Private Berlin (3 page)

KATHARINA GAVE HER laptop several commands. Morgan’s face shrunk and shifted left on the big screen. A photograph of a soccer player performing
a dramatic scissors kick appeared beside him.

“This is Cassiano, the top striker for the Hertha Berlin Sports Club, and the top goal scorer in the German second league,”
Katharina said. “Manchester United hired us to look into him because they are thinking of acquiring him.”

Even though Cassiano had proven himself a prolific scorer, the British team was concerned about the Brazilian’s erratic play
in a handful of games. They’d wanted him vetted before offering him a contract.

Katharina said, “But as of two Fridays ago, Chris told me he had just a few loose ends to look into, but he was leaning heavily
toward clearing Cassiano.”

“And Chris’s other case?” Morgan asked.

Katharina typed on her laptop again. A video clip played showing a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses that
shielded much of his face. He exited a black Porsche Cayenne and walked away from the camera. A beautiful, elegant woman climbed
out the other side and followed him.

“That’s Hermann Krüger,” Katharina informed them. “Billionaire. Early fifties. Big art and car collector. Very secretive.
Doesn’t like his name in the media. Grew up in the GDR, but took to capitalism quickly after the wall came down. He built
a fortune in real estate here in Berlin and big public works projects in Africa.”

Mattie said, “Didn’t we do some work for his company?”

“Two years ago,” Dr. Gabriel confirmed as he reworked the band that held his ponytail. “A comprehensive review of their security
system. But we didn’t deal directly with Krüger himself.”

“But Chris was dealing with him?”

“No,” Katharina said. “Krüger’s wife, Agnes, is the client. She believed he was seeing other women and asked us to look into
it. As of the last update I got, Chris had located at least three mistresses. He’d also discovered that Krüger visited prostitutes,
lots of them, sometimes twice a day.”

Burkhart snorted. “Twice a day? An older guy like that must be taking testosterone supplements to be able to get it up that
often. And Viagra.”

Mattie cringed. She’d had limited interaction with Burkhart since he’d joined Private. But overall she’d found him to be headstrong,
crude, and abrasive, perhaps good traits for a counterterrorism expert and bodyguard but not, in Mattie’s opinion, for the
kind of delicate investigative work Private Berlin often performed.

“Chris didn’t mention testosterone or Viagra,” Katharina sniffed. “But I know he had an appointment set for tomorrow to update
Frau Krüger.”

“How much would Hermann Krüger stand to lose if his philandering went public in a nasty divorce case?” Morgan asked.

“A billion,” Gabriel replied. “Maybe two.”

Private’s owner thought about that. “Why did Chris take time off?”

“I don’t know,” Katharina said. “He texted me last Monday that he needed a few days’ personal time and that he would call
me on Thursday at the latest. He’s such a hardworking guy, I gave him the time without questioning it.”

“Of course,” Morgan said. “That’s it. No other cases?”

“Not that I—”

“Not true,” Gabriel interrupted. “He
was
working on something else, Jack.”

MY MOTHER WAS the first to show me the power of masks.

She was a makeup artist with the German State Opera and Ballet. She was also a traitor to her country, to her husband, and
to me.

But those are stories for another time.

The masks.

As a child I lived with my mother and father in a prefabricated apartment building that the state erected in the far eastern
reaches of Berlin, out where the city met farms where livestock was raised for milk and slaughter.

I note this, my friends, only because in addition to being a raging alcoholic, my father was a professional butcher.

The day I learned about the power of masks, my father was at work, and the opera house was dark for the season. I must have
been about seven and had been sick with chicken pox.

Trying to cheer me up, my mother climbed into the attic and brought down a large trunk. She opened it, and I swore I could
smell old people in there—you know, the scent of slow, inevitable decay?

She pulled out a
Papierkrattler
mask, which featured smirking, cartoon features: ruby lips, a gargantuan nose, wild eyes, and a raccoon tail for hair. She
said it was last used fifty years before during a parade in Ravensburg, down near the Swiss border.

My mother said that the mask had once belonged to her mother, who had died in the bombing that reduced Berlin and my father
to smoking rubble and desperation in the last year of Hitler’s war. The mask had somehow survived.

“This mask is a miracle,” my mother told me. “A miracle.”

She set it aside and brought out another mask, this one black, narrower, and fitted across the bridge of the nose like a criminal’s
disguise.

“It’s from
Don Giovanni
, the opera,” she said as she slipped it on me.

“Who’s Don Giovanni?” I asked.

“A bad man who dies badly. That is how an evil person dies. The death of a sinner always reflects their life. Remember that.”

Of course I would later learn that this was complete and utter nonsense.

Death is never a form of retribution.

Death is a thing of beauty, something to behold, a moment to celebrate.

But good son that I was, I agreed earnestly. My mother brought out her makeup kit and showed me how to paint my face. She
gave me surly lips, sunken eyes, and wicked brows that made me laugh.

After she’d added a wig and glasses, I remember looking in the mirror and thinking I really was someone else, most certainly
not me anymore.

“Do you know why they use masks and makeup in the theater?” my mother asked.

I shook my head.

“A mask changes you. So does makeup. With the right mask you can be anyone you want to be. With a mask you can hide in plain
sight. You can do what you want, act the way you want. With a mask, it’s almost like you’re invisible and free to be anyone
or anything you desire. Like a prince. Or a tiger.”

I nodded, feeling possibility swelling inside me. “Or a monster?”

“Even a monster,” my mother said and kissed me on the head.

A NEW VIDEO appeared on the screens to the right of Jack Morgan’s head.

It showed a woman wearing a shabby black dress over black denim jeans. Mattie’s initial thought was that at one time she must
have been attractive.

But the woman’s hair was dry and mussed. Her skin was sallow. And her eyes were sunken and dark. She looked like she’d lived
a very, very hard life.

“This is from our lobby camera, early morning, two Fridays ago,” Gabriel told them. “Here, Chris comes out to meet her.”

Mattie frowned, feeling strange and then hollow when Chris went to the woman and embraced her, pressing his cheek to hers
and rubbing her back.

“Who is she?” Mattie managed.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel replied, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “But I did see her come out of his office about
an hour after these images were taken. I also heard him say that he would look into something for her and there would be no
charge. They hugged again. She left.”

Morgan said, “Can you go into Chris’s files, find out who she is?”

“With your permission, Jack,” Gabriel replied.

“Granted,” Morgan said.

Gabriel typed again. He paused, seemed puzzled, and typed again. “That’s odd,” he muttered.

“What?” Mattie asked, leaning over to see the scientist’s screen.

The old hippie was typing again. “This should do it.”

But instead of Schneider’s digital file folders, Gabriel’s screen was filled with bright pink, emerald, and black pixels that
seemed to shift and move and crawl over one another, as if they were alive.

“What the hell is that?” Gabriel said, shocked and staring at the screen.

“What’s going on, Doc?” Morgan demanded.

Gabriel mumbled in disbelief, “I think we’ve been hacked.”

Up on the big screen, Morgan looked perplexed and then angered. “That’s impossible,” he sputtered. “I just spent millions
upgrading the security system. Gabriel, you were part of that effort.”

The computer scientist held up his hands in surrender. “I was, Jack. But I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like
someone dumped thousands of termites into Chris’s work area. They’ve eaten all the data.…”

Katharina Doruk interrupted, “I thought you once told me that you can always bring back echoes of files, Doc.”

“Not this time,” he replied. “Whoever did this was good, Kat. Scary good.”

Morgan looked furious, but said: “We’ll deal with this breach later. Between the hacking and the cases he was working on,
I think we’ve got cause enough to activate Chris’s chip. Do it, Doc.”

Mattie nodded her agreement with Morgan’s decision, but she felt agitated by questions that suddenly shot at her from all
sides.

Who hacked the system? Why? What if it’s a coincidence? What if this is separate and Chris is off on a vacation he decided
to extend? What if we find him there with another woman? Should I care?

I do.

But should I?

“Give me a minute, Jack,” Gabriel said, entering a command that stripped his screen of the brilliant termites.

He typed in a second command and his screen filled with a long list of names. He scrolled down to Chris Schneider’s, and then
highlighted a corresponding series of numbers and letters.

After making a copy of that code, Gabriel called up an application called Sky Eye. He entered the code into a blinking box
and hit Enter.

Half of the amphitheater’s screen jumped to a Google Earth view of Berlin. Mattie was first to spot the blinking orange icon
out on the far eastern outskirts of the city, several kilometers south of the neighborhood of…

“Ahrensfelde?” Mattie said, puzzled. “Can you bring us in, Doc?”

Gabriel was already ahead of her. He highlighted the blinking icon and hit Enter. The picture zoomed down and in, revealing
the blurry image of a building in the shape of an L. It had an arched roof that looked broken in places.

Dense vegetation pressed in around the place, which abutted a large undeveloped space choked with trees and brush.

“Cross-reference it with the city plan,” Mattie said.

A moment later, an address popped up on the screen along with a file. Gabriel clicked on the file and it opened, revealing
a PDF of the building’s handwritten property records.

Blown up on the screen that way, the words Mattie read sent an involuntary shudder through her for reasons she could not fully
explain.

“What’s it say?” Morgan demanded.

Mattie looked at her boss and replied with a slight tremor in her voice: “It says the building is abandoned now. Has been
for twenty-five years. But back in the communist era, it was a state-run
Schlachthaus
. A slaughterhouse.”

A FEW MINUTES later, Mattie rode in the passenger seat of an agency BMW while Tom Burkhart drove them across the Spree River and then east
through the city toward the neighborhood, or
Kiez,
of Ahrensfelde.

Jack Morgan had ordered them out to the slaughterhouse, and demanded that Dr. Gabriel start figuring out how in the hell someone
had managed to breach Private’s state-of-the-art firewall. Katharina was supposed to go to Chris’s apartment to see if his
personal computer contained any notes on the cases he was working.

Burkhart said nothing as he drove. Mattie was glad for it. She was in no mood to talk. Apprehension had enveloped her, and
she tried to fend off the sense of being trapped by studying the giant television tower with its revolving ball and spire
looming high above Berlin, getting closer with every moment.

The communists built the tower in 1965 as a way of showing the West that they were modern enough to accomplish such a feat.
At more than three hundred meters high, it was visible from virtually everywhere in Berlin on a sunny day.

But it was gray now. The clouds hung low in the sky. Drizzle had begun to fall on the tower and on the S-Bahn, the elevated
train station at Alexanderplatz, a bustling part of the city day and night.

The tower loomed over it all as did the Park Inn Hotel, a communist-era building that had been spruced up. The Park is where
Westerners would stay when visiting East Berlin before the wall came down. It was said that there were more electronic bugs
in the Park Hotel than anywhere else on earth.

Mattie tried to imagine Chris at eighteen. In her mind, she saw her ex-fiancé standing out there on the plaza between the
tower and the Park Hotel, one of half a million protesters gathered in early November 1989.

She saw Chris and the others acting and speaking in defiance of the scores of Stasi—the dreaded and oppressive East German
secret police—who surrounded Alexanderplatz that night, filming the crowd, trying to intimidate the protesters into disbanding.

During their two-year romance, Chris had told Mattie very little about his childhood and adolescence. She knew that his parents
died in an auto accident when he was eight, and that he’d grown up in an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere southeast
of Berlin.

But Chris also told her that shortly after the uprising began in earnest, he left the orphanage with some friends and went
to Berlin, ending up on Alexanderplatz the night of the largest protest, the one that showed the world how much the East Germans
wanted freedom.

Chris said that he’d felt like his life really began that night as the wall began to crack and crumble, falling not five days
later.

“I was free for the first time in my life,” Chris said. “We were all free. Everyone. Do you remember, Mattie? What it felt
like?”

Sitting next to Burkhart as they drove east, hearing Chris’s words echo in her mind, Mattie did remember.

She saw herself at sixteen on the west side of Checkpoint Charlie, cheering and singing and dancing with her mother when East
Berliners broke through the wall there and came freely into the West for the first time in more than twenty-eight years.

Mattie remembered seeing her mother’s face when her sister came through the wall that night. They had all wept for joy.

Then, in Mattie’s mind, her mother’s teary face blurred and became Chris’s the morning he’d asked her to marry him.

She felt a ball in her throat and had to fight not to cry in front of Burkhart.

Mattie’s cell phone rang. It was Dr. Gabriel. “Good news,” he said. “He’s moving. Not much, a couple of meters this way and
that, but he’s moving.”

“Oh, thank God!” Mattie cried. Then she looked at Burkhart. “He’s alive!”

“Well, all right then,” the counterterrorism expert said, downshifting and accelerating east on Karl-Marx-Allee.

Mattie’s mind spun as the prefabricated, Soviet-style architecture that surrounded them became a blur out the window.

Was Chris injured? What was he doing in an old slaughterhouse?

Was I wrong to have ended it? Was I? Do I still love him?

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Burkhart said, breaking her from her thoughts.

Mattie looked over at him. “About what?”

“Ending your engagement with him,” Burkhart said.

“Easier said than done given the circumstances,” Mattie shot back, annoyed that she was evidently so transparent.

“You break it off?” Burkhart pressed. “Or did he?”

“That’s none of your business,” she said hotly.

“I take it you did, then. Mind telling me why?”

“I do mind. Just get me there, okay?”

Burkhart shrugged. “Helps to talk about stuff with an impartial observer.”

“Not always,” she said, and turned to look out the window again.