. “Think what a crime boss could do in banking.”

“Right. Thank God, he only wants to save the environment and not the banks.”

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“Ha, ha.” Mackenzie’s shiny red stiletto tip-tapped annoyance on the linoleum. “Michael Usher tells me, we’re giving Poland $40 million in aid to clean up the environmental messes left by the Communists. That’s American money earmarked for American construction companies, and now an organized crime boss will sign off on how the contracts get awarded.”

“You’re right,” Bliss said, “Not funny.”“How are you doing with Jordan?” she asked. “Will she help us?”“I haven’t asked her yet.” Bliss said. “Don’t want to scare her off.”“Losing our touch with the ladies, are we?” Mackenzie asked.Crap. How predictable. Her jealousy was once again getting in the

way of the job. He scratched his head and enjoyed her wince. “Well?”“Maybe I am,” he said. “Not funny, Ray. You said it before, weapons-grade plutonium, a

dirty bomb in London. We need her on the ATTF team.”“I’m too old for this.” “Save the excuses.” She offered Murphy a chocolate from her stash

of Godiva and smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her short straight skirt, while Bliss watched.

She caught him looking and offered her chocolates as a reward. “Want some, Ray?”

He ignored the intentionally ambiguous invitation. “Tell me again, why she quit NSA.”

“Actually, she was fired. ‘Allowed to resign’ is the politically-correct phrase. We showed her the scams Pawlowski was running and allowed her to resign,” she said.

“I can’t get much further without her NSA psych evaluation.”She slid a blue folder across the coffee table.Inside were four heavily redacted pages. He looked up. “You’re

kidding? What’s with all the black? Doesn’t NSA get that we’re on the same team?”

“Sorry.”“How can I figure out what makes her tick with 80% of this blacked

out?”

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“I’ve spoken to Michael Usher, who was an acting NSA director back then about it. He’ll try to dig it up in Washington next week, but he thinks the original may have been lost.”

Bliss quirked an eyebrow at her.“Look, I know you don’t like Usher, but…”“Don’t like? That’s got nothing to do with it. I don’t want to marry

the guy. I just want the straight dope. Answers. Every time I ask him something, I get the feeling he’s holding out.

“For starters, I can’t believe that NSA just let her walk. Usually they pressure top mathematicians to stay. Make them offers they can’t refuse.”

“Maybe she wasn’t that good.”“After what you told us about Mojo? So she had a loser boyfriend, if

she so brilliant, and Mojo was so important… I don’t believe they would just fire her.”

He leafed through the papers again. “At least this explains the switch to history. She signed a termination agreement. No mathematics for ten years. No computers for two.”

“Which she is abiding by, even though we have no way of enforcing it here in Europe.”

“She’s a good kid. But I still need to know what makes her tick.”Mackenzie reached for another chocolate. “Perhaps you should let us

in on the particulars, Ray. Laura and I are women. We might spot something you’re missing.”

Yeah, right. On the scale of feminine wiles, Fritzi was Mackenzie’s polar opposite, but he wasn’t about to pull an Usher.

“Okay.” He took his time finding the words. “I’ve recruited a lot of agents. You get a sixth sense about when they’re ready. That all you have to do is ask them to dance. But not this kid. I think she thinks of me as a friend, but NSA and Pawlowski have her spooked. I really do need an unredacted version of her psych evaluation, Mackenzie.”

“Any sign of pent-up anger? Getting fired these days…what with the read out and the security guards watching you clear out your desk, it can’t be easy.”

Bliss shook his head. “Not her style. She turned what happened in Washington into a bad dream; stored it away where it can’t hurt her.” He

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put the folder back on the coffee table. “The only reason the kid talks to me at all, is that she is lonely and homesick.”

Pink-tipped fingernails tapped the blue folder. “Thirty two is hardly a kid, Ray.”

“Her naïveté is a real concern as well,” he said.“I have to agree with Ray there,” Murphy said. “Pawlowski used that

to get close.”Mackenzie picked through her chocolates while Bliss poured a glass

of mineral water.“She’s a nice kid, Mackenzie. I mean, nice thirty-two-year-old, but I

don’t see her as agent material. We should find someone else.”“Laura?” Mackenzie asked.Murphy shook her red curls. “Sorry, Bliss. We have no choice.”“Pawlowski’s file just keeps growing,” Mackenzie said. “Our latest

report says that he got the money to study in America by whacking emergency room patients in Łódź, so his buddies in the funeral trade could expand their business. It just gets worse and worse. Thinking of the plutonium train in his hands…”

Murphy turned to Bliss. “Jordan did wise up. Too late for our national security comfort level, of course, but in the end she did give him the boot. Appeal to her sense of patriotism.”

“Ask her to ‘dance’, Bliss,” Mackenzie said. “We can’t get close without her.”

She turned to Murphy. “What’s the latest on the train?”“The best satellites money can buy, not to mention all of NATO,

aren’t finding it.”“How can something as big as a castor train just disappear?”

Mackenzie asked. “Polish authorities think it may be inside somewhere. Their army is

searching abandoned coal mines, but there are hundreds of them.”“Which makes dangling Jordan in front of Pawlowski even more

urgent.” Mackenzie opened another folder. “So we have our cast of characters. Let me tell you about the setting for our play.

“Commercial Service has scheduled a conference on entrepreneurial strategies for Eastern Europe a week from now in Katowice, Poland.

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Routine stuff, creating industrial parks and free trade zones, explaining high tech business incubators, financing how-to’s with lawyers and bankers, and so on.

“Michael Usher has arranged for Fritzi to lead a workshop on industrial recycling in their environmental programming track.”

“An old friend of the Environment Minister holding an environmental workshop on his turf. If that doesn’t lure him in, nothing will,” Murphy said.

“It’s up to you now, Ray. Get her on board.”“I’ll try.”“Try?” Her eyebrow arched.Mackenzie was right. Negativity didn’t help. Fritzi was bright. She

would learn operational procedure quickly, and he knew he could talk her into it. He just didn’t like doing it. “What if Pawlowski suspects she’s working for us?”

“Then he’ll be even more interested. He’ll want to know what we know. You’ve got until the end of the day,” she said, handing him a folder with promotional materials. “Get her to sign, or we’ll find someone else to run her.”

11 Berlin

FRITZI JORDAN WALKED INTO THE DARK CAFÉ and spotted Bliss sitting alone at their corner table. There were dark circles under his eyes and his smile wasn’t as sunny as usual. She felt sorry for him. Then he pulled down that damned book and asked her that damned question again, and her sympathy vanished.

What was it with him? Sooner or later he always found a way to ask if she ever thought of going to Poland to see where those mathematicians she was so interested in had lived, and she had to scramble to avoid answering.

Today of all days she didn’t feel like playing Bliss’ silly game. Splashed in two-inch white capitals on the bottom of her own

traitorous TV that morning had been a name from her Washington past, Jan Pawlowski, the new Polish Minister for the Environment. His appointment came on the heels of two years as Sports Minister, a job he was given after his predecessor was gunned down leaving a Warsaw disco.

Why was she still so mesmerized by him? She had been unable to turn off the TV. Charismatic, intelligent, handsome; she watched him walking down a Warsaw street surrounded by reporters. Was there any doubt he was going places? Or that he would leave his mark on European politics?

Now her new friend with the omnipresent smile was asking, again, if she wanted to go to Poland. None of your business, Bliss.

Behind that sunny smile, Bliss kept secrets. His claim to be working out of Berlin because he was sick of Washington left plenty unsaid. It was as close to a confession as any spy was likely to make.

She should run, but she missed America and Americans with their friendly, relaxed manners.

“Hello?” Bliss said. “You still here?” Concern showed in his tired blue eyes. “We could go there together,” he offered. “Lay bare the hotbeds of mathematics in the world’s travel rags.”

Did he know how hard his very American smile made it to say no? She wondered for a few reckless seconds what it would be like,

going there with a friend to keep her from thinking of Jan. It would never work. “I can find everything I need in the Humboldt Library,” she said.

“You can’t say that until you’ve actually stood on the aula steps in Wrocław and breathed in the same air as Kronecker.”

“Mathematics isn’t architecture. It happens in your head. I don’t have to go anywhere. Besides, except for the broken down German dialect when the coalminers’ rehearse with their brass bands, they don’t even speak the same language. It’s all Polish now.”

He just smiled his tempting smile. “Let’s go and see.”Why did she feel like she would be hurting his feelings by turning

him down?He wasn’t like Jan. Would it hurt to take a little trip to help him with

his article? She put her hand on the Schreiber book. “Even if the names still

appear in books, there’s nothing left to see. Not even for a travel article. Look, I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings, but it’s a dumb idea. Whoever heard of math tourists?”

“You can’t just ‘think’ history into being. Not even math history.” Bliss went on. “Research is more than reading books. Just ask Schultzi.”

Who was this man? Why had he invited her for coffee?Schultzi would be ecstatic. He would want her to find the homes, the

schools, even the classroom desks that the area’s mathematicians had used, if they hadn’t been bombed to smithereens. And what if she stumbled across an original manuscript?

“Travel is expensive.” Bliss provided her with an out.“No.’ She sipped her coffee. “Look, I just don’t want to go to

Poland, okay?” She didn’t have to explain.But Bliss was a terrier who didn’t quit. “Have you ever thought of

applying for a grant?” he asked. “You could get funding…”She fought to hide her feelings, and was mortified to realize she

wasn’t succeeding. “I don’t need money,” she told him. “I live simply.”

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The irresistible smile returned. “You could help your government out at the same time.”

At last she understood. Friend? How could she have been so stupid?Someone closer to her own age? Schultzi was a naive fool.Here was the real reason Bliss had befriended her.Years spent at NSA made her glance around the café before

continuing. “Perhaps I’m wrong, but…Are you asking me to spy?”She took in his chagrined smile. Was he really embarrassed, or just a

good actor?“I’m not interested,” she said.“Not interested in serving your country?” She felt slapped in the face by his words, just as he intended, she

realized. How could she have let him get so close? Would she never learn?

“I love my country, and I’ve put in my time.” She spoke softly, but furiously. “No doubt you already know all about that.”

His easy, breezy smile came out, like the sun emerging from behind a cloud, and turned his insulting words into a teasing joke.

How dare he! She pulled her wallet from her backpack and looked for coins to pay

for the coffee. “I don’t know who you are, or who sent you, but I want you to leave me alone. Tell your puppetmasters back in Washington, ‘No. Never again.’ They’re doing a good enough job screwing up the world without my help.”

She threw euros onto the table and put her wallet away. “And if you see me on campus again, do me a favor. Walk the other way.”

Before she could stand, his hand reached across the table and grabbed her wrist. “No, no. It’s not like that. You’ve got me all wrong.” His smile pleaded. “Let me finish.”

She wasn’t strong enough to keep her hand from being pulled down onto the table.

The other patrons of the café watched, thinking lover’s spat.

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She felt her face flush and vowed never to let her need for friendship embarrass her again. But even now that need held her seated with more strength than Bliss’ hand.

“Why aren’t you studying mathematics?” he asked. “They say you were one of the best.”

None of his business.“Professor Schultz says you want to make sure mathematics gets

used for the right stuff.”Not Schultzi! Had the spooks gone after her only real friend? She felt

tears form.Christ! How embarrassing.She listened heartbroken, as her words to Schultzi were quoted back

at her. ‘Mathematics should be used to make peace. To build. To do science and medicine. To feed people. To grind eyeglasses. Not to calculate missile trajectories or build landmine factories and cluster bombs or to encrypt and keep secrets.’

Had the spooks actually interviewed Schultzi or just bugged his apartment?

Why was Bliss keeping her here? He must see how she felt. Her wrist hurt. He pulled her hand under the table and signaled for

fresh coffee. As soon as the waiter left, he continued, “You’re right. I’m a spy. But you can’t hold that against me. You used to be one too. What if I could fix it, so you could do real math again?

“I like math history.”“Right.”This wasn’t about a travel article, she realized. This was about Jan.

She tried tugging her hand away again.He tightened his grip. “Two minutes more, Fritzi. Please.” She was feeling sick to her stomach. This couldn’t be happening.“A train loaded with plutonium has been hijacked in Poland. Jan

Pawlowski is involved.”“Jan wouldn’t…” But he would. She knew he would. She stopped

talking and listened, as Bliss outlined the plan.“I’ll go with you,” he promised. “You’ll never be alone. A whole

team of operations specialists will back us up and keep you safe.

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“You’ll be back in school in a week, two tops,” he promised, releasing her hand.

She stared at the candle while he made his final promise. “When we’re done, Fritzi, you will get your mathematics back. Your real mathematics.”

Startled, she looked back into his eyes, wondering if he meant what she thought he did.

“Trust me Fritzi?”If he could do that…Her eyes moistened. She saw candle flame

refract inside the tears filling her eyes. She didn’t care if he saw them. To do mathematics again; real world, cutting-edge mathematics…Could Bliss really make that happen?

“You help me, Fritzi, and I’ll help you. Those papers you signed at NSA will disappear.”

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12 Berlin

FRITZI SAT WITH HER FEET DANGLING over the edge of the concrete quay along the Spree River next to the Berlin cathedral, across from the tour boat loading ramp.

“You could have found a more comfortable place to sit,” she heard Schultzi complain behind her.

She turned and started to get up. “There’s a bench over…”“Stay, stay,” the white-haired professor said, and lowered himself. Schultzi’s boyish spirit rarely recognized the limits of his body. She

watched the rotund figure warily, hoping he wouldn’t topple into the murky canal.

How had he guessed, she needed to talk?She didn’t know where to start, but he was patient. They waved to

the children on a passing tour boat, then sat in silence for several minutes.

“It’s nice to have friend from back home,” he said, finally.“He’s a spy,” she said.“Yes,” he agreed.Surprised, she turned and looked at him. “You know?”His smile was chagrined. “I’ve lived most of my life in a police state.

You get kind of a sixth sense about people. CIA?”She shrugged. “He was vague.”More silence, then Fritzi picked up a lone pebble from the well-

swept quay and flung it into the water. “I suck at picking friends.”“Hey. You picked me. I’m your friend, aren’t I?” She shrugged. “I guess.”“You could look at little happier. Show some gratitude?” She grinned. “Yes. Sorry. Thank you. You’re a good friend,

Schultzi.”“Besides, I believe your new friend chose you, didn’t he?”

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She picked at an imaginary spot on her slacks and nodded.“Whatever he is, Fritzi, there’s a big difference between American

spies and our Stasi.” He looked at the canal and the museum buildings that had once been the heart of communist East Germany. “Americans are idealists,” he said. “They really do want to make the world better.”

“Do they?” Fritzi asked, not surprised at how Schultzi saw Americans even twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Old ways of thinking were often harder to knock down than concrete.

“People here in East Berlin could turn on their televisions and see something was terribly wrong with how we ran our economy. The Stasi was created by corrupt political leaders, people without souls or imagination, growing more and more desperate to hold onto power.

“If you could have heard the things I heard…Party officials talking with Czech and Hungarian colleagues about ‘das Problem der Devisen.’ Our currency was worthless and still falling, yet the only plan these brilliant bureaucrats could come up with to forestall impending economic collapse was making ‘tourists’ pay more fees. ‘Tourists’ would be West Germans wanting to visit their grandmother or to attend a great uncle’s funeral here in the east.

“The need for international currency was so urgent that someone bringing in a funeral wreath of real, live flowers would drive the party bureaucrats crazy because it meant a western family wouldn’t be buying the overpriced paper wreaths our planned-economy factory managers foisted on us. Border guards seized the fresh flowers and forced westerners to pay for the ugly paper flowers one-to-one with West-Marks, even though our currency was worth just pennies on official currency exchanges. They disrespected the people, those bureaucrats, even as their ‘comrades’ were buried.” His face grew dark, remembering. “And our East German economy was the healthiest in the East Bloc.”

Fritzi listened without interrupting. The West wasn’t perfect either, but Schultzi couldn’t know about people like Usher. Was it just that almost universal German love of all things American that let him delude himself into thinking that everything America did was good? Or was he being a good friend, telling her what she needed to hear?

“Fritzi, your grandmother is from Silesia, isn’t she?”

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She nodded.“And she’s never gone back there?”“She won’t go alone. Mom’s too busy and lives in Wyoming now,

and I…I don’t know…When I was in high school back in the States, my American History teacher refused to believe me when I told him that Germans and Italians living in America during WWII were interned along with the Japanese.”

She waved hello to more tourists on another canal boat. “Those interned American-Germans had it good compared to my grandmother, my Oma, and my mother over here. Americans, not soldiers of course, but ordinary American civilians, don’t understand what war is…Well maybe a few do. There was a writer…Kurt Vonnegut. He survived the firebombing of Dresden. But he was a soldier too. I never even tried to tell anyone at school about my Oma. I was too afraid they would say I was lying. Like with the American internment camps.

“But it did happen.”She shrugged. “Oma’s gotten over it, Mom hardly remembers, and I

only know about it from Oma’s stories.”“But your new friend isn’t asking you to go there to dredge up the

past, I’m sure. Why are you so reluctant?”“To spy?” Fritzi finished his question. “What he wants me to do…

It’s over, Schultzi. Just as over as my grandmother’s stories. Why dredge it up?”

“Yes, why indeed? That is the historian’s biggest dilemma. Let the world live a comfortable lie, or rub people’s noses in the truth.”

“He’s making promises he won’t be able to keep, but I can’t keep myself from hoping.”

“It must be important for the Americans to ask for your help.” Schultzi watched the tourists on the opposite shore descend the quay steps and board the next tour boat. “Did you ever convince your history teacher?”

“I gave him a book by Art Jacobs, a German kid from New York who was interned with the Japanese in Texas.”

“Did that change his mind?”“Yes. He made it a class project. One of my friends heard from his

little sister that he later told his classes, ‘and in spite of what it says in

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your textbook, Fritzi Jordan would want you to know that Germans and Italians were also interned.’ He then sends them to Art Jacobs’ YouTube channel to watch an American government film shot at Crystal City while Art was interned there as a child.”

“Are you afraid of what you will find when you go to Poland.” “Terrified.” She couldn’t tell Schultzi why.He waved at a street vendor to bring two beers. “Zum Wohl. To your

health,” he said, clinking bottles one-handedly as he gave her one.“Historians need courage to look at the facts,” he said, drinking

deeply. “Even your high school teacher. Seeing the truth can be painful.”She stared at the swirling muddy water. Her ouster from NSA, her

exile from Washington had been painful. Still was. But losing her memories of Jan, having to acknowledge what he was really like would hurt more. In her memories Jan was only a bad boy, not truly evil. Even that Swedish fighter hadn’t been able to prove Jan was involved.

She would never be stupid enough to fall for him again, but he had been charming, warm and funny, and she didn’t want Bliss to take away those golden Washington days filled with beautiful Polish mathematics.

“Are you afraid?”She chugged beer. Yes, afraid of losing dearly held prejudices about

a former lover who’d gone from fixing fights to hijacking trains filled with plutonium. The Americans must be desperate to ask for her help.

Schultzi concentrated on his beer before speaking again. “For a mathematician books and papers are good enough, Fritzi, but for a math historian, it is a fine, fine thing to see the places where our mathematical concepts came into being. And,” he winked at her, “It is an even finer thing to have a young friend, even a spy, to see them with.” He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. “Ah, to walk the streets, to sit in the lecture halls and cafés…if they haven’t all been bombed…No one has ever done it.

“You must take a camera, Fritzi. You can find old, pre-war, black and white photographs in the Prussian State Archives,” he pointed at the building down in the bend of the canal, “But color photos of what the places look like now would be much better. I understand much has been rebuilt for the tourists. You must photograph the Hanseatic warehouses

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with their winches hanging out over the harbors; and the storage lofts filled with wooden barrels, burlap sacks, and bolts of lace to show how keeping a tally led to our ‘+’ plus and ‘–‘ minus notations.”

Schultzi flagged another vendor. A currywurst seller, this time. Did she want a sausage?

She nodded. “It will be a most attractive dissertation. I could see myself buying a

copy at Schindler’s, even if you hadn’t already paid me the honour of asking me to be your Doktorvater,” he said, and handed her a sausage. “Bon appétit.”

He paid the woman and bit into his own sausage. “You will make a fine, fine historian, Fritzi.”

She chewed in silence.“But you are really a mathematician.” He gave her a rueful smile.

“You were born to be one, and I fear you still are one, and you should be one again; a brilliant mathematician.”

She stared at him. What was he saying? “Don’t look at me like that. And don’t even think about taking a PhD

in history out of loyalty to your old friend, Professor Schultzi. We only live once, Mädchen.

“Each of us faces obstacles in pursuing our passions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I spent forty years of my life living in a dictatorship. Almost every day of my professional life was a delicate maneuver, a dance through a political minefield.”

The thought of the overweight maladroit professor dancing through a minefield almost made her smile.

He gave his tummy a contented pat. “That was a good sausage, wasn’t it?” he asked, and polished off his beer. “As I was saying, there were many hurdles for historians in our old East Germany, but here I am, still pursuing my passion. The Genossen, the comrades, who tried to tell me what to study and what to write, are gone. Forced to crawl back into their holes and hide from the bright light of intellectual freedom.”

“I do like history.”“Of course you do, and like I said, you will make a fine historian.

But will you be following your true passion? Or just trying to please your history professor? You must take me out of the equation, Mädchen,

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and go east. I won’t be disappointed if you come back without a dissertation.”

“But I…”“Since the first day I met you, I’ve sensed a cloud hovering over

you, Fritzi. Something in your past made you leave America and your mathematics far behind, and now that the Americans want you and need you again, this could be your chance to get rid of that cloud.

She almost started to explain, but he stopped her. “I don’t need to know the details.” He looked around at who might be watching. “I have this feeling inside this big, fat belly, that this is your first step in finding your way back to your real passion.”

How, Fritzi wondered dejectedly? The real source of her own problems was Michael Usher, and he was safely ensconced behind a Washington desk, surrounded by layers and layers of policy makers none of whom would believe what she had seen on that flash drive unless by some miracle she held it in her own hands again. That was about as likely as convincing Jan Pawlowski to return a hijacked train filled with plutonium.

“While you are off helping the Americans to save the world, Fritzi, I’m going to have a talk with my friend Professor Doctor Hans Thielmann. He’s in quantum physics at the Max Planck Institute out in Potsdam. ‘The effect of airflow over mountain ranges on ocean currents’, or some such thing. He’s having trouble finding someone to do the mathematics for the computer modelling.”

The old professor smiled, pleased with the solution he had found for the rest of her life. “Who knows, Fritzi? Maybe you’ll become the world’s next Lise Meitner. Wouldn’t that be something?” He chuckled.

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13 Berlin

MICHAEL USHER STORMED INTO THE ATTF MEETING. “The Polish Navy just boarded a Liberian freighter in Gdańsk,” he said, and waved the NSA transcript in the air. “September 11, 2001 was only the opening salvo in the Global Age of Terror.”

Bliss watched the room filled with terror experts break out into pandemonium.

Usher gestured for quiet and read the report out loud. A tramp freighter taking reconditioned mammography machines to the railhead in St. Petersburg stopped off in Gdańsk to pick up twenty containers of canned cherries. A NATO plane searching for the train noticed the ship oozing radiation and sent a warning to the Gdańsk harbourmaster who refused permission for the ship to dock. When police boarded, they found the ship wired with explosives. “Poland has just kept the world’s largest radiological dispersal device from detonating,” Usher concluded.

“They also found another note: ‘Give us what is ours, then we will return the train and the terror can end.”

“Does it say what ‘ours’ is?” Mackenzie asked.“Money,” he answered. “They want us to free up bank accounts

being held frozen by international law enforcement for having terrorist or organized crime ties.”

“We can’t do that,” Mackenzie said.“Of course not.”“If they can threaten us with old x-ray machines, what will they do

with the plutonium from the train?” Bliss asked.

14 On the Run

GENNADY FILSHIN FELT HIS LIFE SLIP FURTHER AWAY from science and reason and deeper into criminality and superstition with every passing kilometer.

He had been set up by Michael Usher…by an American. How fitting then, that his gang was using an American brand name to flee from the Czech police, he thought, as he rolled up the side of a stolen Slovakian Pepsi-Cola truck.

While his gang unloaded crates of bottled cola and hid them behind the wild rose hedge alongside the road, Filshin scanned the Prague Metro for news of the kidnapping. It was on the last page. One woman was killed and a man taken hostage. The article called it a bungled drug heist at the Old Town pharmacy and included a large security camera picture of Popov.

Popov saw what Filshin was looking at and snatched it out of his hands. “Hey, look at this.” he crowed. “Popov is famous, like movie bandido, like Sundance Kid.” He showed the others the photo of himself in his scarf and sunglasses.

“Help me get Pawlowski into the truck,” Mario said, as he ripped the paper out of his hands and returned it to Filshin.

Popov and Mario pulled the gagged Pawlowski out of the van and taped his arms and legs together. When Filshin threw his own raincoat into the truck for Pawlowski to lie on, Popov snarled he disapproval but he contented himself with flicking a cigarette butt at Filshin’s feet.

Filshin grew braver. He ordered Bogosian to throw in his down vest for Pawlowski to use as a pillow. They paid less for damaged goods, he told his gang. Though this being his first and, he sincerely hoped, his last kidnapping, he had no idea if it was true.

“What? No robe and slippers?” Popov growled. He slid the section shut, jamming the lock with a crowbar. The Czech-Polish borders

inspections were gone, but trucks were sometimes stopped by mobile customs units.

Filshin cursed Michael Usher to Hell once again and got into the truck cab missing his America baby with a stab in his gut that earned him a vulture-like look from Popov, who was driving. The tattoo-fingered ex-con had spent the journey across the Czech Republic questioning Filshin’s every move, trying to turn the Filshin Gang into the Popov Gang.

If Filshin could have convinced himself Popov would let Pawlowski live when it was over, he would gladly have abandoned the whole mess in his lap.

The rest of the Filshin Gang sensed their leader’s ineptitude, but were more afraid of Popov’s violence than of Filshin’s mismanagement on that mad, mad ride east.

Filshin heard the grumbles. He knew the mutiny would follow. Keeping Pawlowski alive now required significant amounts of cash.

Popov and Mario were already squawking that he hadn’t paid them enough. Caspar wouldn’t be far behind. Usher’s money was gone. Filshin was now drawing cash advances on his own credit cards. If he kept doing that Natasha would never be able to repay the bank.

He picked up the coffee-stained issue of the The Economist lying crumpled on the front seat and found a bio of Pawlowski. He was amazed to read that the Polish government minister owned a considerable stake in several eastern European hotels and casinos. His mood brightened. Pawlowski’s business interests were probably too small to impress Michael Usher, but the article hinted at a number of activities where the talents of a Popov or other Filshin gang member could be useful. Could he convince his gang that letting Pawlowski go might pay more than ransoming him?

The truck wheels rolled all through that long dark night, while Filshin tried to puzzle a way out of his dilemma.

Pawlowski would be angry about the kidnapping and the knocked-out teeth, but what if Filshin told him the alternative, that Usher wanted him dead? Would he listen to Filshin’s proposal?

And the members of the Filshin Gang? Could he sell them on the employment opportunities under a real criminal overlord? Maybe.

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Then, as soon as Natasha’s father was safe at his sister-in-law’s in Canada, Filshin would find a new job. It wouldn’t be easy. Usher was sure to interfere, but he would find something.

The truck rattled back and forth along steep switchbacks through sinister black conifers that stretched up into the dark night sky like a prison stockade. Smuggling, planting toxic waste, kidnapping…where would it end?

Filshin imagined a descent into hell beginning with a boat ride behind a hooded ferryman; a bony index finger waggling at anyone who dared to interrupt the still sounds of the ferryman’s pole dipping into the water with self-pitying protests of not belonging in hell.

The banality of hell surprised him. The grinding of gears. An ex-con ferryman missing two fingers and still managing to fill the truck cab with the stink of Russian cigarettes. The whining about the job not paying enough. The rattling of cola bottles. The dead forest killed by emissions from coal-burning power plants and factories closing in on him.

Dawn on the mountaintop plateau was cold and unforgiving. Pale grey, silvery light revealed row upon row of dead black spruce trees. A giant mountain face razor-stubbled by naked tree trunks. Skeletal black branches wove lace shrouds over green ferns and wildflowers that dared to resurrect life on the forest floor.

The road curved and started down. Popov slammed on the brakes and downshifted. The truck lurched and groaned, refusing to slow. Popov swore, spat his cigarette out the window, and battled with brakes and gears.

Staying in control of the Filshin Gang was like trying to slow a runaway truck.

Mario had plans, big plans that couldn’t wait. Popov squashed them; no contact with Meitner until they had Pawlowski stowed someplace secure, he told Mario.

Filshin wondered if Popov had a place in mind, but was afraid to ask. Gang leaders were supposed to know these things.

Caspar noticed they were low on cash when Filshin opened his wallet to pay for gas. We should pop a Polish bank, he whined to Popov.

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One crime was leading to another. Filshin felt his life sliding into a downward spiral. A runaway truck barreling downhill.

Popov rescued him from Caspar too. Rob a bank for a few measly złotys? Don’t be stupid, man. We’re going to get euros, real euros for Pawlowski. Why risk a dumb heist? We can’t get greedy. We’ve got to stick together.

Filshin admired Popov’s management skills even as they led him deeper into the underworld and into debt. It had to stop.

He noticed that the bank in Lublin used the same ATM machines as his own bank in Ohio. Natasha had often complained about installers who forgot or were too lazy to change the default administrator password. She had shown him how it worked in the manual. There was a way to get cash, but he couldn’t use his own bank cards. Reluctantly, he sent Caspar out to lift a few wallets and a cell phone.

Inside a Lublin bank ATM cubicle, Filshin opened the ATM’s administrator page, changed a few entries and inserted the first stolen card. Presto! Abracadabra! Just like in a fairytale! The machine spit out twenty 50-euro notes instead of the twenty tens it should have. They hit four more banks, but it was a one-day-only kind of magic. The banks would catch on when the first machine ran out of cash. By the next morning passwords would be added across Poland.

Still, the Filshin Gang cleared a cool 5000 euros with no guns and nothing messier than a little pick pocketing. The stunt earned Filshin respect from his whole gang, even Popov.

Bogosian had an idea where they could stash Pawlowski while they waited for the ransom. The Baltic Sea sailing season had ended early. Ships were in dry dock for routine maintenance and repainting, but in Russia there was never enough money to repaint all the ships or overhaul all the engines. A few ships were always tied up empty while their crews found work to hold them over the winter. An empty ship offered everything they needed. A place to hide. Provisions. Isolation.

A sailor friend from his navy days lived in Minsk. Career officer, Black Sea Fleet, sailing out of Odessa. Ukrainian. Sailors knew where the empty ships were, Bogosian assured the Gang.

The friend picked Bogosian up for dinner and vodka in a shiny new Mercedes.

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The rest of the gang waited with the Pepsi-Cola truck and the white van in the parking lot of a Walmart garden center halfway between Vilnius and Minsk.

Filshin watched a farm couple plow the field opposite the superstore. The tractor stopped and the farmer’s wife jumped down. She placed the ladder into what must have been a deep hole and disappeared. How strange. Minutes later she resurfaced carrying a heavy bucket, took a funnel and poured the bucket into the tractor fuel tank. Filshin stopped wondering. For decades Soviet aircraft flying over eastern Europe dumped excess fuel without any regard for the environment. Fields near former military bases were drenched in it.

While Filshin wondered what spinach grown in fuel-drenched fields tasted like and if it was sold at the local Walmart, Bogosian and his friend were trading stories about how the Soviet Union crumbled. Like the rickety Lada Bogosian used to drive around Odessa. They laughed. The friend gave him a list of dry docked ships without a crew aboard, but he also told a story that stuck with Bogosian.

During the summer a gang of Ossetian teenagers used the basement of the uninhabited Russian House of Soviets in Kaliningrad as a base for their cigarette smuggling operations. When winter came, they left to wait tables in Spain, peddle drugs in Amsterdam, or hawk newspapers in London. Some even headed back to high school after making a contribution to parental finances.

Abandoned unfinished in the 1970’s, Kaliningrad Oblast’s House of Soviets, or parliament building, was built on the ruins of an 800-year-old German castle. Russian history buffs had marched in the streets to save the castle, but communist party hacks ignored them. Explosives took down the ruins left by the 1944 British firebombing of the city. Then with typical Soviet bureaucratic inefficiency, a survey was misplaced. No one noticed that the basement was sinking until the House of Soviets was almost complete. Tons of concrete had shifted the quicksand under the old castle basements. Structurally unsound ceilings, floors, even stairwells, could give way without warning. Local police deemed it too dangerous for regular patrols. Local civilians called it the ‘Kaliningrad Monster’ and thought it was haunted.

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Filshin silently blessed the energy of teenagers when they found the opening the Ossetians had chipped through the stone under a staircase.

They walked through the basement and found not a single room, but several medieval cellars and passages that had survived the demolition. Electrified decades before by long-dead Germans, bare light bulbs hung suspended from round, barrel-vaulted, brick ceilings. An extension cord powered a small stove for cooking and heating, and the underground siege tunnel used to bring water and food into the castle during the Middle Ages now led not to the open countryside, but to the basement of a rundown apartment complex two blocks away. Perfect.

Filshin assigned Bogosian to keep watch over Pawlowski while he went to contact Meitner, the company which the Economist said he owned. Popov showed his disapproval by blowing stinking cigarette smoke into his face, but Filshin pointed out that except for Turks, Armenians got along with everyone…Georgians in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Californians in LA, Israelis in Jerusalem, wherever history took their Armenian forefathers. If one of the Ossetian cigarette smugglers came back, or worse, if the Russian police appeared, it would be good to have Bogosian there to smooth things over.

What if Meitner managers didn’t speak English. They must, Filshin told himself. Most business people spoke at least a little BSE, the Bad Simple English which had become the de facto language of global business. Meitner executives wouldn’t be any different. But what if negotiations drifted into German? Filshin wondered if he should use Mario to contact Meitner. Mario had learned German during summers selling ice cream in his uncle’s Mannheim café. No. Filshin couldn’t follow when Mario rattled away in rapid fire German. The situation could get out of control. Caspar didn’t speak much German, but he understood it well, thanks to a great-grandmother who spoke it at home even after the Soviet NKVD resettled her family in Kazakhstan in the 1930s. When the time came, Filshin would take Caspar along.

15 Berlin

FRITZ’S TRAINING SESSIONS WERE SCHEDULED inside the American Embassy. She was alarmed at how rusty her English had gotten, and enjoyed hearing its languid American cadences again.

And Bliss…were all spies so sociable?The entire Embassy including the Ambassador seemed susceptible to

his Pythagoreanly perfect smile. He chatted with everyone, male and female, flirting with the sixty-year-old gym teacher from the Embassy school, and shooting the breeze with the Marine Corps corporal who signed in visitors.

She saw him watching from Laura Murphy’s office window when she practiced with the ATTF ops team in the Embassy garden.

He tested what she learned out in the real world. Could she elude a tail at the zoo, in the train station, or window-shopping on the KuDamm? She got up easily on the days she was scheduled to work with him. Did he look forward to those days as much as she did?

She enjoyed tricking him at the Brandenburg Gate flea market. She spotted him following her, slipped away, doubled back and followed him, watching him for endless minutes while he pretended to be interested in Meissen pottery, but was really searching the crowd to find her.

She tapped his shoulder. “I’ll take that old vase, if you don’t want it.”

His smile was like the sun rising. She recited everything he had done since he lost her.He laughed and pulled her into his arms. For a few seconds she

enjoyed the warmth of his body. Then she remembered Jan. What was she doing?

This time it was different, she told herself. This time the warm, muscular body next to hers promised only friendship.

Was that because he had read her NSA psych profile? Because it said sex wouldn’t work? Not after Jan?

She felt sick to her stomache and pushed him away.He stopped laughing. Warm, golden Berlin sunshine reached through

the arches of the Brandenburg Gate and found his face. As his smile faded, he reached for her hand and pulled her close. “Don’t go,” he whispered, so the inevitable ATTF ops team watchers couldn’t hear.

What was he saying? She stayed close, felt his breath on her neck, warm and good like the sunshine.

“Don’t let them…don’t let me…do this to you,” he whispered. She was embarrassed for him. “What would Mackenzie say?” she

asked.“Fuck Mackenzie. Fuck the whole lot of them. Stay here in Berlin

with your math history and your Professor Schultzi.”She laughed and returned his chaste hug. Schultzi was right. She

needed a friend, a young friend, and she believed Bliss when he promised she would be a mathematician again.

The very next day she walked into the Embassy meeting room and found Michael Usher standing at the electronic whiteboard.

The sound coming from his mouth took long seconds to form into words, as she mentally relived the humiliation of being fired from the National Security Agency while Usher watched.

Her face burned.“…America’s ‘Marshall Plan for the 21st century’…American-

sponsored business incubators…cutting edge environmental technologies…” Shock wouldn’t let the words make sense.

She fled, knocking over her chair and pushing past Murphy.“I can’t do this,” she told Murphy, who followed her into the hall.

“Tell Bliss, I’m sorry. I, I…” She ran into the ladies room feeling sick to her stomach.

She was splashing cold water on her face when Murphy came in. “Bliss is outside, but maybe you’d rather talk to me. What’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

How could she explain? “I can’t work with Michael Usher.” She didn’t believe she was doing this. Usher had actually crawled out from his bunker. He had left Washington and come here to Berlin, to her. Here

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was her chance to reveal what a slimeball he was, and she was throwing it away. Hiding in the bathroom! Even Schultzi would be disgusted.

“I get that,” Murphy said. “I don’t like him much myself, but we have no choice.” She stared at Fritzi like a junior high school principal wondering what to do with a rebellious student.

Fritzi stayed silent. Murphy shook her head. “Okay. So you don’t want to speak to me.”

She walked to the door. “But you need to tell someone.” She opened the door and yanked Bliss into the ladies room. “You talk to her, Bliss. I’ll keep watch.”

The concern on Bliss’ face made Fritzi want to hide in a cubicle. “What is it, Fritzi?” he asked. “Tell me, please?” She didn’t believe this was happening. Dissipating the cloud hanging

over her reputation was harder than Schultzi could imagine.She had to say something, or she would lose her chance. “Usher was

at NSA when I was there.” She wasn’t alone now, and this wasn’t Ft. Meade, but she wasn’t ready to test the bonds of their friendship with the truth. What if he insisted that Usher be sent back to Washington and she lost her one chance to show the world what a lying hypocrite he was.

Bliss put his hand on her arm. “What did he do? Did he harass you?… Sexually?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” What could she say? “He did something. Something…” The word dishonest was on her lips, but she had no proof! And she had been dishonest as well. Even if the flash drive hadn’t been tagged, she had known better.

What would happen to the concern in Bliss’ eyes, if he knew the truth? By reading the data on Usher’s flash drive, she had broken the law.

Worse, what if collecting confidential corporate communications was standard operating procedure for spies? She wasn’t ready to find out. She took a step away from him and his hand fell.

Bad enough that Bliss knew about Jan. How foolish she had been.“Then what?”He waited. No prodding. No joking. “You can tell me.” His voice

was gentle.

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But she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that Michael Usher had gotten wealthy through insider trading. It was personal as well.

Michael Usher had made it impossible for her to work in her chosen field in her own country. The vetting paperwork had always looked fine. Then would come that FBI visit to the graduate school, the one that no one ever spoke about out loud. Telling the object of an FBI background investigation that there were questions, circumstances in her life that needed checking into, would have been breaking the law.

Then came the rejections and new looks in the professors’ faces. Suspicion. Wondering. Occasionally even regret. Where they had been welcoming, after that visit they were all too aware that having her in their program was saying ‘no’ to all government-funded research.

Bliss’ eyes were filled with concern, but he couldn’t even imagine what being persona non grata in your own country was like. Or what it felt like to know the American dream didn’t count for you. She had been an expatriate in her own country, and Michael Usher was probably still laughing at how stupid she had been, when she handed that flash drive back to him.

Schultzi was right. The nightmare wouldn’t end until she fought back.

Usher would show his true colors one day, and she would be ready. But right now she had to say something to Bliss.

“He was there when I was read out of the Agency,” she said. That too had been awful. Not as bad as watching a politically well-connected slimeball like Michael Usher getting away with lying and cheating his way to riches, but good enough to explain why she ran. Usher had been with the security guards that frog-marched her straight from her desk to the security office in the gatehouse. He had watched her being signed out.

“I know what that feels like.”What? She looked up at Bliss, surprised.“I was in military intelligence before I became a contractor. If it

helps, I can tell you, a reading out is like that for all of us. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, the procedure can makes you feel like you’ve done something to be ashamed of. But you shouldn’t think of it like that. When you leave government service, sorting out all the things you had to

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know to do your job can get confusing. The reading-out is designed to help you by sorting out which things have to stay secret, that’s all.”

He smiled. “Look. I don’t like the guy either, but he’s providing our cover, so we have no choice. How about I sit in the meetings with you? We’ll suffer together.”

“They do say misery loves company.”Sharing the misery didn’t help. How could Usher lecture on free

market competition, when they both knew how he avoided the free market whenever it got in the way of his lining his own pockets?

Michael Usher was too cowardly to walk the walk of a real capitalist.His lying bullshit made her angry, which was a step up from

ashamed. Jan Pawlowski’s escapades were penny ante compared to the megadollars Usher had wheeled and dealed with his NSA-aided industrial espionage.

Falling for Jan had been naïve, but that hadn’t made her a bad person. She began to forgive herself.

Bliss was always there. He believed she could do this job, and after her talk with Schultzi, she wanted to do it. She would win back her reputation and her mathematics. What did it involve, really? Attending a conference, giving a couple of speeches, and luring Jan Pawlowski into a glass of wine for old time’s sake. In two weeks she would be back home.

She let Usher spin his webs of annoyance, as the experts taught her about incinerators, landfill sorting, storage, and composting methods; and how rainwater leachate was kept from soaking through landfills and contaminating ground water. Usher delivered the final most important lecture on landfill security himself, and she survived it.

Afterwards Bliss whisked her away for a walk along the canal by the ultra-modern German government buildings. “You’ll do fine,” he told her, but his smile wasn’t as carefree as it had been. “You’ll have me and Murphy, even Mackenzie, to help. Just keep your eyes and ears open, and report back to me on what Pawlowski is up to.

“The most important thing, Fritzi, is to tell me the truth. That’s not as easy as it sounds. You need to look beyond the truth that Pawlowski wants you to see, to what actually is. Even if it makes him look bad, even

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if you were once good friends, you must tell me the truth. The analysts need the objective truth to do their job properly.”

The truth, Fritzi thought. Like how she had looked at the contents of a missing NSA flash drive?

Bliss walked her back to the classroom and Usher’s security lecture continued with the dangers of orphan radiation sources and why Americans were the best-equipped to keep nuclear materials from falling into the hands of Muslim terrorists.

Usher spun more webs, on and on, but she couldn’t leave. They needed her. All of them, Bliss, Murphy, Mackenzie too.

Could the fly change its mind once it tested the web?

16 Berlin

LAURA MURPHY PULLED COPIES OF FRITZI JORDAN’S signed liability and life insurance contracts out of the copier tray, turned around, and collided with Ray Bliss. She handed him a set of copies.

“Still no word on Pawlowski?” Bliss asked.“It’s like he’s vanished from the face of the Earth.”“This whole plan is lunatic,” Bliss said. “We’re all spinning our

wheels and for what?“Mackenzie’s psychological experts think he’ll show once we dangle

Fritzi out there.” She handed him a file. “Still no unredacted NSA psych evaluation, but Mackenzie sent us this.”

“What is it?”“Transcripts of her weekly FBI vetting, her contact with a foreign

national interviews. They go into some detail into her relationship with Pawlowski.”

“I’m liking this less and less. You don’t get to be an organized crime boss without being ruthless.”

“Fritzi’s a big girl. She’ll be fine.”“I know. It’s just…Something’s not quite right. She…I get this

feeling…She’s hiding something from me.”“Something about Usher?”“I don’t know. She seems trusting, but…you know how I am. If my

agents don’t confide in me, how can I run them? I have this feeling there’s something she’s not sharing.”

“Not surprising. Considering her years with the spiders.”“Another thing…Why is she so willing to be the bait?”“Because she likes you?”“Christ, I hate this job.”“It will be okay, Ray,” she said.

“God, I hope so. I need to get out of this business. Bartending has to have this beat. How hard can it be to solve people’s mother-in-law problems?”

Murphy laughed. “You say that at the start of every operation.”“I do, don’t I?” He didn’t share her amusement. “Well, this time I

mean it.” “Why don’t we take Fritzi out for a test spin? See how she runs?”“Got something in mind?” “Tadeusz Lekki found us an open house at a Polish landfill near the

conference location. We could take her there and let her interact with the locals. Test her cover before the big day.”

“I like it,” Bliss said. “Set it up. See if Lekki is available to interpret.”

“One more thing, Bliss?”“Yeah?”“I don’t buy her read-out story. Find out what really went on

between her and Usher.”“I’ll try.”“Try? To quote, Mackenzie, ‘interesting choice of words.’”

17 Berlin

MICHAEL USHER WAS RUSHING through the subway station on his way to an Adlon Hotel breakfast meeting with a NYC fund manager hoping to add eastern European real estate to his REIT, when he spotted Pawlowski’s picture at the subway newpaper kiosk.

It was done. Pawlowski was finally dead and gone. Out of his life for good.

Without slowing his gait, he plunked down euros, picked up an International Herald Tribune and scanned the story.

Hold on, the photo caption read, ‘Missing Polish Environment Minister-in-Waiting.’

‘Missing’? Usher stopped like a dropped stone. The stream of commuters on the subway platform split in two and flowed past him. He should be reading, ‘Dead’. ‘Killed in the holdup of a Prague pharmacy’. He should be reading about Filshin going down as well. ‘Also Shot and Killed by Police’ would have been the ideal, but he would have settled for ‘Arrested for Attempted Robbery.’ The plan had been perfect. What had gone wrong?

Pulling out his mobile, he cancelled his breakfast meeting and hopped on a subway train. He went on line and looked for more news about the Prague hold-up.

Nothing but speculations about the AWOL Polish government minister. They ran the gamut from his secretary’s, ‘worried’, to his friends’, ‘he takes little trips like this all the time; he’ll show up in a day or two’, to his New Jersey waste industry business partner Giovanni ‘Johnny’ Rienzo’s, ‘yeah, I’m flying out later today. Gotta check on my investments over there.’

Usher turned off the phone and got off at Alexanderplatz.Above ground the day was grey and rainy, but people still wandered

the square near the television tower. He turned up his collar and hurried

across the plaza to the bank of payphones by the old East German World Clock. The trees weren’t tall enough to shelter the phones from the drizzle, but he was less likely to be overheard than inside the mini-mall. He inserted a disposable phone card, dialed Filshin’s house in Cleveland, then turned his back to the wind to keep the rain out of his face.

“Where is he?” He was livid, and barely kept his voice from screaming.

“Mr. Usher? Is you?” Filshin’s wife asked.“Damn straight, it’s me!” Cold rain fed his anger. “Where’s

Gennady?”The woman hesitated. “He says he is working for you. In Europe.”Christ! Idiot even told his wife. “Tell him to call me. Right away.”“Everything is good, Mr. Usher?”No, everything is not good, Usher thought, but it wouldn’t do to tip

her off. “Just tell him to call.” He kept his voice flat. “Now. Give him this number.” He read the payphone number into the receiver and hung up.

A German businessman picking up a morning paper at the mini-mall kiosk looked in Usher’s direction. For a few seconds, he thought he had a tail, but no. The man ducked down the subway escalator into the U-Bahn.

Usher’s cell phone rang. He heard Filshin’s voice say ‘hello’ and pushed the ‘end call’ button without saying a word. Why didn’t Russians ever do as they were told? A few minutes more, then finally, the pay phone rang.

“Are you on a payphone?”No answer.“I’ve told you again and again, no cell phones. They are listened to.”“Yes. So are landlines here in East. You get used to it, Mr. Usher. Is

all matter of choosing which devil you are wishing to bargain with. My colleagues have had chance to inspect Russian prisons and are not being eager to repeat experience.”

The man was raving. Usher refused to let himself get drawn into a conversation that led in circles. “Are you on a payphone?”

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“You must be taking chance also, Mr. Usher. We have been doing job for you. Dangerous job. Now you must be taking small chance by speaking on phone.”

How dare he! “Job? You haven’t done any job for me. Where the hell is he?”

“I have been telling you, is not being good idea. All you are doing, Mr. Usher, is speaking on phone. But Filshin must be going out and playing games with people who are not being very nice. With hoodlums.”

“Just finish it. No more money until it’s done.”“This is being problem, Mr. Usher. We are having little argument

about wages, my hired hoodlums and I. They are not being happy with what you and I will be paying them. They have become union of thugs that is striking against my management. I am not being good gang leader, I confess. Am only scientist. Hoodlum union is thinking Meitner will be paying more money for our friend’s safe return than Mr. Usher will be paying for killing him.

“You told them my name! You dumb . . .“No. I am not being stupid. If my hoodlums are knowing your name,

they will be killing me and coming to Berlin. But I am also not being good killer, Mr. Usher. I am thinking my hoodlums are right to be going to Meitner.”

“How dare you?” Usher scared himself with his outraged bellow. He looked to see if anyone had heard. No, thank God. The few people crossing the plaza were too far away.

“I was daring to keep from killing man you are wanting dead, Mr. Usher. Now I am daring to lead gang of thugs into thinking we can be getting ransom. All I am really wanting is to be going home to family in Cleveland…”

He wasn’t hearing right. “I’ll see that your family…”“Go near my family, Mr. Usher, and he will be back on street in less

than one hour. Maybe he will even be knowing name of man who is wanting him dead.”

How dare Filshin threaten him!

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“I was saying, due to precarious position with employees, all I can be doing, is slowing down inevitable. You, Mr. Usher, must be leaving nice office and be taking Blue Sky barrels out of Meitner landfill. Then when I am paying employees with ransom money we will be getting, and letting him go, there will be nothing for him to be showing authorities. Is best I can be doing.”

Like hell. In his mind, Usher was already forging intercepts that would get Filshin’s name added to the terrorist watch list of individuals forbidden to enter the US of A. Kiss your kids goodbye, Asshole. Their mama’s going to have to find them a real American daddy.

18 Kaliningrad

BACK FROM THE CITY WITH SUPPLIES, POPOV AND MARIO filled the shelves behind the hot plate with wormy apples, potatoes, dark bread, vodka, mineral water, and assorted tin cans. For a handful of rubles they had also snagged a real prize from the battered cardboard suitcase of an old Novgorod grandmother at the main train station…a black-market Siberian bear-paw salami.

“Nice.” Bogosian said, admiring the salami. He waved his fork at the canned spaghetti à la Bolognese warming on the hot plate.

Popov made a face. He picked up Filshin’s new disposable cell phone. “You waste our money on new phone? You have one. Pawlowski has one. Caspar can steal one anytime. Why you waste our money on this cheap Soviet shit?” He flung it across the room.

“The other mobiles have GPS,” Filshin said. “We turn them on and boom, the Americans give the longitude and latitude to Interpol, and the Russian Militsiya comes knocking.”

“How do you know they don’t have GPS in that phone?” Popov asked.

“I’m an engineer. I looked.”“Okay, okay,” Popov acquiesced. Filshin understood his anger as he looked at the shriveled potatoes.

How many times had he heard Natasha say, you have to feed your troops well, if you want a happy family. He opened his wallet and handed Popov euros from their rapidly dwindling supply to buy a real dinner.

While Popov and Mario returned to the city, Filshin, Bogosian, Caspar, and new hire, Bashir, the Ossetian kid they found living in the basement, secured the abandoned basement restaurant they were using to lock up Pawlowski.

Pawlowski sat tied to a captain’s chair in the middle of the room. One eye was swollen shut. The other eye scanned them like a bird of prey. Filshin would have to be careful when he proposed his plan.

Bogosian shoved a usable table across the uneven stone floor to Pawlowski and ordered Caspar and Bashir to stack the broken tables and chairs into a pile in front of the only other door. The lock was rusted shut, but a pile of wood would make doubly sure no one would get in or out without passing through the gang’s makeshift kitchen.

Filshin was drawn to the giant wine barrels that reached almost to the brick ceiling arching overhead. Their wooden lids were carved with scenes from the old Hanseatic League of Cities. Ships and markets in old city squares. Fascinating how this depiction of 1,000 years of Baltic history could escape being vaporized by both the 1944 RAF bombing run and the Soviet demolition. He ran his fingers over a three-dimensional medieval sailing ship and blew away the dust from the ship’s rigging and the faces of the tiny sailors.

A sharp pain struck his calf, and a chair leg clattered to the floor and skittered across the stones.

“Hey,” Bogosian yelled. “Quit daydreaming and help me carry out this table and some chairs. The others are back with dinner.”

19 Berlin

ON THEIR LAST NIGHT IN BERLIN, BLISS TOOK FRITZI to the city’s oldest restaurant, the Zur Letzten Instanz.

He plumped the light green corduroy pillow lying on the bench of the shiny, dark-brown majolica tiled stove and patted it for her to sit. “I thought you should sit on the same bench where the great man himself once sat.” He pointed to a white porcelain bust on top of the stove. Napoléon scowled down at the tiny table with Bliss’ name on the reservation card.

She laughed. “Half of Europe claims Napoléon ate or washed his hands somewhere. It’s as bad as ‘George Washington slept here’ back home.”

“Well in this case there was a witness. His name was E. T. A. Hoffmann. You’ve heard of him, the writer who wrote The Nutcracker, that ballet that gets danced by every American ballet company at Christmas?” He pointed to the large round table in the corner. “He was sitting right there when Napoléon marched in, sat on your bench and ordered pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut to go with his wheat beer.”

“I don’t believe it.”“I kid you not. Hoffmann wrote about it in a letter to one of his Paris

friends.”Bliss ordered wheat beer, pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut and Fritzi

was caught in another of his spells.“Do you remember the little café along the Gendarmenmarkt where

we drank our first coffee together?” he asked.How could she forget?“Well, right next door, on the second floor, is where Hoffmann had

his law office. He was the one who gave the German language its word for sparkling white wine.”

“Sekt?”

“Yes. Back home after a trip to Paris, he went to the little pub down the street from his office for dinner. The barkeep poured him a glass of sparkling white wine, and Hoffmann said, ‘C’est sec.’ He was saying in French, ‘It’s dry.’ But his drinking buddies thought it was the name of the wine they were drinking, and ever since the German word for champagne is Sekt.”

He watched her pick at her pig’s knuckle. “Nervous?”“Not really. I just want it to be over.”“We still haven’t found anything linking Pawlowski to the train

except that phone call. I’m wondering if we should call this whole thing off.”

“What do Mackenzie and Murphy think?”“They say he has the manpower and the organizational skills to pull

it off, but…”“Why would he risk something so stupid?”“Exactly. On the other hand he is AWOL. He could be taking the

train to Chechnya or Iran where they have labs that can extract the plutonium. But more likely we’re witnessing a turf war and he’s lying low until the shooting ends, and we’re spinning our wheels for nothing.

“I almost had ATTF talked into cancelling the whole operation, but then I saw how much Michael Usher wanted us to call it off. Do you have any idea why?”

She shook her head.“You were at NSA when he was.” He grinned as if he was

embarrassed. “I don’t know how to ask this without sounding insulting but…what does Usher have against you?”

She shrugged. He had his drive back and he had succeeded in ruining her reputation. Fritzi Jordan was just another item ticked off on Usher’s to do list. Neutralized. No longer a threat.

“Maybe it’s the landfill,” Bliss said. “It used to be owned by the Germans. Maybe he doesn’t want you blown away by all that German overengineering and overspending before you lead that workshop. He’s a complicated guy.”

“Usher complicated? Hah! Usher is all about the money. Something about the conference or Pawlowski is threatening his portfolio.”

“How do you know that?”

ASTRID JULIAN

Should she mention the flash drive? Half of her wanted to tell him, but she no longer had the proof. And the flash drive had been US government property. She had broken the law. “Just a hunch,” she said.

“So, should we call it off ?”She grinned. “Don’t you want to find out why Usher is so nervous?”“Atta girl,” he said. “I knew you’d see it my way. Dessert?”“Are you insane? I’ve never eaten so much in my life.”“The portions could feed a family of four, couldn’t they?”She drank her beer without speaking. He took her hands and lifted

them until she looked into his eyes. “Sometimes you’re like a raindrop falling into a pond,” he said. “Don’t lose yourself out there.”

110

20 Kaliningrad

THE RANSOMING WAS TAKING TOO LONG. Filshin and his wife Natasha had planned for 24-36 hours, but it had been days now. Why was it taking so long? And how would he keep Popov from killing Pawlowski when the ransom arrived?

Filshin was at an internet café instant messaging Natasha when the reply to his ransom email arrived.

He was elated. His nightmare excursion into the underworld was about to end. He had already decided to take whatever they offered. Then he would extricate himself by convincing his gang to take jobs with Pawlowski. Simple, straightforward.

So simple that at first, he didn’t understand the email. It was in English, but it made no sense. “Meitner AG not

responsible,” it read. “Employee contracts reassigned during asset relocation following corporate merger. RGB International, formerly Meitner-Poland, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of RGB Waste of Newark, New Jersey, USA.”

He looked up the merger in Business Weekly online, found the telephone numbers he needed, and called. The more calls he made, the more worried he became. The last call, with a man called Johnny Rienzo, was the worst.

His voice was raspy. Filshin understood every word, but again, it made no sense. ‘Who is this?’…‘RGB International doesn’t carry ransom insurance.’…‘Our executives sign contracts indemnifying RGB. We expect employees to take appropriate measures. Hire a security team.’

Employee? The Economist bio had been vague about Pawlowski’s connection to Meitner, but employee? Filshin had thought Pawlowski was more than a mere employee…

ASTRID JULIAN

Finally, most ominous of all…when he mentioned Pawlowski by name… “Jan Pawlowski? Never heard of him,” the raspy voice said. “Wrong number.’

Filshin didn’t dare mention this to his gang. He had to talk to Pawlowski. Fast.

The day went downhill from there.He entered the basement hideout and heard shouting, the sound of a

punch connecting, and the crashing of chairs being thrown.Bogosian was yelling, “Stop!” Someone else moaned.Filshin ran through the dimly lit tunnel.Caspar, just back from buying a pack of smokes, was close behind. “Shut up, Bogosian,” Popov yelled. “The man has a memory

problem. This will remind him to stay quiet next time.”Filshin and Caspar ran faster. They found Pawlowski on the ground,

trying to crawl under the table with the hot plate.Popov was a mad man, not feeling the kicks Pawlowski flailed at his

tattooed hands, as he pulled him back out.An easy extrication? Pawlowski would never agree to hire his gang

after this.Popov kicked Pawlowski’s belly, his legs, his back, anywhere his

thick boots could connect. Pawlowski curled into a ball. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. Bashir, drinking vodka next to Mario, laughed as if watching an American reality TV show. A horrified Bogosian stood behind them.

“Idiots,” Filshin screamed. “Stop it.”“You’ll kill him,” Bogosian shouted.“Leave them alone,” Mario snarled. “Pawlowski will ruin everything

if he gets the FSB curious.” His bloody hands testified, he had gone the first round.

Caspar, with his young man’s reflexes, responded before Filshin could. He pulled Popov away, freeing Pawlowski. Then he didn’t stop, as first his elbow, then his fists smashed into Popov’s belly. “Stupid fucker,” he yelled. “You’re not cheating me out of my ransom.”

“Leave Popov alone and sit, Caspar.” Filshin said in a loud, but calm voice. He turned to Bogosian. “Some water. And a rag.” He tipped his

112

head at Pawlowski. “Clean him up.” Popov stalked away. Filshin looked at Mario. “What happened?”

Speaking badly mangled Russian to Filshin and German to Caspar, Mario told how he and Popov had made the rounds that day, collecting their first cash payments for the protection from the recent arson attacks along Kaliningrad’s river front that they were providing for local businesses. The police must have spotted them, because not twenty minutes later, the FSB was knocking on the door, demanding their share, and Pawlowski started his ruckus. The wood was too thick for them to hear what he was screaming, but the FSB men started asking questions.

Bogosian told them it was Filshin, and Popov took the hint for once, instead of losing his temper. Yes, he told them. Filshin likes to fight when he gets drunk, so we lock him up until he sleeps it off. Mario had had to add a lot of rubles to the pile to make them go away.

Popov walked back in. “Next time won’t be so easy. Pawlowski has to learn his lesson.”

“We can’t ransom a dead man,” Caspar yelled from his chair. Ransom. Filshin felt sick to his stomach.He peeled some bills from the few he had left and handed them to

Popov. “Take the night off. You, Bashir and Mario. Drive Caspar into the city, show him Immanuel Kant’s grave, so he knows where he and his bride should leave bouquets on their wedding day.”

When they were gone, Bogosian put water on the hot plate to make tea. “You trust Popov with Caspar?”

“They’re two of a kind. They’ll blow off steam with a few vodkas and come back pals.”

He walked to Pawlowski and helped him stand. Bogosian took his other elbow, and they helped him onto a chair.

“He’ll be all right, I think,” Bogosian said, after looking at how Pawlowski’s right eye was swelling shut. He set three glasses on the table.

Filshin undid the tape holding Pawlowski’s wrists together. He had to convince him that employing the Filshin Gang was the best way forward, and he had to do it now.

“So, Mr. Pawlowski. How is your tea tasting?” he asked, as the three men sipped tea.

ASTRID JULIAN

“Good, thank you, good,” Pawlowski said. He perched on his chair with his abdomen and chest scrunched into a small ball, as if expecting another beating.

Filshin sipped and waited. Let him get used to the idea that he wasn’t Popov. Bogosian refilled their glasses and, after a nod from Filshin, added a shot of vodka.

He would have to be careful. Bogosian had worked for the Americans in Georgia, so had to know at least a few words of BSE, or the Americans wouldn’t have hired him. He gave Bogosian some rubles, “Bring us something with meat, will you?” he asked. “A nice hot shashlik. None of that lukewarm Soviet-style swill.”

Bogosian left to find a street vendor, and Filshin waited for the vodka to take effect.

“Tell me why, Mr. Pawlowski,” he began. No. That sounded like an interrogation. Start by revealing something, he told himself. “We have mutual enemy, I am thinking.”

Pawlowski silently sipped tea. Was he curious? His swollen face was hard to read.

“Mr. Michael Usher?” No reaction. Filshin poured more vodka, not bothering with tea.Of course Usher’s name hadn’t surprised Pawlowski. He had tried to

blackmail him and doubtless spent most of the last week cursing his stupidity in believing Usher wouldn’t try something like a kidnapping. But it wasn’t supposed to be a kidnapping. Had he figured that out?

“Why, Mr. Pawlowski, is Michael Usher wanting you dead?” Filshin asked.

“Dead?” Surprise showed through the puffiness.“Yes, dead. Kidnapping is being my idea. Free enterprise like in

America. I am thinking we can be getting more from Meitner to be letting you go, than from Usher to be killing you.”

He sat up straighter. “That bastard!” “You have been careless, Mr. Pawlowski. And maybe a little naïve.

You think because Usher is working for American government, you will be safe from dirty tricks, no?”

114

Pawlowski didn’t answer.Filshin waited. “We are keeping you alive, as you can see.”Pawlowski snorted his opinion of how he was being kept, then

winced in pain.“You are not needing to be afraid of Popov,” Filshin said. “If he is

having night off, he will be finding young lady and be dancing at disco. In morning he will be coming back with big headache, but happy. You are being safe.”

“How much did Usher offer you to kill me?”By then Bogosian had returned with the shashlik. Filshin glanced

over at him. Had he understood? “Enough,” he said.A craftiness burned in Pawlowski’s eyes. The beating hadn’t cowed

him. “How much did you ask Meitner for?”“Also enough.” Quid pro quo. He had given Pawlowski information.

Now it was his turn. He wouldn’t mention Rienzo or the refusal to pay ransom until Pawlowski told him more.

“I can get you more. Lots more.”Filshin looked at Bogosian who had stopped unwrapping shashlik to

watch. How good was his English? Filshin had to chance it. “Perhaps you are thinking you can be going directly to Blue Sky, to be accusing them of dumping barrels of nuclear waste at Meitner facility in Poland?

“Perhaps you are having photos and thinking Blue Sky will be paying you money so photos are not appearing in press?”

“You’ve seen the photos?”“Mr. Usher was telling me,” Filshin said, without revealing who had

planted the barrels.“I thought Usher would want to protect his friends at Blue Sky, but

we can take the photos directly to Blue Sky. They’ll pay.”Filshin noticed the ‘we’ and let himself hope. Yes, this was the right

way.The swollen face contorted into a lopsided grin. “After they pay for

the photos, we’ll release them to the press anyway. I’ll get that fucker Usher.” His eyes grew crafty. “There’s a big bonus in it, if you help me.” He looked at Bogosian unsure if he understood, but included him anyway. “For all of you. And jobs. Real work. No more hiding and running. I’ll take care of the police.”

ASTRID JULIAN

It was that easy. He should have talked to Pawlowski days ago. Now, Filshin decided, he needed to be told the rest. He poured more vodka. “It will not be working. Blue Sky can be claiming innocence.” He tossed back his glass, and became reckless.

“It was all being fault of this Russian immigrant they are hiring, Blue Sky will be saying. Gennady Filshin was his name. Gennady Filshin, that’s me, Mr. Pawlowski.” Had he just aimed a loaded gun at himself? Too late now. “Filshin was having good recommendations, but he was having financial difficulties and was disappearing. Probably he was being agent for Meitner to be making Blue Sky look bad in Europe.”

“You?” Pawlowski asked. “Why?”“Why? You are seeing what kind of man Michael Usher is. Can you

not be guessing?” He wouldn’t say more. He couldn’t mention his family.

“Yes.”“Usher is needing something nuclear to be making Meitner look bad.

‘Nothing dangerous. Just messy. Something to be ending deals with risky company that cannot be guaranteeing security,’ he is saying, and I am thinking, why should I be risking my life in Lithuania or in Belarus to be doing this thing?” Filshin drank. “So I am organizing job in Michigan and forgetting about lousy quality of paint in eastern Europe.”

Pawlowski said nothing.“After he is seeing photos, Usher is trying to make Filshin into

murderer, and Filshin is having to be making deals with people like Popov.

“I am engineer, Mr. Pawlowski. I will be finding work again, Usher cannot be stopping me here in Mother Russia, but they…Popov, Caspar, and the others,” he nodded at Bogosian, “Are being desperate men. They are needing money to be letting you go.”

“The ransom insurance will pay.”“That is bringing us to problem number two. Meitner is saying they

are not being responsible. Meitner-Poland is having new owner…RGB International, man is saying, and is no ransom insurance, and is no one called Jan Pawlowski working for RGB.”

116

“What the fuck?” Pawlowski’s swollen face went white. “Who? What was his name?”

“A man named Rienzo. Johnny Rienzo.”He laughed. “Puffed up little weasel. Of course I don’t work for him.

I’m his partner. I own the company. At least I will once I sign the final papers. The deal can’t go through without my signature.” He grinned a Quasimodo grin and reached for the newspaper-wrapped shashlik.

Filshin opened his own package of shashlik and nibbled on a bit of onion between the lamb chunks. “I think you are now understanding, how dangerous everything is being.”

“Oh yeah.” Pawlowski swished vodka around his mouth. “I think it’s time for Michael Fucking Usher to meet my new partner, New Jersey born-and-bred Johnny Rienzo.”

Who was predator and who was prey, Filshin wondered, as he handed Pawlowski a printout of a newspaper interview with Rienzo.

“So Johnny’s coming here? Even better,” Pawlowski said. “I have an idea.” He took a cigarette from the pack Bogosian had left lying on the table and poured out three vodkas as if he was in charge.

Filshin saw Bogosian wonder, but he would wait for an explanation. “No one will get rich quick,” Pawlowski said, “But it will solve our

Usher problem.”So easy. Why, oh why, had he waited so long, Filshin wondered, as

he listened to a real crime gang boss laying out his plans.“Yes…Michael Usher needs to meet Johnny. And you, Filshin,

you’re an engineer. Rienzo’s smart. Once I explain things, he’ll see that your name on the company stationery is worth every penny.”

“Popov won’t like working for a living.” “I’ll give him Rienzo’s number. Let him play hard ass with the hard

ass.” He smiled, and his swollen lower lip cracked open. “I can understand how an engineer might have trouble managing Popov, but trust me, Rienzo and I can handle him.”

“You’re not angry?”“Of course, I’m angry. But I’m not a fool. Neither is Popov. I’ve

been treated worse and survived.” He felt the swelling around his eye. “With enough vodka, I don’t even feel it.”

ASTRID JULIAN

The eye that still saw peered at Filshin with drunken sincerity. “If you had refused to play along, Usher would have hired someone else, and I’d be lying in the Prague morgue, not sitting here with a banged up face. Considering what could have happened, I’m prepared to be generous.”

He lifted his glass. “When that fucker Usher sees us together, he’ll go nuts trying to get even, but there’s nothing he can do. With Rienzo, a 100% bona-fide American heading the company, and you, a real engineer with sheepskin, running the day-to-day, and me in charge of the Polish Ministry that hands out the certifications…Blue Sky is history.”

118

21 Kaliningrad

PAWLOWSKI WAS SHORT ON HONESTY, but when it came to leadership the man had something.

Bogosian decided working for an American-Polish company was almost as good as crossing the Big Water. Caspar was a follower. When it was explained, he saw that a payroll job was his best option. Popov and Mario took two days to convince themselves there would be no ransom, then became Pawlowski’s personal bodyguards. They were good. Even Filshin had to run his appointments with Pawlowski through Popov.

Filshin didn’t know whether to be afraid or relieved that he wasn’t party to all of his boss’s enterprises. Chief among the big man’s concerns was regaining control over the frozen bank accounts he used for laundering the money he earned. Pawlowski explained that he and his men had been working that problem when the Filshin Gang interrupted them by kidnapping the boss, but those plans would now go forward.

Filshin expected Johnny Rienzo to look like he belonged to the reality TV show gangster family he once caught his son watching back in Cleveland before Filshin chased him outside to mow the lawn… pudgy, short, and dripping with gold chains and diamond pinkie rings. But Johnny Rienzo was cool understated elegance in thousand-dollar suits. The ponytail that would have looked silly on Tony Soprano added élan and class.

Filshin’s life veered further out of control. Man up, he told himself, and opened the requisite bank accounts in New York, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas and Aruba. Stop whining. He sent Natasha’s father a plane ticket to Toronto and arranged for a weekly stipend to be sent to Natasha. He paid the bill for the kids’ conservatory and medical school. If he couldn’t go home, he would shoulder the finances. His family was safe. The rest didn’t matter.

ASTRID JULIAN

At the top of Pawlowski’s agenda was a business conference in Katowice, Poland. The conference website explained why he was so interested. Michael Usher was the keynote speaker and the new Polish Environment Minister, aka Pawlowski, was scheduled to welcome conference attendees. Pawlowski would stay out of sight until then.

Filshin was reading the bios of the other speakers when Pawlowski walked by his desk. He stopped to stare at the photo of a young African-American woman.

“Well, well, isn’t this interesting,” Pawlowski said.Friederike Jordan looked about the age of Filshin’s own daughters;

hardly old enough to be the expert in environmental remediation that the conference website said she was.

“I never thought I’d run into Fritzi Jordan again, but here she is. And she’s coming to Poland. Hey Johnny, come get a load of this.”

“Cute. Who is she?” Rienzo asked.“An old friend from my Washington days. Though how in the hell

Fritzi Jordan ever got involved with wanting to clean up the environment beats me. Maybe it was having to work with Michael Usher. He definitely leaves me wanting to clean up the world.”

“Wait a minute,” Rienzo said. “Are you telling me, she used to work for Michael Usher, the guy who just tried to have you killed?”

Pawlowski nodded. “Usher introduced us. He arranged for me to show up at a swank party and sweep her off her feet.” His swollen face twisted into a smile that showed genuine fondness. “Wasn’t much of a challenge. She’s a sweet kid.”

“It’s a setup,” Rienzo said.Pawlowski laughed. “Fritzi? Ridiculous.”“She just appears here, on your home turf? After how many years?”

Rienzo said. “With the guy who hired Filshin to kill you?” He shook his head. “It’s a setup.”

“Fritzi doesn’t have it in her.” Pawlowski pulled up a chair and sat in front of Filshin’s monitor. “This is great. Not only do I get to come back from the dead to snag a lucrative contract, I also get to hook up with an old friend.”

120

Rienzo picked up a conference brochure from Filshin’s desk. “This isn’t good.” He passed it to Filshin. “What do you think, Jenye?”

“I am also thinking, is looking like trap.”“What? Am I working with a couple of old ladies? This is going to

be fun. Fritzi and Usher had a falling out even before I left Washington. I’m surprised she’s still works for him.”

Rienzo and Filshin looked at each other. Pawlowski didn’t notice. “ “She was his secretary?” Rienzo asked.“No. Nothing like that. They worked together at NSA.”“The National Security Agency?” Rienzo asked. “She was a spy?”“Mathematician. Usher said she was some kind of genius. Wrote

encryption algorithms. You know, software to keep people from hacking into government computers.”

Rienzo and Filshin exchanged another glance. “So why was Usher wanting you to be meeting her?” Filshin asked.

Pawlowski was grinning, still thinking of his student days in Washington. “Usher said she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. He needed to know what she knew.”

“And? What was it?”“No idea. I never did find out. Fritzi never talked about her work.”Rienzo grinned in disbelief. “A woman who doesn’t like to talk?”“Never ever,” Pawlowski insisted. “Everything I learned about her

work came from Usher.” He snatched the program booklet from Rienzo and leafed through it. “Whatever she had on Usher, it must have been a doozy. I was invited to so many parties, I lost count. Fun for me, awful for Fritzi. She hated the Washington social scene, but her boss wouldn’t take no for an answer. Usher must have been behind that too. I became a refuge for her, which was probably what Usher intended.

“You know, thinking back, I think Usher was afraid of her.” He laughed so hard that his bruises made him wince. “How can you be afraid of a mathematician!”

A sly look came over Rienzo’s face. “She did programming for government computers? As in government banking computers?”

“Maybe. Usher didn’t say.”“Your friend may be the answer to our banking problems.”“You mean…”

ASTRID JULIAN

“Exactly. Let’s get back to your office.” He shot him a warning glance meant to exclude Filshin, but Pawlowski stopped him. “How can Jenye help us, if we aren’t up front about our cash flow problems?”

Rienzo turned to Filshin and explained. “The biggest handicap we have in growing our business is quickly making our money legal by investing in something tangible, which can’t be shut down or seized without taking down a lot of other businesses. You know, like in the banking crisis…too big to fail and all that.

“We like the waste industry, and construction…architectural renovation and interior design. Expenses can be padded there. But cash businesses, big cash businesses like casinos and hotels, are best.

“Since this global war on terror thing though, the US has clamped down on how money moves. We have millions waiting to be invested, and we can’t do anything with it.” Rienzo said.

“Millions?” Pawlowski said. “Try hundreds of millions.”“Jan has come up with a brilliant plan to free up our money.”“It is brilliant, isn’t it?” Pawlowski’s bruised face managed a

crooked smile. “But we need to get the press involved. It can’t work without the press.” He gave Rienzo and accusing look.

“My PR contacts in New York are working that,” Rienzo told him.What were they talking about?Pawlowski gave Filshin a brief summary. Filshin worked to keep his horror from creeping into his face as he

listened to how Pawlowski had arranged for a train loaded with nuclear material to be hijacked. He intended for the public to force governments in eastern Europe to unfreeze his bank accounts, but somehow the authorities had hushed it up. He and Rienzo were now planning attacks in a number of eastern European cities that would ratchet up public fear and get news of the train’s disappearance out. That would increase the pressure to unfreeze their accounts.

“RDDs is engineer-speak,”Pawlowski said. “‘Dirty bomb’ sounds so much scarier.”

“Scary will give us back what is ours,” Rienzo said in his raspy NYC voice.

They were seriously crazy, Filshin thought.

122

Rienzo wasn’t done. “I read in the Wall Street Journal the NSA is making banks install transaction monitoring software to find accounts being used for money laundering,” Rienzo said. He tapped Fritzi Jordan’s picture on the monitor. “If your friend here is the mathematical genius you say she is, I think Filshin and his boys should go to the conference and snatch her.”

Filshin looked up at Pawlowski, who didn’t like what he was hearing one bit. “Come on, Johnny. NSA has hundreds of projects. We have no idea what Fritzi was working on.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have a more ordinary math genius project in mind. Like where she cracks bank security on the internet and moves our money somewhere safe, while we step up the timetable with the dirty bomb attacks. Hijacking the train isn’t working. Every time I read about it, the authorities say the castor train was ‘delayed’ or ‘diverted’, and the bastards repeat all the security stuff; how anyone trying to get at the plutonium will keel over from radiation poisoning.

“No more warning shots. Let’s see what happens when we hit a city with an armed dirty bomb. That should shake something loose.” A sly look crept into his face. “But it won’t really matter, because we’ll have Little Miss Math Genius moving our money out the whole time they’re chasing dirty bombers. By the time the Feds and Interpol catch on, it will be too late.”

Another kidnapping, Filshin thought. A woman this time. And another road trip with Popov. The only consolation was that Pawlowski seemed as unhappy about it as he was.

If you liked A Spy in Berlin you can read more in The Professional Friend: A Spy Novel

available at most online booksellers.

About the Author

Astrid Julian was born in Germany, raised in Canada, and currently lives on the southern shore of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. Her fiction has been published in the US, Russia, Canada, Germany and the UK, where her novelette "Irene's Song" was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award in the short fiction category. 2014 marks the first appearance of her spy thriller The Professional Friend. It takes readers on an adrenaline-charged race across Europe as organized criminals terrorize cities from Berlin to Moscow with dirty bomb radiation.

The topics of Astrid Julian's nonfiction range from space-based microscopy on the International Space Station to the testing of jet engines and rockets in NASA wind tunnels and vacuum chambers. Her film "Return to Flight" is the story of the men and women of Cleveland's NASA Glenn who worked to return the shuttle to flight status after the Columbia accident. It can be found on YouTube.

Also by Astrid Julian

Mysteries and ThrillersAtomic MouseThe Icarus MirrorJulianne’s FrecklesThe Professional Friend

FantasiesBringing Sissy HomeIrene’s SongThe Last SecretThe Hunter and the Stag

Science FictionChild of ChernobylMother’s DayBlowup

Connect with Astrid Julian

https://www.facebook.com/astrid.julianhttps://twitter.com/AstridJulianhttps://www.youtube.com/user/pliny47https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AstridJulian/posts