Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

“ Guten morgen , Herr Steinbock.” She heard a quiet click as the door locked.

He gestured. “ Bitte .”

She handed him her briefcase. All purses, briefcases, and backpacks were inspected when employees arrived or left. It wasn’t personal. Still, she felt a frisson of fear as he took it, wrapping his hand authoritatively around the leather handle. Opening it, he examined the journal articles, magazine clippings, and latest Siemens newsletter.

“ Danke .” He returned the case.

Anna headed down the hall, nodding and greeting administrators, assistants, and fellow engineers.

The door to her office was open.

“Good morning, Fraulein Doktor.” Her secretary, Helga Smits, held up a large white envelope bordered in black. “I have a Confidential for you.” A “Confidential” was a controlled document. Only those with Class 2 security clearances, such as Helga, could handle them; only those with Class 1 clearances, such as Anna, were allowed to read them.

“Good morning, fraulein. Thank you.” Anna raised the hand in which she held her briefcase and accepted the Confidential envelope with her thumb and forefinger. With the other hand she took the pen Helga offered. Helga pushed an acknowledgment-of-receipt form across her desk, and Anna signed it.

In seconds, Anna was inside her office. Closing the door, she hurried to her desk, dropped her briefcase at her feet, and sank into her chair. She opened the big envelope. Inside was a memo followed by five more pages. Leafing through them, she saw they were detailed diagrams and figures. She read the memo. It was from Herr Doktor Gunter Vogel: “How would you like to lose some weight?”

So droll, Gunter, Anna thought, but that was Gunter. An engineer’s humor. By asking whether she’d like “to lose some weight,” he was asking for help. The five technical pages illustrated the problem.

Anna picked up the phone. “So you’re calling me fat, Gunter?”

“Would I dare? And risk a date with Germany’s most beautiful PhD?”

“Check your fingers, Gunter. Is your wedding ring still there?”

“Wait a moment.” There was a pause. “Nope, not there.”

“Sudden transfer to your vest pocket, no doubt. Stop proposing bigamy and let’s get down to business.”

“If the Soviets ever attack, we’ve always got you—you can shoot down anyone.” He was trying, poorly, to sound hurt.

“Talk to me about your other problem—your engineering problem.”

Anna and Gunter were team leaders of a project to design new technology—a turbofan jet engine that would give the West a critical military edge over the Soviets. Conventional jet engines worked by sucking air into the compressor then driving it into the combustion chamber—“combustor”—where it was mixed with fuel and ignited. The resulting hot exhaust created the thrust that propelled the aircraft. What made the turbofan engine cutting-edge was that it diverted some of the air around the combustor, forcing it out the back of the engine cold. The combination of hot and cold exhaust produced more power without consuming more fuel. Such new engines would significantly increase the range of NATO’s bombers and fighters.

Anna’s team was designing the turbine, and Gunter’s the combustor.

“We’re having trouble with the inner combustor casing,” Gunter told her. “It’s too fragile at peak temperatures, so we have to switch to a heavier alloy.”

“So you need a heavier casing,” Anna said, “which means—just a wild guess here—you’re asking us to reduce our weight to compensate. How much?”

“Two kilograms.”

She sighed. Her team had spent months refining the turbine. They’d developed an exquisitely light and strong alloy for the blades and shaved every gram possible from the rotor and shaft. Now they were supposed to cut even more weight? Where? Damn . Weight versus budget, heat versus weight, weight versus thrust, thrust versus fuel efficiency, production schedules versus budget—Sisyphus had it easy.

Anna considered the situation. At last she nodded to herself. “How about I lend you our expert on heat dissipation, the good Herr Doktor Sterne.”

Gunter laughed. “Hermann Sterne? Isn’t he the one who told you a real German woman belonged in a kitchen making strudel? If I remember, you asked for the address of his cave.”

“That’s the guy,” she said grimly.

“Sure, I’ll take him off your hands—and you owe me.”

“No, Gunter, Neanderthal or not, he’s good at his job. He’s yours for a month. Then I want him back.”

The problem resolved for now, they ended the call.

The sudden quiet in her small office gave Anna relief. She gazed at her desktop—the telephone was set at the corner equidistant from both edges. Then at her file cabinet—the labels were perfectly horizontal. And at the stacks of working papers and blueprints—aligned like marching soldiers along the edge of her credenza. She prided herself on orderliness. It gave her a sense of decency, of control and purpose.

She stared around her immaculate office. Control and purpose—the very things she’d lost. She dropped her head into her hands. What had she done? How could it have gone so far? All she could think about was her mother. Her mind churned; her heart ached. With effort she pulled herself together. They would get through this crisis, she vowed. Taking a deep breath, she lifted her head and reached for the diagrams and notes Gunter had sent in the Confidential. Yes, this information would be useful.

She picked up her phone again and pushed a button. The noise of the buzzer on Fraulein Smits’s phone was muffled by the closed door.

“ Ja , Fraulein Doktor?” Fraulein Smits’s voice sounded in Anna’s ear.

“I’m working on some new specs. I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, of course.”

Hanging up the phone, Anna reached for her briefcase. Using a razor-thin blade from her desk drawer, she popped open the leather handle. Inside, nestled in black felt, was a metal cylinder about two inches long and the width of a man’s thumb—a miniaturized microdot camera.

Moving quickly, Anna unscrewed the camera’s top, inserted film, and began photographing Gunter’s diagrams.

For lunch, Ines Klaas sliced freshly baked rye bread, plump red tomatoes, and fine Emmentaler cheese, a Bavarian specialty. With care, she took out her favorite blue-and-white porcelain plates from the old days, before the war. She was a tall woman, taller than her daughter, Anna. Her long gray hair was parted in the middle and gathered back into a ponytail. At one time her hair had been as black as her daughter’s, and in the old days it was said her smile could light up a banquet hall.

But much had happened since then. Her husband had been killed in the early years of the war, a Luftwaffe captain. Anna’s fiancé had died in 1946, a teenage army private who’d survived the Soviet campaign but come home with end-stage tuberculosis. Now only the two of them were left, she and Anna. The story of her family’s losses wasn’t unusual.

Remembering better times, Ines went to the mirror in the sitting room and pulled her fine linen tunic close. It was pale yellow. Anna had given it to her, brought it home when she’d finished her studies at the California Institute of Technology—Caltech, she called it. With a critical eye, Ines studied her body. She’d lost fifteen pounds in the last month. The frames of her eyeglasses accented the thinness of her face. Her back hurt all the time now; she was always weary.

Still, as she returned to the kitchen to finish making the sandwiches, she began to smile. Anna would be home soon. She pinched her cheeks to bring color to them.