What an amateur you are, Adrienne Brenner. You toss your anti-communist sentiments in my face, and then expect me to think you’re here to see the sights and participate in a medical exchange program that clearly bores you? You play the part of the dutiful wife even though your husband is so flagrantly unfaithful you haven’t lived with him for months? Shall I fit the pieces into my puzzle? From the microfilm to Emil von Eyssen’s photographer brother-in-law to you to the CIA in a nice neat recapture of the ball that Stepan Brodsky fumbled.
Over my dead body!
Aleksei gritted his teeth, a scissor-sharp pain making him long for numbness. He knew the signs. The old terror was accelerating.
When he managed to pull himself together, he played with the idea of pulling Luka off his brother and shadowing Ernst Roeder instead.
Much too obvious, he decided. If Roeder were alerted, he’d never make his move. Better to save Luka for a showdown in case Roeder proved to be obstinate.
He studied his most charming co-optee until she cringed under the scrutiny. “From now on,” he said sotto voce, “whenever Adrienne Brenner is not in her room, you will not let her out of your sight. That’s an order.”
It had been a few hours since Colonel Emil von Eyssen received a call from his man at the Schnellboot dock. The information was scant. Colonel Aleksei Andreyev had been on Glienicker Bridge and something had occurred—important enough for him to contact the East Berlin KGB station. A few hours later, the Vopos had recovered a cigarette lighter from one of their patrol boats and the lighter was now in Andreyev’s possession.
Under von Eyssen’s impatient questioning, the Vopo who surrendered the lighter to Andreyev confirmed he had been accompanied by a Soviet lieutenant, but, no, he did not get his name. Yes, Vopo personnel had conducted the search; but no, he did not know who had authorized it. Yes, the lighter had some kind of design on its metal case; but, no, he could not remember what it was.
With every answer, von Eyssen had become more frustrated. He was certain of only one thing. What he did know was potentially fatal.
Air Force Lieutenant Stepan Brodsky had attempted to defect. He did not succeed because of the chaotic bloodbath on the bridge. But the summit had dissolved just before Captain Brodsky had made a run for it—and that’s when Brodsky had been spotted talking to von Eyssen’s brother-in-law, Ernst Roeder. If Ernst was somehow complicit in the security leak, Colonel Aleksei Andreyev would find a way to lay it at von Eyssen’s doorstep.
Unless he could buy Andreyev’s silence?
Impossible. The man was impervious to every human feeling, even greed. He thought of the East German guard, killed on Glienicker during Brodsky’s aborted escape and how Andreyev had reacted to the news with callous indifference.
Not that von Eyssen’s superiors weren’t equally indifferent. With the summit looming, word had come down from above. Keep the borders quiet. No incidents during the negotiations. None after they were over. None during the expected new round of talks when bold proposals by the Soviet Union would be tossed on the bargaining table for the first time.
Von Eyssen’s jaw clenched as he relived the criticism that had been heaped on him by his superiors—and worse, by the likes of Aleksei Andreyev. What should he have done, allow some Soviet swine to escape and peddle his espionage wares to the West? The Soviets this, the Soviets that—and to hell with the Germans. Potsdam wasn’t even in his normal jurisdiction!
How carefully, how cautiously, he had nurtured his career. No sacrifice had been too great, not even the humiliation of being patronized by inferiors. Soviet barbarians who raped, not just our women, but our country! That the Soviet Motherland had plundered twenty billion dollars’ worth of German industry by calling it “reparations” never ceased to enrage him.
But there would be a day of reckoning. A day when Germany’s leaders, East and West, were replaced by men of vision and courage, he brooded. He would be ready for that day, his record spotless, his career intact.
Von Eyssen rose, walked to a floor-length mirror, and stood at rigid attention. The reflection that stared back was, as always, reassuring. White-blond hair and azure-blue eyes. Tall and broad-shouldered. Neat green uniform adorned with medals. A true Aryan…
The man of the future.
Colonel Emil von Eyssen clicked his heels, did a smart about-face, and cleansed of fear and anger, returned to his desk.
Where a pile of photographs rested placidly. Von Eyssen forced himself to leaf through them again. A face loomed with each name, like a roll call. This one is in no position to betray me. That one is, but would not dare. This one has no access to classified information. That one used to, but not anymore.
And his brother-in-law?
Damn you, Frieda!
He could hear his sister’s voice as if it were yesterday.
“My husband must have an important position in life, Emil. The kind that allows us to mingle with important people. And besides,” she pouted, “Ernst happens to be very talented. He takes such beautiful photographs.”
And I gave in to her, von Eyssen groaned.
He put through a call to his sergeant, who had just returned from tailing Roeder. “From now on,” von Eyssen told him, “I want my brother-in-law under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”
Chapter 34
Everything was in readiness for the high point of the Humboldt University medical conference. The amphitheater was standing-room only—physicians, nurses, medical students, staff members, journalists, even some of the idly curious.
The elderly patient, unconscious on the operating table, lay between a sheet and a hypothermia mattress that had lowered his body temperature to the required coolness. Doctors, nurses, and technicians were stationed around the table. Behind them, in customary white smocks and masks, were four honored guests: Dr. Mikhail Yanin, Dr. Kiril Andreyev, nurse Galina Barkova, and Mrs. Adrienne Brenner.
A technician sat placidly at the controls of a heart-lung machine.
The chief surgeon, an East German of excellent reputation, leaned over the patient. Making an incision from collarbone to diaphragm, he sawed through breastbone, spread open the rib cage to expose a gleaming fibrous membrane laced with blood vessels—the pericardial sac.
As if on cue, at that precise moment Dr. Kurt Brenner entered the operating room from a side door. He walked to the table, held out a gloved hand for an instrument, and with a quick deft movement in what seemed a split second, cut open the pericardial sac to reveal the patient’s heart. There were murmurs of approval from many in the audience, a scattered clapping of hands. A woman in a green operating smock high in the amphitheater murmured, “Bravo, Maestro.”
With quiet authority, Dr. Kurt Brenner began issuing orders in German that would stop the heart and delegate its indispensable functions to the heart-lung machine.
Brenner glanced at a balloon-like device hanging above the machine—and frowned.
Kiril Andreyev wondered how many other doctors had noticed, let alone figured out why Dr. Brenner was forced to work with a bubble oxygenator rather than the more efficient disc version he probably was accustomed to.
But there was something else. If it troubled Kiril, it had to bother the hell out of Dr. Brenner. The technician’s responses to Brenner’s orders were a touch too lethargic.
Still, Kiril reassured himself, the machine had taken over the patient’s breathing. Everything seemed to be normal.
As the operation progressed, the only sounds in the room were those of the operating team, Brenner’s occasional commands, the gentle whir of an electric motor as the patient’s blood and oxygen were rerouted, and the repetitive blips of an electro-cardiac monitoring machine.