They entered a small office, which was spartan and orderly. A metal desk stood at one end, on which were a telephone and a closed laptop, and behind the desk was one of the many small square windows visible from the street. The only other things on the desk were a mug of coffee, a glass bowl of mixed fruit, and a half-peeled hard-boiled egg.
“You will excuse me,” said Ziegler. “I was in the middle of my breakfast.”
“Please.”
Ziegler sat down and continued to peel her egg, dropping the shell fragments in a neat pile on a napkin. Brodie took a seat in the only other chair in the room, which was wedged next to a dying houseplant that apparently needed more sunlight than the small window could provide, and more love than Frau Ziegler was giving it.
Elsa Ziegler focused her attention on shelling her egg and asked, “Have you spoken to Anna?”
“Who’s Anna?”
Ziegler shot him a look from behind her big glasses.
Brodie explained, “I cannot discuss the investigation, Frau Ziegler. Including anyone I may have interviewed.” Or slept with.
She finished peeling her egg and looked at him. “Call me Elsa.”
“Scott.”
“Now that we are on a first-name basis, Scott, can we end the bullshit?”
“You first.”
“Okay. I knew Anna’s mother, Ursula. Difficult woman. Quite tortured.”
Brodie nodded but said nothing.
Elsa bit into her egg, and asked between bites, “Why did you come here alone, without a German counterpart?”
“We have been given more work than we can do before we report in today, so we divided up the labor.”
“Hm.” She took a long sip of coffee.
“Tell me about Harry Vance’s visit here.”
“What does his murder have to do with the Stasi, or this archive?”
“Maybe nothing. We are exploring all avenues.”
“There’s the bullshit again.”
“It’s not the favored theory. But I have an interest in it.”
“Ah. Striking out on your own, then. The American way.”
Brodie did not reply, but if he’d had a cowboy hat, he would have waved it.
Ziegler thought a moment, then said, “He seemed like a good man. I was very sad to hear the news.”
“Why did he come here, Elsa?”
She looked at him. “Spy hunting.”
“I need details.”
She nodded and seemed to be collecting her thoughts. “Mr. Vance had initially called here and spoken with one of my colleagues. He said he was looking for files pertaining to the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—the HVA—and their activities in the 1980s. My colleague told him this request was far too broad. Mr. Vance said the request pertained to a counterterrorism case he was working, and my colleague told him that he would need to submit an official request, in conjunction with a German law enforcement agency, and that this request needed to specify what records he was looking for based on dates, geographic location, and subject matter. Mr. Vance never got back to them.”
This was the first Brodie was hearing of how Vance classified his own investigation into Odin—as a counterterrorism case. That was a convenient lie, given his official job title. Unless there was something Brodie was still not seeing…
