“I’m sorry,” said Taylor.
“So am I.” Anna took a long drag on her cigarette. “He was a Stasi man himself. Manfred Albrecht. Records analyst.” She looked between her two guests. “Do you know how many records the Stasi kept on its citizens? Well, I’ll tell you. One hundred and eleven kilometers, when placed end-to-end.”
That was about seventy miles of paperwork, thought Brodie, a true image of Hell. Considering the small size of East Germany and the brief time it existed—just about forty years—the average East German could probably have expected at least some detail of their personal life or the lives of their immediate family to be in that vast secret police archive.
Anna continued, “You could commit the smallest infraction and end upgetting spied on for years. And every piece of this surveillance generates a report. My father’s job was to find connections and patterns between all the suspected enemies of the state, which was virtually everyone who lived in that giant prison.”
Brodie and Taylor exchanged glances. Anna was talking, so they stayed silent.
Anna continued, “I was young when it all ended, but… I do remember a generalfeeling. Like, everything was heavy. Everyone was on edge. A lot of drinking. There were constant shortages of everything except alcohol. I’m sure the whole thing would have collapsed a lot sooner if they’d ever run out of alcohol.”
Well, this was depressing. But what did it have to do with Harry Vance getting killed in Neukölln while looking for an Iraqi WMD specialist? This didn’t feel like a practiced monologue, or something building to an alibi; more like some dark thing that had been weighing on her and that she was trying to unload. And when a potential witness—or suspect—was feeling chatty, it was always best to stay silent, or now and then encourage them, and eventually lead them back to what you were really there to talk about. Brodie asked, “What kind of intelligence did your father provide the American government?”
“Many things,” said Anna. “He began working for the Stasi in 1978 and was providing information to the West by at least 1985. And unlike a lot of his colleagues, he wasn’t restricted to a certain department. He had access to all the archives.” She added, “He was ideally placed to be a mole. Until someone blew his cover.”
“Who?” asked Taylor.
Anna looked at her. “This is the question my family has been trying to answer for thirty years.”
Taylor and Brodie again exchanged glances. This seemed to be going somewhere, though Brodie still couldn’t tell why Ms. Albrecht was spilling her guts to them, or what any of this had to do with the murder of Harry Vance.
Anna stared at the table for a moment, then looked at them. “One Sunday morning in September 1989, men in dark suits came to our door. I was six years old. They arrested all of us and put each of us in a separate car tobe taken for interrogation. Can you imagine? Interrogating a six-year-old? I remember being terrified, sitting in this horrible green room…” She trailed off, her mind going back to that room, but she didn’t seem to want to share the details. “They let me and my mother out after a few days. My mother knew nothing about my father’s activities—he knew that if either of them was ever arrested, her ignorance might save her. I guess they believed her.” She paused. “I never saw my father again.”
Anna looked toward the window. The dull gray light illuminated her somber eyes. “They phoned my mother sometime at the end of October, told her where and when to expect the burial. You got full service in the German Democratic Republic. Cradle to grave. They tried you, they executed you, and they planned the goddamn funeral.” She laughed bitterly and looked at Brodie and Taylor. “One of your politicians, I can’t remember his name, he said something about the Vietnam War that has always stayed with me: ‘How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?’ Well, that was my father. The last to die before the Wall came down… That whole country was a goddamn mistake. A travesty.”
They all sat in silence for a moment. Taylor said, “I am so sorry.”
Anna shrugged and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray piled with butts. “After the Wall fell a couple of weeks later, my mother began going through all the official channels to try to learn about what had happened to her husband, how he’d been caught. The reunified government set up the Stasi Records Agency so any East German could find their own reports, see if they were spied on, find out if your friends and neighbors were informing on you or your family. But there were restrictions. Any report that involved a foreign government—including West Germany—was still locked away. State secrets. So, no luck. But my mother was a stubborn old bitch.” Anna smiled to herself. “She wouldn’t quit. She petitioned every government agency that might have some loose connection to state intelligence. She hounded politicians. She contacted journalists. For years and years. But, nothing. Until one day.”
Anna got up and walked to an old wooden desk across the room. She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a thick manila envelope, then tossed it on the coffee table and sat back down.
Taylor picked up the envelope and pulled out a thick stack of typewrittendocuments. They were all slightly misshapen, jagged on the edges, their surfaces shiny from the heavy application of clear tape. Brodie watched as Taylor flipped through the pages, and he realized that every page had been shredded and meticulously reassembled.
Anna said, “When it was clear that East Germany was finished, the bastards in every Stasi office in the country started shredding everything. And when their shredders broke down, they began ripping up all the records by hand. When the Stasi headquarters was stormed by the people, the Stasi men fled and left behind thousands of bags of paper scraps. The most difficult jigsaw puzzle in the world. But also, one of the most important. To this day, thirty years later, a group of people sit in an office in a little town outside Nuremberg, trying to piece together the past. We call them the puzzle women.”
“This is incredible,” said Taylor as she flipped through the stack of reassembled pages, all in German. “Is this record about your father?”
“Not exactly,” said Anna. “That record is unique. Not a surveillance report, but a comprehensive record of the activities of an American double agent, a military man, who was betraying your country and giving information to the Stasi. His identity was so secret that his name is not even used in this top secret document. He is referred to only by his code name, Odin.”
Anna looked at her American guests to see if they recognized this name. She explained, “Odin is the chief god in Germanic mythology and folklore. God of war, death, wisdom, and many other things.”
Brodie said, “That’s a pretty wide mandate. Even for a god.” He added, “And a pretty grandiose code name for a traitor.”
Anna nodded. “Fitting too. The god Odin would seek greater knowledge by disguising himself and wandering among mortals.” She gestured to the papers with her cigarette. “Sometime in 1999, someone who was working in the Records Agency received this report from the puzzle women, along with official instructions to turn it over to state intelligence. Well, whoever read it realized what they had in their hands, and instead of turning it in to be put in some secret vault forever, this person brought the report to my mother. People working in the Records Agency knew how many years she had been looking for information on her husband. You see, this report implicates Odin in blowing the cover of four different Stasi agents who wereworking for the West. Each man was caught, each man was executed. The last of these four men was my father.”
Brodie asked, “Was Odin ever caught?”
Anna shook her head. “His identity remains unknown.”
Brodie processed that. Throughout the Cold War, there had been a number of Americans who had betrayed their country and sold secrets to the Communists, but only three known moles within the American Intel community had ever betrayed foreign double agents in a matter that led to those agents’ deaths—Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames of the CIA, and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. Howard had managed to escape to Moscow. Ames and Hanssen were both currently serving life sentences without parole.
It was almost inconceivable that there was a fourth American traitor out there with such a high body count who had never been discovered or caught, and whose ability to escape justice was not itself a matter of public knowledge. And this traitor was someone in the U.S. military, no less.Odin.
Brodie eyed the stack of yellowing typewritten pages that Taylor was still holding, their thousands of shredded pieces carefully reconstructed like a museum artifact. It looked real. And in his gut, it felt real too.
Anna continued, “My mother died nine years ago, never getting the answers she sought. I’d seen what this obsession had done to her, and I promised myself that I would let the past lie. Then I fell in love with a stubborn American CID agent who heard this story—from me—and vowed to discover Odin’s identity. To find this American traitor and bring him to justice. But also to get justice for my father. And my mother. And me. And for Harry’s efforts,” she said, her eyes now shining with tears, “someone killed him.”
CHAPTER 24
