by Erika Holzer
“The limousines had stopped single file behind the horizontal striped pole. A Russian Air Force officer got out of his jeep and…” Bruno flushed. “I was arguing with the American diplomat—he blew smoke in my face!—when the Air Force captain butted in…”
Aleksei had a gift for visualizing. As Bruno talked, he pictured the first limousine moving leisurely across. The second, stalled by the angry exchange of words. He saw Brodsky’s sudden move. Heard the screech of tires. The clatter of machine guns. Saw a large Mercedes smash into the side of the bridge. Pictured Brodsky’s body arc through the air before he was thrown clear. Saw the limousine burst into flame. Touching the steel of the bridge with his fingertips, Aleksei pictured East German patrol boats cruising restlessly back and forth under the bridge, ready to swing into action whenever—
Under the bridge? Under it?
He seized Bruno’s arm. “Think hard now. Since this is the spot where Brodsky lay just before the lighter went over, were any boats patrolling right about here?”
Bruno frowned. “They might’ve been, sure, but—”
Aleksei headed for the cobblestone square and entered the Soviet guardhouse just opposite the East German one.
Bruno scurried after him. He was curious. He was paid to be curious about the Russkies.
Inside the Soviet guardhouse, Aleksei telephoned the East Berlin KGB station, explained what he wanted, and sat down to wait.
Two hours later he was picked up by his trusted aide, Lieutenant Anatoly Barkov. On the way to their destination, Lieutenant Barkov explained what Aleksei had put in motion. The Russians had obtained from the East Germans a list of every patrol boat in the vicinity of Glienicker Bridge for two hours before and two hours after Stepan Brodsky’s escape attempt. The roster of every man on every boat was obtained. There were only four such boats, with a crew of four on each boat—four Schnellboots. Sixteen men.
As Aleksei and his aide sped to the dock, the East Germans were locating the boats and sending out Vopos to question the crew members. By the time they arrived at an inlet on the Havel River where the boats were berthed and serviced, one was already in dry dock for repairs.
“I have been assured that the other three boats are on their way and should arrive shortly, sir,” Barkov reported.
The two of them were intrigued by the steel-hulled vessels. Roughly thirty feet long, they had a large cabin that bristled with searchlights, loudspeakers, sirens, radar, and other electronic equipment.
Aleksei had asked for a hundred Vopos, intending to use them for turning each ship inside out as they looked for the lighter. “Where are the men?” Aleksei wondered out loud.
“On their way, Colonel. They should be here momentarily.”
Which they were. The East German officer in charge assembled his men in formation, saluted the two Russians, and said to Aleksei, “My men are at your command, sir.”
Standing in the bed of a nearby truck, Aleksei addressed the men in German. “You will divide into teams of 25 men each, one group for each boat. The other three are arriving as I speak. You are looking for a cigarette lighter. I cannot describe it because I have not yet seen it, but you will know it when you find it. Begin your search with the equipment attached to the cabin—searchlights, loudspeakers, sirens, radar, and other electronic equipment. Some of you will search the cabin. Others are to inspect every vent and drain on the surface of the boat, every place on the deck where a lighter could be hidden. If it is not on deck, you will search below deck. Dismissed.”
Turning to the officer in charge, Aleksei said, “See that bar not far from the dockyard?”
“Yessir.”
“That’s where we’ll be once your men find the lighter.”
Just as their dessert was being served, the Vopo officer rushed in.
“We have it, Colonel!” He handed the lighter to Aleksei. “And I have a theory,” he added, flushed with success. “Someone must have dropped it on the wet deck in the dark. When the vessel rolled from the strong current, the lighter slid into an uncovered drain where one of my men found it. If whoever lost it looked for the lighter in the daylight, he couldn’t have found it.”
“Sounds plausible,” Aleksei said with a smile. He shook the officer’s hand. “Please commend your man.”
As Aleksei left the bar, he kept a firm grip on Brodsky’s lighter. Once inside Lieutenant Barkov’s vehicle, he fingered the Zippo lighter, frowning at the double-eagle emblem on one side. He spun the lighter’s ridged wheel to strike the flint and ignite the device. Nothing. The wheel worked. There was a flint. Also a wick. He tried again with the same result. He studied the lighter. Opened and closed it. Turned it this way and that.
This time he pulled each working part out of the stainless steel case. Yes, there was cotton stuffing for lighter fluid that should have been able to work its way to the wick but—
Aleksei sniffed the cotton. No discernible odor of lighter fluid.
He had it—the Holy Grail!
Digging out the cotton stuffing with a fingernail, he found a tiny piece of microfilm in an equally tiny piece of sealed cellophane.
“How long to get this developed and some prints made?” he asked his aide.
“We can be at the station in a half-hour, sir.”
“I must attend an important function at the Humboldt University Medical Clinic, Anatoly. I want you to drop me off there, then have the film and the photographs delivered. But to me, no one else. And I want you to process the microfilm yourself. No one else is to see it or, for that matter, know anything about it. Understood?”
“You can count on me, sir.”
Aleksei smiled at the lieutenant’s response. It was true. He had been counting on Lieutenant Barkov for over five years.
Chapter 32
Aleksei opened the curtains of his limousine, chasing the semi-darkness from the rear seat but admitting a different kind of gloom—a colorless landscape under a gray sky that had swallowed up an earlier promise of sunshine.
His eyes kept returning to the place next to his driver—Luka Rogov’s customary seat—now uncharacteristically empty.
He thought of Luka’s reliability. His soothing presence. His incredible strength. Just thinking of Luka’s strength gave Aleksei comfort, although he had never tried to identify the nature of that comfort.
He sat back and lit his pipe.
But as usual, along with his relaxed state of mind, memories invariably followed… .
Aleksei Andreyev was no more than three years old when he first encountered fear. He feared the fat boy on his block who’d grab Aleksei’s toys and run off with them. The skinny girl who’d kicked him in the ankle once and left a throbbing bruise. The red-bearded man who came regularly to his family’s flat, dragging huge clanking milk cans behind him. And his father—his own father!—whose booming voice and large rough hands would hoist him high in the air whenever his breath had that funny sour smell. Aleksei never wondered why such things made him feel helpless and bewildered. He took his fear for granted, as much a fact of life as the sidewalk in front of his building.
Until the day he made a double discovery. Grownups had fears too. And, wonder of wonders, he, Aleksei Andreyev, could make them afraid!
The day had started out like any other. School. Homework afterward. A visit to the home of his best friend, Ilya. The same old invitation to stay for supper. During the meal he had reached past Ilya for a platter of meat instead of asking for it as he’d been taught, and his elbow had knocked against a bowl of thick brown gravy.
Ilya’s older sister, Dasha, had leaped up in a rage. “Look how you’ve splattered gravy all over my dress, you clumsy fool!” she sputtered.
Aleksei jerked away from her, eyes squeezed shut with terror, sure that Dasha would strike him. Nothing happened. He opened his eyes a crack, then all the way. He saw it first in the eyes of Dasha’s parents, and then in hers as well. Fear. They kept pushing apologies at him. Dasha’s mother kept saying he shouldn’t tell
his father. What did his father have to do with his bad table manners and the spilled gravy?
It was only when he was walking home that he realized what they were afraid of—his father. But why? Aleksei made up his mind to find out.
His father, he learned, was an early member of the Cheka in Moscow. Its full name was “The Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage”—whatever that meant. The Cheka was new to the Soviet Union, appearing almost immediately after the Great Socialist Revolution, and Aleksei’s father held an important position in the organization—“high-ranking,” someone told him. People spoke of it in whispers. But what did it mean?
Aleksei tried to understand what his father did but gave it up when he realized it didn’t really matter. Whatever his father’s job was, it made people like Dasha and her parents afraid. He heard two things over and over about his father. That he was a powerful man and that he was in intelligence, which meant looking into the secret activities of “counter-revolutionaries.” He shook his head over that one.
But no one had to tell him about powerful. His father, he discovered, could have whole families arrested or sent to Siberia. Or even shot.
Once he knew this, things began to happen—he made them happen. Like mentioning his father’s name in a roomful of people and waiting for the nervous coughing or stillness in the air that was suddenly thick with fear.
One day he made the most important discovery of all. In the face of other people’s fears, Aleksei forgot his own. He began to study people more closely. With a word or a hint, he found he could always get his way, and no arguments. He got lots of presents and invitations to parties. He began to experience a secret pride—and a heady new feeling of power. He became a sort of crown prince, reigning in the dark shadow of his father.
When he was about seven years old, the presents and invitations ceased abruptly. His mother had gone to Germany with his little brother Kolya and then disappeared. His father was blamed for letting her leave the country. At first Aleksei feared for his father’s personal safety but what happened turned out to be worse. Three judges from his father’s own organization held a “troika”—a secret trial—and his father was branded an “Enemy of the People” even though he’d been cleared of being a “co-conspirator” and a “wrecker.”
Aleksei had never particularly noticed his style of living, but he noticed its absence. No more five-room flat in Moscow filled with furniture and paintings and Oriental rugs. No more dacha in the country. Gone in the blink of an eye. One day the Andreyevs were at home. The next, they were living in a two-room flat shared by three other families in an apartment house on the outskirts of Moscow.
But physical discomfort and hunger weren’t the worst of it. Aleksei Andreyev, crown prince in a secure world, experienced a raw terror that transcended his old fears. This time, it was a knowledgeable terror. It sprang from the fear-inducing tools he had used against others that could now be used against him! He knew informers were planted, not just in factories, but in apartment buildings like the one he, his father, and his little brother Kiril lived in. His father complained endlessly that even thieves and murderers fared better when it came to punishment than “betrayers of the revolution.”
Aleksei realized his father would never rehabilitate himself and resume his old career. His father was drinking himself into an early grave… On that same night, Aleksei made a solemn oath that someday he would win back the family honor. Someday, he would hold his father’s post.
In the midst of making bold plans, he noticed that the prospect of such a future brought him a sense of relief. That the terror he carried with him, like a heavy knapsack on his back, didn’t bear down quite so heavily.
* * *
It took him over twenty years, but by the time Aleksei was in his early thirties, the terror had disappeared. The years he’d invested in the Archives Section of the Information Directorate—his “mole years,” he was later to call them—had finally paid off. After being given access to the Classified Library, he set about learning its contents as no one ever had—lovingly, like a violinist with his Stradivarius. He became an expert researcher. He stole files. He honed his ability to ferret out and file away in a steel-trap memory the secrets and misdeeds of people who were in a position to help him. As to those who might do him harm, he became adept at applying just the right combination of hints and pressure, promises and threats, to keep his potential enemies at bay.
At first, he barely survived. Over time, he prospered.
Until the day he realized his career could be crushed as swiftly as his father’s had been—and by the same kind of sledgehammer.
His brother Kiril was leaving a trail of unhealthy rumors in his wake. Allusions were made to Kiril’s diversionist tendencies. His unpatriotic attitude. Some of the disreputable people he hung out with.
Cursing himself for his lack of foresight, Aleksei put into immediate operation a tight surveillance program. Even so, a feeling of vulnerability continued to dog him until the day—following a chance encounter on a Moscow street—Luka Rogov, who’d served under him during the Great Patriotic War, reentered his life. Luka, the fearless, incapable of entertaining a scruple inside that sluggish brain. Luka, the human torture machine. Luka, his loyal soldier, who—when necessary—took pleasure in meting out pain to Aleksei’s enemies. Over the years, they had morphed into an effective interrogation team with a conventional but effective approach: the carrot and the stick. Aleksei brought to the table a subtle mind, a patient literate reasonableness, and a carefully researched dossier on the subject of the interrogation. Luka, a symbolic presence in the interrogation room, was like a bulky piece of furniture—noticeable, but more often than not, unused.
The word got around, making it increasingly easy to deal with recalcitrant subjects. Plum security assignments came his way—most recently when Chairman Khrushchev had a good excuse to clash with General Eisenhower and cancel the summit.
In recognition of his achievements, Aleksei remained confident he was close to being rewarded with the biggest plum of all—a KGB intelligence position equivalent to the one held by his father in the Cheka.
Until a few months ago.
Until the night Stepan Brodsky had tried to defect and had almost pulled it off.
Aleksei’s pipe had gone out. Tapping it idly against one of the limousine’s jump seats, he followed the drift of cold ashes onto the rug. True, he thought, the Brodsky affair was no more than a blemish on his otherwise clean record. On the other hand, no one in intelligence could afford blemishes.
But Aleksei was a realist. He had mixed feelings about trying to get Dr. Kurt Brenner to defect. His plan, while a good one, had pitfalls. He thought of it as an intricate puzzle. So many pieces had to fall together in the right way for it to work.
Yet he had to admit that the average Soviet citizen with whom he had dealt over the years was no match for his interrogation skills.
Aleksei visualized a parade of faces: men, women, teenagers. One cowed subject after another. People who had grown used to his threats and the power of his office to make good on them.
But Dr. Kurt Brenner? A prominent American heart surgeon who was used to giving orders, not taking them? A man who had been raised in a decadent culture that nurtured independence?
Aleksei smiled. There was a challenge!
Chapter 33
“Zum Wohle aller!” For the good of all!” The Direktor of the Humboldt University Medical Clinic smiled at his honored guest, Dr. Kurt Brenner of New York City, United States of America.
Glasses were raised. Champagne was passed around as, one by one, the array of doctors rose to toast Brenner’s good health in German, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech.
Someone proposed a toast in honor of the ladies. Galya, seated unobtrusively near a desk in a corner of the spacious room, smiled shyly. Adrienne Brenner inclined her head in a silent “thank you.” Herr Direktor himself was toasted for
having arranged such an excellent breakfast in the gaily-decorated clinic cafeteria.
Dr. Brenner did not imbibe.
Breakfast and toasting finished, the doctors began positioning their chairs in a loose semi-circle around Kurt Brenner.
Kiril, his chair arranged slightly behind Adrienne’s, whispered, “Now it begins. They are about to pick your husband’s brain about the latest techniques in cardiology and cardiac surgery. All through the meal and the toasts afterward, they have thought of nothing else. But first, they will waste time going through the required ritual of claiming that doctors in the People’s Democracies have the best of everything.”
“The best of our goods… sounds right up your alley,” Adrienne teased.
All except one doctor, Kiril thought. His mentor, Dr. Mikhail Yanin, wouldn’t dream of wasting valuable time extolling the Soviet Union’s inferior cardiac “achievements” when there was so much to learn from the eminent Dr. Brenner… and so little time in which to do it.
Dr. Yanin was on his feet. Kiril leaned forward as Yanin asked a highly technical question about artificial hearts—the agenda of the upcoming symposium in West Berlin sponsored by Medicine International.
Dr. Kurt Brenner spoke with eloquence for almost fifteen minutes.
The cardiologists from the People’s Democracies was a poor followup as they segued into their ritualistic bragging…
“The Soviet Union’s electronic monitoring system is a huge success!”
“A patient’s heartbeat speeds up. A second attack seems imminent but we are ready with a new drug.”
“A thousand-volt electrical charge to the chest was perfectly timed.”
“So our vascular stapling machine has made suturing obsolete.”
“It was a surgical breakthrough in congenital heart lesions.”
“Medical helicopters swiftly dispatched to remote areas.”
