Dan Fesperman - The Arms Maker of Berlin

“That’s always our downfall, isn’t it? Our need to know?”

Hermann clinked his bottle to Nat’s and they downed the dregs, appropriately bitter.

“I must pack,” Hermann said. “I am taking my wife to dinner. A peace offering. I had to cancel our weekend in Tuscany to make this trip to Riga.”

“Let me guess. A fresh lead on the Zweites Buch?”

“Like I said. Our downfall. Can I drop you somewhere?”

“No, thanks. I walked from the U-Bahn. Frankly, right now I could use the air.”

It was dark when they left the building. Nat watched the taillights of Hermann’s Opel disappear. A breeze carried the scent of pine needles, and the streets and sidewalks were empty. He supposed he should call Holland with an update, but he decided that first he would call Karen.

So much to tell her, especially about Berta, which he knew was her main subject of interest anyway. Karen would want poetry, of course, as part of his presentation. But somehow even the brooding lines of Dickinson weren’t nearly broad or flexible enough to enfold Berta’s dark complexities. How, indeed, could he explain to an impressionable girl of eighteen the ways in which a surveillance state could swallow your entire childhood?

He was punching in the number when he heard footsteps approaching from behind. Something about their urgency made him reconsider the call. No sense being overheard.

Nat kept walking, but the footsteps drew nearer. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see a jogger. Instead, it was a thin figure in a leather jacket. No reason to panic, but he walked faster. The footsteps did, too, moving closer. Nat broke into a trot, feeling silly yet frightened. Scuffing soles told him his pursuer was still gaining.

Nat lengthened his stride and lowered his head, going all out. By then he could hear labored breathing-closing, closing. A hand fell on his shoulder, and he cried out as the grip spun him around. They lost balance. Nat landed on his rump, his pursuer atop him. They grappled clumsily. Nat, in a panic, saw a stubbled face, dark eyes leering eagerly, the sharp scent of sweat and cologne. He tried rolling free, but a huge hand pinned his chest, and a second thrust forward with a flash of metal lit by the streetlamp.

He wrenched sideways just enough to avoid a blow to the chest, but the blade tore his sleeve and sliced open his forearm, a line of heat. The attacker again raised the knife just as light exploded from a nearby hedge with a bright yellow flash and an unearthly bark-once, twice. His attacker cried out and fell away onto the sidewalk, gurgling as if he were choking. Nat scuttled crablike into the dewy grass, palms against pine needles.

Just as a sense of deliverance was sinking in, another set of hands clamped his shoulders, and a gruff voice whispered in Berliner German, “Don’t make a move,” while a second man gripped his forearms and pulled him roughly to his feet.

“What’s happening?”

“Quiet! Stay still!” The grip around his arms tightened.

Both men were dressed in dark clothes. Two more rushed forward from the shadows, one of them holstering a pistol in his jacket. All four wore gloves. Down on the sidewalk, his attacker lay still in a spreading pool of blood.

Seemingly from nowhere, a black Mercedes pulled to the curb with its lights off, followed closely by a second. The man behind him briskly patted Nat down from head to toe. The doors of the first car opened and the driver rasped, “Put him in. Let’s go.”

“Will someone just tell me what the hell’s going on?” Nat shouted.

The man behind him clamped a gloved palm over Nat’s mouth.

“Not another word!” he whispered harshly. “Get in the car. No struggling unless you want to end up like the other one.” He twisted Nat’s arm to show he meant business.

“Ow! Easy!”

They shoved him onto the backseat and piled in after him.

“Where are you taking me? Are you the police?”

“No questions.”

The driver started the engine, still no headlights. Nat twisted around for a view through the smoked windows and saw the body being loaded into the second car while someone else sluiced water onto the sidewalk to wash away the blood.

The whole thing had lasted no more than a minute or two, and the manpower and hardware employed were, in themselves, impressive-eight men in dark clothes and gloves, two unmarked cars, a gun with a silencer. Result: one man dead, a second captured, both wiped from the scene like fingerprints from a doorknob.

The car pulled away smoothly. He was flanked on both sides, and there were two men up front. No one said a word. By now Nat assumed that the initial assailant must have been a member of Holland’s “competition,” meaning he was from Iran or Syria. If so, then who were these people? And why the need for so much tidiness? More to the point, who would be capable of orchestrating it?

The answer seemed obvious. The same sort of fellow who could illegally obtain a Stasi file, of course. Kurt Bauer. No wonder the scene had unfolded with such industrial precision. Build a better shaver. Construct a neater abduction. It was all in the engineering.

After a block the driver switched on the headlights. The other car wasn’t following. Maybe Nat was going to be all right. He took a deep breath and realized he was shaking.

“Can someone tell me where we’re going?”

“Take care of him!” the driver barked, and before Nat could respond a hood came down over his head. A drawstring was cinched tight at the neck, and the darkness was complete. When he reached up to loosen it, someone slapped his hands away.

“Cuffs!” the driver said.

They wrenched his wrists behind him and tightly clamped a pair of handcuffs on them.

“C’mon! What is this?”

No one answered.

His breath was warm against the heavy fabric, which smelled of panic and old sweat. Nothing like the stench of fear to set your mind at ease. He thought of Karen, and how he should have called her earlier, and he wondered how long before he would talk to her again, if ever. She might even be meeting the same fate. Maybe these people were rounding up everyone, everywhere. If only he had stayed in contact with Holland, perhaps none of this would have happened. Fear and panic made him shout again.

“Where are you taking me!” He was embarrassed by the strangled tone, so he repeated it, this time trying to master his emotions. “I said, where are you taking me?”

Still nothing. Just the maddening hum of German engineering in full trim as the Mercedes leaned into a curve, purring like a great cat that has eaten its fill. He spent a few seconds trying to calm down, wondering how he might free himself. Fat chance, with all these people around him. For a while he tried to keep track of their course, but he had already lost count of the turns, and the hood kept him from even detecting the strobe of passing streetlamps. His arm stung, and blood was seeping onto his torn sleeve.

The driver swung the wheel sharply left, and the engine echoed as if they had just entered a tunnel. Nat’s stomach told him they were plunging downhill, below street level. The springs sagged as they hit a speed bump and went deeper into a series of right turns-three, four, five, then more for at least a minute longer until they stopped.

By then they must have been several stories underground, and when a door opened he detected the bunkerlike smell of damp concrete. The engine shut off. More doors opened. Whatever they were planning to do, he sensed it was about to happen.

“Get him out,” a voice said sternly from outside the car. “Quickly.”

Maybe they would take off the hood and all would be revealed. Bauer himself would be there, seated in a big swivel chair like some caricature of a tycoon gone mad. He would puff a cigar and scold Nat for reckless research. Then he would hand over a folder of forged documents, his version of setting the record straight, and the thugs would unlock the cuffs and send Nat on his way, chastened but intact.