The Berlin Package

by Peter Riva

  “What the hell have we got here? It’s a mess, Sam.”

  “Ah, all is not as foggy as it seems. Discounting the calcium for a moment, even though it’s the most deadly thing in the room … let’s ask our friend here,” he patted the screen “to combine the two—leave out the paint sampling—and treat them as one sample for a match.” He did so. “And voila! It’s the Nazi thermonuclear signature, the one they shut down in 1943. The half-life is short, but not exponential, early stuff, very radioactive. And look, Pero, here’s a note with a hypertext …”

  “No, Sam, don’t!” Too late.

  He had clicked on the hypertext link. It connected the computer to something and then the screen went blank. An anti-virus program came up and said it was locking the computer from intruders, suggesting a purge, scan for viruses, and re-boot. They looked at each other. Sam shrugged. Suddenly, a ringing started in the desk drawer. Sam looked at Pero and raised his eyebrows. He took out a phone similar to the type Pero had shown him but one that had no satellite connection, cell only. He opened the lid, placed it on the desk, and keyed the speakerphone. He wanted Pero to hear.

  “Turner, S. here.”

  “We had an intruder probe from CERN. Can you advise?

  “No. Who’s that?”

  “Control.”

  “Control who?” There was no answer.

  “Standby.” He nodded, same as Pero. Pero knew what was coming. “Standby,” they repeated, waiting.

  “Oh, yes, sorry, standing by.”

  Now Pero took up his phone, punched in his number, and placed it on the desk next to Sam’s, speaker on. What happened next was a farce. Pero’s phone connected and it could be heard ringing somewhere distant. It was answered and only static could be heard. Pero keyed 5-5-5 and said his name, “Baltazar, P. here.”

  Sam’s phone’s speaker said, “Who?”

  Pero’s phone responded, “Lewis here, report.”

  Sam’s phone’s voice asked, quite irate, “Lewis, who Lewis? Turner respond.”

  Sam obliged, “Turner, S. here.”

  Pero decided to confuse the issue, “Baltazar, P. here.”

  Lewis’ voice sounded worried, “Baltazar who’s Turner?”

  Sam’s contact wasn’t too happy either, “Turner who’s Lewis, who’s Baltazar? Report.”

  “Gentlemen,” Pero began, “you are talking on cell phones on speaker in the lab of one Professor Sam Turner at CERN in Geneva. I am Pero Baltazar. Director Lewis is State and CIA Langley.” He looked at his friend, “Sam, any idea where, who, your phone is connected to?”

  “Langley as well, but sometimes I get different people. But my director is called, let me see, I had that here somewhere …” He flipped noisily through some notes on a clipboard.

  Sam’s phone piped up, “Oh Christ, I am Director Bergen, for Christ’s sake, can’t you ever remember my name?” Sam was smiling. He’d done it on purpose. He shook his head, he hunched his shoulders silently laughing.

  “Bergen, Bergen?” Lewis was angry, “What the hell are you doing involved in ops, your job is communications, not ops!”

  Bergen responded, “I am not involved! My codifier, the best we have, is Turner at CERN, he called me.”

  Sam got professional, “Not true Bergen, you called me because there was a hypertext link to CIA that called for a computer phishing probe which my computer rejected, no probe effective. Then you called me asking me if I knew anything. Now why would there be a link to you, in communications, regarding a sixty-year-old data file at CERN?”

  Bergen responded, “I didn’t know why. I was called, by upstairs, to find out. The data transferred to me included the links for me to decode. Your computer-blocking program? It has your IP address. I know it by heart. So I called you. Besides, you are CERN’s best, aren’t you? And you’re one of us.”

  “Lewis, Baltazar here. Listen, this quote upstairs end quote … it couldn’t be the same one who’s giving you directives, the one you wouldn’t tell me the name of, could it?”

  “Wait.” He suspected they were talking on an internal phone. Lewis’ connection had gone quiet. Bergen’s was muffled, he had his thumb over the microphone. Sam keyed a few buttons and put the USB red ball next to the phone’s infrared port. He smiled at Pero and mouthed “recording.” They waited a minute or so.

  “Lewis here, you can shut the other phone, we’re getting feedback, Bergen and I are on together, conference call.” Sam shut his phone down. “Okay, Baltazar, you’ve broken all the rules again. You’re going to kill me with all this stress. Now, what the hell were you looking at when the computer cut off the fish or whatever it’s called?”

  Sam and he explained together. He explained his end, and Pero explained his. Lewis summed it up to be sure he understood: “So, you have a sample of a bank note that turns out to be soaked in radioactive something and now has salts, you say? Well, those salts are local calcium carbonate and you have other things in there: U234, and radium as used in watches, provided by the pre-CERN labs to the watch industry. Only not to the watch industry alone was it Turner?”

  “Hang on, the computer is coming back up after a dump. I’ll use Tonto …”

  “Who’s he? Not someone else Baltazar!”

  Pero explained, “No, no one Lewis, relax. It’s a new program, untraceable.”

  Sam continued, “As I was saying, I’ll enter in the radium pre-CERN supply data, and in case you don’t know, yes my predecessors here at CERN supplied this stuff all around the world. But the handling agents, pre-World War Two, were always the same. CERN’s export partner was J. Mengele & Sohne, Bayern, Germany.”

  Lewis had the rest of the puzzle “The chemist, J. Mengele’s son was the famous doctor butchering kids, twins, in concentration camps. His brother Aldon, also a chemist, conducted the nuclear refining for the Third Reich. He died in 1944, radiation poisoning.”

  “I am surprised he lasted that long.” Sam was telling them this stuff was hot.

  “His supplies and samples were never recovered.”

  Pero chimed in, “How much are we talking about?” Pero had an idea why, suddenly, this stuff was important.

  “About two to three tons as best we can tell.” Lewis was shuffling through papers, they could clearly hear him.

  “Mass? Density?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Sam chimed in: “Almost like lead.”

  “And the boss who is telling you men in Langley to quicken the pace?”

  Bergen answered before Lewis could cut him off, “The DG … what Charles, what? I don’t have secrets from his man, he’s too valuable.” He meant Sam, who smiled and folded his arms. Hah! His manner said. Bergen had revealed it was the director general who had received the direct computer warning from Sam’s computer. And that meant the link, as fast as it was, had to be for his eyes only. It was no wonder Lewis had been reluctant to tell Pero who was pulling the strings. If the director general was involved, the White House was involved. Directly involved.

  “Look, Lewis,” Pero began “You’ve got to think ahead of the curve here. The label turned out to be a portion of a Reich’s Mark. So ask yourself what was hidden as an asset near the end of the war, what would the Nazis have realized was the super weapon by then? And where would they have hidden this asset? And with what other assets?”

  Sam understood immediately, “Okay, I get it, they hid the Uranium with the gold in a cave somewhere, maybe that cave had water dripping or even flooding it, hence the calcium carbonate. I read about one gold stash like that once in ’52, only accessible in winter when it was frozen. The US Treasury team could hack it out, but at least it was not underwater. The rest of the year the cave was flooded, impenetrable.”

  Lewis chimed in, “Anyway, I see the point. This is gold that was with that radioactive stuff, maybe also with some loot. But why all the sudden interest?”

  “Why, Lewis, why? Because it is obvious. The gold and the Uranium are one and the same. The gold wasn’t con
taminated with the Uranium and radium. The uranium is inside the gold, the gold is shielding it. It’s Sam who gave me the clue here. He told me that gold acts as a delay to radioactive exposure. There are gold-coated windows all around here, like astronaut’s visors, that rely on that ability. The Nazis must have known that.” Sam was nodding. Pero told them, “Sam’s nodding. He agrees, he’s the expert. And, his guess? The radium was used to mark the gold. In the dark you could tell what is what, which is just gold and which is gold covered uranium.”

  Sam corrected him, “No Pero, bad guess … the radium was in the gold, that’s how they refined it. It’s complicated, but the radium acted as a chemical catalyst in the enrichment process back then. It made it very unstable, loads of rems given off. In time the whole shipment would glow in the dark, gold or no gold. I’ll bet it’s glowing away right now.”

  “And can this stuff make a bomb? Is it that quality?” Pero asked Sam.

  “I don’t like this field, so I keep up on it. Once it could have been used that way, the signature says it still is, just, but the yield is inefficient, like the first bomb, Fat Boy, all over again. And you need a delivery system for a big metal bomb weighing three tons to deliver one megaton of explosion. It is not worth it. The only nations with that kind of delivery system already have bombs much more efficient. And you can’t use it for something small, like NATO’s howitzer shells, it wouldn’t trigger properly.”

  To Pero, then, it seemed useless, a relic of the past. “That means they’re covering up other deeds, it’s the only reason I can think anyone would bother if the stuff’s useless.”

  Sam shook his head, “It’s not useless for a dirty bomb, which would work quite well.” A dirty bomb is the nightmare of security forces everywhere. One dirty bomb in New York and downtown Manhattan would be off limits for decades.

  “Okay, there’s that. But Tische is not a terrorist. He may be supplying them, though.” Another thought occurred to Pero. “Who ordered the gold to be shipped? I’ll bet it was a mistake. Find out, will you?”

  Lewis chimed in, “Okay, I’ll do that. And your thinking on the money, the notes?”

  “Find out if there were cases with Reich Marks and maybe printing plates, something like that, with any cache uncovered by the Army. Call the Treasury or the Pentagon, or better yet, just call the Pentagon historian. My father was with counterintelligence for a while so he may be able to help here. Somebody should know this cache. Even if the gold went somewhere else, we know these gold-uranium bars had money—by then useless money—shipped with them? That must have been unusual. You find the place this money came from and you’ll know who handled it. Maybe then we’ll know who has designs on it now and why.”

  “Okay, Baltazar.” It was Bergen.

  Lewis was trying to get control, “No, not okay anything, you’re not ops, stay out of this.”

  Pero changed the subject, “And another thing: I was followed on the TGV down here. Paris was my known destination but known only to you Lewis. Tische’s people acted very quickly. That means they and their informants in DC are in crisis mode. I still don’t know why. So, I think it’s safe to assume, now, that Tische or the DG or whoever has an agent or agents watching CERN at this time. If it’s CIA, could you find out and try to calm things down? We’re on the same side after all. No?”

  The silence was deafening.

  “Lewis, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you answer that?”

  “No.”

  “Can you find out if signals or any instructions have been passed to a field agent or worse,” Pero meant an assassin, “in this region this morning?”

  The two men in Washington engaged in an argument. Bergen and Lewis answered together, stumbling over each other. Lewis won out “I told you before, you are not in ops. Okay, Baltazar, I’ll call back with the answer.” Before he could hang up, Sam and Pero heard Bergen’s voice saying, “But it is my department … and I have passed the DG’s orders to Switzerland …” The phone went dead. Pero picked his up and dropped it into his parka jacket.

  All the while Pero was working it out. Bergen was head of communications. If there was a second agenda here, the communications people should be able to track a call—or be the ones who sent it. The DG shouldn’t have any way to order a CIA operative in the field unless it was through communications.

  “Okay, that was fun,” Sam said, “now let’s see what they said to each other …” He keyed the computer recorder and played the voice tape. It was muffled. He stopped it, set some sliding icon switcher, an equalizer, and replayed the recording. Lewis’s voice came in clearly enough:

  “Paul, you can’t tell them. For Christ’s sake, we’ve got dead agents in the field, Berlin Station One, I might add, plus one level 3 and a German Internal Security man, plus one field agent missing four days now. We’ve got agents trying to recover the sample my man has taken to your man at CERN. I didn’t know Baltazar knew your man or that your codifier was even there. You never filed that with me …”

  Bergen’s voice was louder: “I didn’t have to.”

  “Okay, but if you blab to anyone, the DG will shut this down, and we’ll never get this solved. And I am not sure either of our men are safe either. There have been real threats. And the DG is not telling us anything, yet we report to him!”

  “Okay, Charles, but I want in, you understand, all the way in.” Pero and Sam heard Lewis agree. “Okay, I’ll tell the DG the CERN lead was nothing, a mistake by a Google random hit.” Lewis agreed and then it went back to an open line.

  Lewis and Bergen were obviously old hands. As Sam and Pero discussed them, as best they could, Sam revealed that he had known Bergen for over ten years. “Bergen trusts no one. If he is suddenly trusting your Lewis, it had to be a good sign.”

  Pero explained that he knew Lewis from an anti-terrorist plot in Kenya but did not elaborate further. He confirmed to Sam that he trusted Lewis, completely after that—if not the CIA.

  Sam asked for the highlights of Kenya, “I really need to see the depth here Pero …”

  So Pero briefed Sam on Kenya, the highlights only as requested. Even the highlights were impressive. “Wow, when this is over, let’s meet and discuss that again over some beers. Sounds exciting!” Pero told him not to hold his breath if the beer was the only enticement. The old friends laughed. “On the other hand,” said Pero, “If it were a meal at that little restaurant halfway up to the Col de la Faucille, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I’d give in.” It was an old haunt and the best food on the side of the Jura overlooking the lake, the city of Geneva, and the shimmering massif of Mont Blanc.

  What was more urgent was their discussion that there was a conspiratorial aspect to all this that Lewis and Bergen were acting behind the DG’s back. Sam said that the DG was a political appointment, CIA and State directors were permanent staff. “And remember that the DG could have agents in the field with terminal orders—orders to kill if necessary—to recover your sample, the package. With Tische and possibly the DG against you, well maybe us, the chances are getting slim we’ll get away with this.”

  “But why do they want the sample? If it were me, I’d forget it and take the gold.”

  “Pero, there’s also one thing we didn’t tell them about poor Max Bierbaum in Zurich.”

  “Yeah, call him while I call my film team. You can warn him. Don’t tell him anything, no info, okay? What can you do if he’s exposed?” Pero meant exposed to the radiation.

  “He is, I am sure. He just won’t expect it or else he would never have released that sample. I’ll tell him to do the same thing I was going to do with you.” He reached into a Red Cross cabinet on the wall and took out a glass bottle. Inside were little red pills behind brown glass. The lettering was Cyrillic. “Leftover souvenir from Chernobyl, iodine tablets, good ones. If they had given the people these on day one, fifty thousand would still be alive today. Take two a day for a month, your nails might get brittle but take the
pills. Okay?”

  Pero said he would. While Sam started calling Max, Pero keyed the address book on his phone and saw Susanna’s number. She had placed it there. He pushed the green call button. When it answered, he heard static and pressed 5-5-5, Susanna answered.

  “Pero, sie? Is that sie?” She sounded desperate, speaking half German, half English.

  “Yes, are you all right?”

  “Nein. No, no. They … they have been kidnaped. Ich habe eine, a message for you. Dreißig Stunden, sorry, thirty hours. Das ist alles. Oh, sorry again,” he heard a little sob, “it is all it says. It is all they wrote.”

  Chapter 10

  In the Lab

  “But are you okay, Susanna?” To Pero, it sounded like her world was imploding.

  “Nein, nein, I am not. The police are all over. I left the museum shoot immediat after Herr Redmond and Heep were entführt, kidnappen. I have been trying to call you for over ten minutes. I could not call you before, the polizei officier was keeping an eye. I do not trust anyone. I cannot. Except my sister Bertha,” Susanna pronounced it Bear-ta, “Bertha is living here in Berlin, she is agreeing to coming over immediat. While I try to call you again and again, she has arrived. She is here with me now. I do not want to be alone.”

  “Okay, easy does it. Tell me what happened, slowly. I need to understand everything.”

  “It is just like my mother again. Demands, unknown peoples, they are going to die and, scheiße, I cannot save them.”

  Pero almost yelled down the line to try to instill confidence, “Susanna, hey, please, listen to me. Yes, we can, I know we will, we will save them.”

  Sam concluded his call with Max in Zurich, and Pero waved him over, keying the speaker. Pero was still trying to calm Susanna, “Together Susanna, together, we can save them, you have my word.” He heard her breathe loudly, pause, and still he could hear her sobbing lightly. He put the phone on the desk as he introduced her to Sam. “Susanna, listen, here’s my close childhood friend, Sam.”