PART I
CHAPTER 1
Harry Vance finished dressing in the dark bedroom, using his cell phone to find a pair of matching socks. It was past two in the morning and he was trying to leave without waking Anna, so he shouldn’t have been so particular. But at the age of fifty-three, Vance had learned to accept and embrace his own bullshit. And he knew his steps felt a little less sure when his socks didn’t match.
He walked to the tall window and parted the curtains. The dark streets below were lined with turn-of-the-century apartment buildings and shuttered storefronts, and the day’s rain had turned the curbside snowbanks into rivers of gray slush. The sidewalks were barren on this cold January night, but the bars and clubs tucked away in this trendy corner of Berlin were still open, their music and laughter echoing down the dark street.
Vance turned and looked at Anna, asleep under a thick blanket. A space heater hummed at the far end of the room. These old buildings were nice to look at, but they weren’t insulated, and nothing worked. Anna thought the building had “character,” a word that made Vance want to step into traffic. Well, that’s what he got for becoming involved with a younger woman.
He approached the bed and took a closer look at her by the dim light coming through the window. She didn’t look like herself when she slept. Her face was relaxed, soft. So different from who she was.
Vance reached his hand out to… what? Touch her? Try to wake her? Tell her where he was going? Why would he do something like that?Because you’re an idiot.Which is another way of saying you’re in love.
He withdrew his hand. The point was to not tell her anything. She didn’tlike that, of course. And neither did the brass back at headquarters when he froze them out of his investigations until it was time to make arrests. But this was how Army CID Agent Harry Vance had always approached his work. Just do it. Only amateurs and cowards needed outside opinions before the job was done.
So he hadn’t told her about tonight’s rendezvous, and he’d be back in bed before sunrise. They’d wake up together, maybe a morning roll in the sack, then fried eggs with black bread and coffee, watch the news. Sunday stuff.
Anna rolled over, muttering something in German that he couldn’t make out. Her arm flopped onto the empty side of the mattress, which still contained his impression in the cheap memory foam.
He pictured her waking up in the night to use the bathroom or get some water and seeing that he was gone. She’d freak out.
He took out his phone and typed her a text:Couldn’t sleep. Going for a walk. Back by dawn.He hesitated, then added:I love you.
Every word of that was true, though he might have left out a few things. He hit Send and heard her phone vibrate on the bedside table.
He walked to the foyer, where he put on his scarf and wool cap. He eyed a small table piled with yesterday’s mail, then slid open a drawer to reveal his Beretta M9 inside a pancake holster.
Vance stared at the pistol. He wasn’t doing anything dangerous. Unless, of course, he was closer to the truth than he realized. And you never know you’re there until you’re there.
He clipped the holster on his belt, then put on his camel-hair topcoat. He unbolted the heavy door and stepped onto the dimly lit landing, closing the door quietly behind him.
Vance descended two flights of stairs, then stepped out into the winter night and felt the sharp snap of cold air on his face. He lit a cigarette and walked north to the Prenzlauer Allee S-Bahn train station, a handsome turn-of-the-century brick building that—like Anna’s street and much of the neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg—appeared to have somehow survived the war intact. Though in Berlin you didn’t always know what was original and what got pieced back together from the rubble.
He walked down a set of icy stairs to the tracks, which ran along a trenchbelow street level. He checked his watch as he waited on the platform: 2:27A.M.It was the weekend, so the S-Bahn ran all night. He watched a young couple huddled inside a glass-paneled shelter as a cold north wind whipped down the platform.
On a typical case, he’d have his partner, Mark Jenkins, with him. But this wasn’t a typical case. In fact, it wasn’t a CID case at all. He was moonlighting here in Berlin, hundreds of miles from the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s 5th Military Police Battalion in Kaiserslautern, a small city near Frankfurt where Vance lived and worked. His colleagues knew he came to Berlin whenever he had time off. They assumed it was for a woman, and they made their jokes. But they were only half right.
He thought about his wife, Julie, back in Kaiserslautern, soon to be ex if the papers ever went through. German efficiency, he’d found out, did not extend to divorce proceedings. She was a good woman and didn’t deserve half the crap he put her through. Then again, she’d chosen to stay in the marriage. We all make our own prisons.
Vance spotted the train approaching and took a last drag on his cigarette. He flicked the butt onto the tracks, then took out his cell and texted:Ich bin unterwegs.I’m on my way.
After a few seconds he received a reply:Ich werde da sein.I’ll be there.
The train eased into the station and Vance boarded. He took a seat and looked around as the train pulled out. His car was mostly empty, as was the entire train, the length of which he could see due to the open gangways. He spotted a group of hyperactive twenty-somethings at the far end, probably club-hopping until dawn. He’d done that once with Anna, which was one time too many. She thought she was keeping him young, but she was actually just reminding him of the gulf between them.
The city slid by out the grimy window. He was heading southeast to Neukölln, a neighborhood with a large Turkish and Arab immigrant population, made larger in the last few years thanks to Germany’s generous asylum policy toward Syrian refugees. It was a policy that made many Germans proud—and enraged and frightened just as many.
Vance tried to stay out of his host country’s internal politics, though as a Chief Warrant Officer in the CID’s Terrorism and Criminal Investigation Unit, or TCIU, this rapid influx of refugees had affected his caseload. Therewere dozens of U.S. Army installations across Europe, and Vance and his colleagues in the TCIU were responsible for investigating perceived terrorist threats against all of them, as well as threats against any U.S. Army personnel located on the European continent or North Africa, which was his command’s area of responsibility.
In truth, most of the flood of refugees arriving in Germany came here to escape the ravages of war and create a better life, and even the criminal element among them largely restricted their activities to nonpolitical felonies. But it was the potential ISIS or al Qaeda operatives who managed to slip through, and also the jobless and isolated young men who became radicalized once in Germany, who kept Vance and his colleagues busy. As they say in counterterrorism, the good guys need to succeed every time; the bad guys need to succeed only once.
Vance looked out the window as the train crossed over the Spree River, and then passed from the former East Berlin into the West. What had once been a fortified wall of concrete, razor wire, dogs, soldiers, and searchlights was now a phantom border crisscrossed by twenty-four-hour train lines and rejoined streets, and you’d have to have a sightseeing guide to find the few shards of the Wall still standing. Vance figured that was probably a good thing. Berlin, more than most places, had to navigate remembering the past without becoming a shrine to its horrors.
He remembered watching the Wall come down on TV. The cheering crowds as people took sledgehammers to the hated structure. East German police and soldiers standing impotent as Germans from East and West defiantly held hands atop the Wall, one people again.
He had been in his first semester of his senior year at Johns Hopkins, thinking about a military career and what his role might be in helping to contain the Soviet menace. And then, in the blink of an eye, the forty-year Cold War was over. The Iron Curtain parted. The nuclear threat lifted. A new world had dawned overnight, and no one knew what to do about it. It turned out the new world was more complicated than the old, and thirty years later Vance was still trying to figure it out.
In a few minutes the train arrived at the Neukölln station and Vance got out. He walked along the elevated train platform, which was covered in graffiti and smelled vaguely of urine. He descended the stairs andexited onto Karl-Marx Straße, a street that mocked its namesake with a McDonald’s.
