Fritz’s training sessions were scheduled inside the American Embassy. She was alarmed at how rusty her English had gotten, and enjoyed hearing its languid American cadences again.
And Bliss…were all spies so sociable?
The entire Embassy including the Ambassador seemed susceptible to his Pythagoreanly perfect smile. He chatted with everyone, male and female, flirting with the sixty-year-old gym teacher from the Embassy school, and shooting the breeze with the Marine Corps corporal who signed in visitors.
She saw him watching from Laura Murphy’s office window when she practiced with the ATTF ops team in the Embassy garden.
He tested what she learned out in the real world. Could she elude a tail at the zoo, in the train station, or window-shopping on the KuDamm? She got up easily on the days she was scheduled to work with him. Did he look forward to those days as much as she did?
She enjoyed tricking him at the Brandenburg Gate flea market. She spotted him following her, slipped away, doubled back and followed him, watching him for endless minutes while he pretended to be interested in Meissen pottery, but was really searching the crowd to find her.
She tapped his shoulder. “I’ll take that old vase, if you don’t want it.”
His smile was like the sun rising.
She recited everything he had done since he lost her.
He laughed and pulled her into his arms. For a few seconds she enjoyed the warmth of his body. Then she remembered Jan. What was she doing?
This time it was different, she told herself. This time the warm, muscular body next to hers promised only friendship.
Was that because he had read her NSA psych profile? Because it said sex wouldn’t work? Not after Jan?
She felt sick to her stomache and pushed him away.
He stopped laughing. Warm, golden Berlin sunshine reached through the arches of the Brandenburg Gate and found his face. As his smile faded, he reached for her hand and pulled her close. “Don’t go,” he whispered, so the inevitable ATTF ops team watchers couldn’t hear.
What was he saying? She stayed close, felt his breath on her neck, warm and good like the sunshine.
“Don’t let them…don’t let me…do this to you,” he whispered.
She was embarrassed for him. “What would Mackenzie say?” she asked.
“Fuck Mackenzie. Fuck the whole lot of them. Stay here in Berlin with your math history and your Professor Schultzi.”
She laughed and returned his chaste hug. Schultzi was right. She needed a friend, a young friend, and she believed Bliss when he promised she would be a mathematician again.
The very next day she walked into the Embassy meeting room and found Michael Usher standing at the electronic whiteboard.
The sound coming from his mouth took long seconds to form into words, as she mentally relived the humiliation of being fired from the National Security Agency while Usher watched.
Her face burned.
“…America’s ‘Marshall Plan for the 21st century’…American-sponsored business incubators…cutting edge environmental technologies…” Shock wouldn’t let the words make sense.
She fled, knocking over her chair and pushing past Murphy.
“I can’t do this,” she told Murphy, who followed her into the hall. “Tell Bliss, I’m sorry. I, I…” She ran into the ladies room feeling sick to her stomach.
She was splashing cold water on her face when Murphy came in. “Bliss is outside, but maybe you’d rather talk to me. What’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
How could she explain? “I can’t work with Michael Usher.” She didn’t believe she was doing this. Usher had actually crawled out from his bunker. He had left Washington and come here to Berlin, to her. Here was her chance to reveal what a slimeball he was, and she was throwing it away. Hiding in the bathroom! Even Schultzi would be disgusted.
“I get that,” Murphy said. “I don’t like him much myself, but we have no choice.” She stared at Fritzi like a junior high school principal wondering what to do with a rebellious student.
Fritzi stayed silent.
Murphy shook her head. “Okay. So you don’t want to speak to me.” She walked to the door. “But you need to tell someone.” She opened the door and yanked Bliss into the ladies room. “You talk to her, Bliss. I’ll keep watch.”
The concern on Bliss’ face made Fritzi want to hide in a cubicle.
“What is it, Fritzi?” he asked. “Tell me, please?”
She didn’t believe this was happening. Dissipating the cloud hanging over her reputation was harder than Schultzi could imagine.
She had to say something, or she would lose her chance. “Usher was at NSA when I was there.” She wasn’t alone now, and this wasn’t Ft. Meade, but she wasn’t ready to test the bonds of their friendship with the truth. What if he insisted that Usher be sent back to Washington and she lost her one chance to show the world what a lying hypocrite he was.
Bliss put his hand on her arm. “What did he do? Did he harass you?… Sexually?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” What could she say? “He did something. Something…” The word dishonest was on her lips, but she had no proof! And she had been dishonest as well. Even if the flash drive hadn’t been tagged, she had known better.
What would happen to the concern in Bliss’ eyes, if he knew the truth? By reading the data on Usher’s flash drive, she had broken the law.
Worse, what if collecting confidential corporate communications was standard operating procedure for spies? She wasn’t ready to find out. She took a step away from him and his hand fell.
Bad enough that Bliss knew about Jan. How foolish she had been.
“Then what?”
He waited. No prodding. No joking. “You can tell me.” His voice was gentle.
But she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that Michael Usher had gotten wealthy through insider trading. It was personal as well.
Michael Usher had made it impossible for her to work in her chosen field in her own country. The vetting paperwork had always looked fine. Then would come that FBI visit to the graduate school, the one that no one ever spoke about out loud. Telling the object of an FBI background investigation that there were questions, circumstances in her life that needed checking into, would have been breaking the law.
Then came the rejections and new looks in the professors’ faces. Suspicion. Wondering. Occasionally even regret. Where they had been welcoming, after that visit they were all too aware that having her in their program was saying ‘no’ to all government-funded research.
Bliss’ eyes were filled with concern, but he couldn’t even imagine what being persona non grata in your own country was like. Or what it felt like to know the American dream didn’t count for you. She had been an expatriate in her own country, and Michael Usher was probably still laughing at how stupid she had been, when she handed that flash drive back to him.
Schultzi was right. The nightmare wouldn’t end until she fought back.
Usher would show his true colors one day, and she would be ready. But right now she had to say something to Bliss.
“He was there when I was read out of the Agency,” she said. That too had been awful. Not as bad as watching a politically well-connected slimeball like Michael Usher getting away with lying and cheating his way to riches, but good enough to explain why she ran. Usher had been with the security guards that frog-marched her straight from her desk to the security office in the gatehouse. He had watched her being signed out.
“I know what that feels like.”
What? She looked up at Bliss, surprised.
“I was in military intelligence before I became a contractor. If it helps, I can tell you, a reading out is like that for all of us. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, the procedure can makes you feel like you’ve done something to be ashamed of. But you shouldn’t think of it like that. When you leave government service, sorting out all the things you had to know to do your job can get confusing. The read
ing-out is designed to help you by sorting out which things have to stay secret, that’s all.”
He smiled. “Look. I don’t like the guy either, but he’s providing our cover, so we have no choice. How about I sit in the meetings with you? We’ll suffer together.”
“They do say misery loves company.”
Sharing the misery didn’t help. How could Usher lecture on free market competition, when they both knew how he avoided the free market whenever it got in the way of his lining his own pockets?
Michael Usher was too cowardly to walk the walk of a real capitalist.
His lying bullshit made her angry, which was a step up from ashamed. Jan Pawlowski’s escapades were penny ante compared to the megadollars Usher had wheeled and dealed with his NSA-aided industrial espionage.
Falling for Jan had been naïve, but that hadn’t made her a bad person. She began to forgive herself.
Bliss was always there. He believed she could do this job, and after her talk with Schultzi, she wanted to do it. She would win back her reputation and her mathematics. What did it involve, really? Attending a conference, giving a couple of speeches, and luring Jan Pawlowski into a glass of wine for old time’s sake. In two weeks she would be back home.
She let Usher spin his webs of annoyance, as the experts taught her about incinerators, landfill sorting, storage, and composting methods; and how rainwater leachate was kept from soaking through landfills and contaminating ground water. Usher delivered the final most important lecture on landfill security himself, and she survived it.
Afterwards Bliss whisked her away for a walk along the canal by the ultra-modern German government buildings. “You’ll do fine,” he told her, but his smile wasn’t as carefree as it had been. “You’ll have me and Murphy, even Mackenzie, to help. Just keep your eyes and ears open, and report back to me on what Pawlowski is up to.
“The most important thing, Fritzi, is to tell me the truth. That’s not as easy as it sounds. You need to look beyond the truth that Pawlowski wants you to see, to what actually is. Even if it makes him look bad, even if you were once good friends, you must tell me the truth. The analysts need the objective truth to do their job properly.”
The truth, Fritzi thought. Like how she had looked at the contents of a missing NSA flash drive?
Bliss walked her back to the classroom and Usher’s security lecture continued with the dangers of orphan radiation sources and why Americans were the best-equipped to keep nuclear materials from falling into the hands of Muslim terrorists.
Usher spun more webs, on and on, but she couldn’t leave. They needed her. All of them, Bliss, Murphy, Mackenzie too.
Could the fly change its mind once it tested the web?
16 Berlin