“Sure,” Dennis said. He was leaning against the car, his hat pushed back. “Of course, it was pretty hard to get a flight back then, since the airplane wouldn’t be invented for another eight hundred years.”
“And when were sarcastic little know-it-alls invented?”
“During the Renaissance, I believe.”
“Is that why Arthur made me bring you?” Jim asked. “To bore me to death?”
“I think he sent me because he doesn’t trust you alone with our visitor.”
“What? I’m the perfect gentleman.”
“Right,” Dennis said. “So all those stories they tell back at HQ . . .”
“All lies, pal,” Jim said. “Except the good ones.”
He thought briefly (and maybe a little wistfully) about the girls he’d left behind. He doubted any would even remember him, gone these long years on his grand spy adventure overseas. He checked his watch. Some adventure. After failing out of magician school and scraping by at Harvard, he’d been awestruck by the Agency recruiter who had asked for a moment of his time. A real-life spy, he had thought. What they hadn’t told him that day outside his dorm was that spying was less action and drama and more of this: waiting. Lots and lots of waiting.
Still, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do, and being a spy, even a bored spy, was better than any other job opportunity back in Little Rock.
“What do you think about all this?” Jim asked.
“All what?”
He waved his hands to encompass their surroundings. “The hole in the Wall, us bringing over a magician from Stateside,” he said. “Arthur seems crankier than usual, and I wasn’t sure that was even possible.”
“Of course he is. Like all real red-blooded Americans,” Dennis said, “magic gives him the willies. Even worse that he had to ask for help from the OMRD. He’d rather ask Hitler’s ghost.”
“You really think the Reds will start something?”
“If that spell fails and yonder Wall comes tumbling down,” Dennis said, “we’re suddenly sitting on the most dangerous border in the world. You’ve seen the reports: those East Germans are killing themselves to get over the Wall now. What do you think they’ll do if it suddenly vanishes in a puff of smoke?”
“Kill themselves all the same,” Jim said, looking up at the stars beginning to dot the evening sky. “Just with a shorter jump at the end.” He nodded up at a flashing set of lights descending from the heavens. “Make yourself presentable, pal; I believe our girl is here.”
Jim snatched the file from the passenger seat and flipped it open as the plane came in overhead. There was a picture clipped to the file: young, cute, short brown hair, green eyes (the picture was black-and-white, but the dossier filled out the salient details). She’d been two years behind him at St. Cyprian’s, but unlike him, had sailed through with enough honors and accolades to require two extra pages stapled behind. No criminal record, no improper political ties. A perfect all-American girl, except for the whole magic thing. Her parents (Roger and Doris, registered Democrats, married twenty-nine years) had probably wanted her to become something respectable, like a nurse or a secretary. Instead, right out of college she’d gone off and joined the bastard child of American government agencies: the OMRD. Probably a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth over that decision.
The passengers were coming out now. Mostly military, some old fat men in suits, and then there she was. Wearing a loose- fitting knit sweater and pants (what would Doris think of that outfit?), she would have looked more natural on the Harvard quad than waiting for her CIA contact on the tarmac at Tempelhof.
“Miss O’Neil?” Jim said as they approached.
There was something lively about the way she looked at them, something he liked and something he wasn’t sure he could handle. “You must be my contacts,” she said.
“My name is James, but I insist that you call me Jim.” He took her hand in both of his. “Welcome to Berlin. Thank you for coming to our aid in this time of crisis.” Next to him, Dennis coughed and Jim fought back a glare. “Allow me to introduce Dennis, the tiny unpleasant fellow next to me.”
“You can ignore most everything he says,” Dennis said as he shook her hand. “We certainly do.”
“Don’t mind him,” Jim said. “He didn’t get his nap today.” Before Dennis could offer his best attempt at a witty reply, Jim added, “Please, let me carry your bag for you.”
“There’s no need, James,” she said, her mouth turned in a coy smile. She had something hanging around her neck, a well-worn leather pouch. She reached up and touched it, eyes slightly closed, and whispered a few words. A moment later, her heavy luggage began to hover off the tarmac.
Jim quickly grabbed it out of the air; it was heavier than it looked. “I appreciate your capabilities, Miss O’Neil,” he said, trying not to sound like he was struggling with the weight of the bag, “but we’d rather not call attention to them in such a public space.”
She glanced around, her sly grin gone, those green eyes suddenly very aware of their surroundings. “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .” She dropped her hand from the pouch and nodded. “Well, if you are going to carry my bag, you can call me Karen.”
* * *
• • •
Jim hadn’t been that impressed with Berlin when he’d first arrived (you’ve seen one big, dirty city, you’ve seen them all), but on the drive back from Tempelhof, Karen had the uninitiated’s curiosity and a dozen questions about every landmark they passed. To him, they looked the same: gray buildings, cracked statues, empty churches. Not to mention the occasional blockade or tank. Luckily Dennis could provide the running commentary, though that left Jim with uncomfortably little to add to the conversation.
“First time out of the country?” Jim asked during a brief lull in her inquiries.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Not at all,” Jim said. “I’m a spy, after all. Reading people is my job.” Dennis snorted, but Jim ignored him. “I remember my first time in Berlin. It was amazing. All this history—”
“You don’t care about history,” Dennis said.
“I care about history,” Jim said. “Just not when you’re talking about it.”
“What about the Wall?” Karen asked. “Are we going to drive by it? Magic on that scale . . . it’s almost unprecedented in human history. I’ve read the studies on it, but I’m sure that’s nothing compared to seeing the real thing.”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “The Wall’s great. But we should probably take you to see the boss first. He feels lonely when he’s left out.”
Karen seemed disappointed. For the first time since they’d started driving, she fell silent and took to staring out the window at the city flashing by.
“So,” Jim said to fill the silence, “that pouch around your neck, that’s your locus, right?”
A hand went protectively up. “You have magical training?”
“Jim here’s a bona fide wizard,” Dennis said with a chuckle. “He’s got this fire spell that will knock your socks off, and if you’re lucky, only figuratively.”
“I took the tests in school,” Jim said with a sour look lobbed at Dennis. The other agent didn’t seem to notice. “I had enough aptitude to get into St. Cyprian’s, but not enough to stay there. I never made it to the spells hard enough to require a locus. Just a few words in Latin or Late Middle Japanese and some fancy finger-wiggling.”
“But it’s all the same,” Karen said, shifting in the seat toward Jim. “It’s all about concentration and focus. That’s what the locus is for: a talisman to help you channel that focus. But there’s this idea, called Universal Expression Theory, which says that the spells and the hand waving, they aren’t really necessary. It’s all just to help us focus on what we want the spell to do. We don’t need any of it.”
A looker who was both smart and enthusiastic.
Nothing like the usual dregs Washington sent over. Jim was fairly certain this was the best thing to happen to him during his entire tour in Berlin. “So what’s the alternative?”
“Magic. Just magic. Not just repeating the same spells done by every magician since the dawn of time. Real magic as an expression of the magician, magic by thought, not recitation. I wrote my dissertation all about it. It isn’t well regarded by the traditional . . .” She suddenly turned red. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to babble. I just don’t get a lot of chances to talk magic outside of work.”
“Well, I never got far enough for any theories,” Jim said. He felt less dumb when she was asking questions about Berlin history he didn’t know. “Luckily the CIA doesn’t care much if you can do magic. In fact, they probably prefer . . . I mean, not that . . .”
“No, go on, Jimbo,” Dennis said. “Tell our guest here all about how the CIA loves and respects magical practitioners.”
“I’m used to people wanting to burn me at the stake,” Karen said. “Magic is just misunderstood, but that’s changing. Americans need to realize that magic is part of this world, and if we want to compete with Russia, we’ve got to start caring about magical progress as much as technological.”
“Until magic wins us a war like the bomb won the last one,” Jim said, “I think that might be an uphill battle.”
He was never good at identifying the wrong thing to say before he opened his mouth, but he had a talent for realizing it after the words came out. Karen turned away, her eyes drawn away from him and back to the dreary concrete and dead trees of Berlin.
“That’s just it,” she said, almost too quiet to hear over the sound of the car engine. “If we were any good with magic, we might not have needed the bomb. Think of the lives we might have spared.”
Even Dennis didn’t have a witty reply to that. Luckily they were saved by their arrival at headquarters.
“We’ve arrived at the next stop on our tour of the most boring landmarks in Berlin,” Jim said as he put the car into park. “Let’s go introduce you to BOB.”
SIX
When Jim turned onto a quaint street called Föhrenweg on the western outskirts of Berlin and parked across from an unexceptional building, Karen couldn’t help but be surprised. What had she expected? A bunker? A militarized compound with razor wire and guard towers? A glowing sign announcing the headquarters of the CIA in Berlin? Such ideas made her feel childish, but still she couldn’t get over how normal it all appeared.
She followed her handlers inside. It looked like any other office building, except of course for the armed guard sitting behind bulletproof glass watching their arrival with professional skepticism. Karen could only see from the chest up, but his shoulders were linebacker wide and his neck bulged thicker than his bald head. He looked like a cross between a rhinoceros and a brick wall.
“Hey, Earl,” Jim said cheerily. “How’s the day shift?”
Earl grunted.
He checked identification for Jim and Dennis, then searched a clipboard for record of Karen’s visit. After staring at her for what felt like a good five minutes, he pushed a red button with a hand that looked better suited for cracking skulls and as a buzzer sounded the door in front of them clanked open.
Past the main security entrance, her garrulous guides took her through a series of locked doors, some of which she sensed were magically warded, though she wondered if Jim or Dennis even knew. The wards were old, probably in place for five years or more, and not minor spells either; a serious magician had secured this otherwise innocuous-looking location against all manner of magical intrusion. Perhaps the Americans weren’t so bad at putting magic to use after all. Or, more likely, they’d had help.
Berlin, after all, was buzzing with magic. She had felt it thrumming the moment the plane landed. Like white noise, like radio static, it could fade into the background, but when she focused on it, it was more like standing in the ocean rolling in at high tide. It had to be the Wall. Most major cities had all sorts of magical networks crisscrossing them like a street map, but no other city on earth could boast encapsulation by a twenty-foot-high barrier of pure magical energy. No wonder the magic was loud here; she’d be lucky to hear anything else.
Jim ducked his head in an open doorway. “And here you are, my dear June,” he said, holding out the car keys with a flourish to a middle-aged woman in a floral-print dress. “With nary a scratch on it.”
“And a full tank?” the woman—June—asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Karen,” Jim said, “this is June, master of the CIA motor pool. If you ever need a vehicle, don’t even think about asking her, because she’ll just make you fill it up on your own dime. And on my meager salary!”
June held out a hand and Karen gently squeezed it. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“A word of advice, dearie,” June said through a slow Alabama drawl. “Just forget everything these two dummies tell you, and you’ll do fine here.”
“That seems to be common advice.”
Dennis snorted. “You should probably listen to her.”
“Ignore both of them,” Jim said. “The tour continues.”
On the second floor, they entered a large open room awash with noise and activity. “And this is the center of it all,” Jim said. The far wall was nearly covered by a neatly annotated map of Berlin. Thin gray lines denoted the various districts, color-coded to show which occupying power held sway: in the north, blue for the French in Reinickendorf; in the west, brown for the British in Spandau and Charlottenburg; green in the south for the USA in Zehlendorf and Tempelhof; and of course red in the east for the USSR in Treptow, Auttenberg, and Pankow. A dark black outline hemmed in the Western districts on all sides. From this vantage, it was hard to see if the Wall was to keep them in or the Soviets out.
The center of the room was dominated by a large oak table flanked by hard-looking chairs and piled with informational detritus: files stuffed with documents blackened by the myriad of available typewriters lining the wall opposite the map; at least four separate telephones, each a different color and shape; grainy aerial photographs arrayed like a fan; notes and reports and dossiers and who knew what else. Karen wondered if there was some sort of mad organization to the mess. She doubted it.
Jim introduced her to a few of the people milling about, including the cadre of silver-haired women manning the typewriters. Most were American, but a few had a noticeable German accent. They were polite and looked at her with a mix of maternal warmth and pity.
“This is the bullpen,” Jim said, taking the whole room in with a sweep of his hand. “All our operations start and end right here.”
“It’s a bit . . . chaotic,” Karen said over the low hum of a dozen conversations and the metallic rainfall of the typewriters.
“Nothing good ever gets done without a little chaos,” he said.
The door to an office attached at one side of the bullpen opened and a handful of men jostled out, each looking eager to escape. Most were of an age with Jim and Dennis, though a few were older. All of them had the blanched faces of the reprimanded.
“Rough meeting, Milt?” Jim asked the first man to pass them. He looked to Karen like a storm cloud: dark, puffy, and ready to ruin someone’s picnic.
“Milton,” he said slowly. “To you, Mr. Garriety or ‘sir.’ Is that understood?”
“Sure,” Jim said as he put his hands up, adding, “sir.”
His thunderhead eyes turned on Karen. “This the magician?”
“In the flesh, Mr. Garriety, sir,” Jim said.
“Lovely,” he said, rolling his sunken eyes. “Bad enough they have to send us a magician, and then they go and send us a woman. Lord help us.” Before Jim could reply or Karen could set his tie on fire, he groaned and vanished out the door.
“Head of Espionage,” Jim said when he was gone. “Wonderful man. Great with k
ids.”
Karen decided Milt would get along splendidly with George Cabott.
“Bill!” Jim called as the rest of the agents filed past. “What’s the story?”
A red-haired man with a boyish collection of freckles on his cheeks looked up and did his best to offer a smile. “Boss is on the rampage,” he said before offering his hand to Karen. “Bill Holland. Sorry that you got assigned these jokers. All the real agents were too busy.”
“Busy with what, exactly?” Dennis asked.
“Sitting on our hands, if you ask the boss. He thinks the Commies, German or Russian variety, are behind this Wall nonsense, and that they are up to something. Something big.”
“And are they?”
“Who knows?” He let out a long sigh. “I guess we’re supposed to find out.”
Jim patted him on the shoulder. “Well, keep fighting the good fight, pal. Tell your lady friends I said hello.”
“Sorry again,” Bill said to Karen as he ducked out.
“Good spy,” Jim said. “Specializes in getting hookers to inform on their johns.”
“Hookers?” Karen said.
“Uh, you know,” Jim said. “Prostitutes. Real fonts of intel. Men will say all sorts of things they aren’t supposed to when they’re . . . well . . .”
“Go on,” Karen said, enjoying watching Jim’s cheeks flush. “You were talking about men saying stupid things around women.” She thought for a moment. “What did he mean by ‘Wall nonsense’?”
“Right,” Jim said. “That’s why you’re here. But we’d probably better let the chief explain that one.”
The humming noise of the bullpen died down as one last man exited the office. He wore his middle age hard, not unlike the rumpled suit that hung badly from his shoulders and struggled to restrain an expanding gut. What remained of his grizzled hair was buzzed short in a style Karen recognized all too well; her father, even years out of the uniform, had never been comfortable with a civilian’s haircut. This man had an alcoholic’s nose, an insomniac’s bruised eyes, and an old soldier’s handshake.
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