by Saul Herzog
“Right,” Laurel said.
“Now picture that happening again, and again, every nine months, for four years. Because that’s what happened on the Eastern Front alone. It was a mauling on an unimaginable scale, Laurel. Imagine six Holocausts. That’s what Russia went through. And just as it was ending, the United States unveiled a weapon that could deliver fresh Holocausts at will, almost without limit, in an unending inferno of death that caused even the scientists who delivered it to have nightmares.”
It was only then that Laurel began to see what he was trying to say. From a wide enough perspective, from the perspective of the Russian steppe and the meatgrinder of the Eastern Front, Russia’s actions during the Cold War might not have been as senseless as she’d always assumed.
“To us,” Roth said, “nuclear war is the stuff of nightmares. Dystopian visions of a planet in its death throes. Things imagined more often by writers of fiction and Hollywood special effects artists.”
“But to Russia?”
“Russia has seen it happen. They know what twenty-seven million dead looks like. They know what a War of Annihilation looks like. They’ve faced it. And they know it wasn’t a movie, Laurel. It was real. It happened. And everything that happened once can happen again.”
“They’re preparing for the next one.”
“Their politics is the politics of survival, Laurel. Their fight is the fight of survival.”
“So what are you saying? They’ll never drop their guard. They’ll never put away their weapons. All traumas, even the one they faced, fade eventually. Eventually, they have to forget.”
Roth sighed. “Did you know that, even before the Nazi surrender, even before they were out of that nightmare, Britain and the United States had draw up plans for finishing the Soviets off?”
Laurel shook her head.
“Churchill drew up plans for a surprise attack against the Russian forces occupying East Germany, and what’s worse, the Russians found out about them.”
“I didn’t know that,” Laurel said.
“We’d watched the Nazis sap their power almost to breaking point,” Roth said, “and we drew up plans to destroy what was left of them. Their fear of us was well-founded. It wasn’t just the paranoia of a crazed leadership, Laurel. We wanted them gone. We wanted them dead. And we’d just developed the nuke.”
“But we never seriously considered using it on them, did we?”
“Oh, we did, Laurel. At the highest levels, on both sides of the Atlantic. The generals and leaders in London and Washington, and the nascent intelligence organizations of both countries, plotted in detail how to bring the Soviets utterly to their knees.”
Roth’s words resonated with her now, as the cab rolled past these concrete segments of the wall Russia had built between themselves and West Berlin.
After what history had shown them, she could see why they built walls that spanned continents.
They were afraid.
And they were right to be afraid.
They’d always been right to be afraid.
“It was Churchill himself,“ Roth told her, “who said that those who forgot the past were doomed to repeat it. The Russians can’t take the risk that history will ever repeat.”
47
Prochnow stood in a cavernous underground tunnel that the Soviet government had upgraded and secured during the decades it had been in occupation of Berlin.
According to GRU documents, the tunnel’s granite walls were four feet thick and lined with metal sheets that could block all manner of modern detection methods.
The tunnel was part of a vast network built by the Nazis in preparation for Hitler’s new German capital, which he’d named Germania. The city was never built, but part of the groundwork had been laid, and the current tunnel extended beneath what would have been the Avenue of Splendors, a five-kilometer long thoroughfare that would have formed the central axis of the city.
Prochnow stood on a set of steel steps that connected the chamber to the tunnel above. Below him was a chamber that had been built for drainage and ventilation equipment. The equipment had never been brought in, and large slabs of Swedish granite were piled around the walls. On one of those slabs, Tatyana Aleksandrova lay stretched out, spread-eagle, her ankles and wrists secured to iron rings in the rock.
He flicked his cigarette down onto her, and it landed next to her neck. It must have burned her because she suddenly jerked away from it with a deep gasp for air.
She tried to rise but couldn’t.
Prochnow had restrained her himself. Her wounds were dressed and treated.
Kirov had made it amply clear that she was to be brought back to Russia alive. But before that happened, Prochnow was authorized to interrogate her. Kirov wanted to know exactly how much information Roth had about his plans in the Baltic. As long as Prochnow didn’t kill Tatyana, he could do whatever he wanted with her.
“You’re awake,” Prochnow said, descending the steps.
The space had the feel of an underground quarry, or a crypt, and apart from a few Soviet-era surveyors, and the KGB and GRU agents who later took possession, no one had been down there since the final days of the war.
Much of the complex was submerged in water, although this section had been drained, and Prochnow himself had explored as much of it as was possible. He doubted there was anyone alive who knew the tunnels as well as he did. He’d even come across secret stashes of Nazi treasure, paintings, and other works of art that had been confiscated or stolen from Berlin’s Jews during the war.
“Where am I?” Tatyana said.
She spoke in English, but Prochnow knew that would soon change.
In his hand was a metal briefcase, and inside the briefcase were a number of vials containing the most advanced and experimental truth serums the GRU possessed.
Once administered, it would be impossible for her to resist his interrogation. She’d be so out of it he could tell her to kill herself, and she would obey. Torture would be unnecessary.
Prochnow walked toward her slowly and made a protracted show of opening the briefcase, removing the vials, extracting the contents of one of them with a long syringe, and lifting it up in front of the light to check its content.
“Who are you?” Tatyana said.
“Think of me,” Prochnow said, “as a friend of a friend.”
“What friend?” Tatyana spat.
“Why, Jacob Kirov, of course.”
She turned away from him, but that was fine. They’d be talking like lovers soon enough.
He grabbed her arm and jammed the syringe deep into the bicep. She didn’t react, but he knew the serum would begin to act soon enough.
She looked around the chamber, searching for ways to escape, and her movements grew heavier and less coordinated as the serum took effect. He could practically see the cogs of her mind slowing down, looking first at the steel ventilation duct, then at the staircase he’d just descended, before reaching the point where she just stared vacantly at the ceiling above her.
There was no way she was going to escape. The restraints at her ankles and wrists had been drilled into the granite during the war, apparently Prochnow wasn’t the first to use this chamber as an interrogation room, and if the passage of eighty years hadn’t pried them loose, Tatyana’s feeble struggling wasn’t going to.
“My, my,” Prochnow said. “Look at you, so pretty, splayed out like that. I must admit, I’ve always had a fondness for a woman in shackles.”
She said nothing. The serum was working its way into her nervous system, into the neurotransmitters in her brain. Before long, she’d be spewing so much unintelligible gibberish he’d want her to shut up.
He smoked a cigarette while he waited, then tried again.
“Tatyana Alexandrova,” he said, walking around her so that she could see his face. “Do you remember me? I’m your friend.”
She looked at him, and he could see the confusion in her eyes. It really didn’t take a lot of skill to int
errogate someone with these serums. She didn’t believe everything he said, not yet, but she’d get there.
“You were just telling me who you were meeting at the bar in Kreuzberg,” he said.
There was a look of intense concentration on her face. She was doing her best to resist him, but the human brain obeyed certain rules, and scientists at a government lab in Sverdlovsk had been looking for ways to crack interrogation resistance for decades. There was only so long she’d be able to fight back.
“I wouldn’t tell you that,” she said.
Prochnow smiled. He placed his hand on her neck and began to squeeze, just slightly at first, but enough that she would know what he was capable of.
“You were meeting your friend from Riga,” he said.
She shook her head, and he squeezed more tightly. Fear and oxygen deprivation increased the effectiveness of the serum. His grip grew tighter and tighter, and he looked into her eyes as he squeezed.
“You were meeting your friend, Agata Zarina, the Latvian policewoman.”
“I would never tell you that,” she said again, gasping for air, her mind struggling to hold onto its grasp of reality.
“Yes, you would,” Prochnow said, his grip growing tighter and tighter. “I’m your friend too. You need me to help her. If you don’t tell me, she’s going to get hurt.”
“You’re not my friend,” she gasped.
A sneer crossed Prochnow’s face. He was surprised. He’d never seen anyone show such resistance to the drug. Physically, it was working. Her pupils were so dilated that the entirety of her irises were black. Her blinking was so slow she looked like a video recording in slow motion. He checked her pulse, and it was in the thirties.
“The others are coming soon,” Prochnow said. “They’re coming to rescue you.”
“Rescue me?” Tatyana said.
“That’s right,” Prochnow said. “They love you, Tatyana. They’re coming to rescue you.”
“Lance is coming?”
“Lance?”
“Lance Spector.”
“That’s right. Lance Spector is coming. And the others.”
He had to be careful. Her mind was so suggestible now that anything he said to her would become a new reality. If he planted too many seeds, it would be impossible to differentiate what originated from her from what he’d planted.
“Laurel is coming too?” Tatyana said.
“That’s right,” Prochnow said, “to the arranged place.”
“To the place?”
He said nothing. Every time he made a suggestion, it prompted her thoughts but also introduced the danger that she would begin to imagine the things he wanted her to think.
He couldn’t risk contaminating this detail. He needed it to be real.
“Cedric will help them,” Tatyana said.
“Cedric?” Prochnow said, leaning in closer to her.
He tightened his grip on her neck to the point that he was in danger of asphyxiating her. If he crossed the line and killed her, Kirov would not forgive him. She was gasping for air, straining desperately for breath, but he didn’t allow her to get air.
She couldn’t even speak if she’d wanted to.
And he felt her try, felt the movement in her throat, the struggle of her larynx and vocal cords.
“Cedric Chopin,” she gasped.
The words were almost a whisper. She was on the verge of losing consciousness. For a moment, he feared he’d gone too far, then she started coughing.
He had to go all the way to the surface, along tunnel after tunnel, through cavernous sections and up flights of metal stairs, until he reached a metal doorway, like the door of a safe, that let him into part of Berlin’s modern underground service tunnels. He was in a tunnel that lay beneath the Air Ministry Building, and he followed it all the way to a section of the Air Ministry’s basement that was no longer in use.
He had a way of getting from there into the service hall of the Detlev Rohwedder Building, and from there, to a secret access that had been used during the Nazi years but had been concealed by the GRU after the war.
As soon as he got back out to the street, he dialed the code for Kirov’s operator and waited.
“Did she talk?” Kirov said the instant he picked up the phone.
“She talked,” Prochnow said.
“And?”
“She said a name. Cedric Chopin. Have you ever heard it?”
When Kirov spoke, he sounded genuinely stunned.
“She said that name?”
“Yes, she did.”
“I see,” Kirov said.
“You know him? You know where to find him?”
“Prochnow,” Kirov said. “Have you ever heard of the Clockmaker of Berlin?”
48
The Clockmaker of Berlin was not a young man. He was not even spry, as they said. He wasn’t one of those elderly men who was in good shape for his age.
Decades of indulging in fine cognacs and expensive pipe tobaccos had taken their toll, and he’d been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx and esophagus just six months earlier. He’d undergone chemotherapy and a total laryngectomy, and while the treatments had taken a huge toll on him, aging him by twenty years and turning him completely bald, and while the laryngectomy had removed his ability to speak, so that he now needed an electrolarynx machine, and sounded like a poor impression of Darth Vader, they had done nothing to put the cancer into remission.
He was a man used to being surrounded by clocks, and now, their ticking no longer marked time that had passed, but rather, time that was left.
They ticked for him.
He’d lived a long time, and he looked backward more than forward.
As his body betrayed him, one organ at a time, and as his wits began to lose their grip on reality, it was really only his memories that remained. As everything else faded, they became the last vestiges of the man he was, the man he had been, and what that man was made of.
He realized, as all men do in the end, that a man becomes his memories. The moment he loses those, is the moment he no longer exists.
Cedric Chopin was a man without family.
No wife. No children. No grandchildren.
He’d lived most of his life an orphan, and he’d spent that life not seeking to build a family but to avenge one.
Whereas others looked forward through the generations, taking joy in the children and grandchildren they were leaving to posterity, Cedric Chopin looked only back at those who had come before.
And sought revenge against them.
His forefathers were from the German nobility, that class of Pomeranian and Prussian Junkers, itself descended from Teutonic knights, who owned all the German estates and duchys east of Berlin.
It was they who furnished Hitler’s army with its marshals, field marshals, and Reichsmarschalls.
Names like von Rundstedt, von Bock, von Manstein, von Bismark, von Hindenburg, von Siemens, von Moltke, von Tirpitz, von Kleist, von Papen, von Ribbentrop, and even, von Clausewitz, all came from that same Junker class.
To Cedric Chopin, it was difficult to find a tribe of men anywhere in history, more intimately entwined in the deaths of millions than those whose blood coursed through his own veins.
There were those who subscribed to the philosophy that what was buried in the past should stay buried in the past. That the only way forward lay in moving on.
Cedric Chopin was not of that opinion. To him, in the indelible record of human events, all ledgers had to be balanced, all debts had to be settled.
In full.
And so, he’d spent his life trying to do just that, avenging the sins of his fathers while simultaneously atoning for his portion of them.
The circumstances of his birth were as strange as the circumstances of his life.
He was born in Warsaw on the first of September, 1939.
It is a day that looms large in the history of the human race.
The day Nazi bombers began bombarding Warsaw.
The day Hitler invaded Poland.
The day World War Two began, a war that would over the coming years rack up over a hundred million corpses.
Less than three weeks after the Nazi invasion from the west, the Soviets invaded from the east.
That was the substance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Cedric Chopin always said that the invasion of one country by another was a rape. And that what Hitler and Stalin did to his country, just as he was coming into the world, was a gang rape.
And although he did not know it until years later, he himself was the result of a rape.
And not just any rape, but the rape of a Polish woman by a German man.
The man was the descendent of a Pomeranian duke, and Chopin’s mother, whose name was Kasia Szopen, the spelling was altered later when he immigrated to Germany, was a maid in his house.
The German, Chopin’s father, although he never thought of him as such, owned a clock factory that made some of the finest timepieces in all of Europe.
Chopin knew nothing of the relationship between his mother and father in the early days of his life. He knew he himself was never acknowledged. And he knew that when he was less than a year old, a foreman from the factory came to his mother’s house and filled out paperwork that changed his name from Szopen, as his mother spelled it, to Chopin, a more Germanic form.
Later, that piece of paperwork saved his life, though not the life of his mother.
Before the war, Hitler drew up a plan that was unusual, to say the least, from a military point of view. He ordered that the city of Warsaw be erased.
The erasure of a city of that size, over a million souls, had never before been contemplated, and indeed, Hitler almost achieved it. By war’s end, ninety-five percent of its buildings had been destroyed, and the new government in Poland seriously considered not rebuilding it.
By that point, almost no one was left in the city.
Hitler’s plan was strangest, though, not because of its scale, not because of its sheer destruction and loss of life, but because it served no objective. It wasn’t necessary. It was not the byproduct of battle or strategic aerial bombardment. It was a plan based entirely on spite.
