Locked On

— he was damn certain he did not want to know.

Lilly made it clear to Clark that there was no one else in the Agency he trusted, and the thirty-three-year-old SAD asset agreed to help out his old friend.

Minutes later John was handed a satchel full of deutschmarks and taken to the U-Bahn, then he shuffled into a train half full of locals.

The exchange between Clark and the Stasi extorters was to be in a surreal location, unique to Berlin and the Cold War. The West German subway system had a few underground rail lines that, rather inconveniently, ventured under East Berlin. Before the partition of the city this was of no consequence, but after the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, the lines that rolled under the wall were no longer allowed to stop at the stations on the other side. The East Germans boarded or barred the doors at street level, in some cases they even built apartment complexes over their access, and they wiped any references to the subway stations from East German rail maps. Down below, these dark, vacant, and labyrinthine halls became known as Geisterbahnhofe—ghost stations.

A few minutes past midnight, John Clark dropped out of the back of the last car of the U8 train that rolled under the Mitte district of East Berlin. As the train clicked and clacked its way up the tunnel, the American pulled out a flashlight, adjusted the satchel over his shoulder, and walked on. In minutes he’d found his way to the Weinmeisterstrasse U-Bahn ghost station, and here he waited on the darkened concrete platform, listening to the sounds of rats below him and bats above him.

Within minutes a flashlight’s beam appeared in a stairwell. A single man appeared behind it, shined his light on Clark, and told him to open the satchel. Clark did as he was told, and then the man lowered a package to the dusty concrete and slid it over to the American.

Clark picked up the package, checked it to make certain they were the negatives, and then he left the satchel.

It could have, it should have, ended right there.

But the Stasi crooks were greedy, and they wanted their negatives back for another round of blackmail.

John Clark turned and began heading toward the edge of the platform, but he heard a noise on s back forthe opposite platform, across the rails. He shined his light over there in time to see a man with a handgun leveled at him. Clark dove and rolled onto the filthy concrete floor as a pistol shot cracked and echoed around the maze of tunnels and open halls.

The American CIA officer came out of his roll onto his feet with a Colt.45-caliber 1911 model pistol in his hands. He fired twice across the tracks, hit the shooter both times in the chest, and the man dropped where he stood.

Clark then shifted to the man with the money satchel. The Stasi agent had retreated back up the stairwell. Clark took a shot but missed low just before the man disappeared from view. He considered going after the man, it was the natural tendency of a direct-action expert like Clark, as he could not be certain the surviving Stasi man would not turn the tables and come after him. But just then the next train through the ghost station approached, and Clark was forced to quickly duck behind a concrete column. The bright lights of the train cast long shadows on the dusty platform. Clark slid to the tiled floor and chanced a look toward where the East German had disappeared. He saw nothing in the moving lights, and he knew that if he missed this train, he’d have to wait here another ten minutes for the next one.

Clark timed his leap onto the rear car perfectly; he caught onto a handhold by the back door and then moved around behind the car. He rode back there through the dark for several minutes, until he was in West Berlin, where he melted into the light station traffic.

Thirty minutes later he was on a streetcar full of West Germans heading home after working the night shift, and thirty minutes after that he was handing the negatives off to Gene Lilly.

He flew out of Germany on a commercial flight the next day, certain that nothing that had happened would ever go into the archives of the CIA or the East German Staatssicher-heitsdienst.

Standing there in the cold rain in Cologne, he shook off the memory and looked around. The Germany of today bore little resemblance to the divided nation of thirty years ago, and Clark reminded himself that today’s problems needed his undivided attention.

At four p.m. the day’s light was leaving the gray sky, and a light came on in the tiny lobby of number thirteen Thieboldgasse. Inside he could see an elderly woman leashing her dog at the foot of a stairwell. Quickly Clark crossed the street, hitched his collar higher up around his neck, and arrived at the side of the building just as the woman exited the front door, her eyes already on the street ahead. As the door closed behind her, John Clark moved up the wall through the grass and stepped in silently.

He was already halfway up the staircase with his SIG Sauer pistol in his hand by the time the door latch clicked behind him.

Manfred Kromm reacted to the knock at his door with a groan. He knew it would be Herta from across the hall, he knew she would have locked herself out yet again while walking that little gray bitch poodle of hers, and he knew he would have to pick her lock like he’d done dozens of times before.

He’d never told her where he learned to pick locks. Nor had she asked.

That she locked herself out purposely so that he would pay attention to her only annoyed him further. He could not be bothered with the old woman. She was a pest of the highest order, only slightly less annoying than her yapping Hund-chen Fifi. Still, Manfred Kromm did not let on that he knew her wd woman. eekly lockouts were a ruse. He was a loner and a social hermit, he would no more insinuate to people that they were interested in him than he would sprout wings and fly, so he smiled outwardly, groaned inwardly, and unlocked the old bitch’s gottverdammt door each time she knocked.

He climbed up from his chair, shuffled to the door, and lifted his picks off of the table in the entryway of his flat. The aged German put his hand on his door latch to step into the hall. Only the old force of habit made him look through the peephole. He went through the motions of glancing into the hallway, had begun to remove his eye after looking so he could open the door, but then his eye widened in surprise and it rushed back to the tiny lens in the door. There, on the other side, he saw a man in a raincoat.

And in the man’s hand a stainless-steel automatic pistol with a suppressor attached was pointed directly at Manfred Kromm’s door.

The man spoke in English, loud enough to be heard through the woodwork. “Unless your door is ballistic steel, or you can move faster than a bullet, you’d better let me in.”

“Wer is denn da?” Who the hell is it? Kromm croaked. He spoke English, he’d understood the man with the gun, but he had not used the language himself in many years. The right words would not pass his lips.

“Someone from your past.”

And then Kromm knew. He knew exactly who this man was.

And he knew he was about to die.

He opened the door.

I know your face. It’s older. But I remember you,” Kromm said. As instructed by Clark, he had moved to his chair in front of the television. His hands were on his knees, kneading the swollen joints slowly.

Clark stood above him, his weapon still pointing at the German.

“Are you alone?” Clark asked the question but searched the tiny flat without waiting for a response.

Manfred Kromm nodded. “Selbsverstandlich.” Of course.

Clark kept looking around, keeping the SIG pointed at the old man’s chest. He said, “Keep perfectly still. I’ve had a lot of coffee today, you don’t want to see how jumpy I am.”

“I will not move,” the old German said. Then he shrugged. “That gun in your hand is the only weapon in this flat.”