Erika Holzer - Freedom Bridge

Aleksei shifted gears immediately, recognizing his mistake. All stick and no carrot…

“Your reputation precedes you, Dr. Brenner,” he said, feeding admiration in his voice. “You’re a humanitarian. Think how your considerable talents would be a boon to us. Think of the challenge! And let’s not forget your financial difficulties of late,” he added, managing to sound both pragmatic and solicitous.

“You’re delusional!” Brenner said, incredulous. “You expect me to leave my country for good, just like—like switching off a light bulb?”

“It need not be forever,” Aleksei said, recalling Kiril’s suggestion about turning this particular issue into a bargaining chip.

“You want me to desert my institute for, what—a couple of years? You want me to abandon my parents? My wife?”

Back to the stick.

“As to your charming wife, Adrienne, only a few hours ago she committed a serious crime against the German Democratic Republic, possibly against my country as well. I’m in a position to have her detained for taking photographs of a national security nature. Rest assured that I will detain her if you refuse my terms.”

“Terms? What terms?” Brenner asked shrilly. “You lose nothing. I give up everything!”

Aleksei smiled. “You capitalists believe in negotiating, do you not? Lend the Motherland a few years of your life. In return, I guarantee to keep your reputation intact so that ultimately you can reclaim everything you have lost. Refuse us—” he paused while he practically obliterated the remnants of his last cigarette, “and I promise you the consequences will be permanent.”

As he headed for the door, Aleksei couldn’t resist one last jab. Resting one hand on the doorknob, he said, “They tell me you are an imaginative man in the operating room, Dr. Brenner. Imagine this, then. Picture your colleagues, your family, your friends—everyone who admires those capable hands of yours for their capacity to save lives. Now picture those same people unable to look at your hands without seeing a permanent stain—the blood of innocent children.”

His superior having left the scene, Andreyev ignored the glass and drank from the bottle of vodka.

“The clock is ticking, Dr. Brenner. Don’t keep me waiting too long. Don’t keep the press and the television cameras waiting.”

Kurt Brenner stared at his image in the bathroom mirror. “I am Dr. Kurt Brenner,” he asserted, as if someone were challenging that fact. “I am not—I will not—be intimidated.”

His image, haggard-looking, was unconvinced.

“They cannot destroy my career.”

The image said they could.

“They’ll never get away with it! In a showdown, people will believe me , not them.”

The image looked doubtful.

His glance shifted to the coffee table in the next room, empty now except for a heavy glass ashtray. He strode over to it and sent the ashtray to the floor in a cloud of ashes.

Brenner sat down at the table and slowed his breathing, something he did just before a particularly complex operation. He thought of it as his “sniper mode”—a perfect, nearly impregnable state of calm.

A World War II “artifact” and a sixteen-year-old conversation—who would take it seriously? Who would take the word of the KGB over the word—the vehement denial—of a prominent American heart surgeon?

Who wouldn’t take them seriously? These people have proof. Facts!

Brenner thought of his own reverence for facts. How they kicked in the minute he stepped into an operating theater.

Fact. A clogged line in a heart-lung machine sends blood clots to the brain.

Fact. A patient five or six minutes off the machine will turn into a vegetable.

Fact. Every patient I operate on depends on my skills, my ability to choose without hesitation between life and death alternatives.

Now, ensnared in the worst crisis of his life, Brenner was caught between the unpalatable and the unthinkable. Defect to the Soviet Union? Ridiculous. See his past exposed, his career in a shambles? Never!

In the end, as in every major crisis in his life, he succumbed to the inevitable: the famous Dr. Kurt Brenner temper. What ignited the explosion was Andreyev’s smug parting remark.

“Picture your colleagues, your family, your friends, unable to look at your hands without seeing a permanent stain—the blood of innocent children . ”

Brenner could picture it all too well. His hands, shaking as if he were some pathetic alcoholic with the DTs. How ironic, he thought with a tight smile. It was Andreyev’s last-minute threat that had galvanized him.

Seizing the telephone, he spoke rapid German to the operator. The last thing he told her was to see that the message was delivered promptly to Colonel Aleksei Andreyev, 38th floor, banquet room. Slamming down the phone, he began tossing things into a suitcase.

Shortly after Aleksei had rejoined the party and taken a seat at the table with Adrienne Brenner and his brother, a messenger handed him an envelope. He opened it, scanned it, and, without comment, handed it to Kiril.

Kiril never got past the first sentence. He had trouble masking his response.

Dr. Brenner was leaving. Now.

As he turned his chair slightly away to make sure Adrienne couldn’t read the note over his shoulder, he realized it was unnecessary. She looked… spacey. Too much champagne on an empty stomach.

He read the rest of Brenner’s note quickly. The tragic outcome of yesterday’s operation had left Brenner “too despondent to cope with the remaining events of the conference—so much so that he planned to cancel next week’s Medicine International symposium in West Berlin as well. Would Colonel Aleksei Andreyev please make arrangements for an immediate flight to Zurich so that he and his wife could join his parents there?”

“Let me see what I can do,” Kiril said to his grim-faced brother in Russian. He hailed a waiter and ordered a gin and tonic with a twist of lime. “Brenner’s drink of choice,” he told Aleksei. “Perhaps a sympathetic talk with another physician will change his mind. Can you stall things a little longer?”

“Why not?” Aleksei said, straddling between cold fury and bleak despair as he reached for his now half-empty bottle of vodka.

Kiril took the down elevator to the 21st floor, stopping first to pick something up in his own room before heading to the Brenner suite.

He found Kurt Brenner in the bedroom, one suitcase packed, and another half empty. “Given the stress you must be under, Dr. Brenner,” Kiril said evenly, “I thought you might need this.”

He held up the gin and tonic.

“I won’t need it much longer,” Brenner snapped, continuing to pack. “If you’re here to change my mind, you’re wasting your time.”

Kiril put the drink down on the coffee table in the other room. Without another word, he entered the bathroom, flicked on the light, and closed the door.

At the sound of running water, Brenner called out, “Don’t bother trying to drown out our voices. Malik already made sure your brother debugged this place.”

When the water in the sink turned brown, Kiril submerged his head one more time, toweled it dry, and stepped into the bedroom. Brenner, who was in the process of folding a sports jacket, looked up—and gaped.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Kiril said. “I know it must be a shock, our strong resemblance.”

“How on earth could I have missed it?” Brenner murmured, as if talking to himself. “I thought your hair was as brown as those dark glasses you never seemed to take off— Ah, yes, an eye infection according to your girlfriend,” he said drily, recalling Adrienne’s confusion at the beach. “A non-existent infection, I gather?”