Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

It would mean changing trains at Fehrbelliner-Platz, and he would still

have some distance to walk. Better to walk the whole way and use the

time to decide how to tell Ilse about the Spandau papers. He started

west with a loping stride, moving away from the crowded Ku'damm. He

knew he was duty-bound to hand the papers over to his superiors, and he

felt sure that the mix-up with the Russians had been straightened out by

now. Yet as he walked, he was aware that his mind was not completely

clear about turning in the papers. For some irritating reason, when he

thought of doing that, his father's face came into his mind. But there

was something else in his brain. Something he soon recognized as Heini

Weber's voice saying: "Three point seven million Deutschemarks -- ."

Hans had already done the calculations. At his salary it would take 150

years to earn that much money, and that represented the offer of a

single magazine for the "Hitler diaries." That was a powerful

temptation, even for an honest man.

As Hans reached the mouth of the side street, a dark shape disengaged

itself from the gloom beneath the cinema awning and fell into step

behind him. It neither hurried nor tarried, but moved through the

streets as effortlessly as a cloud's shadow.

CHAPTER FOUR

5.'50 Pm. American Sector. West Berlin Colonel Godfrey A. "God" Rose

reached into the bottom drawer of his mammoth Victorian desk, withdrew a

halfempty bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, and gazed fondly at the label.

For five exhausting hours the U.S. Army's West Berlin chief of

intelligence had sifted through the weekly reports of his "snitches"-the

highly paid but underzealous army of informers that the U.S. government

maintains on its shadow payroll to keep abreast of events in Berlin-and

discovered nothing but the usual sordid list of venalities committed by

the host of elected officials, bureaucrats, and military officers of the

city he had come to regard as the Sodom of Western Europe. The colonel

had a single vice-whiskey-and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn

of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.

Pouring the Turkey into a Lenox shot glass, Rose glanced up and saw his

aide, Sergeant Clary, silhouetted against the leaded glass window of his

office door. With customary discretion the young NCO paused before

knocking, giving his superior time to "straighten his desk." By the

time Clary tapped on the glass and stepped smartly into the office,

Colonel Rose appeared to be engrossed in an intelligence brief.

Clary cleared his throat. "Colonel?"

Rose looked up slowly. "Yes, Sergeant?"

"Sir, Ambassador Briggs is flying in from Bonn tomorrow morning.

State just informed us by courier."

Rose frowned. "That's not on my calendar, is it?"

"No, sir."

"Well?"

"Apparently the Soviets have filed some sort of complaint against us,

sir. Through the embassy."

"Us?"

"The Army, sir. It's something to do with last night's detail at

Spandau Prison. That's all I could get out of Smitty-I mean the

courier, sir."

"Spandau? What about it? Christ, we've watched the damned coverage all

day, haven't we? I've already filed my report."

"State didn't elaborate, sir."

Rose snorted. "They never do, do they."

"No, sir. Care to see the message?"

Rose gazed out of his small window at the Berlin dusk and wondered about

the possible implications of the ambassador's visit. The American

diplomatic corps stayed in Bonn most of the time-well out of Rose's area

of operationsand he liked that just fine.

"The message, Colonel?" Sergeant Clary repeated.

"What? No, Sergeant. Dismissed."

"Sir." Clary beat a hasty retreat from the office, certain that his

colonel would want to ponder this unpleasant development over a shot of

the good stuff.

"Clary!" Rose's bark rattled the door. "Is Major Richardson still down

the hall?"

The sergeant poked his head back into the office. "I'll run check,

sir."

"Can't you just buzz him?"

"Uh ... the major doesn't always answer his pages, sir.

After five, that is. Says he can't stand to hear the phone while he's

working."

"Who the hell can? Don't people just keep on ringing the damned thing

when he doesn't answer?"

"Well, sir ... I think he's rigged some type of switch to his phone or

something. He just shuts it off when he doesn't want to hear it."

Rose stuck out his bottom lip. "I see."

"Checking now, sir," said Clary, on the fly.

Since 1945, Berlin has been an island city. It is a political isiana,

quadrisected by foreign conquerors, and a psychological island as

insulated from the normal flow of German life as a child kidnapped from

its mother. Berlin was an island before the Wall, during the Wall, and

it will remain so long after the Wall has fallen. Kidnapped children

can take years to recover.

The American community in Berlin is an island within that larger host.

It clusters around the U.S. Military Mission in the affluent district of

Dahlem, a giant concrete block bristling with satellite dishes, radio

antennae, and microwave transmitters. In this city of hastily built

office towers, bomb-scarred churches, and drab concrete tenement blocks

whose color accents are provided mostly by graffiti, the American

housing area manages to look neat, midwestern, suburban, and safe. Known

as "Little America," it is home to the sixty-six hundred servicemen,

their wives, and children who comprise the symbolic U.S. presence in

Berlin.

These families bustle between the U.S. Mission, the Officer's club, the

well-stocked PX, the private Burger King and McDonald's, and their patio

barbecues like suburbanites from Omaha or Atlanta. Only the razor wire

that tops the fences surrounding the manicured lawns betrays the tension

that underpins this bucolic scene.

Few Americans truly mix with the Berliners. They are more firmly tied

to the United States than to the streets they walk and the faces they

pass each day in Berlin. They are tied by the great airborne umbilical

cord stretching from Tempelhof Airport to the mammoth military supply

bases of America. Major Harry Richardson-the man Colonel Rose had sent

Sergeant Clary to find-was an exception to this pattern. Richardson

needed no umbilical cord in Berlin, or anywhere else. He spoke

excellent German, as well as Russian-and not with the stilted State

Department cadence of the middle and upper ranks of the army. He did

not live in Dahlem or Zehlendorf, the ritzy addresses of choice, but in

thoroughly German Wilmersdorf. He came from eL iiiuiieyed family, had

attended both Harvard and Oxford, yet he had served in Vietnam and

remained in the army after the war. His personal contacts ranged from

TJ.S. senators to supply sergeants at distant Army outposts, from

English peers to Scottish fishing guides, from Berlin senators to

kabob-cooks in the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg. And that, in Colonel

Rose's eyes, made Harry Richardson one hell of an intelligence officer

Harry saluted as he sauntered into Rose's office and collapsed into the

colonel's infamous "hot seat." The chair dropped most people a head

lower than Rose, but Harry stood six feet three inches without shoes.

His gray eyes met the stocky colonel's with the self-assured steadiness

of an equal.

"Richardson," Rose said across the desk.

"Colonel."

Rose eyed Harry's uniform doubtfully. It was wrinkled and rather plain