Erika Holzer - Freedom Bridge

It must have occurred to Joe Cherner too. He had leaped out of his jeep and was racing toward the middle of the bridge. Raising his sidearm, he fired into the air.

Malik and his soldiers turned into statues.

As if on cue, Irina paused. A ruptured support beam from one side of the bridge hung in the water like a broken limb, leaving a narrow breach. A few feet beyond, the pontoons bobbed in the water. The darkness made it hard to tell where the sky ended and the river began.

Suddenly Irina cried out and leapt into the breach. Three older boys followed instantly, three others hesitated but only momentarily. Two children—the youngest—froze. Russian soldiers scooped them up.

As Joe Cherner reached the scene, tears running down his face, the only thing his probing flashlight picked out was a shadowy patch being dragged downstream that might have been Irina’s hair floating on the gray-black surface.

“Don’t look down,” Malik said philosophically, appearing suddenly at Brenner’s shoulder. “By next week, you’ll be saying goodbye to all this.”

Thanks a lot, Major. Let’s hope Joe Cherner is so distracted that your remark didn’t register.

But it was Malik that Cherner pointed his weapon at. And not for long. The barrel of a rifle was pressed against the back of Cherner’s neck.

“Show some sense, Lieutenant,” Malik said coolly. “I have ten men here. Lousy odds, ten against one. My advice? Walk back to your jeep and move on. Forget this ever happened.”

Cherner hesitated before holstering his .45. He turned on his heel and walked slowly toward his truck.

His friend Joe was smart enough to move on, Brenner thought, but forget? Never.

He wondered if the same was true of him.

Kiril stood on a stretch of unprotected tarmac at Schönefeld Airport, the major civilian airport of East Germany and the only one that served East Berlin. It was a cold, gray afternoon with no buildings or foliage to serve as a windbreaker. His fedora was soaked. His threadbare raincoat slapped against his trousers. Dark glasses obscured his eyes.

Beside him, Galya shivered uncontrollably even in a long coat lined with down, marveling at how Kiril could be so oblivious to the cold.

His mind was elsewhere. Would Dr. Kurt Brenner succumb to blackmail? he wondered. Damn Aleksei’s secretiveness and his need-to-know rules! In Moscow, he had shown Kiril bits and pieces of the Brenner file, but not enough to get a clear picture of Dr. Kurt Brenner, famous heart surgeon—or Kurt Brenner, private citizen.

Then go over what you do know, he told himself wearily.

German father and mother. Both naturalized American citizens, both employed by their son’s cardiac institute. Dr. Brenner’s flamboyantly successful medical career. A long bachelorhood followed by marriage to a journalist. Brenner’s widespread and apparently earned reputation as a humanitarian because of his nonprofit cardiac clinic for indigent children. Temperament: Brenner was known to cancel an entire day’s surgical schedule and lock himself in his office on the rare occasion when a patient died on his operating table .

A man of contradictions, Kiril mused. A renowned surgeon who had declined every invitation to medical exchanges in Iron Curtain countries, yet heaped extravagant praise on Medicine International’s Peace through Medicine activities in such places.

Why had Brenner accepted the invitation to East Berlin with such alacrity?

Kiril thought about some Western physicians who’d come to Moscow from time to time.

How everyone in Dr. Yanin’s operating theater, from Yanin on down, had been excited at the mere prospect of learning about new ideas and technologies. The Americans, in particular, were open and generous about sharing their medical expertise—and friendly. But not judgemental. They saw—there was no way they could help seeing—the rigid control the Soviet government exercised over its citizens. No free exchange of ideas. No opportunity for hosts and guests to be alone. He recalled one American doctor who had given him a politically harmless detective novel in exchange for a volume of Russian poems but hadn’t even noticed that both books had been examined by the KGB minders as if their pages contained a coded plot to overthrow the Kremlin.

Kiril’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of two limousines. During their research, Kiril and Stepan had learned a lot about Western vehicles—cars and trucks manufactured in the Soviet Union after World War II by reverse engineering of a classic American automobile: the Packard Super-8. The Soviet “Packard,” a ZIS-110 sedan, had a 6-liter, 8-cylinder engine under the hood, 140 horse power, and could reach a top speed of nearly ninety miles per hour—fast for those days. Stalin was rumored to have owned several Packards, so the story went, and he wanted the Soviets’ first effort to manufacture a luxury automobile patterned after a stellar American car of the 1940s. Indeed, the ZIS-110 was so popular that Communist leaders from around the world—Mao, Tito, and Walter Ulbrecht of East Germany—favored them. So Kiril wasn’t surprised to see two of them on the tarmac.

The lead limousine pulled up to where Kiril and Galya were standing, the second just behind it. The first vehicle’s right rear door opened and a trim uniformed Vopo emerged, snapped open a black umbrella, and helped a short man wearing a top-hat to get out of the car. Top-hat carried a large piece of cardboard in the shape of a key.

The mayor of East Berlin bearing a symbolic key to the city for Herr Doktor Professor Kurt Brenner?

When Kiril had been stationed in Murmansk, he’d picked up a lot of American slang. The slang word he thought of now was “corny.”

The second car disgorged a huge woman wearing clodhopper shoes, serge trousers, and a heavy wool overcoat. Her close-cropped gray hair was immediately soaked. As her car door was closing, Kiril glimpsed a man sitting in the rear seat.

“Here they come!” Galya exclaimed.

Kiril squinted toward the horizon and saw a tiny speck. As he watched it grow larger, the speck became a flying fish skimming over dark clouds. He felt a surge of optimism. Whatever else he might be, Brenner was an American. He would never succumb to a blackmail threat—not if the price were his way of life, his freedom.

The fish metamorphosed into a smooth silver body. Circling for a landing, the plane taxied to a halt in front of the small group.

The man and woman who emerged from the plane were Americans, all right. You could sense it in the lift of their heads. In the way they moved. Kiril focused on Kurt Brenner’s walk—jaunty, with a brisk authoritative step. Unlike his own more deliberate way of moving. He burned the image into his brain. He would need to replicate Brenner’s walk until it was second nature. Brenner was swinging a trim briefcase the way an American movie hero might cross a patio swinging a tennis racket. Another indelible image. He zeroed in on Brenner’s hair. It was thicker than his, but not by much. He made a mental note to pick up some hair tonic.

The inventory stopped abruptly. He scrutinized Kurt Brenner’s face, now only a few yards from his own.

I have a good chance of making this work!

He was so elated that he forgot the standing order he had given himself. Monitor people’s reactions—especially Galya’s.

He needn’t have worried about Galya. She had barely noticed Brenner, too preoccupied with studying his wife. As he readied himself for making small talk, he glanced at Adrienne Brenner. She was tall, with an almost cat-like grace. She wore a forest-green cape, gold braid running across the shoulders and along the raised collar. Copper glints were all he could see of her hair, most of it captured under a wide-brimmed hat.