“Sounds pretty benign.”
“Maybe itisbenign.” She pocketed her phone. “It sounds like Colonel Granger turned his specific expertise into a lucrative consulting career, as many retired military specialists do.”
“Colonel Charles Granger is Odin.”
“Maybe. But even if he is, his employer might have nothing to do with any of this. Maybe Colonel Granger has a cushy, overpaid position on their board because of his impressive biography. And in his off-hours, he’s helping neo-Nazis plot against the German government.”
“He’s on the board of a company founded by a former East German military scientist, Reinhard Dorn, who worked with bubonic plague and God knows what else. And if Black Harvest was real, Reinhard Dorn could have been working on genetically engineered pathogens to destroy crops, and in his post-Communist life pivoted to making money off genetically engineered crops that resist pathogens. That makes sense. But it’s also possible that Dorn and Granger are doing something on the side.” He added, “They could have first gotten connected at Storkow.”
Brodie hailed a cab and they climbed in. Taylor gave the cabbie the address for Titan Genetics, then said to Brodie, “I’ll see if I can find any more info on Granger.”
As the cab pulled out, Brodie checked his call log. He had four missed calls from Colonel Dombroski and one from General Kiernan, who had probably been asked by his old OCS classmate Stanley Dombroski to help corral his renegade CID agent. Scott Brodie was, in fact, in a world of shit. What else was new?
He saw he also had a text message from Dombroski:Your resignation is not accepted. Call me.
Apparently he was still in the Army. But at some point the colonel needed to cover his own ass, which meant not putting it on the line for an insubordinate warrant officer who had an uncomfortable relationship with the chain of command.
Well, the best way for Brodie to save his own ass and Taylor’s ass and protect Dombroski’s ass was to find Harry Vance’s killer, who could be Charles Granger or someone Granger hired. And in the process Brodie needed to discover the identity of the traitor Odin, who was possibly also Charles Granger, and while Brodie was at it, he might be able to foil a neo-Nazi terrorist attack on Berlin and possibly other German cities. That might all be more difficult than it sounded. Especially since he and Taylor had been taken off the case, and had no authority, power, or resources.
He recalled an old Army saying: “The difficult we do now, the impossible takes a little longer.” The real problem here was that he didn’t have much more time to do the impossible.
Taylor said, “I found something on Charles Granger, but it’s not much. AnArmy Timesarticle from May 1982, looks like a puff piece aboutcommissioned officers who recently completed training at the U.S. Army Chemical Corps School at Fort McClellan.” She read, “?‘Among the graduates is Major Charles Granger of Greenwich, Connecticut, a Princeton graduate and Rhodes Scholar who told theTimeshe left his duty station at Camp Humphreys in South Korea in order to participate in the Army’s recommitment to a robust chemical defense.’?” She tapped out something else on her phone and said, “There is a hedge fund called Granger Capital based in Manhattan, founded by Sidney Granger of Greenwich in 1963… Sidney has two children, Katherine and Charles.” Taylor looked up. “That’s quite a pedigree.”
So, this guy had been born in one of the wealthiest towns in America, went to one of the country’s top schools, then secured arguably the most prestigious scholarship in the world, joined the Army and became a commissioned officer, served in South Korea, then trained for the Chemical Corps and became an intelligence officer stationed in West Berlin through the final decade of the Cold War. That was the picture of a man who was born with a ton of advantages and leveraged them all into an extremely impressive career serving his country. In other words, Colonel Granger benefited from the system and had a hell of a lot to lose. Not the typical profile of a turncoat and traitor.
Then again, people surprise you, and you can’t generalize whatever goes on in an individual’s heart and mind. Brodie considered the timeline of Colonel Granger’s military career and how that dovetailed with the Stasi report on Odin. Granger completed Chemical Corps training in May of 1982, and Odin was offering his services to the Stasi by March of 1983. Had Granger decided to aid the Stasi somewhere in that ten-month timeframe? Or was Charles Granger planning on treason long before he arrived in Germany?
Maybe something had embittered Colonel Granger, the kind of thing that wouldn’t show up in an official bio or news article. Or maybe the guy had read too much Marxist theory at Princeton.
There was also the matter of money. Odin made a point of not asking for money when he began his cooperation with the Stasi. That fit the profile of Charles Granger, who came from money and didn’t need more of it. But then in July 1989, in exchange for turning over Manfred Albrecht, Odin demanded four million deutsche marks. Maybe Granger had been cut off fromthe family fortune in those intervening years, or had simply become disillusioned with the Communist cause and figured he might as well do a cynical cash grab before the whole East German system came crashing down.
Or maybe Charles Granger was not Odin after all. Maybe he was a patriot who’d stood at the front lines of a global conflict and helped defend the West against the threat of unconventional warfare. And the fact that he now consulted for a firm run by Reinhard Dorn, a man who used to be his Cold War rival, was simply an interesting footnote. Or maybe they had this completely backward, and Reinhard Dorn had been a mole for the Americans and West Germans and had fed intelligence to Colonel Granger, which was how the men knew each other and came to work together in later years.
Taylor asked, “What are you thinking?”
“That maybe we’re hurtling toward the wrong conclusions.”
“Funny. I was just thinking the opposite.”
“Tell me.”
She thought a moment. “What kind of man would betray his country to help the Communists, to the point that he risks his freedom and his life, and gets four pro-Western assets within the Stasi executed, and then, decades later, allies himself with NordFaust, arguably the most dangerous neo-Nazi organization in Europe?”
“Someone who’s confused.”
Taylor shook her head. “An active, intelligent mind searching for meaning. Someone who dislikes the world as it is and is trying to reshape it. Charles Granger did not have to climb his way to the top. He was born there. He feels secure, so secure that maybe he starts to question the foundations he’s standing on. This is a man who wants to be in the center of things, a hand on the lever, working to shape the world. We don’t know what he did between the end of the Cold War and working for Titan Genetics, but imagine he was in the wilderness. No direction. Looking for a new cause. It’s not a coincidence that the center of right-wing white nationalism in this country is in the former Communist East Germany. Part of that’s from a lagging economy and the resentment of immigrants. But there’s something else. The idea of a lost cause. Like parts of the American South. You can’t have the thing you were fighting for, but you also can’t accept what’s taken its place—liberal democracy, globalization, immigration. The whole modern world.”
Brodie added, “So you reach further back in history. For another lost cause.”
Taylor nodded. “And that cause, fascism, has unfortunately got a lot of gas in the tank these days. If you’re a committed white nationalist, modern Germany offers you plenty of opportunity for grievance.”
Brodie thought about that. It was an interesting psychological profile, and sort of made sense. Except, of course, that Brodie had every reason to want to believe that his partner was onto something, and that they’d found their man, and that they were possibly minutes away from confronting an American traitor who had evaded justice for thirty years.
Taylor looked again at her phone and said, “Here’s something else. An obituary in theFrederick News-Postfrom December 1990 for a Rebecca Granger, aged thirty-seven years old, of Frederick, Maryland. She, quote, ‘ended her life after a long battle with depression.’ It mentions her loving husband, United States Army Colonel Charles Granger.”
Brodie considered that, and tried to graft the little they knew about Odin’s activities onto the even less they knew about the life of Colonel Granger. He said to Taylor, “Odin sought East German residence for himself and another person—probably his wife—around March of 1989. Odin had learned something that convinced him of an East German victory in the Cold War.”
“Like the details of Black Harvest. And a planned invasion of West Berlin and West Germany. Day X.”
